Untold Dylan

by Larry Fyffe

Ben Carruthers And The Deep perform a jacked-up version of a John Lee Hooker traditional blues tune, but with the following fragmented lyrics:

Jack O' Diamonds
On the move
Jack O'Diamonds
One-eyed knave
On the move
Hit the street
Bumps his head
On the prowl
He's down
You'll only lose
Shouldn't stay
Jack O'Diamonds
Is a hard card to play

(Ben Carruthers And The Deep: Jack O’ Diamonds ~ Carruthers/Bob Dylan)

There are those among us who wonder why Bob Dylan is given vocal credits for the song above. Well, it’s very clear that lines are taken directly from the following Dylan poem which alludes to the traditional Appalachian folk song ‘Jack Of Diamonds’:

Jack O' Diamonds
Jack O'Diamonds
One-eyed knave
On the move
Hits the streets
Sneaks, leaps
Between the pillars of chips
Springs on them like Samson
Thumps, thumps
Strikes
Is on the prowl
You'll only lose
Shouldn't stay
Jack O' Diamonds
Is a hard card to play

(Bob Dylan: Jack O’ Diamonds)

The song performed by Carruthers And The Deep continues:

Jack O' Diamonds
Whew
Jack O' Diamonds
This one-armed prince
Wears a single glove
For sure
He's not that lovin'
Jack O' Diamonds
Break my hand
Leave me here to stand
Jack O' Diamonds
Is a hard card to play

(Jack O’ Diamonds: Carruthers/Dylan)

Dylan’s poem goes:

Jack O' Diamonds
Wrecked my hand
Left me here t' stand ....
Jack O' Diamonds
One-armed prince
Wears but a single glove
As he shoves
Never loves ....
A high card
Jack O' Diamonds
But ain't high enough
Jack O' Diamonds
Is a hard card to play

(Bob Dylan: Jack O’ Diamonds)

The song lyrics closely match those of the poem (printed on the cover of ‘Another Side Of Bob Dylan’ album):

Jack O' Diamonds
Is a hard card
Jack O' Diamonds
Is a high card
Jack O' Diamonds
Is a high card
But it ain't high enough
Jack O' Diamonds
Can open for riches
Jack O' Diamonds
But then it switches
Colour by picture
But it's only the Ten
Jack O' Diamonds

(Jack Of Diamonds: Carruthers/Dylan)

The use of many phrases from Dylan’s long poem can hardly be called ‘sampling’:

Jack O' Diamonds
Can open for riches
Jack O' Diamonds
But then it switches
A colourful picture, but
Beats only the Ten
Jack O' Diamonds
Is a hard card to play

(Bob Dylan: Jack O’ Diamonds)

Dylan revisits the line “Left me here t’ stand” in his ‘Tambourine Man’ – “Left me blindly here to stand, but still not sleeping”.

Dylan mixes up the medicine, and samples a Late Victorian poem that’s a speech given by a personna (he’s won, not a card game, but a duel – ‘I stand here now’); the poem reveals the speaker’s regret at what he has done:

Take the cloak from his face, and at first
Let the corpse do its worst!
How he lies in his rights of man!
Death has done all death can
Ha, what avails death to erase
His offence, my disgrace? ....
I stand here now, he lies in his place!
Cover the face!

(Robert Browning: After)

Regret is expressed from a third-person point of view in the following song lyrics:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger ....
But you who philosophize disgrace
And criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face .....
William Zanzinger with a six month sentence
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace
And criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face

(Bob Dylan: The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll)

Note the the Dylanesque “rhyme twist” ~ ‘disgrace’/’face’.

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

My absolute thanks to Aaron Galbraith for finding this track.   It is a leftover from The New Basement Tapes collection with lyrics by Dylan of course, and this time music by Elvis Costello. Elvis is believed to have performed it live 8 times, we’ve got two recordings, below.

So, here’s a couple of the live versions..   This first one is not a very good recording but is included because Elvis Costello states “words by Bob Dylan” at the beginning

And here is a secnd recording from Leicester in 2015…   The quality is better on this one but the lyrics are less clear.

Aaron has even gone so far as to provide a set of lyrics…. and I am doubly thankful for this because there’s no way I could make a stab at it.

