Untold Dylan

by Stephen Scobie

Previously in this series

• It takes some getting used to. Rough and Rowdy Ways Part 1
• Rough and Rowdy Ways part 2: false prophets and my version
• Part 3: “Made my mind up; Goodbye Jimmy; Mother…”
• The Rubicon to Key West: Rough and Rowdy Ways Part 4

“Murder Most Foul”

As has been widely acknowledged, the title comes from Hamlet: Act One Scene Five.  Hamlet confronts his father’s Ghost.  The Ghost enjoins him: “Revenge my foul and most unnatural murder.”  Shocked, Hamlet exclaims “Murder!” and the Ghost drives the point home: “Murder most foul, as in the best it is, /But this most foul, strange and unnatural.”  “Foul” – three times in three lines.  Not just murder, but something unnatural.  What the Ghost is hinting at, but even he dare not say it, is incest.  If Gertrude became Claudius’ mistress when still married to his brother, then she is guilty of incest – foul and unnatural.

Yet the Ghost goes on to admonish Hamlet to do nothing against his mother – which puts him in an impossible position.  He cannot make any public accusation against Claudius, since that would implicate Gertrude too,  So the only way Hamlet can revenge his father is by acting in secret, by pursuing his revenge privately.   And that is the one thing that Hamlet cannot bring himself to do.  Hence his famous delay, his inability to act.

Hamlet’s tragedy is that fate places him in the one situation in which his finest qualities conspire against him.  He knows that an essential part of civilisation is that the state assume a monopoly of violence: that “blood feuds” are settled by law, not by private violence. Yet the Ghost’s instructions are pushing him back to the role of Revenger, which he cannot assume.  And this is the sticking point that Dylan comes back to in RRW, again and again, in all the references to private violence, which he (or his narrator) appears to indulge with such relish.

‘Twas a dark day in Dallas

Personal disclosure required.  I don’t see how you can react to this song without taking a position on all the conspiracy theories around Kennedy’s assassination.  On the one hand, I have never been a big fan of conspiracy theories, whose promoters decidedly tend towards being nuts.  On the other hand, I have never been fully convinced by Oswald-as-lone-assassin.  Dylan (or the speaker of this song) is clearly convinced that Kennedy died because of some conspiracy, and I am prepared to accept that as the narrative basis of the song.  But I will not go through “Murder Most Foul” in as much source-hunting detail as I have done with the nine previous songs.  If you want footnotes on “Dealey Plaza” or “Zapruder,” there are plenty of places you can find them.  “Conspiracy” includes “piracy.”

Similarly, I am not going to try to comment on every reference or dropped name in this song.  As Eyolf Ostrem says, in an excellent on-line review,

“I see them as a whole …where a seemingly endless row of characters pass before our eyes  and ears in a procession. One by one they step into the light before they recede into the      multitude again, but the remaining impression is that of the procession itself, not of the individual participant.”

So I will highlight a few references, but make no attempt at completeness.  However, looking at the vast array of works listed in the second half of this song, and asking who gets in and who gets left out, there are a few general comments I want to make.

The immediate critical consensus was that the works listed in the second half of the song were in some way a cure, a counterbalance to the deeply pessimistic view of American culture brought on by the Kennedy assassination.  So, to be blunt, who gets in and who gets left out?  And let’s focus first on who gets left out.

The list is confined to music and movies.  No novelists.  No poets.  No painters.

The majority of songs referred to come from before 1963: in other words, they are songs which JFK himself could plausibly have heard and enjoyed.  There are a few exceptions: The Who, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and of course Wolfman Jack.  I find it hard to explain these exceptions, but the general principle holds.  If the musical tradition is to be advanced as a redemption of our current cultural malaise, then it is a tradition which more or less predated Kennedy’s death.

And there is no mention at all of folk/protest music of the 1960s.  A passing mention of Tom Dooley; possibly Jean Redpath.  Woody Guthrie is not mentioned by name, but by the title of one of his songs.  No Pete Seeger.  No Joan Baez.  No “We Shall Overcome.”

Wait a minute, boys

This is a common phrase, and needs no “source,” but a surprising number of Dylan followers have jumped to its use in “Hurricane” (1975).

We’ve already got somebody here to take your place

The most direct statement in the song of conspiracy theories implicating LBJ.

Wolfman

Wolfman Jack was the most famous radio DJ of the early 70s, culminating in his semi-fictitious portrait of himself in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973).

Hush, little children… The Beatles are coming, they’re gonna hold your hand

“I Wanna Hold Your Hand” was one of the first Beatles mega-hits.  Dylan casts them in an innocuous role: “hold your hand” like a parent rather than a boyfriend.  Again, unlike “them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones” (though I do remember some of my more subversive fellow students singing it as “I wanna hold your gland”).

Ferry ‘cross the Mersey and go for the throat

Another innocuous Liverpool group, Gerry and the Pacemakers, immediately followed by another stab of vengeance.

Woodstock… Altamont….

Emblematic moments, high and low, for the 1967 Summer of Love.  Dylan actually attended neither.

Good times….

   It sure takes a lot of gall
   to rhyme
   Let the good times roll
   with
   Grassy knoll

Living in a nightmare on Elm Street

Elm Street, Dallas, is the actual location of Kennedy’s assassination.  A white cross in the roadway marks the exact spot at which he was hit.  In 1984, Nightmare on Elms Street was the first of a series of highly successful horror movies.  In the next line, Dylan puns on the name in “Deep Elem Blues,” a traditional American song, widely recorded, by everyone from The Grateful Dead to Dylan himself (in 1962),

Frankly, Miss Scarlett, I don’t give a damn

Last line of Gone with the Wind (1939).  Actually, in the movie Gable says “my dear,” not “Scarlett”; he also, to placate censors, laid the stress on “give,” not “damn.”

That magic bullet of yours has gone to my head
I’m just a patsy, like Patsy Cline….
Got blood in my eye….

 OK, now the references are coming thick and fast, it’s hard to keep up with them.  The “magic bullet” is the description for one of the shots that killed Kennedy; for conspiracy theorists, it is “magic” because, in order to inflict the wounds in a way consistent with the demands of the single assassin scenario, it would have had to behave in ways that, forensically, seem highly unlikely. Dylan then offers a black joke on the double meaning of “gone to my head,” followed by an even nastier twist on the name of country singer Patsy Cline.  But it was Oswald, not Kennedy, who said, “I’m just a patsy.”  So who is the singer here?  “my head” is Kennedy; but “patsy” is Oswald.  Then we are back to “blood in my eye,” which sure sounds like Kennedy, except that it’s also the title of a 1974 song by the Mississippi Sheiks, memorably covered, in 1993, by Bob Dylan.

I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay

Whatever one’s views on the conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, most people will agree that it was a shattering moment, and that nothing in American political or cultural life has been the same since.  In recent years, Bob Dylan’s world view has perceptibly darkened.  He sees his nation in a “slow decay”; he sees us living in a “World gone wrong.”  Maybe all that’s left is the music.

Wolfman Jack, he’s speaking in tongues
He’s going on and on at the top of his lungs
Play me a song, Mister Wolfman Jack
Play it to me in my long Cadillac

 Way back at the beginning, third verse of the first song, Dylan had pictured himself in a “Red Cadillac”; earlier in this song, it’s a “long black” Cadillac; historically, it was navy blue, repainted black later.  It was, with deepest irony, a Lincoln.  It seems to be JFK who is calling in requests as the Wolfman goes on and on.  The list has now more or less consumed the song.

If you want to remember, you better write down the names.

And they come, thick and fast, going on and on.  Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Charlie Parker, Jelly Roll Morton, Bud Powell….  You see what Ostrem means by “the procession itself, not  the individual participant.”

“Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”

The classic version is by Nina Simone, but there is also a fine performance by Eric Burdon and the Animals, who had stunned Dylan with their version of “House of the Rising Sun.”

Far away down Gower Avenue

Personal confession: for many years, I misheard this as “your avenue,” and even built whole interpretations on that mishearing.  Although Dylan here associates the phrase with The Eagles and Carl Wilson, it is actually by Warren Zevon, during the inspired fade-out of “Desperadoes under the Eaves.”  The omission of Zevon’s name here is all the more surprising because Dylan was a great admirer of Zevon, playing several of his songs in concert after his death.

Take me back to Tulsa, to the scene of the crime

The most obvious “crime” associated with Tulsa is the infamous race riot in 1921, where as many as 300 Blacks were killed by white mobs.  More recently, it has become the home for major archives and study centers devoted to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.  Of course, Dylan may also have been thinking about  Gene Pitney’s 1963 hit “24 Hours from Tulsa.”

Birdman of Alcatraz

Probably best known now by the 1962 film, starring Burt Lancaster and directed by John Frankenheimer.

Play Buster Keaton, play Harold Lloyd

 Two of the biggest silent screen comedians – but curiously no mention of the biggest of them all, with whom the early Dylan was often compared: Charlie Chaplin.

Play “Pretty Boy Floyd”

Epitome of the American “good outlaw,” the Robin Hood figure who steals from the rich to give to the poor.  Immortalised in song by Woody Guthrie.  The 1988 tribute album A Vision Shared features a fine performance of “Pretty Boy Floyd” by Bob Dylan.

Play “Down in the boondocks” for Terry Malloy

 “Down in the boondocks” is the first in a series of “Down in… “ locations for Key West in the previous song.  It’s the title of a 1965 song, written by Joe South, sung by Billy Joe Royal, and containing, so one web site informs me, a “sampling” from Gene Pitney’s “24 Hours from Tulsa”!  Terry Malloy is the name of the character played by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan (1954).  At the end of the film, he gets spectacularly beaten up, which was somewhat of a Brando specialty.  It is Brando’s second appearance on RRW, after “My Own Version of You.” Again, the choice is a bit odd: Keaton, but not Chaplin; Brando, but not James Dean.

Merchant of Venice…
Play “Stella by Starlight” for Lady Macbeth

Shakespeare again, bookending his earlier appearances.  I’m afraid I don’t see any special relevance in Merchant of Venice, but Lady Macbeth is more promising.  The song “Stella by Starlight,” by Victor Young was written for a 1944 haunted-house ghost movie called The Uninvited.  Lady Macbeth has to deal with ghosts, uninvited guests at a banquet, and, of course, the assassination of a political leader.

Was a hard act to follow, second to none

“Second to none” reappears from “False Prophet,” where Dylan ascribes it to himself, his own status.  Here, though, it pictures the assassination itself as a theatrical “act,” which will be hard to follow – except, of course, that the JFK killing was followed, in that fatal series of initials: JFK, RFK, MLK.  And the sinister conspirators have just assured the dying President that we’ll get them as well.

Memphis in June

1945 song by Hoagy Carmichael.  Previously quoted by Dylan in “Tight Connection to My Heart” (1985).

Play Moonlight Sonata in F Sharp

In the first song on the album, Dylan did promise to play Beethoven Sonatas.  This one would be especially challenging, since it’s in C Minor.

“Dumbarton’s Drums”

A traditional Scottish folk song, and indeed the closest this list comes to 1960s “folk.”  Dylan may have learned it from Jean Redpath, whose exquisite version can be found on You Tube.  Redpath was a young Scottish singer who hung around Greenwich Village in 1961-62.  Dylan biographer Ian Bell tactfully observes that the two of them “briefly become more than friends.”

But what  are Dumbarton’s drums doing here, wedged in between two references to the American Civil War?

Play “Marching through Georgia”….
Play “The Blood Stained Banner”….

As if carefully balancing sides, Dylan gives us one image from the North and one from the South.  “Marching through Georgia” celebrates Sherman’s decisive victory over the Confederate army – the ultimate triumph of Old Fuss and Feathers, as celebrated in “Mother of Muses.” ”The Blood Stained Banner” is an actual flag, the last of several designs used by the Confederate States of America.  It was the subject of a 1990 song unabashedly celebrating the Confederate cause, written by Phil Driscoll.  If you follow that name on You Tube, you will discover a rather splendid 8-minute version of Dylan’s “Serve Somebody.”

Dylan has long been interested in the Civil War, describing it in Chronicles as the “all-embracing template  behind everything that I would write.”  So it is only fitting that these two references should be the final context in which he places the life, and death, of an American President.

…. Play “Murder Most Foul”

So the last song on the list, the last song that Dylan asks the Wolfman to play for the dying President, is the song we have just been listening to, for almost 17 minutes, on its separate CD.  “Murder Most Foul.”  No wonder records, tapes, and discs have always been circular.  Repetition is their essence, going round and coming round.  Time to start again: “Today and tomorrow and yesterday too.”  Where will the circle take us this time?

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Index to all the Rough and Rowdy Ways articles

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

If you are a regular reader of Untold Dylan, you’ll know that one of the things we like to do in the reviews is comment on the musical structure as much as the lyrics.

But, of course, I know it can be most frustrating when I start rambling on in one of my reviews about the unusual chords and rhythms Bob uses in a particular piece.  Especially if you’re wanting to play along but don’t know a particular chord, or haven’t got the rhythm or melody in your head.

I’ve never known how to resolve this on the website until seeing the Chordify website, which provides the technological answer.

Quite simply you type in the name of the song you want to play along with, and it brings up a screen which shows the guitar chords, with the graphic layout in case it is a chord that is unfamiliar to you.

Then you click on the recording of the song (top right in the screen), it starts playing, and the chords being used, complete with the finger positions, move across the screen.  You hear the music, see the chords and can play along at the same time.

I really haven’t seen anything like this before (and in case you are interested there are thousands of songs by many other artists also on the site), and I really do think it is a great idea.

Better still, it allows you free access, so if there is a song you want to play, just type in the name of the song, and you are there, ready to go.

You can also upload your own songs to the service so that you have a record of what you have done, and can share it with other people – which is particularly helpful if you are in a band.

The site is at https://chordify.net/ and I really do recommend it for anyone who wants to play a song and can’t quite get the rhythm or is not fully familiar with all the chords within the song.  Also, if you are a parent with a son or daughter at home wanting to get to grips with the guitar, this is really going to make it much easier for them to learn, and more likely that they will continue.

And just in case you are not yet convinced, there is one other link I would suggest – not least because I got so carried away with using the main part of the program I didn’t get around to looking at what else is on the site until some time later.

When you’ve finished looking at what is available through the link above go to https://chordify.net/pages/ – and there you will see four more options.  The one that particularly fascinated me was “Academy”.  I won’t spoil it for you by spelling out what is there, but if you are going on the site do spend a moment on that link.  I think you might well enjoy it.

As you may know we don’t recommend other websites very often on Untold Dylan, but this one I did enjoy, and I do hope it resolves any issues that have arisen when I start rambling on about Bdim or F#m7.

Have fun!

Shot Of Love (1981)

by Jochen Markhorst

Chaos is a 2005 American crime thriller that does not make it to the American cinemas and is only distributed direct-to-DVD in 2008. Strange; it is a layered action film with a surprisingly intelligent plot and superior acting by Wesley Snipes as the bad guy.

The lead role is for English action hero Jason Statham, who plays Quentin Conners, a suspended detective from the Seattle PD – unjustly suspended, but he’ll now have his glorious revenge, of course.

Statham’s English background and grammar school past has, obviously, no connection whatsoever with the discarded policeman on the American West Coast he portrays in this film, but is still revealed, after forty minutes in the story. He has caught Gina, the girlfriend of one of the fugitive thugs, and sits down with her at the police station, in the interrogation room.

Det. Conners: This isn’t possession or solicitation, Gina. This is felony murder one. If you’re protecting him, you’d get life.
Gina Lopez: I didn’t do nothing.
Det. Conners: It’s “I didn’t do anything.” “Didn’t do nothing” is a double negative, infers the positive. [to himself] The grammar in this country’s terrible.

