Untold Dylan

Dylan the sideman: Bromberg, Booker T, Priscilla Jones, David Blue

Posted on September 20, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (1963) Part I: Time Passes

Posted on September 19, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

It is a missed opportunity for IBM. They should of course have called their talking supercomputer HAL, the name of the talking computer from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odessey (1968). Writer Arthur C. Clarke later stated, quite convincingly, that it was just a sheer coincidence, but to no avail: the fact that an alphabetical one-letter shift changes “HAL” into “IBM” (H becomes I, A becomes B, and M becomes L) is too good to be coincidental. Film fanatics and Dylanologists don’t differ that much – some of them really do have a tendency, or perhaps an urge, to see more than there actually is.

IBM, however, misses the opportunity for free publicity and brand awareness. Perhaps also because HAL is not that nice; after all, he kills almost the entire crew of Discovery One, including, in a cowardly manner, the three travelling scientists who spend the journey time frozen, in “cryonic sleep”, in their survival capsules.

It will eventually become “Watson”, which may be a second mistake. It is meant as an honourable naming after Thomas J. Watson the founder of IBM, but of course the whole world only thinks of Sherlock Holmes, of his sounding board John H. Watson. Not necessarily the association you want to evoke if you want to sell a supercomputer, since Watson is the permanently amazed, never understanding, in all respects average side-kick of the superior, human supercomputer Holmes.

Anyway, the commercial is funny. In 2015 the IBM marketing department manages to attract Bob Dylan for an amusing advertising film, in which Watson converses with the bard. Watson claims to have analysed all of Dylan’s songs.

“Your main themes are,” Watson concludes, “Time Passes and Love Fades.”

“That sounds about right,” Dylan answers amused.

Watson’s claim really is about right. IBM spokeswoman Laurie Freedman officially reports that the researchers have actually fed 320 of Dylan’s songs into Watson and his analysis has in fact distilled the themes mentioned. Watson’s ability to “personality analysis, tone analysis and keyword recognition” has helped to better understand the data. All right, not “all of Dylan’s songs” (Dylan has written more than six hundred songs), but still more than half of them.

It doesn’t cost Watson any effort of course (by his own account he reads 800 million pages per second), but he could have saved himself some trouble: Watson would already have been there if he had confined himself to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”.

Dylan writes “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” in 1962, records it in the autumn and 27 May 1963 it appears on the legendary LP The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. To put it mildly, the song is indebted to “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)” from Dylan’s friend Paul Clayton, who in turn based it on a nineteenth-century “Negro song”, on “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone”, as well as quoting from the traditional “Scarlet Ribbons for Her Hair”.

Not only the melody, but also considerable fragments of text from Clayton’s 1959 song Dylan copies almost unchanged: It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, darlin’ and So I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road and You’re the one that made me travel on, for example.

Which is not considered plagiarism in those days – it is customary to polish up or cut up each other’s songs, or old folk and blues songs. However, it is not very honourable to claim copyright, which is what Dylan does. By the way, he effortlessly acknowledges his indebtedness:

“Paul was just an incredible songwriter and singer. He must have known a thousand songs. I learned Pay Day At Coal Creek and a bunch of other songs from him. We played on the same circuit and I traveled with him part of the time. When you’re listening to songs night after night, some of them rub off on you. Don’t Think Twice was a riff that Paul had. And so was Percy’s Song.”

(liner notes Biograph, 1985)

Twenty years earlier, in an interview with Helen McNamara for Toronto Telegram (3 February 1964, published in Gargoyle too), Dylan is similarly enthusiastic about Clayton, and confesses a mystical awe for his qualities as a folk musician:

“The only guy I know that can really do it is a guy I know named Paul Clayton, he’s the only guy I’ve ever heard or seen who can sing songs like this, because he’s a medium, he’s not trying to personalize it, he’s bringing it to you … Paul, he’s a trance.”

The admiration is mutual, and the openly homosexual Clayton may also be a bit charmed by the young Dylan, so it does not disrupt the friendship. Outside the courtroom, lawyers from the respective music publishers settle on a buy-off of any claims. Clayton receives a modest amount of money, and does not complain.

To Clayton, it hardly could be a sensitive issue, for that matter. He may be “an incredible songwriter”, but he is above all, just like Dylan, a thief of thoughts, a miner who digs up old melodies, ennobles them and records them (Clayton has released about twenty records). He does this digging at home in West Virginia, in the university library of Charlottesville. That’s where he found the template for his “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)”; in an obscure booklet from 1923, the collection Eight Negro Songs. Editor Alfred J. Swan admires in the foreword the musicality and originality of those nineteenth century songs,

“the rich imagery, the racy humour, the naive pathos, and the simple, yet original philosophy of the modern negro’s mind,”

and also gives a crash course negro dialect, for he has transcribed the songs as faithfully as possible:

Who gon bring you chickens when I’m gawn? Aw! Ba-beh!
Who gon bring you chickens when I’m gawn?
Six mont’s in jail ain so long, Aw, dahlin
Hit’s wukkin on dat county farm.

Clayton turns those chickens into ribbons, and concocts some sentences around them. By the looks of it, he has browsed a few more pages; on page 36 “Dat Lonesome Road” is printed:

True love, true love, what hev I done
To mek you treat me so
You’ve made me walk dat lonesome road,
Like uh nuvvuh done befo’
Look down, look down dat lonesome road,
Hang down my head an’ cry

According to commentators, Clayton takes a few melodic things from another old West Virginia folk song, from “Call Me Old Black Dog”. An antique recording of that song by Dick Justice, 1929, does not illustrate this claim, though:

Anyway, Clayton is actually doing the same thing as Dylan is doing with Clayton’s Ribbons song – which is why indignation would be somewhat misplaced. Entirely in line, by the way, with the somewhat cynical quote attributed to Clayton:

“If you can’t perform, write; if you can’t write, rewrite; if you can’t rewrite, copyright; if you can’t copyright, sue.”

Paul Clayton dies 30 March 1967 in his New York apartment. He sits down in the bathtub and electrocutes himself by dropping his electric heater into the water. It is less than two years after Dylan’s electric attack on acoustic folk, after “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival. Far-fetched perhaps, or even a bit disrespectful, but it almost seems as if the intelligent and sensitive Clayton, the standard-bearer of acoustic traditional folk music, has staged his suicide as a metaphor.

It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe, I’m on the dark side of the road.

