Untold Dylan

by Tony Attwood, with many thanks to Aaron Gailbraith for the links.

These three tracks are taken from the Shot of Love outtakes.   Only the third one gives me a feeling that we could have been listening to a song that might have gone somewhere rather exciting, but (at least as far as I know) it didn’t.

The recordings were made in March and April 1981, and the list of recordings from that era gives us these reviews so far…

1. Is it worth it?
2. On a Rocking Boat
3. Hallelujah 
4. High Away (Ah ah ah)
5. Wind Blows on the Water
6. Magic
7. Dead Man Dead Man
8. Trouble
9. Don’t ever take yourself away

So now we have three more, starting with “You’re still a child to me”

There is a clearly worked out chord sequence in the song but nothing much happens save the attempt at a plucked out melody and then to our complete surprise the vocals start around 1 minute 42… but then sadly they too go nowhere.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FDHg_AjY9fI

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S3HLf4OjW5s

Moving on we have the not very promising title of “I want you to know I love you”.  But to my surprise, at least, this one really does move along.

I am not sure if it is the female vocalists who come up with the lyrics, or if Dylan has had a previous run through.  It sounds like the latter because when Dylan comes in with his line everything really is pounding along just fine.

Indeed the variations in the chord sequence make it clear that this has been sorted before, and I get the very clear impression that this could indeed have been a real crowd pleaser on stage had it ever made it past this outtake stage.  But it doesn’t.  It goes no further.

So there we are, three more songs to add to the March / April sessions.  There are a couple of instrumentals left which we haven’t reviewed, but I don’t feel too moved to review them since I can’t find much to say of a positive nature.  However if you would like to have a go please do write in, with a link to where the songs can be found on line.

Send your review to Tony@schools.co.uk and at the top of the review please write your name so I can give you full recognition.

by Jochen Markhorst

I tried to write another Mr Tambourine Man. It’s the only song I tried to write “another one”.

(Dylan, Sing Out! October 1968)

On July 30 1965, Dylan records “From A Buick 6” in New York, fairly quickly. It is done within an hour. Two false starts, the fifth take is only the second full version and immediately good enough for Highway 61 Revisited. He spends the remaining studio time on “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” and that goes less smoothly. The last attempt is take 17, which accidentally ends up on the A side of the first pressing of “Positively Fourth Street”. That intro, the first bars … no doubt: “Like A Rolling Stone Part II”. And the rest does not escape the comparison either. Bloomfield plays an extract from his part on that global hit, the little trick with which each verse builds up the tension to the (comparable) chorus, the harmonica … boy, did we hear this one before. Only Al Kooper’s jingle-jangling on the celesta (it is not a xylophone, as many critics think on hearing it) adds a – successful – novelty to the mercury sound.

Great recording, no question, but Dylan does hear the similarities too, and that is a sensitive issue. He has already dropped the masterful “Farewell Angelina” because it smells too much of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, later he will dump the beautiful “Up To Me”, because that song is too similar to “Shelter From The Storm”.

He holds on to “Can You Please Crawl”, though. More than two months later, on October 5, he takes another run-in, tries a slower approach, but soon gives up. Seven weeks later, November 30, is the last attempt.

Immediately at the first take, a false start, it already appears that Dylan has removed the most important stumbling point. The Rolling Stone intro has been replaced by an al niente, a “to nothing”, where the band falls silent for a moment and only drummer Bobby Gregg plays, counting on a cymbal. The find is so successful that it is also used after every chorus and it becomes one of the strongholds of the song at all.

This version is quickly established. During the last recording session it hardly changes, only organist Garth Hudson is still looking for a definitive part. The faltering rehearsals and the breakdown are due to the very unusual chord scheme of the couplet. The esteemed gentlemen musicians have to stay focused on this front, but the final version of the song itself has been found. The initially disturbing similarities have largely evaporated – partly because colour-determining musicians such as Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield are now not playing, of course (Al Kooper remembers that he also plays this session with The Hawks, but the organ part sounds like Hudson, the piano plays way too skilled for Kooper’s keyboard qualities and is perhaps Paul Griffin, but more likely Richard Manuel and that guitar really is Robbie Robertson).

It is released as a single, and Dylan has expectations. In No Direction Home, Shelton tells the story of how Dylan throws the Doormat on Duty, Phil Ochs, out of the car because Ochs is not too enthusiastic about the hit potential of the single.

But Ochs is right. In the US, Can You Please Crawl barely hits the charts (number 58 in the Billboard is the highest position), in Canada it remains stuck at 42, and in Europe the song only scores in England, but that is about it: it is listed five weeks, topping out at 17. The covers of the song do not score anywhere either. In the Netherlands, not even national sweetheart Patricia Paay (in 1975) can succeed with her refined version, which is quite beautiful thanks to none other than Steve Harley – who in his glory year (“Come Up And See Me”) finds time to produce the entire debut album from his sister-in-law.

Indeed: the lack of hit potential cannot be ignored anymore.

Still, it really is a fine, genuine Dylan song. Nick Hornby in his witty, autobiographical book 31 Songs devotes Chapter 8 to Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”

Already in the third line, he boldly confesses: “I am not a big Dylan fan.” He cherishes, obviously, like everyone who loves music, the three mid-60s albums plus Blood On The Tracks. But standing in front of his record collection, he finds, to his own surprise, that he has more than twenty CDs from the master (more than from any other artist), he must admit that he has knowledge of many more pointless Dylan facts then about facts from the life of, say, Shakespeare and Hornby comes up with the highly quotable oneliner “there is a density and a gravity to a Dylan song that you can’t find anywhere else.”

But a fan, no.

The awarding of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” as one of the 31 Songs is not entirely pure, the successful British author nuances. The attraction of this song lies mainly in the fact that you haven’t heard it a zillion times, so one can experience approximately what an impression “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Visions Of Johanna” must have made on the witnesses from the first hour. Dylan is at an artistic peak here, with that crisp, clear organ sound, unmistakably Dylan, but it’s not such a well-known song – similar to The Beatles’ “Rain”.

It’s true. Dylan never plays the song, mainly due to the flop; it does not appear on an album and the single barely sells. Only in 1985, when the successful Biograph box is released, “Can You Please Crawl” reaches a larger audience – twenty years after the recording.

Hornby’s “density and gravity that you can’t find anywhere else” certainly suggests a hermetic text here. The You seems to be the same lady as the Miss Lonely from “Like A Rolling Stone”, and is being tackled more ruthlessly here.

The narrator registers that she is trapped in an unhealthy relationship, a relationship in which she is physically and mentally abused. She allows herself to be bullied by a vengeful, unloving egomaniac, who through his presence alone manages to turn her room into a burial vault and who radiates aggression, with his “fist full of nails”.

Halfway through the first verse, the suspicion comes up: Dylan paints a self-portrait of his own black side. All the testimonies of intimates from the mid-sixties make a point of Dylan’s nasty side, his habit of verbally insulting less gifted guests to the bone, surrounded by a few loyal disciples such as Phil Ochs and especially Bob Neuwirth:

“I would see him consciously be that cruel, man, I didn’t understand the game they played, that constant insane sort of sadistic put down game.”

(Michael Bloomfield in Larry Sloman’s On The Road With Bob Dylan, 1975)

“If Dylan got drunk enough, he’d select a target from among the assembled singer/songwriters, and then pick that person apart like a cat toying with a wounded mouse. Making fun of a person’s lyrics, attire, or lack of humor was the gist of his verbal barrage. Dylan was so accomplished at this nasty little game, that if he desired, he could push his victim to the brink of fisticuffs.”

(Al Kooper in Backstage Passes And Backstabbing Bastards, 1998)

When he was on his “telling it like it is” truth mission, he could be cruel. Though I was never on the receiving end of one of his tirades, I did witness a few. The power he was given and the changes it entailed made him lash out unreasonably, but I believe he was trying to find a balance within himself when everything was off-kilter.

(Suze Rotole in A Freewheelin’ Time, 2008)

Although, according to Marianne Faithfull, Bobby Neuwirth was the worst, the really diabolical of the two:

“He was affable but as forbidding, if not more so, than Dylan. Dylan had a reputation for demolishing people, but when people told these stories it was really Neuwirth they meant. Neuwirth and Dylan did such a swift verbal pas de deux that people tended to confuse them. But the most biting commentary and crushing put-downs came from Neuwirth. And when Neuwirth got drunk he could be deadly. I never saw Dylan’s malicious side, nor the lethal wit that has often been ascribed to him. I never thought of him as amusingly cruel the way I thought of John Lennon. Dylan was simply the mercurial, bemused center of the storm, vulnerable and almost waiflike.”

(Marianne Faithfull in An Autobiography, 1994)

… bearing all a very close resemblance to the male protagonist from “Can You Please Crawl”, with which this song fits in with the other sketches “of what goes on around here sometimes, tho I don’t understand too well myself what’s really happening” as Dylan says in the liner notes on Bringing It All Back Home.

This protagonist can erupt in a “businesslike anger”, is surrounded by slavish bloodhounds and can break through any armour to expose it, to expose his victim to the public.

Biographically, the confusing amorous stuff in the unhealthy triangle Dylan – Edie Sedgwick – Bobby Neuwirth fits in with the fatal atmosphere of the lyrics. The narrator does not really offer a warm shoulder like in “Queen Jane Approximately” this time, but she is grandly allowed to come and see him. He does not offer any further hope. The narrator and the male protagonist both adhere to the religion of the little tin women, both see women as toys, and if she leaves him, where would she flee? Towards more darkness, apparently: come on out, the dark is beginning.

Hardly any successful covers, unsurprisingly. A decisive quality factor of the song is indeed the crisp, clear organ sound Nick Hornby appreciates so much – even though it is not small fry, the colleagues attempting an interpretation.

A few live recordings of Jimi Hendrix float around in cyberspace, unfortunately of inferior sound quality, but apart from that: Hendrix does, by far, not reach the level of the original, nor the standard of his unsurpassed “All Along The Watchtower”. The tempo is too high (and fluctuates annoyingly), affecting the vocals – messy and chaotic, all in all.

Despite his impending death, Dr. Wilko Johnson, the guitarist of Dr. Feelgood, takes all the time. He invites The Who’s Roger Daltrey to sing, and produces an energetic but somewhat too ordinary rock song (on his farewell album Going Back Home, 2014). To his surprise, Johnson lives to see the release of the album; only after the recordings it turns out that he has an operable form of gland cancer, he survives the major operation and declares to be free of cancer in October 2014.

However, most covers, such as those from the hypeband Transvision Vamp and from the Westcoast group Colorblind James Experience, have too little fire.

Most charming is a band from Brooklyn, The Hold Steady, contributing to the soundtrack of the Dylan film I’m Not There (2007). A skillfull Springsteen imitation front to back, but what the heck; it is better to steal something well than to re-invent something badly, as the Bard himself learned on the way.

What else is on the site

You’ll find 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.

The index to the 500+ Dylan compositions reviewed is now on a new page of its own.  You will find it here.  It contains reviews of every Dylan composition that we can find a recording of – if you know of anything we have missed please do write in.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  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 Mike Johnson (kiwipoet)

Introduction:

In this unique series of articles we examine Bob Dylan’s harmonica playing, in each case with multiple examples of the way his craft has developed.  The earlier articles, in case you missed them, were…

• Bob Dylan: Master Harpist
• Bob Dylan Master Harpist part 2
• Bob Dylan Master Harpist part 3.
• Bob Dylan Master Harpist part 4 

I gazed down in the river's mirror 
And watched its winding strum
The water smooth ran like a hymn 
And like a harp did hum

At the end of the last article in this series, Master Harpist 4, we had arrived at the year 2010, towards the end of what I have dubbed Dylan’s organ-grinder period, marked by his rinky-dink organ work, his circus barker voice – and some of the greatest harmonica work you’re likely to hear.

By 2011, new and fresh elements were beginning to stir in Dylan’s performances. A rigidity of musical form that marks the organ-grinder period began to give way to more fluid performances. The band sounds newly energised and, if you listen carefully, you can hear the crooner beginning to emerge from the circus barker. Dylan’s vocal performances in 2011/12 are extraordinary. He barks, growls, croons, yips – and even sings! Breaking into falsetto, particularly on the word ‘you’ gives the performances a demented, unhinged feel.