Statham is not really a great actor, but the tired disdain with which he speaks these words is very convincing. And then Gina makes only one mistake. Imagine how depressed Jason would have been if director Tony Giglio had chosen Dylan’s “Shot Of Love” for the soundtrack:

I don’t need no alibi when I’m spending time with you
I’ve heard all of them rumors and you have heard ’em too
Don’t show me no picture show or give me no book to read
It don’t satisfy the hurt inside nor the habit that it feeds

Terrible grammar, though we don’t have to doubt Dylan’s language skills. The double negatives the song poet here uses as a stylistic figure, as a language trick to place the song in a tradition. In this case in the blues tradition, the same tradition that prevents The Stones from singing “I Can’t Get Any Satisfaction” and has Pink Floyd singing We don’t need no education – and a very young Dylan Ain’t gonna grieve no more, an adult Dylan when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose and a very old Dylan I ain’t no false prophet.

Going back, all of them, to the Big Bang of Blues, to W. C. Handy and his “jazzman’s Hamlet,” to “St. Louis Blues.”

W.C. Handy writes the song in 1914 and it is still played by everyone in the jazz and blues world today. The version inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame in 1993 is Bessie Smith’s version with Louis Armstrong on trumpet from 1925:

Now dat gypsy tole her, don't you wear no black
She done tole her, don't you wear no black
Go to Saint Louis, you can win him back

In Chapter 9 (“St. Louis Blues and Solvent Bank”) of his superb, compelling autobiography Father Of The Blues (1941) Handy describes the song’s impact on the dance floor and on his band, but especially on himself:

“Well, they say that life begins at forty – I wouldn’t know – but I was forty the year St. Louis Blues was composed, and ever since then my life has, in one sense at least, revolved around that composition.”

This is true on several fronts; the actual Big Bang of the Blues, “Memphis Blues”, Handy may have written before this song, but the musical genius is not yet as gifted on a business level and sells the rights for $100 – together with Decca Records’ rejection of The Beatles in 1962 one of the bigger blunders of the twentieth century. But W.C. learns from it and so the next hit, “St. Louis Blues”, is and remains his. It will be a goose that lays a golden egg every year for the rest of his life. Still in his dying year 1958, forty-two years after he wrote the song, $25,000 in royalties is transferred to him for this song alone (the equivalent of over two hundred grand today).

Louis Armstrong & Bessie Smith – St. Louis Blues (1954 version)

By chance, Dylan is forty too, when he writes a “composition around which ever since my life revolves”, when he writes “Shot Of Love”; he apparently experiences a similar semi-superstitious, age-related insight as Handy. The famous words from the interview with Martin Killer (New Musical Express, 1983) in any case bear witness to an identical, all-decisive weight:

“To those who care now where Bob Dylan is at, they should listen to “Shot Of Love” off the Shot Of Love album. It’s my most perfect song. It defines where I am at spiritually, musically, romantically and whatever else. It shows where my sympathies lie. No need to wonder if I’m this or that. I’m not hiding anything. It’s all there in that one song.”

“My most perfect song” … very big words. Well alright, should they have been spoken by, say, a Justin Bieber or a Beyoncé, you could still go along with them. But they are spoken by Bob Dylan, on July 5, 1983, at a time in art history when “Visions Of Johanna”, “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Tangled Up In Blue” have long since been written, not to mention the hundred other Dylan songs that any neutral music critic will value higher than “Shot Of Love”. July 1983… two months after he recorded “Blind Willie McTell”, “Foot Of Pride” and “Jokerman”, for example.

Yeah well. “I’ve been asked: ‘So how come you’re such a bad judge of your material?’” Dylan recalls, clearly disagreeing with the hidden premise therein, during the press conference in Rome, 2001 – but he still can’t think of an answer to the suggestive question he himself poses there.

A second line to W.C. Handy, a line that does hold, is his sense of language and the importance he attributes to it. The right words are decisive, but, just as with Dylan, not so much for reasons of content – no, for the “colour”, for the sound of the song the right words are decisive;

“The question of language was a very real problem at the time I wrote St. Louis Blues. Negro intellectuals were turning from dialect in poetry as employed by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. I couldn’t follow them, for I felt then, as I feel now, that certain words of Negro dialect are more musical and more expressive than pure English.”

Handy illustrates his conviction with an amusing, but also somewhat abrasive anecdote from 1915. An unnamed “white musician” openly doubts Handy’s ability to read music, let alone write. “Name any classical melody,” Handy answers, “and I’ll give it a Negro setting.” The white musician challenges him with Schubert’s “Serenade” (the English name for Ständchen, D. 889), which Handy promptly edits into “Shoeboot’s Serenade”, with lyrics to it:

I woke up this morning with the Blues all ’round my bed
Thinking about what you, my baby, said.
Do say the word and give my poor heart ease,
The Blues ain’t nothing but a fatal heart disease;
I’m going to leave this town just to wear you off my mind;
Can’t sleep for dreaming, can’t laugh for crying.
So in the moonlight, Shoeboot played
This little Serenade.

… with deliberate grammatical and syntactic errors, but bursting with astonishing melodic and musical discoveries – like the opening, which will become the template for blues songs “I woke up this morning” – and the lyrical power of the double negation in the blues ain’t nothing but a fatal heart disease.

Nevertheless, Handy is not too proud of this particular song. Or so it seems, anyway: in his autobiography he mentions this song only once. Still, each one of the three verses has more poetic hits than all six verses of Dylan’s “Shot Of Love” put together. Alone Handy’s opening line Shoeboot Reader was the leader of a colored band has more infectious rhythm, is more melodic and narratively more exciting than any of the verses in “Shot Of Love” – and undoubtedly, the Nobel laureate would see that too.

Dylan’s song seems at least initially inspired by Moon Martin’s “Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)”. The lyrics then are set up as a “list-song”, a style form the bard often chooses (“Gotta Serve Somebody”, “Everything Is Broken”, “Blowin’ In The Wind”, to name but a few – in Dylan’s catalogue you can find about fifteen to thirty, depending on your definition).

“Shot Of Love” doesn’t really stand out positively within that selection – most of the verse lines just aren’t that strong. Partly absurd (like Don’t need a shot of codeine to help me to repent), partly clumsy (“no book satisfies the habit it feeds”?), partly, well… powerless, adolescent poetry is, unfortunately, a striking disqualification for verses like You’ve only murdered my father, raped his wife and what makes the wind wanna blow tonight?

Just as unsatisfying are the two Bible references. One is empty (“I seen the kingdoms of the world”), the other incorrect, or incomprehensible: “It’s just bound to kill me dead like the men that followed Jesus when they put a price upon His head.”

No, Dylan’s outspoken satisfaction will mainly be due to the sound, which indeed is spectacular. Sound also is a long, captivating topic of conversation in the very entertaining interview Bono is doing for an Irish music magazine, Hot Press, in 1984. Bono believes in the importance of the room, the space for the right sound, and explains how the German producer Conny Plank always uses the sound of the recording room. And then “Shot Of Love” comes up:

Dylan: Yeah, you’d make an album in three days or four days and it was over—if that many! It’s that long now… it takes four days to get a drum sound.
Bono: […] But you can’t go backwards, you must go forward. You try to bring the values that were back there, you know, the strength, and if you see something that was lost, you got to find a new way to capture that same strength. Have you any idea of how to do that? I think you’ve done it by the way… I think Shot of Love, that opening track has that.
Dylan: I think so too. You’re one of the few people to say that to me about that record, to mention that record to me.
Bono: That has that feeling.
Dylan: It’s a great record, it suits just about everybody.
Bono: The sound from that record makes me feel like I’m in the same room as the other
musicians. I don’t feel like they’re over there.

It is the only song on the album produced by the legendary Bumps Blackwell (Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke) – surely no coincidence. Dylan explicitly honours him in the Biograph booklet: “I gotta say that of all the producers I ever used, he was the best, the most knowledgeable and he had the best instincts.”

Few covers. The most famous is the one by the irresistible PJ Harvey; just like her version of “Highway 61 Revisited” a trashy, furious performance (1999, live at Music Of The Millennium Awards) – Polly Jean does love a good racket, every now and then.

Beautiful, but incomparable with the by far best cover of the song, which does what a cover should do: enrich the original.

Since 1999, our German friends from Frankfurt, the tribute band DoubleDylans, have been combining brilliant, successful Dylan covers with their own songs and with edited translations of Dylan songs.

Already on the first record, Monsters Of Folk Rock from 2000 (when the men still call themselves The Devilish DoubleDylans), there are highly attractive versions of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Drifter’s Escape”, “Silvio” and “Goin’ To Acapulco”. And especially the cover ensuring even international recognition: The DoubleDylans’ version of “Shot Of Love” is selected for the popular collection May Your Song Always Be Sung Vol. 3 (2003), where it proudly shines among big guns like Rick Danko, Chris Whitley and Mick Taylor.

The made-in-Germany approach of “Shot Of Love” is a revelation. The DoubleDylans ignore the sound, colour and style of the original, do not try to copy Dylan’s sweaty, hard-rocked soul, but move the song to the Basement. Upright bass and acoustic guitar lay down a friendly folk shuffle, the mandolin gives shots of lovely, cheerful licks throughout, but above all the duetto, the ensemble singing provides the magic; the men deliver something very similar to the brilliant rendition of “Clothes Line Saga” by The Roches, one of the very best Dylancovers at all: the contradictory trick of singing both toneless and melodic at the same time.

On a side note: fans who are not put off by a German re-translation should also be enchanted by the brilliant, hilarious “Lilli, Rosemarie & der Rettichretter” or by one of the most beautiful, haziest “Visions Of Johanna” covers: “Visionen von Johanna“.

And not a single grammatical error, by the way.

Shot of Love…

Here’s Visions…

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

by Stephen Scobie

Previously in this series

• It takes some getting used to. Rough and Rowdy Ways Part 1
• Rough and Rowdy Ways part 2: false prophets and my version
• Part 3: “Made my mind up; Goodbye Jimmy; Mother…”

“Crossing the Rubicon”

I crossed the Rubicon on the 14th day
Of the most dangerous month of the year

What would Julius Caesar do?  Well, one answer is that he would lead his army across the River Rubicon, thus precipitating Civil War in Rome.  So this action has become emblematic of a decisive and irrevocable act, a calculated risk, a breaking of taboos.  In Caesar’s case, it worked – but  there are no guarantees for prospective crossers.

Why the 14th day of an unnamed month?  The best known historical reference for that date would be July 14^th: the storming of the Bastille, the beginning of the French Revolution, an ideal example of Rubicon crossing.  And July is, of course, the month named in honour of Julius Caesar – who actually crossed the river in January.  But there is also September 14^th, 1901, date of the assassination of William McKinley: see below, the opening lines of “Key West.”

I painted my wagon, abandoned all hope.

“Paint your wagon” is a colloquial phrase for getting things ready to be done, deciding to act – not quite as drastic as crossing the Rubicon, but getting there.  Also the title of a 1969 movie musical starring, incongruously, Clint Eastwood.   And remember the “painted wagon” in “Senor” (1978).

“Abandoned all hope” comes from Dante’s Inferno: it is the inscription above the Gate of Hell.  Translations vary between “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” and “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”        

Well, the Rubicon is a red river

But it’s not the only one.  There is a Red River in Dylan’s home state of Minnesota.  There is a great 1948 western movie called Red River, whose plot has several echoes in RRW.  In 1997, Dylan recorded a wonderful song called “Girl from the Red River shore.”

I can feel the bones beneath my skin

It’s a bit of a stretch, but I cannot resist the echo from T.S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality,”  “Webster was much possessed with death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.”

And here again are the threats of violence –

I’ll make your wife a widow
You’ll never see old age….
I’ll cut you up with a crooked knife

And yet here too, in the midst of these threats, we come to the most explicitly redemptive lines on the whole album:

I feel the Holy Spirit inside
See the light that freedom gives
I believe it’s in the reach of
Every man who lives

— punctuated by an almost off-microphone “O Lord!”

Mona, baby, are you still in my mind?

Are we all the way back to 1966, “Memphis Blues Again,”  “Mona tried to tell me / To stay away from the train line”?  Or is it Lisa again?

“Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”

 Key West is, Dylan’s song tells us, “on the horizon line.”   It’s as far as you can go in one direction of America: the limit, the end.  But like a horizon, it recedes: it is always just beyond reach.  It is posited as an ideal, never quite attainable, but possibly imaginable in one particular place: Key West.

Historically, Key West has long been seen as a refuge, for pirates (such as one 18^th century predator named Black Caesar!), or for writers, from Ernest Hemingway to Wallace Stevens.  (There is no doubt a whole article to be written on the links between Dylan’s song and Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” but I’m sorry, I don’t feel up to attempting that one.)  The New Basement Tapes, the 2014 collection of songs based on texts written by Dylan in 1967 but left unfinished, contains one track entitled “Florida Key,” which also evokes the idea of an ideal destination.

But before we even get started, and despite the dreamy music in the background, there is a violent interruption:

McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled,
Doctor said McKinley, death is on the wall

The first two lines of Dylan’s song are the same as the first two lines of “White House Blues,” a 1926 song by Bill Monroe, lamenting the death of William McKinley, 25^th President of the United States, who was assassinated in Buffalo, NY, on September 14^th, 1901.  (See “Crossing the Rubicon” for another 14^th.)  I am not aware of any special connection between McKinley and Key West   He appears here mainly as a signpost towards that huge song looming just ahead, “Murder Most Foul,” where his memory will hang in the background list of the four assassinated Presidents: Lincoln, Garfield. McKinley, Kennedy.  Still, it is an odd way to begin a song about an idyllic ideal.  As if, before the “idea of order” has even been established, it has to be brought violently back down to earth,  Later in the song, there will be another violent interruption.

Down in the boondocks

 See “Murder Most Foul.”

I’m looking for love, for inspiration
On that pirate radio station
Coming out of Luxembourg and Budapest

Key West always welcomed pirates, such as Black Caesar.  The term “pirate radio station” dates from Britain in the 1950s, when Radio Luxembourg operated outside the tight constraints of BBC regulation.  Many a British teenager lay awake at night listening to Radio Luxembourg beneath the pillows.  Later, the most famous pirate station was Radio Caroline, operating from a ship in the North Sea, forever patrolling just outside British territorial waters.  I am not familiar with the history of pirate radio in Hungary,  Maybe it’s just that Budapest rhymes with Key West.

Down in the flatlands

Not quite “Lowlands,” but almost.

Key West is the place to be
If you’re looking for immortality…
If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there

At the expense of a somewhat clumsy rhyme, this is the song’s most direct statement of the ideal waiting on, or beyond, the horizon line.

Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac

Allen, Gregory, Jack.  A triumvirate of the Beat Generation.  In 1954, Ginsberg recorded a song playing variations on “When the Saints Go Marchin’ in.”  It’s called “Walking at Night in Key West.”

Like Louis and Jimmy and Buddy and all the rest

Take your pick.  I guess Armstrong, Reed, and Holly, but the possibilities are endless.

Got my right hand high, with the thumb down

Again, justice as violence.  Thumb down is now generally accepted as a sentence of death.  (There is a memorable thumbs down in Spartacus.)  It was not ever thus.  In Roman times, and right up until just a couple of hundred years ago, it was the other way round.  Thumbs down asked the victorious gladiator to plunge his sword or spear into the ground, sparing the defeated opponent.  Thumbs up signalled that the death blow should come higher, into the heart or neck.

Down on the bottom

 The New Basement Tapes also contains a song called “Down on the Bottom.”  Perhaps Dylan did scavenge some lines from his earlier, forgotten, and newly rediscovered self.

I’ve never … wasted time with an unworthy cause

Recall “Restless Farewell”  (1964): “The cause was there before I came.”

Newton Street, Bayview Park….

