The aim of this series is to provide one Dylan concert to listen to with reasonable acoustics for each year since Bob started performing regularly. However, there have of course, been some years when Bob hasn’t performed very often on stage, so on occasion the choice of shows is limited.
But if you have a particular concert that you feel should be included and you know of a recording of it on the internet which can be replicated here, please do send in your suggestion to Tony@schools.co.uk Don’t worry if we already have a concert for that year – there is nothing to say we can’t have more than one entry each time.
Today it is 1985 – and there is a list of all the other concerts included in the series, below.
This appearance from Dylan at the Live Aid concert only included three songs, in which he was accompanied by Keith Richards and Ron Wood.
The three songs chosen were a curious collection – Hollis Brown was a fairly regular choice by Dylan, being performed from 1962 onward and reaching 211 performances all told – the last in 2012.
But for “When the Ship Comes In,” this was one of just three performances and it was in fact the last time ever that Bob performed the song.
Ballad of Hollis Brown however had 211 performances stretching from 1962 on to 2012
The concerts so far in this series (each of which are much longer than the above)
Prelude: I tried at first to write a set of reviews of Dylan’s “Philosophy” book but I found I really couldn’t do it – so I then started to ask if anyone else would like to try, but no one came forth. (And to be clear I mean, come forth by reviewing what Dylan says about the songs, not primarily about the songs themselves).
Thus with no offers on the table, I am now writing reviews not of the book but of the songs that Bob chose to include in the book, and doing so totally from my own perspective. If nothing else, it gives you a chance to hear the occasional song that Bob chose, which perhaps you might not have heard before, and maybe you might wish to consider your own thoughts on why Bob included each particular song.
So now we have “Cheaper to Keep Her” – which is a song I have never heard before today – although quite possibly that is because I have lived most of my life in England and I guess it was never heard on UK radio. And I’ll also admit to ignorance about the performer too. But let’s start with the song.
It has a jazz-blues feel but uses the chords that can be found in a classic 12 bar blues. And here’s my second admission, I find the notion that any person and/or relationship is to be reduced to finance as offensive.
So quite clearly this is not a song that appeals to me, although the music stripped of the lyrics has a nice swing to it. Add to this the fact that before today I didn’t know about Johnnie Harrison Taylor who was born in 1934 and passed away in 2000, and you can quite reasonably conclude I’m in unknown lands.
And that might well have you shuddering and leaving this page, not least because I had to look it up to discover that the singer has had a number of hits in the USA, including “Disco Lady” which reached number 1. If it was a hit in England, I missed it, not least because around this time I was living in Algeria, so I’ll use that excuse to explain my ignorance.
But of course my ignorance counts for nought for this track, I have found out today, sold over 2.5 million copies in the USA and Cashbox made it the number 1 song of the year.
Taylor started out as a gospel singer and was in a group with Sam Cooke early on, and it has been said that his voice was very similar to that of Sam Cooke. He also later recorded with Booker T and the MGs, and had a number of hits both on the Hot 100 chart and in the R&B chart, including “Cheaper to Keep Her”.
Wiki tells me that “Taylor, along with Isaac Hayes and The Staple Singers, was one of the label’s flagship artists, who were credited for keeping the company afloat in the late 1960s and early 1970s after the death of its biggest star, Otis Redding…”
The site also tells me that “Stax billed Johnnie Taylor as ‘The Philosopher of Soul’. He was also known as,”the Blues Wailer.”
And although it is not relevant to the music, I must admit I was fascinated to read of the singer’s “highly complex personal life” which apparently was not revealed until after his demise, particularly in Rolling Stone, and which led to difficulties in allocating how much of his subsequent royalties each of his numerous heirs should receive. And this is not me just digging around in the dirt, at least I don’t think so, but due to the fact that the song in question has the title “Cheaper to Keep Her”. I haven’t really studied the situation, but reading about his multiple children with different mothers, the song does take on a new meaning.
But to be clear “Cheaper to keep her” was not written by Taylor but by Mack Rice.
When your little girl make you mad
And you get an attitude and pack your bags
Five little children that you're leaving behind
Son, you're gonna pay some alimony or do some time
That's why it's cheaper to keep her
Help me say it, y'all
It's cheaper to keep her (it's cheaper to keep her)
See, when you get through staring that judge in the face
You're gonna wanna cuss the whole human race
That's why it's cheaper to keep her (it's cheaper to keep her)
(It's cheaper to keep her)
(It's cheaper, it's cheaper, it's cheaper, it's cheaper)
(It's cheaper to keep her)
You didn't pay but two dollars to bring the little girl home
Now you're about to pay two thousand to leave her alone
You see another woman out there and you wanna make a change
She ain't gonna want you 'cause you won't have a damn thing
I am not sure, after listening to the song or reading the lyrics how I can comment further on this piece; it has within it an attitude toward others that I just can’t identify with. But maybe that is why Bob wanted to include the song in “Philosophy” – because it does indeed reflect the view of the world that some people in the music business have found themselves in. And I guess it can be argued that we all of us, no matter what our outlook on life, deserve some music akin to our vision of the world.
I am also not sure I like that argument, but I guess it can be made. And I am glad I had the time for the background, for knowing something about the writer’s mutiple relationships, the song does make a lot more sense.
And maybe that is why Bob wanted to include it – because here the singer is indeed revealing the basic facts of his life, rather than romanticising the world in a way that he feels others want to hear.
XIII “One of the sweetest motherfuckers you could ever meet”
You can bring it to St. Peter - you can bring it to Jerome
You can move it on over - bring it all the way home
“Jerome Green was Bo Diddley’s maracas shaker. He’d been with him on all the records and he was sloppy drunk, one of the sweetest motherfuckers you could ever meet. He would just fall into your arms.” Keith Richards was quite fond of Jerome Green, as we can gather from his autobiography Life (2010). During The Stones’ first UK tour, a shared bill with the incredible line-up of the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Mickie Most in the autumn of 1963, Keef and Jerome hit it off, and Jerome even stayed with Keith for a while when Jerome fell ill towards the end of the tour and couldn’t continue. But Keith already had Jerome on a pedestal way before this shared experience, as we can deduce from a diary entry dated 5 January 1963:
Got wallet back,
Richmond
Cock up. My pickup clapped out completely. Brian played harp and I used his guitar. “Confessin’ the Blues” “Diddley-Daddy” & “Jerome” and “Bo Diddley” went well. Mad row with promoter over money. Refused to play there again. Discussed new demo disc. To be made this week with any luck. “Diddley-Daddy” looked good. With Cleo and friends as vocal group. Band earned PS37 this week.
By “Jerome” the Glimmer Twin means “Bring It To Jerome”, the B-side of Bo Diddley’s third single, “Pretty Thing”. “Bring It To Jerome” was written by Jerome Green, and besides the maracas, we also hear his voice; he sings the chorus together with Bo Diddley, the words that Dylan copies: Bring it all home, bring it to Jerome.
At first listen, the song doesn’t seem all that spectacular. An “ordinary” B-side, a simple two-chord riff repeated from start to finish, with a run-of-the-mill blues lament about the woman who treats me so badly. The kind Bo Diddley could pull out of his left sleeve while signing an autograph for Mick Jagger on the cover of Have Guitar Will Travel with his right hand.
Simple and not particularly original or idiosyncratic, but apparently, the song has a magnetic power that attracts all the greats. So The Stones included the song in their set list in 1963; Manfred Mann graced his first (and best) American album, The Manfred Mann Album (1964), with it; the song is one of the highlights on ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons’ second solo album, The Big Bad Blues (2018, awarded “Blues Rock Album of the Year” by The Blues Foundation, on which, incidentally, Bo Diddley’s “Crackin’ Up” is the finale); but above all: Sir Paul himself often plays “Bring It To Jerome” as a warm-up – we know of ten recordings of soundchecks in which McCartney puts his heart and soul into the song, sometimes on his Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass, sometimes on guitar.
Paul McCartney – Bring it to Jerome (Soundcheck in Sunrise, FL, 2002):
The Stones, a Supreme Beatle, and now the name-check in a Dylan song… despite its seeming insignificance, “Bring It To Jerome” is one of the very rare songs that has penetrated all three members of the triumvirate. And apart from his song, Jerome Green also left his mark on music history in other ways: he infected the British Invasion with maracas. Since Jerome, we have seen Mick Jagger, Phil May of The Pretty Things, Van Morrison (then still with Them), The Animals and Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones shaking the samba balls – and Jagger’s unforgettable, stylish shaking of the maracas on American television (The Mike Douglas Show, 1964) in The Stones’ version of Buddy Holly’s Bo Diddley rip-off “Not Fade Away” brings the song right back home, back to Diddley and Green.
The introductory recommendation You can bring it to St. Peter is an intriguing, Dylanesque riddle. The idea that Dylan is indulging in a play on words here, a playful nod to the meaning of the name Peter, “rock”, and with it the implication that Dylan’s “own version” will lead us via blues and spirituals to rock music, is appealing. However, the context, after the closing line of the preceding verse, the verse with Judgment Day and Armageddon and especially with I’ll hear your footsteps – you won’t have to knock, almost inevitably leads the associations to the heavenly gatekeeper Peter, who springs into action after he hears knockin’ on Heaven’s door. A poetic stroke of luck, perhaps. It seems obvious that Dylan first decided that his creation should immortalise the song “Bring It To Jerome”, and that his meandering inspiration then lingered on another gem by Bo Diddley and Jerome Green, on their version of “Sixteen Tons” (on Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger, 1960), the classic with the chorus
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
… and with prominent maracas. There are, obviously, more songs and more possible sources of inspiration in which St. Peter appears (not least Dylan’s own “Ring Them Bells”, of course), but we know that “Sixteen Tons” has been under Dylan’s skin for at least sixty years already:
“I changed words around and added something of my own here and there. Nothing do or die, nothing really formulated, all major chord stuff, maybe a typical minor key thing, something like “Sixteen Tons”. You could write twenty or more songs off that one melody by slightly altering it. I could slip in verses or lines from old spirituals or blues. That was okay; others did it all the time.”
… from Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles, chapter 5 “River Of Ice”. In which Dylan, the songwriter, again expresses the secret of his core business, this time in a completely clear, demystifying way. “You change the words here and there,” “slightly alter a melody,” “smuggle in lines from old spirituals or blues”… and then “add something of myself.” The autobiographer describes this creative process in 2004, when Chronicles is published, and in doing so reveals his recipe for success in a surprisingly unambiguous way, the recipe that he expresses here, in “My Own Version Of You”, in a much more poetic way –demonstrating it in the process: You can bring it to St. Peter – you can bring it to Jerome / You can move it on over – bring it all the way home… “I changed words around and added something of my own here and there.”
