Untold Dylan

by Jochen Markhorst

In 1997 Dylan surprises friend and foe with the album Time Out Of Mind. It’s the second time he entrusts the production to Daniel Lanois (after Oh Mercy, 1989), and that works out well this time too. Of course, for the first time since Oh Mercy, Dylan has very strong songs again, gaining strength through Lanois’ spherical, dark production, which recognizes the added value of Dylan’s grit.

There are more breathtaking songs on the album (“Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”, for instance, and the world hit “Make You Feel My Love”), but the dark pearl “Not Dark Yet” stands out above all else.

It is a monumental song, just like “Desolation Row” and “Where Are You Tonight?”, too impressive to discuss in one article – today part 1, about the first verse.

I           Mehr Licht

Shadows are fallin’ and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep and time is runnin’ away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there

We owe it to Dr. Carl Vogel that we know Goethe’s last words, or, more specifically: the revised reconstruction of that finale: “Mehr Licht (More light)”.

Vogel, Goethe’s physician, was in the room next door during the last minutes on March 22nd, 1832. Other persons, who were present in the bedroom, report something like “Open the other hatch, so that there be more light,” or correct the quotation to the equally romantic variant “Mehr nicht (No more)”. And Goethe’s daughter-in-law Ottilie, also present, later revealed that the old poet, very profane, in his last moments asked his servant Friedrich Krause for the “Botschampfer“, the chamber pot.

All more realistic and more likely, but a year later, in 1833, Dr. Carl Vogel publishes his Journal der practischen Heilkunde (“Journal of practical medicine”) containing the words that would become famous:

“More light,” are said to have been, while I had left the death chamber for a moment, the last words of the man who hated darkness in every respect.

“The last words of the man who hated darkness in every respect”… being, obviously, far more attractive than something as banal as I have to pee. Dr. Vogel’s intervention is defensible.

The court physician’s poetic instinct is admirable. Approaching darkness as a metaphor for dying has been a popular image among artists for centuries. Especially in literature (Heart Of Darkness, Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”, to name but three relatively recent examples), but just as popular with painters, of course. David’s “Death of Marat”, the dark skies of Carel Willink, and Morbelli’s painted impression of Goethe’s time of death is striking as well: on Goethe Morente (1880) the light falls on Ottilie, the great poet’s head fades into darkness. Not dark yet, but getting there.

Goethe himself was also receptive to the dramatic power of darkness; Werther commits suicide on 21 December, the shortest, i.e. darkest day of the year, at midnight. Faust I ends in a dark cell with the death of Gretchen, at the end of the night – the darkest hour right before the dawn.   

Although the metaphor is too universal to draw a line from Goethe to Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet”, the artistic congeniality with Goethe and, as Professor Ricks passionately argues, with Keats but especially with later generations of poets in the heart of the Old Continent is unmistakable – Rilke and Trakl, in particular.

The Marilyn Monroe of the European fin-de-siècle lyricism is Rilke’s early masterpiece “Herbsttag” (“Autumn Day”, 1902). It’s a rather short poem that, unlike most poems in the canon, does not survive because of an unforgettable opening (like “April is the cruellest month”), or one memorable, quotable verse (“Two roads diverged in a wood”), but rather because of its overall perfection, from the superb opening line to the supreme last line.

Not only in that respect, “Herbsttag” is comparable to Dylan’s dark pearl “Not Dark Yet”. Rilke’s opening, and with it the theme, is identical too:

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and in the fields let loose the winds.

Identical imagery (the shadows depicting the approach of death), the same observation regarding the passage of Time without the narrator, and the withdrawal from the world, the loss of Space – great minds think alike, apparently.

However, it is not limited to Rilke, the kinship of “Not Dark Yet” with the decadent grandeur of the dying days of the Danube monarchy. If one of Dylan’s works, in terms of elegance, choice of words and visual power, fits into a Vienna of roughly 1910, into the downfall melancholy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is this song.

With another giant of those days, from that part of the world, the kinship is at least as demonstrable and just as remarkable; with the Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914), one of the most important poets of Expressionism. Immortalized by his last poem, the terrifying war memorial “Grodek”, which he wrote just before his (presumed) suicide, but the congeniality with Dylan is evident in many more of his works. The majestic “Psalm” (1912) for example, which in itself already looks like a preliminary study for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, and of which on a detailed level the synesthetic images, the melancholic tone and the trench jargon echo in songs like “Gates Of Eden”, “Jokerman” and “Not Dark Yet”:

Auf silbernen Sohlen gleiten frühere Leben vorbei
Und die Schatten der Verdammten steigen zu den seufzenden Wassern nieder

Former lives glide past on silver feet
And the shadows of the damned descend to sighing waters.

“Former lives glide past on silver feet”… the beauty, visual power and autumnal melancholy of such a verse paints in seven words the same Great Emotion as Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet”; the cocktail of feelings, insights and stillness on the threshold of death, the musings of an old man at the end of his life. As Trakl’s next line, “And the shadows of the damned descend to sighing waters“, summarizes in one line the content of Dylan’s masterpiece.

Producer Daniel Lanois does not make that connection with the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy of a century and a half ago, but is close – by acknowledging an ancient trench feeling:

“There’s always going to be a sense of discovery with Bob because, at the last second, without warning and as the “record” button is pressed, he’ll change the key and time signature! Then musicians will just look at themselves and dribble in and often Bob will say “that’s it”. That happened in at least half the tracks on this album. Not Dark Yet had a radically different feel in the demo we did, which I loved and still miss. It was quicker and more stripped down and then, in the studio, he changed it into a civil war ballad.”

(interview Irish Times, 24 oktober 1997)

“A civil war ballad”? It’s hard to tell wherein Lanois does hear that or of what he is thinking. “Dixie”? “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”? “John Brown’s Body”? None of the standard civil war ballads seem to have a link to Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet”. Lanois explicitly doesn’t mean the lyrics though, but rather the musical accompaniment. However, the feel of civil war ballads is not discernible there either; they are usually quicker and more stripped down – like for instance Dylan’s own civil war ballad, “John Brown”. At best, the “feel” corresponds with the war ballad “’Cross The Green Mountain”, which Dylan will write a few years later for the film epic about the American Civil War, God And Generals (2003) – but obviously, Lanois does not know that song at the time of the interview.

No, presumably Lanois’ association is driven more by the Walt Whitman-“feel” of the lyrics than by the slowing down of the musical accompaniment, which apparently was more up-tempo originally.

Still, “Walt Whitman” is hardly more than an instinctive link. Very demonstrable influence of the great American poet there is not in this “Not Dark Yet”, at least not as tangible as a quarter of a century later in “I Contain Multitudes” (2020). The album title could have been inspired by Whitman’s “Song Of The Broad-Axe” (“Served those who, time out of mind, made on the granite walls rough / sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships, ocean-waves”), and from Whitman’s continuous preoccupation with Time and Space, lines can also be drawn, just like from his weakness for shadows (undoubtedly in the Top 10 of Whitman’s most used nouns, along with soul), but that’s about it.

In the end the choice of words is, just like the theme at all, too universal to lead back to one admired work or one admired poet. If so, then Paul McCartney would be an even better candidate:

Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be
There’s a shadow hanging over me
Oh, yesterday came suddenly

Jimmy LaFave:

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

by Larry Fyffe

Apollo is disliked by Hera, the wife of Zeus, as he’s not her son though Zeus is his father; the feeling be mutual because Hera’s unkind to Apollo’s mother. Hera supports the Greeks in the Trojan War because Paris, a Trojan, does not judge her the most beautiful woman in the world; instead, he gives the honour to Venus in return for Helen of Troy.

Apollo (whose father, Zeus, the God of Thunder, attempts to remain neutral) sides with the Trojans. Exceptions are made to the rule by these Olympian gods in events that involve desecrating temples, or killing sacred animals.

Apollo falls in lust with Princess Cassandra, daughter of the King of Troy, expecting sex in return for granting her the gift of prophecy. A good Greek god don’t break no promises so when Cassandra doesn’t come across, he amends his promise, adding that no one will believe her. Cassandra foretells that the Trojan Paris will abduct Helen, and that the ‘Trojan horse’ is a Greek trick. Sure enough, no one pays any attention to Cassandra’s warnings.

Married though he be, the leader of the victorious Greeks – Agamemnon – takes Cassandra home as his concubine. She’s thought mad, and a whore to boot; predicts her own death, and that of the Greek leader.

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, transgendered, can be considered to take on the persona of Cassandra in a number of song lyrics.

In a song lyrics below, Bob Dylan refers to the prophecy of the Old Testament. From a Jewish background, the entertainer refers to “the Lord” and to “God”; the name of Jesus is not mentioned:

Are you ready for the judgment
Are you ready for the terrible swift sword
Are you ready for Armaggeddon
Are you ready for the day of the Lord?

(Bob Dylan: Are You Ready)

https://youtu.be/dtTKkRKgijI

In the Old Testament, God’s final judgment is foretold – God’s kingdom will be established in Israel:

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom
Which shall never be destroyed
And the kingdom shall not be left to other people
But it shall break in pieces, and consume all these kingdoms
And it shall stand for ever

(Daniel 2:44)

The Gnostic-like earth/air/fire/water metaphors in the book of Revelations (New Testament) are  interpreted simplistically by most orthodox Christian authorities – it’s all about Christ’s coming victory over the Whore of Babylon (Revelations is the only book in the Holy Bible where “Armaggeddon” gets mentioned):

And he gathered them together into a place
Called in the Hebrew tongue Armaggeddon
(Revelation 16:16)

When Dylan refers to Jesus, and to Christ’s anti-materialistic teachings, he does not speak about Christ as though Jesus were God – the lyrics below be not straight forward, but double-edged indeed:

When the whip that keeps you in line doesn't make him jump
Say he's hard of hearing, say that he's a chump
Say he's out of step with reality as you try to test his nerve
Because he doesn't pay tribute to the king that you serve
(Bob Dylan: Property Of Jesus)

Blasted Dylan gets from all sides – from nonbelievers, from Christians, and from Jews. He sings lyrics that criticize the God of the Hebrews; he joins a Christian sect, and sings gospel songs; not only that, he preaches from the stage like a fire-breathing evangelist.

Yes he does, but the burlesquing ghost of Lord Buckley stands, a-smiling, behind the “Whore of Bab Dylon”.

Cassandra's a sad-eyed lady; 
    she's treated  badly, and unfairly so:
Are you to pay for what you have
With all you are? - No other word
We caught, but with a laughing crowd
Moved on. None heeded, and few heard

(Edwin Arlington Robinson: Cassandra)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

by Jens-Philipp Gründler

With the release of the third song from the forthcoming Dylan album, it’s time to look back to the first released to get some more perspective on what we are being offered. 

On the occasion of the publication of an unheard song, “recorded a while back”, Bob Dylan sends his audience the following greetings and wishes: “Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.”

At first glance, the dirge “Murder Most Foul”, a quote taken from Shakespeare´s “Hamlet”, deals with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.

Running at approximately seventeen minutes, the exquisite piece of music deals with the looming apocalypse of today´s America at an allegorical level. One could even go so far as to say that in it, Nobel prize winner in literature Dylan is mourning the general loss of the soul worldwide. The narrator tells us that on the day of the murder of the charismatic US president, “the age of the anti-Christ had just only begun.”

