Bob Dylan And Harold Pinter (Part III): Hearts Of Fire

Posted on October 25, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

Off to the Land of Blake, and Wordsworth’s Lakes, the young Bob Dylan flies.

There, an association with BBC-TV director Philip Saville acquaints Bob Dylan with the dramatic methods employed by playwright Harold Pinter – absurdist comedy, black humour, puns, poetic lower-class speech, and silent pauses mix with tragic events and memories of better times that arise out of realistic situations.

Saville directs Pinter’s TV play ‘Night Out’ with the playwright in the cast. A number of Pinter’s plays portray the betrayal of innocents by powerful religious and societal authorities who rave against the sex instinct though not against the horrors of war. The result is the creation of confusion, insecurity, alienation, and violence in people trying to cope with their mundane ‘kitchen sink’ lives.

Saville directs Evan Jones’ Pinteresque TV play “The Madhouse On Castle Street”. Philip adds a feature to it. Bob Dylan performs ‘Cuckoo Bird’, a symbolic song that the young singer/songwriter already knows – it’s about betrayal in that the cuckoo takes over the nests of other birds. Dylan never forgets such dramatic techniques; nor the anti-authoritarian content of Harold’s plays. Pinter later writes a screenplay for Joseph Conrad’s ‘Victory: An Island Tale’.

Dylan goes down to the figurative basement and sends up Pinter-like fragmented song narratives peppered with allusions to old folk songs:

Well, the cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies
I'm preaching the word of God, I'm putting out your eyes
(Bob Dylan: High Water)

A closed and desolate tomb-like room is the he setting of many of Harold Pinter’s plays; so too in the song lyrics below:

Light flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's really nothing, really nothing, to turn off
Just Louise, and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

As in Pinter’s plays (ie,The Homecoming) so it be in songs presented from the presumptuous point of view of male writers – the biological nature of the female sex better prepares it’s members to cope with the existential angst engendered by modern society; indeed, Nietzschean ‘resentment’ can be turned into lots of cash through ‘high class’ prostitution.

And chastity too can bring in money like it does for Jack Astor’s widow, and the fictional sad-eyed lady – if the following lyrics be so interpreted:

With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions, which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Who could they get to carry you
(Bob Dylan; Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

In the play ‘The Madhouse On Castle Street’, the following song is performed:

Hang me, oh hang me, I'll be dead and gone
Wouldn't mind the hanging, but the laying in the grave so long
Lord, Lord, I've been all around this world
(Bob Dylan: Hang Me, Oh Hang Me ~ traditional)

Akin to the motif that pops up in the song lyrics below:

At midnight all the agents, and superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do
Then they bring them down to the factory where the heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders, and then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castle by insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

Mustn’t forget the carol scene.

Back home, in the stage directions, Dylan lists those musicians and songsters that the singer/playwright wants in the grand choir loft to accompany his song-play entitled ‘Murder Most Foul’.

12 years of Untold Dylan

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Dignity: part V – Nowhere to fade

Posted on October 25, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Dignity Regained

by Jochen Markhorst

V Nowhere to fade

A contemporary, female Chekhov, a Russian Harold Pinter… one of the greatest treasures of modern Russian literature is Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (1938), whose brilliant works have been published only since the perestroika of the 80s. Since then she has won almost all the most important literary prizes in Russia (including the highest, the Russian Booker Prize, the Pushkin Prize and in 2006 the Triumph Prize) and we are awaiting the – justifiably – Nobel Prize. Petrushevskaya is a versatile super talent (besides being a playwright, poet and prose writer she is also a gifted visual artist and an irresistible singer), but she deserves world fame for her short stories. The collection There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby was acclaimed in the New York Times Book Review in 2009 and is a bestseller, as is her second English book, There Once Lived A Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, And He Hanged Himself (2013).

The titles already do spoil the surprise somewhat: bleak. But there is more to it, of course. Many stories take place in a dreamlike setting, the main characters are in a kind of trance, in strange environments or in an unidentifiable land – often without knowing how they got there. A man notices that he walks alone at night in a snowy forest, looking for a child he has never seen before. A girl stands on the side of a dark road and notices that she does not recognise at all the clothes she is wearing. A man under anaesthesia meets his daughter in a strange house and eats a raw heart.

Their experiences can only be interpreted allegorically… “Dignity”-like archetypes in “Dignity”-like decors and a “Dignity”-like allegorical tone. Mysterious and ambiguous – indeed, like a Very Great Dylan Song.

A comparison with Dylan extends beyond literary output. The Russian writer’s modesty struggles with overt expressions of appreciation too, she insists on putting her own talent into perspective, and even chooses similar evasive explanations as Dylan. When the British writer Sally Laird interviews her for her book Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews With Ten Contemporary Writers (1999), Petrushevskaya says, responding to Laird’s question how she came to write the masterful novel The Time: Night:

Russia is a land of women Homers – women who tell their stories orally, just like that, without inventing anything. They’re extraordinarily talented storytellers. I’m just a listener among them. But I dare to hope that The Time: Night is a kind of encyclopaedia of all their lives.

… Homer, the modest reservation “I’m just a listener”, the Sing In Me, O Muse characterization: words, tone and images like Dylan uses in interviews and in his Nobel Prize speech to downplay the uniqueness of his lyrics.

Artistic congeniality, however, is also evident in the details: in remarkable choice of words. For example, the unobtrusive, shining catachresis in the third “chorus” of “Dignity”.

The attention is distracted by the ostentatious nod to Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre (“The Drunken Boat”);

Got no place to fade, got no coat
I’m on the rollin’ river in a jerkin’ boat
Tryin’ to read a note somebody wrote
About dignity

… in which the protagonist in a “drunken boat” perhaps is trying to read Rimbaud’s Lettre du Voyant. Beautifully phrased, too, with the compelling internal rhyme coat – boat – note – wrote. But it distracts from, and overshadows, the beauty of the great opening words, of the contamination no place to fade – a splendid, poetic contraction of no place to hide and fade away. And another trigger to look at Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, at her moving and witty poem “An Old Woman Crosses The Road”.

The old woman who wants to cross is stopped by the traffic police and is fined; she is not allowed to cross here. Of course, she does not have the money (“I only get my pension on the sixth”), but the policemen are adamant:

ГБДД стоит,
Приняв упорный вид,
Старушку не желая отпускать:
Давно пора понять,
Что некуда линять,
Придется бабка денежки отдать.

 The traffic police just stood there
Taking on a stubborn look,
Not wanting to let the old woman go:
It's about time you understand
You got nowhere to fade
You’ll have, grandmother, to give the money.

“некуда линять”, nekuda linyat’, nowhere to fade… It is a unique expression and demonstrates a poetic kinship across the continents and oceans.

By the way, in 2010 a heart-warming, 72-year-old Ljudmila Petrushevskaya sings the poem, to the music of the indestructible Yiddish love song “Bei Mir Bistu Shein”, known in the Anglo-Saxon world thanks to The Andrew Sisters. (“Bei Mir Bist Du Schön”, 1937)

This third part of “Dignity”, stanzas 9-12, reveals how the poet Dylan searches for balance in his lyrics. We are familiar with the notebooks, typescripts and scribblings full of erasures, arrows and corrections, we know the stories of eyewitnesses who tell how Dylan is still shifting couplets back and forth in the studio, changing verses and verse lines, and we know quite a few primeval versions of songs – primeval versions with almost always different lyrics.

Both in content and colour, the final version’s third set of stanzas, the version that remains intact after rewriting, deleting and shifting back and forth complete verses, neatly mirrors the four previous stanzas;

The Petrushevskaya-like archetype blind man breakin’ out of trance from stanza 5 is a drinkin’ man listening to voices in stanza 9,
The setting of the sixth quatrain is a cinematographic cliché (the wedding) and describes a classic film noir dialogue (“Said she could get killed if she told me what she knew”); the “mirrored” quatrain 10 has a similar movie setting (Prince Phillip in the home of the blues) and a similar mafia film dialogue (“Said he’d give me information if his name wasn’t used. He wanted money up front”),
The bridge in both parts (stanzas 7 and 11) introduces mythical, biblical characters (tongues of angels versus sons of darkness and sons of light, i.e. demons and angels),
And the concluding quatrain, the chorus-like stanza, features in both cases the nameless I-person and expresses in archaic, nineteenth-century wording the difficult circumstances in which the narrator finds himself. Here with a Rimbaud paraphrase, in the previous “chorus”, stanza 12, with Edgar Allan Poe-like choice of words (“Chilly wind sharp as a razor blade”).

And the main character has only one part left, only one quartet of stanzas to find dignity…

To be continued. Next up: Dignity part VI

———

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

———

12 years of Untold Dylan

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All Directions at Once 11: Beyond the remains of Desolation Row

Posted on October 24, 2020 by TonyAttwood

A full index to the previous articles in this series is available here.

By Tony Attwood

After composing “Desolation Row” Bob Dylan might have been forgiven for taking a little break; he had after all created a monument, something that most people would consider to be their supreme artistic achievement of a lifetime. But he didn’t stop at all, for after a quick side-line with From a Buick 6 Bob then really started to explore the possibilities that Rolling Stone had opened. The possibilities of the anti-love song, or as I’ve called them on this site, “the songs of disdain”.

And he didn’t hang about, for he was straight into that notion with the next songs: first a quick trial run with “Can you please crawl out your window,” then full-blown disdain with “4th Street”.

But let’s get the perspective right. By the time Dylan had come to write “Rolling Stone” he had already written 114 of the 600+ songs of which we now have recordings, and none of those 114 songs can readily be counted as a “song of disdain.” The only contender for such a subject title would be “Ballad in Plain D” but here the disdain is for the sister, while the essence of the song is not his dislike of her, but the love she caused him to lose. So I stay with the notion of “Rolling Stone” as the first song in this newly invented genre. And most certainly in “Rolling Stone” we could be left in no doubt as to who in the piece was the centre of his attention, and what he thought of that person.

Indeed, so accomplished is “Rolling Stone” lyrically and musically, that we can easily forget that this was not just a first for Dylan in this particular genre, but pretty much a first for pop and rock music, wherein the songs were fundamentally about love, lost love and dance, as I have mentioned before. Yes folk songs went elsewhere, most commonly into social justice and being against war, but otherwise, love, lost love and dance held sway.

So it is therefore probably not surprising to recognise that having discovered (or indeed we might say “invented”) the concept of “songs of disdain” Dylan now used it four or five times more (the number depending on what you make of “Queen Jane”) before the year was out. The songs I put in this genre are

Lunatic Princess is an incomplete song, but there can be little doubt as to the nature of the piece. There is a link to a recording to it within the article listed above; we may best note it as a sketch preparing the ground for this what was to come in the aftermath of “Rolling Stone”.

And thereafter Bob settled down to continuing the work he had started in Rolling Stone by composing “Can you please crawl out your window.” And what makes this song so fascinating is that at this point Dylan not only decided to explore this new genre of disdain that he had created, he also decided to explore just how instrumentation and accompaniment could affect the enter meaning of the song – something that he came to develop over and again from 1987 onwards in what we came to know as the Never Ending Tour

What really changes everything in this song is the introduction of the glockenspiel – an instrument akin to a xylophone but with metallic rather than wooden blocks and hammers. It makes for a much more relaxed sound, as Dylan adjusts the melody to fit to this, with both the glock and the singer producing descending scales in the chorus.

The result is a much more reflective piece than we got in the single that was released… Dylan is almost pleading with the subject of the song to come out beyond the window and explore the world – and the subsequent re-write clearly demonstrated to him (if he didn’t know it already) that melody and instrumentation can be used to change the meaning of a song just as much as words can.

This second version is much more edgy, and that extra edge is achieved entirely through instrumentation and those very slight changes to the melody. The accompaniment is only just this side of cacophony; now he really is digging into the subject of the song and he really wants us (and the subject of the song) to know exactly how he feels.

So why should I make such a fuss about songs of disdain and changes of instrumentation and melody? Basically, because through our having access to so much of Dylan’s unreleased material, and through Dylan’s propensity for exploring options and possibilities, and the fact that he wrote so much music, we have what is an extremely rare insight into a composer at work. For while many short songs can be, and indeed are, written in a matter of minutes (just how long could it have taken to write “Hound Dog” for example?) Dylan was now like a painter wondering just what happens if I change the shade of the picture here, or the put that line just a little further to the left…

To show what I mean by this, we might consider that Wikipedia (at least at the moment I am writing this, on 23 Oct 2020) has an article on the subject of the song, which opens with the statement that, “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? is a folk rock song written by American musician Bob Dylan.” I find this very odd, for to describe the song as “folk rock” is to ignore everything within the song. The anger of the lyrics, the musical aggression in the version released as a single… This is not folk rock but something far more aggressive. A expansion of the new form… a song of disdain in fact.

Jochen in his review of this song on Untold Dylan presented us with a version of the song by The Hold Steady, taken from the soundtrack of the Dylan film I’m Not There (2007). It is a most interesting performance as the band gives us both interpretations of the song – the gentle first verse, and then the full blow disdain.

Now as we all know the song ends with the opening line of “Positively Fourth Street” which, at least according to such records as exist, Dylan wrote after “Please Crawl.” And we note that both songs are unusual musically in that they neither of them resolve the song back to the chord that is the foundation (the key chord) of the song. Pop, folk, rock and songs from similar genres in western music are each in a key – usually written as being “in C” or in “D minor” etc. There are 24 keys, half of them major and half minor ranging from A to G, and incorporating keys that start and end note just on the seven white notes of the piano keyboard (A to G) but the five black notes (B flat, C sharp etc, normally written Bb and C#). Most people hear songs in a minor key as being inherently sad, although skillfull writing can change that.

When we say a song is “In C” it not only tells us which notes are primarily used, but also what chord the song generally starts and finishes on (leaving aside songs that fade out on the record of course). But both these songs abandon this rule, and that adds very significantly to the edginess that we feel. I am not sure that Dylan wrote any other songs that used this technique, but I think these were the first two where he tried it out. (Do correct me if I’m wrong).

So these are two songs of real disdain (something I think that was new in popular music) are linked by an even rarer musical experiment of ending each verse on an unexpected chord. But then, having tried that Bob set these ideas aside to think instead about “Highway 61 Revisited”. Not just as the title of his next album but also a song that he has played and played on his tours, over and over again.

Indeed at the moment of writing, “61” is the third most often played song by Dylan in concert, beaten only by the Watchtower, (mostly as an encore) which was finally dropped from the schedules in 2018, and “Like a rolling stone.” Up to November 2019, “Highway 61” had notched up a very pleasingly round total of exactly 2000 outings. It clearly still means a lot to Bob.

As I think we all know Dylan has expressed an affinity with the road saying in Chronicles “I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors … It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”

For a man who has almost certainly done more full-scale professional gigs to significant audiences than anyone else, that is quite a statement.

As for the highway itself, this is the road that ran through Duluth, the road that connects with everyone from Muddy Waters to Charly Patton via Elvis Presley. Bessie Smith died in a car crash on Highway 61. Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil on Highway 61. And Dylan uses the song to say “only the blues makes any sense”. It’s another Dadaistic vision of the world. Art for a world that makes no sense. It’s about his home, his father, the blues, the road, weird people and … nonsense.

In the late summer of 1965, Dylan did an interview with the New York Post in which he is quoted as saying, “folk music is the only music where it isn’t simple. It’s never been simple. It’s weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. I’ve never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs. They were out of sight.” Which suggests that this was Dylan drawing on the traditions of folk, by inventing his own weirdness.

Which goes someway to justify my one line entry for Highway 61 as I tried to represent every song’s subject matter in just one line: “The world makes no sense, except maybe the blues; Dada.”

