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.

by Larry Fyffe

“Hearts Of Fire” is a dark-humoured, sometimes slapstick, sometimes shocking, post-modernist movie. The film deals with the trials and tribulations of a young creative artist (Molly McGuire played by Fiona Flanagan) who is determined to follow her God-given talent in the face of the demands of business-oriented promoters who control the music industry.  If you want to watch the movie there is a link to it at the end of this article.

Their god is money, and they tend to play it safe by having singers and musicians perform ‘the usual’ stuff that audiences are familiar with. However, competition is the name of the game in the industry, and there are promoters who will take risks, and back innovative artists in whom they see potential.

James Colt (Rupert Everett), admired by Molly, is a ‘new wave’ star headed for the big time. Molly, somewhat naive, gets involved with him. Though British he be, Colt’s name reminds one of Jessie James and Cole Younger.

Bob Dylan plays a retired artist (Billy Parker), a singer and musician who’s been there and done that; he’s wise to the ins and outs of the music industry; he knows what the young gal singer is up against. Yet her spunk rekindles his own creative spark; he warns Molly that Colt is using her. Billy’s interest in her, however, is not all that ‘fatherly’. His name reminds one of Billy the Kid and Bonnie Parker.

Billy was of course young and innocent once himself, but his experiences with the music industry has made him really cynical. At first, the film appears to be a sentimental Romantic drama. Parker retires to the peace and quiet of the countryside.

And I picked up a couple more years on you babe, and that's all
But I've been down more roads than you, and that's all
Now, I' m tired of running where you're only learning to crawl
You're heading for somewhere, but I've been that somewhere
Found it was nowhere at all

(Bob Dylan: A Couple Of More Years)

As the film progresses, it explores  the heart of darkness, with black humour abounding, that ‘s more in tune with the Edgar Allan Poe-influenced  French Symbolist poets. The three stars of ‘Hearts of Fire’ get together in the rock n roll atmosphere of the city. It’s quite Hell-like, full of cynicism, pessimism, and degeneracy.

The critics of the movie do not realize that the joke is on them. For one thing after Billy states from the stage that the gal singer’s name is Molly Parker, she’s referred to as ‘Maggie’.

A poetic reference:

Maggie and Milly, and Molly and May
Went down to the beach (to play on day)
Maggie discovered a shell that sang
So sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and

(ee cummings: Maggie And Milly, And Molly and May)

An admirer of a preRomantic writer is the modernist romantic ee cummings.

One of the famous poems by the preRomantic:

Bring me my body of burning gold
Bring e my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear; O clouds unfold!
Bring  me my chariot of fire
(Willim Blake: Jerusalem; Proverbs of Heaven and Hell)

And another:

And what shoulder, and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart
And when thy heart began to beat
What dread hand and what dead feet?

(Willim Blake: Tyger, Tyger)

Put’em together, and what have you got:

Hearts Of Fire!

That movie can be interpreted as a mischievous spoof on the rather serious, and fact-based, movie “Chariots Of Fire”. That film is about two British runners, and their determination to win races fair and square.  This is Molly’s desire also – at the end of ‘Hearts of Fire’, Molly races alongside of Colt’s sports car using Billy Parker’s motorcycle. She rides off into the sunset by herself as befitting a white-hatted cowboy in an old Western movie.

And here is the movie…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S5niOEpr0Qs&t=1s

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 study 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.

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 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 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.

But now, the track we have chosen to end side 1 of the vinyl edition is Dylan’s take of “Uranium Rock”.  At least that is what Aaron calls it.   Or it might be “Rock ’em dead” which is how Tony has referred to it on this site.

This version was recorded in Philadelphia in 1986 backed by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. The feeling here is that this would make for a suitably rocking ending to side 1, making you want to get up and turn over for more on side 2.

But now if you are a real aficionado of Untold Dylan you will know this song under another name because in December 2016 we reviewed another performance of  the song under the name “Rock em Dead.”   Indeed Tony has listed the song as a Dylan composition and it is placed at number 400 in the alphabetical index of all Dylan’s songs.

https://youtu.be/N_tyciW_IRo

The view at that point was that “Dylan’s song owes something to ‘Uranium Rock’ by Warren Smith.   Dylan keeps the ‘Money, money honey’ line and the basic riff, but ups the tempo until it becomes truly frenetic.”

And of course Dylan knows Smith’s work for he also performed Smith’s “Red Cadillac and black moustache” at three of the gigs.

Either way this really is great fun, and should not be put down as in some obscure and unexplained way “messing with the minds of his fans” as Heylin suggested.  Most Dylan fans that I know are far more knowledgeable and far more sophisticated than that.

So let’s track back to the song written by Warren Smith and listening to his original it’s easy to see why he was recognized by the Rockabilly Hall Of Fame.  But whether Dylan is arranging his song or creating a new one, you’ll have to judge.

Dylan is a big fan of Smith’s work, he repeatedly featured his work on his Theme Time Radio Hour show, playing Smith’s records, “Red Cadillac And A Black Mustache”, “So Long, I’m Gone”, “Ubangi Stomp” as well as “Uranium Rock”. Dylan himself also went on to record “Red Cadillac And A Black Mustache” himself in 2001, for a Sun Records Tribute album (we wrote about that previously in the “Why does Dylan like” series). He also returned to quote the title in the recently released “I Contain Multitudes”.

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

(PS We are currently contemplating issue two versions of the LP, one with this track labelled Rock em Dead and one where it is called Uranium Rock.  That way everyone should be satisfied).

By Tony Attwood

“What are Dylan’s songs about?”

That is a very good question, and not an easy one to answer – at least not without going through every song he has written or co-written (of which, as you will know if you have been paying attention, there are over 600) and considering what each is about.

Which is what the series of little articles under the title “Dylan’s songs: the themes” that I have been writing for the past few months is all about.  Taking each song and trying to tie down its core subject matter, and then look and see what we have overall.

When I started I had no idea what the answer to the question “What are Dylan’s songs about?” would be, or indeed if there was an answer.  I didn’t know any book that had done such an analysis across all of his songs, and no one came along to tell me of one (which would have saved me a lot of trouble) so I have ploughed on, from the few songs we have of the 1950s, through to 1979.

However as I prepared for the series I recognise that a lot of books and articles about Dylan start from the premise that Dylan is primarily writing about x or y, and then find examples in his songs to prove this.  What I hope the series on the themes within Dylan’s songs shows is that you can do this with practically any topic.  If you want to prove that Dylan is concerned about the rural poor, there are plenty of examples.  If you want to show that his central theme is that of moving on – something he reveals year after year with the Never Ending Tour – there are lots of songs that give weight to that argument.

You can, in fact, find songs that can lend weight to any such argument.

So my first interest was to know the answer in broad terms, what are the most common subjects that Dylan deals with in his songs?  The number after each topic is the number of songs identified in that category, with each song only being allocated to one topic.  (There are of course many other topics Dylan has written on; these two lists only include the most common).

The 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: 8
• People: 8
• Lost love: 17
• Love, desire: 18
• Faith: 19

And in case you are interested in the overall winners in terms of topics for the songs of the first two decades of Dylan’s writing – they are love and lost love.  Which may not surprise you, but it certainly surprised me.

Dylan’s song writing exploded in the 1960s and over much of the decade sustained a level of productivity that was not, and indeed could not have been, kept up.  He was just pouring out songs year after year until suddenly in 1968 he stopped, and wrote only one song – which he delivered late (it was Lay Lady Lay).

Of course part of that productivity came from the somewhat artificial period of Dylan being shut up in the Basement with the rest of the gang, with songs being improvised without any sense at the time that they would be kept for posterity.  So it could be argued that we should not really be counting all those creations, but even without the Basement songs, the output of Dylan in the 1960s was prodigious.

But in fact, what we can also see was a constant movement in the themes that Dylan was interested in.  Indeed what is fascinating is the sheer speed at which Dylan could pick up a new lyrical theme and run with it.

1961’s compositions were dominated by humour – although suddenly twice in the midst of the amusing pieces we got songs of tragedy or sadness, most notably Man on the street  And indeed, it was when I saw the list of 1961 songs in order and thought about their subject matter that I realised I really did want to analyse Bob’s songs by lyrical theme and date.

What struck me so strongly was this sequence of composition…

• Talkin New York 
• Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues.
• Talkin Folk Lore Centre Blues
• Talkin Hava Negeilah blues

These are not just talking blues – they are very amusing talking blues.  OK the humour is very dark in places, but still they are in utter contrast to Man on the street which was composed next.

That ability to switch subject, theme and style in one leap struck me as utterly remarkable in a songwriter who was composing so many songs.  Yes, one can do it if one is writing maybe one song a month, because in a month your whole life can turn upside down.  A friend can die, one might have a huge success with a venture, a child can be born, a lover leaves.  A lot can happen in a month.

But what becomes clear when we look at Dylan chronologically is that he can jump from subject to subject in matter of days.

In 1962 Dylan wrote 36 songs – or at least 36 songs of which we have recordings.  It is an astonishing number by itself, but when the variety of themes that we find within the songs is taken into account then it becomes more than extraordinary.  This is where we start to see the mark of a driven genius.  Just consider this sequence of songwriting.

• Quit your Lowdown Ways (a song which says you have to change, and learn to do the right thing)
• Baby I’m in the mood for you (a song of passion and absolute desire)
• Down the Highway (a song of leaving and moving on)

Yes of course other song writers have changed their subject matter in a matter of a handful of songs, but Dylan seems to have been doing this week after week through the year.

