Untold Dylan

by Jochen Markhorst

“Spent a week in the hospital, then they moved me to this doctor’s house in town. In his attic. Had a bed up there in the attic with a window lookin’ out. Sarah stayed there with me. I just remember how bad I wanted to see my kids. I started thinkin’ about the short life of trouble. How short life is. I’d just lay there listenin’ to birds chirping. Kids playing in the neighbor’s yard or rain falling by the window. I realized how much I’d missed. Then I’d hear the fire engine roar, and I could feel the steady thrust of death that had been constantly looking over its shoulder at me. [pause] Then I’d just go back to sleep.”

(“True Dylan”, by Sam Shepard, Esquire, July 1987)

On July 29, 1966, Hurricane Dylan comes abruptly to a halt. The mythical motorbike accident at Woodstock forces Dylan to cancel all upcoming commitments, concerts, recordings and whatnot, and the following recovery period is used as an opportunity to get out of the rat-race altogether.

Record company CBS and manager Albert Grossman do not mind the first, forced break that much; Blonde On Blonde has just come out and is doing well. Six days before the accident, on the 23rd of July, the first double album in pop history enters the Billboard 200 (on 101), a month later, August 20, the LP is already at number 15, in the week of October 1 Blonde On Blonde reaches its peak (number 9). It isn’t until months later, mid-February 1967, that Dylan’s masterpiece disappears from the Top 200 again, in the week that The Monkees are at number one and two (with More Of The Monkees and The Monkees, respectively – Dylan’s influence with regard to original album titles has still not found its way into every sub-region of the pop world).

So, from that side the money tap is still open, and the singles are still doing fine, too; when Dylan is in the hospital, “I Want You” is number 20 in the Hot 100 and on the sixteenth place in England, the successor “Just Like A Woman” reaches the Top 40 as well. But a few months later, in the spring of 1967, the well is starting to dry up. “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” has a go in March, but this single doesn’t really score (top ranking: 81). In West Saugerties Dylan is already making music again, with the boys of The Band in the Basement, but for the time being no income is to be expected from that endeavour. CBS fears – rightly – to miss the momentum, and decides to release Dylan’s first compilation album: Greatest Hits.

The compilation is released 27 March 1967 and is a huge success. It reaches “only” the tenth place in the charts, but has very long legs. In January ’68 gold, and it goes on into the twenty-first century; April 2001 the five millionth copy is sold, so Greatest Hits is now on 5 x platinum.

The tracklist is quite safe. All Top 40 singles, plus the songs with which others have scored a hit (Peter, Paul & Mary with “Blowin’ In The Wind”, The Byrds with “Mr. Tambourine Man” and The Turtles with “It Ain’t Me, Babe”) plus “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, which wasn’t a single in the USA, but was a Top 10 hit in England:

Side one
1. Rainy Day Women ♯12 & 35
2. Blowin’ in the Wind
3. The Times They Are a-Changin’
4. It Ain’t Me Babe
5. Like a Rolling Stone
Side two
1. Mr. Tambourine Man
2. Subterranean Homesick Blues
3. I Want You
4. Positively 4th Street
5. Just Like a Woman

In those years, when the record industry begins to grow into a multi-billion dollar business, the marketing departments are still dominated by big talkers and windbags, who get a hefty budget and have free rein to make their own work important and make their empty opinions the norm.

In England, it is decided that Greatest Hits needs a different tracklist. “Positively 4th Street” is deleted, “She Belongs To Me”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “One Of Us Must Know” take its place. Six of one and half a dozen of the other, but still: nothing wrong with that, of course – and it has got two more songs. Why “All I Really Want To Do”‘isn’t on either compilator’s list is puzzling, by the way; that was a big hit for Cher in both countries. Or “Don’t Think Twice”, which was a big hit for Peter, Paul & Mary as well as for The Wonder Who?

Much earlier, but also much weirder, was the European mainland. In the early summer of 1966, well before the American and English editions, the first Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits is compiled in Hamburg: the so-called “stern music” edition. Since the 60’s, the German magazine stern regularly releases its own compiled records, in cooperation with the respective record company, which magazine subscribers can then order at a discount. Middle of the road, mostly (James Last, Herb Albert, and the likes) but occasionally special, attractive rarities – the beatles in hamburg, for example. And Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. Although it is also possible that the album was compiled by CBS Holland, and then taken over by stern – in the summer of ’66 the stern musik-edition is already for sale in Amsterdam.  By the way, the Dutch edition has a now well-known motto on the cover: Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan.

The A&R-person of stern musik, or perhaps of CBS Holland, has an own opinion too. When the tracklist is to be chosen, presumably somewhere in the early spring of ’66, Dylan has only had one real hit on the European mainland: “Like A Rolling Stone”. Plus the three songs known in cover versions, but that’s about it – the record shall have twelve songs, so there are eight vacancies. Blonde On Blonde hasn’t been released yet, debut album Bob Dylan has no candidates. That limits the choice to five LP’s (Freewheelin’ up to Highway 61 Revisited), to 54 album tracks. With plenty of choice of classic, indestructible songs, but the final tracklist is surprising still:

Side one
1. Blowin’ in the Wind
2. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
3. Queen Jane Approximately
4. Maggie’s Farm
5. Mr. Tambourine Man
6. Bob Dylan’s Blues
Side two
1. The Times They Are a-Changin’
2. It Ain’t Me Babe
3. Subterranean Homesick Blues
4. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
5. Like a Rolling Stone
6. Highway 61 Revisited

“Maggie’s Farm”? “Highway 61 Revisited”? The compiler not only ignores the covers that were hits in Europe as well (Cher’s “All I Really Want To Do” was a Top 20 hit in the Netherlands, for instance), but also the singles Dylan did release on the mainland: “Positively 4th Street” and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window”. Alright, Maggie and Highway are recent, earth-shattering signature songs, songs that define the new, electric Dylan – and in June ’65, “Maggie’s Farm” was released in Germany as a single (and flopped).

However, the choice of “Bob Dylan’s Blues” is incomprehensible. “Bob Dylan’s Blues”? That unsightly, hardly to be taken seriously album filler from 1962 a Greatest Hit?

To be continued. Next up: Bob Dylan’s Blues – part II

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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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

By Tony Attwood

This series looks at the subject matter of Bob Dylan’s songs year by year, trying to see a pattern in his writing across a year, rather than analysing his work song by song, as has been the traditional approach of commentators on Dylan’s work.

I have been writing this series as a voyage of discovery for myself, without a clear idea of what I would discover, and indeed I was genuinely surprise to find that for many years the main themes of Dylan’s writing were love and lost love.  Two of the three main themes of popular music since the 1950s (the third being dance which Bob has shown no interest in at all).

And as this review has moved on I have noticed a move in Bob’s writing into writing about darker issues, giving a feeling of a strong lack of positivity about the world around us by the end of the 1980s.   That decade ended with The menace emerges – the title to my piece about the meaning of the songs in 1989.

In the 1990s I offered up three articles

• 1990: The rebirth of protest before the end of all songs
• Bob Dylan’s songwriting 1991- 1996: the end of everything
• 1997/8: That oh so very very clear theme

The “very clear theme” to which I was alluding for 1997/8 was loss and simply walking away.

Then moving to the 21st century, I have offered two articles thus far:

• What was Dylan writing about at the turn of the century? Chaos!
• Dylan’s songs 2005/6: change, moving on; life with the barbarians

It’s all negative stuff.  Now moving on I come to the Together Through Life songs, which were of course co-compositions, and we don’t know who wrote what exactly.  But reading through the reviews of  those songs and listening again, it is clear to me that these are not songs of love and hope.

Indeed I am reminded as I look through Bob’s songwriting across his career, of the last work by the great English novelist HG Wells.  Wells had written novels which have lived on since he created them, novels written before the age of film which were turned into popular movies such as “The Time Machine” and “War of the Worlds”.  But as time passed he lost that belief in the human race’s ability to survive no matter what.

Wells’  last book  was “Mind at the End of Its Tether”.  It is only 34 pages long and was written at the age of 78, and in it he considers the notion that humanity has had its day and is soon to be replaced.  It is as if the violence of “The Invisible Man” (another early Wells, smash hit story) has become the essence of humanity.

To return to Bob Dylan’s themes, In preparing this piece about 2008/10 I have revisited the reviews of the “Together through Life” songs and added videos where it seems appropriate – they were not available at the time I did the original reviews.  I hope they might be helpful, and I wanted to go back to the songs and think about them again.

After all, I wrote, not long after the album was released, that the “Highlight across the two years 2008/9” was the song “It’s all good”, in which ” Bob sums up everything that is wrong with the world in one song based on one chord.  This really does tell it as it is, and by and large it is pretty much all over.”

My point here is that I had no idea what I was going to discover when I hit on the notion of trying to summarise the meaning of each and every song of Dylan’s in a word or two.  What I find is that the rich mixture of themes of the earlier years, replaced as it was for one year by nothing but songs about faith, is now replaced by songs about decline and negativity.

Using the same format as in all the previous articles – trying to summarise each song in just a few words… but also taking the first song of this period of writing as a scene setter this is what I find…

• Life is Hard (lost love; lost life)

https://youtu.be/SjZ5agESpkg

The evening winds are still
I've lost the way and will
Can't tell you where they went
I just know what they meant
I'm always on my guard
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me

And now moving on to the rest of the songs, again using a similar format to that used before

• This Dream of You (Lost love in the nowhere cafe)
• Beyond here lies nothing (Everything is wrong)
• My wife’s home town (Life is really bad)
• If you ever go to Houston (This is not a good place to be)
• Forgetful Heart (The door has closed forevermore; if indeed there ever was a door)
• Jolene (Need of a woman)
• Shake Shake Mama (Lost love)
• I feel a change comin on  (I have nothing)
• It’s all good (Nothingness: we’re making lame responses to a world of chaos)

There is one more song in this period of writing, probably written in 2010, although the date is somewhat uncertain.    The Love that Faded  with lyrics by Hank Williams and music by Bob Dylan.  As Dylan only wrote the music and not the lyrics, I’m not including this in my reviews of how Bob’s lyrics reflect his vies of the world and his thinking.

So yes, I have expanded my previous one or two word summaries, to try and get closer to the flavour of these complex songs, although that makes giving a summary of the year’s work harder, but I’ll give it a go, since that is the theme of the series.

• Lost love: 2
• Everything is wrong / life is bad: 6
• The need of a woman: 1

This is so different from where we began.   Dylan himself obviously took a few years to settle down into the themes that he really wanted about, but in looking at 1962 and 1963 together I came up with these subject areas across those two years…

• The Blues (5)
• Love / desire (3)
• Gambling (1)
• It’s just how we see the world (1)
• Personal commentary – do the right thing (2)
• The future will be fine (1)
• Lost love / moving on (12)

The point is that I have been evolving my theory that we can learn a lot about Bob’s state of mind by the subject matter of his songs in groups and I am going to have to go back and review this earlier work, to try and pull everything together, but two things stand out from this 1962/3 review.

There is a tendency even in the early days towards the negative, but it is not all consuming.  There is also an understanding that we all see the world in different ways.  However although in the early times positive songs did take their place alongside the negativity, now as we look at Dylan’s subject matter in 2008 to 2010 the negative has won out, utterly.

Of course it can be argued that many of these 2008/10 songs were co-compositions, but I do not believe that Bob Dylan by this stage of his life would have agreed to put out songs that were not on themes that he felt.  I can’t prove it, but it would seem utterly odd if not downright weird that the most famous songwriter of his age, the only songwriter who could stand alongside Irving Berlin in terms of the number of songs written, the popularity of those songs, and the generally agreed quality of those songs, if in the latter stages of his songwriting he was co-composing songs that were not on a subject of his choice.

There is an index to all the articles in this series,   and I recognise I am going to have to go back and re-write the whole series at some stage, in the light of what I have found (which is not what I expected at all).

But first I’ll carry on through the remaining years of Bob’s writing to finish the series off.

by mr tambourine

I am not that big of a fan of Dylan covers, to tell you the truth. But I also can’t be immune when I see a gift.

I am also not that familiar with the work of Emma Swift, at least that I know of. I’ve heard so many different musical styles, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ran into this woman somewhere, where she might’ve been a backing vocalist or just one of the people in the credits, you know? Her spirit must’ve been around me somewhere before. Because, listening to her and saying her name, she looked very familiar.

First time I ran into this lady was when she uploaded her version of “I Contain Multitudes” on her YouTube channel. It really touched me I must say. I didn’t think it was better than Bob’s version (I rarely actually think that about any song Dylan wrote and recorded) but she was really good with it. I remember the video was really nice too.

Then I heard two other singles, which apparently were the promotion of the new album “Blonde On The Tracks”, an all Dylan-covers album.

The other two singles “Queen Jane Approximately” and “You’re A Big Girl Now” didn’t catch my attention that much.

This week I decided to give it a listen. Like I said, I’m not a fan of these, but, I said to myself, if I could’ve listened to Joan Osborne’s album from 2017 which was all Dylan covers as well and enjoy it, then I can enjoy this one too.

Before listening to the album, what really caught my attention was this lady’s interviews about this album. I really liked her point of view and takes on Bob’s music. That was a great first impression that I needed.