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
“Positively 4th Street” – the last song reviewed in this series – was composed within a sequence of songs of which the prime essence within the lyrics was that nothing made sense. The series started with “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, and continued through a range of songs including “Maggie’s Farm”, “Why do you have to be so frantic”, “Tombstone Blues”, and, among others, “Can you please crawl out your window”.
But even then Bob was not finished with the joint themes of the world not making sense, and a feeling of disdain for those around him, with the totally negative “4th Street” for the next song he composed, “Highway 61 Revisited” once more contains the notion that the world really is disjointed and out of phase with itself and the people within it. One might perhaps say that the world has become so complex and so diverse, while at the same time trying to be unified (in that most of the realities Bob describes are clearly within the United States)
Dylan is quoted as saying that “It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors … It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”
The lyrics of the opening verse leave us in no doubt that we are still in this universe of contradictions and no sense being made
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”
Perhaps the simplest thing to say is that this is a world in which reality and non-reality combine to such a degree, one can’t tell them apart. Thus, each verse suddenly leaps into the world of another character who seems to have no connection with the person sung about in the previous verse. We can get a real sense of this through the opening line of each verse wherein a new character or two comes on the scene….
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose
Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
… and then disappears from the song.
It is as if, in fact, there is no connection – and thus onec again Dylan has used the strophic form of composition, writing five musically identical verses but with ever changing and seeingly disconnected lyrics, save for the fact that everyone is connected with Highway 61. The notion of the chorus which we found in “Rolling Stone” has not been used apart from Buick Six having a repeated final line (“If I go down dying…”), similar to a degree with the repeated words at the end of each verse in “Desolation Row”
So with the lyrics of “Highway 61” what holds the song together are the facts that each verse is about a character or two (God and Abraham in verse one, Georgia Sam and Howard in verse two, Mack the Finger and Louis the King in verse three, the fifth daughter and the first father (and variants) in verse four, and the gambler and promoter in the final verse) are all somehow (we never really know how) connected with Highway 61.
Now this approach of songs about multiple characters, with each character having one verse to him/herself and then vanishing from the script, is very unusual lyrically. Did someone do this before Dylan? I can’t think of anyone, but if you can, please let me know!
This approach is the reverse of “Rolling Stone” and “Fourth Street” by way of examples, where the song is about one person – and this in fact is the convention of popular music. However, this level of complexity and confusion could easily cause listeners to lose track of the coherence of the whole song – hence the use of the strophic form of music, in which each verse, although lyrically different, is musically the same.
Indeed the song is so complex lyrically, taking a street name from Edgar Allan Poe, “Housing Project Hill” from Kerouac, “Tom Thumb” from Rimbaud, “Howling at the Moon” from Frank Williams, etc, that once again the stophic form is needed to hold the piece together. Put another way, even the introduction of a “middle 8” to vary the music, could have been confusing with this level of quotations and references within the lyrics.
But more than that, the music is based on the construction of the extended 12 bar blues.
Indeed as the Dylan Chords website agrees the only change made to the music during performances of the song is that Dylan changes the key slightly (the website suggests adding a capo to take the song up a semitone or two), but otherwise he leaves everything as is.
And this really makes the point. As the lyrics get more and more complex and one might even say more and more convoluted, the music gets simpler and less varied. Undoubtedly. Bob’s feeling is just that: you can’t have complex music and complex lyrics at once.
Even “Rolling Stone” with its ascending bass line counters by having the melody virtually all on one note for the first two bars of each line. So at this stage in his life he’s taken to working hard on new forms of song lyrics, but left the music pretty much in the standard place.
The aim of this series is to provide one Dylan concert to listen to with reasonable acoustics for each year since Bob started performing regularly.
And of course I have picked the easy ones first, but now we come to 1972 – and there I am having a problem – if you can find a decent video for 1972 please send me the link. But for now I am putting up the concert for New Year’s Eve 1971, which is as close as I can get.
But this is the great thing about the internet – if I have missed something utterly obvious, I can just put it up and pretend I knew all along.
So what we get is
Crash On The Levee (Down In The Flood)
When I Paint My Masterpiece
Don’t Ya Tell Henry
Like a Rolling Stone
The concerts so far in this series (each of which are much longer than the above)
There’s an adrenaline shot that will pop players once “The Tambourine Man” enters a modern gaming craze. On the singing surface, sultry ballads, and poetic lyrical work of Dylan do not by any means place him in the front as strong contenders for frantic energy in rhythm games. Yet, somber entrance into Rock Band as well as Guitar Hero demonstrates even folk-rock icons can have their moment under the digital lights. What this journey also did was not solely amplification of universal appeal but allowed thousands to witness the storytelling magic.
Dylan Pops Up in Music Games
When Rock Band 2 released “Tangled Up in Blue” by Bob Dylan in 2008, this pretty much redefined the game’s classic rock selection, sneaking in a song focused more on lyric nuance than explosive riffs. A year later, “All Along the Watchtower” returned in Guitar Hero 5, further embedding Dylan’s tunes into rhythm games. It was the addition of his tunes that signaled a step toward a more inclusive metal/arena rock game genre, and perhaps even culture. These careful slots of Dylan’s songs let players find his artistry and broaden their musical horizons beyond what they might have done outside the console.
Why Dylan Didn’t Lead His Show
It would be nice to imagine a world in which ‘Bob Dylan: Rock Band’ could coexist with ‘The Beatles: Rock Band’ or ‘Guitar Hero: Metallica,’ but it’s much more nuanced. At its core, the challenge is Dylan’s musical style. His songs are more narrative and emotive than the type of guitar-driven epics that get players strumming a plastic fretboard. It’s the riffs that are at the heart of these games. Quite a significant portion of the rhythmic action in these games comprises riffs and solos, and Dylan’s songs, while lovely, just don’t quite make it.
And let’s not forget the market dynamics. For instance, ‘The Beatles: Rock Band’ is a cool package since the entire band’s catalog was included for group performances, singing together, harmonies, and up-tempo tracks to turn any living room into the concert hall; more introspective product not really suitable for that rollicking party-gaming vibe that characterized the golden years of the rhythm genre. Of course, there were fans making jokes on a hypothetical “Harmonica Hero” being more suitable to his essence but this was more of playful banter than a serious topic of business speculation.
Cultural and Gameplay Impacts
Nothing was done here as clean room building around Dylan’s songs, yet the force was with them just the same. And so it goes that handing the work over to Rock Band and Guitar Hero was an act of reverence to the musical poet. People could be Dylan for a second and feel what it was to sing stories on multiple levels and paint vibrant pictures. This was no evasion, but truly felt history and soul in every line.
Finally, there’s the matter that including Dylan in the game represents a kind of ‘coming of age’ for rhythm gaming, as its creators look to expand the appeal of their vaunted soundtrack beyond the pop/dance/hip-hop demographic and into the folk/alternative/classic rock demographic. The tracks were their response to the demonstration that rhythm games don’t have to be strictly didactic or otherwise empty exercises in technical problem-solving; they can “teach” about music history and culture.
Dylan vs Other Rhythm Game Legends
Dylan’s legacy relative to musicians who received stand-alone music games is quite extreme compared to the rest but, surprisingly limited. ‘Fab Four’ enthusiasts went through ‘The Beatles’ game to trace the band’s evolution; metal heads were treated to a face-melting amalgamation of power solos and heavy riffs in the ‘Guitar Hero’ Metallica game. Dylan lowered the volume: a thoughtful breather amidst the din; an inkling that rhythm games need not be only supercharged, but also substantial, and even something more.
In short
Bob Dylan’s cameo in Rock Band 2 and then in Guitar Hero 5 was not enough to launch a franchise in his name. But it was part of a revolution that changed the genre of rhythm gaming. His songs asked players to re-think their strategy for music games, less centering on finger speed and more on the strength of words and melody. Dylan initiated a quiet revolution in a genre based mostly on extravagance; he will never be the face of a music rhythm game, but proof that even now in this digital age, good songwriting still matters.
Have you ever wondered why some Dylan recordings seem to sound so wonderful so that you hear them over and over again, while others fizzle out in the background noise?
It’s not always to do with the undoubted writing talent of Bob, for sometimes it is about your metadata, the invisible information that guides you in terms of how you hear the music and what it then means to you.
The truth is, your music distribution service has just as much to do with just how much you appreciate his work.
Why Metadata is the Secret Sauce of the Streaming Era
It might sound technical, but metadata is just information about your music: artist name, track title, genre, year, and so much more. Think of it as each song as a digital passport, stamped at every streaming checkpoint.
Now, the industry is levelling up. Deezer’s June 2025 newsroom release announces “the world’s first AI tagging system,” designed to flag synthetic tracks, reduce fraud, and protect accurate metadata across its streaming catalogue. This isn’t just an innovation; it’s a lifeline for artists such as the great man who want to be sure their music is correctly credited, found, and fairly paid.
The Human Side of Digital Details
Of course Bob Dylan will have all this nailed through his recording company. But if you are creating your own music, or indeed if you are playing songs he has written, you don’t have to be a tech whiz to nail your metadata. Most music distribution platforms, from MusicAlligator to CD Baby, walk you through the process. Still, the best results come from those who pay attention to every field. Got a collaborator? Credit them right. Have a unique album name? Double-check the spelling. Want your genre to be pop, not generic “other”? Be specific.
A quick checklist for boosting your metadata:
Double-check all spellings, especially artist and song names.
Choose the most accurate genre and mood tags.
Include ISRC and UPC codes for tracking and payment.
Add composer, lyricist, and featuring artist details.
Go over all before clicking the submit button.
One missed field could mean a missed royalty or a lost listener. Don’t let it happen.
AI and the Future of Metadata
It is an era in which art and artificial intelligence merge. Platforms like Deezer are pushing boundaries, using artificial intelligence to catch errors and flag tracks that don’t belong. It’s an extra set of eyes protecting your hard work. But don’t leave it all to the robots. The best music finds its way to fans when humans and tech team up.
MusicAlligator and You, A Winning Team
So if you are performing your own songs or indeed Dylan songs every track deserves the chance to shine. By treating metadata as more than an afterthought, you’re setting your music up for real success. Trust your music distribution service, keep your details sharp, and let innovative tools from companies like MusicAlligator guide your journey. The right info, in the right places, can open the world to your sound, one perfectly tagged track at a time.
