Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood, research by Aaron Galbraith

Improvisation exists as a well-established, well-recognised part of the creative arts, particularly the performing arts such as theatre and music.  But definitions of what makes up “improvised art”, “performance art” etc can go on for pages and pages, and if I tried establishing strict definitions here I know I’d lose half my readership and annoy the other half.

But improvisation does have a major input both in music and theatre which continues from mediaeval times into the present day.   Play the standard chord sequence of the blues on a guitar and other musicians can (and usually will) join in, improvising around that chords sequence on any instruments to hand.

In improvised theatre there is no chord sequence but there are topics.  A session I took part in earlier this year before the virus outbreak, had one of the actors holding a birthday party, and receiving a group of guests each of whom had a secret.  The guests had to act in a way that was informed by their secret without overtly giving it away, while the hostess had to guess what the secret was.  (The audience of course are in on the secret – only the actor playing the hostess is outside the loop).

In this case I was a “guest” at the party and as I approached the stage I was told my secret was that I was carrying two canisters of oxygen.  I had two seconds to think and then I was on.  So I mimed carrying something heavy in each hand while telling the hostess how thirsty I was.  As she offered me a variety of drinks, I refused them, asking her if she had any hydrogen – preferably four cans of the stuff.

OK not that profound, but not too bad for two seconds thinking, and people laughed [it just loses a lot in the telling!]

So improvised music and improvised drama are fun if you are there, seeing the artists creating on the spot.  And it is great fun to do, if you don’t mind regularly looking like a total idiot.   But are such sessions worth keeping for posterity?

In my case most certainly not, but what if the improviser was Bob Dylan?  Then yes, because it is Dylan.  And possibly it might give us an insight into his methods of composing.

So we have “Stoned on the mountain” which was improvised with Eric Von Schmidt in November 1964 and the event was captured on tape.

My improvisational sketches are done because I enjoy the experience of performing, and my fellow actors on stage are quite happy for me to be part of the gang when we work through the sketches.  I find them enlivening, I like the people I meet, and it’s a lot better than watching TV night after night, or indeed going to a bar.

Bob’s session with RvS can be seen in the same way.  The guys were having fun, mucking around, and quite sensibly leaving the tape recorder running because, well, every now and then you do one of these improv sessions and think, “hey there really is a song in there; what did I just do?”   Likewise improvising with a theatre group you occasionally think, “Oh, I like that character, let’s try and develop him…”

As for us, the outside audience, I can’t imagine many people want to listen to this piece very often, but we have the recording on line, and it was released on the “50th Anniversary Collection 1964” copyright extension collection.

The Haiku61 collection has also incorporated it, just as it has all the weird and strange pieces from the Basement Tapes.   We get…

On the mountain, in
The valley, or wherever,
You might end up stoned.

The writer of the haikus apologises for not being to get all the lyrics, but really no apology is needed.  He’s done a thousand times better than I ever could.  I hope he doesn’t mind me copying his work, and that the link above might compensate a little.  If you can fill in any of the missing lines please write in.

xxxxxxxxx
Must have been a junkie
Xxxxxx
Must have been a junkie
xxxxxx
Must have been a junkie
All his followers
They was stoned, stoned on the mountain
Smashed in the valley
Stoned on the mountain
Smashed in the valley
Stoned on the mountain
Smashed in the valley
Smashed, oh brother
Stoned, take a little sniff
Take a little sniff
And you draw it down deep
When you take a little sniff
Draw it down deep
Well you take a little sniff
And you draw it down deep
Well you take too much,
Oh brother, you go to sleep
Stoned on the mountain
Walkin’ in the valley
Stoned on the mountain
Sleepin’ in the valley
Stoned on the mountain
Wanderin’ through the valley
You’re going to smash old… xxxxxxx
When you’re stoned
What is this stoned business?
Well, there’s a whole lot of stones all layin’ around
In the valley?
Yes, they roll ’em down.
Yes, I know they roll them.
In Colombia.
My God, vacation land.
Well you better watch out
That stone get stoned
That you don’t get stoned
Better watch out
That you don’t get stoned
You better watch out
That you don’t get stoned
You might find you might you might lose your home.
Don’t do drugs
you better watch out
For the sign of falling rocks
You better watch out
For the sign of falling rocks
You better watch out
For the sign of falling rocks
Oh wow.
I couldn’t say what I was thinking.

by Jochen Markhorst

At the end of 2016, around the time that Dylan was awarded his Nobel Prize, I published in the Netherlands the book Blonde On Blonde. Bob Dylans kwikzilveren meesterwerk.

Translations of individual chapters have already been published here on Untold in recent years. But now, the entire book has been revised, expanded and translated into English.   There are details of the book in English here, and of the book in German here.

Here, by way of introduction is a “transitional chapter”, on producer Johnston, on Nashville Cat Charlie McCoy and on Dylan’s musical confidant Al Kooper.

Col. Jubilation B. Johnston & His Mystic Knight Band

Influential is the qualification one encounters in every discussion on Blonde On Blonde. One of the merriest, corniest and most tangible influences is the obscure long-playing album Moldy Goldies from the one-off occasional band Col. Jubilation B. Johnston & His Mystic Knight Band and Street Singers.

It’s an unserious, alcohol-soaked party album on which producer Bob Johnston, after the Blonde On Blonde sessions, holds the musicians and the atmosphere of “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35” for a few more nighttime hours to replay current hits – but à la Rainy Day Women.

For example, Cher’s “Bang Bang”, “Monday, Monday” (The Mamas & The Papas), “Daydream” from The Lovin’ Spoonful, plus seven other hits all receiving a hilarious, pleasantly disrespectful treatment with hopping bar pianos, lots of carnival honking, sound effects, cough fits, laughter and cheers from the Nashville Cats.

In 2012, Nashville Cream asks for Johnston’s memories:

NC: […] you made an interesting record with the musicians from the Blonde on Blonde sessions, Moldy Goldies. It’s all cover versions of songs that were popular around 1966. How did that come about?
BJ: I got a bunch of those guys in there, and got ’em all stoned, and we played all night, and it was good. That was a funny record, wasn’t it?
NC: Yeah, and the versions of “Secret Agent Man” and “Rainy Day Women #13 & 35” are hilarious, as if you’re sending up the whole idea of pop music. It’s ahead of its time.
BJ: I had just done Dylan, and “Rainy Day Women” and all that shit, and I thought, what a great thing, we’ll use that band and get them all fucked up and take it sideways, and that’s what we did. And yeah [sings], “Secret Agent Man.” That was the guy with [Elvis] Presley, who was screaming on that. I can’t even think of his name, he was a — Lamar Fike, that’s it.
NC: Who else was singing on Moldy Goldies?
BJ: I don’t have any idea. I got these office girls to sing ’em, and a janitor, Lamar, and somebody. I just picked ’em random.

The album does not score artistically nor commercially, but it does achieve a certain cult status. And well, it certainly has a certain music-historical value. As if Rembrandt drew some caricatures from Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburgh after completing the Night Watch.

1          Bob Johnston

He is a master in downplaying his contribution to music history, the Texan Bob Johnston (1932-2015), who is in control of dozens of masterpieces. Johnny Cash’ At San Quentin and At Folsom Prison, Sounds Of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen’s Songs From A Room and Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and John Wesley Harding… and Blonde On Blonde, of course. It is just a small selection of Johnston’s extensive discography. Nevertheless, in all interviews the producer maintains modestly that he does not do much more than facilitate, ensure that there are session musicians and that the tape recorder is running. It is only towards the end of his life that he publishes an autobiography online, Is It Rolling, Bob?, in which he reveals what is involved in producing an album such as Blonde On Blonde in a more realistic, detailed and proud manner.

In the years before, experience experts such as Leonard Cohen and Dylan (in Chronicles) have already tried to word what is so great about this producer: all praise his passion, his boundless drive and his ability to create the right atmosphere for delivering top artistic performance. From Is It Rolling, Bob? it can be concluded that this also involves the necessary know-how and creativity. The technical knowledge does not come out of the blue: Johnston comes from a musical family and says he has been around in recording studios since he was four years old.

Inversely proportional to his modesty is his fanatic enthusiasm for his artists. “I love Dylan. He is a visionary, and everything he does must be recorded because of its historical value.” Dylan is a genius, he says, you don’t think that I am going to tell him how to do his job. Who am I? My job is just to start the tape.

Sympathetic and modest, and a colossal downplaying of his importance.

2          Charlie McCoy

The Supreme Cat of the Nashville Cats is a multi-instrumentalist who has been in the studio with all the greats. Playing the drums, harmonica, guitar, bass, keys, marimba, vibraphone, sax (on Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman”) and trumpet on records by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Elvis Presley, Simon & Garfunkel (the bass harmonica on “The Boxer”, for example) Perry Como, Ringo Starr … it’s a long, dizzying list. In 2015, at the age of seventy-four, McCoy himself counts about 13,000 recording sessions. In addition, Charlie McCoy has also scored hits, a Grammy Award and gold records under his own name.

Dylan gets to know him in New York, while shooting for Highway 61 Revisited. Producer Bob Johnston has lured McCoy and his wife to New York with tickets for a Broadway show. Well, if you’re here anyway, Johnston says, drop by the studio. We will be recording “Desolation Row” this afternoon.

McCoy gets a guitar pushed into his hands and plays the Spanish decorations off the cuff. Dylan is impressed. McCoy later understands that he was only a pawn in the cunning game of the producer:

“Bob Johnston said, ‘You know, I was using you as bait. I wanted Dylan to come to Nashville and he didn’t want to.’ So I was bait and it worked.”

In the same interview (with The Independent, June 2015) McCoy talks about the culture shock Dylan caused in Nashville.

“We sat there from 2pm till 4am the next morning and we never played a note. This was unheard of, everybody was on the clock. We couldn’t believe it. You’re figuring out ways to stay awake because he might decide at any minute that he wanted to record and we wanted to be ready for him.

I don’t know how many games of ping pong we must have played. Then at 4am he came up with “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”, an 11-minute ballad. And everybody’s sitting there saying, “Please don’t let me make a mistake.” He just started playing it and kind of left it up to us to decide what to do. Every recording, there was no conversation.”

But along the way, McCoy, as the undisputed leader of the Nashville Cats, is developing a kind of communication form with that trio of crazy guys from New York, Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson and especially Bob Dylan.