To be continued. Next up: Don’t Think Twice – part II: Love Fades

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: The Roving Gambler

Posted on September 19, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Larry Fyffe

Though the lyrics of songs by Bob Dylan do not saddle the the human race with such doctrines as ‘original sin’ imposed by the officials of some organized religions, his lyrics express a cynical view of the nature of humankind, a sorrowful view akin to the state found in the Holy Bible where individuals are left abandoned and alone awaiting deliverance to a ‘Promised Land’ or else the return of a departed ‘Saviour’ to help them.

In many of Dylan’s source lyrics that pertain to the microlevel of individual existence, filled as they are with the trials and tribulations of love affairs, gambling, and death, so too is this sorrow reflected:

Down in the willow garden
Where me and my love did meet
Oh, there we sit a-courting
My love dropped off to sleep
I had a bottle of the burglar's wine
Which my true love did not know
And there I poisoned my own true love
Down under the banks below ....
My father always taught me
That money would set me free
If I'd murder that pretty little miss
Whose name is Rose Conley
(Grayson/Whitter: Rose Conley ~ traditional)

Happy endings few and far between:

Come around you roving gamblers, and a story I will tell
About the greatest gambler, and, you know, you should know him well
His name was Willie O'Conley, and he gambled all his life
He had twenty-seven children, yet he never had a wife
(Bob Dylan: Gambling Willie's Dead Man's Hand)

Also drawing a card from the deck of the following song:

He put the money in the pot
And passed the cards around
I saw him deal from the bottom of the deck
So I shot the gambler down
(Bob Dylan: The Roving Gambler ~ various/traditional)

https://youtu.be/SD82d33GOA0

Below, into the song (with the objective correlative of a “sallow” or “willow” tree) substituted be the word “flowery” by an Irish songster:

Down by the flowery garden
Where me and my true love did meet
I took her in my arms
And unto her gave kisses sweet
She bade me take love easy
Just as the leaves fall from the tree
But I, being young and foolish
With my one true love I did not agree
(Andy Irvine: You Rambling Boys Of Pleasure ~ traditional)

The song of yore is reworked by a modern Irish poet, and his words changed a wee bit by a songstress:

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet
She bade me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree
(Marianne Faithful: Down By The Salley Gardens ~ William Yeats)

More lyrics by the same poet, rendered by a songstress with a very slight change in the wording:

Through hollow lands, and hilly lands
I will find our where she has gone
And kiss her lips, and take her hands
And walk among long dappled grass
(July Collins: "Golden Apples Of The Sun" ~ William Yeats)

Reflected the above poem be in the following song lyrics:

You're gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I'll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the one I love
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go
(Bob Dylan: You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You go)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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A song is like a painting, you can’t see it all if you’re standing too close.

Posted on September 18, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

It was Dick Dale, “king of the surf guitar,” who said “every song is like a painting.” It is not a massively famous quote any more than Dick Dale’s music is remembered worldwide, but it gives an indication of a way of looking at Dylan’s work that I think is sometimes ignored, but which can be rather helpful.

For it seems to me that although the examination of literature line by line, phrase by phrase, can be highly informative and indeed exceedingly interesting, it is not all there is in a song. Most self-evidently there is the music as well. The vocal and the accompaniment. Put it together and you can get the overt meaning of the lyrics (“I love you” is one of the most commonly used phrase) plus an additional expression via the music, of the emotions which cannot be fully expressed by the lyrics.

To take one simple example, the phrase “Beyond here lies nothing,” can express despair, it can be a powerful version of “at the end of the line,” and it can also be something more, a looking out into the mists of the future. It can even (and more literally) suggest looking into the blackness of space. Or, it could be used the vision of the writer who has just created her/his ultimate masterpiece and knows nothing else could ever be half as good again. Or there again a rumination on the collapse of a civilisation or a marriage, or… nothing at all.

Part of the problem, if we continue to examine that phrase and all it implies, is that we are not very good at examining “nothing” because in our real lives there is always something. And after death, well, others retain memories of us, plus as far as I can see, most people seem to have some belief in a life thereafter.

To consider this further, we might recall that in the days of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire (an era lasting roughly 1000 years) there was plenty of maths. They were very precise about this, with a Roman legion not being a big bunch of fighting men, but a team of 6000 soldiers divided up into ten cohorts, with each cohort containing ten centuria.

All very exact, but rather interestingly all created without the concept of zero. There is no “0” in Roman numerals. Or put it another way, “no nothing”. Which meant the response to the question, “If I had half a dozen bananas to sell in the market and I sold them, how many bananas do I have?” has to be “Yes there are no bananas.”

Now, to come back to reality, we can enjoy the notion, “Beyond this lies nothing” but it might take a bit of thinking about really to get into the concept. And it is also a reasonable view to think that Bob Dylan came across the phrase in the ancient texts, thought, “there’s a lot in that phrase” and used it, just like that, without an immediate notion of where it might go. Just as Jackson Pollock perhaps could not explain why he wanted to throw a sudden burst of pink across a canvas at a particular point in a particular way. For each artist, it just seemed the right thing to do at this point.

But the option of introducing abstraction into art through the use of phrases, colours, patterns or images that have been used before, but without accepting their previous meanings, is not the only issue when considering the art of the poet or songwriter. There is also the issue of, “is it true?”

Now most of us can readily accept that when a novelist writes a story it can be totally a work of fiction, even when written in the first person. And we can accept that a modern artist might draw or paint an abstract piece of work or paint a picture of a person who does not exist.

For the viewer it might be a bit of a laugh to see the cube or the squiggle as representing something, but it quite probably isn’t what the painter had in mind, just as it can be fun to say that the person in the painting looks like my auntie Ethel, but that doesn’t actually mean the painter knew my late aunt.

And yet a similar disassociation between the lyrics of Bob Dylan and what Bob himself feels, believes or thinks, or what has actually happened to him, is something many who listen to his music seem to find a hard step to take. And this for two reasons. One, because on some occasions it most certainly does sound as if what he is singing is what he believes most passionately. And two, because we might want him to believe what we believe.

It isn’t always like this in popular music of course. When Elvis sang “Heartbreak Hotel” I don’t think too many people assumed he’d just lost his lover. Nor indeed did those who thought a little further assume that the writers of the song had. Indeed as Tommy Durden reported, he began writing the lyrics for “Heartbreak Hotel” when he was inspired by a Miami Herald story about a man who committed suicide, leaving a note that read “I walk a lonely street.”

