In the Canadian version of the song “Red River Valley”, a soldier leaves behind his French/Indian “half-breed” maiden in Manitoba:
Says she in the lyrics thereto:
So come sit by my side if you love me
Do not hasten to bid me 'adieu'
But remember the Red River Valley
And the girl who loves you so true
(Red River Valley ~ traditional)
In the American version, it’s the girl who leaves the southern Red River Valley, and abandons her “cowboy” lover there.
So says the song from the movie “Red River Valley”, starring Roy Rogers (Gene Autry stars and sings the song in a movie by the same name – says ‘one’ instead of ‘cowboy’; Rex Allen sings “Red River Valley” in a movie titled “Red River Shore”):
Come sit by my side if you love me
Do not hasten to bid me 'adieu'
But remember the Red River Valley
And the cowboy that loved you so true
(Roy Rogers: Red River Valley ~ traditional)
The rendition below, sung by a Canadian, returns to the “half-breed” motif:
Won't you ever come back to the Valley
To a half-breed that's lonely and blue
Many years I have waited, my darling
Don't you know that you said that you'd always be true
(Wilf Carter: Red River Valley Blues ~ Carter/traditional)
The following song lyrics be somewhat akin to the Canadian variation of “Red River Valley”:
There lives a fair maiden, she's the one I adore
She's the one I will marry on the Red River Shore
She wrote me a letter, she wrote it so kind
And in that letter, these words you'll find
"Come back to me darling, you're the one I adore"
(Kingston Trio: Red River Shore ~ Omar/Cierley/Spittard)
Things don’t turn out well in the song above; nor apparently in the lyrics below:
She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing what was in her mind
I don't see why I should even care
It's not dark yet, but It's getting there
(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)
The themes of lost love and death-awaiting are found again in the following song:
Well, I went back to see about her once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to had seen us there
Said they didn't know who I was talking about
Well, the sun went down on me a long time ago
I've had to pull back from the door
I wish I could have spent every hour of my life
With the girl from the Red River Shore
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)
In the song lyrics quoted below, the Red River (Rubicon River) In Italy serves as an ominous symbol – sooner or later a person must face the inevitability of his own death:
What are these dark days I see
In this world so idly bent?
I cannot redeem the time
The time so idly spent
How long can this go on?
(Bob Dylan: Crossing The Rubicon)
Because of the above song’s double-edged lyrics, it’s easily construed that the narrator thereof puts his arm around Frederick Nietzsche, and they walk off into the fog seeking vengeance against God for throwing Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden; making all humans mortal, and depriving them of everlasting love:
I'll cut you up with a crooked knife
Lord, and I'll miss you when you're gone
(Bob Dylan: Crossing The Rubicon)
Verily, the Lord tests Abraham, but leaves His own young Son hung on the cross to suffer and die.
Untold Dylan: who we are what we do
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
After writing and recording “Love and Theft” Bob Dylan entered another sparse period of song writing, and indeed much of the 21st century can be characterised in terms of a far less active periods of composition than earlier in Bob’s life.
Indeed in 1999 Bob wrote one song, “Things have changed” and that line “I used to care but things have changed” caused a lot of headscratching.
But then he was getting a little bit older by now. And Bob did not give up composing completely at this time, as in 2001 he wrote the first of four movie songs which were written between 2001 and 2005. This first venture, Waitin’ for You, was composed after Love and Theft in 2001.
However I should point out that the compositional date of King of Kings is not clear, but it was certainly in this year. Here’s the list and the subject summary which is the essence of this little series.
And just in case you are hitting this series for the first time, let me explain. The idea is to classify the meaning of each song in as few words as possible, such as “Love”, “Lost love,” “moving on”, “Gambling” etc etc.
I’ve been doing this all the way through Dylan’s writing career, and if you have been following the series you’ll know that most times we get a mixture of songs. (There is an index to all the articles in the series – see the foot of this page.
That pattern stopped suddenly in 1979 when every song Dylan composed was on the same theme – his newly found faith. After that it began to unravel rather, and we also had periods when Bob stopped altogether. In 1999 he wrote just one song: “Things have changed.” In 2000 he wrote nothing. Which brings us to 2001, and this is how I classify the songs for that year.
That looks like a crazy mixture, but it also looks like a continuing theme. Break it down into key themes and we have “Chaos, departure, it makes no sense”.
And what fascinates me here is that I think we are seeing a sort of wave movement in Bob’s themes.
So there is a clear theme in this decade. “Things have changed” did not come out of nowhere, but as a reflection on Bob sinking backwards into an awareness that when he declared that “Times they are a changing” and we all took that to mean “for the better” it turned out they were indeed changing, but not necessarily on a wave of improvement. They were changing in fact for the worse. For a moment Bob found relief from this drift into chaos through his religious conversion but it didn’t last.
So what of 2001? In this year Bob looked at chaos from a variety of angles – but always it was chaos. There always had, of course, been negativity in Bob’s songs, obviously including the many songs of lost love, and the songs of moving on (a central blues theme).
There had been chaos when Bob brought surrealism and despair into the songs of the 60s, from which he subsequently found Dada being added to the mix so that by 1984 there were 15 songs of a Dadaist variety. Drifters Escape, that song to which I so often return, is the perfect example. Nothing makes sense, not even in a court of law where sense is supposedly handed down.
By 2017 even Bob knew there was more chaos here than there was along the watchtower.
Although as we can see sometimes the chaos is loud, sometimes it is frighteningly quiet.
Well, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day
Yeah, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day
I’m just sittin’ here thinking
With my mind a million miles away
All we can do is drift. We can’t affect the world – it just is. We might get references from ancient Greece or from those blues singers of the 1920s whom we have seen come and go, but none of this makes any difference. We live in a world of chaos. There’s nothing we can do.
Just watch Bob, and then if you can look away follow the lyrics. It is rare that I feel the need to publish the whole set of lyrics – since everyone can find them everywhere. But if you have a few minutes, do follow these, and then tell me this is not about chaos.
Well, I’m stranded in the city that never sleeps
Some of these women they just give me the creeps
I’m avoidin’ the Southside the best I can
These memories I got, they can strangle a man
Well, I came ashore in the dead of the night
Lot of things can get in the way when you’re tryin’ to do what’s right
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
You’d be honest with me if only you knew
I’m not sorry for nothin’ I’ve done
I’m glad I fought—I only wish we’d won
The Siamese twins are comin’ to town
People can’t wait—they’re gathered around
When I left my home the sky split open wide
I never wanted to go back there—I’d rather have died
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
You’d be honest with me if only you knew
My woman got a face like a teddy bear
She’s tossin’ a baseball bat in the air
The meat is so tough you can’t cut it with a sword
I’m crashin’ my car, trunk first into the boards
You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice
Well, I’ll sell it to ya at a reduced price
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
You’d be honest with me if only you knew
Some things are too terrible to be true
I won’t come here no more if it bothers you
The Southern Pacific leaving at nine forty-five
I’m having a hard time believin’ some people were ever alive
I’m stark naked, but I don’t care
I’m going off into the woods, I’m huntin’ bare
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
Well, you’d be honest with me if only you knew
I’m here to create the new imperial empire
I’m going to do whatever circumstances require
I care so much for you—didn’t think that I could
I can’t tell my heart that you’re no good
Well, my parents they warned me not to waste my years
And I still got their advice oozing out of my ears
You don’t understand it—my feelings for you
Well, you’d be honest with me if only you knew
The meat is so tough you can’t cut it with a sword
I’m crashin’ my car, trunk first into the boards
You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice
Well, I’ll sell it to ya at a reduced price
Indeed.
Welcome to chaos.
The index to the entire series of articles about the meanings of Dylan songs year by year can be found here.
Untold Dylan: who we are what we do
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”–in addition to being a palimpsest for “Got My Mind Made Up” from Knocked Out Loaded, which opens with the lines, “Don’t ever try to change me/ I been in this thing too long/ There’s nothing you can say or do/ To make me think I’m wrong”–is an exquisite love song, with a melody taken from Offenbach’s opera, The Tales of Hoffman.
Most reviewers have taken the song at face value as a romantic proposal to a woman. It has also been seen as another address to Dylan’s sometimes wayward audience. But there is also a theory among certain Dylanologists that his love songs are often covertly addressed to God. This theory can be applied far too indiscriminately, but I believe it works perfectly here. (As “To Make You Feel My Love” makes wonderful sense if Christ is taken to be the singer.)
The key to “I’ve Made Up My Mind” is the line, “I’m giving myself to you, I am.” We might take this to be repetition for emphasis. “I’m giving myself to you, no really I am.” But there can be no doubt Dylan knows the divine name revealed to Moses at the burning bush. There can be very little doubt that Dylan has heard the theory that some of his love songs are addressed to God. So, either he is now confirming that theory or purposefully lampooning it. To me, this is a fairly straight-forward declaration of devotion to the God of Abraham, the God revealed on Mt. Horeb.
The second bridge provides a clue that the first interpretation is correct: “Take me out traveling, you’re a traveling man/ Show me something that I’ll understand/ I’m not what I was, things aren’t what they were/ I’m going far away from home with her.”
Most strikingly, the lines unexpectedly address a man. So, the “You” of the title is not a female lover, but a traveling man, whom the speaker wants to accompany on his journey. If the ‘traveling man” is Christ, then the woman is the church.
The middle lines refer to I Corinthians and Galatians. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (Gal. 2:20); “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (I Cor. 13:12). The speaker has made up his mind to give himself over to God in order to experience the illumination that comes from conversion.
Other verses corroborate this reading, for example the fifth: “If I had the wings of a snow-white dove/ I’d preach the gospel, the gospel of love/ A love so real, a love so true/ I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.” “Oh that I had wings like a dove!” of course, originates in Psalm 55.
There is now an inevitable echo of Henry James, though I’m not sure that is relevant here. The desire for wings to fly shows up in well known folk tunes such as “Dink’s Song,” “The Water is Wide,” and “Carrickfergus,” as well as Dylan’s own “Watching the River Flow.” But I believe the most direct and pertinent allusion is to Bob Ferguson’s “Wings of a Dove,” a number one country hit for Ferlin Husky in 1960, that begins, “On the wings of a snow-white dove/ He sends His pure sweet love.” The allusion to the country-gospel song confirms that the dove is the Holy Spirit.
For the persona, the love preached in the gospel, love of God and of neighbor as oneself, rather than erotic love, is real and true. Therefore, in the penultimate verse, when he sings, “I’ll see you at sunrise, I’ll see you at dawn,” it is legitimate to hear this as, “I’ll see God when the Son rises on Easter morning.” “I know you’d say yes, I’m saying it too,” he sings to a God who loves all of His children and wants all of us to give ourselves to Him, not simply out of blind faith, but because we have “thought it all through” and made up our minds to do so.
“Black Rider” casts Death as a sometimes charming villain in an epic showdown worthy of the OK Corral. The music features Spanish guitar resembling something Grady Martin might have played on a Marty Robbins cowboy song or an Enrico Morricone soundtrack for a spaghetti Western. The Black Rider might originate with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse but he seems here to represent death generally rather than famine specifically.
The singer takes differing attitudes to the ominous rider, as we often do with death. In the second verse he bargains with him, “Be reasonable, mister, be honest, be fair/ Let all of your earthly thoughts be a prayer.” The third and fourth verses take diametrically opposed attitudes:
Black Rider, black rider, all dressed in black
I’m walking away, you try to make me look back
My heart is at rest, I’d like to keep it that way
I don’t want to fight, at least not today
Go home to your wife, stop visiting mine
One of these days I’ll forget to be kind.
Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, then let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war
Don’t hug me, don’t flatter me, don’t turn on the charm
I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.
In the first stanza, the singer walks away from the rider, in the second he asks him to open the door. In the first his heart is at rest, in the second his soul distressed and mind at war. In the first he does not want to fight, in the second he hacks off the rider’s arm. In the first, the rider dallies with the singer’s wife, in the second he attempts to hug, flatter, and charm the singer himself.
What are we to make of these contradictions? They represent how differently we view death in different moods and at different times in our lives. The first stanza describes a time when the persona is at peace and doesn’t want to think about mortality or have to resist the inevitable encroachments of time. The second describes a melancholy moment when the persona is half in love with easeful death, yet still is able to resist the seductive charm of ceasing upon the midnight with no pain.
The final stanza reveals the proper attitude to take toward death: “Black rider, black rider, hold it right there/ The size of your cock will get you nowhere/ I suffer in silence, I’ll not make a sound/ Maybe I’ll take the high moral ground/ Some enchanted evening, I’ll sing you a song/ Black rider, black rider, you been on the job too long.”
Although this verse makes no direct allusion to I Cor 15:55 (“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory”) or to John Donne’s famous sonnet, this is Dylan’s version of “Death Be Not Proud.” The language has been coarsened to fit the song’s wild west setting. Death asserts his power by boasting of the size of his male member. (Donne’s poem employs sexual imagery as well: “And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well/ And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?”)
But the singer now realizes that for all Death’s seeming invincibility, he has already been swallowed up in victory. The high moral ground in the face of death is humble acceptance–to suffer in silence–in the recognition that all flesh is grass. But since we know that death is not the end, if we are spiritually prepared to meet our Maker, to go without a sound whenever our time comes, then we can fly to death as the man flies to the stranger he sees in the standard, “Some Enchanted Evening.”
The most complex allusion in the stanza is the final line’s quotation from “Duncan and Brady”: “you been on the job too long.” In the version of the folk song that Dylan recorded in 1992 (which was based on versions recorded in the early 60s by Dave Van Ronk and Tom Rush) that line is repeated at the end of every verse. (By contrast, Leadbelly performances of “Duncan and Brady” often did not feature the line at all.)
Brady is a corrupt lawman who intends to “shoot somebody just to see him die.” Thus the black rider, in Dylan’s western version, is a disreputable sheriff who kills indiscriminately. Brady comes to arrest Duncan as death comes for us all, but Duncan shoots him in the chest killing him. Or, as Donne phrases it, “Death, thou shalt die.” Brady, referred to repeatedly as King Brady, is taken to the graveyard, definitively defeated. When the women hear that King Brady is dead, they dress in red to celebrate, no longer having to live in fear. Death has been on the job since Cain killed Abel, but after Christ freed us, he had been on the job too long.