The album opens with “Queen Jane Approximately”. Despite a distracting start, for me at least, because I felt the song lacks a certain kind of firepower, whether in the music or the voice, it catches up nicely and is a very fair opener. It’s definitely a grower.

The second track “I Contain Multitudes” is, as I said, brilliant. Not better than the original, just as the first track wasn’t, but again, a fair tribute to the great artist of this age who’s still alive by the way and creating masterpieces. This is the only newer song in Dylan’s catalogue on this album.  Emma’s delivery is very rich. Her vocals are very relaxing.

What I will give credit to Emma in the first two tracks is that she absolutely pulled it off in her own way. There was no evidence of her trying to imitate Dylan in any kind of way. Kudos for that!

The third track, “One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)” is an amazing, staggering cover. An album highlight if you ask me.

Definitely the best cover of this song I’ve heard, and I’ve heard a singer like Mick Hucknall (from Simply Red) cover it and it’s nothing like this.

Emma’s tone here is mesmerising. It’s like Blonde on Blonde meets Sgt. Pepper. It’s really great!

The 4th track, “Simple Twist Of Fate” was a nice landing back to the earthly ground after “One Of Must Know” blew me to the sky.

▶︎ Simple Twist of Fate _ Emma Swift

I didn’t even know that Simple Twist Of Fate was playing until the last verse, which Emma sang beautifully. I also forgot these original lyrics of the song after listening to so many live performances with different ones. Thank you Emma for reminding me. Not sure if Bob ever used “a parrot that talks” in his live performances. It’s a very interesting line. Especially for a Philosopher Pirate that’s listening to the wireless radio in Key West. Not surprising that he has a parrot. What’s surprising is that he never mentions it.

The fifth track, “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, another Blonde On Blonde gem, is again delivered masterfully here. Not an easy song to sing at all, lasting 11 minutes, Emma does it like a goddess I must say.

▶︎ Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands _ Emma Swift

It just proved to me, with this and “One Of Us Must Know” that Blonde on Blonde, if it was made today, would still be as relevant.

I just thought to myself “people don’t write songs like these anymore” or “we don’t have songwriting or songwriters like this anymore”. Once again I realized how blessed we were to live in the age of Dylan.

The two Blonde on Blonde covers of Emma Swift on this album have cemented themselves as one of the best Dylan covers out there (and I’m sure there’s many good ones, having listened to them and knowing many people covered them) and Emma Swift certainly made it clear that she understands Dylan and Dylan’s art.

The sixth track, “The Man In Me” is also very beautifully done and arranged. The musical arrangement of this entire album is very good and it’s nicely produced. I have always had a soft spot for “The Man In Me”, so I was really happy it was included. I have only one flaw with this one : it’s too short.

The Man In Me _ Emma Swift

The seventh track, “Going Going Gone” sounds like it’s arranged for Blood On The Tracks. Seriously. I felt it was a genius idea to do, because, Going Going Gone did feel as a prequel to Blood On The Tracks. No other Planet Waves song can say that.

The eighth track, “You’re A Big Girl Now”, still didn’t impress me. And I’m so sorry to say that as it is a song I really love. It’s a hard song to do though and I know that. So I won’t be critiquing it too much.

The main problem I have of it is that the album was very nicely put together until this moment. Tracks were nicely placed until this.

Going Going Gone felt like a Blood On The Tracks song. And then, a very similar arrangement, and even vocal delivery, was used for this one too.

You’re A Big Girl Now, of course, is not even near a “difficult listen”, it’s actually very uniquely arranged and again, kudos for such originality, but…

Emma’s potential is definitely through the roof and I think she could’ve performed this much better. This is not a critique, this is just encouragement.

Dylan usually ends the album on a very high note, and with Emma putting together an album like this, it needed a little bit of more… I don’t know… Firepower.

Queen Jane Approximately, when listening to it as a single, also did the same thing for me. But when listening to the album, it grew on me. You’re A Big Girl Now failed to do that unfortunately.

But I’ll certainly be listening to this album more.

I’m very glad that there are artists still covering Dylan. I’m also glad that, along with Joan Osborne a few years ago, Emma has decided to cover the deeper cuts more rather than the greatest hits.

I wish some people would even cover the really deep cuts like “Changing Of The Guards” , “Caribbean Wind” , “To Fall In Love With You” , “Tell Ol’ Bill”… The list goes on, but people get the point. Maybe we should promote that part of Dylan’s career more?

Nonetheless, Emma’s “Blonde On The Tracks” will go down as one of the better Dylan cover albums we’ve heard. All the universal acclaim she received for it is well deserved.

It’s a nice, short, walkthrough Dylan’s career.

Emma’s respect for the lyrics and keeping them the way they are without changing them to the female perspective and even sometimes finding ways to express herself in a more masculine way, shows Emma’s great adaptability that goes along with her incredibly gifted singing voice. Along with her singing, Emma really highlighted her unbelievable phrasing. Somewhere it reaches Dylan level even, which is the highest level of phrasing, and is a very necessary ingredient to Bob’s music, which again shows her knowledge of Bob’s music and the way she respects it and treasures it.

This is a great promotion for Bob Dylan’s music and Emma’s delivery really makes you focus on the beauty of the lyrics more than anything which only adds to Dylan’s genius even more. Also, it will especially make people check out Bob’s two albums that are combined in the album title, Blonde on Blonde and Blood On The Tracks. Especially Blonde on Blonde, having delivered the two songs mastefully.

I also like the art that was used for the videos uploaded to YouTube of the three singles – I Contain Multitudes, Queen Jane Approximately and You’re A Big Girl Now. Really beautiful videos! Wish more videos were made like that nowadays.

There’s so many good things about this album . I would give it 4.5/5 or 9/10. It’s really that good, if you understand Bob’s music that much. Really good job by Emma Swift! I wish she would make at least two more albums like this.

The albums that Emma will make you check out, having covered some of their tracks, are:

1. Highway 61 Revisited
2. Rough And Rowdy Ways
3. Blonde on Blonde
4. Blood On The Tracks
5. New Morning
6. Planet Waves

Six amazing albums.

So… Check those six albums and check out Emma’s album. You don’t need anything else to listen to but that. That’ll be enough.

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Editor’s note: There are a couple of songs from the album for which there are not musical or video links above.  This is simply because I couldn’t locate online copies which I could legally use here to accompany the article – there’s no other significance.

By Tony Attwood and Aaron Galbraith

High Water – you know the song – but just to remind you here it is…

According to the official site Bob has played the song 712 times in concert between 2001 and 2018, making it the 23rd most performed song in his repertoire.

But what is not often noticed (except by Aaron) is that at least once it turned up sounding like this

https://youtu.be/9w_jxNHgSiI

So where did that rearrangement come from?

In fact it appears to be a reworking of Boom Boom Mancini by Warren Zevon, which by chance we have already commented upon….

And we commented upon that because it has featured on our “Once only” series, when Bob performed the above mentioned “Boom Boom Mancini” at Key Arena, Seattle WA, on 4 October 2002, 14 years before he used the music for the re-write of High Water.

https://youtu.be/eNKWLfwJEKk

Actually it does seem to be a song that gets quite a few reworkings, although most of them stay much closer to the original construction of the song and vary the accompaniment.

There is however no real connection between Bob’s “High Water” and the original Charlie Patton song “High Water Everywhere” except in the title.  Here’s Charlie Patton’s original

And here is part two

And here are the lyrics to the original

Backwater at Blytheville, backed up all around
Backwater at Blytheville, done took Joiner town
It was fifty families and children come to sink and drown

The water was risin' up at my friend's door
The water was risin' up at my friend's door
The man said to his women folk, "Lord, we'd better go"

The water was risin', got up in my bed
Lord, the water was rollin', got up to my bed
I thought I would take a trip, Lord, out on the big ice sled

Oh, I can hear, Lord Lord, water upon my door
You know what I mean, look-a here
I hear the ice, Lord Lord, was sinkin' down
I couldn't get no boats there, Marion City gone down

So high the water was risin' our men sinkin' down
Man, the water was risin' at places all around
Boy, they's all around
It was fifty men and children come to sink and drown

Oh, Lordy, women and grown men drown
Oh, women and children sinkin' down
Lord, have mercy
I couldn't see nobody's home and wasn't no one to be found

Now what is also interesting is that in the concert in Seattle on 4 October 2002 where Bob sang “Boom Boom Mancini” he also sang “High Water”.  But I can’t find a recording of that song in that concert.  The “Set List” web site does have a link to the song, but it takes us to the studio recording, not the performance in Seattle.

Ok so that is quite a meander around and about, but the real standout moment in all this is where we started: the Boom Boom Mancini re-arrangement by Bob Dylan.   Just in case you’ve got confused with so many videos in one little article here’s the piece we are making the point about once more.

And if you know of any other case where Bob has taken one of his lyrics and then re-written the music so that it incorporates someone else’s melody and chord sequence, please do let us know.  It’s the sort of thing we really like chasing down.

https://youtu.be/9w_jxNHgSiI

Oh and if you feel any of the leaps and conclusions within this little piece are wrong, we’d like to know because it really was quite a meander, so please do write in.  But also please could you give evidence rather than just stating something as a fact, while leaving us to verify what you’ve said.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

By Larry Fyffe

A consistent theme expressed by singer/songwriter Bob Dylan through his lyrics is the loss of a Paradise that might have been – lost because of greed.

Humorously expressed in the following song:

"I think I'll call it America", I said as we hit land
I took a deep breath, I fell down, I could not stand
Captain Arab he started writing up some deeds
He said, "Let's set up a fort, and start buying the place with beads"
(Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan's 115th Dream)

More darkly in the ‘Romantic’ lyrics below – native American Chief Shenandoah converts to Christianity, supports the American colonialists first against French-Canadian ‘voyageurs’, and then against the British in the War of Independence- only to have ‘Indian Territory’ more and more occupied:

Well, the white man loved an Indian maiden
Look away, you rolling river
With notions his canoe was laden
Look away, we're bound away
Across the wide MissourI
Shenandoah, I love your daughter
(Bob Dylan: Shenandoah ~ Vandall/traditional)

Later the song becomes a lament for the southern belle left behind, personified by the Shenandoah River of Virginia:

Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter
Away, I'm bound away 
'Cross the wide Missouri
Oh, who will tie your shoe
Oh, ,who will glove your hand
And who will kiss your ruby lips 
When I am gone?
(Harve Persnell: Shenandoah ~ Persnell/traditional)

The ‘Paradise’ of the Southern Confederacy is lost due to the American Civil War, but, in this case, four million black slaves are freed:

"Virgil, quick come see, there goes the Robert E. Lee"
Now I don't mind chopping wood
And I don't mind if the money's no good
You take what you need, and you leave the rest
But they should never have taken the very best
(The Band: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down ~ Robbie Robinson)

A theme picked up in the song lyrics quoted below:

I'm going to spare the defeated, I'm going to speak to the crowd
I am going to teach peace to the conquered
Well, I'm gonna tame the proud
(Bob Dylan: Lonesome Day Blues)

https://youtu.be/_NgTjNhyQtE

Referencing:

Roman, remember by your strength
to rule the Earth's peoples
For your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law
To spare the conquered
Battle down the proud
(Virgil: Aeneid,  Book VI)

A theme akin to that expressed in the following lyrics:

I went out in Virginia, honey, where the green grass grow
I went out in Virginia, honey, where the green grass grow
I tried to tell myself I didn't want you no more
My baby told me, honey, stop doing me wrong 
My baby told me, honey, stop doing me wrong
Well, I'm telling you, baby, 'cause I'm tired of living alone
(Jimmy Reed: Down In Virginia)

Now, with a little dirty humour thrown in:

Transparent woman in a transparent dress
Suits you well, I must confess
I'll break open your grapes, I'll suck out that juice
I need you like my head needs a noose
Goodbye, Jimmy Reed, goodbye and so long
I thought I could resist her, but I was so wrong ....
Can't you hear me calling from down in Virginia?
(Bob Dylan: Goodbye Jimmy Reed)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

by Jochen Markhorst

PLAYBOY: Do you think you have a purpose and a mission?
BOB DYLAN: Henry Miller said it: The role of an artist is to inoculate the world with disillusionment.
Playboy interview, March 1978

They met once, Dylan and Henry Miller, but that wasn’t really a success. Dylan is with Joan Baez in Big Sur, California, in the late summer of ’63, and Baez casually mentions that Miller lives nearby. She happens to know him. The fan Dylan wants to meet him, and after the Baez concert in Los Angeles (October 12th), where Dylan makes his Hollywood Bowl debut as an opener and accompanist for Baez, she takes him and sister Mimi to the famous writer. In the liner notes of Another Side Of he incorporates an impression of that encounter:

henry miller stands on other side of ping pong table an’ keeps talkin’ about me. “did you ask the poet fellow if he wants something t’ drink” he says t’someone gettin’ all the drinks. i drop my ping pong paddle an’ look at the pool. my worst enemies don’t even put me down in such a mysterious way.

At that time, August ’64, it still seems to be a somewhat surreal memory of a fictitious encounter. But Henry Miller is indeed a fanatical ping-pong player, and in the same Playboy interview in 1978 in which he quotes the above words of Miller, it seems to be a real, true memory: “Yeah, I met him. Years ago. Played ping-pong with him,” which he repeats a year later, in the interview for L’Expresse with French journalist Philippe Adler (“we played table tennis”).