Matthew Met Mary

Matthew met Mary
In a garden on a clear cool market day
Said Mary to Matthew
“I’d like to give my child away”
Said Matthew,
“I got a pheasant farm and I’ll take good care of him
There’s a diamond spring and a big oak tree
And he can climb on every limb
A thousand doors couldn’t hold me back from you”

Said Mary to Matthew
“You know that this may never be
I’m not going to give my child for nothing but an old oak tree”
Just then a man wearing woman’s clothes began to hop around
“So unto you and if I do and then maybe woe unto me
A thousand doors couldn’t hold me back from you”

There’s a diamond spring and a big oak tree
And he can climb on every limb
A thousand doors couldn’t hold me back from you
A thousand doors couldn’t hold me back from you
A thousand doors wouldn’t hold me back from you

Aaron added the comment in supplying us with the music and lyrics,  “I’m not to sure where the line breaks come or even how to split up the verses but this was my best attempt!” and the comment, which I agree with, “A thousand doors wouldn’t hold me back from you is an amazing line don’t you think?”

I think Aaron has done a great job – certainly far better than anything I could have done.

For myself, I think these are some of the strangest Dylan lines I have ever seen – I wonder if they were just a sketch of ideas and lines from Dylan, which, had he wanted to go further, would have been edited and played with.

Certainly when I first looked at “Just then a man wearing woman’s clothes began to hop around” I really couldn’t believe that could be the right representation of the lyrics, but listening again and again I can’t come up with a better suggestion.   Then I thought, “is this some sort of weird verse from the Bible that I’ve never come across before” – but no of course it can’t be.

So just a strange line in what is otherwise a song that is starting to make sense, but which Dylan thought was not going anywhere so left in his notebook.

But whatever is going on in that strange line, it is another Dylan song, so thanks very much to Aaron.   And even better news, there’s another lost track comiing up shortly.

by Jochen Markhorst

He is quite the dreamer, our minstrel. Browsing through the collected lyrics, dreams and dream descriptions appear to be among the constants in the catalogue. After sad, cheerful and dark dreams such as in “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, “Talkin’ World War III Blues” and “To Ramona” we have already arrived at “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” on Bringing It All Back Home (1965). And it doesn’t end there. True, in the last groove, in “It’s Alright, Ma”, the poet coquettishly sighs: And if my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine, but that doesn’t stop him, the fifty years thereafter.

Saint Augustine appears before the nocturnal mind’s eye, in “Time Passes Slowly” (1970) the narrator experiences time delayed not only here in the mountains, but also when you’re lost in a dream, “Durango” (1975) is a bloody nightmare, “Jokerman” is a dream twister, in “Born In Time” the love couple is not made of stardust, but of dreams and so on. Up until Tempest (2012) a watchman dreams of the demise of the Titanic and in the borrowed songs of Shadows In The Night (2015) the dreaming goes on (in “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Full Moon And Empty Arms”, among others).

In short, the collected works of the master are a series of dreams.

It is one of the more substantive overlappings with the work of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), in whose relatively comprehensible oeuvre one reverie follows the other. Both artists even share their dreams, occasionally. Rimbaud dreams of war (in Illuminations XXXIX: Guerre – C’est aussi simple qu’une phrase musicale), as Dylan does in “Talkin’ World War III”, and the Frenchman’s Tom Thumb is a dreamer too (Petit-Poucet rêveur, j’égrenais dans ma course des rimes – Tom Thumb the dreamer, sowing the roads there with rhymes).

The director of the fascinating video clip to “Series Of Dreams” feels the connection well; in the final seconds of the clip, Meiert Avis edits the well-known youth portrait of Rimbaud in front of a musing Dylan, letters fleetingly appear and disappear: black a, white e, red i, green u and blue o – the Alchimie du verbe, the second délire from Un Saison En Enfer (1873).

The only 19-year-old genius defines poetry here as if he is talking about Dylan’s best work:

I invented the colour of vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. – I regulated the form and motion of every consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself I’d created a poetic language, accessible some day to all the senses. I reserved the translation rights.

It was academic at first. I wrote of silences, nights, I expressed the inexpressible. I defined vertigos.

‘Expressing the inexpressible’, ‘writing of silences, nights’, ‘defining vertigos’… the congeniality is also recognized in the Dylan film I’m Not There (2007). One of Dylan’s incarnations from that intriguing motion picture is a 19-year-old ‘Arthur Rimbaud’, masterfully performed by Ben Whishaw, haughty and vulnerable at the same time. He also receives the most rewarding texts, the most beautiful one-liners and aphorisms from liner notes, interviews and press conferences. Among them is the one from Shelton’s No Direction Home, which beautifully describes the Rimbaud-Dylan connection:

Yet “Series Of Dreams” is an atypical song in the series of dream songs by the bard. No extravagancies like in the 60s, nor the mystical quitened down dream references from the seventies and eighties – here the poet almost clinically administers the outlines of four dreams, some couleur is given by details such as a folded umbrella and the stage directions like the accelerated time (in a different version delayed time, by the way) and, moreover, the narrator declares: they are not too special and certainly not too scientific, none of them.