Now part of the definition of Dada is that it negates traditional values in art, and this is where Dylan most certainly was; the creating of a new set of values (which is something we are most certainly going to have to face when this series reaches the Basement Tapes). Traditionally art is about beauty – but the songs of disdain such as “4th Street” and “Window” have nothing to do with beauty. They are of portraits of nasty people, self-centred people, people gone very wrong. But not necessarily real people, for with “Highway 61” Bob starts to create his own myths, legends and ghosts exactly as folk music (at least in Bob’s view) does. Indeed this song can be seen as the foundation stone of the 1967 songs from John Wesley Harding.

But was he right about folk music? Yes in the sense that folk music, like folk tales, was not about the world as we know it. Consider Nottomun Town…

Sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone
Ten thousand stood round me yet I was alone
Took my hat in my hand, for to keep my head warm
Ten thousand got drowned that never was born

But before that Bob had another idea in his mind. He had written some outspoken songs of disdain and he was about to write more. So the pattern continued with the absolute nightmare and despair of Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues. Indeed one could argue this is not so much disdain but self-loathing. And just in case we hadn’t got the message Queen Jane Approximately opens with, “When your mother sends back all your invitations…”

And even then after that round of negativity Bob is still not ready to stop, for the next song is another song of absolute disdain, Ballad of a thin man. Indeed Dylan seems to want to present us with negativity from every angle; despair at ourselves, dislike of everyone else, from the intellectual through to the common man; in fact pretty much everyone.

It therefore seems inevitable that he would want to compose an overarching piece which put all this into some kind of unity. But before he could do that he needed to get a few more thoughts out of the way.

And I should add that it is completely wrong to say at this stage that Bob Dylan had abandoned folk music and gone across to pop and rock music. In fact the reverse is true, for he had mined the folk traditions ever deeper and brought them into a rock music accompaniment through which he could reach a wider audience.

Although I must admit there is just a chance that at this moment Bob was actually thinking that he’d pushed things too far. He was still with Dada, but in Jet Pilot we do get a moment of humour… Nottamun Town having a laugh….

Well, she’s got Jet Pilot eyes from her hips on down.
All the bombardiers are trying to force her out of town.
She’s five feet nine and she carries a monkey wrench.
She weighs more by the foot than she does by the inch.
She got all the downtown boys, all at her command
But you’ve got to watch her closely ’cause she ain’t no woman
She’s a man.

Indeed what we have is yet another preview of the Basement Tapes.

And we must also note that these songs came pouring out from Dylan one straight after another for as far as we can tell it was just one studio session produced a new arrangement of “Can you Please Crawl out Your Window” and “I Wanna be your lover,” plus “Jet Pilot”. along with “Medicine Sunday”, which later became “Temporary Like Achilles”.

Indeed this song is worth considering for a moment for it is very much of a style that Bob Dylan favoured at this time – the surreal characters, some of whom are engaged here in references to myths, some to actual people, the racing rhythm, the restriction of the whole piece to just three chords and hardly any melody, the band at full pelt… And a fair amount of Verlaine and Rimbaud.

Thus the message is clear: nothing makes any real sense in this world, and leaving aside Medicine Sunday of which we only have an extract, the next two songs retain that vision of nothing being as it should be allied with a certain sense of panic in Long distance operator. And all that before Dylan ends the year with yet another masterpiece

There are thousands in the phone booth
Thousands at the gate
There are thousands in the phone booth
Thousands at the gate
Everybody wants to make a long-distance call
But you know they're just gonna have to wait

Well yes, when you are preparing to write another absolute masterpiece, I suppose you have to do something with that typewriter. Until you are ready, that is.

So let us just pause and recall that in this year of 1965 Bob didn’t just write 29 songs, these songs included a whole string of masterpieces. You will undoubtedly be able to create your own list, but I struggled to get my list of works of total brilliance even down to ten. Ten songs that would more than do most songwriters for a lifetime, and for Dylan it was just one year. Here’s my choice with these simple summations of what each is about.

Farewell Angelina (Song of Farewell)
Love Minus Zero (Love)
She Belongs to Me (Love)
It’s all over now baby blue (Song of Farewell)
It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry (I’m so tired of all this moving on)
Like a Rolling Stone (Song of Disdain)
Desolation Row (Political protest; It’s not the world, it’s how you see the world)
Positively Fourth Street (Song of Disdain)
Highway 61 Revisited (The world makes no sense, except maybe the blues; Dada)
Visions of Johanna (Mystical people in the half light, surrealism, Dada)

What I see here is the sadness of saying farewell to Angelina and Baby Blue, being replaced by the love songs (ahead of Bob’s marriage) and then a tiredness of the world and the notion that the world is wrong and the world makes no sense… and finally, that urge at the end to set out for all time what life is like in this twilight world beyond the mainstream, beyond the lights.

A song that says the wreckage of the world is everywhere for us to see, but people still have to live here – they still are living here in these shadows where the night plays its tricks.

To my mind “Johanna” could not have been written without Dylan working his way through a mindset which included the vitriol about “going electric,” the utter disdain of “4th Street”, the mystical love of “Love Minus Zero”, the most heartfelt farewell of Baby Blue, the anger of “Thin Man”…

For Johanna is the ultimate picture of life in the shadows, and before one can see the shadows, one has to see the life in the daylight, and then adjust one’s eyes to settles down and not just see the inhabitants of the underside, but find the words to describe their strange world, their strange half-life.

Of course it is night. Of course everyone in this crazed world is trying to be quiet. And yes Louise quite possibly believes she actually is holding a handful of rain. And yes, all in all there really is nothing to turn off because there is nothing left. This is not so much a mad world any more but an utterly lost world. The people in it are lost, as is the world itself, disconnected from the rest of reality. Everything is tangled, everything is muddled nothing is real, the visions (and they are not even the singer’s visions, but her visions) have taken over.

For me, brilliant as so much of the work this year was, undoubtedly as several of the songs are works of absolute genius, “Visions of Johanna” is the summit of the Dadaistic expression, and the summit of Dylan’s creative life thus far.

Plus there is a moment in the midst of the images where Bob says, “How can I explain, it’s so hard to get on…” and that in itself, to me sums up the whole year. The year of absolute love and total disdain. Of marriage and “4th Street”. Of regretful farewells and turning away. Of not just writing “Love minus zero” but of also writing “Fourth Street” – and writing them within a few months of each other.

But what this list of my top ten from the year (still retained in the order that they were written) tells me is that the journey of exploration for Dylan was still continuing. The love songs like “She Belongs to Me” are replaced by the songs of utter disdain (Rolling stone) before we move away from pointing fingers at the people and simply are given the canvas revealing the world in which these people exist.

From 24 September 24 Bob Dylan toured the U.S. and Canada for six months, backed by what became known as “The Band”.

On 22 November Dylan quietly married Sara Lownds while they were (or so we are told) living in the Chelsea Hotel.

On 30 November Dylan made the first ever recording of “Visions of Johanna”. He had created a bleak landscape, a desolate land, a wilderness in which people live, unsure and unaware that there actually is anything beyond their world. In all, 14 takes were recorded.

On 4 December Bob Dylan gave the world premier of “Visions” at the Berkeley Community Theatre. He had looked at the world, and shone a light in the darkened corners which until that moment, the world had chosen not to look at.

The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him
Sayin’, “Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”
But like Louise always says
“Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes “ev’rything’s been returned which was owed”
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

12 years of Untold Dylan

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Never Ending Tour, 1993, part 4 – The Supper Club and beyond.

Posted on October 24, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Michael Johnson

On the 16^th and 17^th of November, 1993, Bob Dylan did a two day season at New York’s Supper Club, doing two concerts a day, morning and evening, ten songs per concert. The recordings made at these four concerts have become famous in collector circles as much for the well-balanced soundboard recordings as for the enhanced acoustic sound and a setlist that went beyond his usual suspects.

Some enthusiastic commentators suggest that these performances are better than those delivered the next year, 1994, in the commercially released Dylan Unplugged concert. They may well be right, but I have some reservations. The Supper Club performances are more adventurous, but Dylan’s voice is still pretty patchy in 1993, and his Supper Club vocals are more ragged than the smoother, 1994 concert. His voice has been better in this year too – see NET, 1993, part 1.

One of the finest performances of the season would have to be this passionate rendition of ‘Ring Them Bells’. Something of a sleeper, this one, from the 1989 Oh Mercy album, bursts into life here. It is an odd song, sounding a little like a leftover from the Christian era, but it’s not quite that, remaining, as the best Dylan songs do, somewhat mysterious.

‘Time is running backward
and so is the bride.’

The last lines are the most telling.

‘Oh the lines are long
and the fighting is strong
And they're breaking down the distance between
right and wrong.’

It’s the collapse of moral certainty that concerns the poet here. I can see a message in these lines that is very contemporary. Chaos results when a culture loses its moral compass. Dylan has approached this issue before, in ‘Idiot Wind’ (1974)

‘What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good
you’ll find out when you reach the top’

and again in ‘One Too Many Mornings’.

‘You’re right from your side
and I’m right from mine’

and in ‘Baby Stop Crying’(1978).

‘Go get me my pistol, babe,
Honey, I can't tell right from wrong.’

Despite this topsy-turvy world that has inverted good and evil or confused them, even from our fortresses we must ring them bells for the regenerative powers of spirit and nature.

Ring them bells from the fortress
for the lilies that bloom

Ring them bells

That one is from the late show on the 17^th, surely Dylan’s best live performance of the song, although I love the haunting piano demo version on Tell Tale Signs.

Another from that same late show is the more familiar ‘One Too Many Mornings’(1964) just mentioned. I’ve commented on the effects of extending shorter songs to greater length in previous posts, in this year when Dylan favoured long, epic versions of even his shortest songs. ‘One Too Many Mornings’ only takes 2.43 minutes on the album (Times they are a Changing).

What made such songs feel miraculous was that they could communicate so much in such a short time, especially a moment of acoustic bleakness that this song captures. Pushing it out to just over five minutes sacrifices that wonderful brevity. But there are gains as well. The more lavish and staged presentation allows for a more seductive unfolding of the sense of loss and hopelessness.

I prefer this version to the loud, high-pitched rock performances of 1966, epic and wonderful as they are. There’s a delicacy of feeling here, and I’m certainly not averse to the minute or so of quiet harmonica solo at the end, reminiscent of Dylan’s earliest harp playing.

One Too Many Mornings

Slipping back to the late show of the night before, we catch an epic version of ‘Forever Young’. I’ve commented before on the paradox of the song and its yearning for the impossible, but what struck me about this performance was the pain, the anguish inherent in our doomed mortality. Dylan powers into the vocal, but what strikes us is how rich and full the sound is created here. It is all underpinned by Tony Garnier’s solid double bass playing, but it is Bucky Baxter creating those ‘orchestral’ sounds with his slide guitar. I’ve called this enhanced acoustic because of the sound Baxter is creating. Dylan sings alone on the choruses, enhancing the pathos of the song, and keeps a tight rein on Mr Guitar Man.

Forever Young

‘Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)’ from Empire Burlesque was something of a hit for Dylan in 1985, at least it was here in New Zealand.

According to Wiki, Dylan performed ‘Tight Connection to My Heart’ 14 times in the early 1990s. He first performed it on January 12, 1990 in New Haven, Connecticut and then 11 more times in 1990. On November 16 and 17, 1993 he played the song twice in New York City.

I preferred the earlier formulation of the song, ‘Someone’s got a Hold of my Heart’ from the Infidels recording sessions in 1983. The original is far less disdainful and more vulnerable. But this powerful live performance has almost persuaded me. It’s far better than the album version, I have to say, and returns us to the full raw power of the song without the silly overdubs.

Elsewhere on this site, Tony Atwood has registered his dislike for the song as it appeared on the album. I wonder if this live performance will change his mind. (This is another from the late show on the 17^th)

Tight connection to my heart.

‘I Want You’ is one of those songs that works well whether fast or slow. A bouncy little number off Blonde on Blonde, it hides its sophistication.

‘The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn, but it's
Not that way, I wasn't born to lose you.’

This Supper Club performance is in the style of the original, just a somewhat more edgy expression of desire without that confident verbal leer of the Blonde on Blonde recordings. Note, however, that in the last verse which goes

‘But I did it, because he lied and
Because he took you for a ride’

Dylan sings ‘I did it because I lied…’ A slip of the tongue? A deliberate change? We’ll never know. This is from the early show on the 16^th.

I want you

From the early show on the 17^th, we find ‘The Disease of Conceit’, a song from ‘Oh Mercy’. This song was to drop from Dylan’s set list in 1996. This Supper Club performance may well be the best ever.

The disease of conceit

Every now and again Dylan throws himself into an epic interpretation of ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ off Highway 61 (1965). This nine-minute performance is no exception. The song is as much about a yearning for companionship as it is an attack on living falsely.

‘Now, when all of the flower ladies want back
what they have lent you
And the smell of their roses does not remain
And all of your children start to resent you
Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?’

Queen Jane Approximately

Earlier in this survey of 1993 we encountered an electric version of that wonderful love song with the hypnotic melody line, ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ (see NET, 1993, part two), and now the song turns up again at the Supper Club. As with the electric version, I don’t think this acoustic performance lives up to the glory days of the Rolling Thunder Tour, but it’s getting there.

One more cup of coffee

That completes our visit to Dylan’s Supper Club season, yet as we saw in the previous post (part 3), excellent acoustic performances were not confined to that venue. Both the London and the Portland performances are at least as good if not better, even though there are no soundboard recordings of them. The same goes for the Toulouse concert (30^th June)

Take for example the performance of ‘Gates of Eden’ from that Toulouse concert. We have kept track of this song from the first, angry rock driven 1988 performance, always different yet somehow always the same, the same Celtic lilt. The same magic.

We’ve heard many wonderful performances of the song, but this one surely must stand out as one of the best, if not the very best. A ten minute epic in the year of epics, this is an extraordinary mood piece. The last verse is finished at about six and a half minutes, with most of the last four minutes sustained by a gentle, exploratory harp break before Mr Guitar Man steps in to land the song. How on earth did I miss this one in my Master Harpist series?

There’s power too in Dylan’s vocal performance, swinging between soft and sharp. My only issue is that there seems a little mix up in the lyrics. It was great however to hear the ‘Motorcycle black madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen’ verse which tends to get dropped.

We don’t get anything quite like this at the Supper Club

Gates of Eden

I could say much the same about this eleven minute ‘A Simple Twist of Fate’ from the London concert (2/12). It’s the same structure, right down to the harp break. This time, however, Dylan’s main interest seems to be in giving Mr Guitar Man plenty of room to move, to explore that always oddly dissonant and unsettling guitar style.

Simple twist of fate

I think at this point we have to ask ourselves what function these guitar breaks really serve, to what extent they add to the song, and to what extent the emotion of the song is being explored in these extended versions.

Perhaps the Supper Club performances are outstanding because they are more constrained, because the structure is tighter and Mr Guitar Man’s playing is more closely integrated with the band.

Next post will be the fifth and last for this outstanding year. We’ll hear live performances of some of the songs from Good As I Been To You and other bits and pieces that beg to be heard.

Kia Ora

12 years of Untold Dylan

Tony Attwood

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The Highway Is for Gamblers: Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen Take a One-way Trip

Posted on October 23, 2020 by TonyAttwood

This article originally appeared on “Pop Matters”.