Dylan puts himself in Kennedy´s position lyrically: “[…] ridin´ in a long, black Lincoln limousine / Ridin´ in the back seat, next to my wife / Heading straight on into the afterlife.” And, he states, the murderer had killed the body but not the soul. For more than fifty years it could not be found, because “his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at”.

These sinister verses are of beguiling beauty, accompanied by still background music. When the narrator diagnoses the loss of truth in our world, he expresses bleak, metaphysical facts and the listener is free to interpret these on manifold levels.

One such cryptic message contains the following verse: “Hate to tell you, Mister, but only dead men are free”. According to Platonic philosophy, the soul appears here as an immortal substance which can be separated from the body. Freed from its physical prison, the soul of the murdered president, or more broadly formulated: the souls of the dead, float around eternally. As usual, Dylan proclaims enigmatic truths, tinged with a sense of eternity. That’s what makes his songs and lyrics so irresistible and thrilling. And that is why the realm of his poetry is such a paradise for those who are committed to the act of interpretation. It is a hermeneut’s heaven.

In general terms, the song “Murder Most Foul” narrates the gradual decline of American culture and moral decay. Even though it was written at an earlier date, the content seems to allude to Donald Trump´s presidency. Published at the end of March 2020 when the Corona crisis had reached its temporary peak in America, Dylan´s song could not fail to be understood as a commentary on current politics.

Dylan´s style of performance is reminiscent of spoken word poetry and of the eulogy in particular. More a recital than a chant, “Murder Most Foul” seems to offer universal meanings. The soul (of a nation) has been torn away and a slow decay began on the day of the assassination. Meanwhile the narrator tells us: “[I]t’s thirty-six hours past judgment day.”

Seen through the eyes of the murderer, we discover he has made a deal with the devil. At Dealey Plaza in Dallas where the killing took place, “Faith, Hope and Charity died”. However, we are reassured in Platonic terms, the invisible soul cannot be slain: “See if you can shoot the Invisible Man”.

• Murder most foul: Teasing meanings from Dylan’s song

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

You might say that I saved the best till last, once you hear the first couple of performances, but it was not deliberate!

The pattern of these posts is starting to come clear to me. I use part 1 to introduce new songs, rare or unusual, and parts 2 and 3 to catch up with Dylan’s new approach to old favourites. This last part is a safety net of sorts, to catch any performances that had slipped by me.

So I’ve got a couple of absolute beauties to kick this off.

First up. ‘She Belongs to Me’, that hymn to the superior female, the girl who belongs to no one, probably the kind of woman your mother forgot to warn you about. Beware, lovers, put her on a pedestal and she’ll have you grovelling. We have met this song before and will do so again, but never this way, just Bob on acoustic guitar and harmonica. For lovers of Dylan’s acoustic sound, and his squealing 1989 harmonica style, this is an absolute gem. Classic performance coming up!

She Belongs to me

Just as you’re sighing with satisfaction from listening to that, consider the next performance – ‘Every Grain of Sand’. Most Dylan followers agree that this is one of his greatest songs. There’s a magic in it that goes beyond the lyrics.

In Master Harpist 3 I wrote about the song, and how Dylan seemed to be able to make some fairly corny lines sound wonderful. Many lovers of the song prefer the demo version he did at home on the piano, to the lush, swept-up version on the album (Shot of Love 1981). Like me you might have wondered what it would sound like if Dylan just played it alone, on the acoustic guitar, like it was a folk song. Well…wonder no longer. Here it is, the gems of gems, the discovery of discoveries.

Every grain of sand

Around the time of the harmonica break in the middle of the song, a second guitar joins. GE Smith, I suspect, doing some very discreet work, harmonising beautifully and unobtrusively with Dylan. Relatively rare to hear them working so closely together like this.

‘Deadman,’ also off Shot of Love, has always intrigued me because of its ambivalence. Presumably, the ‘deadman’ is a man unredeemed, who’d never accepted the word of god. Reprobates. But the descriptions suggest Dylan could be talking about the very crowd he’d fallen in with – the Pentecostals.

What are you tryin' to overpower me with,
the doctrine or the gun?
My back is already to the wall
where can I run?
The tuxedo that you're wearin'
the flower in your lapel,
Ooh, I can't stand it, I can't stand it,
You want to take me down to hell.

When he sings ‘Do you have any faith at all/do you have any love to share?’ he’s most likely singing about those who claim to have faith and love, not the unconverted sinner. The deadman’s sin is worse as it is rooted in hypocrisy and Dylan’s old foe, godless materialism:

‘The glamor and the bright lights
and the politics of sin,
The ghetto you build for me
is the one you end up in.’

Deadman

Dylan’s voice here is deeper and darker than it was in 1981, and we get a nice sinister feel from this performance, with some great opening work from GE Smith. The problem here is that GE Smith doesn’t know when to end the song, which peters out after a couple of aimless choruses. It sounds to me as if Smith is expecting Dylan to round it off with another verse, or a harp break, and nothing happens. There are lot of these, shall we say ‘unrehearsed’ endings in 1989. Nobody quite sure what will happen next.

At the Toronto concert in 1980, his almost hysterical assertion of his faith in that powerful love song, ‘I believe in you,’ might well be Dylan’s greatest vocal ever. Any subsequent performances of the song have to suffer comparison with that superlative moment. I wasn’t expecting too much, therefore, and was pleasantly surprised. The 1980 sound is big and warm and rich. Here, nine years later, it is hard and spare, with that sharp metallic edge we have come to associate with 1989. Dylan’s performance is quite ragged, he messes up the lines a bit, but warms to the song as it goes. I find GE Smith’s guitar work quite intrusive on this one, but we get some nice plaintive harmonica work at the beginning and end.

I believe in you.

‘I dreamed I saw St Augustine,’ although written twelve years before ‘I believe in you’, fits in well with the religious theme here. I wrote about this song when we looked at 1988, and the sense of quiet despair that fills this little ballad. In the later, gospel songs, salvation is at hand, but in ‘I dreamed I saw St Augustine,’ salvation is nowhere to be found. On the album it’s a slow, gentle acoustic song but here it turns up with a solid rock base, medium tempo, sounding good. Sometimes I wonder if Dylan’s ‘folk songs’ are not rock songs in disguise.

Again we hear Dylan building the song up from a quiet, vocally understated beginning to the loud confessional climax: ‘I put my hands against the glass/and bowed my head and cried.’

 I dreamed I saw St Augustine

I have to admit to an ongoing fascination with ‘Tears of Rage’ (1967). Again, this religious undertone. Again, lyrics that seem to lie just beyond our ability to comprehend them. Perhaps the song is not written to a person but to America. Perhaps that ‘false instruction’ is the kind of materialism that turns a ‘heart into a purse.’ It’s all perhaps perhaps, while the song continues to exert a mysterious power with a hint of grandeur. Dylan’s declamatory vocal style suits the song well as a form of rhetoric – ‘Oh what kind of love is this/which goes from bad to worse?’

Tears of Rage

Every concert, like every album, needs a fast, hard rocker or two to remind us that rock is one of Dylan’s first loves, even before he became a folk-singing icon. The fast, hard and irreverent ‘Highway 61 Revisited (on the album version, Dylan blows a police whistle) sounds frivolous, with throw-away lyrics, but that is far from the case. The first verse, however casual the language, catches the Biblical Abraham as he was about to sacrifice his son, Isaac. God holds Abraham back, an act of divine mercy.

The answer to all earthly woes is ‘Highway 61’. Back in the druggy days of the sixties, junkies called their veins ‘highways’, but there’s no need to get snagged by that interpretation, despite the allusion to some sinister ritual or other:

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

Highway 61 is a place where you can abdicate all responsibility and allow evil things to happen, even a ‘next world war.’ Have a think about all this serious stuff while you rock along!

Highway 61 Revisited

The accepted narrative is that Bob Dylan stopped writing protest songs and started writing ‘surrealist’ or ‘symbolist’ songs. That’s so hardly true, it’s false. Dylan stopped writing topical songs, like ‘Oxford Town’, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll’ and ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?’ but a song like ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ takes protest to another level – a zany, madcap level. Humour and satire are the weapons here. As Dylan was to write many years later, ‘People are crazy and times are strange.’

‘It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry,’ off the same album, has quite a different intent. While Dylan never wanted to become trapped by the blues, he likes to put at least one twelve-bar blues on every album. I think it’s his way of acknowledging the importance of the blues in his music. Blues singers were writing strange lyrics long before Bob, and of course the structure of the blues underlies a lot of rock music. On the album, it’s a gentle rollicking love song with some impeccable verses, but in performance it tends to heavy up. It’s easy for something that starts with the flavour of country blues to slip into a surging, urban blues.

It takes a lot to laugh

To finish off this post, and the year of 1989, we come to ‘Visions of Johanna’, and I lose all objectivity and even-handedness as a commentator. For me, ‘Visions’ is a lot more than a song. To listen to the studio version (Blonde on Blonde, 1966), or the live acoustic performances of that year, is to enter another medium, like stepping into another world. It’s like trying to stand underwater; it makes you feel queasy.  You reach for the bottom but there is no bottom – you just keep falling. It’s like being in somebody’s bad trip. There are strange people in this world, which is a very claustrophobic place, and they plumb the depth of cynicism:

The peddler now speaks to the Countess
Who’s pretending to care for him
Saying, name me someone who’s not a parasite
And I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.

‘Visions’ is a nightmare of Dantesque proportions. The question it generates is, why does the poet’s conscience ‘explode’ at the end of the song? Because sinister and unconscionable things have been going on, unsavoury rituals only hinted at. Everybody seems seriously fucked up.

The jelly-faced women all sneeze
And the one with the moustache says ‘Jeez
I can’t find my knees.’

You find yourself in receding hallways of echoing voices, haunted by the absence of a certain Johanna. The phantasmagoric world around us becomes an ‘empty cage’ which we see ‘corrode’. There is no salvation here, merely the echo of it. The song ends with the vanishing sound of harmonicas in the rain. It’s a crepuscular song, a consummate mood piece…

… at least, that’s how it sounded in 1966. After all this raving about it, I think we need to hear what I’m talking about. This is ‘Visions of Johanna,’ Sheffield, 1966.

Visions of Johanna

A voice like a fallen angel!

Tony Attwood has posted Dylan’s Australian performance* from that year, one of delightful weariness. This is peak Dylan.

These performances are unmatchable. Subsequent performances of the song just don’t seem to cut the mustard. The lyrics are there, but the fast beat means he has to rush through them, almost throwing them away. He doesn’t savour the lines, those magnificent lines, rolling them around in the echo chambers of his mind. The spookiness has gone, and the hints of depravity somehow don’t resonate. But here it is, ‘Visions’ 1989 style. Just another song.

That brings to a close this article and the series ‘The Piercing Edge’ in which I looked at some highlights from Dylan’s 1989 NET. What can we say about 1989? The effect is looser and less locked-down than 1988. Dylan’s prepared to sing the song through, then allow time for improvisation, either GE Smith on the guitar or Dylan on the harp.

