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.

By Tony Attwood

In this series of articles I’m picking out a few of the songs that Bob has played just once in a live show, and then never returned to the song at all.  They are not coming out in a particular order, and I’m open to suggestions for performances that could be featured.  Otherwise I’m just selecting some of the songs I happen to like.

A list of the earlier articles in the series is given at the end.

B-Thang

In late August/early September of 1989, Dylan went through a stretch of opening shows with instrumentals. Three of these are suggested by some reviewers to be improvised by  Dylan and his band, and were given the names “B-Thang”, “E-Thang” and “G-Thang”.

This was played at Park City UT September 1, 1989

https://youtu.be/RhjrrlyKg20

Now the few people who have bothered to mention this piece of music have tended to call the work “improvised” but I really don’t think it is – the chord changes do not follow a regular enough pattern, although the piece does move into a 12 bar variation mode after a while. But then there are once more some variations are there.  They are not extensive but enough to throw anyone who has not played along with Bob off the track.

Moving on, we have “Blue Bonnet Girl” which Bob performed on 1 November, 2000 in Bloomington, Indiana.

https://youtu.be/xyEKQriqyBE

The tune was written in 1936 by Glenn Spencer for his brother Tim who performed with of the Sons of the Pioneers, and who recorded the best known version of the song.

Here is a Roy Rogers / Sons of  the Pioneers version.  I wonder if Bob came across this while watching a movie.

Now just one more for today which comes from 23 November 2005 at the Carling Academy Brixton, London: “Blue Monday” but this one is rather an important piece in the history of rock n roll.

It is also one of the songs for which there is a lot of false information around – SetList FM for example leading us to a song by Bill Monroe and  the Bluegrass Boys which is not what Dylan is performing at all.    Maybe they do that just to see if people like me simply cut and paste without checking.  But really, if I did that, what would be the point?

https://youtu.be/Pruiqx4BtU8

For as it happens I’m writing this little series, because I really do enjoy these pieces of music, and although a few take me by surprise, I do claim a bit of knowledge of the old songs largely because of my own ancientness.

And really it only takes a few moments to think on hearing Bob, “that surely is going to be a Fats Domino song”, and yes it is.   What’s more there are videos of the great innovator performing it…

Now when I say this is a Fats Domino song I don’t mean he wrote it – rather he recorded it, and gave it his trademark piano style and really made it famous.

But it was written in 1953 by Dave Bartholomew, who was the man who got Fats Domino’s career moving, and it was in fact first recorded that year by Smiley Lewis.  Fats Domino got hold of the song in 1956 and from then on the song was credited to both Bartholomew and Domino – which seems a bit generous by Bartholomew, but I am sure he knew how to keep an artist happy.

Indeed Dave Bartholomew was no slouch when it came to songwriting, and this was not just a one off hit for he also wrote  “I Hear You Knocking”, “Blue Monday”, “I’m Walkin'”, “My Ding-A-Ling”, and “One Night” – the last for Elvis Presley.

Here is the original of Blue Monday…

https://youtu.be/uc-Clo2IdHg

But it was Fats Domino’s version that turned up in the 1956 movie “The Girl Can’t Help It” – one of the early rock n roll movies that made legislators get twitchy and suggest that rock n roll music should be banned as immoral.

It really is one of the classics of rock n roll.

And please don’t forget we have this series on our You Tube channel Dylan’s once only file: the concert. 

Dylan’s once only file: earlier editions

• Dylan’s once only file: You’re too late and the Old Rock n Roller
• Dylan’s Once only file “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” “Blue Moon” “Weeping Willow”
• Dylan’s “Once Only” File: 10,000 men and 20/20 Vision
• I defy you not to play this song twice

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

by Jochen Markhorst

Stanley Kramer’s Inherit The Wind from 1960, with Spencer Tracy in a starring role, is a classic that owes its classic status mainly to the court duel between attorney Henry Drummond (Tracy) and prosecutor Brady (Frederic March). Around it, the present-day viewer may stumble over the melodramatic staging of some scenes, but the story has a timeless, eternal value still. It is based on a true event, on the lawsuit against a teacher in Tennessee who was indicted in 1925 for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution – the famous “Monkey Trial”. In 1960, however, the story may just as well be understood as a satirical attack on the repugnant practices of communist hunter McCarthy, and in 2020, sadly, the petty attacks on dissenters are just as topical still.

However, when writing “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” in 2020, Dylan seems to be mainly inspired by the religious component, by the oppressive, narrow-minded fanaticism of the creationists in the village of Hillsboro, the short-sighted reverend and prosecutor Brady. The last line of the first verse quotes the song with which the film opens, and which is later sung again by half the village, welcoming Brady: “Give Me That Old-Time Religion”. The variant of the film opening is a cappella, terrifyingly sung by Leslie Uggams and sets an ominous, suffocating tone. But especially that second time, the massive variant with bells and whistles, sung by half the village, marching along with the smug Brady, gives the old, nineteenth-century gospel song an almost creepy, fascist charge; the camera gives all the attention to the irreconcilable, fanatical heads of the front line – all ladies who would be called “Karens” today.

The old gospel song comes to Dylan after that opening with saint and churches and Jews, Catholics, Muslims and Protestants – and that, that “Give Me That Old-Time Religion”, in turn, opens the gate to the second verse with the Inherit The Wind-associations: “thine is the kingdom”, the “straight forward puritanical tone” and especially the bible-thumpers, the rabid zealots who in their blind faith destroy much more than they could ever repair.

And none of it has anything to do with Jimmy Reed.

Brinkley: “On the album Tempest you perform “Roll on John” as a tribute to John Lennon. Is there another person you’d like to write a ballad for?”

Dylan: “Those kinds of songs for me just come out of the blue, out of thin air. I never plan to write any of them. But in saying that, there are certain public figures that are just in your subconscious for one reason or another. None of those songs with designated names are intentionally written. They just fall down from space. I’m just as bewildered as anybody else as to why I write them.”

The interview with Douglas Brinkley that the New York Times publishes around the release of Rough And Rowdy Ways in June 2020 is a delightful, worth-reading interview with a grand old man who reflects with attractive modesty and a strange mix of wonder plus reliance on his own work. We are already familiar with the drift of his self-analysis; in previous interviews Dylan often confesses that he has no idea where those songs come from. But by now he is almost eighty and chooses his words more soberly than ever – and at the same time with a kind of self-evident acceptance of the magic behind it. He calls his creative phase “trance writing”, he doesn’t plan his songs, songs come “out of the blue, out of thin air”, and:

“The songs seem to know themselves and they know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically. They kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them.”

Beautifully phrased, with a pleasant touch of mysticism – although the old bard recognizes elsewhere in the interview that the songs do not entirely come “out of the blue” or “out of thin air”. Regarding the opening song “I Contain Multitudes” he analyses:

“It’s the kind of thing where you pile up stream-of-consciousness verses and then leave it alone and come pull things out. In that particular song, the last few verses came first. So that’s where the song was going all along. Obviously, the catalyst for the song is the title line. It’s one of those where you write it on instinct. Kind of in a trance state.”

No doubt that’s no different with “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” – a title line as a catalyst for an entire song, and the lines to that title line come in a “trance state”. In any case, there are hardly any references to the historical, actual Jimmy Reed in the song. Actually, quite similar to that other ode to a blues legend, to the granite masterpiece “Blind Willie McTell”.

“Blind Willie McTell” was initially rejected by Dylan himself and passed over for the 1983 album Infidels. To the dismay of producer Mark Knopfler, who, just like the rest of the music-loving world, found the song an inexorable masterpiece, the inevitable high-light of the album on which he had worked so passionately. But Dylan deemed it “not finished”, and Dylan’s word is – unfortunately, in this case – law.

Maybe at the time, almost forty years ago, Dylan thought that the flag didn’t cover the content; “Blind Willie McTell” is certainly not about Blind Willie McTell, but is an impressionist masterpiece that evokes the slavery history of the Southern states. And biographically, Blind Willie Johnson would fit more than McTell. Hence perhaps Dylan’s uneasiness with the song; the refrain line Nobody could sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell does not really meet music history. Only after bootleggers illegally distribute the rejected recordings, which are then hailed by fans and music lovers as a masterpiece, and after The Band puts it on the setlist, Dylan surrenders – the song is released on the first Bootleg Series box in 1991. Since 1997, Dylan is fully aboard, playing it live for the first time. To his satisfaction, apparently: since then he has played “Blind Willie McTell” more than two hundred times.

The title line of “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” has just as little relationship with the rest of the lyrics, but in 2020 that doesn’t bother the maestro anymore. On the internet forums biographical lines are enthusiastically laid to Van Morrison, in this case.  “I can tell a Proddy from a mile away”, for example; Van the Man was a Proddy, a Protestant in Northern Ireland. Morrison sometimes took off his shoes on stage (“Never took my shoes and threw them into the crowd”), mystic is a “Van-word” anyway and, well alright, the words from the closing couplet I’m just looking for the man, I came to see where he’s lying in this lost land could just as well be a reference to “The Man” and to his native Northern Ireland.

Not too convincing, any of it, but at least the song has a lot more in common with Van The Man than with Jimmy Reed. But then again, a first association with I didn’t play guitar behind my head is Jimi Hendrix, the man Dylan honours in that wonderful, fascinating MusiCare speech, February 2015:

“He took some small songs of mine that nobody paid any attention to and brought them up into the outer limits of the stratosphere.”

Although in this context the internet forums eagerly share knowledge of useless but always entertaining facts about unorthodox playing techniques. It seems that already Charley Patton did pull stunts like that, for example – just like those bare feet insignificant, anecdotal frills; after all, despite its title, the song is not a coherent tribute or in memoriam.

The beautiful lines, for instance, with the see-through woman in a see-through dress,

Transparent woman in a transparent dress
It suits you well – I must confess

…do on the one hand paraphrase Charlie Rich’s “Easy Look.”

She sits there at the bar
Her feelings standing bare
Open as a see-through dress
She always wears

But might on the other hand have flowed into Dylan’s “trance-like, stream-of-consciousness” through Big Joe Turner’s ancient “Shake, Rattle And Roll”.

Way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shinin’ through
Way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shinin’ through
I can’t believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you

By the way, Walt Whitman haunts this place just as inspiringly, this “thin air” and “blue” from which Dylan, according to his own words, as a kind of telegrapher, drops his impulses on the notepad in front of him. In the same collection of poems from which Dylan gathered I contain multitudes, a butcher’s hook and mystic hours can be found, and the line go lull yourself with what you can understand is the positive variant of Dylan’s I can’t sing a song that I don’t understand.

The same goes for almost every song fragment. Most of them can be traced back to songs in Dylan’s book or music library. Or to his home cinema, like Inherit The Wind.

Only at the very end of the song, at the very last three words, down in Virginia, we find a first, literal reference to Jimmy Reed, to his song “Down in Virginia”.

None of those songs with designated names are intentionally written. They just fall down from space.

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 Kevin Saylor

• Dylan’s Christian Anthropology: An exploration of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Part 1 – multitudes
• Dylan’s Christian Anthology part 2: False Prophet & My own version of you
• Dylan’s Christian anthology 3: Black rider and Made up my mind
• Dylan’s Christian anthology 4: Jimmy Reed; Crossing the Rubicon

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

The last two songs on “Rough and Rowdy Ways” run for a combined 26-plus minutes. On the CD release, “Murder Most Foul” occupies its own second disc, so perhaps it is best to see “Key West” as the true final chapter on the album, with “Murder Most Foul” as an extended coda.

In many ways, “Key West” serves the same function as the album finale that “Highlands” did for Time Out of Mind. In “Highlands,” Dylan, riffing on Robert Burns, says that his heart is in the highlands, a paradisal, otherworldly place (although it is simultaneously described as an actual geographical location), even as his physical body remains in this world while he is alive. He calls the Highlands his home even though he currently is far away “like a prisoner in a world of mystery.” Like Dylan’s Key West, his Highlands is a liminal space, “way up in the border country.”  “Key West” plays a similar role. It is described as “the place to be,” “fine and fair,” “on the horizon line,” “the place to go,” “ the gateway key,” “the enchanted land,” “the land of light,” and “paradise divine.” Clearly, Key West is a place set apart from and superior to all other locales in which the rest of the songs on Rough and Rowdy Way are set. The singer of “Key West,” released 23 years of “Highlands,” is closer to his final destination than the singer of the earlier song. “Highlands” ends: “Well, my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day/ Over the hills and far away/ There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow/ But I’m already there in my mind/ And that’s good enough for now.” In the new song, he is already in Key West, the borderline city on the horizon, the place of passage to our ultimate goal.

But why Key West? It is the southernmost city in the contiguous United States. (Since many aging retirees migrate to Florida, there is perhaps a submerged joke about Florida being “God’s waiting room.”) In the song’s description, Key West resembles the Blessed Isles of Greek mythology. The previous song had ended with the “killing frost…on the ground,” but with the singer looking to the rising sun. In Key West, however, “winter…is an unknown thing.”  Key West is thus a land of blessedness and contentment, a place where every tear shall be wiped away.

But Dylan wants to insist that this Key West is a real place, not an imaginary island. Immediately after singing, “Key West is the enchanted land,” (n.b. “the” not “an”) the perona says, “I’ve never lived in the land of Oz/ Or wasted my time with an unworthy cause.” (There are other references to The Wizard of Oz in the lyrics). Key West exists not somewhere over the rainbow, but “down by the Gulf of Mexico.” Dylan mentions actual locations in the Florida city: Amelia Street, Bayview Park, Mallory Square; and historical facts: “Truman had his White House there.” In other words, the Key West he describes is a real place, although not identical with the city in Florida. Like the Scottish highlands in the earlier song, Key West is a symbol of an actually existing paradise divine, not the bogus land of Oz. Trying to construct “My Own Version of You” is an “unworthy cause”; trying to make your way to this city “on the horizon line,” the City of God that is the true destiny of all souls who have won the hard hope achieved in “Crossing the Rubicon,” is an admirable goal. It is the ultimate and perhaps the only true goal. It is not some head in the clouds opiate of the masses; in this Key West the singer has “both [his] feet planted square on the ground.” It is the “gateway key” to St. Peter’s gate, the key that the persona of “Crossing the Rubicon” turns before crossing the river.

But if this is the case, the song certainly commences in an odd fashion, with a murder: “McKinley hollered; McKinley sqaulled/ Doctor said McKinley, death is on the wall/ Say it to me, if you got something to confess/ I heard all about it, he was going down slow/ I heard it on the wireless radio/ From down in the boondocks, way down in Key West.” The opening couplet revises the beginning of Charlie Poole’s “White House Blues,” a song Dylan would have known as a young man from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. “White House Blues” uses a technique Dylan frequently employs: composing a topical song by incorporating floating verses from older songs. This allusion to Charlie Poole works on several different levels.

For one, it connects “Key West” to “Murder Most Foul,” itself an (ostensibly) topical song incorporating scores of references to previous songs. Each song uses the assassination of a president as a launching pad to engage in larger issues. “Murder Most Foul” includes a quote from “White House Blues”: “Hush, little children.” “White House Blues” and “Murder Most Foul” are both written well after the assassination and mention by name the presidential successors, Roosevelt and Johnson.

McKinley was murdered for political reasons by an anarchist and “Murder Most Foul” intimates Kennedy may have also been killed for political reasons. All three songs use art to confront and try to understand violence. In “White House Blues,” the doctor tells McKinley that he “can’t find the ball.” This is a specific reference to a particular shooting and a physician’s inability to help one patient by removing the shot from his body. In Dylan’s rewrite, “Death is on the wall.” As he did with the album title, Dylan revises to universalize. Ultimately, the writing is on the wall for all of us–death spares no one. Dylan’s doctor is also a priest, asking the dying, hollering McKinley if he has anything to confess, any burden of sin he needs to unload before meeting his Maker.

However, “Key West” is set in contrast to this world of violence. The persona hears the radio blasting the news from the safety of Key West. In fact, the city in the song is a place of reprieve from violence, even from death. As we near the end of the album, it may be worthwhile to stand back and consider its progress through the sequence of tracks. Rough and Rowdy Ways begins with the universality of mortality (“I Contain Multitudes”), manoeuvres past false prophets (“False Prophet”) and false idols (“My Own Version of You”), proclaims deliberate devotion to the God Who Is (“Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You), discovers the proper way to meet death (“Black Rider”) thumps a Bible and proclaims a creed (“Goodby Jimmy Reed”), asks for inspired wisdom and enacts a baptism (“Mother of Muses”), struggles through adversity to reclaim hope (“Crossing the Rubicon”), and finally arrives in the land of realized hope (“Key West”).

