Untold Dylan

Bob Dylan And Delmore Schwartz (Part I) appears here

By Larry Fyffe

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan comes in contact with the nonabstract, co-ordinating conjunctive style of  Ezra Pound’s poetry indirectly through the poetics of Delmore Schultz – ‘the thing’ is the thing.

The vorticose imagery of Ezra Pound swirls in the themes of the modern symbolistic poems of Delmore Schwartz. Dominant be the imagery of a non-discriminatory whirling universe – if there be any divine plan behind the universe, it’s kept secret from most of its earthly inhabitants by the God of Creation; He’s transcendent, mysterious, and unknowable; He’s beyond, not immanent in, the material world:

Each minute bursts in the burning room
The great globe reels in the solar fire
Spinning the unique and trivial away
How all things flash! How all things flame!
(Delmore Schwartz: Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day)

A sorrowful sentiment expressed in the lyrics of the following song:

When the Reaper's task had ended
Sixteen hunderd had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The lovliest, and the best 
(Bob Dylan: Tempest)

As for the distant God, He’s apparently disinterested, and just stands there looking down.

However, according to Schwartz, something stable in the whirling chaos of time, with a bit of luck, may be found to cling to – possibly someone to love:

The old error, the thought of sitting still
The senses drinking, by the summer's river
On the tended lawn, below the traffic
As if Time would pause, and afternoon stay 
No, night comes soon
With the cold mountains, with desolation, unless love
Builds it's city
(Schwartz: In The Slight Ripple, The Mind Perceives The Heart)

The singer/songwriter stirs the theme into the lyrics of the song below:

I'm movin' after midnight
Down boukevards of broken cars
Don't know what I'd do without it
Without this love we call ours
Beyond here lies nothin'
Nothin' but the moon and stars
(Bob Dylan: Beyond Here Lies Nothing ~ Dylan/ Hunter)

Indeed, it’s hard to keep a good-hearted person down – his or her ‘spirit’ figuratively lives on in the memory, in the imagination, and in the world of dreams:

A master of men was the Goodly Fere
A mate of the wind and the sea
If they think they have slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally
(Ezra Pound: The Ballad Of The Goodly Fere)

Similarly, writes Bob Dylan:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive as you or me
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold
(Bob Dylan: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine)

Ezra Pound would freeze the never-ending flow of time if he could:

Tell her that sheds 
Such treasure in the air
Recking not else, but what her graces give
Life to the moment
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid
Red overwrought with orange, and made
One substance, and one colour
Braving time
(Ezra Pound: Envoi)

Reminding us of the pounding imagery of Delmore Schwartz:

As for my part felt in my heart as one who falls
Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly and feel the vast
Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down
An endlessly helplessly falling, and appalled clown
(Delmore Schwartz: All Night, All Night)

And the imagery in many of the songs of Bob Dylan:

Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
By users, cheaters, six-time losers
Hang around the theatres
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin' for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters
(Bob Dylan: Subterranean Himesick Blues)

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

This article continues from Tangled up in Harmonicas Part 1.

An index to all the articles in the series is given at the foot of this article, and in the index file Bob Dylan Master Harpist.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

We ended part 1 of this postscript with a triumphant, acoustic, 1997 performance of Tangled Up in Blue. The pattern Dylan laid down in 1996, with amplified acoustic guitar and harmonica breaks, continued through to 2002 pretty much unchanged. This foot-stomper became a showcase for Dylan’s guitar and harmonica work.

I wasn’t going to include this 1999 performance, since it doesn’t break new ground, but it’s a good way of picking up from where we left off. A wonderful vigorous performance. Seems like the song has lost none of its luster for Dylan and the band

Performances continued, pretty much in the same vein, until Dylan put aside the guitar and took to the keyboards in 2002. I’ve written about this shift, and how it affected his sound, in Master Harpist 4. This song, from 2003, is a repeat, and I encourage the new reader go to that article for the full discussion.

This could well be the greatest ever performance of this song. Dylan, the band, they all sound so liberated, and boy, do they cook!

This performance, with the excited screams of the harp, is as epic and thrilling as those 1990’s ecstatic versions, while heading back in the electric direction for the guitars. Dylan evolved a mix of acoustic and electric sounds that work like charm, at least in this case. Acoustic rhythm guitar, electric bass and lead, acoustic piano.

It wasn’t until 2006/7 that we get another change in direction. Dylan moved from the piano to the organ, and at first, his tendency was to play the organ softly, lightly and whimsically, with a circus like sound. With these new arrangements, TUIB goes from being a foot-stomper to a toe-tapper. The opening harp break and the acoustic first verse takes us back to a slower, more reflective TUIB that has it roots in the original New York recordings in 1974.

Experience, as mediated through memory, becomes something not so much to be celebrated with wild sounds but gently probed. A whiff of sadness and nostalgia for times past can be heard in the opening and closing harp breaks (heartbreaks?) and while the song still builds to a climax, the mood has moved towards the somber. Here’s a performance from 2007.

From somber to desperate we go as we arrive in 2009, during which there were some highly ambivalent performances of TUIB. Again, I have written about this version in Master Harpist 4, and won’t now repeat those comments, except to say this ‘mechanical’ version, as I have nicknamed it, must be the strangest performance of TUIB you’re ever likely to hear. Strained and plodding, we’re a long way into weariness, the drudgery of memory, and far away from the ecstatic celebration of experience. Only the harp remembers the light and the airy.

By 2011, the song had regained its force and vigor. If Dylan is playing the organ here, I can’t hear it. For all its power, and Dylan’s passionate vocal, the song has been tamed a little, I can’t help but think. Those ten to twelve minute wild sprees have been cut back to a brisk six minutes.  And, brilliant as the harp break is, everything is under tight control.

In 2012 there is another shift in sound, as Dylan moves from the organ back to the piano, but this time a baby grand. Bob’s love affair with his baby grand begins, and this new love starts to push out his old used to be – his trusty harp.

A new arrangement emerges for TUIB that Dylan will keep for the next four years. He does the first verses center stage, does a mid-song harp break, then heads to the piano for the last verse and some piano flourishes to end. The harp thus loses its established position as the instrument that finishes the song off. Those wonderful, wild end breaks are gone for good.

There is a sense of excitement, however, in the early days of the new arrangement, with Dylan sometimes varying the pattern by playing a harp intro, as in the link below. Some of old wildness is there, even while the song is still trimmed back to six minutes and there are no guitar breaks. Dylan toots and shimmers his way through the harp break, but the triumphant piano ending announces the arrival of Dylan’s new love in the most emphatic manner.

What makes this version special is the re-appearance of the 1984 lyrics, spliced into the more familiar lyrics. Dylan was getting ready for a major reinvention of the song.

In 2015 there was another major shift, this time with the lyrics. For some time Dylan had been cutting out some of verses, and these we sorely miss. We lose the wonderful, ‘there was music in the cafés at night/ and revolution was in the air.’ And we lose the ‘working for a while on a fishing boat’ verse.

To my mind, this compromises the epic reach of the song, the sense of a life full of incidents and craziness. These stripped down versions are not as Odyssean as the earlier, richer song.

In the 2015 version, it all gets focused down to one event – the ‘she lit a burner on the stove’ verse. This verse is sandwiched between the opening two verses and the last verse. This makes it the focal point of the song, as if memory has faded to one or two emblematic incidents; the rich variety of experience honed to a few fragmentary moments.

That, however, doesn’t detract from the brilliance of the revamped last two verses.

These are lyrics in the 2015 version, largely unchanged to the present day.

Early one morning, the sun was shining
and he was lying in bed
Wondering if she changed at all,
if her hair was still red.
But their folks they said that their lives together
sure was gonna be rough,
they never liked mama’s homemade dress,
papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough.
He was turning on the side of the road
with the rain falling on his shoes,
Heading out for the east coast,
the radio blasting out the news,
right on through
Tangled up in blue.

She was married when they first met,
she was soon to be divorced,
Well, he helped her out of a jam I guess
but he used a little too much force.
And they drove that car just as far as they could
and they abandoned it way out west,
Splitting up on a dark, sad night
somewhere in the wilderness.
He turned around and looked at her,
as she was walking away
Saying over her shoulder,
“we’re gonna meet someday stepping on the avenue.”
Tangled up in blue.

She lit a burner on the stove
and then she swept away the dust.
“You look like someone that I used to know,” she said,
“You look like someone that I used to trust.”
Then she opened up a book of poems and she said,
“take that, just so you know.”
“Memorize these lines,
and remember these rhymes,
when you’re up there, walking to and fro.”
Every one of them words rang true
and they glowed like burning coal,
Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul,
from me to you.
Tangled up in blue.

I’m going back again
I got to get to them somehow
Yesterday is dead and gone
and tomorrow might as well be now.
Some of them, they went to live upon the mount
And some of them went down to the ground.
Some of the names were written in flames
And some of them, well, they just left town.
And me I’m still on the road
trying to stay away from the joint.
We always felt the same
depending on your point of view.
Tangled up in blue.

Classic Dylan, that last verse. And the harp too has lost none its sharpness, it’s capacity to lift the song towards the wild and ecstatic.

And so it continued until 2017/18 when the song once more undergoes a dramatic rearrangement, but before going there, let’s just tune in to this 2016 performance. I’ve chosen it because of audience response. Oh, don’t we love this song, can’t get enough of it, and there is enough kick in the harp to take us back to earlier performances. Not quite the ecstatic version of old, but near enough for a Dylan fan!

There our story ends, pretty much. But I can’t finish without a listen to how the song sounds now, without any harp break, or guitar break. The song has some charm, but has become a tiptoe-through-the-tulips down memory lane.

Dylan’s post Sinatra singing is intriguing, to say the least, but control reigns and ecstatic rock is more than a swing and beat away. We’re down to a quick five minutes, in and out. Experience has lost its edge, perhaps; these things no longer hurt. A quick bounce and swing through the gallery of time. Was that even us?

We could say that all art is a tension between order and chaos. Too much order, and your work becomes rigid, predictable, too tightly framed. Too much chaos and there is no coherence, just a big mess. In Dylan’s work, we often see these two tendencies in play.

The song ‘Dark Eyes’ has been criticized for having too rigid a musical structure. Rigidity of form is to some extent built into rock music, more so than jazz. We think of the fanatical rigidity of the arrangements on Tempest, and the tight coherence of Frank Sinatra. In Tempest, Dylan emulated Sinatra’s method of recording, and Sinatra’s absolute control of the sound he created. Songs like ‘Narrow Way’ create a very narrow way musically indeed.

On the other hand, we find the wild innovator and improviser. The artist who could stand in front an audience and pretty much make up on the spot a whole set of new lyrics to ‘Serve Somebody’. The artist whose impulse to improvise is perhaps most vividly and clearly expressed in his harmonica solos, the best of which are touched by the wildness of a free spirit, passionate and playful.

TUIB attempts to capture the chaos of experience within the ordered development of a song. It’s all about experience – to be celebrated, anguished over, and, in the end it seems, tamed and neatly tied with a perfectly constrained musical ribbon.  And only the hint of a swagger, a touch of madness in this weird piano!

I’d be foolish to assume that the story of this mighty, indestructible song, ends here. If Dylan, in his late seventies, keeps on keeping one, like that bird that flew, who can tell what the future might hold, and that beautiful little instrument, the harmonica, might yet fly again too.

