Untold Dylan

by Aaron Gailbraith

Uncle Tupelo were an alt-country band formed in 1987 by Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy. It has been said that it was like having Neil Young and Bob Dylan in the same band. Tweedy brought Young’s knack for mercurial but memorable hooks. Whilst Farrar’s cryptic, intense ruminations and personal revelations have more than a passing resemblance to Dylan.

Jeff Tweedy said in an interview, “We probably have more influences than we know what to do with. We have two main styles that have been influences. For instance, we like Black Flag as much as early Bob Dylan and Dinosaur Jr. as much as Hank Williams … To us, hard-core punk is also folk music. We draw a close parallel between the two. We’ll play both in the same set if we get a chance. We don’t have any biases as far as music is concerned.”

Their first album “No Depression” (with the A.P Carter title track) has been cited as one of the most important albums in the alternative country genre. The periodical “No Depression” took its name from the album and “No Depression” is sometimes used as a synonym for the genre.

In 1991 they opened for The Band at a few shows.

Their third album “March 16-20 1992” includes their take of “Moonshiner” using Bob’s 1963 lyric changes.

There are also several unreleased Dylan covers available online including this amazing take on “A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall” and a fine version of “Wallflower”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24oBzSa_o_M

Following the release of 4^th album “Anodyne” the relationship between Farrar and Tweedy soured to the point where they could no longer work together. The band split, Farrar went on to form Son Volt, and Tweedy took the rest of the band and formed Wilco.

Son Volt continued in the alt country vein, with an emphasis on traditional American Music. Over the next 20 or so years they released 10 albums and several Eps.

An absolutely stunning version of “Going, Going Gone” was included on the “Switchback EP” in 1997.

Jay Farrar kept up a concurrent solo career along with his Son Volt activities. He has performed several Dylan tracks in concert including “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35”

At the same time Jay was forming Son Volt, Jeff Tweedy and the rest of Uncle Tupelo reformed as Wilco.

In 2003, Wilco released the utterly brilliant “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” album. The track “Bob Dylan’s 49^th Beard” appears on the bonus disc “More Like The Moon EP” and then on the Rarities collection “Alpha Mike Foxtrot”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48UOZzYAdcY

And things got weird
And I started growing
Bob Dylan's beard

• Jeff Tweedy – Bob Dylan’s 49^th Beard

Jeff’s haunting solo version of “Simple Twist Of Fate” appeared on the “I’m Not There” soundtrack album in 2007.

In anticipation of the 2008 US presidential election, Wilco released a downloadable version of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” that they performed with Fleet Foxes. The MP3 was available as a free download from the band’s website in exchange for a promise to vote in the election. It too was included on the rarities box “Alpha Mike Foxtrot”.

In 2013 Wilco (along with future New Basement Tapes member Jim James) joined Dylan on the AmericanaramA tour. They shared the stage on several occasions singing The Band classic “The Weight”.

“We played that song in a different key every night,” a bemused Tweedy reveals. “It was never in the same key. The tour manager would say, ‘It’s in A flat tonight.’ Or we’d already be out onstage, and we’d talk to Tony Garnier, the bass player, and somehow ask him which key and he’d say, ‘A flat.’ And that’s in front of a lot of people. But Dylan never told us. I think he likes putting himself and his band into a corner, to see if they can play their way out.”

They also performed a wonderful version of “Let Your Light Shine on Me”.

In 2014 Tweedy was asked to write music for a set of unrecorded Bob Dylan lyrics—a project which, without his involvement, became the New Basement Tapes.

But before that happened Jeff was so inspired by these Dylan lyrics that were shared with him that, over the course of two days, he wrote and recorded an album’s worth of songs using and drawing from the Dylan lyrics. The producers ultimately went in a different direction with the project.

Other articles from this series…

Bob Dylan and Neil Young: If it sounds like me it should as well be me

Bob Dylan and Jack White: a songwriting duo?

Bob Dylan and… Paul McCartney

Bob Dylan and… David Bowie

Bob Dylan and John Lennon

by Jochen Markhorst

Nuremberg, July 1 1978. Bob Dylan offers Eric Clapton a cassette with the first two songs he wrote with Helena Springs: “Walk Out In The Rain” and “If I Don’t Be There By Morning”. Two weeks later Clapton already has recorded both and can present his adaptation to Dylan and Springs when they meet again, this time in England (Blackbushe Aerodrome, July 15). Dylan’s performance there also inspires the title of the album on which the songs will open side A and side B respectively:

“The album we were promoting on this tour was the follow-up to Slowhand, which we had named Backless, a title suggested after we played a gig with Dylan at Blackbushe Airport. It referred to the fact that I thought he had eyes in the back of his head and knew exactly what was going on around him all the time.”

(Eric Clapton, The Autobiography, 2007)

Thus Dylan leaves his mark on this LP on several fronts. But he does not get much applause; both songs are not much appreciated in Dylan circles, and generally “If I Don’t Be There By Morning” is dismissed as even weaker, or more uninspired, or more meaningless than Walk Out. Clapton himself, however, loves the song. It is released as a single (and flops), the song is on his set list for two years, 44 times, and one of those performances also earns a place on his successful live album Just One Night (1980).

In later years, a modest, yet public, revaluation takes place. Just like with Walk Out: Time is friendly for the song. In retrospects and discographies the song is usually ignored, but sometimes it is appreciated as a “pleasant rocker”. The “chunky riffs” get compliments and the song “generates some excitement” because Clapton sounds like The Band.