Untold Dylan: who we are what we do
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
When Dylan butterflies around his gypsy gal in the early sixties, the toddler Suzanne Vega is playing on the streets in the same Spanish Harlem. She may have fleetingly noticed the shabby folk hero back then, but from puberty onwards, the maestro has played a growing role in her artistry. In interviews, the Grammy winner and “mother of mp3” (the inventor of mp3, Karlheinz Brandenburg, uses her song “Tom’s Diner” for his first audio compression) keeps mentioning Dylan’s name as her source of inspiration and personal hero. “From Bob Dylan,” she says for example, “I learned to expand my mind and the power of the image and metaphor.”
In 2013, when asked, she does not call her breakthrough hit “Luka” the highlight of her career, but: “My highlight was opening for Bob Dylan. Childhood hero, way more friendly and kinder than I could have imagined.”
The accompanying selfie is posted on her twitter account in January 2016 with the title The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face, the well-known song line from “Visions Of Johanna”. Undoubtedly out of fear for plagiarism accusations, Vega adds loud and clear the name of the author; “Bob Dylan #selfie”.
That caution is a legacy of the hot late summer of 2006, when a rampant Plagiarism Or Inspiration discussion in the various online Dylan groups skips to the grown-up world and even sets the opinion pages of The New York Times on fire, briefly. One of the most striking names among the letters submitted in the Times is Suzanne Vega’s, who in her movingly naive letter stands up for her hero. Dylan did not deliberately copy some lines of poetry by 19th-century poet Henry Timrod, she argues:
“Maybe he has a photographic memory, and bits of text stick to it. Maybe it shows how deeply he had immersed himself in the texts and times of the Civil War, and he was completely unconscious of it.”
(The Ballad Of Henry Timrod, New York Times, September 17, 2006)
Babe in the woods. Her closing words are a lot less wide-eyed, though. Quite captivating even, as a matter of fact: “He’s never pretended to be an academic, or even a nice guy. He is more likely to present himself as, well, a thief. Renegade, outlaw, artist. That’s why we are passionate about him.”
The fat hit the fire thanks to the digging of one Scott Warmuth, a New Mexico disc jockey, passionate Dylan fan and excellent, very worth reading Dylan blogger, who finds on Modern Times a dozen rather literal Timrod quotes, especially in “Spirit On The Water”, “When The Deal Goes Down” and “Workingman’s Blues #2”. Coincidence is indeed out of the question, so soon the discussion divides the fans, critics and know-it-alls into shruggers, defenders, attackers and disappointed. The disappointed stumble over the pattern that is now beginning to emerge; on “Love And Theft” (1997) the poet did copy exuberantly too, without mentioning the source (from Ovid, for example, and from Confessions Of A Yakuza, the fascinating memoirs of a Japanese gangster doctor).
Dylan’s interest in the forgotten Henry Timrod (1829-1867), the unofficial poet laureate of the Southerners in the American Civil War, presumably sparked around “Love And Theft”. We hear in “Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum”: well a childish dream is a deathless need, which already comes from a poem by Timrod (“A Vision Of Poesy, Part I”). Apparently, Timrod stays on Dylan’s nightstand hereafter; a year later another patch comes along, in the crushing “’Cross The Green Mountain” (the verse along the dim Atlantic line).
It’s a special recording in more ways than one, “’Cross The Green Mountain”. Dylan writes the song for the soundtrack of an epic, far too long flop about the American Civil War, Gods And Generals (2003), a prequel to the much more successful Gettysburg from 1993. Thanks to the incidental character of the recording, the conservative Dylan for once allows the use of a computer. Technician Chris Shaw is finally given permission to demonstrate the ease of ProTools, a program that the immediately impressed master uses more often afterwards, especially for cutting and pasting:
“We did a take of the song, and he was like, ‘Okay, I want to edit out the second verse and put the fourth verse in there.’ And I said, ‘Okay,’ and by the time he walked into the control room from the studio, I had it done. And his eyes just opened wide. ‘You can edit that fast on ProTools?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘And you can keep everything?’ ‘You can keep everything, Bob.’ You could just see the gears in his head suddenly spinning.”
(interview with Chris Shaw, “Tell Tales Special”, Uncut, 2008)
More noteworthy is the particularly tasteful video clip that accompanies the (abridged) song, with the singer in an outfit and with a charisma that has become one of the iconic images of an elderly Dylan. Partly filmed at the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, where a subdued grieving Dylan places a photograph at the grave of a Southern officer, Captain William R. Jeter, who was fatally wounded at Culpeper Courthouse in October 1862 at the age of 28.
Clip ’Cross The Green Mountain:
But above all, obviously, the song is a magnificent masterpiece, a song deserving a status like “Blind Willie McTell” or “Not Dark Yet”, harmonic and meditative, but it’s out for blood, as the bard would say.
An inspired Dylan, who has been studying the Civil War (1861-65) for over forty years, chooses a sober, elegant and poignant musical background with the push and pull rhythm of a marche funèbre – matching the end of the film and the theme at all. Equally fitting this customization are the graceful, stately lyrics. From his notebook full of Bible quotations and 19th-century poetry fragments, the poet constructs an atmospheric monument, a tight, apocalyptic elegy. References and quotations can be found in each of the twelve verses. The first lines are inspired by Revelations (“And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea”), the Irish poet W.B. Yeats (“Heaven blazing into the head,” from “Lapis Lazuli”) and perhaps also Ezekiel 20:47, the only Bible verse with the word blazing, and, again, fitting in with the bloody war between North and South: “and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned therein.”
In the following verses we find more Civil War poets. Shepherd, Henry Lynden Flash, Walt Whitman (the letter to mother part), Gannett and Waterston – all contribute more and less literal quotes. And Henry Timrod, the only source to which a defensive Dylan, years later, acknowledges some indebtedness.
The acknowledgement takes place in the Rolling Stone interview with Mikal Gilmore, 27 September 2012:
“And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It’s an old thing – it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back. […] It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.”
A bit too assertive perhaps, but paradoxically too modest as well. “’Cross The Green Mountain” is a great song with a compelling mosaic lyric, demonstrating how a brilliant poet who lards his work with copy-pasted snippets from all over, can reach Olympic heights.
Awkward only is that Dylan himself is one of those “wussies and pussies complaining about that stuff.” Just ask Hootie & The Blowfish.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Thematically, “False Prophet” shares some things in common with “Jokerman,” Dylan’s great song about messianism. The man who was hailed as a prophet from a young age and labelled against his will the spokesman of his generation is once again playing with his public image. The song is titled “False Prophet,” but repeats three times the phrase, “I ain’t no false prophet.” Why not make the entire five word phrase the title? Is the speaker a false prophet who claims like all false prophets to be true? Or is the song, in the voice of a true prophet, calling out false prophets? Is the double negative significant or merely colloquial? Or is the point that claiming not to be a false prophet is not the same thing as claiming positively to be a prophet? As with any lyric, at issue is the degree to which we are to relate to or distance ourselves from the persona singing the song. In this case, I suspect the persona sympathetic, a voice claiming no prophetic mantle, but willing to speak the truth as best he sees it. It is the voice not of someone who has all the answers, but of someone willing to be honest.
What does this honest voice have to say? The song begins: “Another day that don’t end, another ship going out/ Another day of anger, bitterness, and doubt.” In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dylan mentions Moby-Dick as a novel that profoundly influenced him. Perhaps we are aboard the Pequod along with Ishmael who tells us, “the world’s a ship on its passage out.” The same speech also mentions The Odyssey. Perhaps we are with Odysseus traversing perilous waters. Perhaps this is one of the “distant ships sailing into the mist” from “Jokerman.” Perhaps we are with the reluctant prophet Jonah. To whom does the “anger, bitterness, and doubt” belong? To the singer, the world, or both?
The verse continues, “I know how it happened, I saw it begin/ I opened my heart to the world and the world came in.” If the antecedent of “it” is “another day of anger, bitterness, and doubt,” then “it” begins in Eden with man’s first disobedience. In the second line of the couplet, Dylan uses an allusion to signify a meaning the opposite of the passage alluded to.
At the end of The Stranger, Camus’s narrator Meursault says, “As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate” (emphasis mine). Such a feeling could not be more at odds with the voice of Dylan’s song which is alive to hope, searching “the world over for the Holy Grail,” and open to a reality that he in no way finds indifferent. Meursault gets it wrong; the proper response to Original Sin is an open heart of love not a closed heart of hate.
Nevertheless, the singer of “False Prophet” does have adversaries. He tells us, “I’m the enemy of treason, the enemy of strife/ I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life/ I ain’t no false prophet, I just know what I know/ I go where only the lonely can go.” I take it that we ought properly to be the enemy of treason, strife and the unlived meaningless life. These lines could have come from Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” a song clearly indicative of Dylan’s own position. An honest voice goes where only the lonely go because honest voices are often unpopular and refuse to court favor. Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” is a heartbreak of a song, but it ends on a note of hope: “Maybe tomorrow/ A new romance/ No more sorrow/ But that’s the chance/ You’ve got to take/ If your lonely heart breaks.” Even in a world of anger, bitterness and doubt, we have to take a hopeful chance on tomorrow and new love.
On this track, greed is again condemned. We are told to “Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold/ Put ‘em six feet under and then pray for their souls.” We also hear, “Put out your hand, there’s nothing to hold/ Open your mouth, I’ll stuff it with gold/ Oh, you poor devil, look up if you will/ The City of God is there on the hill.” The values expressed are explicitly those of Augustine’s City of God, not the City of Man. Lust, too, is condemned again: “Hello stranger, hello and good-bye/ You rule the land but so do I/ You lusty old mule, you got a poisoned brain/ I’ll marry you to a ball and chain.”
The devil, who is both strange and well-known to the wayfaring pilgrim, rules the land precisely because we repeatedly surrender our wills to our various lusts. We say “Hello stranger” to the devil because even if we manage to drive him away for awhile, he returns like an old friend, whether we want him to or not. The Carter Family song, “Hello Stranger,” contains the line, “I’m prison bound, I’m longing to be free.” Such is the sentiment of all of us who are enslaved to sin.
But that is not the end of the story. The devil may rule a fallen world, but “the prince of the world will be driven out” (Jn 12.31). We are also told, “You don’t know me darling, you never would guess/ I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest/ I ain’t no false prophet, I just said what I said/ I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head.” “Ghostly” makes us think of the Holy Ghost, explicitly named in other songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Who is infinitely more powerful than the devil, even if the ways of God seem to have little traction in the world. The somebody on whose head vengeance will be brought is that lusty old mule with a poisoned brain.
There are numerous images of violence and revenge in the lyrics, but they tend to be directed at clearly wicked figures, i.e., they demonstrate an active and aggressive resistance to evil. A final clue to the song is the line “Don’t care what I drink, I don’t care what I eat.” This passage alludes to Mark 7:15 (and possibly the early Church arguments of kosher dietary regulations). In the gospel Jesus proclaims, “There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.” This means that the key to freeing oneself from sin and imprisoning the devil with a ball and chain comes from the spirit operating inside of a person, not adherence to the minutiae of the law or any externally imposed code of conduct.
“My Own Version of You”has been one of the most commented on and possibly the most misunderstood song on the album. Most reviewers have seen the song as a humorous bride of Frankenstein tale about creating a perfect partner.
Others have found Dylan speaking to that part of his audience that has always wanted him to remain still steadfast, still unchangeable from the time of going electric in the mid-sixties to going country in the late sixties through overtly gospel albums of the late seventies/early eighties to his most recent reworking of the Great American Songbook and the ever-evolving arrangements in concert of songs considered sacrosanct. According to this reading, Dylan, the great and original writer, is singing about creating the taste by which he is to be relished. A more interesting view discovers a song about the folk process itself, i.e., about how Dylan takes various parts from various places to bring to life something new and greater than the sum of its parts.
Numerous aspects of the song militate against any of these interpretations. For one, this is clearly a golem tale, and in the classic golem narratives, however benign the intentions of the creator, the outcome is usually tragic. The most famous gentile version of a golem tale is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dr Frankenstein is a man of science attempting to discover the secrets of life in order to benefit mankind, yet his experiment goes horribly awry. I take it, then, that the song tells a story about a deeply misguided attempt to bring someone–or perhaps actually something–new to life. We are not to identify with the persona behind this song.
As with “False Prophet,” the title to this tune is somewhat unexpected. The phrase (with some variation) “I’ll bring someone to life” is repeated eight times in the song, while the title, “My Own Version of You” is sung only once at the end of the first verse.
A golem is not the recreation of someone particular; Frankenstein did not revivify a new version of an old friend or lover. But the song’s persona wants to recreate an improved version of a unique “you,” someone he has previously known, although it is “someone [he’s] never seen.” How can you know someone well enough to create a new version of him or her if you have never seen that person? “You” must refer not to a particular human being but to a concept or to an invisible entity. Thus, I contend, the song is best heard as a cautionary tale about the creation of false idols and the Promethean impulse to remake the world. It is, in fact, Dylan’s greatest anti-utopian song since “Gates of Eden” where Aladdin held a time rusted compass blade along with his dubiously wish-fulfilling lamp while sitting side-saddle on a golden calf next to Utopian hermit monks who are taken so seriously by those outside the gates of Eden but laughed at by those inside.
The song begins with the narrator spending “the summers into January…visiting morgues and monasteries.” We might think that he is searching the past (morgues) and religion (monasteries) to discover the blueprint for his new creation, but this is misleading because he goes on to say “to hell to all things that used to be.” He clearly is not mining the wisdom of the ages but wants to bring to life something utterly unprecedented. He tells us “it must be the winter of [his] discontent,” an obvious allusion to Richard III, one of Shakespeare’s most dastardly villains, and another clue not to sympathize with the persona. Now, there is nothing wrong with being discontent with a broken world, nor is there anything wrong with, as he says later, wanting “to do things for the benefit of all mankind.” However, it is a most dangerous presumption to think that anyone, whatever the intentions, can bring to life a creature capable of eliminating our discontentment.
The most commented on couplet in the reviews occurs at the beginning of verse three: “I’ll take the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando/ Mix it up in a tank and get a robot commando.” I’ll admit there is some comedy to this image, and I would never want to deny Dylan’s humor. There is also something of a carnival vibe to the music, but the mood is ominous house of mirrors more than “Monster Mash.” Plus, what he explicitly intends to create is not some lover for his life but a violent gangster. He thinks that if he can “do it up right and put the head on straight/ [He’ll] be saved by the creature that I create.” This imagery conveys excellently the inherent violence and danger in the Utopian longing to manufacture an entity with salvific powers. What could be more misguided than to believe you can create the being that will save you, when clearly only the Being who created us can redeem us. The persona’s proposed creature is another golden calf (albeit one with mafia connections).