In the second verse, the singer changes the dial on the radio that brought the bad news of McKinley’s assassination. “I’m searching for love, for inspiration/ On that pirate radio station/ Coming out of Luxembourg and Budapest/ Radio signal clear as can be/ I’m so deep in love that I can hardly see/ Down in the flatlands, way down in Key West.” Instead of violence, he searches for love and inspiration, which can only be found on pirate, i.e. unofficial and unlicensed, radio. Pirate radio allows one to broadcast the naked truth, here the truth about love, considered taboo by the powers that be. (Interestingly Radio Martí, originally intended to be called Radio Free Cuba, was broadcast from Key West to Cuba while Castro was in power.)   When the clear signals come in from Luxembourg and Budapest, two cities famous for pirate radio, the singer falls deeply in love. The pirate radio broadcast is a metaphor for feeling the Holy Spirit which gives light and freedom as described in “Crossing the Rubicon.” To hear the unadulterated Truth is to fall in love and be set free. It is available to everyone who looks for it and discovers where to turn the dial.

The third verse then tells us, “Key West is the place to be/ If you’re looking for immortality/ Stay on the road, follow the highway sign/ Key West is fine and fair/ If you’ve lost your mind, you’ll find it there/ Key West is on the horizon line.” This stanza makes it fairly clear that Key West is a symbol for the eternal City of God where death is undone. Various roads scatter across Rough and Rowdy Ways. This road is Jesus’s narrow way that leads to life (Mt. 7:14), Dante’s straight path that does not stray into the dark wood of error and sin (Inferno 1), the “path in the mind” (“I Contain Multitudes”), the path on which you must travel light on the slow journey home (“Mother of Muses”). It is the King’s highway and the signs are posted if you know where to look. Hint, “thump that Bible” as in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” It is the place to find true sanity in God if you’ve lost your mind in the world. In verse six, it is the “key to innocence and purity.”

In verse ten, it is “under the sun/Son,” where you “feel the sunlight (light of the Son) on your skin/ And the healing virtues of the wind (Holy Spirit)/ Key West is the land of light.” Taken together, this description seems sufficient to indicate that in the song, Key West stands for the Christian Heaven, or at least as the place set aside for true believers who possess the expectant hope of salvation.

If so, it helps interpret one of the strangest verses on the album: “Twelve years old, they put me in a suit/ Forced me to marry a prostitute/ There were gold fringes on her wedding dress/ That’s my story, but not where it ends/ She’s still cute and we’re still friends/ Down on the bottom, way down in Key West.” On May 22, 1954, two days shy of his thirteenth birthday, Robert Allen Zimmerman celebrated his bar mitzvah. The choice was his family’s, hence he was “put into” a suit and “forced” to participate in the ceremony.

Dylan alludes to the prophet Hosea who was instructed to marry a harlot, Gomer, because “the land hath committed great whoredom” (Hos. 1:2). The gold fringes refer to a decorated Torah covering. So, marrying a prostitute at 12 years old is Dylan’s metaphor for his bar mitzvah, which he did not want. Yet he still finds much in his Jewish heritage that is attractive. He is on good terms with Judaism, if not a fully practising, Orthodox Jew. He has had his sons bar mitzvahed, been photographed at the wailing wall in Jerusalem, celebrated passovers, been spotted in Temple, raised money for Jewish causes, written a song defending the state of Israel (“Neighborhood Bully”), etc.

The references on Rough and Rowdy Ways to the Holy Spirit, Christian gospel, the theological virtues, baptism, and other aspects of Christianity suggest strongly, if not conclusively, that Dylan remains the believing Christian has continuously been since the late ‘70s. This, then, would seem to be as close as we are ever likely to get to an explicit declaration by Bob Dylan, ne Robert Zimmerman, that he is a messianic Jew. If that is correct, then the lines in stanza four–”Well, it might not be the thing to do/ But I’m sticking with you through and through/ Down in the flatlands, way down in Key West”–refer to Jesus, even if that is not a popular position to take, amongst most of Dylan’s fans or in the general political and social climate.

In “Key West,” Dylan sings beyond the genius of the sea. The subtitle of “Key West” is “Philosopher Pirate.” Throughout Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan is a philosopher pirate broadcasting via his own version of pirate radio a semi-coded message of faith, hope, and love to a tangled and torn world. His music projects a philosophy of belief to people living under the tyranny of political correctness and media conformity, and even more under general depravity and corruption. As he says, “I’ll drink to the truth” and “I have no apologies to make” (“I Contain Multitudes”).

Finally we have the coda to the album, at nearly 17 minutes the longest song Dylan has ever released, dropped unexpectedly as a single in March. “Murder Most Foul” is a treasury of references, to American pop culture and history in particular, but also to Shakespeare, Beethoven, the Bible, and much else. I have tried to make sense of Dylan’s mosaic of allusions on the songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways, exploring how he employs them to create meaning in his lyrics. In truth, I have touched on only a small fraction of these allusions. I will not here try to make sense of the scores of references in this one song, although I strongly suspect Dylan’s choices are not promiscuous. Many of these references are far more straight-forward and recognizable than allusions elsewhere on the album. He cites well-known information about the Kennedy assassination. He names familiar names from contemporary culture, such as Patsy Cline, Marilyn Monroe, Don Henley and Glen Frey, Nat King Cole.  Whereas elsewhere it takes some digging or a broad knowledge similar to Dylan’s own to catch the allusions, here they are often on the surface.

In doing so, and by setting this artistic litany in the context of a traumatic national event, Dylan suggests the importance of the creative imagination in dealing with real-world tragedy. Kennedy’s murder is just the starting place, a synechdoche for all the violence, hatred, and darkness in the world. “Murder Most Foul” does something similar to the title song of Tempest, where Dylan uses the sinking of the Titantic to make more general comments on human responses to tragedy and death. The second line of the new song already expands its scope beyond the shooting of JFK: “‘Twas a dark day in Dallas–November ‘63/ The day that will live on in infamy.”

By quoting Roosevelt’s speech reacting to the attack on Pearl Harbor, a quote famous enough to be recognizable by most listeners, Dylan indicates that the event in Dallas was not an isolated occurrence, but a continuation of sanguinary human history that extends far beyond December 1941 to that primal eldest curse, Cain’s murder of Abel. The song takes on slavery and race relations in America as well. The lines “The day they blew out the brains of the king/ Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing” must refer primarily to the Kennedy shooting. The details don’t fit the assassination of Martin Luther King. But how can we not hear an echo of that act of hatred in the title “king”? And possibly, in a muted manner, we might think about the execution two thousand years ago of the King of kings. The line “Take me back to Tulsa, to the scene of the crime” certainly refers to the Tulsa massacre of 1921. It also refers to the Bob Wills song “Take Me Back to Tulsa” that includes the lines: “Little bee sucks the blossom/ Big bee gets the honey/ Dark man picks the cotton/ White man gets the money.”

Allusions extend further back to the Civil War, with references to Gone With the Wind, the Union song “Marchin’ Through Georgia,” and the Confederate “Blood Stained Banner.” And further back to Beethoven and Shakespeare’s violent tragedies. In “Murder Most Foul” the call to arms against the universal sea of troubles in human history is artistic not political. Or, if you prefer, it is politics by other means. The song calls for an imaginative more than an activist response to the hardness of human hearts. It bespeaks the healing power of art, and song in particular, in a fallen world where suffering is ineradicable. Throughout his career, Dylan has always believed that the key to genuine reform lies in changing hearts not changing laws. Or, if you prefer, that changing laws is only truly efficacious when hearts have been converted. As he sang in “Wedding Song,” “It’s never been my duty to remake the world at large/ Nor is it my intention to sound the battle charge.” But he does consider it his duty to lighten the world through the creation of beautiful and inspiring music. Music provides a tremendous reprieve from pain; it may even change people’s way of thinking and offer them a new set of rules.

Dallas, as the main setting of “Murder Most Foul,” provides a couple of coincidentally relevant names. The main waterway through Dallas is the Trinity River and the main airport in ‘63, Love Field. Roads and rivers are important throughout Rough and Rowdy Ways. In “Murder Most Foul” Dylan alludes to the the most famous intersection in American musical history, the crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil: “I’m going to the crossroads, gonna flag a ride/ That’s the place where Faith, Hope, and Charity died.” The devil always meets people at the crossroads, those moments when we must make crucial decisions about the direction our lives will take. The devil tempts us to take the broad road to perdition, to resist the yoke that comes with adhering to the theological virtues.

The persona of “Murder Most Foul” is not going to the crossroads to sell his soul; he goes to force the moment to its crisis, to choose the narrow path, reject sin, and keep Faith, Hope, and Charity alive. In the next verse he sings, “Wake up, Little Suzie, let’s go for a drive/ Cross the Trinity River, let’s keep hope alive/ Turn on the radio.” In the Everly Brothers’s “Wake Up, Little Susie,” a teenage couple falls asleep watching a movie getting Susie into “trouble deep” with her parents for breaking curfew by six hours. They fear Susie’s reputation will be ruined because her parents and their friends will assume they have spent the night in an amorous embrace. The boy calls her to wake up so they can avoid getting into further trouble. We’ve already seen in “Mother of Muses” how Dylan uses awakening as a baptismal metaphor for rejecting sin: “Take me to the river…Wake me, shake me, free me from sin.” And on Slow Train Coming he included a song based entirely on this idea, “When You Gonna Wake Up?” The point of the allusion then is wake up little Susie and stop sinning. In this context, Dylan puns on Dallas’s Trinity River as a place to be baptized into belief in a three-personed God, which if not the only is at least the best way to keep hope alive. Then he connects all of this with turning on the radio, reinforcing the idea that music helps to sustain hope and rousing belief. Dallas’s “Love Field is where [Kennedy’s] plane touched down/ But it never did get back up off the ground.” “Murder Most Foul” is Dylan’s wake-up call that the we need to start flying once again from “Love Field.”

Another river is mentioned on “Murder Most Foul”: “Ferry ‘cross the Mersey and go for the throat.” The English river provides Dylan with a homophone for mercy. Gerry & the Pacemaker’s hit single, though far simpler, actually has affinities with “Key West.” In Gerry Marsden’s song, the singer wants to stay in the place he loves, a place where people smile even at strangers and turn no one away, because elsewhere, “Life goes on day after day/ Hearts torn in every way,” and “People they rush everywhere/ Each with their own secret care.” In both songs, as in “Murder Most Foul,” the field of love, the place where torn hearts and secret cares are healed, lies across the river of Mersey/mercy.

In this examination of Rough and Rowdy Ways I have analyzed a small fraction of the allusions Dylan employs, trying to understand how he uses intertexts to create meaning. But of course Dylan’s collage technique works only if the songs are enjoyable, approachable, and to some degree understandable without recognizing and interpreting every (or even any) allusion. In the Divine Comedy Dante makes hundreds of allusions to scripture, Church fathers and doctors, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, and scores of other sources. But, if we are not moved by the story of the protagonist’s journey through the realms of the afterlife, we will not bother to read the poem let alone exert the effort to interpret it.  To use an ancient formulation, art must delight as well as (before really) instruct. I have neglected to a large extent the ways in which these songs are simply appealing–the musical arrangements, the vocal performances, the sound of the words. In truth, these things constitute the primary importance of the album as a work of art. Yet, if we take the time to look more closely, Dylan’s achievement opens up for us on multiple levels of meaning and illumination.

I have tried further to argue that Rough and Rowdy Ways reveals, as I believe all of Dylan’s albums at least since Slow Train Coming if not before have always revealed, a Christian anthropology. The songs portray a world gone wrong moving inexorably toward apocalypse. But apocalypse, after all, is an unveiling, a revelation of the beneficent Creator’s true providential ends. Similarly, the songs portray fallen human beings, struggling against violence and malignancy both outside themselves and within, plagued by fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but who are nevertheless, through the grace offered by the Holy Spirit, open to redemption and capable of faith, hope, and charity.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Play Lady Play is a collection of articles relating to interpretations of Bob Dylan’s songs by lady performers.

Throughout the recordings are selected by Aaron Galbraith, based in the USA.  Aaron then sends his selection to Tony Attwood in England who then writes the commentary – and tries to complete each set of notes while the track is playing (although he does sometimes cheat).

You can find links to previous episodes of this series on the Play Lady Play homepage.

All of the episodes are on line as YouTube videos at the Untold Dylan Video Channel

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Aaron: For this episode I thought I’d look back at Dylan’s first 3 studio albums of the 80s, Shot Of Love, Infidels and Empire Burlesque and pick two female led covers from the three albums.

Shot Of Love

Aaron: Nana Mouskouri – Every Grain Of Sand. I thought I’d hate this when it first started, but I grew to kinda love it as it went along…it’s just so deliciously 80s! I think it came out in 1986. A second play is recommended!

Tony: It’s a very personal thing but for some reason I don’t like the excessive use of the vocal vibrato that seems to be part of Ms Mouskouri’s style. But I have to say this is an extraordinary rendition of this song.  The harmonies are staggeringly beautiful, and the orchestral arrangement is brilliant.

This is is exactly what one hopes for in a re-arrangement of a Dylan piece, bringing out the pure genius of the music and lyrics as a unity, rather than using the performance as an excuse for piggy-backing on Dylan’s genius.  I do want arrangers and performers to recognise that they are utilising works of brilliance, and add their own abilities to this – and when they can, the results can be exquisite.

Just listen to the line “Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me” – what they do is so simple, so relevant to the piece, so brilliant, so beautifully executed.

Aaron: Chrissie Hynde – In The Summertime. Very laidback…I wondered how they shot the video, any ideas?

Tony: In terms of shooting videos, my work in TV was a writer, which meant the guys making the shows would threaten the likes of me with death if I got anywhere near the studio, the editing room, or the set.  So no idea.

But it is a fantastic video, and it is so good to see the creative team being given the chance to make a video that is worthy of the song, and this certainly is.  In fact I forgot to keep writing and just watched the vid all the way.

This is one of few recordings that made me need (not want, but need) to go back and listen to Bob working on the song.   Just in case you get the need to do that here’s where I went .

It just reminded me how much more Chrissie and co have put into this recording, not just in the video but in the music.  And here again I am hearing the lyrics as I have not understood them before.

Strangers, they meddled in our affairs
Poverty and shame were theirs
But all that suffering was not to be compared
With the glory that is to be
And I'm still carrying the gift you gave
It's a part of me now, it's been cherished and saved
It'll go with me unto the grave
And into eternity.

Oh goodness me – that is good.  (OK I am being naive and simplistic now, but what else can be said about lines like that?)

I love this recording.  Certainly one of the ones I want to come back to.  Thank goodness of the Untold Dylan Video Channel.

Infidels

Judy Collins – Sweetheart Like You.

Aaron: Unusual. Breathtaking vocals. I closed my eyes whilst listening to “get in the zone” and just went with it. Excellent.

Tony: OK so I have declared my love for Judy Collins’ music many a time – but nooooooooo I do not take to lyrics spoken not sung.  They are there to be sung not there to be declaimed; for me it never works.

I guess there must be a lot of people in the world who actually like hearing song lyrics declaimed against music.   “You know you can make a name for yourself….”  just listen to that line here spoken not sung.   What is the point?

And then at around 2 minutes 33 seconds the percussion comes in and I thought what??????   I even went back and played the vid again, not able to believe my own ears.  What is going on here?

"Hey guys, I know, let's do everything they don't expect us to?"

"But why?  What's the point?"

"It's different."

Yes it is different.  But that’s not enough.  In fact that is quite often just the opposite of what is enough.  Sorry Aaron.  I think it’s awful.

Eliza Gilkyson – Jokerman.

Aaron: Nicely restrained, slightly countrified version. I enjoyed it.

Tony: Goodness I must be in a bad mood today – although I didn’t think so when I woke up.  But “A nod to Bob”   ?????????????????????   What person thought that this was a good name for any album, let alone an album of women singing Bob Dylan songs.

But she’s the sister of a member of Lone Justice, which puts her up there worthy of special attention in my book.  Yet somehow this version of the song doesn’t seem to do justice to the lyrics, in the way that Bob does.   It made me pondering what it is in the original that really makes the song work so well.  Is it the way the bass players quavers through the verses, against the laid back approach of the other instruments?  I suspect so.

If you (dear reader, not Aaron) have the inclination go back to Bob’s original version, and instead of listening to Bob and the lyrics, listen to what the band is doing and then see how they link the verse to the chorus.  It gives the song a rare magic, and I think that is lost here.   Maybe that “Nod to Bob” nonsense put the band off.

Bob doesn’t do choruses that often, but when he does he tends to put in something very special, and that needs to be considered carefully if one is going to offer a new version – in my opinion.  But then, that’s probably just me.

Empire Burlesque

Aaron: Bettye LaVette – Emotionally Yours. Surprising arrangement. Unsurprisingly great. Love it, especially the second half.