“I’d say, “Bob, what would you think if we did this or that?” And his answer would always be, “I don’t know, man, what do you think?”

So I finally went over to the producer and I said, “You know what, I’ve got to quit asking because he’s not answering. If we do something he don’t like, maybe he’ll say something.” And the producer said, “That works for me, so go ahead.” So that’s the way that it went.”

And Nashville does thrive on the culture shock. Until Dylan’s arrival, the studio, and the town anyway, has a peasant image, is considered backward area. Only ready-made treadmill work, corny country songs, and old-fashioned folklore come out of the studio. After Blonde On Blonde, Nashville is suddenly the place to be, the city and studio are flooded with the hippest birds from both the East and West coasts.

3          Al Kooper

When Dylan has made the radical decision to abort the frustrating recording sessions in New York to try it further in Nashville, he doesn’t want to be totally lost and lonely and alone among strangers; he brings along the confidants guitarist Robbie Robertson and organist Al Kooper.

Kooper has acquired his position in a legendary way during the recordings for “Like A Rolling Stone” in June ’65. He is not on the payroll, those June days. Indirectly, as a friend of producer Tom Wilson, he is able to penetrate into the recording room and he just hangs around there, hoping silently to get a chance. He is a gifted guitarist, but has already seen that brilliant Mike Bloomfield has been hired, and with that the hope of participating in a real Dylan recording session has actually disappeared: “Just hearing Bloomfield warm up ended my career as a guitarist…Until then, I’d never heard a white man play guitar like that.”

From the control room, he then watches Dylan, producer Tom Wilson and the musicians struggle with the song. Producer Wilson moves organist Paul Griffin to the piano for yet another take.

Kooper sees his chance. Before Wilson can stop him, he is called away for a phone call, Kooper slips into the recording room and sits down behind the organ. Wilson sees him on his return, we hear him saying on the tape “What are you doing there?”, but he lets him go. “He was a very gracious man,” Kooper grins in 2007. “I’m always an eighth note behind everyone else, making sure of the chord before touching the keys.”

Dylan listens back to the recording and tells the engineer:

“Turn the organ up louder.”
Tom Wilson quickly replied, “Bob, that guy is NOT an organ player.”
Bob said, “I don’t care, turn the organ up!” Thus cementing my career as an organ player.

Dylan is right. That slight delay creates the energetic, hectic urgency that makes the song all the more exciting and Al Kooper has his entrance ticket to Dylan’s inner circle. A month later, he sits behind the organ at the legendary Newport Folk Festival performance, in which Dylan plays electric to the audible horror of part of the audience. Afterwards, Kooper participates in the recordings of the other songs for Highway 61 Revisited and subsequently again for Blonde On Blonde.

Kooper describes his special position in his beautiful autobiography Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards:

“Bob had a piano put in his hotel room, and during the day I would sit and play the chords to a song he was working on, like a human cassette machine, while he tried different sets of lyrics to them. (Incredibly, cassettes hadn’t been invented yet!) It was good ’cause I got the jump on learning the tunes and was able to teach them to the band that night without Dylan being bothered with that task. My favorite of the lot was “I Want You”, and each night I would suggest recording it to Bob, who saved it as the last song recorded, just to bug me.”

https://youtu.be/TjfC-vFecYk

by Larry Fyffe

As noted, Bob Dylan nips bits and pieces from the ancient mythological tales of the Greeks and Romans; from Judeo-Christian ones too.The singer/songwriter inserts them into stories of his own making.

Tired of Zeus’ shenanigans, Hera tries to have the God of Thunder overthrown, but the rebellion fails. Her husband suspends Hera from the sky on a golden chain with anvils tied to her feet. Hanging there she cries and moans until Zeus releases her on the condition that she’ll never attempt that again.

In the following song lyrics, an angry husband seeks out his unfaithful wife in her lover’s abode:

He lowered himself on a golden chain
His nerves were quaking in every vein
His knuckles were bloody, he sucked in air
He ran his fingers through his greasy hair
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

Bob Dylan – Tin Angel

Hera’s promise does not stop her from heaping vengeance on Zeus’ lovers such as Lamia. The beautiful half-snake woman turns into a child-eating monster after Hera causes the death of Lamia’s children. In a version of the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve, Lamia appears as Adam’s first, and sexually-charged wife; she’s called Lilith. Wanting a more submissive mate, Adam convinces God to create Eve out of his rib. Vengeful Lilith, in the form of a snake, seduces Eve in the Garden of Eden. God throws Adam and his new wife out into the world of mortals. As Lilith’s punishment for disobedience, angels kill her children, and she in turn causes the death of human children.

The song below sums up the trials and tribulations wrought by God, Adam, Eve, Lamia, and Lilith as a result of mankind becoming mortal:

Tell me straight out if you will
Why must you torture me within
Why must you come down off of your high hill
Throw my fate to the clouds and wind?
(Bob Dylan: Tell Ol' Bill)

Nor does the role played by Jesus Christ, God’s son by a mortal (the New Testament), go unquestioned by the persona in the song lyrics below. That is, how come God shows up on earth in the form of Jesus at a particular time in the past when He’s needed now?:

In the hills of mystery
In the foggy web of destiny
You can have what's left of me
Where we were born in time
(Bob Dylan: Born In Time)

https://youtu.be/ibE2TeQaKdE

A female poet-friend of poet and bird-watcher John Whittier writes that God has severely tried her patience, and she therefore returns the favour; no hurry is she to die in order to join her kinfolk in Heaven:

Saying, "I will go with thee
That thou be not lonely
To yon hills of mystery
I have waited only
Until now, to climb with thee
Yonder hills of mystery"
(Lucy Larcom: Across The River)

Laments a Gothic Romantic poet, male mythology demonizes Lamia, but philosophy does worse – puts her out to death:

Philosophy will clip the angel's wings
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine
Unweave the rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-personed Lamia melt into shade
(John Keats: Lamia)

So saith another poet about science – a Hamadryad is a tree spirit that dies when the tree does:

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car
And driven the Hamardyad from the wood
To seek shelter in some happier star?
(Edgar Allan Poe: To Science)

In mythology, the cypress is the sacred tree of sorrow to Artemis (Diana), Apollo’s sister:

I waited for you on the running boards
Near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned
Slowly into autumn
(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

According to poets Larcom and Whittier, time on earth is not there to be wasted:

They sat in silent watchfulness
The sacred cypress tree about
And, from beneath old wrinkled brows
Their failing eyes looked out
(John Whittier: The Cypress Tree Of Ceylon)

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3600 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 599 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 Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Previously on the tour…

• The Never-Ending Tour: 1987 – Farewell to all that
• NET 1988: Desperate stratagems, Part 1: Heroes and Villains
• 1988 Part 2: The 60s revisited

We finished Part 2 of our tour of the first year of Dylan’s Never Ending Tour with ‘All along the Watchtower,’ a song that would remain embedded in Dylan’s setlist for many years. We begin Part 3 with Tangled Up in Blue (from Blood on the Tracks, 1974) another perennial.

I have traced one thread of this song’s remarkable history in the Master Harpist epilogue, Tangled up in Harmonicas Part 1 and  Tangled up in Harmonicas Part 2

And while this song did become a showcase for Dylan’s virtuoso harmonica playing, this is not the case in 1988 where, true to that year’s form, there is no harmonica, the song bustles along with a bit of jingle-jangle from guitarist GE Smith, and is all over in six minutes.

However, Dylan  is right on top of the vocals, in full mastery of the song, and gives us a clear, up front performance, using his 1988 abrasiveness to put a sheen of irony on the lyrics. This is not an exercise in nostalgia for times lost past, as the song can sometimes be, but a wry, hard-bitten look at what we call ‘experience.’

Tangled up in Blue

Another song of love and regret from Blood on the Tracks, ‘You’re a big girl now’ doesn’t last the course the way Tangled does in terms of Dylan repertoire but can carry a strong emotional punch when performed. The bitterness underpinning the repeated ‘…you’re a big girl now,’ is not softened in this 1988 performance; there’s no attempt to ease the pain, or let the melancholy of the melody take over. Those who like that album for its raw edge might well enjoy this.

You’re a big girl now

‘Rank Strangers’ isn’t a Dylan song but it could be. Like ‘Silvio’, ‘Rank Strangers’ is one of those songs he has made his own, all the more as its sentiment is very Dylan like – that sense of estrangement or alienation from the world. This 1988 version is a very solid performance indeed, with the full power of Dylan’s voice evident, enough to blow you out of your seat. And the performance is not rushed, with some thoughtfulness in the backing that will become a feature of 1989.

Rank Strangers

A traditional song that Dylan also made his own is ‘Man of Constant Sorrow.’ He sang it often in the early 1960s, and it was to appear again in a completely transformed version in 2005. Being a ‘man of constant sorrow’ was a part of Dylan’s image, always leaving town, always on the dark side of the road burdened with a broken heart. What I find interesting is how this archetype of the alienated outsider that comes through so much of the old, country-and-western and cowboy music was absorbed into Dylan’s persona, and reflected in his lyrics. He became the archetype.

Man of Constant Sorrow.

Dylan would never perform ‘Serve Somebody’ with the same fervour as during the gospel years, 1979 – 1981, and this is not a particularly distinguished performance, so why place it at the end of my tour of 1988? Because, rough-and-ready as it is, it comes with a completely new set of lyrics, and I can’t know this for sure of course, but it sounds as if he’s improvising, making up new verses as he goes. In other words, just having fun, which is not the feeling we get from most 1988 performances, which are tightly constrained.

In this respect it points forward to later years, when improvisation will play a greater role. And the new lyrics, as far as I can make them out, are also fun and cheeky, suggesting that Dylan hasn’t entirely lost his sense of humour.

Serve somebody

So how are we to regard the performances during the first year of the Never Ending Tour? They seem rushed and abrasive. Call it a garage band roughness.  Dylan’s voice often sounds forced and hoarse, with a throw-away feel you can hear most strongly in the first song of this study ‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’ (See NET, 1988 Part 1). He sounds impatient, tearing through his old songs and spitting them out as fast as he can. It’s all pretty tightly controlled.

These are Dylan songs stripped down to their bare essentials, to the core of each song. There is nothing relaxed or expansive here, the performances are driven, often seemingly torn from the singer’s will. There’s no lack of passion, and some of the performances are masterful – ‘Gates of Eden’ is one of my favourites. (See NET, 1988 Part 1) Dylan’s voice is always upfront, the words in our faces.