In the next verse he claims that he will both do the impossible and do it without any risk: “I’ll get blood from a cactus, gunpowder from ice/ I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice.” This alchemic miracle will result in “someone who feels the way that I feel,” some idol, that is, created in the singer’s own image. When he “get[s] into trouble” with “No place to turn,” he asks himself “What would Julius Caesar do.” Obviously, this question riffs on the once ubiquitous, “What Would Jesus Do.” The persona of the song might take Julius Caesar as the JC to whom he holds allegiance and turns for advice, but Bob Dylan turns to a different JC when he “hit[s] the wall.”
Admittedly there is something seemingly ludicrous about the conjunction of personages in the following verse: “I’m gonna make you play piano like Leon Russell/ Like Liberace, like St. John the Apostle/ I’ll play every number that I can play/ I’ll see you baby on judgement day.” But this same confluence of music and religion recurs later in this same song and on other songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Dylan is up to something more than rhyming for laughs. St. John’s depiction of final judgement continues into the next verse, set at the “Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street,” where the persona sings that he will “balance the scales” without getting involved “in any insignificant details.” Apparently, in bringing someone to life, the singer intends to balance the scales of justice for all time, to right all wrongs immanently and imminently, initiating a post-apocalyptic secular millennium. With a goal that high, one fears, all details become insignificant, anything being justified in order to balance the scales of perfect justice.
The ninth verse again confounds religion and music: “You can bring it to St. Peter, you can bring it to Jerome/ You bring it all the way over, bring it all the way home/ Bring it to the corner where the children play/ You can bring it to me on a silver tray.” There are multiple allusions to unpack in these lines. Jerome might be St Jerome, but he also might be Jerome Green, a member of Bo Diddley’s band, who wrote “Bring It to Jerome,” a song urging a straying woman to bring herself and his money back home.
The lines also hint at Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me,” which features a similar theme. In the prophets, when the people stray from God to pursue false idols, Israel is often compared to an unfaithful woman. So, if St. Peter holds the true keys to heaven, then Dylan as author (as opposed to the persona singing the song) suggests that the attempt to create a new, alternate path to salvation is a form of harlotry.
Furthermore, the third line alludes to Cat Stevens’ “Where Do the Children Play,” a song about the cost of the relentless pursuit of progress and the unintended consequences of technological innovation even when pursued with, in Dylan’s persona’s words, “decency and common sense.” “My Own Version of You” ends with the singer proclaiming that when he brings someone to life, he will “Do it with laughter and do it with tears.” The final verse of the Stevens song concludes, “Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry? Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?”
The drive to create a new version of a saviour always results in a tyrannical concentration of power. In the final verse of “My Own Version of You,” the persona ominously declares, “Show me your ribs, I’ll stick in the knife.” Dylan struck a similar chord in 1974’s “Dirge”: “So sing your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine/ The naked truth is still taboo wherever it can be seen.” The lines also evoke Dylan’s own album, Bringing It All Back Home, which contains, “Gates of Eden.” Finally, the verse alludes to John the Baptist. Here the persona is cast as Herod, the man who, in order to maintain his own power, must silence the true prophet who proclaims the necessity of repentance because the true Kingdom is coming. Hence we have yet another reason not to trust the persona.
The next verse quotes Shakespeare’s most famous line, “Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be.” Hamlet suffers from a metaphysical despair–a belief that the world is so fundamentally corrupt that removing his regicide usurper uncle from the throne will do nothing to relieve the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
As Marcellus, a royal guard, estimates the situation, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” This is a political evaluation. If some specific thing is rotten in the state, that thing can be removed, restoring the state to health. Remove Claudius and heal Denmark. But as Hamlet assesses matters, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right.” For Hamlet, the entire age, not something but everything, is broken, and he has the Messiah complex that he is the one chosen to set it right.
The singer of “My Own Version of You” possesses a similar complex, and in order to bring to life the creature that will set things right, he is willing to “use all of [his] powers.” This too is a sinister quote. In Godfather 2, when Kay wants to leave Michael and take the children with her, he says, “I’d use all my power to keep something like that from happening.” The persona is once again associated with gangsterism and the willingness to use any force or coercion to achieve his goal, which is tied to the very nature of existence: what it means “to be.”
In the following verse he claims that he can “see the history of the whole human race.” As previously quoted, he has already said “to hell to all things that used to be.” He does not look to the past for guidance. Rather, the line conjures ideas of historical dialectic and being on the right side of history. It is the progressivist claim to be able to sweep the past into the dustbin of history and finally usher in the perfect society. It claims to take a godlike view of history, seeing past, present, and future simultaneously. But, as creatures embedded in time, participants in the continuous flux of history, we can never stand outside of it to see it whole. Such a claim is more evidence of hubris on the part of the persona.
The lyric suddenly shifts to address slavery, “Stand over there by the cypress tree/ Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery/ Long before the first crusade/ Way back before England or America were made.” Whatever playful humor there might have been in the opening verses has clearly fallen by the wayside. Dylan’s bona fides on the race issue are solidly established. Civil Rights is the one cause he has consistently and firmly stood behind. As a student of the Civil War Dylan knows the high price America has paid and continues to pay for for its violent refusal to abolish an unmitigated evil.
But, at the same time, as an American Jew, Dylan knows very well that the United States is not a uniquely racist nation nor did dead white Anglo-Saxons invent slavery. Dylan knows classical history as well American history. Slavery existed throughout the ancient world. And he knows the history of his people. In his song about the State of Israel, “Neighborhood Bully,” he sings, “Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone/ Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon.” Bigotry and slavery have existed throughout the world since time out of mind. They are the consequence of human sinfulness and the lust for power that afflicts people of every place and every color.
In “Precious Angel,” Dylan sings to an African American lover, “you know our forefathers were slaves/…/But there’s violence in the eyes, girl, so let us not be enticed/ On our way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia, to the judgment hall of Christ.” The path from slavery to true freedom leads to Christ. But the persona singing “My Own Version of You” seeks to find his own means of balancing the scales that have been tilted since the days of Troy and before.
The scene again suddenly shifts from Troy to hell, “Step right into the burning hell/ Where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell/ Mr Freud with his dreams,/ Mr Marx with his axe/ See the rawhide lash rip the skin from their backs.” I find it amusing that the reviews tended to focus on the Pacino/Brando pairing rather than the far more interesting Freud/Marx tandem.
Apparently the reviewers did not want to look too closely at this complex and serious song. Freudian psychology and Marxist dialectic are both named as forms of hellish slavery. They claim to provide a full explanation of human behaviour and historical progress not based on Christian anthropology and Providence. Dylan dismisses all such claims as “enemies of mankind.” The persona, however, engages in a similar, but rival, project. Like all millenarians, he wants to assert that every previous attempt to create a new version of God has been damnably flawed, but that he finally has come up with the “necessary body parts” to bring to life a perfect being. For Dylan it is just one more attempt to create a false idol in our own image.
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
When we find a Dylan song that has not had any music added, we put it on Untold and invite readers to submit their own musical performance of the song. It is then listed on our index of songs, and immortality is granted to the performer / composer.
Recently we had another discovery – Tioga Pass – you can read all about it here. And now we’ve had our first submission of the music to complete the song. It is from Jeff Kosoff. Below I reproduce Jeff’s email to me, and below that is the track he has created.
You will also find details of the other articles in this series below – complete with the music created in each case.
My name is Jeff Kosoff. I’m a painter/writer/musician of no repute whatsoever who has enjoyed reading many thoughtful, provocative posts by you and your stable of contributors.
I am not one to be compelled to enter contests, or even share amongst friends, the vast majority of what I like to call “my work”. I’m not sure why I’ve responded to your clarion call regarding “new music for existing lyrics”, but I did–as demonstrated in my very one-off take, recorded without looking back on a recent stiflingly hot Sunday morning in bucolic Bucks County, PA.
When I saw that no one had yet to respond, I thought, “Maybe the good folks at Untold Dylan will appreciate this loose commitment to quality and at least be mildly entertained.” I love the story of how Dylan came to possess these lyrics. Who doesn’t appreciate a good canard? Anyway, I have a deep appreciation for the unconventional voices, whose influence is evident in what might be described as my singing.
Thank you and all the writers/contributors of Untold Dylan. I think reviewing the songs in the date order they were written truly does provide clarity as to the bard’s state-o-mind. Well worth reading! Looking forward to the forthcoming book.Keep doing great things!
To your continuing success (and dancing)–Cheers,
Jeff Kosoff
The lyrics
Needle's on empty
and here I'm stuck
Four in the morning
and just my luck
Listen to the radio
waiting for the sun
Can't flag a ride
until daylight comes
Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass
Tuned to a station
I've never heard
while moonlight glimmers
on Dead Man's Curve
Glory in the morning
and God bless you
for playing that song
when another would do
Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass
Ain't quite rock
although it moves
It sure ain't country
and it's not the blues
They don't say nothing
when it gets to the end
Just keep playing it
over again
Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass
It isn't pop
and it isn't soul
Nothing like fifties
rock and roll
It isn't folk
Not especially jazz
Got something special
nothing else has
Four in the morning
and out of gas
Mile and a half
from Tioga Pass
The sun comes up
about six o'clock
The station drifts
to some pre-fab rock
Although they played it
all night long
I never did learn
the name of that song
Dylan’s “Rough And Rowdy Ways” compilation of songs takes its title from the lyrics below:
But I can't give up my good old rough and rowdy ways
(Jimmy Rodgers: My Rough And Rowdy Ways ~ Rodgers/McWilliams)
Edward Taylor, a Puritan preacher in America during its colonial days, writes poetry in secret that features the conceits and darkness of the Baroque style; however, Taylor pens some rather unpuritan colourful and florid lines in a style that later becomes known as Rococo:
Shall not thy rose my garden fresh perfume
Shall not they beauty my dull heart assail
Shall not they golden gleams run through this gloom?
(Edward Taylor: The Reflection)
In Dylan’s “rough and rowdy” songs, there be Taylor-like figurative language that compares the great outdoors to a cathedral of light rather than an unadorned church with uncomfortable pews:
People tell me that I'm truly blessed
Bougainvillea blooming in the summer, in the spring
Winter here is an unknown thing
(Bob Dylan: Key West)
In ancient mythology, according to Virgil, those in the Underworld must drink from the River Of Forgetfulness in order to return to the world above. Postmodernist Judaic folklorist Steve Stern writes a novel with disreputable characters in it:
For this generation, half of my soul belongs to you,
and the other half to another,
whom you must seek out"
(Steve Stern: The Angel Of Forgetfuness”)
In song lyrics mentioned below, that novel is alluded to.
According to his poetry, Eward Taylor desires to have some rough and rowdy ways himself:
Was ever heart like mine? So bad, black, vile?
Is any devil blacker? Or can hel
Produce it's match? It is the very soil
Where Satan reads his charms, and sets his spell
(Edward Taylor: Still I Complain, I Am Complaining Still)
Likewise, such dark thoughts are expressed by the singer/songwriter:
Red Cadillac, and a black moustache
Rings on my fingers that sparkle and flash
Tell me, what's next? What shall we do?
Half my soul, baby, belongs to you
(Bob Dylan: I Contain Multitudes)
Indeed, “Ed The Knife” Taylor confesses to himself that though he is an Elect-seeking Puritan on the outside, not so much is he that on the inside:
Nay, muster up your thoughts, and take the pole
Of what walk in the entry of your soul
Which if you do, you certainly will find
With robbers, cutthroats, thieves it's mostly lined
(Edward Taylor: The Accusation Of The Inward Man)
Black-humored though they be, a sentiment hyperbolically displayed by the narrator in the following song lyrics:
Pink petal-pushers, red blue jeans
All the pretty maids, and all the old queens
I carry four pistols, and two large knives
(Bob Dylan: I Contain Multitudes)
Depending, of course, on the translation sourced, direct allusions to Virgil’s tale of the left-and-right pathed Underworld be there in “Rough And Rowdy Ways”:
Let now thy visionary glance look long
On this thy race, the Romans that be thine
Here Caesar .... ascends to the world of light!
(Virgil: Aeneid, Book VI)
Thus:
You stay to the left, you lean to the right
Feel the sunlight on your skin, and the healing virtues of the wind
Key West, Key West is the land of light
(Bob Dylan: Key West)
Untold Dylan: who we are what we do
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Mysterious musicians with hypnotic skills have been around since Orpheus, who is still the greatest of all; his divine arts on the lyra can already calm storm waves and ward off ferocious warriors, but his singing makes trees bend, the wild animals gather peacefully around him, the rocky rock weeps with emotion – and even the god of the underworld melts.
The musician with magic powers remains a popular protagonist in the following centuries. Further north, from the thirteenth century onwards, the Pied Piper of Hamelin becomes an iconic figure, enriched with demonic traits. After the city council does not pay him for the neatly executed pest control, he retaliates horribly: on St John and Paul’s Day, 26 June 1284, while the adults are in church, he returns, lures all 130 children with his flute and disappears with them auf Nimmerwiedersehen into a mountain. In later centuries, a Disney variant pollutes the original story with a happy ending in which the children return home safely and well, but der Rattenfänger, the Pied Piper, remains a dubious, devilish stranger – dressed in a red suit in most variants.
The more sentimental counterpart emerges in literature and music from the eighteenth century onwards: Il Trovatore, the Good-for-nothing, the Poor Minstrel, the wandering, ragged old man who with his violin, hurdy-gurdy or flute, touching hearts, making crippled children dance and fraternizing enemies. Or symbolising Death, as in the most famous example, the Leiermann from the last song of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (1827).
The Tambourine Man fits seamlessly into the row from Orpheus to Leiermann and the charm is easily felt. At the beginning of ’64, when Dylan writes the song, he himself is a Pied Piper who shows the way with his music, brings masses on their feet and enchants followers. With this song again: the extraordinary beauty of “Mr. Tambourine Man” gives birth to folk rock and devout disciples: The Byrds will record over twenty more songs by Dylan in the years following the world’s success with this song, thus contributing to the spread of His word.