As I have commented, there is a sharp, metallic sound to most of these performances, reinforced by Dylan’s piercing edge harmonica. He’s beginning to work his songs from quiet beginnings, often acoustic, to a pounding climax. As in 1988, his voice is strong and to the fore and there are some passionate performances to be found.

I’ll be back shortly with the next round, 1990 – a new decade. Take care out there, in the cities of the plague.

Michael Johnson

Please note this final audio was originally missed from the presentation. Apologies.

Kia Ora

*The recording from Australia is now appearing with a note that it is only available in some regions, but there is a second performance in that article which is also worth hearing

• The Never-Ending Tour: 1987 – Farewell to all that
• NET 1988: Desperate stratagems, Part 1: Heroes and Villains
• 1988 Part 2: The 60s revisited
• 1988 Part 3: Absolutely still on the road
• 1989 Part 1: A sharper edge
• 1989 Part 2 – A fire in the sun
• 1989 Part 3: Blown out on the trail

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

By Tony Attwood

So here we are publishing a series of articles about the album Bob Dylan could have made, and having just published the latest episode, we find he actually is releasing a new album – just as has been rumoured.  Ah well – we’ll just have to work on both sets of reviews at once!  (The latest in our invented album series is Bob’s missing album: “Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing” Track 7.)

But now in the real world, after two songs which were actually recitations above an improvised musical background, Bob isn’t actually back to singing per se, but there is a much stronger sense of song as he goes back to the 12 bar blues as a basis for this third released track.

It’s not an exact 12 bar of course, but it’s got that feel.  And it is too early to start giving a meaning to the song or unravelling the references but there is one couplet I love already:

I sing songs of love
I sing songs of betrayal

which is pretty much what I’ve been writing in the long and meandering series about the subject matter of Bob’s songs.   For there is no doubt (as you will know if you have read the series) that the subject matter that dominates his writing through his life is “love” and “lost love”.  (If you are interested there is an overview of the series so far here).

Of course I am not suggesting that Bob has read my meanderings on what he writes about, (that would be ludicrous) but any little confirmation that one might be on the right track is worth grabbing!

Here are the lyrics…

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Just recently we’ve been engaged in a project listening back to some of the outtakes from the 1986 and 1987 sessions that produced the majority of Bob Dylan’s “Down In The Groove” album, as well as some of the live shows from the era.

And between us we reached the conclusion that, as many people said at the time, the album is, to be fair, not very good. Robert Christgau called the album “horrendous product”.

So we decided to see if we could compile a better album ourselves from the outtakes and live shows from the period. Just in case the guys upstairs fancy issuing a new version when they run out of materials for the Bootleg series. The tracks we have selected so far are listed with links at the end of this review.

(Our charge to the record company for being the researchers on this project will be modest, although Tony is insisting that there is a sleeve credit with his surname spelt correctly.  “Two t’s please,” is the phrase being used.)  (And two “A’s” in Aaron).

The song chosen for track 7 is this cover of “Got Love If You Want It” that Bob and the band recorded in April 1987.  What better way to follow the brilliant take of “That Lucky Old Sun” on the album with another classic track, this time in the blues genre.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0sIF7D06fkQ

The song was written by James Moore (AKA Slim Harpo) in 1957 and was covered by The Kinks and The Yardbirds on their respective debut albums along with many, many other artists.

Dylan’s version was actually officially released on the Argentinian edition of Down In The Groove but has so far failed to appear anywhere else in the world. This edition of “Sheep In Wolves’ Clothing” seems a great place to rectify this and present the track to the wider world.

Here is the version by the Kinks (included by Tony not because it is a particularly fine Kinks record, although it does warm up along the way, but for the shot of the dancing or the era – we’ve come quite a way since then).

The song was written by Slim Harpo (real name James Moore; 1924 to 1970), who led the “swamp blues” movement and was known as a fine harmonica player – which is where his name “Harpo” comes from (with him originally performing as “Harmonica Slim.”)  His song “Baby Scratch My Back” was major hit in the 1960s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezJY_qqz_x8

“Got Love if you Want It” was released in 1957 as the “B” side to “I’m a King Bee” – which gained only modest attention.

Reports suggest that a number of his songs were co-written with his wife Lovelle Moore, but she was not credited as a joint composer, which suggests either sexism or an accountant who was not on the ball.

Apart from the Kinks a number of British bands used his material in their acts, such as The Rolling Stones, Pretty Things, Them, the Yardbirds and Pink Floyd.  Slim Harpo also wrote a song called Moody Blues and it is said that this was the source of the band’s name.

Slim Harpo died tragically young of a heart attack, aged 46.  The Slim Harpo Music Awards, awarded annually in Baton Rouge, his home town, are named in his honour. Proceeds from the awards benefit the local “Music in the Schools” programme.

Here are the lyrics…

Got love if you want it, babe
Got love if you want it, babe
Got love if you want it
Got your love if you want it
Got love it you want it, honey

We can rock, awhile
We can rock, awhile

Quit teasin’ me, baby
Quit teasin’ me, baby
A-wit’ yo’ fine bone frame
Wit’ yo’ fine bone frame
If you let me love you, baby

I’ll be yo’ lovin’ man
I’ll be yo’ lovin’ man

Now, here you come, baby
Now, here you come, baby
A-wit’ ya head hung down
A-wit’ ya head hung down
I know ya been followin’

The talks all over town
The talks all over town

Now, the next do’ neighbor
Now, the next do’ neighbor
Peepin’ through the blinds
Peepin’ through the blinds
Don’t worry, nobody

That’s all, they spyin’
That’s all, they spyin’

I love you, little woman
I love you, little woman
Better than, I do myself
Better than, I do myself
But you mistreat me, baby

For someone else
For someone else

The lost Dylan album – the tracks so far

• Track 1 Twist and Shout
• Track 2: Just when I needed you most
• Track 3: Willie and the Hand Jive
• Track 4: Important words
• Track 5: Uranium Rock (Rock ’em dead)
• Track 6: Lucky old Sun

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

By Tony Attwood

Oh, you are so going to love this!

If you have been to any of the “Showcase” articles before you will know that we offer the chance to readers to put on this site one or two recordings of their own.  It’s not a competition, and we don’t do a critique – it is just that a reader of the site offers us a recording.

So, amateur or semi-professional, or indeed a band breaking through into the professional world.  The only requirement is that we are found because the musician or a member of the band is a reader of Untold.

And to show I know how much nerve it can take, I’ve even put one of my own recordings up.  (And people were very polite).

And now we have Anana Kaye.  Just listen, and enjoy…

Here’s the commentary…

“Covering Dylan, in general, is not a small task because of how revered he is but we always found it interesting that often same, more well-known songs got covered by musicians even though he’s got such a vast catalog.

We feel like his work from mid 70’s and on is very often overlooked. “Street-Legal” is one of our most favorite Dylan albums and “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” has been our faithful guide and companion for years. Great songs are like prayers… In fact they are prayers. This surely is one of them. I never thought that we’d even dare to approach it, but you know how it goes, “things have changed”… as its writer said in another one of his masterpieces. I don’t think we planned on releasing it but it felt especially timely now.

“As a singer, I’ve been majorly influenced by Bob Dylan’s musical phrasing and emphasis on lyrics. We produced the track at our home studio and had of a couple of Nashville’s most in-demand musicians (Chris Donohue on bass, Chris Benelli on drums) play on it and everything came together when later it was mixed and mastered by Stephen Leiweke. We also filmed and edited the music video ourselves during quarantine.”

And the PR…

Anana Kaye is a Nashville based husband and wife Duo. Hailing from Georgia (no not the state, but the ancient country on the crossroads of Europe and Asia, where Argonauts sailed to steal The Golden Fleece and where wine was invented some 8000 years ago) Anana Kaye and Irakli Gabriel deliver a unique and distinctly European sound we rarely experience in such potent doses today.

With influences including Bob Dylan, Kate Bush, Nick Cave and David Bowie their music is a genre bending experience akin to twisting kaleidoscope.

“Rich, strong, tender, translucent, and dynamic. The luminous vibrancy simply embraces the listener, enfolding you into sumptuousness.” – The Huffington Post.

“Exquisite, full of uncompromising fluidity, infectious hypnotic rhythms, electrifying sonic sensations, and the nonpareil voice of Anana Kaye.” – MEDIUM

And a personal note…

“Greetings from Nashville, TN.   This song off Street-Legal has been my faithful guide and companion for years. We just released our cover of it. Thought you might like to check it out. Hope you like it, Anana xx”

And Tony’s note (because there is always Tony’s note)…

If you like this half as much as I do, you’ll want to play it again.  So here it is…

The only danger with giving Showcase over to such a beautiful arrangement is that it will put everyone else off.  But really, I insist, Showcase is for everyone, and it can be because we all know the difference between the amateur and the professional, between the song recorded on your phone at home, and the full studio rendition.

And yes, to show that I know, and I believe in the validity of doing it this way, I will put another one of my little efforts up at some time.

The rules are

a) A cover of a Dylan song, which adds something to Dylan’s original

b) A recording of a Dylan song, which Dylan has not recorded.

c) A recording of a song that you have composed which emerges in some way from your interaction with Dylan’s music. So not necessarily a cover – it could be a completely new song but one which has in a way been influenced by Dylan. You don’t have to explain how or why, as long as you feel that there is something “Dylan” within the song, that’s fine.

As I said at the very start, I’m doing this because I’ve worked in the creative arts all my life, and I know how hard it is to get any exposure for one’s art. I’m not saying that record company producers will be queuing up to look and see what we’ve got, but I just have the feeling we might come across something interesting.

So if you would like to send me a recording with the right for me to put it up on this site, please email it to Tony@schools.co.uk. It can be a link to a youtube site, or a recording as an mp3 or mp4 file.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

by Larry Fyffe

Adonis is born of mortals and dies, but with the help of the gods, he comes back from the Underworld in the form of anemone flowers which spring up in summertime; Dionysus, whose mother is mortal, but fathered by a god he is, returns to the Upperworld world as himself in the summertime with the help of the gods. Apollo is a full-blooded god. Like his fellow gods on Mount Olympus, the son of Zeus may be injured, even imprisoned for a time, but cannot be put to death.

So too the angels who rebelled against the Judeo-Christian God:

.... God spared not the angels that sinned
But cast them down to hell
And delivered them into chains of darkness
To be reserved unto judgment

(Peter II: 2:4)

According to the New Testament, Jesus is mothered by a mortal, and fathered by God. Manifested therefrom, somehat akin to Dionysus, Christ is considered by Christians to be immortal; the “Son of God” awaits in Heaven for now,  but will return to Earth sometime in the future:

And we know that the Son of God is come
And hath given us an understanding
That we may know Him that is true
And we are in Him that is true
Even in His Son Jesus Christ
This is the true God, and eternal life

(I John ,5:20)

Jesus is referred to as the ” Son of Man” elsewhere in the New Testament. Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan takes a middle-of-the road approach ~ Christ lives on through the spirit that lies behind his teachings – teachings that need to be revived in today’s decadent society.