The latter remains to be seen. The founder of the scientific dream interpretation, Sigmund Freud, would know what to do with it. Any series of dreams is related anyway, as he teaches on page 171 of his Traumdeutung (1899), and despite the lack of details it is possible to predict in which direction Freud’s analysis would point.

The umbrella of course symbolizes the male genitals (“des der Erektion vergleichbaren Aufspannens wegen – because of the stretching out, comparable to the erection”), ‘climbing’ represents The Deed and ‘running’ fear – fear of dying, usually, but here Herr Doktor would probably steer towards fear of commitment. After all, the umbrella remains folded, the burning numbers symbolize the passing of the years, to witness indicates culpable passivity.

However, and on this count Dylan is right, it is not a coherent, specific interpretation, nor should it be, indeed. The poet does not describe a dream here, nor a series of dreams, but rather, after all those bizarre, melancholic, visionary and romantic dreams in his oeuvre, the act of dreaming in itself.

The fate of the song is now well known. Recorded during the Oh Mercy sessions, but to the dismay of those involved and to producer Lanois’s despair, Dylan refuses to put it on the album. His motives, as expressed in the autobiography Chronicles, are once again puzzling. After the recording, Lanois suggests something like reversing the bridge and the couplets. Dylan considers it, understands what his producer means, but then rejects the idea: “I felt like it was fine the way it was,” and then all of a sudden the song is gone. Wondrous.

His criticism of Lanois’ approach to that other rejected masterpiece, “Mississippi” from 1997, seems to point much more to his discomfort with “Series Of Dreams”:

“[Lanois] thought it was pedestrian. Took it down the Afro-polyrhythm route –  multirhythm drumming, that sort of thing. (…) But he had his own way of looking at things, and in the end I had to reject this because I thought too highly of the expressive meaning behind the lyrics to bury them in some steamy cauldron of drum theory.”

A “Mississippi” recording with ‘multirhythm drumming’ is unknown, but the official releases of “Series Of Dreams” (on The Bootleg Series 1-3 and on Tell-Tale Signs) do fit that description. Still, the remarkable drumming is precisely what makes it so distinctive. The whole arrangement, but especially the percussion, provides the majestic grandeur which the sober, relativizing lyrics deny. Oh Mercy had indeed been a more beautiful album with “Series Of Dreams” on it, in this regard Lanois is unquestionably right.

It is an enchanting song. All the more remarkable is the fact that it has relatively few covers. Hard to improve or to match, that might be the reason. Most covers remain anxiously close to the source, in particular with regard to the rolling, thundering drum avalanche and the driving bass.

The single lone wolf who deviates from this, the Antwerp collective Zita Swoon for example (on Big City, 2007), is really attractive, but inevitably misses the elegant magnificence of the original.

No, the faithful copy of the Italian grandmaster Francesco De Gregori wins. Translations rarely work with Dylan songs, but ever since De Gregori’s version of “If You See Her, Say Hello” (“Non Dirle Che Non È Cosi”, on Masked And Anonymous, 2003), it is established that the Italian rendering of the Roman ‘Principe dei Cantautori‘ is the exception.

Apart from the translation, his “Una Series Di Sogni” actually adds little, but it is enough to be fascinated again. From the beautiful tribute album De Gregori Canta Bob Dylan – Amore E Furto (2015), on which also fairly loyal, but excellent cover versions such as “Dignità”, “Tweedle Dum & Tweedle Dee” and “Via Della Povertà” shine.

Pensavo a una serie di sogni
dove niente diventava realtà.
Tutto resta dov’è stato ferito,
fino al punto di non muoversi più.

Pensavo a niente di niente,
come quando ti svegli gridando
e ti chiedi perché.
Niente di troppo preciso,
solamente dei sogni così.

Italian truly is the language of dreams. Sogni che l’ombrello era chiuso.

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

The self-proclaimed ‘garbologist’ AJ Weberman’s “A Listener’s Guide To Bob Dylan’s Tempest” might be hailed as Juvenalian satire at its best except the  savage invective is so over the top that it makes Jonathan Swift look slow.

Weberman demonstrates that Bob Dylan’s song lyrics, if cherry-picked and ‘decoded’, can be twisted to show that the singer/songwriter is anything from a Communist to a fundamentalist Christian to an out-and-out neo-Nazi.