1963 gave us 31 Dylan compositions, including some of Dylan’s strongest and fiercest commentaries on the world he saw around him, from Masters of War onwards through the year. And he kept coming back to that anger from other perspectives, with songs such as With God on our Side and Only a pawn in their game  written later in the year.   But amidst this he could be phenomenally upbeat, positive and hopeful as with When the ship comes in.

Of course this is not to say that Dylan jumped from subject to subject all the time – but he could do.  Just consider this sequence of songwriting

• Troubled and I Don’t Know Why – a song which suggests everything is wrong
• When the ship comes in  – suggesting there is going to be a really good time ahead
• The Times they are a-Changing – no matter what we do things are going to improve
• Percy’s Song – reflecting on the total and absolute failure of justice
• The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll – the sheer horrors of contemporary life

Just that sequence alone puts pay to any notion that Dylan had a message – unless one claims that his message was that the world is going in every direction at once.

Now through this sequencing, I am not trying to suggest anything other than the inescapable fact that Dylan has had the ability to write about all sorts of themes, and move from one to another with ease.

However as I pause in this endeavour of seeking to understand his writing overall, rather than this writing in terms of each individual song, I am struck by the final year that I have looked at thus far: 1979.  19 songs written that year, and every one of them was a faith song.  1978, no faith songs – and there wasn’t even a build-up to the songs of 1979.  The last three songs of 1978 were

• Legionnaire’s disease
• Slow Train
• Do right to me baby (do unto others)

The first one of these is simply about the illness.  “Slow Train” although firmly associated with the first religious album, is (if you listen to the lyrics afresh without the thought that the rest of the album is religious) primarily about being out of step with those around you, and indeed with the world – it is a song about moving on.  And the final song contains the message – “let me be me”.

My view, therefore, is that this venture of analysing the subject matter of Dylan’s songs which seems not to have been done before, of seeing all the Dylan compositions in the order in which they were written, and looking at the meaning of each, is really informative if we want to understand Dylan’s view of the world and Dylan’s unique creativity when it comes to songwriting.

I hope to explore this further in later articles in the “Year by Year” series.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics who study 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.

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 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

The poet Dylan undoubtedly envisions the archetype bully, the neighborhood bully from The Little Rascals, Tommy ‘Butch’ Bond, who played the role twenty-seven times between 1931 and 1938. Our Gang, as the series was originally called, began in 1922 and is still one of the most successful comic film series in history. Up to 1944, 220 episodes are recorded, feature and cartoon versions are being released well into the twentieth century (the 1994 cinema version is a hit), in the twenty-first century even coloured versions are re-released, and on Netflix The Rascals do well again in 2018, almost a hundred years after the first episode.

It is, therefore, a seductive, and most likely true, fantasy to imagine the little boy Robert Zimmerman sitting cross-legged on the living room floor in front of the telly, after the Saturday bath with combed hair in his pyjamas with a glass of lemonade, experiencing deep satisfaction when that mean bully Butch once again loses out.

Thirty years later that image from his youth looms up again when the protest singer ventures onto the politically slippery ice of the Israeli question. Although… “political”?

“I don’t consider anything that I write political,” as Dylan writes in the early sixties, in the (withdrawn) liner notes for “Let Me Die In My Footsteps” on The Freewheelin’ (1963). Until well into the 90’s this is a refrain in the interviews, sometimes unsolicited, but mostly as a reaction to a journalist who unsuspectingly uses the adjective “political”: “I don’t write political songs.” Even “Masters Of War”, Dylan declares defensively at a press conference in London, 1997, “is a very non-political song.” Remarkable, but even more remarkable is Dylan’s explanation: “I don’t know what politics is, to tell you the truth. I don’t know the difference of right-wing or left-wing. I don’t know those differences.”

The addition then confirms what we have suspected since the 1960s: Dylan has a rather private, simplistic conception of the meaning of the word “politics”. He seems to think it means something like “being active for an official political party”. Already in 1965, in an English interview with Ray Coleman, he argues quite naively:

“No politics. It would be just impossible for me to stand up and be associated with any political party. They’re all crap – every single one of them is crap. They all think they are better than the next one. Huh.”

In that light, Dylan’s commentary on the through and through political “Neighborhood Bully” is easier to grasp. Nonsensical, but still traceable within his own, simple-minded definition of “politics”:

“And Neighborhood Bully, to me, is not a political song, because if it were, it would fall into a certain political party. If you’re talking about it as an Israeli political song – even if it is an Israeli political song – in Israel alone, there’s maybe twenty political parties. I don’t know where that would fall, what party”.
(Rolling Stone interview with Kurt Loder, 1984)

“You can’t come around and stick some political-party slogan on it,” the bard clarifies. And in the Robert Hilburn interview, 1992, he’s still on the wrong track: “They call a lot of my songs political songs, but they never really were about politicians.” By the way, in that same conversation he admits, half-jokingly, to having written maybe one political song: “All Along The Watchtower”.

Granted, the term is not very clear-cut, but in general we mean something like “regarding the governance of a community’, in which community is understood very broadly. After all, we also do “politics” in the office space, at the football club, in the classroom and we already did in the sandbox.

And that’s where things go wrong, in all those interviews with Dylan. Journalists and radio interviewers who, quite rightly, casually refer to the political impact of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” or “Blowin’ In The Wind” really don’t think that those songs are meant as party political tunes for the Farmer Labor Party, the communists or the Republicans, but refer to the common, to the dictionary meaning of “politics”: meaning the songs highlight and comment on social power structures.

Oddly enough, Dylan’s reflex, the retort that his songs are not party-political songs, is never corrected. Awe for the man’s status or for his supposed intellectual superiority, presumably.

It is only in the twenty-first century that increased insight seems to descend. After some forty years of “not writing political songs”, Dylan suddenly says in 2001, in response to the humour in the songs of “Love And Theft”:

“Basically, the songs deal with what many of my songs deal with – which is business, politics and war, and maybe love interest on the side.”

(Rolling Stone interview with Mikal Gilmore).

Suddenly claiming, without blinking his eyes, that the songs of “Love And Theft” are just like “many of my songs” political.

Shortly afterwards, in the autobiography Chronicles Vol. 1, the writer uses the term (finally) in the common, universal sense. Looking back, Dylan will probably then qualify “Neighborhood Bully” as a political song after all, in a Chronicles Vol. 2 that will hopefully be released someday.

The song is an odd song out in Dylan’s catalogue, similar to the position of a “Give Ireland Back To The Irish” in McCartney’s portfolio or Sting’s “Russians” – simplistic, one-dimensional, pamphlet-like songs about complex, politically loaded problems. Dylan gives the song some literary cachet by making an allegory of it, by introducing a personified “Israel” as a thinking and acting man, as “just one man”. Personifications the poet Dylan uses all the time, in all the decades of his writing career, but he rarely writes allegories. “Dignity” is the clearest exception, other songs could be considered allegorical, but are poetically vague enough to escape that stamp (“Maggie’s Farm”, “Dear Landlord”, “Man In The Long Black Coat”, to name but a few).

That attractive, misty, Dylanesque poetic vagueness lacks the unique “Neighborhood Bully”. All right, the choice of title echoes a romantic, nostalgic residue from his Minnesota youth, and at most the last two lines are, in terms of literary sparkle, out of tune as well. But that’s all. The lyrics themselves are unsubtle, disparate and even a bit pushy, they reveal the same kind of Calimero complex as we already know from “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”: no matter how well-intended and even admirable the protagonist operates, “they” stone him. The power of the ironic reversal to consistently refer to the good guy as “bully” is milked out after two verses but is then still served up for another nine verses – no Dylan glasses are rose-tinted enough to be touched, surprised or moved for that long.

Outside Israel, the lyrics do not make many waves. In reviews of Infidels the song is usually ignored, maybe mentioned without much clangour of clarions, focusing mainly on Dylan’s passionate singing, the guitar duel of grandmasters Knopfler and Taylor, and the driving, gospel-rock-like musical accompaniment.

Bordering on embarrassed disregard, all in all, which seems to be shared by the master. In the studio he still devotes quite some time, by his standards, on a definitive recording (returning to it a month later, this time with Rolling Stone Ron Wood on guitar), but after that the song disappears into the drawer; Dylan never plays the song on stage.

Not even when he’s in Israel, in 1987. When journalist Robert Hilburn asks, a day after the concert in Tel Aviv, the master acts surprised:

“I hadn’t even thought of that song. I probably should have but I didn’t. It would seem to be an appropriate song. Maybe I’ll play it in Germany (laughs).”

Not very convincing. Dylan has, as always, thought carefully about the setlist, performs a surprising finale, the very Jewish “Go Down, Moses” (with the refrain line Let my people go) and two days later in Jerusalem he plays a totally different set (in extremis; not one single song is repeated), again without “Neighborhood Bully”.

Perhaps he shies away from the song’s charge and the propagandistic abuse that can be (and is) made of it. An understandable reticence, as is evident after a look at the internet forums where the song is discussed. On the American expectingrain.com, the British Untold Dylan, on YouTube… inviting a discussion about the song immediately gets out of hand, turns into poisonous, intolerant bickering about Palestine, bombings, UN resolutions, Gaza and arms supplies, in short: into the well-known, fruitless hostile debate and flame wars.