Years later, February 1975, when asked about Dylan in the Rolling Stone interview with Dylan fan Jonathan Cott, Henry Miller remembers:

“I have no way of knowing whether Bob Dylan was influenced by me. You know, Bob Dylan came to my house ten years ago. Joan Baez and her sister brought him and some friends to see me. But Dylan was snooty and arrogant. He was a kid then, of course. And he didn’t like me. He thought I was talking down to him, which I wasn’t. I was trying to be sociable. But we just couldn’t get together. But I know that he is a character, probably a genius, and I really should listen to his work. I’m full of prejudices like everybody else. My kids love him and the Beatles and all the rest.”

Dylan remains an admirer. He often mentions Miller when asked about his favourite writers, Miller drops by in Tarantula, and in 2000 that enigmatic line from the Oscar-winning “Things Have Changed” (I feel like putting her in a wheel barrow and wheeling her down the street) seems to be a paraphrase of an excerpt from Miller’s Tropic Of Capricorn: “Sometimes he’d stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a wheelbarrow.”

Overlapping is the love for songs by both greats. Quantitatively less often than in Dylan’s Chronicles, of course, but in any Miller book about every four or five pages a song, a musical scene or a memory of a song comes along.

At the crossroads of both declarations of love lies John Jacob Niles. Miller writes full of admiration in Plexus (1952):

“Over the coffee and liqueurs we would sometimes listen to John Jacob Niles’ recordings. Our favorite was “I Wonder As I Wander”, sung in a clear, high-pitched voice with a quaver and a modality all his own. The metallic clang of his dulcimer never failed to produce ecstasy. He had a voice which summoned memories of Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere. There was something of the Druid in him. Like a psalmodist, he intoned his verses in an ethereal chant which the angels carried aloft to the Glory seat. When he sang of Jesus, Mary and Joseph they became living presences. A sweep of the hand and the dulcimer gave forth magical sounds which caused the stars to gleam more brightly, which peopled the hills and meadows with silvery figures and made the brooks to babble like infants.”

In every respect (content, stylistic and even word choice) comparable to Dylan in Chronicles (2004):

“I listened a lot to a John Jacob Niles record, too. Niles was nontraditional, but he sang traditional songs. A Mephistophelean character out of Carolina, he hammered away at some harplike instrument and sang in a bone chilling soprano voice. Niles was eerie and illogical, terrifically intense and gave you goosebumps. Definitely a switched-on character, almost like a sorcerer. Niles was otherworldly and his voice raged with strange incantations. I listened to Maid Freed from the Gallows and Go Away from My Window plenty of times.”

Well-chosen words, from both writers. And Dylan implicitly reveals the sources for two of his songs. “Maid Freed From The Gallows” has given him the plot for “Seven Curses” (1963), and “Go Away From My Window” leaves traces, too:

Go away from my window
Go away from my door
Go away way from my bedside
And bother me no more

…so, the opening line, the rhyme scheme and the theme for “It Ain’t Me, Babe”.

John Jacob Niles, however, has the words spoken by the girl, the girl with whom the narrator is in love and by whom he is rejected. According to his own words, this is a true story. At least, that’s how Niles introduces the song, in 1957:

“I wrote Go Away From My Window for a girl, with blue eyes and blond hair, and the year was 1908. I was exactly sixteen years of age. The girl didn’t think much of the song, she didn’t think much of me. Since then, a great many people have sung Go Away From My Window.”

Touching. Though not very believable – it is not very likely that a sixteen-year-old boy in love would try to charm his chosen one with a song in which the woman says that the guy should get lost. And “I wrote” also could do with some nuance; the Roud Folk Song Index dates the first of a long, long line of “Go From My Window” songs 1611, and the title is even mentioned as early as 1578. With a different tenor, though; usually these are songs in which the woman tries to warn her lover, who is standing outside under the window, that her husband has come home unexpectedly – it is the first example of the intrigue ballad of the night visit.

Niles changes the plot, and Dylan eventually tilts the motive. This brings him back to the narrative of the seventeenth century “Go From My Window”, with a different, much more vicious mentality, of course, and even with the same constellation of persons:

Go melt back into the night, babe
Everything inside is made of stone
There’s nothing in here moving
An’ anyway I’m not alone

 In Dylan’s song the third party returns, present behind the back of the speaker, just like five centuries ago the party with whom the protagonist will spend the night.

“It Ain’t Me, Babe” makes a huge impression. Joan Baez loves the song and records it as early as 1964 for her album Joan Baez 5 (which also includes her cover of Niles’ “Go Away From My Window”); it becomes a year later the breakthrough hit for The Turtles, still in 1965 Johnny Cash scores a hit with it as well, with future wife June Carter; Jan & Dean; Nancy Sinatra; Peter, Paul & Mary; Bryan Ferry through Bettye LaVette in 2018… the song has been continuously covered in all echelons of the pop world for over fifty years and the end is not yet in sight.

As a catchphrase, the song title has long since penetrated into the collective cultural baggage. In lawsuits, for example.  Like in New York 2003, in the case Kinkopf v. Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority. An insignificant dispute about whether or not tolls have been wrongly collected, on which the judge rules in writing:

“Rather than provide any documentation to support his contention such as showing that his vehicles were elsewhere at those times and places, claimant offers the Bob Dylan “It Ain’t Me, Babe” plea.”

A feminist magazine from Berkeley calls itself It Ain’t Me Babe in 1970; a writer of an erotic novel uses the title in 2014; magazine articles; episodes of TV series; titles of graphic works of art; and in 2005 a racehorse is born and is given the name It Ain’t Me Babe, the poor soul.

The biographical crime film Blow (2001, Ted Demme), starring Johnny Depp, goes one step further. George Jung (Johnny Depp) is arrested with 660 pounds of marijuana and the judge asks: how do you plead?

George: [stands] “Alright. Well, in all honesty, I don’t feel that what I’ve done is a crime. And I think it’s illogical and irresponsible for you to sentence me to prison. Because, when you think about it, what did I really do? I crossed an imaginary line with a bunch of plants. I mean, you say I’m an outlaw, you say I’m a thief, but where’s the Christmas dinner for the people on relief? Huh? You say you’re looking for someone who’s never weak but always strong, to gather flowers constantly whether you are right or wrong, someone to open each and every door, but it ain’t me, babe, huh? No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe. It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe. You follow?”

It is a brilliant, absurd monologue, which does justice to music historical cross connections; George connects Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe” with a verse from Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd”, which Dylan in turn has quoted in “Song To Woody” and paraphrased in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”.

Part of the Olympic magic the song owes to contrast; the lyrics are blunt and mean, almost cynical, but set-up, composition and structure of the musical accompaniment do not match that; the introductory lines to the chorus promise a We Are The Champions-like hymn, the chorus itself is, well, jubilantly comes pretty close. “It’s not me!” the narrator cheers triumphantly.

Quite indestructible, the combination of these lyrics with this magnetic melody. Thus, almost all covers are fun, at the very least – you have to dress it up very, very corny to compromise the power of the song. The downside is: it is apparently difficult to add something. All those nice covers are actually quite interchangeable. Only radically different arrangements stand out. Not necessarily better than the original, but some of them do surprise, at any rate.

At the top of that category: the old-fashioned, glowing soul approach by Bedford Incident, a completely unknown band with a completely unknown single from May 1969 – with a magnificent harmony-intermezzo and an overflowing, irresistible arrangement. Horns, violins, four male vocalists and a complete band – fortunately, Bedford Incident completely fails in Henry Miller’s function-requirement to inoculate the world with disillusionment. Although… Bedford Incident’s single never got any further than “Best Leftfield Pick” on Radio KIBH in the remote village of Sewald, Alaska, August 1969.
Which, with all due respect for Sewald and Radio KIBH, is a bit of a disillusionment, obviously.

And in case of difficulty, here’s an alternative source…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frVt1jGDS6Y

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

By Mark Thompson

Stanza 1:

I live on a street named after a Saint
Women in the churches wear powder and paint
Where the Jews, and Catholics, and the Muslims all pray
I can tell they're Proddie from a mile away
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Reed indeed
Give me that old time religion, it's just what I need

The opening stanza makes most sense in conjunction with the second, but, briefly, note the stock metaphor of “women in powder and paint,” an image which is usually deployed to connote insincerity or artifice.  As this stanza and the next are about religion, it is worth noting that one thrust of the Protestation Reformation and Henry VIII’s schism was the removal of painted statues and much of the adornment and ceremony of the Roman Catholic Church.  This association is reinforced by the second couplet, in which Protestants appear in a separate reference from the other three named religions; in the third, the singer calls for that “old-time religion,” a phrase generally associated with Baptist and related  fundamentalist Protestant sects in rural America.

Thus, the first stanza sets up a commonplace contrast between artifice and something more intense.  The items in the contrast are religions and it may make some uncomfortable to read this as an explicit preference for the fundamentalist style of religious experience instead of endorsing politically correct diversity.  It’s possible to read the contrast in a way that the religions are merely metaphors for, say, contemporary media versus the old time music that Bob venerates.

Some have noted that the Proddie reference invokes an association with Van Morrison, who covered some Jimmy Reed songs.  It is also worth noting that Van has been known to drop in and sing during services at a fundamentalist church in Southern California, not at all far from Dylan’s Malibu residence. It’s thus possible that this stanza and the next are written with Van in mind, and might even stem from a conversation between them on Jimmy Reed.

Stanza 2:

For thine is the kingdom, the power, the glory
Go tell it on the mountain, go tell the real story
Tell it in that straightforward, puritanical tone
In the mystic hours when a person's alone
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, godspeed
Thump on the Bible, proclaim a creed

In calling on a deceased person to speak, and tell a story, the second stanza reminds me of the similar conjuring of the spirit of Wolfman Jack in “Murder Most Foul,” although here the invited guest will talk about himself and not the historic events narrated in the other song.

This stanza is a fairly straightforward continuation of the prior one. The first line is a phrase appended initially, by Protestant sects, to the “Lord’s Prayer” and “Go Tell it on the Mountain” is an African-American spiritual; it’s also the title of a 1953 James Baldwin novel about the importance of the a Pentecostal church in African-American life. It makes perfect sense in a song about a bluesman to invoke these associations.

The next couplet relates back to the contrast in the first stanza, calling for “the real story” to be told “straightforward” and in “puritanical” tone, i.e., no powder and paint.

And last, the singer asks  the spirit he’s summoned up to be a “Bible thumper,” another stock fundamentalist image.

As before, if the religious preference makes one uncomfortable, you can always metaphorize it as a contrast between a purer form of art, say the blues or folk music, and more powdered and painted forms.

The singer calls on the spirit of Jimmy Reed to “proclaim a creed” but actually the spirit delivers an autobiographical sketch in three Dylanized stanzas.

Third stanza:

You won't amount to much, the people all said
‘Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head
Never pandered, never acted proud
Never took off my shoes, throw 'em in the crowd
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye, goodnight
Put a jewel in your crown and I put out the lights.

Per genius dot com, the line about playing guitar behind his head refers to other black musicians, such as Charley Patton, perhaps even Hendrix, who did that on occasion. Also, the line about “jewel in your crown” refers to the inlays of Jimmy Reed’s guitar.  So basically, this stanza is portraying Jimmy Reed as a live performer.

Stanza 4:

They threw everything at me, everything in the book
I had nothing to fight with but a butcher's hook
They had no pity, they never lend a hand
I can't sing a song that I don't understand
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye, good luck
I can't play the record 'cause my needle got stuck

This stanza, I believe, conveys two facts about Jimmy Reed’s life offstage,  First, like so many bluesmen, he did not get paid all his royalties or other earnings for the songs he wrote and the records he made.  The people who robbed and cheated him are the “they” referred to several times in the stanza.  Second, the reference to “a butcher’s hook”  makes sense when one learns (see Wikipedia entry on Jimmy Reed) that, after WWII, Reed worked in a meat-packing plant in Akron Ohio. It’s a very economical way to squeeze that fact into the larger context of a bluesman not making enough money off his calling.

Stanza 5:

Transparent woman in a transparent dress
Suits you well, I must confess
I’ll break open your grapes, I’ll suck out the juice
I need you like my head needs a noose
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye and so long
I thought I could resist her but I was so wrong

This is where the muses separate the Nobel laureates from the rest of us.

In reading Jimmy Reed’s obituaries online, it seems he died while on tour in San Francisco, trying to make a comeback after losing years to alcoholism.

Picture a bottle of really cheap vodka in your mind, then read the stanza again.

Clear liquid? Clear bottle? I thought I could resist her but …

This stanza is a poetic, to say the least, reference to Reed’s alcohol addiction.

Stanza 6:

God be with you, brother dear
If you don't mind me asking what brings you here?
Oh, nothing much, I'm just looking for the man
Need to see where he's lying in this lost land
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, and everything within ya
Can't you hear me calling from down in Virginia?

This closes the song and doesn’t’ require much exploration.  Bob continues his late period cinematic technique of composing lyrics that are basically movie dialogue.