Double-edged and cheeky, Dylan’s songs often be. In the printed lyrics below, Dylan takes on the persona of Jesus Christ. There’s a bit of wordplay going on in the spoken lyrics; Dylan could be Apollo. In mythology, the musician Apollo is the god of the rising and setting “Sun”; in the New Testament, at least according to John, Jesus is the “Son” of God;

Go ahead, say I'm dead and gone
You will see that you were wrong
Go ahead, try to hide the Son
But the day will come
When you'll see I'm the one
(Bob Dylan: Rise Again)

One could even make the case that Zeus, the god of Thunder, is the historical forerunner of the vengeful God of the Old Testament; Apollo, of the compassionate God of the New Testament. There’s hope. The times they are a-changing. Things are going to get better.

Or are they? Is it, figuratively speaking, wintertime, and Dionysus is sleeping?; Is the new god the same as the old god; Is the band playing on while the Titanic is sinking?

In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years
He read the Book of Revelation
And he filled his cup with tears

(Bob Dylan: Tempest)

Says the Holy Book, the Dragon, like Jesus and Dionysus, can go missing, but cannot die for he too is eternal:

And  the devil that deceived them
Was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone
Where the beast and the false prophets are
And shall be tormented day and night forever and ever

(Revelation 20:10)

On the personal level one’s own boat is sinking for sure albeit there’s a promise of an “afterlife”:

I was born here, and I’ll die here against my will

I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still
Every nerve in my body is vacant and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear a murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet,  but it's getting there

(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet )

No wonder that in some other songs Bob Dylan grasps tightly the tiny spider web (spun by the gnostic-like Romantic Nature poets) that’s attached to a manifestation of the great White Mother Goddess of birth, love, and death:

If not for you
My sky would fall
Rain would gather too
Without your love
I'd be nowhere at all
If not for you

(Bob Dylan: If Not For You)

https://youtu.be/jJ0p7-MjI-E

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Way way back, before the dawn the time, far beyond the outer limits of civilisation, while human beings were just a twinkle in the eye of the almighty (or 2018 as it is more often known) we ran a series about Dylan cover versions, with many readers of this site kindly contributing their own favourites.

Looking back at the list I (Tony) see that I didn’t get round to adding all the links for the last few recordings nominated, but I will do that soon.  However the full list of nominated wonder covers is on the site in the index.

Now this little venture came to mind as the two of us started debating from our respective sides of the Atlantic this take of The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar, and we (Aaron) found Bob Dylan re-working his own song, but with Michael Bloomfield, so it is like a semi-cover, or maybe a coverette (we do like inventing new words!)

This was included on a Michael Bloomfield Box Set called From His Head To His Heart To His Hands. It also includes an instrumental version of Like A Rolling Stone, and an alternative Tombstone Blues

Bob gave a remarkable introduction to Michael Bloomfield at one particular gig

But there is more to it than this – however from here on you need a Spotify account.  The good news if you don’t have one is that you can get it free.

Obviously if you already have a free Spotify account you can just go in and type “Like a rolling stone Bloomfield”.

But back to the version of Groom…it would be interesting to compare it to the take recorded two days prior, without Bloomfield, which was included on the Trouble No More Set…

Here are the alternative lyrics

Prayed in the ghetto
with my face in the cement,
heard the last moan of a boxer,
I seen the massacre of the innocent,
felt around for the light switch,
became nauseated.
Just me, an overweight dancer,
between walls that had deteriorated.

Oh, set my affection on things above,
let nothing stand in the way of that love,
not even the Rock of Gibraltar.
If you see her on Fanning Street,
tell her that I still think she’s neat
and that the groom’s still waiting at the altar.

We… h’t’m’n ‘n’ highwaymen,
pushin’ women into robbery,
mistake your shyness for aloofness,
your silence for snobbery.
Never did get the message,
didn’t even know one was sent to me
for the madness of becomin’
what one was never meant to be.

Well, set my affection on things above,
let nothing stand in the way of that love,
not even the Rock of Gibraltar.
If you see her on Fanning Street,
well, tell her that I still think she’s neat
and that the groom’s still waiting at the altar.

Well, what can I say about Claudette
that wouldn’t come on back to haunt me.
I finally had to give her up
’bout the time she began to want me.
The Lord God has mercy
on them slandered and humiliated.
I’d a-done anything for that woman
if she’d only made me feel obligated.

Well, set my affection on things above,
let nothing stand in the way of that love,
not even the Rock of Gibraltar.
Well, if you see her on Fanning Street,
tell her that I still think she’s neat
and that the groom’s still waiting at the altar.

Locked into a time zone,
with a high-degree temperature,
wise men count no money,
fools standin’ around like furniture.
There’s a wall between you
and what you want and you got to leap it.
Tonight you got the power to take it,
tomorrow you won’t even need the power to keep it.

Well, set my affection on things above,
let nothing stand in the way of that love,
not even the Rock of Gibraltar.
If you see her on Fanning Street,
tell her that I still think she’s neat
and that the groom’s still waiting at the altar.

Wait on a minute,
I found the solution,
too rich for my blood
and I needed a transfusion.
Don’t know what I can say ’bout Claudette?
She’s in the mountains or the prairies,
she could be respectably married
or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires.

Well, set my affection on things above,
let nothing stand in the way of that love,
not even the Rock of Gibraltar.
If you see her on Fanning Street,
tell her that I still think she’s neat
and that the groom’s still waiting at the altar.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

In this series we try and find some songs that Dylan has performed which are largely forgotten.

Return To Me – from the Sopranos : Peppers & Egg Soundtrack cd. It’s a wonderful performance and deserves to be heard by more.

https://youtu.be/BpJik0gE3M4

“Return to Me” was originally released in 1958 by Dean Martin. The song was in the UKs charts (or at least the New Musical Express version) for 22 weeks, getting to number 2.

It also reached number 4 in the Billboard Top 100, a chart that was based on sales, radio plays and jukebox plays.  Dean Martin re-recorded the song in 1961 for his Italian Love Songs album.

Moving on we have Do Re Mi

https://youtu.be/6TJrkxMo6LM

This is Dylan’s 2009 take of Woody Guthrie’s song from The People Speak Soundtrack, another wonderful performance, and this one probably slipped passed a few people unnoticed.

Even though the album is great and has new performances by Dylan, Springsteen, Randy Newman, Jackson Browne amongst others I don’t remember it being hugely publicised at the time it came out. Here is the audio only from the album, without the voiceover at the start

And here it is as it was shown in the film with Dylan singing the song in the flesh, along with Ry Cooder and Van Dyke Parks.

If you can find a way to watch the full documentary you really should, as it is really great. A treat from start to finish with great musical moments throughout. The film uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans. The film gives voice to those who, by insisting on equality and justice, spoke up for social change throughout U.S. history and also illustrates the relevance of this to today’s society.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

by Jochen Markhorst

“But I’m not going to make an album and lean on a marriage relationship. There’s no way I would do that, any more than I would write an album about some lawyers’ battles that I had. There are certain subjects that don’t interest me to exploit. And I wouldn’t really exploit a relationship with somebody. (…) So a person in my position says, “Well, I got this available information, this is the way I really feel; I think I’ll write it and say how I feel.” I don’t do that. I don’t like feeling those kinds of feelings. I’ve got to think I can do better than that. It’s not going to positively help anybody to hear about my sadness. Just another hard luck story.”

(interview with Bill Flanagan, 1985)

To remain discreet is a thing to Dylan, especially in the days when it is rumbling in his marriage, in the days he writes Blood On The Tracks. Prior to the above words, he has regretted the indiscrete “Ballad In Plain D” and indirectly admitted that “Idiot Wind” crosses that border, too. But despite his noble intention, the poet Dylan can not prevent private turbulence, observations, emotions from seeping into his work – he is human, and no man is an island. He is aware of this. In his radio program Theme Time Radio Hour (episode 71, Birds) he gives attention, in general, to that mechanism.

A caller from Bloomington, Indiana, has a fundamental question about the song “The Coo Coo Bird” by Clarence Ashley. He wonders what Ashley means by that date, why the singing bird “never hollers coo coo ’til the fourth day of July”. What do I know, says the radio host Dylan:

“If I had to guess, I’d guess it had more do with Clarence Ashley. Perhaps the Fourth of July was important to him for some reason. Maybe it was somebody’s birthday or the day his wife walked out of him. You can never tell why someone’s gonna stick something in a song. You just gotta remember that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. You can’t expect to understand everything in every song.”

He may, however, decide not to publish such a trickled in, unwanted indiscretion or to rewrite it. And that seems to have happened with “Call Letter Blues”. More radically than ever; Dylan deletes the entire text, writes the words for “Meet Me In The Morning” and sings over the original basic track of “Call Letter Blues”. It is a unique manoeuvre in Dylan’s output and is probably inspired by his embarrassment about the all too open peep-in, about the verses 2 and 3, which tend to be exploiting:

Well, your friends come by for you
I don't know what to say
Well, your friends come by for you
I don't know what to say
I just can't face up to tell 'em
Honey, you just went away

Well, children cry for mother
I tell them, "Mother took a trip"
Well, children cry for mother
I tell them, "Mother took a trip"
Well, I walk on pins and needles
I hope my tongue don't slip

 On the other hand: he can not completely reject the song. Dylan publishes the text in The Lyrics (incomplete, oddly enough, only the first four of the seven couplets, just like on the site). And the third, last take of “Call Letter Blues” is selected for the first episode of the acclaimed Bootleg Series (1991).

The release of the recording triggers the discussion about the correctness of Dylan’s intervention in 1974, and arouses the generally rather senseless exchange of opinions about which song is better. So in this case: “Meet Me In The Morning” or “Call Letter Blues”?

On expectingrain.com, the majority of Dylan fans tend to Call Letter on the relevant discussion forum, while many Meet Me voters admit that they prefer “Meet Me In The Morning” for nostalgic reasons; after all, that is the version that they first heard when they were crushed by Blood On The Tracks, back in the day.

It is understandable; the magical power of a 56th and Wabasha alone overshadows the most beautiful couplets of Call Letter. But from a distance, without that statistic-polluting nostalgia, the superior class of “Call Letter Blues” is hard to ignore.

The title is already a first great find. Inspired by “Sad Letter Blues” from Tampa Red, presumably, but a call letter is the employer letter in which you are offered a job or in which you are invited for a job interview. It is a beautiful, original and twentieth-century metaphor for the supplication of a poor devil who wants to have his wife back home and a beautiful flag on the poetic, refined blues song, which despite its multicoloured nature is more coherent than “Meet Me In The Morning”.

In terms of content, it is a variant on the song from which it also borrowed the structure, on “32-20 Blues” by Big Maceo from 1945 (with Tampa Red on guitar) and on the motif of the murderous cuckold at any rate. The poet Dylan, however, incorporates that motif infinitely more elegantly than the many straightforward classics from the decades before. There, it usually is presented with the subtlety of the sledgehammer:

I walked all night long with my 32-20 in my hand
I walked all night long with my 32-20 in my hand
Lookin’ for my woman, while I found her with another man

… as Big Maceo sings in that “32-20 Blues”. Robert Johnson does not like mistiness either, in the eponymous, much-covered classic, which is also on Dylan’s repertoire:

And if she gets unruly, thinks she don’t wan’ do
If she gets unruly and thinks she don’t wan’ do
Take my 32-20, now, and cut her half in two

Still, neither of these men, Big Maceo nor Robert Johnson, and indirectly Dylan, did invent it. Back in 1929, Robert Sykes recorded the bloodthirsty “44 Blues”, with the opening lines that will end up in “Call Letter Blues” via Big Maceo:

Lord, I walked all night long with my forty-four in my hand
Lord, I walked all night long, my forty-four in my hand
I was lookin’ for my woman, found her with another man

A year later Sykes also writes a “32-20 Blues” (same title, but another song than Maceo’s and Johnson’s) and is also pretty clear:

Lord, I carry my 32-20 in my right hand
Lord, I carry my 32-20 in my right hand
Lord, I’ll shoot my woman ’bout wastin’ time with a monkey man

It always has been and continues to be a popular motif throughout the ages, the bloody revenge of the deceived lover. It appeals to a millennia-old moral sense and is legitimized early in the Old Testament, in Leviticus 20: And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.