In Israel, they do like it, though. As late as in 2016, the country’s oldest newspaper, the venerable Haaretz, recalls that “rare declaration of full-throated Israel support by a mainstream American rocker” in a short article on the occasion of Dylan’s seventy-fifth birthday. The journalist Gabe Friedman states in the article that “some of the lyrics sound like they could have been taken from a speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” and that other lines “are reminiscent of the 2015 campaign ads for religious Zionist political party Habayit Hayehudi (The Jewish House)”.

Writer and university lecturer Adeyinka Makinde reports from Westminster University that the song is particularly popular with the Likud, as an “after-party conference boogie-down number” and according to the Jerusalem Post it is “a favourite among the Dylan-loving residents of the territories”.

There is, therefore, a slight disappointment when Dylan does not play “Neighborhood Bully” at any of his six concerts in Israel (1987, 1993 and 2011). Which is, in itself, not too surprising. After all, Dylan himself is, as we all know, perhaps the biggest bully of them all.

Publishers’ footnote:  As is noted in the article above when this song was reviewed previously, the commentary immediately degenerated into political, religious and economic assertions without evidence, and as Jochen says, “into the well-known, fruitless hostile debate and flame wars.”  As a result I was forced to ban numerous readers from commenting on the site, and remove a large number of posts.  You may feel it unreasonable and unfair, and you may feel that your comment is perfectly legitimate and worthy of publication, but in this case you’re not making the decision.  If I think the comment is unhelpful it will be removed.  If I think it is very unhelpful the author will be banned.  Autocratic, dictatorial, pathetic, unreasonable … yes my approach probably is all of those, but I have better things to do with my time as publisher of Untold than mediate political argument.  On the other hand if you would like to comment on the chord structure, guitar work, or use of phrasing, in a non-political, non-aggressive manner, that’s fine by me.

By Larry Fyffe

“Casablanca” is a movie that’s set in a French Protectorate during World War II; it features Humphrey Bogart as ‘Rick’, Igrid Bergman as ‘Ilsa’, and Claude Rains as ‘Renault’, a captain in the Vichy police.

Rick is cynical because his love affair with Ilsa did not last; he considers human nature fickle and self-centred; nevertheless, he helps members of the French resistance in their struggle against the Nazis occupation.

Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan draws from the film’s artistic well of memorable quotes.

There’s the Cafe scene in Casablanca containing the following dialogue:

Strausser: “I’m not entirely sure which side you’re on”
Renault: “I have no conviction if that’s what you mean. I blow with
the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy”
(Capablanca)

Dialogue that echoes in song lyrics below:

Praise be to Nero's Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
Eveybody's shouting, "Which side are you on?"
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

In the following song, Captain Renault’s amoral attitude is questioned. The wind symbolizes a spirit of unselfish love that rises above concern for one’s own physical existence:

Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind
(Bob Dylan, Blowing In The Wind)

The French police captain in the movie is no ideologue; he’s an opportunist who observes that at this point in time the Nazi occupiers are winning and that members of the French Resistance are being chased down. So best it be to present oneself as on side of the occupiers:

Renault: “This is the end of the chase”

A broader picture is painted in the song lyrics below. Painted in black because no matter what, death awaits everyone. This fact causes the singer/songwriter to combine the cynical attitudes of both Renault and Bogart, and grind it all down to the necessity of an individual having to make Existential decisions:

Well, I've walked over two hundred miles, look me over
It's the end of the chase, and the moon is high
It won't matter who loves who
You'll love me, or I'll love you
(Bob Dylan: When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky)

https://youtu.be/dLhJYQQn0Lc

Added is a line taken from another Bogart film:

Bogart: “All we’ve got is that maybe you love you, and maybe I love you (The Maltese Falcon).

In contrast to Renault, Rick chooses to side with the oppressed French (albeit colonists) rather than with the German oppressors; he makes a decision based on Romantic idealism:

On the other hand, the police captain’s remarks are cynical and sarcastic:

Renault: “The winning side would have paid you better”

The persona in the song lyrics below strikes out at such self-centred behaviour:

You've got a lot of nerve to say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on the side that's winning
(Bob Dylan: Positively Fourth Street)

The Devil in the movie, as in Milton’s epic poem ‘Paradise Lost’, gets the best lines:

Renault: “I like to think you killed a man. It’s the Romantic in me”

Akin to black humour that appears in the following song lyrics:

They say I shot a man named Gray
And took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks
And when she died it came to me
I can't help it if I'm lucky
(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

In the same series…

• Bob Dylan And Western Movies
• Bob Dylan And Films Noir
• Bob Dylan And The Movies Continued
• Bob Dylan and More Movies of Despair
• Movies And The Post Modern Technique: Tight Connection To My Heart
• Bob Dylan sees The Real You At Last.
• Bob Dylan and Movies: Absolutely Sweet Marie
• Bob Dylan At The Movies: Sweetheart Like You (Part I)
• Bob Dylan At The Movies: Sweetheart Like You (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And The Children Of Paradise
• Bob Dylan and The Movies: “My Name Is Penny Day”

So here we have “Dope Fiend Robber” by Bob Dylan and Nick Juno.

As we noted above, the lyrics by Dylan were clearly not finished, so Nick has kindly provided us with his amendments and additions in italics in the text that follows

I got shot from a gatling gun
In the uniform of your land
I was doing nothing else
But fighting for uncle sam

They took me to the infirmary
They had to give me something for my pain
It was morphine

In the hospital till ‘45
More or less half alive
They patched me up and I am glad
But now I got a habit and I got it bad

It caused me ruin and it caused me shame
My wife don’t even want my name
I was buying high day by day
All I do is pay and pay

I don’t want to harm no man
Hope that you can understand
Most need food to get along
I need dust inside inside my bones

I tried to rob the jewelry store
The police grabbed me at the door
They soon found out I use morphine
The papers called me a dope fiend

Nobody would go my bail
I couldn’t stay inside that jail
I didn’t mean to kill that man
But he held the keys right in his hand

They quickly caught me on the street
The police knocked me off my feet
The headlines on the Morning Star
Mad dope fiend killer back behind bars

They found me guilty at the trial
The Judge condemned me to die
Been on that morphine quite a while
But once I was somebody’s child

I don’t want your sympathy
An I’m not part of your society
But there’s a ghost who's chained to me
You’ll take my life and we both go free

And here it is.  A new old Dylan song, exclusive to Untold Dylan, thanks very much to Nick Juno.

• Lyrics © Bob Dylan and Nick Juno, Music © Nick Juno 2020.
• Published originally by Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

This article continues the reviews of the meanings of Bob Dylan’s songs of the 1970s.  Previous articles in this series have been…

• The meanings behind Bob Dylan’s 15 compositions of 1970
• The subject matter of Bob Dylan’s songs 1971-3
• The subject matter of Bob Dylan’s songs 1974
• Dylan songs of 1975: the meaning
• Dylan songs of 1976/7: the meanings
• Dylan songs of 1978: the meanings in Bob’s troubled year.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

I’m very excited about the set of performances in this post. Not only some of the finest for 1989, but some ‘best ever’ or at least ‘very hard to beat’ performances of these 1960s favourites. I’ve learned my lesson when it comes to proclaiming a ‘definitive’ performance of any song, not just because someone will come up with a better one, but because the performances change from year to year and you can’t compare chalk with cheese.

Nevertheless, if you can point me to a better performance of ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ (10-31-89) please do – maybe 1974, with the Band?

 The Ballad of Hollis Brown

And while you’re enjoying the crisp, kick-arse vocals, and GE Smith’s scratchy little riff, take a moment to admire this elegant piece of storytelling. With its roots in the dustbowl poverty that Woody Guthrie sang about, this deadly, driving blues adroitly takes us through the stages of mind that lead Hollis Brown to murder his children and himself. One moment the shotgun is ‘hangin’ on the wall’ and the next it is in his hands. It’s narrated in the second person (you), rare in story telling, most opting for he/she or I. This ‘you’ brings us right into Hollis’s state of being; we’re right there standing in his shoes:

‘Well your brain is a-bleeding
and your legs can’t seem to stand…’

Interestingly, neither the first person (I), or the third person (he/she) would work here.

Is there anything to match that? Well, I think there is, in a gentler, more acoustic vein. ‘Love Minus Zero No Limit’ has, for me, remained a mystery wrapped in an enigma, just like the subject of the song herself, the silent, all-knowing one. And yes, it is a love song, and a very tender one, but what are we to make of these two verses?

‘The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
In ceremonies of the horsemen
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of matchsticks
Crumble into one another
My love winks, she does not bother
She knows too much to argue or to judge.

The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles
Bankers' nieces seek perfection
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows cold and rainy
My love she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.’

I could write ten thousand words and still be no closer to understanding these lyrics. Since they are resistant to interpretation, they keep their mystery. In performance, combined with the music and vocalisation, they seem to fit perfectly.

Dylan has said that we can enjoy a song without understanding it. He’s right. The question is, not what do these words mean, but rather how do they fit in with the feeling-tone of the song. This is Dylan at his best – specific yet elusive, restrained yet passionate. Enjoy!

Love minus zero

It’s all over in 2mins 53 seconds, the length of a pop song. Could be a no-frills 1988 performance. At the end of the song we get some twangy guitar playing that is not GE Smith. That’s Dylan, an early emergence of Dylan as second lead guitar. I’ll have more to say about Dylan’s guitar playing later, but it’s enough at this point to note it, and the dissonant effect it creates.