The revaluation is justifiable. It really is a very nice, melodic rocker, the bridge is remarkable and true, the lyrics are not too titanic, but still food for Dylanologists; largely Love and Theft, so the song uncovers some of the master’s influences and fondnesses.

Dylanesque it is, except for that weird bridge. Both the melody and the words of the bridge are atypical, and especially on a lyrical level suspiciously weak:

Finding my way back to you girl,
Lonely and blue and mistreated too.
Sometimes I think of you girl,
Is it true that you think of me too?

Song titles can sometimes start with a gerund. “Watching The River Flow”, “Driftin’ Too Far From Shore”, “Standing In The Doorway” and “Seeing The Real You At Last”, for example. But within the lyrics it soon gets juvenal and Dylan hardly ever starts a verse with it. “Jokerman”, “Roll On, John” and “Temporary Like Achilles” are the exceptions – and within these songs, they are also the literary weaker spots.

In these song lyrics it doesn’t get any better after Finding, with the poor, Dylan-unworthy rhyming by repetition and the hollow cliché lonely and blue as outliers.

The similarity with the hit song “Working My Way Back To You” by The Four Seasons is probably a coincidence; that was a small hit in the spring of ’66. The worldwide mega hit version by The Spinners is a 1980 release.

The other couplets are much stronger, fortunately. The opening line, Blue sky upon the horizon, is an original and confusing stage direction, suggesting either the beginning of the day or the end of dark clouds at the same time. After that the poet Dylan assembles a blueslamento from various sources.

Blue sky upon the horizon,
Private eye is on my trail,
And if I don't be there by morning
You know that I must have spent the night in jail

Heylin points to Grateful Dead’s “Friend Of The Devil”, the song that Dylan himself will play almost a hundred times between 1990 and 2007. The Dead sings about a sheriff on my trail, Dylan about a private eye on my trail, which rhymes with jail in both songs, and both protagonists remember a twenty dollar bill.

In the live performances of “Going, Going, Gone” in these summer months of ’78 it is already noticeable that Dylan smuggles in a complete verse from Robert Johnson’s “From Four Until Late”, and in this song an echo seems to resonate, too. Johnson opens the second verse with From Memphis to Norfolk, in this song Dylan turns it into, also as opening of the second verse, from Memphis to L.A.

Similarly, Leadbelly resonates in Dylan’s discography since his very first steps in a studio (“Midnight Special”, “Corrina, Corrina”). Fragments from Leadbelly’s songs have coloured Dylan’s work for at least as long; “Gallows Pole” in “Seven Curses”, “John Hardy” in “John Wesley Harding” and “Mr. Tom Hughes Town” (or “Fannin Street”) echoes in both “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “The Groom’s Still Waiting By The Altar” (Shreveport women gonna kill you), to name only three examples.

From that last song again seems, equally unimportant by the way, to descend a next phrase: I got a woman living in L.A. versus I got a woman living on Stone Hill.

Interesting, though not too important, all of this, and not very revolutionary either, but it does suggest that, as with “Stop Now”, for example, Helena Springs’ input is very limited. Grateful Dead, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly… all of them artists who are under the skin of the seasoned bluesman Bob Dylan – it is quite unlikely that, while talented, the young, green girl Helena Springs could shake all those references and paraphrases out of her puff sleeve.

It also applies to the title and vers line If I don’t be there by morning. Grammatically and/or syntactically incorrect (it must be either “if I am not there” or “if I won’t be there”). A weathered songwriter like Dylan effortlessly ignores language errors for the sake of rhyme and reason, but an inexperienced novice would not dare to let it pass (according to her own words, this is Springs’ second song lyrics attempt).

The limited input perhaps explains those wondrous additions to the Dylan / Springs songs in the Copyright Files:

With this document, signed by Helena Springs, the songwriter transferred and assigned to Special Rider Music “all her right, title and interest,” including the copyright

… and under “Notes” the whole is once again defined as an “Assignment”, so as a transfer. The same goes for those other songs that have been officially released, such as “Coming From The Heart”, “Stop Now” and “Walk Out In The Rain”.

Agreed, sometimes the songs with co-authors also get strange additions. As with “Isis,” from which Jacques Levy is said to have a 35% ownership:

words, music & arr.: Robert Dylan p.k.a. Bob Dylan;
words: Ram’s Horn Music, as employer for hire of Jacques Levy.

… but there is no such addition like this “the rights have been transferred” – though “as employer for hire” is odd again.

The rights to songs he writes with Robert Hunter, like the horrible “Ugliest Girl In The World”, are properly registered to both Ice Nine Publ. Company, Inc. (Hunter’s, or rather Grateful Dead’s publisher, of which Hunter is the president) and to Dylan’s Special Rider Music. Just as, for example, the collaboration with Michael Bolton, “Steel Bars”, is unsurprisingly in both names (Mr. Bolton’s Music, Inc. and Special Rider Music), like “Got My Mind Made Up” is also registered to Tom Petty’s company Gone Gator Music and the honour and rights for “Under Your Spell” are shared with Carol Bayer Sager Music.

In short, it is quite unusual for a co-author to be requested to transfer all rights to Dylan’s music publisher. Springs may still share in the royalties, but it is more likely that she has sold her rights – the U.S. Copyright Office reports on all songs that Dylan’s Special Rider Music is the only “Copyright Claimant”, the only entitled party.