Half of the opera repertoire relies on the crime passionnel, in the judiciary, it is a mitigating circumstance, it is an evergreen in Hollywood and in the pop music from The Beatles (“Run For Your Life”, 1965) to Rihanna (“Man Down”, 2011). But never as fragile, as suggestive as in “Call Letter Blues”.

The prelude is pastoral. A lonely soul walks the streets at night and seeks solace in the distant sounds of church bells. Intriguing is the cliff hanger: he wonders whether those bells are ringing for him, for something he would have done wrong.

The solitude, we understand in the second verse, is involuntary. His wife has left him. Not only him, tells verse three, the children miss their mother too and he does not know what to say, he is lying about a holiday trip, he bites his tongue: I walk on pins and needles and I hope my tongue don’t slip. It occupies him in a sheer neurotic way. Every time someone walks past their house, he jumps up. Is it she? Is she back? Only then, in the fifth verse, we learn that there is another man in play. But this wretch is the meek opposite of all those gun-wielding, violent blues heroes. I know you’re with another man, but that’s alright. You know I always understand. A comforting escape to carnal, physical love is within reach, he walks along the harlots, they are all free … but the grief is too overwhelming, his head is not there.

So far it already is an original, layered variation on all that murderous My Baby Left Me whining from the blues canon. This narrator is not aggressive, aggrieved, unreasonable. He does not want revenge, he is gentle and forgiving, and wants to save his children grief.

But then the last verse.

My ears are ringin'
Ringin' like empty shells
My ears are ringin'
Ringin' like empty shells
Well, it can't be no guitar player
It must be convent bells

 Ringing ears, “like empty [bullet] shells”, and that is due to the death bells of the monastery; we now get the answer to that riddle in the first verse, where the church bells are ringing, “maybe because I’ve done something wrong”.

The mild, lenient narrator is either a confused, or an intelligent psychopath, at least a man who knows how to conceal, fully credible, that he has just shot down his adulterous wife – perhaps because he does not even remember it.

It is a pioneering, literary version of all those revenge songs that “Call Letter Blues” elaborates on. In those songs the firearm violence is usually announced in the first or second verse. The narrator swings his 32-20 (the .32-20 refers to the 32 calibre Winchester bullet with a load of 20 grains, about one and a half grams, gunpowder), his German Luger (“Down In Spirit Blues”, Tampa Red), his razor, rifle and Gatling machine gun (“Georgia Hound Blues”, also from Tampa Red) or his .44 (Roosevelt Sykes means his .44 Winchester, “the gun that won the West”).

Similarly, Dylan’s forerunners are painfully clear about what they are planning to achieve with those tools (“shoot my lady”, “kill my baby”, “she’s dead and gone”), but this protagonist surprises us with his murderous mood, and then still only indirectly; through that unusual, lugubrious empty bullet shell metaphor and that reference to the church bells, he only hints, in the very last verse only, that there is blood on his tracks.

The church bells metaphor is just as classic, and in this song just as suggestive and indirect as the firearm violence. On his debut album Dylan covers already the evergreen “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”:

Did you ever hear them church bells tone
Means another poor boy is dead and gone

… like death bells sound in dozens of blues songs, and they always mean that these bells are ringing because my baby is dead. The Mississippi Sheiks in “Stop And Listen Blues” (1929), Muddy Waters in his “Buryin’ Ground Blues” (1947), “Sad And Lonely Day” by Roosevelt Sykes (1933) and Dylan himself, too, sometimes chooses the explanatory addition. In “Standing On The Doorway” for example, and in “Can’t Escape From You”:

The dead bells are ringing
My train is overdue
To your memory I’m clinging
I can’t escape from you

But in “Call Letter Blues” words like dead, or gone, or no more do not occur; just like the empty bullet shells, these clocks only insinuate a macabre background.

The poet Dylan produces here, in short, a veiled literary thriller superior to “Romance In Durango” (Desire, 1976) to “Señor” (Street Legal, 1978), to “Man In The Long Black Coat” (Oh Mercy, 1989), reaching a level he will not achieve again until “Soon After Midnight” (Tempest, 2012): so very, very much more than just another hard-luck story.

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Just recently we’ve been engaged in a project listening back to some of the outtakes from the 1986 and 1987 sessions that produced the majority of Bob Dylan’s “Down In The Groove” album, as well as some of the live shows from the era.

And between us we reached the conclusion that, as many people said at the time, the album is, to be fair, not very good.

So we decided to see if we could compile a better album ourselves from the outtakes and live shows from the period. Just in case the guys upstairs fancy issuing a new version when they run out of materials for the Bootleg series.  (Our charge to the record company for being the researchers on this project will be modest, although Tony is insisting that there is a sleeve credit with his surname spelled correctly.  “Two t’s please,” is the phrase being used.)

The track we have chosen to open side 2 of the vinyl edition of “Sheep In Wolves Clothing” is this take of “That Lucky Old Sun”.

This was recorded at a rehearsal with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers and we have to be grateful that the cameras were rolling to capture this wonderful performance on tape. It’s a great vocal performance from Dylan and would make a great start to side 2 of the album.

The song itself is one of the all time greats. Written in 1949 by Beasley Smith and Haven Gillespie, everyone who is anyone has recorded this track. From Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Charles to Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. Brian Wilson even wrote an entire song cycle around the track in 2008 with his wonderful “That Lucky Old Sun” album.

Here’s one of, no correct that, here is THE great classic early version – just as everyone recorded it, so everyone in the post-war world would have known this song and probably this recording.  This was the big hit version of the song; number 1 in the USA charts, where it stayed for 22 weeks.  The Sinatra’s version got to number 16.  It was a song that was utterly perfect for the post-war world.

Dylan himself returned to the song for his “Shadows In The Night” album and subsequent tour.

The lost Dylan album – the tracks so far

• Track 1 Twist and Shout
• Track 2: Just when I needed you most
• Track 3: Willie and the Hand Jive
• Track 4: Important words
• Track 5: Uranium Rock (Rock ’em dead)

Part I of this article appeared here.

by Larry Fyffe

God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son:

And He said, "Take now thy son
Thy only son Isaac, whom thou lovest ...
And offer him there for a burnt offering
Upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of"
(Genesis 22:2)

Just as Abraham is about to stab his son to death,
God announces: “This is only a test”:

And He said, "Lay not a hand upon the lad ...
For now I know that you fearest God
Seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son
Thine only son from me"
(Genesis 22:12)

Taking his cue from Mark Twain’s “Letters From The Earth”, singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan parodies the biblical story:

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe said "Man, you must be putting me on"
God said, "No, Abe"; Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me coming, you better run"
Well Abe said, "Where do you want this killing done?"
God said, "Out on Highway 61"
(Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited)

https://youtu.be/weyK8YlXsUM

Things don’t turn out so well in the New Testament as in the Old. There’s no one around to stop God from looking the other way when His own son Jesus gets killed. Apparently, by sacrificing a human ‘Lamb’ to Himself rather than an ordinary lamb, God intends to strikingly demonstrate that His creations no longer need fear Him; the crucifixion is done for their benefit, to show that the Almighty forgives them in return for their loyalty:

At the ninth hour, Jesus cried, with a loud voice, saying ...
"My God, my God, why hath Thou forsaken me?" ....
And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost
(St. Mark 15: 34, 37)

Posed in the following song lyrics is an interesting question:

Through many a dark hour
I've been thinking about this
That Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot had God on His side
(Bob Dylan: With God On Our Side)

https://youtu.be/M7FKyouUIsQ

The phrase the ‘Lamb of God’ first appears within the Holy Bible in the Book of St. John:

The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him
And saith, "Behold the Lamb of God
Which taketh away the sin of the world"
(St. John 1:29)

St. John takes great pains to separate the followers of John the Baptist from those he refers almost exclusively to as ‘the Jews” ; the consequence thereof is the demonizing of ‘the Jews’ by Christian leaders for many centuries, including the killing of Jews by the Crusaders on their way to take the Holy Land from the followers of Islam; for the Nazis of the twentieth century the table’s been prepared:

Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now, too
Have God on their side
(Bob Dylan: With God On Our Side)

I can’t think for you, you’ll have to decide – are the lyrics below rife with sarcasm as well?:

I've been saved
By the blood of the Lamb
Saved
By the blood of the Lamb
Saved
Saved
And I'm so glad
Yes, I'm so glad
I'm so glad
So glad
I want to thank You, Lord
I just want to thank You, Lord
Thank you, Lord
(Bob Dylan: Saved)

https://youtu.be/iOWukkyhjV8

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

If in reading the site and listening to some of the music you get even one-tenth as much pleasure as we get in researching, writing and publishing the material, you’ll be having a good time.

Tony Attwood,  Publisher / editor, Untold Dylan.

Editor’s note: There is an index to the previous articles in this series at the end of this piece.

Blown out on the trail

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

In Part 1, 1989, we considered new songs from Oh Mercy, with a few performances from older songs. In Part 2 we looked at Dylan’s continuing love affair with his sixties songs. Today we look at a spread of songs with a focus on the 1970s.

Before we get there though, let’s pause to listen to two traditional songs given wonderful voice here in 1989. I doubt you could find a more passionate rendition of ‘The Water is Wide.’ This is not just the best vocal performance of the year or getting there, but one of Dylan’s best ever. A NET standout. Kick back and enjoy.#

The Water is Wide

The official Bob Dylan website claims ‘Trail of Buffalo’ as a Dylan song, but it is not. Wikepedia says: ‘According to extensive research carried out by Jürgen Kloss in 2010-2012, this song is one of the many variants of John B Freeman’s “The Buffalo Song”. Dylan was continuing to do what he’d always done – immersing himself in the flow of traditional songs.

There are many variants to the lyrics, also. At heart, it’s a cowboy story of betrayal and murder. Familiar Dylan territory.

Trail of the Buffalo

Ah! Forever Young! We can’t escape it.

In 1974 Dylan is still pretty young himself; there is the ache of youth in his voice, but in 1989, with Dylan a couple of years off fifty, there’s a sharp edge of anguish in the performance, and an extra edge of wistfulness in the extended harp break at the end.

It’s wonderful the way the song is built up; from acoustic roots it grows into a rich, full-bodied rock song. His voice is raw and unaccompanied, and the song, with its impossible injunction to stay ‘forever young’ has seldom sounded so heartfelt.

Forever Young

Just as Dylan developed a core of sixties songs he could use night after night, in the grind of constant performance, so he did with the 1970’s, mainly concentrating on Blood on the Tracks, with a nod to Planet Waves and New Morning. Only ‘Senor’ survives into performance from the powerful Street Legal.

