Untold Dylan

By Paul Robert Thomas & Kim E. Hatton

This article continues from Bob Dylan’s Odyssey: The Basement Tapes, Part 1

The title of Get Ya Rocks Off and the way it’s performed hardly needs explanation. Or does it? It’s unambiguously sexual. Or is it? ‘Old maids’ could either be a derogatory reference to a couple of gay men, or to lesbian sex.

Fats Domino immortalized Blueberry Hill in 1954/5 drawling with bovine contentment ‘I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill’ and he wasn’t referring to the scenery!! Now, just over ten years later, Dylan’s narrator pays the place a visit and reports ‘one man turned to the other man and said …. ‘A homosexual encounter is heavily implied, and driven home with reference to ‘Mink Muscle Creek’ in the next verse, which could be Gay slang for arse, or again, straight slang for vagina. But if Get Ya Rocks Off can only ever be interpreted as a sexual command or invitation (there has been some disagreement on this) then it’s now the last line which is disturbing.

"Well, you know, we was cruisin' down the highway in a Greyhound bus
All kinds-a children in the side road, they was hollerin' at us sayin’
Get Ya Rocks Off (Get em off!)
Get Ya Rocks Off-a-me (Get em off!)"

 Someone has suggested that this is just a reference to the children of southern shantytowns, ragged and dirty, hungry’ and rude. We’ll come back to this at the end of discussing this song.

Another suggestion makes them child prostitutes. They are in ‘the side streets’ – on the edges of society, (another possible interpretation of ‘down by the river’ in the verse quoted earlier. They shout out the refrain of the title. Then again the drawing in Lyrics depicts a man throwing rocks from a pile on top of a van.

So maybe the ‘Rocks’ are ‘oppression’s’, acts of sexual invasion, or rocks of social repressiveness. (The only thing the drawing calls to mind is a scene from a riot). ‘Cruising’ is sexual slang for importuning, seeking out sex. So are these child prostitutes?

It was written at a time when The Velvet Underground; Warhol’s Factory and sexual libertarianism were all in the ascendant. The interpretation hinges on the phrase ‘Get Ya Rocks Off’. If Jagger sang it there would be no doubt that it was a sexual invitation. But it can also mean ‘get loose’, drop your reserve, don’t be so oppressive. And each time that the phrase is used, it’s used Personally and negatively, Get Ya Rocks off-a me. (But as John Baldwin has suggested, in recent conversation, Dylan’s grammar is such that he might mean “get ya rocks onto me’.

In conclusion the song is either a demand for sex, a refusal of sexual advances, or a demand for personal freedom and respect. Maybe the song is an archetypal shout for liberty against oppression. An interpretation, which came to one of us, suggests that the song is a montage, cinematic in its imagery, nonlinear in its chronology. Snippets of sexual encounters perhaps heard of or experienced in the craziness of that era fill one frame at a time till, in the final frame, we see what Greil Marcus might call a slice of Americana. The bearded, matted face of the narrator who has been recollecting these scenes looks out through the smeared window of his millionaire’s touring bus, and sees another world, poor, undernourished but spirited. Ragged kids run alongside shouting “Get Ya Rocks Off!”. Suspend your Bacchanalia and Get Real! (Or even applied to interpreters of Dylan, ‘Stop all your intellectual masturbation and get out on the streets.’)

Million Dollar Bash could also be read as a song about sexual frustration/obsession. ‘I’m hittin it too hard my stones won’t take’ sounds like a masturbation reference, and ‘come now sweet cream’ a seminal reference – if you’ll excuse the pun! Listening to it and reading the lyrics it seems to be describing a boozy sex-soaked apocalyptic orgy to one of us. Going out with a bang not a whimper. Dumb blondes, Silly Nelly, (a ‘Nelly’ is archaic slang for a male prostitute) and Turtle all remind us of the freaks on the ‘official’ Basement Tapes cover as well as Warhol’s retinue. But what about the following stanzas?

"The louder they come
The harder they crack"

"Well I looked at my watch
I looked at my wrist
Punched myself in the face with my fist”

"I look my potatoes down to be mashed
Then l made it over
To that million dollar bash"

 In three of the six verses ‘The Bash’ is in the future. What it is, however isn’t clear. Someone says ‘Orgy’; another says ‘Judgment Day’. But ‘the louder’ they come is a paraphrase of ‘The bigger they are the harder they fall’, a reference to the vanity of pride and self-importance. And ‘Punched myself in the face…’ suggests trying to wake up. Interpret it how you will. If it’s about sexual encounters then they seem pretty futile and vain, ‘Hello/Goodbye, Push/Crash’ ‘But we’re all gonna make it to that Million Dollar Bash’. When ya’ll come to your senses Bob?

In Silent Weekend the woman is the dominant partner, e.g. ‘My baby she gave it to me’ ‘She’s actin tough and hardy’ ‘She’s rockin’ and a reelin’/Head up to the ceiling’ etc. But is ‘she’ a woman? ‘Head’ (Penis) up to the ceiling might refer back to Temporary Like Achilles ‘pointing to the sky and hungry like a man in drag’. Alternatively she could he acting tough and hardy because she’s in the line of women like the ‘steam shovel mama’ and ‘junkyard angel’ of Highway 61 Revisited.

You Ain’t Going Nowhere, popularized by The Byrds and neutered by Joan Baez, appeared as a song almost completely rewritten as an up-tempo celebration of the pastoral life but with much more obscure lyrics on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits vol 2. Here it is delivered with a laconic humour with the chorus ‘Whoa-eee ride me high’ sounding like a jaded, cynical request for a good fuck before tomorrow, ‘the day (when) my Bride’s gonna come.’ No double-entendre on ‘come’ here, but who is fucking who in the absence of the ‘bride’? And “we’ll climb that hill no matter how steep, when we get up to it”? We’ll face tomorrow when it comes but, for now, ‘Ride me high’ while we have time. Any sexualisation of this song is wholly dependent on a reading of ‘Ride me high’ = Fuck me hard. So is Dylan’s narrator/persona referring to going back to faithful monogamy? (If so where is he keeping his mistress? Not in the kitchen at this stage). We’ll return to this song with a fuller interpretation later.

The line followed by these songs could be congruent with the tradition they are rooted in – Blues, Burlesque, Jazz and ‘Race Music’, (and of the type of life and characters described in Levon Helm’s story of The Band This Wheel’s On Fire.) The tradition drew a thin veil over sex by describing it in innocuous metaphors or apparently meaningless slang. Listen to Bessie Smith singing ‘I love it when my Daddy takes me for a Buggy Ride’ and try to convince yourself that she’s celebrating the joy of increased mobility!!!! (It seems a good time to mention Bessie Smith because in all this ‘analysis’ maybe we’re not conveying how much deadpan humour and sly ribaldry there is on this vast collection of songs.) But we are aware of many who find that any suggestion of sexual innuendo in Dylan’s songs is anathema to them. But how would they interpret the following:

"Well you can tell everybody'
Down in ol' Frisco
Tell em Tiny Montgomery says Hello”

"Now ev’ry boy and ev’ry girl's
Gonna get their bang
Cause Tiny Montgomery’s
Gonna shake that thing
Tell evr’body
Down in old Frisco
That Tiny Montgomery’s comin'
To say hello"

"Scratch your dad
Do that bird
Suck that pig
And bring it on home'

Pick that drip
And bake that dough
Tell em all
That Tiny says hello"

 Michael Gray has written that some interpreters of Dylan have seen ‘Tiny Montgomery’ as about ‘wielding power’. And someone out there will say he’s God or Jesus. We invite interpretations on this song because if we’re struggling – help us with our load. That said, it seems like Tiny is a randy little bugger who is happy fucking either sex and when he ‘shakes that thing’ well, People Get Ready there’s more than a-train-coming! ‘Suck that pig’ (Fellatio with a cop’?) ‘Do that Bird’? ‘Bring it on home’? San Francisco, notorious for its sexual license, Gay population and carnival atmosphere, seems the ideal setting for such debauchery and even Sade-Masochistic acts. (Does the pig want to be greased?). But maybe Tiny Montgomery is just an old forgotten Blues singer, like Little Walter, who Dylan and The Band wanted to pay homage to. Maybe. Maybe. Please Mrs. Henry has been dealt with playfully in one of Michael Gray’s chapters from Song & Dance Man, as fitting the ‘scatology obsession theory’ which, paraphrased, goes something like this:

The male narrator is playing at little boy lost, drunk and with his bladder bursting, he falls to his knees begging Mrs. Henry to take him to his room. His ‘crane’ (penis is gonna leak, his ‘stool’s’ (turd) squeaking, he’s not going to be able to hold on much longer, and hasn’t got a dime to pay to get in to ‘the little boys room’.

Now that’s power play. And Mrs. Henry is doing the wielding. But couldn’t ‘Down on my knees’ suggest a submissive sexual position? And Mrs. Henry? A sadistically powerful woman or, given the juxtaposition of female title with male name, a transvestite/transsexual? But, doesn’t Gray have a point? This sounds ‘Just Like A Man’ who has been hitting the bottle too hard and now wants Mama to take care of the consequences. He breaks just like a little boy. No? As the title of the chapter from Michael Gray’s Song & Dance Man says, however, ‘Theories-Anyone Can Play’. So, put pen to paper.

The Basement Tapes can be plumbed over and over again for meaning and often, in sharing this article, the authors have violently but creatively disagreed. Is ‘mound’ in Lo and Behold a reference to an erection, what is meant by ‘chicken town’? Another interpretation of chicken, according to American slang, is a young or fresh, (virginal) young woman. Read Charles Bukowski’s short story, Life In A Texas Whorehouse. The phrase never appears there but all is not what it seems. The whole town is a whorehouse except for the pimps, portrayed by various liars, hypocrites and rednecks. Further, an American at Sussex University has confirmed that ‘Chicken Town’ has been used in reference to parts of America, or ‘Red Light’ districts Given these interpretations of ‘chickens’, is this a song of sexual excess?

“Get me out of here my dear man!”

And exhaustion? And ‘dear man’? Effete? Or a pastiche of Anglo/Southern States courtesy? In the process of each of us working on our own ‘angle’, then sharing our ideas we began to form a larger picture, and a theme seemed to be emerging. If such songs as those above, and others which space hasn’t permitted us to treat in enough depth, could be viewed as ‘songs of debauchery’ what of the others, Sign On The Cross, Too Much of Nothing, I Shall Be Released’?

Many have commented extensively and persuasively on the sexual imagery in Dylan’s songs and it is there in many of them. But is sex and excess always viewed positively? Goin’ to Acapulco features a whore (Rose Marie) but the debauchery’ begins to lose its amoral tone. Unease can be detected

“It's a wicked life but what the hell
The stars ain’t falling down.
I'm standing outside the Taj Mahal
I don’t see no one around”.

 ‘It’s a wicked life’ might be read as It’s a sinful life – I’m listening as I write, to the way it’s sung and I’m not convinced by the bravado, vis. it’s ‘wrong’ but ‘what the hell the stars ain’t fallin’ down’…. memories of being a kid and testing the validity of what I’d been told about ‘GOD’, and saying/praying …. ‘I don’t believe you exist’ and being relieved/disappointed when the ‘stars didn’t fall down’. In the song, Dylan seems to be saying ‘it’s a wicked life but’… it’s only sex, a bit of fun, but he doesn’t sing it as though he believes it. The song is performed as a dirge, a lament, carnality offers none of the comfort which is craved. Rose Marie is out for what she can get, ‘likes to go to big places,’ dependent on Dylan to pay. Love stands alone, abandoned. The Taj Mahal, a Tomb/Memorial, was built by a heartbroken Indian Prince to immortalize the love he felt for a young wife who died in childbirth It is a paradigm of unconditional, ‘agape’, love. Dylan suggests nobody is interested in such love.