The organ work too, tends to be more subtle, if you can hear it. And, there are some outstanding harmonica performances, as we shall see.

However, the writing was on the wall for the tiny instrument, and by 2013 harmonica breaks were largely relegated to a few ritual blues blasts on ‘Tangled up in Blue’ and ‘She Belongs to Me’. Dylan’s interest shifted to his baby grand piano, introduced on stage late in 2012.

There were two major influences at work, possibly conjointly, that would take Dylan away from his trusty harp. The first was the music that must have been brewing in his mind for his 2013 album, Tempest. The orchestral sound, with its metronomic precision, didn’t allow any room for harmonica work, which is better suited to more open and improvised forms. Nor, in the live performances of Tempest songs like ‘Scarlet Town’, ‘Pay in Blood’, ‘Early Roman Kings’ and ‘Long and Wasted Years’ did Dylan attempt to adapt the sound to include the harmonica.

And then there is the growing influence of Frank Sinatra and the Great American Songbook. Sinatra’s music grew out of the big band era of the 1940s. Big bands had all kinds of reed men: saxes, trombones, clarinets, cornets, trumpets, even flutes – but no harmonicas. The humble harmonica is the instrument of the lone cowboy and the blues journeyman. It is a folk instrument. Dylan’s ‘uncovers’ of Sinatra’s songs, two albums and a triple album, contain no harmonica work.

So there was a brief period, some 18 months from 2011 to mid-2012, the last flowering of the organ-grinder phase, in which these elements were emerging, but the harmonica still flourished.

There’s no better place to start than with three performances of that exquisite little ballad ‘Forgetful Heart’ from Dylan’s 2010 album, Together Through Life. Night after night, all through 2011, Dylan delivered poignant and powerful performances of the song. ‘Forgetful Heart’ is itself a heart-wrenching song, dealing as it does with our capacity to forget even our most profound experiences, or call them into doubt. Along with that goes the pain of loss. It must have one of the most devastating last verses Dylan ever wrote, or in this case co-wrote.

Forgetful heart Like a walking shadow in my brain All night long I lay awake and listen to the sound of pain The door has closed forevermore If indeed there ever was a door

I love the following performance, from early 2011, for its quiet, understated character, lit by piercing gull-like cries from the harp. A piercing nostalgia. Bright nails in the heart. It doesn’t get much better than this, I thought.

I was wrong. It could get better! In the following performance from later in 2011 we get pretty much the same vocal, with the crooner on the rise, but the harp solo lifts the performance into a different category, turning this little ballad into a tour-de-force. Dylan extends the harp break over a second chorus, with sharp, repeated jabs to the heart. Dylan’s genius for improvisation is evident. As with the best of Dylan, you’re not just listening to the song, you’re living the experience.

By the time we get to 2012, the edge seems to have worn off the pain, but, if anything, that softness is more subtle and poignant than those earlier blasts of hurt and loss. Jazzy and sad, as if seen from a distance. Maybe the best version of all – take your pick!

Another song with loss and nostalgia at its heart is ‘Shooting Star’, from the 1989 Oh Mercy album. This song is not so much about the loss of experience to the eroding effects of time, but the loss of love. It strikes me that it is the shooting star of salvation that keeps slipping away. The ‘you’ addressed might be a woman, of course, but might also be a saviour. However you read it, in these later performances the song becomes something of a showcase for the harmonica, which as always adds emotional intensity to the song’s central drive. Once more I notice a softening of effect from 2011 to 2012. The sharp edge of the 2011 sound, with a frantic touch to the harp solo, gives way to a more reflective, softer response in 2012.

Here’s the 2011 version:

Here’s the 2012 version:

We last encountered ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ in 2006, right at the beginning of the organ-grinder period (see Master Harpist 4). Dylan continued to perform the song, often featuring the harmonica in breaks that are surprisingly delicate and jazzy, given the heavy pulse of the song. Again there is an evolution worth following.

In 2010 we have a more minimal, slower-paced performance with a comparatively gentle harmonica break:

Fine as that performance is, it doesn’t match the richer, fuller sound of this 2011 performance. The energy level has cranked up and, to get the weirdness the song needs (being about an encounter with weirdness), an echo has been added to Dylan’s voice. You’re in a crazy-house of distorted mirrors here, and the jeering harmonica is no help when trying to find your orientation.

But we’re not quite finished with the song. This performance from 2012 is notable, not just for yet another stellar harp performance, but the audience response. You can hear the energy go up when the harp appears. This time we get a more subtle use of the echo with, at times, Dylan duetting with his own echo!

Mostly Dylan’s harp work is restricted to certain songs, but there are times when he throws a harp solo into a song not associated with the harmonica. ‘Lovesick’ is just such a song.

Dylan continued to work with some of the songs from Time out of Mind, now 14 years old. Dylan himself has expressed admiration for the song, suggesting it might be a song to join the ranks of the classics in the Great American Songbook. Like ‘Lonely Avenue’ by Doc Potus, which it vaguely resembles in its tight, repetitive musical form, it expresses the very essence of alienation. It’s one helluva crepuscular song.

I see, I see lovers in the meadow I see, I see silhouettes in the window I watch them ’till they’re gone and they leave me hanging on to a shadow

If you like, it’s a song about a haunting, driven by the heavy tread of a night walker, one who has become a ghost to the world. Then, shatteringly, just as you are becoming mesmerised, the harp break arrives to rock you off your feet. A short, sharp harp break, brilliantly delivered, makes this performance a compulsive listen:

And, as you hit the link an awe-struck second time, take note of the whimsical organ work, a few notes here and there, beautifully understated.

Another song not usually associated with the harmonica is ‘Things Have Changed’, often Dylan’s preferred opening song during this era. It’s brisk and provocative, and, if you cut through the superficial explanation that it’s about a young, rebel folk singer, who might be called Bob Dylan, who became disillusioned, then the song becomes quite mysterious. To me it speaks of a turbulent reaction to the madness of the modern world – ‘people are crazy/and times are strange.’ Madness breeds madness, and one way out of there is to lock yourself away, become impervious to it all, that world which might explode – ‘I’m locked in tight/ I’m out of range…’ Such madness is catching!

Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet Putting her in a wheel barrow and wheeling her down the street

A correspondent commenting on Master Harpist 4 asked if there were any other songs, beside ‘Every Grain of Sand’, in which Dylan enters into a duet with his harmonica. I replied that nothing sprang to mind.

I few days after that, while working on this article, I found this performance of ‘Things Have Changed’ in which we hear, as the song progresses, another vocal/harmonica duet, only this one at a frenetic pace suitable to the zaniness of the song. Crazy little harp interjections into the vocal line.

In the last article I commented on a 2010 performance of ‘Not Dark Yet’, so won’t repeat those comments. For me, no other performance quite matches the bleak intensity of that rendition. The song, however, survived into 2011/12 with more sensitive harmonica breaks than on the 2010 performance. I mean sensitive to the quieter, less desperate and more reflective. In this late 2011 performance, listen to how, around 3 mins 47 seconds, and into the harp break, we get an echoing, fading effect – our lives slipping out of sight as the dark approaches. I run out of superlatives for this kind of genius.

It’s my contention that the genius of the harp work is enabled, inspired if you like, by the genius of the lyrics and the feelings they potentially open up:

Well I’ll live here and I’ll die here against my will It might look like I’m moving but I’m standing still…

‘Blind Willie McTell’, an outtake from the 1984 album Infidels, surfaced in the late 1990s in some pretty heavy, if not ponderous, rock versions. By the time we get to 2011, Dylan is not taking the song quite so seriously, or at least giving it a less serious treatment, preferring to bounce or swing it the way Frank Sinatra might have swung it. And the serious lyrics come across with less agony, more of a celebration of an era, the 1930s once more, the locus of such songs as ‘Summer Days’ and ‘Po’ Boy’ (see Master Harpist 4). Its vision of a world riddled with moral corruption, however, survives in the swinging versions. We celebrate despite the song’s dark vision, rather than wallow in it:

Well God is in his heaven and we all want what’s his but power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is…

This first performance, from March 2011, is totally harmonica-driven. (You will find this same link in my article Dancing to Dylan, but I make no apologies for repeating it here in its proper context, it’s such a compelling performance.) I don’t know quite how to explain this, but to me there is a Chaplinesque feel to this performance. Maybe it’s an evocation of the Charlie Chaplin era, or maybe it’s to do with the cheeky irreverence of the harp work, that satirical bounce in the beat – or maybe I’m just imagining it…

Wonderful as that is, we can’t leave the song there. This version, from October, has the advantage of being better recorded, and so is perhaps more rewarding to listen to, but it also features an extended harmonica ending, with two false endings. It has more swing and less bounce than the previous version. I can’t decide which I like best!

As I write this, a climate-change-driven storm is bringing mass rain and flooding to Louisiana. The US has just experienced its wettest twelve months in recorded history. It was Ezra Pound who said that literature is ‘news that stays news’. Dylan’s ‘High Water’ is an excellent example. It’s as true now as when he wrote it at the turn of the century – ‘high water everywhere…’ Chaos and anarchy are let loose in this madcap song. Not a song that really features the harmonica much, but in this performance Dylan uses the instrument to wrack up the audience.

Dylan may not talk much to his audience, but he can still communicate. No great harp solo here, but listen to the audience response! He has them whooping along, using his harp rather than his voice to bark at the audience. It’s an audacious performance from 2012:

I nearly didn’t include this next performance of Dylan’s old favourite, ‘Just Like Tom Tumb Blues’ as the recording is quite inferior. Such a pity, as it has a nice, foot-tapping, forward-looking beat and some fine harmonica work. Well, warts and all, it seems like a good way to bid farewell to the organ grinder. We last encountered this song in 2006 (See Master Harpist 4) and, while I prefer that earlier version, this one carries itself with conviction.

Dylan’s transferred affection from the organ to his gleaming black baby grand did not lead to the immediate disappearance of the harmonica. There are some great harmonica performances through to 2014 and beyond, they just became few and far between. This includes some rare and lovely moments, such as this little ballad, ‘This Dream of You’, from Together Through Life. Not as compelling as ‘Forgetful Heart’, but still a vehicle for some nostalgia-driven harmonica work, reminiscent of what I have called Dylan’s ‘muted trumpet’ sound (See Master Harpist 4)

To audiences’ delight, ‘She Belongs to Me’ continued to showcase the harmonica, right through the Sinatra years, from 2014 to 2018. I commented on this deadly song in Master Harpist 4, but by this stage in its evolution, with that pounding beat, it has become ominous, almost sinister, particularly given the implication of these lines:

You start out standing
proud to steal her anything she sees… (repeat)
you wind up peeking through a keyhole
down upon your knees.

And the harmonica! Gorgeous timing, the way it catches the song, carrying it across a few missed beats. Here’s one from 2014:

So… is it all over now between Dylan and his harp? In some recent performances of ‘Tangled up in Blue’ he doesn’t even produce the instrument. I’d be very wary of making predictions where Bob Dylan is concerned. In his late 70s, he’s still innovating and, as Frank Sinatra has faded from his set list in the last year or so, Dylan has returned to earlier songs not heard for a while. And he certainly hasn’t forgotten how to play the harp! Try this 2018 version of ‘Don’t Think Twice’, a song we started with back in the first Master Harpist article. He sings it the way Frankie might have sung it, which creates a strange effect, but the beautiful harmonica work is pure Dylan (see below).

Well it is all over now baby blue for this series, and I want to thank those readers and Dylan enthusiasts who have come along for the ride. It’s been a real exploration for me too, which has kept me at the keyboard. I started out with something to prove. I’d had enough of ill-conceived attacks on Dylan’s musicianship. I wanted to show what he could really do with that humble little instrument. I trust I have demonstrated to everybody’s satisfaction that Bob Dylan is indeed a master harpist.

Until we meet again!

Kia Ora

Ps: I’ll be back shortly with a postscript to this series: ‘Tangled Up in Harmonicas’. Watch this space.

By Larry Fyffe

A number of  song lyrics by Bob Dylan are criticized for their misogynistic content, but in many cases the singer/songwriter is just messin’ around with the secluar sonnets of William Shakespeare.

