In his Modernistic Symbolist French novels and short stories that are presented in a rather imagistic surrealistic-like format, devoid of a tight plot (often in diction double-edged and satirical), Marcel Proust searches in vain for meaning, or purpose linked to human existence, except in the creation of art; he considers emotional aspects of life, like love and jealousy, to be fleeting – here today, and gone tomorrow, only to re-appear yet again.
Proust takes an Existentialist position in which the solitary individual is imprisoned within the secret self. Bound by language, the self is entangled in sensual experience, and internal feelings – good and bad – all mixed up with memories from the past, and hopes for the future – with little time left over to appreciate the magical things in life felt in childhood, like the smell of the sea:
To find any happiness, writes he:
It's better not to know, to think as little as possible,
not to feel one's jealousy with the slightest concrete detail
(Marcel Proust: In Search Of Lost Time)
Within a number of Bob Dylan’s, often double-entendred, song lyrics there’s a viewpoint present, albeit sometimes shifted, akin to that of the Romantic-inclined Proust:
She's got everything she needs
She don't look back
She can take the dark out of the night-time
And paint the daytime black ...
You will start out sanding
Proud to steal her anything she sees
But you'll wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees
(Bob Dylan: She Belongs To Me)
There be the following formidable song in which thoughts expressed therein are rather similar to those of the nonpracticing Jewish/Catholic writer:
Anger and jealousy is all that he sells us .....
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
And no time to think
(Bob Dylan: No Time To Think)
Indeed, the following song could be entitled “In Search Of Lost Time”:
It's been such a long, long time
Since we loved each other, and our hearts were true
One time, for one brief day, I was the man for you
Last night I heard you talkin' in your sleep
Saying things you shouldn't say, oh baby
You just might have to go to jail someday
Is there any place we can go?
Is there anybody we can see? Maybe
It's the same for you as it is for me
(Bob Dyan: Long And Wasted Years)
A title that’s referenced in the song lyrics below:
You break your promises all over the place
You promised to love me, but what do I see?
Just you comin' in, and spillin' juice all over me
Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again
(Bob Dylan: Odds And Ends)
Characteristic of the singer/songwriter, thoughts expressed by Proust he modifies, sometimes completely inverts:
... I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of trees ...
I was no longer near enough to the sea which seemed to me
not a living thing, but fixed; I no longer felt any power beneath it's colours.
(Marcel Proust: In Search Of Lost Time)
Transformed to:
... I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the pines.
I wasn't near it, but could feel the power beneath it's colours.
(Bob Dylan: Chronicles I)
One of the basic elements and symbols of times past – earth, water, fire, and wind – revisited.
Scott Cohen wrote a piece in Interview Magazine in February 1986 which basically seemed to consist of Dylan giving very short answers to a series of questions, including details of songs he particularly liked.
Included in the list was “Bony Moronie” which is referred to as “some great minor masterpiece.” I am not sure if that was Dylan’s actual comment, but I’m taking it that this was a song he particularly liked.
Bony Moronie was the third single by Larry Williams, released in 1957.
The song was a hit for Williams, and he had other hits in the next couple of years with “Short Fat Fannie”, “Slow Down”, “Dizzy, Miss Lizzy”, “Bad Boy” and “She Said Yeah”.
Wikipedia tells us that Larry Williams’ life “mixed tremendous success with violence and drug addiction,” and that he was a longtime friend of Little Richard – and indeed when Little Richard left rock n roll to become a preacher, it is Williams who was designated by the record company to take over as its lead performer.
This he did as “Short Fat Fannie” and “Bony Moronie” each sold over one million copies. And indeed some of his songs were covered later by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and John Lennon as a solo artist.
Williams success however faded quickly, and in 1960 he was given a three year jail term for drug dealing. However he did return with Little Richard in the mid 1960s both as a performer, as a manager and musical director, giving Little Richard considerable success once again.
However he seemingly never quit the drugs scene, and Wiki reports that in 1977 Williams threatened to kill Little Richard over a drug debt. Williams died aged 44 on 7 January 1980. It was reported as suicide.
However thereafter Martin Allbritton claimed to be Larry Williams, and toured billing himself as Larry Williams. There was also a 1970s revival of Larry Williams work thanks to a glam rock band, Hush who performed Bony Moroney.
Unfortunately the Hush recording of Bony Moroney is not available in the UK for me to display it here but here is Tom Jones singing it
So why does Bob Dylan like this song?
It is classic 1950s rock n roll, and we know that Bob has always had a fascination with this music from his young days.
And unlike so many fast songs of the era, this song does actually lyrics that run all the way through (compare, for example, “Hound Dog”). Also there are no compromises in terms of the pure 1950s rock music: the sax solo after the first two verses is the real thing – exactly capturing rock n roll before the electric guitar came to dominate everything. Yes there is a guitar in the second instrumental break which fades the song out, but its engagement is minor. This is the real rock n roll as it really did sound in the late 1950s.
Here’s another Larry Williams hit
Actually if you watch that video you can understand why as we got older, those of us who loved to jive moved over to modern jive. It is danced at a somewhat slower speed. Mind you it is still fast enough to be great fun.
There is a list of some of the other songs in this series in our index.
The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979–1981 is in its entirety devoted to the period that Dylan was born again as a Christian. He shared that new belief with the world through the studio albums Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love. To promote that new box set, a page in the form of a stained glass window appeared on bobdylan.com in November 2017. A click on the images grants acces to ‘never-bfore-seen memorabilia from the period.’
In the right part of the stained glass window there are two images of unused artwork for the cover of Slow Train Coming. The fifth image from the top is a watercolour of a prophet, with a staff / flower in his right hand. At the bottom right it is stated that the concept was designed by William Stetz and drawn by “Canner” [sic]. The other design (the eighth from the top) is solely attributed to William Stetz and represents a similar prophet who follows a train track from right to left. His discipels follow him, neatly in line.
Looking for more info on these drawings, I contacted William Stetz. It appears that he has never seen either of the “unused artworks”. “… although I later made similar illustrations myself, as proposals for Dylan’s album “Saved”, none of the drawings on this webpage belong to me and, as far as I know, neither to Catherine Kanner.”
In a next mail he emphasizes once again: “Typography IS mine, but I don’t think the figurative illustrations have any connection with the work of Catherine or myself. ”
Catherine Kanner responds equally astonished: “I can absolutely assure you that I have made only one piece of art for the cover of Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming. No sketches were submitted. There is only the finished pen drawing that has been used for the cover.”
She says she will take steps to see her name removed from those “rejected drafts”.
The illustration above is one of the rejected pictures.
Publishers’ interjection: Subsequent to our publishing this article Catherine Kanner sent a comment (which is published in full below in the comments section) saying the following. We’re grateful to Catherine for taking the time to put the record straight.
“This is Catherine Kanner, the artist of Dylan’s album cover for Slow Train Coming. The artwork you are showing on this screen page – Sleeve art – with the train coming straight on is not my work and should NOT be attributed to me. The small image of the album cover on the tracks appears to be unaltered and is my work. There are many art pieces floating around online that are attributed to me, but are fakes. Several people have contacted me for confirmation in hope that they had an original, only to be disappointed. Here is a link to an interview for Rock Pop Gallery where I tell the story of how the art was made: https://rockpopgallery.typepad.com/rockpop_gallery_news/2008/04/cover-story—b.html”
Art-director: Wm. Stetz
William Stetz (called Bill) is a graphic designer and photographer from Chicago. As a 25-year-old he moved to Los Angeles where he started designing posters for plays and films. He also makes some cover designs for local bands. Although there are no known names among them, one must have caught the attention of Bob Dylan – or someone from his entourage.
Bill Stetz tells his story in an email from 14 May 2019.
“1. I was drawn into a design project for Bob Dylan through Jude Elliott, the
girlfriend of my friend David Stafford. Jude was working as an assistant to Bob
Dylan who had opened a studio in Santa Monica – Venice, CA on Main Street
south of the corner of Pico Blvd.
This was a warehouse-type building on Main Street where Jude worked and Bob
used as a base/studio. Jude knew I was a designer and photographer (I had
been working for a motion picture title designer up to that time) and asked if I
would be interested to pitch an idea to Bob for his new album artwork, his first
Christian-themed album. CBS was the publisher for Dylan at the time and
although I dealt with CBS eventually, Dylan personally initiated the creative
process through me, up to the production phase of the work which was overseen
through CBS.
2. I met Jude at the Main Street space and we went upstairs. It was mid-morning
when I located the studio a couple of blocks from the beach. She led me to the
second floor of the loft, a large room that took up a lot of the second floor, and
then to a smaller unfinished room that faced the street. My first meeting with
Dylan was in that smaller room of the warehouse. Bob entered and appeared
more slight in stature than I had imagined. I was 5’11” and he was much shorter
and slim. Jude introduced us and then left. In a business-like manner I extended
my hand to shake his and immediately sensed that he wasn’t used to shaking
hands with people, but took my hand and we exchanged a timid grasp.
3. Dylan stood with his back to the warehouse window in the bare room, so he
was somewhat in silhouette to me or side-lit as he turned profile to the window.
He was soft spoken and didn’t say too much, but he wanted me to have a listen
to the music of his new album (Slow Train Coming) for me to get a flavor of the
work. He produced a cassette tape (which he wouldn’t allow me to take) of some
of the music on his album. I remember him using a small portable cassette player
to play “Gotta Serve Somebody” and we stood quietly while the music played.
Then he left the room while I listened to more of the music. Dylan never
expressed or described any visuals to me. He was all about the music. He gave
me full reign to come up with something in the way of art and I never felt that I
was in competition with the record company or another artist that might be
coming through the door. I felt some pressure about inventing a design that
would be appropriate for a musical artist that I respected and admired for so
many years. At the same time Dylan’s so completely unpretentious demeanor
allowed me to concentrate on my ideas all to myself. I left that meeting that day
and began my work.
Usually, as is the case, my first ideas come on the strongest. Working from my
original first thoughts often takes precedence to working and re-working an idea.
Slow Train Coming. It conjures the obvious of a train, a progression of forward
movement, forward ideas, people, moving forces. A train is a train — and all that
other stuff, too. But this train is a movement of spirit, conviction and forces of
man and god. This album was Dylan’s vision of religion, Christianity and so
building upon that idea I introduced the cross through the axe and made this
“slow train,” the movement of mankind down a track that was being laid, all
honed by a cross-wielding laborer that would pound a spike to the rails.
Not having the expertise to translate my idea into the illustration myself, I hired an
illustrator, Catherine Kanner, that I had met through another work project to do
the drawing.”
Here we let Catherine have her say. She told her story in March 2008 to Cover Story:
“My first job out of college was one working at a film titles company in Los Angeles (around 1980), after which I moved on to a permanent freelance illustration and design career which included regular work with the Los Angeles Times “Opinion” section. There, my editorial pen and ink illustrations appeared weekly. One morning, I received a phone call from out of the blue from one of my former co-workers at the film titles company (sorry, I don’t recall his name– [that would be Bill Stetz]). who had also moved on and who had seen my editorial work in the Times. “Drop everything,” he said. “I’m coming over with an incredible job!” As it turns out, he was now working as a freelance designer and had a good connection at Columbia Records. He rushed over and let me know that this was a potential cover for a Bob Dylan album, […] and that it had to be done and turned in that night!
The concept was very concrete as he expressed it to me. As he explained it, this album was to be Dylan’s exploration of Christian ideas through his words and music. I recall being amazed to hear this.
The graphic style was meant to have an engraved look – which pen and ink (my specialty) certainly mimics. Dylan’s concepts for the illustration were clear [sic] – he requested locomotive train coming down tracks that were being laid by a crew, and there was to be a man in the foreground holding a pick-axe. The axe was meant to be a symbol of the Cross. In my original sketch, I rendered the axe as it would naturally be, but I recall my friend insisting that I extend the top of the axe so that it more resembled a cross. I thought that was too obvious and argued for a more subtle approach, but in the end the axe was extended.
I did, in fact, finish the rendering that afternoon and after my friend took the piece, I never saw it again. I never met with anyone face to face at the record company, nor did I meet with Dylan.”
Bill Stetz confirms that he has stayed besides Catherine Kanner to give her instructions, while she was working: “I related all my ideas to Catherine and while I stood over her shoulder we worked out the image together. She did no work on the art outside of my presence and we made revisions to the art at her apartment studio.”
“The drawing was a patchwork of separate drawings that were reworked, cut from paper and fit together like a puzzle to create a forming the final work. I still own the original pieces of that work. From the composite, I had a film positive made of the line drawing and overlaid it on brown construction paper in the dimensions of the album cover for presentation. This gave it an old printing effect of having been produced on paper which had discolored or was of less than high quality paper stock. And, it looked like an album.”
“[Stetz] delivered the illustration to Columbia Records,’ Catherine continues. “And I believe it was about a week later that I heard back from him that Dylan had seen it – and he liked it! He wanted to use it as it was, however the record company wanted to give it another go, and I heard they used their own team and presented Dylan with new pieces in a style quite similar to mine (!!)”
In one of the emails Catherine sent me, she suggests that the “rejected drafts” on Dylan’s site are these proposals from the CBS staff, made in the style of Catherine and Bill’s work: “I cannot confirm this, but this could be an explanation. Again, I did not make any drafts, only the final approved and used artwork.”
Stetz adds: “I never heard directly from Bob Dylan what he thought of the work, but it must have made an impression as I did hear from the CBS art director for contractual arrangements to purchase the work. Jude seemed to think that Dylan liked the work a lot, so that pleased me.”
That art director is Tony Lane, former chef layout at Rolling Stone, but recently head of CBS. “When asked by Tony Lane if I wanted a credit as Art Director”, Bill Stetz writes, “I naively asked for the credit “cover design and concept” which is exactly what I did and what Columbia printed.”
“I had no input to Columbia about the photos or the liner. I presented only the cover artwork and typography as a completed layout overlay over a paper background. What I handed in “looked” exactly like the album cover that was published. Later I saw the finished album with back cover photo and liner art/copy when the album went public. I could have designed the whole thing and was not offered to do that.