But when Bob put “It ain’t me babe” on an LP, the hunt was on to find who the “babe” is or was. When he sang “Masters of War” everyone believed he was against the arms race. When he wrote 19 songs about Christianity and faith in 1979, and nothing else, everyone took it that he had converted to Christianity. And earlier when he wrote “All along the watchtower,” likewise people looked for a meaning (mostly metaphorical, not many went looking for your actual watchtower).

Meaning is what we seek. In fact I suspect there are some who have sought, and indeed found a meaning in “Drifter’s Escape”….

But really, for most of us, this is where it breaks down. What is to be made of the lyrics of that song? It is in essence meaningless. There is no sequence, no sense, no relationship to reality, anymore than one finds such things in a lot of Kafka – whose work was clearly influencing Bob Dylan at the time.

Of course artists in all walks of art are drawn to subject matter that interests them or about which they feel they have something to say. To put it at its most obvious, Picasso could not have constructed Guernica without feeling the pain and anger. And maybe one might be able to argue that Bob could not have written “Positively 4th Street” without having someone specific in mind. Likewise When He Returns could not have been written by a non-believer…. Or maybe I should say WOULD not have been written by a non-believer. Because she or he would surely choose to write about something else.

And so I come back to the simple proposition made earlier: if the person characterised in “4th Street” had been placed in a short story, we would in all probability not be particularly trying to think who it was. We’d have seen it as fiction, and a rather engaging fiction at that; a story of the way friendships can break apart. OK maybe we might have dug away into the author’s past to work it out an origin, but still, we might have accepted it was not a literal representation of an individual. It starts as one person, but through the artistic process becomes something else.

Now of course everyone who writes poetry or novels has the option of writing about real people or fictional characters. The first seventeen of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to a young man, with whom the poet has an intense romantic relationship. By and large the writer is trying to convince the young man to marry and have beautiful children who will look just like their father.

The general assumption is that Shakespeare’s writing at this point is so intense, and there are so many beautiful sonnets here that the poet must have been writing to a specific person. And yes there indeed are several hints and suggestions dotted around that this is so, such that some will write today that it is all perfectly obvious and agreed that Shakespeare was writing to… [fill in your choice of suspect].

Well, maybe. Certainly writing this many sonnets along the same lines to an imaginary person would seem a little curious. But without a clear statement of intent we can never be completely sure. Besides, to write all that Shakespeare wrote, to have the success he had at the Curtain Theatre, and then tear down the whole theatre, ship it across the river and build the Globe where they had greater success and fame, and then to leave London and settle down in his home village once more, thereafter writing nothing of significance, seems to us today a little odd. (Or unlikely, depending on your point of view).

Odd and unlikely because although we know some parts of Shakespeare’s life, such as why they moved theatres, so much is missing. Shakespeare, very annoyingly, did not leave a detailed diary. A bit like Bob Dylan not telling us what all his songs mean.

And please allow me to divert from my thesis for a moment. Dylan’s work is often denigrated on the basis that he is a plagiarist – with many examples being given. But I rarely, if ever, see those who complain of this, also note that Shakespeare was the same. “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players,” is indeed one of the greatest metaphors of our language. Others have used it since (Oscar Wilde: “The world is a stage, and the play is badly cast,” Allan Moore: “All the world’s a stage, and everything else is vaudeville.”) But few condemn Shakespeare for nicking the line from the Greek playwright Juvenal in the second century, “All of Greece is a stage, and every Greek’s an actor.” Shakespeare was a great plagiarist. So what?

But back to my theme, and broadening out the issue somewhat, I am hoping after travelling with me this far you can see even greater difficulties within the debate. If the writer confesses neither the details of what lies behind his or her writing, nor leaves notes on the source, we can never be quite certain – especially as there might not be any real person or events referred to at all. There is, after all, nothing to stop one writing a love song to an imaginary person. And indeed many have done it. Just as there is nothing to stop one taking an image or idea from a previous writer and using it as one’s own. Phrases can be copyrighted, but not ideas.

So let’s see how any of my thoughts before the diversion into taking ideas from previous wrtiers, apply to a (to take one song as an example) “Masters of War”. On the surface it seems unlikely that Bob Dylan could have written that song without actually believing that it would be good if the creators of armaments did not continue their ghastly industry. Just as surely he must have believed in the reality of the New Testament when writing 17 songs in one year on Christian themes.

Except even here the idea of the writer believing in what she or he writes breaks down. Consider, for example, professional writers of horror fiction and science fiction. Do they seriously believe all they are writing will come to pass? I am most certainly not classifying myself as an author of particular merit – a jobbing writer seems a better description – but I can at least say that for my two published science fiction novels I most certainly didn’t believe they were portraying the future. I was evolving an entertainment, nothing more. And the few full time writers of such fiction I met at that time, were most certainly of that point of view.

So on this basis let’s just dip back for a moment to “Masters of War”. Bob wrote that in 1963, the same year that he wrote “Times they are a changin'” What both of these songs have in common is a sense of fatality. Neither says we can rise up and do this or that and the world will be a better place. Yes there is a reference to the death of the armaments manufacturers, but not because young people are going to kill them. He simply says he will celebrate trusts that they and will be called to account in the afterlife.

I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

There’s a similar theme in Times they are a changin’

For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

Dylan is telling us here that the songs are about the fact that things change, and everything moves on. Yes there might be an element of hope for the downtrodden in each case – the masters of war will suffer eternal damnation, and the losers of the past will get their rewards in the future. But it is all quite vague and not too much is certain except that times do change and the future is not a repainting of the past with a few extra bright colours added for effect.

OK, so two songs like that might well be saying to us, that is what Dylan believed. But I would argue that as with most writers, we do have to be fairly careful in our reading of the songs, because many people appear to have convinced themselves that these are revolutionary songs extolling the young to see off the old ways. But a closer study of Bob’s work shows not only that Dylan has written many, many more love songs than he has written songs of the world changing, he has also written many more lost love songs than world changing songs, as well.

Finally, I’m going to add one final theme here, to try and make my point a little clearer. Let’s take the theme of moving on.

In the same year as “Masters of War” and “Times they are a changin'” Bob Dylan wrote a series of twelve songs about moving on and leaving.

Does that mean that we have to believe that he was indeed “doing some hard travelling too” in the physical and geographical sense? Maybe he was moving around a bit, but I don’t think that was the prime motivation here. As I look back to 1963 and the 31 songs Dylan wrote in that year, I don’t hear this as an autobiography with lots of moving from place to place. Rather a much easier explanation for what Dylan wrote about that year was that he was a storyteller exploring his art.