Peculiar. But all that legal haggling has no further influence on the impact of the song, obviously.

That impact is negligible. Just like almost all songs from the Street Legal period (apart from “Señor”), “If I Don’t Be There By Morning” drifts unnoticed away on the Waters of Oblivion. In 2001, the Louisiana veteran club The Hoodoo Kings produces a nice but rather superfluous cover on their eponymous album (although the JazzTimes of July 1, 2001 considers the interpretation as one of the four highlights of the album).

Already in ’78 the Flemish singer Ann Christy tries to score a hit with the song, remarkably enough in combination with that other Dylan / Springs / Clapton title, “Walk Out In The Rain”. Fans of the late Christy think to this day that Dylan wrote the songs for her – and both readings were then, and still are, insurmountably frumpy.

The best interpretations are and remain the live performances of Mr. Slowhand himself. But even Clapton never plays “If I Don’t Be There By Morning” again after May 18, 1980.

In Guildford by the way, 15 miles from Blackbushe Aerodrome – so before abandoning her, he does take the song back home, like a gentleman. Well before the morning, of course.

by Aaron Galbraith

Sit back and prepare yourself for this one – this is going to be a very video heavy overview of Neil and Bob’s career interactions. Which is how we like it here, right?

In the authorized biography “Shakey” Neil Young refers to himself as “a ‘B student’ of Bob Dylan.” I’m not sure I’d agree, I’d bump him up to an A-. Judging by the amount of Dylan covers he has given in concert and record over the years, he knows his stuff!

Bob became aware of Neil early on and had a bit of a problem with “Heart Of Gold”!!

“The only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about ’72 and the big song at the time was “Heart of Gold.” I used to hate it when it came on the radio. I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me every time I listened to “Heart of Gold.” I think it was up at number one for a long time, and I’d say, “Shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.”

“I needed to lay back for awhile, forget about things, myself included, and I’d get so far away and turn on the radio and there I am. But it’s not me. It seemed to me somebody else had taken”

He got over it quickly though. In August 1974, Bob Dylan attended a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert in Minneapolis. From a Rolling Stone magazine article by Ben Fong Torres:

“In the middle of the acoustic set, Young introduces ‘For the Turnstiles’ by saying: ‘Here’s a song I wrote a long time ago. There’s a couple of really good songwriters here tonight; I hope they don’t listen too closely.”

The music in the video below starts around the one minute mark…

Then in 1975 the pair got together to rip through a medley of “Helpless” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” – rewritten as “Knockin’ On The Dragon’s Door”.

In 1988, Neil joined Bob on tour, the pair performed this stunning version of “Gates Of Eden”.

Even though the video quality isn’t great, there is no mistaking Young’s presence as he prowls the stage and his guitar sound is unmistakable.

Young’s performance at the Bridge Benefit Concert in 1989 included this jaunty take on “Everything’s Broken” with Tom Petty.

In 1990 Young released the album “Ragged Glory” with Crazy Horse. It included the track “Days That Used To Be”. The track was originally called “Letter to Bob” and the melody is identical to “My Back Pages”

Talk to me, my long lost friend,
tell me how you are
Are you happy with
your circumstance,
are you driving a new car
Does it get you where you wanna go,
with a seven year warranty
Or just another
hundred thousand miles away
From days that used to be

• Neil Young – Days That Used To Be

In 1991 Young’s live album “Weld” includes his definitive “Gulf War” version of “Blowin’ In The Wind”.

“Yeah, well, I had planned to do something along those lines,” he says. “I was gonna do something off Ragged Glory that’s almost the same, ‘Mother Earth.’ But I didn’t really want to do ‘Mother Earth.’ I didn’t think it was gonna make it to the concert. We were rehearsing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ before the war and the tour started. Basically, the songs took on the ambience of the times. That’s all we do–we just reflect what’s going on. It just seems like we go out and it all comes from the audience; we just pick it up and send it back. So whatever’s happening, there’s no reason to just go out and entertain.

“Entertainment, all by itself, is great; it’s a great thing to do. But when something like [the war] is happening, certain songs just seem trite. Why bother doing ’em? It’s just natural that the songs reflect what was happening in the country. You’d see it in people’s faces as they came in and out of the concert–the slogans they had on the signs they were holding. But there’s room for everybody. Some people might want to forget about the war. Some people might not.”

That same year Neil teamed up with Bob’s old buddies The Grateful Dead for this awesome version of “Forever Young”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwvN3KJBT9M

In 1992 Neil played the “Bob Dylan 30^th Anniversary Concert” and christened it “Bobfest”. He gave us excellent versions of “All Along The Watchtower” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”

A later version of “All Along The Watchtower” was also included on his 2000 live album “Road Rock Vol. 1”.

The 2003 album “Greendale” includes a song “Bandit” – one of Neil’s best in my opinion. In the song Neil sings:

no one can touch you now
but i can touch you now
you're invisible
you got too many secrets
bob dylan said that
somethin' like that

• Neil Young – Bandit

Besides the “Like A Rolling Stone” quote this reads like Neil’s take on Dylan’s “Talkin’ World War III Blues”:

Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
But all the people can't be all right all the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,"
I said that.