Next to ‘tangled up Blue’ we have ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, a song which is to become a fixture on the setlists. Switching the pronouns in the song gives rise to different stories. If, at the end, she ‘hunts him down by the water-front docks/where the sailors all come in’ he is likely to be a sailor and the girl a maybe one-time lover. However, if he hunts her down by the waterfront docks etc, she is likely to be a prostitute scoring from the sailors. Either way. It’s a one night stand or a short, intense affair that leaves a lingering taste of something that might have been ­– but there is no outguessing fate.

Simple twist of fate.

‘Shelter from the storm’ is still going strong, and will also stay the course through the years. It starts with the best lines Dylan ever wrote, surely.

'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form
Come in, she said I'll give ya shelter from the storm’

‘A creature void of form’? How good can lyrics get? This goddess gives shape to him. The song is the emotional counterpart of ‘She Belongs to Me.’ That song gives a warning about putting one’s love on a pedestal, and the humiliation that follows. In Shelter from the storm, ‘she’ is not just on a pedestal but touched by divinity, one who can save him from his martyrdom,

‘She came up to me so gracefully
and took my crown of thorns…’

In performance, the song can be given a hard, driving rhythm, as in the 1976 Rolling Thunder tour. Here it is given an almost cowboy uplift. This most mystical of songs is given a jaunty treatment. Of interest is a joyful sense of experiment here. Dylan plays with a half-spoken style of vocal, punctuated by his harmonica in squeaky sixties style. Then he slows down the song for a few lines before picking up the rhythm again. The whole performance stays interesting right to the end. Don’t miss the slow, quiet harp break that finishes the song. A gem this one.

Shelter from the storm

How does it feel to be in the last stages of a relationship you suddenly don’t want to lose? Pretty abject. You’re on your knees pleading, making all kinds of promises about changing your lowdown ways. You do lots of crying, but it’s all to no avail because… she’s a big girl now.

 You’re a big girl now.

Note how he sings most of the song through before an extended musical break. Dylan again squeezes some high-pitched shrills from his harp and GE Smith scales the heights. I think the bitter-sweetness of the song suits the 1989, sharp-edged, Dylan. We have to feel that ‘corkscrew to the heart’.

‘Man of Peace’ (1984) is one song that clearly signals Dylan’s withdrawal from certain kinds of Christian certainties. If Satan can come as a man of peace, then who can we trust? Even Jesus might have been Satan in disguise. Even the devil can quote scriptures. Dylan had this insight before.

‘But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency
All non-believers and men-stealers talkin' 
   in the name of religion.’
(‘Slow Train Coming’)

Now we get a clearer picture of what this ‘Satan’ looks like:

‘Well, first he's in the background,
and then he's in the front
Both eyes are looking like they're on a rabbit hunt’

And what about these marvellous lines:

‘Well, he can be fascinating, he can be dull
He can ride down Niagara Falls
in the barrels of your skull
I can smell something cooking
I can tell there's going to be a feast’

I don’t know if this song has ever fully realized its potential in performance. The power of the words tends to get lost in the chuggy beat. Sometimes I wonder what it might have sounded like slowed right down.

Man of Peace.

Talk of albums rarely visited, Empire Burlesque (1985) is a case in point. ‘Seeing the Real You at Last’ is the exception. You can see why; it’s good old beaty rocker. Check out the lyrics to this song; there are lines from different movies. Tony Attwood does a great job of unpicking some of these lines. This is approaching a cut-up method of songwriting, where lines are lifted from various sources and juxtaposed in interesting ways. Fascinating, in the light of Dylan’s recent epic ‘Murder Most Foul’ where this cut-up method is used extensively. My favourite lines?

‘I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble
trouble always comes to pass’

A whiff of Humphrey Bogart in there.

Seeing the Real You at Last.

That’s it for ‘Blown out on the trail.’ I’ll be back shortly with the fourth and final part of this tour through Dylan’s 1989 performances.

Kia Ora

The earlier parts of this series

• The Never-Ending Tour: 1987 – Farewell to all that
• NET 1988: Desperate stratagems, Part 1: Heroes and Villains
• 1988 Part 2: The 60s revisited
• 1988 Part 3: Absolutely still on the road
• 1989 Part 1: A sharper edge
• 1989 Part 2 – A fire in the sun

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

If in reading the site and listening to some of the music you get even one-tenth as much pleasure as we get in researching, writing and publishing the material, you’ll be having a good time.

Tony Attwood,  Publisher / editor, Untold Dylan.

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

The track is called “Home” and is credited to Gary ‘Mudbone’ Cooper/Dave Stewart/Bob Dylan.  Aaron discovered it and the background.  Tony however is not impressed.

It was released in 2006 On the Mudbone album Fresh Mud (produced by Dave Stewart). Dylan plays piano on the track.  However the opening piano sounds very much like “kum ba yah” – it is described in some reviews as blues piano, but I (Tony) don’t hear that at all.

If you want to check that assertion, have a listen

It really is an old song and was sung by slave workers in America.   There is a very early recording sung by H. Wylie, recorded by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1926 – and this is the first known recording of ‘Come by Here,’ – the song that came to be known as ‘Kumbaya.’
It is sung in ‘Gullah,’ – a dialect of the Sea Islands Creole Dialect.

You can download it at this link

The song fell out of fashion by the 1980s after it was picked up by many organisations as a sort of camp fire, everyone-join-in song and has not really been rehabilitated since.

Back to Bob’s recording, Gary ‘Mudbone’ Cooper was in the bands Funkadelic and Parliament. Dave Stewart had recorded Dylan’s piano part at Dylan’s home in 2002, they lifted it and wrote a track around it (along the lines of Worth The Waiting For), thus Dylan gets a credit on the track! The album came out a couple of weeks after Modern Times and got some great reviews

Mudbone – Fresh Mud

Here’s a full review.

And here are the lyrics…

As we walk this narrow highway
On the road to worlds unknown
Sometimes its hard to make our way
Help us lord to make it home
I made a promise yesterday t
Hat I will keep in every way
And every morning I will pray
To make it home
I had a feeling yesterday
As I was staring at the milky way
I knew that things would be okay
If I make it home...Oh lordy
Hmmm..
I made a promise yesterday
That I will keep in every way
And every morning I will pray
To make it home
I had a feeling yesterday
As I was staring at the milky way
I knew that things would be okay
If I make it home
Hmmm.
I made a promise yall im gonna keep it now
Home

Tony is not a fan: “My problem is twofold: that the introduction from Bob on the piano doesn’t really seem to have very much to do with anything else in the song, and what Bob is playing is not an original piece.

“Now the former arises because they simply seem to have bolted Bob’s work onto the rest of the song.  OK they might do that for publicity, and if Bob agreed, then he agreed, probably not even remembering at the time what he had played on that piano on that day.

“But everyone must be aware that this is not original Bob Dylan work, and I am surprised it was put forward as Bob as a co-composer.  Unless of course the story we have about this being Bob’s only contribution is not true.

“Of course I am not saying we won’t include it in the list of Dylan compositions – he (or his agent or copyright company) has claimed it, so we take their word, but it isn’t something I am going to come back to as a Bob Dylan co-composition.

“Besides, what does my opinion matter?  I’m just one fan.”

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

If in reading the site and listening to some of the music you get even one tenth as much pleasure as I get in publishing the material, you’ll be having a good time.

By Tony Attwood

If asked, “what does Bob Dylan write about?” not many people would say “love” as their first choice for an answer, and yet as we study his compositions from the start of his active writing through to 1979 – by far his most prolific period –  “love”, and its close relative “lost love” are the topics that surpass all others.

68 songs of love and desire, 48 songs of lost love and moving on.  The protest song for which Dylan was so well known in the early years flourishes for a little while but then fades away.  20 protest songs in the 1950s and 1960s and then just one in the 1970s.

Now of course with any simplistic analysis, as these totals surely represent, one can disagree – you may count the protest songs and get a few more or a few less, than I do, but in terms of the generality, these give us the order of magnitude.

To an extraordinary degree, Dylan has had the ability to dip in and out of themes and topics across the years according to his mind-set, and the world around him.  It is a rare talent and one that is somehow ignored as we focus on each new album and each new tour.

But these changes of theme are there; they are real.  In the Basement, for example, Dylan came up with ten songs about being trapped.  There was a burst of randomness in the early years too, as surrealism, Dada and Kafka (topics of interest to him) all merged together into one gooey theme.

And although the blues, which has always been part of Dylan’s output, gradually became less important, it was supplemented always with its eternal bedfellows, the songs of moving on, and the songs of farewell which have always been part of that tradition.

I have already published a list of the different topics that can be found in Bob Dylan songs from the moment he started composing in the late 1950s, up to the end of 1979.  In case you missed it there are eleven topics that occupied Dylan for more than ten songs during this period.

Put these totals together and across the two and a bit decades we get these as the mainstream Dylan topics for his songwriting.  Oh and to be clear, Kafkaesque randomness as a subject has gone into randomness not Surrealism.  Just thought you would like to know.

• Randomness: 11 songs
• Being trapped: 12 songs
• Humour, satire, talking blues: 14 songs
• Surrealism, Dada, Kafka: 15 songs
• Travelling on, songs of leaving, songs of farewell: 16 songs
• Environment: 17 songs
• Faith: 19 songs
• Protest: 21 songs
• Lost love / moving on: 48 songs
• Love, desire: 62 songs

And within this admittedly crude set of classifications, we have the topics that are always with us in popular music (the love, lost love, moving on collection) and those songs that are otherwise related to the moment.

Other topics come and go.  “Being trapped” is a topic from the Basement, perhaps understandably, and after that it has little impact on Dylan’s songwriting consciousness.  On the other hand awareness of “place” is stronger as time passes.  Plus as we shall see, in 1979, for the first time ever, Dylan devoted himself entirely to one topic throughout the whole year: his newly found faith.

But more than this, leaving aside the eternal topics of love and moving on, other topics come, occupy the writer for a while, and then themselves are in turn, moved on.  And with such a perspective it would have been easy when the religious songs burst upon the scene to think (as it turned out with a certain level of accuracy), “I’ll give it a couple of years”

However this is not to say that Bob wrote evenly around those topics year by year – this was far from being the case.  For example, just breaking the 22 years into two sections we find…

The late 1950s and 1960s

• Being trapped: 10
• Randomness (including Kafkaesque randomness): 11
• Humour, satire, talking blues: 13
• Surrealism, Dada: 15
• Travelling on, songs of leaving, songs of farewell, moving on: 16
• Protest: 20
• Lost love / moving on: 30
• Love, desire: 31

The 1970s

• The environment, places, location: 8
• Moving on etc: 8
• People: 8
• Lost love: 17
• Love, desire: 18
• Faith: 19

However, these lists don’t really tell us the full story because Dylan wrote on certain topics in bursts, with the most obvious example being the already mentioned explosion of songs expressing he Christian faith in 1979 – 19 of them all told.   Meaning that in one year he had created almost as many Christian faith songs as he had written “protest” songs in his entire career as a composer up to that point (21).

My quest in this article is to conclude the review of the topics of Dylan’s songs in his first two decades as a composer (and described on this site in a series of articles) by looking at a few other “bursts” of interest in particular subjects.