Prelude: I tried at first to write a set of reviews of Dylan’s book but I found I really couldn’t do it – so I have been asking regularly if anyone else would like to try. But no one has come forth. (And to be clear I mean, come forth by reviewing what Dylan says about the songs, not primarily about the songs themselves).
Thus I am continuing to write reviews of the songs that Bob chose to include in the book, and doing so totally from my own perspective. If nothing else it gives you a chance to hear the occasional song that Bob chose which you might not have heard before, and maybe you might wish to consider your own thoughts on why Bob included each particular song.
In this case the link is obvious – Johnny Paycheck and Bob Dylan both devoted their lives completely to music, creating the music they wanted, regardless of what others said or thought. They were/are the music, the music is them, and will remain long after they are gone.
One thing in this activity however has caused me a problem or three – and that is that while some of the songs are ones I am utterly familiar with (“My generation” being an obvious example) others were not familiar to me, and so if nothing else, I have enjoyed getting to know these pieces of music – and indeed these performances. And I am hoping that in plodding on with this series. if nothing else, maybe you’ll find one or two pieces of music you didn’t know and which you find moving.
Certainly in the “not knowing” category and in the “moving” category, I would place “The old Violin” by Johnny Paycheck. And that is unusual for me, since I really don’t normally relate to this type of openly emotional song.
So, doing my research into a singer and song of which I knew nothing (and if that sounds ludicrous to you, please remember I was born and brought up in England, where such music has never been as popular as it has been in the United States) Wiki started me off with the raw details: “Johnny Paycheck (real name Donald Lytle, born 1938, died 2003) was an American singer and songwriter. He is a notable figure in the outlaw movement in country music.”
Now that meant I had to expand my knowledge of country music – so just in case you are as ignorant of the genre as I (which I very much doubt is possible) the outlaw movement refers to those “who fought for and won their creative freedom outside of the Nashville establishment that dictated the sound of most country music of the era.”
His most famous song was released in 1977 with the wonderful title “Take This Job and Shove It,” which gave Paycheck a status alongside Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, whose music I am more familiar with.
Johnny Paycheck was however, one of those performers who struggled seemingly in all aspects of his life with substance abuse, spending time in prison, and often being involved in what Wiki calls “legal controversies, including a conviction for assault and a high-profile sexual misconduct case.”
The music is described in the Wiki article as “raw and uncompromising,” which I don’t really understand in relation to the music I have heard in preparing this piece, but then I am not familiar with nor a fan of “outlaw country music,” so my comments are not particularly relevant.
In fact this is a case very much of me being on the outside looking in to find that, “His life and work have been recognized as emblematic of both the rebellion and the heartbreak that defined a pivotal era in American country music.”
And this certainly comes across in The Old Violin, written in 1986, when he was 48. And these are pretty desperate lines for a man of that age.
He did live for another quarter century or so, but as is obvious here, his music and his life is something new for me, so I can’t really write anything more illuminating at this point except to quote the lyrics of the song Dylan chose to include. In case you, like me, don’t know the song, and want to play it while reading the lyrics, the link used above is here: https://youtu.be/NrvY6Lkgu_
Well, I can't recall, one time in my life I've felt as lonely as I do tonight I feel like I could lay down, and get up no more It's the damndest feelin', I never felt it before
Tonight I feel like an old violin Soon to be put away and never played again Don't ask me why I feel like this, hell, I can't say I only wish this feelin' would just go away
I guess it's 'cause the truth Is the hardest thing I ever faced 'Cause you can't change the truth In the slightest way, I tried
So I asked myself I said, "John, where'd you go from here?" And then like a damned fool I turned around and looked in the mirror
And there I saw, an old violin Soon to be put away and never played again
So one more time, just to be sure I said, "John, where in the hell do you go from here?" You know that when a nickel's worth of difference And I looked in the mirror,
That there I was seein', an old violin Soon to be put away, and never played again
And just like that, it hit me That old violin and I were just alike We'd give our all to music And soon, we'll give our life
Now, having read up on the life of this artist whose work I have had no knowledge of before, I must say I find the song incredibly moving. And indeed here I can see why Dylan chose this as one of the songs he wanted to include in “The Philosophy”, not least because the song was not only recorded by Johnny Paycheck but also written by him. Which seems to add a lot to the feelings I get on listening to it today, for the very first time.
What can one say other than that the music industry is not always a good place to be.
I’ll see you baby on Judgement Day
After midnight if you still want to meet
I’ll be at the Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street
Two doors down not that far to walk
I’ll hear your footsteps - you won’t have to knock
In October 1971, journalist Pete Hamill writes a column for the New York Post entitled “Going Home”. Six young people are travelling by bus from New York to Fort Lauderdale for a beach holiday, a journey of around 24 hours. Soon, the six become intrigued by a silent, hunched man sitting a few seats in front of them. One of the girls tries to strike up a conversation. He is not unfriendly, but seems very shy and holds his tongue. It is not until the next morning, after a coffee break at a roadside restaurant, that the girl manages to get his story out of him. His name is Vingo, he has just been released after serving a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence, and is now on his way home to Brunswick, Georgia. “Wow,” says the girl. “Are you married?” ‘I’m not sure,” replies Vingo. “You’re not sure?”
“Yeah,” he said shyly. “Well, last week, when I was sure the parole was coming through, I wrote her again. We used to live in Brunswick, just before Jacksonville. There’s a big oak tree just as you come into town. I told her that if she’d take me back, she should put a yellow handkerchief on the tree, and I’d get off the bus and come home. But if she didn’t want me to come home, forget me—no handkerchief, and I’d keep on going.”
We all know how it ends. Twenty miles before Brunswick, a nervous, tense silence descends on the bus. The six young people crowd around the window, looking out for the old oak tree. Ten miles to go, five… When the bus pulls into Brunswick, Vingo doesn’t dare look. But then suddenly the young people start shouting, jumping, crying. Stunned, Vingo stares at the oak tree. It is covered with yellow handkerchiefs. Twenty, thirty, maybe a hundred.
The Grammy-winning liner notes Pete Hamill wrote for Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks (1975) were not Hamill’s first contribution to music history. The global hit “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree” by Dawn featuring Tony Orlando, which was number one in Australia, Europe, Africa and North America two years earlier (number 2 in Argentina, so South America is only slightly less enthusiastic), and has been in Billboard’s All-Time Top Songs Top 50 for fifty years, is based on his column.
ABC television filmed the story in 1972 (with James Earl Jones as the ex-convict), and in Japan, the award-winning film The Yellow Handkerchief was based on it in 1977, but it was the million-selling hit single that really bothered Hamill. He sued songwriters Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown, but when they proved that the story was over a hundred years old and that Hamill, too, had just heard it somewhere, he dropped the charges.
A wise decision. And Hamill has already earned his place in music history anyway. Even more honourable than with that embellished second-hand melodrama that led to a global hit: the award-winning liner notes for Blood On The Tracks definitely carry more weight than those hundred yellow handkerchiefs. Liner notes that, moreover, seem to have inspired a Dylan song years later: “The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin suits,” Hamill writes in the opening of his essay, and 37 years later Dylan opens his blood stained song “Early Roman Kings” with “All the early Roman Kings in their sharkskin suits” (Tempest, 2012).
Bob Dylan – Early Roman Kings (live Aug. 10, 2024):
In the meantime, Hamill continues to write and his star continues to rise. Hundreds of journalistic essays, short stories and columns, scripts and ten novels – almost all of which are set in New York, the city where he was born 1935 and where he died in 2020. Like Dylan, he is part of the fabric of the city, as Pete’s colleague with the unbeatable name Lucian K. Truscott IV puts it (Village Voice, 2 November 2016). The novels are all well-received, but perhaps the most remarkable is the widely acclaimed bestseller Forever (2003), which seems to be on Dylan’s bookshelf too.
Forever is the Homeric story of Irish Jew Cormac O’Connor, who arrives on the island of Manhattan in 1741 in search of his father’s killer. When he is mortally wounded in his attempt to free the slave Kongo, he is brought back from the dead by a grateful mystical African priestess. Brought back for good: Cormac is now immortal, as long as he does not leave the island of Manhattan. And so the immortal Cormac remains on Manhattan. He watches the settlement grow over the centuries into The Big Apple, the economic, cultural and political world power, and will continue to roam Manhattan until Judgment Day.
During the crossing from Ireland, Cormac has already managed to secure a job: he will be working as a printer for Mr. Partridge, who is staying at the Black Horse Tavern. And there we have Hamill’s next contribution to Dylan’s oeuvre: “I’ll be at the Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street,” Dylan’s narrator reveals in this fifth verse. The address is poetic licence. The historic Black Horse Tavern was in the far north of Manhattan, now Inwood, and was located at the intersection of what is now Broadway, Dyckman Street and Riverside Drive – pretty much exactly where a Starbucks is now.
Anyway, “immortality” seems to be the paddle stirring Dylan’s stream of consciousness here. We follow a Dr. Frankenstein-like narrator, the Dr. Frankenstein who became a scientist in the first place in order to play God (“the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand,” Ch. 3), and who creates a creature that will apparently outlive him: he will only see him again after midnight on Judgment Day, after the end of time. According to Revelation 16:16, this will take place immediately after the “gathering” at “the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon” – Dylan’s associative leap from Judgment Day to Armageddon is somewhat more obvious than the immortality triple jump Frankenstein – Cormac O’Connor – Black Horse Tavern.
The gloomy street name and sombre location description suggest that the narrator does not expect to be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven or the Garden of Eden after midnight on Judgment Day. Which is historically accurate, more or less:
“Of all bleak and dreary travesties of wayside inns, of all melancholy mockeries of old time hostelries the Black Horse Tavern is the dismalest.”
(New York Herald, July 7, 1890)
The inn could do with a makeover, as a more constructive way to express the Herald’s criticism would be. Perhaps something with a hundred yellow handkerchiefs. Surely would brighten things up.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
If ever Bob Dylan was giving us a message in consecutive songs it surely was in 1965 when he composed, one after the other, “Can you please crawl out your window” followed by “Positively Fourth Street”
The disdain in both these songs however was not new for in this run of eight successive compositions virtually every one (possibly except “From a Buick 6”, although that included the lines about a “graveyard woman” who is a “junkyard angel”) seems to be about nothing making sense, life being a jungle, and above all a world full of disdain. That notion that everyone else is unworthy of consideration is mixed with that of nothing making any sense, through this whole sequence of songs leading up to Fourth Street.
If you have been following my ramblings in this series, you will know the songs I have in mind, including particularly Desolation Row in which Bob is inviting the recipient of his message to meet him at the bottom and please crawl out your window in which he is expressing his exasperation at the subject of his song.