One should give pity to others as one may wish it returned some day, asserts the Bard:
Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lovest those
Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee
Root pity in thy heart, that when it grows
Thy pity may deserve to pitied be

(William Shakespeare: Sonnet CXLII)

Sings Bob Dylan:

Everything passes, everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And someday maybe
Who knows, baby
I'll come, and be cryin' to you

(Bob Dylan: To Ramona)

The Bard laments make-up women wear hides raw reality – he’s happy that the times they are a-changin’:

Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack
Slanders creation with a false esteem
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe
That every tongue says beauty should look so

(William Shakespeare: Sonnet CXXVII)

So writes the musician/songster:

They tell me to be discreet
For all intended purposes
They tell me revenge is sweet
And from where they stand, I'm sure it is
But I feel nothing for their game
Where beauty goes unrecognized
All I feel is the heat and flame
And all I see are dark eyes

(Bob Dylan: Dark Eyes)

Another imaginistic poet and singer deplores this cultural game of

one-upmanship:

And I've seen your flag on the marble arch
But listen love, love is not some kind of victory march
(Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah)

Concise, and black humorous be:

Tie your banner on you well
'Cause I want you
(Bob Dylan: Hallelujah)

https://youtu.be/B6IoRNRahqo

Without the presence of a beloved, the beauty of the surrounding natural environment  be not appreciated – according to the Bard:

Yet nor the lay of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew ....
Yet seemed it winter still and you away
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet XCVIII)

A sentiment expressed in the song lyrics below:

Winter would have no spring
Couldn't hear the robin sing
I just wouldn't have a clue
Anyway, it wouldn't ring true
If not for you

(Bob Dylan: If Not For You)

There’s even a Dylanesque ‘”rhyme twist” included: ~ ‘hue’/’grew’; ~ ‘clue’/’true’/’you’.

by Larry Fyffe

The lyrics of a number of Bob Dylan’s songs reveal that the singer/songwriter is well acquainted with William Shakespeare’s sexually suggestive sonnets.

Bob Dylan bases ‘Watered-Down Love’ on a sonnet by the Bard that tells the tale of Diana’s fairest nymph trying to drown the narrator’s lust for a woman, and his desire to have her for his Muse, but the water nymph fails to dampen the narrator’s love for  creating art:

Says the narrator:

.... but I, my mistress' thrall
Came there for cure, and this by that I prove
Love's fire heats water, water cools not love
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet CLIV)

The narrator in the song below casts mythology aside, and places blame directly on any fair damsel who’d get in the way of his art:

You don't want a love that's pure
You want to drown love
You want a watered-down love
(Bob Dylan: Watered-Down Love)

The message contained in the following sonnet can be interpreted to mean that unrequited love, lust unfulfilled, can actually inspire the creation of art:

Thine eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly
Have added feathers to the learned's wing
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet LXXVIII)

The narrator in Dylan’s ‘Hallelujah’ reformulates the above message – he wants both loves to be requited; he wants to have his cake and eat it too:

Tie your banner
On you well
'Cause I want you
And I couldn't wail
Stick the feather there
(Bob Dylan: Hallelujah)

Or, as it’s put in another song:

Raspberry, strawberry, lemon, and lime
What do I care
Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin, and plum
Call me for dinner
Honey, I'll be there
(Bob Dylan: Country Pie)

An obvious reference to a play by the Bard:

Do you think I meant country matters? ....
That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs
(William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act III, Sc.ii)

Decadent writer Oscar Wilde insists that the object of the Bard’s sexual desire, his inspirational Muse, is a  young male actor who takes on the parts of women in Shakespeare’s plays.

The Wilde claim is that the actor’s name is encoded in the two sonnets that follow – it’s ‘Willie Hughes’:

A man in hue, all hues in his controlling
Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls amazeth
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet XX)

According to Wilde, the fair actor is also referred to by the narrator in the funny, and ambiguously punny sonnet below; note as well that Elizabethans have a name for the penis – it’s ‘Will’, or ‘Willie’:

One will of mine, to make thy large 'Will' more ....
Think all but one, and me in that one 'Will'
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet CXXXV)

Binging it all back home to ‘Just Like A Woman’ by Bob Dylan:

I just can't fit
Yes, I believe it's time for us to quit
But when we meet again
Introduced as friends
Please don't let on that you knew me when
I was hungry, and it was your world
Ah, you fake just like a woman
(Bob Dylan: Just Like A Woman)

Sorrowful be the conclusion of the following sonnet:

Then if he thrive, and I be cast away
The worst was this, my love was my decay
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet LXXX)

Note the Dylanesque ‘rhyme twist’ in the song lyrics below ~
‘away’/’decay’; ‘day’/’decay’:

Situation just gonna get rougher
Why do we needlessly suffer?
Let's call it a day
Go on separate ways
Before we decay
(Bob Dylan: We better Talk This Over)

by Aaron Galbraith

It’s hard to believe but it was 20 years ago last month that the first White Stripes album was released! By way of celebrating the anniversary, and as promised, here is a look at the Dylan interactions in the career of Jack White III.

A Bob Dylan show was the first concert White ever saw — he says he had seat No. 666.

“I know that the first concert I went to when I was ten years old was Bob Dylan, and I really wanted him to play ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ – but he didn’t play it. I wasn’t upset. I kind of thought it was cool he didn’t when I was ten years old.”

That first album included The White Stripes take on Dylan’s “One More Cup Of Coffee.”

The album also included covers of Son House’s “Cannon” as well as the classic “St James Infirmary Blues”, which Dylan adapted for “Blind Willie McTell”.

Talking of Blind Willie McTell, the Stripes second album “De Stijl” was dedicated to the man, as well as including a wonderful version of McTell’s “Your Southern Can Is Mine”

A non-album single immediately followed this of McTell’s “Lord, Send Me An Angel”

The White Stripes really exploded into the world’s consciousness with the release of third album “White Blood Cells”. The second single “Fell In Love With A Girl” included a live version of “Love Sick” on the b-side.

In concert the White Stripes would continue to cover Dylan songs, including “The Ballad Of Hollis Brown”, “Blind Willie McTell”, “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding” and “Isis”.

Jack White told The Observer about Dylan’s need for privacy in 2004: “I guess I like that about him. It seems like everybody today is so available – ready, willing and available for anything, and will go on and be part of a reality show at the drop of a hat. It seems like nobody has any sort of dignity any more. Dylan was trying to maintain his dignity, and a lot of people from an era earlier than maybe 40 or 50 years, it was easier to maintain that dignity.”

In 2006 Bob included The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army” on the “Countdown” episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour”.

And then Dylan and White struck up a friendship in 2007.

“That was just by accident. I went and saw him play in Detroit and he said to me, ‘We’ve been playing one of your songs lately at sound checks.’ I thought, Wow. I was afraid to ask which one. I didn’t even ask. It was just such an honor to hear that.

“Later on, I remember I went home and I called back. I said, “Can I talk to the bass player?” I called the theatre. I was like, “Did Bob mean that he wanted me to play tonight? ‘Cause he said some things that I thought maybe – maybe I misconstrued. Was he meaning that he wanted me to play with him tonight? I don’t want to be rude and pretend that I didn’t hear or something like that.” So turned out yeah, we played together that night. He said yeah, come on, let’s play something, and we played “Ball and Biscuit,” one of my songs. It’s not lost on me that he played one of my songs, not the other way around.”

That night Bob and Jack played “Ball and Biscuit together. You can read about that here as well as listen to their take of the song (including the White Stripes versions of “Isis” and “Black Jack Davey”): Why does Dylan like Jack White’s “Ball and Biscuit”?

They also performed “One More Cup Of Coffee”, “Outlaw Blues” and “Meet Me In The Morning”. This might be the only time Dylan has performed “Meet Me In The Morning” live. Could someone confirm or deny this in the comments section below?

[Note from Tony: BobDylan.com has the total number of performances of “Meet me in the Morning” as “1” -September 19, 2007.  So it looks like it was the only one!]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROZHgFYqY68

Jacks “other” band, The Raconteurs also opened for Dylan on a leg of the Never-Ending Tour.

In 2009 Jack formed another new band, The Dead Weather, this time he mainly sticks to drums and writing, but pops up on guitar and vocals now and then. The first album “Horehound” contains a cover of “New Pony” with the wonderful Alison Mosshart on lead vocals.

In 2011 Jack contributed to Bob’s Hank Williams Tribute album “The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams”. You can read about Bob’s own contribution “The Love That Faded” here. The Love that Faded” by Hank Williams and Bob Dylan.

Jack contributed a great track called “You Know That I Know”.

“I did a project with Bob Dylan: he put together twenty or twenty-five people to finish writing Hank Williams songs that only had lyrics and didn’t have music – it was the opposite of this project. I did this a year beforehand – I had to write music for Hank Williams’ lyrics”

Also in 2011 Jack collaborated on a new album by Wanda Jackson, producing and playing on her album “The Party Ain’t Over”. Bob is quoted on the hype cover sticker, “An atomic bomb in lipstick…the queen of rockabilly”. He goes on to say “…could have a smash hit with just about anything”.

The album includes Wanda and Jack’s amazing version of “Thunder On The Mountain”. Here is the stunning official video.

In 2012 Jack was interviewed by the New York Times and discussed his friendship with Bob and Bob’s love of welding!

“This is my workshop,” he said. There were brown burlap sacks draped over some chairs, and sewing and woodworking equipment scattered on the floor. There were also some tools for welding, which White said he was getting into through his friend Bob Dylan. “I’d never done it before, and he’d been doing it for a while, so he kind of gave me the lowdown,” he said. One day the two of them were sitting on White’s front porch, just enjoying the view, when Dylan turned to him and said, “You know, Jack — I could do something about that gate.” “That would be pretty cool,” White said, laughing. “I don’t know what kind of discount I’m going to get.”

Just recently he was featured in Rolling Stone, again discussing his friendship with Bob.

“He’s been an incredible mentor to me, and a good friend, too. I’m lucky to even have one conversation with him. Everything else has been icing on the cake.

“He’s very complicated. A lot of people who go through fame, even a small taste of it, are going through experiences that probably no human being should ever go through. I’ve walked into a room and felt like I’m intimidating people. You don’t know what you’re supposed to do. I think people like Dylan end up trying to avoid that stuff”.

When asked if the two had written a song together, he offered the intriguing reply:

“I cannot tell you that. I wish I could tell you, but I cannot”.

Now wouldn’t that be amazing?

by Jochen Markhorst

Searching for a gem, looking for a jewel, as Dylan sings in “Dirge” and that is a well-found song quote for searchingforagem.com, the site that tries to bring order to the endless ocean of oddities and obscure Dylan releases.

The same sense of romance is evident from the name for the double album Nuggets, gold clumps, which Elektra releases in 1972, a compilation album on which obscure songs by obscure, mostly psychedelic bands from the period 1965-1968 are being saved from oblivion.

The unexpected, great success of the record indeed brings about a revaluation for some of the polished nuggets. For the band of Dylan’s organist Al Kooper, for example, The Blues Project, whose “No Time Like The Right Time” closes side 1. This does Al Kooper a kind of poetic justice; after all, the pop music-loving world owes him the retrieval of Odessey & Oracle, the Zombies’ masterpiece that only is released after the band has already disbanded itself due to a lack of success. “Time Of The Season” is the big hit, in 1969, two years after the Zombies recorded it.

The mine from which those lost gems are dug up, has since seemed inexhaustible. Not all excavations really deserve that delayed appreciation, but every once in a while: bull’s eye. In November 2016, 1968 is released, from the completely unknown Marvin Gardens. The band, from San Francisco of course, is mainly driven by the boundless talent of Carol Duke, a cross between Janis Joplin and Grace Slick. The Texan (from Lubbock, the birthplace of Buddy Holly) has the blues and folk in her blood, and that blends well with the psychedelic rock of her Californian brethren. The band dares to polish and beautify great songs from Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt and Hoagy Carmichael, and has own material too, but their piece de résistance is a Dylan cover: the lost ditty “Walking Down The Line”.