Kia Ora!

Bob Dylan Master Harpist…

• Bob Dylan: Master Harpist
• Bob Dylan Master Harpist part 2: performances you will simply not believe.
• Master Harpist part 3.
• Master Harpist 4: Dylan’s harmonica work as you’ve never heard it (unless you were there!)
• Master Harpist 5: from 2000 to the present day
• Post script Tangled up in Harmonicas Part 1.

by Larry Fyffe

In stories of romance, the heroes thereof often get into trouble big time: they usually manage to get away at the last second.  In the New Testament, though details are lacking, it appears that Jesus of Nazareth manages to slip away from his would-be executioners after a Libyan takes His place:

And as they came out, they found a man of Cyrene
Simon by name
Him they compelled to bear the cross ....
And set up over his head his accusation written
'This is Jesus, the King of the Jews'
There were there two thieves crucified with him
One on the right hand, and another on the left 
(Matthew 27: 32,37,38)

The later written Gospel of St. John omits the switcheroo story – adding to the mystery.

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan oft places the dramatic narrow-escape motif in his song lyrics. Writes he of a member of Captain Ahab’s crew:

Tashtego says that he died and was reborn. His extra days are a gift. He wasn’t
saved by Christ, though, he says he was saved by a fellow man, and a nonChristian
at that. He parodies the Resurrection….

That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs.
(Bob Dylan: The Nobel Lecture)

In the song below, the narrator has a narrow escape from death with aid from the God of Thunder:

"Oh, stop that cursed jury"
Cried the attendant and the nurse
"The trial was bad enough
But this is ten times worse"
Just then a bolt of lightning
Struct the courthouse out of shape
And while everybody knelt to pray
The dwifter did escape
(Bob Dylan: Drifter's Escape)

Also expressed in song is the viewpoint that, in a disinterested Universe, it be just a matter of good luck if one escapes from dire peril:

The ship was going under
The universe opened wide
The roll was called up yonder
The angels turned aside
(Bob Dylan: Tempest)

It’s not all about blind luck – human beings are social animals who get assistance and  knowledge from others as well as learning how to cope with the surrounding physical and social environments from their own individual experiences – most manage to live ordinary, peaceful, and productive lives. However, the effects of authoritarian hierarchical social structures ensure that there are those who do not.

So expressed in the following song:

He was a clean cut kid
But they made a killer out of him
That's what they did
They said, "Listen, boy, you're just a pup"
They sent him to a napalm health spa to shape up
(Bob Dylan: Clean Cut Kid)

The lyrics of many of the songs of Bob Dylan present a somewhat Existentialist position – in the final analysis, the choice of what individuals decide to do rests squarely on their own shoulders, and they’re going to have to live with it, and suffer any negative consequenes wrought therefrom; or else change their way of thinking and behaving:

Jesus said, "Be ready
For you know not the hour in which I come"
He said, "He who is not for Me is against Me"
Just so you know where He's coming from
(Bob Dylan: Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking)

It comes to be believed by many that Jesus of Nazareth is put to death and then reborn. Indeed, it might be construed that He allows Simon of Cyrene to sacrifice himself in His stead so that Jesus is able to live on for a time, and therefore continue to inspire His apostles to spread the gospel abroad:

This is my commandment
That ye love one another, as I have loved you
Greater love hath no man than this
That a man lay down his life for his friends
(John 15: 12,13)

by Jochen Markhorst

The western fascination for the exotic mysticism of ancient Egypt is even older than the introduction of Egyptology in the nineteenth century. Already in Mozart’s Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791), the opera full of freemason mystique, the sage Sarastro invokes Isis und Osiris, standing in a setting of pyramids and palm branches. The appeal culminates in the following decades; the time of the pharaohs inspires thousands of operas, literary works, paintings and later also films (Cleopatra from 1917, for example, and the entire series of Mummy horror films starting in 1932).

After the Second World War, the theme fades a bit, but it never disappears. Tintin and The Cigars Of The Pharaoh is a bestseller in 1955, Asterix and Cleopatra in 1965, Indiana Jones travels with Ra’s Staff to Cairo (Raiders Of The Lost Ark, 1981), The Bangles score their world hit in 1986 (“Walk Like An Egyptian”). And even today, the perfume industry tempts customers with the scent “Egyptian Godess” (Auric Blends, $9.98 on amazon.com).

So the Isis and the pyramids from Dylan’s song do not stand on their own, but are part of an age-old tradition of Egyptian references in Western culture. And much more than that it is not, according to Jacques Levy, the co-author. In one of his last interviews, for Prism Films in May 2004, he tells quite extensively about his collaboration with Dylan.

“We didn’t get into “What do you mean by this, what’s all this” kind of stuff. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked the significance of the fifth day of May. And I just fend it off. I don’t know the significance. And I don’t care. I tell people: make up your own significance. (…)

Exotic is a good word (…) The sense of a foreigness. It was exotic, but there was also some aspects of autobiography in the song. Whether mine or Bob’s. (…)

I was very interested in Western stuff, in cowboy stuff. Stuff I’d written with McGuinn all had that kind of Western flair. And a couple of songs I wrote with Bob had that too. Take a song like “Isis”. “Isis” is this cowboy story, but there’s very little that’s Western about it. The music isn’t Western and the images aren’t Western. But it feels more like a cowboy story taking place through some other kind of lens.”

Just like those Egyptian elements, those autobiographical elements are at most insignificant flavour enhancers. Isis is called a mystical child – in the complete Dylan catalog that adjective appears only in one other song: in “Sara”, on this same album Desire, the same Sara who wears a magical Egyptian ring in “She Belongs To Me”. Apparently the poet thinks of his future ex-wife as an ancient Egyptian beauty. The link between the names Sara and Isis is soon made – it takes place along the same lines on which Kafka calls his protagonist “Samsa”, Klaus Mann renames his collaborating brother-in-law Gustav Gründgen to “Hendrik Höfgen” (in Mephisto, 1936) and Neal Cassady changes to Dean Moriarty (On The Road, Jack Kerouac).

In the enlightening SongTalk interview with Paul Zollo, Dylan too confirms that limited depth:

“With this Isis thing, it was Isis…. you know, the name sort of rang a bell but not in any kind of vigorous way. So, therefore, it was name-that-tune time. It was anything. The name was familiar. Most people would think they knew it from somewhere. But it seemed like just about any way it wanted to go would have been okay, just as long as it didn’t get too close. (laughs)”

Not too close to himself, Dylan explains (laughing still), when asked.

A nice little story, in short. And we don’t mean anything else by that, Dylan claims a few years earlier too, to the question of a listener when the singer patiently answers questions, an hour in a radio studio in Hollywood. “It’s kind of like a journey, you know, like sort of a journey type trip. (…) I don’t really know too much in depth what it would mean.”

Like sort of a journey type trip is a very scanty summary of the fateful odyssey that the main character from “Isis” undertakes, but Dylan’s point is clear: the sparkle of the song is not so much in the narrative quality, and certainly not in hidden meanings, but in the visual power, the unexpected turns and the beauty of the words. The protagonist undertakes a long journey full of hardships and eventually returns to his legal wife – a real odyssey, something like Odysseus did.

 It is not very clear where Levy sees a cowboy story. The main characters travel on horseback, that’s about it. And the word canyon is spoken, but then again; this canyon is icy and snowy, not exactly the kind of canyon one would immediately associate with the Wild West. In fact, the ballad is teeming with decor pieces and props that push the imagination half a world the other way. The main characters meet at the launderette, travel to the cold North and find an empty tomb in an icy pyramid. The backdrop of the homecoming is a grassy meadow near a dry creek, at sunset.

The listener does not see Once Upon A Time In The West, but rather apocalyptic landscapes from a movie like Mad Max or the Bible book Ezekiel, or fantasy worlds like in The Lord Of The Rings. In any case “exotic”, that part of Levy’s analysis is traceable.

The dialogues are no less enigmatic and through and through Dylanesque. Conversations brushing past each other, answers that don’t answer, dialogues that only seemingly make sense.

“Where are we going?”
“We’ll be back by the fourth.”
“That’s the best news that I’ve ever heard!”

He comes back from the Cold North, has just put the body of his companion in an empty tomb in an icy pyramid. But when asked, that was “no place special”.

Tone and the confusing content of the dialogues are comparable to Kafka’s parables, but also from Dylan’s more surreal press conferences and interviews. And Dylan’s life partners undoubtedly recognize it too. “You who are so good with words and at keeping things vague,” as Joan Baez would put it in “Diamond & Rust”. Infuriating when trying to decide on a new ceiling lamp together at the Ikea, but in a song text like “Isis” these kinds of dialogues get an irresistible, deeply poetic shine.

Just as irresistible is the music, or rather: Dylan’s recital. The musical accompaniment is simplistic and effective, really no more than a rolling, falling ostinato (Ⅰ–ⅤⅠⅠ♭–Ⅳ–Ⅰ). Hypnotising enough, but the interpretation elevates the song to a Dylan classic. And not so much because of the combination of the stubborn, mesmerizing piano hammering and the elegant, enticing violin and the driven harmonica; it is mainly Dylan’s vocal performance. The bard sings masterfully meandering around those piano chords, powerful and confident, stretching vowels so that the words merge into one – as if he is playing a saxophone solo. Take a verse like the opening line of verse three, “A man in the corner approached me for a match”; a serpentine of dancing, waltzing sounds, the meaning of which, indeed, is actually no longer important.

Underexposed is the remarkable supporting role of the drums. Most hits from the exceptional talent Howie Wyeth (also a fairly skilled ragtime and jazz pianist) are just milliseconds outside the beat, granting the recording this fascinating, driving dynamic.

Dylan is impressed too. “Your drummer sounds great,” he tells bass player Rob Stoner, who brought his drum buddy to the studio. He is then subsequently invited to the Rolling Thunder Revue. Howard Wyeth has more successful sessions to his name, with Don McLean for example, and with Roger McGuinn, on his most beautiful album, Cardiff Rose. On the continent he is known from the smashing piano solo and the dry, tight drums on the hit “Red Hot” by Robert Gordon and Link Wray (1977), although he is playing on the bass in the videoclip (and bassist Rob Stoner is at the drums).

But at his premature death in 1996 (51 years old), his work on Dylan’s Desire still ranks as his moment of glory.

But at his premature death in 1996 (51 years old), his work on Dylan’s Desire still ranks as his moment of glory.

The fellow musicians are in awe. Few colleagues risk a cover – Dylan’s studio version and the live versions are fairly unassailable and presumably too daunting a challenge. The massive, white blues giant Popa Chubby has had the song on his repertoire for a few years and comes close to what Jimi Hendrix would have made of it.

The 1996 recording is one of the most beautiful. Even better than the only more or less well-known cover of “Isis”, the one by The White Stripes.

The ultimate cover does and will not exist. Dylan surely would have been delighted by Umm Kulthum, Egypt’s national icon, “The Planet Of The East”, “Egypt’s Fourth Pyramid”, the singer he explicitly honours in the Playboy interview with Ron Rosenbaum, 1977:

“She does mostly love and prayer-type songs, with violin and-drum accompaniment. Her father chanted those prayers and I guess she was so good when she tried singing behind his back that he allowed her to sing professionally, and she’s dead now but not forgotten. She’s great. She really is. Really great.”