Most of the street names in this song do show up on Internet searches of Key West street names.  Bayview Park is actually on Truman Avenue.  The only one I haven’t found is, perhaps unsurprisingly, History Street.  President Truman did have a Southern White House in Key West.  But he is one of the few Presidents named on this album who was not  assassinated.

Twelve years old, they put me in a suit
Forced me to marry a prostitute

What??  This is clearly a fiction, which (like “I shot a named Grey” in “Tangled Up In Blue”) is so obviously outrageous that it can only be seen as disrupting and blocking any autobiographical reading.  Like the first (McKinley) verse, it comes as a violent disruption of the ideal – which it then attempts to redeem: “we’re still friends”.

Intermission

So we come to the place where, if you’re going to listen to RRW all the way through, you have to get up from your chair, take out the first CD, fetch the second, put it on, settle back for another 17 minutes.  Many people, I suspect, may let it pass, treating RRW as a 9-song CD, ending with “Key West” – which gives that song a special emphasis, as the “last” song on the album, a position usually reserved by Dylan for definitive statements, from “Restless Farewell” to “Desolation Row” to “Dark Eyes” to “Ain’t Talking.”  And, of course, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the only other song to occupy the whole of a single LP side, or a single CD.  “Murder Most Foul” is thus both an end and a new beginning.

It was the first song from the album to be released, and it was a bombshell.  There had been no advance publicity, not even rumours of its existence.  I remember getting up one morning, checking my computer, and starting to play a song logging in (surely a mistake!)  at 17 minutes,  (Actually a few seconds shorter, but 17 sounded conclusive.)   I understand that, technically, it could have fit on a single CD.  Setting it apart on a separate disc was a deliberate choice, giving it even greater prominence – which I, as listener, reinforce every time I get up to change the disc.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

From out of ‘Key West’ comes the Masked Rabbi, seated on Silvanus, galloping around and about an island located in the blue Jungian Sea. He sings a fragmented postmodern song-epic of the rider’s descent into the ‘Underworld’ where he encounters visions of hell, and of paradise, and of the world-in-between; expresses visions of recurring times by references to the works of other songsters and poets:

McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled
Doctor said, "McKinley, death is on the wall
Say it to me if you got something to confess"
I heard all about it, he was going down slow
I heard it all, the wireless radio
From down in the boondocks, way down in Key West
I'm searching for love, for inspiration
On that pirate radio station
Coming our of Luxembourg and Budapest

A tribute to the rock poem below:

Without those wireless knobs
Fats did not come in
Without those wireless knobs
Elvis did not come in ....
We'd get Luxembourg
Luxembourg and Athlone

(Van Morrison & Paul Durcan: In The Days Before Rock’nRoll)

This rock song too:

Every night I watch for the light from the house upon the hill
I love a little girl that lives up there, and I guess I always will ....
Down in the boondocks, down in the boondocks
People put me down
'Cause that is the side of town
That I was born in

(Joe South: Down In The Boondocks)

The little epic is introduced by the shooting of a President that pays tribute to the following bluegrass song:

McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled
Doc said to McKinley, "I can't find the ball
You're bound to die, you're bound to die"

(Bill Monroe: White House Blues ~ traditional/various)

Echoes of the blues too:

"Soothe me, baby, move me baby"
Yes I heard it all
Another mule is kicking in my stall

(Dave Bartholomew: Another Mule)

As in:

Well, the devil's in the alley, mule's in the stall
Say anything you want to, I have heard it all

(Bob Dylan: Mississippi)

And in the following poem:

But show name your complete confession
"No", said the sick man, "By St, Simon
I have been shivered today by curate
I have told him of my condition
There is no further need to confess again"

(Geoffrey Chaucer: The Summoner’s Tale ~ modernized)

The Masked Marauda rides on:

Down in the bottom, way down in Key West
I play both sides against the middle
Trying to pick up the pirate radio signal
I heard the news, I heard your last request
Fly around, my pretty little Miss
I don't love nobody, give me a kiss

(Bob Dylan: Key West)

Pays tribute to the psychedelic rock song below:

I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh

(Beatles: A Day In The Life ~ Lennon/McCartney)

And to the following bluegrass song:

Fly around my pretty little miss
Fly around my daisy
Fly around my pretty little miss
You almost drive me crazy

(Rising Appalachia: Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss ~ traditional)

Perhaps to a Blakean poem of ‘high art’ as well:

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was maker

(Wallace Stevens: The Idea Of Order In 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

Selections by Aaron Galbraith, commentary by Tony Attwood

Please note, past episodes of this series can also be heard on our YouTube Channel

Intro: Just in case you have not seen the Play Lady Play series before, here’s how the game goes.  Aaron (in the USA) selects a number of performances of Dylan songs by women, and send them, occasionally with an explanation, often without, to Tony (in the UK).

Tony plays each track and tries to write a commentary on his thoughts during the playing of the track.  Extra time for tidying up the commentary is allowed.  There is an index to most of the articles in this series here.

It’s all meant to be a bit of fun, and if you enjoy such things, a way of discovering some of the re-interpretations of Bob’s work, with an emphasis on some of the more unusual such adventures – all of course with female rather than male singers.

Occasionally we find the annoying situation in which Youtube links to the songs work in one country and not in another.  Where we find that we try and put in a second link.

Aaron’s intro:

For this instalment I thought I’d look at female covers from the Time Out Of Mind album. I’m just going to list these in the order they appear on the album, as that’s how I searched for them! I’ve got two with a couple of versions just to show the differences in arrangement.

I’ve purposely not included any versions of To Make You Feel My Love, as there are so many, many fine versions of this song, and so I thought I’d compile those for a future episode of the Play Lady Play series.

Lucy Kruger with Love Sick

Tony: Oh now this does take experience, control, style and talent; it is one hell of a lot easier to shout than it is to whisper.  And what a perfect voice for this type of performance!  I could listen to this over and over.  And oh, that ending.  It pulls me apart.  If you play this a second time, focus for a while on the guitar – it is utterly exquisite.  Take the way she plays the accompaniment to the lyrics “I’m sick of love.”  Oh yes.

Not much of a review, I know, but I was just sitting listening.  It’s wonderful.  I’m off to listen to more of her work after finishing this article.

Bonnie Raitt with Standing In The Doorway

This is one of the songs that I often find going through my head when I’m driving and not listening to an audio, or having a conversation.   And the heart of that brain driven recollection is the heart of the song – lines five and six, which effectively take us into a new key.

I’m a bit taken aback by the percussion; it seems wrong for the message, or maybe because I can’t even think if there is any percussion in the original (and by the rules of the game I’m not allowed to go back and check), but I can recall that the live versions of this song that I like have the gentlest of a snare drum keeping the beat, nothing more.

The point is that (as I intimate above) these lines are at the very centre of the song – we have four lines, these two central lines in what those of us who like to show off call the “subdominant” and then back to where we were.

I got no place left to turn
I got nothing left to burn

and later

I know I can’t win
But my heart just won’t give in

Dylan gets the placement of these midway lines perfect, but I really don’t think this version sees them as central lines; they are just two more lines  So there’s my problem – I’ve come to understand the song in one way, with lines five and six being the core of each verse, and then if a performer understands it differently, I am thrown out.  On one hearing I can’t re-orientate quickly enough.

I’m also a bit taken aback by the percussion; it seems wrong for the message, or maybe because I can’t even think if there is any percussion in Dylan’s original.  I’m sure there must be, but it doesn’t get in the way.

Now Chrissie Hynde with the same song

Chrissie always makes every song her own and that full grand piano accompaniment shows this rendition is no exception.  And from the off I’ve got the feeling she understands the construction of the song, the way it works, and the musicians are with her.

The only problem I have is that the piano is so dominant at the very start it has nowhere else to go, and if anything I’d like it to move in and out of the other instrumentation.  As we get to the instrumental verse we’re getting sounds from all directions, and I want more space in this song.

But Chrissie does create one hell of an ethereal sound which I am loving, but I just feel that the arranger could have given us a little less dominant piano from the off.  By the end it sounds more like a fight than a lost love tragedy.  And I’m sad about that, because I do love Chrissie’s work normally.

Next, Bonnie Raitt, again, with Million Miles

Ah, now this really is my scene.  What is right is that accompaniment and the singing both feel the lyrics; melody, accompaniment, lyrics – it all makes sense.  The percussionist still gets a bit too much limelight for my taste, but the musicians and the vocals express the headhung sadness of the breakup to perfection.  It really says, “I tried, I tried, I tried” in every dimension known to womankind, and then some.

And after the instrumental verse, Ms Raitt still has something new to give us which means when she comes to the “Rock me” verse we are willing to be rocked.   When the blues dance clubs re-open (they are all of course shut due to some sort of pandemic or other – not sure what, I haven’t been paying that much attention) I’m going ask the DJs for this every night.

Lucinda Williams – Tryin To Get To Heaven

If the link below doesn’t work try this one.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rn2eVoapcI

Lyrics are there to be expressed by the vocalist, but there is a point where the singer is just trying too hard, and at the start of Ms Williams’ recording I felt that was happening.  It calms down but I don’t find I’m being given any new insights at all.

“Trying to get to heaven before they close the door” is one of the most astonishing lines in Bob Dylan’s oeuvre but here it seems to be treated as if there is a door which is going to be shut at 6pm so the shop keeper can go home.   And maybe that is what Bob meant, but I’ve never seen it that way and I don’t find I can adjust now.

Shelby Lynne & Alison Moorer – Not Dark Yet

Since I first heard Dylan’s recording of this utter masterpiece I wondered what else could be done with it.  In my imagination of working out what I would do if I were still in a semi-pro band, my first decision was that those two pesky extra beats must always be kept.

Then the thought, what happens if we add harmonies.   And here’s my answer – it really works.  And it works because the harmonies come in to perfection, in exactly the right place.  But oh, that instrumental verse… it sounds like a toy piano, and with that I also became exasperated by the over excited percussionist.   Sure, the double beating works, but it doesn’t have to be that central.  (OK maybe I should be blaming the producer, not the drummer, so I could be very unfair here, but the result on the recording is spoiled.   The drummer’s rhythms are superb and add a lot, but they are just that bit too prominent.)

Ruby Amanfu – also Not Dark Yet

If the video below doesn’t work try this link… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUp42utZAtE

OK, there ought to be a dictum put out among the percussionist community: if you are asked to work on this song, talk with the producer about how your work is going to be used.  Again what the percussionist does is superb, it works brilliantly, but it is mixed in at too high a volume.  This is not meant to be a tumpity thumpity tumpity thump track.  It is a song relating to the gentility yet hopelessness of old age.

And this is a great shame for Ruby Amanfu, who puts in a superb performance and has a voiced so perfectly suited this song.  She does get rather explorative in terms of where her voice can go in the penultimate verse, and really I don’t think the lyrics ask for this.  When you find the line “Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb” I think the poet has taken us into the land of the ghosts, and care and caution should be the watchword.   But even so it is a superb re-working of the masterpiece.

Deb Callahan – Cold Irons Bound

So off and on I’ve be a real old grouch today, more negative than usual I know, and therefore I really wanted to like this final performance, not having heard it before.   The opening is an interesting inter-twining of sounds, and then suddenly we get a rhythm.  Not a raucous rhythm that we’ve been experiencing through these tracks but something more restrained.

And to top it Deb Callahan, who really has a superb range, uses her talents to the full.  She’s travelling her own road and letting the band go their way, and it really does work.  This is the track out of all of today’s ventures that I want to go back to, even though it is  a long way from being a particular favourite Dylan track as far as I am concerned.

When she tells us the road is rocky, we know it is true.  A believable performance indeed.  Thanks for putting his at the end Aaron, even if it simply was by chance.  Oh just listening to those opening lines from the vocalist.  Yes, yes, yes.

Thanks Aaron.  I really enjoyed that.

Other explorations

• Play Lady Play: the alternative rockers
• Play Lady Play in the 21st century
• From “me me me” to exquisite interpretations
• Play Lady Play: the joyful remembrance of staggering performances
• Play lady play: Bettye LaVette – and a kiss on the mouth
• When a woman sings Just like a woman and beats the bass issue
• Play lady play: I believe in you.
• The strange the eccentric and the beautiful
• Play Lady Play: A simple twist of fate
• Play lady play: the strange ones, the eccentric, and the beautiful
• Knocking the pony with the sisterhood
• Play Lady Play: female cover versions of Basement Tapes songs

by Stephen Scobie

Previously in this series

• It takes some getting used to. Rough and Rowdy Ways Part 1
• Rough and Rowdy Ways part 2: false prophets and my version

“I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”

The first thing to say about this song is that it’s simply gorgeous, the loveliest love song that Dylan has written in many a long year.  It contains one of RRW’s  most beautiful lines – My mind’s like a river, a river that sings – and to match Dylan’s vocal performance, I’d have to reach back as far as “Pretty Saro” (1969).  But it is also part of this album, so some questions do arise.

Before I even get to the title, and before Dylan sings the first line, there is the backing vocal.  Dylan has in the past, notably in the late 70s, utilized a choir of female voices to sing a wordless hum in the background; but I don’t think he has ever used a choir of male voices.  They provide a lovely, lilting tune, which is the “Barcarolle” from Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann (1881).  One of these tales is about a man who falls in love with an automaton, a woman who turns out to be a mechanical toy.  Suddenly, all the issues from the previous song, about the artificial creation of a supposedly ideal lover, come back into play.  And they point to the oddity of the title…

“I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you”

The romantic ideal of falling in love is that its experience is emotional, instinctive, spontaneous.  It is not the cold, logical, rational decision implied by “made up my mind.”  You don’t make up your mind to fall in love: you just do it.  If you have to think about giving a gift, is it really a gift?

(Several critics have already suggested that this song may enjoy the same popular romantic success as “Make You Feel My Love” (1997) – but I dislike that song, and have the same reservations about the note of deliberation, even coercion, in the title.)

I saw the first fall of snow

Nothing on the whole album is as beautiful as the slowness (snowness?)  with which Dylan sings this line.

Salt Lake City to Birmingham….

This list of American cities sounds like a tour schedule.  Of course, the “you” being addressed could just as easily be the audience as a single lover.

If I had the wings of a snow white dove

Opening line of the folk classic generally known as “Dink’s Song.”  Among many, many versions, listen to Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis (2014).  Dylan was singing it as early as 1961, when he introduced it as a song he had heard from an old woman called Dink.  Unfortunately, John Lomax said the same thing in 1906.

“Black Rider”

Generally seen as an emblem of death.  He is the third of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; he rides a black horse, and his name is Famine.   Title of a 1990 musical collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits.

(I have another, stray, wholly personal association.  When I was guest-teaching in Kiel, Germany in the 1990s, I spent a lot of time on public transit.  The Kiel buses all had notices denouncing people who tried to ride without paying the fare – they were known colloquially as “black riders” (schwarze Reiter).  I don’t know whether the phrase was common elsewhere in Germany.  I wrote a poem about a black rider, but alas, I can no longer find a copy of it.)

Another vengeance and violence song.  But the threats are not from Death but against Death.  The threats range from the understated but ominous – “I don’t want to fight, at least not today // One of these days I’ll forget to be kind” – to the gruesome – “I take a sword and hack off your arm.” Perhaps the most startling jibe against the supposed power of Death is “The size of your cock won’t get you nowhere.”  Dylan is no stranger to expletives – he was among the first mainstream singers to use “shit.” and even “nigger,” in his recordings – but the crudity here seems calculated to shock, and to increase the disrespect being shown to the Black Rider.

But at the same time, the song shows some kindness, even sympathy, towards the Black Rider:

Be reasonable, mister, be honest, be fair
Let all of your earthly thoughts be of prayer.

He even offers to sing Death a song, though it is introduced, incongruously, as something he will perform “Some enchanted evening.” Dylan has, of course, sung this song, on “Shadows in the Night” (2015), but it is fair to suppose that this is the first time Rodgers and Hammerstein have ever been juxtaposed so closely with an anatomically challenged Death.