Tony: You’re cheating Aaron, we’ve been through the Lavette Dylan song book and I’ve already slipped in the track I really love (“Things have changed”), and I know how much you like the music of this lady.  But here’s another song used by the singer to show off her vocal acrobatics, even when they are not part of the song.

No, sorry not for me, but beyond any doubt our readers will be knocking out more of those emails suggesting you take over the site and push me into the garage (not I hasten to add, to make an album of my own but to try and work out what that strange knocking sound is everytime I start up the exceptionally old and now rather decrepit Mercedes).

Aaron: Thea Gilmore – I’ll Remember You. Wow. Man, what a voice. And that trumpet part towards the end. Genius, just genius.

(Two versions here, one of them doesn’t work in the UK but does in the US)

Tony: Now this is at the other end of the scale.  This is so wonderful, Aaron I forgive you all your meanderings into the strangeness.   She has a beautiful voice which she utterly understands, and an arranger who knows how to make instruments fit around her.

If you play this more than once then try this:  play it once just taking in the music, play it the second time listening to the exquisite vocalist and then play it again listening to one of the most unusual accompaniments ever put together for a Dylan song.  Somewhere around 2 minutes 37 seconds and onwards.  Oh that is so good, so clever, so unusual.  This is why I moved from being a musician to become a writer – I knew I could never have dreamed of putting that sort of arrangement together.

And just go on and listen to the subsequent instrumental break.  I know we are here to consider the work of the ladies, but oh that arranger is so utterly brilliant – she/he has the percussion taking the same routine over and over and yet it never sounds like mere repetition.

Genius all round.   (Incidentally, the second of the two videos (the one I can get to play in the UK) continues with the rest of the album – I don’t want to send you away from this article, but maybe come back later and play the whole album).

Aaron: Now let’s finish this episode the way Dylan signed off the Empire Burlesque album with this bonus track..

Judy Collins – Dark Eyes.

Tony: After my rude comments about Judy above, I hesitate.  Judy it seems knows how to move me to tears and also has me tearing what is left of my hair out.

This one I am sorry to say, doesn’t move me at all (so at least no more hair loss).  It is the twinkly piano that puts me off.  Dark Eyes is a dark song, and that piano is so twee.  It is not the wonderful Judy’s fault of course, I am sure she didn’t write the orchestration, and she probably doesn’t have the power to sack the arranger and demand someone else comes in.

It can work with a piano accompaniment to the fore, but not like this.  When the violins come in I thought it could be salvaged, but no.

I would say, just look in total silence at these lines, and then ask, does that twinkly piano at the end fit?

Oh, the French girl, she’s in paradise and a drunken man is at the wheel
Hunger pays a heavy price to the falling gods of speed and steel
Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies
A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes

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Aaron:  Hope you enjoyed at least some of these selections!

Tony: Oh yes.  This is such fun.   Even if we have no audience left because they’ve got totally fed up with my negativity, can we do it again?

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

By Kevin Saylor

• Dylan’s Christian Anthropology: An exploration of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Part 1 – multitudes
• Dylan’s Christian Anthology part 2: False Prophet & My own version of you
• Dylan’s Christian anthology 3: Black rider and Made up my mind

“Goodbye Jimmy Reed” is a blues stomper. As in “Blind Willie McTell” and “High Water (For Charlie Patton),” Dylan turns a commemorative song into something much more and perhaps other than the legendary bluesman named in the title. The most puzzling thing about “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” is that the first verse seems to be set in Ireland: “I live on a street named after a saint/ Women in the churches wear powder and paint/ Where the Jews and the Catholics and the Muslims all pray/ I can tell a Proddy from a mile away.”

“Proddy,” an Irish-Catholic insult for a Protestant, would not likely be in the vocabulary of a Chicago bluesman born in Mississippi. Niall Brennan, however, has some interesting reflections on how phrases from this song might be a shout-out to fellow blues aficionado Van Morrison, which can be found here: https://www.highsummerstreet.com/2020/07/goodbye-jimmy-reed-hello-van-morrison.html#more

Whatever the case may be with the first verse’s odd diction and setting, the song contains themes consistent with the rest of Rough and Rowdy Ways, most notably the connection between music and religion.

In a 1997 interview, Dylan said, “Those songs are my lexicon and prayer book. All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from ‘Let Me Rest On That Peaceful Mountain’ to ‘Keep On the Sunny Side.’ You can find all my philosophy in those old songs.

I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw the Light.’ I’ve seen the light too.”  The first verse concludes, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed–Jimmy Reed indeed/ Give me that old time religion, it’s just what I need.”

“Give Me That Old Time Religion” is one of those old songs that form Dylan’s lexicon and prayer book. Both the song and the old creed are just what he needs. Different versions of the song contain various lyrics, but a few seem particularly relevant to “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” for instance, “Make me love everybody,” “It can take us all to heaven,” or “It was good for the Hebrew children,” a line especially poignant for a Jew who has embraced Christ.

The second stanza namechecks another of those old songs (and a James Baldwin novel): “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory/ Go tell it on the mountain, go tell the real story/ Tell it that straightforward Puritanical tone/ In the mystic hours when a person’s alone/ Goodbye Jimmy Reed–God speed/ Thump on a Bible–proclaim the creed.” The lyric attaches the doxology to the Christmas carol, “Go tell it on the mountain, that Jesus Christ is born.” The Christmas story is the “real story,” as found in the  Bible, to be proclaimed straightforwardly as a creed.

Lust, or perhaps sin and temptation more generally, are also addressed in this song. “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.”

We deceive ourselves if we think we can resist sin on our own even though we know the wages of sin is the scaffold. In the final verse, the persona is either in a cemetery looking for Jimmy Reed’s grave or a church looking for the Lord: “‘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/ Came to see where he’s lying in this lost land.’”

“I’m just looking for the man” likely alludes to the Don Lee penned gospel song “That’s the Man I’m Looking For,” containing the chorus, “If you can remember ask Him what’s His name/ If He tells you Jesus just say we’re so glad you came/ Tell Him you know someone that still calls Him Lord/ Then send Him on to me cause that’s the man I’m looking for.” Whether it’s gospel, blues, or the old time religion, the end of the search is Jesus the Lord.

The hymn-like “Mother of Muses” invokes Mnemosyne, who in addition to birthing the muses is the goddess of memory. Given Dylan’s vivid and vast historical imagination, Mnemosyne serves as an appropriate presiding deity. He asks her to sing of nature but also of “honor and fame and glory be.”

He loves Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. Then, as traditionally in epic, though rather surprisingly in an American pop song from 2020, he praises military heroes who “struggled with pain so the world could go free.”

Today’s cognoscenti laud protesters and rioters not men of war, but Dylan knows that sometimes liberty must be protected with force. The American Civil War and World War II were fought to set and keep men free, so Dylan sings the praises of “Sherman, Montgomery, and Scott/ And of Zhukov and Pattton and the battles they fought/ Who cleared the path for Presley to sing/ Who carved the path for Martin Luther King.”

This song does not recant or nullify those from the young Dylan who wrote “Masters of War” and “With God On Our Side.” Those songs opposed war profiteering and chauvinistic jingoism, but were not anti-war per se. Nor does “Mother of Muses” glorify acts of war. Rather it recognizes that sometimes evil must be cleared from the path to make way for artistic expression and peaceful reform. Dylan links two democratic kings, Elvis and MLK, who each strove to liberate in his own way. Honorable military leaders secure the necessary peace for art and social reform to occur.

The end of the song turns from world to personal history: “Mother of muses, unleash your wrath/ Things I can’t see, they’re blocking my path/ Show me your wisdom, tell me my fate/ Put me upright, make me walk straight/ Forge my identity from the inside out/ You know what I’m talking about.”

Men of war may be an unfortunate necessity, but the singer, like Solomon, asks for himself wisdom not martial glory. The muses’ wrath is important because sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword and is always the preferable means of settling disputes. Wisdom consists of discernment and rectitude. He asks to see the obstacles that keep him from walking in righteousness. He knows this is not a matter of identity politics. Identity must be forged from the inside out, not vice versa. We walk the straight path because of the content of our hearts and consciences, not because of any group we belong to.

In the last verse, he asks Mnemosyne, “Take me to the river, release your charms/ Let me lay down in your sweet loving arms/ Wake me–Shake me–free me from sin/ Make me invisible like the wind/ Got a mind to ramble, got a mind to roam/ I’m traveling light and I’m slow coming home.”

The river of the muses is Hippocrene, but the singer asks for absolution not inspiration. To be “woke” in this context does not carry the current slang meaning of adhering to a politically correct awareness of values defined by media culture. Rather, it means what it meant in 1980, when, quoting Revelation, Dylan sang, “When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?” He asks for baptismal rebirth that washes away sin, so the invisible wind is yet another reference to the Holy Spirit. To travel light is to remain unattached to the things of this world, which is not our true home, as when Christ advised the twelve to take nothing on their journey.

The hard-driving “Crossing the Rubicon” is a dark, obscure tale, but one that ends in hope. Crossing the Rubicon is obviously a metaphor for taking decisive action in uncertain times. The setting is not ancient Rome since there are explicit references to praying to the cross, the Holy Spirit, Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. The story opens in an infernal setting, “during the most dangerous month of the year/ At the worst time–at the worst place”; the persona has “abandoned all hope” yet he rises early to “greet the goddess of the dawn”; he then finds himself “three miles north of purgatory,” but praying to the cross; he wonders how he can redeem idly spent time in the “dark days” of a “world so badly bent”; he does not know how much longer he can continue but he embraces his love and crosses the Rubicon; next he is filled with rage, threatening to kill someone; he can find no righteous man, yet the sun shines down and he pays his debts; finally, he climbs a hill where he believes he will find happiness and love if he survives, pours a cup, and passes it along.

I have tried to reconstruct the narrative of the first half of the song, although, in fact, it is more disjointed than my summary allows. Nevertheless, it is clearly a story about how to maintain faith (prayer), hope (dawn, redeeming the time [cf Eph 5:16 and Col 4:5]), and love (found atop the hill) in a broken world. The persona knows he must act boldly without surrendering to despair, idleness, or indifference. But who is this “you” he threatens to kill? The saga only grows more mysterious as he accuses this “you” of “defil[ing] the most lovely flower/ In all of womanhood,” an act he finds intolerable and deserving of death. Yet he claims, “I’ll miss you when you’re gone.” He declares that, “You won’t find any…happiness or joy” here and so should “go back to the gutter…find some nice pretty boy.” Is this the same you that has been said to have a wife and to have defiled the flower of womanhood? Is this you bisexual? Or is the pretty boy a tool rather than a lover? Or, as seems more likely, is this “you” a personification of some malignant power? If so, what is this power? The story flirts with allegory, but resists any easy identification. Of all the songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways, I find “Crossing the Rubicon” the most difficult to get a handle on.

And yet, it contains one of the most important verses for understanding the album: “I feel the Holy Spirit inside, see the light that freedom gives/ I believe it’s in the reach of every man who lives/ Keep as far away as possible–it’s darkest ‘fore the dawn/ I turned the key and broke it off and crossed the Rubicon.”

Once the persona feels the Holy Spirit, although the world remains dark and bent, he finds the light of true freedom. In order to feel the Spirit, the speaker has had to take resolute action in the face of uncertainty and danger, engage in prayer and self-examination, pay his debts and drink his cup, and confront a menacing enemy. Having done these things, he revives in the understanding that it is always darkest before the dawn. The Holy Spirit allows him to trust a providential order in which the sun always rises. As the song ends, it is still winter, but he lights a torch, looks to the East, and soldiers on across the Rubicon. Equally important, he asserts that such freedom and grace are offered to everyone. However corrupt the world, redemption is available to all–except perhaps the song’s ‘you,’ another reason to read this character allegorically. Even if many of the details are difficult to sort out, “Crossing the Rubicon” offers a guide for surviving in a ruthless world, as it progresses from its hellish opening through purgatory and across the river, which by the end of the song has become the Jordan as much as the Rubicon.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

by Larry Fyffe

In the Canadian version of the song “Red River Valley”, a soldier leaves behind his French/Indian “half-breed” maiden in Manitoba:

Says she in the lyrics thereto:

So come sit by my side if you love me
Do not hasten to bid me 'adieu'
But remember the Red River Valley
And the girl who loves you so true

(Red River Valley ~ traditional)

In the American version, it’s the girl who leaves the southern Red River Valley, and abandons her “cowboy” lover there.

So says the song from the movie “Red River Valley”, starring Roy Rogers (Gene Autry stars and sings the song in a movie by the same name – says ‘one’ instead of ‘cowboy’; Rex Allen sings “Red River Valley” in a movie titled “Red River Shore”):

Come sit by my side if you love me
Do not hasten to bid me 'adieu'
But remember the Red River Valley
And the cowboy that loved you so true

(Roy Rogers: Red River Valley ~ traditional)

The rendition below, sung by a Canadian, returns to the “half-breed” motif:

Won't you ever come back to the Valley
To a half-breed that's lonely and blue
Many years I have waited, my darling
Don't you know that you said that you'd always be true

(Wilf Carter: Red River Valley Blues ~ Carter/traditional)

The following song lyrics be somewhat akin to the Canadian variation of “Red River Valley”:

There lives a fair maiden, she's the one I adore
She's the one I will marry on the Red River Shore
She wrote me a letter, she wrote it so kind
And in that letter, these words you'll find
"Come back to me darling, you're the one I adore"

(Kingston Trio: Red River Shore ~ Omar/Cierley/Spittard)

Things don’t turn out well in the song above; nor apparently in the lyrics below:

She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing what was in her mind
I don't see why I should even care
It's not dark yet, but It's getting there

(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)

The themes of lost love and death-awaiting are found again in the following song:

Well, I went back to see about her once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to had seen us there
Said they didn't know who I was talking about
Well, the sun went down on me a long time ago
I've had to pull back from the door
I wish I could have spent every hour of my life
With the girl from the Red River Shore

(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

In the song lyrics quoted below, the Red River (Rubicon River) In Italy serves as an ominous symbol  – sooner or later a person must face the inevitability of his own death:

What are these dark days I see
In this world so idly bent?
I cannot redeem the time
The time so idly spent
How long can this go on?

(Bob Dylan: Crossing The Rubicon)

Because of the above song’s double-edged lyrics, it’s easily construed that the narrator thereof puts his arm around Frederick Nietzsche, and they walk off into the fog seeking vengeance against God for throwing Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden; making all humans mortal, and depriving them of everlasting love:

I'll cut you up with a crooked knife
Lord, and I'll miss you when you're gone

(Bob Dylan: Crossing The Rubicon)

Verily, the Lord tests Abraham, but leaves His own young Son hung on the cross to suffer and die.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

After writing and recording “Love and Theft” Bob Dylan entered another sparse period of song writing, and indeed much of the 21st century can be characterised in terms of a far less active periods of composition than earlier in Bob’s life.

Indeed in 1999 Bob wrote one song, “Things have changed” and that line “I used to care but things have changed” caused a lot of headscratching.

But then he was getting a little bit older by now.  And Bob did not give up composing completely at this time, as in 2001 he wrote the first of four movie songs which were written between 2001 and 2005.  This first venture, Waitin’ for You,  was composed after Love and Theft in 2001.

However I should point out that the compositional date of King of Kings is not clear, but it was certainly in this year.   Here’s the list and the subject summary which is the essence of this little series.

And just in case you are hitting this series for the first time, let me explain.  The idea is to classify the meaning of each song in as few words as possible, such as “Love”,  “Lost love,” “moving on”, “Gambling” etc etc.

I’ve been doing this all the way through Dylan’s writing career, and if you have been following the series you’ll know that most times we get a mixture of songs.   (There is an index to all the articles in the series – see the foot of this page.

That pattern stopped suddenly in 1979 when every song Dylan composed was on the same theme – his newly found faith.  After that it began to unravel rather, and we also had periods when Bob stopped altogether.  In 1999 he wrote just one song: “Things have changed.”  In 2000 he wrote nothing.  Which brings us to 2001, and this is how I classify the songs for that year.

• King of Kings (instrumental)
• Summer Days  (The chaos of life)
• Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum (Chaos)
• Honest with Me (Disaffection, disorientation, chaos)
• Lonesome Day Blues (Disorientation, dislocation)
• Bye and bye (Leaving)
• Floater (Too much to ask)   (Living like a contrarian)
• Moonlight (We’re coming to the end)
• Po’ Boy (The world is crazy)
• High Water (for Charley Patton) (The world is crazy; we are all lost)
• Cry a While (Everything is chaos)
• Sugar Baby (We’re all just carrying on whether it makes sense or no)
• Waitin’ for You (Happiness is just a state of mind)

That looks like a crazy mixture, but it also looks like a continuing theme.  Break it down into key themes and we have “Chaos, departure, it makes no sense”.