The specific exchange here reminds me of news articles about Bob visiting the boyhood homes of Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps he made a visit to Reed’s birthplace, although that is in Mississippi and not Virginia.  But word swap is a common Dylan trick, and in this case “down in Virginia” is the title of one of Reed’s songs.

I picture Bob making pilgrimages during the Never-Ending Tour to sites that are associated with his musical inspiration.  I don’t know if he really does, but it’s a nice image.  Maybe he sees them as shrines to the patron saints of the old time musical tradition he seems to venerate (go back to stanzas 1 and 2).

Now that we’re at the end of the song, and we see how “Jimmy” responded to the call at the end of Stanza 2 to “proclaim a creed,” we can perhaps infer that, to Bob, a song and dance man on a Never-Ending Tour, one’s “creed” is not one’s formal sect, but how one lives one’s life.

Borges wrote, “Every poem, given enough time, becomes an elegy.”  Here is a fine elegy for a deceased fellow craftsman of Bob.

It blows me away that Bob is nearly 80, probably a billionaire, and he has both the mental capacity and the commitment to craft such a heartfelt tribute to a man like Reed.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

By Tony Attwood

Boom Boom Mancini was written by Warren Zevon and is a song about a boxer – as we all know Bob Dylan has a particular interest in boxing and has recorded Hurricane and Davey Moore.  He also sang “The Boxer” on Self Portrait.

Ray Mancini was born in 1961, competing as a professional boxer from 1979 to 1992, and then after retirement worked as an actor and commentator.   He held the WBA lightweight title and took his nickname from his father, also a boxer, Lenny Mancini.

The issue most people in the world of boxing recall about Mancini was his fight with Korean challenged Duk Koo Kim which Mancini won in 14 rounds.   However immediately after the fight Kim collapsed and four days later he died.

Mancini was deeply affected by the tragedy, for which he is said to have blamed himself.  Kim’s mother committed suicide three months after the fight and the referee of the contest committed suicide the following year.

The song was written and recorded originally by Warren Zevon.  Here are the lyrics

Hurry home early hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon
Hurry home early hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

From Youngstown, Ohio, Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
A lightweight contender, like father like son
He fought for the title with Frias in Vegas
And he put him away in round number one

Hurry home early hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon
Hurry home early hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

When Alexis Arguello gave Boom Boom a beating
Seven weeks later he was back in the ring
Some have the speed and the right combinations
If you can't take the punches, it don't mean a thing

Hurry home early hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon
Hurry home early hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

When they asked him who was responsible
For the death of do Koo Kim
He said, "Some one should have stopped the fight
And told me it was him."

They made hypocrite judgements after the fact
But the name of the game is be hit and hit back

Hurry home early hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon
Hurry home early hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

Here is Warren Zevon’s version…

Warren William Zevon who wrote the song was born January 24, 1947 and died in 2003.  He started out as a session musician, jingle composer, songwriter, and bandleader, and his career took off when Linda Ronstadt started to record his music.

Thereafter he particularly became known for “Werewolves of London” and “Lawyers Guns and Money” recorded by himself, and a series of hits recorded by other performers such as “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”, “Accidentally Like a Martyr”, “Mohammed’s Radio”, “Carmelita”, and “Hasten Down the Wind.”     He also recorded “Knockin on Heaven’s Door.”

Here is Bob’s one off performance of Boom Boom.

https://youtu.be/eNKWLfwJEKk

This was performed in Key Arena, Seattle WA, on 4 October 2002.

Farewell to the Gold

https://youtu.be/to6z40EzWhg

This was from November 1992 in Youngstown Ohio and it gives me a chance to promote one of my favourite songs…

It was written by Paul Metsers a New Zealand folk singer who has spent a lot of time in the UK, but who seemed to stop writing and performing sometime around his 50th birthday.  A ludicrously early date but it did at least give him time to write and record “Farewell to the gold.”

Shotover river, your gold it is waning
It's weeks since the colour I've seen
But it's no use just sitting and Lady Luck blaming
So I'll pack up and make the break clean

Farewell to the gold that never I found
Goodbye to the nuggets that somewhere abound
For it's only when dreaming that I see you gleaming
Down in the dark, deep underground

It's nearly two years since I left my old mother
For adventure and gold by the pound
With Jimmy the prospector - he was another
For the hills of Otago was bound

We worked the Cardrona's dry valley all over
Old Jimmy Williams and me
But they were panning good dirt on the winding Shotover
So we headed down there just to see

We sluiced and we cradled for day after day
Making hardly enough to get by
Til a terrible flood swept poor Jimmy away
During six stormy days in July

By Larry Fyffe

During the American Civil War, general Stonewall Jackson is accidentally shot by his own men. Surgeon Zimmerman puts the monstrous Civil War back together by gathering alliterative parts and pieces from different poets in his song ” ‘Cross The Green Mountain”:

From Julia Howe:

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps
(The Battle-Hymn Of The Republic)

To this:

Altars are burning, the flames falling wide
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

From William Yeats:

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head
Tragedy wrought to the utmost
(Lapis Lazuli)

To this:

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

From Nathaniel Shepherd:

For the foe had crossed from the other side
That day, in the face of murderous fire
That swept them down in its terrible ire
And their life-blood went to colour the tide
(The Roll Call)

To this:

The foe has crossed over from the other side
They tip their caps from top of a hill
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

From Henry Timrod:

But still along yon dim Atlantic line
The only hostile smoke
Creeps like a harmless mist above the brine
From some frail floating oak
(Charleston)

And from Henry Melville:

The ravaged land was miles behind
And Loudon spread her landscapes rare
(The Scout Toward Aldie)

To this:

All along the dim Atlantic line
The ravaged land lies miles behind
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

From Henry Flash:

Not 'mid the lightning of the stormy fight
Nor in the rush of the vandal foes
Did kingly Death, with his resistless might
Lay the great leader low

(The Death Of Stonewall Jackson)

To this:

Close the eyes of our captain, peace may he know
His long night is done, the great leader is laid low
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

From Robert C. Waterston:

The memory of the just
Shall still be dear, whatever their earthly lot
Dust may return to dust
But Virtue lives, and cannot be forgot
(The Departed)

To this:

Pride will vanish, and glory will rot
But virtue lives on, and cannot be forgot
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

From William Gannett:

Only ten miles from the city
And how I am lifted away
To the peace that passeth knowing
And the night that is not day
(Sunday On The Hill-Top)

To this:

I'm ten miles outside the city, and I'm lifted away
In an ancient light that is not day
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

From Walt Whitman:

See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better
Alas, poor boy, he will never be better ....
While they stand at home neat the door, he is dead already
The only son is dead
(Come Up From The Fields Father)

To this:

But he will better soon, he's in a hospital bed
But he'll never be better, he's already dead
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

From Henry Longfellow:

And I saw a vision how far and fleet
That fatal bullet went speeding forth ....
And a bell was tolled, in that far-off town
For one who had passed from cross to crown
(Killed At The Ford)

To this:

The bells of evening have rung
There's blasphemy on the end of the tongue
Let them say that I walked in fair nature's light
And that I was loyal to truth and to right
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

There be biblical allusions in ‘Cross The Green Mountain’:

And I stood upon the sand of the sea
And saw a beast rise up out of the sea
Having seven heads and ten horns
And upon his heads the name of blasphemy
(Book Of Revelations 13:1)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

by mr tambourine

Time Out Of Mind is the most unique album in Dylan’s career for many reasons.

First of all, the timing of its release is very specific in itself.   Seven years without any new original material (since Under The Red Sky), Bob having heart problems that almost killed him (giving the critics a warmer approach to the album) and a lot of experimentation and uncertainty, that almost lead to the album not even being released.

Bob’s sessions usually pass quickly. Sometimes there’s a lot of uncertainty and experimentation too, but the album always gets rushed and released as soon as it can be.  However Time Out Of Mind wasn’t such a case. Bob took his time more than ever.

The entire process started in what seems to be middle to late 1996, and the album was finally released in September 1997.   A full year of Dylan overthinking an album. Unheard of!

Despite so much going on, we have very little access to this album’s background and we’re not sure how many songs were there and when they were recorded.

However one of the few pieces of information that I have collected in my years as a Bob researcher, is the so called “Oxnard Demos” which could have been recorded in 1996.

Apparently, these songs were demos only, but still, some of them are probably worthy.  But the good news is, the Bootleg Series team, has found a lot from Time Out Of Mind and they’re definitely working on it, but it’s not sure when they’re gonna release it.   It might as well be the next bootleg series: Volume 16.

Along with the Oxnard Demos, we could see the second appearance for some songs on the Bootleg Series.

On Tell Tale Signs, Bootleg Series volume 8, we have witnessed some mighty fine performances.

Dreamin’ Of You – what appears to be an early version of Standing In The Doorway, but an entirely different song. It even has an official video on Bob Dylan’s official YouTube channel. It would be nice to see how this song came about and did it actually turn into Standing In The Doorway, or was it just another song that just had very similar lyrics.  There’s an Untold review of the song with the video here.

Marchin’ To The City – this one sort of seems like an early version of ‘Til I Fell In Love With You, also containing some of its lyrics. Again, it would be nice to find out if it’s actually the same song or was it just another song.

This song has had two versions on Tell Tale Signs. Both versions are far from a finished song in my opinion, but it does show some promise.

Red River Shore – this song is actually seen by many as a lost masterpiece. I’m one of those people that agrees with that. It’s a heartwrenching ballad filled with touching lyrics, but also the one that’s very comforting on dark lonely nights. It doesn’t seem finished though.

We also have two versions of this one, but both lack a few details to be finished and released songs. Maybe there are more and better versions during the sessions?

I have heard that there might be a version that has the lyrics of Not Dark Yet “she wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind”, unless it’s an error. The two versions on Tell Tale Signs do not contain that lyric. Maybe there’s another version.

Mississippi – originally recorded for Time Out Of Mind, it came as a highlight on Love And Theft in 2001 and one of Dylan’s late career triumphs. Written in 1996 apparently, we have witnessed three different versions on Tell Tale Signs, more than any other song from that Bootleg Series volume, maybe meaning that it was a song which Dylan experimented with the most?

The three versions we’ve heard sound very charming and in some parts better than the L&T version, but as a whole it can not eclipse the released version. Still, it would be nice to see if there might be some really masterful versions out there.

Can’t Wait (alternative) – we have had a chance to hear two versions of this song. One with much clearer vocals and different lyrics (some lyrics that later ended up on Sugar Baby from Love And Theft!) and the other with similar, but still different lyrics and the arrangement similar to Love Sick, maybe even more dark!

Those two versions definitely are one of my highlights of Tell Tale Signs, which to this day is my favorite Dylan bootleg series volume probably.

That should be all that we have so far.

There’s this one song I found listed that’s called “All I Ever Loved Is You”. Could it be a Dylan original or perhaps a cover or maybe even just a sheet title or an alternative name of a song we already know?

People have said that there’s an alternative version of Not Dark Yet, that’s much more beautiful than the album version and also, Highlands is said to be more than 27 minutes long in its alternate form! That confirms the rumors about one of Bob’s interview answers. When asked “were there shorter versions of Highlands” he replied “this is the short version” when talking about the released album version, which is “only” 16 minutes long.

You thought Murder Most Foul was long?

I heard a few more stories.

One is that Daniel Lanois ruined the final production, which probably swallowed the songs more than it should. Although I like Time Out Of Mind in many ways, I do feel that it’s missing something. So maybe it is true? Maybe the session performances were much better than the final cuts?

Also, one interesting story.

As we know, Time Out Of Mind has had 11 songs.

One person sort of familiar with the album said that there were 13 songs total recorded for Time Out Of Mind. That makes me ask “just 13?”.   I would be surprised if Dylan didn’t do any covers during the sessions, because he always seems to do so.

Along with the 11 we already know, he said that there’s Mississippi as the 12th and he said something very interesting then.

“I always wondered if the 13th song was actually Things Have Changed”.

What?

This raises a lot of questions then?

If that’s so, then the list looks like this

1. Love Sick
2. Dirt Road Blues
3. Standing In The Doorway
4. Million Miles
5. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
6. ‘Til I Fell In Love With You
7. Not Dark Yet
8. Cold Irons Bound
9. Make You Feel My Love
10. Can’t Wait
11. Highlands
12. Mississippi
13. Things Have Changed (?)

What about Red River Shore? Could that mean that Red River Shore might’ve been an early version of Not Dark Yet, based on the lyric “she wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind”? I mean, everybody knew about Red River Shore before it even got released on Tell Tale Signs and everyone was waiting to hear that one more than anything. How come this guy didn’t mention it as the 13th song? Maybe he knows something we don’t know?

Maybe Red River Shore is actually Not Dark Yet. And I never thought of this until writing this very article. I can definitely see similarities between the two songs.

“I followed the river (Red River) and I got to the sea”. Puzzles everywhere.   We gotta find the code somewhere.

This would also mean that Dreamin’ Of You did become Standing In The Doorway and Marchin’ To The City did become ‘Til I Fell In Love With You?

What about the lyrics “my back is to the sun because the light is too intense, I can see what everybody in the world is up against”, early lyrics of Can’t Wait, later used for Sugar Baby? Was Sugar Baby in the mix here too?

Was there maybe a song out there that could be like a hybrid of Things Have Changed and Sugar Baby?