It is a little too easy to overlook these early NET performances, as there were greater things to come, and sometimes I have returned to them and been surprised and gratified by their direct and unadorned force.

There is something deeper here too. I called this year ‘Desperate Stratagems’, not quite sure why. Now I think it has to do with an underlying claustrophobia evident in the performances; there’s an almost breathless desperation here. A flailing against invisible walls. This is the sound of a soul paying its dues, as it were, on the treadmill of song, and he will never sound quite like this again.

See you next time for a four part look at 1989.

Stay alert, stay alive!

Kia Ora

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3600 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 599 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 Jochen Markhorst

1          Chanson d’automne

I           The Longest Day

The card-playing General Von Salmuth (Ernst Schröder), the commander of the 15. Armee, looks satisfied at the hand that has just been dealt to him. “My best hand tonight,” he beams. But that’s where Oberstleutnant Kurt Meyer (Heinz Spitzner) enters and disturbs the peaceful card scene in the Chateau’s cozy, richly decorated smoking lounge just outside Tourcoing. The Lieutenant Colonel is excited.

“Verzeihung. Herr Generaloberst Von Salmuth: Es ist da!”.
“Was ist da?”
“Der zweite Teil des Funkspruchs! Der zweite Vers! Verwunden mein Herz mit eintöniger Mattigkeit!“

“Excuse me. General Von Salmuth: It is here! ”.
“What is here?”
“The second part of the radio message! The second verse! My heart is drowned in the slow sound, languorous and long!”

Alarmed, Herr Generaloberst looks up, and gravely, his lieutenant repeats the line of poetry from the intercepted radio message. Verwunden mein Herz mit eintöniger Mattigkeit. The effect of the words is somewhat disappointing to him – the General now seems a little annoyed, annoyed that he is being interrupted at this crucial point in his card night. His gaze drifts to his left hand again, with his right he sorts.

“Herr Generaloberst,” Meyer sputters, “we can expect the invasion within the next twenty-four hours!”

Uninterested, Von Salmuth orders: “Put the Fifteenth Army on alert.”

A rather empty measure. One could be tempted to think it is a too free interpretation of what is going on at the headquarters of the SS general on June 5. However, just like the major part of the monumental war film The Longest Day (1962) lives up to the qualification “docudrama”, it seems to have really happened that way.

Likewise, the intercepted code message is real, is historically correct. It is the second half of the opening verse of Paul Verlaine’s 1866 “Chanson d’automne”, one of the most famous poems in French literature: 

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;

Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte

The first half of the code message, Les sanglots lons / Des violons / De l’automne, was broadcast on 1 June and was intended to warn the French resistance that D-Day is coming. After the broadcast of the second part, the invasion will start within twenty-four hours, informing the resistance they must start their sabotage actions now.

The poem is indeed a dazzling work of art by a brilliant poet with a perfect mastery of language; it consists of three relatively short sextets that approach perfection in terms of content, rhythm and rhyme, with the bonus of Verlaine’s characteristic play with timbre, onomatopoetic effects and musicality. For a century and a half, ambitious and brave translators have had quite a nut to crack finding a perfect translation, and Dylan is probably familiar with the – very clever – translation by Arthur Symons (1902), “Autumn Song”:

When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long

Pale as with pain,
Breath fails me when
The hours tolls deep.
My thoughts recover
The days that are over
And I weep.

And I go
Where the winds know,
Broken and brief,
To and fro,
As the winds blow
A dead leaf

Echoes of Verlaine’s oeuvre can be heard across Dylan’s catalogue, from “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Gates Of Eden” from 1965 to “Ain’t Talkin’” from 2006. Verlaine gets a name check in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” and in interviews, Dylan cites the Frenchman’s work as an example of the poetry he absorbed in those early, formative years in New York;

“I stayed at a lot of people’s houses which had poetry books and poetry volumes and I’d read what I found… I found Verlaine poems or Rimbaud.”

(Jeff Rosen interviews; No Direction Home, 2005)

Translator Symons is forced to abandon the brilliance and musicality of specific French phrases – the deadness of feuille morte simply cannot be matched with a correct translation of the term, just as English violins simply has a different timbre from the French, resonating violons. Symons rightly chooses to at least maintain the rhythm and especially the rhyme scheme, the aabccb rhyme scheme, which is quite popular with the French.

II          Little Miss Sue

In French literature, the form has been loved since the sixteenth century, since Ronsard. Victor Hugo writes many poems in these so-called Spanish sestets, Charles Leconte de Lisle is a fan and Verlaine does choose the Spanish sestets quite often. Beyond that, outside of French literature, the aabccb sextets are barely penetrating.

The English apparently find it more suitable for nursery rhymes, for children’s verses. Like the antique classic “Little Miss Muffet” (better known as “Along Came A Spider”) from the seventeenth or eighteenth century:

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
There came a big spider.
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away

With a few exceptions – Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman” from 1906, for example – it takes until 1969 for the form to surface again. Johnny Cash’s worldwide hit “A Boy Named Sue”, written by Shel Silverstein, consists of ten “Spanish sestets” (the English call it “tail-rhyme stanza”):

And he said, “Son, this world is rough
And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough
And I know I wouldn’t be there to help ya along
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you’d have to get tough or die
And it’s the name that helped to make you strong”

Established status in song culture the tail-rhyme stanza finally attains after 1984, when Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” begins to penetrate the canon. For the song, which Cohen says he has never been able to complete, the Canadian bard writes over eighty stanzas – all of them Spanish sestets.

In between, in 1978, Dylan writes his masterful finale for Street Legal, the underrated “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)”. The official release of the lyrics, in Lyrics and on the site, conceals the “true” form of the lyrics:

There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain
Tears on the letter I write
There’s a woman I long to touch and I miss her so much
But she’s drifting like a satellite

But the recital unveils:

There’s a long-distance train
rolling through the rain
Tears on the letter I write
There’s a woman I long to touch
And I miss her so much
But she’s drifting like a satellite

… the same form as Verlaine’s “Chanson d’Automne”, as “Little Miss Muffet” and as “A Boy Named Sue”. Six-line stanza, rhyme scheme aabccb – tail-rhyme stanza. The same “reformation” can be applied to any of the ten verses; they are really Spanish sestets.

III         There’s a train

Why Dylan the Poet obscures that classical form by formatting the text differently from what the recital reveals is unclear at first. He does it more often, anyway; on this album with “No Time To Think” for example – and there he seems to copy T.S. Eliot; both the structure and the “concealing” layout.

It is clear that the poet uses the rather strict form to suggest a unity. In addition to the ten sextets, the three chorus-like bridges also keep a same tight form: five-line stanzas, rhyme scheme aaabb, the last word always being tonight. To underline that suggestion of unity, the accompanying music is also clamped in a tight, unadventurous chord progression. Two chords only (C and F) under the sextets, an ordinary blues scheme (G-C-F) under the three “choruses”, embellished with a smoothly descending chord progression (F-Em-Dm-C), very fittingly under “and she winds back the clock” and “as her beauty fades”. Incidentally, the same chord progression as in “Like A Rolling Stone” (“now you don’t talk so loud”).

There is only a vague unity in content; in the first sestets veiled observations about a she are shared, in the last three sestets the narrative perspective shifts and the she (presumably) is addressed directly and thus becomes a you.

Dylan the Narrator opts for a mosaic-like structure, similar to songs like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Desolation Row”. Quite emphatically even: eight lines of verse start with “There’s a…”, so with the formula with which a witness reports on his observations. And with the epic suggesting tricks we already know from songs like “Shelter From The Storm” and “Visions Of Johanna”. In this case, through the cinematic opening, the wide-shot that promises a film-noir-like story:

There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain
Tears on the letter I write.

Footnote from Tony

If you are a regular reader of Jochen’s reviews you will know that he invariably ends with his pick of the cover versions… and no I haven’t edited them out, for this time Jochen’s text contained links to no covers.  So on setting the article for publication I sent over a quick note to ask if the covers section had been missed off.  To which he replied, “there are ab-so-lu-te-ly no cover versions. At least, no cover versions worthy enough. But if you do manage to find one – please add.”

Quite a challenge, especially when we note that after playing the song on tour in the latter part of 1978 Dylan abandoned it.  Forever.

I’ve searched, and I’ve found a few, but by and large, Jochen is right, they are chronic.  I’m not going to reference any of them here because they are, in my opinion, and seemingly in Jochen’s too, too poor to be listed.

Except… this version by Windillion.

Now unlike all the other cover versions, we have noted, this one is very close to the original.  And that requires a mention and a merit sticker because this is a bugger of a song to perform on stage.  They do it straight, they do a cut-down version, but they get it right.

And what is particularly interesting is that they don’t attempt to sing the whole song – it is in fact about half of it.   But then as they are German band performing in Germany, it is possible that the nuances of the language are not going to make it through.

And if you leave the video running, you’ll find either a live Dylan version or a version by another band (it seems to change from time to time), giving us a chance to compare Windillion’s live version with others, and each time I’ve done this I prefer Windillion, even over Bob’s live version.  Which was what finally persuaded me to put it in, and write this little epilogue.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3600 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 599 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).

Commentary by Tony Attwood; research by Aaron Galbraith; lyrics decoded by Larry Fyffe

The video which was previously available on line for this song has been removed.  If you know of another, please do put a note in comments or write to Tony@schools.co.uk

This is not a newly discovered song, but rather a song that I (Tony) very stupidly missed reviewing when we went through all the bits and pieces from After the Empire.

This means that we had actually reached 600 Dylan songs to review a little while ago, but I never realised and so didn’t fill in the gap caused by not reviewing this song.  But fortunately, I don’t think we have any rivals in this endeavour so we were not overtaken en route.

And just to be absolutely clear, this is not the 600th song Bob Dylan wrote, but the 600th song composed or co-composed by Dylan which we have reviewed.

So onto the album and the music…

This album was an unofficial release of 15 of the recordings that Dylan and co made during the Empire Burlesque sessions, and which were then deemed not suitable for the album.

And it is not too difficult to see why it was rejected.  For the song consists of three chords played over and over with a melody and lyrics woven around it.   The singular problem with the song, however, is that neither the melody nor the lyrics are particularly memorable, and so there is nothing to hold our attention.