Black Rider, Black Rider, you’ve been on the job too long

Poor old Death, suffering from job overload.  This Covid virus must have plumb worn him out.  “Been on the job too long” is a traditional folk line, which crops up in many songs – such as “Duncan and Brady,” a murder ballad which Dylan performed with harsh ferocity in 1992 (eventually released on Tell Tale Signs (2008).

Which leads to another possibly fanciful thread of associations.  In 2014, a bunch of musicians were commissioned to complete a set of lyrics written by Dylan around 1967 but never set to music.  Among the performers was the resplendent Rhiannon Giddens; and among the songs she completed was one which Dylan called “Duncan and Jimmy.”  (Brady disappears, having been shot by Duncan in the original folksong.)  So, just as Offenbach’s automoton provides a subterranean link between “My Own Version of You” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Love you,” Giddens’ “Duncan and Jimmy” provides a link between the allusion to “Duncan and Brady” and the song which immediately follows it on RRW: “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.”

“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”

OK, I can’t help but notice the close echo between “Jimmy Reed” and “Jimmy Dean” – who otherwise does not appear on RRW. 

Jimmy Reed was a blues singer and guitarist whose influence, especially in the 1950s and 60s, exceeded his popular success.  He died comparatively young (just over 50) from epilepsy.  On this song, Dylan not only pays tribute to Reed, but also discreetly shows Reed’s continuing legacy by quoting himself: the opening guitar lick is highly reminiscent of “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat”; and buried way deep in the production are some harmonica flourishes which can only be by Bob.  Of all the songs on RRW, this is the one that most begs to be unleashed in performance.  Let Charlie Sexton loose!

Put a jewel in your crown and I’ll put out the light

“The Jewel in the Crown” was the popular description of the place of India in the British Empire, and was used in the novels of Paul Scott – but it’s hard to see any relevance for such an allusion here.  More interesting is the close repetition of “Put,” twice in one line, which may recall “Put out the light, and then put out the light,” the words with which Othello, murder most foul, strangles Desdemona.  Again, Shakespeare lances the wound between justice and vengeance, public law and personal violence.

I can’t play the record ‘cos my needle got stuck

In contrast to the blunt “cock” of the previous song, Dylan returns here to the rich tradition of blues euphemism, delicate indelicacies.  This wonderfully oblique confession of impotence is immediately followed by  “I break open your grapes, I suck out the juice,” for which I scarcely dare to offer any explication, except to choke and gasp some more at the completed rhyme:

I need you like a head needs a noose.

You could write a whole textbook on sexual pathology based on these three lines.

Can you hear me calling you from down in Virginia

Direct quote from Jimmy Reed.

“Mother of Muses”

Mother of Muses, sing for me

The mother of the Muses was Mnemosyne.  Perhaps Dylan was wise not to include the actual name in his text, where he would have had to sing and pronounce it!  But the odd thing about Dylan’s line is that it reverses the usual order, gets things backward.  The Muse does not sing for the singer; the singer sings for the Muse.  The Muse is the inspiration, not the performer.

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott
And of Zhukov and Patton

A roll-call of military heroes is of course a common device in epic poetry.  Homer is full of such lists.  But this is a very eclectic and wide-ranging list,  including Generals from Britain, America, and even Soviet Russia.  Sherman’s march through Georgia will reappear at the very end of the album.  There is a sly joke that one General (Patton) is perhaps best known for his film portrayal by an actor with the same name as another General (Scott).  As for the original Scott: Winfield Scott was in charge of the US Army in the mid-19^th century, in the years leading up to the Civil War.  He is credited with transforming that army into a disciplined, professional fighting force, ultimately superior to the less organized troops of the Confederacy.  His insistence on small points of discipline gave him his popular nickname: “Old Fuss and Feathers.”  Did he perhaps fuss with his hair?

Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved the path for Martin Luther King

Well, in the long run, yes. insofar as they were all fighting for freedom.  But I kind of doubt what any of them would have made of Elvis.  Does the repeated “path” echo Dylan’s early song “Paths of Victory”?

Calliope … don’t belong to anyone, why not give her to me?

Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry.  The list of Generals is certainly Calliope’s territory.  And nowadays, the epic is not much in fashion, despite a few magnificent attempts to render Homer into contemporary poetics: Christopher Logue, Alice Oswald.  The post is open: why not Bob?

I’ve already outlived my life by far

As a 76-year-old man listening to a 79-year-old singer, I very much appreciate this line.

An index to all our articles on this album appears here.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

The Mississippi series

• The Mississippi-series, part 1; no polyrhythm here please
• The Mississippi-series, part 2: the line that never was.
• The Mississippi- series, part 3: Belshazzar on the steppe
• The Mississippi-series, part 4: Bertolt, Bobby, Blind & Boy
• The Mississippi-series, part 5: Frost in the room, fire in the sky
• The Mississippi-series, part 6: Charades
• The Mississippi series: part 7 : Dorsey Dixon
• The Mississippi-series, part 8: Pretty Maids All In A Row
• The Mississippi-series, part 9: Abandon all hope
• The Mississippi-series, part 10: Eyesight To The Blind
• The Mississippi-series part 11: Bonnie Blue
• The Mississippi-series, part 12: Roses Of Yesterday
• The Mississippi-series, part 13: Down in the Groove
• The Mississippi-series, part 14 Unca Donald
• The Mississippi-series, part 15: Gaze into the abyss

This is part 16 – the final article in the series.

by Jochen Markhorst

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

XVI      Between Point Dume and Oxnard

It’s a long, laborious delivery, the final version of “Mississippi”, the wonderful version on “Love & Theft”. First recording attempts date from September ’96 (Oxnard, California). In January ’97 Dylan is in Miami with Lanois for the recording of Time Out Of Mind, with the well-known falling-out and subsequent discard of the song. And finally, the song is put to tape to the satisfaction of the master in May 2001.

We owe that final recording to, as Dylan reveals during the press conference July 2001 in Rome, the fortunate circumstance that those earlier recordings have not been leaked in the meantime, have not been distributed by bootleggers. Whenever that happens, the song is contaminated for me, and Dylan won’t look back:

“But, thank God, it never got out, so we recorded it again. But something like that would never have happened 10 years ago. You’d have probably all heard the trashy version of it and I’d have never re-recorded it.”  

Still, the “trashy version” may well serve to extract a few extra pennies from the fans’ pockets seven years after that press conference; on The Bootleg Series Vol 8: Tell Tale Signs (2008) are three of those rejected versions from ’96 and ’97. All of them beautiful versions, certainly worth the money, and yet another demonstration of Dylan’s incomprehensible take on his own songs. Dylan does have an opinion about that stubborn image too, in this same press meeting:

“I’ve been asked: ‘So how come you’re such a bad judge of your material?’ I’ve been criticized for not putting my best songs on certain albums, but it is because I consider that the song isn’t ready yet. It’s not been recorded right.”

Art history teaches us that this is not a very strong argument. Nabokov seems to have been on his way to the incinerator with Lolita‘s manuscript (but was stopped by his wife). Claude Monet himself destroyed fifteen of his water lily paintings. Michelangelo had worked his brilliant Pietà for eight years and suddenly did not like it anymore; one leg of Christ had already been smashed to smithereens before a church official could intervene (the one-legged Deposition can still be admired in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence). Kafka was extremely reluctant to publish throughout his life, and at the unrelenting insistence of admiring friends only released a fraction. On his deathbed in the sanatorium, he begged his friend Max Brod to burn everything in his study at home – being most of Kafka’s oeuvre, including masterpieces such as Der Prozeß and dozens of stories (Brod ignored the dying man’s wish and published everything).

How it is possible that the artists are such bad critics of their own work, the question that Dylan tries to undo in that press conference, is not answered. Neither by Dylan, who in fact only repeats the question as he “answers” that the works are “not ready yet” or “not recorded right”. A more persistent journalist would have asked; what does “Farewell Angelina” still miss, what exactly is wrong with the recording of “Blind Willie McTell”?

Though presumably the more persistent journalist had not received a satisfactory answer to this either. Not surprisingly, of course – it really is an impossible question, similar to “why do you like this song?” In Dylan’s case, the dissatisfaction must have to do with the sound, the often elusive “colour” of a recording, a quality Dylan appreciates above all else, the quality he values higher than “the right words” or the beauty of a melody.

The story of engineer Mark Howard, both at Time Out Of Mind and “Love And Theft” the studio technician on duty, does illustrate this point quite well:

“Dylan was living in Point Dume, and he’d drive up every day, and he’d tune into this radio station that he could only get between Point Dume and Oxnard. It would just pop up at one point, and it was all these old blues recordings, Little Walter, guys like that. And he’d ask us, “Why do those records sound so great? Why can’t anybody have a record sound like that anymore? Can I have that?” And so, I say, “Yeah, you can get those sound still.” “Well,” he says, “that’s the sound I’m thinking of for this record.”

But apparently, in 1989, in California, he couldn’t get hold of that particular sound for “Mississippi” after all.

According to legend, we owe the final recording and release of “Mississippi” to a tenacious Max Brod 2.0: manager Jeff Rosen is a passionate fan of the song and is believed to have reminded Dylan after the recordings for “Love And Theft”. Which can in any case be deduced from the interview with drummer David Kemper, in the same beautiful Tell Tale Signs Special in Uncut, 2008:

“I know of two versions of “Mississippi”. We thought we were done with Love And Theft, and then a friend of Bob’s passed him a note, and he said, oh, yeah, I forgot about this: “Mississippi”. And then he made a comment, did you guys ever bring the version we did down at the Lanois sessions. And they said, yeah, we have it right here. And he said let’s listen to it. So they put it up on the big speakers, and I said, damn – release it!”

Kemper is a fan, that much is clear. And is touched by the beauty of the song, the richness of the melodies and the grandeur of the lyrics – but, just like any other fan, is not receptive to what Dylan lacks; the “colour” or the sound.

Still, the melodic richness definitely is a distinguishing quality of the song. In general Dylan doesn’t attach much importance to this – likewise on this album, most songs have only two or three chords, Dylan opting for simple blues schemes with a cast-iron lick and few adventurous variations. No problem, of course; after all, in der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister, as Goethe teaches, “It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself” and that Dylan can produce masterpieces within these limits he has already demonstrated dozens of times (“All Along The Watchtower”, “Knockin’ On heaven’s Door”, “Desolation Row”).

But every now and then a song pushes him to musically more challenging regions. “She’s Your Lover Now” stumbles over his own melodic richness, “New Morning” is such a multi-coloured example and so is this “Mississippi”.

The tireless Dylanwatcher and researcher Eyolf Østrem from Scandinavia, administrator of the beautiful blog Things Twice and compiler of the legendary “Neanderthal site” (his words) dylanchords, points to a second peculiarity: “Mississippi” is one of the very few Dylan songs with an ascending bass line:

G                      /a         /b                             /c
Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
/d                           /e                            F                 G
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
G                   /a    /b                            /c
Sky full of fire, pain pouring down
/d                             /e                  F                    G
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around.

… indeed, an ascending line that neatly climbs the whole scale alphabetically. “Like A Rolling Stone” does that too, but there aren’t many other examples in Dylan’s oeuvre. And there aren’t too many outside of Dylan’s oeuvre either. The chorus of The Eagles’ first hit, “Take It Easy” (1972, written by Jackson Brown and Glenn Frey) has partly the same scheme (under “Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy”), but that’s about it.

Like “Blind Willie McTell” and “Make You Feel My Love”, the cover is released before the original. After Dylan rejected the song for Time Out Of Mind, he donated it to Sheryl Crow, who records it for her album The Globe Sessions (1998). That version may have inspired Dylan to give it another shot himself; Crows “Mississippi” is okay but lacks shine, with a rather joyless and awkward Whoo! finishing it off.

The Dixie Chicks fare a lot better, with a dazzling and sparkling interpretation on the live album Top Of The World Tour (2003). Same approach as Crow, but with real pleasure, passion and thrust (bursting from every single live performance). A small lyrical adjustment does reveal that all the ladies are a bit less tough than the image they are trying to maintain, though:

I was thinkin’ ’bout the things that you said
I was dreaming I was sleepin’ in your bed

…apparently a possible homoerotic suspicion is a little too scary for both Sheryl Crow and The Chicks’ powerhouse Natalie Maines, so they’d rather turn the sung Rosie into a gender-neutral you. Musically, The Chicks more than compensate for the slip. The organ part from The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in the split to splinters-couplet, for instance, is a golden find.

In June 2020 The Dixie Chicks will also change their own name, for politically correct reasons, to The Chicks, to meet this moment, as the official statement says. In 2003 Maines had declared from the podium that she was ashamed of President Bush and the Iraq war, which led to a long, hefty hate campaign including death threats. Since then, The Chicks have been more sensitive to the right thing to do. Fortunately, “Mississippi” isn’t “wrong” yet; in 2020 the song is still on the setlist.

Remarkably, the best version so far comes from Scotland. Veteran Rab Noakes plays live a sober, compelling version in which he manages to bring together both the folky Dylan from 1961 and the elderly troubadour from 2001. Just an acoustic Gibson and Noakes’ relaxed, light-hearted, little hoarse rendition… proving you can come back all the way, after all.

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Everyone who knows Richard Thompson’s incredible contribution to popular music knows the 1952 Vincent Black Lightning.  The song was included in Time magazine’s “All Time 100 Songs” list of the best English-language musical compositions released between 1923 and 2011 – and indeed in 2011 Richard Thompson was given an OBE.  This song comes from the Rumour and Sigh album.

You might also know the work of Richard Thompson through Fairport Convention and through Richard and Linda Thompson.

Bob played the song just once (hence an inclusion here) on July 14 2013 in Clarkston MI

Of course one of the great problems with featuring once only performances is that the song and the performance may be wonderful, but sometimes bits of the recording are not so good, but I beg you to stay with this and ignore the voice that occasionally pops up.  It is so worth it.

Says Red Molly to James "That's a fine motorbike
A girl could feel special on any such like"
Says James to Red Molly "My hat's off to you
It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952
And I've seen you at the corners and cafés it seems
Red hair and black leather, my favourite colour scheme"
And he pulled her on behind
And down to Box Hill they did ride

Says James to Red Molly, "Here's a ring for your right hand
But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man
I've fought with the law since I was seventeen
I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine
Now I'm twenty-one years, I might make twenty-two
And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you
And if fate should break my stride
Then I give you my Vincent to ride"

"Come down, come down, Red Molly," called Sergeant McRae
"For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery
Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside
Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside"
When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left
He was running out of road, he was running out of breath
But he smiled to see her cry
And said "I give you my Vincent to ride"

Says James, "In my opinion, there's nothing in this world
Beats a '52 Vincent and a red-headed girl
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do
They don't have a soul like a Vincent '52"
He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys
He said "I've got no further use for these
I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome
Swooping down from heaven to carry me home"
And he gave her one last kiss and died
And he gave her his Vincent to ride

18 June 1999 with Paul Simon, Concord CA

https://youtu.be/L_SqGodx7vw

I love the way the guys got together and played making it sound as if they had not rehearsed when they apparently had.   You only get one minute 32 seconds of this, but still it is great fun.

Blue Moon of Kentucky was written in 1945 by Bill Monroe and recorded by his band, the Blue Grass Boys and is described as one of the greatest country songs of all time.  And as the composer says in the intro below, Elvis recorded it too.

And one more, Weeping Willow

A different Bob again!  November 17 1993, at the Supper Club New York.  He followed this rendition with “Delia’s Gone” and “Jim Jones at Botany Bay”.