I sensed some tension in my meeting with Art Director Tony Lane that I was allowed to do the cover art, through the insistence of Bob Dylan, as an outsider to the Columbia organization. That was my sense but I have no information to qualify those feelings.”
In an interview, reprinted in Howard Sounes “Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan”, Tony Lane confirmed that there was lengthy consultation within the staff of the record company about how clearly the message should be presented.
“There were great worries that they were going to lose their Bob Dylan core audience.” He added that Bob spoke about himslef in the third person, while discussing the artwork. Perhaps because he was referring to Stetz’s ideas?
“I am happy that the artwork was produced”, Bill Stetz concludes. “I am very proud that the idea took flight. I revere Bob Dylan as one of the greatest artists of our time and having played some role is his work makes me very happy.
Catherine Kanner was inducted in the Album Cover Hall of Fame in 2013 for her illustration on Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming.
“Since that time, there have been a number of Dylan scholars who have analyzed my illustration,” Kanner tells, “reading all sorts of mystical meanings and messages in the layout and concept. I have had a dialogue with one of these scholars (in Italy) explaining that my composition was simply designed to “tell the story”, and so it was not suffered over, or filled with deeper meaning.”
The back cover photo
The cross is also prominent on the back, in a photo of a man with a sailboat. The photo is the work of Nick Saxton (who later directed video for Michael Jackson). Saxton, like Tony Lane, was “closely involved in a secret Bible study.”
For the book Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Bob Dylan (2002), Scott M. Marshall interviewed the photographer Nick Saxton. Saxton told him that the depicted boat was on or near the Amazon and that the mysterious figure is not Dylan, but Gary Wright. Saxton had made that photo for the cover of his LP Headin’ Home (1979), which shows another photo of Gary on a boat. Somehow Dylan had seen that unused photo and insisted on using it for the Slow Train Coming cover.
The inner sleeve photo
The portrait of Dylan dressed in a leather vest and microphone in hand was made by Morgan Renard, the official photographer during the European and American part of Tour ’78.
A nice anecdote: Rolling Stone had an interview with Bob Dylan and wanted to put it on the cover of edition 278 – Dylan’s tenth cover! But when the photographer presented himself at Dylan’s dressing room before his performance at Madison Square Garden, Dylan refused to pose for him. He retired to the restrooms with Morgan Renard and got photographed there. Hence the urinal on the left of the frame.
And yet another anecdote, by Catherine Kanner: Years later, my parents were sitting on the deck of their house in Malibu, and a man was walking up the beach alone. My father recognized him as Bob Dylan. My mother (who is a character) waved him down. He actually came up to their house and she announced herself as “the mom of the artist who illustrated Slow Train Coming”. She had a copy of the art on the wall, and he came in to see. She said he was “modest and interesting”.
This is the first in what we hope will be a series of articles covering the art work on Dylan’s albums.
In November 2015, Andrew Lloyd Webber is considering adding yet another cat in a next revised version of Cats, one of the most successful musicals of all time. The musical is based on T.S. Eliot’s playful Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats, a collection of poems about a dozen cats and their lives. Originally, Eliot wrote the verses in letters to his godchildren and, as it turns out, sometimes also to friends. The compilation of those poems, in 1939, becomes a success.
The consideration of Andrew Lloyd Webber is due to the discovery of an as yet unknown poem about an as yet unknown cat, in a recovered letter from 1964, a letter of thanks from T.S. to his friend Anthony Laude for a dinner at his home. In it he also expresses his admiration for Anthony’s cat, the “particularly fastidious eater” Cumberley, a “dignified and beautiful cat”, whom he then honours with a nice ode on “Cumberleylaude”, a “gourmet cat” who enjoys life’s little joys:
The gourmet cat was of course Cumberleylaude, Who did very little to earn his dinner and board, Indeed, he was always out and about, Patronising the haunts where he would find, People are generous and nice and kind, Serving good food to this culinary lout!
With care he chooses his place to dine, And dresses accordingly, if he has time, Tasting all that Neville Road offers, With never a thought for anyone’s coffers! The best is only fit for the best he opines, When he wants salmon, or duck, or expensive French wines.
Witty, elegant, and clearly just a scribble; Eliot would undoubtedly have repaired the crippled meter for Old Possum’s Book and probably also added a few stronger rhymes. Remarkable, however, is the antique-looking but fresh rhyme scheme, a rhyme scheme that one will not find anywhere in the world literature: aab-ccb dd-ee-ff.
Not anywhere? Well, one single time, almost perfectly: in “No Time To Think”, Dylan’s verbose masterpiece on Street Legal.
In printed form, in Lyrics and on the site, the text is presented in eighteen four-line verses and thus it is not immediately noticeable:
In death, you face life with a child and a wife Who sleep-walks through your dreams into walls You’re a soldier of mercy, you’re cold and you curse “He who cannot be trusted must fall”
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
… but it is after rearranging the words like Dylan sings them:
In death, you face life with a child and a wife Who sleep-walks through your dreams into walls
You’re a soldier of mercy, you’re cold and you curse “He who cannot be trusted must fall”
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 first quatrain, with those two internal rhymes, is therefore actually two terzetto’s. Exactly how Thomas Stearn Eliot in anapestic tetrameters “actually” writes tercets in his cat poem Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town.
In the whole of St. James’s the smartest of names is The name of this Brummell of Cats; And we’re all of us proud to be nodded or bowed to By Bustopher Jones in white spats!
… which, just like the officially four-line couplets of “No Time To Think”, sounds like:
In the whole of St. James’s the smartest of names is The name of this Brummell of Cats; And we’re all of us proud to be nodded or bowed to By Bustopher Jones in white spats!
Same rhyme scheme, identical meter, equivalent inventive enjambements … if Dylan did not use Old Possum as a template, we see at least illustrated: great minds think alike.
Dylan the Poet does go one step further, though. Eliot’s cat poems remain playful and entertaining, not only content-wise, but also with regard to form, the form of children’s songs and folk songs. Dylan, on the other hand, is not only much heavier in content, but after two tercets he takes a turn to an octave, to two quatrains, thus constructing “reverse sonnets”.
And this applies to every pair of couplets: the lyrics actually consist of nine inverted sonnets – first the sestet, then the octave. The layout hides how tightly the word artist and rhyme champion Dylan adheres to that medieval-looking poetry pattern, only the recital reveals the brilliant rhyme finds. Especially those syntax-breaking enjambements of mercy / curse He in the first verse, or like in the last verse, where the reader unsuspectingly reads:
Stripped of all virtue as you crawl through the dirt You can give but you cannot receive
… while the listener gently rocks along with:
Stripped of all virtue as you crawl through the dirt You can give but you cannot receive
Just like, again, T.S. Eliot lavishly infuses his Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats with those brilliant rhymes through enjambment:
He is equally cunning with dice; He is always deceiving you into believing That he’s only hunting for mice. He can play any trick with a cork Or a spoon and a bit of fish-paste; If you look for a knife or a fork And you think it is merely misplaced
(Mr. Mistoffelees)
… or:
Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door. His name, as I ought to have told you before, Is really Asparagus. That’s such a fuss To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.
(Gus: The Theatre Cat)
… with which both Dylan and Eliot demonstrate being soulmates of the grandmaster Cole Porter, who constructs even more extreme hyphenations to rhyme weirdly naturally:
When ev’ry night the set that’s smart is in- Truding in nudist parties in Studios. Anything goes.
And
When Rockefeller still can hoard en- Ough money to let Max Gordon Produce his shows, Anything goes.
Wonderful, sparkling and skilled finds. But here too: Dylan’s “No Time To Think” is more ambitious. Reversing the classic Petrarcan sonnet is already an original trick, strangely enough. Although dozens of sonnet variants have been conceived since Petrarch, the reversal of octave and sestet actually never occurs. Rilke sometimes comes close and Dante also does something similar twice (but then writes two sestets, followed by an octave). Both times, incidentally, in the collection La Vita Nuova, the anthology that is a candidate for that famous “book of poems” that is “written in the soul” of the narrator in “Tangled Up In Blue”.
And it doesn’t stop there; the industrious Dylan strings together no fewer than nine sonnets, and in fact produces a complete series of sonnets for one song – quite a unique feat in song art.
Although the work idiomatically is at least as ambitious, it is less revolutionary on that particular front. Bible references, echoes of ancient mythology, unusual word combinations (so-called catachresis) and replicated fragments from old songs … T.S. Eliot’s technique, and one of Dylan’s style characteristics since the mid-60s.
Old song fragments seem to come from Cole Porter too, as the German Dylanologist and folklorist Jürgen Kloss notices in his remarkable article Rhyming With Bob (2007). A bit remodeled, but the spirit of “Let’s Not Talk About Love” (1941) leaves traces, to say the least:
No honey, I suspect you all Of being intellectual And so, instead of gushin’ on Let’s have a big discussion on Timidity, stupidity, solidity, frigidity Avidity, turbidity, Manhattan and viscidity Fatality, morality, legality, finality Neutrality, reality, or Southern hospitality Promposity, verbosity Im losing my velocity But let’s not talk about love
The other two verses are perked up with similar word processions (And write a drunken poem on / Astrology, mythology / Geology, philology / Pathology, psychology / Electro-physiology / Spermology, phrenology).
The impact is of course radically different. In Cole Porter’s song (first performance Danny Kaye, in the musical Let’s Face It!), the lyrics are aiming at laughter, and it succeeds in this area – this barrage of -idity’s, -ality’s and -osity’s does have a comic effect. Dylan can, obviously, not be accused thereof, of humour.
In essence, that is the criticism from many disappointed fans, Dylanologists and critics; Street Legal is “dead air”, Dylan sounds like a bad parody of Dylan, the poet overstretches, he produces empty poetry. And especially “No Time To Think” gets a bashing. One of the stupidest songs of his career, aimless abstractions, long-winded, melodically weak, just one long litany – it’s only a small selection from a garbage bag filled with hate mail and insults.
The criticism can be felt, but also demonstrates superficiality. The lyrics are elaborate, ambitious, intellectually challenging and anything but aimless. Lack of coherence, that could still be a justified reproach – but then again, that is not mentioned anywhere.
Form prevails, that much a somewhat more distant analysis seems to confirm.
In terms of content, it seems that Dylan had a kind of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” 2.0 in mind: a slalom along eternal, universal vices, along temptations that threaten human salvation, doom prophecy wrapped in poetic images and literary beauty. By the poet who once promised “t sketch You a picture of what goes on around here sometimes. tho I don’t understand too well myself what’s really happening.”
This time he casts his artist’s gaze on the Wide World and records materialism, just like in “It’s Alright Ma”, but now with a beautiful, antique metaphor (Mercury rules you) and desperate violence (stripped of all virtue). He heralds destruction (the moon shinin’ bloody and pink is Joel’s weather forecast for Judgment Day: “The sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord,” Joel 2: 31), and he denounces human failures such as hypocrisy, selfishness and infidelity.
Here, and in that the disappointed do have a point, the poet sometimes opts for perhaps too cryptic wording and too misty symbolism. That fifteenth and sixteenth verse, for example (or rather: the eighth sonnet), with that bloody moon of Joel, seems to condemn human susceptibility to outer appearances and superficial pleasures. We are on our way to the Babylon girl, to the Whore of Babylon, to moral decay, and we cannot resist taking a final look at “Camille”. Camille? La Dame aux Camélias, La Traviata? Or Camille from Kerouacs On The Road? She is, after all, a woman who is repeatedly abandoned (by Dean), and who is sometimes given a final look. The canon does not offer many other Camille’s – this is a dead end.
The Biblical references in this verse (Babylon, starlight in the East, the blood moon) force the associations with the verse You turn around for one real last glimpse towards Lot’s wife, who takes a final look at Sodom, on moral decline, and therefore turns into a salt pillar (Genesis 19:26). But that is one real last glimpse on Sodom. Or does the poet here mean a glance cast by “Camille”? In that case this poet is the only one who knows the name of Lot’s housewife; the Bible reveals neither her name nor the ones of their daughters.
Enigmatic. But: what beautiful, flowing, singing verses –
You turn around for one real last glimpse of Camille ’Neath the moon shinin’ bloody and pink And there’s no time to think
Still, this enigmatic quality is also the major pain for the disappointed. It is too much. Whereas with a masterpiece such as “It’s Alright Ma” impermeability contributes to the beauty (The handmade blade, the child’s balloon / Eclipses both the sun and moon), it stimulates resistance here – perhaps the critics perceive the chosen images as too academic, too artificial, not poetic enough:
Warlords of sorrow and queens of tomorrow / Will offer their heads for a prayer.
Well. Nobility and humility, the poet helpfully explains in the following verse. But that really does not help that much. “Warlords of sorrow”? It does not evoke an image, no. The reversal – the sorrow of warlords – would, but alas: that does not flow as nicely. And that probably demonstrates a decisive artistic argument, illustrates the poet’s art conception:
“It’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They… they… punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose.”
That’s what Dylan says in the Playboy interview with Ron Rosenbaum in November 1977 – around the same time he writes “No Time To Think”. “Words don’t interfere,” more important is how they sound. And well, yes, in that respect the poet succeeds. Warlords of sorrow and queens of tomorrow sounds wonderful and runs like a charm, indeed; a waltz, the dactyl, all those internally rhyming, assonancing o’s, the pleasant rhyme of sorrow – tomorrow … beautiful, but on a semantic level the words really stand in the way; their meaning does not contribute anything.
The words that “don’t interfere” seem, after all, not so much to have come up after a real sense of emotion or a genuine moral outrage, but rather have been picked from various sources which apparently float in the air, these days. Songs by Cole Porter, reading T.S. Eliot, and yet again pinches of Proust, by the look of it.
Dean in Kerouac’s On The Road always carries À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu throughout America as well, and from Dylan we know for sure that he has been browsing the book back and forth for more than half a century. We have seen Dylan’s fascination with lost time since the 1960s (“Don’t Think Twice”, “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, “Odds And Ends”), where not only an increasing “sense of Proust” can be registered, but also more and more Proust jargon and idiom is penetrating. Quite clear in late work such as “Summer Days” and “Floater”, irrefutable in Chronicles (in which Dylan hijacks entire sentences from Proust’s masterpiece).