I doubt that many people take Dylan’s songs of moving on literally. And so I find myself asking, if I am not going to take these songs of moving on literally, why should I take others literally? But then if I am not taking them literally, why do I take the songs of 1979 literally and believe Bob was propagating a belief in Christianity?

Simply the answer is that just because Bob wrote only about faith in 1979, that doesn’t mean there was faith underpinning all his earlier and later works. Just because he wrote about moving on a lot in 1963 it doesn’t mean that he had been moving on, or that he believed in moving on as a way of life, or that”moving on” underpins his whole life. Yes of course there is a connection: we call it the “Never Ending Tour”. But that is not exactly the same as the blues tradition found in “Hell Hound on My Trail”.

No, part of Bob’s genius, as with Shakespeare as it turns out, is surely his ability to move from subject to subject in such an engaging manner, on occasions perhaps actually believing in the truth of his subject matter, other times exploring fictional themes and ideas. Just because he wrote about moving on, love, and lost love a lot, it doesn’t mean all the songs are on these topics. Just because he wrote Christian songs for 18 months, that doesn’t mean Christianity is the underlying message in all his songs before or since.

So what I take from these early songs of moving on, is a set of images of the hobo jumping freight trains and moving on from town to town, and of lovers getting up because of the urge to move on because that’s what’s in their heart and soul.

But here’s the irony. The hobo doesn’t change, but the world around the hobo does keep on changing. The Christian faith that Bob espoused as the sole subject matter of his 1979/1980 songs clearly does not change (although it is modified along the way to fit with changes in thought about things like the equality of the sexes) but as the years come and go, Bob’s thoughts change, as do everyone’s. The hobo can be heroic, but can also be tragic: remember for example Man on the street from 1961. And so eventually the world gets totally out of joint.

Throughout I see Bob as observing and reporting his feelings – feelings which could later change. As I said once before, he has spent a lot of his life leaving town in all directions at once. (That’s my closest attempt at creating my own version of “Beyond here lies nothing”. It’s not real, but it has a feeling about it that makes it worth using).

That is my starting point for understanding the compositions of Bob Dylan. He has used multiple themes and ideas. He was only telling us what to do very occasionally, and each time he did, he then moved on. He has rarely told us about his life. He has been writing songs in the style of, and with the approach of, composers who had gone before him, and then, being a masterful composer, has been adding new layers over the top. His subject matter flows around him, he varies the themes as he goes.

Bob doesn’t tell us to rise up. He doesn’t (any more) say “Worship the Almighty,” the “get up and move on”. Rather he says, “here’s a picture I painted last week.”

To be continued…

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Bob’s live rarities: As I went out, Billy, Get out of Denver.

Posted on September 17, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood with track selections by Aaron Galbraith

What makes Bob pick one of his own songs, perform it just the once and then move on? Sadly that is a rhetorical question – I have no idea of the answer, but I really wish I did. I’d love to know how the idea comes up, and then having been executed well, is just set aside forever more.

John Wesley Harding was released at the end of 1967, and Bob waited five years before giving it an outing, and then that was that.

The venue was Toronto, at the Maple Leaf Gardens, and the date was 10 January 1974.

As you can hear it is performed with vigour and determination. There is nothing here to suggest that Bob isn’t enjoying the performance, the singing is clear the lead guitar is perfectly suited to the performance, the crowd welcome the appearance of the song.

And that’s it. Never again.

Here’s another unexpected piece: Billy, performed 22 March 2009 at Berns Club in Stockholm.

And again I am wondering, why here, why on this day, why not again? It really is a little bit strange I find.

Perhaps less strange than “As I went out” because it is a bit of a plodding tune, and the accompaniment isn’t especially inspired, but it is an interesting and unusual 12 bar blues – certainly one of the most inventive 12 bar blues melodies that Bob has written.

But then, no one can out guess Bob.

Finally, a selection from Tony

This was performed in the State Theatre, Detroit, 16 March 2004 and is a song by Bob Seeger. Here is the original

Bob Seger has sold more than 75 millions records worldwide, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. He finally made his farewell tour in 2018/9. Like Bob he is the great survivor at a time when so many around him faded.

Apart from the songs he recorded himself he also co-wrote (among many others) the Eagles’ number-one hit “Heartache Tonight”, and his recording of “Old Time Rock and Roll” was named one of the Songs of the Century in 2001. Here it is (just in case you need reminding!)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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Dylan’s promotional videos: Must be Santa, Drummer Boy, Duquesne, the noir

Posted on September 16, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Dylan’s promotional videos – the story so far

Aaron: For this episode I’d thought we’d continue on from where the last one left off and look at the next three directed by Nash Edgerton, who if you remember also directed the Beyond Here Lies Nothing promo.

First up is this fun filled video for Must Be Santa.

This time he gets to work with Dylan, who for some reason wears a long grey wig under the obligatory Santa hat. There are some really fun moments for me, Dylan suddenly popping up from behind the bar with two bottles of whiskey, Dylan dancing(!!) and Edgerton shows his stuntman background with the rather raucous ending. It’s great fun and perfect for the song.

Tony: Errrrrrrrr…. I guess my sense of humour has gone down the drain.

Aaron: In the interest of completeness there was also a neat little video for Little Drummer Boy, directed by Jeff Scher. I don’t have too much to say about this one except I liked it!

Tony: Now this I will go with. Bob sings this in a meaningful way, and the video itself has a meaning within the context of the song. That is not to say that I expect everything in life or indeed in art to have a meaning; indeed I’m currently struggling in writing an article which makes this point across many Dylan songs. Meaning, I wish to argue, is not everything. But when there isn’t meaning there needs to be something to make the song worth hearing, or the video worth watching.

This video has both; it is not something I’d go back to, but yes I enjoyed it, and I wouldn’t turn away from it if it came on again.

Aaron: The next Nash Edgerton video was for Dusquesne Whistle.

Aaron: This one borrows a lot from Spike Jonze’s short film How They Get There (we’ve added a link at the end of this piece). Except in this case the girl wants nothing to do with the guy, rightly so in this case, as he’s being a total creep! He probably thinks he is being romantic but his behavior is completely inappropriate, and he ultimately gets what’s coming to him in the end.