This is a Blind Boy Fuller song,

Man, that weeping willow, moaning like a dove
Weeping willow moaning like a dove
Man, there's a gal up the country I sure do love

If you see my baby tell her to hurry home
You see my baby, tell her hurry home
I ain't had no lovin' since my little girl been gone

Where it ain't no love, ain't no gettin' along,
ain't no love, mama, ain't no love and gettin' along.
My baby treats me so mean and dirty, can't tell right from wrong

Gonna buy me a bulldog, watch you while you sleep
Buy me a bulldog, watch you while you sleep
I have to stop them men from makin' early mornin' creep.

You gonna want my love, mama, some old lonesome day,
You gonna want my love, mama, some old lonesome day,
But it'll be too late, I'll be gone too far away.

Oh, that weeping willow, mourning like a dove
Weeping willow mourning like a dove
Well, there's a gal in the country man I sure do love.

It’s a song that has guitarists tearing their hair out because of the unusual chordal accompaniment.  Here’s the original – it really is a fantastic tune with a gorgeous guitar part.  What I can’t understand is why, having worked on this song Bob would only play it once; it is a super song, and his arrangement is exquisite.  I will never understand this guy no matter how much I listen.

For what it is worth, I think it is really worth listening to Bob’s version again after hearing the original; it gives a greater insight into the song and the process Bob and the band had gone through to get to their version.

This is the second piece in the new “Once only file” series.  If you are enjoying it one tenth as much as I am, scurrying around listening to the once only played songs and tracing the originals, then you are having a good time.  If not, well, I’m still having fun.

And just in case you would like a little more

And down to Box Hill they did ride….

Dylan’s “Once Only” File: 10,000 men and 20/20 Vision

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

In the song lyrics quoted below, a melancholic electric bluesman plays and sings about a lost lover:

I went out in Virginia, honey, where the green grass grows
I went out in Virginia, honey, where the green grass grows
I tried to tell myself that I didn't want you no more
My baby told me, stop doing me wrong
My baby told me, stop doing me wrong
Well, I telling you, honey, 'cause I'm tired of living alone

(Jimmy Reed: Down In Virginia ~ J&M Reed)

The passing of the blues singer from the face of this earth, though life thereon be no paradise, is lamented in the the verse below:

God be with you, brother dear
If you don't mind me asking, what brings you here?
Oh nothing much, I'm just looking for the man
Need to see where he's lying in this lost land
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, and everything within ya
Can't you hear me calling from down in Virginia?

(Bob Dylan: Goodbye Jimmy Reed)

The sentiment of loneliness expressed through Reed’s music and lyrics echo in the lines below:

I'm giving myself to you, I am
From Salt Lake City to Birmingham
From East L.A. to San Antone
I don't think I can bear to live my life alone

(Bob Dylan: I’ve Made Up My My Mind To Give Myself To You)

Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan looks abroad to a Prussian author of pre-Freudian Gothic Romantic stories. Ernst Hoffman satirizes the mechanization of life wrought by contemporary industrialized socio-economic conditions that fragments, but fails to displace the organic imagination of creative artists.

Ernst is the Jungian kinsman of the American Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe, both being accompanied by their alchemic transmutation symbols of earth, air, fire, and water.

A lover hyperbolically idealized in the Rococo-like verse below:

Thou wast that all to me, love
For which my soul did pine
A green isle in the sea, love
A fountain, and a shrine
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers
And all the flowers were mine

(Edgar Allan Poe: To One In Paradise)

“The Golden Flower Pot” by Ernst Hoffman features a student apprenticed to an alchemist who is hired to copy ancient Arabic and Egyptian manuscripts. The young man is beloved by a pretty maid named Veronica; he’s soon able to decipher the writings, and reads that the alchemist is the Spirit of Fire exiled from the spiritual underwater world of Atlantis. Turns out that his boss needs to find a suitable husband for his daughter if he is ever to get back home. Serpentina is her name, and she’s a loving green-gold skinned, tree-dwelling lamia with blue eyes. The Spirit of Earth gives the alchemist a golden flower pot to present to a husband noble enough for Serpentina; a wicked witch tries to steal the golden pot, but the alchemist transforms her into a beet. Veronica marries a practical man, and Serpentina and the student run off together to watery Atlantis; they marry. The sorcerer’s apprentice has found his Muse.

In the following song lyrics, we discover such an apprentice:

I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my world
I want to do things for the benefit of mankind
I say to the willow tree, "Don't weep for me"
I'm saying to hell to all things that I used to be

(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

In the song lyrics below, the narrator thereof is quite willing to go with a blue-eyed Serpentina archetype wherever she wants to go:

Take me out travelling, you're a travelling man
Show me something that I'll understand
I'm not what I was, things aren't what they were
I'll go far away from home with her

And the apprentice is more than happy to marry his new Muse:

I've travelled from the mountains to the sea
I hope the gods go easy on me
I knew you'd say yes, I'm saying it too
I've made up my mind to give myself to you

(Bob Dylan: I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You)

The chief song source is:

Would you lay with me in a field of stone ....
Would you go away to another land
Walk a thousand miles through the burning sand
Wipe the blood from my dying hand
If I give myself to you?

(Johnny Cash: Would You Lay With Me ~ David Coe)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

This article continues from It takes some getting used to. Rough and Rowdy Ways Part 1

by Stephen Scobie

“False Prophet”

The words of the song are always disclaimers, in the negative – “I ain’t no false prophet” – but the title remains obstinately affirmative, in the positive – “false prophet.”  Is the singer saying that he is a prophet, but not a false one?  Or is he saying that he’s no prophet of any kind, false or otherwise?  Which double negative takes precedence: “ain’t no” or “no false”?  Remember the very early Dylan song “Long Time Gone,” with its evocation of the Prophet Amos: “I know I ain’t no prophet / And I ain’t no prophet’s son”  (for a detailed exploration of that early song, see my book Always Other Voices).

And while we’re on the topic of ambiguous claims to authority and authorship, let’s acknowledge the wholesale appropriation of the musical arrangement (which is wonderful) from Billy (the Kid) Emerson, 1954.  Love and Theft.  Billy, you’re so far away from home.

I opened my heart to the world and the world came in

When I first listened to the album, I heard this as “the world caved in.”  I have since seen at least one internet posting with the same mistake.  I’m not at all sure I don’t prefer it.

My fleet footed guides from the underworld

“Fleet footed” is a classic poetic epithet, often apped to Hermes/Mercury, messenger and trickster.  But it is also, of course, self-quotation.  In 1965 “Maggie comes fleet foot” in the underworld  Subterranean homesick blues.

I’m first among equals, second to none
The last of the best, you can bury the rest
Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold

OK, this is a tricky one.  I see an odd string of references here, but I acknowledge that I may be letting my fancy run away with me.  These links may exist more in my imagination than in any legitimate reading of the text.  But I can’t resist them.

To begin with, “first among equals,” or in its Latin form, “primus inter pares,” is an equivocal concept, both self-aggrandizing (first) and modest (among equals). It’s not a stable condition: many or even most “first among equals” relationships have ended up in civil strife and the attempted dominance of the one.   One example would be the Roman triumvirate of Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Marcus Lucinius Crassus.  Dylan’s keen interest in Caesar is evident throughout RRW, but for the moment, my interest is in Crassus, the richest man in Rome.  (For my generation, the definitive portrait is Laurence Olivier’s towering performance in Stanley Kubrick’s film Spartacus (1960).)

But before I get back to Crassus, what about Dylan?  If the narrator of this song regards himself as first among equals, who are “the rest”?  If he is “the last of the best,” then who remains to be buried?  And one possible answer, though I feel rather queasy advancing it, is “them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones.”  That use of “bad boys” seems rather condescending, more part of the Stones’ early-60s publicity image than of their mature accomplishment.  But there is the unavoidable fact that both Dylan and the Stones lay claim to the use of the proverb (not to mention Muddy Waters; not to mention Jann Wenner).  If  Dylan is “the last of the best,” last left standing of the rock gods of the 60s, can he finally “bury” them bad boys with their “silver and gold”?  After all, the Stones did in 1969 release a song called “You got the silver, you got the gold” (notable in that the lead vocal is by Keith, not Mick).

And here is where these two stray threads of association I have been uneasily following suddenly loop back together.  In the early 1960s, the Rolling Stones are “them British bad boys.”  In 1965, Dylan records “Like a Rolling Stone.”  In 1969, the Rolling Stones record “You got the gold.”  In 1960, Olivier defines Crassus.  The film, however, does not include Crassus’ death.  In legend, after (let us hope, after) Crassus was killed in battle, his victorious enemies mocked his status as the richest man in Rome by pouring molten gold into his mouth.  On RRW, Dylan sings “Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold,” and then, just two verses later, he adds:

Open your mouth, I’ll stuff it with gold.

Which just leaves second to none, which will reappear, startlingly, at the very end of the album.

I’m just here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head

Somebody’s.  Could be anybody’s.  Blood Feuds aren’t particularly discriminating.

The city of God is there on the hill

Conflation of several texts:

• City of God, 5^th century AD treatise by Saint Augustine of Hippo (I dreamed I saw… )
• “A city set on a hill cannot be hid” (Matthew 5.14)
• sermon on this text by John Winthrop, preached in Boston in 1630, widely quoted (and, arguably, misinterpreted) by Ronald Reagan, and by all of his successors.  For its connections to Dylan’s Basement Tapes, see Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic.

Dylan himself wrote a song called “City of Gold” (1980), which was performed on the Gospel tours, and released on “Trouble No More” (2017).

I’m nobody’s bride

Hard to see Bob as a bride, even in the context of time running backward, or waiting at the altar.  But stranger things have happened – see another strange wedding in “Key West.”

Can’t remember when I was born and I forget when I died

Definitive statement of being beyond or outside of time.  Maybe it comes from some old blues – wouldn’t surprise me – but so what?  He knows what to do with it: place it at the end of a song in which he claims that he is/is not a false/not false prophet.

“My Own Version of You”

I have by now read on line several dozen reviews of RRW, and when they come to this song, they invariably mention Frankenstein.  Fair enough – but the reference exists only in the cultural intertext, not in the text itself.  The name “Frankenstein” is never mentioned in the actual song.   I’ll try to stay away from it for as long as I can.

I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries

Compare “Thunder on the Mountain” (2008):  “Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches / I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages.” I know it’s a tenuous echo, but hey, any excuse to quote that rhyme!  “Brando / commando” is pretty good too.

Lookin’ for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

In medieval troubadour poetry, there was a rhetorical convention in which the poet assembled an idealized lady by combining features from several famously beautiful women: one woman’s eyes, another woman’s hair, another woman’s lips.  However, it never got down to the anatomical level of livers and hearts.  Leave it to Dylan to make the rhetorical conceit literal.

I wanna create my own version of you

It is of course a highly problematic wish, even before it gets literalised into livers and brains.  The narrator refuses to accept his lover as she is, but rather regards her as material to be shaped according to his own desires.   Later, he phrases it as:

I’ll bring someone to life, someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel

But how can she be alive or real if her existence  depends on replicating his feelings?

It must be the winter of my discontent

Shakespeare again, first line of Richard III.   But the original is “our,” not “my”: it expresses (and derides) the collective delight of the victorious York dynasty in deposing its enemies, a delight which Richard does not exactly share.  For him, the discontent still exists, and he will follow it through until he himself attains the crown – by way of means of, to switch plays, murder most foul.  And Richard’s “discontent” goes deeper than his regal ambition: it is, fundamentally, rooted in his own physical deformity, the hunchback, which is the main topic of the rest of this opening speech.  Maybe he should look for repairs in some morgue or monastery.

I pick a number between one and two
And I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do?

 There is of course no whole number between one and two, so the line expresses a paradox, or an impossibility.  Or a preference for fractions. The following phrase is commonly used as “What would Jesus Christ do?”  Dylan exchanges one JC for another.  And if we again think of the Shakespearean tragedy, note how these references – Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III, Julius Caesar — are all plays dealing with the violent overthrow or assassination of a monarch.  Lying in waiting for JC is JFK.  And William McKinley.

Leon Russell / Liberace / Saint John the Apostle

Another unlikely trio, where the bizarreness of the combination (and the delight of the rhyme) is probably more significant than any precise association for each of the names.

I’ll be at the Black Horse Tavern … Two doors down,
    not that far to walk

Would a black rider drink in a Black Horse Tavern?  Or if he were in Greenwich Village, might he not walk (not that far) to the White Horse Tavern, where in 1953 a certain Welsh poet called Dylan quite literally drank himself to death? Riding a pale horse.

You can bring it to St Peter, you can bring it to  Jerome
You can … bring it all the way home

A somewhat less incongruous pairing, between the founder of the church and the translator of the Scriptures.  So the singer is “bringing it all back home,” to an album title from 1965.

Can you tell me what it means, to be or not to be?

            Hamlet again, with a question which remains as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s smile.

Can you help me walk that moonlight mile?

There are probably dozens of references for “Moonlight Mile,” but my favourite would certainly be the sublime 1971 recording by them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones.

I can see the history of the  whole human race

Most of which – the crusades, England, America – seems to deal with slavery, and thus with the question of what it means to be “human.”  Did Jefferson consider his slaves as “human”? Which is, in turn, the question of Frankenstein: is his creature “human”?

Trojan Women

Greek tragedy by Euripides, notable for its focus not on the heroes of war but its victims.

Some of the best known enemies of mankind …
Mr Freud with his dreams, Mr Marx with his axe
See the rawhide lash rip the skin from their backs

Even by the standards of recent Dylan, this is a remarkably violent, even sadistic image.  It’s one thing to disagree with Freud or Marx; it’s quite another thing to conjure up and appear to take relish in such specific and grisly punishment.

Yet the singer immediately does an about-face, evoking an immortal spirit, [which] creeps in your body the day you are born.   Or, perhaps, at the moment when some strange creator brings you to life with a blast of electricity?

The whole song is caught up in what Leonard Cohen called “the tangle of matter and ghost.”  It longs for the “immortal spirit,” but it keeps on snagging on the crudely material: bodies which can be ideally assembled, or else flogged apart.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

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

XV       Gaze into the abyss

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Friedrich Nietzsche most certainly has a thing for music. As early as at the age of fourteen he writes:

God gave us music so that we, first and foremost, will be guided upward by it. All qualities are united in music: it can lift us up, it can be capricious, it can cheer us up and delight us, nay, with its soft, melancholy tunes, it can even break the resistance of the toughest character.

He remains faithful to music throughout his life, studying music theory and piano with zeal, writing some seventy classical compositions (mostly for piano), and even playing with the idea of becoming a professional composer – but both Wagner and Hans von Bülow advise against it. He’s just not talented enough. Von Bülow’s rejection, after Nietzsche sent him his “Manfred-Meditation”, has an entertaining, Nietzschean cruelty, by the way:

“I could not discover in it the least trace of Apollonian elements, and, as for the Dionysian, to tell you frankly, it made me think of the morning after a bacchanalian orgy rather than of an orgy itself…. Once again — don’t take this too badly — you yourself say your music is “detestable” — it is, actually, more detestable than you believe.”

And a little further on Von Bülow even calls the piece a “rape of Euterpe”, a rape of the muse of flute playing and lyrical poetry.

Well, that might be a little too rich. Nietzsche’s music really isn’t that awful. “A gifted amateur” is the friendlier, and a better qualification. And with the miraculous, enchanting “Das Fragment an sich” (The fragment by itself, 1871) Nietzsche actually writes, twenty years before Satie, the first piece of minimal music in music history. Moreover, in 1896 his philosophical and literary work inspires Richard Strauss to write the overwhelming symphonic poem “Also sprach Zarathustra” (which will become the soundtrack to the endless emptiness in 2001: A Space Odyssey), and inspires Gustav Mahler to write music to “O Mensch! Gib Acht!” (O man! Take heed!) from his greatest work, the Third Symphony; hardly insignificant contributions to classical music, all in all.