It is one of Dylan’s early railroad songs. From the very beginning, the construction of the first railways is idealized with big words like “connecting people”, “progress”, “unification” and “prosperity”. And rightly so, of course. In the Arts, however, the endless strings of steel soon symbolize Wanderlust, the romantic longing for unknown destinations and, strangely enough, demise, loneliness and abandonment too.

The train is a tragedy proclaiming leitmotif in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), in 1843 one of Dylan’s heroes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, chooses the railroad as a metaphor for the spiritual journey his protagonist makes (The Celestial Railroad), in almost half of all stories of another hero, Chekhov, trains come by, Melville often uses train imagery and the first filmmakers also recognize the dramatic power of a railway set (such as The Kiss In The Tunnel, 1899, and The Great Train Robbery, 1903).

Dylan is, as is well known, fond of the symbolic power of train transport and, at the very least, taken with the misty ambiguity that arises when allowing a roaming protagonist to walk down the line. After all, apart from walking along the railway line, it can also mean: going over a straight line to prove that you are not drunk, balancing on the border between Good and Evil, or staying good, walking in line. That last meaning is the meaning that the main character in Johnny Cash’s “I Walk The Line” expresses, and that particular song Dylan has had almost his entire life on a towering pedestal, as we understand from his autobiography Chronicles when he talks about his song “Man In The Long Black Coat”:

“In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my “I Walk The Line,” a song I’d always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master.”

This walk the line echoes considerably with the young Dylan. Alone in those early years he uses the expression in “Mixed Up Confusion”, “Bob Dylan’s Blues” and in “Restless Farewell”. And in “Walkin ‘Down The Line”, a remarkable song that of course does not have the mythical power of Cash’s masterpiece, but which also makes a fair impact.

Part of the attraction lies in the stimulating contrast between lyrics and music. The storyteller, who is dragging down the line, is certainly not happy. He has walked all night along the rails, melancholic, with a troubled mind, his girlfriend, who by the way is not too smart, is not feeling well and the money has run out. Sadness everywhere, but the musician Dylan lays a catchy, cheerfully hopping melody underneath, which gives the lament (unintentionally?) a comical charge.

The decor cannot be determined unambiguously. But his feet are flying and he is wearing his walkin’ shoes, so it is likely that the poet here tries to evoke the image of a destitute wanderer following a railroad. The poet has not given much love to the lyrics. It is also figuratively a directionless whole, a not too inspired collection of folk and blues clichés, with just one single Dylan-worthy flash: I see the morning light / Well, it’s not because / I’m an early riser / I didn’t go to sleep last night.

Dylan considers the song a throw-away, apparently, and treats it that way. To safeguard copyrights, he makes a Witmark recording (which will later end up on The Bootleg Series 1-3), for Broadside Dylan already recorded it once before, in October ’62, and in May ’64, at colleague Eric Von Schmidt’s home in Florida, it surprisingly pops up again, but it never reaches a stage or an album.

https://youtu.be/v4z3w8tVxoU

However, the song does not go unnoticed either. It is immediately picked up by colleagues and covered dozens of times in the 60s alone. The narrator’s suffering completely evaporates in all those cheerful, hopping arrangements, but that does not spoil the fun; the melody and the accompaniment have such indestructible, granite power that every adaptation is contagious.

The first one is recorded as early as 1963 and is done by the very charming and very talented Jackie DeShannon. It opens her debut album, which she originally wanted to fill with Dylan covers. Remarkable, because this is shortly after The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan; Dylan’s repertoire is by no means the inexhaustible treasure trove it will be a few years later. DeShannon’s record company Liberty, however, puts a stop to the intention and the singer has to limit herself to three Dylan songs (“Blowin ‘In The Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” survive too), accompanied by folk classics such as “500 Miles” and Dylan related songs such as “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”.

No own songs, by the way, and that is quite remarkable. DeShannon has written dozens of excellent songs. “Put A Little Love In Your Heart”, “Bette Davis Eyes”, “When You Walk In The Room”, “Breakaway”, to name just a few, and her songs are often covered. “Don’t Doubt Yourself Babe” on The Byrds’ first LP Mr. Tambourine Man is hers, for example, as well as Marianne Faithfull’s biggest hit “Come And Stay With Me”. But for her first album she does not dare to do her own work, oddly enough – or those fools from Liberty intervened again, which is of course a possibility too.

Anyway, the gifted songwriter acknowledges and recognizes Dylan’s mastery early on.

Other covers from this period all have a similar, dated sound and arrangements (Glen Campbell, The Dillards, Joe & Eddie, Ricky Nelson), without undermining the song’s charm.

“Walkin’ Down The Line” continues to be popular in later decades. Sometimes to boost a performance (Linda Rondstadt, for example), sometimes as an attractive option to fill up an album side (Ry Cooder with the Rising Sons, Eilen Jewell) and very occasionally on Dylan tribute records (the one by Robin & Linda Williams on A Nod To Bob Vol.2 from 2011 is great fun). In 1987 it seems that Dylan is finally giving in. The men of Grateful Dead want to play the song on their joint tour. It is even practiced, the recording thereof reveals a very pleasant, energetic version and Dylan seems to like it too – but ultimately rejects it again.

In the end, the most beautiful version is that excavated jewel from 1968 of the late revelation Marvin Gardens. The intro is goose bumps inducing, the arrangement fluctuates somewhere between The Who and The Doors, and is infinitely more intelligent and varied than the bulk of those dozens of other covers. But above all: it is one of the few interpretations where the interpreter respects the lyrics’ content. Singer Carol Duke and the band understand that they need to express the suffering of a bumped soul, walkin’ down the line with a troubled mind.

By Paul Hobson and Tony Attwood

This series of articles looks at Dylan’s reinterpretations of his own work, with video examples from his concerts.  The videos are selected by Paul and the commentary is by Tony.

Details of previous articles in this series are shown on the index “Dylan re-imagined”

Here we look at Girl from the North Country, Down along the cove, and two version of Don’t think twice.

Girl From the North Country late 90s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ylgc4y6Ipk

Bob gives us a long introduction, and it is unfortunate that the double bass is overloaded on the mix at the ends.   Interesting too that the audience cheers as he starts singing – how could the audience not know what this was just from the intro?

Dylan plays with the lyrics in a most curious way.  It seems to distance him from the woman rather than expressing his love for her – which is odd given the sympathetic accompaniment.  It almost seems from the singing like he is a dissolute old lover remembering a much younger women, while the music doesn’t reflect this at all.

The music indeed seems to say, yes I am doing well, everything is fine, but oh I remember those old times and I hope she remembers me as I remember her.  But somehow the voice doesn’t quite capture the same thought.

But… for the last verse – the repeat of the first verse, yes it does all work.  The instrumental section before that final verse does set us up perfectly, Dylan now sings with much more sympathy, and then plays a lovely coda with a repeated phrase before moving onto the harmonica.   This is performance is utterly worth hearing for this last quarter – as the band builds behind the harmonica we know that the singer is out there doing his thing, but behind all the bravado and fun he can still have positive thoughts for the old days.

Down Along The Cove 2006

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

In this version “Down along the cove” starts like a 12 bar blues and then suddenly goes a bit odd, and that is always how the song has been, for it is a song that seems to have no connection with the rest of John Wesley Harding.

Here the lyrics are almost unintelligible… is that deliberate?   Possibly so because the originals are not, in my opinion, Dylan’s most inspired lines…

Down along the cove
 We walked together hand in hand
 Down along the cove
 We walked together hand in hand.
 Ev’rybody watchin’ us go by
 Knows we’re in love, yes, and they understand 

What is interesting is that Dylan gets a seven minute performance out of what was originally just ten lines of very simple lyrics.  He does this of course by adding extra verses, and I think the puzzle here is simply, why?   Why reprieve this simple song and extend it so much?

My guess is that this must be the performance from the Cap Roig festival and Dylan chose the piece in relation to the setting.  I’ve not been, but the pictures look fairly cove like to me.   If you know, please do write in.  And if I am wrong, tell me gently.

Don’t think twice

But now with our final selection today, there can be no doubt why Dylan sings this over and over.  It is a staggeringly beautiful, sad, magnetic, hypnotic song.  In the first version below Bob just about makes it to the microphone in time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3niBKLN238

This version reflects the utter sadness of the song.  But still a song where the key lines are jump out and (if you are of an emotional turn of mind) bring tears to your eyes.

“I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul” indeed – and just listen to the audience singing along – a sing along out of sheer and utter devotion to this complete masterpiece.  The musical accompaniment is almost jolly, reflecting the length of time those of us in the older generation have know this song from the moment it first arrived on Freewheelin’.

But even all this doesn’t prepare us for the harmonica, played so gently and perfectly in keeping with the feeling generated by all that has gone before.   What a beautiful version.

And now compare and contrast that version from 2000 with this from 2019.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3WZgNGu1qY

After that opening verse I must admit that I was expecting the beat to come in to carry the song forward through the rest of the verses.   I am not sure if Dylan’s voice carries this slow version all the way through, but of course that is a matter of taste.  To me it sounds to too much like a lost soul thinking of the past, while the original (and the pervious version above) mixes the regret with the determination to move on in a much more balanced way.

And of course our own interpretations are always part of our own lives.  I think one needs to have love and lost in order to see the total depth in this “moving on” song.

But it is an extraordinary version, and I’m really glad to have had the chance to hear it.  And I loved the piano solo – and the way the lights go out at the end.

By Larry Fyffe

From the deep well of esoteric mystical knowledge that attempts to uncover the source of ultimate reality lying behind the world of light and darkness, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan draws out buckets of allegorical narratives, and ornate images (of water, wind, fire, and earth) which he then pours into cups filled with his music.

There’s the vision experienced by the bibical prophet Ezekiel:

And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the North
A great cloud, and a fire infolding itself ....
Also out the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures ...
As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man
And the face of a lion on the right side
And they four had the face of an ox on the left side
They four also had the face of an eagle
(Ezekiel 1: 4,5,10)

A very similar vision of birds and humans, of animals tamed and untamed, repeats in the New Testament:

And the first beast was like a lion
And the second beast like a calf
And the third beast had face as a man
And the fourth beast was like a flying eagle
(Revelation 4: 7)

Somewhat likewise in the Cabbalistic poem below:

Then from the light of Infinity a simple line
Hung down from above, lowered into space
And through that line, He emanated
Crafted, formed, and made the worlds
Prior to these four worlds, there was one light Of Infinity
Whose name is One, in wondrous, hidden unity
(Isaac Lauria: The Tree Of Life)

They be narratives and images that Dylan stirs together in the following song lyrics:

Just step into the arena
Beat a path of retreat up the spiral staircases
Pass the tree of smoke, pass the angel with four faces
Begging God for mercy, and weepin' in unholy places
(Bob Dylan: Angelina)

In the New Testament, Jesus (as his name comes to be pronounced in English) performs miracles, casts out evil demons:

Immediately there met Him out of the tombs
A man with an unclean spirit
Who had his dwellings among the tombs
And no man could bind him, no, not with chains ....
Neither could any man tame him
(Mark 5: 2,3,4)

The quote from Mark is not unlike the short narrative song below that depicts an outlaw of the Old West as though transformed by sparks of goodness emanated from the One:

John Wesley Harding
Was a friend unto the poor
He travelled with a gun in every hand ....
But no charge held against him
Could they prove
And there was no man around
Could track or chain him down
(Bob Dylan: John Wesley Harding)

Galloping onward, the singer/songwriter has a bit of fun with Ezekiel, Lauria, and Mark’s image. The goodly “boss” turns into a serpent; goes after Adam and Eve:

He renounced his faith, he denied his Lord
Crawled on his belly, put his ear to the wall
One way or another, he'll put an end to it all
He leaned down, cut the electric wire
Stared into the flame, and he snorted the fire
Peered through the darkness, caught a glimpse of the two
It was hard to tell for certain who was who
He lowered himself on a golden chain
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

Many writers have an affinity for the the imagery deployed by the Gnostics. The Bard
humourously depicts a lover who loses all sense of himself – indeed he’ll shed his serpent’s skin for the love of a lady – to him, she’s the Absolute One:

Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow
For what care I who calls me well or ill
So you over-grow my bad, and good allow? ....
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of other voices that my adder's sense
To critic, and to flatter, stopped are
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet CXII)

The words ‘care’ and ‘are’ don’t live in the rhyme-house no more.
Nor is ‘Will’ called ‘Bill’ at the time, but there’s:

The river whispers in my ear
I've hardly a penny to my name
The heavens never seemed so near
All my body glows with flame ....
You trampled on me as you passed
Left the coldest kiss upon my brow
All my doubts and fears have gone at last
I've nothing to tell you now
(Bob Dylan: Tell Ol' Bill)

Shakespeare rhymes ‘brow’ with ‘allow’; Dylan rhymes ‘brow’ with ‘now’.

https://youtu.be/vzgCXi69zEQ

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

To begin, and to avoid us getting rather mixed up, there are two Hallelujah songs.  One written by Leonard Cohen and one written by Bob Dylan.  This article concerns the Leonard Cohen piece.  The Dylan song is one of those pesky tracks that somehow we seem to have missed, despite all the grand claims I make on the site of reviewing every Dylan song.   A review of Dylan’s composition, complete with lyrics will be the next post on this site.