There have been some covers of course, but not many and Cash Box described the version by the Vacels as a “hard-driving, bluesy message-song which utilizes some vastly different but interesting melodic constructions.” But what neither that publication nor Billboard mentioned directly was how negative the song was – although that band also recorded “Please Crawl Out”.
In an era when songs were about love and lost love these songs (both “4th Street” and “Please Crawl” were about sheer dislike . Indeed things don’t get more negative than the title of “Please Crawl Out” nor more negative than the opening line of Fourth Street. In fact, though of course I don’t know who you are dear reader, I am sure you know…
You've got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend When I was down you just stood there grinnin' You've got a lotta nerve to say you got a helping hand to lend You just want to be on the side that's winnin'
One might ask, “Just how nasty do you want to get?” And the answer comes with looking at the last verse
I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes And just for that one moment I could be you Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes You'd know what a drag it is to see you
I’ve had some pretty nasty things said to me, but I am not sure anyone has gone that far.
So that much is clear – the lyrics are nasty and very unlike anything we have heard within pop and rock before – or indeed very much since. We might think of “How can you treat me this way” but really there is no much comparison.
However the big question for Bob was what to do about the music? With “Please crawl out your window” he used an accompaniment that sounds awkward and a chord sequence that is most unusual in pop and rock. In that song what makes the music sound so edgy is the use of unusual chords in sequence such as having two lines that run from A minor to C. I find it impossible to think of another song that does this
Am C
you know that he has no intentions
Am C
That he needs you to test his inventions.
It really is an extraordinary sequence, helping to create a very edgy sound and what surely must be one of the ultimate songs of disdain.
What Dylan does in Fourth Street however is use a standard set of chords in a standard way. But he gets the effect of tedium and hopelessness by repeating the same chordal and melodic sequence not just in each verse, but keeping the two two-line sequences very similar
G Am
You got a lot of nerve
C G
To say you are my friend
G D
When I was down
C Em D
You just stood there grinning
Thus we get that exact same sequence and exact same melody a dozen times without variation. There isn’t even an ending. The song just fades out. It is the perfect expression of tedium – even the melody line and accompaniment stay the same throughout. And indeed, through the various takes, the lyrics hardly change.
Yet the song works brilliantly, and Bob has played it 359 times in concert. So what makes this happen?
That I have trouble in answering because the strict structure of the song makes it very hard to find much new that can be done with the song.
You can skip forward to around 4 minutes 45″ on the above and hear a different version – but in reality not that different. It is a sorrowful rather than an angry version, and in that regard interesting, but the structure remains unchanged, and hence so does the song.
It is perhaps the way that the lady pretends that nothing happened that is the most shocking
You see me on the street, you always act surprised You say "how are you?", "good luck", but ya don't mean it When you know as well as me, you'd rather see me paralyzed Why don't you just come out once and scream it
And really that gets to the heart of it all for me. She has treated him so badly, but then pretends nothing happens – hence the music just goes round and round 12 times across six verses. In those few words Dylan captures the world many of us discover – where total denial of what happened in the past is seen as a way of excusing an individual’s actions. It never has been, and never will be yet people do it all the time, and Dylan captures that perfectly.
And for that, as much as for anything else, I am so grateful for this song.
I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes And just for that one moment I could be you Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes You'd know what a drag it is to see you
But there is another point. For it is the sheer repetition of this approach by many individuals that makes the situation this song describes so appalling. It is not about one act of betrayal, one broken date, because a “better offer” came along. It is about the fact that such behaviour goes on and on.
Which is why there are only two musical lines, repeated, in each verse. For that is what the girl in this song, and people who behave like this, do over and over. Their method of living is hurt – repeat – hurt – repeat, and Bob captured this totally in the song. Bob gave up on the song 12 years ago, but for my money, he could bring it back any day he wishes.
After all it is the sheer repetition of the music that makes that song.
For details of some of our other series on this site please see the home page The concerts for this series are selected by Tony Attwood, from those that are available on line in the UK. If you have problems accessing any of the concerts in the series please email Tony@schools.co.uk letting us know which country you are in. Thanks.
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The concert series so far is listed below, and as noted, the aim in the end is to have, as far as possible, at least one gig per year that Dylan performed. For a much more detailed review of Dylan on tour you might well also find the definitive 144-part series on the Never Ending Tourof interest. It is also on this site here.
Today’s selection is the Los Angeles Hollywood Bowl, 3 September 1965. The songs are listed below, but please note there are some problems with this video. I have included it because it is (in the parts that are there) the best recording I have found from the year).
Also, advertisements have been inserted into the recording, which you may find rather unwelcome interruptions. My apologies for these and any other problems you find with this video. If you know of a source of this video without these problems please do write in.
But even with all the issues, for me, it is still worth it.
She Belongs to Me (There is a long tuning pause between song 1 and 2)
To Ramona (this is cut, it is said, for copyright reasons)
Gates of Eden
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Desolation Row
Love Minus Zero/No Limit
Mr. Tambourine Man (cut for copyright reasons)
Tombstone Blues
I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
From a Buick 6
Maggie’s Farm (the recording again states that this has been cut for copyright reasons)
I made an attempt to write about Dylan’s “Philosophy” book but had to stop very early because I couldn’t find a way to comment on it that said anything meaningful or entertaining. (But if you feel you can do a review of that book by all means get in touch: Tony@schools.co.uk). So I moved on to looking at the songs Dylan chose.
Now we come to “Dirty Life and Times” by Warren Zevon
Warren Zevon has turned up time and again on this site, but “Dirty Life and Times” has only had one mention – and that in passing. Which is strange because Warren Zevon made some extraordinarily brilliant recordings in his life, and yet with this one I had to go back and look it up, as it had never made an impact on me.
The lyrics are clearly what has drawn Dylan in, although the melody is certainly very memorable – one listen and it’s there in my head for days to come…
Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me Some days the sun don't shine Sometimes I wonder what tomorrow's gonna bring When I think about my dirty life and times
One day I came to a fork in the road Folks, I just couldn't go where I was told Now they'll hunt me down and hang me for my crimes If I tell about my dirty life and times
I had someone 'til she went out for a stroll Should have run after her It's hard to find a girl with a heart of gold When you're living in a four-letter world
And if she won't love me then her sister will She's from Say-one-thing-and-mean-another's-ville And she can't seem to make up her mind When she hears about my dirty life and times
Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me Some days the sun don't shine Sometimes I wonder why I'm still running free All up and down the line
Gets a little lonely, folks, you know what I mean I'm looking for a woman with low self-esteem To lay me out and ease my worried mind While I'm winding down my dirty life and times
Who'll lay me out and ease my worried mind While I'm winding down my dirty life and times
And really I can do no better than quote what Jochen said on this site…
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Zevon, to whom Dylan also devotes an honourable chapter in The Philosophy Of Modern Song (Chapter 39, “Dirty Life And Times”), as well as to the song “Jesse James” (Chapter 10); Zevon, who is also quoted again in the only interview Dylan gives in 2022 (“We’re in ‘Splendid Isolation,’ like in the Warren Zevon song; the world of self, like Georgia O’Keefe alone in the desert” – Wall Street Journal, 19 December 2022); like Dylan quotes just as reverently from that same “Dirty Life And Times” back in 2011, in the Elderfield interview:
“Sure, but everything in life, directly or indirectly, has a great degree of mystery. To paraphrase Warren Zevon, some days I feel like my shadow’s casting me. Persons, places, things … time itself is a mystery.”
… the song in which the narrator sighs: “She can’t seem to make up her mind.”
“This is a great record,” Dylan writes, continuing with effervescent praise of both this one song, one of the very last songs Zevon writes, and of Warren Zevon the artist at all.
“Being a writer is not something one chooses to do. It’s something you just do and sometimes people stop and notice. Warren was a writer till the very end.”
It’s almost as if Dylan is talking about himself; just before this, again admiringly, he describes the different sides of Zevon at different stages of his career, as well as “all the roles Zevon chose to play in his songs”.
Zevon dies of cancer, 7 September 2003. Just before his death, he manages to record one last record, The Wind, the album featuring “Dirty Life And Times”. And with a breathtaking, moving cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”.
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And I think here we can be absolutely clear what has drawn Bob into the song – it is the lyrics, for surely it cannot be anything in the music that he has found to be unusual or inspirational. It is in fact a reflection of what it feels like to be a person like Warren Zevon or Bob Dylan: “some days I feel like my shadow’s casting me”.
Jochen has returned several times to Zevon several times including featuring a recording of Knocking on Heaven’s Door within the final part of I made up my mind to give myself to you.
But now, since we are back on the subject of Warren Zevon, and since Bob Dylan nominated a Warren Zevon song as one of his favourites in the past, and wrote about him in the Philosophy of Modern Song, I think that is enough of a reason to re-introduce my favourite too – just in case you missed it before.
In fact it turned up in our series on Dylan’s favourite songs so that is all the excuse I need to play it again. If it had been me writing “The Philosphy” it would have been this song that was included from Warren.
Play every number that I can play
I’ll see you baby on Judgement Day
In 2020, Robert Johnson’s stepsister Annye Anderson publishes her memoirs, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, written down by music historian Preston Lauterbach.
It is a surprisingly enriching contribution to the little we know about one of Dylan’s greatest heroes, blues pioneer Robert Johnson. Sister Annye, for example, makes quite a point of how her brother had such a wide range of interests, and how he presented himself as a human jukebox at every gathering and party. “I remember him asking all the guests, and even the children, ‘What’s your pleasure?’” And then he would play a song by Fats Waller, or “Pennies from Heaven”, Gene Autry or Count Basie or “Sugar Blues” or Louis Armstrong, and Annye herself always wanted to hear the Singing Brakeman, also one of her brother’s favourites: “Nothing could take the place of the trainman, Jimmie Rodgers.”
And then he would just as easily play a Protestant hymn; “I’ve never known Brother Robert to attend church, but he knew every hymn in the book.” That’s 765 (Annye undoubtedly sang from the Baptist Hymnal, 1902), so that may be a somewhat overly optimistic representation of Johnson’s encyclopaedic knowledge of songs, but the gist of Annye’s memories is clear: Brother Robert knew a great many songs, from every conceivable corner, and Annye recounts it with the same awe with which colleagues talk about Dylan. As, for example, G.E. Smith, Dylan’s guitarist in the years 1988-90, recounts in the fascinating interview with Ray Padgett for Flagging Down The Double E’s, Ray’s wonderful Dylan newsletter of 2 March 2025:
“On the bus he’s playing these cassette tapes of all this great old traditional stuff, because by then he knew I was really into it. He said, “This is a good song, you should learn this one.” “And this one, see how this turned into this, and then Hank Williams wrote–” You know, he totally knows the history of all that music in the United States. He knows all those songs. Just off the top of his head.”