People are heard to complain, ‘Why doesn’t Dylan sound like the old Dylan?’ Well, because he was so much younger then, but also there are times when he does. This ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (below) takes us right back to the 1966 performances, right down to the swooping harmonica break. Actually, this performance, direct and forthright, reminds me of the Concert for Bangladesh sound (1969). Dylan in full voice. Like many of Dylan’s sixties songs, Mr Tambourine Man’ expresses a yearning to escape, escape those ‘ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming’ and to get ‘far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.’ If you wonder why Dylan is celebrated as a poet, wrap your ears around this.

Mr Tambourine Man

One of simplest and most affecting love songs Dylan wrote is ‘One too many mornings.’ On the album, the song takes a mere 2.45 seconds, but its brevity is matched by its profundity. The ache of loneliness we might feel after a night of lovemaking, the alienation and distance from our own feelings.

‘From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they start to fade
And I turn my head back to the room
Where my love and I have laid
An' I gaze back to the street
The sidewalk and the sign
And I'm one too many mornings
An' a thousand miles behind’

Add to that the despair the artist might feel, the hopelessness of the quest for meaning.

‘It's a restless hungry feeling
That don't mean no one no good
When ev'rything I'm a-sayin'
You can say it just as good
You're right from your side
I'm right from mine’

Note the consummate clumsiness of the lines, the Okie grammar, rhyming good with itself, all to emphasise the artist’s confessed unfitness for the task. He don’t mean it folks – he can say it gooder.

In this 1989 performance, he doubles the length of the song, but doesn’t sacrifice brevity as he works through the verses in about 2.30 minutes and spends the next 3 minutes in guitar work, repeating a verse, and ending by trying to capture the exquisite nostalgia of the song in the frail tones of his harp.

One too many mornings.

We mustn’t be fooled by ‘Ramona’, (Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964). It may sound like a love song waltz; like a love song, assume an intimacy like a love song – but it is not that. Yes, it is a farewell song, but it is more than that. Like ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’, which it prefigures, ‘Ramona’ is an attack on false values, on living unauthentically, blinded by all the bullshit:

‘I see that your head
has been twisted and fed
with meaningless foam from the mouth…’

The music may sound gentle, but the attack is relentless, an expose of sorts of the subject’s underlying drive to conform. To be what others want you to be and not yourself is a grievous sin in Dylan’s moral universe. Peer pressure, we call it nowadays.

‘From fixtures and forces and friends
Your sorrow does stem
That hype you and type you
Making you feel
That you gotta' be just like them…’

This, raw, acoustic 1989 performance doesn’t spare anyone’s feelings, but there’s a certain compassion evident in the timbre of Dylan’s voice. This is no victory song.

Ramona.

Another farewell song from the same era, ‘It’s all over now Baby Blue’ gets the same raw, acoustic treatment. I noticed that the harmonica break at the end progresses to higher and higher notes until he seems to be squeezing out the highest notes, as if in search of a sound beyond audial range.

I have written about the emotion behind this song in Master Harpist 2, in relation to a 1995 performance, and described it as love’s last song. The issue is not so much living falsely, as in Ramona, but suffering the pain of a disappointed love:

‘the lover who’s just walked out your door
has taken all his blankets from the floor.’

But lurking behind this pain, there’s a sense of the greater moral emptiness and confusion of the great hippy, free-love movement.

‘The empty handed painter from your street
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheet.’

And always we are haunted by our vagabond past.

‘the vagabond who’s rapping at your door
is standing in the clothes that you once wore’

Despite the pain, we have to get up and get on with our lives. Strike another match. A very common saying, used to wonderful effect here, at the end of the song.

It’s all over now baby Blue.

‘Knocking on Heaven’s door’ is another kind of farewell song. We heard a very intense vocal on this one in 1987, with the Grateful Dead, (See Net 1987), and this is a lot rougher but no less intense. Dylan tears out the lyrics. Especially recommended is Dylan’s high-pitched squeaky harp work so typical of 1989. Quite jazzy and experimental; he seems to want to push the little instrument to its very limits. The  combination of Dylan on the acoustic guitar and GE Smith playing electric works well in this case. A knock-out version.

This performance may not match the most magnificent 1988 ‘Gates of Eden’ (See NET 1988), but the problem is mostly with the rowdy audience. I nearly excluded it on those grounds, but in the end Dylan’s vibrant vocal proved too persuasive. If you can listen through the idiotic chatter, you’ll hear genius at work, filling these mysterious lyrics with an equally mysterious passion.

Knocking on Heaven’s door

In NET 1988 part 2, I called ‘I shall be released’ a rather delicate, oblique little song. None of us are to blame, of course, we’ve all been framed. We cry out loud for salvation. You’ll have to decide how this one stacks up beside the 1988 performance. A little lyrical sweetness from GE Smith’s guitar.

Gates of Eden

In NET 1988 part 2, I called ‘I shall be released’ a rather delicate, oblique little song. None of us are to blame, of course, we’ve all been framed. We cry out loud for salvation. You’ll have to decide how this one stacks up beside the 1988 performance. A little lyrical sweetness from GE Smith’s guitar.

I shall be released

The template for this fast-paced ‘It’s alright Ma…’ (1964) was created during the Tom Petty years in the mid-eighties and has changed little since. It is Dylan’s most comprehensive protest song, an all-out assault on everything false and phoney, the great rip-off machine. It’s his last blast at the world before departing the protest scene.

In the light of Dylan’s later development, and conversion to Christianity,  consider the terms of his attack.

‘Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred.’

The real crime is the desacralisation of culture from religion to sex. We are ruled by Mammon, the god of money, and he blasphemes: ‘money doesn’t talk it swears…’

And yet the song does not despair; it has a message of resilience because all this crap getting thrown at us is just ‘life and life only.’ And we ‘can make it.’

Do the words just come pouring out! I loved the flat, nasal delivery of the mid-sixties, which constrained the passion of the song, and the 1974 howling version, but have grown to enjoy these hard-out fast versions. This one doesn’t spark the way the 1990 performance will, but it gives us something to look forward to.

‘It’s all right Ma.’

Kia Ora

• 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

Time and distance separate the singer from his love, as if all this happened may years ago and far away ‘where the winds grow heavy on the borderline.’

Those who are always searching for autobiographical meaning in Dylan’s songs might assume the ‘borderline’ to refer to Canada, and that may be so, but it speaks more of that borderline between memory and desire

Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Here we take a look at Dylan and Baez’ performance at Peace Sunday, June 6, 1982

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UEhEcz7iKsw

Whilst not the last time they appeared on stage together… Joan Baez joined Bob for two songs in Germany in 1984… Hamburg 5/31/84 and Munich 6/2/84. They sang “Blowin’ In The Wind” at both shows plus “I Shall Be Released” at Hamburg.

They also both performed separately at Live Aid in 1985 and were both onstage for The We Are The World finale… but I think Bob scuttled off pretty quickly.

Then they were also both on the same bill at Fleadh Mor festival in 1993 (Waterford, Ireland) but did not perform together.

But going back to Peace Sunday…the set list is

• Blowin In The Wind
• With God On Our Side
• A Pirate Looks At Forty

The question would be…why would Dylan/Baez choose that last song in what is a very short set…  It’s a Jimmy Buffett song from 1974… Apparently its part of his “Big 8”..ie the list of songs he has performed at almost every concert. But it’s a very strange choice, right?

https://youtu.be/5ODo23TnVQs

There is something wonderful about the way Bob and Joan will perform in front of these vast crowds, and the two of them have not particularly practised the song together.  The instruction is clearly – “I’ll start and you join in when you can”.

The lyrics below are those published elsewhere for this song, but I (Tony) am not convinced they are 100% what Bob and Joan sing.  There’s also a moment where Bob goes off track with the lyrics too (so it’s not all me).

A footnote from Tony: This is one of those songs which once you have performed it, there just seems to be an incredible urge to sing it again.  It’s impossible to describe what it is in songs like these, but something within the music and lyrics carries the performer (amateur or professional) back to another world.  You sing, you play, you are there.  I suspect this is why Bob and Joan performed it.  They felt that special something with this song.

Some songs are intellectual – the message is in the lyrics, you understand them in your head.  I’d argue “God on our side” is one such.  But some songs like A Pirate are just pure emotion (at least when one performs them).  Lines like “I feel like I’ve drowned” after the two lines that have come before, puts one inside the pirate’s mind.  One is there, one feels what he feels at where his life has left him, and how the past has gone.

I hear it, I feel it.

Bob Dylan And The Golden Loom (Part I) appears here.

by Larry Fyffe

Black the Puritan view of mankind is, but as a poet, Edward Taylor is creative. In his poems, he cannot resist Baroque conceits, nor the flowery images of the ornamental Rococo literary style.

In the poem following, the Puritan poet compares himself, via an extended metaphor, to a loom  worked by the masterful hands of the Almighty:

Make me thy loom then, knit therein this twine
And make thy holy spirit, Lord, wind quills
Then weave the web thyself. The yarn is fine
Thine ordinances make my fulling mills
Then dye the same in heavenly colours choice
All pinked with varnished flowers of paradise
(Edward Taylor: Housewifery)

The singer/songwriter quoted below reveals that he’s aware of Taylors’ Metaphysical style, though  long ago the poet to paradise has gone:

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

Coincidence or not, there’s the Dylanesque ‘rhyme twist” in the poem and song:~ ‘twine’/’fine’; ~ ‘shine”/’wine’.