By Christopher John Stephens

Director Joyce Chopra’s 1985 film Smooth Talk could have been a perfect adaptation of the difficult 1966 Joyce Carol Oates short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Certainly casting Laura Dern as Connie was ideal. As written, Connie is a nervous, gawking 15-year-old girl who “…had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right.” Her sister Connie, (Elizabeth Berridge), 24 and still living at home, is the submissive good girl. She’s suppressed and repressed her own desires in order to sit in judgment of Connie. Their parents (Mary Kay Place and Levon Helm) are calm and willing to give Connie space to explore boundaries, but frustration eventually boils over.

The film is mainly faithful to the story, such as it was on paper. Connie is a restless teen shy with her parents, curious about life with boys, and ready to become an adult woman, whatever that means. She doesn’t want to stay home and help with her family’s summer house renovation. She just wants to wander through the mall, see movies, and eventually just flirt coquettishly with the much too old Arnold Friend (Treat Williams), a mysterious greaser who seems to have wandered anachronistically into this small town. Arnold’s web is set for Connie, and in their final extended confrontation he’s parked in the family driveway, calling for her to come out and take a ride.

It’s in this final ride Connie takes, and whether or not she returns, that “Smooth Talk” takes a sharp turn from its source material. For Joyce Carol Oates, Connie is doomed from the moment she enters Arnold’s web. The difficulty in adapting this as a film rests in having to eliminate much of Oates’ narrative voice, and it’s a heavy burden for Dern to carry all this longing through facial expressions and general awkwardness. Certainly the now cliché ’80s montage scenes in the mall are more padding than essential elements to this film. This story of female identity blossoming over the course of a summer unfolds like a fever dream. It’s deceptively calm, yet beneath the surface for Connie and all the teen girls of her time, the boys are lurking in the background, ready to pounce:

“…all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July.”

Oates was three years into her prolific writing career when “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was published in 1966 and she was carefully building a reputation as a fatalist, a naturalist, a writer whose characters existed primarily to fit her dark themes. Had there been no Edgar Allan Poe, Frank Norris, or even Theodore Dreiser, Oates might have remained a respectable Literature Professor who regularly published yet never exploded into the mainstream.

Aside from this short story, the novel Blonde (about Marilyn Monroe), and the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed We Were the Mulvaneys Joyce Carol Oates has primarily been a writer of high literature (however we choose to interpret that label.) As Oates ends her story, Connie is about to enter the vast unknown with the dark Arnold Friend. Was she about to be devoured? Would she return in one piece? She definitely returns by the end of the 1985 film, but the doom Oates creates at the end of the original source material is conclusive: Connie dared to play with fire, so now she was going to be punished.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is difficult not in content so much as context. Is Connie being punished for taking a bite from the forbidden fruit? Moreover, why did Oates dedicate it to Dylan? The urgency and danger of pop music permeates her pages much more so than in the movie. The most “dangerous” song on the “Smooth Talk” soundtrack is James Taylor’s 1977 cover of “Handy Man”. If the producers had been able to access Dylan’s catalog, the results might have been too incendiary. In an appreciation of Dylan, Oates published on the occasion of the latter’s 60th birthday, she seems cagey and defensive about dedicating this story to that man:

A one-sided admiration, clearly! The story was in fact suggested by a real-life incident involving a young teenaged girl and a “charismatic” serial killer in Tucson, Arizona, and not by Dylan’s song [“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”] Yet [its] haunting melody… beautifully approximate[d] the atmosphere of my story…

Oates would live to regret dedicating the story to Dylan. “… [T]oo many people have asked me ‘why?’ Who knows why?” It remains a trite dismissal on Oates’s part to not pin down the meaning of this dedication. At the time of its publication in Epoch Magazine in the fall of 1966, Dylan had almost slipped this mortal coil after an August motorcycle crash. The Dylan song in question had been in the ether for 18 months and seemed to serve as a final kiss-off to his old folk purist life. “You must go now take what you you need think will last,” he sings. Part defiant farewell to an old life and absolute focus on a new one, there seems nothing here about luring a young innocent out of her safe cocoon into a world from which she’ll never return unscathed. Nevertheless, by the time he reaches the fourth verse this ode to freedom and moving forward does take on a lethal tone:

Forget the dead you’ve left/ they will not follow you. The vagabond who’s rapping at your door/ is standing in the clothes that you once wore.

The moves Arnold Friend makes on Connie stay strictly within the confines of a seductive monologue: “The hell with this house!” he says. “…Be nice to me, be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?” Would Arnold Friend really be able to capture the heart of a gawky teenaged girl with evocative images and a haunting melody? It’s not likely. More convincing is the possibility that the voice Dylan assumes would sweep in under the cover of night and take any random desperate poor girl out of town. What both voices definitely shared was a determination to leave town at all costs.

If Oates was moved in 1966 to dedicate a story to Dylan, she might have done the same nine years later after hearing Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”. The studio version was all bombast and triumph, a sweet harmonica solo starting this urgent tale of a girl (Mary) dancing on her home’s front porch, swaying to a random Roy Orbison song. It starts softly, acoustically, harmonica and guitar with piano. When the singer tells us that he’s learned to make his guitar talk, he proves it. By the end of the song, after the declaration “It’s a town full of losers/ I’m pullin’ out of here to win”, the extended saxophone solo puts a triumphant stamp on the song’s story.

The acoustic version is more mournful, more heartbreaking. Like Arnold Friend, the unnamed singer here wants to lure the girl off her porch, out of her house, and towards salvation a ride down the road might provide: “All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood”. The song sounds like it could come from a resigned, somber Arnold remembering what once was and would never be again. It’s the highway that might have been for gamblers in the Dylan song, and a town full of losers in the Springsteen song, but the singers of both are convinced they can save a little girl from an aimless life.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” might not speak as clearly to today’s youth as it did in 1966. Oates has never been a comfortable writer, and her work is too often unremittingly bleak. Dedicating it to Dylan seems in retrospect an attempt to unjustifiably link it with somebody topical, somebody demonstrably threatening and dangerous. Oates has spent her career traveling down the same highways, drawing on the same themes of death, murder, obsession, and sexual politics. But no story of hers has had the staying power of this one.

Some have argued that Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, recorded in March 1965, was the apotheosis of his career, in that amazing 18 months of 1965-1966 when he went in search for and found what he called his “wild, thin mercury sound.” By 1975, two years into his recording career, Springsteen found a voice that captured the desperate feeling of being stuck in a small town, just waiting for the moment to slam down on the gas pedal and never look back as he barrels down the lonesome endless highway. They’ve all left in their wake characters who’ve taken ecstatic joy rides, long aimless and casual scenic drives, or, like Connie and Arnold, rides where the deadly ending is never in doubt.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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Dylan’s videos: The Wilbury years

Posted on October 23, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith

For this week let’s take a quick look at the videos put out by The Traveling Wilburys. I say “quick” as once you’ve seen one Wilbury’s video you’ve seen ‘em all. Still they are a lot of fun, and it’s great to see the guys all together, especially George, Roy and Tom.

The first single was “Handle With Care” and it sets the scene for future videos with the guys all gathered around a microphone leaning in to sing their various sections of the song.

The next single came out after Roy Orbison’s death. The video for End Of The Line sees the guys appropriately enough singing on a train. For Roy’s section they touchingly used his guitar rocking on a rocking chair. Not too much for Bob to do in these first two selections.

Between the two albums there was a stand-alone single “Nobody’s Child”. There is a video on YouTube if you feel like giving it a look but it is very sad so be warned.

Moving on, the second album presented us with 3 videos for its various singles (well 4 actually).

First up it’s “She’s My Baby”.

There’s a lot more for Bob to do in this one. Plus his hat and suit combo is amazing! I’d love to be that stylish!

Now with “Inside Out” Bob is front and centre and gets some more wear out of his cool straw boater.

Well, I guess by now you got the gist, but they change things up a bit with the Wilbury Twist.

They actually put out two very similar videos for this single but I’ve chosen this one to present, due to all the celebrity endorsements here. Let’s see who you can all spot joining in with the boys here.

Here’s who I got, John Candy, Eric Idle, Jimmy Nail, Cheech Marin, Fred Savage, Whoopi Goldberg, Woody Harrelson and (hilariously) Milli Vanilli!

There was a second video which featured the same footage of the Wilburys, Candy and Idle but the rest of the celebrities were edited out.

Here it is for those who want to spin there body, like a screw one more time!

Footnote from Tony:

If you are a regular reader you will know that Aaron picks the videos and sometimes I drop in the (usually irrelevant) odd thought. And certainly when it comes to the Wilbury’s any thoughts I had would be very irrelevant because for much of the time on the two albums it seems a sublime array of talent is wasted. Yes some of the songs are quite nice and do no harm, but considering the consummate array of talent, really one might have hoped for more.

Maybe the guys were all being so deferential to each other that no one wanted to push their own talents forward too much. Or maybe when they had a good song each artist kept it hidden for their own next solo album.

For me, and of course it is as always just my opinion, the two stand out songs across the two albums are “Tweeter and the Money Man” and “Where were you last night”, the first of which sounds to me like a Dylan song in every regard and the second although unusual for Dylan has his style.

Yet the videos for both are a picture of the album cover in one version, and the lyrics appearing on the screen in the alternate version.

Since I am sure you will be familiar with Tweeter, as it is so widely regarded as a Dylan piece, here is the video of “Where were you”. Not because there is anything there but simply because even after all these years I still adore the song. And it is a Dylan song one can dance too.

Even after all these decades I can still enjoy this. It’s a lost love pop song, but sometimes there’s nothing wrong with that.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Bob Dylan And Harold Pinter (Part II)

Posted on October 22, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Bob Dylan And Harold Pinter part 1

by Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan becomes aware of English playwright Harold Pinter’s motifs concerning lower and middle class families even before he performs on TV in the “log cabin” for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Philip Saville, a director for BBC-TV, and a great admirer of Pinter’s plays, hires the young singer/songwriter to take part in Evan Jones’ television play “The Madhouse On Castle Street”; it’s about a young boarder who who shuts himself off in his room from the world outside where he considers there be no love, justice , or dignity.

The following song is performed in the Pinter-like play, the dark-humoured lyrics of which contain the alchemic symbol of the White Swan, a bird that stays in contact with the surface of the physical water more than it flies off upward into the spiritual sky:

Tenderly William kissed his wife
Then he opened her head with a butcher's knife
And the swan on the river went gliding by
The swan on the river went gliding by
(Bob Dylan: The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan ~ Dylan/et al)

Akin thereto is Pinter’s play “The Birthday Party” wherein Stanley inhabits a Nietzschean world underscored by the supposed basic human urge to find a way to achieve one’s ‘will to power’.

In vain, Stanley attempts to separate himself from that world in a boarding house..

Frederick Nietzsche critiques the Judaeo-Christian religion because it categorizes that basic human instinct as ‘evil’ which Frederick says is simply a ‘resentment’ expressed against those who are achievers by those who possess a ‘slave morality’. Printer declines to take such a detached view of the human condition – deplores the prevailing lack of human dignity in modern times. Indeed, the Nazis latch on to Nietzsche’s views, and completely corrupt them to justify Hitler’s establishment of an unspeakable reign of horror in Germany (There is after all some romantic idealism remaining beneath Nietzsche’s so-called ‘nihilism’).

Dylan often puts on a Pinteresque mask, and conceals his own idealistic “Walden Pond” hope for a better world. Some of the time, but not all that time – as in the song lyrics below:

So many roads, so much at stake
Too many dead ends, I'm at the edge of the lake
Sometimes I wonder what's it gonna take
To find dignity
(Bob Dylan: Dignity)

Alone at the edge of a lake there be no human language spouted by others to contend with; no presence of “The Word” – as noted in another Pinter play:

One way to look at speech is to say
that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness
(Harold Pinter: Silence)

Even before the above-mentioned play is penned by Pinter, the singer/songwriter, and musician, creates the less explicit-in-meaning lyrics quoted below:

My love she speaks like silence
With no ideals or violence
She doesn't have to say she's faithful
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero/No Limit)

And these ones, likely in reference to the war-mongering President L.B. Johnson:

Goodness waits behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Must sometimes have to stand naked
(Bob Dylan: It's Alright Ma)

Dylan’s kindred spirit states that one can find relief in mantra concentrated near silence if one leans how to meditate properly – expressed in the humorous song lyrics below:

Do the meditation, do the meditation, do the meditation, do the meditation
Learn a little patience
With generosity, generosity, generosity, and generosity
(Allen Ginsberg: Do The Meditation Rock - Ginsberg/et al)

If all else fails, one is sure to find dignity at last in the silence of dusty death:

Every nerve in my body is naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Dignity part IV: I contain multitudes

Posted on October 21, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

Previously in this series

Herodotus finds it worth mentioning in his Histories. The father of classical history reports on the rise of the Persian Empire in Book 1.

With, as always, an eye for the peculiarities that make his work so worth reading. But often they also bear witness to some arrogance – such as paragraph 139:

“There is another peculiarity, which the Persians themselves have never noticed, but which has not escaped my observation. Their names, which are expressive of some bodily or mental excellence, all end with the same letter- the letter which is called San by the Dorians, and Sigma by the Ionians. Any one who examines will find that the Persian names, one and all without exception, end with this letter.”

…Herodotus really thinks he is the first to notice that all Persian names end in an s. “The Persians themselves have never noticed.”

Funny, but more interesting is his observation on the Persians’ funeral rites: “the body of a male Persian is never buried, until it has been torn either by a dog or a bird of prey.” Herodotus is the first to inform us of the existence of the Towers of Silence, the remote structures where the corpses are laid down for the vultures. For centuries the place where the vultures feed. The practice still exists today; in Mumbai and in Karachi, for example. But the population of vultures has been severely depleted, due to urbanisation and antibiotics (especially diclofenac in the corpses is toxic to vultures), so after thousands of years there seems to come an end to this rite.

However, in the 1980s, when Dylan writes “Dignity”, with that chilling verse I went down to where the vultures feed, there are still some 80 million vultures in India (a few thousand today) – so the protagonist may have gone via Mumbai, on his quest. But the sequel of this quatrain shows that the stream of consciousness of the poet has not yet reached the subcontinent, not even the Orient, but is still in Asia Minor, in Ephesus, to be precise:

I went down where the vultures feed
I would’ve gone deeper, but there wasn’t any need
Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men
Wasn’t any difference to me

The tongues of angels and men… that is quite unmistakable. The “Excellence of Love”, 1 Corinthians 13, from the First Letter of Paul to the congregation of Corinth: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels”. Then those vultures probably are biblical too; Jesus’ answer to the question of the disciples where the wicked shall be taken. “Where there is a dead body, the vultures will gather” (Luke 14). Now, that is again a part of the New Testament where Jesus does his utmost to answer even the simplest questions with cumbersome and ambiguous parables, but this much is clear: it’s not a place the local tourist bureau will advertise, this place where the vultures feed.

In any case, they are beautiful, mysterious and sparklingly poetic lines. At first, however, the poet himself does not seem to attribute much expressiveness to them. On Tell Tale Signs we hear them in version #1, but they have been bluntly removed from version #2. They do return, fortunately – also in the live performances; up to and including the most recent version (Fuengirola, 2019) the searching protagonist goes to the vultures.

https://youtu.be/pjUV8lJbkU4

This also applies to the two preceding verses – they differ from version to version, and only seem definitive after Greatest Hits 3. In the end, the poet decides in favour for:

Blind man breakin’ out of a trance
Puts both his hands in the pockets of chance
Hopin’ to find one circumstance
Of dignity

I went to the wedding of Mary Lou
She said, “I don’t want nobody see me talkin’ to you”
Said she could get killed if she told me what she knew
About dignity

… a mysterious tableau with a blind protagonist and the elegant, ambiguous catechises pockets of chance, followed by a classic dialogue from a film noir, including ungrammatical double negation, a sinister content and a wedding, the cliché decor of any mafia film.