Traces of those Baptist hymns can be heard throughout recent music history. First and foremost Mahalia Jackson, obviously, but we hear it just as clearly in Aretha Franklin, Doc Watson, Johnny Cash, the Stanley Brothers and then trickling down to their disciples, such as Dylan. Who is well aware of this himself, of course: “My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form,” as he analyses in 2004 (in the LA Times interview with Robert Hilburn). As Sister Annye can identify the Baptists in her brother’s work:
“Brother Granville used to holler out in the field, when he was behind the plow. It sounded like what Brother Robert’s doing in “Terraplane”. I can still hear Brother Granville singing “Guide Me O, Thou Great Jehovah.” You heard that humming like Brother Robert does in “Come on in My Kitchen” in those old Baptist hymns.”
And we hear it even more tangibly in Johnson’s lyrics, of course. Among all the songs about sex, gambling, work and wandering on the monumental King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961), we hear how Side 2 opens with Johnson’s confession:
Oh, I'm gonna get me religion
I'm gonna join the Baptist Church
Oh, I'm gonna get me religion
I'm gonna join the Baptist Church
… “Preachin’ Blues”, the song in which he also sadly has to admit that “the women and whiskey would not let me pray”. Every time he bows his head to pray, “then the blues come along and they blew my spirit away.” And just before that, just before he turned the LP over for the umpteenth time, Dylan listened to the closing track of Side 1 for the umpteenth time in his small apartment on West 4th Street:
If I had possession over Judgment Day
If I had possession over Judgment Day
Lord, the little woman I'm lovin' wouldn't have no right to pray
… “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day”, the song in which Johnson incorporates echoes from Hymn 355 (In the great judgment day, Jesus is mine) or Hymn 663 (Day of judgment, day of wonders), or one of those other hymns about the day “when the last trumpet blows,” as Dylan sings in his own Judgment Day song “Ye Shall Be Changed” (1979).
In any case, the many plays of “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day” have etched “Judgment Day” into Dylan’s working memory (Dylan spells it the British way, with the extra e), if we are to believe Dylan’s own account in Chronicles:
“I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, bigass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction.”
We see more – indirect – echoes of “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day” in Dylan’s oeuvre. The song itself is derived from Hambone Willie Newbern’s “Roll and Tumble Blues” (1929), from which Robert Johnson copied not only the melody and structure in 1936, but also a few words (third verse: “And I rolled and I tumbled and I cried the whole night long”). Muddy Waters turned it into “Rollin’ And Tumblin’” in 1950, which in turn reappeared on Dylan’s Modern Times in 2006, in “Rollin’ And Tumblin’” – actually a copy of Muddy’s arrangement, including an identical first verse, being again the same lines that Robert Johnson wrote:
Well, I rolled and I tumbled, cried the whole night long
Well, I rolled and I tumbled, cried the whole night long
Well, I woke up this mornin', didn't know right from wrong
… after which Dylan takes a sharp turn towards lazy sluts, crazy women and unsatisfied wives, while Muddy and Robert Johnson remain a little more prudish and complain that whiskey and women won’t let me pray and the little woman I’m lovin’ wouldn’t have no right to pray.
And that too Dylan has known for a long time, of course, this chain from “Roll and Tumble Blues” to “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day” to “Rollin’ And Tumblin’” – “And this one, see how this turned into this … he knows all those songs just off the top of his head,” after all. And, as Dylan says in that much-quoted MusiCares speech: “All these songs are connected – I was just extending the line.” After which he picks up his guitar again to play every number he can play. And will continue to do so until Judgment Day.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
What did Bob Dylan write after completing the utter and total masterpiece that is “Desolation Row?” The answer is “From a Buick 6,” a song which expresses the opposite vision of life from “Desolation Row” in the lyrics, and which in the melody has none of the delicate nuances of “Row” and is, in fact, nothing more than a 12 bar blues with, it has been noted, a refernce to Sleepy John Estes song “Milk Cow Blues”
But maybe we should not be too surprised; after all, the writing of “Desolation Row” must have taken a long while, and there was an album to be created, and an album contract to be fulfilled.
But just as Buick 6 was as different musically from Desolation Row as it could be, so the next song that Bob composed was different again; it was “Can you please crawl out your window”.
And the point about this song is that the musical feel of the piece is really very awkward. Which probably explains why Bob only played once in public. There is, as far as I know, no recording of that performance available, but Jimi Hendrix did have a go at the song, so we do have one alternative version… sorry the quality is poor – if you can find a better recording on the internet please do send me the link.
This was in fact the launch of Dylan’s period of writing songs of disdain in 1965. And here we should remember that the year began with the delicate, beautiful and melodic “Farewell Angelina”.
But here, I think, if we look at the lyrics of the following songs we can see just how personal that song was…. for then Bob seems to be asking if love can be real (Love is just a four letter word) before starting to see himself as the person standing outside of society (as in Subterranean Homesick Blues and Outlaw Blues).
I’m not at all sure who Bob is addressing the former of these songs with the lines
Why should you have to be so frantic
You always wanted to live life in the past
Now why d you wanna be so Atlantic
You finally got your wish at last
but equally,I am not sure it matters, and quite understandably, “Lunatic Princess” was never performed by Bob. He did of course, recover all his composing talent (and how!) with “Desolation Row” but the two songs composed between “Rolling Stone” and “Desolation Row” do seem to me to lack the focus that those two masterpieces have.
However, if we wanted to find a phrase for that sequence of compositions without contemplating their artistic merit, I guess it could be “everything is a mess”. The lesson was however, that this message could turn out to be itself something of a mishmash that most people would never remember (as with “Lunatic Princess”) or a profound works of insight (like the first and last songs in that sequence).
But it is also important to note, I think, that this feeling of everything being a mess stayed with Dylan for almost all of the rest of the year in terms of his song writing, and it was only in the final composition of 1965 – Visions of Johanna – that he once more found his way to express the concepts that were on his mind, in a musical form that the rest of us could appreciat eand savour for years and years to come.
The one love song – first song in this series – From a Buick 6 – proclaimed that Bob had everything, but after composinig that then he was immediately back to disdain with Can you please crawl out your window?
And what marks this song out is the musical arrangement which is not only unique for Dylan, but almost certainly unique in terms of any pop, rock or popular song. For a start the instrumental introduction is three bars long – not two or four bars as we normally get but three bars – which even if we are not counting and have no musical education, sounds rather odd. It makes us uneasy before Bob has even started.
Then, the first line covers the conventional four bars of music but is followed in the “Preoccupied with his vengeance” line with another three-bar line. In short we have is actually a seven-bar phrase, which I am not sure was ever tried in popular music before this moment, not least because most of the time pop and rock musicians were expecting some people to be dancing to their songs. (If you want to see the impossibility of dancing to seven bar phrases, in a partner dance, just try it!)
But then no one who listens to the lyrics is going to want to do a partner dance to this song, so really this doesn’t matter, but even though we are listening to Bob and not counting the beats, it feels odd. And it gets odder: “Cursing the dead that cannot throw him back” actually takes up three and a half bars of music before Bob comes back with “You know that he has no intentions” which lasts three bars. And then just to mess with us even more we have four bars of “Of looking your way, unless it’s to say, That he needs you to test his inventions” followed by one bar of music before we get to the chorus.
If you are a musician, have a go at playing it and you will see how weird it is. If not, just listen; it feels odd.
And there is more for the chordal structure is really odd too. The opening line begins conventionally enough with G, C, D which gives a clear feeling of being in G major, and although the second line (“Preoccupied with his vengeance”) contains two chords that are perfectly normal and usual within G major (A minor and G major itself) I can’t think immediately of another song which uses these two chords as a cadance – as a way of rounding off a line. It makes the music feel as if we have got nowhere at all.
The third line returns to something like G major normality with the chords, G major, B minor, A minor, D major – all perfectly acceptable and commonpalce within G major, but then the fourth line (“you know that he has no invetnions”) again throws in two chords from the same key, but in a way that we don’t normally hear (A minor and C major).
And what makes the song sound even more unusual is we then get the totally unexpected whole bar of D major (which would be normal as a way of finishing a verse but here isn’t the end) followed by another A minor to C major sequence as in line four, but this time followed by a D chord leading into the chorus.
In short everything is strange. Indeed the opening lyrics are not just strange but uncomfortable
He sits in your room, his tomb, with a fist full of tacks
Preoccupied with his vengeance
And it gets more and more spooky as it goes on. So what Dylan has done is not just created lyrics that I think we can fairly call “weird” but also created a chordal accompaniment that is equally strange and unsettling.
Indeed if we then expect the song to resolve itself into something more Dylanish he only half obliges. The melody and chord sequence of the chorus are perfectly standard and acceptable to the contemporary ear, but the lyrics are just plain strange….
Can you please crawl out your window?
Use your arms and legs it won’t ruin you
How can you say he will haunt you?
You can go back to him any time you want to
OK, it is a song that says to the lady, “you can leave him whenever you wish” – or at least that is how it seems at the start, but the musical accompaniment is like nothing we have ever heard before. There is no rhythmic balance to the lines, and the lyrics are stranger than strange. Just consider the second verse…
He looks so truthful, is this how he feels
Trying to peel the moon and expose it
With his businesslike anger and his bloodhounds that kneel
If he needs a third eye he just grows it
He just needs you to talk or to hand him his chalk
Or pick it up after he throws it
It is almost as if, having written a song so beautiful, elegant and comprehensible, but also a song which is as utterly unsettling as “Desolation Row,” Bob felt he had to do weird and do it in a big way. Indeed, even the use of the word “please” in the repeated title line sounds odd, given the context of the other lyrics and the jarring effect of the music.
Now this is all getting rather heavy, I know – but it is that sort of song. However, if you would like a little light relief, you can always try and ask “AI Overview” what makes “please crawl out your window” sound so strange. Not I hasten to add that I use AI to write my little reviews and articles here, but rather because I came across this while doing the background research into what others have thought of this song. In essence, their view that that the title phrase “creates a jarring juxtaposition of formality and awkwardness, making the sentence sound unusual and even slightly unsettling. ”
And I mention that because that is what the music does also – here both the lyrics and the music are completely as one. The whole concept is unusual and (I would say more than slightly) unsettling.