There indeed may have been more to the song, but the fade out arrives fairly suddenly, and we’re gone.  I suspect Bob knew that the song wasn’t ready, and for it to be usable it was going to have to have work done in one of those two departments mentioned above.  I can imagine him turning away from the mic and waving at the engineer who rapidly fades it down.  And that’s it.

The musicians throughout the sessions are reported as being, Vito San Filippo (bass), Raymond Pounds (drums) Carolyn Dennis , Madlyn Quebec, Elisecia Wright
background vocals, which leaves Bob playing guitar throughout although surely there is a second guitar there as well, seemingly played by an unnamed musician. 

Now I don’t want to show my ignorance too much but I had not heard of Vito San Filippo and Raymond Pounds before, and my attempts to look them up have not taken me much further.  If you know these musicians, please do write in and tell us all, what else they have done.

As to the overall sound, this suggests that there had been very little rehearsal before, with the bass and percussion filling in as directed, and perhaps seeing if the song “Won’t go back” can actually be taken any further or sent in a completely different direction.   However “Won’t go back” did have some work done on it by Dylan before letting the tape run, so maybe the songs were written the other way round.  This one first, then “Won’t go back” emerging from it.

As for the lyrics, no one seems to be have been brave enough to transcribe them, so here again I must throw myself on the mercy of the audience and say, if you can make out the lyrics please do write them in as a comment below.  I’ll then move them into the main body of the text, with fulsome credits, as not everyone goes on to read the comments.

Here are the lyrics from Larry

Let Me Come Baby

Guess I hop on a train to ride
Hauling a country
Come a ways down by the river side
Honey, I need ya
I love seeing you hold my hand
What I need is a loving plan

Won't you come here, here she comes, baby
One more time on your door again
There she comes baby, all around
Let me come baby
Haul down your door again
I'm gonna leave that thieving town

If the upper train arrive
On the way to pick up town
Guess I'll be on winner's side
Over where the water come running down
I'll be on the river edge
I'll be into your father's head

If you do need a prayer
I'll be on the town of Jerricho
Here she comes baby
One more time around the bend
Hardly ever there
You'll think that it'll never end

Here she come baby one more time again
Over by the river side
Ah, there's no God knows where
If I was a fad for you
I might-a pulled a plug
And she blessed my soul

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 599 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

This article follows from

• Bob Dylan and More Mythology (Part I)
• Bob Dylan And More Mythology (Part II)

Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan messes with Greek and Roman mythology – rearranges their faces, and gives its gods and heroes (some good, some bad, but mostly they’re both) other names.

Greek King Pentheuse does not want his authority challenged by his subjects praying to a new god.  He has Dionysus, and the Bacchantes, imprisoned. But nothing, not even iron doors, can hold back the God of the Vine or his female followers; they escape. The King pursues the cone-bearing women, and they, seeing him as a mountain lion, tear the King to pieces.

Earlier, Zeus’ wife Hera, jealous of princess Semele, Dionysus’ mother by the Thunder God, tricks her into being killed by his lightning bolts. However, Zeus saves his son.

In the song lyrics below, the Jungian template of the above mythological story, is followed to some degree. The Drifter is likened to Dionysus:

Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courthouse out of shape
And while everyone knelt to pray
The drifter did escape
(Bob Dylan: Drifter's Escape)

https://youtu.be/SUfsWKexrwo

Zeus falls in love with Io, daughter of a river god; to hide her from Hera, the God of Thunder turns Io into a white heifer. No fool is Zeus’ wife, and she asks that the heifer be given to her as a present; she then puts her under the charge of Argus who has hundreds of eyes.

Zeus has his messenger  Hermes (Mercury) put Argus to sleep, and  kill him.  Hera, not one to give up easily, sets the eyes of Argus in the tail of the peacock, and sends a gadfly to torment Io. When the heifer reaches the Nile, Zeus is finally able to return her to human form.

A motif found in the song lyrics below:

Don't ever take yourself away
Don't ever take yourself to a place where I can't find you
Don't ever take yourself away
I will never leave you, I will never deceive you
I'll be right there behind you
(Nikki Jean: Steel And Feathers ~ Dylan/Jean)

Philomela, a Greek princess, is raped by King Tereus, and he cuts out her tongue; she embroiders the evil deed on a tapestry; her sister, married to Tereus, serves up their son to him for supper. After the meal, the sisters present the severed head of his son to him. Enraged, he chases after the sisters with an axe. Philomela is transformed into a nightingale by the gods, and her sister into a swallow; they both escape.

Only the male nightingale sings. The singer/songwriter, in double-edged diction, mixes mythologies together. The following song obliquely alludes to tale above:

A messenger arrived with a black nightingale
I seen her on the stairs, and I couldn't help but follow
(Bob Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)

Fathered by Zeus, Artemis (Diana), like her twin brother Apollo, protects the young. As well as deer, and cypress tree, Diana’s associated with scorpions because they renew themselves by shedding their skins. Needless to say, Hera is not happy that the twins are not hers. She and Achilles side with the Greeks in the Trojan War; Zeus’ twins with the Trojans; Apollo guides the arrow that kills Achilles:

Well, I rush into your hallway
Lean against your velvet door
I watch upon your scorpion
Who crawls across your circus floor
(Bob Dylan: Temporary Like Achilles)

Snakes shed their skins, and are also associated with Artemis. Make what you will of the
singer/songwriter’s renewed mythology in the song lyrics below:

Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with with a snake in both of your fists .....
Shedding off one more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within
(Bob Dylan: Jokerman)

The only thing you can say for sure about Bob Dylan is that he’s no stranger to ancient mythologies.

By Tony Attwood

Imaginary Future is the indie folk project of Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Jesse Epstein. Influenced in his youth by the records of Simon and Garfunkel, Epstein pairs acoustic guitar and vocals from his wife and fellow musician, Kina Grannis.

Here is Times they are a changin’

Now if you are a regular reader you may have realised that “Times they are a changin'” is one of my least favourite of all the world-famous Dylan songs.  And just in case you haven’t come across my rant on the subject, I’ll summarise briefly…

“Times” is seen by most of the public at large, journalists, commentators, and even some hard-core Dylan fans, as a protest song.   But even a brief study of the lyrics shows this is not so – what the song says is that our world is changing irrespective of any action taken by people; it is in fact just happening.  If there is a philosophy here it is that of stocism – the view that stuff happens, but we have little or no control over it.

For me, Dylan fans jumping up and down and applauding when Dylan gets to the end of the verse and says “Times they are a changin” is about as bizarre as it can get.

Indeed most cover versions of this song continue the tradition of implying that times are changing because of what we, the people, are doing.

But here, in this rendition from Imaginary Future, it seems to me that the true meaning of the lyrics is finally, at last, after all these years, expressed in the music.  This is how “Times” needs to be performed to put across what the lyrics say.

An excellent performance, in my personal view, and I’m delighted to be able to include it here.

Imaginary Future have their own website at which you can listen to their music, shop for t-shirts and their album, or indeed become a patron.

If you have a suggestion for a performance of a Dylan song, or a Dylan related song, or a song in the style of Dylan, by a comparatively unknown singer or band, please email Tony@schools.co.uk with a link to the performance on line and any background information you have.

Previously in this series…

• Untold Dylan showcase: Make you feel my love – Jüri Aidas
• The Untold Bob Dylan Showcase: Forever Young, Brian Houston

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Larry Fyffe first found “Go away you bomb” for Untold Dylan in his article Bob Dylan and How I Learned to Love the Bomb but at the time we published that we were not able to find a recording to put with the article.

And so, lacking the availability of a recording of the song we didn’t add it to our list of Dylan compositions.  But now we have found one by Dennis Michael Junior, so we can add this in as Dylan song number 599 on our list.  Only one to go to get to our target of 600 songs.

The song is not mentioned in the Clinton Heylin “Songs of Bob Dylan 1957-73” but came to public awareness in 2013 when it was announced that the lyrics would be auctioned by Christie’s on June 26.

“Go Away you Bomb,” was written in 1963 for an unpublished book of anti-nuclear protest songs compiled by Izzy Young, who owned the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village.

In the material written for Christie’s auction, Young is quoted as saying, “I was compiling a book of songs against the atom bomb and asked Dylan to contribute; he gave me this song the very next day.

“I have never sold anything important to me until now and the funds raised will help to keep the Folklore Center in Stockholm going. I have always had a passion for folk music and I have collected books and music since I was a kid. I produced my first catalogue of folk books in 1955, comprised of books that nobody had ever heard of – this was the beginning of the interest in American folk music. Bob Dylan used to hang around the store and would look through every single book and listen to every single record I had.”

Here is a reproduction of the manuscript that was auctioned.

The lyrics date from the time when Bob Dylan was in New York, working on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

It is reported that Izzy Young and Dylan fell out when the musician returned to playing with electric rather than acoustic instruments.  It is also reported that Young has or had an original version of the lyrics to Talkin Folklore Centre Blues, a 1962 song that Dylan wrote about Young’s store.

Nicolette Tomkinson, a director of Christie’s said at the time, “This unreleased song, written against the background of the threat of nuclear warfare, is not only a beautiful example of Dylan’s songwriting, representing his political protest activities during that era, but is also a potent symbol of the anxieties of the American public in the early 1960s,”

Here is the June 2013 auction

Finally it seems that Michel Montecroass has been quite active in recording Dylan songs.  Here is his website, and it includes another version of this song, on Spotify.  If you spot a song he knows that we haven’t got please shout, and we can get up to 600 songs.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 598 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 and Aaron Galbraith

We have recently presented articles on the way those using sampling techniques have delved into Bob Dylan’s music to use it on their own tracks featuring “Lay Lady Lay” and “Just like Tom Thumbs Blues” (details are given at the end of this piece).

So Aaron has been doing more research on some further samples, and has found us several surprising ones!

Now we must confess once again that neither of us can be called an aficionado of this type of music although we have tried to give some background information on sampling in the Tom Thumb article.   So in what follows there might be a gaff or two – please do correct politely if we have got this very wrong.

First, here’s TV Girl with Benny And The Jetts…a pretty cool song I though, it’s a song about a girl listening to Benny & The Jets set to Sign On The Window! “Very nicely done,” says Aaron.

Next another one by Kid Cudi – Party All The Time using All The Tired Horses! Apparently he was only 17 when he did this – and it is much more conventional in terms of its sampling

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SuONz3obaW0

Next we come to two artists using “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”

Or you are getting the hang of this now, or you have given up.  This one is Knxwledge – Shadysidetro and the opening music tells you all you need to know.