Here, in this seventies song, the resonances are more vague still. The expression no time to think can be found twice in the Temps Perdu, for example, and all thirty-two nouns from those word processions in every second verse (memory, ecstasy, tyranny, hypocrisy, etc.) are also present in Proust’s masterpiece – including rather unusual terms such as epitome and materialism. Only a China doll is not mentioned (though abundantly clothing, porcelain, umbrellas, puzzles, painting and what-not from China). Well, the doll is maybe brought in by Chekhov then.
The only artists who risk a cover are brother and sister Gruska from The Belle Brigade, for the Amnesty International tribute project Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan (2012) and that is actually a very nice version. The singing of Barbara and Ethan comes close to the magical shine of the Everly Brothers, the guitars have a Ry Cooder-like vibe, and the dry drums and the warm electric piano create a beautiful, autumnal colour – no, there is nothing wrong with the sound and the words, with The Belle Brigade.
However, the cover does not lead to a revaluation. “No Time To Think”, like most songs from the underappreciated masterpiece Street Legal, continues to shine lonely and alone in a rarely visited, forgotten corner in the cellar.
Maybe Andrew Lloyd Webber could be persuaded to turn it into a musical.
——————–
There is an index of the songs reviewed in this series in: Dylan in Depth
Romantic writers, like Blake, react against the views expressed by those in the deistic Age of the Enlightenment (reason and science be the best path to follow in search for a better world) because the ridding of the old aristocrats leads to the triumph of a “new aristocracy” with their dark “Satanic mills”.
Realist writers, under the influence of Marx, focus on the plight of the working class under the capitalist system. Naturalist writers, under the influence of Darwin, on heredity and environment. Surrealists, under the influence of Freud, look to the role played by the subconscious.
Ayn Rand shrugs, and with her Objectivism that’s influenced by Nietzsche’s no-afterlife anti-altruism, reconciles Romanticism and Realism in her vision of ‘laissez-faire’ capitalism as an ideal model for production of goods; even an object of sexual ‘love’ is produced by the self-interest of a strong individualist. Alas, the ideal is despoiled by the ‘statism’ of liberals, feminists, fascists, and socialists.
The movie ‘Cool Hand Luke (based on a novel by Donn Pearce) with its final shot of two roads in an image of a cross, takes Rand, and her predecessors, to task – where does all this put God and Jesus?
Luke gambles, and gets his name by bluffing when the other players throw in their hands while playing a game of five card stud:
"Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand."
(Lukas Jackson: Cool Hand Luke)
His prisoner number is 37 in a chain gang overseen by the sadistic ‘Captain’, an allusion to:
For with God nothing shall be impossible
(Luke 1:37)
The Captain makes Luke suffer dearly for his masochistic he-man refusal to follow the commandants of established authority; given the odds of winning, rebellious Luke ignores the fact that he’s going to lose, sooner or later.
Looking upward, he complains:
"You ain't dealt me no cards in a long time. It's beginning to look like you got things fixed so I can't never win out."
(Lukas Jackson: Cool Hand Luke)
The film smacks of a deistical, if not an outright Existentialist, allegory – Luke as Jesus Christ:
And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying ....
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
(Mark 15:34)
In the lyrics below, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan puts on the mask of actor Paul Newman who plays the role of the unrelenting anti-establishment, anti-hero Luke:
The same way I'll leave here
Will be the same way that I came
I gotta a restless fever
Burnin' in my brain
(Bob Dylan: If You Ever Go To Houston)
https://youtu.be/vRjtAVYO9LU
An allusion to the description of Luke’s heroic but rebellious stint in the army:
"Then came out the same way you went in."
(The Captain: Cool Hand Luke)
Which, in turn, looks back to the Holy Bible:
This same Jesus, which is taken from you into heaven
Shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven
(Acts 1:11)
Luke’s memory is kept alive after the Captain kills him; the toughest member of the chain gang, played by actor George Kennedy, describes Luke’s spirit of resistence in terms rather sexual in nature:
"Oh, Luke, you wild beautiful thing!
You crazy handful of nothing!"
(Dragline: Cool Hand Luke)
On observing a sexy female temptress who teases the chain gang, Kennedy utters the following words:
"Hey Lord, whatever I done, don't strike me blind for another
couple of minutes."
(Dragline: Cool Hand Luke)
Bob Dylan throws Ayn Rand’s Objectivism out the window, and gambles on the Romantic Jack of Hearts:
Some people will offer you their hand, and some won't
Last night I knew you, tonight I don't
I need something strong to distract my mind
I'm gonna look at you 'til my eyes go blind
(Bob Dylan: Mississippi)
At the same time, the singer/songwriter, unlike beautiful loser Luke, is Realistic enough to know he’ll eventually lose out to the Ace of Spades:
I've been walking down forty miles of bad road
If the Bible's right, the world will explode
I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can't win with a losing hand
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)
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.
All Along the Watchtower (“so good it actually makes you forget Hendrix while listening”)
To make you feel my love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ0p7-MjI-E
“If not for you” comes of course from New Morning – although prior to the version that appeared on the album Dylan had recorded it with George Harrison – a recording that turned up on the first Bootleg collection with another version appearing on Volume 10 of the series. The song was also issued in Europe as a single and of course appeared on the Harrison album “All things must pass”. Olivia Newton-John had a hit with the song.
Dylan performed “If Not for You” with George Harrison during rehearsals for the Concert for Bangladesh in New York in 1971, but did not perform the song at the concert itself. However he has played it 89 times in concert – the last performance being in 2004.
In this live version Dylan has removed the skippy, jaunty feel that is established from the introduction on the album version. On that version there is even a three note glockenspiel part to add to the simple “I love you” feel – with a further tinkling in the middle 8. A very odd bit of orchestration for a Dylan song.
Dylan’s singing develops a feeling of emotion by the second middle 8 – we can hear the emotion in his voice that is expressed in the lyrics from there on. But in the live version the musical accompaniment has not such tinkling with it, and instead Dylan expresses the need for the subject of the song in the way he sings. His voice is much more at the centre – and of course there is no fade out – something which on the LP version just made me think it was a simple pop song nothing more.
It is (for me at least, even if for no one else) really interesting to play the album version and the live version next to each other. The melody has changed, the intensity is much, much greater, and when he sounds laid back it is not because he is disinterested but because the emotion is so overwhelming.
Really – if you have a moment, do play the album track and then the live version one after the other. It really is a change and quite an illustration of what Dylan does. He’s not just looking for another way to play a song, but is completely re-imagining what is going on within the lyrics.
Moving on to our second choice this time…
“All Along the Watchtower” is of course the song that was itself transformed by a cover version. Indeed it can be a shock to go back and hear the Dylan original on the album, if you have not heard it in a while.
Indeed it is easy to forget that this version was issued as a single – and maybe we forget that because it failed to make the charts.
Maybe it is that, as well as the success of the Hendrix re-working on the piece that made Dylan stick with it so much.
Here he really has reinvented the song, and it is nice on this version from the late 1990s to see the guys have a bit of fun together on stage as they seek to out-Hendrix Hendrix.
https://youtu.be/W2RFKxAiH84
On the original album “Watchtower” fits perfectly with the rest of the songs that mostly work in the same format. Now on tour however it has become something else – as it continued to do in the 2268 times the official site tells us it has been played.
The only other song to get into the 2000s in terms of performance is Like a Rolling Stone with 2063. The much adored “Tangled up in Blue” is still only on 1685 (at the time of writing this in June 2019).
And just in case you have forgotten what the Hendrix version sounded like, here it is.
Moving on to the third choice for this collection we have “Make You Feel My Love”. Dylan has played this from November 1997 on to the present day – 289 performances at the time of writing this review.
It was his review of this song that made me convinced that Heylin was a soulless geek who couldn’t tell a burst of real emotion if it came up and hit him round the face and punched him in the nose. He says, “Live performances in the winter of 2000 failed to reveal any hidden depths…” and in this and other reviews seems to me to be totally unable to appreciate that the album beings with a fade in (how rare is that) for “Love Sick” and then drags us slowly from desperation to hope. It was a journey – and a painful one at that – which he seems in his reviews completely unable to grasp.
This live version tells us a lot about what Dylan felt about the song himself – just listen to the way he plays gently with the melody.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1CwAhcMxiE
This really adds to the emotion of the song by keeping it under control – quite something hard to achieve. It’s a lovely version.
There will be more in this series in a short while.
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.
The two icons met for the first time in a smoke filled room in New York in 1964. Whilst it seems that Lennon was initially taken with Dylan, (it was he who passed around copies of “Freewheelin’” to the other Beatles), Lennon’s influence on Dylan’s writing around this time appears to be minimal.
Shortly after this meeting John would begin writing such songs such as “I’m A Loser”, “Nowhere Man” and “Norwegian Wood”. Bear in mind that John had already written “There’s A Place” in 1963 so this might have been the way things were heading in his writing anyway, but it’s easy to see Bob’s influence in lines such as:
"I sat on a rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
'It's time for bed'"
Dylan’s response to this song appears with “Fourth Time Around” both in the title, melody and lyric, particularly this couplet:
“I never asked for your crutch
Now don’t ask for mine."
It seems Lennon never fully got over that line or the song itself, alternatively interpreting it either as a parody of or as a tribute to Norwegian Wood throughout his entire life.
Nevertheless, after “Blonde On Blonde” was released, the pair met up for the infamous limo ride shown in the clip above, which was intended for the “Eat The Document” film. They are both clearly stoned, anxious and nervous of each other, the conversation is bizarre and free ranging, covering topics such as baseball, Johnny Cash, World War II and The Silkie (who covered both Dylan and The Beatles). I’m not sure much more can be gathered from the meeting, except Lennon gets the best line, “Do you suffer from sore eyes, groovy forehead or curly hair? Take Zimdawn! Come, come, boy, it’s only a film. Pull yourself together”.
Lennon continues to reference Dylan directly in lyrics throughout the next few years:
“I feel so suicidal,
Just Like Dylan’s Mr Jones”
Yer Blues (1968)
“Ev'rybody's talking about
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary
Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper”
Give Peace A Chance (1969)
“I don't believe in Zimmerman”
God (1970)
When the Beatles were recording the “Let It Be” album it’s well known that they warmed up with covers of old blues and rock and roll tunes, however they also pulled out several Dylan tunes to get the juices flowing for the day, usually these were led by Harrison, including run-throughs of “I Shall Be Released”, “Blowing In The Wind” and “Positively 4th Street”.
During the sessions Lennon led them through this short version of “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqK7KXt-fU
In 1979 Dylan put out “Gotta Serve Somebody”. It would seem Lennon took offense at some of the lyrical content in the track and penned his own response with “Serve Yourself”.
“I must say I was surprised when old Bobby boy did go that way. I was very surprised. But I was also surprised when he went to that Jewish group. That surprised me, too, because all I ever hear whenever I hear about him is – and people can quote me and make me feel silly, too – but all I ever think of is ‘Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.’ It’s the same man, but it isn’t the same man, and I don’t want to say anything about a man who is searching or has found it. It is unfortunate when people say, ‘This is the only way.’ That’s the only thing I’ve got against anybody, if they are saying, ‘This is the only answer.’ I don’t want to hear about that. There isn’t one answer to anything”.
In private he was even more scathing:
“Gotta Serve Somebody… guess he [Dylan] wants to be a waiter now.”
“Serve Yourself” was never released in his lifetime, but subsequently 2 versions have been issued, one on acoustic version and the other with piano.
Here is the best version in my opinion:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oXd25Jqi7G0
Bob wasn’t against the odd Beatle’s cover himself over the years and warmed up for shows with several selections including these 2 Lennon tracks:
Come together from 1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cg6NbBcKXY
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cg6NbBcKXY
“He got tomatoes
He got Rolling Thunder
He got arthritis”
Then in 1990 Bob added Nowhere Man to the show. Pretty good version here, although the sound quality isn’t great.
This leads us rather nicely to Bob’s “Roll On John” from the “Tempest” album. I was going to write a long piece here on my views on this track, but then I reread Tony’s review of the song and I found I had copied most of his thoughts, sometimes to the letter, so instead and I will take a quote from the review and also add a link to the full article (here).
“Roll On John isn’t a sad song about a friend that died. And it’s not a sonic fist-bump from one icon to another. It’s Dylan acknowledging that Lennon has become legend—another mythic character to populate his songs”.
The End of Innocence written by Bruce Hornsby and Don Henley was performed nine times by Bob Dylan during the autumn 2002 tour. The song was released by the composers as a single as well as appearing on Henley’s third album which took the name of the song for its title. Hornsby played piano on the track.
Hornsby spent two years with the Grateful Dead, and this year (2019) released his 21st album. He is still particularly remembered for his work with Bruce Hornsby and The Range, and his song “The Way It Is”. Although it is the social commentary in this and other songs that many have noted, Hornsby’s work is very notable for the way he uses rhythm and this has attracted many musicians to appreciate his work.
Don Henley (and I know you know all this, but I’m setting it all out, just in case) was a founder of the Eagles and wrote “Hotel California.” He’s been with the Eagles all the way through, including the re-founding of the group after they split up. Don Henley also shares a strong concern for environmental matters with Bruce Hornsby.
https://youtu.be/ucgB8i9JvdY
I’m setting out the lyrics straight away, before going onto the rest of the commentary, as I personally found them hard to follow from Bob’s rendition and he has changed the lyrics very slightly in places. Here’s what I think Bob sings…
Remember when the days were long
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
Didn’t have a care in the world
Mommy and daddy standing by
When happily ever after fails
And we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales
Lawyers dwell on small details
Since daddy had to fly
I know a place where we can go
Untouched by man
Watch the clouds rolling by
And the tall grass wave in the wind
Lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me
Offer up offer up your best defense
This is the end
This is the end of the innocence
O’ beautiful for spacious skies
Now those skies are threatening
They’re beating plowshares into swords
For that tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we’ve been blinded by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie
I know a place where we can go
To wash away this sin
Watch the clouds roll by
The tall grass wave in the wind
Lay your head back on the ground
Let your long hair spill all around me
Offer up your best defense
This is the end
This is the end of the innocence
Who knows how long this will last
Or how we’ve come so far so fast
But somewhere back there in the dust
That same small town in each of us
I need to remember this
Darling give me just one kiss
And let me take just one last look
Before we say good bye
Just lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence
As others have pointed out, the “Tired old man that we elected king” is Ronald Reagan. And indeed there are a lot of political comments in the song, plus a Biblical reference (“Beating ploughshares into swords”) which relates to Isaiah 2:4 “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Here the lyrics reverse the Bible text, and I have also read that Hornsby shares with Dylan the concern about the decline in family farms which Dylan charted from Hollis Brown onwards. And indeed this concern was a strong enough concern to lead to Bob’s Live Aid comment about helping American farmers, and thence on to Farm Aid.