It is quite conceivable that Dylan copied the Eastern garlands in “Isis”, “One More Cup Of Coffee” and “Mozambique” from her.

But alas, no Egyptian “Isis”. Mrs. Kulthum dies on February 3, 1975, a year before Desire is in stores. We can only dream away on the fantasy of how Dylan’s love and prayer-type song would have sounded with Arabic violins and drums – and with Umm Kulthum.

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron suggested that there are enough songs about Bob Dylan to make a new series, so here we are, starting out with the Joan Baez songs.

And Tony picked up on the idea – so in this series, as before, much of the leg work is done by Aaron and the words are put into some sort of relevant order (or not as may be the case) by Tony.  The “I” is thus Tony.  And that is where we begin…

I’ve always been bemused by Joan Baez as a songwriter, because she is obviously brilliant at the art, and yet has released so little of her work.  Or maybe she really has not written many songs;  I’ve found eight of her compositions, but even if I’ve lost half of what she has created, that is still a tiny number for someone with such talent.

Dylan and Baez met in 1961, and at that time she was already ahead of Bob in the LP stakes – and two of her first three albums went gold.  But by 1963 they were often to be found sharing a stage, and then as these things go, within a couple of years of that they were drifting apart.

But Baez was part of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and in Renaldo and Clara, and by then had already written “To Bobby”.  This was released in 1972, possibly written in 1971.

I'll put flowers at your feet and I will sing to you so sweet
And hope my words will carry home to your heart
You left us marching on the road and said how heavy was the load
But the years were young, the struggle barely had its start
Do you hear the voices in the night, Bobby?
They're crying for you
See the children in the morning light, Bobby
They're dying

No one could say it like you said it, we'd only try and just forget it
You stood alone upon the mountain till it was sinking
And in a frenzy we tried to reach you
With looks and letters we would beseech you
Never knowing what, where or how you were thinking
Do you hear the voices in the night, Bobby?
They're crying for you
See the children in the morning light, Bobby
They're dying

Perhaps the pictures in the Times could no longer be put in rhymes
When all the eyes of starving children are wide open
You cast aside the cursed crown and put your magic into a sound
That made me think your heart was aching or even broken

But if God hears my complaint He will forgive you
And so will I, with all respect, I'll just relive you
And likewise, you must understand these things we give you

Like these flowers at your door and scribbled notes about the war
We're only saying the time is short and there is work to do
And we're still marching in the streets with little victories and big defeats
But there is joy and there is hope and there's a place for you

And you have heard the voices in the night, Bobby
They're crying for you
See the children in the morning light, Bobby
They're dying

Well I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call

And here I sit, hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
"My poetry was lousy", you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the Midwest

Ten years ago
I bought you some cuff links
You brought me something
And we both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust

You burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms

And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed

Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling around
An' snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel over Washington Square

Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You, who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
'Cause I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid

Even now all these years – and decades – since I first heard the song I marvel over it.  It is so perfectly composed, so perfectly rounded, how could this be unless the songwriter had written hundreds before to get to this level?

Or if this what she could do straight off, why not write 100 more, because this is a profound work of art!

It was in the year that Diamonds and Rust was released that Dylan invited Joan Baez onto the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and of course on the tour they did sing a few protest songs.   But I am not sure any new ones emerged at that time.

And as a postscript, how about this thought.

Can you imagine someone writing a song for you with the lines

And you have heard the voices in the night, Bobby
They’re crying for you
See the children in the morning light, Bobby
They’re dying

What would you do?

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Tony Attwood

Between 1960 and October 2012 Dylan played this song 12 times in public, and by general agreement during this time he discovered all the depths there are in this song after they had been destroyed by years and years of mistreatment.  I’ve included two Dylan versions here – this first from 1993 is to me the classic

Here are the lyrics – for anyone like me not 100% familiar with American slang of the era, the word “rounders” is, I believe, a word for drunkards, thieves, burglars, and others of ill-repute, bad or illegal behaviour.

The most commonly held view is that the song is about Delia Green who was born in 1886 and killed aged 14.  The song appears in many forms but the most common is that she was shot dead on Christmas Day, 1900, by  youth named Houston, after the couple had had an argument, seemingly him boasting that he had been to bed with her many times, and she saying that was not so.  He served 12 years in prison and died in 1927.  Delia Green was buried in an unmarked grave.

Many songs that since emerged based on the story, including one famously by Blind Willie McTell “Delia” which retells the story in a different way.

https://youtu.be/FcS16tpA6-c

But the real interest in the story and the song returned in the 1950s and as time went by the music lost all touch with the lyrics.  Pat Boone’s song shows this completely.

Johnny Cash also recorded a version

Now these songs have nothing much to do with Dylan’s song.  And yet Bob Dylan’s version is noted as “traditional” in the catalogue.  Here is the second Dylan version…

Such facts as we have of the real life story because of the work of folk song collectors who have recorded multiple versions of the song.  It seems that at first there was no mention of either protagonist’s age, thus removing a key element from the tale.

The earliest versions also have strong negative references to race, suggesting either the events were of no significance because of the colour of those involved.  Also most early versions are told from the man’s point of view, without any thought of the young woman who died, thus continuing to promote misogyny through the song.

Dylan however does something else – portraying Curtis as a victim of his own situation, as much as Delia.  An interesting approach.

It is a forgotten piece of Dylan’s performance history, but it should not be.  To me this is a wonderful rescuing of an old song that needed reworking.

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

by Jochen Markhorst

Somewhere in the last part of his Black Coffee Blues trilogy, in “Smile, You’re Traveling” (2000), the multifaceted phenomenon Henry Rollins expresses his love for Sinatra, and specifically for his 50s albums:

“I like the records he did where he’s all bummed out like In the Wee Small Hours, No One Cares, Where Are You and Only the Lonely.  I like Sinatra because all his life he’s been saying fuck all you motherfuckers with the talent to back it up. He kept coming back no matter what was thrown his way. He inspires me big time. He’s like a swan, graceful but mean when confronted.”

Fifteen years later, Elvis Costello writes a very similar declaration of love in his autobiography, in Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink:

“I spent nights deep in The Wee Small Hours of the Morning, No One Cares, and Only the Lonely, that incredible run of intense ballad albums that Sinatra had cut for Capitol with Nelson Riddle.”

Dylan confesses that same love a little more indirectly, in Chronicles, when he unpacks a lot to describe his awe for the song “Ebb Tide”: “The lyrics were so mystifying and stupendous. When Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his voice — death, God and the universe, everything.”

https://youtu.be/_b6JNRvOat4

“Ebb Tide” is on Side 2 of Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely (1958) and traces of that album can be found throughout Dylan’s entire oeuvre. In songs like “Forgetful Heart”, “Dignity” and “Wallflower” resonate word choice and song structure, Only The Lonely songs like “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)” and “Good-Bye” are paraphrased in the Basement, in “Sign Language”, in “Scarlet Town” and in “Don’t Think Twice”, and with some cut and paste work, the classic “Blues In The Night” can be reconstructed in its entirety from Dylan’s Collected Works.

“Blues In The Night” should be somewhere on the first pages of The Great American Songbook. Even composer Harold Arlen, usually a modest man who can’t be caught on selfcongratulatory behaviour, gets excited again when his biographer Edward Jablonski asks about this song: “I knew in my guts that this was strong, strong, strong!” (Rhythm, Rainbow And Blues, 1996 ). He even takes, very unusually, credit for some of the lyrics by Johnny Mercer:

“It sounded marvelous once I got to the second stanza but that first twelve was weak tea. On the third or fourth page of his work sheets I saw some lines—one of them was “My momma done tol’ me, when I was in knee pants.” I said, “Why don’t you try that?” It was one of the very few times I’ve ever suggested anything like that to John.”

(Source: Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song, 1972)

True; it is an exceptional song. Written for the film Hot Nocturne in 1941, but after the success of the song the film title is changed to Blues In The Night. A year later, the song does not win the Academy Award for Best Song. One of the many injustices in the history of the Oscar awards, but it does get a coda. Winner Jerome Kern (“The Last Time I Saw Paris”), who is actually known as a quite competitive, somewhat arrogant song composer with a strong ego, is ashamed. To make up, he gives Arlen a remarkable, personal gift (the walking stick of Jacques Offenbach) and he ensures that the rules of the game are changed: from 1943, an Oscar-nominated song must actually have been written for the film. Kern’s winning “The Last Time I Saw Paris” was an old song that, more or less coincidentally, was inserted at the last minute in the film Lady Be Good. Not an Oscar winner, as Kern himself thought at the time, so he wasn’t even present at the award ceremony.

Dylan is a fan of lyricist Johnny Mercer, and especially of this song, although in Chronicles he still seems to think it’s all Harold Arlen:

“Arlen had written “The Man That Got Away” and the cosmic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” another song by Judy Garland. He had written a lot of other popular songs, too — the powerful “Blues in the Night,” “Stormy Weather,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Get Happy.” In Harold’s songs, I could hear rural blues and folk music. There was an emotional kinship there.”

Of course; Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Hank Snow… they are all deeper under his skin, “but I could never escape from the bittersweet, lonely, intense world of Harold Arlen.”

Copywriter Johnny Mercer does not get explicit credits from the bard, but indirectly more than once. From this song, from “Blues In The Night”, the Dylan fan recognizes

Now the rain’s a-fallin’
Hear the train a-callin

… of which echoes descend in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and in “Dusty Old Fairgrounds”, the fourth verse opens with

From Natchez to Mobile
From Memphis to St. Joe

… that should sound familiar too, and the chorus,

The evenin’ breeze’ll start the trees to cryin’
And the moon’ll hide it’s light
When you get the blues in the night
Take my word, the mockingbird’ll sing the saddest kind of song
He knows things are wrong, and he’s right

… reveals where Dylan borrowed that atypical combination of moon and mockingbird from “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (and that last line comes very close to “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome”, first verse – when something’s not right, it’s wrong).

Together with “Down Along The Cove”, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is the odd song out on John Wesley Harding. After ten songs with mysterious, biblical, parable-like lyrics such as “All Along The Watchtower”, “Drifter’s Escape” and “Dear Landlord”, the album closes with two genuine country songs, both love songs with simple language, simple lyrics without extravagancies like barefoot servants, fairest damsels or obscure saints wrapped in solid gold, and they are the only songs on the record in which a steel guitar plays along (Pete Drake).

In retrospects and review articles, the songs are often referred to as “transition songs,” as a transition to, or some sort of strategic, announcement of the country on the next album, on Nashville Skyline. Dylan himself does not agree with that, at least: with the assumption that he would have a preconceived strategy, that at the time of John Wesley Harding he would already have had ideas about the next album. But, obviously, it is undenialble that both songs would fit on Nashville Skyline without any problems.

The last two songs are also recorded last, written last and, unlike the other ten songs, written on the spot, where according to Dylan music and lyrics came simultaneously – for the other songs he had written the lyrics well before.

Thus the Spirit of Nashville, country capital of the world, finally gets hold of Dylan after all. Ironic, because Dylan himself had just relieved the city of that stamp by recording Blonde On Blonde in Nashville. The previously prevailing provincialism and the one-sidedness of the music scene before Blonde On Blonde the reminiscing autobiographer expresses, rather crassly, in Chronicles:

“The town was like being in a soap bubble. They nearly ran Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson and me out of town for having long hair. All the songs coming out of the studios then were about slut wives cheating on their husbands or vice versa.”