En passant Dylan reintroduces the musical magician in popular culture; Chrispian St. Peters scores a world hit in 1966 with “The Pied Piper” (a cover – the original is from the band The Changin’ Times, what’s in a name), the men from Status Quo are still called The Spectres when they score their first hit with “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, Dylan disciple Donovan has a hit with another organ grinder, who is also called “The Hurdy Gurdy Man”, with considerably more success (’68), director Jacques Demy then asks the same Donovan for the leading part in his film The Pied Piper, 1972, and Led Zeppelin lends for “Stairway To Heaven” not only the smoke rings but also the image of the piper who takes you with him.
The king of the Philistines, who in Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues” (1965) locks up all those whistling scum (“Puts the pied pipers in prison”) hasn’t been able to turn the tide.
The song is an exceptional masterpiece even by Dylan standards and is, with crown jewels such as “Blowin’ In The Wind”, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “The Times They Are-A Changin'”, now part of the World Cultural Heritage.
At the time of conception (spring ’64) the maestro also seems to have realised that he has something special in his hands. Contrary to his custom, he cannot make up his mind for a definitive recording, so that it does not end up on Another Side Of.
That first recording, with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, indeed does not have the je-ne-sais-quoi that should elevate the song to a classic, and a remarkably critical Dylan rightly dismisses it. In the studio as well as on stage he fortunately stays true to it, in the months that follow. He is proud of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, often plays it to colleagues and friends and the song immediately stands firm on his repertoire. It even seems to be the only song of which he ever tried to make a “sequel”; “I tried to write another “Mr. Tambourine Man”. It’s the only song I tried to write ‘another one’”.
That’s debatable by the way (there are some “Like A Rolling Stone Part Two’s”, for instance), but it does indicate that Dylan himself recognizes the extravagant class of the song.
Fortunately, the long twisting and turning around does not lead to him polishing the song to death, as will happen later on with other brilliant songs (with “Caribbean Wind”, for example). The final version, the sixth take recorded at the Bringing It All Home sessions, is sober. Second guitarist Bruce Langhorne (Mr. Tambourine himself, by the way, because of the extremely large tambourine he carries around for a while) occasionally misses some notes and Dylan also plays far from flawless – perfect imperfection all in all.
Dylan’s paternal pride would have been twofold. On the one hand there’s the melody, which came all from himself. Dylan did not “appropriate”, like with so many of the songs before, he hasn’t siphoned off anything from antique folk songs. But even bigger are the lyrics.
“Rimbaud is the man,” says Dylan in those days, that’s the way he wants to write. And it shows. The perspective of Dylan’s poetry shifts radically: from the outside to the inside: “Hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote a song for you” has become “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me”. He doesn’t want to know anything more about the so-called finger-pointing songs anyway, as we can see on Another Side Of. But most of the songs on that record are still pointing outwards, speaking to something or someone. Only “Spanish Harlem Incident” has shreds of impressionistic portrait painting, and is a steppingstone to the poetic explosion that “Mr. Tambourine Man” is.
Stylistically, the text is just as swirlin’ as its content. The poet weaves myriads of rhyme words (sand-hand stand, feet-meet-street) assonances (windy beach-twisted reach) and alliterations (culminating in silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands) and perfectly feels when he has to break the cadence of the rhyme scheme – nowhere does the lyric twaddle or drone.
In terms of content, the influence of Rimbaud is undeniable. The visionary, dreamy symbolism in decor descriptions such as the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming and to dance beneath the diamond sky seem to come straight from the oeuvre of the French magician. Rimbaud sings of the feux à la pluie du vent de diamants in his Illuminations, just as the image the magic swirlin’ ship will be borrowed from Rimbaud’s famous “Le bateau ivre”. But even more than these traceable images and sets, Dylan adopts the shift in perspective towards an elated, dizzy protagonist, the misty I figure who captures his grand feelings in impressionistic, frayed sensory impressions. Especially according to Rimbaud’s dictum from the Lettre du Voyant: “The poet becomes a seer through a profound, deliberate disruption of all his senses.
Idiomatically, Dylan does borrow some scraps too, left and right. The jingle jangle, for instance, he heard from Lord Buckley (from Scrooge; “jingle jangle bells all over”), whose LP The Best Of is not entirely coincidental on the carefully composed cover of Bringing It All Back Home (on the mantelpiece). Lord Buckley’s oeuvre, incidentally, also contains a version of the inspiring Pied Piper story: “The Swingin’ Pied Piper” (1959).
Unlike most poetry masterpieces, in which the opening line, or one citable verse, or perhaps one verse, transcends the work and becomes more famous than the poem itself, “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a poem that shines from head to toe, from the first to the last line. At the most, the closing line of that magnificent final section removes itself a bit from the song, “Let me forget about today until tomorrow”. But there Dylan paraphrases one of the most beautiful lines from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34).
Hundreds of covers, of course. In every language, colour and genre imaginable. Right from the start, too: in the year of birth 1965 alone, fourteen cover versions are recorded. Some, like the one by The Byrds, are even released before Dylan’s own version. The first one, before The Byrds, is by the folk quartet The Brothers Four and is quite nice. Among the more hilarious lows is Captain Kirk’s cover, William Shatner (his version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” is perhaps even worse).
Fans can be found in every corner of the music universe, so it often goes wrong, but in the vast majority of interpretations the song retains its power, or at least its charm. In 2008, one Jason Castro makes it to the American Idols final with a faithful, beautiful rendition, usual suspects like Judy Collins, Odetta and Melanie are equally safe and nice. The Beau Brummels deliver a pleasant, slowly derailing version – unfortunately though, they succumb to the temptation of a neurotic tambourine from start to finish. The best of the rest is ex-Byrd Gene Clark on his ironically titled collector Flying High (his crushing fear of flying was one of the reasons he left The Byrds).
Actually, only two covers can compete with Dylan’s inviolable monument. The first comes from the Icelandic Premier League, from the enchanting Ólöf Arnalds, performing live at KEX Hostel with her sister Klara. Just a charango, the lute-like string instrument from the Andes, played by Ólöf. But most of all: the magical, swirling, amazing singing by the sisters – yes, you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme and fate, driven deep beneath the waves (first goose-bumps at 1’17’’).
Ólöf Arnalds:
The other one is quite modern, and has the bonus of being from Dylan’s birthplace: in 2006, the local heroes of Cloud Cult, a very cute indie rock band, contribute a hypnotic, experimental, magic swirlin’, driving “Mr. Tambourine Man” to the sympathetic tribute project Duluth Does Dylan Revisited. Their live version on Live at KEXP Vol. 3 is very successful too, as is the alternative take that ends up on Lost Songs From The Lost Years (2011).
Brooding, hypnotizing and magical – as an Orpheus in top form.
Cloud Cult:
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Publisher’s note: We are publishing a number of articles dealing sometimes with the individual songs from R&RW and sometimes with the whole album. You will find an index to these articles and series in the Rough and Rowdy Ways page
================
Dylan’s Christian Anthropology Part 1
By Kevin Saylor
Aside from a few outliers (who still like the album), the early reviews of Bob Dylan’s latest release, Rough and Rowdy Ways, run the gamut from glowing to gushing. The new work joined a long list of Dylan albums described as “his best since….(fill in the year/album of your choice).” It is indeed another late career triumph from the greatest and most significant artist to emerge from the rock scene.
As often happens, reviewers find Dylan’s most recent material to be particularly relevant to whatever the current political and social climate happens to be. Or, given that we do not know how long ago these songs were recorded (“a while back” according to the Dylan quote attached to the press release of the first single, “Murder Most Foul), he is accredited with a remarkable prescience. For example, the New Yorker review describes the album as “unusually attuned to its moment.” But, as usual, the taste-makers are right about Dylan for the wrong reasons. His songs frequently seem to carry particular relevance to the current moment precisely because they speak to perennial concerns which never dissolve into irrelevancy. Far from being topical songs pulled from the headlines, these lyrics reference not only contemporary events, but go back in time past President Kennedy’s assassination to World War II to the Civil War to America’s founding, Ancient Rome, the biblical prophets, and ultimately to Adam and Eve.
Dylan can make such far-reaching references hold together because his art is informed, as it consistently has been for over 40 years now, by a Christian anthropology. He understands the human person to be created in the divine image, but fallen. The lyrics point repeatedly to Original Sin and a “bent world” (“Crossing the Rubicon”). At the same time, there is also a pervading sense of hope and the possibility of redemption. Dylan has known since his earliest lyrics that in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.” Such an anthropology entails limits on the possibilities of political progress and reform. To anyone who has been listening, Dylan has been saying at least since the mid-60s, and sometimes explicitly in interviews, that the government is not going to solve our problems. Genuine change occurs in the conversion of individual hearts more than in ballot boxes.
The new album resides at the intersections of art, history, religion, and politics. As much as anything, it is about how the imaginative creation of art can help us to understand and engage a world that we did not create and cannot be plastically moulded to our every desire. Dylan takes the collage or mosaic technique of composition he has used widely since 1997’s Time Out of Mind to new heights. Scores of allusions–to songs, including Dylan’s own, literature, movies, history–populate these songs, ranging from the blatant (“Crossing the Rubicon”) to the obscure (“Bally-Na-Lee”) to what I suspect are so esoteric that they won’t be discovered for generations.
Dylan has been accused of plagiarism for his uncredited references, but of course the use of frequent allusion is as old as art itself. As Cormac McCarthy has said, “Books are made out of books.” Dylan’s collage technique reveals the interconnectedness of creation, of humanity, and of art. No man is an island, since everything relates to everything else in one way or another. The technique is a way of shoring up fragments against the ruins during the “age of the anti-Christ” (“Murder Most Foul”) “in this lost land” (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”). In this essay, in addition to tracing Dylan’s Christian anthropology, I want to examine a few of his allusions to explore how he utilizes previous works to create new meaning in his own art. My focus will not be on the musical arrangements nor on Dylan’s masterful vocal delivery, although, admittedly, these things are more fundamental to appreciating the extraordinary achievement that is Rough and Rowdy Ways.
The first allusion is the album title. “Rough and Rowdy Ways” takes its name from Jimmie Rodgers’ “My Rough and Rowdy Ways.” As 2012’s Tempest referred to Shakespeare’s The Tempest while dropping the definite article, here Dylan drops the possessive pronoun.
Rodger’s song tells of a man who meets a good woman and tries to settle down but cannot give up his displeasing “rough and rowdy ways.” It’s a common tale of a “rounder” who can’t be civilized even by a “perfect lady.” By dropping the “My,” Dylan universalizes the sentiment; all fallen men and women are guilty of “rough and rowdy ways.” Sinful behavior is not the exclusive province of drunken ne’er-do-wells.
In any interview supporting 2001’s Love and Theft, Dylan said that those songs were largely about the human desire to acquire power. These new songs are about our libido dominandi as well. Since Eve ate the apple, it’s a rough and rowdy world.
The cover photo is another allusion, recycling an old photo that had previously been used as a book cover. The picture shows a man leaning over an incandescent jukebox while two couples dance. The man at the jukebox might resemble Jimmie Rodger’s character, looking for some drinks and some action. He might be a figure for Dylan himself, selecting from that glowing machine that songs from the past that will pepper the music on the album inside the cover. The dancing couples certainly show how art helps us to find solace in a ruthless world, dancing the blues away, as the jukebox pours out the balm of song.
The opening track, “I Contain Multitudes,” reveals Dylan’s complex use of allusions. The title is one of Dylan’s most obvious references to one of the most famous expressions of that most American of poets, Walt Whitman. It plays too on Dylan’s own mythos; a famously chameleon artist, he has always been vast. He refers by name to literary artists Edgar Allan Poe and William Blake; musicians the Rolling Stones, Beethoven and Chopin; the real-life Anne Frank who was persecuted by the Nazis and the cinematic Indiana Jones who fought the Nazis. Names of fairly well known songs such as “All the Young Dudes” and “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache” are incorporated into the lyrics alongside obscure allusions to Irish poems (“The Lass From Bally-Na-Lee”) and Jewish tales (Howard Schwarz’s “The Angel of Forgetfulness”). The first lines evoke universal mortality: “Today and tomorrow, and yesterday too/ The flowers are dying like all things do.” This is less a 79 year old’s reflections on his own mortality than a consideration of the finiteness of all created existence: et ego in Arcadia. The song embraces the multitudinous possibilities existing even in the face of general mortality. If the album ends with a “Murder Most Foul,” it commences with a generous expansiveness, a commodious embrace of reality.
The song incorporates opposites, “I’m a man of contradictions, I’m a man of many moods,” yet it simultaneously offers straight-forward positions on certain moral principles, e.g., the need for companionship, “I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me,” and the importance of veracity, “I’ll drink to the truth.” Other positions are more poetically expressed but ultimately no less clear. He sings “I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed” and starts the succeeding verse by referring to “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache,” a song that repeats the refrain, “Who you been lovin’ since I been gone?” Taken together this seems an offer of forgiveness even for infidelity, as well as an admission, if the car and hirsute lip are ascribed to the persona himself, that the singer too is capable of betrayal. The next verse ends: “I go right to the edge, I go right to the end/ I go right where all things lost are made good again.” These lines rework scriptural passages regarding redemption, e.g., the parable of the lost sheep and the voice from the throne in Revelation 21 declaring, “Behold, I make all things new.” Betrayal, forgiveness, and redemption all form portions of the potentialities of human existence.
In this song as in others on the album, cupidity and concupiscence are singled out as particularly damning sins. The penultimate verse declares: “You greedy old wolf, I’ll show you my heart/ But not all of it, only the hateful part/ I’ll sell you down the river and put a price on your head.”
Given other references to The Divine Comedy on the album, this may allude to Dante’s she-wolf of Inferno 1, often read as a symbol of avarice, but, in any case, Dylan is well aware of the maxim: homo homini lupus. The lines also state the importance of hating and actively resisting vice. The song concludes, “Get lost, madam, get up off my knee/ Keep your mouth away from me/ I’ll keep the path open, the path of my mind/ I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind/ I play Beethoven’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes/ I contain multitudes.” The ‘madam’ here seems to be lust personified, as in the madam of a whorehouse. But lust is now resisted not with hatred but the better weapon of genuine love that keeps an open path in the mind, perhaps referring simultaneously to the narrow path leading to salvation, St. Paul’s stumbling block of I Corinthians 1:23, and the opening of Dante’s Comedy where the Pilgrim wanders off from the straight path and loses himself in a dark wood. Amidst the multitudinous possibilities laid out in the song, love is the ultimate key. And music–sonatas and preludes–help encourage love.
“I Contain Multitudes” takes its title from Whitman. Musically, however, it is no “barbaric yawp” but a lilting, softly sung, melody.