Then again, what’s with this song “All I Ever Loved Is You”?

Could that be the alternate name for one of the songs or an early version of some of the songs that ended up on the album? Like maybe “Make You Feel My Love”? Or was it another song, that hybrid of Things Have Changed and Sugar Baby?

Let’s try again.

1. Love Sick, other than the released version, nothing else. Was there maybe an acoustic demo out there somewhere? Or piano demo? Anything?
2. Dirt Road Blues – again, nothing
3. Standing In The Doorway / Dreamin’ Of You
4. Million Miles – nothing … I do see it resemble Marchin’ To The City a little, but is it actually it? Probably not.
5. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven – again, nothing, maybe some previous demos…
6. ‘Til I Fell In Love With You / Marching To The City
7. Not Dark Yet / Red River Shore + a version more beautiful than the released one
8. Cold Irons Bound – nothing…
9. Make You Feel My Love / perhaps an early version is “All I Ever Loved Is You”?
10. Can’t Wait – multiple alternate versions – very similar to Love Sick in one of those versions and contains future lyrics for Sugar Baby and lyrics that ended up on Tryin’ To Get To Heaven (“you think you’ve lost it all, there’s always more to lose” turned into “when you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more”).
11. Highlands – lasted as long as 27 minutes in its alternate form
12. Mississippi – multiple versions exist, one of the three has lyrics that open the song going like this:

I'm standing in the shadows
With an achin' heart
I'm looking at the world
Tear itself apart
Minutes turn to hours
Hours turn to days
I'm still lovin' you
In a million ways

13. Things Have Changed (?)

Time Out Of Mind definitely has more speculations than the actual trustworthy sources, but it’s certainly an album of experimentation. Tell Tale Signs gave us a hint.

Time Out Of Mind seems, of what we have so far, like a goldmine of great songs (same fate as Infidels it seems) that have uncanny resemblance and connection. It seems like Bob was all over the place with the lyrics. If he didn’t like the lyrics for one song, he was gonna try them on the other.

I’m still surprised that it’s only 13 songs in the mix, but then again, one Dylan song goes through many transformations, it feels like there’s actually 10 different songs that ultimately turn into one.

Forget the Cutting Edge or More Blood More Tracks… This should be the most interesting album step by step walkthrough ever. This needs the Cutting Edge/More Blood More Tracks approach to it. It needs that step by step, chronological order of the entire sessions. I heard that most of it, if not all of it, can be found somewhere.

That would be great because it would give Dylan fans a chance to see the entire sessions for one of the Mod-Bob albums (a popular term among Dylan fans used for a streak of albums from Time Out Of Mind to Rough And Rowdy Ways). We don’t have almost anything from those albums. Love And Theft for example has nothing else but the album itself in circulation. No information about the sessions even.

We know a few things about Modern Times and Together Through Life, but not much. Tempest, not so much either.

Only Time Out Of Mind and Modern Times were covered in Tell Tale Signs, but not as much for us to have any details about how the sessions went.

Hopefully, soon…

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

(I Must) Love You Too Much (1978)

by Jochen Markhorst

 Will Freeman, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s filmed novel About A Boy (1998), lives a luxurious, empty life in London and can afford it thanks to his father’s inheritance; Dad wrote the Christmas evergreen “Santa’s Super Sleigh”, and his son Will sees the annual royalties from it pouring in by buckets and barrels.

For the plot of book and film adaptation (2002, by the Weitz brothers, starring Hugh Grant) this fact is not too relevant; the Christmas hit is more like a MacGuffin to explain the financing of Freeman’s life. Yet it intrigues. Can an heir to a decades-old Christmas hit live off the royalties? In 2005, a reader of The Guardian wonders about that in a reader’s letter, and the answer comes a week later, November 9, from an experience expert in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, Greg Lake:

I can tell you from experience that it’s lovely to get the old royalty cheque around September every year, but on its own, the Christmas song money isn’t quite enough to buy my own island in the Caribbean.

Greg Lake scored a huge hit in 1975 with “I Believe In Father Christmas”, a song that at the time of his readers’ letter, thirty years later, is still one of the most popular Christmas hits in England, so he has a right to speak.

In February 2014, Greg is told he has pancreatic cancer with metastases. He can still process the bad news in his autobiography, which should have been published in 2012, but will eventually be published posthumously, six months after his death in December 2016. The book, Lucky Man (2017), is a pleasant, sympathetic autobiography, written by a pleasant, sympathetic musician without too much pretension, literary or otherwise. The title refers to Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s first big hit, the 1970 “Lucky Man”, a song Lake wrote as a teenager, and it refers to the moving closing line of the autobiography, written in the face of impending death: “I have been a lucky man.”

Entertaining and interesting enough, all of it, Lake’s memories of ELP, King Crimson, his solo work and his contributions to various occasional projects (such as The Who and Ringo Starr’s All Star Band), though especially interesting for the Dylan fan is his background story to “(I Must) Love You Too Much”.

“(I Must) Love You Too Much”, or “Love You Too Much”, or without brackets (there are several titles in circulation) is one of the “Helena Springs songs”, one of the songs Dylan writes in 1978 together with the young singer from his background choir. He doesn’t record it, but apparently Dylan attaches more importance to it than to “Walk Out In The Rain” and “If I Don’t Be There By Morning”: the song is played live twice, and used a few times at a sound check.

Those live performances are pretty fun. Power rock, propelled by Jerry Scheff’s thundering bass, sharp, Stones-like rhythm guitar and even a concrete riff in the middle-eight… it’s quite a boost. Dylan places the song well, at number 12, between “I Shall Be Released” and “Going, Going, Gone”, just before the break, and both times the end falters a bit (Dylan: “Thank you. We almost played that one right”), but still: both times it is a nice, solid rocker.

For Street Legal, the song is too late anyway. That album was released June 15, the first performance of “Love You Too Much” is September 24th; considering the mistakes while performing, the song hasn’t been rehearsed much yet and probably only recently written. The next album is the first evangelical record, Slow Train Coming, and of course the song doesn’t qualify for that, although on closer inspection a not too dramatic lyrical intervention could have made the song reli-proof. If the you is Christ, the lyrics would have the same, somewhat disparagingly complaining, tone as “I Believe In You”.

Anyway, Dylan rejects the song. But he doesn’t completely forget the song. Two years later, in 1980, Greg Lake calls in. Through an intermediary:

For my debut solo record, I wanted to pay tribute to Bob Dylan by recording one of his songs. I had always been a huge fan of Bob and his songwriting, and I felt that this was as good a time as any for me to pay my respects. The only thing was that I did not really want to do one of his big hits, but rather something less well known. Just purely by coincidence, Tommy Mohler, one of my tour managers at the time, used to work for Bob. He asked him if he had any unreleased material that I could record. Bob explained that he didn’t have any completed songs, but that he did have one song that was halfway written and that he would be more than happy for me to complete it. The title of the song was ‘Love You Too Much’. As a result, I share a co-writing credit with the legendary Bob Dylan (plus Helena Springs). Having finished the writing, I began to record the track at Abbey Road.

That recording is, as can be expected from Greg Lake, a smooth, flawless interpretation, performed by world-class hard rocking musicians, with the only drawback being the sterile 80s sound of the Miami Vice synthesizers. Its strong point is Gary Moore’s Formula 1 guitar solo, which also makes Greg Lake’s jaw drop:

“I asked him if he would like to come into the control room and take a listen to the track but he said that he would rather just play along in real time. […]. Gary’s track was done in one single pass having never heard the song before. To be honest, we were all absolutely floored by his performance.”

Greg asks him on the spot for his band, and Moore accepts. So he is standing next to Lake at the King Biscuit Flower Hour on November 5, 1981, when he plays another superlative of that studio part.

Lake has added and changed some lyrics, but hardly distinctive changes. The original text isn’t really a poetic masterpiece anyway – there’s not much to spoil about it. “(I Must) Love You Too Much” expresses in interchangeable verses the suffering of a loser in love with the wrong woman. His mother warns him, but in vain; he sure wishes he could leave her – but he loves her too much;

Well, my mama said the girl’s puttin’ you down
She’s gonna ruin my life
I must have loved you too much

…and variants thereof. Not surprising, and not too original either – in the blues canon dozens of variants of the same approach can be found, in any case. Arthur Crudup’s classic “Mean Frisco Blues”, for example, from which Dylan drew earlier, for the Basement gem “Santa Fe”;

Well, my mama, she done told me
And my papa told me too
A woman that gets in your face
Lord, she ain't no friend for you

Or Lead Belly’s equally influential “Fannin Street”;

My mama told me
“Women in Shreveport, son
Gonna be the death of you”

… more variants of the song in Dylan’s personal Top 10, the song which echoes in seven, eight Dylan songs, of Harold Arlen’s “Blues In The Night”, one of the many highlights on Sinatra’s Sings For Only The Lonely (1958):

My mama done tol' me, when I was in knee-pants
My mama done tol' me, “Son a woman'll sweet talk
And give ya the big eye, but when the sweet talkin's done
A woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing 
        who'll leave ya to sing the blues in the night”

 A third life gets “(I Must) Love You Too Much” in 1996, when The Band releases the peculiar album High On The Hog, after Jericho the second reunion album without Robbie Robertson, this time without really strong songs. The interpretation is not substantially different from Dylan’s original approach – funkier and tighter, but otherwise almost identical; also driven by a thunderous bass of presumably Rick Danko, a similar ladies’ choir (with Garth Hudson’s wife Maud), an identical tempo. However, “I Must Love You Too Much” is the most ferocious rocker of the otherwise mediocre, rather colourless album.

Richard Manuel’s replacement, ex-Beach Boy and “secret weapon of The Rolling Stones” (according to Ron Wood) Blondie Chaplin modestly participates in the background and donates one of the most beautiful songs on the album, “Where I Should Always Be”. Toe-curling lyrics, though. About a boy. In love with the wrong woman. No sustainable Christmas hit potential, unfortunately.

You might also enjoy “Unravelling the origins of Dylan’s rarely heard ‘I must love you too much’.”

==========

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

==========

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

By Tony Attwood

In this series of articles I have been trying to look at each and every Dylan composition and summarise in one or two words the theme within the song.   This has proved reasonably straightforward much of the time (love, lost love, moving on, the blues, surrealism, faith…) but as time passed by it got harder. And in the 21st century, things really get a lot more complex.

I’ve tried to show in these articles (and there is a full year by year index here) that we can tell a lot about where Bob’s thoughts and interests lay by looking at these lyrics, song by song.  Not because the lyrics in detail relate to his real life, but rather that through the generality of the songs’ subject matter we can get an insight into the idea of Bob Dylan the man, and what was concerning him.

Bob has often said that he doesn’t know where his lyrics come from – they come from within, presumably influenced by his emotions, what he has been reading, the music he has been listening to, what films he has seen and so forth.   So my theory is simply that we can get a much better insight into what is on his mind by starting from the premise that what pops into Bob’s mind reflects his current state of thinking and his current interests and feelings.

I also do feel that there has been a strong tendency among commentators to follow Heylin’s lead and primarily to see each song in isolation from those written around the same time.  That approach fails to spot the flow of thoughts and ideas whereas by looking year by year we get a deeper insight into the general flow of thoughts behind the lyrics, in my opinion.

And indeed it’s not been too hard a slog to put this together, at least up to this point.  And so consider the current point in this series, we can note that by 2005 Bob was recognised as the definitive master songwriter of the age, and in response to this he clearly felt even more free that before to meander as and where he liked.  Of course this had always been the case, as witness the subject matter of songs assigned through the Basement Tapes period, where Dylan seemed to be writing and improvising without constraint.

And now, unshackled by any over-arching concern or interest or drive Bob was letting his inner thoughts be expressed in the lyrics more than ever before.

In what follows I am omitting Waiting for the morning light here as I am still not sure of its provenance.  Which leaves us with 13 songs… as ever the simple summary of the subject matter appears in brackets after each song title.

• Tell Ol’ Bill  (It’s just life)
• Can’t escape from you (Lost love)
• Thunder on the Mountain (It’s just life, its complex, don’t try to tie it down)
• Spirit on the water (Love)
• Rollin and Tumblin (Lost love, trying to put it all together)
• When the deal goes down (Death)
• Someday Baby  (Lost love, Love gone wrong)
• Working Man’s Blues #2: (Economic woes in capitalist society)
• Beyond the Horizon: the sources and the meaning (Love, hope)
• Nettie Moore (Lost love)
• The Levee’s Gonna Break (Life’s going to change, time to move on…)
• Ain’t talkin’   (I live among the barbarians)
• Huck’s Tune (Lost love, Moving on)

So, in my usual attempt to draw these categories together I bring the list down to….

• It’s just life / change: 3
• Lost love / moving on: 5
• Love: 3
• Death: 1
• Economic woes / living with the barbarians: 2

Thus the old favourites of love, lost love, and moving on, are still there at the top of the list as they have been throughout so much of Bob’s writing career.  But we may also note that Bob is concerned particularly with change and moving on.

In the last article in this series I looked at the songs written around 2001 and reached the conclusion that Dylan at that time was writing primarily about chaos.   Adding together the subject headings I get for that year we had

• Chaos: 3
• Disaffection, disorientation: 2
• Leaving: 1
• Living lie a contrarian / crazy world: 4
• Coming to the end: 1
• Happiness is a state of mind: 1

So the emphasis has changed somewhat, but it is similar; the world is turned upside down, but we just keep on living in it, trying to do our best.