Maybe this explains why, later, he would change his way of thinking and rant against the Bath Houses in San Francisco (Note 9). Guilt? Self-loathing? (Neville Symington has pointed out that Jesus’s attacks against the pharisees was an attack on his own ‘Shadow’, the part of himself he couldn’t own) (Note 10). As a convert to Fundamentalist Christianity, Dylan would undoubtedly have made a public confession of everything ‘sinful’ to The Church (Vineyard Fellowship) – but in this song a particular moral slant is absent:- ‘I try to tell it like it is’. And in Lo and Behold the stanza, ‘He asked me for my name I gave it to him right away’, which might be interpreted as a rash giving away of the narrator’s sex, integrity or self is followed by a line of remorse ‘I hung my head in shame’ (I associate this with the line in I dreamed I Saw St Augustine ‘I bowed my head and cried’.)

So, while the above songs (including Acapulco‘ and the unexplored Clothes Line Saga, could or could not have sexual references it’s just as possible to read or hear them differently. Art works through its multiplicity of ‘meanings’. Clothes Line Saga, for example, may be heard as a dig at small-town Middle America (Minneapolis?) or a pastiche off Ode To Billy Joe, as Clinton Heylin suggests (Note 9). But many of the songs stand out as being songs of debauchery because, as well as their language and the way the songs are performed, they are in stark contrast to many other songs of the collection. They suggest a tension, a conflict, so that the whole collection begins to make sense in the context of Dylan’s life prior to recording them following a long period of self examination.

The series continues…

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 6500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

by Jochen Markhorst

Like earlier “Desolation Row” and “Where Are You Tonight?”, “Mississippi” can’t really be dealt with in one article. Too grand, too majestic, too monumental. And, of course, such an extraordinary masterpiece deserves more than one paltry article. As the master says (not about “Mississippi”, but about bluegrass, in the New York Times interview of June 2020): Its’s mysterious and deep rooted and you almost have to be born playing it. […] It’s harmonic and meditative, but it’s out for blood.

I           Sexy Afro- polyrhythm

“Things got contentious once in the parking lot. He tried to convince me that the song had to be “sexy, sexy and more sexy.” I know about sexy, too. He reminded me of Sam Phillips, who had once said the same thing to John Prine about a song, but the circumstances were not similar.”

(David Fricke interview for Rolling Stone, 2001)

In the A&E Series Biography, Peter Guralnick’s brilliant documentary about Sam Phillips is broadcast in 2000: “Sam Phillips – The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll”. The film lasts 90 fascinating minutes, and towards the end the sons of Phillips, Jerry and Knox, talk about their father’s interference with John Prine.

At the beginning of 1979 John Prine records a particularly atypical record, Pink Cadillac. After five albums full of widely admired songs, songs for which even Dylan takes off his hat, Prine wants to profess his love for good old rock ‘n’ roll with his sixth album. For the first and only time in his career, the lyrics are of minor importance. It had to be good, honest music, according to Prine in the liner notes of the album.

He repeats it more poetically in the liner notes of the unsurpassed compilation album Great Days, also written down by David Fricke in 1993:

“I wanted to do something noisy, something like if you had a buddy with a band and you walked into his house and you could hear ’em practicing in the basement.”

He would like to record that album in the studio of the legendary Sun Records producer Sam Phillips in Memphis, led by sons Jerry and Knox Phillips, who will also produce Prine’s record. However, to Prine’s delight, one day Dad stops by – and he takes charge of the production right away.

Today “Saigon” and “How Lucky” are on the roll.

The old Phillips only came in to say hello, hears Prine’s – in his ears – “awful” singing and just has to do something. First he thunders his displeasure with Prine’s limp vocals into the studio via the intercom from the control room. “And then he put extra reverb, the slap-back echo, on his voice,” Prine tells. “You felt like Moses talking to the burning bush.”

When it still doesn’t suffice, Phillips slides on his kitchen chair into Prine’s comfort zone and snaps, millimetres from Prine’s face, eyes maniacally wide open and bulging: “And John, can you put some sex in it?”

In the documentary, son Knox, who does look a lot like his father, imitates it in a terrifying way, including the wildly insane look.

The next recording of “Saigon” satisfies Sam, but some question marks may be placed over his judgement – Prine’s vocals on this final recording actually do sound rather twisted, unnatural and not very spontaneous. The protagonist nevertheless looks back with pride and affection, in the same documentary. “I was in the studio with Sam Phillips, you know. If Sam told me to stand on my head and sing that night, I would’ve.”

Phillips wanting to hear sex in “Saigon” is conceivable, indeed:

You got everything that a girl should grow
I’m so afraid to kiss you I might lose control
You can hold me tighter but turn loose of my gun
It’s a sentimental present all the way from Saigon

But why Daniel Lanois thinks “Mississippi” should sound “sexy, sexy and more sexy” is less understandable. Dylan does have a point when he says, “The circumstances were not similar.”

However, Dylan’s next statement, still in the same paragraph of that interview with David Fricke for Rolling Stone, is once again familiarly enigmatic:

“I tried to explain that the song had more to do with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than witch doctors, and just couldn’t be thought of as some kind of ideological voodoo thing.”

My my. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and before that Dylan also points to a hidden expressive meaning behind the lyrics.
Poor Daniel Lanois; that indeed does require some explanation. The ease with which Dylan shifts complete verses back and forth and the untroubled way with which he deletes entire verse lines (for example, the third outtake opens with I’m standing in the shadows with an aching heart / I’m looking at the world tear itself apart) doesn’t really support the statement that Dylan himself sees very clearly what he wants to express in the text.

Even more puzzling is Dylan’s analysis a little earlier in the interview:

“Lanois didn’t see it. Thought it was pedestrian. Took it down the Afro-polyrhythm route — multirhythm drumming, that sort of thing. Polyrhythm has its place, but it doesn’t work for knifelike lyrics trying to convey majesty and heroism.”

“Multi-rhythm drumming” and “Afro-polyrhythm” does sound a bit hysterical, frankly. On the rejected, breathtakingly beautiful recordings, the three versions which will eventually be released on The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006 (2008), there is no such thing. Lanois creates a J.J. Cale-like atmosphere, including a tapping foot – it really is not that fancy. It almost seems as if Dylan confuses the song with the also rejected recordings of “Series Of Dreams”, a song that – although it cannot be catalogued under the heading “majesty and heroism” – is indeed filled with a cascade of furious, overwhelming drumming, with “multi-rhythm drumming” and “Afro-polyrhythm”.

Sexy it is, though.

To be continued. Next up: Mississippi part II: Lomax’ Death

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 6500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

By Larry Fyffe

The downplay of the influence of Blake on Bob Dylan is just too much to take; both in technique and in theme, the nuanced poetry of Blake reveals itself –  seen here, there, and everywhere in the song lyrics of Bob Dylan. As TS Eliot underestimates Blake’s knowledge of classical literature so does Paul Thomas underestimate Dylan’s knowledge of literary giants like the poet William Blake who lives in a world of darkness and light, brightness and night.

Let us go you and I, let us go and make a visit:

O the cunning wiles that creep
In the little heart asleep!
When the little heart doth wake
Then the dreadful night shall break
(William Blake: Cradle Song)

According to the preRomantic poet, the innocence of the Lamb of chilhood soon encounters the dire Tiger of adult experience smiling in the window:

Tiger, Tiger,  burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
(Blake: The Tiger)

The following song lyrics depict a society filled with darkness; a Lamb, even with the inner strength of a Tiger, has no protection from the sleep of death. John Lennon is gunned down and killed by an overly zealous fundamentalist follower of a ferocious Tiger God, the Beatle crucified like Jesus – the Lamb of God – on the cross:

Tiger, Tiger burning bright
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
In the forest of the night
Cover him up and let him sleep
Roll on John
Shine your light
Move it on
You burned so bright
(Dylan: Roll On John)

Observes Blake, the Church of the Tiger God binds the natural urges of the adult human with iron chains of dogma:

And I saw it was filled with graves
And tombstones where flowers should be
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds
And binding with briars, my joys and desires
(Blake: The Garden Of Love)

In the song lyrics below, the sexual desire of human beings, decried by Blake’s black-robed priests, is symbolized by the “Hotel Tiger” :

They walked down by the old canal
A little confused, I remember well
And stopped by a strange hotel
With neon burning bright
He felt the heat of the night
(Bob Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)

No Swedenborgan is Blake – as it be on earth so it be in heaven; matters go awry right from the start when the authoritarian God demands that His shiny followers behave as though they were a flock of clawless, tearful, and spearless sheep. Like the Hebrews who flee into the wilderness from Egypt, the established Church ends up with a breakaway pride of Tigers who’d rather rule in hell than serve in heaven:

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears
Did he smile His work to see
Did He who made the Lamb make thee?
(Blake: The Tiger)

Contrary to what Paul Thomas says in his ‘Untold’ article, Bob Dylan as an artist is Blakean to the core:

Far away where the soft winds blow
Far away from it all
There's a place to go
Where teardrops fall
Far away in the stormy night
Far way and over the wall
You are there in the flickering light
Where teardrops fall
(Bob Dylan: Where Teardrops Fall)

https://youtu.be/hN3KthxvOjE

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 6500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

By Paul Robert Thomas & Kim E. Hatton

FOREWORD

The following is the fruit of two very different approaches to the songs performed and recorded by Dylan and The Band in the period June to October/November 1967, after a year of ‘public silence’ from Dylan following his ‘Motorcycle Accident’. This effectively gave him time to reappraise his life during the ‘retirement’ he had been talking about at the time of the 1966 tour.

It is our belief that the songs which appear on The Genuine Basement Tapes give a unique insight into the way Dylan perceived the madness of his fame, the toll it took and the lifestyle it had led him into.

In the case of one of us, we heard many of the songs as containing sexually explicit lyrics, veiled by innuendo, slang and metaphor, and referring to sexual deviations as diverse as male homosexuality, lesbianism, anal intercourse, transvestism and fellatio. This suggested one reason why Dylan had shown so little interest in releasing The Tapes as an album which would bridge the change in his work from Blonde On Blonde to John Wesley Hardin’, of which the latter suggested, to some, that Dylan had undergone what Clinton Heylin reports as ‘a personality change’ (Note 1) – a rather radical expression for achieving maturity.

But, while one of us was working on questioning the songs sexual content, the other was concerned with the overall feel of this wealth of songs. Some were no more than warm-ups, although the choice of material pointed to the wide range of Dylan’s repertoire, harking back to country and blues by little known artists. Then there were pastiches of the emerging ‘teen music’ of the fifties and, most importantly, there was also a wealth of songs which seem preoccupied with doubt, judgement and apocalypse, and so the possibility suggested itself of there being a narrative revealing a time of spiritual crisis following the touring of 1965 & 1966, captured so well on the films Don’t Look Back and Eat The Document.

Whilst confirming our comments here to the songs included in Lyrics we took account of the material available on The Genuine Basement Tapes. What evolved, as both of us worked separately on an exploration of The Tapes, only discussing our work by phone or the occasional letter, was a shared conviction that The Basement Tapes can be interpreted as having a unifying theme which reveals itself as an eschatological conceit, as we ‘wind back the clock and turn back the page to reveal a book which nobody can write’ – but which Dylan has sought to embody the spirit of in the performances of the last thirty years, and comes close to succeeding with on The Basement Tapes alone.

But who knows. A song is a modest thing and interpretation illimitable. Dylan has become an ‘Archetype’ carrying the projections and fantasies of followers as they impose their own preoccupations and interests on to him. To Stephen Pickering, a Devout Jew, Dylan is a Hassidic, a mystic and Prophet working through The Kabbalah (Note 2). To Jenny Ledeen, Dylan single-handedly created the Peace Movement through teaching a Christian ethic via his music, specifically in the composition of Blowin’ In The Wind, and through the songs of the first five years of his career (Note 3).

Pickering and Ledeen have their ‘blind spots’ but their work should be taken seriously. Born Again Christians, whose doctrines require them to believe, a priori, that Dylan is and always will be a Christian, since his conversion in 78, find such a position difficult to reconcile with his ‘amoral lifestyle’ (Note 4), and fans of no apparent belief system seem to suspend any critical judgement when they assert in the person of Larry (Lambchop) Eden, that “Bob Dylan is the most important person in the universe today” (Note 5). Our position undoubtedly has its own lunacies – and will doubtless upset some people. We do not wish to enter into debate but perhaps the editor would welcome an article challenging our conclusions. We accept that what follows isn’t definitive.