If you want it, you can have ~ ‘shine’/’wine’: ~ ‘fine’/’wine:

Nay, though I make no pay for this red wine
And scarce do say I thank you for it: strange thing!
Yet were thy silver skies my beer bowl fine
I find my Lord would fill it to the brim
Then make my life, Lord, to thy praise proceed
For thy rich blood, which is my drink indeed
(Edward Taylor: Stupendous Love ! All Saints' Astonishment!)

Bob Dylan, having a Jewish background, with Edward Taylor disagrees:

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

Below, the Christian point of view:

The human frame, my glorious Lord, I spy
A golden still with heavenly choice drugs filled
(Edward Taylor: The Human Frame, My Glorious Lord, I Spy)

Below, that point of view is mocked:

Someone must have slipped a drug in your wine
You're gulping it down, and you've lost your mind
(Bob Dylan: Pay In Blood)

With the same motif as in Taylor’s aforementioned poems, anaphora abounds in the following lines:

Shall not thy rose my garden fresh perfume
Shall not thy beauty my dull heart assail
Shall not thy golden gleams run through this gloom
Shall my black velvet mask thy fair face veil?
Pass over my faults: shine forth, bright sun ; arise!
Enthrone thy rosy self within my eyes
(Edward Taylor: The Reflection)

In the song lyrics below, the Dylanesque twist abounds: ~ ‘perfume’/’gloom’; ~ ‘perfume’/’loom’,
and ~’assail’/’veil’; ~ ‘tail’/’veil’:

I walk across the bridge in the dismal light
Where all the cars are stripped between the gates of night
I see the trembling lion with the lotus flower tail
And then I kiss your lips as I lift your veil
But you're gone, and then all I seem to recall is the smell of perfume
And your golden loom
(Bob Dylan: Golden Loom)

Nevertheless, the singer/ songwriter indicates he’s been netted more than once by followers of the “Fisher of Men”, and it’s all because of their golden loom:

Smoky autumn night, stars up in the sky
I see the sailing boats across the bay go by
Eucalyptus trees hang above the street
And I turn my head, for you're approaching me
Moonlight on the water, fisherman's daughter
Floating in to my room
With a golden loom
(Bob Dylan: Golden Loom)

by mr tambourine

When it comes to Bob Dylan, there always has to be some kind of hype involved – and for good reason.

There’s probably a lot of people who will never understand – but when you do understand, the man cannot stop surprising you, be sure of that.

The only live performer that can be introduced as a Nobel laureate.  Which means, his lyrics are life-changing.

Some people will doubt his voice, doubt the musical arrangements during the concert, saying how he butchered it, it sounds nothing like on the record.

I am not against people who choose certain periods of his career over other periods, or people who think he’s not as good as he was before or stuff like that. People who politely express their honest opinion. I’m not against those people at all.

I’m against people who flat-out insult the man without any reason. Like it’s Bob Dylan’s fault why certain people cannot keep cool for at least 30 seconds in a single day.

I have friends who love artists like Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Nick Cave – but none of them like Bob Dylan. And I’m like – why?

Any of those kind of artists would give anything to have the catalogue and the reputation of Bob Dylan.

I think Dylan really shows what a performer and, yes, you hear that right, entertainer, should do!

I think the audience has changed more than Bob Dylan has changed and are demanding very different things from those which they used to.

Going to a Bob Dylan show is cool simply because you’re in for a treat in any kind of way. First of all, there is this aura of a genius, of course, and the mystique. And it really never disappoints.

Whether he’s 20 or 78, doesn’t matter; I haven’t found too many flaws in any Dylan period I’ve ever listened to, that can drive me away.

In any year ever you can find a performance that’s different than any other.

The most intriguing thing that’s always existed is the setlists. You really never know when Dylan is going to add a new song to the set.

Stockholm experienced that in 2019, when Can’t Wait and Girl From The North Country got added instead of Cry A While and Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright, just when we thought the set would never change.

2019 has had one of the steadier setlists in Bob’s entire live career, but even in that kind of year we witnessed some unexpected additions.

Other than the two already mentioned, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues got a couple of closing instrumental versions in Europe. Dignity, of all songs, got 6 attempts.

Who would’ve thought Lenny Bruce would be back?

Or Not Dark Yet with what seems to be the first arrangement change ever (at least melody wise)?

Let’s not forget Bob suddenly playing the guitar every single night on the Fall Tour!   That hasn’t happened since 2012 at least, but maybe even more.

What I have learned by uploading many different performances throughout the years is that there is no end and you will never know.

Playing a song like Saving Grace for example, for the first time since 1980, in 2003, 23 years later.  Then playing it in 2004 and 2005 and then not playing it until once in 2012!? I mean, who would’ve predicted that??

Who would’ve predicted a song like Waiting For You, a Dylan original song from 2002, to be played twice in 2005 and then 150 times in 2013, 2014 and 2015. I heard that it was even rehearsed or soundchecked before a show in 2018.

What about two songs like Shooting Star and Under The Red Sky for example, one from 1989 and one from 1990.

Both played every year (except Under The Red Sky was skipped in 2011) from 1990 to 2013 and then suddenly he stopped playing them?

Or the one outing for Billy 4, in 2009?!! 36 years after being released on Par Garrett And Billy The Kid?

As you see, it might depend on the location.

Stockholm has had many surprises in the set throughout the years. Stockholm is also I think the city where Olof Bjorner lives, a great Dylan researcher. And ultimately, the city of the Nobel Prize commitee.

I can give you a few examples about Stockholm:

1. 1981 only performance of She Belongs To Me that year, played as an opener and played for the first time since 1976 and would not be played again until 1988.
2. 1991 last ever performance of Man Gave Names To All The Animals
3. 1998 rare performance of Watchtower as an opener and with a very unusual arrangement only used in ’98
4. 2002 first Solid Rock performance since 1981
5. 2005 last performance of Bye and Bye
6. 2007 two nights, both nights had Country Pie performed, first time since 2004 and last two times ever
7. 2009 Billy 4 as mentioned already, live debut
8. 2013 Stockholm featured an already mentioned Waiting For You being played for the very first time since 2005 and was the beginning of a 2013-2015 streak. Also, the so far last ever performance of It’s Alright Ma with a very rare arrangement only used twice (previously in Oslo).
9. 2017 Standing In The Doorway first performance since 2005 and last ever so far.
10. 2019 Stockholm, already mentioned earlier in this post.

One of those other specific places I could think about are Oslo and Rome.

Everyone might remember the two crazy Rome nights in 2013 with some of the last performances of many songs and many first and only performances of all songs in 2013. Completely different set!

How about Oslo?

Oslo was the beginning of the Sinatra phase live! First time multiple standards were played was in Oslo 2015.

Oslo 2019 had one of only two performances of Boots Of Spanish Leather, first since 2013 Rome. Oslo-Rome, Oslo-Rome… Do you see what I mean?

Is it an accident that, after playing What Was It You Wanted in 1990 pretty frequently, Bob would play it only once in 1991 in Glasgow, and then not play it until 1995 in Edinburgh of all places and burying it?

Is it an accident that I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine gets played in Dublin 2005 and then not played again until 2011 in Cork of all places before burying it.

Is it an accident that Down Along The Cove gets played in Rome 2006 for the last time so far?

Also, how does Dylan decide when it’s over for a certain song and stops playing it?

He usually likes to stick to some songs for some time before burying them (temporarily at least).

Many of Dylan’s extremely long songs get refused for example to be played live. Yet again, Highlands got 9 attempts in 1999, 2000 and 2001.

Brownsville Girl got only one attempt in 1986 with only the chorus spinning around for 4 minutes. I also heard it was rehearsed or soundchecked in 1995.

Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, no live performances.  Desolation Row, of course, has had multiple ones, but not as much as it probably should have.

So, the moral of the story is, is it fair to write off any Dylan song and consider it buried forever?

Absolutely not!  Some songs seem unlikely of course, but never count any song off!

Remember Romance in Durango being played in London 2003, first time since 1976. Now that I mentioned it, London is one of those occasions where Bob delivers rarities. Waiting For You was debuted there in 2005.

Remember Hazel being played in 2004 and 2005.   Remember We Better Talk This Over being played in 2000, for the first time since 1978.

Even the best songs like Blowin’ In The Wind, Like A Rolling Stone, Times They Are A-Changin’ and Mr Tambourine Man get left out for a few years even.   It’s been a decade since Times They Are A-Changin and Mr Tambourine were played.

Don’t you know that Watered Down Love, although buried in 1981, was actually rehearsed in 1984 and even soundchecked in 1998?

Don’t you know that Angelina, although not played live ever, was soundchecked multiple times. At least twice in 1999 and 2000.   There’s also a version included in Masked And Anonymous Outtakes from 2003.

That’s why I can never count out any song. Not even Changing Of The Guards and Caribbean Wind. None.

Remember Handy Dandy being debuted in 2008, 18 years after the release of Under The Red Sky.

Remember that even the great Basement Tapes weren’t immediately played live. Dylan had to wait many years to play all those songs.   Remember that even a great album like New Morning hasn’t been played live that much.

Know that Mississippi was soundchecked in 2017 (last played in 2012), know that Emotionally Yours was soundchecked in 2002 (last played in 1993).

Know that Shooting Star was soundchecked in 2014 (last played in 2013) or that I Want You was soundchecked in 2008 (last played in 2005).