Tell Ol’ Bill, the song that I ceaselessly rave about to anyone who is crazy enough to listen, contains the lines

You trampled on me as you passed, Left the coldest kiss upon my brow, All my doubts and fears have gone at last, I’ve nothing more to tell you now.

Those are the lines of the ending time; the world marches on and tramples on ordinary people trying to make the best of the world they find themselves in.  In these strange  times Bob knows where he is; he has no more need to shout out the message.  He’s done his bit.

As the reviews of Dylan decade by decade (listed below) show, Bob Dylan has never stood still in his choice of themes for his work, but in the 21st century Bob has been either treading new ground, or tackling where he has been before in a new way.

We we have three more major songwriting periods to cover before our series is done (assuming Bob doesn’t fool us and bring out another new album or the record company don’t give us the outtakes of Rough and Rowdy).   So three more episodes before I can start drawing my final conclusions.

Meanwhile if you are interested in seeing the details of Bob’s songwriting year by year, that is brought together in five files, with each having links to the reviews of each and every song.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

This article continues from The Symbolism of the Red River Part I

by Larry Fyffe

Regular British troops and Canadian militia under Colonel Garner Wolselley put down the ‘Red River Rebellion’ in Manitoba; inhabitants of the the area, including its Metis population, led by Louis Riel, rebel against the authority of the Canadian federal government because their rights are ignored; however, Riel is forced to leave the country, and he settles in Minnesota for a time (the US state from whence singer/songwriter Bob Dylan hails). Louis becomes a bit of a religious fanatic; returns to Canada; ends up hanged.

The eastern militiamen remain in the Red River Colony to maintain law and order, some forming relationships with Metis – women biologically part European, part native ‘Indian’.  Out of this historical setting arises a song that expresses the sorrow these women feel when their lover heads back home:

There could never be such a longing
In the heart of white maiden's breast
As dwells in the heart you are breaking
With love for a boy who came west
(Red River Valley ~ traditional)

The song changes over time, but its origins can oft be detected. In the very-much-revised song lyrics below, the narrator thereof figuratively tranforms into Louis Riel; the girl, into his love – Manitoba.

Not all that crazy of an idea really:

Well, I knew when I first laid eyes on her
I would never be free
One look at her, and I knew right away
She would always be with me
Well, the dream dried up a long time ago
True to life, true to me
Was the girl from the Red River shore
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

The Red River flows into Lake Winnipeg, and eventually into often ice-bound Hudson Bay by way of the Nelson River, near where Gods River enters by way of the Hayes.

The song below at first appears to have somewhat the same Canadian theme as “Red River Shore”:

I got a house on a hill, I got hogs out lying in the mud
I got a long-haired woman, she's got royal Indian blood ....
Well, I'm driving in the flats in a Cadillac car....
Standing on God's River, my soul is beginning to shake
I'm counting on you, love, to give me a break

(Bob Dylan: Summer Days)

https://youtu.be/TjFnzUgDzbc

But it’s a crazy idea – the Canadian name has no apothrophe in it. God’s River likely refers to the Mississippi River in that no Cadillac car is going to be found driving on the shores of Hudson Bay.

The song lyrics below are jokingly and falsely attributed to Bob Dylan:

We were all just hanging around
Down at Ed's Cafe
Everybody had too much beer
And nothing to say
Overlooking Hudson's Bay

(More Or Less Hudson’s Bay ~ Masked Marauders)

While the following lyrics do refer to the Minnesota/Manitoba border:

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

(Bob Dylan: Girl From The North Country)

The lyrics below have a Canadian reference. Charottetown, the capital of the province of Prince Edward Island, gets its name from the queen consort of George III:

In Charlottetown, not far from here
There was a fair maid dwelling
And her name was known both far and near
And her name was Barbara Allen

(Bob Dylan: Barbara Allen ~ traditional)

https://youtu.be/pkOH7Rdfnkg

The Canadian province of Alberta takes its name from a daughter of Queen Victoria:

Alberta, let your hair hang low
I'll give you more gold
Than your apron can hold
If you only let your hair hang low

(Bob Dylan: Alberta)

But alas in the song ‘Red River Shore’, no matter what, the sun is simply not going to shine for its narrator – not even with thoughts of the miracles performed by Jesus Christ:

Well, I heard of a guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife
That if someone around him had died, and was dead
He knew how to bring them on back to life
Well, I don't know what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
'Cept the girl from the Red River Shore

(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

The girl from the Red River is gone.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

By Tony Attwood

What Chrissie Hynde has done is, to me, an example of artistic inspiration of the highest order.  We’ve already covered “In the Summertime” when  Jochen picked this video for his review of the song.  But Aaron had actually got there first with Play Lady Play, shot of love, infidels, empire.  (You did realise that this site is nothing but a competition between the writers, didn’t you?)

So, we’ve all given that track a very big thumbs up, and now it is time to encompass the entire collection of songs that Ms Hynde is releasing.

And thus moving on to number 2 – “You’re a big girl now”

I found myself about to write “there is an earthiness to this rendition” but realised that I had been watching the video, and that would be pretty crass.  So I won’t.

What is so wonderful is the relationship to the lyrics, while not in anyway falling into the trap of doing what Bob has done.   That cascading steel guitar chord on 2 minutes 25 seconds as she sings

I can make it through
You can make it too

adds such a wonderful edge – it is so simple but so perfect.

Thereafter we have the chords building a wall of sound but with variations coming in over the top.   The change in the weather takes us back down, but with the piano picking out raindrops (which sounds naff but is the only way I can describe it).

What they’ve done here is build without going over the top; the drone is still there but it is perfectly acceptable because of the total orchestration.  Fantastic.

And now, the song that gave me the idea of doing a complete review of this collection, even if no one else wanted to read it.   But as you are still here, just listen to “Standing in the doorway” with its piano accompaniment.  And just listen to that final line “You left me standing…” if it doesn’t give you shivers then I guess nothing in music can.

The point about this rendition, and the others, is that they force me to listen and listen although I know the songs so well, and have heard so many people try their hand at them.

As I have written about this song before, the core of its phenomenal power is the key change and it is a challenge for anyone entering the realms of the piece to be able to handle it in a way that makes lyrical and musical sense.

If you are still with me, allow me to try and explore this with verse three which starts after the instrumental verse at around 3 minutes 28.

Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t
But not tonight and it won’t be here
There are things I could say but I don’t
I know the mercy of God must be near
I’ve been riding the midnight train
Got ice water in my veins
I would be crazy if I took you back
It would go up against every rule
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Suffering like a fool

The first four lines are as we expect; the song is plodding along through its message of misery – and I don’t mean that disparagingly, misery is a plod; just ask anyone who has been abandoned.

So the first four lines of the verse just express utter desperation; the misery is destined to go on and on until the Almighty sends some blessed relief.

OK you can’t get any lower than that in a song of this nature, but then what Dylan does is changes key, taking us up to the subdominant – the fourth note of the scale, and suddenly we are not sitting alone in desperation, but freezing to death through the night.

It was a clever move by Bob, but the singer and arranger still has to handle this in a way that makes sense without make the song sound as if it has just suddenly taken off and travelled into another land.   And just listen to Chrissie (if I may be so familiar as to call her Chrissie) handles this to perfection.  She has been lyrical, gentle, but then a grit turns up in her voice for two lines before the voice almost breaks as she sings “I would be crazy…”

These are all details, but the details add to perfection.

And then the final twist – there are five long verses in this song, and most people trying the piece just plough through it, relying on the lyrics to carry them on. But listen to how Chrissie takes on the final verse.  If you have heard this before and not noticed this change, then that is a mark of the genius of this arrangement… and we are still unprepared for what she does to the ultimate line, “Blues wrapped around my head”.

I am going to stop now, and come back to the series anon; there is only  just so much emotion a man can take at times like this.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

In the Play Lady Play series Aaron selects the music, and Tony on the other side of the Atlantic writes the commentary on it.  There is a list of earlier episodes from this series at the end of the piece.

Aaron: This time I took a look at instances when a woman covered a Dylan song, with Bob in her band! I was able to find just a few instances, so I’ll give you the background on each track and what Bob is doing.

First up, and to keep things complete (maybe someone, somewhere will use this list as a complete account of Dylan appearing on Female led covers of his songs, who knows!) we’ll start with one we’ve already covered, and which Tony did not like too much, but maybe he’ll change his mind when he discovers it’s Bob on guitar and harmonica.

Stevie Nicks – Just Like A Woman

Tony: Obviously I spend my time running Untold Dylan because I am a great admirer of Bob’s writing, and indeed his performances of his own material – including his regular re-working of his own songs.

Bob came into music in an era when the norm was for bands to play their hits on stage exactly as it sounded on the record, while on TV often simply miming to the record, and of course he went in the opposite direction, finding new dimensions in the songs he performed live.

So I continue to look for new dimensions in the songs when they presented by others, and still coming back to Stevie Nicks – even knowing Bob was in the band – I just don’t find that extra something in there that makes me want to play the track twice.  It’s ok, but it doesn’t add anything new for me.

Aaron: Next up, from her 1976 album “Songs For The New Depression” it’s Bette Midler with Bob on backing vocals and guitar on her version of “Buckets Of Rain“.

Tony: From the off this is exciting – we can hear what the song is even if no one tells us in advance, but this instrumental opening is really interesting, as is the vocal introduction.

So this is a perfect example of a re-working that is, for me, worth it.  It takes the old song and transforms it while leaving just enough for us to remember where we started.  And in doing so it gives new insights into and meanings of the lyrics.

Basically it sounds like fun; even the instrumental breaks are interesting, amusing, challenging… and so it goes on, with Bette’s long fade out …  OK I don’t want the musicians to sound like they are having fun when singing “Desolation Row” but here, yes I do.  Even the corny bit of singing “Bobby, Bobby” works.

Aaron: Now, as an added bonus, something I just stumbled across, is this practice session between Bob and Bette. Wonderful to hear. I love stuff like this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYmeDej1X4o

Tony: Oh that is a find and a half – I’ve never come across this before.   What is so interesting is how much fun they are having in the rehearsal.  That must be where I went wrong – my band’s rehearsals were always too serious.  If reincarnation is actually real, I’ll try and remember that next time around.

Aaron: Next up, it’s Nanci Griffith’s with “Boots of Spanish Leather”. Not only was this recorded in Dylan’s home studio, but he plays the harmonica. From her 1993 album, “Other Voices, Other Rooms”.

Tony: Can you imagine playing in Bob’s own studio?  I mean, just the thought of that would make me play everything wrong.  Well, ok no change there, but more wrong than normal.

Now, this is interesting indeed because I have gone on and on about the need for a recording of a Dylan song to bring something new to the song, to make it interesting and worth listening to.   I love this version (and not for the harmonica part which I find unnecessary) but I can’t work out why.  What does Nanci Griffith bring to this song that we didn’t know before?   The addition of the percussion later on is interesting, but it is not that.

I think it is that her voice is utterly suited for the song, and she doesn’t try to do anything special – she just sings.  Perhaps it is the wistfulness in the lady’s replies to the offers of something being brought back from Spain – I really believe her when she says there is nothing she wants other than your sweet kiss.

It is an extraordinary feat to carry off what is a long two part conversation in song in this way.  But no matter how well we know the words, when this lady sings “The same thing I would want today I will want again tomorrow” it goes straight to my heart, not least because we all know what comes next.  And even here she doesn’t change her voice, and yet it is still perfect.  Yes there is a moment of additional edge in, “I’m sure your mind is a-roaming”.  But even “I’m sure your thoughts are not with me” is perfect.

I don’t think I have ever heard a better version of this song, and if I need to offer just one line to show why, listen to the very last line.  Of course we all know every line of this classic off by heart but somehow, by making no change in the way she sings that final line, there is an extra 2000% in the line.

Truly, I don’t know how she’s done it, but I am once again utterly moved by a song I have known most of my life, and have heard a million times.  Amazing.

Aaron: Next, and this is one I really like, so be kind Tony, it’s Carlene Carter with her cover of “Trust Yourself”. Bob appears on backing vocals and guitar. He mainly sticks to the background but you can hear him clearly around the 1:10 mark. This is something of a rarity. It was only released in Germany (I believe) as an extra track on the 1994 CD single “Sweet Meant To Be”. It might have appeared later on the 1996 compilation album, “Hindsight 20/20” but as I don’t own the CD I’m not sure about that.

Tony:  Yes Aaron, I get it.  And it works because the singer / arranger / producer / director whoever has gone back to the meaning of the song and started from first principles to make it a new song.

The opening tells us this is going to be a fully produced piece with lots of overlays; sometimes that can make me groan, but each and every diversion raises issues that add to the fun.

The harmonies too are great fun; in the wrong hands some of them would be horribly corny but no, they just keep us going.   Even the little technique of stopping after “if you want somebody you can trust” and then stopping, works.   After the heart-pulling exquisite pain of Spanish Leather, this was quite a relief!  And an enjoyable one.

Aaron: Now, I’m sure Tony has covered this one before, but again for the sake of completeness let’s finish up with Lone Justice, featuring Bob on guitar and harmonica.