Here’s Bruce Hornsby’s version of the song – this video has a commentary in the middle which I know interrupts the music but I think it is an interesting commentary and a moving video of a beautiful song. And of course you can find the album and the song in full on the internet.
So there are a lot of elements that would draw Bob to this song – and if we step back from the detail of the song for a moment and consider it as a entity, and as I just noted, it is a stunningly beautiful and moving piece of songwriting.
For me it is one of those pieces that I find hard to analyse meaningfully, because it is the totalality of the piece that makes it beautiful, combined with the phrase that makes up the title.
I totally love the piece, and I’m glad Bob found it moving as well. The only regret I have is in the way Bob reimagined the piece, making it harder to hear the lyrics and cutting out some of the refinements of the melody. But on the positive side I am sure that because he chose to sing it many people not familar with the song before would have picked up on it for the first time.
Why does Dylan like –
Here are some of the other songs covered in this series
This series contains reviews of the songs of other writers that Dylan admits he loves… along (where possible) with examples of Dylan performing the songs, in contrast with the originals.
I’ve kept “October Song” on its own at the top of the list, because it is for me perhaps the most fascinating and interesting of all the songs included in this series.
“Here’s a mighty, mighty man, a mammoth talent…He’s the father of 14 daughters and 7 sons…He has 64 grandchildren, and 8 great-grand children. No wonder he’s singing this song!”
Thus deejay Dylan announces “Cry To Me” by Solomon Burke, in episode 39 of his Theme Time Radio Hour. Two weeks later, on Valentine’s Day 2007, he opens his radio show with another song from Burke (“Home In Your Heart”, in episode 41, Heart) and this time the radio presenter also delivers an anecdote about the soul king he so deeply admires:
“Solomon is one of the most colourful musicians in soul music. One of my favorite stories is how he once stopped his tour bus in front of a funeral parlor, because no one in his band believed he used to be a mortician. He took all his musicians in this aisle, where the funeral parlor owner was preparing a corpse. His band couldn’t believe it as Solomon took over. He embalmed the body, applied make-up and slipped a suit on the dead man, before climbing back on the bus, heading after the next gig.”
The story touches Dylan in several ways. He is a self-proclaimed Solomon Burke fan, he can of course identify with a band leader who is traveling by bus with his band, and this band leader is also a funeral director – an archetype who comes by a few times in Dylan’s songs (“I Want You”, “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, “Shelter From The Storm”). Dylan demonstrates his admiration musically, too. In March ’87 he records a fairly unknown and beautiful Solomon song from 1979: “Sidewalks, Fences & Walls”.
The four recordings thereof surface years later, in the same February month of ’07 when the deejay Dylan pays all that attention to the singing caretaker. A Dylan fan and friend of the late producer David Briggs (producer of Neil Young, in particular) apparently has been able to obtain the recordings and is now trying to sell it via eBay for $ 12,500.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvxFWPtOf48
When that does not work out, he offers $ 50 copies, which is not that smart; the first buyer puts the recordings on the net, shares them among others on expectingrain.com, so the entire Dylan loving community has the song in no time. In March 2008 a copy ends up with the writer of the song, the eccentric soul legend Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams and he posts an enthusiastic, proud reaction:
Hello Everybody,
I just found out about this last night….one of the greatest honors of my music career, Bob Dylan singing my song, “Sidewalks Fences and Walls”. David Chance turned me on to it. My educated guess is that Dylan’s keyboard man was Williams “Smitty” Smith, a guy I grew up with and taught to play the piano. Dylan is actually singing from the version I produced on Soloman Burke; using Soloman’s riffs, runs and inflections. I’ve never heard him this soulful nor have I ever heard him take on an r’n’b song this intricate. To be able to add Dylan to my list of who recorded my songs is part of my dreams coming true. Too bad it hasn’t been released commercially.
Love and Happiness to all,
Swamp Dogg
Burke’s respect for Dylan is similar to Swamp Dogg’s awe, just like the perplexity with which Solomon accepts a gift from Dylan in 2002: the throwaway “Stepchild” from 1978, intended for Burke’s come-back album Don’t Give Up On Me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy7wAKCwz4M
The song, originally called “Am I Your Stepchild?”, is a surprising choice, not to say: a missed opportunity. Dylan does have soulfuller leftovers in the drawer. “Making A Liar Out Of Me”, for example. Moreover, Solomon Burke is a pastor, and no small fry in that area either: his own church, The House of God for All People, has some forty thousand followers spread over two hundred churches in the US, Canada and Jamaica. That fact could have led Dylan to give up one of his many religious remnants. “Thief On The Cross”, “Stand By Faith” … the list of leftovers with a lot of Solomon Burke potency is long, but the master opts for the rather run-of-the-mill twelve-bar blues Stepchild.
Just as unfathomable is Dylan’s relationship with the song. “Am I Your Stepchild?” appears on the set list in the last months of 1978 and is played remarkably often: fifty-four times. Much more often than comparable blues songs such as “New Pony” (five times) or “Meet Me In The Morning” (once), which are considered good enough for a studio recording and an official release.
The performances are driven, Dylan sings passionately, guitarist Billy Cross is given room to shine with a dirty solo and from the first performance (Augusta, September 15) it is a solid, very pleasantly steaming blues. Three months later, for example in the Charlotte version, the tempo is slightly slower and the guitar solo replaced by smashing harmonica solos. He usually announces the song with “This is a new song I recently wrote” or similar words, and one time the bard says, “This is a new song I wrote about six months ago about a horrible love affair.”
The song does not have fully crystallized lyrics; Dylan sings different words every night – sometimes only four, five words differ from the previous evening, then again complete lines of verse are rewritten. On the last evening of that tour in 1978, it is played too and after that it gets discharged into obscurity. Dylan’s evangelical phase has begun and there is no room anymore for his secular songs. Then, after that Christian phase, Stepchild is definitively waived.
But when he dusts off the song for Solomon Burke in 2002, Dylan first polishes it up again. He radically rewrites all lines (except the chorus) and that is quite remarkable too. The text changes are not spectacular in terms of content. It remains the lamento of a hurt lover who feels wronged by a mean missus and again the chosen words are more or less within the traditional blues idiom. In any case, the lyrics are so insignificant that Solomon feels free to add another verse to it, to improvise in between and to name-check Dylan twice.
It causes a modest revival of “Stepchild”. The come-back from Solomon Burke is very well received, Don’t Give Up On Me receives worldwide acclaim and a Grammy Award (Best Contemporary Blues Album), sells excellently and scores highly in the end-of-year lists of both renowned music magazines and serious newspapers. And every article mentions that even Bob Dylan has contributed. Other big names are top musicians like Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, Nick Lowe and Tom Waits, and the name of Dylan producer Daniel Lanois stands out in the list of studio musicians.
Lanois plays the guitar on “Stepchild” and that leads to a little coda. Twelve years after Don’t Give Up On Me, in 2014, Lanois participates in Rock & Roll Time by the then 79-year-old legend Jerry Lee Lewis and points to the existence of “Stepchild”. Lewis recorded a Dylan song once before, a song writer who was unknown to him. That was “Rita May”, back in 1979, and Jerry Lee approvingly declared: “That boy is good, I´ll do anything by him.”
Thirty-five years later, The Killer returns to this unknown talent. His cover, for which he goes back to a more or less original, early text variant (the Oakland variant, November 13, 1978, comes close), is by far the most exciting version of “Stepchild”, wonderfully easygoing and swampy. In addition to Daniel Lanois, the phenomenon Doyle Bramhall II and co-producer, drummer and Dylan veteran Jim Keltner play along – but the exceptionally spry elderly Killer cannot be outplayed.
Jerry Lee Lewis
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.
His poems abounding in objective correlatives, the preRomantic William Blake, depicts social authorities dampening the fiery spirit of childhood – innocence lost; the light of motherly love, overshadowed by the sternness of a cold-and-distant father; the teachings of Jesus left behind by the patriarchs of religion who palm off social problems by invoking the dogma of ‘original sin’.
Blake presents a personal mythology, a vision in which he imagines a re-balance in the established order that drives away the dark clouds created by the Satanic mills of industrialized socirty:
The night was dark, no father was therehe child was wet with dewThe mire was deep, and the child did weepAnd away the vapour flew
(William Blake: Little Boy Lost)
In the song lyrics below, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan mocks the image of the tough guy who rebels too much against ‘feminine’ emotionalism:
Now, little boy lost, he takes himslf so seriouslyHe brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerouslAnd when bringing up her nameHe speaks of a farewell kiss to me
(Visions Of Johanna)
In the sparcely-worded, symbol-filled (translated) poem below, the sad narrator (a woman, not a a child) expresses the alienation that exists between the sexes in modern society, as well as the alienation experienced by workers that’s wrought by a nihilistic, capitalist society in which people are mere robots:
He poured the coffeeIn the cup ....He got upHe put His hat on his headHe put on his raincoat Because it was rainingAnd he leftWithout saying a word to meWithout looking at meAnd I buried My hands in my faceAnd I cried(Jacques Prevert: Breakfast)
Bob Dylan personifies today’s sociey as a sexually seductive woman who’s designed to accumulate material goods:
And your pleasure knows no limitYour voice is like a meadowlarkBut your heart is like an oceanMysterious and dark One more cup of coffee for the roadOne more cup of coffee 'fore I goTo the valley below
(Bob Dylan: One More Cup Of Coffee)
Harking back to the Holy Bible:
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colourAnd decked with gold,and precious stones, and pearlsHaving a golden cup in her hanFull of abominations, and filthiness of her fornication ....I will tell you the mystery of the womannd of the beast that carrieth her ....
(Revelations 17:4,7)
Dylan paints a Gnostic picture of present-day America as modern Babylon – the American Dream turns into a hedonistic nightmare. A popular band named the Eagles, with a sound bubbly as a meadowlark’s, carries that biblical theme:
Mirrors on the ceilingThe pink champagne on iceAnd she said, 'We are all just prisoners here of our own device'And in the master's chambersThey gathered for the feastThey stab it with their steely knivesBut they just can't kill the beast
( Hotel California ~ Henley/Frey/Felder)
Below, song lyrics inspired by poets William Blake, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and the Holy Bible:
But I know a place where we can goThat's still untouched by manWe'll sit and watch the clouds go byAnd the tall grass wave in the wind ....This is the end of the innocenceO' beautiful, for spacious skiesBut now those skies are threateningThey're beating ploughshares into swords
(Bob Dylan: The End Of The Innocence ~ Henley/Hornsby)
https://youtu.be/In9xgdv-PHA
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.
In this series we are looking at live performances by Bob Dylan in which he transforms a song in a most unexpected way. Paul has selected the videos; the commentary is by Tony.
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.
This time we are taking in Tears of Rage, Masters of War and Man of Constant Sorrow.
Here is Tears of Rage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8f4y336ts0
This is such a different interpretation of the song from that on the Basement Tapes that it is hard to express what is going on. Gone are the strange twists of the melody at the end of the lines, gone are the vocal harmonies, this is a stripped down version in which the lyrics rather than the music comes to the fore.
And given the history of the song and its co-writer it is thus much more powerful – if that is possible.
But it is the end of the chorus in this interpretation just tears me apart.
Come to me now, you know we’re so alone And life is brief
If she comes to him, all is ok, but if not all is lost. A whole life changed through one simple decision. And I have the feeling that is so often how it is.
Perhaps that is what moves me so much about the song, and thus about this performance. If you do feel that life is often ruled by chance, those two lines really take on such a powerful meaning. If not, well, I guess the impact is going to be a bit less.
In fact, there can’t be many songs that can make “Masters of War” seem like light relief but in this context it does happen – particularly when this re-imagined version of “Tears of Rage” is followed by this re-imagined version of Masters of War.
And actually I can’t believe anyone who heard this version of Masters of War knew from the introduction what song was about to emerge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_bi7PJgyR8
What Dylan is doing here is deliberately singing off tune and bending the verse and line structure so that the neat divisions of the original are completely lost. As a result the horror of what would happen if the masters of war unleashed the powers they have created is made much more real.
An easy listen it certainly isn’t but the task for the listener here is completely different from when we first heard the song.
For when “Masters of War” appeared for the first time, we all needed to hear the lyrics, for this was a completely new and different type of anti-war song; one that got to the very heart of American society and the much lauded “American way”. It took the American dream and revealed it to have been turned into a nightmare by the people who were running the show.
Now the words have become so familiar to so many of us, how can the song be performed any more without it just becoming a set of words so oft heard that the meaning vanishes? The answer is through this extraordinary performance.
It is certainly not a comfortable listen, but then it wasn’t when we first heard it. All that has happened is that the original has become too familiar.
But if that transformation with “Masters of War” was unexpected, then what Dylan did to the early 20th century folk song “Man of Constant Sorrow” was even more unexpected – and indeed even more remarkable.
This song, originally called “Farewell Song” appeared for the first time around 1913 in a book published by Dick Burnett, and it has been part of the American folk song tradition ever since.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HihJq1cgVB0
It is interesting how Dylan plays with the lyrics which interpret the original lyrics in a different way from the version on his first album.
Also the repetition of the last line of each verse give a much more dramatic impact to the whole piece. Here are the first three verses from this version
I am a man of constant sorrow
I’ve seen trouble all my day.
I bid farewell to old Kentucky
The place where I was born and raised.