Dylan wrote his song in 1981  four years before Leonard Cohen wrote his song.  I wonder if there was ever a conversation between the two songwriters in which Dylan told Cohen he’d got a song called Hallelujah which wasn’t working very well, and Cohen then wrote his version.

That last bit is of course supposition, but what we do know is that Bob performed the Cohen version in 1988 whilst it was still a relatively obscure track, a few years before John Cale, Shrek, Jeff Buckley and a hundred other versions were recorded or performed.

It is also a song that has the associated story.   Bob Dylan asked Leonard Cohen how long it took to write Hallelujah.  The answer came back “two years”.

Cohen then came back to Bob and said, “I really like ‘I and I.’ How long did it take you write that?”

Dylan told him it was done and dusted in 15 minutes

David Remnick in his profile of Leonard Cohen in the New Yorker, points out however that it actually took Cohen five years to write “Hallelujah,” and when it was done, his label didn’t even want to release the album it appeared on because it didn’t seem commercial.  The Wiki article on the song says that Cohen wrote around 80 verses for Hallelujah, before it was condensed down to the final version.

But here’s a thought – if the five years is true, what this means is that both Dylan and Cohen were writing a song called Hallelujah at the same time.  Could be a coincidence of course.  Or maybe they did have a chat.  “What you working on Leonard?”  “A song called Hallelujah.  What about you?”  “Trying to find some songs for the next album.  Hallelujah you say?  I could give it a go.”

Here’s Bob’s version of Cohen’s work

And here is a live version by the composer…

As noted however, the song found greater popular acclaim through a recording by John Cale, which inspired a recording by Jeff Buckley.

Here is John Cale

Apparently over 300 versions have now been recorded, and it has been used in film and TV as well.  Here, to end the video selection is Jeff Buckley

One interesting link between Cohen and Dylan is that both composers change the lyrics of their songs.  The Cohen shows on the 1988 tour and the 1993 tour particularly varied the lyrics, and since then other performers have taken bits from different versions.

As for the lyrics of Dylan’s own song – well the lyrics are the reason my review of the song hasn’t appeared as yet.  I can’t understand a word.

I suppose the strength of the Cohen piece is that it can be reinvented so many ways to be joyful or sorrowful, according to how the singer wants to interpret the song.  Wiki, in its review, calls Cohen’s version dispassionate, Cale’s sober and sincere, and Buckley’s sorrowful.  The list of the ways it has been interpreted goes on and on.

And my guess would be that it is this, that has made the song attractive to Dylan – that it can be reworked to mean so many different things.  Just as his own songs can.  Here are the lyrics…

Now, I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah

Hallelujah

The point for many people, I suspect, is also that anyone can take a line from the song and it can mean something to that person in that situation.  And indeed that can be said of so much of Bob’s music.  I seem to have come across so many people who hold a few lines of Dylan very close to their heart.

But let me finish with one trio of lines

She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the hallelujah

And, well, yes, what exactly is going on there, particularly in relation to the lines that come before?  Please do let me know.

Here’s the verse in full

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the hallelujah

And some people say Bob can be obscure.

An index to some of the other articles in the “Why does Dylan like?” series is here.

by Patrick Roefflaer

A compilation album isn’t actually part of this series concerning the artwork of the sleeves of Dylan’s studio albums, but the history of his first greatest hits album is too beautiful not to mention. Especially since, in 1966-67, three albums appeared with that same title.

The Netherlands: Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits – No One Sings Dylan Like Dylan

• Released: March 27, 1966
• Photography: Jerry Schatzberg
• Art-director: ?

Worldwide, CBS Holland was the first to release a compilation of Bob Dylan’s songs – exactly one year before the Columbia Records did the same in the US. Up until then only three mono albums of the singer had officially been released in the Netherlands.

The title, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, wasn’t exactly right, as ‘Positively Fourth Street’ was missing and four songs were previously unreleased in Holland and Belgium and so completely unknown to the listeners. Because this compilation appeared before Blonde on Blonde was released, there’s nothing from that double album between the 12 selected songs.

On the front, there’s a picture made by Jerry Schatzberg, during a session for Blonde on Blonde. During that session, on January 28, 1966, Dylan fooled around with random object that were present in the photo studio. A picture was chosen of Dylan with a cigarette in one hand and an ridiculously large Zippo lighter in the other.

On the sleeve, a subtitle is visible in the upper left corner: ‘No One Sings Dylan Like Dylan’. A slogan first used by CBS UK on June 21, 1965, to promote Bringing It All Back Home.

Great-Britain: Bob Dylan – Greatest Hits

• Released: December 1966
• Photography: Jerry Schatzberg
• Art-director: ?

Some nine months later, CBS UK released a similar album in Great-Britain and Ireland, titled Greatest Hits. Like the Dutch compilation it contains 12 songs, but since Blonde on Blonde was a hit by then, there’s a different selection of songs.

Many people seem to think that this album first appeared in 1967, even suggesting it was released at the same time as the US version. However the album entered the British sales list on January 14, 1967, so a release date somewhere in the last weeks of 1966 is more probable.

More important for our story is that this British album has a different sleeve design. Like the Dutch release, this photo is chosen from the same session with Jerry Schatzberg (January 28, 1966).

On the front there’s a picture of Bob Dylan, deep in thoughts, before a white background and in his arms is a large book with a portrait of a Biblical looking man.

The bearded man is a fragment from De aanbidding der wijzen (The Worship of the Kings), a painting by Peter Paul Rubens from 1624. The book by Jacques Lassaigne, published in New York in 1958, is titled Flemish Painting from Bosch to Rubens.

There are other pictures from that sessions from Dylan with the book, which make it obvious that the picture is mirrored for the sleeve. That way there’s room for the record company’s logo on the left and titles of the album and the songs on the right.

On the back of the sleeve the song titles are printed once more, plus the pictures of six of the seven regular Dylan albums appeared until then – for some reason Another Side of Bob Dylan is missing.

US: Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits

• Released: March 27, 1966
• Photography: Rowland Scherman (front), David Gartner and Fred Hammerstein (back)
• Poster: Milton Glaser
• Art-director: John Berg

In early July 1966, while riding his Triumph motorbike, Dylan had an accident. After this, he disappeared completely from the public eye. As there was no communication at all from the Dylan camp, a lot of speculation was raised: the singer had broken his neck or he might even be dead. Others pretended to know he was in rehab.

Whatever the facts: Bob Dylan had a perfect excuse to cop out. His manager, Albert Grossman canceled all his obligations: the rest of the tour, plans for a book, a play and a movie. Even the deal to deliver one last album to the record company was renegotiated, so that he didn’t have to go into the record studio any more.

The staff at Columbia Records felt the chapter Bob Dylan came to an end and proposed a compilation album. The time was ripe as recently at least one big name had released a greatest hits for the first time: The Rolling Stones (Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) – March 1966), while others would do so soon: The Beach Boys (Best of the Beach Boys – July 1966) and The Beatles (A Collection of Beatles Oldies – December 1966).

Dylan himself however didn’t like the idea and refused to co-operate. He didn’t even want attend a photo session for the sleeve.

So the art-director had to be creative.

“Dylan had no direct input in it,’ explained photographer Rowland Scherman in 2013 to Ben Yakas. ‘It was in his contract that he could veto any picture he didn’t like. But this was actually in between contracts. He got another contract a month or so later [actually August 21 1967], but in between contracts he didn’t have the chops to change it.”

Front

The remarkable picture on the front is made by Rowland Scherman, then a freelance photographer mainly working for Life magazine.

The photo was made on November 28, 1965. On that day Dylan played the Coliseum in Washington DC. Scherman lived nearby and visited the concert with his wife. A good photographer always carries his camera and Rowland used his press card to get backstage.

In the book Encounters with Bob Dylan (Tracy Johnson – Humble Press, 2000) Scherman explained: “Dylan was in that dirty blue spot, doing some song I can no longer remember. I put the 300 mill on him, and I could see the whole thing. His hair, his halo, his harp — the three H’s. So, I went bang, bang, bang, bang — six or seven frames. No motor or anything. Then, I said, ‘Thank you very much, I’ll be leaving now.’ I didn’t hang around. I just kept thinking, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this,’ and went back to watch the rest of the concert.”

Sometime later Scherman showed the pictures to the fiancé of his sister, who happens to be the art director at Columbia: “I took them up to John Berg – he’d done dozens of album covers, and he looked through this stack, which was only about an inch-thick stack of slides, and the third one he picks up, he said, ‘That’s the next cover.’ It happened faster than I just told you about it.”

Berg offered him to buy the photo. “I got paid three hundred bucks for shooting that album cover. Three hundred bucks. In 1966, that wasn’t bad dough, it was a couple of months’ rent.”

“John Berg, smart as he was, blew it up big and cropped it real tight and flopped it so his face was looking the other way, and then wrote the type in the top of his head. It was my idea to shoot it backlit, and this may be the first backlit album anywhere. But it was his design that really made it as strong as it was.”

Back

On the backside of the sleeve, there’s a picture of a similar backlighted Bob Dylan.

There’s not much info to be found on this photo. To make the mystery even greater: there are two people credited: David Gartner and Fred Hammerstein.

At that time, Gartner was the official photographer of Playboy magazine and was specialized in making pictures of the bunny’s and all kinds of famous people at party’s.

In my search for info, I found David Gartner on Facebook. Much to my delight, he was prepared to answer my questions. “That photo was taken in Queens New York at Forrest hills tennis courts, now called Arthur Ashe Stadium. I was photographer and Fred Hammerstein. 1968.”

I suggested that it might have been Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York. On Augustus 28, 1965 Bob Dylan played there, for 15.000 people, the openings concert of his very first tour with a band.

Mister Gartner confirmed date and location, and added: “I do remember that the photo was taken behind the curtain. As he turned his head to the curtain and the floodlight hit behind him to lighten up his hair.”

About why there are two names mentioned, Mister Gartner explained: “It was my assignment to photograph Bob Dylan, [for the promoter for the concert, Jerry Weintraub]. As Fred Hammerstein was working with me I thought it would be fair to put both names down.”

So, as this picture was taken three months before Scherman made the picture used on the front of the sleeve, it’s possible that John Berg already had Gartner’s photo, recognized the similarity between the two images and worked from there.

Poster

Another stroke of genius from Berg was to add a third image of Dylan without facial features: a large poster, put inside the sleeve.

Again the design was pre-existing: Push Pin Studios had printed the poster in 1966 – but it isn’t clear if it was actually sold. The poster was designed by one of the founding members of the studio: Milton Glaser.

Milton Glaser was a graphic designer (in 1976 he made the I♥NY logo for the city of New York), and coincidently he happened to be a friend of Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. As such, Grossman had asked him to design the cover of Dylan’s book: Tarantula.

Glaser was inspired by a work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp: Self Portrait in Profile, from 1959. Just like Duchamp he drew Dylan’s profile as a black silhouette, simply placed against a plain white background. This places the focus on the huge colorful swirls which represent Dylan’s free flowing long hair. Long hair, that at this point in history was a symbol of freedom and non-conformity and would have had an obvious appeal to fans of his music.

Because the book was on hold, and it would be a shame to waste such a beautiful image, plans were made to sell it as a poster.

John Berg asked Glaser for few minor changes: the original hair was in brown and blue, so Berg asked for more color. Also, a suggestion of Glaser to add an harmonica in a holder, was found superfluous by Berg.