Both of us began with a distrust of a lot of Dylan interpretation. It seemed either marred by an obsessive Webermanesque quality or a deficit of humour and balance to say the least. Often we related more to the songs out of a gut reaction, and an admiration for Dylan’s genius in fusing language and music, than to dry academic ramblings comparing Dylan to Blake, Yeats or D. H. Lawrence. The whole point of listening to Dylan we argued, was to respond to the feelings he invokes, setting the mind free to allow images and associations to rise from the unconscious and to ‘forget about today until tomorrow’. The songs might be played over and over again, but to crouch over the C.D. player or tape machine and zap the ‘pause button’ to dissect and scribble down the ‘meaning’, line by line, word by word, and to trace these to films or poems or books Dylan might or might not have seen or read seemed absurd. “What does it all mean?” “What does he sing/write ‘table’ there?” “Who is the Italian poet from the 13^th century blah blah blah?”

Put on Like A Rolling Stone, turn up the volume and feel the venom coursing through the lyric as Dylan, by his performance, sets up a chain of responses, memories and insights which identify ourselves at once with the poet/narrator, then with his victim. If you want to feel this song at its most searing, then listen to him scream it out in Manchester 1966, and if you believe any version can be carried by the words alone, listen to his indifferent Isle of Wight performance, or the song in embryo on The Bootleg Series. Same words, a fine poem, but in both cases robbed of all its glory and provoking a disappointment no amount of analysis can relieve. We didn’t want to know why he did it that way, “what he was really saying”, we felt let down, “almost betrayed.” was the response voiced by one of us.

Continually seeing Dylan’s works sombrely dissected on the pages of some Dylanzines, as interesting as some of the opinions of such ‘self-ordained professors’ might be, gave rise to an even deeper sense of betrayal than Dylan at his worst. Did these critics ever stop to put heart and mind together? It’s possible. Read Paul Williams. However, what some of those articles, and works by Gray, Heylin, and some of the contributors to anthologies and the ‘Wanted Man’ series make clear is that Dylan is as much a plagiarizer as any other artist. That he works within a tradition. And they have sent us looking for the sources of Dylan’s inspiration and artistic ventures and ‘opened many a door’.

Most recently, in following Dylan through his ‘roots’ albums, Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong and then listening to some of the artists he covers (and mentions in the liner notes to World Gone Wrong) he has revealed artists long forgotten or never heard of. The feelings these old songsters fill you with are where their value lies, along with the history they preserve. When you can pull yourself away from the never-ending tape collection put on some Mance Lipscombe, Big Bill Broonzy or Blind Willie Johnson and… Enjoy! But, ‘The life which is unexamined’ wrote Plato in his Apology ‘is not worth living’. Dylan seems to have taken this to heart throughout his career, so putting aside prejudices we tried some analysis of our own. As collaboration the views we offer are often held by only one of us but for the sake of unity, they appear under our joint authorship.

To begin with we asked why the release of any of the songs from the tapes (as performed by Dylan and The Band) were delayed for so long and then released in such a partial/bastardized form? Why were so many of the songs cast aside or suppressed’? Dylan had made it known that he would never have released The Basement Tapes, and the record put out under that title, in 1975, by Robbie (Jamie) Robinson did not please him. (Although we seem to remember that he made an ironic remark about the record’s success by commenting ‘I thought everybody already had them’).

Listening now to the Genuine Basement Tapes, with 108 of the recorded songs presented, we hazard a guess at why Dylan wanted these songs held back from release. For some of these songs contain some of the most sexually explicit material he ever recorded, often funny, sometimes distasteful, lacking any subtlety, occasionally disturbing. But the collection doesn’t begin and end there. Other songs tip a hat towards Dylan’s and The Band’s influences rooted in a wide musical heritage of Burlesque, Protestant Hymnody, Honky-Tonk, Folk and Blues, Race Music and standard commercial Pop Music. And yet others reveal feelings of alienation and dread, remorse, and a struggle to find meaning and faith of a personal and global nature looking beyond the present to a time of transcendence and salvation, most notably in I Shall be Released, which is sung in American churches today (Note 6).

Bob Dylan Lyrics 1962-1985 displaces the songs of the tapes from the time they were recorded (around June – October 1967) to the release date of Robertson’s selection (75). This might mislead some from immediately recognizing a link with the previous album Blonde On Blonde especially if they’re new to Dylan. (B.O.B might be seen as suggesting an album of songs featuring ‘autobiographical’ material – a ‘self portrait’ penned after the gruelling and debauched ’66 tour.) The Basement Tapes are, we suggest, a continuation of this ‘reflective’ and autobiographical strain which is present more or less in all of Dylan’s material (Note 7).

At the time Blonde On Blonde came out it was very much a ‘hip scene’ album reflecting, amongst other things, the world of Andy Warhol and The Factory, of 15 minute superstars like Candy Darling; a world of sleaze and sexual experimentation, drag addicts and drug addicts, the blurring of sexual boundaries and the cynical dismissal of any morality. The interpretations below, of only some of the songs from The Basement Tapes, suggest that Dylan was aware of and caught up in a similar world, and that may explain why he wasn’t keen to release the ‘evidence’. What follows are the ‘gut reactions’ of one of us to songs that do not seem to be that difficult to ‘decode’ as dealing with sexual excess and experimentation. But these will be followed by a wider look at the material on The Basement Tapes, and the suggestion made that they comprise a particular work which might be called Epic in the literary sense.

The first song to look at, Odds and End~, contains the following lines:

"You promised to love me,
but what do l see
Just you comin' and spillin' juice over me"

 "Now you take your file and you bend my head"

"You're always spillin' juice like you've got somewhere to go"

"Now I've had enough my box is clean
You know what I'm saying and you know what I mean"

'From now on you'd best get on someone else"
"While you're doing it keep that juice to yourself'

 (The words underlined indicate where Dylan places particular stress.)

In this song Dylan could either be speaking through the persona of a woman complaining about his, or some other man’s sexual inadequacies or describing homosexual encounters. It might just as easily be read as a put down of a particularly persistent but unwanted lover. The first verse quoted suggests – ‘you promised to love me’ – but you come too soon, or ‘you promised to love me’ but all you offer is carnal love.

The next verse might be interpreted as a reference to fellatio (file=penis) and either a woman is being forced to ‘give head’ or a man is being forced to perform oral sex. However, in ‘Now I’ve had enough, my box is clean’ the narrator seems to be moving from oral sex to a request for anal sex (though box can refer to vagina according to dictionaries of slang) which is considered more prevalent among gays. Or does ‘box’ refer to ‘body’ (as ‘house’ may?) But soon Dylan’s protagonist, male or female, is refusing to cooperate – ‘you’d best get on someone else’. Because the other always comes too soon? Because the narrator is being pestered or because the ‘love’ is too shallow? “Lost time is not found again”. Finally the last line quoted above might be the narrator insisting that the subject transcend a merely carnal lust in their definition of love. But ‘juice’ may be slang for lust, sexual fluids, or another deviant sexual practice ‘golden showers’ or ‘watersports’. Confused? Juice = Urine (Note 8).

Don’t Ya Tell Henry opens with the following:

"I went down to the river on a Saturday morn,
A~lookin’ around just to see who's born
I found a little chicken down on his knees,
I went up and yelled to him,
'Please, please please!'

          He said Don't ya Tell Henry, 
         Don’t ya tell Henry, 
         Don’t ya tell Henry,
         Apple's got your fly".

 The saga continues with the protagonist looking for ‘the one I love’ visiting The Beanery and spotting ‘horses’, ‘donkeys’, ‘cows’, who say Don’t ya tell Henry’, and in the fourth verse the action takes place in the ‘pumphouse’, slang for whorehouse – which is what is sung, maybe Gay Whorehouse, (‘I looked high and low for that big ol tree’= stud/male-whore with a large erection) or, with ‘Horses and Cows’ mentioned earlier, maybe the place is a known pick up joint catering for all sexual preferences. So this song is an old fashioned honky-tonk, about looking for sex in bawdy houses. But if that’s the case the first verse is disturbing.

"I found a little chicken down on his knees,
I went up and yelled to him Please please please"

 This line has been the cause of hot dispute. ‘Little chicken’ is often an affectionate term for a child but if the whole song deals with sexual encounters this suggests paedophilia. But the line calls to mind an old blues song on the Paul Oliver 4 CD collection, Roots & Blues.

“If you can’t find me a woman I’ll have a cissv boy instead” (circa 1939/45)

The line presents a precedent for one interpretation of the above lines by Dylan. The subject referred to is male but is promiscuous and knowing enough to say ‘Don’t ya tell Henry’. Is Henry a pimp? In a sexual context, it seems that Dylan’s protagonist could be referring to a ‘rent boy’ that he finds in the ‘give head’ position and begs oral sex from. The ‘Henry’ referred to in the song may or may not be the same as ‘Mrs. Henry’ a name which suggests sexual ambiguity; a gay transvestite man perhaps or a tough ‘masculine woman’. But either way the song persists in the refrain ‘Don’t ya tell Henry’ suggesting fear of disapproval or jealousy. Something has to be hidden.

This series of articles will continue shortly.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 6500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

Commentary by Tony Attwood

For some time we have been locating texts for songs that Bob Dylan has written, and for which no music exists.  So we have been inviting readers of Untold Dylan to provide us with their own music to accompany Dylan’s lyrics.

My view is that this has been one of the most successful ventures on the site since we started – and I think if you have a look at the list of links below and play a few of them you will see why.

And today we have another: “Listen Robert Moses” provided by Paul Robert Thomas who writes…

And below here is a re-run of the story behind the lyrics…

——————–

Last year, we were fascinated when a lyric sheet for “Listen, Robert Moses,” credited to Bob Dylan, popped up on the internet.

And yes it seems “Listen Robert Moses” is another Bob Dylan song – in this case it seems it was originally sung to the tune of Listen Mr Bilbo.  So we typed out the words to make them easier to follow and asked for anyone who felt like it to put some music to the song.

Listen Robert Moses, listen if you can,
It's all about our neighbourhood that you're trying to condemn
We aren't going to sit back and see our homes torn down
So take your superhighway and keep it out of town.

We won't be moved Buddy we won't be moved
We're fighting for our rights and we won't be moved
We're fighting for our rights from our heads to our shoes
We're fighting for our homes and we aren't going to lose

For twenty long years there's been a shadow hanging round
That anyday the bulldozers will throw our houses down
We're going to lift the shadow once and all for good
We don't want a superhighway we want a neighbourhood

Some of us are young and some of us are old
But none of us like to be thrown out in the cold
Are we squatters in the city that we are living in?
Will we stand up for our rights or be scattering the wind?

Up and down Mulberry, Delancy Street and Spring
Chrystie and Canal Streets, you hear our voices ring
From Elizabeth to Thompson, to Varrick Street and Broome
We're trying to save our streets from that superhighway doom

Too many other people have been driven from their doors
To make room for some highway or else some fancy stores
They've been forced to leave their homes and all their roots behind
And dwell in housing projects, the reservation kind

It's time to make a stand, it's time to try and save
This ere neighbourhood of 'curs for it lands down in the grave
So hold up your banners and raise tem to the wind
We'll stand here and fight, and fight until we win.

The background

In this case it seems it was originally sung to the tune of Listen Mr Bilbo.

Research by Aaron Galbraith, Commentary by Tony Attwood

So how did I miss this one in going through all those outtakes from “After the Empire”?  I really have no idea, but miss it I did even though Leon mentioned the song in commenting on “Under your spell” several years ago.  And I thought I had gone through that whole CD of outtakes and written about every single track.   Old age is undoubtedly catching up on me.

But there it is, it is on “After the Empire” and I missed it out, so here we have another Dylan song.  Song number 610.