An important part of his modest oeuvre consists of songs. And although Nietzsche certainly is a great poet, he prefers to set other people’s poems to music – which often have similarities with Nietzsche’s thinking and works. Like “Aus der Jugendzeit” (From the times of youth), by Friedrich Rückert, in which emptiness is the theme, the emptiness one experiences upon the realisation: you can’t go back all the way:

Ist das Herz geleert, ist das Herz geleert,
Wird’s nie mehr voll.

(Once the heart is emptied, the heart is emptied,
it never becomes full again.)

The French phenomenon Jules Michelet (1798-1874), who like Dylan in his later work tries to recreate the past, is touched by Rückert’s poem and incorporates parts of it in his poem “L’Hirondelle” (The Swallow, 1861):

Mais le vide du coeur reste, mais reste le vide du coeur,
Et rien ne le remplira

(But the heart’s emptiness remains; its emptiness remains,
And nothing will make it full again)

… which again is picked up by Vincent Van Gogh, who quotes it when he tries to express in his letters to brother Theo how much and why he is touched by the endless emptiness. This one example is from the letter to Theo of 10 April 1882, but emptiness and endlessness is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Vincent throughout his creative life, as well as an image of doom, as can be seen with increasing frequency from the letters just before his end:

“I can’t precisely describe what the thing I have is like, there are terrible fits of anxiety sometimes – without any apparent cause – or then again a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the mind.“

Vincent writes this to his sister Willemien a year before his death. Thematically similar to one of his last letters, two weeks before his suicide:

“Knowing clearly what I wanted I’ve painted another three large canvases since then. They’re immense stretches of wheatfields under angry skies, and I made a point of trying to express despondency, extreme loneliness.”

It is of all times, the fascination for the Void, the endless emptiness and the Nothing. The Nothing has occupied philosophers since Democritus, twenty-five centuries ago, most religions begin with a Nothing from which a world is created and it inspires artists like Ovid, Homer, Dante, Blake with his obsession for “the abominable void”, “the endless abyss of space and the curtains of darkness round the Void”, it inspires Baudelaire staring from his balcony into the espace profond, into the deep void, Rimbaud, whose Season in Hell is a “fall into the void” and Kerouac, who tries to ward off the void on almost every page of Desolation Angels.

But closest to the poet Dylan is, of course, Allen Ginsberg:

not even the human
imagination satisfies
the endless emptiness
of the soul
                ("Over Kansas", 1954)

For this last quatrain of “Mississippi”, Dylan only borrows that image of the endless emptiness, without further thematizing it – just like the following cold as clay is an atmospheric and melodic, but hardly eloquent cliché. They are fragments that, as Dylan says in that beautiful New York Times interview, “write themselves”, floating around somewhere in that stream-of-consciousness and now surfacing.

The word combination cold and clay then probably entered Dylan’s vocabulary via “Tom Dooley” a long, long time ago:

I dug a grave four feet long, I dug it three feet deep,
Throwed cold clay o’er her, and tromped it with my feet.

“Tom Dooley” is the Kingston Trio’s biggest hit in 1958 (estimated sales between four and six million singles), and according to music historians, John Fogerty and Joan Baez is the spark that ignited the folk revival. The song is an arrangement of a nineteenth-century folk song about the Southern soldier Thomas C. Dula, hung in 1868 after the murder of his fiancée Laura Foster. The impact of that story on him, or at least the impact of the song, Dylan does not hide; as early as 1965 he mentions Dooley in the liner notes of Highway 61 Revisited:

when tom dooley, the kind of person you think you've seen before, 
comes strolling in with White Heap, the hundred Inevitables all say 
"who's that man who looks so white?"

…and in 2020 the old murder ballad is apparently still floating around in that stream-of-consciousness: Take me to the place Tom Dooley was hung, says Dylan in “Murder Most Foul.” And he’s not the only one who is struck by Tom Dooley and that cold clay. Elvis Costello lends the image for even two songs, as he tells in his autobiography Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink:

“I could point you to lines in my songs that use the language of folk songs: from the allusion to Barbara Allen in I Want You to the cold clay pulled out of Doc Watson’s rendition of Tom Dooley, which turns up in Suit of Lights and then again in Tramp the Dirt Down.”

The poet Dylan’s grandeur shines in the sequel, setting those half-known images of despair into the crown borrowed from Henry Rollins: You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way. After all, the emptiness remains – an emptied heart never fills up again.

Or, as Nietzsche would say: if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Nietzsche – Das Fragment an sich: 

To be continued. Next up: Mississippi part XVI, the final: Between Point Dume and Oxnard

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: I thought I’d look at more alternative rock acts to see if they a) consider Dylan cool enough to cover and b) if they are able to do something interesting enough with it to make it worth a listen. For me, the answer to both would be a resounding “yes”, you may feel different of course…so here we go again!

PJ Harvey

Tony: OK this fooled me, and in case you don’t know this track I’ll warn you, it starts very quietly.  As in very very very quietly.

Now my approach to unusual musical arrangements is to ask “is this just done to be different? or does it have a meaning integral to the composition?”

The lyrics of the song “Highway 61 Revisited” are a challenge to all our understanding of the blues, as I think Dylan intended, for as he said, “Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors … It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”

And of course others come along and want to sing it and it is NOT their place in the universe.   Highway 61 goes through Duluth, they were not born in Duluth.  But Dylan was, and Muddy Waters, Elvis Presley, and Charley Patton were all born near its route. And there is the eternal Robert Johnson story too.

So yes for people who come to this song NOT born close to the highway, the song has a different meaning.  And yes, the silence has a meaning for those not born there which is different.  A silence is a way of symbolising it and indeed it reminds me of what’s going on here.  I’ll go for that.  

And indeed having got over that uncertainty I go for the whole re-working.  The blues like rock n roll is the music of the people, everyone can treat it as they want.   And in fact I do love the shouty insistence that says “I want to be heard”.

What I didn’t realise was that Polly Jean had been awarded an MBE (the order of most excellent member of the British Empire).  Shows how out of touch one can get.

Shot of Love

Here again all the original meanings from Dylan’s song are stripped away.  And I did feel the need to go back to Bob’s original after listening to PJ, before then playing her version again.

This really is a way of turning a song upside down, inside out, back to front and round and round.  And that’s just the intro.   Try it  – as PJ’s version ends, play Dylan’s version below and then go back to PJ.  If you are short of time, the first 30 seconds will do in each case.

https://youtu.be/LUq9tawI_0k

Courtney Love & Hole: It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

Again from the very first second we know something has been re-written here, and oh yes it sure has

I do like the arrangement of the musical interludes between the verses.  It is all too easy to continue at the same powerful rate of performance without giving the audience a chance to take a breath, but that is exactly what we need here.  And so we are given it.

The re-arrangement of the lines at the end of the song helps us keep focus and allow us to accept the very different ending too.  I enjoyed it, and it did really make me want to hear Dylan’s versions again — for all the right reasons.

Karen O (singer from the Yeah, Yeah Yeahs): Highway 61 Revisited

I am not sure why we’ve been taken back to “61” but  a re-visit is always welcome, although here we are getting Dylan’s lyrics, melody and  the essence of the original accompaniment.  But still it’s lively, it’s fun.

Maureen Tucker: I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight

Maureen Tucker joined the Velvet Underground when Angus Maclise left because he felt the band sold out when it took a paying gig.   At least that is the story.  I must say I never did that.  But then I never had a chance of fame.

And the story of this version of “I’ll be your baby tonight” is… well, in essence, that Maureen sings out of tune, and the instruments play out of tune.   And…

Rolling Stone called it “counter culture cool”, and yes I did get a lot of the Velvet Underground and what they were doing, and indeed went to see the band several times, and bought the albums, etc, but eventually got fed up with the approach.  After all, how many times can you play a track like this and feel it is enjoyable, or that you are getting something special out of it, or…

But once was enough and it was as relief to see that the next artist Aaron selected was Chrissie Hynde.  And just the introduction of this next piece is enough to make me feel that earlier thoughts were not too unworthy.

This is a fantastic re-working of song I find hard to admire because my views on religion, (in the same way that many might find a song which urges young men to leave their homes, join the army and march to war as a song that is worthy of praise) but this piece always fascinates me because of what happened to Bob in the months after writing this song.

As far as I know Bob has never played this in concert; an interesting thought in itself.  And then when we remember what came next – the set of songs that took Bob away further and further from the earlier Christian songs, from Every grain of sand to the song I know everyone has got so bored with me going on and on and on about over and over again “Making a liar out of me”…. all written in the space of a few months after “Property”.

But despite my prejudice, this version did make me listen again, not just to the musical quality and the arrangement but to the actual lyrics.  And that lovely harmonica interlude.  Just listen to that last verse as Chrissie speaks it

You can laugh at salvation, you can play Olympic games
You think that when you rest at last you’ll go back from where you came
But you’ve picked up quite a story and you’ve changed since the womb
What happened to the real you, you’ve been captured but by whom?

Where was Bob (metaphorically, emotionally, intellectually) when he wrote those lines.  If I had the chance to ask him one question that would be the one.

Patti Smith

And now what would the punk poet laureate make of Changing of the Guard?

Oh, that is good.  Not a version I have heard before (which generally means that the recording was a number 1 hit from a platinum album while I was meandering around China), and I love the way she insists that it is lyrics that are the key to everything here: we will listen.  Yes we will.

Because we don’t have a backing group repeating certain lines, those lines become more important, and the occasional lines sung as harmonies manage not to stand out while standing out.  OK, that’s nonsense, but I can’t think of any other way of expressing the astonishing effect of certain lines sung in close harmony and others not, within the song.

No, this isn’t good.  This really is stunning.  What the band does when Patti isn’t singing is brilliant, and even the bass guitarist needs a mention here, for being neither invisible nor visible (which is also a dumb statement since I am writing about music, but again I am stuck for words.)

This singer and this band has done something utterly brilliant with this song.  I am overwhelmed.  Even the la-la-la at the end is imaginative and perfect.

Siouxsie And The Banshees

Having been overwhelmed I am not any more.  This is all right, but, well just that.   I am committed to reviewing the songs in the order that Aaron presents them to me, but if I were not I’d have this one earlier in the list, so I could have finished with Patti Smith.

So I will

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

by Stephen Scobie

 When I first listened all the way through to Bob Dylan’s new album,  Rough and Rowdy Ways (RRW), I felt a bit like the English poet Basil Bunting encountering Ezra Pound’s Cantos:

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

The album is so epic, so immense, that it seems impossible to write any kind of conventional “review,” any neat summation of themes, any reductive analysis or critical evaluation.  It’s just too big; it takes some getting used to.

So this article is not a review.  It doesn’t pretend to have a coherent, unified viewpoint, from which every odd detail can be slotted into place.  Rather, it is a series of rough notes on individual lines and phrases which particularly struck me in the course of my first few listenings.

Many of these notes involve quotations: identifying sources, references, echoes, allusions.  Much of this work has already been done by assiduous commentators on the internet; I cannot claim credit for being the first to discover and point out most of the identifications (though I do think I have pinned down a couple of references which I have not yet seen identified on the web).

Nor do I intend to pay any attention here to the vexed problems of allusion, intertextuality, or plagiarism, which I have extensively addressed elsewhere.  Certainly, I make no pretence at completeness.  There are many references which I have omitted, knowingly or unknowingly.  Some I may have added in, hearing echoes where none is intended.  This is not a coherent argument: these are first-draft impressions, preliminary reactions, rough and possibly even rowdy.

Packaging…

Could scarcely be more minimal.  The musicians are barely listed; the production (presumably by Dylan himself) not at all.  The front cover photograph is by contemporary English photographer Ian Berry,  The original image was in black and white; the sepia colouring enhances the illusion of a time past – suggesting some 1920s juke joint in the Deep South, but actually taken in London in 1964.

The packaging includes the hagiographic pose of JFK, but not the lurid image which accompanied the pre-release of “False Prophet,” showing a skeleton in a top hat wielding a hypodermic needle.  There is a photo of Jimmy Rodgers, but none of Dylan himself.

Title

The title is rather odd.  “My Rough and Rowdy Ways” is a 1929 song by Jimmy Rodgers.  Dylan is a big fan, having produced a whole tribute album to the “singing brakeman.”  But RRW, other than the title and inside cover photo, contains (as far as I can tell) no other reference or quotation from Rodgers.  Neither is it especially rough – the production is meticulous – or rowdy – even at its most energetic, it’s not going to have your neighbours banging on the wall.  That’s not a criticism: the music is excellent.  But quietly excellent.

“I Contain Multitudes”

The Walt Whitman quote, or at least the idea of it, has been hanging around Bob Dylan critical circles for a long time.  I’m not sure if anyone has actually used the line, though it wouldn’t surprise me if someone has.  Anyway, Dylan has now done it for them.  But it’s one thing to have this Whitmanian (Whitmaniac?) virtue ascribed to you by a critic; it is quite another thing (as Walt himself must have known) to claim it for yourself.  It may be useful for sidestepping accusations of inconsistency or self-contradiction; but identifying yourself with Whitman does carry elements of bragging and egotism.  So, as we will see, such claims are occasionally undercut by wry self-deprecation or deliberate exaggeration.

Today and tomorrow and yesterday too

Possibly a distant echo of Macbeth – “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow … all our yesterdays”?  There is an air of Shakespearean tragedy all over this album.  Lady Macbeth will appear close to the end, over an hour from now.

Follow me close, I’m going to Bally-na-Lee    

Where?  After the obvious Whitman reference, here comes Dylan in the third line throwing a curve ball to all potential transcribers and annotators.  Where is this place, and how do you even spell it?  Turns out it’s a village in Ireland, associated with a 19^th century Irish poet, Antoine O Raifteiri, whose work Dylan has reportedly discussed with Shane MacGowan, lead singer of The Pogues.  (There may also be an echo from Thoor Ballylee, the home of W.B. Yeats.) As such – a distant location, out on the edge, with a few literary ghosts – perhaps it functions as a bookend to the penultimate song of the album – Key West.

I fuss with my hair, and I fight blood feuds

Sets up the first of a series of rhymes for “multitudes.”  I wrote above about Dylan using self-deprecating humour to undercut the possible arrogance of equating himself with Walt Whitman.  The line juxtaposes the trivial with the profound.  “Blood feuds” is only the first of a long series of images of justice as vengeance, judgements rendered as acts of extreme and personal violence.  (This theme has become increasingly prominent in Dylan’s work over the last twenty years.)  It pierces to the heart of the debate between public justice and private revenge, society’s transition from the endless extension of “blood feud” to the rule of law, in which the state claims a monopoly on violence.  This debate continues to this day, but was most memorably articulated by, yes, Hamlet – “Murder Most Foul.”

Yet here, this intensely serious theme is casually paired with “I fuss my hair.”  Now, I would readily agree that there are few heads of hair in the world more worth fussing with than Bob Dylan’s, especially circa 1966 (as ultimately portrayed by the late Milton Glaser).  But it scarcely equates with “blood feuds.”  The coupling here urges you to see an element of irony in Dylan’s commitment to revenge.  The language of “blood feuds” is always, knowingly, a bit over the top.

1. But it turns out we’re not yet quite finished with “fuss.”  But for that, you’ll have to wait until I get to “Mother of Muses.”

Got a tell tale heart like Mister Poe

Volume 8 of Dylan’s “Bootleg Series,” which covers the years around Time Out Of Mind, is entitled Tell Tale Signs (2008).  In Poe, the “heart” belongs to the victim of murder, whose beating heart remains audible as an accusation beyond death.  In Dylan, the role of victim is ascribed to the singer himself, the author of the “signs,” and the signs are the songs, or at least the alternative takes and rejected drafts of songs which, once buried, are now permitted to sound beyond the walls of their tombs.

Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache

Classic rock and roll song by Warren Smith (1957), covered by Dylan (2001).  The recording was used as a TV commercial for

Cadillac cars and trucks.  Dylan has cheerfully allowed his songs to be used to advertise all kinds of products, from Victoria’s Secret lingerie to (just this last weekend) Travelers Insurance golf tournament.   Purists have been distressed, but hey, why not?  If you contain multitudes, why shouldn’t that include salesman for ladies’ underwear? But the Cadillac will also show up later on RRW, as will “red.”

I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana            Jones
And them British bad boys, the Rolling        Stones 

This is the first, and perhaps the most unsettling, instance of a device which Dylan uses throughout RRW, and which eventually consumes it entirely: a list of culturally well-known names (authors, singers, titles) arranged in groups of two or three, held together by rhyme, as if each pairing was a mini-collage, in which the significance was to be found not in the terms themselves but in the very act of their juxtaposition.  Sometimes the names in the list support each other; at other times they seem bizarrely incongruous, even indeed in violent conflict with each other – as here.

What do these three names possibly have in common with each other (aside from the tenuous link that Indiana Jones fought Nazis)?  Indeed, the placing of Anne Frank’s name in this company may be regarded as offensive.  Or the lines may be subject to the criticism levelled by Samuel Johnson against John Donne: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”

In the next lines, Dylan ventures that all these characters “go right to the edge … go right to the end.”  Fair enough: but the question remains: of all the characters in human history who have gone to the edge, why these three?  In his New York Times interview with Douglas Brinkley, Dylan admits that basically, he just doesn’t know:

“Those kind of songs for me just come out of the blue, out of thin air… There are certain public figures that are just in your subconscious for one reason or another.  None of those songs with designated names are intentionally written.  They just fall down from space.  I’m just as bewildered as  anybody else as to why I write them.”

Or in other words: I contain multitudes.

Everything’s flowing, all at the same time

In Greek, panta rhei: all things are in flux, unstable, impermanent.  Central tenet of the Greek philosopher Heroclitus.  In 1919, faced with the complete collapse of European civilisation over the previous five years, Ezra Pound, already “fighting in the Captain’s tower,” wrote: “’All things are a flowing,’ / Sage Heraclitus said.”

I live on a Boulevard of Crime

This was the name colloquially given in the mid-19^th century to the stretch of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris housing the popular theatres – tragedies, comedies, melodramas, musicals, mime shows.  Its name came from the prevalence of petty crime: pickpockets, muggings, blackmail.  It was the setting (though that is far too weak a word) for the film Les Enfants du Paradis  (Children of Paradise), written by Jacques Prévert, directed by Marcel Carné, filmed more or less clandestinely in Nazi-occupied Paris, released after the war to become one of the great classics of French cinema – and also, as it happens, to become one of Bob Dylan’s all-time favourite movies.  It is a dominant influence on mid-70s Dylan, especially on the Rolling Thunder Revue and Renaldo and Clara.  The aim of that movie, Dylan once told Allen Ginsberg, was to “stop time.”  What art could do, then, was to counter the sense that all things are flowing.  Indeed, throughout RRW, Dylan offers various images of time suspended, time cancelled.  And here comes the first one:

I sleep with life and death in the same bed

Red blue jeans

Has “blue jeans” become such a generic term that their colour doesn’t matter?  Are “red blue jeans” what you wear when crossing the Red River in red Cadillac?

I carry four pistols and two large knives

The first in a formidable arsenal wielded by the singer throughout the album.

I play Beethoven’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes

 I look forward to hearing the bootlegs.

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

 This series of articles continues.  Meanwhile you might also be interested in some of the other articles we have published on Rowdy Ways.

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

The Mississippi-series, part 14

by Jochen Markhorst

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

XIV      Unca Donald

My clothes are wet, tight on my skin
Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in
I know that fortune is waitin’ to be kind
So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine

Claustrophobic words indeed, the words with which the narrator describes his current state of mind. Of course, the most famous scene of a hero trapping himself in the corner while painting is Donald Duck, but there it is not oppressive. Donald locks himself in to avoid an obligatory “social” with Daisy, so as not to have to accompany her to one of those stupid social events where Daisy is always so eager to show up.

At first it is tempting to take the opening metaphor literally; wet clothes sticking to his skin… maybe he really did swim across that wide river to reach his beloved. But no – the second line, with the paint metaphor, suggests that the image of the wet, sticky clothes is a first step to yet another accumulatio, in this song the third accumulation of more or less similar images.

In terms of content we are back to the first accumulatio, in which the narrator also indicated to be “boxed in”, “trapped”, with “nowhere to escape”. This quatrain provides the corresponding images: the anguish of the tight, sticky clothes, and like Donald, painted into the corner, nowhere to escape.

The coincidental resemblance with Duckburg’s most famous resident will receive a remarkable psychological deepening in the next line.  Fortune waiting to be kind are striking words to characterise the Donald Duck as it was created by Carl Barks. The brilliant Carl Barks, who managed to transcend the anonymity of “the good Duck artist”, is the creator of Duckburg, the creator of Scrooge McDuck and Gladstone Gander, of Neighbor J. Jones and the Beagle Boys, in short: of the Donald Duck as etched in our collective memory. He is the man who turns the side-figure Donald, the impetuous, frantic pusher next to Mickey Mouse (in The Wise Little Hen and in Orphan’s Benefit, 1934) into a protagonist with the image as we know him today: the Eternal Loser, the schmuck. Similar to Charlie Brown, for example, or Basil Fawlty – and to the narrator of “Mississippi”.

They are usually popular heroes with the public. Perhaps even more popular than the underdog, who usually wins at the end of the film or story. Dramatists can explain that phenomenon: a bad ending “you take home with you”, lets you lie awake at night. Shakespeare, Lessing, Brecht… that’s why they like to write tragedies, plays in which the main character has to die – because the impact is many times greater than a happy ending. The original storytellers were aware of that too, by the way. At Perrault, Little Red Riding Hood is eaten, and finito. No fuss with some hunter cutting open the wolf’s belly, and whatnot (Le petit chaperon rouge, 1697).

The less poignant variant of those fatal tragedies are the stories with the schmuck, who at least does survive his adventure. In Jewish humour and literature, the schmuck has existed as an archetype for centuries; in Western culture it has become increasingly popular since the second half of the twentieth century. Culminating in the 1990s, when Beck scores a mega hit with the schmuck’s signature song “Loser”, when The Big Lebowski becomes the new cult hero, when entire halls roar along with Radiohead’s “Creep” and comedians like Louis C.K. and Seth Rogen lay the foundation for their success: the loser personage.

The most heart-breaking then are the losers like Donald Duck and Charlie Brown, the unlucky ones who so often have happiness at their fingertips. In the music it is most movingly portrayed by John Hiatt in the beautiful song “You May Already Be A Winner” (Riding With The King, 1983):

Dry your eyes pretty girl
I just got news from the outside world
I don't know how they got our names
But yesterday this letter came
“Mr. and Mrs. Resident Dweller, your lucky number is…
You may already be a winner!”

Well, I've suspected this for years
Still in all its good to hear
They're pulling for us in the post
To you my dear, I raise this toast

But the most beautiful words for exactly this state of mind are of course chosen by the Nobel laureate: “I know that fortune is waiting to be kind”.

Variants of the one-liner can be found in Dylan’s record cabinet. With Charlie Daniels for instance, on his rather obscure, nameless debut album from 1970, which he is allowed to record after he assisted Dylan on Nashville Skyline and on Self Portrait. It is a remarkably rugged, kaleidoscopic country rock album by an untamed, extremely talented ruffian (highlight is the closing “Thirty Nine Miles From Mobile”, a hard rocking, Allman Brothers-like jam), with halfway through the beautiful “Georgia”, which sounds like a left-over from Music From The Big Pink. In which Charlie sings:

All of my life I've been told
That the LA streets was paved with gold
Fame and fortune waiting to reward ya
But it didn't take long to understand
California ain't the promised land
But at least a man's a man in Georgia

A more improbable, but bizarrely more striking source is an English Puritan Baptist preacher from the nineteenth century, the “prince of preachers” Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a prolific author of Christian books, hymns and sermons that are still popular in Calvinist circles today. In 1866 he collects all the psalms and hundreds of Christian hymns in Our Own Hymn Book, and number 499 therein, attributed to one Hewett, is called “Seek And Ye Shall Find”:

Come, poor sinner, come and see,
All thy strength is found in me;
I am waiting to be kind,
To relieve thy troubled mind.

Still, Dylan does use the most unlikely sources. More attractive, however, is a source like Charlie Daniels. Or the so admired Bing Crosby (“quite a man, quite a singer,” as Dylan says in Theme Time Radio Hour), whose charming “Meet The Sun Half-Way” also has such a similar “fortune waiting to be kind”-oneliner:

Stop hiding behind a pillow whenever the dawn looks gray,
Get up, get out, and meet the sun half-way!
There may be a fortune waiting, or maybe an egg souffle,
Get out, get out, and meet the sun half-way!

And this Bing Crosby song becomes even more attractive when the last verse is sung:

You may be a new Dick Tracy, conducting an exposé
Get up, get out, and meet the sun half-way!
Now don’t you blame your luck, say, do you want to sound like Donald Duck?
You know, when you smile, you throw yourself a big bouquet!

But then again, Donald Duck would, obviously, have swam to the other side of that wide river without any problems.

And finally, the sweet closing line So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine completes the eclectic character of this exceptional quatrain.

Jesus has a small supporting role in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian (1979). We see him in the scene “Jesus’ Lack of Crowd Control”, the scene in which Brian and his mother, on their way to the stoning, do happen to pass by Jesus, just starting his “Sermon on the Mount”.

It is hardly a spectacular performance. Jesus speaks insecurely and too soft, the audience is noisy and easily distracted. “Mr. Cheeky” (Eric Idle) can’t stay focused either, and finds it more entertaining to harass the nose picking “Mr. Big Nose”.

MAN #2: You hear that? Blessed are the Greek.
GREGORY: The Greek?
MAN #2: Mmm. Well, apparently, he’s going to inherit the earth.
GREGORY: Did anyone catch his name?
MRS. BIG NOSE: You’re not going to thump anybody.
MR. BIG NOSE: I’ll thump him if he calls me ‘Big Nose’ again.
MR. CHEEKY: Oh, shut up, Big Nose.
MR. BIG NOSE: Ah! All right. I warned you. I really will slug you so hard–
MRS. BIG NOSE: Oh, it’s the meek! Blessed are the meek! Oh, that’s nice, isn’t it? I’m glad they’re getting something, ’cause they have a hell of a time.

The poor, pathetically awkward Jesus is played by Kenneth Coley, who can be admired in these same months in the BBC production Measure For Measure, the television adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. Coley will have seen the link with the “Sermon on the Mount” when rehearsing his text for Life Of Brian: For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again (Matt. 7:2).

Kenneth Coley is standing at the same crossroads of Shakespeare and the Bible that will inspire Dylan more than once. “The Sermon on the Mount” provides references and idiom for songs like “Up To Me”, “Buckets Of Rain”, “Angelina”, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar”, and delivers in these same days of Life Of Brian and BBC’s Measure For Measure jargon and theme for “Do Right To Me Baby” (don’t wanna judge nobody, don’t wanna be judged).

Dylan used Measure For Measure’s plot a long time ago for “Seven Curses” (1963), although the format for this particular song probably is the old folksong “Anathea”. Presumably, 21-year-old Dylan is not yet that familiar with Shakespeare’s use of the same storyline – the plot around the dirty old judge who falsely promises a fair maiden to save her lover from the gallows in exchange for sex.

The young bard soon fills the knowledge gap. Shakespeare and his oeuvre still get only superficial name checks in “Highway 61 Revisited”, “Desolation Row” and “Stuck Inside Of Mobile”, but from The Basement Tapes Dylan processes longer quotes and paraphrases with more substantive relevance for the lyrics in question. “Tears Of Rage”, of course, and “Too Much Of Nothing” in particular, and Professor Christopher Ricks ultimately finds a total of forty references in Dylan’s oeuvre – although it should be noted: sometimes very far-fetched.

Not too far-fetched is this one appropriation in “Mississippi”, literally lifted from Measure For Measure:

DUKE VINCENTIO
If he be like your brother, for his sake
Is he pardon’d; and, for your lovely sake,
Give me your hand and say you will be mine.

From the last act, in the BBC adaptation faithfully, spoken verbatim by Kenneth Coley, who in 1979 is the physical manifestation of the Dylan Crossroads, somewhere in Mississippi; the crossing of Shakespeare Alley and Sermon Mountain Row.  

To be continued. Next up: Mississippi part XV: Gaze into the abyss

The Mississippi series

• The Mississippi-series, part 1; no polyrhythm here please
• The Mississippi-series, part 2: the line that never was.
• The Mississippi- series, part 3: Belshazzar on the steppe
• The Mississippi-series, part 4: Bertolt, Bobby, Blind & Boy
• The Mississippi-series, part 5: Frost in the room, fire in the sky
• The Mississippi-series, part 6: Charades
• The Mississippi series: part 7 : Dorsey Dixon
• The Mississippi-series, part 8: Pretty Maids All In A Row
• The Mississippi-series, part 9: Abandon all hope
• The Mississippi-series, part 10: Eyesight To The Blind
• The Mississippi-series part 11: Bonnie Blue
• The Mississippi-series, part 12: Roses Of Yesterday
• The Mississippi-series, part 13: Down in the Groove

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Reaching the end of the working day I occasionally mooch around (as my dear mum used to say – meaning, meander aimlessly), surveying Dylan facts and figures, with no particular destination in mind.  And doing this yesterday I found myself chancing upon the list of songs the Bob has played once, and only once on tour.

Now the first song I tried out was “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”, and playing it I felt I could see and hear why it was tried only once – it sounded to me singularly unrehearsed, and not really something I cared to share with my esteemed audience at large.

But I decided to try my luck again and so moved on to 10,000 Men which was played at Keaney Gym, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, on 12 November 2000.  It’s the original song ok, but not all the verses are covered.

https://youtu.be/s3GJ2W3ZZ8Q

It’s a fun and bouncy

Ten thousand men standing on a hill
Ten thousand men on a hill
Some of them going down, some of them going get killed

Ten thousand men dressed in Oxford blue
Ten thousand men dressed in Oxford blue
Drumming in the morning, in the evening they’ll be coming for you

Ten thousand men on the move
Ten thousand men on the move
None of them doing nothin’ that your mama wouldn’t disapprove

Hey! Who could your lover be?
Hey! Who could your lover be?
Let me eat off his head so you can really see!

Ten thousand men looking so lean and frail
Ten thousand men looking so lean and frail
Each one of ’m got seven wives, each one of ’m just out of jail

Ten thousand women all sweepin’ my room
Ten thousand women all sweepin’ my room
Spilling my buttermilk, sweeping it up with a broom

Ten thousand men digging for silver and gold
Ten thousand men digging for silver and gold
All clean shaven, all coming in from the cold

Ooh, baby, thank you for my tea!
Baby, thank you for my tea!
It’s so sweet of you to be so nice to me

It is a song from the generally forgotten “Under  the Red Sky” album and came at a time when Bob was searching to find a new way to write protest songs.  The songs of that time are generally appearing to be about childhood or adaptations of nursery rhymes but in the end are about something much darker.  Here’s how I categorised them in the review of songwriting in 1990.

• Handy Dandy (Contradictions)
• Cat’s in the Well (It’s all over, there’s no way out)
• 10,000 men (All is not as it seems)
• Unbelievable (We are being fed a pack of lies)
• Under the red sky (Our childhood has been obliterated)
• Heartland with Willie Nelson (Capitalism is destroying us)

I think this live version goes rather well; there’s nothing wrong with it as a rocking R&B song.  Good entertainment all round.

So having started with a song sung only once, which starts with a number, I then found another: 20/20 vision a song by Jimmy Martin.  It was performed at City Coliseum, Austin Tx on 25 October 1991.