… and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is not that far behind. Admittedly, the text is vague enough to be able to deny adultery is committed here. With some creativity one could even say that the sung Baby is literally a baby, that Dylan is writing a lullaby for the one and a half year old Jesse Dylan. But Ockham’s razor points to the most obvious interpretation: an I-person who sings “I’ll be your sweetheart tonight” is not the lawful life partner of the person to whom the song is sung – but probably a slut wife cheating on her husband or vice versa.

Totally unimportant, of course. “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is a beautiful song, with the shine of an indestructible evergreen, which is almost immediately recognized by the front fighters of both the country and pop world.

The superpower Burl Ives records his version as early as 1968, a few months after the release of John Wesley Harding, for his album The Times They Are A-Changin’, on which he covers no fewer than four Dylan songs (also “One Too Many Mornings” and “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” – Burl writes it without a comma).

The covers are rather controversial. The producer is Dylan expert Bob Johnston, who recorded the original a few months before. The album is recorded in the same studio in Nashville and though the sleeve does not mention musicians, it is likely that the Nashville Cats, Charlie McCoy and Kenny Buttrey are on duty again. But it is arranged quite horribly, with tormenting violins, corny female choirs and a theatrically talk-singing Ives.

“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is the exception. It’s not too bad – Burl just sings, the violins hold back – it is rightly chosen as a single and it is both in America and in Australia a modest hit (numbers 35 and 28 respectively).

Equally eager are Emmylou Harris, Ray Stevens, George Baker, Anne Murray and many more artists; before 1970, within two years, half the premier division already has the song on the repertoire.

The popularity does not decrease after 1970. “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is undoubtedly high on a (non-existent) list of Most Covered Dylan Songs, and is often chosen as a single. The Hollies, Judy Rodman, Bobby Darin, John Walker (of the Walker Bothers), Blossom Toes … that list is endless too.

The biggest success is the one-off project Robert Palmer & UB40, which achieves a major hit in 1990 with a tolerable, cute reggae arrangement of the song.

Dylan’s heart probably skipped a beat when Hank Williams Jr., the son of his great hero, covered the song. Only for sentimental reasons, however – Hank’s cover is intolerably smooth.

Unreal, and much more fun, is the former Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan, turning it into a cheerful, cajun-like sing-along (on Gillan’s Inn, 2006).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C27YpoExSzY

But real beauty, real moving power cannot be found that often. For the time being this is limited to two almost perfect masterpieces, both of which also manage to extract something from the original that Dylan himself only partly achieves.

The first, and actually the best, is Norah Jones, the exceptionally talented daughter of Ravi Shankar, who also sings such a crushing “Heart Of Mine”. Her “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is sultry, a bit ordinary and sexy – exactly what the song calls for. On Stay With Me, 2003.

Well alright, of equal merit is the rendition of Curtis Stigers, not coincidentally also from the jazz corner, with a cool swinging, lazy jazz performance – even better live than the studio version (Real Emotion, 2007).

Apparently Dylan, despite the unmistakable country overtones, injected subcutaneously Wee Small Hours. A Blues In The Night is hidden in it, which only the real jazz talents are able to uncover.

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Tony Attwood

In Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan wrote, “The Luke the Drifter record, I just about wore out. That’s the one where he sings and recites parables, like the Beatitudes. I could listen to the Luke the Drifter record all day and drift away myself, become totally convinced in the goodness of man.”

“He” in this case is Hank Williams.

Now I am sure some people have investigated this statement by Bob and considered it in detail; but somehow I just haven’t been able to find their musings.  And that is a shame because on this occasion (and not for the first time) I am bemused.

I suspect that this is simply because my background doesn’t lead me to this type of music and recitation – it is a cultural thing rather than anything to do with the quality of the music.

But I have a problem here because I don’t know of other references from Dylan to this album, or if he at any time specified some aspect of the album that influenced him – but I am going to assume for the moment that Bob meant it seriously and he really loved the album.  However the album sure is a strange affair.

It is an album of country versions of the talking blues style – there’s country music in the background and on most tracks the singer just talks in time to the music.

According to the reports I’ve seen, there was a problem with the record however in that Hank Williams was very famous and all his records sold well – but if he suddenly turned up with something that was mostly not sung, a lot of people would buy the record just because it was Hank Williams and then be rather fed up.  Including apparently the companies that had thousands of juke boxes in bars and clubs around the country, who would order Hank Williams records in bulk each time one came out.

So the recording was called “Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter”.  In a documentary on the recording, Hank Williams grandson is quoted as saying, “While Hank was at the peak of his career, he had another side to him that he wanted to get out, and that side was called Luke the Drifter…. That’s a dark side, man.”

Wikipediea states the country music historian Colin Escott said, “If Hank could be headstrong and willful, a backslider and a reprobate, then Luke the Drifter was compassionate and moralistic, capable of dispensing all the wisdom that Hank Williams ignored.”

The album also included a political song “No, No, Joe”, and much lighter tracks such as “Just waiting” and “I’ve been down that road before.”  Here’s “I’ve been down that road before.”

The most famous tracks from the recordings are  “Ramblin’ Man,” “Pictures from Life’s Other Side,” and “Men with Broken Hearts.”  Here are recordings of these songs…

Ramblin Man

“Pictures from Life’s Other Side” is one that was particularly well known at this time.  It had been recorded by Woodie Guthrie and just to give a break from Luke the Drifter, here is Woody’s version…   I have put the lyrics at the end of this article.

Men with broken hearts

From here on are some more of the tracks from the ablum that Bob says influenced him so much in those early days.  It’s not the whole set, but I must admit I found this collection quite hard to take, so in the end I stopped listening.

Help me understand

Too many parties and too many pals

https://youtu.be/jCNk_2uZKMk

Please make up your mind

Be careful of the stones that you throw

And the lyrics to Life’s other side…

In the world’s mighty gallery of pictures
There are scenes that are painted from life
Scenes of youth and of beauty
Scenes of hardship and strife

Scenes of wealth and of plenty
Old age and the blushing young bride
Hang on the wall but the saddest of all
Is a pictures from life’s other side

A picture from life’s other side
Someone has fell by the way
And a life has gone out with the tide
That might have been happy someday

Some poor mother at home
Is watching and a-waiting alone
Longing to hear from her loved one, so dear
That’s a picture from life’s other side

Now the first scene is one of two brothers
Their paths them both differently led
One lived in luxury and riches
And the other one begged for his bread

One night they met on the highway
“Your money or life, sir”, one cried
And then with his knife took his own brother’s life
That’s a picture from life’s other side

The next scene is that of a gambler
Who had lost all his money at play
An’ he draws his dead mother’s ring from his finger
That she wore long ago on her wedding day

It’s his last earthly treasure but he stakes it
Then he bows his head that his shame he may hide
But, when they lifted his head they found he was dead
That’s a picture from life’s other side

A picture from life’s other side
Someone has fell by the way
And a life has gone out with the tide
That might have been happy someday

Some poor mother at home
Is watching and a-waiting alone
Longing to hear from her loved one, so dear
That’s a picture from life’s other side

Now the last scene is down by the river
Of a heart broken mother and babe
In the harbor light glare see them shiver
Outcasts that no one will save

Once she was once a true woman
Somebody’s darlin’ and pride
God help her, she leaps for there’s no one to weep
That’s a picture from life’s other side

A picture from life’s other side
Someone has fell by the way
And a life has gone out with the tide
That might have been happy someday

Some poor mother at home
Is watching and a-waiting alone
Longing to hear from her loved one, so dear
That’s a picture from life’s other side

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M_AHB0g98E

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Tony Attwood

This is anothe song I’ve missed in putting together to directory of reviews of every Bob Dylan composition.  Here is the song in question (there is a fair bit of tuning up at the start – they didn’t have digital tuning in those days).

Heylin describes this as another “outlandish account of his youth”, but I see nothing in this to suggest that Dylan is trying to claim this is autobiographical.  Heylin to me seems to be one of those weird people who thinks that just because one writes a song or a poem or indeed a novel, then it has to be autobiographical.  It is as if the whole notion of fiction as an art form has passed him by.

In fact it is a fine representation of a way of life – not the daily 9 to 5 grind, but of travelling with the fair ground through all the different weathers and situations, living a life on the road – that image that has so engrossed Dylan across the years.

Here are the lyrics

Well, it’s all up from Florida at the start of the spring
The trucks and the trailers will be winding
Like a bullet we’ll shoot for the carnival route
We’re following them dusty old fairgrounds a-calling

From the Michigan mud past the Wisconsin sun
’Cross that Minnesota border, keep ’em scrambling
Through the clear county lakes and the lumberjack lands
We’re following them dusty old fairgrounds a-calling

Hit Fargo on the jump and down to Aberdeen
’Cross them old Black Hills, keep ’em rolling
Through the cow country towns and the sands of old Montana
We’re following them fairgrounds a-calling

As the white line on the highway sails under your wheels
I’ve gazed from the trailer window laughing
Oh, our clothes they was torn but the colors they was bright
Following them dusty old fairgrounds a-calling

It’s a-many a friend that follows the bend
The jugglers, the hustlers, the gamblers
Well, I’ve spent my time with the fortune-telling kind
Following them fairgrounds a-calling

Oh, it’s pound down the rails and it’s tie down the tents
Get that canvas flag a-flying
Well, let the caterpillars spin, let the Ferris wheel wind
Following them fairgrounds a-calling

Well, it’s roll into town straight to the fairgrounds
Just behind the posters that are hanging
And it’s fill up every space with a different kind of face
Following them fairgrounds a-calling

Get the dancing girls in front, get the gambling show behind
Hear that old music box a-banging
Hear them kids, faces, smiles, up and down the midway aisles
We’re following them fairgrounds a-calling

It’s a-drag it on down by the deadline in the town
Hit the old highway by the morning
And it’s ride yourself blind for the next town on time
Following them fairgrounds a-calling

As the harmonicas whined in the lonesome nighttime
Drinking red wine as we’re rolling
Many a turnin’ I turn, many a lesson I learn
From following them fairgrounds a-calling

And it’s roll back down to St. Petersburg
Tie down the trailers and camp ’em
And the money that we made will pay for the space
From following them dusty old fairgrounds a-calling

The song was played and recorded on 12 April 1963, and there are elements musically of a fast version of what became “Times they are a changing”, plus lots of other traditional style folk songs within the music.   This track was apparently intended to appear on the album “Bob Dylan in Concert”, planned for release in 1964 but then seemingly cancelled.  It apparently appeared on what is called the “hard-to-find 50th Anniversary Collection 1963′,” but I don’t have a copy because, well, it is so hard to find.

As for the lyrics – the song is pure description.  There is no message – it is totally a case of scene setting.   Haiku 61 came up with a good summary

Melancholy clowns
From one fairground to the next
Ride the blue highways.

There has however been one cover version of the song that I know of, on the album No More, No Less – the first album by  Blue Ash, released in 1973.  I am told that the album was re-released on CD by Collector’s Choice Music 2008.

https://youtu.be/81zUmlf8MQI

I love this.  It’s probably just me, but it so takes me back to the music of the 70s that never made it onto radio stations, but could be found on obscure records.  If I’d found it upon its release, I would have played it all day and night.