These scenes, which take place in the daytime are nicely juxtaposed with shots of Dylan and his posse strolling coolly through the city at night. When the two converge, Dylan and gang just step over the young fool’s beaten body on the sidewalk without a second look. It is as if Dylan is stepping over himself as a young man, with it’s optimism of youth and foolish notions of romance and moving forward as an older man with an acceptance of the past. Don’t Look Back indeed.

Tony: Arghhhhhhhhhhh. I love this song, always have from the moment the album came out, and this video adds nothing. In fact it detracts greatly for me, so I am beginning to wonder how other people see this. The story has nothing to do with the song – ok that doesn’t matter, but it detracts from the music, as I watch it.

OK I am not expecting every video to be a literal exposition of the song, but when we have a song with the lines

I can hear a sweet voice gently calling
Must be the Mother of our Lord

what on earth does the video have to do with it? The closest I have got is the link between the casual destruction of the 2011 multiple vortex tornado in the town and of the way the guys beat up the would-be lover. Others have seen the Whistle as a warning about death and perhaps the impending final judgement. Yet others go for the train service that used to run between New York Penn and Pittsburgh Penn Stations, which was named after the 18th century Fort Duquesne.

No, I didn’t find that video added anything for me. In fact the reverse. I need to play the song again without the video (probably several times) to get over it.

Aaron: The final video for today from Dylan is Dylan’s cover of The Night We Called It A Day.

Again directed by Nate Edgerton and by now I think we are beginning to get an idea on how this director works, highly stylized with a heavy emphasis on violence.

This time it’s a film noir pastiche, with Dylan involved in a love triangle with ex-Bond villain Robert Davi and a young female singer who is much, much, much too young for either of them. It’s pretty creepy actually.

She ends up murdering Davi. Dylan is an accomplice to the crime and then…well I’ll leave you to watch and see what happens at the end. I really like this video and for once Dylan’s acting is pretty good. The clip definitely brings new meaning to the lyrics

The moon went down stars were gone
But the sun didn't rise with the dawn
There wasn't a thing left to say
The night we called it a day

Tony: OK yes this is the best of the lot by far, and yes the video adds to the meaning of the song by giving it one interpretation.

But the whole experience has left me wondering what impact these videos have on the record sales or the popularity of the performer. I’d love to hear more from people who like these videos and why they do. It is, I guess, an art form (at least in the guise we see it here) which is completely beyond me.

But that is not always the case. Aaron has mentioned Spike Jonze’s short film How They Get There, which I didn’t know, but have looked at, and yes I see this, understand it, get it.

This works for me, just as a lot of contemporary dance works for, but the videos here don’t. Maybe I am just blind to the form.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Bob Dylan: Shattering The Glass Of Mirrors

Posted on September 16, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

A quick review. It’s a deep artistic well from which singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan draws, Jungian or deliberately, in a number of his song lyrics.

From a Romantic poem, darkly hopeful:

Column, tower, and dome, and spire
Shine like obelisks of fire
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies
(Percy Shelley: Euganean Hills)

Echoed is the sentiment in the ominous song lyrics below:

There's a woman on my lap, and she's drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up at sapphire-tinted skies
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

From a song in which there be sparks of hope in an otherwise dark world:

I saw, I saw the light from heaven
Shining all around
I saw the light come shining
I saw the light come down
(Bascom Lunsford: Dry Bones)

In death for sure if not before:

I saw my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
(Bob Dylan: I Shall Be Released)

From a poem featuring “Blake-light” tragedy; without darkness, there’d be no light:

It is right it should be so
Man was made for joy and woe
And when this we rightly know
Safely through the world we go
(William Blake: Auguries Of Innocence/Joy)

Below, a darker talking song that sinks much deeper into Gnostic gloom:

Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children no where to go
(September On Jessore Road ~ Ginsberg/Dylan)

From an over-the-top Romantic light opera/movie,”Rose-Marie”:

But if when you hear my love call ringing clear
And I hear you answering echo so clear
Then I know our love will become true
You will belong to me, and I'll belong to you
(Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald: Indian Love Call ~ Firml et. al.)

The sorrowful song lyrics quoted beneath express a longing for love unfulfilled:

Sadly I look out my window
Where I can see the raindrops fall
My heart is many thousand miles away
Where I can hear my true love call
(Bob Dylan: California Brown-Eyed Girl)

From a ‘film noir” movie:

"I'll have some rotten nights after I've sent you over
but that'll pass"
(Private detective Sam Spade: The Maltese Falcon)

Following be cynical song lyrics concerning relationships that turn sour:

Well I have had some rotten nights
Didn't think that they would pass
I'm just thankful and grateful
To be seeing the real you at last
(Bob Dylan: Seeing The Real You At Last)

Observed it is that Bob Dylan pays tribute to artists who shatter the glass of mirrors that reflect an illusion of the existence of a perfect world.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Bob Dylan returns to the radio

Posted on September 15, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Research by Aaron, caught out by surprise by Tony

Tony: So there I was watching the clock and trying to finish off my piece, “The song is like a painting, you can’t see it all at once if you’re standing too close” when in comes an email from Aaron saying, “Have you seen the news?”

https://www.radioeins.de/musik/aktion/bob-dylan-s–theme-time-radio-hour-.html

The article is in German but Aaron has translated it

Aaron’s tranlation: Bob Dylan is always good for a surprise. Not only did he finally release new songs with “Rough & Rowdy Ways”, now he’s reviving his radio show. The new episode of his “Theme Time Radio Hour”, which was created during the lockdown, is even two hours long and his theme is “Whiskey”…

“The radio of Bob Dylan again is a huge surprise, but the time he takes us to the realm of “whiskey” for two hours is not surprising, because he has now launched his own bourbon brand, “Heaven’s Door”.

“Between 2006 and 2009, Bob Dylan produced 100 radio shows for Sirius XM. Each show had a special theme, and Bob Dylan proved not only to be an outstanding music connoisseur, with an exquisite record collection, but above all to be a great storyteller. Otherwise Bob Dylan is rather literal, rarely gives interviews and at his concerts he has not spoken to the audience for a long time.

“But as a radio DJ, Bob Dylan shows a very different facet of his personality. His “Never Ending World Tour” was interrupted by Corona and for the first time in many years he is not to be seen on the stages of the world.

“Then the “Nobel Prize winner” just makes radio again and has doubled his airtime. So the broadcast title “Theme Time Radio Hour” isn’t quite right anymore and Dylan isn’t sure who’s still listening to classical radio, but these two hours on the subject of “Whiskey” are a real radio highlight.

“Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour” is original and exclusive, September 24 between 11-01 p.m.”

Tony: Which of course leaves the question: on which station?

Someone please let us know. In the USA for Aaron, and the UK for Tony.

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Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part V: The roving albino

Posted on September 15, 2020 by TonyAttwood

The story so far…

Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part V: The roving albino

by Jochen Markhorst

1 Foreverly

Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
He was tryin’ to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61

Billie Joe Armstrong, the foreman of Green Day, one of the most successful punk rock bands of the last thirty years, is not afraid to step out of his comfort zone. In 2013 he records Foreverly with Norah Jones, a re-make of The Everly Brothers’ second album.

Billie Joe follows The Everly Brothers also in terms of guts; in 1958, the brothers, in turn, were pleasantly indifferent to the iron laws of commercial success. The previous year The Everly Brothers (1957) was released, featuring the three singles that brought them to the absolute top: “This Girl Of Mine”, “Bye Bye Love” and especially “Wake Up Little Susie”, the crossover world hit that hits 1 in the country charts, the “Black Singles” R&B hit list and the Billboard Hot 100. The monster hits hereafter (“All I Have To Do Is Dream” and “Bird Dog”) will be included in 1959 on their first Greatest Hits LP, but in between Don and Phil merrily step off Success Road, right in the middle of their first peak; in December 1958 they release the charming Songs Our Daddy Taught Us.

The album is ahead of its time. Far ahead of its time. The Everly’s indeed sing the old songs they learned from their father Ike and produce a rootsy tribute to tradition and folklore – without too much exaggeration it could be celebrated as a first Americana album, avant la lettre.

Dylan will have appreciated the album. Woody Guthrie’s “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet”, “Barbara Allen”, Charlie Monroe’s “Down In The Willow Garden”, “That Silver Haired Daddy Of Mine” by Gene Autry… songs and artists that Dylan has on a marble pedestal. And the opening song is the spark: “Roving Gambler”.

“Roving Gambler” was first recorded in 1927, by Kelly Harrell. Indirectly Dylan already refers to him in 1963, in that remarkable piece For Dave Glover, in the program booklet of the Newport Folk Festival. Remarkable, because Dylan here, like fifty years later in his MusiCare speech, reveals the sources of his songs, acknowledging them by name:

The folk songs showed me the way
They showed me that songs can say something human –
Without “Barbara Allen” there’d be no “Girl from the North Country” –
Without no “Lone Green Valley” there’d be no “Don Think Twice”-
Without no “Jesse James” there’d be no “Davy Moore” –
Without no “Twenty one Years” there’d be no “Walls a red wing”

… and just before that he shares:

I gotta sing “Hollis Brown” –
I can’t sing “John Johannah” cause it’s his story an his people’s story –
I gotta sing “With God On My side” cause it’s my story an my people’s story –
I can’t sing “The Girl I Left Behind” cause I know what it’s like to do it –
I gotta sing “Boots a Spanish Leather” cause I know what it’s like to live it

“John Johannah” is also a Kelly Harrell song Dylan already knows, again thanks to that famous Anthology Of American Folk Music from Harry Smith, the collection with Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “Down On Penny’s Farm” (the template for Dylan’s “Hard Times in New York City”), “John The Revelator” and “When That Great Ship Went Down” and “John Hardy” and all those other songs that have taught him the lingo, and that will echo through his oeuvre for the next sixty years.

Harrell can be found on Volume 1 twice. The second song from Side C is the song about the assassin of President Garfield in 1881, “Charles Guiteau” and will be played by broadcaster Dylan in Theme Time Radio Hour (episode 68, “President’s Day”). The last song of Side B is the song Dylan mentions in For Dave Glover, with the posed – and untrue – addition that he cannot sing that song “because it is his story and the story of his people”. Posed, because John Johannah’s story is a ten-a-penny story of a farm worker who is being exploited; a protagonist like Dylan will perform in “Maggie’s Farm”, and the kind of protagonist under whose skin Dylan has crawled dozens of times in 1963 (“Walkin’ Down The Line”, for example). Still, he never sings “John Johannah”, that much is true. He does steal the melody, though; he uses it for “Long Time Gone” (although the melody also resembles that other song he “can’t sing”; “The Girl I Left Behind”).

But Dylan will sing a third song by Harrell. A song he will sing longer even than any other song – apart from his own songs, of course. “Roving Gambler” has been on his repertoire since 1960 and returns with interruptions until 2002.

2 From El Paso up to Maine

This roving gambler, the gambler in the last verse of “Highway 61 Revisited”, wants to start a new world war out of sheer boredom, but still is better off than his namesake, who spends his days in jail after shooting a card opponent because I saw him deal from the bottom of the deck.

This path the jumpy mind of the rock poet does not follow. As is often the case, Dylan seems to be mainly triggered by topography. The original roving gambler does travel around: in the first verse he is still in Washington, but by the time we arrive at the fifth verse, the gambler has already come quite a way:

I left her in El Paso and I wound up in Maine
I met up with a gambling man
Got in a poker game

From Washington via El Paso to Maine, back and forth in fact – even if he takes the shortest route (which is not too likely), he is still nearly five thousand miles on his way to that table where he will draw his gun.

Dylan will visit El Paso more often (“She’s Your Lover Now”, “Wanted Man” and “Billy”), but here “Maine” seems to stir Dylan’s stream of consciousness.

In songs, Maine is mostly used like in “Roving Gambler”; as a topographical metaphor for “very far”. Like in “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill” (From San Diego up to Maine) or in Belafonte’s “Farewell Jamaica” (Though I’ve been from Maine to Mexico), but it seems obvious that in the back of Dylan’s mind one of Sinatra’s signature songs plays: “The Lady Is A Tramp”, which opens with

I've wined and dined on Mulligan Stew
And never wished for Turkey
As I hitched and hiked and grifted too
From Maine to Albuquerque

A hint for this guess we find towards the end of Sinatra’s classic:

I go to Coney, the beach is divine
I go to ballgames, the bleachers are fine
I follow Winchell, and read every line
That's why the lady is a tramp

… “The Lady Is A Tramp” is probably the only song in Dylan’s baggage with that atypical word bleachers, which appears so alienating in the penultimate line of this last “Highway 61 Revisited” verse. Sinatra also sings I like a prizefight that isn’t a fake in the next verse, which is a link to Dylan’s half boxing reference in this same stanza, to he found a promoter.