Nothing wrong with it, intriguing and poetic, but with the choice of these verses we unfortunately lose the fascinating quatrain VI from version #2:

Don Juan was talking to Don Miguel
Standin' outside the gates of Hell
There ain't nothing to say, there ain't nothing to tell
'bout dignity

That can only be Don Miguel de Manara, the Don Miguel who lived in Seville in the seventeenth century and became known under his nickname Don Juan … indeed, the shameless womanizer and fighter. Not the Don Juan, obviously (who was a fictional figure, after all), but after seeing Tirso de Molina’s play, The Trickster Of Seville or The Stone Guest (presumably 1616), the primeval version of all Don Juan stories, including the very greatest, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, it is said that it became Don Miguel’s vocation to be “Don Juan”. And he succeeded in getting there. Later, after many scandals and even a murder, he enters a monastery and, bizarrely enough, one year after his death in 1679, he is nominated for canonisation in Rome. The Vatican meticulously examines his life and, after ten years of research, finds that the life of Brother Don Miguel de Manara is edifying enough to make him a Venerable, the preliminary stage of beatification or canonisation – the case is still ongoing today.

It’s a beautiful Dylanesque image, the trickster Don Miguel talking at the gates of Hell with his alter ego Don Juan – a twin with an enemy within, a Jokerman who contains multitudes, a Satan who has become a Man of Peace, a monk and a Casanova… this one line of seven words from a rejected verse of “Dignity” brings together archetypes from more than fifty years of Dylan songs.

But it clashes, as the lyricist Dylan perhaps thinks, with the following bridge, with the place of action where the vultures feed, the place where according to Jesus the wicked go – also Hell, that is. So, Don Juan and Don Miguel can go to hell – Dylan ruthlessly deletes the stanza. The lieder poet being on steam anyhow, effortlessly dashing off the verses, as well as the archetypes; “the list could be endless.”

Still, pity.

To be continued. Next up: Dignity part V

————–

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Why does dylan like Pontchartrain, Legend in my time, and Homeward Bound?

Posted on October 21, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Selection by Aaron Galbraith, words by Tony Attwood

The Lakes of Pontchartrain

This is a rarity – for we can start with an explanation of how Bob came to learn one of the songs that needs covering in the “Why does Dylan like?” series.

In the film below Paul Brady, singer / songwriter from Northern Ireland explains how he taught Bob how to play the song! If you have a long running interest in folk music and its liaison with popular music you may recall Paul from Planxty. Sorry about the odd width / height disparity – that’s how this video is.

As for the song, it is of 19th century US origin, about a man who is helped by a woman from Louisiana, he falls for her, but she is already promised to a sailor and so turns him down.

Here is Bob with the song.

Bob played the song 18 times between June 1988 and July 1981. As for why he likes it – I think the fact that he sought guidance on how the chords were built up shows – it is in itself a beautiful and interesting song, but beyond that it is a song which has the opportunity to build around it an accompaniment that is only possible once you know about the tuning and the resultant chords.

And here is Paul Brady’s version…

Up next we have “Legend in my time” which was played three times in 1989 and was written by Don Gibson, known sometimes as the “sad poet” as so many of his songs were of “lost love”. He was born in 1928 and died in 2003.

Among many hits that he wrote and performed there was “I can’t stop loving you” and “Oh Lonesome Me”. “Legend” is one of those songs that many performers find a taste for and it has been recorded by talents as diverse as Connie Francis, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, BB King and Sammy Davis Jnr.

https://youtu.be/Zh-QXhL1Rzw

Don Gibson reported that the song was written on the road to Knoxville, Tennessee, in a car with Mel Foree. “I was reading an article in a magazine I had picked up about an entertainer. He was talking about show business and his career and how he would like to be a legend in his time. I told Mel that that would be a good title for a song, so I started humming.”

This is Don Gibson with two of his most famous songs…

Finally this time around, “Homeward Bound”.

We know Bob and Paul Simon have toured together, and so obviously recognise the value of each other’s music and can get on with each other

The original version of the song was produced by Bob Johnston and released as a single on January 19, 1966.

There is a plaque on Widnes railway station (near Liverpool on the north of the Mersey) stating that this is the place where Paul Simon wrote “Homeward Bound” for his girlfriend, although he has never confirmed that it was that station, as far as I know, and other railway stations have claimed the honour. Paul Simon has been quoted as saying that anyone who has ever been to Widnes will understand why he was so anxious to get back to London.

As we have noted many times Bob has a lifelong interest in songs of moving on, although less so in terms of songs of coming back home. And personally I simply cannot come to terms with Bob’s performance of this song, which takes it from its lyrical origins and turns it into something I really can’t understand at all. But that’s obviously just me, not Bob.

Here’s the Paul Simon singing it live on TV – as ever you will have your own views. For me this one still pulls at the emotions, even after all these years.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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All directions at once part 10: Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?”

Posted on October 20, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Tony Attwood

Links to the previous articles in this series appear at the foot of this piece and on the “All Directions” Index

In this series I am trying to put forward the notion that while there is a lot to be learned both from the in-depth analysis of Bob Dylan’s songs, and from seeing Dylan’s links with other writers, further insights into Bob Dylan and his music can be gained by looking at the flow of the songs Dylan wrote and recorded. In this way, I am arguing, we can see how Dylan’s interests, visions, approach to music, and thoughts on the world have ebbed and flowed across time, and where his thoughts were taking him.

Within this “All directions at once” series we are now in 1965, in the last episode having left Dylan after the writing of his 11th song of that year – “Maggie’s Farm,” one of a series of Dada-inspired pieces. (For a very brief discussion of Dada please see that article).

“Maggie’s Farm” was the last song that was included in “Bringing it all back home” to be written, and it is interesting how very few songs composed by Dylan were not used in that year. “Farewell Angelina” is the most well-known, but there also a couple of others: “Love is just a four letter word”, and “California”. But that is nothing like earlier years when well over half the songs written might never found their way onto an album.

“Maggie’s Farm” was recorded on 15 January as we have noted, and the album was released on 22 March. In May in an interview in the English weekly music paper “Melody Maker” Bob suggested he had a number of new pieces ready for the next album, but as yet they were not finished, and he was yet to decide what shape the next record would take. Certainly “Phantom Engineer” – the song that became, “It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry” was being tried out in May, which adds to the general commentary that Bob did not take any sort of break from songwriting once, “Bringing it all back home” was recorded. There was no holiday – he just carried straight on. He was, it seems in quite a hurry to get that next set of songs down on tape.

One might of course ask, “why should he take a break?” and there is no reason, save that for many musicians the experience of writing and recording an album is quite exhausting. One hears the songs over and over again, and then some, especially if a tour is then organised to promote the album. The tradition often was: record the album, go on tour to promote the album, take a break, and then the record company reminds the songwriter that new songs are required to fulfil the obligation to produce the next album. At least for most songwriters that process gave them the chance to find a new “voice” for the next album.

But Bob, certainly at this time, was not needing any prompting. He just carried on, which is again why looking at the songs in terms of the order of their composition, and in terms of what form they took and what they are about, does give us a particular insight into how Bob was thinking about life, and about the world.

However in the build up to the next collection of songs we really ought to pause and consider an attack that was made upon Dylan at this time, an attack that was launched by some who had welcomed him into the field of folk music. In particular I think it is worth contemplating the article written by Ewan MacColl, not just because of its vitriol, but because MacColl was a songwriter of amazing ability in his own right.

The article was not published until late August 1965 (in the September issue of “Sing Out!”) but I think most people who were interested in Dylan’s music were aware of the upset Dylan’s movement away from folk-inspired themes and into his own unique approach to lyrics and his use of rock instrumentation, had caused.

Looking back now at MacColl and the tradition from which he came, it is not at all hard to understand why he took such a strong view about Dylan’s music. Nor is it hard to understand why Dylan would not have been touched in the slightest by what MacColl said. They were both talented songwriters (although MacColl wrote far less than Dylan) from different eras, different backgrounds and with different perspectives.

In considering the history two factors stand out. First, MacColl was of a different generation from Dylan, MacColl being born during the first world war and growing up in depression hit Lancashire in northwest England, Dylan being born in the second world war in the upper midwest, at a time when its own economic decline was setting in.

Thus economic decline was known to both of them, but MacColl was also brought up within an atmosphere of revolutionary political thinking which was common among the Scots who lived in their part of England near the Scottish border. But while Bob travelled to a thriving rejuvenated New York in his youth, MacColl saw only the failure of capitalism all around him, and so joined the communists… And thus their outlooks went different ways.

To those in power in the USA, rock n roll and its antecedents were often pictured as a threat to the white man’s way of life because rock n roll and R&B presented to the impressionable white audiences of the baby-boom generation, “decadent” black music and dance forms. This, the political leaders of the day realised, meant that these young people were (in the words of a Rolling Stone article) “beginning to question the morality and politics of postwar America, and some of their musical tastes began to reflect this unrest.”

But I am not sure that the US authorities particularly considered Bob Dylan a danger to the state, despite his appearance with Joan Baez at the Washington DC Civil Rights Rally in 1963. And this, as the Rolling Stone article continued, was primarily because “for all its egalitarian ideals, folk was a music of past and largely spent traditions. As such, it was also the medium for an alliance of politicos and intelligentsia that viewed a teen-rooted mass-entertainment form like rock & roll with derision. The new generation had not yet found a style or a standard-bearer that could tap the temper of the times in the same way that Presley and rockabilly had in the 1950s.

But Ewan MacColl in England did not see folk music in this way and he was certainly not seen in this light by the authorities. He was considered by military intelligence in Britain to be a very serious danger to the safety of the state (and several reports suggest that even the British Communist Party thought he was rather extreme). So while Bob Dylan never joined a political party (as far as I know) and was considered a folk singer who could write hits, and (presumably) a welcome tax payer, MacColl was thought to be in favour of an uprising, and the sooner the better and thus needed to be watched.

As such, MacColl did not see folk music as a thing of the past, as Rolling Stone suggests it was, but rather, as the way of keeping alive the revolutionary feel that Britain had experienced after the first world war. Britain’s history at this time was totally different from that of the USA; there was a major uprising in Ireland (then a unified country) at the end of the first world war, with acts of terrorism perpetrated by both the state’s troops and the revolutionaries, in both Ireland and England. Eventually the UK granted most of Ireland its independence.

Meanwhile at the end of the war there were repeated mutinies of conscripted soldiers ordered to return to France to keep civil peace, while the votes for women campaign, and the strikes by miners, although peaceful in parts, were also viewed as a terrorist plot by some of the authorities.

It’s not my place here to describe the mayhem of that era, but to note it, because out of it grew a solid, radical, and sometimes revolutionary left wing movement, which saw traditional folk music as the true art of the working man.

Thus it was that as an inheritor of this tradition Ewan MacColl wrote in “Sing Out!” that, “Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside disciplines formulated over time …’But what of Bobby Dylan?’ scream the outraged teenagers … Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel.”

Of course I disagree, and I would not be writing this if I did not, but MacColl’s work, along with that of Peggy Seeger and Dominic Behan, is still highly regarded. Indeed I suspect many Dylan fans will know, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” which MacColl wrote for Peggy Seeger. You may also know “Dirty Old Town” which was recorded by seemingly everyone from the Spinners to Roger Whittaker, the Dubliners, Rod Stewart, and the Pogues.

This is just one approach to “First time ever”…

Ewan MacColl died in 1989. His archive is housed by Ruskin College, Oxford University, and there is a plaque commemorating him in Russell Square, London.

Those who booed and jeered at Dylan’s early electric sets were not necessarily followers of MacColl, but they retained the notion that somehow there was a purity in the folk music of earlier times – particularly the folk music of the British Isles which can be traced back to the 15th century and occasionally earlier. The music of the people, by the people for the people.

Yet of course Dylan knew this music… “The Parting Glass” became “Restless Farewell”, as we all know, but Dylan could also perform his own versions of the classic Irish folk songs…

In fact I suspect Dylan was far more aware of and knowledgeable of the traditions of English, Scottish and Irish folk music than many of the people at Newport who objected to his first electric set. And maybe that experience influenced his writing very deeply; after all it was only a few days later that Bob recorded “Positively 4th Street” one of his most angry songs of all time.

But now I am getting ahead of myself, and I do want to continue taking the songs in the order they were written, which means going back to “Phantom Engineer”. A song that suggests that the whole issue of “moving on” which had been the subject of so much of his work, was not always a practical answer.

I get the impression that in his writing Bob had been seeing “moving on” and “leaving” as two separate parts of the same issue. One could “leave” because of the break up of a relationship or friendship, but one could be “moving on” because that is the continual lifestyle choice of many people – including indeed Bob Dylan in the times of the Never Ending Tour.

It seems to me, all these years later, that concerning “It takes a lot to laugh” we can still argue about all different possible meanings – and that now seems to be the point for me. We can take from it a lot of meanings, just as one can from an abstract painting. If Dylan had wanted to give us a clear meaning, he was most certainly capable of doing exactly that. But since he didn’t, the most obvious reason is that he wanted to give us impressions – exactly as many a modern artist wishes to do.

Indeed this video shows us just how much the song was changing as it evolved. Just because one version was released on the album, that doesn’t automatically make it any more “right” or “official” than any other version. It just happens to be the version that was put on the album.

In fact “It takes a lot to laugh” has a particular importance in terms of Dylan’s journey at this point, for it sets the scene for one of the two dominant themes that followed: moving on and disdain, combined with that Dadaistic feeling of using art to disrupt, that we’ve already explored. Indeed the next song Dylan composed followed a similar theme…

But then he clearly decided to up the level of disdain, writing “Like a Rolling Stone”, which was quickly followed by Why do you have to be so frantic also known as “Lunatic Princess” (another song of disdain), Tombstone Blues (more Dada) and then suddenly the definitive statement that even though the world is a total mess, it is not the world that is important, but rather the way in which we see the world: Desolation Row.

“Like a Rolling Stone” and “Desolation Row” are of course among the absolute masterpieces of Dylan’s early rock period – or come to that of all of his creative life. Not just because they are huge, extraordinary works, with few (if any) antecedents in popular music terms, but also because by the time of their release Dylan’s fame was so great that they were bound to be heard by millions. Even if the popular music stations complained they were “too long” to play all the way through (presumably in the belief that their audiences’ minds were so immature or addled by drugs that they were unable to focus for that long), Rolling Stone in particular still got played.

Between them these two songs amount of around 1000 words, which in a sense doesn’t seem that many (a popular novel might be 100 times as long). One is a song of disdain, and the other a song is either about a place or a state of mind, depending on your point of view.

By contrast “Blowing in the wind” is 181 words long (159 if you don’t count the repeated words). “Ballad in plain D” which I must admit sounds interminably long to me, is a mere 438 words.

Now you might well be asking, what idiot counts the number of words in a song? And of course that is a fair question. And my answer is that in writing such works, Dylan was in solidifying what he had just recently done: extending the form beyond anything that was previously thought possible.

Up to this point the bands which wanted to create extended pieces did this through long, mostly improvised, not always inspired, instrumental sections played between the penultimate and the final verse. Dylan however didn’t need this. He wanted to write longer songs because he had more to say. To see the contrast consider this: “Too much monkey business” the Chuck Berry song has, leaving aside the repetitions of the chorus, 83 words. It’s alright ma is 667 words long.

And maybe that is what started frightening some politicians. Could it be, they wondered, that there was something going on in there and they didn’t know what it was?