And what fascinates me here is that I think we are seeing a sort of wave movement in Bob’s themes.

• 1989: The menace emerges
• 1991-6: The end of everything
• 1997: Walking away, lost love
• 1999: I used to care but things have changed
• 2001: Chaos

So there is a clear theme in this decade.  “Things have changed” did not come out of nowhere, but as a reflection on Bob sinking backwards into an awareness that when he declared that “Times they are a changing” and we all took that to mean “for the better” it turned out they were indeed changing, but not necessarily on a wave of improvement.  They were changing in fact for the worse.   For a moment Bob found relief from this drift into chaos through his religious conversion but it didn’t last.

So what of 2001?  In this year Bob looked at chaos from a variety of angles – but always it was chaos.  There always had, of course, been negativity in Bob’s songs, obviously including the many songs of lost love, and the songs of moving on (a central blues theme).

There had been chaos when Bob brought surrealism and despair into the songs of the 60s, from which he subsequently found Dada being added to the mix so that by 1984 there were 15 songs of a Dadaist variety.  Drifters Escape, that song to which I so often return, is the perfect example.  Nothing makes sense, not even in a court of law where sense is supposedly handed down.

By 2017 even Bob knew there was more chaos here than there was along the watchtower.

Although as we can see sometimes the chaos is loud, sometimes it is frighteningly quiet.

Well, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day
Yeah, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day
I’m just sittin’ here thinking
With my mind a million miles away

All we can do is drift.  We can’t affect the world – it just is.  We might get references from ancient Greece or from those blues singers of the 1920s whom we have seen come and go, but none of this makes any difference.  We live in a world of chaos.  There’s nothing we can do.

And if you are not convinced try “Be honest with me”

Just watch Bob, and then if you can look away follow the lyrics.  It is rare that I feel the need to publish the whole set of lyrics – since everyone can find them everywhere.  But if you have a few minutes, do follow these, and then tell me this is not about chaos.

Well, I’m stranded in the city that never sleeps
Some of these women they just give me the creeps
I’m avoidin’ the Southside the best I can
These memories I got, they can strangle a man
Well, I came ashore in the dead of the night
Lot of things can get in the way when you’re tryin’ to do what’s right
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
You’d be honest with me if only you knew

I’m not sorry for nothin’ I’ve done
I’m glad I fought—I only wish we’d won
The Siamese twins are comin’ to town
People can’t wait—they’re gathered around
When I left my home the sky split open wide
I never wanted to go back there—I’d rather have died
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
You’d be honest with me if only you knew

My woman got a face like a teddy bear
She’s tossin’ a baseball bat in the air
The meat is so tough you can’t cut it with a sword
I’m crashin’ my car, trunk first into the boards
You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice
Well, I’ll sell it to ya at a reduced price
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
You’d be honest with me if only you knew

Some things are too terrible to be true
I won’t come here no more if it bothers you
The Southern Pacific leaving at nine forty-five
I’m having a hard time believin’ some people were ever alive
I’m stark naked, but I don’t care
I’m going off into the woods, I’m huntin’ bare
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
Well, you’d be honest with me if only you knew

I’m here to create the new imperial empire
I’m going to do whatever circumstances require
I care so much for you—didn’t think that I could
I can’t tell my heart that you’re no good
Well, my parents they warned me not to waste my years
And I still got their advice oozing out of my ears
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
Well, you’d be honest with me if only you knew

The meat is so tough you can’t cut it with a sword
I’m crashin’ my car, trunk first into the boards
You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice
Well, I’ll sell it to ya at a reduced price

Indeed.

Welcome to chaos.

The index to the entire series of articles about the meanings of Dylan songs year by year can be found here.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

By Kevin Saylor

• Dylan’s Christian Anthropology: An exploration of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Part 1 – multitudes
• Dylan’s Christian Anthology part 2: False Prophet & My own version of you

“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”–in addition to being a palimpsest for “Got My Mind Made Up” from Knocked Out Loaded, which opens with the lines, “Don’t ever try to change me/ I been in this thing too long/ There’s nothing you can say or do/ To make me think I’m wrong”–is an exquisite love song, with a melody taken from Offenbach’s opera, The Tales of Hoffman.

Most reviewers have taken the song at face value as a romantic proposal to a woman. It has also been seen as another address to Dylan’s sometimes wayward audience. But there is also a theory among certain Dylanologists that his love songs are often covertly addressed to God. This theory can be applied far too indiscriminately, but I believe it works perfectly here. (As “To Make You Feel My Love” makes wonderful sense if Christ is taken to be the singer.)

The key to “I’ve Made Up My Mind” is the line, “I’m giving myself to you, I am.” We might take this to be repetition for emphasis. “I’m giving myself to you, no really I am.” But there can be no doubt Dylan knows the divine name revealed to Moses at the burning bush. There can be very little doubt that Dylan has heard the theory that some of his love songs are addressed to God. So, either he is now confirming that theory or purposefully lampooning it. To me, this is a fairly straight-forward declaration of devotion to the God of Abraham, the God revealed on Mt. Horeb.

The second bridge provides a clue that the first interpretation is correct: “Take me out traveling, you’re a traveling man/ Show me something that I’ll understand/ I’m not what I was, things aren’t what they were/ I’m going far away from home with her.”

Most strikingly, the lines unexpectedly address a man. So, the “You” of the title is not a female lover, but a traveling man, whom the speaker wants to accompany on his journey. If the ‘traveling man” is Christ, then the woman is the church.

The middle lines refer to I Corinthians and Galatians. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (Gal. 2:20); “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (I Cor. 13:12). The speaker has made up his mind to give himself over to God in order to experience the illumination that comes from conversion.

Other verses corroborate this reading, for example the fifth: “If I had the wings of a snow-white dove/ I’d preach the gospel, the gospel of love/ A love so real, a love so true/ I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.” “Oh that I had wings like a dove!” of course, originates in Psalm 55.

There is now an inevitable echo of Henry James, though I’m not sure that is relevant here. The desire for wings to fly shows up in well known folk tunes such as “Dink’s Song,” “The Water is Wide,” and “Carrickfergus,” as well as Dylan’s own “Watching the River Flow.”  But I believe the most direct and pertinent allusion is to Bob Ferguson’s “Wings of a Dove,” a number one country hit for Ferlin Husky in 1960, that begins, “On the wings of a snow-white dove/ He sends His pure sweet love.” The allusion to the country-gospel song confirms that the dove is the Holy Spirit.

For the persona, the love preached in the gospel, love of God and of neighbor as oneself, rather than erotic love, is real and true. Therefore, in the penultimate verse, when he sings, “I’ll see you at sunrise, I’ll see you at dawn,” it is legitimate to hear this as, “I’ll see God when the Son rises on Easter morning.” “I know you’d say yes, I’m saying it too,” he sings to a God who loves all of His children and wants all of us to give ourselves to Him, not simply out of blind faith, but because we have “thought it all through” and made up our minds to do so.

“Black Rider” casts Death as a sometimes charming villain in an epic showdown worthy of the OK Corral. The music features Spanish guitar resembling something Grady Martin might have played on a Marty Robbins cowboy song or an Enrico Morricone soundtrack for a spaghetti Western. The Black Rider might originate with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse but he seems here to represent death generally rather than famine specifically.

The singer takes differing attitudes to the ominous rider, as we often do with death. In the second verse he bargains with him, “Be reasonable, mister, be honest, be fair/ Let all of your earthly thoughts be a prayer.” The third and fourth verses take diametrically opposed attitudes:

Black Rider, black rider, all dressed in black
I’m walking away, you try to make me look back
My heart is at rest, I’d like to keep it that way
I don’t want to fight, at least not today
Go home to your wife, stop visiting mine
One of these days I’ll forget to be kind.

Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, then let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war
Don’t hug me, don’t flatter me, don’t turn on the charm
I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.

In the first stanza, the singer walks away from the rider, in the second he asks him to open the door. In the first his heart is at rest, in the second his soul distressed and mind at war. In the first he does not want to fight, in the second he hacks off the rider’s arm. In the first, the rider dallies with the singer’s wife, in the second he attempts to hug, flatter, and charm the singer himself.

What are we to make of these contradictions? They represent how differently we view death in different moods and at different times in our lives. The first stanza describes a time when the persona is at peace and doesn’t want to think about mortality or have to resist the inevitable encroachments of time. The second describes a melancholy moment when the persona is half in love with easeful death, yet still is able to resist the seductive charm of ceasing upon the midnight with no pain.

The final stanza reveals the proper attitude to take toward death: “Black rider, black rider, hold it right there/ The size of your cock will get you nowhere/ I suffer in silence, I’ll not make a sound/ Maybe I’ll take the high moral ground/ Some enchanted evening, I’ll sing you a song/ Black rider, black rider, you been on the job too long.”

Although this verse makes no direct allusion to I Cor 15:55 (“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory”) or to John Donne’s famous sonnet, this is Dylan’s version of “Death Be Not Proud.” The language has been coarsened to fit the song’s wild west setting. Death asserts his power by boasting of the size of his male member. (Donne’s poem employs sexual imagery as well: “And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well/ And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?”)

But the singer now realizes that for all Death’s seeming invincibility, he has already been swallowed up in victory. The high moral ground in the face of death is humble acceptance–to suffer in silence–in the recognition that all flesh is grass. But since we know that death is not the end, if we are spiritually prepared to meet our Maker, to go without a sound whenever our time comes, then we can fly to death as the man flies to the stranger he sees in the standard, “Some Enchanted Evening.”

The most complex allusion in the stanza is the final line’s quotation from “Duncan and Brady”: “you been on the job too long.” In the version of the folk song that Dylan recorded in 1992 (which was based on versions recorded in the early 60s by Dave Van Ronk and Tom Rush) that line is repeated at the end of every verse. (By contrast, Leadbelly performances of “Duncan and Brady” often did not feature the line at all.)

Brady is a corrupt lawman who intends to “shoot somebody just to see him die.” Thus the black rider, in Dylan’s western version, is a disreputable sheriff who kills indiscriminately. Brady comes to arrest Duncan as death comes for us all, but Duncan shoots him in the chest killing him. Or, as Donne phrases it, “Death, thou shalt die.” Brady, referred to repeatedly as King Brady, is taken to the graveyard, definitively defeated. When the women hear that King Brady is dead, they dress in red to celebrate, no longer having to live in fear. Death has been on the job since Cain killed Abel, but after Christ freed us, he had been on the job too long.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

by Jochen Markhorst

 When Dylan butterflies around his gypsy gal in the early sixties, the toddler Suzanne Vega is playing on the streets in the same Spanish Harlem. She may have fleetingly noticed the shabby folk hero back then, but from puberty onwards, the maestro has played a growing role in her artistry. In interviews, the Grammy winner and “mother of mp3” (the inventor of mp3, Karlheinz Brandenburg, uses her song “Tom’s Diner” for his first audio compression) keeps mentioning Dylan’s name as her source of inspiration and personal hero. “From Bob Dylan,” she says for example, “I learned to expand my mind and the power of the image and metaphor.”

In 2013, when asked, she does not call her breakthrough hit “Luka” the highlight of her career, but: “My highlight was opening for Bob Dylan. Childhood hero, way more friendly and kinder than I could have imagined.”

The accompanying selfie is posted on her twitter account in January 2016 with the title The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face, the well-known song line from “Visions Of Johanna”. Undoubtedly out of fear for plagiarism accusations, Vega adds loud and clear the name of the author; “Bob Dylan #selfie”.

That caution is a legacy of the hot late summer of 2006, when a rampant Plagiarism Or Inspiration discussion in the various online Dylan groups skips to the grown-up world and even sets the opinion pages of The New York Times on fire, briefly. One of the most striking names among the letters submitted in the Times is Suzanne Vega’s, who in her movingly naive letter stands up for her hero. Dylan did not deliberately copy some lines of poetry by 19th-century poet Henry Timrod, she argues:

“Maybe he has a photographic memory, and bits of text stick to it. Maybe it shows how deeply he had immersed himself in the texts and times of the Civil War, and he was completely unconscious of it.”

(The Ballad Of Henry Timrod, New York Times, September 17, 2006)

Babe in the woods. Her closing words are a lot less wide-eyed, though. Quite captivating even, as a matter of fact: “He’s never pretended to be an academic, or even a nice guy. He is more likely to present himself as, well, a thief. Renegade, outlaw, artist. That’s why we are passionate about him.”

The fat hit the fire thanks to the digging of one Scott Warmuth, a New Mexico disc jockey, passionate Dylan fan and excellent, very worth reading Dylan blogger, who finds on Modern Times a dozen rather literal Timrod quotes, especially in “Spirit On The Water”, “When The Deal Goes Down” and “Workingman’s Blues #2”. Coincidence is indeed out of the question, so soon the discussion divides the fans, critics and know-it-alls into shruggers, defenders, attackers and disappointed. The disappointed stumble over the pattern that is now beginning to emerge; on “Love And Theft” (1997) the poet did copy exuberantly too, without mentioning the source (from Ovid, for example, and from Confessions Of A Yakuza, the fascinating memoirs of a Japanese gangster doctor).

Dylan’s interest in the forgotten Henry Timrod (1829-1867), the unofficial poet laureate of the Southerners in the American Civil War, presumably sparked around “Love And Theft”. We hear in “Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum”: well a childish dream is a deathless need, which already comes from a poem by Timrod (“A Vision Of Poesy, Part I”). Apparently, Timrod stays on Dylan’s nightstand hereafter; a year later another patch comes along, in the crushing “’Cross The Green Mountain” (the verse along the dim Atlantic line).

It’s a special recording in more ways than one, “’Cross The Green Mountain”. Dylan writes the song for the soundtrack of an epic, far too long flop about the American Civil War, Gods And Generals (2003), a prequel to the much more successful Gettysburg from 1993. Thanks to the incidental character of the recording, the conservative Dylan for once allows the use of a computer. Technician Chris Shaw is finally given permission to demonstrate the ease of ProTools, a program that the immediately impressed master uses more often afterwards, especially for cutting and pasting:

“We did a take of the song, and he was like, ‘Okay, I want to edit out the second verse and put the fourth verse in there.’ And I said, ‘Okay,’ and by the time he walked into the control room from the studio, I had it done. And his eyes just opened wide. ‘You can edit that fast on ProTools?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘And you can keep everything?’ ‘You can keep everything, Bob.’ You could just see the gears in his head suddenly spinning.”

(interview with Chris Shaw, “Tell Tales Special”, Uncut, 2008)

More noteworthy is the particularly tasteful video clip that accompanies the (abridged) song, with the singer in an outfit and with a charisma that has become one of the iconic images of an elderly Dylan. Partly filmed at the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, where a subdued grieving Dylan places a photograph at the grave of a Southern officer, Captain William R. Jeter, who was fatally wounded at Culpeper Courthouse in October 1862 at the age of 28.

Clip ’Cross The Green Mountain:

But above all, obviously, the song is a magnificent masterpiece, a song deserving a status like “Blind Willie McTell” or “Not Dark Yet”, harmonic and meditative, but it’s out for blood, as the bard would say.

An inspired Dylan, who has been studying the Civil War (1861-65) for over forty years, chooses a sober, elegant and poignant musical background with the push and pull rhythm of a marche funèbre – matching the end of the film and the theme at all. Equally fitting this customization are the graceful, stately lyrics. From his notebook full of Bible quotations and 19th-century poetry fragments, the poet constructs an atmospheric monument, a tight, apocalyptic elegy. References and quotations can be found in each of the twelve verses. The first lines are inspired by Revelations (“And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea”), the Irish poet W.B. Yeats (“Heaven blazing into the head,” from “Lapis Lazuli”) and perhaps also Ezekiel 20:47, the only Bible verse with the word blazing, and, again, fitting in with the bloody war between North and South: “and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned therein.”

In the following verses we find more Civil War poets. Shepherd, Henry Lynden Flash, Walt Whitman (the letter to mother part), Gannett and Waterston – all contribute more and less literal quotes. And Henry Timrod, the only source to which a defensive Dylan, years later, acknowledges some indebtedness.

The acknowledgement takes place in the Rolling Stone interview with Mikal Gilmore, 27 September 2012:

“And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It’s an old thing – it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back. […] It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.”

A bit too assertive perhaps, but paradoxically too modest as well. “’Cross The Green Mountain” is a great song with a compelling mosaic lyric, demonstrating how a brilliant poet who lards his work with copy-pasted snippets from all over, can reach Olympic heights.

Awkward only is that Dylan himself is one of those “wussies and pussies complaining about that stuff.” Just ask Hootie & The Blowfish.