Tony: Did you know that Maria McKee is related to Bryan MacLean who was part of Love who recorded “Forever Changes”?  I thought I’d mention that as I saw Love on their final tour just before the passing of Arthur Lee, playing in a small night club in Birmingham.

I just throw that in as it is one of my all-time enduring memories – and yes I know I said the same thing in the in the original review but well, that was a little while back.   There’s quite a bit of background on the song and the connection between Dylan, Bryan MacLean and Maria McKee – as I explored last time.  It’s fun, I do enjoy it.

Thanks Aaron.  That was a really interesting selection.

• Play Lady Play: Shot of love, Infidels, Empire
• Play Lady Play: foreign language lady-Dylan like you have never heard.
• Play Lady Play: Time out of mind
• Play Lady Play: the alternative rockers
• Play Lady Play in the 21st century
• From “me me me” to exquisite interpretations
• Play Lady Play: the joyful remembrance of staggering performances
• Play lady play: Bettye LaVette – and a kiss on the mouth
• When a woman sings Just like a woman and beats the bass issue
• Play lady play: I believe in you.
• The strange the eccentric and the beautiful
• Play Lady Play: A simple twist of fate
• Play lady play: the strange ones, the eccentric, and the beautiful
• Knocking the pony with the sisterhood
• Play Lady Play: female cover versions of Basement Tapes songs

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

by Larry Fyffe

James Arness stars as Marshall Matt Dillon, and Ken Curtis as his Deputy in the TV series western series called “Gunsmoke”. The singer/songwriter Robert Zimmerman is said to have taken the name “Bob Dylan” from that show rather than from poet Dylan Thomas as others claim.

Known for certain is that Ken Curtis be a member of the western singing group ‘The Sons Of The Pioneers’ along with the  ‘King of the Cowboys’ Roy Rogers, Tim Spenser, and Bob Nolan (from Winnipeg who spends part of his youth near Saint John in the Province of New Brunswick).

In the song below, lyrics are changed a wee bit from the original when sung by Ken Curtis:

Warm as the spring
Gentle and sweet
True as the Alamo
You'll find the world at your feet
Wherever you go

(Ken Curtis: Blue Bonnet Girl ~ Glenn & Tim Spenser)

https://youtu.be/-yuLW20GhmQ

The following lyrics stick to the original:

Soft as the springtime
Gentle and sweet
True as the Alamo
You'll have the world at your feet
Wherever you go

(Bob Dylan: Blue Bonnet Girl ~ G.& T. Spenser)

https://youtu.be/RFd2X-QKhuk

Here’s a song from an episode of the TV western series ‘Have Gun Will Travel, starring Richard Boone:

If I had wings like Noah's dove
I'd fly up the river to the one I love
Farewell thee well, O my honey
Fare thee well

(Ken Curtis: Dink’s Song ~ traditional)

Below, the same song performed by Bob “Dillon”:

If I had wings like Noah's dove
I'd fly the river to the one I love
Fare thee well, my honey
Fare thee well

(Bob Dylan: Dink’s Song ~ traditional)

Now a song written by the former New Brunswicker:

I'll know when night has gone
That a new world is born at dawn
I'll keep rolling along
Deep in my heart is a song
Here on the range I belong

(Ken Curtis: Tumbling Tumbleweeds ~ Bob Nolan)

Note the Dylanesque ‘rhyme twist’ in the song lyrics quoted below ~ ‘along’/’song’/’belong’;

‘song’/belong’:

Well, I'm a stranger here in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong
I'll ramble and gamble for the one I love
And the hills will give me a song

(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

The song above has its roots in the one below:

From this Valley, they say you are leaving
We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile
For they say you are taking the sunshine
That has brightened my pathway a while

(Ken Curtis: Red River Valley ~ traditional)

https://youtu.be/fn-F-QN9mWo

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

by Jochen Markhorst

Joni Mitchell owes her breakthrough to Judy Collins, who recorded the immortal “Both Sides Now” of the then still completely unknown Canadian in 1967 for her seventh album Wildflowers. It is also released as a single and it scores well: just like the album, it’s a Top 10 hit.

Still, Mitchell does have mixed emotions about the Collins recording, which can be felt. Wildflowers doesn’t stand the test of time well at all – it’s an over-orchestrated, partly cloyingly sweet collection of essentially brilliant songs – and Collins’ version of “Both Sides Now” is accordingly corny. There are three Leonard Cohen songs on the album, also appearing earlier than the artist’s own performance: apart from the less famous “Priests” the classics “Sisters Of Mercy” and “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye”. The best that can be said of them is that Judy Collins (who on her previous album was the first to record “Suzanne” as well) paves the way for Cohen to be able to record the songs himself in October ’67 – in the superior, breath-taking performances on Songs Of Leonard Cohen (1967), which most certainly do survive.

A second merit of the now dated album is that it draws Dylan’s attention to both Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. Echoes thereof, of the introduction to Collins’ Wildflowers and “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” can be found in the Desire-outtake “Golden Loom” (1975), one of Dylan’s most “Cohen-like” songs (with the little cryptic reference “and then you drift away on a summer’s day where the wildflowers bloom”) – and in “In The Summertime”.

“In The Summertime” is in more ways an outsider on Shot Of Love. Literary, for starters. All other verses on the album are written in the ordinary rhyme scheme aabb, for this song the poet imposes on himself the age-old, in pop music quite unusual aaab-cccb:

I was in your presence for an hour or so
Or was it a day? I truly don’t know
Where the sun never set, where the trees hung low
By that soft and shining sea
Did you respect me for what I did
Or for what I didn’t do, or for keeping it hid?
Did I lose my mind when I tried to get rid
Of everything you see?

This particular form goes back all the way to one of the Founding Fathers of the Art of Song, to William IX of Aquitaine (1071-1126), nicknamed The Troubadour. William, Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine (present-day Dordogne) was one of the most powerful feudal lords in Europe, an unsuccessful crusader and a bad, womanising husband, but a brilliant entertainer and brilliant song poet. His early songs are still rather jocular and aim at a howling and roaring male audience, but his later work is more refined, elegant and experiments with poetry techniques that are gratefully copied in the following centuries. As in one of his last songs, probably written in 1125:

Pos de chantar m'es pres talenz,
Farai un vers, don sui dolenz:
Mais non serai obedienz
En Peitau ni en Lemozi.

Qu'era m'en irai en eisil:
En gran paor, en gran peril,
En guerra, laisserai mon fil,
Faran li mal siei vezi.

Since I feel like singing,
I'll write a verse I grieve over:
I shall never be a vassal anymore
in Poitiers nor in Limoges

For now I shall be exiled:
in a dreadful fright, in great peril,
in war, shall I leave my son,
and his neighbours shall turn on him.

…the very first song with this remarkable rhyme scheme.

Kindred spirits throughout the ages feel challenged by this form. Dylan uses it for the first time in one of his most beautiful love songs, in “Mama, You Been On My Mind”, and is probably triggered once again by Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”;

Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way

In the spring of 1981 Dylan chooses the form one more time, this time for the small masterpiece “Angelina”. However, that song is rejected for Shot Of Love (perhaps out of dissatisfaction with a few too far-fetched rhymes on Angelina, such as “subpoena”, “concertina” and “hyena”). The selected “In The Summertime” seems older, though.

Not only rhyme technical-wise. Stylistically the song is different as well. The dramatic monologue, the poetic form in which an I addresses a fictional audience or a silent opponent, is also a form that suggests that Dylan has been walking around with “In The Summertime” for some time now. On Blood On The Tracks (1975) the song poet likes to use it, and parallels might also be drawn there in terms of content. To “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, for example. Thematically anyway (a melancholy look back on a summer in love), but also by choice of words: But there’s no way I can compare / All those scenes to this affair from “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome” is very similar to But all that sufferin’ was not to be compared with the glory that is to be, just like the decor, the idealized landscape;

Flowers on the hillside, bloomin’ crazy
Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme
Blue river runnin’ slow and lazy

 versus

Where the sun never set, where the trees hung low
By that soft and shining sea

…like the whole song actually is a kind of a best of Dylan’s love poetry.

The beautiful opening “I was in your presence for an hour or so / Or was it a day? I truly don’t know” masterfully expresses Dylan’s eternal theme Time Passes. And specifically the elusive, deceptive experience of Time that the poet on Blood On The Tracks mentions in songs like “You’re A Big Girl Now” (time is a jet plane) and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome” (I could stay with you forever and never realize the time), too. And before that in “Time Passes Slowly” and later in “Series Of Dreams” (where time and tempo fly, in an earlier version where time and tempo drag), up to and including the songs on Rough And Rowdy Ways (2020), where the passage of time is mentioned in almost every song. Already in the opening lines (Today and tomorrow and yesterday too), and more explicit in verse lines like Everything’s flowing all in the same time and How can I redeem the time? (“Crossing The Rubicon”)… well, Time Passes has been a constant in Dylan’s oeuvre since 1962, and still is in 2020.

And like this, almost every verse line of “In The Summertime” skims past an earlier work. This reflection on the experience of time is followed by the familiar description of the set, and after that

Did you respect me for what I did
Or for what I didn’t do, or for keeping it hid?

 … which again inevitably evokes “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, the song Dylan worked on for almost two years, from June 1964 to February 1966, finally rejecting it, with its equally melodious, equally poetic paradox:

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

So, we have: the rhyme scheme of “Mama, You Been On My Mind”, a very simple three-chord scheme (I-IV-V, in this case: A-D-E) which Dylan uses for dozens of songs (here it does smell like “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” as well as “No Time To Think”), the theme and the choice of words (echoing among others “Don’t Think Twice”, “Idiot Wind” and “Slow Train”)… yes, “In The Summertime” truly is a Dylan mosaic, a culmination of Dylan’s most beautiful love lyrics. Including, alright, some winks to the evangelical phase from which Dylan releases himself on this record (the winks being hardly loaded jargon like before the flood, the glory that is to be and unto eternity) – but then again: these are hints that without too much creativity also might fit into the more graceful love lyrics à la “Wedding Song” or “If Not For You”.

The potential of the song, which could have had the detonating power of a “Shelter From The Storm” for example, seems to have escaped Dylan. He spends little studio love on the song, the recording of especially the vocals is downright sloppy, and he hides the song in a meaningless place, somewhere halfway Side Two. In the year of its conception, 1981, the song is on the playlist about twenty times (usually somewhere as the ninth or tenth number), but after that the song is pretty much discarded – apart from an unexpected revival in 2002, when Dylan plays it about ten times again, and now puts it on an ear-catching, honourable second place.

Real rehabilitation the song receives in 2020, thanks to the enchanting Mrs. Chrissie Hynde.

The veteran (Hynde has been the singer and driving force of The Pretenders for forty-two years) feels an urge after the release of “I Contain Multitudes” (April 17, ’20), as she tells in an interview with Rolling Stone, July 30. The song is “fucking devastating” and makes her realize that now is the perfect time to honour her idol, “a man who had inspired me for most of my life”, with a tribute. She chooses a particularly successful form. Since she can’t tour, because of the corona restrictions, and is mainly at home, she decides, together with Pretenders guitarist James Walbourne, to record a Dylan cover and to post it on YouTube.

“I sent James a rhythm track on my phone, he added to it, and I put a vocal to it. Then we sent it to [engineer] Tchad Blake, who is out in the wilds of Wales, to mix it.”  

At the end of April, ten days after the release of “I Contain Multitudes” it is on YouTube.

It’s a bewitching version of one of Dylan’s forgotten masterpieces, and it tastes like more; a pleasantly surprised Chrissie decides to start up “The Lockdown Series“; about every fortnight Mrs. Hynde releases another Dylan cover. “Standing On The Doorway”, “Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight”, “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”… one is even more attractive than the other. The charm and intimacy of living room recordings, Chrissie Hynde’s knife-like vocals and – as in “In The Summertime” – Walbourne’s brilliant, goosebump-inducing keyboards; pearls, all of them.

Number two in the Series is “You’re A Big Girl Now”, by the way. Time is a jet plane.

You might also enjoy:

• Is Dylan slowly revealing his movement away from faith
• Play lady play: Shot of love, infidels, empire

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

I thought you might enjoy this Bob Dylan tribute song I wrote, using Bob’s Song To Woody as inspirational template…

As you may know, alongside this blog there is a Facebook group.

Recently there was quite a bit of political discussion, which I (as moderator) found it very hard to moderate, so we decided to hive off that part of the discussion into another separate group on Bob Dylan Politics.

If you are interested, it is just starting up (by which I mean there are two of us), but if you want to get involved simply go to…

https://www.facebook.com/groups/627237784857751

I’d appreciate it if Dylan’s politics are not discussed on the Untold Dylan Facebook site, which you can of course join if you are not a member.  Just click here.

Thanks

Tony Attwood (publisher, Untold Dylan)

Bob Dylan’s Allusions to A Tale of Two Cities in “I Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.”

by John Radosta

On the morning of March 27, 2020, with the world in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, Bob Dylan provided light, of a kind, by releasing a new single.