What’s more these songs were now pouring out of Dylan at an incredible speed; for most writers “Desolation Row” would be enough for a year or two, but it seems it was not much more than a couple of day’s work from Bob, who was then quite capable of shooting off in a new direction with From a Buick 6 a song which by and large seems to be saying, “I got this woman who does everything”. Not exactly earth shattering, revolutionary or even dada.

What I am trying to say is that Dylan was hereby doing to popular music what Picasso did to modern art with Guernica – the painting shown at the top of this article. He was dramatically expanding the form to a previously unimagined and unimaginable level. Of course lots of words don’t make a great song, any more than a big canvas makes a big picture – and Picasso was by no means the first to paint a big picture. But sometimes the bigger canvas is needed to put the radical thought across.

The penultimate verse of Desolation Row beings

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn

Edlis Cafe contained a comment

"Nice pun on 'titan', as Neptune was the son of Saturn, a
titan."

I wonder if Dylan realised it. Or was it just a "coincidence"

My thought is, probably not. For if it is a pun, we might expect the rest of the verse also to have meaningful antecedents, and I am not sure they have. Rather they are disconnected couplets bombarding us from all sides without profound connection or meaning. Maybe it does mean, “We are all distracted,” and that is fair enough, but in that case the meaning is of a level of importance so far below the elegance and fun of the words, that it is suddenly not important. But then after being told that

...nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

we have the instrumental break – not just there, because it is there, nor because writers often put a musical break before the last verse, but rather because we are about to change direction. The ultimate verse is utterly different from anything else in the rest of the song.

The crazy world in which Cinderella, Cain and Abel, the Phantom of the Opera, Ophelia, Robin Hood, Einstein, Doctor Filth etc etc coexist in meaningless jumbles, is swept away. We are with the singer, isolated, desolated, out of touch, out of reach. The expression of the whole piece is made clear: this is how I see this crazy life, I’m stuck in it, and I can’t communicate with the outside world.

Ewan MacColl in his rejection of Dylan’s dadaist songs was himself effectively “shouting ‘Which Side Are You On?'” which itself was a popular slogan of the political radical left at the time, and which Dylan found pointless. Indeed commentators on Dylan’s extraordinary masterpiece often seem blithely unaware that “Which Side Are You On?” that clarion call from the penultimate verse, is Dylan’s answer to MacColl, for it refers to a song written in 1931 by trade union radical activist Florence Reece. Pete Seeger not only sang it but collected it in the way that Cecil Sharp gathered thousands of tunes both from rural England and the Southern Appalachians region of the United States. Indeed had it not been for Cecil Sharp many of the traditional songs Bob has sung would not have survived for him to sing.

In using this phrase Dylan, I am certain, knew exactly what he was saying in response to Ewan MacColl.

Of course Dylan didn’t mention Ewan MacColl, he went for the intellectuals Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, rather than the revolutionary working man. His point amidst all these colliding images is that it doesn’t matter which side of the ship you are on, if the ship is sinking. It didn’t matter if Hollis Brown took his family out to the front or the back of the house either. What matters is richest society in the world caused this, and allowed it.

And this is really the heart of it all. MacColl wanted to fight the repression of people by big business and the state by collecting and performing the radical left wing works that reflected his manifesto. Dylan was reflecting the fact that while this is going on, ordinary everyday people mostly try to survive and find their own solutions to the horrors of everyday life. And like Hollis Brown, some don’t make it.

Desolation Row thus is a patchwork of images, just as Guernica is. Gallery visitors can inspect the detail of Picasso’s masterpiece (as one can see at the top of this page) and undoubtedly find their understanding of the work illuminated by such inspection. And we can examine individual lines in Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and gain much from so doing.

But in my view, in both cases, we also need to appreciate also the overall piece.

As others have said before me, “Desolation Row” is like a Rorschach test: we see lots of dots and by interpreting them we reveal as much about ourselves as we do about Dylan’s masterpiece.

And interestingly psychologists often argue that those who are unwilling to explain their interpretations are the people most likely to be suffering from thought disorders. Maybe so, but then having an awfully large number of Dylanologists set forth an awfully large number of interpretations doesn’t actually help much either.

Of course Dylan has given lots of answers as to where Desolation Row is, because that’s the point – it is wherever we feel it and see it. We can all interpret the world in our own way; no one is right no one is wrong.

It became a very fashionable approach, but really, if everyone can have their own interpretation, is there any point in discourse about Dylan?

Bob Dylan who never advocated violence as far as I know, wrote a song that began “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”. Ewan MacColl, who spent his life fighting for an armed communist uprising to overthrow the British state wrote one of the most beautiful songs ever composed in the English language. Everyone may shout “which side are you on?” but it doesn’t really help.

All directions at once

This series looks at Dylan’s work from the point of view of the ebb and flow of his writing. Thus rather than only examine a song and relate it to where the ideas came from in terms of literature and music, the series sees Dylan’s changing themes and styles within the music as a clue to what is happening in his life.

So far we have

An index of the articles is also being compiled at All Directions at Once

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Bob Dylan And Harold Pinter part 1

Posted on October 19, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

In the empty lot where the ladies play 
       blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they speak of escapades out on the 'D' train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's insane
(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

Though not by any means as angry as “the angry young men” writers, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan is aware of their semi-realistic, lower-class imagery. Akin to the already mentioned ‘Victory, An Island Tale’ by Joseph Conrad there is the dark-humoured and symbolic play ‘The Birthday Party’ by Harold Pinter.

Seemingly a fragmented dream by the householder’s lonely wife, the play focuses on a birthday party for the child-like adult boarder Stanley Webber to which two gangster-like strangers come. MacCann and Goldberg turn the should-be happy occasion into a Halloween nightmare; Stanley, once a piano player, receives a toy drum from a vulgar young gal, and is subjected to taunting and exhausting questions like, “Why do you pick your nose?” In the mixed-up whiskey confusion, a game of ‘blindman’s bluff’ is played. The lights go out. Eyeglasses broken, Stanley turns violent, and sexually attacks the girl; the two strangers restrain him. Unknown to the householder’s motherly wife, Stanley is taken away in a black limousine.

‘The Birthday Party’ is rather Deconstructionist and Nietzschean in character in that it can be interpreted that the hypocritical master class and their priests keep a strong hold on the social order. Shouts the householder as the boarder is led away, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do”.

Another song lyric that shows a symbolic kinship to those found in Pinter’s play:

Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
For Halloween, buy her a trumpet
And for Christmas, give her a drum
(Bob Dylan: She belongs To Me)

There’s the ominous black limousine in the following lyrics:

Tommy, can you hear me
I'm the Acid Queen
I'm riding in a long, black Lincoln limousine
Riding in the backseat next to my wife
Heading straight on in to the afterlife
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

In Pinter’s play, sex becomes a sign that one is on their way down the road to death; so Stanley tries to avoid it; Nietzsche considers sex a means whereby women exercise their ‘will to power’ in a society that is dominated by men:

Well your railroad gate, you know I just can't jump it
Sometimes it gets so hard you see
I'm just sitting here beating on my trumpet
With all these promises you left for me
But where are you tonight sweet Marie
(Bob Dylan: Absolutely Sweet Marie)

Male sexual frustration again expressed in the following song:

Sad-eyed lady of the Lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I put them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait
(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

The male in turn attempts to exercise his will to power through economic control:

Well, you better fix it ma
You gotta fix it ma
You better fix it for me real quick
Because I'm outside your gate
If you wanna get along with me
(Bob Dylan: Fix It Ma)

https://youtu.be/tFSAfO0K09I

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Dignity (1989) part III: One line brings up another

Posted on October 19, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

It suits well, the poetic perfection of the opening verse. So much so that the poet uses it as a template for the next quatrain:

Wise man lookin’ in a blade of grass
Young man lookin’ in the shadows that pass
Poor man lookin’ through painted glass
For dignity

Just as wonderful, although the verses are much more unambiguous than the previous ones. The wise man looking for lost dignity in a blade of grass reminds the Dylan fan of “Every Grain Of Sand”, the well-read listener of William Blake’s Auguries Of Innocence and the Christian of Psalm 147 or Matthew 6. One of the writings, in any case, reminding the reader that God’s greatness is recognisable in every hair, in every grain of sand and in every blade of grass – and the poet adds through the choice of words, “blade of grass”, a pleasant sounding mirroring with the blade of steel from the opening line.

Equally pastoral poetic is the archaic shadows that pass, which by the way strongly recalls Baudelaire’s “The Owls” (from Les Fleurs Du Mal);

Man, enraptured by a passing shadow,
Forever bears the punishment
Of having tried to change his place

… probably due to artistic kinship rather than direct inspiration. The first association of the listener, and probably of Dylan himself, is Plato’s cave, where shadows that pass is the prisoners’ only observable reality.

Only in the third metaphor does the poet become more unambiguous; painted glass can really only refer to churches, and thus to religion.

Added up, and if, for the sake of convenience, we continue to assume that the poet here wraps a condition humaine in metaphors, the enumeration in this verse leads to an exacerbation of the first one; in God’s creation, in philosophy and in religion there is no dignity to be found either.

The lieder poet knows that now, after two verses, either a chorus or a bridge to the chorus should come. And seemingly Dylan obeys that law. The quatrain

Somebody got murdered on New Year’s Eve
Somebody said dignity was the first to leave
I went into the city, went into the town
Went into the land of the midnight sun

… ends with three ascending chords (from C to D to F), with the deceptive promise that we are climbing a bridge to the chorus. Lyrically, indeed, a refrain-like quatrain follows;

 Searchin’ high, searchin’ low
Searchin’ everywhere I know
Askin’ the cops wherever I go
Have you seen dignity?

… but musically we are back to the verses; both chord scheme and arrangement are identical to the verses, the melody deviating only slightly – in exactly the same rhyme scheme.

In terms of content, the bridge marks a further deepening. Only now do we get the first hint that dignity is personified – after all, “dignity” was the first to leave a New Year’s party. In a semantic discussion, one could maintain that the poet is expressing that after that murder, the situation became undignified, perhaps indecent. In any case, there was no longer any dignity. But a little further on, the protagonist asks the policemen whether they saw dignity, and in the last bridge is even a picture of an alleged “dignity” shown. Yes, this is really a personification… and with that the lyrics are really an allegory – quite an unusual genre in Dylan’s oeuvre.

The turn to allegory is inserted in a film noir-setting. Murder On New Year’s Eve happens to be the title of a murder mystery from 1937, published under the name of Patrick Quentin, the nom de plume of a writers’ collective that has Agatha Christie-like crimes solved by a detective named Peter Duluth – what’s in a name, indeed. By the way, Quentin’s bibliography does surprise Dylan fans quite a few times; Little Boy Lost, Who Killed The Mermaid?, Going, Going Going, Love Comes To Miss Lucy… it’s a parade of song fragments, names, remarkable idiom and half-song titles from Dylan’s oeuvre. Coincidence, of course, but still a funny coincidence.

Apart from that funny coincidence, Dylan’s choice of setting is a classic setting for an old-fashioned crime film or novel. The floodgates of the stream of consciousness open, apparently. After a rather empty transitional line (went into the city, went into the town), the bridge closes with the intriguing choice of scenery the land of the midnight sun. Perhaps a nod from Dylan to Bobby Bare’s gruesome mutilation of the beautiful folk song “He Was A Friend Of Mine” (1964), to which Bare added the line he died ‘neath the midnight sun, perhaps an echo of the ancient folk song “Clayton Boone” (I rode until the midnight sun), but more obvious is another bow to Jerry Lee Lewis, who in these years more often puts a fingerprint on a Dylan song (on “Mississippi”, for example). In 1965 The Killer records a somewhat corny but still catchy version of Johnny Horton’s “North To Alaska” for his LP Country Songs For City Folks:

Sam crossed the majestic mountains to the valleys far below
He talked to his team of huskies
As he mushed on through the snow
With the Northern lights a-runnin' wild
In the land of the midnight sun

Once in that tunnel, Dylan arrives almost naturally at Elvis for the simple “chorus” with the repetitio searchin’, at one of those forgotten, irresistible one-and-a-half-minute throwaway rockers that Elvis recorded on the assembly line in the mid 1960s, at “Long Legged Girl” (1967), the song in which Elvis too is searching all over the world. Granted, not for dignity, but still for an equally desirable greatness:

I've been from Maine to Tennessee, Mexico and Waikiki
Rain or shine, sleet or snow
Searchin' high, searchin' low
Everything depends upon
That long legged girl with the short dress on

https://youtu.be/yAXGQj1EEto

Well, presumably at least – according to his own words, the walking jukebox Dylan is unleashed by the writing of this song, the words flow in as if by themselves. Or, as the autobiographer puts it in Chronicles:

“This song is like that. One line brings up another, like when your left foot steps forward and your right drags up to it.”

…and once your left foot has already stepped towards Jerry Lee, you don’t have to drag your right foot very hard to get to Elvis.

We are at exactly a quarter of the way into the song, and the final form has been found. The final version follows the construction of these first four quatrains;

– two verses of four lines each

– a four-line bridge

– a kind of chorus of four lines

After this opening sequence, the poet will repeat this three more times; “Dignity” is like a traditional four-movement symphony – four times four quatrains, each time two verses, a bridge and a “kind of chorus”.

Then, after establishing this structure, the poet Dylan can unleash his poetic powers.

To be continued. Next up: Dignity part IV

————–

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Bob Dylan And Chuck Berry, and some wonderful videos

Posted on October 18, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

If you’re talking about Bob Dylan and rocknroll, you’re talking about both the lyrics and music of Chuck Berry who hypes up rhythm and blues:

Bertha Mason shook it, broke it
Then she hung it on the wall
Says, "You're dancing with whom they tell you to
Or you don't dance at all"
(Bob Dylan: High Water)

https://youtu.be/48jd7a0PEMM

Bertha Mason is a mad woman from the ‘Jane Eyre” novel, but the lyrics below are from the ‘Father of RocknRoll”:

She could not leave her number
But I know who placed the call
'Cause my uncle took the message
And he wrote it on the wall
(Chuck Berry: Memphis, Tennessee)

There’s this song:

I got eight carburetors, boys, and I'm using'em all
Well, I got eight carburators, and I'm using'em all
I'm short on gas, my motor's starting to stall
(Bob Dylan: Summer Days)

A reference to the following song;

She just don't have the appetite
For gas somehow
And, Dad, I got four carburators
Hooked up on it now
(Chuck Berry: Dear Dad)

Listen to this one:

Learn to dance, get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
(Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Sick Blues)

And then this:

Working in the filling station, too many tasks
Wipe the windows, check the tires, check the oil, dollar gas
Ah, too much monkey business, too much monkey business
I don't want your botheration, go away, leave me be
(Chuck Berry: Too  Much Monkey Business)

A sentiment expressed in the folk rock song below:

The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keeping on
Like a bird that flew
(Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Blue)

Bringing it all back home to:

Ah, Nadine, honey, is that you?
Seems like every time I catch up with you
You up to something new
(Chuck Berry: Nadine)

Rendered below:

Ah, Nadine, baby, is that you?
Seems like every time I catch up with you
You got something else to do
(Bob Dylan: Nadine ~ Chuck Berry)

https://youtu.be/rVXlyjk4Lwo

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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All directions at once 9: So far ahead of the game we lost sight

Posted on October 17, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

If I wanted to point you to just one moment in Dylan’s songwriting life that justified the title “All directions at once,” and if I really was told, “just one moment, no more, just one,” I would probably choose the period in 1964 that has been the heart of the last article. The period that covers the writing of the songs from “Mama you’ve been on my mind” through to “If you’ve gotta go”. And if I had to go further, and really tie it all down to an actual moment, rather than a matter of weeks, I would go for the evening during the Newport Folk Festival when, on the spur of the moment, Dylan decided to play an electric set with Paul Butterfield the next day.