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

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

This article continues from Dylan’s Christian Anthropology: An exploration of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Part 1 – multitudes

By Kevin Saylor

Thematically, “False Prophet” shares some things in common with “Jokerman,” Dylan’s great song about messianism. The man who was hailed as a prophet from a young age and labelled against his will the spokesman of his generation is once again playing with his public image. The song is titled “False Prophet,” but repeats three times the phrase, “I ain’t no false prophet.” Why not make the entire five word phrase the title? Is the speaker a false prophet who claims like all false prophets to be true? Or is the song, in the voice of a true prophet, calling out false prophets? Is the double negative significant or merely colloquial? Or is the point that claiming not to be a false prophet is not the same thing as claiming positively to be a prophet? As with any lyric, at issue is the degree to which we are to relate to or distance ourselves from  the persona singing the song. In this case, I suspect the persona sympathetic, a voice claiming no prophetic mantle, but willing to speak the truth as best he sees it. It is the voice not of someone who has all the answers, but of someone willing to be honest.

What does this honest voice have to say? The song begins: “Another day that don’t end, another ship going out/ Another day of anger, bitterness, and doubt.” In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dylan mentions Moby-Dick as a novel that profoundly influenced him. Perhaps we are aboard the Pequod along with Ishmael who tells us, “the world’s a ship on its passage out.” The same speech also mentions The Odyssey. Perhaps we are with Odysseus traversing perilous waters. Perhaps this is one of the “distant ships sailing into the mist” from “Jokerman.” Perhaps we are with the reluctant prophet Jonah. To whom does the “anger, bitterness, and doubt” belong? To the singer, the world, or both?

The verse continues, “I know how it happened, I saw it begin/ I opened my heart to the world and the world came in.” If the antecedent of “it” is “another day of anger, bitterness, and doubt,” then “it” begins in Eden with man’s first disobedience. In the second line of the couplet, Dylan uses an allusion to signify a meaning the opposite of the passage alluded to.

At the end of The Stranger, Camus’s narrator Meursault says, “As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.   For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate” (emphasis mine). Such a feeling could not be more at odds with the voice of Dylan’s song which is alive to hope, searching “the world over for the Holy Grail,” and open to a reality that he in no way finds indifferent. Meursault gets it wrong; the proper response to Original Sin is an open heart of love not a closed heart of hate.

Nevertheless, the singer of “False Prophet” does have adversaries. He tells us, “I’m the enemy of treason, the enemy of strife/ I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life/ I ain’t no false prophet, I just know what I know/ I go where only the lonely can go.” I take it that we ought properly to be the enemy of treason, strife and the unlived meaningless life. These lines could have come from Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” a song clearly indicative of Dylan’s own position. An honest voice goes where only the lonely go because honest voices are often unpopular and refuse to court favor. Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” is a heartbreak of a song, but it ends on a note of  hope: “Maybe tomorrow/ A new romance/ No more sorrow/ But that’s the chance/ You’ve got to take/ If your lonely heart breaks.” Even in a world of anger, bitterness and doubt, we have to take a hopeful chance on tomorrow and new love.

On this track, greed is again condemned. We are told to “Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold/ Put ‘em six feet under and then pray for their souls.” We also hear, “Put out your hand, there’s nothing to hold/ Open your mouth, I’ll stuff it with gold/ Oh, you poor devil, look up if you will/ The City of God is there on the hill.” The values expressed are explicitly those of Augustine’s City of God, not the City of Man. Lust, too, is condemned again: “Hello stranger, hello and good-bye/ You rule the land but so do I/ You lusty old mule, you got a poisoned brain/ I’ll marry you to a ball and chain.”

The devil, who is both strange and well-known to the wayfaring pilgrim, rules the land precisely because we repeatedly surrender our wills to our various lusts.  We say “Hello stranger” to the devil because even if we manage to drive him away for awhile, he returns like an old friend, whether we want him to or not. The Carter Family song, “Hello Stranger,” contains the line, “I’m prison bound, I’m longing to be free.” Such is the sentiment of all of us who are enslaved to sin.

But that is not the end of the story. The devil may rule a fallen world, but “the prince of the world will be driven out” (Jn 12.31). We are also told, “You don’t know me darling, you never would guess/ I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest/ I ain’t no false prophet, I just said what I said/ I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head.” “Ghostly” makes us think of the Holy Ghost, explicitly named in other songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Who is infinitely more powerful than the devil, even if the ways of God seem to have little traction in the world. The somebody on whose head vengeance will be brought is that lusty old mule with a poisoned brain.

There are numerous images of violence and revenge in the lyrics, but they tend to be directed at clearly wicked figures, i.e., they demonstrate an active and aggressive resistance to evil. A final clue to the song is the line “Don’t care what I drink, I don’t care what I eat.” This passage alludes to Mark 7:15 (and possibly the early Church arguments of kosher dietary regulations). In the gospel Jesus proclaims, “There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.” This means that the key to freeing oneself from sin and imprisoning the devil with a ball and chain comes from the spirit operating inside of a person, not adherence to the minutiae of the law or any externally imposed  code of conduct.

“My Own Version of You” has been one of the most commented on and possibly the most misunderstood song on the album. Most reviewers have seen the song as a humorous bride of Frankenstein tale about creating a perfect partner.

Others have found Dylan speaking to that part of his audience that has always wanted him to remain still steadfast, still unchangeable from the time of going electric in the mid-sixties to going country in the late sixties through overtly gospel albums of the late seventies/early eighties to his most recent reworking of the Great American Songbook and the ever-evolving arrangements in concert of songs considered sacrosanct. According to this reading, Dylan, the great and original writer, is singing about creating the taste by which he is to be relished. A more interesting view discovers a song about the folk process itself, i.e., about how Dylan takes various parts from various places to bring to life something new and greater than the sum of its parts.

Numerous aspects of the song militate against any of these interpretations. For one, this is clearly a golem tale, and in the classic golem narratives, however benign the intentions of the creator, the outcome is usually tragic. The most famous gentile version of a golem tale is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dr Frankenstein is a man of science attempting to discover the secrets of life in order to benefit mankind, yet his experiment goes horribly awry. I take it, then, that the song tells a story about a deeply misguided attempt to bring someone–or perhaps actually something–new to life. We are not to identify with the persona behind this song.

As with “False Prophet,” the title to this tune is somewhat unexpected. The phrase (with some variation) “I’ll bring someone to life” is repeated eight times in the song, while the title, “My Own Version of You” is sung only once at the end of the first verse.

A golem is not the recreation of someone particular; Frankenstein did not revivify a new version of an old friend or lover. But the song’s persona wants to recreate an improved version of a unique “you,” someone he has previously known, although it is “someone [he’s] never seen.” How can you know someone well enough to create a new version of him or her if you have never seen that person? “You” must refer not to a particular human being but to a concept or to an invisible entity. Thus, I contend, the song is best heard as a cautionary tale about the creation of false idols and the Promethean impulse to remake the world. It is, in fact, Dylan’s greatest anti-utopian song since “Gates of Eden” where Aladdin held a time rusted compass blade along with his dubiously wish-fulfilling lamp while sitting side-saddle on a golden calf next to Utopian hermit monks who are taken so seriously by those outside the gates of Eden but laughed at by those inside.

The song begins with the narrator spending “the summers into January…visiting morgues and monasteries.” We might think that he is searching the past (morgues) and religion (monasteries) to discover the blueprint for his new creation, but this is misleading because he goes on to say “to hell to all things that used to be.” He clearly is not mining the wisdom of the ages but wants to bring to life something utterly unprecedented. He tells us “it must be the winter of [his] discontent,” an obvious allusion to Richard III, one of Shakespeare’s most dastardly villains, and another clue not to sympathize with the persona. Now, there is nothing wrong with being discontent with a broken world, nor is there anything wrong with, as he says later, wanting “to do things for the benefit of all mankind.” However, it is a most dangerous presumption to think that anyone, whatever the intentions, can bring to life a creature capable of eliminating our discontentment.

The most commented on couplet in the reviews occurs at the beginning of verse three: “I’ll take the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando/ Mix it up in a tank and get a robot commando.” I’ll admit there is some comedy to this image, and I would never want to deny Dylan’s humor. There is also something of a carnival vibe to the music, but the mood is ominous house of mirrors more than “Monster Mash.” Plus, what he explicitly intends to create is not some lover for his life but a violent gangster. He thinks that if he can “do it up right and put the head on straight/ [He’ll] be saved by the creature that I create.” This imagery conveys excellently the inherent violence and danger in the Utopian longing to manufacture an entity with salvific powers. What could be more misguided than to believe you can create the being that will save you, when clearly only the Being who created us can redeem us. The persona’s proposed creature is another golden calf (albeit one with mafia connections).

In the next verse he claims that he will both do the impossible and do it without any risk: “I’ll get blood from a cactus, gunpowder from ice/ I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice.” This alchemic miracle will result in “someone who feels the way that I feel,” some idol, that is, created in the singer’s own image. When he “get[s] into trouble” with “No place to turn,” he asks himself “What would Julius Caesar do.” Obviously, this question riffs on the once ubiquitous, “What Would Jesus Do.” The persona of the song might take Julius Caesar as the JC to whom he holds allegiance and turns for advice, but Bob Dylan turns to a different JC when he “hit[s] the wall.”

Admittedly there is something seemingly ludicrous about the conjunction of personages in the following verse: “I’m gonna make you play piano like Leon Russell/ Like Liberace, like St. John the Apostle/ I’ll play every number that I can play/ I’ll see you baby on judgement day.” But this same confluence of music and religion recurs later in this same song and on other songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Dylan is up to something more than rhyming for laughs. St. John’s depiction of final judgement continues into the next verse, set at the “Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street,” where the persona sings that he will “balance the scales” without getting involved “in any insignificant details.” Apparently, in bringing someone to life, the singer intends to balance the scales of justice for all time, to right all wrongs immanently and imminently, initiating a post-apocalyptic secular millennium. With a goal that high, one fears, all details become insignificant, anything being justified in order to balance the scales of perfect justice.

The ninth verse again confounds religion and music: “You can bring it to St. Peter, you can bring it to Jerome/ You bring it all the way over, bring it all the way home/ Bring it to the corner where the children play/ You can bring it to me on a silver tray.” There are multiple allusions to unpack in these lines. Jerome might be St Jerome, but he also might be Jerome Green, a member of Bo Diddley’s band, who wrote “Bring It to Jerome,” a song urging a straying woman to bring herself and his money back home.

The lines also hint at Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me,” which features a similar theme. In the prophets, when the people stray from God to pursue false idols, Israel is often compared to an unfaithful woman. So, if St. Peter holds the true keys to heaven, then Dylan as author (as opposed to the persona singing the song) suggests that the attempt to create a new, alternate path to salvation is a form of harlotry.

Furthermore, the third line alludes to Cat Stevens’ “Where Do the Children Play,” a song about the cost of the relentless pursuit of progress and the unintended consequences of technological innovation even when pursued with, in Dylan’s persona’s words, “decency and common sense.” “My Own Version of You” ends with the singer proclaiming that when he brings someone to life, he will “Do it with laughter and do it with tears.” The final verse of the Stevens song concludes, “Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry? Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?”

The drive to create a new version of a saviour always results in a tyrannical concentration of power. In the final verse of “My Own Version of You,” the persona ominously declares, “Show me your ribs, I’ll stick in the knife.” Dylan struck a similar chord in 1974’s “Dirge”: “So sing your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine/ The naked truth is still taboo wherever it can be seen.” The lines also evoke Dylan’s own album, Bringing It All Back Home, which contains, “Gates of Eden.” Finally, the verse alludes to John the Baptist. Here the persona is cast as Herod, the man who, in order to maintain his own power, must silence the true prophet who proclaims the necessity of repentance because the true Kingdom is coming. Hence we have yet another reason not to trust the persona.

The next verse quotes Shakespeare’s most famous line, “Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be.” Hamlet suffers from a metaphysical despair–a belief that the world is so fundamentally corrupt that removing his regicide usurper uncle from the throne will do nothing to relieve the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

As Marcellus, a royal guard, estimates the situation, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” This is a political evaluation. If some specific thing is rotten in the state, that thing can be removed, restoring the state to health. Remove Claudius and heal Denmark. But as Hamlet assesses matters, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right.” For Hamlet, the entire age, not something but everything, is broken, and he has the Messiah complex that he is the one chosen to set it right.

The singer of “My Own Version of You” possesses a similar complex, and in order to bring to life the creature that will set things right, he is willing to “use all of [his] powers.” This too is a sinister quote. In Godfather 2, when Kay wants to leave Michael and take the children with her, he says, “I’d use all my power to keep something like that from happening.” The persona is once again associated with gangsterism and the willingness to use any force or coercion to achieve his goal, which is tied to the very nature of existence: what it means “to be.”

In the following verse he claims that he can “see the history of the whole human race.” As previously quoted, he has already said “to hell to all things that used to be.” He does not look to the past for guidance. Rather, the line conjures ideas of historical dialectic and being on the right side of history. It is the progressivist claim to be able to sweep the past into the dustbin of history and finally usher in the perfect society. It claims to take a godlike view of history, seeing past, present, and future simultaneously. But, as creatures embedded in time, participants in the continuous flux of history, we can never stand outside of it to see it whole. Such a claim is more  evidence of hubris on the part of the persona.

The lyric suddenly shifts to address slavery, “Stand over there by the cypress tree/ Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery/ Long before the first crusade/ Way back before England or America were made.” Whatever playful humor there might have been in the opening verses has clearly fallen by the wayside. Dylan’s bona fides on the race issue are solidly established. Civil Rights is the one cause he has consistently and firmly stood behind. As a student of the Civil War Dylan knows the high price America has paid and continues to pay for for its violent refusal to abolish an unmitigated evil.

But, at the same time, as an American Jew, Dylan knows very well that the United States is not a uniquely racist nation nor did dead white Anglo-Saxons invent slavery. Dylan knows classical history as well American history. Slavery existed throughout the ancient world. And he knows the history of his people. In his song about the State of Israel, “Neighborhood Bully,” he sings, “Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone/ Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon.” Bigotry and slavery have existed throughout the world since time out of mind. They are the consequence of human sinfulness and the lust for power that afflicts people of every place and every color.

In “Precious Angel,” Dylan sings to an African American lover, “you know our forefathers were slaves/…/But there’s violence in the eyes, girl, so let us not be enticed/ On our way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia, to the judgment hall of Christ.” The path from slavery to true freedom leads to Christ. But the persona singing “My Own Version of You” seeks to find his own means of balancing the scales that have been tilted since the days of Troy and before.

The scene again suddenly shifts from Troy to hell, “Step right into the burning hell/ Where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell/ Mr Freud with his dreams,/ Mr Marx with his axe/ See the rawhide lash rip the skin from their backs.” I find it amusing that the reviews tended to focus on the Pacino/Brando pairing rather than the far more interesting Freud/Marx tandem.

Apparently the reviewers did not want to look too closely at this complex and serious song. Freudian psychology and Marxist dialectic are both named as forms of hellish slavery. They claim to provide a full explanation of human behaviour and historical progress not based on Christian anthropology and Providence. Dylan dismisses all such claims as “enemies of mankind.” The persona, however, engages in a similar, but rival, project. Like all millenarians, he wants to assert that every previous attempt to create a new version of God has been damnably flawed, but that he finally has come up with the “necessary body parts” to bring to life a perfect being. For Dylan it is just one more attempt to create a false idol in our own image.

The series continues…

An index to all our articles on Rough and Rowdy Ways appears here.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

When we find a Dylan song that has not had any music added, we put it on Untold and invite readers to submit their own musical performance of the song.  It is then listed on our index of songs, and immortality is granted to the performer / composer.

Recently we had another discovery – Tioga Pass – you can read all about it here.  And now we’ve had our first submission of the music to complete the song.  It is from Jeff Kosoff.    Below I reproduce Jeff’s email to me, and below that is the track he has created.

You will also find details of the other articles in this series below – complete with the music created in each case.

My name is Jeff Kosoff. I’m a painter/writer/musician of no repute whatsoever who has enjoyed reading many thoughtful, provocative posts by you and your stable of contributors.

I am not one to be compelled to enter contests, or even share amongst friends,  the vast majority of what I like to call “my work”. I’m not sure why I’ve responded to your clarion call regarding “new music for existing lyrics”, but I did–as demonstrated in my very one-off take, recorded without looking back on a recent stiflingly hot Sunday morning in bucolic Bucks County, PA.

When I saw that no one had yet to respond, I thought, “Maybe the good folks at Untold Dylan will appreciate this loose commitment to quality and at least be mildly entertained.” I love the story of how Dylan came to possess these lyrics. Who doesn’t appreciate a good canard? Anyway, I have a deep appreciation for the unconventional voices, whose influence is evident in what might be described as my singing.