Creative and wild, these supposed associations, but roving – tramp – Maine – bleachers is still a fairly straight line. More likely, in any case, than the content-driven interpretations of diligent analysts who cloak themselves in the alleged deeper intention behind he was trying to create a next world war – even in the twenty-first century, there are still plenty of Dylanologists who do recognise a “clear political undertone” herein, see it as an expression of apocalyptic fears, taking “world war” quite literally. Not necessarily nonsensical, but once again, the Nobel Prize speech words of the bard seem more apt than these over-serious analyses here:

I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means. (…) But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.

“We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun / And have it on Highway 61”… yup. Sounds good.

3 Complexion much too white

Although “Highway 61 Revisited” is one of the many, many highlights of the Golden Five Hundred Days, the days when Dylan is at a mercury peak and produces Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde (plus small masterpieces like “Farewell Angelina”, “Positively 4th Street” or “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, the songs rejected for those albums), it is still remarkable that Dylan doesn’t immediately recognise the special magic of the song. It does not appear on the set list of performances in the US, Canada and England in ’65, nor is it played during the world tour of ’66, and only at that Isle Of Wight concert, 31 August 1969, does it have its premiere.

Perhaps the persuasion of the men of The Band is needed. On Dylan’s return to the stages, together with The Band in 1974, the song is ignored for another month, but from the twenty-seventh concert, the evening concert in New York on 31 January, Dylan seems to have given in – the rest of the tour the song has a fixed place, somewhere at the end of the setlist. Apparently, Dylan is still not entirely convinced, though – it will take another ten years, until 1984, before he plays the song again. And it is not until 1987 that he is finally won over; since then it has been on the programme almost continuously. Today “Highway 61 Revisited” is even one of his most frequently played songs. On the list of the tireless Dylan watcher Olof Björner, the song is number three in 2020, with 2,032 performances.

The colleagues were already convinced a long time ago. Irresistible stomp, dazzling drive, brilliant, funny lyrics… the song is often and gladly covered.

The most famous is probably the one by the albino guitar god Johnny Winter, who records a splendid cover for his LP Second Winter (1969), and considers the song since, together with “Johnny B. Goode” of course, as one of his signature songs: until his death he continues to play it at almost every concert.

His last performance shall be in France, Quatorze Juilliet 2014. The fragile seventy-year-old Johnny has to stay seated, opens with a flaming “Johnny B. Goode”, plays a set of eleven classics and then returns for his last encore: Robert Johnson’s “Dust My Broom” and finally the very last song he will play in his life: “Highway 61 Revisited”.

He dies two days later in Zurich. Cause of death unknown, but presumably albino related – his complexion was much too white, after all.

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

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The last time Dylan played…. the complete “last time” video

Posted on September 14, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Video and listing by mr tabourine

Intro comments by Tony Attwood

mr tabourine has prepared this amazing video sequence, which I have to admit I have been playing since the moment he made it go live.

It is a sequence of the last performance of Dylan songs between 2012 and 2019, and it runs as a sequence in the order given below. Over 80 songs across eight hours of continuous video, in each case the very last performance.

Of course we all want the virus to be beaten and for Bob to tour again, but we have to admit this might not happen. So this is an incredibly valuable document, and I am so grateful first for mr tambourine creating it, and second for mr tabourine giving Untold Dylan the chance to publish it.

Reviews may follow – but for the moment I am just sitting here with my mouth open

All Dylan songs played for the very last time live (so far), from 2012-2019

01. My Back Pages (Montreux, July 8 2012)
02. Absolutely Sweet Marie (Lyon, July 18 2012)
03. This Wheel’s On Fire (Carhaix, July 23 2012)
04. Saving Grace (Johnstown, August 29 2012)
05. This Dream Of You (Winnipeg, October 5 2012)
06. Nettie Moore (Edmonton, October 9 2012)
07. Hattie Carroll (Sacramento, October 20 2012)
08. Hollis Brown (Sacramento, October 20 2012)
09. Love Minus Zero (Broomfield, October 30 2012)
10. John Brown (Broomfield, October 30 2012)
11. Joey (Toronto, November 14 2012)
12. Sugar Baby (Toronto, November 14 2012)
13. Mississippi (Philadelphia, November 19 2012)
14. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Brooklyn, November 21 2012)
15. Chimes Of Freedom (Brooklyn, November 21 2012)2013
16. Shooting Star (Denver, July 31 2013) – second to last, the last recorded version in circulation. The very last was played the next day in Salt Lake City.
17. It’s Alright, Ma (Stockholm, October 12 2013)
18. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Rome, November 6 2013)
19. Queen Jane Approximately (Rome, November 6 2013)
20. Every Grain Of Sand (Rome, November 6 2013)
21. Man In The Long Black Coat (Rome, November 7 2013)
22. Positively 4th Street (Rome, November 7 2013)
23. Rollin’ And Tumblin’ (Rome, November 7 2013)
24. When The Deal Goes Down (Rome, November 7 2013)
25. Under The Red Sky (Rome, November 7 2013)
26. Ain’t Talkin’ (Rome, November 7 2013)
27. I Don’t Believe You (Rome, November 7 2013)
28. Roll On John (London, November 26 2013)2014
29. Huck’s Tune (Osaka, April 23 2014) – last recorded version circulating, the last one was exactly two months later in Athens, but not in circulation unfortunately
30. Most Likely You Go Your Way (Stavern, July 11 2014)
31. Million Miles/Cry A While (Stavern, July 11 2014) – Bob starts singing what would turn out to be the last performance of Million Miles to date, but then switched to the lyrics of Cry A While (even laughs when realizing what he’s done)
32. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Gothenburg, July 15 2014) – last singing version. The song would be played 6 or 7 more times in 2019 but as an instrumental closer. Bob’s official site doesn’t list those instrumentals as live performances of this song.
33. Watching The River Flow (Gothenburg, July 15 2014)34. What Good Am I? (Hamilton, August 9 2014)2015
35. Waitin’ For You (San Sebastian, July 11 2015)
36. Forgetful Heart (San Sebastian, July 11 2015)
37. ‘Til I Fell In Love With You (Albi, July 12 2015)
38. Jolene (Saint-Malo-du-Bois, July 13 2015)
39. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight (Lorrach, July 16 2015)
40. The Levee’s Gonna Break (Lorrach, July 16 2015)
41. Shelter From The Storm (Lorrach, July 16 2015)
42. Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum (Lorrach, July 16 2015)2016
43. She Belongs To Me (Gilford, July 17 2016)
44. Masters Of War (Indio, October 7 2016)
45. Rainy Day Women #12 & #35 (Indio, October 14 2016)2017
46. Standing In The Doorway (Stockholm, April 1 2017)
47. To Ramona (Portchester, June 14 2017)
48. Lonesome Day Blues (Dover, June 17 2017)
49. Blind Willie McTell (Dover, June 17 2017)
50. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (Dover, June 17 2017)2018
51. Spirit On The Water (Salamanca, March 24 2018) – last recorded version in circulation, played three more times on March 26, 27 and 28 in Madrid, but those are not in circulation
52. Visions Of Johanna (Sydney, August 18 2018)
53. Duquesne Whistle (Newcastle, August 22 2018)
54. Desolation Row (Auckland, August 26 2018)
55. Tangled Up In Blue (Christchurch, August 28, 2018)
56. Summer Days (Christchurch, August 28, 2018)
57. Workingman’s Blues #2 (Tucson, October 5, 2018)
58. High Water (Tucson, October 5, 2018) – last circulating version, played two more times on October 7 and October 9, but neither of those are in circulation
59. All Along The Watchtower (New York, November 29, 2018) – last2019
60. Dignity (Fuengirola, May 4 2019)
61. Cry A While (Roskilde, July 3 2019)
62. Boots Of Spanish Leather (Braunschweig, July 6 2019)
63. Don’t Think Twice (Mainz, July 7 2019)
64. Scarlet Town (Stuttgart, July 10 2019)
65. Like A Rolling Stone (Kilkenny, July 14 2019)
66. Love Sick (Kilkenny, July 14 2019)
67. Blowin’ In The Wind (Kilkenny, July 14 2019)
68. Long And Wasted Years (Irvine, October 11 2019)
69. Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ (St. Louis, October 22 2019) – last circulating version, played the final time the next night but not in circulation
70. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (St. Louis, October 22 2019) – last circulating version, played the final time the next night but not in circulation December 8, 2019 Washington (last show currently that Bob performed)
71. Things Have Changed
72. It Ain’t Me, Babe
73. Highway 61
74. Simple Twist Of Fate
75. Can’t Wait
76. When I Paint My Masterpiece
77. Honest With Me
78. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
79. Make You Feel My Love
80. Pay In Blood
81. Lenny Bruce
82. Early Roman Kings
83. Girl Of The North Country
84. Not Dark Yet
85. Thunder On The Mountain
86. Soon After Midnight
87. Gotta Serve Somebody
88. Thin Man
89. It Takes A Lot To Laugh