Sweatshop Union – Hit The Wall – and here once again once that opening line comes out you will know where we are, or at least roughly where we were before we started.

Finally Gabrielle with Rise…this was a number 1 hit in the UK…

It’s notable as it was an authorized sample, Dylan liked it so much he allowed the use of it for free and receives a co write credit…

This is a different type of sampling and it does not take too much imagination to understand why Bob himself liked it.

Previously on this subject…

• Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues: the sampler version
• Lay Lady Lay: the sampler sessions

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 598 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 Patrick Roefflaer

• Released                       July 14, 1986
• Illustration                    Harry Lemon Pankhurst
• Art-director                   Charles Sappington

The cover of Bob Dylan’s 24th studio album is one that reveals its secrets with difficulty.
On the cover is a painting depicting three figures: two men are fighting and a girl is about to smash a jar on the head of one of them. In the background: a mud hut with a straw roof. The scene seems to be set somewhere in the Wild West. The bandido who can expect a headache could be a Mexican and the señorita a sexy dressed Indian.

The proportions of the illustration are incorrect. It seems that the originally rectangular image has been deformed into a square, so that the figures are squat and expanded in width.

At the top, in black-rimmed orange letters, there’s the name Bob Dylan, and diagonally above the two men, the title is in black capital letters: KNOCKED OUT LOADED.

The same image and layout are once more reprised identically on the back.

Although about 120 people are thanked on the inner cover, the credits remain very vague. The only concrete thing regarding the sleeve is: “Album Art: Charles Sappington”.

In the mid-1990s, Rod MacBeath published a series of articles on the covers under the title ‘Looking Up Dylan’s Sleeves’ in the fanzine The Telegraph. In the fifth part, about Knocked out Loaded, he believes that Charles Sappington based himself on the illustration of a scene from the Western ‘Duel in the Sun’, by King Vidor from 1946. He comes to this conclusion because the I-figure (Bob Dylan) in the song ‘Brownsville Girl’ describes how he saw a movie with Gregory Peck. From the further description, it appears that this concerns The Gunfighter (1950) by Henry King. Peck stars in both Westerns, and his Duel in the Sun co-star Jennifer Jones plays a mestiza Native American.

A tip of the veil will be lifted on May 1, 2009. That day The Houston Chronicle publishes an interview with Charles R. Sappington. You can find it here

When asked whether he made the image, Charles replies:

I created the package. However, the deal was at the time … I promised them I wouldn’t talk about it. There was a reason, and it was legal. They had some legal problems with that cover. I suspect enough time has passed, but I have to stick to my word unless I get approval from the Dylan camp. (Note: Dylan’s camp had no comment.) What I can say is that Bob Dylan supplied the original image and then we distorted it from there.

He also adds that a photographer was originally asked to take some pictures of Dylan and Tom Petty.

They originally had a photographer shoot some photos of Dylan and Tom Petty. I heard Dylan took a look and threw them all in the trash. The only thing he liked from the shoot was a Polaroid test shot, which is the first thing they gave me. I fiddled with that, but they didn’t care for it, and we went in a different direction. That’s the part I can’t talk about.

He does however want to talk about the very long list of thank-you’s.

It didn’t start out that long. It was about 20 names. Bob told me he didn’t want it in this typeset. He wanted it hand-lettered but not calligraphy. I knew exactly what to do. I turned it over to my now ex-wife. She was at UCLA in a landscape architecture program. She was into lettering on drawings, which I thought would be perfect. I sent Bob a sample, and he liked it. But every morning he called with new names to add to the list. The morning it had to go to press he called with five more names. My wife was headed out the door to go to her job, and I said, “Wait, you have to do this before you leave.” She sat down and did it.

When, the day after, this is discussed on the Dylan forum Expecting Rain, there still appears to be confusion whether or not Sappington made the image. He himself (or someone impersonating him) therefore logs into the forum, under the pseudonym Notherelong, to make this clear:

First of all the credit on the album says “Album Art: Charles Sappington” not picture by Charles Sappington. Second the original image is NOT from a Gregory Peck Movie. As to where it originated, you will have to ask BD.

[…]
Sincerely
Charles Sappington

Pulp Fiction

It will take another five years for the truth to come to light. In June 2014, top Bob Dylan researcher Scott Warmuth posts on his Facebook page, without comment, a cover of a pulp magazine from the Spicy-Adventure Stories series. Dylan fans, of course, immediately recognize the image as the long-sought source for the image on the cover of Knocked Out Loaded.

It concerns the story Daughters of Doom, written by E. Hoffman Price, published in January 1939 and illustrated by H.L. Parkhust.

Harry Lemon Parkhurst, like Robert Zimmerman, appears to be from Minneapolis, MN. He was born there in 1876, but moved with his parents to Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute. In 1899 he moved to New York where he became a freelance illustrator for all kinds of magazines. He is doing well until the market collapses due to the Great Depression.

He is forced to switch to illustrating pulp magazines. They are sold in stalls and therefore do not rely on advertisers. Parkhurst continues to work as long as his eyes allow. He spent the last years of his life at the Institute of the Blind in Huntington, NY, where he died in 1962 at the age of 86.

Dylan found the illustration in a book: The Pulps: Fifty Years of American Pop Culture, curated by Tony Goodstone – the first man on the list of people to be thanked on the inner sleeve of Knocked Out Loaded.

In her memoir, published in 2016, as Seeing The Real You At Last: Life And Love On The Road With Bob Dylan, Bob’s then-girlfriend Britta Lee Shain tells of the day the artwork was chosen:

[Bob] is now looking for an album cover, sort of a ’50s pulp detective magazine thing, and when I mention that I have this friend, Tony Goodstone, with an incredible collection of old movie posters, Bob says, ‘Get him up here. Tomorrow.’

Tony is this heavyset actor, writer, and antiques restorer — he owns a ’58 Fairlane convertible with a working retractable top — who I met at a play in North Hollywood. He has literally written the book on pulp art: a substantive tome entitled The Pulps: Fifty Years Of Pop Culture. His best friend is screenwriter Terry Southern, who wrote the scripts for Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, and Easy Rider. Tony had offered to read my novel, Detours, which opens with a quote from the Maltese Falcon about ‘the stuff that dreams are made of,’ and the first time he came to my house, he showed up carrying a replica of the famed fake falcon wrapped in newspaper and string, just like in the movie.

Bob and Tony hit it off right away — which is one of life’s great thrills for Tony — and at a meeting that takes place on Bob’s deck in Malibu, the three of us sit at the round redwood table, pouring over possible photographs for the album cover. ‘That’s the one!’ Bob says, picking out a pulpy piece from the 40s depicting a sarong-clad woman bashing an urn over some guy’s head.

“I’ll check out the rights,” Tony volunteers.

“Let ’em sue us,” Dylan says.

In the thank-you list on the inner sleeve of the album, Britta Lee Shain is probably listed as ‘Rita & Britta’. Incidentally, the list contains a striking number of female names: Annette, Vanessa, Clara, Helena, Nicole, Sharon, Carol … Some are given a full name (Carole Childs, Clydie King, …), while others require a cryptic description (The Baroness, The Duchess, …).

In retrospect, there are some names that ring a bell:

‘Desiree’ is Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, the daughter the singer has with his second (?) wife Carolyn Dennis. Her existence was not known at the time.

Desiree might also be listed as ‘Baby Boo Boo’. A baby boo boo is urban slang for an unexpected pregnancy. Another contender for this designation is ‘Narette, who is rumoured to be his daughter with Clydie King.

Narette also appears with the acknowledgments in his Lyrics 1962-1985.

Rick Griffin

Knocked Out Loaded continues to surprise.

In May 2008 an earlier cover design for the record, made by Rick Griffin, appears at a rock auction at Bonhams.

Griffin was the legendary designer of a colourful psychedelic concert poster in the San Francisco scene of the late 1960s. He also designed a number of covers for people like Neil Young (On the Beach), Jackson Browne (Late for the Sky), but most of all he collaborated a lot with Grateful Dead.

A big surprise is that Knocked Out Loaded was first called All Jacked Up.

The promotional text from the catalog states:

“This is a design for an album by Bob Dylan. After being approached by Dylan’s management to design the cover, Rick listened to the music that would be on the record and designed an emotionally intense vision, with a strong contrast between Marlon Brando’s dark blue, rebellious cool, ” The Wild One ‘(1983), opposite the title’s passionate red. Rick was jacked up at the time. He had just bought a new Harley Davidson motorcycle, hence the autobiographical reference in the image. “

Griffin died in 1991, three days after an accident with the same motorcycle

Junco Partner

Finally, the title. All Jacked Up had to make way for Knocked Out Loaded.

Bob later reveals that he got the phrase ‘Knocked out loaded’ from an old blues song from the New Orleans area, called ‘Junco Partner.’

“Down the road came a junco partner
For he was loaded as can be.
He was knocked out, knocked out loaded
He was a-wobblin’ all over the street.”

The song is best known thanks to the first recording by James Booker (1951) and the cover (s) by The Clash on their 1981 album Sandinista.  This version above also comes from 1951

This is the 12th in our unique series of articles on the artwork on Bob Dylan’s albums.  You can find links to the earlier articles on the Album Artwork page.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 598 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 Philip Hale

As the pandemic of 2020 lays waste to all live music, stopping Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” in its tracks as nothing else has, this seems a good time to reflect on his 2019 Fall performances and what they tell us about Dylan, the artist.

It is both uncertain when he will be able to tour again and what impact a break in his relentless schedule may have. Last year’s Fall shows were met with near-universal acclaim, the argument reduced to how far back did one have to go to find him performing at an equivalent level. Now that the opportunity to see how Dylan would have followed up on them this Spring has been foreclosed they take on an added significance. If we assume for a moment that the praise was not unfounded, is there any way to make sense of such a phenomenon occurring this relatively late in an immense career?

One way to think about these shows and what they tell us about Dylan’s creative essence and the one I want to explore here may be to look at it through the eyes of T.S Eliot and apply some philosophical reading of the concept of art, originality and truth.

So much is written about Dylan yet he remains in a fundamental way mysterious. This mystery is not a product of his oft-cited so-called enigmatic, reclusive or deflective behavior. It concerns why his music impacts the way it does, not,“who he really is?” –  a question which is of no interest to me.