The second song, “False Prophet,” steals a funky blues riff from Billy “the Kid” Emerson’s “If Lovin’ Is Believing.” We’ll come to that in the next article in this series.
Untold Dylan: who we are what we do
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
In the “once only” file I am trying to find recordings of songs that Bob has played only once, but which absolutely stand out to me as amazing, set alongside other one-off performances that all have something to mark themselves out, and make us wonder why Bob only played this once.
Today, I have got one that I think is utterly stunning and remarkable, but I’m going to keep you waiting (unless you flip down to the end to see what it is – but you know that would be cheating.)
So, since you are still here at the top, here is the first…
We’d better talk this over: Sun Theatre, Anaheim, CA (March 10, 2000)
This unique performance has already been covered on Untold, in an article by Jochen in 2018, but I really adore this, it fits into the demands of this series (that Bob only played it once) and it incorporates all the oddities of Bob’s decision making. So here it is again.
I think it is truly wonderful that Bob will work on songs like this, and then develop a changed arrangement … but then to stop and leave the song forever. Of course we only get to hear it once, and the band will have played it a number of times in rehearsal, but even so. Thank goodness it was recorded. It is so worth coming back to.
When you gonna wake up.
Inevitably in searching through these songs that have only been played once, sometimes all is not as clear as it might seem. Take “When you gonna wake up”.
SetList FM has this listed as from Mid-Hudson Civic Center, Poughkeepsie, NYOctober 20, 1989
But several youtube lists have it as Oslo, Norway – July 9, 1981. The song was written in 1979, Bob’s faith year. I’d go for 1981 just on that basis; that later date can’t be right can it?
I mention the disparity of dates not to point out that someone has made a mistake, but really to say that errors occur time and again in writing about Dylan – and I know I’ve added to the list of false information (although not deliberately I hasten to add). In a sense that is why this site has its list of songs in Chronological Order of writing – simply because previous attempts had been incomplete and self-evidently wrong in places. (See the headings under the picture at the top of the page – “Dylan songs of the 1970s” etc etc).
Walk a mile in my shoes
Staying with the songs starting with “W” (OK that is a rather feeble link, but I couldn’t think of anything else) another little curiosity comes with “Walk a Mile in My Shoes”, in that Bob chose to open with it, on 12 January 1990 he opened with this Joe South song at Toad’s Place, New Haven, CT. According to the records he played four sets at that venue, with 50 different songs involved but this got just one outing.
Here is Joe South – this recording cuts suddenly near the end, but it is the best I can find.
He won a Grammy for “Games People Play” and was nominated also for “Rose Garden.” His first hit was in July 1958 with “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor” (honest!) and he also wrote for Gene Vincent, as well as playing guitar on hits such as “Sheila” by Tommy Roe.
But we know him best for playing bass on Blonde on Blonde, and guitar on the “Sounds of Silence” album. “Walk a mile in my shoes” was also performed by Elvis Presley. Joe South died of heart failure in 2012, aged 72.
Here’s Bob’s take…
A satisfied mind
Now something more sombre to finish with a Satisfied Mind, a song that starts with “How many…” and always makes me think of “Times they are a-changing.”
This is one of those songs that I seem always to have known – I must have heard it as a youngster, and certainly looking through the lists it seems that over 50 well known artists have recorded it.
Yet Joe “Red” Hayes was not a songwriter as such. He played fiddle with Jack Rhodes and wrote a number of songs, but nothing else that has remained popular. He died tragically young aged 72 in 2012, and as far as I know this is the one song of his that is remembered.
Here’s his version from 12 January 1990.
Bob played it on at 9 November 1999 at the The Apollo of Temple, Philadelphia, PA, USA and you’ll hear immediately that this is a complete re-working of the song. Personally I love this re-arrangement; for me the original is take at far too much of a rush to make the most of the lyrics.
This is one of those occasions where Bob really takes the lyrics and gives them everything, making the music weave its way around the words, rather than fitting words to the tune.
It is such a beautiful rendition of the song it makes me wonder how he can just do this and then leave the song behind. More and more I am thinking that I’d like to create an album called “Abandoned songs”. Now that Aaron has our YouTube channel running (Untold Dylan: The Youtube channel) it could be put on there alongside the Play Lady Play articles and my other little creation “1980”. (To the guys at the record company who arrange the Bootleg albums – when you put the album “Once only Bob” out and credit me with the idea, it’s double-T in my surname please).
But seriously – just play this and listen. I defy you not to play it twice.
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Bob Dylan makes a number of rather oblique tributes to songs on his “Rough And Rowdy Ways” album:
Re: Crossing The Rubicon –
Since she went away, the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall
(Nat King Cole: Autumn Leaves ~ Mercer/Prevert/Kosman)
Re: Goodbye Jimmy Reed –
I went out in Virginia, honey, where the green grass grow
My baby told me, honey, stop doing me wrong
My baby told me, honey, stop doing me wrong
Well, I'm telling you, honey, 'cause I'm tired of living alone
(Jimmy Reed: Down In Virginia ~ J&M Reed)
Re: False Prophet –
Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight
Only the lonely know this feeling ain't right
There goes my baby, there goes my heart
They're gone forever, so far apart
(Roy Orbison: Only The Lonely ~ Melson/Orbison)
Re: I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You –
Would you go away to another world
Walk a thousand miles through the burning sand
Wipe the blood from my dying hand
If I gave myself to you?
(Johnny Cash: Would You Lay With Me ~ D. Coe)
Re: False Prophet –
Hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart
Sweet Mary Lou, I'm so in love with you
I knew Mary Lou, we'd never part
So hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart
(Ricky Nelson: Hello Mary Lou ~ Olsen/Pitney/Mangiaracina)
Re: I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You –
I'm a travelling man, and I've made a lot of stops
All over the world
And in every part, I own the heart
Of at least one lovely girl
(Ricky Nelson: Travelling Man ~ J. Fuller)
Re: Black Rider –
Some enchanted evening, someone may be laughing
You may hear her laughing across a crowded room
And night after night, as strange as it may seem
The sound of her laughter will sing in your dreams
(Frank Sinatra: Some Enchanted Evening ~ Rogers/Hammerstein)
Re: False Prophet –
There's a long goodbye
And it happens every day
When some passer-by
Invites you eye
(Clydie King: Long Goodbye ~ Williams/Mercer)
Re: I Contain Multitudes –
He was long and tall, he had plenty of cash
He had a red Cadillac, and a black moustache
He held your hand, and he sang you a song
Who you been loving since I've been gone?
(Warren Smith: Red Cadillac And Black Moustache ~ May/Thompson)
Re: Murder Most Foul –
Wake up, little Susie
Well, what are we gonna tell your ma ma
What are we gonna tell your pa
What are we gonna tell our friends?
(Everly Brothers: Wake Up Little Susie ~ B&F Bryant)
Re: Murder Most Foul –
Pussycat, Pussycat, I've got lots of flowers
And lots of hours
To spend time with you
So go and powder your cute little pussycat nose
(Tom Jones: What's New Pussycat ~ Bacharach/David)
Re: False Prophet –
And the storybook comes to a close
Gone are the ribbon and bows
Things to remember, places to go
Pretty maids all in a row
(Eagles: Pretty Maids All In A Row ~ Walsh/Vitale)
Re: Murder Most Foul –
You make me dizzy, Miss Lizzy
The way you rocknroll
You make me dizzy, Miss Lizzy
When you do the stroll
(Beatles: Dizzy Miss Lizzy ~ L. Williams)
Re: Murder Most Foul –
Life goes on day after day
Hearts torn in every way
So ferry 'cross the Mersey
'Cause this land's the place I love, and here'll I stay
(Gerry And The Pacemakers: Ferry 'Cross The Mersey ~ Marsden)
Re: Murder Most Foul –
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
(Fifth Dimension: Aquarius ~ Rado/Ragni/MacDermot)
Re: Murder Most Foul –
I'm the gypsy, the acid queen
Pay before you start
The gypsy, I'm guaranteed
To tear your soul apart
(The Who: The Acid Queen ~ P. Townshend)
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Art-director: Tim Bryant and George Corsillo/Gribbitt
“How sexy he looks,” exclaimed my girlfriend, when she saw the cover of Street-Legal.
That was probably exactly the effect Bob Dylan had in mind with this photo. The man had just gotten a divorce and seems to be looking forward to the future. The title of the album also indicates this: street-legal is the term that indicates that a racing car has been modified, so that it is allowed on public roads.
The message is: Girls, I am a free man, waiting for you. The non-tanned line on his finger, where his wedding ring is missing, confirms his status as a bachelor.
The location of the cover photo
Generally it is stated that the photo of Dylan in front of the stairs is taken at the entrance of the studio where Street-Legal was recorded.
Rundown Studios is not actually a recording studio at all. Dylan rented the space in September 1977, for a five-year period. The building was built in 1960 and, like the rest of the neighborhood, looks a bit neglected. Hence the name “run down” (worn, tatty).
However, the location is ideal: it’s a half-hour drive from his home in Point Dume: a beautiful drive along the Pacific Coast Highway. Part of the 1,100 m² of available space is set up as offices. A large room is used as a rehearsal space for the planned tour.
Since Dylan is very committed to privacy, I have always found it strange that he would risk intrusive fans waiting for him, using a photo of his studio as a cover.
When the address of Rundown Studios (2219 Main Street, Santa Monica) is seen on Google Street View one will see an anonymous building. Parking is available on Main Street. Around the corner, on Strand Street, there is a double door entrance. At the rear there is a narrow outdoor space. However, nowhere can an access can be found with a staircase as seen on the cover. The steeply sloping footpath (better visible on the poster than on the cover itself) in particular seems to suggest a different location.
A possible explanation could be that the building has been demolished and replaced by a new building in the forty years that have now passed since Dylan rented it. I’ve found that Beach House CoWork is now at this location. The company rents custom office space. On their website they praise the space offered with the cry that the creative atmosphere of Bob Dylan still prevails. I received confirmation via email that it is still the original building.
Over the years I searched for more information. On some forums people suggested that the photo was taken in Australia (during the ’78 tour) or Malta (due to the Mediterranean atmosphere). Others began to explore the studio’s surroundings.
Following my post on the Expecting Rain forum, Bob Egan of Popspots, a website highlighting cover photo locations, received a photo of stairs in Santa Monica that is very similar. One Derek Brown from Glasgow had found it via Google Street View.
But because Bob Egan had done his own research, he knew this was not the right location. He advised Brown to start looking closer to the ocean, because the streets steeply rise from the beach. The simple search “staircase Santa Monica” was rewarded with a lucky return: the house at 26 Arcadia Terrace happened to be for sale.
Through Street View Brown found the staircase in question, at the back of the house, near 2 Pacific Terrace. The location is just a 12 minute walk from Rundown Studios.
Many details are correct: the electricity box, the wooden shingles on the left, the double rainwater drains, the sewer cover in the footpath …
Anyway, the photo is the work of Howard Alk, just like the one on the back: Dylan, wearing white make- up and dressed all in white, probably somewhere in Japan or Australia, during the 1978 tour.
Howard Alk
Howard Alk was a man of many trades. At the University of Chicago, he was mainly involved in cabaret. After his studies he was one of the co-founders of the successful improvisation theater The Second City.
He was also involved with The Film Group, a commercial film company that ran commercials as well as documentaries on jazz, blues or political subjects.
In 1963 he and Albert Grossman invested in a club: The Bear. To promote it, he drove through the streets of Chicago, on a motorcycle… dressed in a bear suit. The club opened on April 25, 1963, with a performance by one of Grossman’s upcoming talents: Bob Dylan.
Grossman also later arranged for Howard and his wife Jones to be on the guest list for Dylan’s 1965 British tour. In the credits for the documentary Don’t Look Back, Howard is referred to as an “assistant cameraman”. He also joined Dylan’s next British tour, this time as a photographer.
In the fall of 1966, Dylan asked him to help compile a documentary film from the images of D.A. Pennebaker made on that last tour. This would become Eat the Document.
They kept in touch and when Dylan wanted to make his own movie, during the Rolling Thunder Tour, he asked Howard Alk to film everything. In 1977 they spend a lot of time together in an small house on the grounds of Point Dume, to compose the film Renaldo and Clara.
Alk is also present at the rehearsals at Rundown Studios and the first part of the 1978 tour.
During the 1980 and 1981 tours, Dylan again called on Howard Alk to capture concerts on film.
After his second marriage broke down, Alk finds a place to stay in Rundown Studios. His body was found there on January 3, 1982 – he died of an overdose of heroin.
Joel Bernstein
In addition to the cardboard outer sleeve, the paper inner cover is embellished with two large black and white photos. Both are the work of Joel Bernstein.
In February 1969, Joni Mitchell performed for the first time at Carnegie Hall in New York. To take publicity photos of her, she invited a 17-year-old boy she met in California. Her manager, Elliott Roberts, is impressed by the result and asked the boy to join another one of his clients for a show at The Bitter End: Neil Young and Crazy Horse.
“I tuned his Martin D guitar in the Electric Factory. Three years later, I was a photographer on the Time Fades Away tour when he once asked to tune his guitars – and I was allowed to do that every night.”
Thus, almost unnoticed, he became a guitar technician, first only for Neil Young, then for Crosby and Nash and then for Dylan.
In 1976 Dylan proposed Bernstein to join him for the second part of the Rolling Thunder Revue. “I was the guitar technician on that tour,” he confirmed, “which meant responsible safety, tuning and setup of the guitars and all other stringed instruments (35 in all) for Bob and his band members for the entire tour from rehearsals in Clearwater to the last show in Salt Lake City.
I did the same for Bob on The Last Waltz and the 1978 Japan / Australia tour, from the auditions in Santa Monica in the fall of 1977 to the last show in Sydney.”
But he has not renounced his first hobby. At every opportunity he likes to take advantage of the proximity to the stars to take pictures both on and off the stage. “You are a fly on the wall,” he explains. “You disappear and you are focused on getting the perfect shot, so that later the viewer can see what it was like to be there. ”
His photos can be found on the covers of After the Gold Rush and Time Fades Away (Neil Young), Hejira (Joni Mitchell).
And also for Bob Dylan: “I am also a cover photographer and so I did the photo on the back cover of Hard Rain, the inside of Street-Legal, cover and poster of At Budokan and, I believe, a photo each in Biograph and the Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3. ”
The photos on the Street-Legal inner sleeve were taken in March 1978, at the hotel bar in Melbourne. The guitarist George Benson just happened to be there for a tour at the time and they were staying in the same hotel. Hence….