(The place where he was born and raised)
For six long years I’ve been in trouble
No pleasures here on earth I found
For I’m bound to ride that railroad
Perhaps he’ll die upon this train.
Maybe your friends think I’m just a stranger
My face you’ll never see no more.
But there is one promise that is given
We’ll meet again on the golden shore.
We’ll meet you on the golden shore.
The three beats that pound through the whole piece are extremely powerful, leaving us unable to rest or jog along to the music (which is certainly something that can happen with the normal folk version of the song).
But all of that is actually the background, for there is something else here which gives us a very uncomfortable feeling about the whole song. Normally speaking the phrases of songs last for four or eight bars. Once you have heard a few dozen pop or folk songs you know exactly what is going on. You might not know any musical theory or know about four bar phrases, but you can certainly hear them and appreciate the roundness of the conception.
But here the first two lines of each verse lasts five bars. The next two lines take up another five bars. Then the final line is three bars line.
Dylan achieves this by stretching various parts of the song in unexpected ways. As a result it constantly tricks us, so we don’t know where we are. I have never come across a song doing this before.
The extension primarily happens at the start of each verse; it gives us that immediate sense of being on the edge – and being in constant sorrow. It is a remarkable technique. I hesitate to say it is unique – but I can’t think of anyone else doing it.
So another three re-interpretations. I hope you enjoyed them.
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.
“I Wanna Be Your Lover” is officially released only twenty years after the recording date, on the collection box Biograph (1985). Part of the charm of that box is the accompanying booklet with the liner notes from Cameron Crowe, which incorporates an extensive and fascinating interview with Dylan. The fifty-three songs are also commented separately, often with an addition by the master himself, and that is just as fascinating.
The short commentary on “I Wanna Be Your Lover” opens with a somewhat embarrassing error by the Rolling Stone editor. “A tip of the hat to the only song recorded by both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones – Lennon and McCartney’s I Want To Be Your Man.”
Apart from the annoying misspelling (it’s “I Wanna Be Your Man”): three-quarters of the participants of any given pub quiz in any friendly little country town would effortlessly rattle off four, five, six songs that were recorded by both The Beatles and The Stones. “Money”, “Carol”, “Memphis, Tennessee”, “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Little Queenie”, and if the pub quiz compiler likes trick questions, you can continue for a while with songs that the men recorded together “Dandelion”, “We Love You”, “All You Need Is Love”).
After that faux pas follows an intriguing remark from the master himself: “I always thought it was a good song, but it just never made it onto an album.”
Given the recording date (October ’65), the song was passed over for Blonde On Blonde, and that is quite understandable. Musically it would have been an enrichment – for example after Sad-Eyed Lady, to crush the descended, breathless awe with one cruel, disrespectful blow (much like the Beatles do with “Her Majesty” after the monumental “The End” on Abbey Road).
But the lyrics and the structure are both a carbon copy of “I Want You”, and that is probably why Dylan did not even bring the song to Nashville for the recordings of Blonde On Blonde. Which is a real shame, of course – how would “I Wanna Be Your Lover” have sounded with the thin wild mercury sound, what would a Charlie McCoy and a Kenny Buttrey have done to the song?
The similarities with the lyrics of “I Want You” cannot be ignored. Both songs have a – by Dylan’s standards – unusually simplistic chorus, in which the desire for an adored is expressed with little eloquence. And in both songs, that silly chorus is surrounded by a hallucinating Hieronymus Bosch-like multitude of colourful supporting actors, partly performing in both songs. The undertaker has a guest role both times, the midnight suit is patched into a Chinese suit and rhymes with cute both times, the rainman returns in “Stuck Inside Of Mobile”, just like Mona by the way, and yet another judge (after “She’s Your Lover Now” and “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way”) tends to overkill.
Dylan must have acknowledged, all in all, that he is plagiarizing himself, that the lyrics were written with the Dylan-o-Matic at full capacity.
Blonde On Blonde thus escapes a black frayed edge. Although an ongoing story is not told here, almost all evoked images and actors do have a sinister charge. In these years, a rain man most likely indicates the man who supplies the marijuana, but he also symbolizes Evil or the Devil with the Illuminati, just as rain, in Ezekiel for example, is the punishment of a furious God.
The judge is, as is usually the case with Dylan, harsh, Mona does not get a bail and disappears behind collapsing walls, while the rainman turns into a werewolf. The funeral director dressed in black sees the masked man coming back to life, Jumpin’ Judy is an old acquaintance from many pre-war prison songs, Rasputin, the possessed monk, mysteriously dies and the tragic Phaedra is having a hard time too.
There is really no correlation between all those shreds, which was not the intention, either. The song does indeed originate from that little refrain, meant to be a parody, with which a playful Dylan at a lazy moment in some studio corner mocks that Beatles / Stones song. With a recognizable Dylan touch: the rhyme king manages to rhyme hers with yours (“yerrs”). That again inspires Lennon to a wink back – two years later he writes the ironically titled “Yer Blues” with the famous verse feel so suicidal just like Dylan’s Mr. Jones.
With superior bravado, Dylan cobbles together the surrealistic couplets around it, that same day in October 1965, presumably ignited by an urge to ridicule (“look here, this is how you do it”), rather than by the burning artistic ambition to poetically express an own reality.
The aftermath supports this option; Dylan immediately rejects the song. In the run-up to Blonde On Blonde, he is struggling more seriously with rejected songs like “She’s Your Lover Now” (sixteen takes) and “I’ll Keep It With Mine” (which he also tries to record in Nashville after the unsatisfactory takes in New York, tackling it ten times), but “I Wanna Be Your Lover” never gets any attention again – until 1985, when Dylan curiously declares to really appreciate the song. If so, why does he never play it?
Partly due to that heartless abandonment, the song remains a neglected cuckoo; it is rarely covered. The best-known cover is the one on the I’m Not There soundtrack and is quite beautiful. Yo La Tengo has been a favourite of pop journalists and music critics for twenty-five years, but the band does not really break through although fortunately they continue to make beautiful records.
In between, they have also shown respect for the Minnesota bard since 1989; almost every year a Dylan cover, usually a successful one, is released. The band from Hoboken, New Jersey produces even two covers for the soundtrack to the Dylan film; a beautiful languid, dreamy “Fourth Time Around” and an exciting restoration of “I Wanna Be Your Lover”. A lot of love has been put into it. Yo La Tengo reproduces the sound of the early Rolling Stones (including Brian Jones licks and Mick Jagger’s snarling stabs), copies an Al Kooper organ and has a harmonica honking along; smashing, all of it.
Very different, but just as attractive is the country-rock approach by the hairy quartet Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint on their widely acclaimed but unjustly unsuccessful Dylan tribute album Lo And Behold (1972). More melodic than the original, with contagious monkeying around in the background during the choruses, evoking Rainy Day Women.
An extension of Coulson cum suis is Peter Keane’s country rock (on Milton Street, 2002), with rockabilly accents and here and there even half a yodel – also very nice, actually.
A version by The Beatles will probably not emerge. The Stones is still a possibility, though.
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.
UberChristian Kees de Graaf takes control of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s
“Things Have Changed”; then he shouts out “God is Great”, and plunges the song into the ground because it’s not ‘Christian’ enough.
According to de Graaf’s interpretation of the song lyrics, Dylan considers the Battle of Armageddon is on its way, and that is that; so he gives up, throws his hands in the air, and doesn’t care:
“Dylan’s observation as to where the world stands, and is moving to is very much to the Christian point from a Biblical point of view, but is at the same time very much ‘out of range’ – as far as his own (and for that matter our) responsibility is concerned.”
But is the song really that simple? The author of the song, or his persona anyway, presents a rather Gnostic-like point of view of the world: it’s a dark place in which humans are trapped. The symbolic Titantic sails at dawn; and the Creator God’s not awake. Alas, the Monad’s love light has travelled to earth from so far away that the sparks hereof ignite only a few of those on board.
Not unlike the view expressed by a blues, jazz, rocknroll singer/songwriter:
My head was in a bad place, and I'm wondering what's it good forI been in the right place, but it must have been the wrong timeMy head was in a bad place, but I'm having such a good time
(Dr. John: Right Place, Wrong Time)
“Things Have Changed” is a postmodern montage that combines lyrics from various sources, many of which de Graaf figuratively burns in the fires of the Inquisition if his ignoring them is taken as a signal:
I've been walking forty miles of bad roadIf the Bible is right, the world will explodeI'm trying to get as far away from myself as I canSome things are too hot to touchThe human mind can only stand so muchYou can't win with a losing hand
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wts1nD1t5Zc
A fan of movie star Humphrey Bogart, Bob Dylan messes with one of actor’s lines:
"And the only chance I've got .... is by staying as far awayas possible from you and the police because you'd onlygum up the works."
(Sam Spade: The Maltese Falcon)
The song lyrics suggest that the card decks of all humans contain the Ace of Spades that represents Death. Therein the song be also the alchemic symbols of earth, wind, water, and fire, and a number of Gnostics consider the Creator-God depicted in the Bible to be a Demiurge, a jealous offshoot of the fiery, far away practically unknowable Absolute Monad – who’s supposedly extremely difficult to get in touch with unless one dissolves his or her own ego:
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearthAshes and sparks, my words among mankind .....If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
(Percy Shelley: Ode To The West Wind)
Unlike the Shelleyan imagery above, the song lyrics below only manage to strike a tiny match to light the dimness of modern times:
I'm looking up into the sapphire tinted skiesI'm well dressed, waiting for the last train
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)
Even as the dark side of orthodox Islamic religion treats women unjustly, the Romantic poet of yesteryear is sure another train is on the way:
Column, tower, and dome, and spireShine like obelisks of firePointing with inconstant motionFrom the altar of dark oceanTo the sapphire-tinted skies
(Percy Shelley: Euganean Hills)
A modern dramatist/movie writer peers into this Gothic darkness; watches the kindly engineer as he heads the train out to the madhouse:
Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) –
"Don't get up, I'm only passing through. You arenot the gentleman I was expecting."
(Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire)
The words above are from a disturbing scene in the movie that are alluded to in Dylan’s song:
Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff tooDon't get up, gentlemen, I'm only passing through
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)
In short, there be other sources along with the Holy Bible by which to measure the meaning of “Things Have Changed”.
The first thing to note is that the song that Dylan played 30 times in concerts between 1999 and 2002 was one of two songs called “Somebody touched me”. The one Bob got attached to was written by John Reedy, and it is the original version of a song that has turned up in the repetorie of many singers.
The alternative song is also religious piece but is completely different and need not concern us here. I mention it because it can be easier to find the alternative – the one that was written by the Stanley Brothers.
So going back to the original here it is…
John Reedy performed with his sister Frances Reedy, and included the song “Somebody Touched Me” in their performances from the early days. It was often noted as “traditional” by way of composer, but there seems a general agreement that it was actually a Reedy composition. Citations of the song prior to Reedy are uncommon, and I am not sure they are valid – I’m staying with Reedy as the composer.
Once they started to make an impact the Reedy’s formed the Stone Mountain Hillbillys, with Glenn and Julian Ramey and recorded “Somebody Touched Me” in the late 1940s although I am not able to give an exact date.
The band played for many years on Kentucky radio stations before starting to perform alongside Chet Atkins and also with the Stanley Brothers, adding gospel music to their country songs.
And along the way lots of other people recorded the piece. Indeed on one web site I found the comment that the Boxcar Willie version of the song was the worst ever. I expected something truly awful, but really, is this so bad?
Anyway this is the song that Bob Dylan adopted for three years as an opener…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc-CYc_S_yw
I can’t imagine you need any help with the lyrics but just in case…
Glory, glory, glory, somebody touched me,
Glory, glory, glory, somebody touched me,
Glory, glory, glory, somebody touched me,
Must have been the hand of the lord.
While I was praying, somebody touched me,
While I was praying, somebody touched me,
While I was praying, somebody touched me,
Must have been the hand of the lord.
Glory, glory, glory, somebody touched me,
Glory, glory, glory, somebody touched me,
Glory, glory, glory, somebody touched me,
Must have been the hand of the lord.
Well, it was on a Sunday, somebody touched me,
It was on a Sunday, somebody touched me,
It was on a Sunday, somebody touched me,
Must have been the hand of the lord.
Glory, glory, glory, somebody touched me,
Glory, glory, glory, somebody touched me,
Glory, glory, glory, somebody touched me,
Must have been the hand of the lord.
But this was not a case of Bob digging into the history of this type of music as the popularity of the song was continued by The Stanley Brothers who continuing playing it until the mid 1960s. This version is from 1961.
And indeed the popularity of the song has continued well on to the present day. Here for example we have the Dillards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnIP89KR24k
One of the noted performances by Bob came on 17 July 1999 at the Blockbuster -Sony Entertainment Centre, Camden NJ. Unfortunately the recording quality is not the best but I’m including it because it does get mentioned so often on web sites.
Thereafter the song was officially released as the opening track on the Japan only cd Live 1961-2000: Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances.
So why does Bob like this song so much? Well it’s lively, it’s simple, it’s religious in a celebratory sort of way, and it sort of bounces along in an unpretenious way. Rolling Stone it ain’t but it is fun. And above all else it makes for a good opener.
If you think about it, the guys in the band have to come on stage and without any warming up, have to hit the ground with something that is going to get the audience bouncing, and which for them is dead easy to play. And yes, dead easy to play is important because they are coming in cold. So in that regard it works.
Here is a list of some of the other songs we’ve included in this series of Why does Dylan like…
This is rather a long piece, but its length is necessary in explaining how Bob Dylan songs can be translated into languages other than English. The article is based on a university lecture I gave in Polish to my Polish students and I present it here for anyone who is curious what the Bob Dylan song translation is all about.
The song I analysed was Like a Rolling Stone; an obvious choice. My first intention was to write it down just to justify my approach to myself, and to see if I did anything wrong and if I could verify my translator’s choices.
One of the crucial verifying points for a translated song arises when you play and sing it. And here the song worked; it felt comfortable to be sung and played. But a song of the stature of Like a Rolling Stone is not only to be sung and played comfortably, it also has to have a purpose to be sung and played.