In the lyrics below, Weberman, believe it or not, contends that Dylan is telling white people to wake up and realize that African Americans belong to an inferior race:

How many roads roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man
And how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?

(Bob Dylan: Blowing In The Wind)

According to Weberman, ‘roads’ is a Dylanesque pun on Cecil Rhodes, the white supremacist ‘dove’ who brings peace to South Africa by pointing out that blacks are destined to be ‘male servants’.

And just in in case listeners are not clever enough to pick up on the code by themselves, AJ  provides another example:

Well, a childish dream is a deathless need
And a noble truth is a sacred creed
My pretty baby, she's lookin' around
She's wearin' a multi-thousand dollar crown

(Bob Dylan: Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum)

The song above be not fragmented postmodernist quotes from poet Henry Timrod and a New Orleans travel guide,  but, according to Weberman, it’s Dylan denying the Holocaust, and condemning the inflated ‘sacred creed’ of Zionists since the singer/song writer is certain that only a few thousand Jews (not millions) were killed by the Nazis.

Everybody smart enough to get that now? But it’s in the album ‘Tempest’ , according to Weberman’s listener’s guide, that Bob Dylan shamelessly bares his neoNazi beliefs:

Well, I'm grinding my life out steady and sure
Nothing more wretched than I must endure
I'm drenched in the light that shines from the sun
I could stone you to death for the wrongs that you've done

(Bob Dylan: Pay In Blood )

In the lyrics above, according to Weberman, Bob Dylan would like to attack the black ‘Muslim socialist’ President Hussein Barrack Obama, and stone him to death for stealing his hard-earned money through taxation.

Weberman’s decoding of Dylan’s song lyrics continues on and on:

Charlotte's a harlot
Dresses in scarlet
Mary dresses in green
It's soon after midnight
And I've got a date with the fairy queen

(Bob Dylan: Soon after Midnight)

Deciphered: the immoral ‘scarlet’ whore of Babylon, the Democratic Party of Obama, meets in Charlotte, North Carolina where passives male homosexuals, known as ‘Marys,’ are easily duped, and same-sex marriage is celebrated.

Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing
Blowing like it's gonna sweep my world away
I gonna stop in Carbondale, and keep on going
That Duquesne whistle gonna rock me night and day

(Bob Dylan: Duquesne Whistle)

Weberman claims that in the song, Dylan accuses AJ of being Captain Fritz Duquesne, a South African Nazi spy arrested by the FBI in 1941.  As I’ve pointed out, Humphrey Bogart, in the movie ‘All Through The Night”,  breaks up a Nazi spy ring in New York City, alluded to in Dylan’s “Sweetheart Like You”. Weberman, however, says the the song above is about blowing the whistle on Dylan because Zimmerman is the actual Nazi sympathizer:

Listen to the Duquesne whistle blowing
Blowing like she never blowed before
Blue light blinking, red light glowing
Blowing like she's at my chamber door

(Bob Dylan: Duquesne Whistle)

No reference to Edgar Allan Poe is this, but, decoded by AJ, it’s a reference to a laser beam from a gun pointed at Weberman’s door lest he expose Dylan as the white racist that he is.

The light in my native land are glowing
I wonder if they'll know me next time 'round
I wonder if that old oak tree's still standing
That old oak tree, the one we used to climb

(Bob Dylan: Duquesne Whistle)

The ‘old oak tree’ is one on which blacks were lynched, and Dylan, of course, wants it brought back into service.

By Tony Attwood

Bill Monroe is not one of those names that crops up all the time in Dylan’s commentaries about Dylan himself and his musical influences, but the references are there, including a reference in a 1987 Rolling Stone interview.

Loder asked, “Do you still listen to the artists you started out with?”

Bob replied, “The stuff that I grew up on never grows old. I was just fortunate enough to get it and understand it at that early age, and it still rings true for me.. I’d still rather listen to Bill and Charlie Monroe than any current record. That’s what America’s all about to me. I mean, they don’t have to make any more new records — there’s enough old ones, you know? I went in a record store a couple of weeks ago — I wouldn’t know what to buy. There’s so many kinds of records out.”

One of the key songs from Bill Monroe is “Molly and Tenbrooks” which is what I want to look at here.