The concert series aims to contain links to videos or recordings of a single concert each year; year by year, starting in 1961, gathered together in chronological order. This is the 31st entry in the series – all the links are below.
If we are able to find a recording for each year (which at this stage I very much doubt!) we would have 64 concerts in the series – so we are almost halfway there. I’m hoping this is a bit of a service if you are suddenly wanting to hear a recording from a certain year, but even if not, I’m enjoying listening to the shows.
This concert is another one which has a superb quality of recording, given the restrictions that exist on taking recording equipment into the gigs.
And if you would like to nominate a concert that could be added to the series do drop me a line (Tony@schools.co.uk). Or even send me a link to the recording that you have found. Even if we already have a link for the year in question, there is nothing to stop us from having two concerts from the same year.
Here are the details of today’s gig…
Blackpool (UK) 24 November 2013
Things Have Changed
She Belongs to Me
Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
What Good Am I?
Duquesne Whistle
Waiting for You
Pay in Blood
Tangled Up in Blue
Love Sick
Interlude
High Water (For Charley Patton)
Simple Twist of Fate
Early Roman Kings
Forgetful Heart
Spirit on the Water
Scarlet Town
Soon After Midnight
Long and Wasted Years
All Along the Watchtower
Blowin’ in the Wind
The concert series so far is listed below, and as noted, the aim in the end is to have, as far as possible, at least one gig per year that Dylan performed. You might well also find the definitive 144-part series on the Never Ending Tour of interest. It is also on this site here.
Preface: this article includes a rather unusual recording of “Desolation Row”. Even if you don’t feel like wandering through another of my meanders, you might care to skip the text and go to that recording. If you’ve never come across it before, you might be surprised. Although of course I would much prefer it if you could battle through my prose as well.
By Tony Attwood
Bob Dylan’s book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song”, was written, as I understand it, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I started out this series of articles thinking I might write a commentary upon the book, but soon felt I simply didn’t understand enough of what Bob is saying in the book, particularly in terms of why he chose the songs, to be able to write proper commentaries. Which of course is a failure on my part, not on Bob’s.
And so after a hesitant start in reviewing the book, I abandoned that concept but at the same time still found myself drawn back to it by the notion of listening again to the songs Bob had picked, to see if I could find the links between these songs and his own work.
I would add however that if you, or anyone you know, would like to write an article or a series of articles about Dylan’s “Philosophy” book, I would be very interested in publishing it. Indeed I am always happy to hear about ideas for an article or set of articles as much as receiving the article/s in finished form. Email me at Tony@schools.co.uk
Now I turn on to “My Generation” by the Who, a song which certainly had an impact on me as a school student, not least because of the opening line “People try to put us down”. Living in the then still rural county of Dorset in southern England, being part of the protest movement, or even going to concerts, was simply not possible. TV exposure of such bands was limited (only three TV channels were available where I lived), as was the amount of recorded rock music to be heard on the radio. Everything conspired to make “my generation” feel like outsiders in our own society.
The fact that “My Generation” became part of our genre shows just how alienated from the rest of society some of us felt, and this song perhaps more than most, expressed a sense of total removal from the adult society that ran the country, the schools, society, the radio…
And into this background came “My Generation” and that it was a song of its time was shown by the fact that while by 2004 it was still number 11 in the Rolling Stone “Greatest Songs” list, by 2021 it had sunk to number 232. Yet in terms of overall impact, I think it should still be right up there near the top. We may not listen to the song much any more, but its influence on our society is surely still to be seen and felt.
“My generation” was released on 29 October 1965, by which time Bob Dylan had just released his sixth album (already available were Bob Dylan, Freewheelin’, Times they are a-changin’, Another Side, Bringing it all Back Home, and then, just before “My Generation”, we received “Highway 61 Revisited”.
And it is this coincidence of time that, looking back, I find this extraordinary, because the song “My Generation” is at once the antithesis of what Bob was doing in Highway 61, and deeply connected to it. The connection of course is that both songs are about one part of society being utterly alienated from the other. The antithesis is that Townshend expresses his view as anger – a clear statement that he has every right to choose the lifestyle he wants. Dylan howeer is desperately distressed by living in a society in which “they are selling postcards of the hanging”.
The lyrics of “My Generation” are at the simple end of “simple”. The words “Talkin’ bout my generation” are repeated at the end of each line, but since they are always there and always the same I am not sure they need to be included in the transcript of the lyrics…
People try to put us d-downJust because we get aroundThings they do look awful c-c-coldI hope I die before I get oldWhy don't you all f-f-fade away And don't try to dig what we all s-s-sayI'm not tryin' to cause a big s-s-sensation I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation
And that’s it. Now it is in fact, a coincidence that in my last rambling piece on this site in the series about the music of Bob Dylan,I considered “Desolation Row” and the way in which the horrors of the world were described within a lilting, gentle ballad with minimal acoustic accompaniment.
For what we find is that “Desolation Row” is about the world gone wrong in a racial context, while The Who’s “Talking bout my generation” is about younger people rejecting the older generation, their values, and the restrictions they seek to put on the behaviour of the young.
And you might think there can never, ever be any connection between these two utterly different songs, but just in case that is yur view, have a listen to this…. it is from November 2024…
But equally, the perspective is obviously utterly different. Pete Townshend’s song reflects the world through his eyes as a young rebel, while Dylan is much more reflective.
Yet the two men were only born four years apart (Dylan in 1941, Townshend in 1945). And somehow these two songs from 1965 offer us two utterly different ways of looking at the world. One offers resignation (“Right now I don’t feel too good, don’t send me no more letters, no…”) the other pure anger (“Why don’t you all f-f-fade away”).
Yet there is this powerful connection from these two songs each of which emerged from highly talented songwriters at about the same time, and that is, “it’s broken”. It being both society at large, and our ability to communicate across generations, across the social divide, across race…
Of course, the two songs are not normally considered alongside each other because their musical approach is so radically different. “Desolation Row” is lilting, gentle, full of dismay and regret, “My Generation” anything but. And yet the concept of non-communication, a lack of understanding, and indeed a complete lack of empathy between two major groups of people within the same society, is the same in each case.
The difference comes thus not from the issue that the composer chooses, but from the way the musician responds. For Dylan, there is resignation and despair at the lack of communication between different parts of society.
Right now I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row
For Townshend the break leads to anger and a desire to keep the different generations apart
Why don't you all fff fade away
And don't try to dig what we all ssss say
Yet both pieces of music contemplate in the most unsettling of terms the way society had collapsed, each into their own separate world.
I’m gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell
Like Liberace - like St. John the Apostle
Play every number that I can play
I’ll see you baby on Judgement Day
“I’m absolutely convinced that people essentially see what they’re hearing,” says Stephen Sondheim, one of the most successful musical composers and lyricists of the twentieth century (Follies, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd). That’s why he loves rhymes that don’t seem to rhyme visually, on paper. Rougher, for example, he explains, you can rhyme it with tougher. But if you use suffer instead, “you really engage the listener”;
Brown: Yes. So, I’m hearing rougher and suffer rhyme, but I’m… and then I quickly think…
Sondheim: And you think… and that’s a surprise. I have got a rhyme in “Passion,” colonel and journal. Now, you look at them on paper, they seem to have no relation to each other at all. So, when you rhyme them, it’s, ooh, you know? It’s – it – I really may be wrong about this. It’s just something that has struck me over the years.
(interview with Jeffrey Brown for PBS News Hour, December 2010)
Very recognisable and comparable to that other great, Lorenz Hart, and his passion for “outrageous rhymes”, as he himself calls them, which sometimes had to be reined in by his inseparable partner Richard Rodgers. Take “Mountain Greenery” from The Garrick Gaieties (1926), their first success, when Lorenz was still young but no less frenzied than he would remain for the rest of his career:
We could find no cleaner re-
Treat from life's machinery
Than our mountain greenery home
In the previous verse, Hart rhymes keener re-(ception) / beanery / greenery (“where God paints the scenery”), and elsewhere we encounter extravagances such as lifeits tone / Heifetz tone and map her own / chaperone, and a quatrain that almost collapses under its own linguistic and rhyming delight:
Simple cooking means
More than French Cuisines
I've a banquet planned which is
Sandwiches and beans
Or Tim Rice, the lyricist for giants such as Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar) and Elton John (The Lion King, 1994). In 1999, Rice wrote his autobiography Oh, what a circus, and with reserved pride, he pauses in almost every chapter to reflect on a successful rhyming discovery:
“While purists (and I now count myself as one) would shudder, no one was anything but delighted with the couplets as they flowed from my portable typewriter. ‘Biscuit’ and ‘district’ always hit the button laugh-wise, but is of course an inaccurate rhyme. […] When I have tried to correct rhymes for subsequent professional productions, the directors and singers involved always refused to accept the changes, saying they had always loved the original. I am stuck with ‘biscuit’ and ‘district’.”
Dylan instantly would recognise it, this pure pleasure. “It’s mentally… mentally… it gives you a thrill,” he says when interviewer Paul Zollo (SongTalk, 1991) asks him if rhyming is fun. “It gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.” And besides just enjoying it, Dylan also recognises the necessity: “The rhyming and rhythm, what I call the mathematics of a song,” he analyses in 1965 (Margaret Steen interview for The Toronto Star Weekly), in the same years that he consistently refers to his songs as “mathematical music” in almost every interview.
This pure fun, the thrill of finding a rhyme that has never been used before, has not diminished in 2020:
I’m gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell
Like Liberace - like St. John the Apostle
… the frenzy to rhyme the Apostle with Leon Russell is indeed one in the category of “well, that’s never been rhymed before”. Even Tim Rice never got further than apostle / gospel (in Jesus Christ Superstar, of course), an obvious rhyme that is chosen nine times out of ten by songwriters who feature an apostle. Dylan only has competition from surprising outsiders: Billy Idol, of all people, sings and rhymes colossal with apostle (“Rita Hayworth”, 2021), Blondie’s Debby Harry sings while dancing Do the dark apostle / Do the sidewalk hustle (“Do The Dark”, 1980), and closest to Dylan’s outrageousness is a slightly less surprising outsider, R.E.M.’s eccentric frontman Michael Stipe in the chorus of the opening track of the comeback album Accelerate, in the furious “Living Well Is The Best Revenge” (2008):
All your sad and lost apostles
Hum my name and flare their nostrils
“You get the rhymes first,” Dylan says in the same interview with Paul Zollo, “and work back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way.” And that seems to have been the mechanism here, in this fifth verse of “My Own Version Of You”. Dylan has that crazy rhyme Leon Russell / the Apostle up his sleeve, and sees if he “can make it make sense”. Well, he has a narrator who creates an entity, an entity that produces music… Leon Russell plays the piano. Alright, the creature plays the piano like Leon Russell, like John the Apostle, and who else would fit in between?