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

by Jochen Markhorst

“Buddy” is deeply hurt in The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004). The young fan is so eager to become Mr.Incredible’s helper, has crafted all kinds of gadgets with which he can compensate for his lack of superpowers, has already fully outlined how he can be a useful, perhaps indispensable sidekick for his big idol, but unfortunately … not unfriendly, but a bit weary, Mr. Incredible rejects him and pushes him out of his super hero dream, back to the normal human world.

Years later the rancorous Buddy takes revenge. He is now “Syndrome”, and has further qualified himself in his gadgets – ingenious inventions with which he eradicates all superheroes one by one. And now the crown on his work: it’s Mr. Incredible’s turn. The punchline of his triumphant evil speech is now almost classic:

“Oh, I’m real. Real enough to defeat you!  And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I’ll give them heroics. I’ll give them the most spectacular heroics anyone’s ever seen! And when I’m old and I’ve had my fun, I’ll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes. Everyone can be super! And when everyone’s super… [laughs maniacally]…no one will be!”

Buddy gives in to an admittedly despicable, but universal vice. The Scandinavians call it The Law Of Jante, in most Germanic languages it is called ground level culture, in China 棒打 出頭鳥 (“the bird that lifts its head”) and in Anglo-Saxon culture it is known as Tall Poppy Syndrome – but the phenomenon has already been described twenty-five centuries ago by Herodotus (in The Histories 5). In essence, it is the envious urge to pull down anyone who positively distinguishes himself, back to the Great Common Denominator.

Syndrome has an original, more subtle, in his eyes more humiliating variant: he does not lower the Tall Poppy, but elevates everyone else to the level of the one that stands out above ground level, Mr. Incredible, so that the special thing about the superhero suddenly becomes normal and everyday, has become the Great Common Denominator.

An extension of this is the moral variant, chosen by song poet Dylan for his fascinating youth work “Who Killed Davey Moore?”  Determining liability in the matter of boxer Davey Moore’s tragic death, the singer leads us to the uncomfortable truth that we are all guilty. We, our society, our culture – and that ultimately nobody is guilty.

It is a toxic consequence of every society. In every collective arise mechanisms, morals, conventions, which can be cruel to the individual or, as here, fatal. The philosophers of the Frankfurter Schule (Adorno, Marcuse) articulate not very accessibly this inevitable phenomenon. More accessible and moving, the Swiss genius Max Frisch depicts the “guilty collective innocence” in his plays – in Andorra (1961), in particular.

The American premiere of this parable-like piece takes place in February 1963 on Broadway, New York. It is likely that Dylan, who absorbs cultural, literary and musical impressions like a sponge in these days, has at least indirectly taken note of Andorra, one of Frisch’s most Brechtian pieces. Just like Brecht, Frisch uses Verfremdungseffekte (“estrangement effects”), and just like in Brecht’s Lehrstücke, Frisch demonstrates here with the fate of the tragic Andri how the collective can inadvertently destroy an individual.

A few weeks after that premiere in February, on March 21, 1963, boxer Davey Moore loses his world title in the fight with Sugar Ramos, after which he will die. And again three weeks later, on April 12 in the Town Hall, near Broadway, Dylan plays his new topical song about the tragedy.

The more serious Dylanologists all suspect that the sponge Dylan copies form and structure of the age-old folk song “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, just as he also used “Lord Randall” as a template for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “The Ballad Of Peter Amberly” for “The Ballad Of Donald White” (as for “I Pity The Poor Immigrant”) – it’s a fruitful, grateful and apparently also inspiring technique of songwriting.

But Delawarean Donald Sauter points to a much more likely source, to a children’s rhyme of the nineteenth-century writer Lydia Maria Child: “Who Stole The Bird’s Nest?” from 1865. The similarities are striking indeed:

To-whit! to-whit! to-whee!
Will you listen to me?
Who stole four eggs I laid,
And the nice nest I made?

Not I, said the cow, moo-oo!
Such a thing I’d never do.
I gave you a wisp of hay,
But did not take your nest away;
Not I, said the cow, moo-oo!
Such a thing I’d never do.

Bob-o-link! Bob-o-link!
Now, what do you think?
Who stole a nest away
From the plum-tree to-day?

Not I, said the dog, bow-wow!
I wouldn’t be so mean, I vow.
I gave some hairs the nest to make,
But the nest I did not take;
Not I, said the dog, bow-wow!
I would not be so mean, I vow.

(… and then, just like with Dylan, three more similar couplets, alternated with the chorus).

The Bard extracts details, such as names and remarkable quotes, simply from the newspaper. But the greatest, timeless power of the song is in the find as to elevate this single, individual incident to a symptom of a social malformation, transcending the anecdotal – just like “Only A Pawn In Their Game” does, and “The Death Of Emmett Till” too.

Unlike in Andorra, Dylan does not opt for bloody suspense, but for legal-psychological tension. Davey Moore has already died, it has been in all the newspapers and it still exercises minds. The narrator Dylan therefore cannot use that dramatic dénouement for the suspense, like in, for example, “John Brown” or in “Seven Curses”. Instead, he suggests solving the guilt question, choosing repetition to build up the tension.

In each of six couplets a new suspect speaks. From the third verse at the latest, the tension develops: the listener expects the dénouement, the unmasking of the Real Culprit in the next verse. The referee, the audience, the manager, the gamblers, the sensation journalist and the opponent – however, they can all explain why they cannot be blamed.

In addition, the poet Dylan partly opts for wording and arguments that are almost literally in the newspaper. Opponent and winner Sugar Ramos, for example, in the Sports Illustrated of April 1, 1963, so eleven days before Dylan will sing the song for the first time:

“I did not want to hurt Moore,” Ramos said. “In the ring the fighters are partners. They put on the match. Not to hurt or kill, but to show skill and win the challenge. After the fight my opponent is my brother. But this tragedy is a thing all fighters must live with. It might have been me who was badly injured. Knowing that it could happen, I accept it, and perhaps so did Moore. Perhaps yesterday was his destiny and mine some other day.”

… which the poet transposes to:

Don’t say ‘murder,’ don’t say ‘kill’
It was destiny, it was God’s will

Wryly enough, the words that the poet puts into the mouth of a sensation journalist, there’s just as much danger in a football game paraphrase a statement made by the victim. Less than a year before this, in April 1962, boxer Benny Paret died after his lost fight against Emile Griffith. In the ensuing debate about the dangers of boxing, Sugar Ramos is quoted saying: no one stops the Indy 500 when racing drivers get killed.

That equally tragic, fatal boxing fight has probably already sown the seeds for Dylan’s “Davey Moore”. Gil Turner, singer-songwriter and editor of Broadside, immediately processes that earlier tragedy into one of his best-known songs, “Benny ‘Kid’ Paret” and publishes it barely a week after Paret’s death in the mid-April edition of Broadside, the amateurishly stenciled Greenwich Village folkies’ club magazine that was the first to celebrate Dylan’s talent. Gil Turner, for example, is also the first citizen of the Earth to play “Blowin’ In The Wind” in public (in Gerde’s Folk City on April 16, 1962, the same evening Dylan completes the song) and also the first to record it (with his The New World Singers).

His influence on Dylan is apparent not only by the choice of subject, but also by the music behind “Benny ‘Kid’ Paret”; that is the age-old “The Ballad Of Peter Amberly”, the same music that Dylan will use in turn for “The Ballad Of Donald White”. He also inspires another Greenwich Village celebrity, Phil Ochs, who presents his song about this second boxing tragedy just before Dylan: “Davey Moore”.

So: three songwriters in Greenwich Village who process a boxing tragedy into songs between April ’62 and April ’63.

Phil Ochs opts for an epic, narrative ballad. In the first line Davey Moore sets off, in the last line he dies. Along the way Ochs does not spare with melodrama (“His wife begged and pleaded, you have to leave this game” and “the struggle of two men facing hell”) and caricatural, simple character sketches (‘The money-chasing vultures were waiting for their share” and “hate drives men insane”), interrupted three times by a little imposing chorus:

And thousands gave a roar when Davey Moore walked in
Another man to beat, another purse to win
And all along the ringside, a sight beyond compare

Gil Turner’s ballad is more intelligent. Seven four-line couplets, cyclical structure. The first three verses tell the rise and fall of Paret, then Turner leaves the private and a change to contemplative, universal views follows, such as the fourth verse:

There’s danger on the ocean where the waves roll mountain high
There’s danger on the battlefield where angry bullets fly.
There’s danger in the boxing ring for death is waiting there
Watching for a killing through the hot and smoky air.

… and the smart, Dylanesque sixth verse with the bitter conclusion:

You’ve heard about your Romans, long many years ago
Crowding big arenas just to see the slaves’ blood flow
There’s been lots of changes since those days and now we’re civilized
Our gladiators kill with gloves instead of swords and knives

The final couplet varies on the first verse, bringing it home again, making the song a beautiful, rounded whole.

But Gil Turner also falls short in comparison to the captivating power of Dylan’s “Who Killed Davey Moore?”, thanks to Dylan’s exceptional talent for drama, to his skills to integrate Brechtian stage techniques in his poetry. He brings the main characters back to archetypes (“The Referee”, “The Gambling Man”), they speak curtly, in blunt and thus provocative, clear monologues, which hold the public’s attention. Moreover, Dylan avoids the pitfall of becoming academic (like Turner) and, unlike Phil Ochs, he has an exceptional poetic instinct. Dylan would not produce a laborious verse like

For the fighters must destroy as the poets must sing
As the hungry crowd must gather for the blood upon the ring

… and Phil Ochs will probably be jealous of the deceptive simplicity and brutal poetic power of a fragment like

We didn’t mean for him t’ meet his death,
We just meant to see some sweat,
There ain’t nothing wrong in that.

… just as neither Ochs nor Turner have the flair to elevate up to chorus a syntactic mess, but rhythmically direct hit like

Who killed Davey Moore,
Why an’ what’s the reason for?

Topical, however, the song remains, despite all its timeless power and transcendent literary value. It simply is a song about a single incident and a single individual boxer. The tragic death of Davey Moore and the historical fact that Nobel Prize winner Dylan has written about him do guarantee a place in the history books, the song itself is already covered in dust. Dylan himself never looks back at it, and after a short popularity (Pete Seeger, 1963), his colleagues also stay away – there are hardly any covers.

The two exceptions are truly exceptional, though: in 2005, BoomBox, the thoroughly musical duo from Muscle Shoals, makes an extremely funky, irresistible adaptation of the now antique song, with all the emphasis on the rhythmic power, of course (on Visions Of Backbeat, 2005).

Slightly more loyal, but still distinctive and nevertheless particularly attractive is the veteran “RSM”, the godfather of home recording, the versatile, tireless phenomenon R. Stevie Moore from Nashville who in 2018 has to enlist the help of his fans to craft a somewhat reliable discography on Wikipedia. Around 400 albums, in any case. At the end of the 1980s, the multi-instrumentalist produced a rather lurid and at the same time weirdly exuberant cover of “Who Killed Davey Moore?” – Twin Peaks meets Walt Disney’s Robin Hood, something like that.