As soon as I pondered the topic, the surreal and Dadaist songs of 1965 which exploded out of nowhere, caught my attention.  Indeed the only other sudden burst in terms of topic was the aforementioned Christian songs of 1979.  For although it can be argued that “Slow Train Coming” gave us a clue the year before I doubt that anyone outside of Bob’s inner circle knew what was about to come next.  It is a clue once you know what happens next!

Going back to 1965 we find that Dylan discovered in that year the notion of surreal and Dadaist lyrics in songs and spent the year exploring them, from Visions of Johanna  to Queen Jane Approximately from Tombstone Blues to Subterranean Homesick Blues

This sudden interest in specific themes is a fundamental aspect of Bob’s writing across the two decades I’ve been seeking to analyse, and such specific themes pop up throughout these two decades.  And yet few people seem ever to have looked at Dylan’s work in this way – perhaps because before we came along, no one had such a comprehensive list of Dylan’s composition in the order in which they were written.

Yet the study is most rewarding.  Take the Basement Tapes for example – when we work through the vast array of songs recorded in the basement, and look at these songs with the view of looking for repeated themes, it is not that surprising that we find the three dominant topics from that period were love and lust (all those guys cooped up together!) with 10 compositions, moving on (along with nothing lasts forever) with nine songs, and being trapped (and escaping from being trapped) also with nine songs.

That does all fit – the guys were in the Basement, so Dylan wrote about being trapped, getting out, and finding a new woman.

And what is particularly interesting are the songs which relate to topics Dylan touches on just a handful of times – and yet when he does do this his skill with words and music remains consummate.  Never once is there a feeling that Dylan is not the master of his chosen topic for this song.

Take the theme of leaving the old world behind and seeking a new fortune, unsure of what will be there.   It’s a well established folk music theme, and yet in one year Dylan gives us Boots of Spanish Leather,  One too many mornings,  and Restless Farewell. Three masterpieces on one theme – tucked in among all the other topics Bob feels he wants to tackle that year.

And then he drops in a couple of songs in a rarer topic like justice (Seven Curses,  Percy’s Song) just to show he can!

Then again there is the humour.   Bob was strong on humour with his talking blues songs very early on.  However he moved on and we might have thought he put away these jokes as just being suitable for his early days, but no, suddenly he picks up that threat and gives us Motorpsycho Nightmare.  Although over time the humour has faded away.

It was in 1965 that Bob showed us that he most certainly could pick most unexpected new themes by not simply venturing into Surrealism and Dada where the world is not connected to everyday reality, but also seeing the world through a haze, or making it just plain weird.  From Visions of Johanna to Subterranean Homesick Blues we were taken into a completely new world, while beyond the window the songs of love (such as She Belongs to Me) and the lost love songs tumble out from the maestro and tumble over each other as he moves onto the theme of artist vs society in for example Maggie’s Farm.

So adept does Bob become by this time that within the same year he can offer Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream and Desolation Row – ludicrous humour to the most serious contemplation of society’s failings ever produced in popular music or folk song.

But just as we get the hang of that then suddenly we find ourselves facing something new – four “songs of disdain” are offered in quick succession, including two utter classics in Positively Fourth Street and Like a Rolling Stone.

Indeed by 1965 it is possible to create a list of some 15 themes with which Dylan has worked before, but which are now set aside.  Such themes as civil rights, nothing changes, justice, death…

By 1966 Bob was showing us that he could deliver the inevitable love (6) and lost love (5) songs while, for the rest of the total of 22 songs that year, travel whatever road took his fancy.  Surrealism gets three songs, disdain another two, and five other pieces just doing their own thing, handling their own topic.

But for all the jumping around in terms of his lyrics we can see very clearly what mostly occupies Bob’s mind.  It is not injustice or change.  It remains lost love and moving on (of which there are 31 songs on The Basement Tapes recordings alone).   Lost love and moving on becomes the eternal key topic, with almost 50% of the Notebook songs falling into this area.

And as we might expect from a mind so full of invention and so willing to take on new directions, by now we have all sorts of other themes emerging.  Nine songs are about being trapped, and escaping from being trapped (a telling diversion), seven move onto the notion that life is simply a mess, quite a few of the 10 love songs are more about lust than love, and the moving on songs are often emphasising the more abstract point that nothing lasts forever.

You want to see a restless artist at work?  Look no further than the Basement Tapes!

But then in a sense nothing has changed because by the end of the Basement Tapes, a quick survey shows us that a quarter of all Dylan’s songs were about love or lost love or moving on.  No other grouping gets close to that percentage.

Yet if that was the theme of the Basement, John Wesley Harding had nothing to do with such matters.  Seven of the tracks on that album concern what might be best described as Kafkaesque randomness, or “stream of consciousness” writing.  Drifters’ Escape is the summit of this – a set of meaningless random events set in a world that we know exists, and which is the very essence of making sense (the criminal justice system) but which now makes no sense at all.  The only good thing is that the Drifter does indeed escape while the wretched jury get their comeuppance.

And then Dylan has a year off, and one can hardly blame him.  As we’ve noted, no one since Irving Berlin had worked this hard and produced this much quality songwriting at this speed in the entire history of American songs.  And yet after the year out Dylan was back with the lost love theme (I threw it all away for example) and the love (To be alone with you). Kafka had had his chance; we were back to matters of the heart.

However there was no settling down, no feeling that Dylan had explored the terrain and was now in for the easy ride, for in 1970 Dylan began to write about the environment, places and locations – five songs fall into this group.

1971 was a year in which Bob took more time out and produced the unexpected with Vomit Express (a postmodernist blues concerning getting the cheapest seats on the cheapest flight) and two magnificent reflective pieces relating to art and contemplation (When I paint my masterpiece and Watching the river flow) along with the extremely unusual (or tediously mundane depending on your point of view) Never say goodbye (which is either about the environment or is a love song, depending which Untold Dylan reviewer you choose to follow.)

Love songs dominated the early 1970s for Dylan but then suddenly in 1974 Dylan took another turn – as fate became the theme of songs as diverse as Tangled up in blue, If you see her say hello,  Call Letter Blues,  Simple Twist of Fate  etc etc.

Working with a co-writer as Dylan now found himself, took him in another direction, for he created songs about people, instead of about love and lost love.   Joey, Rita May, Hurricane, Black Diamond Bay, Catfish, Sara and Sign Language took Dylan in yet another new direction.

Curiously tucked away at the end of the year is a song that gave a foretaste of what was to come… What will you do when Jesus Comes? But at this point the theme was not developed.  The song stood alone.

1975 to 1977 were years of lost love (seven songs) and songs about people (eight songs) while 1978 was a year in which Dylan wrote a lot, but apart from “Slow Train” little of it is remembered. It’s almost as if having cleared the basement, he was now clearing out the attic.   For the main themes were by now as expected, four moving on songs, three love songs, three blues and three lost love.  If surprises were wanted, they were not to be found in the subject matter.

Which is why the 19 songs of 1979 were such a surprise.  They really were all about the same subject – something Bob had never done for.  The subject was of course Christianity, and it swamped every other thought for not only did Dylan sing them and record them, he even lectured the audience on the subject.  The one subject which more than any other did not need an explanation, got a 10-minute diatribe in the concerts!

And yes, there was not a single song on another topic. Yet although now we can see Slow Train as being the forerunner of this series, listened to without the benefit of hindsight it is difficult to say this song is about Christianity at all.  It is about change coming – it is as if Bob felt the need for change but hadn’t yet decided what the change is.

And so having taken us through the first two decades of Bob’s lyrics, I can say the main topics of Bob’s songs up to 1978 were

• Love and desire (62 songs)
• Lost love (48 songs)
• Moving on (24 songs)
• Protest (22 songs)
• Environment, places, locations (17 songs)
• The blues (14 songs)
• Being trapped (12 songs)

1979 was, as noted.  Every single song was on the same theme.  Thus after 22 years of writing Bob had found himself a new direction.  The question then was, what on earth was he going to do with it?

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

If in reading the site and listening to some of the music you get even one tenth as much pleasure as I get in publishing the material, you’ll be having a good time.

Tony Attwood,  Publisher / editor, Untold Dylan.

By Larry Fyffe

The narrative of the last days of Jesus is at first rather literal, and linear. Having been betrayed by Judas, Jesus is crucified; He vanishes from the tomb, and pays a visit to a number of his followers, apparently to celebrate a ‘Passover’ meal with them:

And it came to pass, as He sat at meat with them
He took bread, and blessed it, and brake
And gave it to them
(St. Luke: 24:30)

Below, the time-line of the narrative shifts a bit, becomes more symbolic, rather ‘gnostic’- like. In the following biblical verses, Jesus is not yet betrayed:

Now before the feast of the Passover …
And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart
Of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray Him
(St. John 13: 1,2)

There’s time for the coming crucifixion of Christ to be celebrated at a ‘Passover’ supper. But it’s the ‘Lamb of God’ that’s symbolically eaten rather than an actual sacrificed lamb – bread representing His body, and wine, His blood. Jewish tradition is upheld even as it’s abandoned. Jesus, instead of being born in Time, is presented as eternally everlasting existing from the very beginning – like God. Jesus can separate from God, take on human form, and then return to re-unite with the Almighty One.

Even the thought of drinking animal (let alone human) blood has no place in Jewish tradition.

Sarcasm drips from the following song lyrics by a singer/songwriter brought up in a Jewish family:

Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine

(Bob Dylan: Stuck Inside Of Mobile 
With The Memphis Blues Again)

https://youtu.be/fTDRlLXkV2o

More to the point are the lyrics below:

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

Jesus is offered some wine mixed with a painkiller before he’s nailed to the cross, but He refuses to drink it:

And they gave Him to drink
Wine mingled with myrrh
But He received it not
(Matthew 15: 23)

In the songs lyrics below, the narrator snarls at a religion that focused on the sacrafice of a human being, a Jewish rabbi at that:

Someone must have slipped a drug in your wine
You slurped it down, and you crossed the line
Man can't live on bread alone
I pay in blood, but not my own
(Bob Dylan: Pay In Blood)

https://youtu.be/LYMgDRANE2s

The metaphor ‘Lamb of God” is used by a preRomantc poet:

And did those feet in ancient times
Walk on England's mountains green
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
(William Blake: Jerusalem)

Irony abounds, and the answer to the above question is likely, ‘No!’; the “Satanic mills” mentioned in the same poem could well represent the established church.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

If in reading the site and listening to some of the music you get even one tenth as much pleasure as I get in publishing the material, you’ll be having a good time.

Tony Attwood,  Publisher / editor, Untold Dylan.

by Jochen Markhorst

 Keep On Pushing (1964) by Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions is one of the half-hidden records (the bottom one) on the carefully constructed cover of Bringing It All Back Home.

“When I first met Dylan,” Robbie Robertson tells Barney Hoskyns in Across The Great Divide (1993), “I played him a ballad of the Impressions-album Keep On Pushing, “I’ve Been Trying”, written by Curtis Mayfield.”