Here are the full lyrics

Run oh Molly run, run oh Molly run
Ten-Brooks gonna beat you to the bright and shining sun
To the bright and shining sun oh Lord
To the bright and shining sun

Ten-Brooks was a big bay horse, he wore a shaggy mane
He run all ’round Memphis, and he beat the Memphis train
Beat the Memphis train oh Lord
Beat the Memphis train

Ten-Brooks said to Molly, what makes your head so red
Running in the hot sun with a fever in my head
Fever in my head oh Lord
Fever in my head

Molly said to Ten-Brooks you’re looking mighty squirrel
Ten-Brooks said to Molly I’m leaving this old world
Leaving this old world oh Lord
Leaving this old world

Out in California where Molly done as she pleased
She come back to old Kentucky, got beat with all ease
Beat with all ease oh Lord
Beat with all ease

The women’s all a-laughing, the children all a-crying
Men all a-hollering old Ten-Brooks a- flying
Old Ten-Brooks a- flying oh Lord
Old Ten-Brooks a- flying

Kiper, Kiper, you’re not riding right
Molly’s a beating old Ten-Brooks clear out of sight
Clear out of sigh oh Lord
Clear out of sight

Kiper, Kiper, Kiper my son
Give old Ten-Brooks the bridle and let old Ten-Brooks run
Let old Ten-Brooks run oh Lord
Let old Ten-Brooks run

Go and catch old Ten-Brooks and hitch him in the shade
We’re gonna bury old Molly in a coffin ready made
In a coffin ready made oh Lord
In a coffin ready made

Of course Bob doesn’t tell us quite what makes this song so attractive to him, but I suspect it is the sound of the overall piece, and not the lyrics.  But we should remember that the song has its own pedigree, if you see what I mean…

The song first appeared as the B side of “I’m going back to Old Kentuck”  and was then released again as the A side of a single in 1949 – which is when it became a hit.

The song comes from a traditional piece written sometime in the late 19th century.  It was recorded by the Carver Boys in close to its original format, in 1929…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti67332R2x8

The song is a fictionalised version of a race in July 1878 between Ten Broeck from Kentucky and Mollie McCarty – although the notion that the race had a fatal ended is a fiction – in reality it didn’t.

However the idea of the song however goes back further – to Skewball, a British ballad from the 18th century.    Here’s a reinterpretation of that original by Steeleye Span.

The Ten Broeck legend includes the notion that the owner of Ten Broeck bet the owner of Molly McCarthy $5,000 that his horse would win best two heats out of three in a 4 mile race.

This sort of story telling tradition can, in my view, been seen to have been incorporated into the Dylan song, “Lily rosemary and the jack of hearts”, a story from olden days which gets wilder each time it is told.

Of course Bob has never suggested in any interview that there is a link between the “Tim Brook” / “Ten Broeck” tale and the ramblng diamond mine story, but somehow I like to think there is.  The concept of the ever changing tale is within both themes.

As for Bill Monroe he first gained national fame with the Grand Ole Opry, and his experimentation with blue grass music which for many years he played with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs to form the Blue Grass Boys.  It was from this version of the band in 1946/7 that Molly and Tenbrooks emerges, along with “Blue Moon of Kentucky” – the song I guess most of us know in association with Bill Monroe, even if we don’t know the rest of his work.

Bill Monroe remained popular into the 1950s although he did have renewed success in the 1960s when there was a revival of interest in his music which led to the establishment of bluegrass festivals.  He also played at Farm Aid IV – Farm Aid of course being an idea either dreamed up, or at least promoted by Bob Dylan.

Some of the other articles in the Why Does Dylan Like series can be found here.

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 Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Nothing really matters much
It’s doom alone that counts

(Shelter from the Storm)

It seems that there is a convenient Bob Dylan quote for just about every occasion. My poor partner has had to put up with this time out of mind. We’re in a traffic jam.

‘Okay,’ she says, ‘What’s your Dylan quote for this one?’

‘That’s easy – there must be some way out of here…’

Some habits are hard to break and some you just don’t want to. I was put in mind of Dylan lines when I read in The Guardian about a movement among women and couples to choose not have children because of “climate breakdown and civilisation collapse”.

I remembered these lines from ‘Masters of War’ written in 1962.

‘You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins’

Of course these lines spring straight out of Cold War anxiety. We tend to forget how terrifying the prospect of nuclear annihilation was, and indeed, there was a lot of talk at the time of how wrong it might be to ‘bring children into the world.’ Although most went ahead and did so.

I suggest that there is an Apocalyptic vein that runs through Dylan songs, especially the early ‘protest’ songs, that is perfectly suited to our contemporary anxieties. Dylan’s language is in this case specific enough as well as open-ended enough to stay relevant after 50 years.

In 2004 ‘Masters of War’ was seen as too radical for a high school band to play. Can you imagine the Secret Service busting a high school band rehearsal because they thought the song advocated killing the president, George Bush! These masters of war are still there, still calling the shots, the situation has not changed except to get worse, so the song itself can’t fade into history; history won’t let it.