But before I come to that I fear I must set the scene a little more carefully. And at the risk of you turning away saying, “Oh for goodness sake, you’ve told us this already” I will give you the list of 11 songs in the period under discussion in this article, with the simplistic subject matter title that I have accorded each one.

Mama you’ve been on my mind (Lost love)
Ballad in Plain D (Lost love)
Black Crow Blues (Blues, The sadness of lost love and moving on)
I shall be free number 10 (Talking Blues; humour)
To Ramona (Love)
All I really want to do (Song of Farewell; Individualism)
I’ll keep it with mine (Don’t follow leaders; individualism)
My back pages (Individualism)
Gates of Eden (Protest, Individualism, A world that makes no sense)
It’s all right ma (Protest; Individualism, A world that makes no sense)
If you’ve gotta go, go now (Song of Farewell; Individualism)

I really don’t know what else to say but (yet again) this is an amazing mix of songs and subjects. Dylan is dealing with his very real pain at the break up of an affair (Plain D), expressing love (Ramona), contemplating the concept of individualism (various), considering the notion that the world makes no sense (Eden and It’s all right ma) and saying goodbye (All I really want to do, and If you’ve gotta go).

Now in global terms, there are two ways of writing songs – one, you can abstract yourself from the meaning of the lyrics and simply write, or two, you can express your own emotions within the song. Most songwriters that I have talked with say that the second is the dominant process, adding perhaps that the former can be done but unless one is careful the result tends to sound simplistic or false. The tendency is to lean on works that have come before, and rather unfortunately, that approach can often show through.

Of course we don’t know for sure what Dylan was doing, but given that we do know he was expressing his own emotions in “Plain D”, then we might expect he was expressing at least some of what he felt in other songs around that time, which means he was at this time travelling one hell of a roller coaster of emotions. On the other hand if he was expressing these emotions without feeling them, then he absolutely had totally mastered the art of songwriting within a couple of years. He had already become the absolute songwriting genius.

I think the second option goes too far: the events we are looking at in this article show that Bob was reacting to emotions – which reach their heights with Plain D and at that crucial moment when he decided, seemingly on the spur of the moment, to play an electric set at Newport.

But also I feel, looking at the songs written after Plain D it seems to me clear that Bob’s recovery from the depths of anger and despair was not just thankfully rapid, but also a real bounce upwards because what suddenly appeared next was a much, much happier, and one might say, quite cheeky song of farewell: All I really want to do.

However there is more to that song than saying “no” or “no more” in a love affair, because this is a piece celebrating individualism – a song which through its popularity – particularly via the cover versions created by the Byrds and by Cher – emphasised the fact that Dylan was not restricting himself to songs about society and the way it inevitably seeks to control our lives.

And here we see the extent of this change of direction, because from here on for the rest of the year Dylan’s prime focus was not on protest, not on society and the way it works, but individualism, and as it turned out, an artistic form of rebellion against established norms.

For what we see is that around 18 months after writing such powerful works about society, as Masters of War, Walls of Red Wing, You’ve been hiding too long, Seven Curses, With God on our Side, Talking World War III Blues, Only a pawn in their game, North Country Blues, When the ship comes in, The Times they are a-Changing, Percy’s Song, and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll – Bob Dylan suddenly discovered that there is more to the world than the way society works.

For after, “All I really want to do” Bob turned to songs such as I’ll keep it with mine with its focus on becoming an individual. This, for me, is indeed the launch of another break through into the new Dylan. Who else could have written in a popular music format, at this time…

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

Then in My Back Pages he sings…

“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I

The “edges” indeed. What edges? Where are these edges? Wherever they are, whatever they are, they have become of lesser importance. Our meeting is of greater substance than where we meet.

Here is the individual seeing the world from his own unique standpoint – a standpoint that most others (he suggests) will not and indeed cannot feel. It is the “it’s not the world, but the way you see the world” vision put firmly within Dylan’s own view of reality. Dylan now perceives himself as a creative artist who has the ability to change himself, and we discover, a wish to challenge others.

For thus far Bob had had it easy. He was singing all those early protest songs to the converted. They already believed. He didn’t have to persuade them any further.

Now those of us who read novels tend to choose certain authors because with them we know what we are going to get. Science fiction from one writer, murder mysteries from another, political dramas elsewhere, love stories from someone else, and so on. We go and buy that writers’ latest, because we know what he or she does. If our favourite author of crime thrillers had suddenly written a love story we’d be disappointed, we’d find it odd. Yet this, in songwriting form, is what Dylan did.

But although Dylan was changing direction, we don’t find just random jumping from one topic to another. “My Back Pages” for example contains the lines

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach

which prepare the way for “Don’t follow leaders”. This in turn is the natural consequence of the “Chimes of Freedom” – the chimes are there for anyone who can hear them, but we each hear our own “chimes”, and thus see the world in our own way.

And what is extraordinary is that after writing that masterpiece of “My back pages” Bob turned to Gates of Eden where this new individualistic approach gains perhaps some of its most powerful expression. For now we hear that society has nothing to offer – except the false hope that if we behave in the right way and think the right things we can achieve the promised land: the afterlife.

We are firmly in the realms of a world in which it is not reality that matters but the way that we see reality. The world that we see is in part the world we create. If, as Blake said, we can see beauty in a grain of sand, then we are making real progress – but what we see and how we see it is totally up to us. Yet again, it is not the world but the way that we see the world.

This theme continues to build with the next song It’s all right ma emphasising that contrary to the notion that accompanied Bob as the protest singer, the implication of his new way of thinking is that there is no reform to be had, other than living one’s own life in one’s own world. The world beyond has indeed gone totally wrong, and the only response left is one of individual survival. Maybe times are a-changing, but as suggested in that song’s lyrics, that changing process just happens. Change occurs. It’s just life.

Fate suddenly has become inexorable; all we can do is live our lives as we can. Yes if you want to move on, of course you can, because it is up to you how you see the world and therefore up to you what you do. Hence it is perfectly reasonable that the year ended with If you’ve gotta go, go now. Choose your own vision of reality and your own direction of travel; off you go. As an individual, with your own vision, you are of course free to say farewell and move on any time you want. When you are ready, leave this vision behind, and just go.

And in moving on if you are able to hear those Chimes of Freedom that’s fine. But for Bob moving on was now vital because he had (it appears) begun to feel that some views cannot be expressed in normal everyday story telling. We need to go somewhere else because we have not only given control of the world to the wrong people, we’ve forgotten how to forge our own visions and live by them. We have allowed others to become leaders of our thoughts, and forgotten how to think in new and different ways.

On the death of Irving Berlin, America’s other truly dominant songwriter, the New York Times wrote, “Irving Berlin set the tone and the tempo for the tunes America played and sang and danced to for much of the 20th century.” Now, in this year we begin to find that Bob Dylan was himself setting the tone and tempo for the tunes that reminded America of where it had come from, how far it had fallen from its great ideals, where it might yet go, and what was happening to the people within his country.

Although Berlin dominated songwriting during his lifetime, and was nominated for Academy Awards eight times, he never got one. But no one can ever doubt the importance and genius of the man who wrote, “White Christmas” and “God Bless America”. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Cheek to Cheek”, “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, “Blue Skies” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz.”

But just as Berlin reflected his age, so was Bob Dylan. And Bob’s age was an age where questions started to arise.

Certainly by 1964 people were realising that Bob had, in under three years, challenged the whole notion of what popular music could be about. Indeed in an earlier article, written long before I tried to pull all of Dylan’s lyrical themes together and make some sense of the pattern of his writing, I used the title “Bob Dylan in 1964: adding new themes.” And I still think this works as a way of describing the year although perhaps I would now add, “and taking those themes to the limit”. These are songs stressing that reality is all about how you see the world, which implies that the future is out there for us to describe as we see fit, as we venture through the various minefields of love, lost love, moving on, and of course individualism.

I have, in my attempt to continue describing each song in as few a words as possible, added a new term starting with this year, in relation to Dylan’s writing: Dada. It applies as you can see below to songs such as Subterranean Homesick Blues, Outlaw Blues, Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, On the Road Again and Maggie’s Farm, and I think I must now explain what I mean by that.

Dada emerged as a creative response to the horrors of the first world war. As Hans Arp put it at the time, “While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.”

But Dada was not just an expression of artists being against the war, or against all war, but rather artists being against the whole essence of the bourgeois life that allowed war to happen. It was not of itself strongly left wing, but it attracted many people associated with the radical left.

What I feel Dylan was doing was expressing at this point was his reaction to the way in which folk music had elevated itself onto a platform of self-righteousness, through which some might seem to feel that by singing “We shall overcome,” the forces of prejudice and darkness would be set aside. Or indeed that by singing “Kumbayah” one is actually doing something to fight racism, rather than just getting that lovely warm feel of being among like minded people – who were also singing along.

Given the way many people seemed to feel at the time, rejecting the notion that the fight against “power and greed and corruptible seed” (as Dylan later put it) could be continued through peacefully singing in concerts, was pretty damn dramatic, but that’s what Bob expressed.

The immediate response to this suggestion would then normally be to go to the opposite extreme, suggesting that the proponent of such a view wanted an uprising or revolution. But the Dadaists offered a different way – through art which rather than making the audience feel comfortable (as for example being part of a large group singing a simple song together can do), actually made people uncomfortable.

Of course I don’t know exactly what Bob was thinking when he suddenly decided to play that electric set with Paul Butterfield, but whatever it was, it had the effect. But I am pretty sure it wasn’t, “hey guys wouldn’t it be interesting if we played these songs with the whole band rather than just have me up front.”

In fact playing in front of a band at that specific gig was a pure Dadaist statement – self-evidently so, because some people who were there to hear Dylan the folk singer actively booed him. Which I suspect Dylan didn’t mind at all. He had made his point.

Of course, if we look back to our ancient LPs or less ancient CDs and find a copy of Bringing it all Back Home – Dylan’s next album – we know of the contrast between side one and side two. Three quarters of side two (Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden, It’s alright ma) was written in 1964. But now in 1965, side one of the album was written very quickly, and indeed recorded in the same way: the whole recording taking just three days. And side one, you will recall, was Dylan and the band.

In terms of writing, this extraordinary burst of creativity (we have stories of Bob getting up in the middle of the night and typing up lyrics, as well as ceaselessly typing through the nights and days prior to the January recording) led to eleven songs …

Farewell Angelina (Song of Farewell)
Love is just a four letter word (Is love real?)
Subterranean Homesick Blues (Beat Poetry as rock music, the artist vs society; Dada)
Outlaw Blues (Moving on, The artist vs society; Dada)
Love Minus Zero (Love)
California (Blues, moving on)
She Belongs to Me (Love)
It’s all over now baby blue (Song of Farewell)
Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (Beat poetry as rock music; update on talking blues, humour; Dada)
On the Road Again (Moving on, the artist vs society; Dada)
Maggie’s Farm (Moving on, the artist vs society; Dada)

So there we had the rest of the album created in record time, and indeed recorded in just two days (13 and 14 January), along with a couple of songs that didn’t quite fit in.

But also in considering this revolution in the type of sound Dylan was creating on the album we should note the dates. The album was recorded immediately after the songs above were written and was released in March. And to complete the chronology, in July “Like a Rolling Stone” was released and later that month Dylan performed his first electric set – at the Newport Folk Festival.

Thus this was a revolution that really did take Bob, and his audience in all directions at once: the writing of the songs, the recording of this radically different album, the first electric concert, writing “Rolling Stone”… it all happened in a very short period of time. And that tells us quite clearly that Dylan must have been absolutely certain of what he was up to. He knew where he was going, and no one was going to lead him in another direction. Thankfully the record company also knew by now to let him have his head. He’d been right so far.

But to return to my earlier point, we should not forget that the reports that we have of the first electric set suggest that Dylan decided to play electric not “on a whim” as some would have it, but in a definite response to the reaction of the audience to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan had not rehearsed with the band over a matter of days or weeks – it was simply decided on the night before, and the band set to work.

I think this tells us a lot about Dylan, and it fits in with what we have learned through these explorations of Dylan. “All directions at once” itself suggests spontaneity, and indeed Dylan has shown this throughout his career. He gets the feeling, he understands what it means, and he does it. It might come out ok, it might not, but that is how he wants to do it. He does it this way to capture to essence of the music rather than have an over-rehearsed, over-prepared sound. When it does work it is sensational. When it doesn’t, well, that’s just the price that has to be paid.

We can see this approach very clearly in the songwriting too. Clearly many of the Dylan compositions have been written very quickly; where the revisions are to be made, those come later, ready for later performances, which is how we get so many different versions of some songs as time goes by.

So, Bob the folk singer had gone electric, Bob the protest singer had embraced dada. Of course others followed, but at the start he was so far out in front, he seemed like dust on the horizon.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

All directions at once

This series looks at Dylan’s work from the point of view of the ebb and flow of his writing. Thus rather than examine a song and relate it to where the ideas came from in terms of literature and music, the series sees Dylan’s changing themes and styles within the music as a clue to what is happening in his life.

So far we have

An index of the articles is also being compiled at All Directions at Once

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Dylan’s Rarities: Hang me, Hey Joe and Heartbeat

Posted on October 17, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

If you have been following the “All directions at once” series you may have noticed a mention of the traditional song “Hang me oh Hang Me”

Philip Saville invited Bob to perform three songs in a live TV drama “Madhouse on Castle Street”. “Blowin’ in the Wind” was used at the start and the end of the programme over the credits. Dylan also performed two traditional English folk songs, “Hang Me, O Hang Me”, and “Cuckoo Bird”, and then “Ballad of the Gliding Swan” for which Saville had written the words.

Well Aaron has spotted the fact that in 1990 Bob Dylan revisited “Hang me o hang me” and performed it on stage. We can’t find out why Bob chose this moment to perform the song – Tony wondered if it coincided with the passing of Philip Saville who had invited Bob to work on the show with him, but that was not the case. Maybe something just jogged Bob’s mind – or maybe Philip Saville (who was indeed very much alive at the time) was in the audience that night.

This performance from 1990 was the one and only time Bob performed it (as far as we know) after that play.

But of course the internet is full of curious things and there is an article that says “The TV show opened with Oscar Isaac, singing “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” at the Gaslight Cafe,” followed by this link.

We’re pretty sure this performance doesn’t have anything to do with the TV show – not least because a) the BBC archive recording of the song was lost, and b) the show was made in black and white.

You’ll notice the line “all around the world” in the song, which is a song the Grateful Dead have performed…

This again is a traditional song, with the earliest recording dating from 1937. We can’t find any of the early recordings, but this one is one of a number that reflect the song in what is probably fairly close to the original approach

https://youtu.be/ERGlwiNIK5w

And now, as they say for something completely different.

Bob Dylan did once perform “Hey Joe” It is not, to my ears, a very convincing performance, but he did it.

This was apparently recorded on 12 July at Jazz a Juan. You will, we are sure, know all about the original…

And for something very different from that….

That from the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, 23 November 2014. Of course what we are getting onto here are not songs actually performed in concert but in the sound checks on stage. But clearly everyone could drop straight into the song.

That’s all for this time. Hope you enjoyed at least one or two of the recordings.

Songs that Bob Dylan has only ever performed once or twice live.

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My own love song – Dylan’s instrumentals and other soundtrack songs

Posted on October 16, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Tony Attwood

Mike Smith has reminded Aaron and myself that Dylan wrote a series of instrumental pieces for Olivier Dahan’s film “My own love song.”

This gives us a problem on Untold Dylan, because I have for years proudly proclaimed that we were reviewing all the Dylan compositions, and in saying this I didn’t exclude the instrumentals. And yes I did cover the Billy instrumentals quite a while ago.