Grammy

The photo by Scherman and the design by John Berg (and his superior Bob Cato) win a Grammy for best album cover in 1968. “The Grammy shows up,” says Scherman, “and my name’s misspelled, just like it is on the album. Not only that, but the gramophone part was broken. I packed it back up and said, ‘Thanks a lot, but spell my name right and send me another Grammy.’ Never heard from them again. What knocks me out now is that he’s turned out to be one of the icons of the ’60s. That makes me proud, along with the fact that it’s in the Library of Congress.”

by Jochen Markhorst

Melanie Coe is seventeen years old when she leaves a note on the table and runs away from home. Her parents, briefing the media, seem concerned, but indignant too. “I cannot imagine why she should run away,” her father John complains, “she has everything here … even her fur coat.”

It’s true, Melanie does not lack anything. She is doing well at school, has a wardrobe full of clothes and even her own car (an Austin 1100). A-level girl dumps car and vanishes, headlines the London Daily Mail of February 27, 1967, next to an almost full-page photo of the debutante.

Striking enough to attract Paul McCartney’s attention. “We’d seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who’d left home and not been found,” McCartney recalls 30 years later, in the biography Many Years From Now. “That was enough to give us a story line. So I started to get the lyrics – she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up – It was rather poignant.”

Poignant enough to inspire the heartbreaking “She’s Leaving Home”, one of the highlights of the album that is the best record of all time, according to Rolling Stone and to Roger Waters and to The Oxford Encyclopedia, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).

Dylan is not a big fan. In September 1978, in the interview with Matt Damsker, he judges fairly clinically, looking back at John Wesley Harding:

“The Beatles had just released Sergeant Pepper, which I didn’t like at all, because I didn’t like… I could see that… Talk about indulgence. I thought that was a very indulgent album, though the songs on it were real good. I just didn’t think all that production was necessary.”

… and in Biograph’s booklet (1985) he even blames the entire trend for overproduction on that one Beatles album.

“Since the late sixties, maybe since Sgt Pepper on, everybody started to spend more of their time in the studio, actually making songs up and building them in the studio.”

That sounds pretty cool and pure, but Dylan’s own recording history is not entirely unstained either, of course. On The Cutting Edge, for example, we can follow how Dylan can spend hours and hours refining a song in the studio. “She’s Your Lover Now” is a good example, “Like A Rolling Stone” is a marathon, and on “Sad-Eyed Lady” Dylan himself reveals that it was only written in the studio, while the musicians were waiting for hours.

Still, he does have a point and his wonder can be felt. For Sgt. Pepper The Beatles have spent more than seven hundred hours in the studio; more than Dylan needs for his first twenty (!) studio albums. And true, all that tinkering and all those overdubs, additions and technical tricks take something away from the magic, from the pure artistry.

But: underneath, under that overproduction, the songs on Sgt, Pepper are “real good”.

One of those real good songs is “She’s Leaving Home” and apparently inspires Dylan to the theme of “Tears Of Rage”, to the jeremiade of a father who feels abandoned by his daughter.

Immediate cause seems to be, very unusual, an autobiographical fact, as mentioned in the first two lines:

We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day

Shortly before this, Dylan became the father of a daughter (Anna), who admittedly was not born on Independence Day, July 4, but still only a week later, on July 11 – close enough to allow some poetic freedom.

Such a major personal event usually leads to more sugary songs. Stevie Wonder writes the lovely “Isn’t She Lovely” at the birth of Aisha, Billy Joel the safe “Lullabye (Goodnight My Little Angel)” for his Alexa Ray, Kanye West (with Paul McCartney) the sentimental “Only One” as tribute to his little daughter North, The Beatles sing the antique baby song “Ain’t She Sweet”, Jay Z’s “Glory” … it’s a long list.

Sinatra’s “Nancy (With The Laughing Face)” is also included in that category, but that is not entirely justified. Composer Jimmy Van Heusen and lyricist Johnny Burke’s had originally, in 1942, only compiled a birthday song for Burke’s wife Bessie: “Bessie With The Laughing Face”. A year later, during a birthday party at Sinatra’s for three-year-old Nancy, both men improvise in jest “Nancy With The Laughing Face”. Ol’ Blue Eyes breaks and is sobbing with emotion; he thinks the men wrote it especially for him. Embarrased, they leave it that way and when Sinatra even records the song in the studio, a few months later, they register the royalties in Nancy’s name.

Related are the songs of fathers who say goodbye to a phase of life and sing nostalgically the transition from child to adult woman. Neil Young’s “Here For You”, for example, and “I Loved Her First” from Heartland (“Girl You’ll Be A Woman Soon” should definitely not be included).

But a father / daughter song with the bitter, reproachful approach of “She’s Leaving Home” is actually quite unique, and that must have appealed to Dylan’s aversion to sentimental clichés.

Unlike The Beatles, Dylan does not opt for a narrative ballad, but for the dramatic monologue. The influence of Robert Browning, presumably. Browning’s substantive influence popping up in Dylan’s oeuvre is a constant. For the last verse of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, he borrows from Browning’s last verse of “Up at a Villa – Down in the City” (the avoiding of scandals, the wearing of sandals and the rhyme with handles). The much quoted there’s no success like failure from “Love Minus Zero” paraphrases Brownings often recurring preoccupation with success and failure (“Shall life succeeding in that it seems to fail, and a minute’s success pays the failure of years”). And the world could come to an end tonight from “I and I” can be found in “The Last Ride Together” (1855).

Not coincidentally, they are all dramatic monologues, from which Dylan draws. The poetic form, the form in which an ego addresses a fictional audience or a silent opponent, is of course not Browning’s invention, but is perfected by the Englishman. T.S. Eliot is a follower, and Dylan, who by the way will also feel a kinship with Browning’s brilliant rhyming, too.

An additional advantage for the bard who is so fond of keeping things vague (according to Dylan scholar Joan Baez), is the ambiguity that is almost ingrained in this form; the conversation partner being invisible and unknown, allows by definition the circumstances to be open to multiple explanations. The You can also be an abstraction, for example, or a population group, or a social movement, or the mirror image of the narrotor – open hunting season for enthusiastic Dylan exegetes with cryptoanalytic ambitions, at any rate.

“Tears Of Rage” is a popular object of study. “An allegory of the Vietnam experience,” Tim Riley sees, with soldiers on the beach and incapable, deceitful commanders. A song from the perspective of the Founding Fathers, about the current state of affairs in the United States, thinks Paul Williams. King Lear comes by regularly and Sid Griffin sees Jesus references in we scratched your name in the sand. In John 8, the scene with the adulterous woman, Jesus writes “something” in the sand, presumably “he who is without sin cast the first stone” – all in all a rather far-fetched and even by Dylan standards very thin reference.

The “find” in Lamentations 3: 48-51, proudly pointed out by some commentators, turns out to be just as thin:

Streams of tears flow from my eyes because my people are destroyed.
My eyes will flow unceasingly, without relief, 
until the Lord looks down from heaven and sees.
What I see brings grief to my soul because of all the women of my city.

… triggered by tears and grief, obviously. But alas: this is a Bible translation from 1978. In 1967 Dylan browses the King James Version, which does not mention tears or grief:

Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people.
Mine eye trickleth down, and ceaseth not, without any intermission.
Till the Lord look down, and behold from heaven.
Mine eye affecteth mine heart because of all the daughters of my city.

And Greil Marcus, the man who also claims that Dylan “hysterically” shouted “You’re a liar!” at that Judas incident in Manchester (Dylan calmly sneers the words, barely raises his voice), nearly crashes at his canonization of this song and calls it, among other things, an “eerie invocation of Independence Day” – turning the holiday “into an image of betrayal and loneliness.”

My my.

The men from the first hour view it less historically or hysterically. Richard Manuel, who delivers the beautiful music to the lyrics, admits that he does not completely understand the text. Levon Helm calls it a number about a parent’s heartbreak and Robbie Robertson also knows: It’s from a parent’s point of view.

There is something to be said for that. Dylan has just had a daughter, shortly after Independence Day, has been touched by “She’s Leaving Home” and now sits down at the typewriter. Fanning out to empty fragments like the heart is filled with gold or to wait upon him hand and foot and especially the aggrieved why must I always be the thief fits Dylan’s changing understanding of art, as he will explain to John Cohen a year later:

“What I do know is that I put myself out of the songs. I’m not in the songs anymore, I’m just there singing them, and I’m not personally connected with them.”

Dylan explains this in response to “Dear Landlord”, which he writes in these same weeks, and is a credo that extends to most Basement songs.

The song acquires classical status almost immediately after The Band chooses it as the opening song for their monumental debut album Music From Big Pink (1968). The perfection of that recording scares others off; there are not that many covers – it even takes Dylan more than twenty years to play the song for the first time (June ’89 in Greece).

The members of The Band always have it on the set list. Moving added value has the rendition by composer Richard Manuel in 1985, a year before his death, recorded with Rick Danko (on his first official solo album, the posthumously released Whispering Pines: Live At The Getaway from 2002).

Joan Baez is an early bird, as early as 1968, but her a-capella arrangement has at most curiosity value. Beautiful is the live version by the Jerry Garcia Band from 1990, nice is the old-fashioned cover by Karate in the twenty-first century (on the EP In The Fishtank, 2005) and satisfying the recording by Ian & Sylvia, who have a kind of poetic right to the song (after all, three songs from Ian & Sylvia were recorded in the Basement too).

In his admirable Basement project Live At Joe’s Pub (2007), Howard Fishman opts for a minimalist, intimate approach and that one is also heartbreaking.

All covers share the melancholic, tear-jerking atmosphere of the original, but the only one that comes close to perfection is ex-Byrd Gene Clark, on his masterful album White Light from 1971 – thanks in particular to the plaintive colour of his voice, comparable to Manuel, and the Band-like interpretation of the arrangement.

Nevertheless, the “second original”, The Band’s, remains untouchable – apparently that one really cannot be improved. From the album that Roger Waters says is after Sgt. Pepper the most influential album in the history of rock ‘n roll, Music From The Big Pink – “it affected Pink Floyd deeply, deeply, deeply.”

By Larry Fyffe

Pointed out by Jochen Marthorst is that the lyrics that make up Bob Dylan’s song ‘No Time To Think’ can be reformulated into a series of reversed Petrarchan-like sonnets with the eight-lined octave coming after the six-lined seset with the rhyme scheme AABCCB.

That article if you have not seen it, is Dylan’s “No Time to Think”: reversing the sonnet with internal rhymes, and Eliot’s cats.”  