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Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part IV: A smoke raised with the fume of sighs

Posted on September 13, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

The story so far…

1 Open your ears; 9r”5j5&

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

(T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land)

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

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

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

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

blbbbbnnfllmnnmjfgmnmmmassssssjjkbhnmnn

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

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

2 A cloud that’s dragonish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 If music be the food of love, play on

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

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

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

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

immediately because it spoke to me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Dylan the sideman: Jack Elliott, Geoff Muldaur and Neill Young (plus Carolyn Hester)

Posted on September 13, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

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

Aaron: Just the two tracks in this episodes…

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/8Wuz2Vyrv5Y

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

Here’s Bob playing it in 1961.

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

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

Here’s the opening verse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mama, You Been On My Mind, by a straightforward fan

Posted on September 12, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

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

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

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

But a fan, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Play lady play “Oh Mercy” (and some jazz)

Posted on September 12, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And answer came their none.

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

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

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Bob Dlyan: “Booging” The Rhyme

Posted on September 11, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

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

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

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

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

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

The following lyrics are by a country bluesman:

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

End rhymes ~ ‘run’/’one’

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

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

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

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

And so it goes:

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

The end rhyme ~ 'go'/'slow'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Bob’s rarities: Money Honey, More and More, Ragtime Annie

Posted on September 11, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

Money Honey

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

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

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

More and more

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

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

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

Just one more for today:

Ragtime Annie

https://youtu.be/xdK_4Xf1vyU

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

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

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

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

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

More anon…

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

Here are the individual sessions…

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Dylan’s official videos: The deal, Dreaming of you, Here lies nothing

Posted on September 10, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Research by Aaron Galbraith; silly comments by Tony Attwood

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

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

Tony

———

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

“When The Deal Goes Down” from 2006.

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

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

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

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

A wonderful piece of work.

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

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

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

Dreamin of you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Beyond Here Lies Nothin’”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part III: Words don’t interfere

Posted on September 10, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

1 Captain Arab & Pirate Jenny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Louie, Louie

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Brother Bill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Dylan’s Elusive Authenticity: plagiarism, roles and voices

Posted on September 9, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Peter McQuitty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter McQuitty.

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Bob Dylan’s Seventh Dream

Posted on September 9, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Larry Fyffe

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

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

But he records:

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

(Bob Dylan: I Shall Be Free)

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

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

“We lost….we’ll always lose”.

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

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

A sweetness that makes me wonder

"Now when did that take place?"

(Jules Laforgue: Legends ~ translated)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

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

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

(Bob Dylan: Seven Days)

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

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

(Bob Dylan: Seven Curses)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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Dylan the sideman: Bromberg, Booker T, Priscilla Jones, David Blue

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (1963) Part I: Time Passes

Bob Dylan: The Roving Gambler

A song is like a painting, you can’t see it all if you’re standing too close.

Bob’s live rarities: As I went out, Billy, Get out of Denver.

Dylan’s promotional videos: Must be Santa, Drummer Boy, Duquesne, the noir

Bob Dylan: Shattering The Glass Of Mirrors

Bob Dylan returns to the radio

Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part V: The roving albino

The last time Dylan played…. the complete “last time” video

Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part IV: A smoke raised with the fume of sighs

Dylan the sideman: Jack Elliott, Geoff Muldaur and Neill Young (plus Carolyn Hester)

Mama, You Been On My Mind, by a straightforward fan

Play lady play “Oh Mercy” (and some jazz)

Bob Dlyan: “Booging” The Rhyme

Bob’s rarities: Money Honey, More and More, Ragtime Annie

Dylan’s official videos: The deal, Dreaming of you, Here lies nothing

Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part III: Words don’t interfere

Dylan’s Elusive Authenticity: plagiarism, roles and voices

Bob Dylan’s Seventh Dream

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