I been to the doctor he says I'm all right
I know he's lying, I'm losing my sight
He should have examined the eyes of my mind
20/20 vision and walkin' 'round blind

She's gone and left I feel so alone
I carry a heart as heavy as stone
?
20/20 vision and walkin' 'round blind

With my eyes wide open I lay in my bed
If it wasn't for dying, I wish I was dead
But this is my punishment, death is too kind
20/20 vision and walkin' 'round blind

You just couldn't know her the way that I do
You say that she's wicked and I know it's true
I know that she cheated, I knew all the time
20/20 vision and walkin' 'round blind

Since she's gone and left me I feel so alone
I carry a heart that is heavy as stone
I know she cheated, I knew all the time
20/20 vision and walkin' 'round blind

She's gone she's gone oh what will I do?
I bet your not happy if she's there with you
The eyes of your heart will have trouble like mine
20-20 vision and walkin' 'round blind

20-20 vision and walkin' 'round blind...

By Larry Fyffe

In “Murder Most Foul”, Bob Dylan refers to a number of singers/songs that he likes to hear.  Can direct links to Dylan’s own song lyrics be found?

Let’s see.

Therein, the song “Twilight Time”; in it rhymes ~ ‘done’/’sun’:

Deepening shadows gather splendour as day is done
Fingers of light will soon surrender the setting sun
I count the moments darling till you're here with me
Together at last at twilight time
(The Platters: Twilight Time ~ Ram/Dunn/M&A Nevins)

Rhymes ~ ‘sun’/’begun’ in the song lyrics below:

Beyond the horizon, behind the sun
At the end of the rainbow life has only begun
In the long hours of twilight beneath the stardust above
Beyond the horizon, it is so easy to love
(Bob Dylan: Beyond The Horizon ~ Kennedy/Grosz/Dylan)

The song “Memphis In June” makes the list; therein rhymes ~ ‘moon’/’June’:

With sweet oleander blowing perfume in the air
Up jumps the moon to make it much grander
It's paradise, brother take my advice
Nothing half as nice as Memphis in June
(Hoagy Carmichael: Memphis In June ~ Webster/Carmichael)

Found is a tight connection to the figurative diction in the lyrics below:

Well my heart's in the Highland, gentle and fair
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart's in the Highland
(Bob Dylan: Highland)

The song title is noted in the lyrics below; so is the “rhyme” ~ ‘moon’/’June’:

Well, they're not showing any lights tonight
And there's no moon
There's just a hot-blooded singer
Singing 'Memphis In June'
(Bob Dylan: Tight Connection To My Heart)

Mentioned in “Murder Most Foul” is “Driving Wheel’:

My baby don't have to work, my baby don't have to rob and steal
I give her everything she needs, I am her driving wheel ...
Got up this morning, man, said she'd be back soon
Be back early Friday morning, either Saturday afternoon
(Roosevelt Sykes: Driving Wheel)

Paid tribute to in the song lyrics below; rhymed is ~ ‘rob’/’job’ rather than ~ ‘steal’/’wheel’:

Well, she can make you steal, make you rob
Well, she can give you the hives, make you lose your job
Make things bad, make things worse
She got stuff more potent than a gypsy curse
(Bob Dylan: My Wife's Home Town ~ Dylan/ Hunter/Dixon)

Mentioned too is “Love Me Or Leave Me”; Frank Sinatra, for one, sings it, but not Bud Powell as Dylan suggests:

Love me or leave me, and let me be lonely
You won't believe me, and I love you only
I'd rather be lonely
Than happy with somebody else
(Frank Sinatra: Love Me Or Leave Me ~ Kahn/Donaldson)

Below, another song by Frankie ‘blue eyes”; rhymes ~ ‘garden’/’pardon’:

A country dance was being held in the garden
I felt a bump, and heard an oh, beg your pardon
Suddenly I saw polka dots and moonbeams
All around a pug-nosed dream
(Frank Sinatra: Polka Dots And Moonbeams ~ Burke/Van Heusen)

Which is paid tribute in the following lines ; note the rhyme ~ ‘garden’/’pardon’:

As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden ...
Someone hit me from behind ...
Excuse me, ma'am, I beg your pardon
There's no one here, the gardener is gone
(Bob Dylan: Ain't Talking)

https://youtu.be/Hx6fHd99SxA

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

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

by Rolf Säfström, Sweden

I have now listened, for more than a month, to the latest Bob Dylan Album, ”Rough and Rowdy Ways”. I’m thankful for being in the same historical time that Dylan gives us so much of his art.

Now I just want to share with you, one of the many thoughts I have about this beautiful album – and in fact simply about one of the songs, ”Mother of Muses”.

I have a theory about it, which I would like to present to you, along with the arguments supporting my point of view that the first spark of inspiration for the idea of writing the lyrics to this song, came to Bob Dylan in the afternoon of 1st April 2017!

I don’t know how long he worked with this song after that moment. But the more I listen to it, the more I am convinced that this is another masterpiece; one of the several he has ”painted”, so far.

He has put in so much of himself, and how thankful he is over the gift he is given, and his ability to be the artist he is.

So what is the source of my theory?

On a Saturday, 1st April 2017, Bob Dylan started his European Spring Tour.

The concert started at 8 pm, in Stockholm. I was there, with my youngest daughter Moa, and I had bought VIP tickets ( 2nd row) for us. I had a little hope that he would receive the Nobel medal on the scene, so I wanted to be there in the historical moment.

We took our seats, half an hour before the concert, filled with expectations.

Just then, a few minutes later, I recognized some well-known people took their places, some rows back, to the left above our seats. It was a handful members of The Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, Horace Engdahl and some more!

I became more excited and I decided to walk up to them and asked, “Has he received his medal already today?”

One representative of the Academy answered, very politely, “Well, this is not official yet, but yes he has!”

So the concert (my 18th since 1978) took place as normal, but that is not a part of this story.

Later the same year Sara Danius, secretary of the Swedish Academy,  wrote a little book about Bob Dylan. (”Om Bob Dylan”, S Danius, Ad Libris 2017) and there she gives us an inside story, about Dylan receiving his Nobel medal, earlier the same day.

It was a small ceremony with just the Academy, Dylan and some of his nearest men. No press, journalists nor photographers. Dylan wanted it that way. Danius writes:

When he had the golden medal in his hand, he turned the backside up, looked at it for a long time and seemed amazed about the motive.

This is a picture of Dylan’s original medal, and it is of ”Mother of Muses, sing for me…”  

The other picture is of my daughter, just outside the concert hall. As you know, there is no cameras allowed inside, which we all should respect.!

So that’s my theory, and the argument to prove it. I think it is a bit of the truth, but who knows? / Rolf Säfström, Sweden

Best wishes and may God be with You!

Footnote, from the Untold team.  Here’s the setlist from the gig that Rolf attended

Mother of Muses: From Mnemosyne to Elvis, Talking Heads to Leonard Cohen

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.

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 Mississippi-series, part 13

by Jochen Markhorst

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

XIII       Down In The Groove

Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interestin’ right about now

“What would I say if I met Dylan?” His answer, in keeping with his stylish image, is elegant: “I hope you don’t mind.”

Bryan Ferry is being interviewed for his Dylan album Dylanesque (2007), a tribute project arousing rather diverging opinions. The title is a red rag: the Dylan covers by Ferry, the grand master of irony, are anything but Dylanesque – smooth polished, tastefully arranged, wrinkle-free produced… in short, Ferry-esque. Hardcore Dylan fans are rarely tolerant of covers anyway, but the less rabid fans also miss the rough and rowdy, the jagged edges and the raw emotion.

However, the more neutral listeners are generally positive. Also because songs like “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” have a magical, almost indestructible power – they are almost impossible to mess up. And Ferry’s adaptation of “Positively Fourth Street” actually has an enriching quality. The acoustic package (piano and Spanish guitar, mainly) plus Ferry’s somewhat plaintive, high pitched vocals do have an unreal, alienating effect; the contrast of the graceful recitation with the mean, snarling lyrics is fascinating.

Anyhow, it’s quite likely that the bard at that fictional meeting with Roxy Music’s old foreman would say: “I most certainly don’t mind. On the contrary.”

Ferry has been lining Dylan’s pockets since 1973, when the single from his first solo album These Foolish Things, an equally alienating version of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, became a big hit. The royalties for “It Ain’t Me, Babe” from the successor Another Time, Another Place – again gold – and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Don’t Think Twice” from the well-selling album Frantic (2002) are not bad either and are increased fivefold by the equally well-selling Dylanesque.

Apart from that financially motivated, obvious approval from the master, Dylan might also have artistic appreciation. Dylan repeatedly confesses, both in Chronicles and in interviews as well as in his MusiCares speech, his gratitude and sympathy for all his colleagues who cover his songs. Bryan Ferry probably even has an edge.

The contemporaries (Dylan is four years older) largely share the same musical taste, the same missionary drive and even an overlapping choice of repertoire. Years before Dylan’s “Sinatra albums” Ferry already has success with his declaration of love to the same American Songbook, the gold-scoring As Time Goes By (1999).

This shared, wide-ranging taste is perhaps best noticeable on Ferry’s third solo album, Let’s Stick Together (1976). A tasteful adaptation of the long-standing “You Go To My Head”, which Dylan will record for Triplicate forty years later, “Shame, Shame, Shame” from Jimmy Reed, sung on Rough And Rowdy Ways, Ferry’s own ode to Dylan’s cast-iron art motto “Re-make/Re-model” (“next time is the best time, we all know”), his ode to Humphrey Bogart (“2HB”) and the opening song, the song with which Ferry scores his biggest solo hit: “Let’s Stick Together”.

Dylan chooses “Let’s Stick Together” as the opening track for his maligned album Down In The Groove (1988) and most music lovers will agree that Dylan can’t match the excitement, drive and pure musical pleasure that bursts from Ferry’s arrangement. Or from the original, by Wilbert Harrison, 1962.

Wilbert Harrison has earned his ticket to the rock ‘n’ roll Olympus three years earlier, with “Kansas City” – the song from which Dylan lovingly steals for “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (they got some hungry women there is a hardly disguised derivative from Wilbert’s they got some crazy women there) and for “High Water” (He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine is literally copied), and the song from which radio maker Dylan says in 2006: “You all know this song, and it’s always good” (Theme Time Radio Hour episode 20, “Musical Map”).

Harrison himself edited “Let’s Stick Together” in 1969 and turned it into “Let’s Work Together”, with the classic line Together we will stand, divided we’ll fall. He scores a modest hit with it. But in 1970 it becomes for Canned Heat the biggest hit in the band’s long career (number 2 in the UK, bigger than “On The Road Again” and “Going Up The Country”). However, both Ferry and Dylan prefer the less preachy, more pure rock variant “Let’s Stick Together”.

It is, after “Shenandoah”, the second time that thematic or textual lines can be drawn from Down In The Groove to “Mississippi”, providing yet again some insight into Dylan’s working method and sources of inspiration, and illustrating Dylan’s own wording of his working method:

“What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate. A lot of people will look at a crack on the wall and meditate, or count sheep or angels or money or something, and it’s a proven fact that it’ll help them relax. I don’t meditate on any of that stuff. I meditate on a song. I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly — while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”

(Robert Hilburn interview, 2003)

In the run up to “Mississippi” quite a few songs are playing in the head, apparently. And Down In The Groove reveals some of them. The stick with me from “Let’s Stick Together”, the hopeless narrator in “Sally Sue Brown” is goin’ south to humiliate himself in front of Sally Sue again, and the desolate state of the protagonist in “Mississippi” is an echo of what Dylan already heard from his beloved Stanley Brothers, in “Rank Strangers To Me”:

I wandered again to my home in the mountains
Where in youth's early dawn I was happy and free
I looked for my friends but I never could find them
I found they were all rank strangers to me

Still, the apotheosis, the brille of the final line things should start to get interesting right about now does not come from a song that haunts Dylan, but is one of the three or four selfless contributions by soulmate Henry Rollins:

I shook 1992 by the neck
The road shot into me
Now there's only 1993
Don’t attach
Hit hard
Disappear into the treeline
Keep moving
It gets harder to get up in the morning
Lines on my face
It should start getting interesting right about now 

(Now Watch Him Die, 1993)

Rollins, the great, multitalented artist from Washington D.C., and in every conceivable respect the opposite of the distinguished Geordie Bryan Ferry from Washington, County Durham.

To be continued. Next up: Mississippi part XIV: Unca Donald

The Mississippi series

• The Mississippi-series, part 1; no polyrhythm here please
• The Mississippi-series, part 2: the line that never was.
• The Mississippi- series, part 3: Belshazzar on the steppe
• The Mississippi-series, part 4: Bertolt, Bobby, Blind & Boy
• The Mississippi-series, part 5: Frost in the room, fire in the sky
• The Mississippi-series, part 6: Charades
• The Mississippi series: part 7 : Dorsey Dixon
• The Mississippi-series, part 8: Pretty Maids All In A Row
• The Mississippi-series, part 9: Abandon all hope
• The Mississippi-series, part 10: Eyesight To The Blind
• The Mississippi-series part 11: Bonnie Blue
• The Mississippi-series, part 12: Roses Of Yesterday

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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 Symbolism Of The Pine Tree (Part II)

by Larry Fyffe

This article continues from The Symbolism of the Pine Tree I 

In ancient mythology, the Mother Goddess, is depicted as hermaphroditic before being transformed into a female; s/he is associated with the coniferous pine; son Attis turns into a sweet-smelling evergreen tree with needled leaves. . The Hebrew God by some is considered at first to be hermaphroditic, but the female aspect soon disappears from the Judaic/Christian Bible:

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

In any event, the coniferous juniper tree appears later on in the Holy Bible, standing over the prophet Elijah, protectively and mother-like:

And he lay and slept under  juniper tree
Behold, then an angel touched him
And said unto him, "Arise and eat"
And behold there was a cake baken on the coals
And a cruse of water at his head
And he did eat and drink
And laid him down again
(l Kings 5, 6)

In the song lyrics below, the deciduous Dionysus, the “Semi-God” of the Vine from Roman/Greek mythology, appears beside the motherly juniper in the form of an ash, hickory, and oak tree:

Build you a fire with hickory, ash, and oak
Don't use no green or rotten wood, they'll get you by the smoke
We'll just lay down by the juniper while the moon is bright
Watch them jugs a-filling in the pale moonlight
(Bob Dylan: Copper Kettle ~ Albert Beddoe)

The year-round shelter, smell, and warmth provided by the pine tree serves it well as a symbol for matronly comfort.

As illustrated by the following song lyrics:

You can smell the pinewood burning
You can hear the school bell ring
Gotta get close to the teacher
If you wanna learn anything
(Bob Dylan: Floater)

According to Greek/Roman mythology, Titan Saturn (Cronus), is overthrown by the Olympian Zeus, the Sky God of Thunder. The ancient Romans celebrate Saturn, the God of Agriculture, at the winter solstice, a sign of spring in the offing. The Romans hang evergreen boughs in their houses and temples, and the tradition is taken up by the followers of Christianity:

Though the years we all will be together
If the Fates allow
Hang a shiny star upon the highest bough
And have yourself a merry little Christmas
(Bob Dylan: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas ~ Martin/Blane)

The mythological Fates be three females figures:

• Clotho – the Spinner – spins the thread of life
• Lachesis – the Alotter –  assigns destiny
• Atropos – the Shearer –  cuts the thread at death

The following song lyrics could be a depiction of Clotho:

First we wash our feet near the immortal shrine
And then our shadows meet, and then we drink our wine
I see the hungry clouds up above your face
And then the tears roll down, what a bitter taste
And then you drift away on a summer's day where the wildflowers bloom
With your golden loom
(Bob Dylan: Golden Loom)

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.

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