If you start to think about why his music resonates I don’t believe it can be captured by just referencing the lyrics, or the melody, an approach that works just fine with Paul McCartney for example. There is something else, something more profound about the human condition and the core essence of art that is being communicated by Dylan. He challenges us to confront the metaphysical.

The 2019 Fall shows are both an example of that challenge being laid down and an indication of where the answer to it might be found. My reference point is the nine of the 10 Beacon shows that I attended, set in the context of witnessing 42 shows in the era of “The Set” that started in 2013. This period, freed from the expectation of nightly song changes, and with Dylan performing with great consistency throughout, created an environment ripe to absorb what he was doing.

The Fall of 2019 found him energized and wrapped in the material and the performance in a way that marked itself collectively as different from anything that he has produced on stage before. Not better, as that is subjective but different. No single element had not been present before, each song/performance could find its corollary elsewhere in this post 2013 era. The energy, exuberance, pathos and humor among other elements that Dylan delivered had all been present in different quantities and at different times during those years. In the Fall of 2019, however, Dylan seemed to pull together every element he needed and wanted into one harmonious mix. Still, though, how and why was it so impactful to so many people?

It is here that Eliot may be of assistance in understanding the “how”. In his seminal “Tradition and the Individual Talent’ published in 1919, Eliot expounded the theory that a poet, (I am expanding his definition of a poet to encompass the work of Dylan for the sake of making this connection), needs to strip his/her personality from the process of creating the art or as he more eloquently put it, “Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.’

Eliot goes on to say “the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.” This sheds light on the ability of Dylan to write from so many points of view while imbuing songs with a complexity that can defy analysis.  It would help explain why a song such as “Early Roman Kings” resonates with the power that it does while not apparently coming from a consistent narrator. It would point to how “North Country Blues” found a young Dylan inhabiting the character of a miner’s wife so completely that you forget it is him singing it.

Dylan of course is not just a poet, his Nobel acceptance speech concludes with a quote from Homer “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story,” to emphasize his point that “lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page.”

He has also said, “I am only Bob Dylan when I need to be”. It seems safe to assume he is Bob Dylan when he writes and when he performs. This transfiguration from man to artist would explain the times when Dylan’s writing or performing has fallen short of his own peaks. Sometimes he probably cannot get out of his own way, it’s that concept that he has explained as having to get to a place where he consciously can do what he once did unconsciously. When Dylan reaches that place his art becomes transcendent.

Dylan, on this reading, left his personality in the wings in the Fall, entered the medium of live performance exactly and completely, and became “Bob Dylan” in a pure sense; that of the performing character, stripped of any needs that the man underlying it had, everything subsumed to that transformation to  “Bob Dylan” as that is as much a “medium” for him as the act of performance is. By that I mean it is a layered process where Dylan needs to get into the medium that is “Bob Dylan” in order to pass through to the medium of performance.

This not an argument that this was the first time he has done it but more that it is not an atmosphere that can simply be inhaled on demand. What is remarkable is that he could make the transfiguration again so completely in 2019.

The Rolling Thunder Revue performances offer a context of another time where Dylan entered this realm. Opinions may vary but there seems to be a consensus that the 1975 leg was transcendent and the 1976 version laudatory but not sublime. That difference can be viewed through Eliot’s prism; that by ’76 Dylan was unable to block out the noise sufficiently to be at one with the medium and not allow his personality to enter his art.

Much of the buy-in to Eliot’s theory comes from an acceptance of the metaphysical, that there is some mystery to what is created in a great piece of art. Here we can lean on the writing of Martin Heidegger in his 1937 essay, “The Origin of a Work of Art”, to maybe answer the why question around the effect Dylan’s work in 2019 had on so many. In his essay, Heidegger is searching for a definition of what thing is at work in the “work’ of art and he settles on that it is the revealing of a truth that is hidden until the coming into existence of the work of art exposes it.

Dylan, of course, has often talked of the truth of performance. Let’s take the example of “Lenny Bruce” from Dylan’s recent set to try and see if it helps illustrate what Heidegger was getting at and how what typically would be considered a minor song can transcend that ranking. Dylan needs to enter a space where this emergence of the truth or “unconcealment” as Heidegger puts it, happens at on least two occasions. The first time is when he writes the song, that act of creation ‘unconceals” the song, before it was written it exists only as a hidden idea, a potential occupying no space or time. Metaphysically speaking, as it is written its own truth is revealed, that truth is outside of the words or music that the artist employs, the thing that is the song has its own “being”, it “needed” to come into existence as it contained a truth that could only exist in it. It now has its own purpose and identity and no longer “belongs” to its creator.

Arguably that truth with Lenny Bruce is the capturing of a memory, a sense of a man, Bruce, and Dylan’s memory of a time. It also contains another truth, the potential to be performed that is separate from just the written words. It holds within it both elements, its truth as a song and a further hidden truth that will be revealed only if it is performed. This may sound too complex an explanation of what is happening but if we think about Dylan’s abandoned songs or the existence of so many masterpieces left in the vaults it makes perfect sense if Dylan felt he either didn’t or couldn’t access the truth of a given song. It also helps to explain why Dylan adds a song like Lenny Bruce to a setlist after a long absence. He is returning to it seeking something in it once more.

Heidegger was clear that his ideas were only relevant to great art so we can argue over whether “Lenny Bruce” constitutes great art as a written song.  But it is the secondary element, the performance of it in 2019 that reveals a latent greatness in the writing. It does not have to fit a standard interpretation of greatness in the way Tangled Up In Blue does for instance. It just needs to contain the potential for Dylan to make great performative art with it.

Live on stage, Dylan must birth a new relationship with it. Performance creates a new piece of work that lives only for that moment (it can be captured by a recording but not in all its elements as there is a visual component, the presence of an audience etc). So in November of 2019 as Dylan sits at the piano the song doesn’t exist in its performative or written truth. It doesn’t matter if he performed it the night before, that is gone, creation must begin again. It is words and accompanying musical notation that has no life until the first note is played this time and Dylan leans into the song this time. If the song came into existence to invoke a feeling and it is that feeling that is the truth of the song then Dylan must reach for it anew if we are to consider the performance as great art.

Here the silences, the pauses, the cadence, the rhythm, the music, the posture all have to coalesce to conjure the mood. It’s different from when Dylan wrote the song nearly 40 years ago so he must locate the truth of it again and subsequently the truth of this actual performance, as the performance is its own work of art. A simple example is the verse beginning “I rode with him, in a taxi once”. As Dylan sang it at the Beacon the distance the journey they took changes on different nights but it doesn’t matter; the truth of the song doesn’t rely on the tachometer, it doesn’t even rely on whether the journey took place at all. Dylan enters the truth of the song for him which is a memory which in turn is the truth that the song reveals. I would argue it can all be found in the way he sings “rode”, that he pours all the truth and memory the song was waiting to reveal into that one word. It’s a circle that he has completed. If someone else were to sing the song or Dylan himself were to carelessly toss it off then it collapses into words and music that may or may not be pleasant to listen to but would not be great art.

There is arguably a third element of this truth revelation that Dylan was engaged in, in 2019, that wrapped itself around the individual songs and that is the structure of the show as a separate entity. Keeping the focus on the post 2013 shows Dylan entered what can be viewed as a search for the perfect “theatrical” show, a self-contained conceptual work of art that reflects back on him as a great artist beyond the component parts just as the songs are their own individual works of art beyond just their words and music. Seen like this it’s a legacy project that Dylan was only able to approach as his years have advanced. It’s a piece of art that a younger version couldn’t have contemplated. It consists partly of playing theaters with the back drop, the golden movie lighting, the placing of busts and statues on stage but that is just the beginning.

Musically it has been a voyage towards a holy grail that only he can see but we can maybe glimpse. The introduction of the “Tempest “ songs with their epic sweeps and conjuring of visions and characters that don’t have, or need, consistent narrative structure was one element. The bringing in of the Standards, that seemed to have served as both a vehicle to soften his vocals and reconnect him with the heart of his songwriting, that he had perhaps disconnected from at some level, was another. The orchestration of songs and the intense visual and musical focus on him that his unconventional piano playing demanded of the band combined to hone a distinctive sound that Dylan was reaching for.

The fixed but rolling setlist gave Dylan the opportunity to be with songs again and again, ferreting for that connection to them. In recent years when Dylan has performed he can often be seen with his eyes closed at the piano communing with the souls trapped inside his songs. On others he is gesticulating and posturing to unleash their secrets. Having dropped the Standards material and replaced them with his own material Dylan seemed by the Fall shows under discussion to have every song and every arrangement where he wanted them. He had arrived at the destination that the previous 5 years had been heading towards.

Dylan perfectly executed a vision in 2019. His ability to be “Bob Dylan” when he “needed to be” was conjured at will for each song yet he seemed able to luxuriate in the observation of his feat between songs. It was apparent in his energy as he prepped himself for each song. Like a mild-mannered boxer transfigures into a warrior in the ring Dylan stepped back from his “Bob Dylan” creation as he took a glass of water, dried his face or stepped gingerly to his mark before re-engaging in the fight. It produced an avenging angel during “Pay in Blood,” a rocking irascible bluesman on “Highway 61,” a pining and nostalgic lover on “Girl From the North Country”, a wind blowing through a haunted forest of memory on “When I Paint my Masterpiece.” Dylan created a new truth for himself each time as he pulled that truth out of every song by the scruff of its neck.

A small but telling moment happened on a couple of nights on “Simple Twist of Fate”. On the “People tell me it’s a sin” verse Dylan had rewritten the song. He started singing the line “I believe she was my twin” and stopped momentarily in order to finish the line with the rewritten version. It was only important to do so for the next line. He could have just finished the verse out with the original, likely nobody would have noticed or cared. But he cared. It wasn’t what the narrator wanted to say now, the old version wasn’t true to him.

Ultimately perhaps Dylan’s greatest work of art is his 60-year-long connection with his creativity. Eliot concerned himself with tradition and the concept of originality and argued that an artist who leans on tradition and adds to it, can be considered a true original and not just an imitator. Dylan’s ability to stay in connection with his art for so long and to pursue greatness within it when he can access it has led him to creating himself as his own tradition. He has obviously referenced many musical traditions along the way, but this idea that he has produced so much work that he can explore his own history and build on it is maybe one key to unlocking his mystery. He has entered a place where his body of work is so deep and wide that it is its own category, one that he is able to access to produce shows in 2019 that were self-contained truly great works of art.