The other photo, of Dylan with Helena Springs, one of the singers from his band, was also taken during that period.
Later Bernstein became Prince’s permanent guitar technician, but mainly archivist for Neil Young. He spent no less than 19 years “and one day!” on the box set Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972.
Album Design
Since Dylan has moved to the West Coast, he no longer calls on John Berg, the art director for Columbia Records in New York. The Los Angeles department proposes Dylan to work with one of the designers they rely on: Gribbitt!, an “Art direction & graphic design company” located at Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood.
The agency is headed by Tim Bryant, who makes the main designs, but he leaves the finish to his new assistant: George Corsillo. Corsillo just arrived from New York, where he spent three years working for a book cover company. His first album cover was an instant hit: the Grease soundtrack (April 1978). Street-Legal therefore followed very shortly afterwards.
Emmett Grogan
Finally, it is remarkable and unusual that Dylan dedicated the record to someone.
Emmett Grogan is a 35-year-old man who was found dead on the New York City Subway on April 6, 1978 – an overdose of heroin.
Dylan fans mainly associate his name with the Emmett Grogan acetates, which have appeared on numerous bootlegs. They are raw mono mixes of songs recorded during the sessions for Another Side of Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited sessions. Grogan received the songs on six acetates from Dylan, during a meeting in 1966. Grogan said afterwards that: “Bob Dylan is exactly as I had not imagined him.”
Grogan was the ultimate hippie warrior, combining Dada street theater with revolutionary political ideas where he saw everything for free. His autobiography Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (1972) paints a romanticized picture of his life.
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Ich häng an dünnen Fäden
Von der Unsichtbaren Hand
So wie im Wind die Schwalbe
Und wie jedes Körnchen Sand
(I'm hanging by a threadFrom the Invisible HandAs the swallow in the windAnd like every grain of sand)
Thus Nana Mouskouri sings the last lines of her version of “Every Grain Of Sand”, in the German translation by Michael Kunze.
Kunze (1943) is Dylan’s contemporary and no small fry in the music industry either. The German has been writing hits for others since the 1960s, back then still protest-folkish youth sins, and in 1970 he breaks through with the millionseller “Du”, sung by Peter Maffay.
Over the years, he provides half the elite of the German hit parade with hits (Udo Jürgens, Münchner Freiheit, Ivan Rebroff, Peter Alexander, to name but a few) and also breaks through internationally – Kunze writes for Herbie Mann, Sister Sledge, Julio Iglesias and Gilbert Bécaud, among others, and musicals that reach Broadway. His honor roll includes a Grammy Award and some 90 gold and platinum records. He wins that Grammy in 1976 with his girl group Silver Convention, for the saltless “Fly, Robin, Fly”, which also has the record for Least Eloquent Billboard Nr. 1 hit; the whole text consists of six different words (also up to the sky).
Still, Kunze is definitely not some guy from the street. Before his musical career, he studied philosophy, history and law at Munich University and even obtained his doctorate (in law, on Witch Trials in the 16th Century). So technically as well as intellectually one would dare to entrust him with the translation of a monument like “Every Grain Of Sand”, but things go horribly wrong. Not out of ignorance, it is to be feared, but due to a lack of respect for the source text, or worse, out of misplaced feelings of superiority.
Kunze ignores biblical references (and, for example, turns Matthew’s falling sparrows senselessly into a hanging Schwalbe, a swallow), squeezes Schlager clichés like Auch wenn du vieles nicht verstehen kannst, es hat alles seinen Sinn (“Even if you can’t understand many things, everything has a purpose”) in and already fails with the cutesy title (“Jedes Körnchen Sand” – Körnchen being a very unnecessary diminutive).
It is not just any song, of course. “Every Grain Of Sand” is a masterpiece even by Dylan standards, not least because of the lyrical power of the brilliant text. Dylan weaves Blakean influences, biblical references, French symbolists and François Villon, intertwining with baroque, impenetrable, Dylanesque imagery.
Every reviewer points out the indebtedness of the opening lines to William Blake’s Auguries Of Innocence:
To see a world in a grain of sandAnd a heaven in a wild flower,Hold infinity in the palm of your handAnd eternity in an hour.
However, that line is a bit thin; the indebtedness really doesn’t go any deeper than that grain of sand. The desperate, religious desperation in Dylan’s poem is in no way comparable to the devout admiration for God’s Great Plan, which speaks from Blake’s words. Then the influence of his “Prophetical Book” Jerusalem (1804-20) seems greater. It also contains the image of the grains of sand (four times even), even more literally, and even numbers them (“this Gate cannot be found by Satan’s Watch-fiends: tho’ they search numbering every grain of sand on Earth”), but more importantly: it is a dense, impenetrable poetic and theatrical vision in which Christ is found, abandoned and rediscovered, in which seduction, doubt and passion are sung, a prosaic poem without any real plot – in other words: beloved Dylan territory.
By the way, Blake’s semi-related poem Jerusalem opens with the words And did those feet in ancient time, which we find in the last verse of Dylan’s song.
Maybe it is the intoxicating melodies, or Dylan’s overwhelming vocals and ditto harmonica playing, but even the very best Dylan exegetes seem to misjudge the lyrics. Both Shelton and Paul Williams see something like “sense of wonder or awe at the beauty of the natural world”, where Dylan explicitly stacks up eerie, gloomy, saddening images (a pool of tears, a dying voice, nocturnal sorrow, chill, pain, decay, despair, bitterness and so on). Just as the context of Matthew’s references (the falling sparrows and the numbered hairs) is conveniently ignored: they come from a pep talk of Jesus, in which He ups the disciples’ antes, giving them a sharper edge with aggressive, frightening rhetoric; “fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” are the words before and “I came not to send peace, but a sword” the words after.
Clinton Heylin searches and finds possible sources of inspiration, but doesn’t dare to interpret, others see redemption, devotion or humility in Dylan’s words, but can’t tell where. In any case, this narrator does not feel “the inclination to look back on any mistake”, which is not at all repentant, and he compares himself to the murderer Cain, who has to break the “chain of events” with his own hands.
No, the “reality of man” to which Dylan refers in the closing lines is that we are immortal souls in a mortal body, that “man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not” (Job 14:1-2). This song is truly imbued with the Lutheran vision that suffering in this earthly valley of tears is our destiny, until death comes to redeem us.
Remarkable, this widespread misunderstanding of the desolate theme. Especially since Dylan does not hide the narrator’s drab state of mind that underground. Perhaps it is indeed exuded by the beauty of the music, which is rather overwhelming.
That’s widely recognized too. The aforementioned Mouskouri is the first in a long line of artists to throw themselves onto the song. According to Nana this is no coincidence. In 2007 she publishes her Memoirs, an alienating exercise in false modesty, in which she states that Dylan has been a good friend since 1979. After her concert at the sold-out Greek Theater in Los Angeles, he meets her behind the scenes, they go for a restaurant and then “he wrote Every Grain Of Sand‘ for me”. A demo version (the version with the barking dog and Jennifer Warnes of The Bootleg Series 1-3) is mailed, and the Greek superstar is allowed to use it for her next album (Song For Liberty, 1982).
Yeah well. Who knows. Maybe so – Dylan does actually undertake quite some eyebrow-raising things in these 1979-81 years. But pretty Nana’s smooth rendition is not. The versions by Emmylou Harris, especially the studio version of Wrecking Ball (1995, produced by Dylan expert Daniel Lanois), can hardly be improved and overshadow all the other covers. The recording of the Blind Boys Of Alabama, with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon (2013) does attract attention thanks to an inimitable, enigmatic rhythm and, alright, the sympathetic Irishman Luka Bloom knows how to move with a warm, sober version (on Head & Heart, 2014).
Though perhaps the interpretation by the enchanting Lizz Wright (Grace, 2017) rivals Miss Harris’s. Miss Wright does display a truly Dylanesque phrasing, an enviable skill to stretch notes and to sing “behind the beat”.
Lizz Wright:
Above all of them, however, the bard himself still towers, with the masterpiece featured in almost every top 10 of Most Beautiful Dylan Songs. Where it belongs, obviously. As the swallow in the wind.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Performance selection by Aaron; commentary by Tony
If you’ve got to go
Aaron: Following on from the Angela Aki version of Knockin On Heaven’s Door, which we both loved, I thought I’d look for more versions of Dylan songs by woman artists in a foreign language. I thought I would not give you too many details around the artists or songs (apart from the last one) and instead just let the music speak for itself.
So to start us off, here is the most famous one of all, Fairport Convention (with Sandy Denny on lead vocals) with Si Tu Dois Partir.
Tony: For a change a song selected by Aaron which I know about. Richard Thompson told the story about wanting to translate the song into French / Cajun style, and asked for volunteers at a gig, and, he said, “About three people turned up, so it was really written by committee, and consequently ended up not very Cajun, French or Dylan.”
The studio version had Dave Swarbrick on fiddle, Richard Thompson on accordion and Trevor Lucas, who later formed Fotheringay with Sandy Denny, on triangle. Joe Boyd, in “White Bicycles” wrote, “Martin created the Cajun washboard sound for ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’ by stacking some plastic Eames chairs and running his drumsticks along them. The percussion break was supposed to feature an empty milk bottle lying on the topmost chair, but when the time came it fell and smashed on the floor. I signalled frantically to keep playing. The crash of broken glass was absolutely in time and worked perfectly, a good omen for the session.” The song got to number 21 in the UK singles chart.
The cover photo is of Sandy Denny’s parents, Neil and Edna, standing outside the family home in Wimbledon, south London, with the band in the garden.
I can’t really review the song as I know it so well; it is still fine and quirky, which is what Fairport always wanted to be.
Next, Lill Lindfors – Låt Mej Va De E Bra
This arrangement is so unexpected that it took me a second or two to realise what was being sung. It just didn’t want to compute in my brain! The change of key and accompaniment as we go into the second verse is unexpected on a recording that is already going somewhere odd, which is why the transformation to a third key with a full (if gentle) backing lacks something. If you are going to be unique, keep being unique.
The point is simply changing key by going up a tone (from C to D for example) is so old fashioned… but maybe that is the point. The orchestral arrangement at the very end with the strings coming down the scale certainly amplify that point.
It’s cute, but I wouldn’t play it again.
Giusy Balatresi – Sei come sei
Oh I wish someone could eject that coconut playing percussionist – at least he/she does stop for a moment, but then we are back with them.
I personally blame the producer either for not stopping the percussionist or even worse, for thinking of the idea in the first place.
The lady has a lovely voice and when allowed to use it, the sound is really interesting. She doesn’t need to double up the voice with recording with herself. But really the arranger needs to be shot; by half way through I was utterly sick of the various effects.
The lady deserves better.
Reina Rodina – Learen Spaanske Skuon
This one had me guessing. The percussive background is interesting, and then distracting but slowly I got to realise what the song was. It was the last line of music in each verse that revealed it – which will also tell you that my Frisian is not that good. (You’re doing this on purpose aren’t you Aaron??!!!)
The literal translation of “Learnen Spaanske Skuon” is “Learn Spanish Shoes” – but by the time I’d got that sorted I’d heard the last line of the verse, and that told me where we were.
And I did have one bit of help, for we have written about Frisian versions of Dylan before with the review of De swalkers flecht That version I loved, but this one, hmmm. It is fascinating and I need to hear it a few times when not writing. I am one of the people who really believe that traditional languages need to be retained and with very few still speaking the language, this project is something I welcome. Plus I like the track.
After all the adventure of Learning Spanish shoes, this came over as a bit twee; singing without much depth. “If you gotta go” needs some attitude in it somewhere, I think, and I don’t find it here.
Marlene Dietrich Die Antwort weiss ganz allein der Wind
Maybe I am getting less tolerant, but I want these cover versions to do something new, or at least to offer me a new insight into the song, but the backing here turns it into a 1950s pop song. It is as if the 60s had never happened, which when it comes to a Dylan cover, is a fairly silly musical thing to achieve. We all know the lady, and what she has done for music, but I wonder why she is doing this.
AND WHY DID THEY INSIST ON CHANGING KEY BY JERKING UP THE WHOLE PIECE BY A SEMI-TONE FOR THE LAST VERSE???????????????????????
Trio Mei Li De Dao
Aaron: Last up, this time it’s an instrumental. There might be no words, however, musical it’s in a foreign language as it’s by an all female Taiwanese trio of musicians called Trio Mei Li De Dao and it’s their version of I Want You. This comes from the most interesting and diverse Dylan covers album you’ll ever hear called “From Another World”, which includes covers from artists from all over the world, including Iran, aboriginal Australian singers, India, Hungary etc, done in the traditional style of the region. The album is on Spotify and YouTube if you have an hour to check it out, I thought it was sensational.
Tony: I am stunned. Amazed. Shocked. This is completely extraordinary. I beg you, my audience (if you are still there) do not play a few seconds and give up. Please listen, and please don’t think, “This isn’t ‘I want you’.” Your continued attention will be rewarded. The ending however is unexpected.
Yahweh of the Old Testament employs harsh allegories in His depiction of the inhabitants of the divided Promised Land as though they be two whoring wives He’s married to – Northern Israel and Judea.
Samaria to the north is personified as the elder sister Aholah who sleeps with Assyrians while Judea as Aholibah is even worse by comparison – she also takes on Babylonians, favouring those with cocks the size of a donkey’s:
For she doted upon their paramours
Whose flesh is as the flesh of asses
And whose issue is like the issue of horses
(Ezekiel 23: 20)
In another allegory, Yahweh appears to be more forgiving toward the northerners prior to their fall to the Assyrians. He orders Hosea, a prophet of doom, to take pesonified prostitute Samaria as his wife, and attempt to reform her worshippers of Baal, the ancient god of rain, wind, and fertility:
And the Lord said to Hosea
"Go take unto thee a wife of whoredoms
And children of whoredoms
For the land hath committed great whoredom
Departing from the Lord"
(Horsea 1:2)
Interpreted it can that the singer/songwriter quoted below takes on the persona of a modern Hosea (Ezekiel be thirteen when he becomes a prophet):
Twelve years old, they put me in a suit
Forced me to marry a prostitute
(Bob Dylan: Key West)
The Judaic God, via the allegory of Hosea, endeavours to be motherly – kindly and lovingly as the symbolic pine tree; faith-filled Ephraim considers Baal a false idol:
Ephraim shall say
What have I to do any more with idols?