I think after this pandemic is over, Bob has something to surprise us with as soon as touring gets allowed and concerts and events get approved all over the world.

by Jochen Markhorst

“Folk music,” says Dylan in the chaotic, unserious New York Post interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston in the late summer of 1965, “the only music where it isn’t simple. It’s weird, man, full of legend, myth, bible and ghosts. I’ve never written anything hard to understand, not in my head, anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs. They were out of sight.”

“Like what songs?” the ladies ask.

“Little Brown Dog,” Dylan answers, and he sings: “I bought a little brown dog, its face is all gray. Now I’m going to Turkey flying on my bottle.”

It’s – again – a half-serious answer. “Little Brown Dog” indeed is an ancient, bizarre song that goes all the way back to “When I Was A Little Boy”, echoes of which can be heard in “Nottamun Town”, which Dylan will turn into “Masters Of War”. It’s a chain of songs through the ages and across the continents – all those songs are connected, as Dylan said in that remarkable MusiCares speech, in 2015. “I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. It’s just different, saying the same thing.”

In this interview, fifty years earlier, the young Dylan already demonstrates this: he improvises on the spot a variation on the original text of “Little Brown Dog”, which he probably knows in Judy Collins’ version (on Golden Apples Of The Sun, 1962):

I buyed me a little dog its color it was brown
Taught him to whistle to sing and dance and run
His legs they were fourteen yards long his ears they were broad
Round the world in half a day on him I could ride
Sing taddl’o day

The song has also been recorded, in variations and with other titles, by Dave Van Ronk, Taj Mahal and Peggy Seeger (in 1957), among others.

Dylan recorded the Van Ronk variant in 1970, which will be released as “Tattle O’Day” on The Bootleg Series: Another Self Portrait (2013). That text is nonsensical enough. Half a petting zoo passes by, from an oyster the chicken hatches a hare, the hare jumps over an attractive horse, sheep that supply wool sometimes, feathers at other times, but in 1965 Dylan adds a little more absurdity by also “flying to Turkey on a bottle”.

It is the cheerful nonsense of nursery rhymes, of children’s songs, not so much the “mystique of old folk songs”. Dylan’s weak-spot for the daring nonsense of nursery rhymes he demonstrates definitively on under the red sky (1990), but much earlier, in ’67, in the basement of the Big Pink, the love is already emerging. “The Mighty Quinn”, “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread”, “Apple Suckling Tree”… songs with simple, catchy melodies, with language and rhyme fun and above all: with exuberant tattle.

And that’s where the foolish little miniature “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” comes in.

Is it, though? The refrain line apple’s got your fly and verse fragments like a little chicken down on his knees breathe the same insane anarchy as it ain’t my cup of meat and underneath that apple suckling tree, but most of the verse lines of “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” are more traceable than the nonsense in those other children’s rhymes from The Basement Tapes.

The opening line of each verse, for example. “I went down to…” (the river, the corner, the beanery) echoes blues classics like “Crossroads” (I went down to the crossroads), old negro spirituals like the nineteenth-century “Down To The River To Pray” and a legendary folk song like “St. James Infirmary Blues” in Louis Armstrong’s 1927 jazz adaptation (I went down to the St. James Infirmary).

Remarkably, the rest of the first verse appears to be satirising a modern classic: “A Chance Is Gonna Come”, Sam Cooke’s immortal masterpiece. Conditional intent hardly seems conceivable; that would be bordering on disrespect. But still: Dylan’s storyteller goes to the river to see who was born, looks around and finds a spring chicken on its knees, and calls please. It gets very inviting to call in Sam Cooke:

I was born by the river
(…)
I said mother could you help me please?
(…)
Then I looked around
and I was right back down,
down on my knees

… implying that Dylan compares the protagonist of “A Change Is Gonna Come” to a kneeling, newborn squeaky spring chicken. No, that’s not very likely; Dylan’s awe for both Sam Cooke and the monumental song are well documented, culminating in his acclaimed interpretation of the song in 2004, at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.

The other three verses give no reason to suspect any underlying intention, either. The words are squeezed into a rather restrictive corset and don’t tell much more than that the narrator visits a certain place (the river, the corner, a beanery and a pumphouse) around a certain time (Saturday-morning, at half-past ten, at half-past twelve and the other night). He looks around, browsing, and successively discovers a kneeling chicken, his beloved, three farm animals and himself, and in the chorus each of those opponents pleads him not to tell one Henry that the “apple has your fly”.

The most obvious association with the apple + fly combination is the Mediterranean fruit fly, the rhagoletis pomonella, which is called apple fly in American English. It remains uncertain why the unknown Henry should not be informed of the presence of this harmful insect, popular among entomologists. It must be a surprise, presumably.

But then again, fly has many meanings. Baseball. Batsman Apple figured out pitcher Henry’s fly ball, and we are not supposed to tell. Or Apple cut Henry’s zipper out of his pants. Or snatched his favourite artificial fly from of his tackle box, who knows.

Legally, the world does not get to know the song until 1975, when it is released on the first official edition of The Basement Tapes. It is a polished, replayed version of the 1967 rough diamond. Levon Helm now takes care of the singing and does so very well. The Band has already more or less annexed the song; the song is instantly on the setlist when The Band starts touring again in 1969 (Winterland, San Francisco in April, Fillmore East, New York in May, and at Woodstock in August, for example).

For the sensitive Helm the tour is a revelation: “It was the first time in four years we hadn’t been booed when we played” (in his autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire, 1993). And consequently, in the following years, the song regularly makes appearances. It is still pretty obscure, though; The Band’s performance at Woodstock will not appear on the best-selling triple-LP (1970) due to legal struggles and half-hearted artistic objections, and “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” is not to be found on the famous “primal bootleg” Great White Wonder. But Levon does love the song, which fits him like a glove, which he really makes his own. Despite a potentially traumatic experience, by the way:

“My other recollection of that weekend is from Saturday night. I’d moved from the drums to the mandolin for Don’t Ya Tell Henry, and I touched my lip against the live microphone and saw a flash. I’d been shocked. It nearly blinded me. I went through the song, tears filling my eyes, my whole face on fire. Our equipment was new, remember, and probably hadn’t been grounded properly.”

The only time Dylan plays the song again is as a guest, at the Band’s New York New Year’s Eve performance ’71, where, to the surprise of the audience, a relaxed Dylan appears on stage to help to finish the set. In a good mood, the bard responds to shouting requests and decides to perform “Down In The Flood”, “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” and as bouncer “Like A Rolling Stone”.

Henry remains a line between Dylan and The Band in the decades that follow, as Levon tells in his book. In 1983 Helm and Richard Manuel do an acoustic tour of clubs and universities.

“At five o’clock on a February evening Rick and I were doing our soundcheck when Bob Dylan strolled in wearing a cashmere coat and a big fur hat. He was between tours and said he was just hanging out in the Village when he heard we were playing. He said, “Whatcha playin’ tonight?” and I told him we liked to open with “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” one of his songs. He borrowed one of Rick’s guitars, I picked up the mandolin, and we played some old tunes together. He stayed until about nine o’clock, then disappeared.”

But in the evening, during the performance, Levon is told that Dylan is at the bar, and lo and behold: when Manuel calls him, he actually climbs the stage and plays a few songs along.

When Robbie Robertson plunges into the first official release of The Basement Tapes in ’75, he discards the messy Basement recording on which Dylan sings, and plays with The Band their crystallized, superior version with Levon at the microphone.

Purely on musical grounds it is an excellent intervention. The musical historical value and the charm of the original, on The Bootleg Series 11 – The Basement Tapes Complete (2014), are of course irresistible to every Dylan fan, but the song really had become Levon’s, my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation, as Dylan writes after apple finally got Henry’s fly, after Helm’s death in April 2012.

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

In the video below Dylan explores for a moment his admiration for traditional Irish music, and this is followed by Liam Clancy telling a story of meeting Bob and going to the White Horse Tavern, which then introduces a version of The Parting Glass followed by the best cover of Restless Farewell ever.

In case you don’t know them, the Clancy Brothers were an incredibly influential Irish folk music ensemble who came to widespread notice and acclaim in the 1960s, taking Irish traditional music in America.  If you are interested in the music that influenced Bob Dylan in the early days, they should most certainly be part of your study.

They were rather oddly known for wearing Aran jumpers – something they complained about as their fame grew, wishing they’d never started wearing clothes that became unbearable under the TV lighting of the era, which threw out a huge amount of heat.  But that was their costume, and they were stuck with it.

They were, in fact, the ensemble that prepared the way for many other Irish groups, most notably the Dubliners.

Unlike some other “brother” ensembles The Clancy Brothers did include three brothers, Paddy, Tom and Liam, along with Tommy Makem, although the ensemble changed over time as Bobby Clancy also joined the group.  Paddy died in 1998.

They worked particularly with traditional Irish ballads, sea shanties and other traditional songs.  Here Restless Farewell, after an introduction from Bob.

Liam also recorded a version in the studio with his son Donal singing

This is Dylan’s cover of the Clancy Brothers own Eileen Aroon

And The Clancy’s own version

Other articles in the Dylan Nobody Knows series

• Remember Me and Black Cross
• Bob’s LGBT song and Christmas recitation
• Wynton Marsalis and Jacek Kaczmarski
• Jacek Kaczmarski – an epitaph, a diatribe, or a paean?
• The VD Songs

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 4200 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  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.

The index to all the 603 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, or indeed have an idea for a series of articles that the regular writers might want to have a go at, please do drop a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article to Tony@schools.co.uk

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which 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

Bob Dylan and Pygamalion part 1 is published here.