The 17-minute epic “Murder Most Foul” is ostensibly about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Despite its length and the darkness of its topic, “Murder Most Foul” became Dylan’s first ever Number 1 single, and was widely read as a way to give hope to a nation beset by the ravages of a virus. Alluding to nearly a hundred songs, films, and plays, many in the form of “requests” to Wolfman Jack, the song encapsulates not just a moment, but a cultural history of the nation, and so gave perspective on how a country can deal with trauma by turning to art, particularly performative art.

The songs and other performances he refers to all captured the popular imagination in their time, providing relief or respite from other crises. In the months after the song was released, the nation also began to rise up against police brutality, demanding justice first for the murder of George Floyd and then expanding to a massive movement calling for the restoration of civil rights in general. The protests have exposed wrongs and inequities that have long been ignored, forcing us to confront ourselves in ways few living people have had to do. It was—it continues to be—the worst of times for the country.

And then, in the midst of all of it, Dylan released his first album of original material in eight years, Rough and Rowdy Ways.

As with much of his work, especially in the 21st Century, Rough and Rowdy Ways is a kaleidoscope of cultural references that go far beyond the song requests in “Murder Most Foul.” Others have already pointed out the strong connections the album has to ancient history, especially in “Mother of Muses” and “I Crossed the Rubicon.” In “I Contain Multitudes” Dylan not only conjures up the ghost of Walt Whitman, but also compares himself to Anne Frank, Indiana Jones, “and those bad boys from England, the Rolling Stones.”^[i] All of these examples of intertextuality have the effect of conflating history. As he says in the deliciously creepy “My Own Version of You,” “I can see the whole history of the human race / It’s all right there – it’s carved into your face.”^[ii] But it’s the next track—I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”—sung as an earnest and sweet love song, that provides a most subversive and intriguing comment on our not-so-unique moment in history.

“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” is a slow, spare love song that sounds as though it would fit on his recent albums of Great American Songbook. Certainly, having recorded five disks of standards, he’s absorbed, as he does so well, the rhythms and word play that mark that style and has become adept at writing his own. The words flow gently, with familiar images and simple rhymes that lend themselves to a universal understanding of the singer’s emotions. In the second stanza, Dylan croons,

I saw the first fall of snow
I saw the flowers come and go
I don’t think anyone else ever know
I made up my mind to give myself to you.[iii]

It’s a lovely sentiment, at face value.

However, the song takes its initial stanza not from the pages of the American Songbook, nor from traditional lyrics of love, nor even this nation’s history. In fact, it draws its words from a satirical chapter of a book set in the “best of times and the worst of times.” In his Nobel Lecture, Dylan attributes his songwriting abilities not only to his knowledge of musical history, but also his “principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world.”^[iv] He gained those, he says, through typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by.”^[v] Among the novels he lists as foundational to his principles is Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

A negative example seems to have developed some of those principles regarding romance. The novel’s central love triangle, in which Lucie Manette chooses Charles Darnay over the brooding Sydney Carton, is actually more of an intersection where three roads meet, with Lucie as the central point. She has one more, oft-forgotten, suitor: C.J. Stryver, the buffoonish lawyer who lets Carton do all the work, and then takes all the credit. Stryver “shoulders his way” through the story, trying to live up to his name, and always failing. In the ironically-titled chapter “The Fellow of Delicacy,” Stryver, based only on the fact that others have pursued her, decides he is in love with Lucie. He embarks on a campaign to marry her, supported by absolutely no conversation with the lady to encourage him. Here is the opening paragraph of the chapter:

“Mr. Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal of good fortune on the Doctor’s daughter, resolved to make her happiness known to her before he left town for the Long Vacation. After some mental debating of the point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as well to get all the preliminaries done with, and they could then arrange at their leisure whether he should give her his hand a week or two before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it and Hilary.”^[vi]

Notice the phrasing “having made up his mind” as well as “whether he should give her his hand.” Dylan recasts those lines of resolute but misguided belief in the second half of the first stanza of “I Made Up My Mind,” saying, “Been thinking it over and I thought it all through / I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.”^[vii] Right from the start, Dylan casts doubt on the narrator’s sincerity and chances, while simultaneously sounding sincere and successful.

In both cases, the character has no apparent encouragement from the object of his desires, but has utterly convinced himself of the result. Compare these two lines, first from the novel:

As to the strength of the case, he had not a doubt about it, but clearly saw his way to the verdict…it was a plain case, and had not a weak spot in it…After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer case could be.^[viii]

Similarly, Dylan’s narrator insists,

No one ever told me, it’s just something I knew

and later,

I knew you’d say yes - I’m saying it too.”[ix]

Yet we never hear at all from the person—presumably a woman—and so can’t imagine whether this “gift” is welcome or not. It is significant, too, that the idea of “giving one’s hand” is generally a phrase used to describe a woman’s betrothal in marriage. In both Dylan and Dickens, the men in question might have broken the strictures of a gender-normative society. Much more likely, though, is that they have cast themselves in a position of weakness, not from romantic vulnerability, but from a complete lack of desirability. All to comic effect.

What follows in the novel is that Stryver’s attempts to court Lucie are continuously repelled, until he must present himself to the family friend Mr. Lorry for advice. Lorry, attempting diplomacy, suggests that “there really is so much too much of”^[x] Stryver for Lucie to handle, but that doesn’t deter his ardent wooing. Only later, after having spoken to Lucie himself, does Lorry deliver the message that she is not interested in Stryver (however, nothing of scene is ever shown in the book, and the reader is left wondering if, in his visit, Lorry ever even broached the subject to Miss Manette). Styver blusters his way through the heartbreak, denying he had ever fully committed himself to such a course of action, but the chapter ends with him “on his sofa, winking at his ceiling,” an image quite close to Dylan’s lines, “Sitting on my terrace lost in the stars / Listenin’ to the sounds of the sad guitars.”^[xi] Both Stryver and Dylan’s narrator, forced to confront their unrequited realities, begin to cry, and both stare sadly upwards.

But Dylan’s narrator, as so often happens, is not so one-dimensional as Stryver. Unlike Dickens’ lawyer, Dylan’s narrator is capable of growth and resurrection. That ability Dickens ascribes to Sydney Carton, the dissolute drunk who is introduced as being spiritually, almost literally, dead. In the second half of “I Made Up My Mind…,” the narrator gains empathy by looking beyond himself, in the same way that the “resurrected” Carton does. “I traveled the long road of despair,” Dylan says. And while he claims to have “met no other traveler there,”^[xii] he still understands that his own travails are not unique.

A similar formulation can be found in the novel. As a mid-July storm approaches, Lucie stands at an open window with her two rivals, Carton and Darnay, and her father. Listening to people dashing out of the rain, she tells them that she imagines the echoing footsteps, “to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by-and-bye into our lives.”^[xiii] It is her prescient foreshadowing of the French Revolution that shows her deep love for both Paris, where she was raised, and London, where she was born. Her travels make her “the golden thread”^[xiv] that ties the two cities together. Dylan’s line, “A lot of people gone, a lot of people I knew”^[xv] echoes these thoughts, but now they’re in the mind of the song’s transfigured narrator, whose self-awareness connects him more strongly with Carton than with Stryver and teaches us that the best path to peace is to understand those who are different from ourselves.

The famous opening of A Tale of Two Cities describes a period of time when the world was tossed between poles of prosperity and poverty, belief and superstition, hope and despair. It was, he writes, “in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”^[xvi] That “present period” was of course 1859, two years before the American Civil War, but Dickens knew that his description would be apt at any period and any place in history. In fact, his central goal was to stave off an American-style revolution right in England.

So, too, could it describe how the pandemic has created a turbulent, almost revolutionary, atmosphere in America, and how many of the Rough and Rowdy Ways songs speak to this moment. But Dickens offers a path out of the prospects of a devastating social cataclysm: inspiration and sacrifice, personified by Sydney Carton. In the reflecting chapter (the novel is full of mirror images), “The Fellow of No Delicacy,” Carton also declares his love to Lucie, but knowing that he has wasted his life and is not eligible, he asks only that she allow him to periodically visit. He tells her, “Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever.”^[xvii] He continues, “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything.”^[xviii]

Of course (here there be spoilers), when he climbs to the top step of the guillotine platform in place of Lucie’s beloved Darnay, his last thoughts are, “…it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known,”^[xix] because at last, through Lucie’s guiding light, he has found his respite. Dylan distills this declaration and sacrifice into the lines, “I’m not what I was, things aren’t what they were / I’m going to go far away from home with her.”^[xx] The addition of that last phrase, “with her,” sets up an ambiguity, though. Is this character, unlike Stryver or Carton, going to be successful in attaining his beloved? Or does the echo of “far,” (as Lucie’s fancy about the footsteps), suggest his resurrection will be because of, but not in the physical presence of, her? It all turns on whether that “home” is an actual place, or, since the experience of loving her has been transformative, giving him the ability to rise above his habitual failings, and through her become more compassionate and humane.^[xxi]

In the same climactic scene, after foreseeing the deaths, some imminent, some distant, of all the main characters of the novel, the prophetic Carton also imagines that “I see her [Lucie] and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both.”^[xxii] Dylan uses the same image, but cuts out the middle man in the lines, “I’ll lay down beside you, when everyone is gone.”^[xxiii]

One final connection between the song and novel can be found in the third stanza. To illustrate the vastness of his love, the narrator tells his beloved that he’s giving himself to her “From Salt Lake City to Birmingham / From East L.A. to San Antone”^[xxiv] (these two sweeps from west to east parallel the direction he takes in “Idiot Wind”: “From the Grand Coulee dam to the Capitol”^[xxv]). Not once, but twice, he lays out connections to two cities.

It is significant that of all the American cities that Dylan could have chosen, each of these four have been associated with some kind of popular uprising or revolutionary activity: the Native Americans living in the area that became Salt Lake City were decimated by disease brought by Brigham Young’s LDS followers, who were seeking to establish their own religious state beyond the borders of the United States; Birmingham, of course, was the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (who appears several times on Rough and Rowdy Ways) gained international renown; in 1968, East L. A. witnessed the “Chicano Blowouts”—student-led protests demanding better conditions and curricula in the high schools.

But it is the final city, “San Antone,” that draws a direct connection with Dickens’ novel. In A Tale of Two Cities, the Defarges’ wine shop, the central hub for the Jacquerie plotting the revolution, is located in the district of Saint Antoine. The neighborhood is such a powder keg that when a cask of red wine breaks, the starving residents of the neighborhood spring to life to drink it up, even from the mud, since in Saint Antoine, “cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence.”^[xxvi] It is one of the “raindrops,” along with the storm Lucie and her coterie observe, that Dickens uses as a symbol of the coming Revolution. Most likely, Dylan wrote this song before the protests that now grip the United States, but they, too, are a predictable shower of “raindrops” in reaction to oppressive actions. Dylan’s act of twice pairing two cities, including one that plays such an important part in the novel of revolution and resurrection, is a clear indicator that we must bend toward justice.

The message, of course, is that only though sacrifice can the depredations of an oppressive regime be stopped. Through compassion, empathy, and love, we can “see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.”^[xxvii] Dylan’s lovely song, spoken almost as a lullaby, allows us to experience the development from self-delusion to universal love, and maps out the course.

Bibliography

• Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. New York: Dover. 1999.
• Dylan, Bob. The Nobel Lecture. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2017.

Discography

• Dylan, Bob. “I Contain Multitudes.” 2020. Track 1 on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Sony. Compact disc.
• ———. “Idiot Wind.” 1975. Track 4 on Blood on the Tracks. Columbia. Compact disc.
• ———. “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” 2020. Track 4 on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Sony. Compact disc.
• ———. “My Own Version of You.” 2020. Track 3 on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Sony. Compact disc.

Footnotes

• ^[i] Bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/i-contain-multitudes/.
• ^[ii] Bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/my-own-version-of-you/.
• ^[iii] Bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/ive-made-up-my-mind-to-give-myself-to-you/.
• ^[iv] Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 6.
• ^[v] Ibid.
• ^[vi] Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Dover, 1999), 108.
• ^[vii] Bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/ive-made-up-my-mind-to-give-myself-to-you/.
• ^[viii] Dickens, Tale, 108-9.
• ^[ix] Ibid.
• ^[x] Dickens, Tale, 110.
• ^[xi] Bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/ive-made-up-my-mind-to-give-myself-to-you/.
• ^[xii] Ibid.
• ^[xiii] Dickens, Tale, 78.
• ^[xiv] Dickens, Tale, 162.
• ^[xv] Bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/ive-made-up-my-mind-to-give-myself-to-you/.
• ^[xvi] Dickens, Tale, 1.
• ^[xvii] Dickens, Tale, 116.
• ^[xviii] Dickens, Tale, 117.
• ^[xix] Dickens, Tale, 293.
• ^[xx] Bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/ive-made-up-my-mind-to-give-myself-to-you/.
• ^[xxi] Thanks to Henry Bolter for this suggestion.
• ^[xxii] Dickens, Tale, 292.
• ^[xxiii] Bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/ive-made-up-my-mind-to-give-myself-to-you/.
• ^[xxiv] Ibid.
• ^[xxv] Bobdylan.com, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/idiot-wind/.
• ^[xxvi] Dickens, Tale, 22.
• ^[xxvii] Dickens, Tale, 292.

An index to all the articles on Rough and Rowdy Ways published on Untold Dylan can be found here.