Now this could all be dismissed with “he’s a performer, that’s all that’s going on here”. I think that misses the mark. Heidegger argues that the “preservers” as he calls those that witness it are essential for the work of art to fulfil its potential as in being witnessed it grasps a historical placement in which to exist. I don’t know for sure if that is what was going on as I watched Dylan in 2019 but it certainly transcended the idea of a concert in any normal use of that word. It’s an idea that stayed with me as I left the theatre but it floated beyond a precise definition. What I had seen was not a stage-play but it pointed towards one; it was not a “show” but it entertained. It was more akin to a happening, an event of serious magnitude. It left people perplexed, enamoured, excited or disappointed but it had its own existence even if one that defied an easy label. A “great work of art” might capture it, a sense that a truth had been set free might be closer.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 598 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).

If you would like to submit a piece for this series, the only requirements are that it is somehow Dylan related.  Just email the audio or video file to Tony@schools.co.uk and mark the subject line of the email “Untold Dylan Showcase”.  Please also supply some background information about yourself, recording the song or come to that anything else that you feel is relevant and would like to share.

I won’t publish your email address unless you specifically ask for that to happen.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 598 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).

This article continues from Bob Dylan And More Mythology Part I

by Larry Fyffe

A number of song lyrics by Bob Dylan have their roots soaked in the mythology of Dionysus.

Dionysus (Bacchus) is known to be both kind and cruel. The son of Zeus, and the mortal princess Semele, he is thereby unique among the Olympian gods. The God of the Vine, he’s torn to pieces in the Autumn, and rejuvenates in the Spring; he always comes back again; from his barley and corn, his grapes and apples, alcohol is made; from his herbs, intoxicants. His daughter is Methe, the nymph-goddess of Drunkenness, given birth to by a mortal:

Well, they're stone you, and say that's it the end
Then they'll stone you, then they'll come back again
(Bob Dylan: Rainy Day Women, no. 12#35)

Noted it be:

The ‘Maenads’, or the ‘Bacchantes’, as they were also called, were woman frenzied with wine.
They rushed through woods, and over the mountains uttering sharp cries, waving cone-tipped wands, swept away in a fierce ecstasy (Edith Hamilton: Mythology).

Imagery that’s repeated in the song lyrics below:

All the early Roman kings
In the early, early morn
Coming down the mountain
Distributing the corn
Speeding through the forest
Racing down the track
You try to get away
They drag you back
(Bob Dylan: Early Roman Kings)

In another story, handsome young Bacchus is seized by pirates; he tangles their ship in vines; turns into a lion; the pirates jump overboard, and are transformed into dolphins. Only the helmsman is saved because he recognizes that the young man be a god.

Below, a folk song with a similar motif. A supposed lover – for pieces of gold – smuggles a maiden aboard a ship heading for Canada; revealed  she is, and the crew threatens to toss her into the sea:

Now, when the other sailors heard the news
Well, they fell into a rage
And with all the ship's company
They were willing to engage
Saying, "We'll tie her hands and feet, my boys
Overboard we'll throw her
She'll never see the seaport town
Called Canadee-i-o"
(Bob Dylan: Canadee-i-o ~ Dylan/traditional)

[There is no Dylan video of this song available freely on line so we’ve found an alternative]

The captain, angered by their evil intentions, saves her:

Now, when the captain he heard the news
Well, he too feel in a rage
And with the whole ship's company
He was willing to engage
Saying, "She'll stay in sailor's clothes
Her colour shall be blue
She'll see that seaport town
Called Canadee-i-o"
(Bob Dylan: Canadee-i-o ~ Dylan/traditional)

Dionysus is a symbol of regeneration – spring returns, and with it hope; in Christian mythology, Dionysus is replaced by Jesus; however, He’s slow in returning:

When the cities are on fire with the burning flesh of men
Just remember that death is not the end
And you search in vain to find just one law-abiding citizen
Just remember death is not the end
(Bob Dylan: Death Is Not The End)

[And again, no Dylan version freely available so an alternative…]

Alas, as far as the singer/songwriter is concerned, neither the positive thoughts of the Romantic Transcendentalist poets in regards to the return of Spring, nor the regenerative-themed mythology pertaining to Dionysus, be of little help in the depth of a cold, lonely winter:

Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody needs
So many things that we never will undo
I know that you're sorry, I'm sorry too
(Bob Dylan: Mississippi)

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 598 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 Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Previously in this mega-series we have looked at the very start of the Never Ending Tour (NET).

• The Never-Ending Tour: 1987 – Farewell to all that
• NET 1988: Desperate stratagems, Part 1: Heroes and Villains

So now we come on to NET 1988, Part Two – the 1960s revisited.

Check any setlist of Dylan’s in 1988 and you’ll find it weighted towards his sixties hits, his tried and true favourites. We have traditional folk songs, and  ‘Silvio’ and ‘Rank Strangers’, not written by Dylan, from the album Down in the Groove released in May 1988, just before the NET began. I found one performance of ‘Drifting too far from Shore’ from Knocked Out Loaded, 1986, but the recording is too poor to include here.

The ten songs in this post, therefore, are from his early period, 1962 to 1966. What he appears to be doing is putting together a group of core songs, known to the audience, and popular songs on which his reputation was built.  This group of songs, with variations, was to carry him through into the 2000s when a lot of new songs would come on stream, and the sixties material would begin to take a back seat. He wanted durable songs that would keep him going night after night. And there were plenty to find.

Songs like ‘Just Like Tom Thumb Blues’, the junky’s lament. He delivers the song in a brisk four and half minutes here. It’s pretty up-tempo, which may not appeal to everybody. The song may better suit the world-weary, druggy slowness you find on the album version. The backing is mediocre, but, as in all these 1988 performances, Dylan’s voice, right up front, pushes the song right into your face.

Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues

We heard John Brown powerfully delivered in 1987, and this 1988 version is hardly less powerful, although I do miss Baumont Tench’s nifty piano riff (see NET, part 1, 1987). The pace is a little slower, Dylan’s vocal delivery more emphatic than the 1987 performance, and GE Smith’s sharp, twangy sound fits well with the hard-edged drama that takes place between the returning soldier and his mother.

John Brown

For the fan of the old acoustic Dylan, however, it is Dylan’s acoustic performances of 1988 that must stand out. Dylan continued to perform solo acoustic guitar with his songs until 1993, so while this version of his 1964 classic ‘Love Minus Zero No Limit’ is to be surpassed in later, more sumptuous versions, this ‘primitive’ simple solo strumming takes us right back to the old Dylan, the tousled haired kid who charmed us with his poetry.

This song happily idolises his love without the awful sting in the tail we get with songs like ‘She Belongs to Me.’ There’s a tenderness and beauty that even the gruff 1988 Dylan can’t hide. This song is tribute to his love. There is a touch of the divine to this figure, who, possessed by a deep wisdom, seems to rise above the everyday aspects of life.

‘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’

Love Minus Zero

Similarly, ‘A hard rain’s a gonna fall’ sounds pretty much the way Dylan first sang it, way back in 1962. Perhaps his greatest protest song, a surreal nightmare of what life might be like in an apocalypse. Surely this song must ring a bell in a world right now suffering it own viral apocalypse. These images are terrifying and universal, images of a dying world which speak just as clearly to us now as they did when they were written. The harsh, urgent, 1988 voice suits the song perfectly.

Hard rain

Written in 1967, thirteen years before Dylan’s Christian period, ‘I shall be released’ expresses the desire of the soul for liberation, for release. Release from being hemmed in, trapped and isolated in ‘this lonely crowd’. We find this theme in ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ and still going strong in ‘Mississippi,’ in 2001, where the soul is ‘all boxed in no room to escape.’ In ‘I Shall be Released’ we find: ‘So, I swear I see my reflection/Somewhere inside these walls.’

I bet that pretty much describes a lot of us right now living in lockdown.

The raucous versions from The Rolling Thunder Tour, with The Band singing along, do not, to my mind, serve this rather delicate, oblique little song that well; it suits a quieter, more acoustic sound. We don’t get that exactly with GE Smith in the background, but it’s great to hear Dylan singing solo on the choruses, and, sounding raw, this is as affecting as any performance you might hear.

I Shall be Released

There are some songs that remind us of Dylan’s rock/blues roots, and ‘It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry’ (1965), is one of those. On the album, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), it takes the form of a gentle, lyrical, bluesy ballad, somewhat on the melancholy side.

‘Now, the wintertime is comin', the windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody but I could not get across
Well, I want to be your lover, baby, I don't want to be your boss
Don't say I never warned you when your train gets lost.’

It has the feel of country blues about it with simple strumming and minimal backing. In performance it became something else, a heavier and more urban blues, a rollicking rocker. It stays that way, with variations right up to the present time. You can find a heavy, crashing version on YouTube from 2018. Meanwhile, here’s how it sounds in 1988.

 It takes a lot to laugh

Along with ‘Hard Rain’, ‘Masters of War’ is associated with Bob Dylan the protest singer, the one who is ‘young and unlearned’ but knows the truth anyway, the truth that can’t be hidden. Stripped of any Dylanesque ambiguities, the song hits hard at the real war criminals, the arms manufacturers. (I’ve written about this song in the post Masters of War and Extinction Rebellion.) It’s a song that suits both acoustic and electric treatment. Here it gets a hard-edged treatment, courtesy of GE Smith’s guitar and Dylan’s punchy voice.

Master of war

‘Maggies Farm’ from the 1964 album ‘bringing it all back home’ typifies the defiance and rebellion that marked Dylan’s early image. Maggies farm, the place, is another closed-in space to be broken out of, a place full of lies, hypocrisy, slavery and general paranoia – ‘his bedroom window is made out of bricks…’  The farm is the absurdist face of modern American culture, represented as the mad, dysfunctional family. Who wouldn’t want to make their escape? The implicit anger in these 1988 performances finds a perfect vehicle here. Dylan’s voice is dripped with fury and contempt.

Maggies Farm

And a touch of that same contempt suits the psychology of ‘She Belongs to Me’. She doesn’t belong to anybody, and is the much revered and hated mistress of his soul. She is sarcastically described as a ‘hypnotist collector’ a ‘walking antique’ but on the other hand she has him down on his knees peeking through keyholes. Like ‘Romana’, it sounds like a love song, like an intention towards a love song, but it isn’t. The love, hate and humiliation are all there, given powerful voice. What this performance may lack in smoothness and some of the more rounded versions we hear later, it makes up for in raw, rough power.