The specific yet open-ended nature of these lyrics can also be found in the lines:

‘You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks’

What walls are these, exactly? The walls of the room? the wall of prejudice? the Berlin Wall? Hadrian’s Wall? Trump’s imaginary wall? the walls of silence? The walls are both real and metaphorical at the same time. These walls resurface again in 1997 in ‘Cold Iron’s Bound’, another anxiety ridden song:

‘The walls of pride, they’re high and they’re wide
You can’t see over, to the other side.’

In this instance, when we look over the walls what we see are young men and women, part of a movement known as Extinction Rebellion, making the most painful decision they will possibly ever make. And once again Bob Dylan anticipates the headlines.

Dylan began dropping the ‘fear to bring children’ verse from later performances of the song, but it sounds as strong as ever in this gutsy 1978 performance.

However, the song doesn’t necessarily need a young, angry voice to deliver the message, as this 2005 performance testifies. Dylan, at 64, sings with power and conviction.  He misses out the ‘fear to bring children’ verse in favour of repeating the first verse at the end of the song. A passionate and heartfelt performance with Dylan on the piano.

Kia Ora

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.

Nettie Moore (2006)

by Jochen Markhorst

In 1986, John Fogerty goes on tour again for the first time since Creedence Clearwater Revival, to promote his recently released solo album Eye Of The Zombie. He recruits the same musicians who assisted him in the studio, plus a few musicians. The first concert is in Memphis.

“I was overjoyed to be in Memphis, thinking about all the great music there. The day before the concert, we were at Handy Park, looking at the statue of W. C. Handy. And one of the dudes in my new band said, “Who was W. C. Handy?” If you could’ve read the little balloon over my head at that moment, it would’ve said, “Man, we in trouble now!”

(John Fogerty, Fortunate Son, 2015)

Fogerty’s dismay can be felt. William Christopher Handy, the ‘father of the blues’, the man who wrote “St. Louis Blues”,”Beale Street Blues” and especially “Memphis Blues”, the first song with the word blues in it, the father of all 20th century blues legends and grandfather of Elvis, Buddy Holly and well alright, even Bob Dylan … and then his new band, the men who have to play his music, who are professional musicians, never heard of W.C. Handy.

It will not be an unqualified success, that tour. Fogerty refers to that time as another dark period in my life.

Handy (1873-1958), an extremely talented musician and intelligent author, publishes his beautiful autobiography Father Of The Blues in 1941. The work masterfully paints an America that has since disappeared, but the song composer also reveals where his songs come from. Like the story on “Yellow Dog Blues”. That one starts in 1903, when Handy and his band tour through Mississippi and have to wait nine hours for the next train at Tutwiler station.

“A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.

Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.

“The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind. When the singer paused, I leaned over and asked him what the words meant.”

Amused, the ‘Southern Negro’ explains to him that he is talking about the town of Moorhead, where the north-south line crosses the east-west line, nicknamed the Southern and the Yellow Dog.

Handy commits a great commercial blunder when he sells the rights to “Memphis Blues” for $100, and does not make that mistake again when he releases “Yellow Dog Blues” ten years after that memorable meeting in Tutwiler. In chapter 14, Pace & Handy – Setting A Pace, he cheerfully tells how that song changes everything. He needs fifty dollars, can’t scrape it together at home and has to borrow it somewhere. Upon return there is an envelope and I saw that it contained a check of seven thousand dollars.

That must be a mistake. But then he sees that it is written out to his music publishing company, Pace & Handy Music Co. “And then I saw the number of Yellow Dog records that were sold – unbelievable!” The resulting demand for the sheet music to “Yellow Dog Blues” exceeds everything: more than one hundred thousand copies. The incoming money thereafter overshadows the first check. And all of that, W.C. Handy acknowledges, thanks to that one line he heard the improvising guitar player sing that evening in Tutwiler: Down where the Southern cross the Dog.

An intriguing mystery, by the way, remains the identity of that ‘lean, loose-jointed Negro,’ who in fact would then be the actual Father of the Blues. Charley Patton is a candidate, as is the legendary Henry Sloan.