I have heard Him, and observed Him
I am like a green fir tree
From me is thy fruit found
(Hosea 14: 8)
God commands Hosea give his unfaithful wife a second chance at reconciliation after the prophet divorces her:
And she shall follow after her lovers
But she shall not overtake them
And she shall seek them, but shall not find them
Then she shall say, "I will return to my first husband
For then it was better with me than now"
(Hosea 2:7)
Hosea tries again, fails again:
That's my story, but not where it ends
She's still cute, and we're still friends
Down on the bottom, way down in Key West
(Bob Dylan: Key West)
So ‘tough love’ Yahweh let’s the false gods of the Assyrians in:
"And I will visit upon her the days of Baalim
Where on she burned incense to them
And she decked herself with earrings, and her jewels
And she went after her lovers
And forgat me," saith the Lord
(Hosea 2:13)
Take what you have gathered from coincidence:
Key West is under the sun, under the radar, under the gun
You stay to the left, and then you lean to the right
Feel the sunlight on your skin, and the healing virtues of the wind
Key West, Key West is the land of light
(Bob Dylan: Key West)
One sign points to ‘Judea’; the other to ‘Samaria’.
Untold Dylan: who we are what we do
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
This new series (of which this is the third instalment) takes in songs that Bob has performed once and only once on stage.
Two songs this time – first off “You’re too late” by Lefty Frizzell.
William Orville “Lefty” Frizzell was a songwriter and performer who was popular for ten years or so and had two major hits in 1950. In this case he wrote the song with Herman P Willis, and Bob played it at Daytona Beach, FL, Jan 29, 1999. There is a story that Hank Williams wrote this (see the album cover below) but I’m fairly sure this is a Frizzell original.
Lefty Frizzell was one of those men who didn’t have a long career which brought him loads of money, but his influence was profound, with so many stars of the era citing his influence from Roy Orbison to the Everlys. Tragically he faded from the public’s after ten years or so and he took to drink, dying aged 47.
But his impact on other singers in terms of how country music could be sung has outlasted him, and he is still remembered by those who have a particular knowledge of this type of music.
This is the original 1954 recording – as I say, forget the cover reproduced below. Perhaps it got that way as Hank Williams and Lofty did tour together.
If I had someone that's true
It would thrill me through and through
I'd be happy oh so happy night and day
Seems each one has a perfect mate
But for me I'm always late
And it kills my soul to hear my sweetheart say
Too late too late you're too late
I have waited oh so long
But you never did come home
So just go on alone you're too late
I have built my castles high
Just to watch them fade and die
Makes me wonder if I really have a mate
But I'll keep looking o'er the hills
For someone and I always will
But maybe it's just my fate to be too late
Too late too late you're too late
When I search for heaven's door
I hope these words won't ring no more
And a voice say here's a gate but you're too late
His number 1 hit was “Give Me More, More, More (Of Your Kisses),” and Frizzell thereafter had personal problems, arguing a lot, spending the money and eventually falling out of favour.
The second choice this time is Old Rock n Roller performed by Bob on 3 July 1990.
https://youtu.be/GgJ8cNAktzE
He's just an old rock'n'roller playing music in a backstreet bar
And he sings a little flat and he never learned to play the guitar
But he keeps on belting out them rhythm and blues
"Long Tall Sally" and "Blue Suede Shoes"
He never faced the fact that he's never going to be a star
He's just an old rock 'n' roller playing music in a backstreet bar
He had a record in the sixties, it was big enough to go Top Ten
And though he tried and he tried he never could make it happen again
He's been living twenty years on bourbon and pride
Jerry Lee went crazy and Elvis died
Then his third wife left him but he never really thought it would last
And now she ain't nothing but another little blast from the past
But sometimes on a Saturday night when the music and the crowd is having fun
He steps up on the mike with a gleam in his eye
And once again he's twenty-one
And then it's "Be-Bop-A-Lula" and "Heartbreak Hotel"
And "That'll Be The Day"
Then the sweet bird of youth just flies away
He's an earthbound eagle that never did learn how to fly
He ain't never going to make it but he sure did give it a try
So go dye your hair and turn the music up loud
When it's time to go at least you'll go down proud
You ain't never going to be nothing but what you are
Just an old rock 'n' roller playing music in a backstreet bar
And here is the original…
Charlie Daniels was both a session musician and a composer, with his song “It Hurts Me” being recorded by Elvis Presley.
He was friends with Bob Johnston (1932 – 2015) hence the connection with Bob Dylan. And thereafter he played guitar and bass on Dylan’s 1969 and 1970 recordings, as well as on Leonard Cohen records. Thereafter he became a producer himself.
He reached the top 10 with “Uneasy rider” and also played violin on a number of albums. He also had a hit in 1975 with the Charlie Daniels Band, “The South’s Gonna Do it Again, and won a Grammy for “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” which was another top 10 hit and was included in Urban Cowboy.
There is more, more and more – he wrote film scores, guest starred in TV shows, and was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame. He died this year (2020) at the age of 83.
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
The film Wayne’s World is the debut of Mike Myers and at the time of its release, in 1992, a huge commercial success. The reviews are mostly positive and that’s remarkable; much more than a chain of adolescent jokes, clumsy fluttering and bungling (especially from cult favorite Garth, Dana Carvey) and exaggerated parody nonsense, the film doesn’t really offer. Although… the supporting roles of the overacting Rob Lowe and the way he says literally, the classic headbang scene of course, in that little car on “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Garth’s hilarious playback act with “Foxy Lady” are still irresistible a few decades later. And: that one scene in the music store, the eleven seconds in which Myers stuffs his No Stairway joke, has eternal value. Wayne wants to buy a new guitar, starts playing “Stairway To Heaven”, but the seller intervenes after just two notes and silently points out the prohibition sign: NO STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN.
It’s a joke that meets with a lot of recognition and approval, especially among music store staff, and a joke that leads to an unexpected, profitable byproduct: the signs are a sales hit to this day. Most guitar shops have one nowadays, and on Amazon a faithful copy still is a strong seller ($29.99).
Via a detour, the scene will be just as topical again in 2016, by the way. At the time, the joke causes some surprise because the two or three notes Wayne plays don’t resemble Stairway at all. That has a legal background: the lawyer rabble guarding the rights of Led Zeppelin prohibits the use of “Stairway To Heaven” in the movie, so Mike Myers only plays a few rather random notes
However, in the twenty-first century the heirs of Randy California are trying to prove that Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page stole the melody from “Taurus”, a short instrumental piece from 1968 by Randy’s band Spirit. In the course of the court case it is shown that the melody is much and much older; it can already be found in a baroque piece from 1630, “Sonata di Chitarra, e Violino, con il suo Basso Continuo” from the Italian guitarist/composer Giovanni Battista Granata. Thus, in April 2016 the court rules that the melody belongs to the public domain and can therefore not be claimed by anyone.
It would mean, alert journalists report, that the famous intro may be played with impunity in the event of a possible re-release of Wayne’s World – at least, until the music shop assistant intervenes, of course.
The plagued store staffs have more candidates for such an official ban. “Smoke On The Water”, for example, and “Sweet Home Alabama”, or “Sunshine Of Your Love”… in every guitar shop in the world those intros, in more and less gruesomely mutilated versions, are played a dozen times a day. Still, the next prohibitory sign that is eagerly in demand is not one of the usual suspects.
That would be a ban on playing a Dylan song. And not on one of the obvious everyman’s friends like “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” or “All Along The Watchtower”, but on the unlikely, by Dylan himself long rejected ditty, “Wagon Wheel”.
“Wagon Wheel”, or “Rock Me Mama (Like A Wagon Wheel)”, as the song is actually called, is again one of those songs with a history that would be unique to any other artist, but is not exceptional in Dylan’s catalogue at all. Songs like “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”, “Quinn The Eskimo”, “Farewell, Angelina” or “Stepchild”; (sketches of) songs that were rejected by the master and later picked up and perfected by others could fill a very nice double-cd.
“Rock Me Mama” may be the most unfinished, sketchy snippet in that collection. It can be found on the bootleg Peco’s Blues, a collection of session recordings from January and February 1973 for the soundtrack of Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Charming, messy recordings of a reasonable quality, that are historically especially interesting because of the embryonic versions of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, but for the fans the studio talk and the other takes are fun too. And the two versions of “Rock Me Mama”.
On this bootleg the song is attributed to the legend Arthur Crudup, the man to whom we owe Elvis Presley. That’s remarkable. Normally Dylan is not too lenient with granting copyrights to a rightholder, not even if he copies entire text parts, melody lines or complete choruses. On top of that, this song has nothing in common with Crudup’s “Rock Me Mama” from 1944; only the title is the same. And Crudup himself has borrowed it from Big Bill Broonzy’s “Rockin’ Chair Blues” (1940). The wagon wheel metaphor comes from other, even older blues songs. Curtis Jones sings as early as 1939 roll me mama, just like I’m a wagon wheel (“Roll Me Mama”) and Dylan undoubtedly knows B.B. King’s hit “Rock me” from 1964, with the lines roll me baby like you roll a wagon wheel.
Dylan uses about those words for his refrain, he sings it on a very accessible, simple melody, over an equally simple and pleasant chord progression, around it he mumbles some unintelligible sounds and that’s it.
The song has since long been forgotten and covered in dust, when the teenager Ketch Secor, sometime in the 90s, first hears the half-mumbled, unfinished patch of a non-existent song on that bootleg collection.
Teenagers, especially the male ones, are known to have a rather flexible prefrontal cortex, therefore they dare to ride down the hill in shopping carts, jump three floors down from the balcony into the hotel swimming pool and they do not mind messing around with a Dylan song. Ketch adds two great verses to the sketch, and merrily and often plays the song. And still does after he founded a band, the now world-famous Old Crow Medicine Show.
A first time the boys record the song for a self-released EP (Troubles Up And Down The Road, 2001). In 2003 the band scores a record deal and, after copyright has been arranged with Dylan (it shall be fifty-fifty), the song is recorded again, this time as the closing number for the acclaimed, untitled debut album from 2004. It is not a hit, it is not even released on single, but it is picked up. Initially by amateurs, on talent shows, by school bands, in karaoke bars and truck stops – the song is easy to play and has a high sing-along quality – and slowly and surely it seeps through to the higher echelons.
Old Crow Medicine Show – Wagon Wheel:
In 2012 the Irishman Nathan Carter reaches the top of the charts with the single “Wagon Wheel” and the album of the same name. A year later, when Darius Rucker scores a number one hit with it, the song definitively reaches the Great American Songbook. It earns Rucker a Grammy Award (Best Country Solo Performance, 2013) and membership in the Grand Ole Opry.
It does have a small spicy edge, Rucker’s success. Before his solo career, Darius Carlos Rucker has been the face of Hootie & The Blowfish, the band with which he records five albums and sixteen hit singles, tours around the world and sells tens of millions of records (the debut album from 1994, Cracked Rear Window, achieves sixteen times platinum and is the 14th best-selling album of all time). One of the biggest successes is the world hit “Only Wanna Be With You” (1995) and that song leads to a conflict with Dylan. Rucker has plundered Blood On The Tracks a little too enthusiastically. Starting with a chip from “You’re A Big Girl Now”:
Put on a little Dylan
Sitting on a fence
Followed by a big bite from “Idiot Wind”:
Said I shot a man named Gray
Took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks
And when she died it came to me
I can't help it if I'm lucky
And in case we still don’t get it, the last verse opens with:
Yeah I'm tangled up in blue
Dylan’s management of Dylan, the thief of thoughts who has a rather double-minded attitude with regard to citing someone else’s work without acknowledging the source, mobilises lawyers, threatens with a copyright infringement indictment and eventually Hootie & The Blowfish settles the case, for an unknown, but undoubtedly substantial amount.
Nevertheless, no hard feelings with Rucker, apparently. With “Wagon Wheel” he lines Dylan’s pockets once again. But it also has an unexpected, negative effect: Rucker’s hit version gives the song a second, huge boost. So much so, in fact, that it becomes after Stairway the second song for which prohibition signs are manufactured, sold and hung by the thousands. This time not in music shops, but in concert halls, pubs and festivals. At Americana festivals, like in New England, No Wagon Wheel zones are set up, T-shirts with the logo fly sell like hot cakes, and students risk guitar shattering when they play it on campus.
Nevertheless, Ketch Secor still likes to play it, with his Old Crow Medicine Show. He is particularly struck by Dylan’s approval and the old master’s next step: in 2014 Dylan gives him another scrap of that 1973 bootleg, “Sweet Amarillo”, and encourages the band to complete that song as well. It gives them their next hit.
On a country channel, CMT News, Secor tells the story behind it. First, he receives an e-mail from Dylan’s manager congratulating him on Ruckers no. 1 hit. A few weeks later there is a package in the bus. It contains a demo recording and a note. From Dylan.
“It’s quite amazing to me. Bob very much cleaned out his dresser drawer and found a scrap and said [in a Dylan voice], “Here, try this.” Just to hear that is the stuff that dreams are made of. I couldn’t even write a script. The audience wouldn’t believe it. “Oh, yeah, then Bob Dylan called and said, ‘OK, finish this song now.’”
So I finished the song with Old Crow, and we sent it back to Bob and he said, “Hey, that sounds great, but I think Ketch should play the fiddle, not the harmonica, and I think the chorus needs to come in at the eighth bar, not the 16th.” We did exactly what Bob said, and it’s like the song sprouted wings and flew.”
He’s still glowing – justifiably – with pride, the lucky Wilbury.
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
At the end of 1992 Dylan released Good as I Been to You, an album of mostly traditional folk songs. The album was well received, better than Under the Red Sky, and he was to follow up in 1993 with World Gone Wrong. These were both solo acoustic albums, and were generally viewed as Dylan returning to his roots, searching for inspiration as the commentators saw it.
One of Dylan’s favourite songs from these albums is ‘Delia’, from World Gone Wrong. ‘Delia’ is one of those songs which seems just made for Dylan; it sounds like a Dylan song, which goes to show how close much of Dylan’s work is to that tradition.
Although it didn’t come out until the following year, Dylan was trying it out in 1992, not as a solo acoustic, but a gently paced full-band ballad. It’s a little gem, this one, with Dylan fully committed to the vocal.