Interestingly, ‘She Belongs to Me’ would last all the way through the NET, even through the Frank Sinatra years from 2014 to 2017 and undergo many transformations.

She Belong to Me

‘All along the Watchtower’  from John Wesley Harding was to become the standard rocker with which to end shows – to go out with an apocalyptic roar. GE Smith is only too happy to oblige. But once more, the presentation is minimal; packed into four minutes, it makes its statement and gets out with none of the wild improvisations we’re going to find further down the track. This is the unadorned core of the song, and as such is typical of these 1988 performances.

All along the Watchtower

That’s it for Part 2 of our tour through 1988. Next post will be Part 3, finishing off 1988 with a few choice performances.

See you then, and in the meantime, stay safe.

Kia Ora

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 598 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 Jochen Markhorst

 By now it has the status of a classic, the book by The Band‘s drummer (1993). It is a textbook example of a rise-and-fall tragedy, embellished with some bitter venom (Robbie Robertson doesn’t get away well) and a Horn of Plenty of revealing, hilarious and moving anecdotes. It is not entirely clear why Levon Helm names his autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire, but the anecdote he tells about fellow Band member Rick Danko, the song’s co-author, could be a key:

“Those first royalty checks we got almost killed some of us. This Wheel’s on Fire was never really a hit, but it had been recorded by a few people and all of a sudden I got a couple hundred thousand dollars out of left field! This was half the writer’s royalties from one song. We were all shocked at these windfalls we never dreamed existed. Dealing with this wasn’t in the fuckin’ manual, man!”

At first it is amusing, the naivety of the men of The Band, who have been involved in the music business for some years at the time and who have toured around the world with Dylan.

Later in the book, however, it becomes clear that in retrospect Helm sees all accumulated money and fame as the root of the coming misery. After the success of Music From The Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969) and hits such as “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, he says, their lives become an absurd rollercoaster of luxury, drugs and tinsel. Particularly strange is the behaviour of the people around him; suddenly they get all sorts of things thrown into the lap, total strangers want to give them gifts, they get drugs thrown everywhere, bills no longer need to be paid. That, Helm analyses, has destroyed the bond, our friendship and actually our lives.

Hence perhaps This Wheel’s On Fire as the title for his book: that first royalty check is the beginning of the end.

Danko, by the way, is mistaken when he says that the song was not a real hit at all. In England, Julie Driscoll scores big with the song (no. 5 in the UK Single Chart) with Brian Auger and The Trinity, a version that is today considered a monument, as a standard-bearer of the psychedelic music of those years.

The British owe the hit to a rather cold, remarkable business clean-up by Dylan. In that mythical summer of ’67, when the master with the men of The Band records the legendary Basement Tapes in that Big Pink house, he selects fourteen songs, which manager Albert Grossman in London, at music publisher Feldman, offers to a small group of avid musicians. Manfred Mann picks up “The Mighty Quinn”, The Fairport Convention is happy with “Million Dollar Bash” and Brian Auger’s heart jumps at “This Wheel’s On Fire”.

Incidentally, Grossman does not, as persistent historiography tells, bring acetate pressings, but an ordinary tape recording, as Dylan scholar Hans Seegers has shown.

Thereof, from that tape recording, a few so-called Emidisc copies are made in England (a kind of CD-R avant la lettre), which eventually end up in the bootleg circuit.

Rick Danko wrote the music to the lyrics, which is probably the reason why Dylan gives up the song so easily. True, he has a proverbially poor view on the quality of his own songs, but it is hard to believe that Dylan could miss the exceptional beauty of this, “This Wheel’s On Fire”. Although… this is, of course, the same genius who rejects “Mama You Been On My Mind”, “Farewell Angelina” and “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, and dismisses some twenty other masterpieces.

“This Wheel’s On Fire” does reside somewhere at the top of all those disowned jewels. The opening line If your mem’ry serves you well already has, in part thanks to Julie Driscoll’s interpretation,  the timeless, granite power of classics like Villon’s Où sont les neiges d’antan, or Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gently into that good night, or Heine’s Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, and is at least as well known as the official title of the song.

It is a wonderful line. It plays with the petrified expression if my memory serves me well, an expression that does exist in most languages but suddenly shifts aggressively from the first person to the second person. It is not, as some analysts think, a Rimbaud paraphrase. Indeed, Rimbaud opens Une Saison en Enfer with “si je me souviens bien”, but it is too much honour to attribute that phrase to the French poet; the expression has been around for centuries. Still, Dylan is at a level that recalls his best works from the previous years; “Like A Rolling Stone”, “She’s Your Lover Now”, “Most Likely You Go Your Way”.

Thematically anyway. A suitor with a sharp tongue lashes out to his love partner with vicious venom. Content-wise, however, the poet takes a different turn, compared to those other put-down songs. This time, the loved one is not demoted, but on the contrary, with fierce contempt she is claimed exclusively. The words the narrator chooses inject a strange, uncanny suspense into the lyrics. It is quite a lurid, evil lover who is speaking here: no man alive will come to you. And the four times repeated “you knew that we would meet again” are the words of a rancid, dangerous assailant who deserves a restraining order, as a matter of fact.

Just as overstrained as the Rimbaud interpretations are the exegetes who resort to the Bible. Some see a monologue to God in the song (because of that same no man alive will come to you, mainly), but of course cannot place verses like I was goin’ to confiscate your lace within such an interpretation. The trigger is the title, which would then be directly traceable to Ezekiel, who sees burning wheels in his visions (remarkably enough Daniel 7:9 is never mentioned; “his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire”). And Greil Marcus even hears an unspecified “sermon on Revelation” from a grim, reproachful preacher.

The Scripturians ignore the emotional context of the chorus. The poet Dylan searches and does find here a pleasant-sounding metaphor that instinctively comes close to what he wants to express: drive, consuming passion, vengeful desire. Very similar to other language finds on the Basement Tapes, such as “round that horn” (“Lo And Behold!”) and “now, it’s king for king / queen for queen” (“Down In The Flood”), and older songs, like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.

Julie Driscoll’s and Brian Auger’s hit version eventually leads to a reworking in the 90s, which is used as the theme song for the hugely popular television comedy Absolutely Fabulous. In any case, “This Wheel’s On Fire” has penetrated the collective memory on the Old Continent, and the many, many covers only maintain that status.

Just before Absolutely Fabulous, the mascara collective Siouxsie and the Banshees already reached the Top 20 with a sterile, but not unattractive version (1987), just like in Australia the charming band Flake (1970) did with a somewhat exalted, psychedelic power cover.

In between, the half pantheon of the pop and rock world has had a go at it. Rod Stewart, Golden Earring, Elvis Costello, The Hollies (horrible again), Neil Young (with The Sadies on the very likeable Garth Hudson presents a Canadian Celebration of The Band, 2010 – a beautiful, trashy version turning the song suddenly into a thoroughbred Neil Young song) and Kylie Minogue are just a few of the names.

However, one of the most beautiful covers, besides Julie Driscoll’s protected cultural heritage, remains another old one: The Byrds. The opening track of the underrated album Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde (1969) is a beautiful mix of country rock and psychedelic pop, with fitting, hollow backing vocals in the chorus and an equally fitting plaintive performance by Roger McGuinn.

Outside the competition, obviously, is the irresistible standard version of The Band, but it must be acknowledged that Levon Helm, over the years, did promote it to his own personal anthem. Not only because he named his autobiography after it, but mainly because he continues to play the song until his death. His last official performance, March 24, 2012 at Tarrytown Music Hall, a month before his death, again opens with “This Wheel’s On Fire”.

On April 27, 2012, he is buried in Woodstock Cemetery, directly opposite the Bandmate who provided the music to his song, Rick Danko.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 598 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

OK the Untold Dylan Showcase is on the road: we have our first recording.

This is a speculative idea, which comes out of the fact that I suspect many of us are stuck in our homes without the normal access we enjoy (and in my case, take for granted) to the world at large.

So the idea is that any Untold Dylan reader who has recorded a Dylan song privately or has written or recorded a song that is somehow related to Dylan, can have the recording put up here.

Any songs that we get sent in will be clearly listed as being part of the “Dylan Showcase”, so readers who only want to hear recordings by Dylan and other professional recording artists won’t come here by mistake.

If no one sends anything in, then ok, another one of my brilliant ideas hits the dust.  But these are unusual times and it struck me that a bit of something different could be worth exploring.

So here is the first recording…  Details of how to say thank you to this artist, and then how to send in your own recording are given below.

by Tony Attwood

“I’ll not be a stranger” is a song that Bob Dylan has performed twice, and it is something of an interesting choice.

It is a rather obscure piece and it is listed, (where it is listed at all), as “traditional”.  Which is in itself interesting, in that it is longer and it feels more complete and more complex than most traditional songs.

But I don’t have any evidence to cite a composer, so we’ll take it that “traditional” it is.

I’ve also not found many ensembles who have recorded it – just a couple in fact.

The Traditional Grass

And so here is Bob singing the song…

https://youtu.be/ApnfbTKi0bs

Two very fine performances in November and December 1997 have been the only ones so far.   Here are the lyrics:

The Stanley Brothers were an American bluegrass duo of singer-songwriter-musicians made up of actual brothers (as opposed to supposed brothers, as many “brothers” groups of the period were) Carter Stanley (1925–1966) and Ralph Stanley (1927–2016).

Ralph and Carter performed with their band, The Clinch Mountain Boys, from 1946 to 1966. Ralph continued as a solo artist after Carter’s death until his own death nearly 40 years later.

Here is an album of their music

So why does Bob like this music?

I suspect this is a song Bob heard early on in his life, and it stayed in his affections.  It is really interesting to hear how he has changed it to make it a much more emotional piece – I find the original much more sanitised – Bob has put a lot more feeling into it.  The original has so much focus on the harmonies and the perfect timing.  Bob does it from the heart.  Certainly, at the instrumental break, it sounds as if the band isn’t quite sure what Bob is about to do.  So I guess he just gave them a quick run through during the sound test.

Perhaps, sadly, Bob had just had the news of the passing of a good friend or relative and he added this to the show for two nights by way of tribute.

We’ll never know, but he sure delivers it with some profound feeling.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3400 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 598 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).