• Bob Dylan – Talkin’ World War III Blues

In 2005 he introduces the Song “This Old Guitar” by saying:

“This is Hank William’s guitar [he points to the guitar]. I try to do the right thing with the guitar. You don’t want to stink with Hank’s guitar. I lent it to Bob Dylan for a while. He didn’t have a tour bus so I lent him mine and I left the guitar on the bed with a note saying Hank’s guitar is back there. He used it for a couple of months.”

I wonder what Dylan might have played on Hank William’s guitar.

Young’s 2006 album “Living With War” contains the track “Flags Of Freedom”. A young girl watches her brother march off to certain death to a chorus that echoes Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.”

Flags that line old main street
Are blowing in the wind
These must be the flags of freedom flying

She sees her brother marchin' by
Their bond is everlasting
Listening to Bob Dylan singing in 1963
Watching the flags of freedom flying
She sees the president speaking
On a Flat-screen TV

• Neil Young – Flags Of Freedom

Another Bridge School Benefit concert in 2008 included this beautiful take of “I Shall Be Released” with Wilco.

The album “A Letter Home” (produced by Jack White – another entry in this “Bob Dylan and…” series) contains covers of some of Neil’s favourites recorded on a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-graph vinyl recording booth. Amongst the tracks was this wonderful take of “Girl From The North Country”

Also to be found as a bonus track on the very expensive vinyl box set special edition was this new version of “Blowin’ In The Wind” – making this one of Neil Young’s rarest and hardest to acquire tracks:

For his part Dylan has mentioned Neil Young once on record:

I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone’s always yellin’ “Turn it down”

• Bob Dylan – Highlands

When I saw Bob sing this one in Glasgow, he brilliantly changed the lyric to “I’m listening to Annie Lennox” – to cheers from the very partisan Glaswegian crowd, always happy to hear a reference to one of our own from the master! Makes me wonder if he changed this line for every city he visited!

In 2002 Bob performed this wonderful version of a Neil Young classic – from one Old Man to another.

Performances selected by Paul Hobson, commentary by Tony Attwood

In this series we have been taking a look at some of the more notable performances of songs by Dylan on the Never Ending Tour.  There is an index to our articles in this series here.

Workingmen’s Blues No 2 from “Modern Times” has been one of Dylan’s favourites since he introduced it into the song rosta on 11 October 2006, and it stayed as part of the Never Ending Tour for two solid years, garnering 267 performances, before finally being set aside 12 years later almost to the day, at least for a while.

Although listening to the performance below I felt it would be hard to make much of the lyrics if one didn’t know them.  But the fact is that into this century Bob was still telling us his visions:

Some people never worked a day in their life
Don’t know what work even means

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

Moving on to our second choice – “If Dogs Run Free” this is an interesting selection indeed.  It was part of New Morning which came out in 1970 but did not get an outing on stage for 30 years until suddenly on 1 October 2000, there it was, in the show.

Over the next five years Bob performed it 104 times, until in 2005 it was once more shut away in its box not to be seen again.

The live performances had none of the twinkling jazzy piano that was central to the album version, and of course the unexpected scat singing of the second vocals, which at times sounds like imitation dog type noises.   But the bounce of the song is still there, and here Bob sounds much more convinced about his own lyrics – as if he had looked again at his lyrics and thought – “no this is not rubbish as some reviewers said – we just need to change the arrangement.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XocQNESUmQ

And for our third selection today, here is “Highway 61 Revisited.  Bob decides to talk to his audience a little before bringing those familiar lyrics, and he really looks like he is enjoying himself with it.  And why not – it is a song from 50 years ago, and still going strong.  Still most certainly worth performing.

https://youtu.be/W1i_Q9NDGJk

Now it really was a bit of a surprise to find the song has been with us for 50 years, as the listings show us that Bob began playing this song at the end of 1969 and was still playing it in the shows this year – a staggering 1,986 live performances.

As such it is the third most performed song in the Dylan repertoire, with the current (August 2019) list, reading

By Paul Hobson and Tony Attwood

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

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

This time we start with “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPzNjVOq1OU

Dylan has put a real bounce into the rhythm, but then against that sings in a laid back way.  You can say that even for Bob this is a non-movement piece.

As a result the song becomes a simple statement – he is not trying to convince anyone of the truth of what he is saying.  He says he’s going to let you pass, not with a sense of regret but as fact.  That’s how it is, there’s nothing else to it.

Then, when after the middle 8, the band takes a more back seat point of view, it is just Bob telling us well… it really is just a statement of how it goes.   And the focus moves onto the “Time will tell just who has fell” comment.  That time, as we know, has passed.  It’s a retrospective.

The nearest we can get to dating that recording, and this song below is to say it is in the early 2000s.  If you can get us closer, please do say.

So onto song number two: Hard Rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElY8_qidV4Y

Dylan rushes the first line and then waits.  The melody has almost gone, but the performance emphasises the lyrics, just as should always happen.   And suddenly, even though we know the lyrics forwards, backwards and inside out, we are hearing it unlike ever before.

Even the chorus has a surprise – Dylan singing in harmony with the band!  Really?  Yes it is.

This very laid back accompaniment means we really can focus on the lyrics once more even though we do know it so well.   Indeed with this reworking the meanings can being to shift and change in ways that we do not expect.   Just listen to Dylan delivering the line “that could drown the whole world”.  We know what it implies and symbolises, except this time we are thinking, is there is something else here that we’ve never got before.