In the song lyrics following be a ‘gnostic-like’ vision, a twisted version of a song from ‘My Fair Lady,’ a musical that harks back to the ancient Greek mythology of Pygmalion:

Hold on, I've been led in to some kind of trap
Where we ask no quarter, no quarter we give
We're right down the street from the street where you live
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

The gloomy dark world in the song above contrasts with the the world of enchanted light in the song below:

Are there lilac trees in the heart of town
Can you hear the lark in any other part of town
Does enchantment pour out of every door?
No, it's just on the street where you live
(Vic Damone: On The Street Where You Live ~ Lerner/Loewe)

The reference to “murder most foul”:

Ghost: Murder most foul, as in the best it is
But this most foul, strange and unnatural
(William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act I, sc, v)

In another tale of Greek mythology, the goddess Venus (Aphrodite), marries Vulcan, the god of Fire and Metalworking; he’s not good looking; makes himself machine-like handmaidens out of gold. Venus has an affair with Mars (Ares), the god of War, and sees to it that both her husband Vulcan, and her lover Mars side with the Trojans against the Greeks.

Trojan Paris, you see, judged Venus the winner in a beauty contest; needless to say, Vulcan is not content with being Venus’ obedient servant anymore; she’s an unfaithful wife.

So Vulcan plays a dirty trick. Venus and Mars have a daughter Harmonia. Cadmus, King of Thebes, marries Harmonia. Blacksmith Vulcan gives Cadmus a beautiful necklace to present to Harmonia as a wedding gift.

But it’s cursed so as to bring bad luck to the offspring of Cadmus and Harmonia, among them their daughter Semele, the mother of Dionysus, god of the Vine (The bluish-white metal “Cadmium” takes its name from the King Cadmus).

The song lyrics below mixes up mythologies:

I was thinking about turquoise, I was thinking about gold
I was thinking about diamonds, and the world's biggest necklace
(Bob Dylan: Isis ~ Levy/Dylan)

https://youtu.be/yL0xLUP8P_o

In Greek mythology, Pygmalion creates a statue of his vision of a perfect woman; Venus grants his wish that the statue come to life.

In the following song lyrics, that mythology is messed with. A Venus-like woman grants a man his wish not to become a non-communicative Pygmalion statue, nor a Vulcan machine:

The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from being seen
But that's because he doesn't want to turn into some machine
Took a woman like you to get through to the man in me
(Bob Dylan: The Man In Me)

Athena, the goddess of the City, is a wise protector who has dignity; her sacred bird is the owl; Mars, the god of War, and lover of Venus (despised by Vulcan he be) is rash, even cowardly; his sacred bird is the vulture.

In the lines below, the persona therein has dark-humoured fun at the expense of such mythological and religious tales:

I went down where the vultures feed
I would've gone deeper, but there wasn't any need
Heard the tongues of angels, and the tongues of men
Wasn't any difference to me
(Bob Dylan: Dignity)

No difference to the persona in the song just mentioned, but to the supposed Olympian gods, who were not devoid of compassion, there is. Athena is a favorite of Zeus, the god of Thunder. Gods and goddesses are immortal, but that doesn’t stop Athena from wounding Mars with a spear.

Below, a story is told in song that’s similar in kind to the mythological tale above (Dionysus, it’s noted, be not around in winter):

I'll be back in a month or two
When the frost is on the vine
I'll punch my sword right straight through
Half-ways down your spine
(Bob Dylan: Workingman's Blues, #2)

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 4200 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  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.

The index to all the 603 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, or indeed have an idea for a series of articles that the regular writers might want to have a go at, please do drop a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article to Tony@schools.co.uk

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which 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

Leon Redbone, the famously mysterious musician whose Ragtime way of strumming a guitar and singing, and who very much numbered Bob Dylan among his fans, has passed away at the age 69.

He was notorious as a joker, and indeed when journalists and interviewers asked him for a picture to go along with the story they were creating he would often hand over a photo of Bob Dylan.

It is also widely reported that Bob Dylan went to Mariposa Folk Festival in 1972 particularly to find him, and in an interview Dylan said, “I’ve heard he’s anywhere from 25 to 60… I can’t tell. But you gotta see him.”

Bob added that the music was “so authentic you can hear the surface noise [of an old 78 rpm record]” adding that he ever started a label, he would sign Redbone.  Redbone’s first album was released by Warner Bros three years later.

He was a prolific live performer and also released more than 15 albums over a four-decade career.

But one thing that really linked the men together was that Redbone would often rearrange the classic songs he sung, changing the chord sequences, and most interestingly not rehearsing with the band.   He was also notorious for not following the agreed setlist but simply playing what he felt at that moment, requiring the band to follow him.  That sounds somewhat familiar!

He also became a regular on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” More recently, he served as the voice of “Leon the Snowman” in Will Ferrell’s 2003 holiday hit “Elf.”

His introductions to his songs were also something to behold – he was the opposite of Dylan on stage, chatting away to his heart’s content.  At the same time he could be funny, contradictory, vague, rambling, and always knowing exactly what he was doing and where he was going but making it seem he did not.

If you enjoy this music, you might just want to leave the video running after the first song – it is a real treat.

Redbone was known for eternally making up stories about his life.  According to several reports, when asked for a biography for a music festival program, he handed over copy which said, “I was born in Shreveport, La., in 1910 and my real name is James Hokum” — which of course is fantasy.

In fact what he did share with Dylan was his sense of privacy – and both men dealt with media intrusion by making things up.  In a Canadian magazine 19 years ago he said, “Some people seem to believe that as soon as you perform on stage you lose your rights as a private citizen.   They want to find out who I am, what I am, where I was born, how old I am—all this complete nonsense that belongs in a passport office.”

What we do know (or at least think we know) he was born in 1949, in Cyprus. He announced his retirement in 2015, citing health concerns.

Announcing his passing his website said, in true reference to the man himself, said, “To his fans, friends, and loving family who have already been missing him so in this realm, he says, ‘Oh behave yourselves. Thank you… and good evening everybody.’ “

So why did Bob Dylan admire this musician so?  First, most obviously, he was a one-off, and he was original, exactly as Bob Dylan himself is.   Leon Redbone was also a sublime musician, not just as a performer but also in terms of holding an audience and carrying off a show.

Plus he had a magnificent voice which he knew exactly how to use, understanding exactly how the accompaniment could compliment the vocals.   Also he brought a style of music to my generation that had been brought up on rock n roll.  He reminded us all of another style, another place, another way of seeing the world.  When he told the audience to behave, you knew that is exactly what he would not be doing – but in his own inimitable way.

In addition to his many other achievements Redbone appeared on children’s programmes such as Sesame Street, several times singing over films songs such as “Blueberry Mouth”, “Have You Ever”, and “What Do They Do When They Go Wherever They Go?”

He appeared as Leon in the 1988 film Candy Mountain, and narrated the 2011 Emmy Award-winning documentary Remembering the Scranton Sirens, celebrating the musical legacy of one of the most significant “territory” dance bands in American musical history.

He performed also in a Budweiser beer commercial in which he lay on a surfboard singing “This Bud’s for You”, and in a British Rail advert in which he sang the song “Relax”.

We have his recordings… and with those he will always be remembered.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 4200 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  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.

The index to all the 602 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, or indeed have an idea for a series of articles that the regular writers might want to have a go at, please do drop a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article to Tony@schools.co.uk

by Jochen Markhorst

Gallup in New Mexico is a small town, about twenty thousand inhabitants, with a remarkably high crime rate (five times the national average) and for a large part of the twentieth century popular with filmmakers. Films such as Billy The Kid (1930) and Superman (1980) were shot there, and the local El Rancho Hotel has hosted guests such as John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck and Burt Lancaster. But the real claim to fame comes from a song: Gallup is one of the ten places listed in “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66”:

Get your kicks on Route 66
It goes through St. Louis
A-Joplin, Missouri
A-Oklahoma City looks oh-so pretty
You’ll see Amarillo, a-Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino
Would you get hip to this kindly tip
Take that California trip?

Not sung, but still mentioned, the town is on the first two Dylan albums, in the liner notes; in both texts the biographical “fact” is recalled that young Dylan has already seen so much of America, for he has lived in Gallup NM, Sioux Falls and Cheyenne (South Dakota), Phillipsburg KS, and in Hibbing and Minneapolis in Minnesota. An alert reader could have placed a first question mark at the time – there is a Cheyenne in Oklahoma and the capital of Wyoming is called Cheyenne, but a Cheyenne in South Dakota does not exist at all (although the Cheyenne River flows through it).

The source of this nonsense is Dylan himself, who, in the early years of his career, revived and mystified his own biography in newspaper and radio interviews. With many more details, too: he is said to have run away from home, several times, living and travelling with an itinerant fairground company.

After the release of The Freewheelin’, Newsweek magazine, in a disclosing, much-discussed article, punctures the balloon (“I Am My Words”, November 4, 1963) and reveals to the world that Dylan’s real name is Zimmerman, comes from a very ordinary middle-class family and has lived at home in Minnesota all his youth.

According to biographer Shelton, the publication infuriates the young bard, and he withdraws from public life for weeks, sulking (Björner’s unsurpassed website Still On The Road indeed does not record a single performance in November ’63).

Despite that early rebuttal in Newsweek, the story lingers. So persistent, in fact, that the Albuquerque Journal devotes an article to it still in 2012 with the beautifully alliterating title “Did Dylan Roots Really Reach Gallup?”