Thank you and all the writers/contributors of Untold Dylan. I think reviewing the songs in the date order they were written truly does provide clarity as to the bard’s state-o-mind. Well worth reading! Looking forward to the forthcoming book.Keep doing great things!

To your continuing success (and dancing)–Cheers,

Jeff Kosoff

The lyrics

Needle's on empty
and here I'm stuck
Four in the morning
and just my luck
Listen to the radio
waiting for the sun
Can't flag a ride
until daylight comes

Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass

Tuned to a station
I've never heard
while moonlight glimmers
on Dead Man's Curve
Glory in the morning
and God bless you
for playing that song
when another would do

Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass

Ain't quite rock
although it moves
It sure ain't country
and it's not the blues
They don't say nothing
when it gets to the end
Just keep playing it
over again

Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass

It isn't pop
and it isn't soul
Nothing like fifties
rock and roll
It isn't folk
Not especially jazz
Got something special
nothing else has

Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass

The sun comes up
about six o'clock
The station drifts
to some pre-fab rock
Although they played it
all night long
I never did learn
the name of that song

We are still waiting for some music for Bowling Alley Blues

==================

Here are some other songs from this series.

• Don’t let anyone write your story – original renditions
• Don’t let anyone write your story, Rob Beretta
• Don’t let anyone write your story, Paul Robert Thomas
• Don’t let anyone write your story, fourth edition
• Listen Robert Moses: Chris Sheriden
• Song to Bonny Paul Robert Thomas
• Don’t Let Anyone write your story: Claudio Diarni
• Dope Fiend Robber Nick Juno.
• Untold Dylan Showcase: the publisher’s turn

If you want to have a go at writing the music to any of these songs, please do make a recording and email it to Tony@schools.co.uk

By Larry Fyffe

The previous article in this series appears here: Bob Dylan Obliquely: Rough And Rowdy

Dylan’s “Rough And Rowdy Ways” compilation of songs takes its title from the lyrics below:

But I can't give up my good old rough and rowdy ways

(Jimmy Rodgers: My Rough And Rowdy Ways ~ Rodgers/McWilliams)

Edward Taylor, a Puritan preacher in America during its colonial days, writes poetry in secret that features the conceits and darkness of the Baroque style; however, Taylor pens some rather unpuritan colourful and florid lines in a style that later becomes known as Rococo:

Shall not thy rose my garden fresh perfume
Shall not they beauty my dull heart assail
Shall not they golden gleams run through this gloom?

(Edward Taylor: The Reflection)

In Dylan’s “rough and rowdy” songs, there be Taylor-like figurative language that compares the great outdoors to a cathedral of light rather than an unadorned church with uncomfortable pews:

People tell me that I'm truly blessed
Bougainvillea blooming in the summer, in the spring
Winter here is an unknown thing

(Bob Dylan: Key West)

In ancient mythology, according to Virgil, those in the Underworld must drink from the River Of Forgetfulness in order to return to  the world above. Postmodernist Judaic folklorist Steve Stern writes a novel with disreputable characters in it:

For this generation, half of my soul belongs to you, 
   and the other half to another,
whom you must seek out"

(Steve Stern: The Angel Of Forgetfuness”)

In song lyrics mentioned  below, that novel is alluded to.

According to his poetry, Eward Taylor desires to have some rough and rowdy ways himself:

Was ever heart like mine? So bad, black, vile?
Is any devil blacker?  Or can hel
Produce it's match?  It is the very soil
Where Satan reads his charms, and sets his spell

(Edward Taylor: Still I Complain, I Am Complaining Still)

Likewise, such dark thoughts are expressed by the singer/songwriter:

Red Cadillac, and a black moustache
Rings on my fingers that sparkle and flash
Tell me, what's next? What shall we do?
Half my soul, baby, belongs to you

(Bob Dylan: I Contain Multitudes)

Indeed, “Ed The Knife” Taylor confesses to himself that though he is an Elect-seeking Puritan on the outside, not so much is he that on the inside:

Nay, muster up your thoughts, and take the pole
Of what walk in the entry of your soul
Which if you do, you certainly will find
With robbers, cutthroats, thieves it's mostly lined

(Edward Taylor: The Accusation Of The Inward Man)

Black-humored though they be, a sentiment hyperbolically displayed by the narrator in the following song lyrics:

Pink petal-pushers, red blue jeans
All the pretty maids, and all the old queens
I carry four pistols, and two large knives

(Bob Dylan: I Contain Multitudes)

Depending, of course, on the translation sourced, direct allusions to Virgil’s tale of the left-and-right pathed Underworld be there in “Rough And Rowdy Ways”:

Let now thy visionary glance look long
On this thy race, the Romans that be thine
Here Caesar .... ascends to the world of light!

(Virgil: Aeneid, Book VI)

Thus:

You stay to the left, you lean to the right
Feel the sunlight on your skin, and the healing virtues of the wind
Key West, Key West is the land of light

(Bob Dylan: Key West)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

by Jochen Markhorst

Mysterious musicians with hypnotic skills have been around since Orpheus, who is still the greatest of all; his divine arts on the lyra can already calm storm waves and ward off ferocious warriors, but his singing makes trees bend, the wild animals gather peacefully around him, the rocky rock weeps with emotion – and even the god of the underworld melts.

The musician with magic powers remains a popular protagonist in the following centuries. Further north, from the thirteenth century onwards, the Pied Piper of Hamelin becomes an iconic figure, enriched with demonic traits. After the city council does not pay him for the neatly executed pest control, he retaliates horribly: on St John and Paul’s Day, 26 June 1284, while the adults are in church, he returns, lures all 130 children with his flute and disappears with them auf Nimmerwiedersehen into a mountain. In later centuries, a Disney variant pollutes the original story with a happy ending in which the children return home safely and well, but der Rattenfänger, the Pied Piper, remains a dubious, devilish stranger – dressed in a red suit in most variants.

The more sentimental counterpart emerges in literature and music from the eighteenth century onwards: Il Trovatore, the Good-for-nothing, the Poor Minstrel, the wandering, ragged old man who with his violin, hurdy-gurdy or flute, touching hearts, making crippled children dance and fraternizing enemies. Or symbolising Death, as in the most famous example, the Leiermann from the last song of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (1827).

The Tambourine Man fits seamlessly into the row from Orpheus to Leiermann and the charm is easily felt. At the beginning of ’64, when Dylan writes the song, he himself is a Pied Piper who shows the way with his music, brings masses on their feet and enchants followers. With this song again: the extraordinary beauty of “Mr. Tambourine Man” gives birth to folk rock and devout disciples: The Byrds will record over twenty more songs by Dylan in the years following the world’s success with this song, thus contributing to the spread of His word.

En passant Dylan reintroduces the musical magician in popular culture; Chrispian St. Peters scores a world hit in 1966 with “The Pied Piper” (a cover – the original is from the band The Changin’ Times, what’s in a name), the men from Status Quo are still called The Spectres when they score their first hit with “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, Dylan disciple Donovan has a hit with another organ grinder, who is also called “The Hurdy Gurdy Man”, with considerably more success (’68), director Jacques Demy then asks the same Donovan for the leading part in his film The Pied Piper, 1972, and Led Zeppelin lends for “Stairway To Heaven” not only the smoke rings but also the image of the piper who takes you with him.

The king of the Philistines, who in Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues” (1965) locks up all those whistling scum (“Puts the pied pipers in prison”) hasn’t been able to turn the tide.

The song is an exceptional masterpiece even by Dylan standards and is, with crown jewels such as “Blowin’ In The Wind”, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “The Times They Are-A Changin'”, now part of the World Cultural Heritage.

At the time of conception (spring ’64) the maestro also seems to have realised that he has something special in his hands. Contrary to his custom, he cannot make up his mind for a definitive recording, so that it does not end up on Another Side Of.

That first recording, with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, indeed does not have the je-ne-sais-quoi that should elevate the song to a classic, and a remarkably critical Dylan rightly dismisses it. In the studio as well as on stage he fortunately stays true to it, in the months that follow. He is proud of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, often plays it to colleagues and friends and the song immediately stands firm on his repertoire. It even seems to be the only song of which he ever tried to make a “sequel”; “I tried to write another “Mr. Tambourine Man”. It’s the only song I tried to write ‘another one’”.

That’s debatable by the way (there are some “Like A Rolling Stone Part Two’s”, for instance), but it does indicate that Dylan himself recognizes the extravagant class of the song.

Fortunately, the long twisting and turning around does not lead to him polishing the song to death, as will happen later on with other brilliant songs (with “Caribbean Wind”, for example). The final version, the sixth take recorded at the Bringing It All Home sessions, is sober. Second guitarist Bruce Langhorne (Mr. Tambourine himself, by the way, because of the extremely large tambourine he carries around for a while) occasionally misses some notes and Dylan also plays far from flawless – perfect imperfection all in all.

Dylan’s paternal pride would have been twofold. On the one hand there’s the melody, which came all from himself. Dylan did not “appropriate”, like with so many of the songs before, he hasn’t siphoned off anything from antique folk songs. But even bigger are the lyrics.

“Rimbaud is the man,” says Dylan in those days, that’s the way he wants to write. And it shows. The perspective of Dylan’s poetry shifts radically: from the outside to the inside: “Hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote a song for you” has become “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me”. He doesn’t want to know anything more about the so-called finger-pointing songs anyway, as we can see on Another Side Of. But most of the songs on that record are still pointing outwards, speaking to something or someone. Only “Spanish Harlem Incident” has shreds of impressionistic portrait painting, and is a steppingstone to the poetic explosion that “Mr. Tambourine Man” is.

Stylistically, the text is just as swirlin’ as its content. The poet weaves myriads of rhyme words (sand-hand stand, feet-meet-street) assonances (windy beach-twisted reach) and alliterations (culminating in silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands) and perfectly feels when he has to break the cadence of the rhyme scheme – nowhere does the lyric twaddle or drone.

In terms of content, the influence of Rimbaud is undeniable. The visionary, dreamy symbolism in decor descriptions such as the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming and to dance beneath the diamond sky seem to come straight from the oeuvre of the French magician. Rimbaud sings of the feux à la pluie du vent de diamants in his Illuminations, just as the image the magic swirlin’ ship will be borrowed from Rimbaud’s famous “Le bateau ivre”. But even more than these traceable images and sets, Dylan adopts the shift in perspective towards an elated, dizzy protagonist, the misty I figure who captures his grand feelings in impressionistic, frayed sensory impressions. Especially according to Rimbaud’s dictum from the Lettre du Voyant: “The poet becomes a seer through a profound, deliberate disruption of all his senses.

Idiomatically, Dylan does borrow some scraps too, left and right. The jingle jangle, for instance, he heard from Lord Buckley (from Scrooge; “jingle jangle bells all over”), whose LP The Best Of is not entirely coincidental on the carefully composed cover of Bringing It All Back Home (on the mantelpiece). Lord Buckley’s oeuvre, incidentally, also contains a version of the inspiring Pied Piper story: “The Swingin’ Pied Piper” (1959).

Unlike most poetry masterpieces, in which the opening line, or one citable verse, or perhaps one verse, transcends the work and becomes more famous than the poem itself, “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a poem that shines from head to toe, from the first to the last line. At the most, the closing line of that magnificent final section removes itself a bit from the song, “Let me forget about today until tomorrow”. But there Dylan paraphrases one of the most beautiful lines from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34).

Hundreds of covers, of course. In every language, colour and genre imaginable. Right from the start, too: in the year of birth 1965 alone, fourteen cover versions are recorded. Some, like the one by The Byrds, are even released before Dylan’s own version. The first one, before The Byrds, is by the folk quartet The Brothers Four and is quite nice. Among the more hilarious lows is Captain Kirk’s cover, William Shatner (his version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” is perhaps even worse).

Fans can be found in every corner of the music universe, so it often goes wrong, but in the vast majority of interpretations the song retains its power, or at least its charm. In 2008, one Jason Castro makes it to the American Idols final with a faithful, beautiful rendition, usual suspects like Judy Collins, Odetta and Melanie are equally safe and nice. The Beau Brummels deliver a pleasant, slowly derailing version – unfortunately though, they succumb to the temptation of a neurotic tambourine from start to finish. The best of the rest is ex-Byrd Gene Clark on his ironically titled collector Flying High (his crushing fear of flying was one of the reasons he left The Byrds).

Actually, only two covers can compete with Dylan’s inviolable monument. The first comes from the Icelandic Premier League, from the enchanting Ólöf Arnalds, performing live at KEX Hostel with her sister Klara. Just a charango, the lute-like string instrument from the Andes, played by Ólöf. But most of all: the magical, swirling, amazing singing by the sisters – yes, you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme and fate, driven deep beneath the waves (first goose-bumps at 1’17’’).

Ólöf Arnalds:

The other one is quite modern, and has the bonus of being from Dylan’s birthplace: in 2006, the local heroes of Cloud Cult, a very cute indie rock band, contribute a hypnotic, experimental, magic swirlin’, driving “Mr. Tambourine Man” to the sympathetic tribute project Duluth Does Dylan Revisited. Their live version on Live at KEXP Vol. 3 is very successful too, as is the alternative take that ends up on Lost Songs From The Lost Years (2011).

Brooding, hypnotizing and magical – as an Orpheus in top form.

Cloud Cult:

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

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

Publisher’s note: We are publishing a number of articles dealing sometimes with the individual songs from R&RW and sometimes with the whole album.  You will find an index to these articles and series in the Rough and Rowdy Ways page

================

Dylan’s Christian Anthropology Part 1

By Kevin Saylor

Aside from a few outliers (who still like the album), the early reviews of Bob Dylan’s latest release, Rough and Rowdy Ways, run the gamut from glowing to gushing. The new work joined a long list of Dylan albums described as “his best since….(fill in the year/album of your choice).” It is indeed another late career triumph from the greatest and most significant artist to emerge from the rock scene.

As often happens, reviewers find Dylan’s most recent material to be particularly relevant to whatever the current political and social climate happens to be. Or, given that we do not know how long ago these songs were recorded (“a while back” according to the Dylan quote attached to the press release of the first single, “Murder Most Foul), he is accredited with a remarkable prescience. For example, the New Yorker review describes the album as “unusually attuned to its moment.” But, as usual, the taste-makers are right about Dylan for the wrong reasons. His songs frequently seem to carry particular relevance to the current moment precisely because they speak to perennial concerns which never dissolve into irrelevancy. Far from being topical songs pulled from the headlines, these lyrics reference not only contemporary events, but go back in time past President Kennedy’s assassination to World War II to the Civil War to America’s founding, Ancient Rome, the biblical prophets, and ultimately to Adam and Eve.

Dylan can make such far-reaching references hold together because his art is informed, as it consistently has been for over 40 years now, by a Christian anthropology. He understands the human person to be created in the divine image, but fallen. The lyrics point repeatedly to Original Sin and a “bent world” (“Crossing the Rubicon”). At the same time, there is also a pervading sense of hope and the possibility of redemption. Dylan has known since his earliest lyrics that in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.” Such an anthropology entails limits on the possibilities of political progress and reform. To anyone who has been listening, Dylan has been saying at least since the mid-60s, and sometimes explicitly in interviews, that the government is not going to solve our problems. Genuine change occurs in the conversion of individual hearts more than in ballot boxes.

The new album resides at the intersections of art, history, religion, and politics. As much as anything, it is about how the imaginative creation of art can help us to understand and engage a world that we did not create and cannot be plastically moulded to our every desire. Dylan takes the collage or mosaic technique of composition he has used widely since 1997’s Time Out of Mind to new heights. Scores of allusions–to songs, including Dylan’s own, literature, movies, history–populate these songs, ranging from the blatant (“Crossing the Rubicon”) to the obscure (“Bally-Na-Lee”) to what I suspect are so esoteric that they won’t be discovered for generations.

Dylan has been accused of plagiarism for his uncredited references, but of course the use of frequent allusion is as old as art itself. As Cormac McCarthy has said, “Books are made out of books.” Dylan’s collage technique reveals the interconnectedness of creation, of humanity, and of art. No man is an island, since everything relates to everything else in one way or another. The technique is a way of shoring up fragments against the ruins during the “age of the anti-Christ” (“Murder Most Foul”) “in this lost land” (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”). In this essay, in addition to tracing Dylan’s Christian anthropology, I want to examine a few of his allusions to explore how he utilizes previous works to create new meaning in his own art. My focus will not be on the musical arrangements nor on Dylan’s masterful vocal delivery, although, admittedly, these things are more fundamental to appreciating the extraordinary achievement that is Rough and Rowdy Ways.

The first allusion is the album title. “Rough and Rowdy Ways” takes its name from Jimmie Rodgers’ “My Rough and Rowdy Ways.” As 2012’s Tempest referred to Shakespeare’s The Tempest while dropping the definite article, here Dylan drops the possessive pronoun.