That meeting is a few months after Bringing It All Back Home, and in his autobiography Testimony (2016) Robbie tells it differently again (and plays the record during a get-together sometime in December ’65, shortly after Levon Helm left The Hawks, a few months after the first meeting), but anyway: Curtis Mayfield stands on a pedestal with both Dylan and Robertson. Fan Robertson doesn’t have to push Mayfield very hard in the following years – and regularly smuggles him into the Basement, for instance through his guitar licks in “Goin’ To Acapulco”.

When Dylan leaves his place at the forefront of the civil rights movement, Mayfield is one of the greats filling the vacancy. Songs like “We’re A Winner” and especially “Keep On Pushing”, which are even quoted and used by Rev. Martin Luther King, have a similar impact and status as Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind”; they are sung at rallies and protest gatherings of mainly black students, with Mayfield’s songs gradually developing into a soundtrack for the black pride.

His pièce the résistance is of course “People Get Ready”, the masterpiece to which Dylan keeps returning. He sings it in the Basement in that summer of 1967, again during the Rolling Thunder Revue in ’75, in 1989 he records a beautiful studio version for the soundtrack of the film Flashback, in ’91 the song is unexpectedly on the setlist (in Argentina, 8 August, immediately after the already surprising opening “New Morning”) and in the episode “More Trains” of his Theme Time Radio Hour, March 2007, radio maker Dylan finds the metaphorical use of “train journey” reason enough to qualify the song as a train song, so he may play it again. In every decade of Dylan’s long career, “People Get Ready” comes along once in a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-XDQZGf1lU

Robertson’s soul-loving heart will have jumped when Dylan, in the latter days of that long summer in West Saugerties, comes up with “All You Have To Do Is Dream”, a melodic, smoothly swinging Impressions-like soul number on which the Canadian gets the chance to quote from half the soul catalogue. The short, vicious accents on the third beat as in Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home”, fills as in Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man”, Curtis Mayfield’s licks and, certainly in the second, slightly faster take, the nonchalant, percussion-like funky accompaniment à la early James Brown.

Only that solo steps out of the soul idiom; Robertson is experimenting with the pinky swell technique, by the sound of it – the little trick where the little finger closes the volume knob just before the stroke and then opens it again, causing the sound to swell and die away again. Undisputed grandmaster and pioneer of that technique is Phil Keaggy, but both Keaggy and Robertson probably copied it from Zal Yanovsky’s guitar part on The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream”, the first recording on which that manual swell can be heard. Dylan has a short line with frontman John Sebastian anyway, and Yanovsky is from Toronto, just like Robbie Robertson, so they probably know each other.

Nor is the lyrics 100% soul. Far from it, even. Clichés like that’s just how much I would love you / If you’d just only let me try and the title fit seamlessly in Otis’ or Solomon’s repertoire, but for the rest the lyrics are the work of an original poet. Like the opening lines:

If the farmer has no silo
And his fuel cost runs up high
Well, that’s just how much I would love you
If you’d just only let me try

… Dylan is the first song poet at all to include the word silo in a song, as well as fuel cost (only fuel is – rarely – used; by the Beach Boys in “Shut Down”, for example; and by Chuck Berry in “You Can’t Catch Me”), and apart from Ol’ MacDonald, farmers are not archetypes in song culture either (Woody Guthrie sometimes sings one).

It’s a remarkable, atypical opening and it clashes right away in line 3 with that’s how much I would love you. “I’ll love you as much as fuel prices will go up”? It’s an alienating simile that even Brecht would shy away from and equally striking by Basement Tapes’ standards. Thanks in part to the neat, correct syntax, the lines, unlike most songs from The Basement Tapes, suggest coherence. And with that, the tone shifts from Dadaist haze (as in “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread” and “Quinn The Eskimo”, for example) to the anarchic humour of Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce.

The second verse is stylistically similar. Again four coherence suggesting lines with new, original idiom (up to date kitchen and acquainted) and an alienating pointe with grinning floor birds, whatever that may be. Chickens, obviously, but then again: they really can’t “grin from ear to ear”, so it’s another inimitable metaphor (other transcriptors understand claw birds, by the way, but that does not clarify either). Heylin refers to it as just another contribution to the basement lexicon of nonsense.

For a moment, Dylan the stand-up poet seems to be a bit rudderless in the third verse. He tries to associate on those floor birds, but gets stuck already in the second line – and then suddenly dashes off a thoroughbred Dylanesque aphoristic one-liner:

But restriction causes damage
And damage causes lust.   

It is a very quotable, depth and wisdom insinuating phrase à la lost time is not found again (“Odds And Ends”) or too much of nothing can turn a man into a liar, aphorisms that have the antique sound of age-old sayings, yet really are forged here and now, in this pink house this summer. Though this one has less practical applicability, at first sight. Alright, a scenario to restriction causes damage could still be devised. Sleep restriction causes damage indeed, as does water restriction, and there are plenty other restrictions conceivable which could cause some damage. But damage causes lust? It does take some perverted empathy and ditto sexual preference to find any truth in there.

It does not really inspire the freely associating song poet Dylan to a revealing sequel either. He does take a turn towards ambiguous, slightly vulgar imagery in the next verse, in which the little girl is asked to blow this hard horn, but no aphrodisiac damage precedes this. Now the steam seems to be running out. The poet turns to self-plagiarism, to it’s very easily done, almost literally a quote from “Highway 61 Revisited” – very unusual for the bard who hates repetition so much – and then completes the lyrics with the typical, and by now somewhat dutiful Basement nonsense, with an earful here and a loaf of bread there.

Mayfield dies on Christmas Day ’99. From Dylan there’s no statement known. However, in most necrologies Mayfield is compared to Dylan and sometimes even called black Dylan, although that somewhat dubious nickname actually was reserved for Gil Scott-Heron.

When theatre director Jackie Taylor of the Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago is interviewed in 2013, for the play It’s All-Right To Have A Good Time: The Story Of Curtis Mayfield, she does have a fierce opinion about that nickname:

“People call Curtis the black Bob Dylan because of the impact of his music and proficiency and magnitude. I would turn it around and say that Bob Dylan is the white Curtis Mayfield.”

Well, “All you have to do is dream,” Dylan would probably say to that.

Jochen’s 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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

If in reading the site and listening to some of the music you get even one tenth as much pleasure as I get in publishing the material, you’ll be having a good time.

Tony Attwood,  Publisher / editor, Untold Dylan.

By Aaron Galbraith and Filip Łobodziński

When is a Dylan credit not a Dylan credit? As Sherlock Holmes once said, “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”.

If you have done any research into the subject of Dylan’s songwriting credits, as those of us who live in Untold Dylan Land are want to do in our spare time, you would notice some anomalies popping up from time to time.   We’ve made it our job to explain these mysteries so you don’t end up buying some expensive and rare CD thinking you had found some previously unknown Dylan original when you haven’t.

As an example, take the case of this credit Dylan received on the Sue Foley album Secret Weapon. Here is a screen shot from the reverse of the CD inlay:

As far as we know Dylan has never written a song titled “If You Think I’ve Lost You”. Now for this one, we didn’t have to open a file at Scotland Yard to see that this was a simple case of someone mistakenly copying the credits from the track above which is a cover of Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street”. The proofreader should be fired! Tony would have spotted this mistake that’s for sure.  [I certainly wouldn’t put money on that! – Tony]

Or how about this one, “I Ain’t Gonna Pin My Hopes On That” which is credited to Bob Dylan/Joachim Trastell. You can listen to it here.

It might take a bit of time to figure out the reason for the Dylan credit. It incorporates two lines from “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie”. The title also refers to the number of mentions of “hope” throughout Dylan’s poem. Special Rider music is given as the publisher but lists Trastell first and Dylan second.

This leads us to our latest research and a track called “Kiedy Wieje Wiatr” by the Polish group Wolna Grupa Bukowina On their album “Sad” which is credited to Bob Dylan/W. Bellon.

Now, our Polish is non existent, however, Google Translate tells us that the title means “When The Wind Blows”.

The song starts at 2.50 on this video

We could not work out for the life of me why Dylan gets a credit here, we assumed it was a translation of “Blowing In The Wind” but the music doesn’t sound like it and the lyrics are of no help either.

This is what google translate gives us – first the Polish

Kiedy Pada deszcz i lśni wokół nas
Trawa podnosi źdźbła i zieleni się liść
Kiedy pada deszcz, kiedy pada deszcz
Gdzie podział się tamten deszcz

Pada inny deszcz, pada już od lat
Lecz trawy nie ma i nie ma już drzew
A ten, który stał patrząc jak tęcza lśni
Nie zobaczy już nic, nie zapyta
Gdzie podział się tamten deszcz

Kiedy wieje wiatr niebem wstrząsa dreszcz
Liście tańczą w takt pieśni starej jak świat
Kiedy wieje wiatr, Kiedy wieje wiatr
Gdzie podział się tamten wiatr

Wieje inny wiatr, wieje już od lat
Lecz trawy nie ma i nie ma już drzew
A ten, który stał patrząc jak ziemia drży
Nie zobaczy już nic, nie zapyta
Gdzie podział się tamten wiatr

And the English

When it rains and shines around us
The grass picks up the leaves and the leaf turns green
When it rains, when it rains
Where did that rain go?

It's raining, it's been raining for years
But the grass is gone and there are no more trees
And the one who stood watching the rainbow shine
He won't see anything anymore, he won't ask
Where did that rain go?

When the wind blows the sky shivers
The leaves dance to a song as old as the world
When the wind blows, When the wind blows
Where is that wind?
Another wind is blowing, it has been blowing for years

But the grass is gone and there are no more trees
And the one who stood watching the earth tremble
He won't see anything anymore, he won't ask
Where is that wind?

So, it was at this point we decided to reach out to our Polish friend Filip Łobodziński who helped us so wonderfully with the Jacek Kaczmarski article.

Filip did his usual top notch work and provided the following research:

—-

Dylan’s authorship is attributed absolutely mistakenly. The song is Malvina Reynolds’s “What Have They Done to the Rain?” (originally titled “Rain Song”) and the only Dylan connection I can find is that Joan Baez sang it on her second live album “Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2” (1963). Which is not necessarily equal to Bob Dylan being its writer. actually he did not write it nor did he sing it as far as I know.

The song has been covered by the Searchers and Marianne Faithfull, among others.

For the performance:

Wolna Grupa Bukowina (Bukovina Free Group) was a band or, rather, a free conglomerate of artists who loved folk music in the American vein but deeply rooted in Carpathian entourage and mythology. Hippy-infused lyrics about liberty, free wandering, mountains and s.o. Jack London was one of their heroes.

Wojciech Belon (he stylized his last name as Bellon) and a couple of his friends were the core of the WGB but there were many other singers and players associated with them.

Bellon died in 1985 aged only 33, due to alcoholic problems and kidney’s disease.

The band was started by Bellon in high school when he invited her school mate Grażyna Kulawik to sing with him – she sings lead on the song in question. The album was recorded nearly a decade after Bellon’s death.

—-

So, all credit to Filip for his fine research into this one and we can all close our wallets back up safe in the knowledge that we were not, after all missing an unknown Dylan original in our collections. Unless you really liked the song for its own sake of course!

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with approaching 5000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which also lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

If in reading the site and listening to some of the music you get even one tenth as much pleasure as I get in publishing the material, you’ll be having a good time.

Tony Attwood,  Publisher / editor, Untold Dylan.