We now know that Dylan’s story was baloney, but the question still intrigues: why Gallup, of all places? Lawyer and former mayor of Gallup Bob Rosebrough thinks he knows. The starting point is that young Dylan once, with his parents, took a holiday trip through the Midwest and Southwest. Rosebrough recalls that at the time there was a Western-wear store in Gallup along Route 66, which happened to be called “Zimmerman’s”, written on a large, eye-catching sign.

“Well, what did he see as he drove through town? A huge sign stuck smack-dab in the middle of a town filled with Indians and cowboys that said ‘Zimmerman’s.’ And when it came time to invent a persona to match the freewheelin’ Bob Dylan he thought back to that sign and the town where he saw it.”

It is a creative story. But more likely Nat King Cole’s “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” has left a deeper impression on young Dylan than the supposed memory of an unproven family trip. In episode 83 (“Street Map”) of Theme Time Radio Hour, radio maker Dylan calls the song the definition of grooviness, the grooviest song I know, all about America’s main street – it’s a pity that neither Nat King Cole nor songwriter Bobby Troup have lived to hear this compliment from the world’s best songwriter. In Tarantula, Dylan’s inimitable literary debut, we see the impact demonstrated once again, in the last chapter “Al Araaf & the Forcing Committee”:

aretha – known in gallup as number 69 – in
wheeling as the eat’s in heat – in pittsburgh
as number 5 – in brownsville as the left
road, the lonesome sound – in atlanta as
dont dance, listen – in bowling green as
oh no, no, not again – she’s known as horse
chick up in cheyenne – in new york city she’s
known as just plain aretha . . . i shall play
her as my trump card

Gallup, Pittsburgh, Bowling Green, Atlanta… all of them place names lifted from songs in Dylan’s record collection (“Route 66”, “Sweet Little Sixteen”, “Long Gone”, “Mary Don’t You Weep”) and place names that will pop up in his songs (Brownsville, Cheyenne, New York City).

Dylan did live in that southwest corner of the United States for a while, when he and his family were fleeing from intrusive fans and other idiots in the early 1970s. In a 1985 interview with Scott Cohen, Dylan talks about the terror that drove him out of Woodstock and casually drops: “… when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about ’72.”

This – in itself irrelevant – biographical fact is completely watered down in the very worth reading article “When Bob Dylan Practiced Downstairs” by Lucian K. Truscott IV in The Village Voice of November 2, 2016, in which the lucky dog Truscott recalls memories of 1974, when Dylan was his downstairs neighbour in Greenwich Village and he could secretly listen in while Dylan wrote his songs for Blood On The Tracks:

You read about how Dylan had decamped from New York in those years — first for Woodstock, then Santa Fe, then Malibu — but he was so much a part of the fabric of the city that there was never a sense he’d left.

“Woodstock, Santa Fe and Malibu.” And Albuquerque is mentioned too, with some regularity – apparently, there is a vague, but universal agreement that Dylan spent part of his life at least somewhere in New Mexico.

Truscott writes his article in 2016, a quarter of a century after the world officially met one of the more unfamiliar Basement gems, with “Santa-Fe” (on The Bootleg Series it is written with a hyphen, in Lyrics and on the site without). Presumably the song title causes Truscott’s confusion, but oh well; Gallup, Santa Fe, Albuquerque… all in New Mexico, all along Route 66.

In the popular music of the twentieth century, Santa Fe usually refers to a train, to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (ATSF), one of the largest and best-known train companies in the United States. In 1944 Bing Crosby scores a big hit with “On The Atchison, Topeka And Santa Fe”, a year later it’s an even bigger hit for Johnny Mercer (number one, in the charts for sixteen weeks) and Judy Garland’s version wins an Oscar (crazy enough for “best original song”, in the movie The Harvey Girls) in 1946.

Before that, in 1942, Arthur Crudup already recorded “Mean Frisco Blues”, the song that, thanks to big guns like B.B. King, Jimmy Witherspoon, Eric Clapton and Muddy Waters, now belongs to the canon, and that song opens and closes with

Well that mean old dirty Frisco and that low down Santa Fe
Mean old Frisco and that low down Santa Fe
Well take my girl away, Lord and blow back out on me

…as in Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Santa Fe Blues” and Skip James’ “Cherry Ball Blues” the Santa Fe is is the Big Mean Train that runs off with the narrator’s sweetheart.

But here, in Woodstock 1967, Dylan’s jumpy mind is perhaps most triggered by the recent version of “Midnight Special” by the Spencer Davis Group (on Autumn ’66). Dylan hears the band on their English tour in ’66 and is quite impressed, especially by the then eighteen-year-old foreman Steve Winwood. In Eat The Document you see him talking to Spencer Davis, as he asks, in awe: “How’d he learn to sing like that?”

Dylan jumping up on “Midnight Special” is hardly surprising: the song was his debut in the music industry (in ’61, when he is invited to play the harmonica on Harry Belafonte’s cover of that classic). And in England he undoubtedly notices the changed lyrics:

Get your ticket at the station, get your dinner on board
Well you know I have to leave you but I don’t wanna go
Let the Midnight Special shine its light on me
The Midnight Special to Santa Fe

…with Spencer Davis the opening verse, but merely the third line is the same as the other and the traditional versions.

Further down, the lyric line from which Dylan will make a whole song is maintained: “if you ever go to Houston” (on Together Through Life, 2009).

In the Basement Dylan then has a catchy tune, he has Santa Fe, and apparently he thinks that is enough. Robertson remembers in his autobiography that Dylan, after a cigarette break, pulls the lyrics for “Santa Fe” out of his typewriter, but that does not seem too likely; the verses are filled with empty words, with placeholder lyrics, pleasantly sounding harmonies without coherence. She’s rolling up a knot to pray till God’s away – or something like that. Strange, though, is the “remedial action”, a few years later, while securing copyrights. Dylan changes words and complete lines of verse rather arbitrarily and by adding eccentric idioms he only increases the incomprehensibility of the text: I’ll build a geodesic dome and sail away. That doesn’t even sound remotely like what Dylan sings there. Still, it does fascinate the Dylanologists, so there ís some gain, if you will.

Another uncertainty, equally unimportant, dividing the experts concerns the moment of creation. At the official release, on The Bootleg Series 1-3 (1991), Dylan expert John Bauldie writes that Levon Helm plays the drums.

But two of the top experts, Clinton Heylin and Sid Griffin (Greil Marcus skips the song), date the song before the return of drummer Levon Helm. Heylin isn’t particularly charmed by the song anyway (“just another discarded ditty”) and places it in the summer. Griffin isn’t very touched either (“this slight if charming little ditty”) and analyses that the drumming cannot be Helm’s and that Bauldie must be mistaken.

In his autobiography Testimony (2016), however, eyewitness Robbie Robertson remembers:

“We played through it with Levon on drums. He was a bit rusty and tentative from just getting back, and still a little unfamiliar with the clubhouse groove. We had recorded a ton of songs with Bob already, and by the time Levon joined us we were winding down a little.”

Robertson even places it after Halloween, so after October 31st, somewhere in early November. Also remarkable is the observation with which he introduces this anecdote: “Bob did some of his vibing vocables on words” with which he qualifies the lyrics of “Santa-Fe” as (something like) “intuitive wording of sounds” – not as real, meaningful words, anyway.

Levon Helm does not mention the song at all, in his memoirs (This Wheel’s On Fire, 1993).

The undervaluation is strange. “Santa-Fe” is certainly more than an “insignificant disposable tune”. It’s a particularly catchy, skilful piece of work, richly decorated with accessible melodies, comparable to a pretty nursery rhyme and has at least as much potential as “The Mighty Quinn” or “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”.

Heylin and Griffin, however, are not the only ones to discard it, shrugging their shoulders; the song is hardly covered. But a few nice ones are still out there.

Funny is the fierce rockabilly adaptation by the obscure Bavarian punk band Lee and the Liars, and charming is Howard Fishman’s cover for his unsurpassed Basement Project (Live at Joe’s Pub, 2007); sunny, with a dazzling trumpet.

Still, even the most beautiful cover cannot break through that granite wall of lukewarm indifference; the version of the otherwise unknown Nick Mencia from Miami, who, together with one Erik Gundel and one David Stern, produces a monumental, atmospheric lecture of “Santa-Fe”, of the same level as, and very similar to, the piece of art that Jim James delivers with “Goin’ To Acapulco” for the I’m Not There soundtrack.

Mencia’s cover, which almost entirely follows the published lyrics on the site (only geodesic dome really goes too far; that becomes big ol’ dome), doesn’t make it to a soundtrack, unfortunately. Isolated and alone, it collects dust in a quiet corner of YouTube.

Perhaps Mencia first should have broadcasted that he used to live in Gallup.

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

Copies of the volumes are also available in Dutch from the same source.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 4200 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  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.

The index to all the 602 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, or indeed have an idea for a series of articles that the regular writers might want to have a go at, please do drop a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article to Tony@schools.co.uk

*The note above about “riches” might be a slight exaggeration.

Please send your recording as an audio file, or as a YouTube video to Tony@schools.co.uk and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE mark the subject line “Dope Fiend Robber music.”   Tony does get a fair number of emails as a result of running Untold Dylan – which is fine, and no complaints about that, but it is helpful to be able to identify what each is about from the subject line.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 4200 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  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.

The index to all the 602 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, or indeed have an idea for a series of articles that the regular writers might want to have a go at, please do drop a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article to Tony@schools.co.uk

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which 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).