And, just to make things a little more complicated there is a Sam Cooke song called “Bring it home to me” which has the chorus line “Bring it on home to me” – a song which Jakob Dylan and the Wallflowers have performed.  But this isn’t that.

Nor is it Buddy Johnson’s “Bring it home to me”

So, it is none of the previous versions, but something new.

https://youtu.be/30tNnn8PJLc

And it is also not to be confused with “Bring it on Home” by Bob Dylan from the Basement Tapes complete.  That has just one line of lyrics – the title line.

Musically this is a variation on the 12 bar blues concept, with just two chords used (I and IV).  The piece has a fairly limited number of words, and a lot of time taken up with the ladies doing their singing.  Plus some harmonica work from Bob.  And some musical interludes.

I’m not to sure about the coda which has Dylan instructing the lady singers to sing “Bring it home” over and over.  And quite honestly having listening to all five minutes of the piece three times while writing this little review I am not too sure I actually want to hear it again.  At least not for a while.

In short, it is in my view, just an idea.  Of course all songs start as just an idea.  It is just that this “just an idea” hasn’t really got any further.  If it had done, it could have been interesting.  But it was left at this point.

Were these improvised lyrics?  I suspect they were.  And I am not going to make a complete fool of myself yet again by trying to transcribe them.  So if you would like to be part of Bob Dylan song number 610, then please write in and the lyrics can be added to the review.

Larry?  Aaron?  Anyone?

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 6500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

By Michael Johnson

‘And when it all came crashing down
I became withdrawn’

‘On a freezing night that January, the traffic locked solid on the snowbound London streets, we shuffled back to the Hammersmith Odeon to see the latest episode of the saga. Dylan came on wearing a strange boxy plaid jacket that looked as though it belonged to someone else, and performed with a sort of wilful lethargy, constantly picking up the wrong harmonicas, forgetting words, leaving out entire verses of Desolation Row… As he mangled some old favourite, reducing a fine melody and incomparable lyric to an indecipherable racket, I turned to the occupant in the next seat. “Well,” I said, “I suppose they’re his songs, and he can do what he likes with them.” “Yes,” she replied, “That seems to be his idea too.”’

(Richard Williams, Bob Dylan, A Man Called Alias)

My readers will be aware that I try to steer clear of commentaries and commentators in favour of looking at the performances themselves, and 1991 should be no exception. But there is pretty much a universal consensus that the NET crashed in that year, particularly the summer tour of Europe.

Performances were messy and shambolic. Dylan’s voice was scratchy and brittle, his new band raw and unrehearsed. It was hard to recognise the songs. And so on. Looked like Bob had had his day!

The bad reputation that the NET gained in the popular press was mostly due to some dismal performances in that year. The band began to call themselves The Undesirables because of their negative reception.

The cracks were starting to show in 1990, with Dylan performing in a hoodie to hide his face, presumably, and covering his face while going through airports looking pretty wasted. Those wedded to referring everything he does back to Dylan’s personal life have had a field day, blaming his abrupt decline on all kinds of things from the break up of his second marriage to too much of a good time with his Traveling Wilburys mates.

Gossip is a poor substitute for critical appreciation. And, being an avid listener to Dylan’s performances, I have my own sense of what might have happened here, especially to Dylan’s voice. We need look no further than the previous three years in which, as I observed from time to time, Dylan seems to be tearing the hell out of his voice.

Remember those rough, forced performances in 1988, seeming to come from the back of his throat (see NET 1988, all parts). And those screaming-edge performances in 1989 and 1990. Not helped, perhaps, by having to compete with GE Smith’s metallic guitar sound.

This might have been Dylan’s attempt to re-create his ‘high, wild, mercury sound’, but my sense is that he did his voice in, simple as that. Three years of punishment, and he paid the price. It wouldn’t be until 1994 that Dylan recovered the luminous clarity of his voice.

And yet …and yet, if Dylan’s voice is so shot, how come he can sing the way he does on some of these songs, such as ‘The Man in Me’. Even given that he chooses the lower registers, mostly, the performances are passionate and his use of a low vibrato (to replace his high keening) makes it sound like he’s really singing.

The issue as to what extent Dylan’s voice really is shot, and to what extent he’s forcing that scratchiness to give feeling to the songs (just as, in the early sixties, he tried to sound older than he was) is a moot one. Or is this all too complicated, and what we’re hearing is just the natural ageing of his voice and the strategies he’s using to deal with that? You’ll have to be the judge.

There were other changes too that made for a messy year. GE Smith did his last concert with Dylan in October 1990, and guitarists auditioning with Dylan would find themselves onstage playing a concert. For the first 21 concerts of that European leg of the tour, Dylan added an extra guitar to the mix with John Johnson replacing GE Smith and Cesar Dias playing back up. After those first 21 concerts Dias dropped out, leaving the backing band as John Johnson, Ian Wallace on drums, and Tony Garnier on bass.

It wouldn’t be until the following year, 1992, with the arrival of the dobro, that Dylan began to forge the sound that would take him through the Nineties.  In 2004 Dylan made an interesting comment about these early NET years.

‘In the early 90’s, the media lost track of me, and that was the best thing that could happen. It was crucial, because you can’t achieve greatness under media scrutiny. You’re never allowed to be less than your legend. When the media picked up on me again five or six years later, I’d fully developed into the performer I needed to be and was in a good position to go any which way I wanted. The media will never catch up again. Once they let you go, they cannot get you back. It’s metaphysical. And it’s not good enough to retreat. You have to be considered irrelevant.’ (interview with Edna Gunderson)

I can’t help putting this quote from Dylan alongside the Richard Williams quote above and wonder if that ‘indecipherable racket’ Williams talks about isn’t Dylan deliberately being ‘less than his legend’, crashing that legend so he can start again. But then I’d be doing what I criticise others for doing – reading motives into Dylan’s behaviour. Sigh! After all, no performer willingly performs badly, surely?

Still, by the end of 1991 there were lots of people writing Dylan off as irrelevant, past his best etc, giving him the camouflage he needed to forge his sound, so who knows?

So I approached this year with some trepidation, thinking I’d have nothing much to offer you but a bunch of botched performances. To my surprise I found all kinds of strange fruit – hidden gems and oddities, especially in that disastrous summer tour. It suddenly became an exciting adventure. Dylan was on a new path, the very beginning. His audiences would change. He would lose some, those who just wanted to see the legend; he wasn’t playing for them. And he would gain some, those who wanted to follow a new musical direction. Those who could leave Bob Dylan behind.

So let’s start with one. First blood, as it were. A messy, improved ‘New Morning’ from the summer tour but unrecognisable from the jaunty first song off that album. At first I thought the track had been misnamed as it sounds like a jam session, then Dylan starts to sing, some chords emerge, and low and behold! ‘New Morning’.

Remarkable for its harmonica solo (how did I miss it for my Master Harpist series? I ask myself) and Dylan’s free flowing piano work. Suddenly this is jazz. We’re in another world. Dylan wouldn’t take to the keyboards until 2002. And moving from harp to piano would come much later also. This is a special recording I would say, and shows Dylan willing to explore, improvise and re-arrange his songs. It is indeed a new morning.

New Morning

Remarkable for its harmonica solo (how did I miss it for my Master Harpist series? I ask myself) and Dylan’s free flowing piano work. Suddenly this is jazz. We’re in another world. Dylan wouldn’t take to the keyboards until 2002. And moving from harp to piano would come much later also. This is a special recording I would say, and shows Dylan willing to explore, improvise and re-arrange his songs. It is indeed a new morning.

Acoustic jam

In the same exploratory vein, we have this unnamed acoustic jam. It might have turned into a song but didn’t. Another from that dreaded summer tour. The Undesirables having fun. When you’ve nothing, you’ve  got nothing to lose. It just bounces along and then stops.

Man gave names

Now here’s an oddity from that dreaded summer tour. ‘Man gave Names to all the Animals.’ A rarity enough in itself, and far from typical of his gospel songs, but here it gets a spirited airing. And the lyrics… not sure if he remembers them very well, and he mumbles over a few lines, and doesn’t end the song properly, allowing it to peter out, but who cares?

Bob Dylan’s Dream

Hidden away on the second side of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan (1962) is a powerful piece of nostalgia, ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream,’ – yet another neglected masterpiece, I suspect, since it’s written from the point of view of someone much older than its 21 year old composer.

Now, many a year has passed and gone.
Many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a first friend
And each one I've never seen again

The song was justly praised for its extraordinary emotional maturity. It captures that sadness we feel when we look back at the friends of our youth, and the wonderful illusions we laboured under. And here’s our protest singer showing an acute awareness of the complexity of things two years before ‘I was so much older then,’ which is often taken as his first indication that he was tuning out of the protest movement.

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices they were few so the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

What a pity Dylan didn’t cultivate this song for his performances. I’m not pretending that this rare 1991 performance packs the same emotional wallop as the original, but in this rough, scratchy version, the age at least sounds about right.

The Man in Me

The next song, again from the summer tour, ‘The Man in Me’ from the New Morning album, is notable in several respects. Dylan’s voice sounds just fine if a little reedy; we could almost be back with the voice he used on Infidels in 1984. There’s a lot more than ‘wilful lethargy’ here.

Listen to the guitar break that begins around 2.25 seconds into the song and you hear Dylan on his Stratocaster. It may be difficult at first to distinguish Dylan’s guitar from Johnson and Diaz, but it has a distinctive, wirey sound that dominates the music until the harp break begins around 4.25 seconds. This heralds the arrived of Mr Guitar Man, whose sound will dominate the electric sets until 2002, when Dylan will take to the piano.

There is much to be said about Mr Guitar Man, but I’ll leave that for a later date.

Its all over now baby blue: 1

I want to finish this first part of The Undesirables with two takes on ‘It’s all over now Baby Blue.’ I have discussed this song previously, most fully in my Master Harpist series, when I presented Dylan’s wonderful 1995 performance of the song (see Master Harpist part 2: performances you will simply not believe.), and refer my reader to that post.

The first take here is from the summer tour we have been dipping into. The emphasis is on crafting an effective vocal line for the song. It is all in the voice, which is close and intimate, and those sublime lyrics. Only the last sixty seconds are left for some sweet harmonica and guitar work, weaving in and out. It’s tentative, but fresh and interesting.

Its all over now baby blue: 2

The second take is from the later, fall tour of the US, as the band began to leave The Undesirables behind. Here Dylan slows the tempo, and while the last verse finishes at 4.20 secs, we have three more minutes of improvisation, both guitar and harp. While the harp break at the end cannot match the soaring grief of the 1995 performance, we can hear it taking shape, thoughtful, contemplative and sad.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back soon for the next instalment of this puzzling and provocative year – 1991.

Kia ora

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

Bob Dylan On Faith (Part 1)

by Larry Fyffe

According to Paul Thomas, Bob Dylan’s “hymn” ‘Every Grain Of Sand’ has “very little to do with the thought, faith, or poetry of William Blake”; instead  the song “unequivocally” expresses “his faith in God. Not Blake’s God, nor the God of the Vineyard Fellowship, but the One God prayed to twice daily, once during daylight, and once at night”. (Every Grain Of Sand, A Perfect Finished Plan – Part I).

When Dylan talked about the song, Thomas says of it:

“Dylan affirms his religious belief,and his dependence on the Bible, and Blake is not alluded to amongst the ten names of stars, writers, and singers that he mentions”.

Whatever Dylan’s religious beliefs may or may not be, I know not, but Thomas asserts that ‘Every Grain Of Sand’ establishes that the singer/songwriter’s faith lies firmly in the Judaic concept of the God with Jesus as “some part of ourselves”, but certainly not part of the mysterious, unknowable  One God.