LARS is an emblematic song and so its translation required special attendance and attention. Being one of the most important songs in the whole music industry and within popular culture, it proved a single can have long duration; can be played very loud; can touch complicated matters with difficult words; can be passionate and scathing. And, last but not least, that it can be ABOUT SOMETHING.
As a translator, I always have to either find the true meaning or choose one way of interpreting the original text. The more alternating ambiguities I can impose on my translation the better, of course. But when you’re confronted with a song like Like a Rolling Stone you have to find yourself a thread that will lead you through the labyrinth.
All purely American and historical contexts were out of the question: when I translate a song I want it to be perfectly suited to the Polish mentality. Which does not necessarily mean I simplify things; I only try to excavate the universal meanings so the song will resonate in Polish ears and souls, so it talks to us and gives us space for our own reflections.
Thus, the Edie Sedgwick connection was out of my radar. I preferred the song to be about youths, the young and vigorous élite, who are suddenly confronted with real life in the street. Or/and about the author himself. A warning and an advice.
One of the most important differences between English and Polish is that our verbs have genders. It always matters whether we talk about a girl/woman or a boy/man. So I literally HAD TO choose the gender of the LARS protagonist. I chose a female.
And in December 2013 I started working.
When a song has an instantly recognized lyrical motif – a title phrase, a chorus – I begin with it because otherwise I can’t go on. Here, I paid my attention first to the chorus – which, by the way, is sung four times in the official studio version but is not repeated verbatim. There are slight differences. Apart from the title phrase, what matters really is that the first line, “how does it feel”, always rhymes with the last line of each verse. There’s a long tradition in Polish poetry and song of not using only pure rhymes but also assonances where only the vowels match.
So, “how does it feel” was my first bite. I opted for “i jak to jest, no jak to jest” which means literally “and how is it, well, how is it”. And immediately I put down “kęs”, a word meaning “morsel” to replace the original “meal” from the first verse’s ending.
The next three/four lines are attuned with the “-ome/-one” rhyme. So now I had to find the Polish equivalent for the “like a rolling stone”. This made me ponder a bit. Not only is it the most prominent phrase within the choruses, it’s the song’s title. Who is a “rolling stone”? A vagabond, a wanderer, a restless spirit… But not necessarily here. Not this time, baby. You’re alone, away from home, the times turned bad – so you’re not a free spirit by your own design but rather a spirit expelled into liberty you didn’t know nor want.
You’re on the outside of your previous life, you’re chased away from your comfort zone. An outlaw?
First I thought „to be without a home” would be perfectly matched by „gdy dom daleko masz” (= “when you have your home far away/when your home is far away”). Thus, either I had to find an A-vowelled word for “rolling stone” or start all over again.
Leafing through my synonyms thesaurus I ran into a word “łach”. Its meanings are: a rag (textile); an old nag; a bum. BINGO! So “jak bezdomny łach” (= “homeless bum”) would be fine if it was not for the repeated ‘home-‘ element. I decided upon “błądzący” (= ”stray”). The last thing was the line “like a complete unknown”. I remembered the unknown people are sort of invisible, transparent. Where does one look to recognize other people? At their faces. So I wrote: „i przezroczystą twarz” (close to: „when your face is transparent”). And so I had the first chorus:
And how is it
Well, how is it
When your home is far away
When your face is transparent
And you’re like a stray bum?
All right, I lost the „like a” repetition but you can’t have everything at once.
And now for the verses.
“Dawno, dawno temu” (= “long, long time ago”) is a typical intro to Polish fairy tales so it suited me best for “Once upon a time”. But it required rhymes because in the original we have “time – fine – dime – prime”. (And then: “call – doll – fall – all” and “didn’t you – kiddin’ you”). An AAAAC BBBBC pattern.
First I found the rhyme “fart” (= “luck”) and “żart” (= “joke”) for the C lines. But to obey the content and the rhymes (for “temu” there are few rhymes in Polish that would make sense here). So for “you dressed so fine” I opted for “byłaś jak z wybiegu” (= “you were straight from a catwalk”). Then, for “you threw the bums a dime” I wrote “datek ubogiemu” (= “alms to a poor man”) and for “in your prime” I sailed away a bit and coined “a ty wprost z Edenu” (= “while you, as if from Eden”). Eden is absent in this particular Dylan song but for me it symbolizes here a better world.
The rest of this part of the first verse went smoothly “ostrzegano cię” (= “you were warned”) “to się skończy źle” (= “It’ll turn out bad”), “znajdziesz się na dnie” (= “you’ll find yourself on the bottom”) “ty myślałaś, że” (= “you thought that”).
So the first lines went:
Long long time ago you were straight from a catwalk
Alms to a poor man while you as, if from Eden
You had luck
They warned you, „It’ll turn out bad
You’ll find yourself on the bottom”, and you thought that
it was just a joke
So you can already see one doesn’t need to translate it word for word but rather to capture the spirit of the message and to deliver it convincingly. I might be meandering and straying myself but this is how it went. The way leading to the result is much more interesting than the result itself!
The second part of the first verse also required rhymes „about – out – loud – proud”. And this “kęs” (“morsel”) to end it with.
All I had to do here was to rearrange the word order to have the rhythm but otherwise it turned out rather easy:
Z ludzi , których zdeptał los (= At people trampled by fate)
zawsze dotąd rechotałaś w głos (= until now you used to laugh loudly)
dziś ucichłaś, otóż to (= today you’re silent, that’s a fact)
dziś masz mniej zadarty nos (= today you keep your nose lower)
skoro nagle trzeba żebrać (= now that suddenly you have to beg
o kolejny każdy kęs (= for every morsel).
The second verse is not rhymed so strictly as the first one which is fine for me, especially since one-syllable word carrying meaning are rare in Polish (it’s a real curse to have to end oxytonic – that is with an accent on the last syllable – acute lines with pronouns or particles that do not sound well in the Polish syntax at the final position).
Here we have “lonely – only”, a distant alliteration of „taught – street – get” and a piled-up rhyme „juiced in it – used to it”.
And once again, as before and after, a confrontation of the heroine’s present shabby condition with a luxurious previous life.
The “Miss Lonely” was the first flank I charged at. It points at the gender but I wanted my Polish version to be universal. So, I thought of a noun that is female in gender (our nouns have gender too, as in French or German) but sexless in meaning. Since I already pictured the person who is the subject of the song as something of a ghost of previous times, someone otherworldly, I put down a “Samotna Zjawo” (= “O, Lonely Apparition”) phrase.
Then I dug at the rest of this part of the verse.
My final choices were:
Najlepsze szkoły za sobą masz (= You finished the best schools)
Samotna Zjawo (= you Lonely Apparition)
ale przecież wiesz (= but you know after all)
że cię prawie (= you were nearly)
wyżymali tam (= wrung out there)
nie uczono cię, jak (= you werer never taught how)
przetrwać na ulicy (= to survive on the street)
a teraz pytasz (= and now you ask)
“Jak ja tu niby (= „How am I supposed)
sobie radę dam?” (= to make it down here?”)
nie chciałaś z tym guru żadnych umów, skąd
(= you wanted no contracts with this guru, no, not at all)
zgrywałaś twardziela, teraz miękniesz, bo
(= you played tough girl, now you get softer because)
na alibi z jego strony liczyć nie ma co
(= you can’t count on any alibi from him)
gdy napotykasz jego pusty wzrok (= as you meet his empty gaze)
i robisz w jego stronę pojednawczy gest
(= and make a conciliatory gesture to him) –
note the “gest” (= “gesture”) rhyme to “jest” in the chorus.
As you can see, I switched the “mystery tramp” for a “guru” and “make a deal” for a more general “conciliatory gesture”. These are triumphs and failures of a translator. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the literality for a flow, without losing the general idea altogether.
The second chorus contains one more line (talking all the time about the Highway 61 Revisited studio version). For the “to be on your own” I chose “gdy w krąg pusto tak” (= “when there’s desolation around”). And for the emblematic “with no direction home” which gave title for the famous Martin Scorsese movie I gave up trying to force the Polish version of the film’s title (“No Permanent Address”) into the song. It just wouldn’t work.
The third verse was the most difficult – I spent nearly a day on it, and then returned to it several times.
Who are the jugglers and their frowns? Who’s the diplomat on the chrome horse?
To translate a song as such you don’t have to truly understand the deep meaning – you create it, you enter into a kind of trance and you catch phrases blowing in your soul’s wind. It didn’t matter for me if the diplomat was Andy Warhol or Dylan’s aunt. It surely was someone important to the central figure of the song, with a vehicle, his/her ways through the upper world and… a Siamese cat. I just projected a meaning on my mind’s screen. And changed a “diplomat” for an “envoy”.
There are rhymes too, in the pattern of AAAAC BBBxC DDDDZ: “around – frown – clowns – down”, “understood – good – should”, “tricks for you – kicks for you”, “diplomat – cat – that – at – steal” (“steal” being a rhyme to “feel”, you remember).
And so my final choice was:
Za trikiem trik (= Trick after trick)
pokazywali ci (you were shown by)
magicy, ale ty (= the magicians you
w nosie miałaś ich (= didn’t care)
wściekli byli więc (= that’s why they were mad at you)
nie pojęłaś, że (= you didn’t understand that)
tak nie robi się (= it’s not polite)
zamiast ciebie jednak inni (= Yet others instead of you)
bawili się (= had their fun)
na konia ze stali twój poseł nieraz z tobą wsiadł
(= on the iron horse your envoy got on with you more than once)
z syjamem na ramieniu – podobał ci się tak
(= with a Siamese cat on his shoulder – you liked him very much)
aż tu nagle odkrywasz nieprzyjemny fakt
(= and suddenly you discover an unpleasant fact)
że ukradł ci wszystko, co tylko chciał
(= that he stole from you everything he wanted)
i w sumie oblał najważniejszy test
(= and so he flunked the most important test)
I give literal re-translations here also to let you have a glimpse into a Polish syntax where we have much more freedom, thus a construction “on the iron horse your envoy got on with you” is perfectly understandable because of the grammatical suffixes determining the words role function and position within the sentence’s structure.
I think I saved the bulwark here although I drifted a bit from the original mainstream. I know I did.
The “test” flunked by the envoy is a distant equivalent of “wasn’t where it’s at”. And it gave me the „jest” rhyme from the chorus beginning.
Now for the fourth verse. It’s really thickly populated, we have a princess (a new star of the élite?), the pretty people (an in-crowd?)… Rhymes are fewer but, still, they protrude.
“The pretty people” can have their Polish equivalent in “młodzi-prężni” which stands for “the young and resilient”. And “prężni” rhymes with the first two syllables of “księżniczka” (“princess”) so I set my camp here. BTW, “na wieży” (= on the steeple”) and “wierzą” (= “believe”) have a very similar pronunciation so…
So the final verse in my interpretation goes on like this:
Bogaci, młodzi, prężni (= The rich, the young, the resilient)
piją zdrowie księżniczki (= drink to the princess)
na wieży, bo wierzą, (= on the steeple because they believe)
że to piękne i że (= that it’s beautiful and that)
tak ma być (= it should be that way)
wymieniają się darami – (= they exchange gifts)
ty pierścionek z brylantami (= while you your ring with diamonds)
zdejmij lepiej z palca (= better take off your finger)
i czym prędzej (= and as soon as you can)
do lombardu idź (= pawn it)
Napoleon w łachmanach tak rozbawiał cię
(=Napoleon in rags used to amuse you)
językiem dziwnym budził twój głośny śmiech
(= with his strange language, he caused your loud laughter)
słyszysz, woła cię właśnie, już do niego pędź
( (= do you hear, he’s calling you, run up to him now)
skoro nic już nie masz, nic nie stracisz też
(= since you don’t have anything, you won’t lose anything either)
jesteś niewidzialna, więc to i twych tajemnic kres
(= you’re invisible so it’s the end of your secrets too).
I worked on it for about two weeks. It turned out to be coherent, convincing (in Polish) though I’m almost sure one can give it another try and do it better. But what I’m aware and proud of, it proved efficient on the record and live.
‘The lonesome organ grinder criesthe sliver saxophones say Ishould refuse youthe cracked bells and washed out hornsblow into my face with scorn…’
Before leaping into what I have nicknamed Dylan’s organ-grinder period, which lasted from 2006 to 2011, we need to pause a moment and have a look at the Never Ending Tour, and perceptions of it.
If you listen to the nay-sayers, the NET is a kind of never ending failure, with Dylan dragging his sorry ass from venue to venue, cashing in on his former glory. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What the record shows (apart from some off nights and some off seasons even) is Dylan constantly reconceiving and reinventing his songs. Constantly rediscovering them anew. Over the thirty years of the NET, the sound Dylan and his band produced onstage changed from year to year, even from set to set. A continuous evolution and creative engagement with his material.
These phases have been a huge challenge to audiences, but none more so than the period we are entering. It is during this time that some of the worst reviews and responses Dylan’s ever got seemed to suggest a final nadir. I know one Dylan compiler who refused to listen to any Dylan after 2009, because that year was so bad. When I played my wife (who usually suffers my Dylan affliction with good humour) a 2009 performance of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ (link below) she turned white and said, ‘Oh my God what’s happened to his voice,’ followed by, ‘he has to stop touring!’
Indeed, during this period there were other murmurings to this effect. It was time for Dylan to put his suitcase down. Of course, Dylan had a surprise in store for those folk, which he sprang in 2013/14 with the arrival of the baby grand and the soft-voiced crooner who could put his voice anywhere he wanted.
So, suitably forewarned, let’s venture forth into the NET’s strangest and darkest period!
In the previous post in this series, we saw that one of the effects of putting aside the guitar and getting in behind the keyboards in 2002 was to deprive Dylan of a lead instrument. Through the 1990’s the instrumental breaks, both electric and acoustic, were increasingly driven by Dylan on lead guitar. His punky Stratocaster. Putting it aside left a gap which that handy little instrument, the harmonica, might fill.