In case you are not that familiar with the Petrarchan sonnet, the lyrics presented below demonstrate how it’s done.   And in case you want to hear the song while reading the lyrics presented in this way, here once again is the cover version that Jochen selected…

The first sonnet:

In death, you face life
With a child, and a wife
Who sleep-walks though your dreams into walls
You're a soldier of mercy
And you're cold, and you curse you
Cannot be trusted, must fall

(A different version than the one quoted above says “curse he” to keep the rhyme with “mercy”)

Loneliness
Tenderness
High society
Notoriety
You fight for the throne
And you travel alone
Unknown, as you slowly sink
And there's no time to think

The second sonnet:

In the Federal City
You've been blown and shown pity
For secrets, for pieces of change
The empress attracts you
But oppression distracts you
And it makes you feel violent and strange

Memory
Ecstasy
Tyranny
Hypocrisy
Betrayed by a kiss
On a cool night of bliss
In the valley of the missing link
And there's no time to think

The third sonnet:

Judges will haunt you
The country priestess will want you
Her worst is better than best
I've seen all these decoys
Through a set of deep turquoise
Eyes, and I feel so depressed

China doll
Alcohol
Duality
Mortality
Mercury rules you
And destiny fools you
Like the plague with a dangerous wink
And there's no time to think

The fourth sonnet:

Your conscience betrayed you
When some tyrant waylaid you
Where the lion lies down with the lamb
I'd had paid the traitor
And killed him much later
But that's just the way that I am

Paradise
Sacrifice
Morality
Reality
But the magician is quicker
And his game is much thicker
Than blood, and blacker than ink
And there's no time to think

The fifth sonnet:

Rollin' in jealousy is
All that he sells us
He's contented when you're under his thumb
Madmen oppose him
Your kindness throws him
To survive it you play deaf and dumb

Equality
Liberty
Humility
Simplicity
You glance though the mirror
And there's eyes staring clear
At the back of your head as you drink
And there's no time to think

The sixth sonnet:

Warlords of sorrow
And queens of tomorrow
Will offer their heads for a prayer
You can't find no salvation
Have no expectation
Any time, any place, any where

Mercury
Gravity
Nobility
Humility
You know you can't keep 'er
And the water gets deeper
That is leading onto the brink
And there's no time to think

The seventh sonnet:

You've murdered your vanity
Burned your sanity
For pleasure you must now resist
Lovers obey you
But they cannot sway you
They are not even sure you exist

Socialism
Hypnotism
Patriotism
Materialism
Fools makin' laws
For the breaking of jaws
And the sound of the keys as they clink
And there's no time to think

The eighth sonnet:

The bridge that you travel on
Goes to the Babylon
GIrl with the rose in her hair
Starlight in the East
You're finally released
You're stranded with nothin' to share

Loyality
Unity
Epitome
Rigidity
You turn around for one real
Last glimpse at Camille
'Neath the moon shinin' bloody and pink
But there's no time to think

The ninth sonnet:

Bullets can harm you
And death can disarm you
But, no, you will not be deceived
Stripped of all virtue
As you crawl through the dirt you
Can give, but you cannot receive

No time to choose
When the truth must die
No time to lose
Or say good-bye
No time to prepare
For the victim that's there
No time to suffer or blink
There's no time to think

By Tony Attwood

There is something about the 12 bar blues.  And there is something about White Stripes – I utterly loved that duo.   And indeed so did Bob.   Certainly Jack White is one of the greatest guitarists of them all.

Dylan has always been a fan of the 12 bar format – that straightforward three chord song where the first line is repeated and then answered.  Probably because of the number of possibilities it adds.  You’ll find 12 bar songs on Dylan albums from the earliest days onwards.  “Down the Highway” on Freewheelin” to “Highway 61 Revisited”.  From “New Pony” to “Til I fell in love with you.”

So what of Ball and Biscuit?

It came from the album “Elephant” by the Stripes, and became a big fan favourite, despite not ever being released a single.   The reason for that was probably it’s length.  Record company executives like to keep their singles short.  And of course radio stations wouldn’t like to play it.

The whole song is about a man/woman relationship which could also be about drugs – it depends how you want to interpret the lyrics; most people go with the drugs link, as it is fairly obvious all the way through.

There is also the whole seventh son thing, relating to the special talents a seventh son is supposed to have.  The seventh son of a seventh son reaches god like powers in the myth – but it appears that Jack White is the seventh son – or at least that is what is said in some of the publicity.

Here’s the White Stripes doing it their way

It is considered by many to be the best Jack White song ever.   The Washington post said of the song in its review that it was the Stripes “definitive statement.”

Now let’s hear the album version, which is of course what introduced most people to the piece…

This is, I guess, what Bob heard and what knocked him and out.

Here are the lyrics – and we can see here the mysticism that Bob has liked in many parts of his career – in this case the mystique of being a seventh son.

It’s quite possible that I’m your third man, girl
But it’s a fact that I’m the seventh son

It’s quite possible that I’m your third man, girl
But it’s a fact that I’m the seventh son
And right now you could care less about me
But soon enough you will care, by the time I’m done

Let’s have a ball and a biscuit, sugar
And take our sweet little time about it
Let’s have a ball, girl
And take our sweet little time about it
Tell everybody in the place to just get out
And we’ll get clean together
And I’ll find me a soapbox where I can shout it

You read it in the newspaper
Ask your girlfriends and see if they know
You read it in the newspaper
Ask your girlfriends and see if they know
That my strength is ten-fold, girl
I’ll let you see it if you want to before you go

Let’s have a ball and a biscuit, sugar
And take our sweet little time about it
Let’s have a ball
And take our sweet little time about it
Tell everybody in the place to just get out
We’ll get clean together
And I’ll find me a soapbox where I can shout it

Yeah, I can think of one or two things to say about it, now listen

It’s quite possible that I’m your third man
But it’s a fact that I’m the seventh son
It was the other two which made me your third
But it was my mother who made me the seventh son
And right now you could care less about me
But soon enough you will care, by the time I’m done

Yeah, you just wait
So stick around, we’ll figure it out

And since we are talking about Bob doing a White Stripes song we can reverse the compliment.  Here are the Stripes doing Isis

And (again) since we are doing Dylan / White Stripes links there is Black Jack Davey which Bob played 18 times in 1993.

Of course the trouble with this sort of connection following is that it can go on forever.  For example the Incredible String Band also recorded Black Jack Davy, and Dylan went out of his way to praise the ISB when asked about the Beatles – Dylan famously citing “October Song” by ISB as a song he particularly liked.

The fact is the Stripes, Dylan and indeed the Incredible String Band have this same thing in common – they all love to explore, to twist, to turn and to seek out new meanings within the music, as well as seeking out new ways of making the music do something new.  It is all about exploration.

Of course quite often the meanings that emerge are not overt and clear, but they are part of the music, even if they cannot be turned into straight explanations.

And because you don’t have to play any of these videos unless you want to, and you can also stop them if you don’t like them I thought I would indulge myself and offer the ISB singing Black Jack Davey.

How did we get here?  Well, much the same way that Bob travels with his musical interests.  You simply start from any point you like and keep listening as you find more and more connections.   If you want more ISB you can take a look at the article, “Why does Dylan like October Song”

Here, to stop this little meander is “Black Jack Davey”

I’ve stopped.  But we can always start again.

What else is on the site

You’ll find 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.

The index to the 500+ Dylan compositions reviewed is now on a new page of its own.  You will find it here.  It contains reviews of every Dylan composition that we can find a recording of – if you know of anything we have missed please do write in.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  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

This series of articles looks at Dylan’s reinterpretations of his own work, with video examples from his concerts.  In this article we look at Just like a Woman from the late 1990s, “It’s all over now baby blue”, and “My back pages.”   As ever the recordings are selected by Paul Hobson and the commentary and personal comments are from Tony.

Details of the previous episodes in this series are shown at the end of the article.

First off today then, is Just like a woman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ska5ZpaEf4A

Very unusally for Bob Dylan he starts with a harmonica solo, and it is a wandering and occasionally rambling solo not at all typical of Bob’s normal work.  And that provides an intro for the fact that when he begins to sing it is a halting, uncertain voice that emerges.  Indeed he’s so laid back he’s almost retreating.

The singer is totally resigned to the situation; he is broken by what has happened and what he has seen as the musicians weave counter melodies around his voice almost tangling him up in his sadness and desperation.

And indeed when he gets to “What’s worse is this pain in here” it really does sound like he is going to break up.

In fact so much pain is there in here that it almost becomes a relief to move on to the next song – which in our case is “It’s all over now baby blue.”    And this time although the introduction eventually tells us what song we are going to hear it does take a while.

But when we do get to Bob’s vocal it is clear at once that we are getting a very much more reflective, inward looking consideration of the song than we are used to.

To my ear it does take Bob a verse to get into the new mood of the song, but it is certainly worth persevering with this piece because from the second verse onwards we get an interpretation that is well worth hearing and a very clear re-consideration of the emotions within the song.

In fact it is one of those re-working of songs that made me want to go back to the lyrics and reconsider them myself, even though I have lived with them since they were first heard on the LP.

Whereas sometimes the song appears to be just a statement of fact – almost a “get over it, it is over, move on” this is not that at all.  There is a deep sadness here which we don’t always hear, particularly as the instruments weave in and out of each other’s melodic line

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p20f4h_I_ec

And indeed when Bob tells us “they will not bother you” it is with a level of regret that we rarely hear.

There is also a most curious effect when Bob sings the “all” in “It’s all over now baby blue” wherein he sings a note outside of the chord that the band is playing, to give a dischord that again we are not used to in this song.  This break up really is tearing him apart.

And to stay with the meloncholia, we finish this set with My Back Pages from the 2000s.   As you can hear the audience is very appreciative of being at a performance of the classic.

Unfortunately the balance of the band doesn’t work all the way through after the first verse, which may well be just a fault in the recording, and it is a great shame, but still we can appreciate what Bob is doing here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2XwL-IL4UY

Between 1978 and 2012 Dylan performed the song 260 times, which is of itself interesting, given that it appeared initially on “Another Side” in 1964.  Quite what encouraged him to re-visit the song and perform it for the first time 14 years after he recorded the song I don’t know but it certainly gave the audience a surprise for which they show fulsome appreciation.

And the unexpected plaintive harmonica solo added to that sense of something special happening in the show.   Indeed the decision to extend the final instrumental section at the conclusion of the performance across several verses is inspired.  I am not sure there is another moment like this in Dylan’s work.

The series so far

• You can find the first article in the series here where we looked at Pretty Peggy O, Ring them Bells and the total reworking of Visions.
• The second article took in Like a Rolling Stone, Positively 4th Street and Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues.
• Part 3 took in Tears of Rage, Masters of War and Man of Constant Sorrow.
• Then we had  Re-imagined 4: If not for you, the Watchtower and Make you feel my love
• Bob Dylan Re-imagined 5 took us to  Shelter from the Storm, Forever Young, Simple Twist

By Larry Fyffe

In Norman Foster’s semi-humourous western movie ‘Rachel And The Stranger’, starring Robert Mitchum and William Holden, a purchased wife (Loretta Young) is treated not unkindly, but not lovingly by her husband (Holden); alongs comes a tall, dark stranger (Mitchum) who shows interest in  the wife; the cold-hearted husband realizes that he loves his wife, and he’d best start showing it.

A song from the western movie:

Once was a man, a hateful man
Had a wife, but didn't see the danger
'Til one day, one fateful day
Along came a tall dark stranger

(Robert Mitchum: Tall Dark Stranger ~ Webb/Salt)

Perhaps gathered from coincidence are the following song lyrics:

Oh sister,  when I come to lie in your arms
You should not treat me as a strange
Our father would not like the way that you act
And you must realize the danger

(Bob Dylan: Oh Sister ~ Dylan/Levy)

https://youtu.be/YiOnyZ5UClQ

The movie ‘La Strada’ (The Road) takes place in modern-day Italy. It mixes realism with surrealism; paints the same theme in darker colours –

Circus strongman, the abusive Anthony Quinn, unintentionly kills his circus rival, and only comes to realize that he loved his child-like drum-and-trumpet playing wife after he’s abandoned her, and she dies. She’s associated with  warm ‘air’ from the cosmological mythology of yore; the ‘mighty’ Quinn with cold ‘earth’; the Christ-like tight-rope walker with regenerative ‘water’. As the movie ends, the chain-breaking strongman grasps the wet sand with his hands as he crawls on the beach.

A crooner later sings along with the thematic tune from the ‘La Strada’:

If you would open up your heart
And let my love come shining through
You'd know how much
I wanna walk the road with you

(Perry Como: Travelling Down A Lonely Road ~ Rota/Galdier/Raye)

In his double-edged, often ironic, song lyrics, singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan shows the influence of Marcel Carne’s ‘”Children Of Paradise”, and Frederico Fillini’s “La Strada”, films that feature mimes and tight-rope walkers:

Yes, to dance  beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands with memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

For the moment at least, the speaker avoids the social command that one’s obligated to serve somebody:

She's got everything she needs, she's an artist
She don't look back ....
For Halloween buy her a trumpet
And for Christmas give her a drum

(Bob Dylan: She Belongs To Me)

In the face of these demands, the independent-minded individual struggles to loosen the chains that bind his destiny:

l don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake
Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break
In the fury of the moment, I can see the master's hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand

(Bob Dylan: Every Grain Of Sand)

Dylan envisions earthly existence metaphorically as a travelling troupe of acrobats and clowns:

They're selling post cards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlour is filled with sailors, the circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner, they've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants
And the riot squad, they're restless, they need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight from Desolation Row

(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

What else is on the site

You’ll find 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.