But Paul Thomas is among those who think that they can outguess Bob Dylan. Poet William Blake does indeed have a very strong influence on the singer’s imaginative cosmological outlook that is expressed in Dylan’s written lyrics trough metaphors, symbols, and images:

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

Good-striving Jesus, not the individual who is usurped by orthodox religion, but He who, to varying degrees, be part of humankind, even altogether absent from individuals thereof, the Jesus, who is not a part of  an unknowable God, but instead part of the Universe, an infinite world detectable by the senses possessed by the body of the human being, and describable by the imaginative processes of the human mind….epitomized by the artist:

To see the world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold  Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
(William Blake: Auguries Of Innocence)

Mankind is God-the-Creator:

Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
(William Blake: The Tiger ~ The Songs Of Experience)

The poet also creates ‘The Lamb’:

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name
For he calls himself a Lamb
He is meek, and he is mild
He became a little child
(William Blake: The Lamb ~ The Songs Of Innocence)

Another poem:

I wondered through each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe
(William Blake: London ~ Songs Of Experience)

Renewed Blakean the following song lyrics be ~ a word-painting of entangled reality, not of entangled abstraction:

In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence of each forgotten face
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand
(Bob Dylan: Every Grain Of Sand)

The above song lyrics snipping fragments from the poem below:

And did those feet in ancient times
Walk upon England's mountain green
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
(William Blake: Jerusalem ~ Milton/Auguries Of Innocence)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

by Jochen Markhorst

In the second, revised edition of his wonderful study of the Basement Tapes, Million Dollar Bash from 2014, Sid Griffin devotes two short pieces to “I’m Alright”. The first one he wrote when he only knew the first take, the fifty-eight seconds one, the second after the release of The Bootleg Series Complete Vol. 11: The Complete Basement Tapes, which features the second take. Brutally aborted too, but this time at 1:45.

The longer take doesn’t console Sid; in both pieces he regrets that this song remained unfinished. And in both pieces he notes that this would have been a perfect song for The Faces. The Faces from the time of Ronnie Lane and Rod Stewart, that is.

Rod Stewart is, certainly on his first records, indeed a undisputed, great Dylan interpreter. Nick Hornby even devotes an entire chapter in his 31 Songs to one of Stewart’s Dylan covers, “Mama You Been On My Mind”. Hornby introduces his ode with a kind of disclaimer:

“It’s hard to imagine now, but loving Rod Stewart in 1973 was the equivalent of loving Oasis in 1994, or The Stone Roses in 1989 – in other words, although it didn’t make you the coolest kid in your class, it was certainly nothing to be ashamed of.”

The embarrassment only begins with the sixth solo album, Atlantic Crossing (1975) with that megalomaniac cover and the ubersweet world hit “Sailing”, with the straw hats, with the jet set stuff and all those interchangeable blonde models, the carnivalesque low point “Ole Ola” (the football song for the Scottish World Cup team, 1978) and the final knockout with “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”.

Before that, however, Hornby argues, the albums with The Faces and Stewart’s next five solo albums, before 1975, Rod is totally okay.

On those first solo records, 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).

The next record is Atlantic Crossing, the one with which Hornby’s embarrassment begins, and the first record without Dylan cover. But it opens with a song of his own writing that explains Griffin’s association: “Three Time Loser”. Stewart doesn’t know the obscure Basement recording yet, but most likely Sid is triggered by the chorus of “I’m Alright”:

All right, I’m all right
I’m a three time loser
But I’m all right
All right, I’m all right
I’m a three time loser
But I’m all right

Dylan’s throwaway actually only shares that one expression with Stewart’s chorus:

I'm a three time loser.
Caught it up in Monterey,
Shook it up in East Virginia,
Now my friends say it's here to stay.

. . .but in the rest of the song there’s one Dylan reference after another. He sings a lady in leopard-skin ankle-high boots, and the third verse seems to be a nod to the mid-sixties Dylan:

How dare you have a party
In a Chelsea basement
When the poor excited Jezebel said come outside.
She felt me up and kissed my face,
Put her dirty hands down in my pants.
She took all of my money,
Left me naked by the silvery moon.

Chelsea, Jezebel (the nun, from “Tombstone Blues”), the basement from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, and with some tolerance there are more lines to draw to Dylan songs, at least enough to explain Griffin’s Stewart association with “I’m Alright”.

The song is a rather banal rocker by the way, and will not quite meet Sid’s ideal of an exciting Faces/Stewart rendition of a Dylan song.

There is a common ground, though: Wilson Pickett. On June 15, ’66 (and not 1967, which most websites erroneously report) The Wicked Pickett is released, the album with “Mustang Sally”, with “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love”, with “Sunny” and “Knock On Wood”, with a Wilson Pickett, in short, at a peak in his best years – a record that undoubtedly can be found in the Big Pink’s record cabinet, probably brought along by soul-aficionado Robbie Robertson. The penultimate song on that record is “Three Time Loser”:

How many teardrops gonna fall tonight?
How many heartaches must a woman have in one life?
I lost a lover, lost a friend
Through with love I just can't win.

Three time loser
Three time loser.
One, two three in misery.
Three time loser.

It’s a steaming soul smasher, tailor-made for “one of the roughest and sweatiest soul singers” (radio maker Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour episode 11), of which Dylan only brings the title and theme to “I’m Alright”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBpyOl15ZZ4

An improvising Dylan derives the music from that other soul greatness, from Curtis Mayfield and his Impressions. Melody deviates only slightly from “People Get Ready” and that Robbie Robertson is such a fan of Mayfield’s guitar licks and -fills is something we often hear, here in the Basement.

Lyrically the song is indeed undeveloped. The simple chorus was already fixed, apparently (because Rick Danko sings along), the verses consist, like in more Basement songs, of filler lyrics, incoherent clichés, unintelligible sounds, semantic misses and cover-ups:

Oh, it’s so high, so divisive
It’s all can, I swear to God
You know she’s gonna be the death of me
But she opened my heart
And now she takes in my breath, but I,
You know, she’s sucking out the life and breath of me   

 …for example (or something). It doesn’t tell too much, but at least it communicates the theme: amorous disappointment – a disheartened protagonist who considers himself a sucker because he is once again in love with the wrong woman.

So, the only artist worth mentioning covering the song is forced to invent some lyrics himself. In 2016 the very nice tribute album Bob Dylan Uncovered Vol. 2 is released at Paradiddle Records and its opening, “I’m Alright” by Bill Shuren & The Cavalry, is so successful that it is also released as a single. Bill Shuren turns this second verse into:

Oh, it’s so high, so defensive, it’s okay,
Now, the sweetest girl
You know she’s gonna be the death of me
Well she holds in my heart
And then she takes in my breath, but I,
You know, she’s sucking out the life and breath of me

…and why not, indeed. The soul from the original is skillfully replaced by a melodic rock approach à la Hootie & The Blowfish, and with a small trick (a tiny, instrumental bridge) plus a beautiful guitar solo, Shuren stretches “I’m Alright” to a respectable 3:17.

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:

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

By Tony Attwood

The 1980s really were an amazing time for Bob Dylan – a time of absolute certainty and total uncertainty.  A time in which his professed love for his newly found religion slipped away, leaving him feeling lost and adrift.   Here are the articles thus far for this extraordinary decade.

•  1980 Part 1: Bob says to Tony, “Make me an album” 
• 1980 Part 2: Make me an album part 2 
• 1980 Part 3: The hopes and fears and dreams of the discontented
• 1981: Back to the old ways; (But it doesn’t always work)
• 1982/3: Songs of Untold Genius – the year of no going back
• 1984: Back to the old ways (again)

It can be said that Bob Dylan spent 1984 trying to find his new muse experimenting all the way through the year up to Drifting too far from shore which, as I have said in the review of that song, really doesn’t work for me at all but in retrospect, fits with the way this era was working out.

For when we look at 1985 we find something unexpected.  I have oft pointed out that in 1979 for the one and only time, Bob wrote every song on the same subject: that of faith.  19 songs, all about his faith. A totally atypical year.

And when we come to look at 1985 it looks like he is about to do the same thing again – a year where every song is on the same subject – at least to start with.  For what we get are six lost love songs all in a row, followed by two in which he did not write the lyrics, a love song and an instrumental.

Then we are back to the darker sie: sadness, farewell, lost love, criminals on the run…

And after that group…  three lost love songs in a row, one that might be love or might be lost love and then a mix of love, lost love and life being a mess (which if you are mixing love and lost love it most certainly is!)

Here is the index…

1. Maybe Someday (Lost love)
2. Seeing the real you at last  (Lost love)
3. I’ll remember you (Lost Love)
4. Trust Yourself  (Being alone; lost love?)
5. Emotionally Yours (Lost love)
6. Steel Bars  (Lost love)
7. Well well well (Not Dylan lyrics)
8. Howlin at your window (Not Dylan lyrics)
9. All the way down (Love)
10. Moving on the water (Instrumental)
11. Tragedy of the trade (Sadness of life)
12. Time to end this masquerade (Farewell, lost love)
13. Worth The Waiting For (Lost love)
14. Nothing here worth dying for (Lost love?)
15. 26 Storeys High (Criminals are escaping)
16. Won’t go back til they call me back again (Moving on, lost love?)
17. Straight A’s in Love (Love)
18. The Very Thought of You (Love)
19. Baby coming back from the dead (Love)
20. Waiting to get beat (Love / lost love?)
21. When the night comes falling from the sky (Chaos?)
22. Never gonna be the same again  (Lost love)
23. Dark Eyes (Sadness, being lost)
24. Shake (Love?)
25. Under your spell (Life is a mess)
26. Find Me (Love)
27.  Right Hand Road Blues (Change, life is a mess???)

The fact is some of the subject matter is unclear (as signified by my question marks), so I am going to create a new category called “Uncertain themes”.  I am of course also omitting the two songs for which Dylan did not write the lyrics this year.  So we get numbers approximately like  this:

• Lost love: 12
• Love: 6
• Chaos / criminals escaping / life is a mess / being lost: 6
• Instrumental: 1
• Not Dylan’s lyrics: 2

As I have often tried to indicate, it is of course very easy to argue with my exact allocation of meaning within a word or two of each Dylan song, and of course you can go through all the 600+ songs and decide for yourself on the meanings, but if you can accept that my one or two word summaries are roughly correct we can go on and draw a conclusion as to what was happening to Dylan at this time.

And given the level of approximation in assigning titles for songs in which the lyrics seem to meander somewhat in terms of their subject matter “roughly correct” is all I am aiming for here.

But now I want to do something else however.  If we cut out the instrumental and the two songs that don’t have Dylan lyrics, we have 24 songs, of which 18 (that is to say three quarters) are on the negative themes of lost love, chaos, criminals escaping and life being a mess.

And at this point it might be worth looking back to the previous year of 1984:

• Blues/moving on: 3
• Love: 4
• Lost love: 4
• Tedium, the bad life: 1

Looked at in the light of what Dylan wrote in 1985, that’s a pretty negative group as well.  We can argue that around two thirds are negative songs.

Going back, 1982/3 we can see that most of those songs were about it being chaos out there, as well.  So memo to myself: when this work is over, let’s go back and try and judge the percentage of positive and negative songs year by year.

Now if we pull this together, we can see that in 1979 we had the faith year – every single song was about Dylan’s newly expressed religious faith.  After that things seem to have wobbled and increasingly, year on year the number of songs expressing the vision that the world is a mess, or simply life is a mess, has grown.

I have said many times that my numbers are approximate, because I am endlessly reducing complex songs which quite often have meanings that are not always overt, into simply descriptions, like “lost love” etc.   It is a crude measure, but I am doing this because I have never seen anyone do this analysis before, and the alternative would be to spend a year slaving over the process on my own and then publishing the conclusions in one go.   But this way I am receiving comments and help as I fumble my way through this exploration.  And I, like you (if you are following my series) simply don’t know what is to be found.  It is certainly not revealing what I expected when I started out.

In my next article therefore I am going to try and analyse further what happened in the years following the faith year of 1979.  The feeling I am getting is that Bob didn’t just let go of religion, he did far more than that, plunging into the depths in a musical depression that lasted quite a number of years.

More next time.

There is an index to all the articles in this series, which trace the themes within Dylan’s songs from the 1950s onwards, in the index Dylan’s Songs: the themes

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

by Tony Attwood  Song nominated by Aaron Galbraith

In a recent interview Bob Dylan was asked about his favourite songs, and particularly mentioned the Eagles.  He then went on to cite three Eagles songs, each from 1976’s Hotel California.