About a hundred years later Bob Dylan, the most famous grandson of the father of the blues, brings a salute in one of his most fascinating songs of the twenty-first century, in “Nettie Moore”;

I’m going where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog
Get away from these demagogues
And these bad luck women stick like glue
It’s either one or the other or neither of the two

… like that entire monumental song, and actually the entire album Modern Times, is a deep reverence to the sources of Dylan’s own music. That already starts with the choice for the sung Nettie. Dylan borrows the chorus and the first two lines from “The Little White Cottage, or Gentle Nettie Moore” from 1857, written by Marshall S. Pike and especially James S. Pierpont (the composer also of “Jingle Bells”). Dylan is undoubtedly familiar with Roy Rogers’ rendition, who records the song in 1934 (“Gentle Nettie Moore”).

In this Yellow Dog couplet, blues classics such as “Born Under A Bad Sign” and “It Hurts Me Too” (But you love him and stick to him like glue) echo through, for example. The next verse:

She says, “look out daddy, don’t want you to tear your pants.
You can get wrecked in this dance.”
They say whiskey will kill ya, but I don’t think it will
I’m riding with you to the top of the hill.

… paraphrases the old (probably nineteenth century) folk song “The Moonshiner” (If whiskey don’t kill me, I don’t know what will), as well as a novelty Christmas hit from 1955, “Nuttin’ For Christmas” (I did a dance on Mommy’s plants, climbed a tree and tore my pants) and a ballad from the American Civil War, “Two Soldiers”, the song Dylan also records for World Gone Wrong (Straight was the track to the top of the hill). Or maybe “Top Of The Hill” from 2004 by Tom Waits (Get me on the ride up / I’m on the top of the hill). Given the opening of the song, Lost John sitting on a railroad track, however, the nineteenth-century blues ballad “Railroad Bill” is more likely to have been an inspiration (Railroad Bill live way up the Railroad Hill, ride, ride, ride).

That opening line itself is also the first W.C. Handy connection to the song;

Lost John sittin' on a railroad track
Something’s out of whack
Blues this morning falling down like hail
Gonna leave a greasy trail

… is an adaptation of the old classic “Lost John” (also called “Lost Boy Blues”, “Long Gone”, “Lost John Dean From Bowling Green” and other titles). W.C. Handy claims, casually, he wrote that song too:

“Presently we moved on to Pittsburgh. While there I visited a friend at whose home I had once written a song called Long Gone from Bowling Green. She reminded me of something I had forgotten. On my first visit to her home I had been everlastingly at the piano, forever picking out notes and chords for Long Gone but never playing anything consistently.”

(Chapter 18, Down Memory Lane)

But most historians think it’s a traditional. Anyhow – in 1920, Handy protects the copyrights: music W.C. Handy, lyrics Chris Smith. And the second verse then is:

Long John stood on the railroad tie,
Waiting for a freight train to come by;
Freight train came just puffin' and flyin',
Ought-a seen Long John grabbin' that blind

The song, with the very catchy sing-along chorus, becomes very popular and is recorded hundreds of times. In the studio by legends like Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Merle Travis and Louis Armstrong, in prison by Alan Lomax (1933, sung by ‘Lightnin‘ & Group’) and live by Woody Guthrie, Roy Acuff and Doc Watson – just a small selection. There are about a hundred different couplets, and also variants thereof. Dylan may have the John Lennon version in mind (from 1970, published on Anthology, 1998):

Lost John standing by the railroad track
A-waitin' for the freight train to come back

… but probably one of the variants as sung by Roy Acuff and others, also with a seated John:

Lost John sittin' on the railroad track
Waitin' for the freight train to come back

Dylan takes a turn at the third line, to Robert Johnson (Blues fallin’ down like hail is the second line of “Hellhound On My Trail”, recorded during Johnson’s last recording session, 1937).

And like this, each verse offers references to, paraphrases of or tribute to the Songs of the Occident. Sometimes written on the wall (“Frankie And Albert” in the fourth verse) and other times more subtle (gone berserk in the same verse probably comes from Johnny Cash’s version of “The Road To Kaintuck”), and through it all Dylan illustrates his sparkling, fascinating confessions from that surprising MusiCares speech, February 2015:

“These songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth (…) there was a precedent. It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock & roll and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs.”

And then the bard reveals how singing “John Lee” all those times leads to “Blowin’ In The Wind”, that Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key To The Highway” automatically delivers “Highway 61 Revisited”, that he owes “Maggie’s Farm” to “Roll The Cotton Down”, that “Deep Elm Blues” produces the template for “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and how after all those come all ye-songs “The Times They Are A-Changin’” will flow out of your pen by itself.

Sympathetic, modest words of course, and too modest; Dylan underestimates his own excessive talent. But the overall thrust is true – “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” as Sir Isaac Newton, equally modest, said in 1675 (copying the 12th-century philosopher Bernard of Chartres, by the way).