The index to the 500+ Dylan compositions reviewed is now on a new page of its own.  You will find it here.  It contains reviews of every Dylan composition that we can find a recording of – if you know of anything we have missed please do write in.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  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 the winter of 1975/76 Eric Clapton is in Los Angeles, in The Band’s Shangri-La Studio to record one of his most successful 70s albums, No Reason To Cry. But despite that success, he looks back with little satisfaction in his autobiography (Clapton: The Autobiography, 2007).

Clapton calls it a “drunken and chaotic album”, blaming it on his own unstable state, on the fact that he initially tried to record the album without a producer and on the idyllic location and circumstances of the studio. The men of The Band and producer Rob Fraboni come to the rescue. All Band members play along, Richard Manuel gives him the beautiful song that will be the opening song (“Beautiful Thing”) and Rick Danko writes and sings, together with Clapton, the successful song “All Our Past Times”. And above all: Slowhand is so lucky that Dylan is around, in those days.

It is a bit mysterious, by the way. Dylan “was living in a tent in the garden of the studios, and every now and then he would appear and have a drink and then disappear again just as quickly.” But during one of those brief visits from that tent-resident, Clapton can ask if the bard would contribute something to his album, “write,sing, play, anything.”

“One day he came in and offered me a song called “Sign Language,” which he had played for me in New York. He told me he had written the whole song down at one sitting, without even understanding what it was about. I said I didn’t care what it was about. I just loved the words and the melody, and the chord sequence was great. Since Bob doesn’t restrict himself to any one way of doing a song, we recorded it three different ways, with me duetting with him.”

It is, Clapton concludes this episode, all in all his favourite track on the album.

The short passage in Clapton’s memoir is intriguing. So Dylan has already played the song before, in New York. That must have been during those chaotic, overcrowded Desire sessions, to which the British guitar god has less pleasant memories. When he is invited, he is delighted, but the enthusiasm immediately evaporates when he enters the studio.

There are “two or three bands already waiting to go into the studio”, there are twenty-four musicians present and Clapton is one of the five invited guitarists. It is “not unlike being in a doctor’s waiting room” and he has the same feeling as when he first met Dylan in the mid-60s: “I felt like Mr. Jones again ”- with the witty self-mockery in which his autobiography excels, Clapton refers to the incomprehensible, disorientated Mr. Jones from “Ballad Of A Thin Man”, something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.

Despite all self-mockery, he does ignore the parallels with his own No Reason To Cry; according to the liner notes no fewer than forty (!) people are involved in the production thereof. In addition to the names of the men from The Band and Dylan, Ron Wood also stands out – according to tradition, Clapton was first offered “Seven Days”, but he passed that song on to the Rolling Stone, who indeed plays it on his next solo album (Gimme Some Neck, 1979).

The other intriguing point concerns Dylan’s own lyrics and genesis analysis: written down in one sitting without even understanding what it was about.

That seems a bit posed. It is not that complicated. Apparently a moderately inspired Dylan wanted to unleash his creativity on the potentially fertile, symbolic sign language metaphor. In song art, and in the arts at large, a rather unexplored image, indeed, that invites the creation of Nobel-worthy new poetic expressions.

Sign language, for example, beautifully depicts the limits of the human deficit, or is the key to deciphering what is not being said; thus beautifully symbolizes the inability and pitfalls of interpersonal communication – all angles which could infuse a language-loving, poetic genius like Bob Dylan in his usual form to an “Idiot Wind” or a “Man In The Long Black Coat”.

But he cannot reach those heights, in these days. We are on the eve of 1976, a year like 1972 and like 1984, years in which the spring is dry and the poet is watching the river flow, contemplating unreachable masterpieces.

Dylan has the phrase sign language, scribbles some rhymes in the margin, of which only sandwich and advantage survive, and even these rhymes he cannot squeeze in without hammering and prying:

You speak to me in sign language,
As I’m eating a sandwich in a small cafe
At a quarter to three.

In itself a promising, cinematic opening. Similar to the decor and the constellation of “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word” or the interlude of “Highlands”, and it seems to be based on Sinatra’s “Only The Lonely” (Each place I go only the lonely go / Some little small café) and on Sinatra’s “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)”: It’s quarter to three / There’s no one in the place ‘cept you and me – both can be found on the album Sings For Only The Lonely (1958), incidentally.

So: in three short lines an I-person and relationship stuff, a promising metaphor, the contrast of a banal act with a universal, human conflict, an attractive, Dylan-worthy rhyme find and references to the Great American Songbook … the way seems to be paved for a multi-coloured , mosaic-like Dylan classic.

The second verse does not really destroy hope;

But I can’t respond to your sign language.
You’re taking advantage, bringing me down.
Can’t you make any sound?

… does, however, lead to a first raised eyebrow. “You’re taking advantage”? The main characters, presumably love partners, have a communication problem, the click is no longer there, they no longer understand each other – that much is clear. But apparently the poet pertinently wants to paste the rhyme find sign language / advantage into it, even at the expense of a storyline, whether intended or not. After all, this is the poet who repeatedly defines his understanding of song art with the words: it’s the sound; words should not interfere.

Dylan does not succeed here in the latter; the content of the words “taking advantage” does interfere, is alienating and distracts from the sound.

The poet, who told Clapton he shook the lyrics out of his sleeve in one short session, recognizes this too. The third verse is therefore not very ambitious:

‘Twas there by the bakery, surrounded by fakery.
This is my story, still I’m still there.
Does she know I still care?

… a lazy, empty rhyme (bakery / fakery), a stylistic remarkably weak line of text (This is my story, still I’m still there) and a weirdly unsuccessful punchline, where the I-person suddenly becomes sentimental and – out of nowhere – wistfully wonders if she knows he still cares about her.

No, this is not the song artist who wrote “Abandoned Love” barely six months ago and who will build an alphabetical cathedral like “No Time To Think” in a year and a half.

Some rehabilitation then the final verse offers.

Link Wray was playing on a jukebox, I was paying
For the words I was saying, so misunderstood.
He didn’t do me no good.

The rhyming triple is nice and a pre-announcement of the rhyming pleasure that Dylan soon will demonstrate on Street Legal (“I took a chance, got caught in the trance or a downhill dance” in “We Better Talk This Over”, for example) and the greeting to Link Wray is appealing. Link Wray is thus admitted to a fairly exclusive members’ club, the club of Musicians Who Are Mentioned In A Dylan Song.

Neil Young, Alicia Keys, Blind Willie McTell, Ma Rainey and Beethoven, Billy Joe Shaver, Elvis … it’s a colourful, attractive mix of people and Link “Rumble” Wray will feel at home there. And apparently the name check also contributes to his already undisputed status; after Dylan, Link Wray is also sung by The Fall (“Neighborhood Of Infinity”, 1984), The Who (“Mirror Door”, 2006) and by Robbie Robertson (“Axman”, 2011).

With a sense of poetry, one might appreciate Robbie Robertson’s tribute to Link Wray as the closing of the circle; after all, Robertson plays two solos in that first homage, in “Sign Language”. Wonderful, again – it varies on that unusual, pinched, nervous little tour de force opening Dylan’s “Going, Going, Gone” on Planet Waves. Which is again very gracefully and sympathetically appreciated by Clapton, who is actually a much better guitarist:

“It also gave me the opportunity to overdub Robbie Robertson, doing his “wang bar” thing that I love so much.”

He is elegant, the godly Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire, triple member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, West Bromwich Albion fan and eighteen-fold Grammy Award winner from Ripley, Surrey.

Eric Clapton with Bob Dylan:

By Aaron Galbraith

“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of Progressive Rock. The man who attempted to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility. The legend who forced art into bed with Psychedelic rock, who donned capes in the ’70s and disappeared into a bank of keyboards and ten minute guitar solos, who emerged to find the Hobbit, and who suddenly shifted gears into fantasy and epic story-telling, releasing some of the strangest concept albums of his career.  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Prog Rock Tribute Concert To Bob Dylan…On Ice!!”

Starting us off tonight with their cover of “Open The Door, Homer” is the short lived English Prog band Titus Groan!

Thanks for that guys, the Bard would have been proud! It’s time to welcome our next act, give it up for the symphonic stylings of Refugee, featuring ex-The Nice members Lee Jackson and Brian Davidson plus future Yes & Moody Blues keyboard man Patrick Moraz. Here they are with their version of “She Belongs to Me”…

Wasn’t that something?? Love those keyboard solo’s Patrick!

Next we will be hearing a track from the legendary Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Here we have “Man In The Long Black Coat”

Now Greg Lake will step up to the mic for his take on a song he wrote with Bob called “Love You Too Much”

Thanks Greg…that was wonderful.

Now there is nothing Prog fans love more than a competition, so here is ex-Genesis Steve Hackett with his own version of “Man In The Long Black Coat”! Who does it best??

Now it’s time to bring out Yes men Steve Howe, Jon Anderson and Geoff Downes for their wonderful version of “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands!

Steve is going to stay on stage and take over from Jon on lead vocals for his version of “Just Like A Woman”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpCxSE_2rlI

Wasn’t that amazing! Now it’s time to bring out our headliner tonight…here he is…its ex-Genesis front man Phil Collins with his prog-tastic take of “The Times They Are A-Changin”!

Now like all good tribute concerts it’s time to end the evening with a special one of a kind supergroup! You know them from their time in groups such as Genesis, Yes, Asia and King Crimson. Ladies and Gentlemen let’s hear it one more time for Steve Hackett, with guests John Wetton and Chris Squire for their Prog Rocking version of “All Along The Watchtower”!!

Thanks for coming everyone…see you next time! Safe journey home, please remember to take all your possessions with you…and be careful on the ice whilst leaving the arena!!

What else is on the site

You’ll find 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.

The index to the 500+ Dylan compositions reviewed is now on a new page of its own.  You will find it here.  It contains reviews of every Dylan composition that we can find a recording of – if you know of anything we have missed please do write in.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  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

There are some songs by Bob Dylan that can be construed as ‘confessional’, as expressing the singer/songwriter’s strong personal feelings in the manner of poets like Allen Ginsberg.

‘The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar’ presents an allegory. In orthodox Christian terms, Jesus is depicted as a groom who’s waiting to be married to his bride, His church followers, once they’re found worthy.

With the benefit of hindsight, Dylan’s lyrics below can be interpreted as a peace-seeking Jewish groom who finds union with his Christian bride, Claudette, so far to be unworkable:

Don't know what I can say about Claudette
That wouldn't come back to haunt me
Finally had to give her up
'Bout the time she began to want me
But I know God has mercy
On them who are slandered and humiliated
I'd a-done anything for that woman
If she didn't make me feel so obligated
(Bob Dylan: The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar)

The singer/songwriter, or his persona anyway, throws back, with Juvenalian glee, any humiliation he’s suffered at Claudette’s hands:

What can I say about Claudette?
Ain't seen her since January
She could be respectively married
Or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires
(Bob Dylan: The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar)

It’s later revealed that Nazi escapees to Argentina, including the ‘architect of the holocaust’, were likely assisted by the Vatican.

The lyrics of ‘Dead Man, Dead Man’ could be said to depict a cob-webbed, tuxedo-clad Christian bride waiting around while she unrealistically expects her dead groom to return sooner or later; in the meantime, she colaborates with the gun-happy American rulers of modern Babylon:

What are you trying to overpower me with,
the doctrine of the gun?
My back is already to the wall, where can I run?
The tuxedo that you're wearing, the flower in your lapel
Ooh, I can't stand it, I can't stand it
You wanna take me down to Hell
Dead man, dead man
When will you arise?
Cobwebs in your eyes
Dust upon your eyes
(Bob Dyan: Dead man, Dead man)

Nevertheless, agreeing with a Christian poet, Dylan considers his experience  not be a waste of time:

Since then 'tis centuries,  and yet
Feels shorter than a day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity
(Emily Dickinson: Because I Could Not Stop For Death)

He has nothing but affection for the empathic Christians who sailed with him – he just stayed a day too long:

Strangers they meddled in our affairs
Poverty and shame were theirs
But all that suffering was not to be compared
With the glory that is to be
And I'm still carrying the gift you gave
It's part of me now, it's been cherished and saved
It'll be with me unto the grave
And then unto eternity
(Bob Dylan: In The Sumertime)

https://youtu.be/wY0xvjXcMD4