‘New Kid in Town,’ ‘Life in the Fast Lane,’ ‘Pretty Maids All in a Row.’  And of the last one he then added, “That could be one of the best songs ever.”

I’ve put in both the original and the remastered version in the links below.  Here’s the original version first…

And in case you prefer it the remastered…

“Pretty Maids All In A Row” has Joe Walsh on piano and synthesiser rather than guitar, and this isn’t really what, I suspect, most of us probably remember from this album.  It was written by Joe Walsh who on this occasion wrote this with Joe Vitale.  Joe played with the Eagles on tour.

Hi there, how are 'ya?
It's been a long time
Seems like we've come a long way
My, but we learn so slow
And heroes, they come and they go
And leave us behind as if
We're supposed to know why

Why do we give up our hearts to the past?
And why must we grow up so fast?

And all you wishing well fools with your fortunes
Someone should send you a rose
With love from a friend,
It's nice to hear from you again
And the storybook comes to a close
Gone are the ribbons and bows
Things to remember, places to go
Pretty maids all in a row

It is a song which appears to me to use Dylan’s own technique of giving hints of where we are, with lines that can be interpreted in many ways.  But I have the feeling that if we get too close the meaning will evaporate before us.

The lines…

“heroes, they come and they go And leave us behind as if We’re supposed to know why”

are to me the key.  If Dylan had said that in a song we would nod and understand at once.  He is a great hero to so many people, but he is also forever moving on and on.  As he travels in his own musical and poetic world, and from time to time seemingly amends his beliefs, he leaves behind those who admired him in an earlier age with an earlier set of lyrics and an earlier set of songs.

Dylan is living out the life he has portrayed through all his songs of moving on – that great traditional blues theme.  And here, that original blues message is turned into a contemporary format, but the message is clear.  You have to keep on keeping on.

For many people, why Dylan has moved on and doesn’t sing the old songs in the old way any more is a mystery.  Why is each new album going somewhere new, with a new style and new messages?  Why does he turn from the past where he was so perfect, so magnificent?

In truth he doesn’t know the answer to that one himself.

There is one other point: the song uses chords and chord sequences that I don’t think Bob has ever used (my apologies if I simply can’t find an example which is out there and obvious).

By way of example take this sequence

Gmaj9        F#m7     Cmaj9                 G
and leave us be  hind as  if we're supposed to know
 Bm7            F#m7      Gmaj9

If you are a musician you will know that the major 9ths are not a common part of Bob’s musical agenda.   But major 9ths followed by a minor 7th?  Absolutely not.  I dare you to prove me wrong.

So an interesting song, an interesting lyric / message, and interesting music.  Yep I can see what I Bob likes it.   But one of the best songs ever?  It’s an interesting idea.

I wonder if he really meant it.

Why does Dylan like?   The series index

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

By Larry Fyffe

As the aphorism goes, there be none so zealous than a new convert. Paul Robert Thomas
converts from Christianity to Judaism; then asserts that he’s “perplexed” why the singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, who’s from a Judaic background, advances the tenets of Christianity so much in his song lyrics.

Thomas mocks the singer/songwriter; he includes these remarks:

“Bob Dylan no more wrote ‘Pressing On’ or ‘Saving Grace’ than Roger McGuinn wrote ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’. McGuinn ripped off ‘Ecclesiastes’ just as Dylan got most of his stuff from St. Paul. Dylan was just passing on what he had been soaking up in California for four months. It’s a wonder that someone didn’t claim St. Paul’s royalties.”
(Paul Robert Thomas: Every Grain Of Sand ~ Part III).

Words from the Old Testament:

To everything there is a season
And a to every purpose under the heaven
A time to be born, and a time to die
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted
A time to kill, and a time to heel
A time to break down, and a time to build up
A time to weep and a time to laugh
(Ecclesiastes 3: 1,2)

Paul Thomas falls on his prized crusader sword that he brandishes; no matter what his quote says, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds didn’t write ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’; Pete Seeger does:

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
(Pete Seeger: Turn, Turn, Turn)

Bob Dyan does borrow some stuff from Seeger; he stirs it in with the song lyrics below while admitting he took the melody from elsewhere:

I walked down the hallway
And I heard the door slam
Turn, turn, turn again
I walked down the courthouse stairs
And I did not understand
Turn, turn, turn to the wind, and the rain
(Bob Dylan: Percy's Song)

https://youtu.be/PRoJVfZAZrw

He snatches a bit from the Bard too:

But when I came to man's estate
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain
'Gainst knaves and thieves, men shut their gate
For the rain it raineth every day
(William Shakespeare: Feste's Song, Twelfth Night, Act V, sc.i)

Nor is it correct to say, as Thomas claims, that ‘Every Grain Of Sand’ has no connection to poet William Blake:

To see the world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
(William Blake: Auguries Of Innocence)

There be both pieces of Blake and of the Bard in the following verse:

I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer's dream, in the chill of a wintry light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face
(Bob Dylan: Every Grain Of Sand)

The very two songs by Dylan that  Thomas mentions above actually poke a little fun at the writings of St, Paul from which are derived the Christian twin doctrines of ‘original sin’ and ‘salvation by faith’:

First in reference to original sin; Eve leads poor Adam astray, and now everybody is stuck with the temptation to do evil things:

Shake the dust off of your feet, don't look back
Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack
Temptation's not an easy thing, Adam given the devil reign
Because he sinned I got no choice, it run in my vein
(Bob Dylan: Pressing On)

And the Christian cauldron holds the final decision on who’s saved and who’s not. A pinch of irony flavouring gets thrown in the pot below:

The wicked know no peace and you just can't fake it
There's just one road, and it leads to Calvary
It's gets discouraging at times, but I know I'll make it
By the saving grace that's over me
(Bob Dylan: Saving Grace)

No doubt about it.

Besides in many of his songs, along with references from the New Testament, Bob Dylan takes more lines from the Old Testament than you can shake a candelabrum at.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

Songs selected by Aaron Galbraith; commentary by Tony Attwood

1. Laura Marling – Hard Rain

According to Wiki, “Peaky Blinders is a British period crime drama television series set in Birmingham” (England’s second city).   “It follows the activities of a family living in the city in the aftermath of first world war.  The song was used in the last episode of series four.”

“Period crime drama” doesn’t really tell you too much about the utter brilliance of the show, but at least it serves as an introduction.  In the UK it has become so big there are (or were before the virus took over) Peeky Blinders club nights being held in every city.

According to me, this is one of the great, great versions of the song, and indeed is right up there with Thea Gilmore’s “Drifters Escape” which I have managed to sneak into many a commentary on a variety of different subject.

It is the pulse that is established from the off which makes this “Hard Rain” work where so many others have simply plodded through the lyrics.  The contrast between the sweetness of the voice, emphasised by the harmonies in the second verse, and the spikey accompaniment is a magnificent achievement.  Full marks to singer, producer and the band.

Quite often I find it hard to disconnect music used in a TV series from the visuals.  Here, much as I have adored Peaky Blinders from the off, the music is so utterly sublime in delivering an overall sound appropriate to the lyrics I find the series forgotten and I am back to walking to the depths of the deepest dark forest where the people are many and their hands are all empty where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison and the executioner’s face is always well hidden where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten where black is the colour, where none is the number…

And don’t stop the video just because you think the song has ended.  Let it roll those last 30 seconds.

2.  Alicia Keys – Pressing On

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ldxrsSEo6iE

Ladies who take Bob’s original melody and go for long extemporised meanders to whatever far distant reaches of the audible spectrum they can reach in order to show off  their range are not really my favourites.

Many of them do it however, and Bob obviously took a shine to Alicia Keys one way or another by mentioning her in passing and wondering where she could be, so I guess that gives her every right to do whatever she wants.

But somehow it doesn’t add to the song, whereas Laura Marling (above) adds so much I start to wonder how there was room for anything there in Dylan’s original of this particular song.   Sorry, not for me.

3) Norah Jones – Heart Of Mine

Norah Jones however always seems to know what restraint and control is all about, and never more so than in this gorgeous rendition.  The first “Don’t let him know” is so held back one almost misses it, and is totally in keeping with the lyrics.

If I’d been producing I would have cut the percussion’s volume by 50%, but then by and large people don’t ask me to produce, so what do I know?  But really, the drummer’s not doing anything interesting or unusual, so why give him so much prominence – and why keep it going all the way through?   And Ms Jones has such a delectable voice.

4) Miley Cyrus – You’re Going To Make Me Lonesome When You Go

I do like this video, but having come straight from Norah Jones’ recording what I love mostly is the extremely laid back percussion.  That is how it should be.  Let the lady sing; let the lyrics shine.

Nice slide guitar too – and unexpected in the first run through.  Clever stuff, and gorgeous harmonies which come in most unexpectedly.   And there is such a terrific bounce through the build up before they take it all back down.

A fabulous version.  Inventive and controlled.  Full marks all round.

Baby, I’m in the Mood For You – Miley Cyrus

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ysK2oltJNUA

Miley doesn’t have the greatest ever Dylan lyrics with the “Mood” song but she and her arranger do the best possible with what they have up until she descends into hell with the chit chat.  Oh for goodness sake!   What follows after the mid-song nonsense taking the accompaniment down to a single guitar is really good.   Public execution is no longer legal in most countries, which has probably saved the arranger.

5) Ke$ha – Don’t think Twice

We have two versions of this song below as there is a growing issue with videos that can be played in one country and not another.  And with Aaron being in the United States and Tony in the United Kingdom this is cropping up occasionally.  Hopefully one of them will work for you.  If  they both work, play it twice.

The opening of verse of this version came as a profound shock, my finding the exaggerated hurt of the voice too much to take.  But the addition of the cello in the second verse removed the edge somewhat, making the third verse with just the single high note by way of accompaniment making for remarkable (although uncomfortable) listening.

Stay with it at the end (or at least at the end of the version I could listen to in England) for the band to take over.

It is an adventurous production and one that I will remember.

6) KT Tunstall – Tangled Up In Blue

There’s no mention of “Tangled up” on KT’s Wiki page, which is a shame because it is a thoroughly enjoyable and listenable version.

I think the key to this is that the energy is kept under control without there being any feeling that she is trying to do this.  Yet verse by verse she holds us, even though we’ve all known the lyrics off by heart for however many years it has been.  (I’m not counting any more, I don’t need to know how old I am).

But seriously that’s the trick – it is all so artless, so that when we get to the mostly unaccompanied half verse, it just feels like the most natural thing in the world.  Indeed making the performance seem like this was what the song was written for really seems to be what it is all about.

7) Adele – Make You Feel My Love..I guess we can’t not mention this one!

I’m not normally too interested in what has happened to a performance vis a vis the charts, TV shows and all that guff, but the tale of “Make You Feel My Love” by Adele is quite interesting, and it is a remarkable performance.

It was the only cover song on Adele’s first album, and was apparently included because her manager badgered her to do a Dylan song – which she didn’t want to do.   She apparently only agreed after hearing Dylan perform it in New York; this version has Adele on bass.

The recording made various entries into the UK singles chart because of coverage on the X Factor, and within Comic Relief and ultimately became the 48th best selling single in the UK two years after it was first released.  But it carried on selling, eventually passing the million sales mark in the UK in 2017.   Readers in other parts of the universe will have their impression of UK confirmed – we can be a bit slow off the mark.

“Next time we will look at some of the most legendary female performances of all time!” says Aaron in his sign off note to me.  I’ve no idea what he’s going to deliver, but I shall do my best to explore whatever turns up, without too many complaints.

Was that ok Aaron?

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

Video by mr tambourine, commentary by Tony Attwood

Ahead of the release of Bob’s new album, it is perhaps worth a spot of reflection on just how good Bob Dylan can be.