And then after five minutes we get the instrumental with Bob leading on acoustic guitar.  No fancy electric lead – no of course not – and then suddenly it cuts and we get the softest verse of all for the “darling young one.”

Even then Dylan has more surprises for us for after the instrumental break we get the “What will you do now?” verse, and here we go even more laid back than before.  Thankfully there is no audience shouting and whooping to distract us, as Bob gives us a view from a much higher place than normal for the executioner’s face being always well hidden.

And after all that the chorus changes and then we get a completely new instrumental coda which extends the normal chorus lines to take us to the conclusion.  Amazing.

Our final piece in this selection is “Big Girl Now” from the Rolling Thunder Revue 1975.

Dylan is careful to use the slow speed of the song to give us the full power of the lyrics – including a long pause after “You’re a big girl now”.   This makes the whole piece, which has always been personal, now ever more personal than before.

This in turn means that lines like “Love is so simple” take on even more power.  In fact it becomes almost too much. So much so that I found myself wondering how much more of this angst I could take, and was grateful on the five minute mark for the instrumental verse.  But really, if you want a song of pain, here it is.  And then some.

by Jochen Markhorst

In Martin Popoff’s Judas Priest – Heavy Metal Painkillers (2007), one of the founders of the band, Al Atkins, reveals how they got that band name:

“Bruno, the bass guitarist in Judas Priest #1, came up with the idea when looking for something similar to the Black Sabbath name which we liked at the time. He got it from a Bob Dylan album called John Wesley Harding—the song was ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’. The curious moniker can be looked upon as a mild exclamation, or the duality of good and bad, Judas being a betrayer of Christ, a priest being a proponent thereof. Just on its own, the religious tone of the name carried a sort of ominous weight.”

… hitting the nail on the head. This plays out in 1969, and in those years it is trendy to invent a kind of contradictio in terminis as a band name, preferably absurd dualities. So a zeppelin is made of lead, a butterfly is made of iron and an alarm clock is made of strawberry. Metal bands are fond of religious, satanic and dark connotations, resulting in names like Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Lucifer’s Friend.

Equally, Dylan the Song Poet is attracted to the alienating effect that can be caused by a loaded name. He is chased away from a nice girl by her boyfriend Achilles, a nun is called Jezebel, a neighbour Tom Paine, he marries Isis and a flirty street sweeper is called Cinderella. But even in that – endless – row of alienating names, “Judas Priest” has a special, eccentric power.

Dylan probably already knows the word combination as a civilized expletive, as a “mild exclamation”, as Al Atkins calls it; instead of taking His name in vain, like “Jesus Christ!” or “God Almighty!”, some decent Christians prefer to use the less blasphemous “Judas Priest!”. Main characters in the plays of Sam Shepard, for example (first in Operation Sidewinder from 1970, later also in Buried Child, ’78).

Language artist Dylan appreciates, just like hard rock singer Al Atkins does two years later, the inner tension and chooses to elevate the decent curse to the name of a protagonist in his ballad.

“Frankie Lee” is less traceable. Dylan’s first association is probably Lightnin’ Hopkins cousin, Frankie Lee Sims, of whom he will play “Lucy Mae Blues” and “Walkin’ With Frankie” some forty years later in Theme Time Radio Hour. And in the second instance perhaps the murderer of “Little Sadie”, Lee Brown; yes sir, my name is Lee – maybe he is even called Frankie Lee Brown.

But both associations the bard probably only has afterwards, reading back – more likely is that the artist chooses an everyday, colourless name as a contrast for that exorbitant “Judas Priest”. A Midwestern, farm boy’s name, such as “Lucy Mae” or “Bobby Jean” or “Billie Joe”. After all, in the ballad Frankie Lee is the somewhat simple loser who goes down, Judas Priest the mysterious, stable counterforce.

“The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest” is the first song Dylan records for John Wesley Harding and probably the first song he writes for it. The elaboration and the length differ considerably from the other eleven songs and the song comes close to Dylan’s own understanding of a classical ballad:

“When they were singing years ago, it would be as entertainment… a fellow could sit down and sing a song for half an hour, and everybody could listen, and you could form opinions. You’d be waiting to see how it ended, what happened to this person or that person. It would be like going to a movie.”

(interview with John Cohen, summer of ’68)

Dylan thinks of epic songs, of the long, drawn-out, narrative ballads, rhyming stories to music, such as “Beowulf” and the Broadsides. The song “John Wesley Harding” was set up like that too, as he explains in ’69 to Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner: “You know, a real long ballad.”

In the end most of the “ballads” on John Wesley Harding become compressed, parable-like songs of three couplets, more lyrical than epic, which have hardly any common ground with the classical ballads. Only Frankie Lee and Judas Priest still does. Somewhat, at least: it is real long. Well, quite long, anyway.

Yet even with this real long ballad, it is not so much the narrative component that dominates, but that parable character. In the same interview with John Cohen, Dylan himself is a bit shy about his knowledge of, or his click with, parables:

JC: “That’s why I gave you Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes, because those stories really get to the heart of the matter, and yet you can never really decipher them.”
BD: “Yes, but the only parables that I know are the Biblical parables. I’ve seen others. Khalil Gibran perhaps… It has a funny aspect to it – you certainly wouldn’t find it in the Bible – this type of soul. Now Mr. Kafka comes off a little closer to that.”