Liberace has been floating around somewhere in the shadowy corners of Dylan’s creative mind for more than half a century. Opposites attract, apparently. The über-flashy bird of paradise, whose exceptional piano talent is overshadowed by glitter, fur coats and an uncanny toothpaste smile, really would seem to be Dylan’s incarnate allergy, but he is certainly not. Remarkably, Dylan talks about Liberace with apparent sympathy and without irony. He poses willingly and charmingly when the two happen to meet on the David Letterman Show on 22 March 1984 (Dylan performs with The Plugz, Liberace gives a cooking demonstration). In Dylan’s inimitable prose explosion Tarantula (written in 1964/65), Liberace is alpha and omega – Dylan incorporates “liberace” both in the first chapter Guns, the Falcon’s Mouthhook & Gashcat Unpunished (“save the clean, the minorities & liberace’s countryside”) as in the last chapter AI Aaraaf & the Forcing Committee: “the sight of george raft-richard nixon-liberace-d.h. lawrence & pablo casals-all the same person.” And when interviewer Bob Fass (WBAI Interview, 1966) tries to provoke Dylan into a taunt, Dylan doesn’t budge:
Fass: Well, people call up and ask us to play old Mario Lanza
records. Somebody called up and asked me to play some Liberace
tonight.
Dylan: Oh, that’s fine.
Fass: Yeah?
Dylan: Yeah. […]You know, I met him one time. He smiled.
So if he in 2020 is looking for a musician who can serve as a model for his creature’s skills, the talented Liberace is a respectful choice. That, and because Li-be-ra-ce has the same rhythm as Le-on-Ru-ssell and the-A-pos-tle, of course. And we put him at the beginning of the second line, in the middle of the unlikely trio, because finding a rhyming word for Liberace is even more difficult than for Apostle. Well, finding a rhyming word might still be possible – Liberace loves an Apache from Karachi playing a mariachi or something like that, at most – but then again: see if you can make that make sense.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Two themes dominated Bob Dylan’s song writing in 1965, a disdain for the world he saw around him, and a desire to be moving on physically and emotionally. Combined with this, I find in the songs of that year a sense of Dada, in that Dylan seems not to see or value progress or reform, but instead sees a world of chaos; a world with a lack of any value in the norms of society.
Except that although Dylan comments on the abandonment of reason within the racism described in some of the songs, he does so using a traditional musical approach. The “postcards of the hanging” are so appalling, they represent in one lyrical line, the chaos and insanity of the world. To this (and this explains the magic of “Desolation Row”) Dylan responds not with shock and challenge, but rather with a performance that is musically gentle and lilting. It moves on through ten musically identical verses, telling us of the atrociousness of human behaviour through the style of a lilting, unchanging ballad. He could have been talking about having a picnic on a spring afternoon. Instead he is talking about a racist murder and it is the most brilliant summation of all of Dylan’s work (which is to say at least 119 songs – although there may have been more) up to this point.
The approach to composing “Desolation Row” is thus of much interest in thta the musical sequence begins with Farewell Angelina – a genuine and gentle song of farewell, which in compositional terms was followed by a song that questioned if love can ever be truly real Love is just a four letter word, which in turn was followed by a song that took us into the world of dada, a world beyond any thought of making sense (Subterranean Homesick Blues – itself followed by Outlaw Blues
Of course the “love” and “lost love” songs which dominated popular music at the time, and at the composing of which Bob had already shown himself to be the absolute master, were still there and certainly righly seen as great works of a master songwriter. Love Minus Zero, She Belongs to Me and It’s all over now baby blue all told us that love can exist, but also suggested (with that last song) the fragility of all human emotions.
But it was at this point that the notion of the world as being, if not meaningless, then certainly a place in which all one can do is move on. Indeed song after song incorporated the “moving on” theme at this time, such as On the Road Again, Maggie’s Farm, and It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry – which were written one after the other.
Of this new world through which and away from which one feels the need to move, Bob Dylan also seemed to feel a growing sense of disdain, alongside the view that things don’t make sense. Sitting on a barbed wire fence, Like a Rolling Stone,Why do you have to be so frantic followed one after the other each posing questions and anxieties, but rarely giving answers or resolutions.
At the heart of this, is the vision that nothing makes sense and the world is hurtling out of control as in Tombstone Blues.
Where Ba Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedroll Tuba players now, rehearse around the flagpole And the National Bank at a profit sells road maps for the soul To the old folks home and the college I wish I could write you a melody so plain That could hold you dear lady from going insane That can ease you, cool you, and cease the pain Of your useless and pointless knowledge
What is particularly interesting here is the way Bob uses music – in this case, taking us charging through the reams of references without any clear explanation or exposition of what on earth is going on. It is indeed all useless and pointless knowledge. By 2005 the song had become much scarier and frightening, with the emphasis on the beat and Bob’s singing so much of the lyrics on one note. This is a bleak world on the edge of the end. (This version comes from the Never Ending Tour series on this site). This really is an end of the world sound, while using the basic three chords of the blues.
But what is especially interesting is what Bob wrote next: it was Desolation Row. And although the message is the same, Bob has moved on. Tombstone Blues ends with the comment…
I wish I could write you a melody so plain That could hold you dear lady from going insane That can ease you, cool you, and cease the pain Of your useless and pointless knowledge
And indeed the melody is so plain that it hardly exists – especially by this version from 2005.
But what he wrote next most certainly incorporated a melody – and not one that was “so plain” but a melody to remember for all time. The melody that was plain but beautiful, and could hold us all from growing insane.
You will undoubtedly recall how it sounded at first in 1965 with Bob at the age of 24. The lady and Bob were looking out onto Desolation Row, but not facing their end. Bob was simply describing how it was.
And consider also the accompaniment. The normal thought when creating a piece of music about the end of all things, is to give it lots of noise. But all we get is two guitars and a bass. No electrics, no percussion.
Lyrically we have ten six-line verses taking us through 661 words, and of course the lyrics are so wonderfully crafted that they hold us all the way through, and need no musical variation. Instruments don’t come and go; the music just continues over 11 minutes. We are held in its trance.
This really is a magical achievement to keep us engaged with the song, with each verse the same and only three chords. Of course, it is the lyrics that engage our interest, but melody is something remarkable, and I have sought to make the point before on this site that the meaning of the song comes not just from the lyrics, but from the gentle, constant nature of the music. Music as I have suggested in previous articles, “tells us that life goes on, and on, and it can be pretty horrifying, but somehow because it is always there, we get used to it.”
If we look at the lyrics of the last verse…
Yes, I received your letter yesterday (About the time the door knob broke) When you asked how I was doing Was that some kind of joke?
we know we have reached the end of hope, and yet the music continues, if not exactly in a jaunty mood then most certainly not in a feeling of utter despair.
And this to me is the absolute point of the song, and the absolute genius of Dylan’s approach. The song is about the hopelessness and horror of life in our civilisation (just consider the opening line of lyrics) and yet the music in this original recording is not that at all. It has a spot of swing to it, the lead part is played on an acoustic guitar and meanders happily around the chord sequence, there is no rise or fall in tempo or volume. Everything is gentle and calm, and yet this is a piece that starts, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”. This is our world of contradiction.
Thus it is that by the end, the line that “No one has to think too much about Desolation Row” takes on a powerful central meaning, when the music is taken into account with the lyrics.
And so as the characters slip in and out, yet there is a constancy within the song, while the horror show slips by. We are made immune to what is happening out there because it is out there every day. Indeed, it is still there, but much of the time we pretend it is not.
In this view of the song, there is no point shouting about the life that Dylan describes, any more than it is worth my while shouting out about the three giant trees at the end of my garden that I watch swaying in the wind, day after day, as I sit and write. The sun, the snow, the rain, it all comes and goes and everything is pretty much the same. In such a world one begins to accept everything that is present, and everything that happens. Emotions and energy drift away. The sun rises, the sun sets. It rains, it snows. We don’t particularly notice, because this is how it is.
Change the music however and the song becomes something quite different. Which is to say that the meanings and emotions carried within the lyrics and not just based on the lyrics themselves but are also determined by the music that accompanies them. And indeed it can be argued that the song is thus 11 minutes long in order to express the constancy of a world of horrors which exist all around us and the way we come to terms with those horrors.
For me, the recording above is superb because the music does give us this contrast between the acceptance of life around, and the life itself. The original album version does the same. Being gentle and pretty much unchanging, these two versions say, “there’s the horror show out there, it never changes, we have to live with it.”
Which is rather a profound thought, given that Dylan was seen as a protest singer, which, as I have often argued before, he wasn’t. Indeed as I’ve noted so often, “Times they are a changin’” is not a protest song, but a song that actually says, the world changes, it happens, it has nothing to do with what people do – it just happens. “Desolation Row” says life is awful, but somehow we just carry on.
Put the two messages together and we have a vision of humans meandering through a world, letting everything just happen around them. It gets better it gets worse, it’s not much to do with us.
All such meanings however are lost when the song is transformed and the original music is lost. In 1990 for example it sounded like this – and it gives us a feeling of rushing to the final end.
Listening to this 1990 version still makes me feel almost breathless, and brings forth an image of being in a truck hurtling towards the edge of a cliff – and I’m really not very happy about it.
By 2017 we were still utterly sure the end was coming, but there was perhaps that slight feeling that maybe we could all sit in our favourite armchairs in front of the fire and watch civilisation collapse on TV. There was nothing we could do to stop it, but we didn’t have to be there.
Bob of course does play with the melody somewhat but it is the rhythm that Bob changes which makes all the difference. In this last version, there is a swing to the movement of the song. So when we are “getting ready for the show” we know it is the end, but we, like Bob have aged, and we know we all have to go sometime. As I have said to many friends in the same age group as me (ie almost but not quite as old as Bob) with this version, stop listening to the lyrics, and take in the music. It says, yes the end of it all is coming soon, but rather amazingly we made it to this point.
So my thought is with these last two recordings, both are telling us of the end, but in the former, I feel pushed onward when I don’t want to be. With the 2017 version, Bob manages to make me feel it’s ok – it is all coming to an end, and that’s all right.