Which is why we think it is worth having a listen to “Crowned before the Ceremony (2020 Tribute For The 2019 Tour)”

The point about this recording is that it contains song after familiar song but each with a totally different arrangement from that with which we are familiar.   Indeed I like to think that I am fairly au fait with all of Dylan’s compositions (having reviewed just about each one of them on this site), yet I was on several occasions completely bemused by what song we were about to hear, as the introduction was played.

Of course there is a danger with this approach in that a lesser artist can become transfixed with the concept of changing the piece, and forget what the original was all about.  But not here, as I hope you will agree.

Set 1: Kingdom Come

• 1: Ballad of a Thin Man
• 2: Scarlet Town
• 3: Girl from the North Country

Set 2: The Throne awaits its king

• 4: Beyond here lies nothing
• 5: Don’t think twice it’s alright
• 6: Pay in Blood

https://youtu.be/pMQSD8VL2vo

I’m pausing at Pay in Blood, because this is one where the transformation of the song is in one regard not as large as it is in many other songs in these sets, and yet the way Bob delivers the lines does alter the meaning.  The emphasis on the title line which is we might expect has now gone and is now shared with every other line in the whole arrangement.  It’s one hell of a trick.

Set 3: The Guiding Light to the Promised Lane

• 7: Boots of Spanish Leather
• 8: Long and Wasted Years
• 9: Will the Circle Be Unbroken (written in 1907 by Ada R. Habershon with music by Charles H. Gabriel).

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, by and by?
Is a better home awaiting
In the sky, in the sky?

Set 4: The Road to Eternal Peace

Even if some of the tracks here don’t appeal to you (and we all have our own favourites), I would beg you to listen to “Lenny Bruce is Dead” which starts around 46 minutes 50 seconds.  It is a song which, I think, can give us a particular insight into the way Bob writes and how he writes.  This is an utterly staggering performance of a brilliant song, in my opinion, and gives an counter-insight into Bob’s supposed religious views, given Lenny Bruce’s take on religion.

• 10: Lenny Bruce is Dead
• 11: It’s all over now Baby Blue
• 12: Dignity

There’s a lovely extra bounce to Dignity which gives it a much more relaxed feel – along with that unexpected chord change just before “Have you seen Dignity”.  It is, for me a perfect example of how a minor change to the musical arrangement can alter the entire meaning of a song.  One chord change, and it’s all different.

Set 5: The Ceremony Calls

• 13: Can’t Wait
• 14: When I paint my masterpiece
• 15: Not dark yet

Did anyone ever try a viola and a harmonica together before?  Come to that did anyone dare to re-write the music of an absolute masterpiece (I refer to “Not Dark Yet”) in such an audacious manner, and get away with it?  The oppression of the situation which is to some extent held at bay in the original, is let fully off the leash here.

However I must admit I’m rather glad this version wasn’t on the original; I wasn’t feeling 100% when the album was released and I am not sure I could have taken that version.  At the very least Untold Dylan would have been put on hold for a year or two in my household.

Very many thanks to mr tambourine – you can subscribe to mr tambourine’s videos here.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

by Jochen Markhorst

For three years, from May 2006 to April 2009, Dylan will host the radio show Theme Time Radio Hour, a weekly show that can be listened to via Sirius XM Satellite Radio. The legend is given free rein and that works out very well: it’s a wonderful programme. Within the framework of a weekly changing theme (“Summer”, for example, or “Tears”), Dylan provides a very entertaining hour, grafted onto the image we have from a late-night 50s program, roughly the way Donald Fagen depicted it on the cover of The Nightfly.

From a cultural and historical point of view, the music choices are of course impeccable, surprising and exciting, but at least half of the appeal lies in the chatter in between. Dylan sounds like the voice-over of a Sam Spade film, growls anecdotes, shares obscure facts, mumbles corny jokes about mothers-in-law, reveals secret recipes for barbecue sauce, gives household tips, welcomes guests like actor John Cusack and music colleague Tom Waits, and is above all stylish, cool and witty.

A bonus for Dylan fans is the insight that is won. In almost every show there is an aha-moment, a flash of recognition: Dylan doesn’t hesitate to play those records, from which he borrows for his own songs, or at least inspire him a lot. Sometimes it’s just the sound or the atmosphere. Modern Times, mostly, but from a “Stardust” by Hoagy Carmichael, for example (in episode 52, “Young And Old”) a line can be drawn to “Born In Time”.

Or we hear a familiar melody patch and more often we recognize text fragments. “High Water Everywhere” by Charley Patton is of course self-evident, but surprising is “Brain Cloudy Blues” by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys (1946). In itself that song is just as derived from Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues” (1934) as Dylan’s “Quit Your Low Down Ways”. Dylan has left even more lines intact – the whole third verse almost literally coming back in the first verse and in the chorus of “Quit Your Low Down Ways”:

Now you can read out your handbook, preach out your Bible,
Fall down on your knees and pray the good Lord to help you
Because you going to need, you going to need my help some day
Mama, if you can’t quit your sinning please quit your lowdown ways

From Bob Wills, Dylan mainly copies the way he sings. The uber-jolly, yodel-like jumps to the falsetto voice, which makes the song such an odd duck out in his repertoire, are a trademark of the King Of The Western Swing. Bob Wills’ own cover of “Milk Cow Blues” was probably Dylan’s source – easier to find than Kokomo Arnold in the late 50s and early 60s, anyway.

In the same song the line Don’t the sun look good going down stands out: it gets a place in the predecessor of It Takes A Lot To Laugh, “Phantom Engineer” and the catalogue of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys is a goldmine from which Dylan seems to draw a lot.

In Theme Time, the host finds no less than eight excuses to play a song from his Texan hero (only George Jones towers higher, with nine hits), surprising the Dylan fan more than once. January ’07 Wills’ version of “Corrine Corrina” is on the roll, which Dylan has used for his own “Corrina, Corrina”, jumbling it up with a few Robert Johnson songs (on Freewheelin’) and half a year before that he plays “New San Antonio Rose”, in which we hear where Dylan learned to pronounce the name of that city as San Antone and why he mentions it in the same breath with The Alamo, as he will do later in “Brownsville Girl”.

But “Quit Your Low Down Ways”, which is recorded, very nicely, for the breakthrough The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), will ultimately be rejected (it is finally revealed thirty years later, on The Bootleg Series 1-3). The young Dylan seems to feel that this yodelling is perhaps is too silly after all, not matching the content of the malicious, irreconcilable lyrics, nor the rest of the LP. And he quite radically rejects the song; before that Columbia recording, he only performed it live once, after that only a Witmark recording follows, to secure the copyrights. Smart move, because Peter, Paul and Mary pick the song up for their hit album In The Wind (1963), which will sell over a million copies.

This version, the first cover of the song, is even faster than Dylan’s. The trio may be more focused on the content of the lyrics, but still doesn’t leave a lasting impression; Peter, Paul and Mary are a bit too civilized and well-adjusted. They do have, after all, quite a harmonious, conflict-avoiding presence – tying in rather poorly with the vindictive, hateful monologue of the hurt Romeo discarding his lover here.

The same goes in extremis for The Hollies, who on their painful Hollies Sing Dylan (1969) are guilty of a kind of auditory mass rape, with a James Last-like Lowdown as one of the more prominent victims.

Curious is the incorporation of the song (and seven other Dylan songs from The Bootleg Series) into the ballet Moonshine by choreographer Christopher Bruce. A nice, but by now quite dated attempt by George Edwards & Friends (on If You’re Ready!, 1966) is in any case still entertaining, but it is only with Dylan’s favourite interpreter, Manfred Mann, that things start to make sense again.

When Dylan is asked at a press conference in San Francisco, December ’65, who does most justice to his songs, he states unequivocally:

“Manfred Mann. They’ve done about three, four. Each one of them have been right in the context with what the song was all about.”

That public compliment does not paralyze Manfred, fortunately. Quite on the contrary; he goes on covering Dylan songs and sure enough, most of them are very successful. He records “Quit Your Low Down Ways” in 1975, with his Earth Band, but this time Mann himself doesn’t seem entirely convinced. He leaves it off the album. Or maybe he regards the song too American; the song is released on the American pressing of Nightingales & Bombers, as a bonus. Only a quarter of a century later, with a remastered re-release on CD, the rest of the world is allowed to hear this version as well.

It is in any case superior to the other covers. The tempo is, justifiably, slowed down, the blues stomp returns and Mann adds a fitting, menacing descending bass line. His own reserves, however, are also understandable; unfortunately he stuffs quite abundantly electronic bleeps and synthesized frills into the accompaniment. Still, it is the best cover, though perhaps not “right in the context with what the song is all about”.

So, the ultimate version still hasn’t been released or even been produced, some sixty years after the fact. Ideally, the master himself surprises us someday with a reinterpretation – but all too likely that option is not. The lyrics are hardly out of date, though:

Well, you can run down to the White House
You can gaze at the Capitol Dome, pretty mama
You can pound on the President’s gate
But you oughta know by now it’s gonna be too late

There might even be an addressee to be found, over there at the White House, who should quit his low down ways.

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

By Larry Fyffe

Depending on which translation is referenced, women are biblically described metaphorically as  ‘screech owls’, ‘lamias’, and ‘liliths’ who are cast out of Eden by God for refusing to be subservient to men:

The screech owl also shall rest there
And find for herself a place to rest
(Isaiah 34:14)

This is not exactly how things were initially supposed to be; so saith the Hermaphroditic God:

And God said, "Let us make Man in our image
After our likeness, and let them have dominion
Over the fish of the sea ...and over all the earth ....
So God created Man in His own image
In the image of God created He him
Male and female created He them
(Genesis 1:26,27)

Apparently, Adam is not happy because Lilith wants dominion too; so God does things all over again; creates Eve:

And the rib, which the Lord God taken from the man
Made He a woman, and brought her unto the man
(Genesis 2:22)

Now it’s Lilith turn to be unhappy. She curls up on a tree branch; seduces Eve to do that which God has forbidden her to do:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field ....
And the serpent said unto the woman, "Ye shall not surely die
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof
Then your eyes shall be open as gods, knowing good and evil"
(Genesis 3:1,4,5)

A Gothic romantic poet  describes the snake-shaped lamia:

She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue
Vermillion-spotted, golden, green, and blue
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard
Eye like a peacock, and all crimson barred
(John Keats: Lamia)

A preacher and poet elaborates on this archetype by way of analogy –  Geraldine, a sexually charged vampiric lamia, has little trouble gaining dominance over innocent Christabel:

And in her arms the maid she took
And wel-a-day!
And with low voice, and doleful look
These words did say
"In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell
Which is the lord of thy utterance, Christabel"
(Samuel Coleridge: Christabel)

From the Holy Bible, from the poetry of Keats, and that of Coleridge, singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan grasps the hermaphroditic serpent:

And hisses:

Just a minute before you leave, girl
Just a minute before you touch the door
What is it that you are trying to achieve, girl
Do you think we could talk about it some more?
You know the streets are filled with vipers
Who've lost all ray of hope
You know it ain't even safe no more
In the palace of the Pope
(Bob Dylan: Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight)

https://youtu.be/Ahr1cWjOjYI

The theme of a desire to dominate others appears again in the song lyrics below:

A worried man with a worried mind
No one in front of me, nothing behind
There's a woman on my lap, and she's drinking champaign
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up into sapphire-tinted skies
I'm well dressed, waiting for the last train
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

And then there’s the struggle to dominate conflicting facets of one’s own nature:

I ain't looking to block you up
Shock or knock or lock you up
Analyze you, categorize you
Finalize you or advertise you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you
(Bob Dylan: All I Really Want To Do)

There is something that doth not like a vampire:

Never could learn to drink that blood
And call it wine
Never could learn to hold you, love
And call you mine
(Bob Dylan: Tight Connection To My Heart)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

By Tony Attwood

Thinking of the many different themes we’ve covered on this site over the years it struck me that I don’t think we’ve ever touched on Bob Dylan and Paul Simon playing together.  But I have just been reminded of this video of the 1999 set…

https://youtu.be/Iu87FYaEUeQ

The video takes us through “I Walk the Line”, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”,  “Sound of Silence” and “Forever Young”.