So time to make amends.

Life Is Hard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjZ5agESpkg

Sweeping The Floor

This is an engaging 12 bar blues with a relaxed rocking feel.

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

Bumble Bee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJydDId7IEw

Bob’s still keeping to the standard three major chords that most popular music uses. A little piece of atmosphere.

Jane’s Lament

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwiWIpP_RE8

This could be improvised with the guitarist playing along to whatever what on the screen at the time.

Joey’s Theme (alternative version of Forgetful Heart)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIV96fwjMQ4

Again there are suggestions of improvisation here – the whole piece is on one chord and there is a sense that the accordion player is simply playing around the chord as the banjo player plays the chord over and over. I’m rather glad I wasn’t the bass player on this.

The album also has some of the covers from the movie by various cast members

https://youtu.be/343mqZxRc5A

Precious Angel by Renee Zellweger

This rendition really makes the most of a most beautiful song; I’m so glad it is not overplayed but kept completely under control especially in the build up to the “couldn’t make it by myself” life – I have heard so many artists go far too far, far too quickly at that point.

I Believe In You – Don Sparks

The elegance of the performance of “Precious Angel” is retained here. I find this rendition utterly moving.

Life Is Hard – Renee Zellweger

And in keeping with the rest of the music, this is perfectly poised, delicate but not fragile.

Here is the complete list of tracks used in the movie – including some more links to the songs. I’ve not put in links to music from the Classical-Romantic repertoire, as that is not what Untold is primarily about, but I have included the more contemporary songs that were used in the film.

Anything missing, is missing because I can’t find a copy on the internet.

Bob Dylan – Forgetful Heart (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Life Is Hard (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Sweeping The Floor (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Bumble Bee (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Jane’s Lament (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Joey’s Theme (Dylan) *
Ron Eaton – Preludes, Opus 28 #6 in b Minor (Chopin)
Bob Dylan – I Feel A Change Coming On (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Driving South (Dylan) *
Georges Drakoulias – What Good Am I (Dylan)
Forest Whitaker – What Good Am I (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Back Alley (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Snow Falling (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Billie #30 (Dylan) *
Chopin Nocturne 7
Renee Zellweger – Precious Angel (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Road Weary (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Click Clack (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Life Is Hard (Dylan) (instrumental)
Bob Dylan – Robbie Robert’s Lament (Dylan) *
Robert Johnson – Me And The Devil Blues

Bob Dylan – New Orleans Drums (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Janet’s Step (Dylan) *
Source Music – Late Night Blues For Leroy Carr

Ron Eaton – Preludes, Opus 28 #4 in e Minor (Chopin)
Don Sparks – I Believe In You
Bob Dylan – Swingin’ (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Blues Club (Playback) (Dylan) *
Renee Zellweger – This Land Is Your Land

Bob Dylan – It’s All Good (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – East Texas (Dylan) *
The Bourbon Street Stompers – Down By The Riverside

Georges Darkoulias – What Good Am I (Dylan)
Ron Eaton – Preludes, Opus 28 #15 in Db Major (Chopin)
Renee Zellweger – Life Is Hard (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Beyond Here Lies Nothing (Dylan)

Again particular thanks to Mike for alerting us to this omission on the site. And if you find a legal way to provide recordings of the missing tracks (other than the classical-romantic pieces, and the Together through Life tracks, which we have of course already reviewed, please do write in. As ever it is Tony@schools.co.uk

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Bob Dylan And The Tombstone Blues (Part VI)

Posted on October 16, 2020 by TonyAttwood

The series so far…

By Larry Fyffe

In his song lyrics, generally speaking, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan avoids making direct comments about specific politicians – most of the time.

Concerning a Jewish American senator who’d run for US president (and lose) against Lyndon Johnson, Bob Dylan writes the humorous lines quoted below:

Now I'm liberal, but to a degree
I want everybody to be free
But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door, and marry my daughter
You must think I'm crazy
(Bob Dylan: I Shall Be Free No. 10)

Nixon is not mentioned by name in any of Bob Dylan’s song lyrics, but it’s not much of a stretch to consider that he’s the President who stands naked.

President Bill Clinton is not directly mentioned either in any of his song lyrics, but Dylan performs “Chimes Of Freedom” at Clinton’s inauguration concert so it’s reasonable to assume that the newly-elected President’s political position is not anathema to the singer/songwriter:

Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned, and forsaked
Tolling for outcast, burning constantly at stake
And we gazed upon the the chimes of freedom flashing
(Bob Dylan: Chimes Of Freedom)

A song that pays tribute to hymn below:

Tolling for the outcast, tolling for the gay
Tolling for the millionaire, and friends long passed away
But my heart is light and gay as I stroll down old Broadway
And listen to the chimes of Trinity
(Peerless Quartet: Chimes Of Trinity ~ MJ Fitzpatrick)

Keeping with the political agenda, First Lady Hillary Clinton gives an address at Ulster University in Belfast, Northern Ireland; at the time my first cousin Trevor Smith (son of my mother’s brother), is Vice-Chancellor there; he makes the introductory remarks (see:11/O2/97 video at C~Span, ‘Northern Ireland Peace Process’). The Clinton sex scandal is yet to break; Dylan’s constant concert touring stopped because of a medical problem.

In the lyrics below, it might be suggested the ‘Uncle Bill’ refers to Clinton, and that ‘Uncle Tom’ is Obama in the White House who slavishly carries on a Clinton’s political agenda beneath Capitol Hill in Washington:

Uncle Tom still working for Uncle Bill
Scarlet Town is under the hill
(Bob Dylan: Scarlet Town)

Seems a nasty stretch, however, in that Dylan and Obama have a personal connection – Dylan performs “The Times They Are A-Changing” at Obama’s celebration of the civil rights movement in the White House (later receives the Medal of Freedom there from the same President):

Come senators, congressman
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
(Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changing)

In his so-called “Christian phase”, Dylan writes some lyrics that can certainly be construed as ‘right wing’, but he returns to the idealism engendered by the presidency of John Kennedy – a mythical paradise that is lost with his assassination:

Your brothers are coming, there'll be hell to pay
Brothers? What brothers? What's this about hell?
Tell them, "We're waiting, keep coming"
We'll get them as well
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Dignity (1989) part II: You can never play too much Bob Wills

Posted on October 15, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Previously: Dignity Part 1: A bloody mess

by Jochen Markhorst

II You can never play too much Bob Wills

“The list could be endless,” says Dylan, referring to the many archetypes appearing in “Dignity”. Thus, the songwriter implicitly reveals that he already had a “list-song” in mind at the time of conception, a song like “Political World”, “Forever Young”, “Everything Is Broken”, “Blowin’ In The Wind”… that list is endless too. Well, not endless, but he has written quite a few – depending on your definition, about fifteen to thirty.

Within that category, “Dignity” is really only comparable to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” – a similar explosion of metaphors testifying to Dylan’s “pictorial way of thinking”, as the Nobel Prize Committee later will call it. The opening stanza is an excellent example thereof:

Fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel
Thin man lookin’ at his last meal
Hollow man lookin’ in a cottonfield
For dignity

The colour of the lyrics is also comparable to Hard Rain: bleak. Where Hard Rain evokes apocalyptic visions, due also to Dylan’s own commentary on the song (declaring, falsely, to have written the song during the Cuban crisis and that the resulting mortal fear was the trigger), this first verse pushes the associations towards the Holocaust.

This is mainly due to the hollow man-vers line. Coincidence perhaps, but the image is practically identical to Primo Levi’s description of his fellow concentration camp residents. From the beginning of the most moving, and at the same time stylistically brilliant book about the Holocaust, from Ecce Homo (“If This Is A Man”, 1958):

“Imagine now a man who has been deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, of literally everything, in short, that he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, heedless of dignity and restraint, for he who loses everything can easily lose himself.”

“A hollow man, heedless of dignity”… It is conceivable that these crushing words of one of the greatest Jewish authors of the twentieth century resonate with Dylan.

In hindsight, then, the first line has the same sinister undertone as the stage direction from “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts” (“Rosemary started drinkin’ hard and seein’ her reflection in the knife”) and the second line involuntarily evokes the misery of Levi’s starving fellow-victims in Auschwitz.

Technically, it is “just” a list-couplet like there are dozens of them, just a list of an eclectic range of men. Dylan himself undoubtedly rocked along with Sinatra’s “The Look Of Love” (not Dusty Springfield’s song with the same title, that of the James Bond film Casino Royale, 1967) on Softly, As I Leave You (1964);

I've seen the look of a jockey on a winner
I've seen the look of a fat man havin' dinner
I've seen the look of those spacemen up above
But the look that closes the book is the look of love

…and Dylan must also be familiar with Mother’s Finest’s world hit “Piece Of The Rock” from 1977,

A millionaire lookin' for another million dollars
A poor man lookin' for one
A chainstore owner lookin' for another store
A hungry man lookin' for a hamburger bone.

The walking music encyclopaedia Dylan could effortlessly name another twenty songs; as a template the form is not too original. But his execution thereof, the content, is. Usually a song poet uses the enumeration to express something like “inside we are the same” or “we all have our problems”. Judy Garland’s “You Can’t Have Everything” (Rich man, poor man, beggar or king, you just can’t have everything), “God’s Children” by The Kinks, Gershwin’s “Love Is Sweeping The Country”… there are dozens of songs with such a tinker tailor soldier listing that try to express that naïve household philosophy of basically-we-are-all-equal. But, despite its superficiality, it’s an irresistible, golden formula, and it inspires catchy variations -like Elvis’ “King Of The Whole Wide World” (1962);

A poor man wants to be a rich man
A rich man wants to be a king

… which sixteen years later shall resound in Springsteen’s masterpiece “Badlands”:

Poor man wanna be rich
Rich man wanna be king
And a king ain't satisfied
'Til he rules everything

Otherwise, as in Mother’s Finest’s song, the enumeration is used to express social injustice. As in the song that gets a name-check in Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” in 2020, in Bob Wills’ “Take Me Back To Tulsa” from 1941 (Poor man raise the cotton rich man makes the money). Originally Wills sings the rather racist darkie raise the cotton, white man gets the money, but successors like Merle Haggard prefer to change that particular line. In Theme Time Radio Hour episode 20, “Musical Maps”, broadcaster Dylan plays the original though, with that questionable text, but he doesn’t waste a single word on that darkie. Dylan does, however, quite explicitly profess his love for Bob Wills (“Here on Theme Time Radio Hour we believe you can never play too much Bob Wills”) and concludes the broadcast with a heartfelt incident regarding an injustice that has been done to his hero:

“In Gruene, Texas, there is an eight-foot statue for Bob Wills. On Saturday May 2, 2006, vandals knocked it over, and knocked its arm off. Local radio stations offered a reward for information leading to an arrest. I don’t know if anyone was arrested, but if you’re listening: stop vandalizing that statue. Bob Wills is a national treasure and must be respected.”

In itself, though, the antithesis in “Take Me Back To Tulsa” is classical, a contradiction like in “Fortunate Son”, like in the dozens of songs in which a rich man is set against a poor man, or a fat man against a thin man. In 2006 disk-jockey Dylan even devotes an entire broadcast to it (Theme Time Radio Hour episode 13, “Rich Man, Poor Man”).

The choice of cottonfield, however, suggests that Dylan is indeed singing that Bob Wills song in the back of his mind. But his implementation is idiosyncratic.

All other songs use these archetypes to illustrate either essential equality or a crying injustice. Dylan’s find frees “Dignity”’s opening stanza from such one-dimensionality. First off, the choice of words puts the listener on the wrong track. Only after the third line, after hollow man, we hear how “looking” is used as a transitive verb. The men do not look in a blade, at a last meal and in a cotton field respectively, but look for, for “dignity”, apparently.

These last two words, for dignity, is a brilliant, confusing find that torpedoes the listener’s expectations and tilts the previous lines. Predictable would be a traditional contrast; the fat man is an exploiting bad guy, the thin man an exploited poor soul, and then, after that hollow man in the cotton field, we would expect a solid man on the veranda, something in that vein.

But no; it is only then we understand that the list of archetypes is not a list of men set against each other, but rather a list connecting them – they all are searching for dignity.

The ambiguity of Dylan’s directing instructions provides the magical, poetic brilliance of this quatrain. The fat man may be sitting at a dining table, staring, like Rosemary did back in the days, at his reflection in the blade of his knife. Or, like Rosemary back in the days, about to commit murder. Or he is the victim and an aggressor holds the knife in front of the fat man’s face… possible too. But it is more appropriate, of course, to appreciate the parable-like quality of this verse fragment, and of the whole text at all; it does not say what it says. A “blade of steel” then depicts something transient, like “weaponry”, and the fat man is the archetypal master of war, a Goering type, a warlord or arms dealer who earns his living from war – and now seems to be at a moral crossroads: “What the hell am I doing?”, something like that.

Just like the thin man’s last meal opens several doors; in extremis literally his last meal, a last meal on Death Row, or he stares hungrily at fat man’s last meal, or – the most obvious, but therefore not necessarily the best interpretation – he looks at the remains of his own, most recent meal. But on a transcendental level, the thin man represents the fat man’s antithesis, meaning the one standing on the other end of that weaponry. And the hollow man then is the real victim of both, the concentration camp prisoner, the slave, the man reduced to suffering and needs, heedless of dignity and restraint, as Levi says.

The insight that he can turn the opening into such a compact triplet only gradually subsides, as the alternative versions on The Bootleg Series 8 – Tell Tale Signs (2008) reveal. An overarching Holocaust narrative can still be distilled from the first version, the naked piano version (“fat man lookin’ in the shining steel”), but has evaporated from the brilliant second version:

Fat man lookin' at a ferris wheel
Yellow man lookin' at his last meal
Hollow man lookin' in a cottonfield
For dignity

The versions on the illegal bootlegs open with the final, official lyrics, just like the MTV Unplugged recording – apparently the poet lacks the aggressive charge of steel with ferris wheel, and does, on second thought, need the antithesis fat man – thin man (and probably is not too happy with the ugly, unintentional inner rhyme yellow – hollow).

He is right. And the great artists of Solas are wrong; for unknown reasons they skip precisely this verse, in their wonderful cover on The Edge Of Silence (2002). The definitive twenty-three words of the opening quatrain form a perfect, closed in itself tableau of a condition humaine.

To be continued. Next up: Dignity part III

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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All directions at once: Bob Dylan in 1964; (while we were still in 1963)

Posted on October 15, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

This is part 8 of “All Directions at once. Previous episodes are…

In 2020 by the time “Rough and Rowdy Ways” was released, most of us had already downloaded and played endlessly the extracts from the album that Dylan and his record company had agreed to put on line for public consumption: it was “in the wild” long before it was “released.”

Although it is hard to appreciate now, the reverse was true in terms of Freewheelin’. It was released in May 1963, but unless one was living in New York, or completely up to date with the very latest trends in the American folk music scene how would one have known? Maybe some US radio stations played it – I wouldn’t know. But I do know that by the time many of us had bought it, “Times they are a changin'” had been written and Bob was lyrically and musically somewhere else.

Then it happened again. As (I suspect) most of us were trying to come to terms with the evolution between Freewheelin’ and its successor, Bob had already moved on and was writing “Another Side,” which came out the following August. Thus in the space of 15 months (May 1963 to August 1964) Dylan released three utterly ground-breaking albums: Freewheelin’, Times and Another Side. And written a huge lot more.