Dylan’s piano playing, at this stage, is percussive and rhythmic. He doesn’t begin to play the piano as a lead instrument until 2013, when the baby grand arrives. From 2002 to 2005 he uses the piano to urge a song forward, his method of anticipating the beat creating a momentum and excitement in something of a rough, roadhouse blues style. You can hear that best on the 2003 performance of Desolation Row (see Master Harpist part 3). He developed a technique for playing the harmonica with one hand while keeping up the rhythm on the keyboard with the other.
When he switched his little keyboard to organ mode in 2006, there was a further realignment of sound as Dylan did not, at least a first, use the organ in the same way as the piano, to drive the song forward, but created an eccentric, circus-like sound, an oddly mechanical, rinky-dink effect, with Dylan as organ-grinder. But the harmonica was still in easy reach.
In this odd take of ‘A Simple Twist of Fate’ from 2007, the circus-like organ provides just the right amount of pathos, while the oblique, tangential harp work helps keep us at a whimsical distance from the events in the song.
What marks this song in Blood on the Tracks is its freshness, as if we have just come from the experience, but how might it be remembered after 30 years or more? Through the hurdy-gurdy of memory – the song of a sad clown?
‘She belongs to Me’ (an ironical title for sure), written in 1964, is one of Dylan’s most enduring performance pieces, and it’s still there on his set lists. It’s a song that could be used to chart Dylan’s development over the years. A song about the mystery and inscrutability of love, and love’s humiliation; devotion edged with sarcasm. All our goddesses have feet of clay!
It is also a song closely associated with the harmonica, from the bluesy blasts of more recent years, to more delicate earlier interpretations. The current, hard-driving, drum-thumping version has its origins in 2006, and was a part of Dylan’s experiment with a more minimal, stripped back sound. During the first couple of years, Dylan played the organ very softly; the band softened down to match, allowing the harmonica space for his gentle, jazzy interpretations. Enjoy the laid-back sophistication of this performance:
Between 2006 and 2010 a new sound began to emerge from Dylan’s harmonica. He had always loved the high, shrieking edge, that wild, mercurial sound, and while he could always swoop low, it was in the high notes that he found his musical climaxes. Right from the start, Dylan’s ‘squeaky’ harmonica was distinctive.
I’ve suggested that Dylan’s style evolved from having to play the harp without hands, in a neck brace. Since he couldn’t always ‘cuddle’ the instrument in the manner of blues harpists, the resulting sound is thinner and sharper, with a lot less vibrato.
However a richer, more full-bodied, mid-range sound began to emerge when he switched to the organ. You can hear the beginnings of it in his 2006 performance of ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’. It’s a pity that the harmonica break at the end of the song is under-recorded because it is beautifully paced, and builds satisfyingly through the mid-range to Dylan’s favourite high, clear flying notes. But even then it doesn’t go squeaky. A virtuoso performance hidden away here!
This song is something of a junky’s lament – his friends have deserted him and there’s a cold turkey on his trail. Once more Dylan amps the emotional charge of the song, gives it a cutting edge, with his harmonica, the instrument perfectly suited to capture the long, lonely despair of the road.
Along with discovering a more full-bodied sound in the mid-range, Dylan pretty much abandoned his rapid ‘peppering’ style for kind of ‘squirting out’ the notes by breaking them up. One, two or three notes forcefully pushed through the reeds. It’s a jazz technique often used by trumpeters to keep the breath flow going though that demanding instrument. With the harmonica we get a ‘tooting’ sound that begins to characterize Dylan’s harmonica style.
Imagine you are cruising through Kansas City one time. When you reach 12th Street and Vine you hear rough sounds coming from some dive. You stop in for a beer and there he is, the old guy you saw years back, the piano thumper, here with his band cooking up a storm. He’s got an axman with him onstage, a tenor if you’re not mistaken, and, wow, he’s playing alto to the sax’s tenor on the harp! Two reed men standing up in their creases duetting and duelling, sax and harp over top of one another. Jeez, buddy, you’ve seen nothing like it since Charlie Musslewhite and Paul Butterfield in the old South Side days… Beyond here lies nothing? You can say that again!
Plenty going on in this song, a suitably raucous introduction to 2009, but the general tendency of the performances in this year is towards a more minimal sound. The result was to push Dylan’s voice to the front, right at the time when his that voice turns gravelly.
By the time we get to 2009 we have some of Dylan’s roughest vocals ever. And some of his most jazzy harp performances. You can hear both on this little gem of performance of a gem of a song. Po’ Boy.
Like ‘Beyond here lies Nothing’, ‘Po’ Boy’ takes us right back to that era we are becoming familiar with. The 1930’s, Great Depression, not a good time to be a po’ boy having to be dodging Jim Crow laws. Dylan has sharpened the lyrics too by shifting lines around.
This is really a protest song, albeit a subtle one, laced with rye humour. The harp break is all casual subtlety with few jabs thrown in, a touch of nostalgia for a past era, jazz phrasing all the way.
‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ – What can you do with an iconic song like this after forty-five years, other than mess the words up a little? You swing it, give it a cheeky riff on the organ, throw in a few even cheekier, taunting harmonica blasts. Use the organ to give it bounce. A circus-barker voice rich with the irony of it all. Once around the dance floor with the same old, eternal and unanswerable questions.
‘Tangled up in Blue’ is a special case, and I want do a postscript to this series featuring the song.
The journey is from the reflective, quiet song of the first New York recordings in 1974 to the stadium rock epic of the nineties. Fast forward to 2009 and gone is the crowd pleasing, foot stomping, harmonica wailing, piano bashing days of 2003. Gone too is the performance of the song as a celebration of time and era. It’s been stripped right down.
It’s minimalist and downright weird, as if, somehow David Bryne of the Talking Heads turned into Bob Dylan for a moment (or the other way around).
We’re on the treadmill of memory, a constricted, mechanical beat from which the song struggles to escape. It’s not just the rigid bass riff, but Dylan rinky-dinks it on the organ, emphasizing the rigidity rather than fighting it. You can hear Dylan struggling to cut across it with a hoarse, exhausted voice.
But he can’t quite make it work, or just makes it – your call! When his voice falls into the beat, matching it, the results borders on the burlesque. Only the harmonica can cut loose from this cage and it sure does, sailing serenely above the mechanical beat, above the intractable struggle with memory, free as flight. At least one hand’s waving free! It’s so good Dylan must have liked it too, because he comes back for second flight before the last verse, and once more we are gliding through time, pushing higher into the stratosphere.
And, while we’re in weirdland, try this odd dumpty-dum performance of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. Perhaps the song itself, which is about an encounter with strangeness, is outlandish enough to sustain a performance like this. The circus really has come to town! And, by emphasizing the rigidity of the dumpty-dum, the harmonica break at end of song just pushes the performance from the weird to the bizarre. Oh my God, am I here all alone?
It’s useful to remember that during this so-called nadir phase in the NET, a whole bunch of new songs were coming on line from Time Out of Mind (1997) ‘Love and theft’ (2001) and Modern Times (2005).
I admired ‘Cold Irons Bound’ from Time out of Mind but could never quite get with the song. The opening clash between Dylan’s voice and the guitar seemed too dissonant for my ear, and early performances did pretty much the same. It wasn’t until we get that contentious year 2009 that we get a performance that got through to me.
A throbbing, sinister beat starts the song, with Dylan’s voice echoing in on top. For me, the song expresses an awful existential despair – like the universe has swallowed me whole – a prisoners’ song, and this cut-to-the-bone performance brings out the best of it. And the harmonica break! It just slashes back and forward across that sinister beat, whipping the song along. This has easily become my favourite performance of this one.
Also from Time out of Mind we have that wonderfully despairing ‘It’s Not Dark Yet.’ The only problem with the album version is that it’s not desolate enough for the lyrics. It’s swampy and evocative, in Lanoir style, but doesn’t push us to the edge of our mortality the way this 2010 performance does. Funereal and cheerless it is, with the harp’s dismal insistence, playing the same notes through the chord changes, bleak and relentless. Now he sounds like he really means it!
For me, nothing can replace the echoey trippiness of ‘Wheels on Fire’ from The Basement Tapes, 1967. Admirers of the song also need to check out Julie Driscoll’s wonderfully overwrought psychedelic version (find it on You Tube). Yet this rough-edged 2010 performance comes a close second. Arguably, the circus barker has some trouble sustaining the song, but there’ll be no argument about the power of the harp breaks. The harp work turns the performance into a tour-de-force. What I have called the ‘tooting effect’ with the harp is put to good use here. It’s all in the timing!
I want to finish this post with ‘Every Grain of Sand’ and one of Dylan’s greatest vocal/harmonica duets ever. We go beyond the idea of a harp ‘break’ or solo to what becomes, after the first verse, a duet for voice and harp, with the harp ‘talking’ back to the voice.
There is a long tradition of talking harmonicas in the blues. Aficionados might know of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. Sonny would sing verses and Brownie would insert harmonica replies and comments along the way. Champion Jack Dupree would talk to his harmonica that would talk back. It’s a lonely, on the road thing, just me and my little harp.
While I love the 1981 album performance on Shot of Love, and its wonderful swooping harmonica break, the production is pretty lush, nothing like this stripped down 2010 version. I had problems with some of the lyrics, at first, too. They seemed terribly uneven, but I hadn’t fully understood Dylan’s breathtaking ability to switch from the sublime to the cliché:
'Oh, the flowers of indulgenceand the weeds of yesteryearLike criminals, they have choked the breathof conscience and good cheer'
Perhaps I could never quite see weeds (or ‘leaves’ as he sings in this 2010 performance) as criminals. And the self-conscious poeticism of ‘yesteryear’ seemed, well… like the very flower of poetic indulgence.
Contrast that awkwardness and tendency to mixed metaphor with the masterful:
‘In the bitter dance of lonelinessfading into spaceIn the broken mirror of innocenceon each forgotten face’
However, listening to the old circus barker and his lonely conversation with his harp, my issues seem to melt away. Even the anachronistic ‘yesteryear’ feels fitting sung by an ancient who is looking back a long way to a vulnerable moment in time, a moment that called his faith, and his very being, into question. I am reminded of Robert Browning – ‘there is more faith in honest doubt than all of the established creeds.’
I’ll be back this way with the last in this series soon, I hope. Keep on keeping on, and enjoy!
Considering poet Arthur Rimburd as a precursor thereof, Andre Breton comes to lead the Surrealist Movement, an offshoot of absurdist anti-bourgeois Dadaism, and he attempts to reconcile the thoughts of Sigmund Freud and with those of Karl Marx. His poems depict the social contradictions experienced by ordinary people imprisoned by the supposedly ‘rational’ rules of capitalist economics.
To this end, ‘Tweedle-Dum’ Breton arranges words not in a standardized format, but by using a ‘stream of consciousness’ technique that produces images that flow, yet are fragmented, like the dreams of the subconscious when the conscious mind is asleep.
In translation:
My wife with eyes full of tearsWith eyes of purple panoply, and of a magnetic needleMy wife with eyes of water to be drunk in prison
(Andre Breton: Freedom Of Love)
Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan tones Breton’s poetry down a bit:
Ramona, come closerShut softly your watery eyes ....Your magnetic movementsStill capture the minutes I'm in
(Bob Dylan: To Ramona)
‘Tweedle-Dee’ Jacques Prevert dwells on the fluidly thought processes of childhood being dammed up by socializing institutions(Lawrence Ferlinghetti translates the poem below):
At each mileEach yearOld men with closed facesWith gestures of reinforced concrete
(Jacques Prevert: The Straight And Narrow)
Bob Dylan too is concerned with the restrictive roles placed upon the young:
May your heart always be joyfulMay your song always be sungMay you stay forever young
(Bob Dylan: Forever Young)
The French poet, who writes the screenplay for the Romantic drama ‘Children Of Paradise’, laments the loss of the mysterious imaginings of the young. Below Jacques Prevert, in translation, correlates the emotion of sorrow with objects man-made, and from the world of Nature:
Dead leaves are picked up by the shovelMemories and regrets tooAnd the north wind carries them away In the cold night oblivionSee, I haven't forgottenThe song you used to sing to me
(Jacques Prevert: Dead Leaves)
A poem immortalized in a famous song:
Since you went away, the days grow longAnd soon I'll hear old winter's songBut I'll miss you most of all, my darlingWhen autumn leaves start to fall
(Bob Dylan: Autumn Leaves ~ Prevert/Kosma/Mercer)
A Canadian musician, and singer/songwriter, criticizes Dylan for his being a ‘plagiarist’ even as she sings:
I've looked at love from both sides nowFrom give and take, and still somehowIt's love's illusions I recallI really don't know love at all .....I've looked at life from both sides nowFrom win and lose, and still somehowIt's life's illusions I recallI really don't know life at all
(Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now)
But, albeit in translation, there’s:
We love, and we liveWe live, and we loveAnd we don't really knowWhat life isAnd we don't really knowWhat the day isAnd we don't really knowWhat love is
(Jacques Prevert: Song)
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.
In Chronicles, the autobiographer recalls that producer Bob Johnston is trying to tempt him to come and record in Nashville. The first impressions and associations are not too positive:
“The town was like being in a soap bubble. They nearly ran Al Kooper, Robbie Robertson and me out of town for having long hair. All the songs coming out of the studios then were about slut wives cheating on their husbands or vice versa.”
But in the end they do go into that Nashville studio to record the monument Blonde on Blonde … the album with all those songs in which the protagonist tries to seduce one rainy day woman after the other, is scratching the door of someone else’s wife or himself is assaulted by some slut wife cheating on her husband. The studio air there is infectious, apparently. Not until side 4, until “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, the protagonist will ultimately find erotic peace and finally face the One.
However, we are not there yet. We are on side 3 of the double album, at the elegant blues “Temporary Like Achilles”, and are witnessing yet another amorous disaster. The ninth, to be precise.
In “Pledging My Time” the pleading narrator stays in the cold, and the following Johanna remains a vision. The pushy girl from “Sooner Or Later” is being rejected with some difficulties, the desire for the adored from “I Want You” is still unfulfilled, so the Queen of Spades needs to offer some comfort. There are, of course, enough friendly ladies further down South, in Mobile. Mona, and a French girl, and Ruth, and a debutatnte who knows what he needs, but none of them really interests him, at least not so much as the fatal woman with her “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”. But alas, she is another slut wifecheating on him with the doctor.