Both artists have a very high regard for each other, as you might expect, and although I am not sure they work together perfectly, it is still a remarkable piece of history to have recorded.

In an interview Paul Simon said  that initially they had tried singing folk songs together using two acoustic guitars, but they realised that what the audience really wanted was to hear the two artists play each other’s songs.   Although “Forever Young” was dropped after this first night performance.

More recently Paul Simon said in an interview, “I usually come in second to Dylan, and I don’t like coming in second.  In the beginning, when we were first signed to Columbia, I really admired Dylan‘s work. ‘The Sound of Silence’ wouldn’t have been written if it weren’t for Dylan. But I left that feeling around The Graduate and ‘Mrs Robinson’. They weren’t folky any more.”

“One of my deficiencies is my voice sounds sincere. I’ve tried to sound ironic. I don’t. I can’t. Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. He’s telling you the truth and making fun of you at the same time. I sound sincere every time.”

Here is “Knocking on heaven’s door”

https://youtu.be/0j7gaqtrLFI?list=PLbkBUXIQQvu8KOgu6oEK5fvSlFbBBrLww

Now I must admit that somehow I wanted much more from my two favourite songwriters of all time, although turning “heaven’s door” into “I hear you knocking” does give me an excuse to meander elsewhere.

I recently wrote a piece about Bob Dylan’s use of other people’s materials, and how some commentators like to focus on that issue, suggesting that Dylan is nothing but a copyright thief.   As I tried to point out, the issue is far more complex than most people who commentate on it from outside the industry understand.  Copyright is not an infinite protection as witness the fact that if you decided to write a piece about copyright and use the phrase “Copyright is not an infinite protection” without crediting me, I couldn’t do much about it – other than write a sarcastic piece about how my phrase had been copied.  (And I think that phrase is mine, because I typed it into Google, and no one else seems to have used it).

The reality of what copyright is was mentioned in passing in my little piece, but one thing that struck me at the time but I didn’t really make too much of, is the fact that when people do comment on the re-use of older material in a song by Dylan, they don’t look at the broader context to see if this is  widespread phenomena.

Which brings me back to “I hear you knocking” to which Dylan and Simon refer in this concert.  It is a song that has been used in this way and it does give us a chance to understand Dylan’s reuse of older material in context.

So, onto “I hear you knocking…”

That started out in 1928 with a song by Boodle It Wiggins.

https://youtu.be/cE2YCFcZK0A

In 1939 Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five recorded the song as “Keep A-Knockin'” but they credited Bert Mays and Perry Bradford as the writers. In 1957 Little Richard recorded it with “R. Penniman” (his real name) as the composer.  But there was presumably a challenge because later versions of the recording have Bert Mays and J. Mayo Williams as songwriters, although not Boodle It Wiggins.  Maybe his lawyers were not on the ball.

All of which gives me an excuse finally to put up a Dave Edmunds recording which got to number 1 in the UK in 1970.

I meander, because somehow with Dylan and Simon, those two utterly magnificent songwriters, on stage together I hoped for something more.  In fact something better.  It was interesting, but not, to my mind, among the highest points of either singer’s careers.

But as I am here I have the opportunity to put up a piece of Paul Simon, just to round this meander off.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

by Jochen Markhorst

A P R I L, 1 9 7 0

Dear Fay,

Some people are going to get killed out of this situation
that is growing. That is not a warning (or wishful thinking). I
see it as an “unavoidable consequence” of placing and leaving
control of our lives in the hands of men like Reagan.
These prisons have always borne a certain resemblance to
Dachau and Buchenwald, places for the bad niggers, Mexicans,
and poor whites.

The logical place to begin any investigation into the
problems of California prisons is with our “pigs are beautiful”
Governor Reagan, radical reformer turned reactionary.

Governor Ronald Reagan of California participates enthusiastically, with the playful idea of an agent from Long Beach. At the end of the 1960s, the militant Black Panthers consistently call policemen pigs and that swear word begins to take hold. Officer Bernie Frydman believes in reverse psychology, invents the acronym Pride-Integrity-Guts-Service and initiates a “Pigs Are Beautiful” campaign with friendly happy pigs on ties, buttons, tie pins, cufflinks and posters.

“I like it,” declares his boss, the future president Reagan, and he appears for a few weeks with a gilded pig as a tie pin at press conferences and television broadcasts.

The transparent attempt to turn pigs into an honorific, into a badge of honour, does not catch on. The officers are not suddenly proud to be a pig and to this day pig is just as insulting and as popular as it was in 1968. Even more popular actually; it’s now spread to all English-speaking countries.

In his collection of letters, the bestseller Soledad Brother, Black Panther George Jackson does not exercise any particular restraint either: 117 times the brave constables are indicated with the hated invective (twice with “policeman”, thirty times with “cop”).

Now, George Jackson deserves some consideration for being a little less nuanced. In 1961, at the age of 19, after a few juvenile offences, he is factually sentenced to life imprisonment. His crime: he is behind the wheel of the getaway car during a robbery at a gas station (where the loot is $71). After more than seven years in San Quentin, he is transferred to Soledad Prison in January ’69, where a guard shoots him in August ’71, officially during a violent escape attempt.

During his prison years, he has developed himself considerably – from petty criminal street punk to a well-read, leftist-intellectual philosophical activist with remarkable literary talents. His metaphors sometimes do derail slightly (“These prisons have always borne a certain resemblance to Dachau and Buchenwald, places for bad niggers” – after which Jackson ends his letters for a while with “From Dachau with love”), but he also scatters his writings with beautiful aphorisms (“I’m doing as I’ve always done, wish for five, expect three, and get nothing”), classical quotations (Jackson loves Shakespeare: “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the ranged empire fall” from Antony and Cleopatra) and paraphrases the ideas of men like Kipling and Darwin to marble one-liners like “The jungle is still the jungle be it composed of trees or skyscrapers, and the law of the jungle is bite or be bitten.”

Dylan is fascinated, not only by Jackson’s colourful and tragic course of life, but also by the collection of letters. In songs like “Walls Of Red Wing” and “I Shall Be Released” the poet plays with the notion that the world is a prison, that we are all prisoners. Dylan’s reflex to elevate the prisoner to the status of hero is known from “The Ballad Of Donald White”, “Drifter’s Escape” and, later, from “Hurricane” and the songs about Hattie Carroll and Davey Moore demonstrate his compassion for black victims of a white, repressive system.

So George Jackson’s story is right up Dylan’s alley, leading to a rare flash of inspiration. Dylan’s well is empty in the dry years between New Morning (1970) and Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973). He doesn’t achieve more than the songs “Watching The River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, both inspired by his writing block. The apparent ease and remarkable speed with which “George Jackson” is written, recorded and released creates hope, also because of the old-fashioned, pre-’65 finger-pointing content of the song: is Dylan back?

The B-side of the single, the acoustic version, is in any case a return to old times. The instrumentation (guitar and harmonica only) and the simplified, dramatized distortion of the actual events is 1963 Dylan: “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll”, for example, including that philosophical finale.

Jackson himself divides the world into two distinct types only: the guilty and the innocent. Dylan embellishes that into the more poetic image some of us are prisoners, the rest of us are guards. There is also some excitement about the four-letter word shit, the first expletive in an official Dylan song. It is beeped by the mainstream radio stations, but alas, it does not generate too much extra attention.

Back at the top of the charts it does not bring him. A disappointing 33rd place is the single’s peak; like the press, the public is not too enthusiastic either. There are even cynical questions about Dylan’s sincerity – that the worn out protest singer would want to slip back into the hearts of his old fans over Jackson’s back (as if Dylan ever cared about the expectations of his admirers).

Neither does the recording mark a reopening of his creative vein – it will take some more time before the songs start flowing again.

No, no return, just an isolated burst. One that evaporates quite quickly. It almost seems as if the subject is too controversial, even for the master himself. Jackson is of course radicalized, embracing Lenin and Mao (“with them I found salvation”) and has – officially – the death of at least one prison guard on his conscience. So the single, with a band version on side A, does little and soon fades, just like the song at all; Dylan never plays it live, doesn’t select it for compilation albums and it’s hardly picked up by any of his colleagues.

In the Far East the song pops up again, on the compilation Masterpieces (1978) and a next official re-release takes until 2013, until the bonus disc at The Complete Album Collection Vol. 1.

In the black community the song is more appreciated. As on the Sounds Of The Black Power collector Listen Whitey! – with on the cover Dylan fan and Black Panther founder Huey Newton cherishing a copy of his beloved Highway 61 Revisited.

Of the rare covers, the reggae version of Steel Pulse (2004) has at least some conviction; their own “Uncle George” demonstrates passion and commitment to the cause as well. However, memorable music it does not yield, nor does the sterile live performance by Joan Baez. The only performance that is (more than) worth listening to is J.P. Robinson’s glowing soul ballad from 1972. An Otis Redding approach (especially the opening, in which he seems to slide down to “I’ve Got Dreams To Remember”), with horns, organ and ladies’ choir – an arrangement which works surprisingly well. And that languishing mouth organ certainly is a very nice reverence to the song’s spiritual father.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.

By Larry Fyffe

Rob Stoner, bassist who accompanied ‘the song and dance man’ on tour, succinctly describes Bob Dylan’s mixing of personal and artistic motives behind many of his public performances, including those in documentaries and films:

“He’s always trying to put people on, to put people off his trail. He’s busy throwing shade ….   It’s all part of him just being a shapeshifter. It’s all intentional, and it’s all in fun.”

Indeed, satirists Lord Buckley and Sheldon Allan Silverstein have a strong influence on the singer, songwriter, and musician Bob Dylan.

The following lyrics are directed at children; nonetheless, like many fairy tales and nursery rhymes, they be not light-hearted in tone, but quite dark-humoured:

He watched till his eyes were frozen wide
And his bottom grew into his chair
And his chin turned into a tuning dial
And antennae grew out of his hair
(Shel Silverstein: Jimmy Jet And His TV Set)

(Please note video  below takes a few seconds to get going)

The song lyrics below are directed at children, but send a warning to their parents as well:

"The news of the day is on all the time
All the latest gossip, all the latest rhyme
Your mind is your temple, keep it beautiful and free
Don't let an egg get laid in it by something you can't see"
(Bob Dylan: TV Talking Song)

https://youtu.be/4Iv-sO_Sw1M

The following lyrics, sung by Bob Dylan, appear in the film “Hearts Of Fire”:

I've got a couple of more years on you babe, and that's all
I've had more chances to fly, and more places to fall
It ain't that I'm wiser
It's only that I've spent more time with my back to the wall
And I've picked up a couple of more years on you baby, 
      and that's all
(Dr. Hook: A Couple of More Years ~ Shel Silverstein)

A shapeshifter Bob Dylan is for sure, but as the following lyrics demonstrate (like those above do), many are not performed just for the fun of it. Though they be not out-right didactic, they contain a message that does not place the blame for anti-social behaviour solely on the inherent nature of human beings:

I saw the headlines on the 'Morning Star'
"Mad dope fiend killer behind bars"
I was found guilty at the trial
Judge said I'm condemned to die
(Dope Fiend Robber ~ Bob Dylan)

Another rendition thereof with accompanying music:

They found me guilty at the trial
The judge condemned me to die
Been on the morphine quite a while
But once I was someone's child
(Nick Juno: Dope Fiend Robber ~ Dylan/Juno)

(For more information on this Dylan song recreated via Untold Dylan please see here)

The song lyrics below may be rendered rather light-heartedly in tone,  but only for the sake of making them more poignant through the incongruity:

He was a clean cut kid
And they made a killer out of him
Is what they did
They say, "Listen up, boy, you're just a pup"
They sent him to a napalm health spa to shape up
(Bob Dylan: Clean Cut Kid)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 6000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

But what is complete is our index to all the 604 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found, on the A to Z page.  I’m proud of that; no one else has found that many songs with that much information.  Elsewhere the songs are indexed by theme and by the date of composition. See for example Bob Dylan year by year.