Rodger’s song tells of a man who meets a good woman and tries to settle down but cannot give up his displeasing “rough and rowdy ways.” It’s a common tale of a “rounder” who can’t be civilized even by a “perfect lady.” By dropping the “My,” Dylan universalizes the sentiment; all fallen men and women are guilty of “rough and rowdy ways.” Sinful behavior is not the exclusive province of drunken ne’er-do-wells.

In any interview supporting 2001’s Love and Theft, Dylan said that those songs were largely about the human desire to acquire power. These new songs are about our libido dominandi as well. Since Eve ate the apple, it’s a rough and rowdy world.

The cover photo is another allusion, recycling an old photo that had previously been used as a book cover. The picture shows a man leaning over an incandescent jukebox while two couples dance. The man at the jukebox might resemble Jimmie Rodger’s character, looking for some drinks and some action. He might be a figure for Dylan himself, selecting from that glowing machine that songs from the past that will pepper the music on the album inside the cover.  The dancing couples certainly show how art helps us to find solace in a ruthless world, dancing the blues away, as the jukebox pours out the balm of song.

The opening track, “I Contain Multitudes,” reveals Dylan’s complex use of allusions. The title is one of Dylan’s most obvious references to one of the most famous expressions of that most American of poets, Walt Whitman. It plays too on Dylan’s own mythos; a famously chameleon artist, he has always been vast. He refers by name to literary artists Edgar Allan Poe and William Blake; musicians the Rolling Stones, Beethoven and Chopin; the real-life Anne Frank who was persecuted by the Nazis and the cinematic Indiana Jones who fought the Nazis. Names of fairly well known songs such as “All the Young Dudes” and “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache” are incorporated into the lyrics alongside obscure allusions to Irish poems (“The Lass From Bally-Na-Lee”) and Jewish tales (Howard Schwarz’s “The Angel of Forgetfulness”). The first lines evoke universal mortality: “Today and tomorrow, and yesterday too/ The flowers are dying like all things do.” This is less a 79 year old’s reflections on his own mortality than a consideration of the finiteness of all created existence: et ego in Arcadia. The song embraces the multitudinous possibilities existing even in the face of general mortality. If the album ends with a “Murder Most Foul,” it commences with a generous expansiveness, a commodious embrace of reality.

The song incorporates opposites, “I’m a man of contradictions, I’m a man of many moods,” yet it simultaneously offers straight-forward positions on certain moral principles, e.g., the need for companionship, “I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me,” and the importance of veracity, “I’ll drink to the truth.” Other positions are more poetically expressed but ultimately no less clear. He sings “I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed” and starts the succeeding verse by referring to  “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache,” a song that repeats the refrain, “Who you been lovin’ since I been gone?” Taken together this seems an offer of forgiveness even for infidelity, as well as an admission, if the car and hirsute lip are ascribed to the persona himself, that the singer too is capable of betrayal. The next verse ends: “I go right to the edge, I go right to the end/ I go right where all things lost are made good again.” These lines rework scriptural passages regarding redemption, e.g., the parable of the lost sheep and the voice from the throne in Revelation 21 declaring, “Behold, I make all things new.” Betrayal, forgiveness, and redemption all form portions of the potentialities of human existence.

In this song as in others on the album, cupidity and concupiscence are singled out as particularly damning sins. The penultimate verse declares: “You greedy old wolf, I’ll show you my heart/ But not all of it, only the hateful part/ I’ll sell you down the river and put a price on your head.”

Given other references to The Divine Comedy on the album, this may allude to Dante’s she-wolf of Inferno 1, often read as a symbol of avarice, but, in any case, Dylan is well aware of the maxim: homo homini lupus. The lines also state the importance of hating and actively resisting vice. The song concludes, “Get lost, madam, get up off my knee/ Keep your mouth away from me/ I’ll keep the path open, the path of my mind/ I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind/ I play Beethoven’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes/ I contain multitudes.” The ‘madam’ here seems to be lust personified, as in the madam of a whorehouse. But lust is now resisted not with hatred but the better weapon of genuine love that keeps an open path in the mind, perhaps referring simultaneously to the narrow path leading to salvation, St. Paul’s stumbling block of I Corinthians 1:23, and the opening of Dante’s Comedy where the Pilgrim wanders off from the straight path and loses himself in a dark wood. Amidst the multitudinous possibilities laid out in the song, love is the ultimate key. And music–sonatas and preludes–help encourage love.

“I Contain Multitudes” takes its title from Whitman. Musically, however, it is no “barbaric yawp” but a lilting, softly sung, melody.

The second song, “False Prophet,” steals a funky blues riff from Billy “the Kid” Emerson’s “If Lovin’ Is Believing.”  We’ll come to that in the next article in this series.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

by Tony Attwood

In the “once only” file I am trying to find recordings of songs that Bob has played only once, but which absolutely stand out to me as amazing, set alongside other one-off performances that all have something to mark themselves out, and make us wonder why Bob only played this once.

Today, I have got one that I think is utterly stunning and remarkable, but I’m going to keep you waiting (unless you flip down to the end to see what it is – but you know that would be cheating.)

So, since you are still here at the top, here is the first…

We’d better talk this over: Sun Theatre, Anaheim, CA (March 10, 2000)

This unique performance has already been covered on Untold, in an article by Jochen in 2018, but I really adore this, it fits into the demands of this series (that Bob only played it once) and it incorporates all the oddities of Bob’s decision making.  So here it is again.

I think it is truly wonderful that Bob will work on songs like this, and then develop a changed arrangement … but then to stop and leave the song forever.  Of course we only get to hear it once, and the band will have played it a number of times in rehearsal, but even so.   Thank goodness it was recorded.  It is so worth coming back to.

When you gonna wake up.

Inevitably in searching through these songs that have only been played once, sometimes all is not as clear as it might seem.   Take “When you gonna wake up”.

SetList FM has this listed as from Mid-Hudson Civic Center, Poughkeepsie, NYOctober 20, 1989

But several youtube lists have it as Oslo, Norway – July 9, 1981.  The song was written in 1979, Bob’s faith year.  I’d go for 1981 just on that basis; that later date can’t be right can it?

I mention the disparity of dates not to point out that someone has made a mistake, but really to say that errors occur time and again in writing about Dylan – and I know I’ve added to the list of false information (although not deliberately I hasten to add).  In a sense that is why this site has its list of songs in Chronological Order of writing – simply because previous attempts had been incomplete and self-evidently wrong in places.  (See the headings under the picture at the top of the page – “Dylan songs of the 1970s” etc etc).

Walk a mile in my shoes

Staying with the songs starting with “W” (OK that is a rather feeble link, but I couldn’t think of anything else) another little curiosity comes with “Walk a Mile in My Shoes”, in that Bob chose to open with it, on 12 January 1990 he opened with this Joe South song at  Toad’s Place, New Haven, CT.  According to the records he played four sets at that venue, with 50 different songs involved but this got just one outing.

Here is Joe South – this recording cuts suddenly near the end, but it is the best I can find.

He won a Grammy for “Games People Play” and was nominated also for “Rose Garden.”  His first hit was in July 1958 with “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor” (honest!) and he also wrote for Gene Vincent, as well as playing guitar on hits such as “Sheila” by Tommy Roe.

But we know him best for playing bass on Blonde on Blonde, and guitar on the “Sounds of Silence” album.   “Walk a mile in my shoes” was also performed by Elvis Presley.  Joe South died of heart failure in 2012, aged 72.

Here’s Bob’s take…

A satisfied mind

Now something more sombre to finish with a Satisfied Mind, a song that starts with “How many…” and always makes me think of “Times they are a-changing.”

This is one of those songs that I seem always to have known – I must have heard it as a youngster, and certainly looking through the lists it seems that over 50 well known artists have recorded it.

Yet Joe “Red” Hayes was not a songwriter as such.  He played fiddle with Jack Rhodes and wrote a number of songs, but nothing else that has remained popular.  He died tragically young aged 72 in 2012, and as far as I know this is the one song of his that is remembered.

Here’s his version from 12 January 1990.

Bob played it on at 9 November 1999 at the  The Apollo of Temple, Philadelphia, PA, USA and you’ll hear immediately that this is a complete re-working of the song.   Personally I love this re-arrangement; for me the original is take at far too much of a rush to make the most of the lyrics.

This is one of those occasions where Bob really takes the lyrics and gives them everything, making the music weave its way around the words, rather than fitting words  to the tune.

It is such a beautiful rendition of the song it makes me wonder how he can just do this and then leave the song behind.  More and more I am thinking that I’d like to create an album called “Abandoned songs”.  Now that Aaron has our YouTube channel running (Untold Dylan: The Youtube channel) it could be put on there alongside the Play Lady Play articles and my other little creation “1980”.   (To the guys at the record company who arrange the Bootleg albums – when you put the album “Once only Bob” out and credit me with the idea, it’s double-T in my surname please).

But seriously – just play this and listen.  I defy you not to play it twice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Ifjb_giWA

Dylan’s once only file.

• Dylan’s once only file: You’re too late and the Old Rock n Roller
• Dylan’s Once only file “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” “Blue Moon” “Weeping Willow”
• Dylan’s “Once Only” File: 10,000 men and 20/20 Vision

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

by Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan makes a number of rather oblique tributes to songs on his “Rough And Rowdy Ways” album:

Re: Crossing The Rubicon –

Since she went away, the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall
(Nat King Cole: Autumn Leaves ~ Mercer/Prevert/Kosman)

Re: Goodbye Jimmy Reed –

I went out in Virginia, honey, where the green grass grow
My baby told me, honey, stop doing me wrong
My baby told me, honey, stop doing me wrong
Well, I'm telling you, honey, 'cause I'm tired of living alone
(Jimmy Reed: Down In Virginia ~ J&M Reed)

Re: False Prophet –

Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight
Only the lonely know this feeling ain't right
There goes my baby, there goes my heart
They're gone forever, so far apart
(Roy Orbison: Only The Lonely ~ Melson/Orbison)

Re: I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You –

Would you go away to another world
Walk a thousand miles through the burning sand
Wipe the blood from my dying hand
If I gave myself to you?
(Johnny Cash: Would You Lay With Me ~ D. Coe)

Re: False Prophet –

Hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart
Sweet Mary Lou, I'm so in love with you
I knew Mary Lou, we'd never part
So hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart
(Ricky Nelson: Hello Mary Lou ~ Olsen/Pitney/Mangiaracina)

Re: I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You –

I'm a travelling man, and I've made a lot of stops
All over the world
And in every part, I own the heart
Of at least one lovely girl
(Ricky Nelson: Travelling Man ~ J. Fuller)

Re: Black Rider –

Some enchanted evening, someone may be laughing
You may hear her laughing across a crowded room
And night after night, as strange as it may seem
The sound of her laughter will sing in your dreams
(Frank Sinatra: Some Enchanted Evening ~ Rogers/Hammerstein)

Re: False Prophet –

There's a long goodbye
And it happens every day
When some passer-by
Invites you eye
(Clydie King: Long Goodbye ~ Williams/Mercer)

Re: I Contain Multitudes –

He was long and tall, he had plenty of cash
He had a red Cadillac, and a black moustache
He held your hand, and he sang you a song
Who you been loving since I've been gone?
(Warren Smith: Red Cadillac And Black Moustache ~ May/Thompson)

Re: Murder Most Foul –

Wake up, little Susie
Well, what are we gonna tell your ma ma
What are we gonna tell your pa
What are we gonna tell our friends?
(Everly Brothers: Wake Up Little Susie ~ B&F Bryant)

Re: Murder Most Foul –

Pussycat, Pussycat, I've got lots of flowers
And lots of hours
To spend time with you
So go and powder your cute little pussycat nose
(Tom Jones: What's New Pussycat ~ Bacharach/David)

Re: False Prophet –

And the storybook comes to a close
Gone are the ribbon and bows
Things to remember, places to go
Pretty maids all in a row
(Eagles: Pretty Maids All In A Row ~ Walsh/Vitale)

Re: Murder Most Foul –

You make me dizzy, Miss Lizzy
The way you rocknroll
You make me dizzy, Miss Lizzy
When you do the stroll
(Beatles: Dizzy Miss Lizzy ~ L. Williams)

Re: Murder Most Foul –

Life goes on day after day
Hearts torn in every way
So ferry 'cross the Mersey
'Cause this land's the place I love, and here'll I stay
(Gerry And The Pacemakers: Ferry 'Cross The Mersey ~ Marsden)

Re: Murder Most Foul –

And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
(Fifth Dimension: Aquarius ~ Rado/Ragni/MacDermot)

Re: Murder Most Foul –

I'm the gypsy, the acid queen
Pay before you start
The gypsy, I'm guaranteed
To tear your soul apart
(The Who: The Acid Queen ~ P. Townshend)

An index to all our articles on Rough and Rowdy Ways can be found here.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

By Patrick Roefflaer

• Released: June 15, 1978
• Photographer: Howard Alk
• Photographer inner sleeve: Joel Bernstein
• Art-director: Tim Bryant and George Corsillo/Gribbitt

“How sexy he looks,” exclaimed my girlfriend, when she saw the cover of Street-Legal.

That was probably exactly the effect Bob Dylan had in mind with this photo. The man had just gotten a divorce and seems to be looking forward to the future. The title of the album also indicates this: street-legal is the term that indicates that a racing car has been modified, so that it is allowed on public roads.

The message is: Girls, I am a free man, waiting for you. The non-tanned line on his finger, where his wedding ring is missing, confirms his status as a bachelor.

The location of the cover photo

Generally it is stated that the photo of Dylan in front of the stairs is taken at the entrance of the studio where Street-Legal was recorded.

Rundown Studios is not actually a recording studio at all. Dylan rented the space in September 1977, for a five-year period. The building was built in 1960 and, like the rest of the neighborhood, looks a bit neglected. Hence the name “run down” (worn, tatty).

However, the location is ideal: it’s a half-hour drive from his home in Point Dume: a beautiful drive along the Pacific Coast Highway. Part of the 1,100 m² of available space is set up as offices. A large room is used as a rehearsal space for the planned tour.

Since Dylan is very committed to privacy, I have always found it strange that he would risk intrusive fans waiting for him, using a photo of his studio as a cover.

When the address of Rundown Studios (2219 Main Street, Santa Monica) is seen on Google Street View one will see an anonymous building. Parking is available on Main Street. Around the corner, on Strand Street, there is a double door entrance. At the rear there is a narrow outdoor space. However, nowhere can an access can be found with a staircase as seen on the cover.  The steeply sloping footpath (better visible on the poster than on the cover itself) in particular seems to suggest a different location.

A possible explanation could be that the building has been demolished and replaced by a new building in the forty years that have now passed since Dylan rented it. I’ve found that Beach House CoWork is now at this location. The company rents custom office space. On their website they praise the space offered with the cry that the creative atmosphere of Bob Dylan still prevails. I received confirmation via email that it is still the original building.

Over the years I searched for more information. On some forums people suggested that the photo was taken in Australia (during the ’78 tour) or Malta (due to the Mediterranean atmosphere). Others began to explore the studio’s surroundings.

Following my post on the Expecting Rain forum, Bob Egan of Popspots, a website highlighting cover photo locations, received a photo of stairs in Santa Monica that is very similar. One Derek Brown from Glasgow had found it via Google Street View.

But because Bob Egan had done his own research, he knew this was not the right location. He advised Brown to start looking closer to the ocean, because the streets steeply rise from the beach. The simple search “staircase Santa Monica” was rewarded with a lucky return: the house at 26 Arcadia Terrace happened to be for sale.

Through Street View Brown found the staircase in question, at the back of the house, near 2 Pacific Terrace. The location is just a 12 minute walk from Rundown Studios.

Many details are correct: the electricity box, the wooden shingles on the left, the double rainwater drains, the sewer cover in the footpath …

You can click the location here in Google Street view: https://tinyurl.com/y2boz3qt

Anyway, the photo is the work of Howard Alk, just like the one on the back: Dylan, wearing white make- up and dressed all in white, probably somewhere in Japan or Australia, during the 1978 tour.

Howard Alk

Howard Alk was a man of many trades. At the University of Chicago, he was mainly involved in cabaret. After his studies he was one of the co-founders of the successful improvisation theater The Second City.

He was also involved with The Film Group, a commercial film company that ran commercials as well as documentaries on jazz, blues or political subjects.

In 1963 he and Albert Grossman invested in a club: The Bear. To promote it, he drove through the streets of Chicago, on a motorcycle… dressed in a bear suit. The club opened on April 25, 1963, with a performance by one of Grossman’s upcoming talents: Bob Dylan.