Delia
However, 1992 did see some incomparable solo acoustic performances; the last year, I believe, when Dylan appeared on stage alone with guitar and harmonica. These following acoustic performances are all the more precious for that, but this wasn’t just a last hurrah for the legend; these performances are superlative. He’s not just dusting off his old material but re-exploring it with a passion, feeling his way into the songs as if he’d just written them, trying them out in different ways from one performance to the next.
Let’s start with that mysterious love song ‘Love minus Zero No Limit’. The vocal is so upfront and clear that it sounds like a soundboard, rather than an audience, recording. This one is from the 24th of March. In this case the ragged edge to Dylan’s voice works perfectly. This one is surely a candidate for one of the NET’s finest moments – at least to date.
Love Minus Zero (A)
In other performances he brings in the harmonica. Hard to kill a legend when offering such legendary performances. Hard to escape a twinge of nostalgia when that harp begins to blow. Masterful vocal. Wonderful to sense a respectful audience. Sorry don’t have the date for this one.
Love Minus Zero (B)
And, just in case you haven’t had enough of that classic song, here’s another knockout performance, this one from the 15th of March.
*Love Minus Zero (C)
Sigh! Sometimes it’s great when Dylan just plays Dylan, no tricks, no great baroque extensions. Just Bob and his genius. Blink for a moment and you’re back in the 1960s.
Here’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ just like it ever was, except that exquisite vocal timing makes it lighter and more peppy than the sixties performances. And that dancing, peppering harmonica!
How many years must some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
And how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see
Perhaps we have become so familiar with these lyrics that we can’t hear them anymore, but these rhetorical questions still cut to the heart of the human condition. The quoted lines take us right out onto the streets of our contemporary world where the Black Lives Matter demonstrations are happening. Perhaps it takes such a fresh performance to remind us. Simple it may appear, its questions unanswerable, ‘Blowin’ remains one of Dylan’s greatest songs. And this must be one of his greatest performances of it.
Blowing in the wind
Listening to Dylan’s wonderful acoustic guitar work as he accompanies himself, it occurs to me that we are reaping the benefits of those long hours he was putting in recording ‘Good as I been to You’, alone in his garage. Discovering the guitar parts for those traditional songs seems to have lead to a rediscovery of his own songs and the joys of acoustic performance.
And while deep in the nostalgia of acoustic Legendland, we just can’t afford to get any older without listening to this brisk but cutting performance of ‘Ramona’. Perhaps behind this ‘attack’ song there is a plea for us to live more aware lives, to be aware of the ‘fixtures and forces’ that govern our lives and bring us to grief. Lovers of Dylan the Master Harpist will be in ecstasies over the last minute or so of this performance. Enough said!
Ramona
Ah, very nice, but there is more to come in this acoustic promised land. Like this tender version of ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’, one of Dylan’s earliest separation songs. The song is remarkable for its dialogue, a score for two voices, and the build up of pathos. We feel that the lover will never return, at least not as a lover, and the singer will never get his boots of Spanish leather. Once more, note the gorgeous harp solo, reminiscent of, but more sophisticated than his sixties playing. Don’t the audience just love this! No wonder, it’s a treat.
Boots of Spanish Leather
We are so deep in our nostalgia trip now that there is no stopping us. The gentle, intimate and reflective Dylan is irresistible. So there’s nowhere to go but to the equally tender and reflective ‘Girl from the North Country’. I have described this song as one of Dylan’s most pure love songs, as it is free of bitterness and without any ambiguous edges. The song is in itself an exercise in nostalgia, that place beyond tears where we can fondly remember old loves. So once more Dylan throws aside the stadium rocker, which he plays so well, to be his old folkie self again, and deliver this subtle, understated performance.
Girl from the North Country
Of course, the acoustic performance lies at the heart of early sixties protest songs, even songs like ‘John Brown’ which we have only heard in rock versions, probably because it makes such a good rocker. Think back to the 1987 performance with Tom Petty’s band, one of the best ever (see NET 1987), or the version with GE Smith in 1990, another kick-arse rocker. But now we hear it as the acoustic song it must have started as. And what a powerful performance, with the song building to a climax as Dylan wrings everything he can from his sandpaper voice.
John Brown
‘John Brown’ takes us into the world of Dylan’s early sixties protest songs, and perhaps the greatest of those songs, ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’. This nightmare/hallucination still haunts after all these years, and Dylan certainly hasn’t tired of it yet. Lines that seem so contemporary still jump out at us:
I saw a white man who walked a black dog.
This performance is close to the tempo of the original, perhaps a little faster, and there is some fine acoustic guitar work. Dylan stretches his voice to deliver a performance with more vocal variation than we’re accustomed to with this song. The challenge for many of these long, repetitive songs is to keep up the interest, to build, vocally and musically to that stunning final verse.
I’m a-going back out ’fore the rain starts a-falling
I’ll walk 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 color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it, and speak it, and think it, and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking
But I’ll know my song well before I start singing
I quote these lines in full to remind us of just how good they are, in case we start taking the song for granted. These last lines demonstrate what dramatists call ‘rising action’ – a build towards a final climax, a lyrical momentum that gathers pace as the images flash by. This helps to mitigate the somewhat plodding nature of the original, which might have worked fine in the summer of 1962, when the song was written, but not so well thirty years later.
This is a spirited vocal – just a pity he had to leave off those last two lines, suggesting that he didn’t know his song so well before he started singing.
Hard Rain
Note that while this is acoustic, it is not Dylan alone onstage. I think I can detect two other guitars at work. It starts off sounding solo, but it isn’t, not quite.
Same applies to that other iconic song, that ode to escapism, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, which remains acoustic but slowly brings in the rest of the band, drums and all. This performance clips along a little too fast for me, but the extra pace makes for some nifty guitar work and a suitably squeaky harp break. Pity about the loudmouth in the audience who comes so close to wrecking the experience of the song that I almost left it out.
Still, part of the experience of listening to these audience recordings is hearing the response of the audience, in this case a little too positive. Much depends on who was near the recorder at the time.
Mr Tambourine man
Another track from side B of Bringing it all Back Home (1964) that we have been closely following is ‘Gates of Eden’, that classic symbolist song that never seems to lose its mystery. We have heard some very fine performances of this song, particularly the 1988 version (See NET 1988, part 1). This performance is not likely to go down as anyone’s favourite owing to Dylan’s scratchy, nasal performance, but the rapid strumming and faster pace, which seems to be a feature of 1992, keeps it interesting.
Gates of Eden
I’d like to pause for a moment here to note that both these songs offer some picture of their creator. In Mr Tambourine Man we find this:
And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time
It's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind
It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing
The ‘ragged clown’, I would suggest, is a perfect image for the Dylan who wrote this song. Those skipping reels of rhyme aptly describe the song itself. Those critics of Dylan’s shift from his ‘protest songs’ to his ‘symbolist songs’ might well agree that the man had given up the good fight in favour of chasing shadows.
In Gates of Eden we get a different formulation:
And I try to harmonise with songs
the lonesome sparrow sings
‘The lonesome sparrow’, I would suggest, is a perfect image for the Dylan who wrote ‘Gates of Eden’, as it is more cryptic and Zen-like than the ‘Tambourine’ quote. And ‘Gates’ ends on a suitably cryptic, Zen-like note:
Sometimes I think there are no words
But these to say what’s true…
These lines should be my cue to exit this post, as I’ve hit the word limit, but I still have a couple of these acoustic performances to go. So, I’m going to unceremoniously jam them in at the end here. They are both songs we will return to. Guitar driven performances of ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘It Ain’t Me Babe.’
Desolation Row
It Ain’t Me Babe
Stay safe from the ravaging plague, and I’ll be back soon with the final part of this survey of the NET, 1992.
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. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Keeping to his lusty character, Zeus, the Olympian God of Thunder (who’s overthrown the gigantic Titan Saturn) falls in love with a tree dryad; in a fit of jealousy Hera, the wife of Zeus, transforms the dryad temporarily into a tree; Zeus, who’s in human form, decides to impress the dryad – the Thunder God reveals to her that he’s now the big god. Not to be outdone Hera makes the dryad’s change permanent. The tree spirit cries, her limbs droop. Venus, the Goddess of Love, sees to it that the Weeping Willow spreads far and wide across the land. The willow tree becomes a symbol of sadness, but also of flexibility and regeneration.
Symbolism that’s depicted in the song below:
Oh, bury me under the weeping willow
Yes, under the weeping willow tree
So he may know where I am sleeping
And perhaps he will remember me
(Carter Family: Weeping Willow Tree ~ traditional)
The narrator in the following song lyrics takes a tough view in regards to life’s sorrows:
I say to the willow tree, "Don't weep for me"
I'm saying to hell with all the things I used to be
Well, I get into trouble, then I hit the wall
No place to turn, no place at all
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)
As the listener is made aware in the lyrics below, the God of Thunder has human emotions, and cries hyperbolic conceits of teardrops, even though, of course, a god cannot die:
Now, I taught the weeping willow how to cry, cry, cry
And I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky
And the tears that I cried for that woman are gonna flood you Big River
And I'm gonna sit right here until I die
(Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash: Big River ~ Johnny Cash)
The willow used as an objective correlative in the song lyics below:
Well, that weeping willow, mourning like a dove
Weeping like a mourning dove
There's a gal in the country that I sure do love
(Bob Dylan: Weeping Willow ~ Fuller/Doherty)
As such in the following song, the sad-eyed willow fails to regenerate:
Once upon a hill
We sat beneath a willow tree
Counting all the stars, and waiting for the dawn
But that was once upon a time
And now the tree is gone
(Bob Dylan: Once Upon A Time ~ Strouse/Adams)
Below, no longer is the tree flexible:
Well, I just reached place
Where the willow don't bend
There's no more to be said
It's the top of the end
I'm going, I'm going, I'm gone
Bob Dylan: I’m Going, I’m Going, I’m Gone
https://youtu.be/bQ4FGx6H1CE
Untold Dylan: who we are what we do
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
For Bob, the decade of the 1990s was a time of total change. It started off with gusto in 1990, trying to show that the world had indeed gone wrong by utilising themes from children’s songs to reveal the forthcoming catastrophe, before delivering some bits and pieces for the Wilburys to play with.
And then he took a gap year. Well actually five gaps years, in which he wrote a few lyrics (although some argue even these four sets of words were actually written in the 80s, and indeed maybe they were. I only put them in the gap years because others say they came from that time, and without them the era looks so bleak and empty).
So the nineties became a period in which Bob stopped writing completely, and ramped up the Never Ending Tour.
Those four sets of lyrics that are noted in some commentaries as dating from 1995 and they… well, express a man confused, lost, and wishing he wasn’t. The recording we have of Well well well is superb and worth a listen, otherwise… you decide.
But my take on this is that all these songs were originally written (or at least Dylan’s input into the songs was completed) in 1984 while Dylan was writing songs for Empire Burlesque. I’ve listed them again here simply because some commentaries could lead you to 1995. For details of 1984 please see here.
Then suddenly the master songwriter was back, and how, with 1996 not just including ten songs, but having in the midst of those songs Mississippi and Not Dark Yet. I mean how totally utterly brilliant do you want a songwriter to be?
The themes were lost love, emptiness, moving on, being disconnected from the world, drifting, dying, love as a hopeless myth, and the darkness. Oh yes, there is a lot of darkness.
They were all going into the album, but the album was not yet complete, and so with perfect logic, in 1997 Bob finished the album with
Of course there may have been more, the songs he wrote but rejected for the album, but if so, we haven’t been given a chance to listen.
And as I have suggested before, the fact that the first song on the album was the last song written suggests that the concept of loss and sinking deeper emerged as he wrote the pieces; it wasn’t there at the start. I’d guess that he started writing them, realised the journey the songs described and then filled in the gaps.
The traditional pop rock album starts with an upbeat song, and then has a ballad in track two. Of course Bob never goes by the book, and in starting this album with “Love Sick” he delivers the most amazing opening to an album I have ever heard – and one that I can’t imagine any other composer getting away with. Just consider this afresh, opening an album with
I’m walking through streets that are deadWalking, walking with you in my headMy feet are so tired, my brain is so wiredAnd the clouds are weeping.
Indeed the songs composed over these two years are contrasts ranging from
I don’t know what I’m gonna doI was all right ’til I fell in love with you
To
When the rain is blowing in your faceAnd the whole world is on your caseI could offer you a warm embraceTo make you feel my love
And this whole, amazing, incredible, journey of sheer genius started with
I’m walking through streets that are deadWalking, walking with you in my headMy feet are so tired, my brain is so wiredAnd the clouds are weeping.
The total contradiction is overwhelming and so extraordinarily powerful, these songs almost seem to defy description.
I am not in the group that thinks “Feel my love” is a mistake for this album or in any way an inferior song. If I had written it, and never written anything else, I’d spend every day walking around saying to people “I wrote that”. Of course, I’d probably get carried off to a hospital at the same time, but even so…
Dylan is offering us both sides of love – the total and utter despair and the overwhelming yearning to express love.
This is the world in which one is conscious of love and lost love, but also, utterly improbably, a world in which one can distance oneself from those emotions. Indeed I would say it is not surprising that having written this staggering collection of songs Bob stopped. In 1998 he wrote nothing. Although that might have been a ploy to get us to forget him, for in 1999 he wrote the song that got him the Oscar: Things have Changed – the song that “doesn’t pussyfoot around or turn a blind eye to human nature”.
The opening…
A worried man with a worried mind
No one in front of me and nothing behind
makes it clear – I am isolated, I have no idea where I am going. The past has not yet happened. We know nothing, except we know the world really has gone wrong.
And what of love and lost love, those concepts which dominated Dylan’s writing for song long? Well, we might care to remember that by 1977 Dylan had written 56 songs of love and desire, and 43 songs of lost love.
And now?
Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meetPutting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street
Now there is no lost love, because there is no love, not in the real sense. And as for that period where he tried to get his message across by using themes from nursery rhymes and children’s stories, well, well…
Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lakeI’m not that eager to make a mistake
Farewell old songs, indeed. As I said (I thought rather cleverly but everyone wrote in telling me I’d written the last paragraph twice)
And the music continues, using its three chord routine with simple accompaniment. The singer doesn’t get excited. There is a continuum. It is just that the continuum doesn’t make a blind bit of sense.
And the music continues, using its three chord routine with simple accompaniment. The singer doesn’t get excited. There is a continuum. It is just that the continuum doesn’t make a blind bit of sense.
A work of stunning genius. A work so utterly worth waiting for.
Untold Dylan: who we are what we do
Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.
We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 7000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