To appreciate just how radical, and one might say “unlikely,” the music of “Desolation Row” is, just consider the opening about selling postcards of the hanging. This is a horror story of a racist incident of the first degree, and yet it is a gentle, lilting ballad. Now consider the ending:
Right now I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters no Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row
And still, that gentle lilting ballad music continues, as if saying, yes, this is normal, this is all right.
This is the most appalling horror story, but somehow we just treat it as our history, as part of how things have been, and maybe in some places still are. And that brings home the horror of the story far more than any heavy drum beat and crashing of cymbals could ever do.
The idea of the concert series is very simple – a set of links to videos or recordings of a single concert year by year, gathered together so that when complete we can all find at least one concert for each year, really quickly, (if for any reason we ever so wanted to).
And I have to add by this point having put up 31 recordings, I was wondering if it was worth going on to the final aim of one a year, but now looking at the number of views, not just of the latest concert linked to, but previous ones in the series, it seems that this collection is providing a service. And certainly I am enjoying going back to these gigs and taking a snapshot of how Bob was at the time, how his voice sounded, and what he chose to play.
This concert is exceptional for its sound and visual quality, and for the editing. I really do recommend it, even if you have no interest in the series as a whole.
But in case you want to go further there is a full index of concerts below: every decade now has five concerts, and I am hoping to get as close to one a year as I can by the end of the series…
The concert…..
And just as a thought from me – even if you don’t listen to the whole gig, do listen to the final track. Although if you can listen to the whole event the power of that last song is doubled and redoubled. There is a palpable sadness in Dylan’s voiec with “Come mothers and fathers…” between the two instrumental breaks.
1. Highway 61 Revisited
2. Jokerman
3. All along the watchtower
4. Just like a woman
5. Maggie’s Farm
6. I and I
7. License to kill
8: A Hard Rain’s a gonna fall
9. Tangled up in Blue
10. It’s alright ma
11. Simple twist of Fate
12. Masters of War
13. Ballad of a Thin Man
14. Enough is Enough
15. Every grain of Sand
16. Like a rolling stone
17. Mr Tambourine Man
18. Girl from the North Country
19. It ain’t me babe
20. Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat
21. Tombstone Blues
22. Blowing in the Wind
23. Knocking on Heaven’s Door
24. Times they are a changin’
The concert series so far (and as noted, the aim in the end is to have, as far as possible, at least one gig per year that Dylan performed).
I get into trouble and I hit the wall
No place to turn - no place at all
I pick a number between one and two
And I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do
Todd Haynes’ beautiful biopic I’m Not There (2007) has an apt subtitle, “The Many Faces & Lives of Bob Dylan”, which fully lives up to its promise: the idea of having Dylan played by six different actors works well. Particularly intelligent is the idea of having the most clichéd, iconic Dylan, the neurotic, sunglasses-wearing, sardonic Dylan of the mid-1960s, with his pale skin, polka dot shirt and wild hair, played by a woman. This alone allows Haynes to avoid histrionics – which, as we see in 2024 in the performance by the talented Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, is almost inevitable. Plus: Haynes is of course very fortunate to have been able to secure the exceptional Cate Blanchett for the role.
Anyway, 2007 is still a little too early to write a complete biography, obviously; Dylan will continue for a few more decades and calmly expand his resume with new Faces & Lives. So Haynes inevitably misses, and could not have predicted, the 2023 Dylan: Dylan the crowd pleaser.
The seventh leg of the Rough And Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour kicks off on 1 October 2023 in Kansas City, and Dylan has decided to open with Wilbert Harrison’s classic “Kansas City”, much to the delight of the audience. It’s not a spur-of-the-moment decision. It soon turns out to be policy: next we go to St. Louis, where he plays two songs written by the city’s most famous son, Chuck Berry (“Johnny B. Goode” and “Nadine”), and the opening of the third stop is “Born In Chicago” from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band – because we are in Chicago, indeed. In retrospect, we can even see that Dylan had been preparing his sudden, atypical friendliness towards the audience for years:
I’m giving myself to you, I am
From Salt Lake City to Birmingham
From East LA to San Antone
I don’t think I could bear to live my life alone
… in the first bridge of “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”. Dylan probably wrote the song sometime around 2019/2020, and the names of those four cities were not chosen at random: all four are places that appear on his 2022 tour calendar, and, even more atypically, he even makes a point of it: “From Salt Lake City to Birmingham!” the entertainer shouts as he announces the song on 30 June in Salt Lake City, predictably generating loud cheers and surprised applause.
In the autumn of 2023, after Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago, we arrive in Milwaukee, which then does not inspire Dylan. He could have chosen something by Al Jarreau, or even more obvious, Steve Miller, but apparently Dylan is not in the mood to give out gifts today. He prefers playing Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’”, which does name-check Chicago, New York, Detroit, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Buffalo, but not Milwaukee. The Milwaukeans will have to console themselves with the fact that their neighbours in Dylan’s next stop Grand Rapids (14 October), don’t get anything special either. He rejects Alice Cooper’s “I Like Girls” (I bought a Porsche and I’m leaving Grand Rapids), and even Grand Rapids’ son Del Shannon, who does have a place in Dylan’s heart, fails to inspire him. Dylan opts for another rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Nadine” Sure, Nadine is walking towards a coffee-coloured Cadillac, but Cadillac is still about 90 miles from Grand Rapids – way too far to evoke local patriotic feelings in his audience.
But then next stop Indiana is treated to a personal touch again, with the surprising choice of “Longest Days” by Hoosier John Mellencamp, and even more surprising is 20 October Cincinnati: Dwight Yoakam’s forgotten album track “South Of Cincinnati”, from Dwight’s 1986 debut album Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. Surprising and odd, as Dylan has many, often more attractive alternatives to choose from. “Susie Cincinnati” from the Beach Boys, Ray Charles’ “The Cincinnati Kid”, Buck Owens’ “Sam’s Place” (There’s Hootch-why-kootchy Hattie, she comes from Cincinnati), “Cincinnati Lou” by Merle Travis, Waylon Jennings, Dave Dudley… there are dozens of songs to choose from if you want to add a personal touch to your Cincinnati concert. And often enough, excellent songs from artists who are held in high regard by Dylan. Bobby Bare’s “Cincinnati Jail”, for example, Johnny Cash’s “Papa Was a Good Man” (okay, that’s a terrible song), Hank Williams’ “Pan American”, and especially Connie Smith’s unabashed declaration of love, her 1967 hit “Cincinnati, Ohio”:
There she lies at the foot of the hill
Shinin' like a jewel in the valley below
Cincinnati, Ohio.
And let’s not forget Sinatra’s “I Can’t Get Started” (In Cincinnati or in Rangoon, I simply smile and all the gals swoon), another highlight from Dylan’s beloved American Songbook. In fairness, it should be noted that it is not so much the grandeur or beauty of the city, but rather the euphony of the word “Cincinnati” which usually motivates the décor choice.
Sinatra, Cash, Hank, Buck Owens, Bobby Bare and Merle Haggard… but Dylan chooses Dwight Yoakam. His afterword conveys a certain intimacy: “Dwight wrote that, you know that. I think he wrote it for King Records.” Partly fake news (Yoakam never signed with King Records), but that familiar “Dwight” stands out. Which makes sense: the men know each other and Dylan does appreciate him. They even have sung together: the background vocals for Carlene Carter’s 1993 recording of Dylan’s “Trust Yourself” are provided by the occasional duo Yoakam & Dylan, and a quarter of a century before “South Of Cincinnati” Dylan had already played another Yoakam song: the flawless tear-in-your-beer ballad “The Heart That You Own” (West Palm Beach, 1999).
It makes it all the more likely that Dylan is giving a nod to Dwight Yoakam here in this fourth verse. “Cincinnati” may appear in hundreds of songs, but there is really only one song with that strange, absurd concept of “pick a number between one and two,” and that is the closing track on Yoakam’s 2003 album Population Me, “The Back of Your Hand”:
Take a guess at where I stand
Pick a number one to two
Take a look at the back of your hand
Just like you know it
You know me too
Funny, and not entirely unusual in a Dylan song, such a paraphrase from a song by an admired colleague. However, it becomes more puzzling when we look at the credits: “The Back of Your Hand” is one of the few songs not written by Dwight himself. It was written by actor Gregg Lee Henry, the actor who usually plays the bad guy and whom we know from films such as Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984), the Guardians Of The Galaxy series (2014-23), dozens of TV series and, above all, as the serial killer Dennis Rader in the horror television film The Hunt for the BTK Killer (2005).
In June 2017, Gregg has a somewhat more demanding role: he is playing the title role in the Shakespeare play that is on the programme for this year’s annual Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park. Dylan is nearby: on 13, 14 and 15 June, he is in Port Chester, barely a 45-minute drive from Central Park. And Dylan is a big, self-proclaimed Shakespeare fan (“I like to see Shakespeare plays, so I’ll go — I mean, even if it’s in a different language. I don’t care, I just like Shakespeare, you know” – AARP interview 2015). So it’s very likely that Dylan seized the opportunity. And what does he see?
I pick a number between one and two
And I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do
… he sees how Gregg Lee Henry, the actor who wrote Yoakam’s “The Back of Your Hand” with the chorus line “Pick a number one to two”, gets into trouble on stage, is pushed against the wall, no place to turn – no place at all, and then murdered by Casca, Cinna, Cassius and even Brutus – Dylan sees Gregg Lee Henry playing Julius Caesar.
In a controversial performance, incidentally – Gregg’s Julius Caesar is very much modelled on Donald Trump, which is causing the organisation quite a few problems. How did you prepare for that role, Backstage asks Gregg Lee Henry in May 2017.
“You invest your creativity in your part. You can watch other films and productions of Julius Caesar and see what they did and see whether it’s worth stealing or not! [laughs] Which is true of all art—you take things and you make them your own.”
I create, says Gregg, very Dylanesque, my own version of you. And then chooses – coincidentally, probably – almost the same words as Dylan did at the time in that famous Rolling Stone interview, 2012: “You make everything yours. We all do it.”
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
In October 1971, journalist Pete Hamill writes a column for the New York Post entitled “Going Home”. Six young people are travelling by bus from New York to Fort Lauderdale for a beach holiday, a journey of around 24 hours. Soon, the six become intrigued by a silent, hunched man sitting a few seats in front of them. One of the girls tries to strike up a conversation. He is not unfriendly, but seems very shy and holds his tongue. It is not until the next morning, after a coffee break at a roadside restaurant, that the girl manages to get his story out of him. His name is Vingo, he has just been released after serving a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence, and is now on his way home to Brunswick, Georgia. “Wow,” says the girl. “Are you married?” ‘I’m not sure,” replies Vingo. “You’re not sure?”