The compositions that appeared on these three albums are harder to date exactly but “Blowing in the Wind,” the first Freewheelin’ song was almost certainly written in April 1962, while “My Back Pages” the last of Another Side, was written in early June 1964. So all those works within those albums were written in a 26 month period. Given the diversity of these songs, that is an amazing achievement.

But that was not all. For within that period of writing the music for those three albums Dylan actually wrote 75 songs. That in itself is phenomenal – even composers of the most mundane of songs who churn them out to order, can’t compose that many songs in 26 months. But to write that many and include within that era so many phenomenal masterpieces is utterly extraordinary. Then on top of that to go through at least three major stylistic changes, is beyond belief. To my mind if one wants a simple justification of the notion that Dylan is a unique genius, then that one burst of songwriting is enough to achieve that.

And even this burst of composition was not everything. For having achieved all that and recorded the three albums that made and secured his reputation, Dylan then amused himself in the remainder of the year by writing three classics of the “individualism” genre “Gates of Eden”, “It’s all right ma” and “If you’ve gotta go, go now”.

The first two have within them strong elements of the “protest” genre, as well as a lot of Dylan’s latest fascination: the notion that the world very much does not make sense. And then the year ended (in terms of compositions) with another song of farewell. What we see therefore is that by now Dylan had a set of themes for his songs which he liked to use and re-use, and I’ll return to this as we progress through the years. New themes were certainly found from time to time, but many of the old ones returned time and time again throughout Bob’s writing career. The blues, lost love, moving on… he returned to these themes time and again, no matter where else he ventured.

That of course doesn’t mean that Bob’s music was the same. Musically and lyrically “Gates of Eden” and “It’s all right ma” take us into new fields. Anyone hearing those songs at the time of composition would know at once that Dylan’s next album was going to be different again.

Obviously Dylan’s music was getting a fulsome exposure on radio stations in North America, where stations catering for all tastes already existed. Britain, and Europe generally however had very restricted radio services which had no space available for such a rapidly evolving talent.

But in 1964 the first pirate radio station appeared in Europe. And to be clear, Radio Luxembourg was never a pirate radio station although Bob has suggested it was; that station found a niche because the amount of popular music broadcast on radio stations in the UK was extremely limited, and so R. Luxembourg (based in the principality and fully licensed by the government of the country) became the evening and night time broadcaster of top 40 music to the British Isles.

But it was thoroughly a top 40 station, financed by the record companies that released the pop music of the day, and so even there one was not going to hear Dylan. The fact that he existed and his music was revolutionary and radical was a matter dealt with in the four weekly pop and rock music papers. In the end, if you wanted to hear the music, you had to take a chance and buy the album.

And I suspect this is how it was over much of Europe, and quite possibly parts of North America. The music was being recorded and released, but unless you knew someone who was into Dylan, or read the music weeklies, it was hard to find out more. If you wanted to hear it, you had to take a chance and buy the record.

Then two things happened. Late night programmes on pirate stations like Radio Caroline and Radio London picked up on Dylan, and cover versions of Dylan’s songs began to appear and get coverage on mainstream radio. The Byrds, Sonny & Cher, the Hollies, Manfred Mann and others recorded songs, that simply seemed different, and the word spread: these songs resonated with the way many people who were unmoved by contemporary pop actually felt. These were songs that reflected their own feelings about the world in which they lived. Songs that were about more than love, lost love and dance (although Dylan as we have seen wrote a lot about the first two. But even then, when he did choose love and lost love as his themes, he did so in a way that was so completely different from everyone else).

As we got to know the music of “Times” we could hear that here, at last, was a man who was singing about the issues that many of us were concerned about. But what we didn’t know was that while we were marvelling at the “Times” album, Bob was writing Guess I’m doing fine (a simple folksong about being hurt) and then Chimes of Freedom (a song of hope, which I noted at length previously) followed by Mr Tambourine Man (an utterly different song concerning the way we see the world and touching on surrealism).

And although it was beyond the understanding of most late night disc jockeys and weekly newspaper pop music journalists, some of us did grasp the fact that, “Let us forget about today until tomorrow” is the antithesis of the fight for justice at the heart of the protest movement, although curiously it resonates strongly with “Times they are a changin” wherein the times appear to change by themselves, without any interaction from us. Likewise the Chimes of Freedom simply are there, “Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended.” We don’t do anything; life moves on. That wasn’t quite what those who were protesting against capitalism and society in the city streets in the 1960s, were thinking.

These two songs are linked; they both touch on the relationship between music and the world, and to a degree the way in which we are in control of how we see the world. They concern the relationship between the artist and the world, as well as the implication that just as we will all experience the change predicted in “Times” so we can all see the world in a new way, if we choose to.

This was an utterly revolutionary approach to any concept of popular music that had existed previously. Songs which debated the passing of time, and our appreciation of the world around us as philosophical concepts were simply not known. And indeed ever since then these songs have often seemed to baffle commentators, who flailing in the face of such challenging concepts have retreated to debates about whether Dylan stole the music or lyrics from somewhere else, or indeed who he was dating. Such debating has always been irrelevant; at this moment it was even more irrelevant than usual.

For anyone who was actually paying attention to the music and the lyrics, rather than its sources, it would have be no surprise that after the success of “Times they are a changin'” both in terms of the song and the album, Bob changed again. Some might have expected Bob to stay with the writing of protest songs, at least for a while, but no, that has never been his way. Instead he wrote I don’t believe you (a lost love song), Spanish Harlem Incident (a love song) Motorpsycho Nightmare (back to Dylan’s unique brand of humour) It ain’t me babe (a song of farewell unlike anything we’d heard before) and Denise Denise (a song about taking a break and having a laugh).

Now this approach of Dylan’s involving moving on from subject to subject within his songs, is a fundamental of his work. Only once did he abandon the approach and that was 1979, when he wrote every song on the same subject. We will obviously get to that later – but not for a while.

But now another change was happening. Everyone recognised the huge success Peter PAul and Mary had had with Dylan’s work, so from 1964 onwards, other singers and groups fancied a bit of the action and so started to notice Bob’s music and began to record it. And this, I think, was the third big event of this period. First he had jumped from theme to theme in what he was writing. Second he was exploring lyrical themes that no one else touched, and now third other esteemed performers were hearing his songs and re-interpreting them.

And this third point is a key issue that I think is sometimes missed. The notion of taking a Dylan song and re-arranging it completely is what we are all used to in terms of the Never Ending Tour; it is what we expect, it is what we are there to hear. But this was new in the 1960s. In this regard Bob had already started to become not just a one man songwriting industry, but a producer of songs that could be taken apart and rebuilt. Here’s an early example

Mama you’ve been on my mind is a beautiful song of lost love – one of Dylan’s favourite themes as we have noticed. It came immediately before (in terms of Dylan’s writing), the oh so painful desperate poem of lost love and dislike Ballad in Plain D. Plain D got the attention, but it can be argued that “Mama” is the much, much more exquisite piece. The contrast, if noted at the time, was rather baffling, not least because we didn’t know the guy was writing enough to produce not just two but five albums a year, should he have wanted to. But also because he could change subject so quickly.

These two songs cannot have a greater contrast between them. Plain D recounts the disintegration of a relationship and the conflicts surrounding this. It is fair to say that no one else had written a song like this at the time (and I am not sure there have been many since).

But then “Mama” although a totally different type of song, is equally revolutionary, and to my mind far more successful. Both songs use the same unusual approach to the chord sequence, involving variations of what in classical music is called the “interrupted cadence” which simply put means ending a line with a most unusual and unexpected pair of chords

But Mama goes much further both musically and lyrically.

Just consider …

Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

OK, if you have known those lines for years they might float by, but just look at them. We can by and large work out a meaning, but quite what has each line got to do with the next? Yes given a few moments we can work something out – but even then there is still a problem. The poet is saying over and over, it’s nothing, I’ve just been thinking about you, that’s all. Except that he says, “pretendin’ not that I don’t know” – and if we think we are bound to ask what on earth he is talking about? That “pretending” line means “I’m pretending I know” which means “I don’t know” … or does it. Trying to work that line out we go round in circles, which is exactly what the singer of the song is doing. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t understand, and Dylan expresses this both musically and lyrically in a way that I suspect has never been done before in folk or pop.

And he does this immediately before writing Ballad in Plan D!

I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind

If ever there is a Dylan song in which, to understand it, you need to listen to the music and lyrics, and not just the lyrics, this is it.

If we go back to the version on Bootleg Series volumes 1 to 3 (disk 2 track 4, recorded 6 September 1964) what we find is a plaintive song with endless unexpected chord changes (sometimes catching us out by coming half a beat to early or late). But it is none of this that causes us to stop and think “what?”

It is the musical structure which gives us two four bar phrases in standard 4/4, but with a bar (in the first verse) in 3/4 time. Even if we are ready, the next verse throws us out again, because that interrupting half-way house bar is reduced to a beat. By the third verse it has become a complete 4/4 bar.

So it goes on with the timing of the piece becoming ever vaguer and more and more unexpected. And no one at the time was doing anything remotely like this in popular music.

What aids these curious rhythmic changes is the fact that the lines of the verses over run, cut short, change… there is in fact no rhythmic constancy. Conventionally the lyrics are written (depending of course on the version you are listening to) as

Perhaps it’s the colour of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

But equally we could have

Perhaps it’s the colour of the sun cut flat An’ cov’rin’
the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

Or in the second verse

I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind

could actually be

I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ 
or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind

However we play with them, the words express the mixed up feelings that we can all get at the end of a love affair, where the narrow thoughts are eating us up, but we are trying to deny it is happening. We desperately want to get out of conventional angst (that was very much the thinking of the 1960s – we don’t have to think like our forefathers) – but he knows that this is not really true – he’s just “pretending not that I don’t know”.

And the ending is so powerful that it takes us several hearings of the song to get this right…

I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind

Can you see yourself as clearly as I can see you? Now, there’s a thought and a half. Utterly simple, utterly complex.

What we have here is a piece in which the music follows the words, but the words endlessly tumble over an the music is trying to catch up, until by the end the words follow the music. Words can get extended in different versions as in the final verse in the second line suddenly the “I” in “I won’t be near” is curiously given an extra beat and a half in some versions – but not others.

Of course this works in the early recordings because it is Dylan on his own – you can’t so easily do this with a rock band, or even if singing a duet. And so as time has gone by the song has become fixed into set rhythms, although Dylan’s own performance with Joan Baez retains some of the rhythmic oddities, but in the end it loses all the subtleties. If you want this song as it was intended you have to have a solo version.

And maybe it is because the song can exist in so many different versions that we never had a version of it on the early albums. Certainly the song was intended to perhaps for Times They Are a Changing or Another Side of Bob Dylan but came out on neither, and we had to wait for the live versions, and the Bootleg series.

So this is a song whose rhythm we can’t hold down, and indeed nor can we with the chords – version after version of the song has been recorded with different chords, and of course different feelings.

And maybe this is the mark of a great, great song – because it can be reinvented so many, many times. Contrast the Buckley version above (if you dare) with Rod Stewart’s version on the “Reason to Believe” album, which works in a Rod Stewart sort of way, but utterly, utterly fails with the twiddly instrumental cover for the pauses that some idiot somewhere decided to put in. They mean nothing, have no relation to the song, and destroy what could have been an entertaining version of the piece.

But the fact that you can have so many different versions shows what a song this is.

So magnificent is this song that you don’t need to know the origins of the lyrics, but for completeness, let’s record the fact that it is the breakup with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (or at least that is what the commentators say) that led to the song. But the notion of Oliver Trager which suggests this is a “straightforward love song of separation and yearning” is to miss the point. That is the start, but not the end.

People who suffer romantic breakups as Dylan had done react in different ways – and often different ways at different times. Some are devastated, some remain in a very depressed or even desperate state for months or years. But Bob, it seems, after writing that piece could pick himself up and just move on. It must also have been a warning note to any other woman, and indeed the family of any such woman, with whom he had a relationship!

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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More Ginsberg and Dylan – the final chapter (we think)

Posted on October 14, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

We have over the years looked at Bob Dylan’s work with Allen Ginsberg a number of times – the articles noted above are the main ones. Not with any intention of doing a series on Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan but rather as a way of recording what we have found (mostly what Aaron has found) as the information has come to light.

This article looks to pull in the other work the two did together which we haven’t touched on so far – and so (as far as we know) round the articles off. But if you we have missed something… please see the plea at the end.

—————-

Bob was involved in two sessions with Allen Ginsberg, once in November 1971 and again in January 82. These resulted in a number of tracks which appeared on the Ginsberg album “First Blues” and subsequently on two further Ginsberg box sets. Tony has already reviewed the Ginsberg/Dylan co-writes “Vomit Express”, “Jimmy Berman Rag”, “September On Jessore Road” and “ For You, Baby”. So now let’s take a listen to some more tracks from these sessions featuring Bob’s musical backing.

First up, with Bob on vocals, guitar, piano and organ… it’s “Goin’ To San Diego”

Tony: What I can’t work out is whether Ginsberg actually can’t sing in tune and has no sense of time and rhythm, or if this is just put on to make a politico-musical point. The clarinettist is however a fine musician – his work contrasts with the lyrics. Is that the point? I wish I knew.

Aaron: Next Bob contributes vocals, piano, organ and guitar to two poems by William Blake, A Dream and Nurse’s Song. I’m not sure anyone will listen to these all the way through. To be honest, they are a bit of a chore, still it’s interesting to hear Bob’s arranging skills.

Also from the same sessions was Ginsberg’ own composition “Spring (Merrily Welcome)”. Bob plays guitar, piano, organ and provides backing vocals. This one is (mercifully) a bit shorter than the others and much more upbeat.

Tony: Ginsberg is highly rated by many people, and Dylan is known to be hyper critical of his own work (just see Dignity Part 1: A bloody mess – the start of Jochen’s new series on “Dignity”). So as for what is going on here, I remain puzzled as before.

Aaron: The final two this time were taken from the 1982 sessions, these were released in 2016 on the “Last Word On “First Blues”” box set. They are a lot funkier than we are used to and here we have the unusual pleasure of hearing Bob join in on bass guitar!

And the second…

Tony: If there is someone who is kind enough to read Untold Dylan, and who has an insight into the music of Ginsberg and why Dylan recorded these pieces with him, I would love to receive either a comment below, or a whole article (send to Tony@schools.co.uk) on Ginsberg and Dylan – or if you prefer Dylan and Ginsberg – which we can publish.

Or indeed if you have a book that explains it all, please do let us know what it is and we’ll try and get a copy. Bemusement exists within the Untold Offices.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Untold Dylan

Bob Dylan And Harold Pinter (Part III): Hearts Of Fire

Dignity: part V – Nowhere to fade

All Directions at Once 11: Beyond the remains of Desolation Row

Never Ending Tour, 1993, part 4 – The Supper Club and beyond.

The Highway Is for Gamblers: Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen Take a One-way Trip

Dylan’s videos: The Wilbury years

Bob Dylan And Harold Pinter (Part II)

Dignity part IV: I contain multitudes

Why does dylan like Pontchartrain, Legend in my time, and Homeward Bound?

All directions at once part 10: Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?”

All directions at once

Bob Dylan And Harold Pinter part 1

Dignity (1989) part III: One line brings up another

Bob Dylan And Chuck Berry, and some wonderful videos

All directions at once 9: So far ahead of the game we lost sight

All directions at once

Dylan’s Rarities: Hang me, Hey Joe and Heartbeat

My own love song – Dylan’s instrumentals and other soundtrack songs

Bob Dylan And The Tombstone Blues (Part VI)

Dignity (1989) part II: You can never play too much Bob Wills

All directions at once: Bob Dylan in 1964; (while we were still in 1963)

More Ginsberg and Dylan – the final chapter (we think)

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