Some love happiness promises the relationship from “Just Like A Woman”, but unfortunately, she turns out to be a pathetic poseuse – she is rather cooly discarded. One song later it’s the beloved from “Most Likely You Go Your Way” who is viciously boned out and ruthlessly dumped.
But: we are approaching the end of Lover’s Lane. After Achilles, the loser will still have to be humiliated by Sweet Marie, who once again is painting the town red, he has to make one more big mistake in “Fourth Time Around” and in conclusion falls into despair in “Obviously Five Believers” … and then he may finally, at last kneel down before the One, the Nonpareil with the smoky eyes and a voice like a chime, with her silky body and her glass face; his Sorrowful Dame from the Nether Countries.
The honey from “Temporary Like Achilles” is just as unapproachable as Sweet Marie and Johanna, forces the desperate lover on his knees and thus exhibits a side of the narrator we don’t see often: helpless, upset, no trace of the usual bravado or superiority, let alone of his vicious, sharp tongue. No, this suffering even lowers him to stalking, he is scratching at her door and is being treated like a nasty bug; honey sends her current boyfriend, her “guard” Achilles, out, who denies him entry and drives him out of the alley.
In earlier versions of the text, the rejected lover is submitted to a treatment even harsher: “I get beat up and sent back by the guard”.
Humiliating. But a bit more in line with the associations that are evoked by the choice of that loaded name Achilles, who was, after all, a first-rate jaw crushing ferocious fighter.
This choice of name is, obviously, the most striking thing about this song, but it doesn’t seem to be much more than name-dropping. Dylan does have some knowledge of ancient myths and classical Greek and Roman literature; in high school he attended the Hibbing High Latin Club for two years, and in Chronicles he tells he thanks a large part of his knowledge to the bookcase in one of his places to stay, in his first year in New York.
For the time being, that knowledge only indirectly trickles into his work. Later, in the twenty-first century, he loots exuberantly from the work of, for example, Ovid (in “Ain’t Talkin’”, 2006) and Vergilius (“Lonesome Day Blues”, 2001), but in the decades before it is limited to a single name or a single image.
In doing so, the poet is aiming more at the comic effect of alienation in the 1960s; the closing, nonsensical bottom note in his experimental prose-poem Tarantula (written ’65 / ’66, published in 1971) is signed by “Homer the slut”, the same Homer receives a meaningless name check in the cheerful homage “Open The Door, Richard” (“Open The Door, Homer”, Basement Tapes) and Phaedra pops up, too (“I Wanna Be Your Lover”). In the 70s and 80s, names such as Jupiter and Apollo and references to, for example, Hercules (“Jokerman”) and Odysseus (“Seeing The Real You At Last”) sometimes drop by, but they are no more than superficial references.
In the run-up to that symbolic name, we see the usual uncommon foggy poetry of Dylan’s lyricism in these years. The opening line is already disruptive: “Standing on your window”? A thoughtful mistake, we learn from the unsurpassed Cutting Edge. In the first take Dylan sings “Standing ’neath your window”, (semantically correct) in the aborted second take “Standing at your window” (nothing wrong with that) and in the third take the poet decides for the confusing on.
This play with words is not limited to the innocent prepositions. The I-person feels “harmless” and is languishing at her “second door”, the first couplet also reveals. Harmless, the listener only thinks in the second instance, is quite weird. Desperate, unhappy, lonely, that all fits. But “harmless”? Can a person feel “harmless“? Second door is equally strange. The expression has no figurative meaning, does not exist as a metaphor.
And yet, despite the linguistic inaccuracies, the image that Dylan conjures up is crystal clear: a pathetic, worn-out and excluded loser is pining at his ex-lover’s house. Just one spark of attention, one sterile greeting would be enough, but unfortunately, she does not budge. Retold like this, it sounds like a tear-jerking, sentimental penny novelette. And that pitfall is avoided by Dylan’s frantic choice of words; it provokes associative side-tracks which make the text sparkle.
He stays on this track. In the following verse, “he kneels ‘neath her ceiling” and is “as helpless as a rich man’s child” In the – beautiful – bridge, the poet excels in his beloved catachrese, the ‘misuse’ that still sounds very familiar. “Like a poor fool in his prime,” does not make sense, neither does the rhetorical question “is your heart made of stone, lime or solid rock?”
The metaphors in the third verse insinuate sexual allusions, but more than ambiguous suggestions they are not really. Many commentators lose themselves in nudge-nudge-wink-winks with regard to the velvet door. Recognized and high-quality Dylanologist Andy Muir knows that the window and the velvet door are “well-known blues metaphors for sexual apertures”, Clinton Heylin mentions it as an example of sexual innuendo and dozens of other Dylan exegetes cheerfully parrot it.
Baseless; a “velvet door” really is nowhere to be found in the blues canon or in the literature – sexual associations are obvious, indeed, but more appropriate is the interpretation that the poet plays with our associations here – the metaphor for someone who is soft on the outside and appears to be accommodating, but turns out to be hard and rigid. Also matches what is revealed to be behind that velvet door: a scorpion crawling across the floor.
Musically the song is a well-chosen resting point between the driving dynamics of “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie”. “Temporary Like Achilles” is carried by the clattering playing of the blind pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins, and that alone distinguishes the song from the other pieces on Blonde On Blonde. It starts out like a traditional blues, but surprises halfway with an unusual tone change; not only does a middle-eight create an alien atmosphere in such a classic blues, the choice for minor chords is also unexpected. Normally the musician slides down to seventh chords. Unusual, but certainly very successful – thanks also to the beautiful melody. Though Dylan does not share that opinion, apparently. It is, bizarre enough, the only song from Blonde On Blonde he will never play and will be left without looking back (even the Sad-Eyed Lady is rehearsed once, in 1975).
Also from the amount of covers it can be deduced that “Temporary Like Achilles” is indeed the wallflower of Dylan’s most sparkling masterpiece, snowed in by all the beauty around it. Undeserved, of course – on an album by any other artist, this song would be the prom queen.
Amusing is the pleasantly swinging New Orleans approach of the rather obscure Don Olson Gang (2006). The neat version of a veteran, the gifted blues guitarist Deborah Coleman on the tribute album Blues On Blonde On Blonde, is spotless but not very exciting. And music magazine Mojo, which is initiating a sympathetic birthday project at the fiftieth anniversary of the LP, also has no surprise. On the CD that is filled with more and less successful, but in any case remarkable covers of all fourteen songs, “Temporary Like Achilles” stands out in a negative way; the stale, amateurish living room recording by the moderately talented Kevin Morby bores after just twenty seconds. Forgive him; there are very few Blonde On Blonde covers which do not collapse under the weight of the original.
In this second article in the series we continue to look at versions of Dylan’s songs which turn out to be quite different from the original recordings. This time we are looking at Like a Rolling Stone, Positively 4th Street and Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues.
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.
So now, moving on…
“Like a Rolling Stone” presents Bob Dylan with a real problem because both the verse and the chorus are so singular they come to define the song. Change them and the song would be changed so much that it would no longer be Rolling Stone.
So yes that is a big problem, but our Bob knows a thing or two about music and so here he does two things. First the instrumentation in the verse is changed with additional runs from the guitars. That gives us a totally different feel. Second Bob gives up on any attempt to tell us what the lyrics are – he is assuming that we know them all off by heart as of course we do. He sings them, but in such a word the words merge one to another.
So everything comes out as a gabble of sounds; vocal sounds pour out one on top of the music. Indeed we may ask, “Are they words?” Well, yes occasionally we catch the last two or three words of a line, but nothing more.
And then… oh wow what a total surprise – an instrumental break unlike anything we’ve heard before in terms of Rolling Stone – or come to that virtually any Dylan composition. It is in total contrast to the blast that makes up each rush through of a verse.
The second break takes us on another journey. The chord sequence stops, and the song goes on hold. Then there is part of the sequence back again as we get to that gradual slow down, the last two chords are held… we wait, we wait, and the crash of the ending hits us. Clever stuff.
Bob is saying, “OK guys, you all know this, you probably know it better than I do, but there is more to this song that a lot of clever lyrics. Have you actually listened to the music?” And then he forces us to do just that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf5mTJUM9Qo
Moving on to our second revisitation, Positively 4th Street has had over 350 live outings. But in this version Dylan sings it with regret rather than the anger and disdain that the lyrics proclaim. Here he is sad not so much that the relationship is over but because of what the woman is, and the fact that she cannot be different. Maybe he recognises that there was something there originally – even though the lyrics tell a different tale – but overwhelmingly this is a tale of what is. “That’s how you are,” he says. “And that’s that. Nothing to get too worked up about.”
Of course that was the message on the single when we first heard it, but now it seems to be made even clearer.
The very laid back instrumental break just takes the song around and around, those two lines repeating and repeating and repeating, for she can never change, she can never be any different, she just is, the situation just is.
Positively 4th Street without the anger – as it was from the start, but now he is more distanced than ever. Just look at Bob’s face as he sings. He’s just a commentator now; there is no story, no involvement, just the recounting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf0tl3MFPEA
Finally for this selection, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” from the early 2000s. Again we have Bob in relaxed style, telling the story as if he has no involvement in it whatsoever. He can just stand there an rock gently to the rhythm as the bass player takes a gentle stroll up and down behind him. And why not, we’re all just lolloping along.
But notice how clear Bob is enunciating the lyrics – this is what he is valuing here; the words so carefully crafted, that overlay the melody. Forget the tune guys, here’s where the genius is.
If we think again about those lyrics that we all probably know by heart yes they can be taken at this slow relaxed pace. Because as with 4th Street, it is now all over, he’s reflecting…
Now all the authorities They just stand around and boast How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms Into leaving his post And picking up Angel who Just arrived here from the coast Who looked so fine at first But left looking just like a ghost
Indeed it is only after he’s sung the last two lines of the whole piece, sung with extra feeling if not venom…
I’m going back to New York City I do believe I’ve had enough
do we find that the band can really pick up some energy. He’s done reflecting, he’s packed his bags, he’s going back home. Let’s play some riffs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeA_GPiG_eg
Footnote from Tony
This series looking at selected live performances came about through an idea of Paul’s and this is now being explored in articles such as this.
Meanwhile Larry’s series of articles about the way Dylan uses language and the writings of others came out of his comments on some pieces I’d written. Jochan’s reconsidering of individual Dylan songs came from work he had already published in his native tongue. Jochen also suggested that we might look at the songs Bob mentions as being an influence on him, which became the “Why does Dylan like?” series. Likewise Mike Johnson came up with the idea for Dylan Master Harpist and is promising a new article in the near future.
And there must be 1000 of other ideas out there which we could explore in a series of articles. If you can think of one, please do write to me (Tony@schools.co.uk) and set out your thoughts. If you want to write the series or part of it, great. If not, that’s fine too – set out the notion and I’ll see if I can tackle it myself.
Many of Bob Dylan song lyrics comment on the human social predicaments that have existed from time out of mind; for example – sexual, racial, class, and generational antagonisms:
They walk among stately treesThey know the secrets of the breeze ....One is a lowdown, sorry old manThe other'll stab you where you stand(Bob Dylan: Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum)
The singer/songwriter examines America’s present state in the context of its past history, but does so in the manner of an artist in that it leaves songs open, though not wide open, to interpretations on the part of the reader/listener. Based on the music of a John Wright/Jack Anglin song, and the lyrics of an English nursery rhyme of yore, the Dylan piece above could be construed to feature two Romantic Transcendentalist poets – Walt Whitman and Henry Timod. On opposite sides of the American Civil War, both poets believe that they have God, whose Spirit is blowing in the breeze, on their side:
And high and hushed arose the stately treesYet shut within themselves, like dungeons, whereLay fettered the secrets of the breezeA childish dream is a sacred creed ...A childish dream is now a deathless needWhich drives him to far hills, and distant wildsThe solemn faith and fervour of his creed
(Henry Timrod: A Vision Of Posey)
Timrod supports the Confederate States during the American Civil War:
Well, a childish dream is a deathless needAnd a noble truth is a sacred creed
(Bob Dylan: Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dee)
In more orthodox religious terms:
How do we standMove by faithBy faith, by faith, oh Lord
(Bob Dylan: Stand By Faith)
Mocked, in the following lyrics, are the ‘old bats’ who condemn the ‘voodoo’ dancing and music of the freed descendants of black slaves:
Who's that hiding in the tree tops?It's that rascal, the JitterbugShould you catch him buzzing 'round youKeep away from the JitterbugOh, the birds in the breezeAnd the bats in the treesHave a terrible, horrible buzzBut the birds in the breezeAnd the bats in the treesCouldn't do what the Jitterbug doesSo just be careful of that rascalKeep away from the Jitterbug, the Jitterbug
(Judy Garland: The Jitterbug ~ Arlen/Hardburg)
Dylan makes fun of the rigid Puritans guarding the gates of American towns:
This place ain't doing me any goodI'm in the wrong town, I should be in HollywoodJust for a second there, I thought I saw something moveGonna take dancing lessons, do the Jitterbug rag
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)
Bob’s grabs a taxi named ‘Desire’, and heads to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem:
Now here's old Father, a wicked old manDrinks more sauce than other bugs canHe drinks jitter sauce every mornThat's why jitter sauce was born
(Cab Calloway: The Call Of The Jitterbug)
There’s trouble in River City – ’emergency’ rhymes with ‘brain salad surgery’ (and that stands for fellatio); the rock goup ‘Emerson, Lake, And Palmer’ borrows the term:
I been running, trying to get hung up in my mindGot to give myself a good talking to this timeJust need a little brain salad surgeryTo cure my insecurity
(Dr. John: Right Place, Wrong Time)
https://youtu.be/7qWV1xXjny8
Times are a-changing so fast that things get all mixed up – it’s hard to keep up:
You're gonna make me wonder what I'm doin'Stayin far behind without youYou're gonna make me wonder what I'm sayin'You're gonna make me give myself a good talkin' to
(Bob Dylan: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)