Stevie Moore is, by the way, not related to Davey Moore. He is the son of Bob Moore though, Elvis’ bass player on the Dylan cover “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” and moreover: he can be heard on six songs from Dylan’s Self Portrait. Unfortunately not in Dylan’s version of “The Boxer” – that would have rounded the circle perhaps a bit too nicely.

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

by Larry Fyffe

Tossa’s Clorinda (like Virgil’s Camilla) is a literary archetype – a soul guided by the white-faced virgin Moon goddess Diana, a beautiful goddess who comes to be associated with Satan and ugly witches. Clorinda re-appears in Bob Dylan’s mixed-up movie ‘Renaldo And Clara’ as the Lady-In-White (Joan Baez), the red rose she carries symbolizes passion. Akin to golden-haired Apollo, Renaldo’s true love is song and music. Jealous-prone Clara lives with Renaldo (Dylan); her name happens to rhyme with Sara, and she’s played by Dylan’s wife.

The Lady-In-White is modelled after the Man-In-White, the mime who’s featured in the movie ‘The Children Of Paradise’ (he’s keeps a rose given to him by Garance, a courtesan). It’s Renaldo, the knight-in-rusty armour, who does not talk very much in the Dylan/Shepard movie. Instead, his French “armour” shines through his music and songs. Matters end rather sadly for the Lady and the Man-In-White, slaves they both be to their own passions – folksongs and pantomime, respectively, if you’re inclined to add biographical allegories to the two movies:

Oh, the ragman draws circles
Up and down the block
I'd ask him what the matter was
But I know he don't talk
(Bob Dylan: Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again)

There’s no doubt that Bob Dylan is quite familiar with ‘The Children Of Paradise’ picture show – the mime, who achieves great success in the theatre of his day, says to the courtesan  who’s fallen in love with him:

"You're right, Garance, love is simple"

In the song below, the line’s repeated:

'Love is simple', to quote a phrase
You've known it all the time
I'm learnin' it these days
Oh, I know where I can find you
Ohhh, in somebody's room
It's a price I have to pay
(Bob Dylan: You're A Big Girl Now)

The mime in ‘The Children Of Paradise’ suffers the same fate as silent movie stars – the ‘talkies’ are at the gate, and the mime disappears into the sheep-like crowd.  Bob Dylan’s aware of the fate of  television’s stars ‘Mr. Jinx’, the cartoon cat, and Lucy of the ‘I Love Lucy’ show; so, as far as Dylan is concerned, it’s a good thing that Garance the courtesan grabs a carriage to make her get-away at the end of the movie:

Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lake
I'm not that eager to make a mistake
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

Poet Allen Ginsberg appears in the Dylan movie, and relates the biblical story about Simon from Africa (not the apostle) who helps Jesus carry the cross:

And as they led Him away they laid hold upon one Simon
A Cyrenian, coming out of the country
And on him they laid the cross that he might bear it for Jesus
And there followed Him a great company of people, and of women
Which also bewailed and lamented Him
(Luke 23:  26, 27)

Jesus turns to the crowd, and tells them not to pity Him, but to pity themselves; there arose the myth that it was not Jesus who gets crucified, but Simon by mistake.

Double-edged singer/songwriter Bob Dylan is not going to disappear into his own parade; the movie reveals that he sides with Romantic-inclined artists (like the poet Tossa) who are able to bring sad-eyed rebellious types like Camilla and Jesus back to life:

Now I heard of a man who lived a long time ago
A man of sorrow and strife
That if someone was around him had died, and was dead
He knew how to bring them on back to life
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

Dylan’s going to pay in blood, but it’s not going to be his own. He’s a-gonna figuratively sacrifice Elvis Presley instead …. as it sadly turns out, it’s Elvis who literally doesn’t live here anymore:

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

Like the courtesan in ‘Children Of Paradise’, Bob Dylan’s rubber-masked persona has no intention of riding a one-trick pony who sacrifices him/her on the saddle of conformity.

In ‘Renaldo And Clara’, Allen Ginsberg sings:

No, no, let us play, for it's yet day
And we cannot go to sleep
Besides in the sky, the little birds fly
And the hills are all covered with sheep
(William Blake: The Nurse's Song)

As I’ve said before: the only thing we know for sure about Bob Dylan is that his name isn’t Bob Dylan.

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Tony Attwood

Here is a recording from a performance in California in 1998.

https://youtu.be/1gWU5j0cilw

In terms of the song lyrics, I take it that the singer not only stole the other man’s wife but also murdered the husband, and is now about to go to the gas chamber.   That is, of course, reading quite a lot into this, although it is the only way I can explain that he is a “three times loser”: he murdered husband and wife (that’s two) and now is being killed by the state (three).

But I am known for totally misreading lyrics, so if there is a simple and clear explanation other than this, do let me know.  Although it could also be that the lyricist actually found two phrases he really liked: “Stone walls and steel bars” first and “three time loser” second, and simply melded them together.

Even if that second explanation is true and the song doesn’t really mean too much, it doesn’t stop it being a great piece of music.  Here are the lyrics in full…

Stone walls and steel bars, a love on my mind
I’m a three time loser, I’m long gone this time.

Jealousy has took my young life,
All for the love of another man’s wife.
I’ve had it coming, I’ve known all the time,
No more stone walls and steel bars and you on my mind.

Gray-haired warden, deep Frisco Bay,
Guards all around me leading my way.
I’ve had it coming, I’m at the end of the line,
No more stone walls and steel bars and you on my mind.

Stone walls and steel bars, a love on my mind,
I’m a three time loser, I’m long gone this time.

The first recording of the song that was released came in 1963 from the Stanley Brothers, and I’ve put a copy of that below these notes.

Ray Pennington, one of the co-composers of the song was a western swing performer, record producer and artists and repertoire manager with a record label – and indeed he produced of some Stanley Brothers records, as well as being an occasional drummer.

But although he clearly had a variety of talents, Pennington seemingly did not always have the success needed to keep the wolf from the door and there were times when (according to the histories I have found) he also worked in a record shop.

However in the 1960s he signed with Capitol Records and later Monument Records, recording a number of records himself, gaining some chart success, as well as finding that his compositions were now in demand.  Ultimately he had the much sought after number 1 hit with “I’m a rambling man” recorded by Waylon Jennings.

From 1984 onwards, Ray Pennington worked for his own record company Step One Records recording many successful songs and albums over the next four years.  After that he slowed down, and eventually took retirement – but as far as I know he is still with us, now aged 85.

As for his co-composer Roy Marcum, I regret I know very little except that apart from writing for the Stanley Brothers he also wrote for Ricky Scaggs.

Here is the first release on Stone Walls and Steel Bars from 1963.

And another version from Bob – rather different this time.

So to the question, why does Bob like this track?

First it has a great opportunity for those opening harmonies.  And the chord changes are unusual.   The chorus with which the song opens (and let us note that opening with the chorus is itself unusual) really sets the scene, and has an iconic feel because of those harmonies and the lyrics.

Then the verse opens not on the tonic – the basic chord of the song, but the dominant.  I can’t think of too many other songs that does this – Dylan does it in “Baby Blue” but not too many other times.   In fact, although only using the chords that we find in 95% of pop and rock songs, the whole of this song has a completely different feel from anything we might expect or anticipate.

And that I think is what makes the song so attractive to any musician looking for something different.  Plus then when combined with a couple of really good simple lyrical phrases, it is an absolute winner.

Finally, the lyrics, although short, have three really cracking lines within them.

Stone walls and steel bars
I’m a three time loser, I’m long gone this time.

I’ve had it coming, I’ve known all the time

These are all dead simple but really very effective and unusual lines.   Yes, there is a mawkishness in the whole piece, but we can maybe forget the meaning and listen to the overall effect!

Oh yes, and how many times do we hear Bob say “Oh you’re so kind” as the audience cheers?

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Paul Hobson and Tony Attwood

There is an index to this series at https://bob-dylan.org.uk/dylan-re-imagined

 Mama you’ve been on my mind

This recording “Mama you’ve been on my mind” comes from the late 1990s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd5wL73ttio

This is an approach to the song which retains the clarity of the lyrics and the simplicity of the accompaniment, leaving the way Dylan sings as the method of giving new insights into the lyrics.

Somehow the fact that the Mama who has been on his mind, is now from much further back in the past comes across because of the style and approach.  Certainly the guitar solos help enormously to give that feeling of distance in time, and we are carried through those instrumental breaks perfectly until without warning… Bob turns to the harmonica.

The performance on the harp is limited for most of the time emphasising the sameness of the situation – he’s now looking back.

Frankie Lee and Judas Priest

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

Sometimes – not that often but sometimes – I find Dylan songs that only come to life for me in the live performance, having not given me that sense of “oomph” in terms of the original recording.

This is certainly true of Frankie Lee.   And it is intersting that this version works for me given the simplicity of the arrangement here, and the fact that some of the lines are sung on a single note.

Maybe I have mellowed over the years, or maybe it is simply, to my ear, what this song needed.  I even like the instrumental break which mostly consists of the band continuing as it has been right the way through the song.

The problem with the song is that it consists of just the same three chords over and over, and many of the vocal lines over the top have the same melody.   It isn’t that I need to hear to lyrics, but rather I need to appreciate the overall sound.  At least that is how it seems to me.

Standing in the doorway

In this version of Standing in the Doorway, Dylan makes the expression of the lyrics as clear as he possibly can – although some members of the audience want to add their own sounds for some reason during the performance.

This really is one of those performances that really does make one go back to the originial with fresh insights simply because the lyrics are now so clear and meaningful.

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Larry Fyffe

A number of songs by Bob Dylan are inspired by not-so-happy stories featuring ‘chivalrous’ romance, and ancient mythology:

Gypsy Davey with a blow torch, he burns out their camps
With his faithful slave Pedo, behind him he tramps
(Bob Dylan: Tombstone Blues)

The ballad below tells the story of Lady Brown, the bride-to-be of Lord Thomas. She kills his girlfriend, fair Eleanor; the Lord is not amused, and kills Miss Brown …. and then himself:

The Brown girl had a little penknife
Which was both keen and sharp
And betwixt the short ribs and long
She pricked fair Eleanor to the heart
(Lord Thomas And Fair Eleanor ~traditional)

In the black-humoured Post Modern song below, the wife of the Boss runs off with Henry Lee, head of the clan; the Boss confronts them, and Henry it would seem shoots him down; his wife’s aghast at what Lee has done, and stabs the leader of the clan to death; then kills herself:

"You died for me, now I'll die for you"
She put the blade to her heart, and she ran it through
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

In an Italian epic romance, Rinaldo, a Christian crusader, is distracted from his duty by Armida, an evil enchantress; she falls in love with him. He’s re-awakened to his  duty, and spurns Armida. In a battle, he unknowingly wounds Clorinda, a pagan women whom he loves; she turns Christian, and with her last breath, forgives him; afterwards, Rinaldo reconciles with Armida:

By far over every knight that drew the sword
Or couched the lance, the boy Rinaldo towered
How fierce, how far, he rears his head on high
While fixed on him alone is every eye
(Torquato Tasso: Jerusalem Delivered, Canto I ~ translated)

Bob Dylan and Sam Shepherd paste together a mythological-based Post Modern movie entitled “Renaldo And Clara”. Unnoticed by all Dylan analysts, (except those at ‘Untold’), is that the movie’s roots lie in Tasso’s epic about Rinaldo and Clorinda, a romance story that takes place in an earth-centred Universe:

In the movie, the knight – in not-so-shining armour – sings:

Patty gone to Loredo ...
The door is locked, and the keys are inside
(Bob Dylan: Patty's Gone To Laredo)

One key ~ the Lady-in-White of the movie, like Clorinda, is a remodelled archetype from Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ – Camilla, a baby, tied to an arrow and slung for her protection across a river to serve Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt and moon:

Too proud her hands the needle to assume
To ply the household labours of the loom
Recluse abodes, soft garments, she disdains
Yet keeps her virgin honour unprofaned ....
Over hills and forest to their bloody lair
She tracks the lion and the shaggy bear
(Torquato Tasso: Jerusalem Delivered, Canto II)

In the lyrics below, the handmaiden to the white-faced tracker of Ptolemaic constellations is mentioned by the ‘song and dance’ man:

Loyalty, unity, epitome, rigidity
You turn around for one real last glimpse of Camille
'Neath the moon shinin' bloody and pink
And there's no time to think
(Bob Dylan: No Time To Think)

In another fragmented song, Lily’s never met anyone quite like the Jack Of Hearts; to protect him, it appears that she stabs her boyfriend Big Jim to death; Big Jim’s wife takes the blame for it:

The next day was hangin' day, the sky was overcast and black
Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back
And Rosemary on the gallows, she didn't even blink
The hangin' judge was sober, he hadn't had a drink
(Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

by Jochen Markhorst

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the station. As I checked my watch against the tower clock I realized it was much later than I had thought and that I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I wasn’t very well acquainted with the town as yet, fortunately there was a policeman nearby, I ran up to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: “You asking me the way?” “Yes,” I said, “since I can’t find it myself.” “Give it up! Give it up!” he said, and swung around, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

(Franz Kafka, Give It Up! 1922)

If on John Wesley Harding the Bible is Das Ich, The Ego, as Freud would say, then Kafka is Das Es, The Id, the engine that is driven by a complex of unconscious desires, emotions, and urges. It defines the uncanny, alienated, dreamlike atmosphere of highlights such as “All Along The Watchtower”, “Drifter’s Escape” and this “The Wicked Messenger”, a stifling discomfort so masterfully articulated in Kafka’s stories, like in the above “Gib’s auf”

Dylan does not often mention Kafka and he seems to have only a superficial knowledge of his work. John Cohen, who interviews him in 1968, specifically asks about Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes, to which Dylan hardly responds. But during a press conference in Rome, July 2001, Dylan states, appreciatively meant: “There’s nobody like Kafka who just sits down and writes something without wanting somebody to read it.”

If anything, this shows some biographical knowledge. True, Kafka did not want his work to be read. During his lifetime he only reluctantly released, on the insistence of admiring friends, a fraction of his work for publication. On his deathbed in the sanatorium he begged his friend Max Brod to destroy all the writings in his study at home (Brod ignored that and deciphered, sorted and published everything – including masterpieces such as Der Prozeß, The Trial, and many parables such as the above Gib’s auf!).

Incidentally, how Dylan comes to his conclusion is puzzling; writers who do not publish their work because they do not want it to be read are by definition unknown, after all.

Nevertheless, despite the presumably superficial knowledge of Kafka’s work, the parallels cannot be ignored. An obvious guess would be that both Jewish writers demonstrate their comparable, superior talent in a similar way because there happens to be a congeniality, a spiritual affinity. Kindred spirits, if you will.

Just like Kafka, Dylan’s grandparents belong to a Jewish minority in the Slavic part of Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century (Dylan’s grandparents flee the pogroms in Odessa in 1905, Kafka then lives in Prague). The oppression, being an outsider, the stories, the parables and the use of language from the Torah… it is cultural baggage that is shared by Kafka and Dylan, and perhaps explains the receptiveness of both men to clear but impenetrable storytelling.

In the same interview with John Cohen (together with Happy Traum, published in the October ’68 Sing Out) Dylan reflects on his lyrics for John Wesley Harding, in particular on “All Along The Watchtower” and “The Wicked Messenger”.

Cohen wants to know what Dylan thinks about traditional ballads, and whether he would also consider a song like “The Wicked Messenger” a ballad. Dylan’s answer seems serious, he chooses simple language and speaks in short, clear sentences and the whole is incomprehensible – Kafka could not have done it better:

“In a sense, but the ballad form isn’t there. Well the scope is there actually, but in a more compressed sense. The scope opens up, just by a few little tricks. I know why it opens up, but in a ballad in the true sense, it wouldn’t open up that way. It does not reach the proportions I had intended for it.”

A ballad, as Dylan teaches in the same interview, is actually the antique version of a feature film; a balladeer tells long, drawn-out stories with a real plot and main characters who perform actions about which the public forms an opinion. The plot and the actions are all plainly told, the listener does not have to find his own interpretation, the listener does not have to fill in blanks – it says what it says.

This is in line with the literary theory; there the literary ballad is defined as a narrative poem.

In that sense, Dylan continues, the ballads on John Wesley Harding are not real ballads:

“These melodies on the John Wesley Harding album lack this traditional sense of time. As with the third verse of “The Wicked Messenger”, which opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider. One realizes that when one hears it, but one might have to adapt to it. But we are not hearing anything that isn’t there; anything we can imagine is really there. The same thing is true of the song “All Along The Watchtower”, which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for here we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.”

Kafka all over again: clear vagueness. Or mumbo jumbo, that is of course also possible. The “time schedule takes a jump” in the third verse? The narrative structure of the third verse is identical to that of the first two couplets, the storyline from couplet 1 to couplet 2 is exactly the same as that from couplet 2 to 3.

Each couplet opens with a wide shot; in the first half of the verse in question, an all-knowing narrator outlines successively the protagonist, his living conditions and the decor. Each verse tells an anecdote in lines four to six, every fifth line expresses an interaction of the protagonist with his environment and every sixth line is a Bible paraphrase:

For his tongue it could not speak, but only flatter can be inspired by multiple passages; flattery is damned in about twenty places in the Bible. Because of the proximity of the word wickedness, Dylan’s King James was probably open at Psalm 5, verse 9: “their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue.”

The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning paraphrases another Bible passage in which again the wicked are tackled; Malachi 4:3 “And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet.”

And the final line, If you cannot bring good news, then don’t bring any, seems to be inspired by the story of the prophet Micah, the only one of four hundred prophets who predicts that King Ahab will fare badly if he goes to war against the Syrians – all other prophets predict a resounding victory (1 Kings 22). It is not entirely conclusive though; Micha does not bring news, but predicts, and moreover does so at the express request. Ahab knows in advance that Micah never predicts anything good (“I hate him because he never prophesies anything good about me, but always bad.” – 1 Kings 22: 8).

By the way: respected Dylanologists such as Andy Gill and Derek Barker who bend and twist to fit in the prophet Eli (the wicked messenger comes from Eli, after all), seem to ignore that Eli also means “my God”, that Eli is God’s call sign (like Jesus on the cross also calls on Him: Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani – My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?).

Despite all the ambiguity and vagueness, within “The Wicked Messenger” it is more likely that the wicked messenger (Proverbs 13:17) comes from God, and not from the prophet Eli. When asked by whom he is sent, he only answers “with his thumb”, because his tongue could only respond with “flattery”. Strange, but traceable still within the Old Testament culture and the Jewish tradition, in which one is not allowed to speak the name of God.

Like all lyrics on John Wesley Harding, the form has a classic, elegant simplicity, yet it is different. Almost all songs (eight of the twelve) consist of eight-line couplets with the rhyme scheme abcb-defe; a classic ballad form, indeed.

But “The Wicked Messenger” has six-line couplets and a rather unique, “open” rhyme scheme: abcdbc. That fourth, surprisingly non-rhyming line contributes to the open character, which Dylan may refer to when he talks about “jumps” to “open” the ballad.

Unusual, but not entirely unique. Maybe Dylan copied “For Once In My Life”, until then actually the only song with this rhyme scheme. That heartbreaker from 1965, according to authority Ella Fitzgerald a beautiful tune, only reaches the canon after Stevie Wonder scores a huge hit with the song (October ’68), but in this late summer of 1967 the walking jukebox Dylan may have heard the Tony Bennet version, or the Four Tops or The Temptations, who all score a little hit with this song in ’67.

There are more indications that Dylan the poet has found this distinctive rhyme at W.H. Auden. Dylan has already written “As I Went Out One Morning” for this same album, whose form, rhyme scheme, weird meter and title all have been copied from Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”.

Indeed, Auden’s “In Schrafft’s” apparently had a comparable effect.   Dylan borrows the structure (the, on this album, unusual three six-line couplets) and, in particular, the different abcdbc rhyme scheme for “The Wicked Messenger”:

Having finished the Blue-plate Special
And reached the coffee stage,
Stirring her cup she sat,
A somewhat shapeless figure
of indeterminate age
In an undistinguished hat.

It takes quite some time before Dylan himself recognizes the special beauty of the song. The dissatisfaction he expresses in that interview with John Cohen (“It does not reach the proportions I had intended for it“) is not false modesty: it takes no less than twenty years for the song to pop up on his set list, and then it is still thanks to the persuasiveness of the men of Grateful Dead that he plays it at all. Jerry Garcia is rather fond of the song, that’s why – in 1975 Garcia already plays it ten times with his hobby project Legion Of Mary, for example.

The version with Dylan, July 12, 1987 in New York, is a driving, dynamic and enthusiastic performance, but Dylan dismisses the recording for Dylan & The Dead (maybe because he makes one mistake in the lyrics), plays it two times more (both times in Italy) and then puts the song back in the bottom drawer.

But in the twenty-first century he rediscovers the song again and he plays “The Wicked Messenger” more than a hundred times. In viciously rocking, sharp versions, destroying much of the deceptive domesticity of the original from 1967, but no less attractive.

Dylan is suddenly even to such an extent charmed that he selects the song for his film Masked And Anonymous (2003). In the original script, the full song lyrics are typed out, but eventually a charming live performance of “Diamond Joe”, the traditional he already plays on Good As I Been To You (1992), appears on that particular spot in the film. It is unknown why Dylan commits this intervention (like “All Along The Watchtower”, “Trying To Get To Heaven” and “Standing In The Doorway” all reach the script, but not the final filming), but is likely that the filmmaker Dylan does not want interference; the ambiguity of “The Wicked Messenger” pushes the film interpretation somewhat too blatantly to messianic distances, probably. To distances he avoids with a “Diamond Joe”, anyway.

The song is fairly popular with colleagues and that produces enough beautiful covers. The soulful adaptation by Rod Stewart with his Faces, the opening track of their debut First Step (1970), is rightly praised.

Patti Smith opts for an ominous, solemn and gradually derailing approach, pushing the song in a completely different direction – which suits the song well (Gone Again, 1996). In terms of atmosphere comparable to the garage sound the Black Keys pour over it, on the successful I’m Not There Soundtrack (2007).

Dylan himself will be touched by Marion Williams’ version, by one of the best gospel singers of the twentieth century. Williams’ “Blowin’ In The Wind” from ’66 is already one of the few successful covers of this worn monument, her “I Shall Be Released” is superb, and especially her unparalleled, brilliant reading of “I Pity The Poor Immigrant” (1969) is goose bumps inducing. Her “The Wicked Messenger” comes close to that – from the magnificent 1971 album Standing Here Wondering Which Way To Go, an intersection of the best that gospel, soul and blues have to offer, and whose title song should be the soundtrack to Kafka’s “Gib’s auf!”