“A funny aspect”. Funny? That again indicates a strange sort of congeniality with Kafka. We know from the great Prague writer that he classifies some dialogues, plot twists or situations in his own work as “funny”, have been intended as a joke, situations that the average reader would qualify as lurid, uncomfortable or cruel.

In contrast to Kafka and Dylan, the Biblical parables are usually not too enigmatic, at least: not intrinsic. Jesus’ parables follow a normal cause-and-effect structure, the action and the plot are clear and logical. A sower sows his seed. Some seed grains end up on rocky soil. Those seeds will not grow and bear no fruit. The other seeds fall on good soil and will bear fruit (Luke 8). No surprises, no absurdities. Problems only arise with the interpretation of the chosen metaphor, are text external.

Dylan’s lyrics on John Wesley Harding follow Kafka’s narrative style: the problems start text-internally. Actions, dialogues and plot turns evade everyday expectations and patterns. A traveler asking the way is laughed at by the police officer (Gib’s auf!). A gentleman who wants to leave is stopped by his servant, who demands to know where his lordship thinks he is going (Der Aufbruch). When Gregor’s parents bump into a monstrous giant insect in their son’s bedroom, they do not think: what is this beast doing here, where is our son? Bizarrely, they think: dear God, our son has turned into a beetle (Die Verwandlung).

Because of Kafka’s factual, recording style, the reader at first does not notice the illogic in the opponents’ actions – thus making the evoked anxiety elusive and all the more nerve-wracking.

In “The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest” Dylan applies the same technique. Just like with Kafka, the logic derails right from the start. Frankie Lee needs money, his friend Judas Priest pulls out a roll of banknotes. But then: Judas puts the money “on a footstool just above the plotted plains.” A bizarre, unreal location determination. Next, Frankie’s actions are disconcerting. Word choice and the continuation of the dialogue suggest that it is important which of the ten-dollar banknotes Frankie will choose now. “Make a choice,” says Judas. Frankie assumes a thoughtful pose (“put his fingers to his chin”), but is unable to choose as long as Judas is watching. Judas is lenient and willing to wait somewhere else, but again underlines that he has some concern regarding which specific banknotes Frankie chooses: “You’d better hurry up and choose which of those bills you want” – as if one ten-dollar bill is ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’.

This psychedelic above the plotted plains is still Dylanesque. It is comparable to illogical location indications such as inside of Mobile, or up on Housing Project Hill, or along the watchtower, or underneath the apple suckling tree – locations that can only be found on the map of La La Land, due to semantics or incorrect prepositions.

Kafkaesque, however, is the consequence with which the incongruence (the apparent importance of the “right” banknotes) by both protagonists is maintained as an obviousness. It clashes with the sense of reality of the reader / listener, thus creating discomfort.

The following verses deepen this discomfort by assigning “improper” qualifications to the dialogue. Judas says that he will wait for Frankie Lee later on, in “Eternity”. “Eternity?” Frankie asks, with “a voice as cold as ice”

A voice as cold as ice? Words can be “cold”, a look, even a character, but a “cold voice” should be something like an unfriendly, unsympathetic voice – Darth Vader, something like that. And also in terms of content unfitting. “Surprised” or “amused” or “shocked” – those are qualifications that would match the tone of Frankie’s verification question, not “unfriendly”.

“Cold” would at least content-wise be appropriate to the following response from Frankie. “Yes, Eternity,” says Judas, “though you might call it ‘Paradise’.”

That does sound a little condescending, and Frankie’s reply is accordingly defensive: “I don’t call it anything” – this time he does not sound “cold” however, but rather says it “with a smile”.

After that, it only gets more tumultuous. Frankie is sitting there on his own, presumably staring at that roll of banknotes, and feels “low and mean” for unclear reasons. A stranger does not just come in, no, he “bursts upon the scene” and approaches Frankie with the wondrous question whether he is “Frankie the gambler, whose father is deceased” – if so: one Priest calls for him, a little down the road. Surprisingly, Frankie replies that he “recalls this Priest very well” – as if it had been years since he last saw him – to add immediately: “In fact, he just left my sight.” Peculiar way to express that someone has just left the room, even more curious after the previous communication that he has not yet forgotten Priest.

On the narrative level, the poet has shifted up a gear again. The derailments are no longer from one sentence to the next, but even within one and the same sentence it starts to grind, logic is lost. Frankie speaks this ambivalent sentence with – incomprehensible – “fear”. To which the stranger replies, just as inconceivably, “as quiet as a mouse” (“Yes, that’s the one”).

We are halfway through, a stylistical rollover is ahead, with this accelerated sequence of incongruities. Time for a breather, for a fermate. The poet Dylan feels that too. The seventh verse is on a substantive level driven and hectic, but syntactically “calm”; Frankie’s actions follow a recognizable logic and a normal pattern (he panics, drops everything, runs in the right direction and finds Judas). The dialogue then is coherent – Frankie’s question is appropriate (“What kind of house is this?”), Judas’ answer is surprising, but not unrealistic (“This is not a house, but a home”).

After the fermate we can return to Full Kafka Mode. In couplets 8, 9 and 10 the mismatches tumble over each other again. On Judas’ quasi-ambiguous, little spectacular correction that he is not standing in front of a house, but in front of a home, a trembling Frankie “loses all control over everything he has made” while the “mission bells” sound.