Grossman also later arranged for Howard and his wife Jones to be on the guest list for Dylan’s 1965 British tour. In the credits for the documentary Don’t Look Back, Howard is referred to as an “assistant cameraman”. He also joined Dylan’s next British tour, this time as a photographer.

In the fall of 1966, Dylan asked him to help compile a documentary film from the images of D.A. Pennebaker made on that last tour. This would become Eat the Document.

They kept in touch and when Dylan wanted to make his own movie, during the Rolling Thunder Tour, he asked Howard Alk to film everything. In 1977 they spend a lot of time together in an small house on the grounds of Point Dume, to compose the film Renaldo and Clara.

Alk is also present at the rehearsals at Rundown Studios and the first part of the 1978 tour.

During the 1980 and 1981 tours, Dylan again called on Howard Alk to capture concerts on film.

After his second marriage broke down, Alk finds a place to stay in Rundown Studios. His body was found there on January 3, 1982 – he died of an overdose of heroin.

Joel Bernstein

In addition to the cardboard outer sleeve, the paper inner cover is embellished with two large black and white photos. Both are the work of Joel Bernstein.

In February 1969, Joni Mitchell performed for the first time at Carnegie Hall in New York. To take publicity photos of her, she invited a 17-year-old boy she met in California. Her manager, Elliott Roberts, is impressed by the result and asked the boy to join another one of his clients for a show at The Bitter End: Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

“I tuned his Martin D guitar in the Electric Factory. Three years later, I was a photographer on the Time Fades Away tour when he once asked to tune his guitars – and I was allowed to do that every night.”

Thus, almost unnoticed, he became a guitar technician, first only for Neil Young, then for Crosby and Nash and then for Dylan.

In 1976 Dylan proposed Bernstein to join him for the second part of the Rolling Thunder Revue. “I was the guitar technician on that tour,” he confirmed, “which meant responsible safety, tuning and setup of the guitars and all other stringed instruments (35 in all) for Bob and his band members for the entire tour from rehearsals in Clearwater to the last show in Salt Lake City.

I did the same for Bob on The Last Waltz and the 1978 Japan / Australia tour, from the auditions in Santa Monica in the fall of 1977 to the last show in Sydney.”

But he has not renounced his first hobby. At every opportunity he likes to take advantage of the proximity to the stars to take pictures both on and off the stage. “You are a fly on the wall,” he explains. “You disappear and you are focused on getting the perfect shot, so that later the viewer can see what it was like to be there. ”

His photos can be found on the covers of After the Gold Rush and Time Fades Away (Neil Young), Hejira (Joni Mitchell).

And also for Bob Dylan: “I am also a cover photographer and so I did the photo on the back cover of Hard Rain, the inside of Street-Legal, cover and poster of At Budokan and, I believe, a photo each in Biograph and the Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3. ”

The photos on the Street-Legal inner sleeve were taken in March 1978, at the hotel bar in Melbourne. The guitarist George Benson just happened to be there for a tour at the time and they were staying in the same hotel. Hence….

The other photo, of Dylan with Helena Springs, one of the singers from his band, was also taken during that period.

Later Bernstein became Prince’s permanent guitar technician, but mainly archivist for Neil Young. He spent no less than 19 years “and one day!” on the box set Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972.

Album Design

Since Dylan has moved to the West Coast, he no longer calls on John Berg, the art director for Columbia Records in New York. The Los Angeles department proposes Dylan to work with one of the designers they rely on: Gribbitt!, an “Art direction & graphic design company” located at Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood.

The agency is headed by Tim Bryant, who makes the main designs, but he leaves the finish to his new assistant: George Corsillo. Corsillo just arrived from New York, where he spent three years working for a book cover company. His first album cover was an instant hit: the Grease soundtrack (April 1978). Street-Legal therefore followed very shortly afterwards.

Emmett Grogan

Finally, it is remarkable and unusual that Dylan dedicated the record to someone.
Emmett Grogan is a 35-year-old man who was found dead on the New York City Subway on April 6, 1978 – an overdose of heroin.

Dylan fans mainly associate his name with the Emmett Grogan acetates, which have appeared on numerous bootlegs. They are raw mono mixes of songs recorded during the sessions for Another Side of Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited sessions. Grogan received the songs on six acetates from Dylan, during a meeting in 1966. Grogan said afterwards that: “Bob Dylan is exactly as I had not imagined him.”

Grogan was the ultimate hippie warrior, combining Dada street theater with revolutionary political ideas where he saw everything for free. His autobiography Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (1972) paints a romanticized picture of his life.

Previously published…

• The story of the art work on Bringing it All Back Home
• The untold story of the artwork on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• The Sleeve Art of Bob Dylan’s album: “Bob Dylan”
• The Sleeve Art of Bob Dylan’s Album: Slow Train Coming
• The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – the untold story of the artwork of the album
•  Times they are a changin’: the album artwork
• The art work on Bob Dylan’s albums: The Basement Tapes
• The source of the artwork of “Another side of Bob Dylan”
• The art work on Bob Dylan’s “Infidels”: what’s in a name?
• The art work of Nashville Skyline
• Absolute Exclusive: Empire Burlesque and Biograph artwork
• The artwork to Knocked Out Loaded
• The Art Work of the Traveling Wilburys Vol 1 (guest visitor, Michael Palin)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

by Jochen Markhorst

Ich häng an dünnen Fäden
Von der Unsichtbaren Hand
So wie im Wind die Schwalbe
Und wie jedes Körnchen Sand

 (I'm hanging by a thread
From the Invisible Hand
As the swallow in the wind
And like every grain of sand)

Thus Nana Mouskouri sings the last lines of her version of “Every Grain Of Sand”, in the German translation by Michael Kunze.

Kunze (1943) is Dylan’s contemporary and no small fry in the music industry either. The German has been writing hits for others since the 1960s, back then still protest-folkish youth sins, and in 1970 he breaks through with the millionseller “Du”, sung by Peter Maffay.

Over the years, he provides half the elite of the German hit parade with hits (Udo Jürgens, Münchner Freiheit, Ivan Rebroff, Peter Alexander, to name but a few) and also breaks through internationally – Kunze writes for Herbie Mann, Sister Sledge, Julio Iglesias and Gilbert Bécaud, among others, and musicals that reach Broadway. His honor roll includes a Grammy Award and some 90 gold and platinum records. He wins that Grammy in 1976 with his girl group Silver Convention, for the saltless “Fly, Robin, Fly”, which also has the record for Least Eloquent Billboard Nr. 1 hit; the whole text consists of six different words (also up to the sky).

Still, Kunze is definitely not some guy from the street. Before his musical career, he studied philosophy, history and law at Munich University and even obtained his doctorate (in law, on Witch Trials in the 16th Century). So technically as well as intellectually one would dare to entrust him with the translation of a monument like “Every Grain Of Sand”, but things go horribly wrong. Not out of ignorance, it is to be feared, but due to a lack of respect for the source text, or worse, out of misplaced feelings of superiority.

Kunze ignores biblical references (and, for example, turns Matthew’s falling sparrows senselessly into a hanging Schwalbe, a swallow), squeezes Schlager clichés like Auch wenn du vieles nicht verstehen kannst, es hat alles seinen Sinn (“Even if you can’t understand many things, everything has a purpose”) in and already fails with the cutesy title (“Jedes Körnchen Sand” – Körnchen being a very unnecessary diminutive).

It is not just any song, of course. “Every Grain Of Sand” is a masterpiece even by Dylan standards, not least because of the lyrical power of the brilliant text. Dylan weaves Blakean influences, biblical references, French symbolists and François Villon, intertwining with baroque, impenetrable, Dylanesque imagery.

Every reviewer points out the indebtedness of the opening lines to William Blake’s Auguries Of Innocence:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

However, that line is a bit thin; the indebtedness really doesn’t go any deeper than that grain of sand. The desperate, religious desperation in Dylan’s poem is in no way comparable to the devout admiration for God’s Great Plan, which speaks from Blake’s words. Then the influence of his “Prophetical Book” Jerusalem (1804-20) seems greater. It also contains the image of the grains of sand (four times even), even more literally, and even numbers them (“this Gate cannot be found by Satan’s Watch-fiends: tho’ they search numbering every grain of sand on Earth”), but more importantly: it is a dense, impenetrable poetic and theatrical vision in which Christ is found, abandoned and rediscovered, in which seduction, doubt and passion are sung, a prosaic poem without any real plot – in other words: beloved Dylan territory.

By the way, Blake’s semi-related poem Jerusalem opens with the words And did those feet in ancient time, which we find in the last verse of Dylan’s song.

Maybe it is the intoxicating melodies, or Dylan’s overwhelming vocals and ditto harmonica playing, but even the very best Dylan exegetes seem to misjudge the lyrics. Both Shelton and Paul Williams see something like “sense of wonder or awe at the beauty of the natural world”, where Dylan explicitly stacks up eerie, gloomy, saddening images (a pool of tears, a dying voice, nocturnal sorrow, chill, pain, decay, despair, bitterness and so on). Just as the context of Matthew’s references (the falling sparrows and the numbered hairs) is conveniently ignored: they come from a pep talk of Jesus, in which He ups the disciples’ antes, giving them a sharper edge with aggressive, frightening rhetoric; “fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” are the words before and “I came not to send peace, but a sword” the words after.

Clinton Heylin searches and finds possible sources of inspiration, but doesn’t dare to interpret, others see redemption, devotion or humility in Dylan’s words, but can’t tell where. In any case, this narrator does not feel “the inclination to look back on any mistake”, which is not at all repentant, and he compares himself to the murderer Cain, who has to break the “chain of events” with his own hands.

No, the “reality of man” to which Dylan refers in the closing lines is that we are immortal souls in a mortal body, that “man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not” (Job 14:1-2). This song is truly imbued with the Lutheran vision that suffering in this earthly valley of tears is our destiny, until death comes to redeem us.

Remarkable, this widespread misunderstanding of the desolate theme. Especially since Dylan does not hide the narrator’s drab state of mind that underground. Perhaps it is indeed exuded by the beauty of the music, which is rather overwhelming.

That’s widely recognized too. The aforementioned Mouskouri is the first in a long line of artists to throw themselves onto the song. According to Nana this is no coincidence. In 2007 she publishes her Memoirs, an alienating exercise in false modesty, in which she states that Dylan has been a good friend since 1979. After her concert at the sold-out Greek Theater in Los Angeles, he meets her behind the scenes, they go for a restaurant and then “he wrote Every Grain Of Sand‘ for me”. A demo version (the version with the barking dog and Jennifer Warnes of The Bootleg Series 1-3) is mailed, and the Greek superstar is allowed to use it for her next album (Song For Liberty, 1982).

Yeah well. Who knows. Maybe so – Dylan does actually undertake quite some eyebrow-raising things in these 1979-81 years. But pretty Nana’s smooth rendition is not. The versions by Emmylou Harris, especially the studio version of Wrecking Ball (1995, produced by Dylan expert Daniel Lanois), can hardly be improved and overshadow all the other covers. The recording of the Blind Boys Of Alabama, with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon (2013) does attract attention thanks to an inimitable, enigmatic rhythm and, alright, the sympathetic Irishman Luka Bloom knows how to move with a warm, sober version (on Head & Heart, 2014).

Though perhaps the interpretation by the enchanting Lizz Wright (Grace, 2017) rivals Miss Harris’s. Miss Wright does display a truly Dylanesque phrasing, an enviable skill to stretch notes and to sing “behind the beat”.

Lizz Wright:

Above all of them, however, the bard himself still towers, with the masterpiece featured in almost every top 10 of Most Beautiful Dylan Songs. Where it belongs, obviously. As the swallow in the wind.

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

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.  Not every index is complete but I do my best.   Tony Attwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Performance selection by Aaron; commentary by Tony

If you’ve got to go

Aaron: Following on from the Angela Aki version of Knockin On Heaven’s Door, which we both loved, I thought I’d look for more versions of Dylan songs by woman artists in a foreign language. I thought I would not give you too many details around the artists or songs (apart from the last one) and instead just let the music speak for itself.

So to start us off, here is the most famous one of all, Fairport Convention (with Sandy Denny on lead vocals) with Si Tu Dois Partir.

Tony: For a change a song selected by Aaron which I know about.  Richard Thompson told the story about wanting to translate the song into French / Cajun style, and asked for volunteers at a gig, and, he said, “About three people turned up, so it was really written by committee, and consequently ended up not very Cajun, French or Dylan.”

The studio version had Dave Swarbrick on fiddle, Richard Thompson on accordion and Trevor Lucas, who later formed Fotheringay with Sandy Denny, on triangle.   Joe Boyd, in “White Bicycles” wrote, “Martin created the Cajun washboard sound for ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’ by stacking some plastic Eames chairs and running his drumsticks along them. The percussion break was supposed to feature an empty milk bottle lying on the topmost chair, but when the time came it fell and smashed on the floor. I signalled frantically to keep playing. The crash of broken glass was absolutely in time and worked perfectly, a good omen for the session.” The song got to number 21 in the UK singles chart.

The cover photo is of Sandy Denny’s parents, Neil and Edna, standing outside the family home in Wimbledon, south London, with the band in the garden.

I can’t really review the song as I know it so well; it is still fine and quirky, which is what Fairport always wanted to be.

Next, Lill Lindfors – Låt Mej Va De E Bra

This arrangement is so unexpected that it took me a second or two to realise what was being sung.  It just didn’t want to compute in my brain!   The change of key and accompaniment as we go into the second verse is unexpected on a recording that is already going somewhere odd, which is why the transformation to a third key with a full (if gentle) backing lacks something.  If you are going to be unique, keep being unique.

The point is simply changing key by going up a tone (from C to D for example) is so old fashioned… but maybe that is the point.  The orchestral arrangement at the very end with the strings coming down the scale certainly amplify that point.

It’s cute, but I wouldn’t play it again.

Giusy Balatresi – Sei come sei

Oh I wish someone could eject that coconut playing percussionist – at least he/she does stop for a moment, but then we are back with them.

I personally blame the producer either for not stopping the percussionist or even worse, for thinking of the idea in the first place.

The lady has a lovely voice and when allowed to use it, the sound is really interesting.  She doesn’t need to double up the voice with recording with herself.   But really the arranger needs to be shot; by half way through I was utterly sick of the various effects.

The lady deserves better.

Reina Rodina – Learen Spaanske Skuon

This one had me guessing.  The percussive background is interesting, and then distracting but slowly I got to realise what the song was.  It was the last line of music in each verse that revealed it – which will also tell you that my Frisian is not that good. (You’re doing this on purpose aren’t you Aaron??!!!)

The literal translation of “Learnen Spaanske Skuon” is “Learn Spanish Shoes” – but by the time I’d got that sorted I’d heard the last line of the verse, and that told me where we were.

And I did have one bit of help, for we have written about Frisian versions of Dylan before with the review of De swalkers flecht    That version I loved, but this one, hmmm.  It is fascinating and I need to hear it a few times when not writing.  I am one of the people who really believe that traditional languages need to be retained and with very few still speaking the language, this project is something I welcome.   Plus I like the track.

Astrud Gilberto – Ti mangerei

Aaron pointed out that there is also an English version… “but I prefer the Italian version”.  The English language version is here.

After all the adventure of Learning Spanish shoes, this came over as a bit twee; singing without much depth.  “If you gotta go” needs some attitude in it somewhere, I think, and I don’t find it here.

Marlene Dietrich Die Antwort weiss ganz allein der Wind

Again, there is also an inferior English version.

Maybe I am getting less tolerant, but I want these cover versions to do something new, or at least to offer me a new insight into the song, but the backing here turns it into a 1950s pop song.  It is as if the 60s had never happened, which when it comes to a Dylan cover, is a fairly silly musical thing to achieve.  We all know the lady, and what she has done for music, but I wonder why she is doing this.

AND WHY DID THEY INSIST ON CHANGING KEY BY JERKING UP THE WHOLE PIECE BY A SEMI-TONE FOR  THE LAST VERSE???????????????????????

Trio Mei Li De Dao

Aaron: Last up, this time it’s an instrumental. There might be no words, however, musical it’s in a foreign language as it’s by an all female Taiwanese trio of musicians called Trio Mei Li De Dao and it’s their version of I Want You. This comes from the most interesting and diverse Dylan covers album you’ll ever hear called “From Another World”, which includes covers from artists from all over the world, including Iran, aboriginal Australian singers, India, Hungary etc, done in the traditional style of the region. The album is on Spotify and YouTube if you have an hour to check it out, I thought it was sensational.

Tony: I am stunned.  Amazed.  Shocked.  This is completely extraordinary.  I beg you, my audience (if you are still there) do not play a few seconds and give up.  Please listen, and please don’t think, “This isn’t ‘I want you’.”  Your continued attention will be rewarded.  The ending however is unexpected.

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