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

By Larry Fyffe

To what extent Bob Dylan has read the works of any particular poet or writer of literature we may not know, but we do know that his song lyrics reveal that he’s been swimming in the Jungian Sea of the collective unconsciousness of the purveyors of art. And swimming there enough times to get soaked by the themes from the days of yore to modern times.

Crouching in the thickets of many of Dylan’s songs is the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, himself an admirer of a poet of romance, and melancholic lyrics of love lost:

Why were the winds heard, blowing
Through the dark air, round and round
Till dawn with mournful sound
Were they perhaps the strife
Of your going love of my life?

(Torquato Tasso: What Weeping, Or What Dewfall)

Below, a poetic address to a girl taken away by Nature – literally killed by tuberculosis:

And must all mortals wear this weary yoke?
Ah, when the truth appeared
It better seemed to die!
Cold death, the barren tomb, didst thou prefer
To harsh reality

(Giacomo Leopardi: To Sylvia)

Writer Bob Dylan, in the song following, sings of figurative death-in-life:

Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness

(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

Not a preference by the author to undertake himself for sure, but Dylan’s characters in narrative songs sometimes take their own lives as happens in traditonal adventure tales of romance:

She touched his lips, and kissed his cheek
He tried to speak, but his breath was weak
"You died for me, now I'll die for you"
She put the knife to her heart, and she ran it through

(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

Spotted the poems of Leopardi be with dark humour that mocks the human fascination with fashion that cloaks the inevitabitiy of decay and death:

Fashion: "In short, I contrive to persuade the more ambitious of mortals daily
To endure countless inconveniences, sometimes torture and mutilation
Yes, and even death itself, for the love they have for me"

(Giacomo Leopardi: Dialogue Between Fashion And Death)

The singer/songwriter follows suit in a lighter-hearted fashion:

Well you look so pretty in it
Honey, can I jump on it sometime
Yes, I just wanna see
If it's really that expensive kind
You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

(Bob Dylan: Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat)

In the lyrics below, Dylan could well be making a pun on Eugene Delicroix, the French Romantic artist who paints ‘Tasso In The Madhouse’:

Workin' for a while on a fishin' boat
Right outside of Delacroix
But all the while I was alone
The past was close behind

(Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Blue)

Nature does not hear Giacomo’s plea that Spring regenerate his body, or, at least, the Spirit of the Times:

Ah, since the mansions of Olympus all
Are desolate, and without guide, the bolt
That, wandering over the cloud-capped mountains-tops
In horror cold dissolves alike
The guilty, and the innocent
Since this, our earthly home
A stranger to her children has become
And brings them up, to misery

(Giacomo Leopardi: To The Spring)

The singer/songwriter finds Leopardi’s outlook too dark, but takes his goodly advice:

Thunder on the mountain, rollin' like a drum
Gonna sleep over there where the music's comin' from
Don't need a guide, I already know the way
Remember this, "I'm your servant both night and day"

(Wanda Jackson: Thunder On The Mountain ~ Bob Dylan)

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.

by Jochen Markhorst

In a New York hotel room, as some guy named Joe from Minneapolis fables on songfacts.com, a Grateful Dead party gets out of hand. Dylan is there too and he is especially amused at the complaints of another famous hotel guest: the actor Anthony Quinn.

There you have it, the source of inspiration for the song. The Grateful Dead is still a relatively unknown band in the summer of ’67 (their first, not particularly notable LP is just three months out), the first time that Grateful Dead is in New York is June 17, ’67 (coincidentally the same day that the murders are committed for which Rubin “Hurricane” Carter will be convicted), and no source mentions that Dylan left the Basement and West Saugerties that June to rebuild a hotel room in New York with Jerry Garcia, but Joe from Minneapolis prefers to ignore these insignificant details.

Jerry from Poughkeepsie knows better: this is “of course” about fun spoiler Sheriff Larry Quinlan, who arrested the LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary in 1966.

And these are just two of the many quite desperate interpretation attempts that are circulating. “The coming of the Messiah” is another popular one, an even sadder one actually.

The nonsensical, exuberant text of “Quinn The Eskimo” is a magnet for Dylan exegetes with crypto-analytical ambitions, that much a tour along the comments on this song makes clear.

That Dylan himself has repeatedly stated that this song is really not about anything, is preferably ignored and sometimes denied. Obviously, a poet’s unconsciously expressed outbursts can also tell a story or reveal a message, but in this case hidden meanings really do seem far-fetched.

“I don’t know what it was about,” Dylan confesses in the Biograph booklet (1985), “I guess it was some kind of a nursery rhyme.” And in an old interview with John Cohen in 1968, shortly after the Big Pink days, he confirms that there will probably be a link with that Eskimo film with Anthony Quinn (meaning The Savage Innocents from 1960, in which, absurdly, the Mexican Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca indeed does play an Inuit), but: “I didn’t see the movie.” It could have triggered it, the journalist insists. Of course, says Dylan, giving in, sometimes you might overhear something. “I know the phrase came about, I believe someone was just talking about Quinn, The Eskimo. ”

Robbie Robertson has fewer doubts. And as a witness of the first hour, he is of course not only entitled to speak, but his words (in Testimony, his autobiography from 2016) also do have a bit more value than the conspiracy theories of hogwashing nitwits on the Plughole of the Occident, the internet forums. Robertson reports:

“Howard Alk and his wife, Jonesy, Albert and Sally Grossman, and Al Aronowitz all came out to Big Pink to see what was going on. They could tell we were having too much fun. We had just recorded “Quinn the Eskimo” with Anthony Quinn in mind—he’d portrayed a memorable character, Inuk the Eskimo, in the 1960 film The Savage Innocents.”

The words “having too much fun”, refer to the preceding paragraph, in which he tells they had just smoked “a J”. Which, in turn, also sheds light on the depth of the lyrics, obviously. And, admittedly, alone the insane fact that Antonio from Chihuahua is cast for the role of an Inuit is enough to inspire a farcical novelty song.

In Chronicles the song title pops up too, again in connection with a film. During the recording sessions for Oh Mercy (1989), Dylan walks in New Orleans past a movie theater where The Mighty Quinn is shown, a Jamaican thriller starring Denzel Washington as the mighty Xavier Quinn, a crime-solving detective. “Funny,” writes Dylan, “that’s just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song” – with which he, very Dylanesque, suddenly implies knowing what the song is about after all.

Some literary handiwork has been attended to it, that much is true. Each chorus has an antithesis, one varying verse line that then always contrasts with the preceding verse (despair – joy, on a limb – going to run, no sleep – doze), there is a cast-iron rhyme scheme and the wording does suggest a deeper meaning. The half reference to Noah (shipbuilding, pigeons) fits Dylan’s flood fascination, which he airs at more Basement sessions (“Down In The Flood”, “Tupelo”, “Big River”), but further attempts to finding a message or a story are ridiculous – it just isn’t there.

Manfred Mann deserves most of the praise. During a listening session where tracks from the unpublished Basement Tapes are revealed to a select club of musicians, he is the only one who recognizes the potential in those messy and rattling two minutes of Quinn. Dylan is not at his best at this recording. It does sound musty and perfunctorily. The master seems even a bit bored and whiny, as a matter of fact (singer Mike d’Abo: “It was sung in a rambling monotone”). Mann squeezes the song in a tight, poppy arrangement and blows up the verse into stadium-worthy sing-along proportions.

Mike d’Abo, who actually wanted to choose “This Wheel’s On Fire”, has difficulty understanding what Dylan is singing, and is forced to flee to a kind of onomatopoeically sound echoing of what he thinks he understands (It was like learning a song phonetically in a foreign language). “I have never had the first idea what the song is about,” he adds, “except that it seems to be Hey, gang, gather round, something exciting is going to happen ’cause the big man’s coming. As to who the big man is and why he is an Eskimo, I don’t know.” (in 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh, 2005).

It was, says drummer Mike Hugg in Mannerisms (Greg Russo, 2011), as with most major hits by Manfred Mann, quite a chore: “We had huge problems with Mighty Quinn. We just couldn’t finish it. We kept going back to the studio to try other things. It took us ages to get it right. ”

But a few hours after finishing it, the initial relief evaporates again, as Manfred reveals. After the exhausting recording sessions, he goes home, listens once more in all peace and quiet, and doesn’t like it after all. He rejects the song, and the others just accept his rejection. The song has already been forgotten, when D’Abo calls Manfred a month and a half later. He played an acetate to Lou Reizner from United Artists and both, D’Abo and Reizner, are convinced that it will be a success. He persuades everyone to come and listen again at his home.

“When it was played at Michael’s house, it sounded very good, and I felt pretty foolish. I just couldn’t believe that I could have made such a mistake. Then I asked Michael whether his turntable could have been running fast, and we checked and found that his record turntable was running a semi-tone fast. We then went into the studio and did the work that Mike Hugg referred to. We speeded up the record a semi-tone for release.”

A new, catchy intro is also added: Klaus Voormann, the German bass player, fifes the characteristic tune on his flute and bingo, now (January 1968) we have a world hit – and indeed, for years several sports clubs let the chart breaker blare through the stadiums.

The South African band leader cannot do much wrong with the master anyway, after the previous hits with his songs (“Just Like A Woman”, “With God On Our Side” and “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”). Already in December ’65 Dylan publicly declares that this British band does the most justice to his songs. “Each one of them has been right in context with what the song was all about.” He will therefore have peace with the fact that the song moves to Manfred Mann’s catalog. The appearance on the setlist of Wight, 1969, is probably a gift to the English public. That performance also appears on Self Portrait and on Greatest Hits Vol. II, but then Dylan lets the song rest for 33 years and only plays it again in 2002 (four times) and 2003 (one time, again in England).

Others are more enthusiastic. Grateful Dead plays it often in the encore (59 times), for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band it is even the most played song and the list of covers is endless.

The majority of the covers gratefully adopt the revelry of Mann’s approach. And therefore have little added value, although the metal angle by the Swiss rockers of Gotthard (2003) is funny. Kris Kristofferson’s sober, folky version on Chimes Of Freedom (2012) is quite a relief. Paul Weller tries, together with Sam Moore and Amy Winehouse, to dress up Quinn in a soul jacket, but stumbles over the non-stop party content of the sing-along chorus, too.

No, Manfred Mann’s own revision, with the Earth Band, still is the most distinctive. The best known is, live with overdubs, on the hit LP Watch (1978). Reviled among die-hard Dylan fans, but Manfred plays his hit at every performance since 1971 to this day, and continues to vary. The long, spun out versions sometimes degenerate into improvised jazz rock, then again into screaming hard rock or worn, pompous symphonic rock, but the band invariably brings the song “home” again; out of the chaos the familiar chorus peeps up again, and a relieved audience may – sometimes a capella – sing along.

Whatever else we may think of it: Manfred Mann transforms the faltering, slightly bizarre, misty, unsightly, dadaesque lightweight nonsense rhyme from the Basement Tapes into the indestructible pop historical monument it is today.

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, 1978:

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

And please do note   The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.