The dreamlike, Kafkaesque atmosphere now being evoked is enhanced by the shadowy, unreal shifts in time and place. In couplets 6 and 7 it is suggested that Frankie and Judas see each other again and converse in the strange house, but in couplet 8 they are suddenly back on the street in front of that same house. It seems to be a brothel – the description (“bright as a sun”) refers to the most famous brothel in art history, The House Of The Rising Sun and behind the twenty-four windows are twenty-four ladies.

Equally unreal is the subsequent time warp. In Frankie Lee’s reality, sixteen days and nights seem to pass, in which he runs an apparently exhausting and ultimately fatal, orgasmic marathon through that brothel, but Judas, apparently in a different time zone, is still waiting at the bottom of the stairs, waiting to receive him on Day Seventeen.

Just like in couplet 6, the poet is now gearing up again; from couplet 10 the logic does not crash from one line to the other, but within one and the same line:

No one tried to say a thing
When they took him out in jest

“Nobody said anything” would be a normal stage direction for this sad scene, but Dylan nuances: “No one tried to say a thing,” while Frankie Lee’s corpse is being carried “out in jest”. “In jest”? Would it have been more serious, more appropriate, to leave the corpse lying there in the brothel?

No time to reflect thereon; the next enigmatic plot turn again forces away any confusion hereon. Out of nowhere appears “the little neighbor boy” who is also “guilty”, but this loaded addition does not get the chance to resonate either, being already drowned out by the intriguing exit of the neighbour boy: “Nothing is revealed,” he mumbles, under his breath, on top of that – and in passing, the poet thus smuggles in two of Kafka’s main themes (guilt and concealment).

In accordance though with Biblical parables is the coda – an explicit interpretation, or in this case: a moral. However, that only concerns the form, of course. The content is “normally” Dylanesque, or Kafkaesque, but in any case inscrutable:

The moral of this song
Is simply that one should never be
Where one does not belong
So when you see your neighbor carryin’ somethin’
Help him with his load
And don’t go mistaking Paradise
For that home across the road

The poet opens his epilogue with a run of the mill greeting card wisdom (‘know your place, remember who you are, stay where you belong”). The subsequent wisdom begins with “so”, thus promising a conclusion – which does not come. “If your neighbor is carrying something, help him with his load” is not a conclusion from the above, in fact: that “morality” teaches, quite on the contrary, to not go to your neighbour, but to stay “where you belong”.

The last sentence then opens with “And”, suggesting a listing, an addition to the previous appeal to help the neighbour, but alas: again there is no substantive relationship. “And don’t confuse Paradise with that home across the road.”

True to form, the moral of “The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest” is a moral lesson not linked to the little that is told.

Inscrutable, all in all, and that has been a deliberate, strategic choice by the Bard. In stylistic terms, he cheats with incorrect, and therefore confusing, prepositions and conjunctions, and illogical adjectives and adverbs.

In terms of content, he also interlaces the “ballad” with suggestive, symbolic power insinuating accents that force interpretation attempts into distant blind alleys. Biblical of course, by naming Judas Priest, by the capitalization of Paradise and Eternity, by insinuating number symbolism (sixteen symbolizing ‘Love’, seventeen ‘Victory’ and twenty-four ‘Priesthood’ – a seasoned Dylanologist should be able to deduce some heads and tails out of it) and through the paraphrases. Remarkable idioms such as foolish pride, foaming at the mouth and helping with load can all be found in the Book of Books.

Smoke curtains and fog clouds. Masked and anonymous. A classical ballad, an epic poem with a beginning and an end and a real narrative like “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts” is merely suggested, but evaporates behind an accumulation of non-sequiturs, misleading stage directions and irrelevant details … masterfully disguised as a dramatic novella full of Kafkaesque clarity.

The accompanying music is unambiguously simple. A basic, unadorned chord scheme with just three chords (G-Bm-Am) that is repeated from start to finish without variation (Dylan plays with capo, as with almost every song on John Wesley Harding, so in fact it is in C), bass and drums. The only excess is provided by two short, beautiful, harmonica solos.

But in spite of the undeniable beauty and inviting simplicity, length and uniformity seem to deter the colleagues. There are virtually no covers by artists from the higher divisions. Dozens by YouTube amateurs, usually low-quality labours of love by white, spectacled men in their fifties, and in addition a few perfunctory ones by tribute bands – all negligible too.

Obviously, Thea Gilmore cannot escape the song on her beautiful tribute project, the integral performance of John Wesley Harding (2011). Her rendition is beautiful.

Gilmore artificially adds excitement by raising the tempo and the arrangement, to which she steadily adds instruments, but above all: by cheating with the chord scheme. The seventh verse, the textual pause for breath, is turned into a bridge and that is actually a particularly successful find. It had done Dylan’s original well, too.

In 1987 Dylan plays the song with Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia then takes the song back to the studio of his musical friend David Bromberg in the early nineties. Bromberg releases most of his recordings with Garcia only after Jerry’s death. Their “The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest” is therefore not released until 2004, on the tasteful, acoustic collection Been All Around The World.

The men also opt for minimalist instrumentation, but more ornamented (Bromberg lets his mandolin flutter around the melody and the words). The true stronghold is Garcia’s hypnotic talk-singing, that more than Dylan’s words seems to tell a mysterious, moving and exciting story.

Still, it remains only suggestion, of course.

The final cover is not yet available and must be produced by Judas Priest, obviously. The guys are capable; their cover of Joan Baez’s melancholic ode to Dylan “Diamonds And Rust” (on Sin After Sin, 1977) is amazingly respectful and equally attractive – and after that name choice the second time the British metal band skims Bob Dylan. That cover will come, eventually.

by Larry Fyffe

Though there be confusing and paradoxical interpretations abounding here, there, and everywhere, the cosmologies of Gnostic and related Cabbalism, some forms of which are thought knowlegable only to a special elite, can be said to differ from the orthodox Abrahamic religions in that the actions of humans, including the overt display of joy, have an impact on the traditionally aloof, all-powerful ‘God’ –  the anthropomorphic ‘masculine’ giant in the sky replaced by linguistic correspondences and metaphors for a universe that is mysterious and infinite.

That is, through the gathering and expanding of knowledge obtained from the proto-science of alchemy that focuses on the basic elements (earth, water, wind, fire), and by acting in good faith for the benefit of one’s fellow man, good works undertaken by enlightened individuals light up the conditions for all in an evolving material world that’s traditionally depicted as dark. According to modern Romantically-inclined mystics, the big problem, rooted in the ancient mystical view, is that  ‘sparks’ emanating from the caring homemaker ‘feminine’ side of the Godhead have all but been extinguished; Adam becomes the big boss, necessitating a rebalancing of the cosmological order.

The narrator in the song lyrics below by singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan warn of destructive ‘demonic’ forces afoot in the cosmos:

The engines they exploded
Propellers failed to start
The boilers overloaded
The ship's bow split apart

(Bob Dylan: Tempest)

Though the songwriter grows up in the heyday of of Western movies, most of which feature dominant men and submissive women, the lyrics below suggest an equitable and harmonious partnership will once again exist between the sexes:

Searchin' for the truth the way God planned it
But the truth is I might drown before I find it ....
Yeah, I need a woman, oh, don't I
Need a woman, bring it home safe at last ....
Been watchin' you in the sunshine
Walkin' with you in the dark
And I want you to be that woman - treat me right
Be that woman every night

(Ry Cooder: Need A Woman ~ Dylan/Cooder)

At other times, song lyrics envision the sexes trapped in a dark, materialistic world of stupidity devoid of loving spirituality:

Idiot wind
Blowin' through the buttons of our coat
Blowin' through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind
Blowin' through the dust upon our shelves
We're idiots, babe
It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves

(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

Under such circumstances, fleeing from an Eden that is burning, rather than seeking a union with the Infinite ‘God’, appears to be the rational way out:

"There must be some way out of here"
Said the joker to the thief
"There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine
Ploughmen dig my earth
None of them along the line
Know what any of it is worth"

(Bob Dylan: All Along The Watchtower)

Before he experimented with Christianity, Bob Dylan displays an interest in Gnostic/Cabbalistic thoughts:

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

(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

Even more so thereafter, but much darker:

She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writin' what was in her mind
I don't see why I should even care
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)

In the Lurianic Universe, there are demons everywhere a-floatin’:

Broken lines, broken strings
Broken threads, broken springs
Broken idols, broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain't no use jiving
Ain't no use joking
Everything is broken

(Bob Dylan: Everything Is Broken)

https://youtu.be/Ev-Ru1QpTqU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

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

(Dylan, Sing Out! October 1968)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But a fan, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Suze Rotole in A Freewheelin’ Time, 2008)

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

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

(Marianne Faithfull in An Autobiography, 1994)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

By Mike Johnson (kiwipoet)

Introduction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the 2011 version:

Here’s the 2012 version:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until we meet again!

Kia Ora

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

By Larry Fyffe

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

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

(William Shakespeare: Sonnet CXLII)

Sings Bob Dylan:

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

(Bob Dylan: To Ramona)

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

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

(William Shakespeare: Sonnet CXXVII)

So writes the musician/songster:

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

(Bob Dylan: Dark Eyes)

Another imaginistic poet and singer deplores this cultural game of

one-upmanship:

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

Concise, and black humorous be:

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

https://youtu.be/B6IoRNRahqo

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

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

A sentiment expressed in the song lyrics below:

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

(Bob Dylan: If Not For You)

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

by Larry Fyffe

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

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

Says the narrator:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, as it’s put in another song:

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

An obvious reference to a play by the Bard:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorrowful be the conclusion of the following sonnet:

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

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

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

by Aaron Galbraith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now wouldn’t that be amazing?

by Jochen Markhorst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/v4z3w8tVxoU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Paul Hobson and Tony Attwood

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

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

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

Girl From the North Country late 90s

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

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

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

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

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

Down Along The Cove 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t think twice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhat likewise in the Cabbalistic poem below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/vzgCXi69zEQ

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

Dylan told him it was done and dusted in 15 minutes

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

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

Here’s Bob’s version of Cohen’s work

And here is a live version by the composer…

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

Here is John Cale

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

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

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

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

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

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

Hallelujah

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

But let me finish with one trio of lines

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

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

Here’s the verse in full

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

And some people say Bob can be obscure.

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

by Patrick Roefflaer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great-Britain: Bob Dylan – Greatest Hits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

US: Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits

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

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

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

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

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

So the art-director had to be creative.

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

Front

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poster

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grammy

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

by Jochen Markhorst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My my.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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