Dylan is a gold digger, a goldsmith, a thief of thoughts who chops raw chunks of unrefined minerals from the ore of centuries of song art and forges dazzling jewelry from it. Or timeless heirlooms, actually; American Civil War, whiskey distillers, W.C. Handy, Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, Johnny Cash … “Nettie Moore” transcends the centuries, as do, for example, “Highlands”, “Mississippi” and “Desolation Row”, the songs that will lead someday, probably within one year after Dylan’s death, to the opening of a Dylan Park in Duluth, Malibu, Hibbing or Greenwich Village.

With a statue. At which, one hundred years from now, some professional musician will look and ask, to his band leader’s horror: “Who was Bob Dylan?”

(II Corinthians 12:9)

Like the free-thinking poet William Blake, Bob Dylan has problems with accepting that kind of reasoning:

I hate myself for loving you and the weakness that it showed
You were just a painted face on a trip down Suicide Road
The stage was set, the lights went out all around the old hotel
I hate myself for loving you, and I'm glad the curtain fell ....
Lady Luck, who shines on me, will tell you where I'm at
I hate myself for loving you, but I'll soon get over that

(Bob Dylan: Dirge)

According to sociologist Max Weber, the psychological tension produced by the predestinarian doctrine causes Calvinists to seek a ‘sign’ that he or she is indeed in God’s Elect – success in one’s earthly “calling” being such a sign.

Many try to stop me, shake me up in my mind
Say, "Prove to me that He is Lord, show me a sign"
What kind of sign they need when it all comes from within
When what's lost has been found, what's to come has already been? 
Well, I'm pressing on
To the higher calling of the Lord

In all their acts, public and private, nay,
And secret too, they praise impart
But in their acts divine, and worship, they
With hymns do offer up their heart
Thus, in Christ's coach saints sweetly sing
As they to glory ride therein

For God, who commanded the light to shine out of the darkness
Hath commanded in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge
Of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ

Calvin, Blake, and Wilson
Gambled in the dark
Not one of them would ever live
To tell the tale of disembark

When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude
Prepared a rest for the people of God
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought

by Tony Attwood

According to an article in the New Yorker, Bob Dylan has described Roscoe Holcomb’s work as exhibiting “a certain untamed sense of control, which makes him one of the best.”

I am not sure when Bob said, and indeed IF Bob said that, but it is a quote that turns up in all sorts of places.  But there is an album by Roscoe Holcomb called “An untamed sense of control”.  I’m not sure if Dylan nicked the phrase or the people releasing that record took it from Dylan.  Either way it is a great phrase.

What makes me very suspicious is that each of the internet sites that quotes Dylan in this way just puts in the quote in a very similar style, says Bob said it, but without saying where and when he said it – which is usually a good indicator that someone just made it up.

Certainly one of Holcomb’s best known performances is “Man of Constant Sorrow” which of course Dylan recorded.  Spotify has five songs by the artist available – including “Across the Rocky Mountain” which is well worth seeking out.

Holcomb lived from 1912 to 1981, came from Kentucky and performed Appalachian folk songs.  The phrase “High lonesome sound” was apparently originally said by Holcomb’s friend John Cohen, and is now used as a general description of bluegrass rather than just Holcomb’s singing although it suits Holcomb well.

During the “folk revival” of the 1960s Holcomb became famous among those seeking out the origins of the music they were discovering.   Much of his work is unaccompanied, despite his skills as a musician, because the Baptist church of which he was a member forbad the accompaniment of music, but did encourage singing.

Here’s a movie about Roscoe – if you don’t want to watch the whole thing just forward to 3 minutes 40 seconds to hear him perform.

https://youtu.be/dlQJcSy6lHA

Mike Yates, in an on line commentary on Holcomb says, “Roscoe’s music stems from a number of factors.  It is rooted in the hard life that he was forced to endure in the mountains of eastern Kentucky.  It takes in the traditions that were all around him, the old ballads and love-songs, the Baptist hymns and chants, the blues 78s that were played on treasured Victrolas, performers on the radio.  But, whatever the source, Roscoe’s singing was, as I said, his and his alone.”

It is the second volume of Holcomb’s music that took the title “An untamed sense of control” – whether Bob said it before that is not clear, but either way the phrase is now placed in history.  That album is available on Amazon, but you have to be a member to hear it.  However (at least in the UK) you can sign in and have a month free, if you just want to hear the album.  If you do, take a listen to “Train that carried my girl from town”.   It’s not Bob Dylan in any way, but it is an early example of that link between the effect of the railways on love which all the singers of the era and since have continued.

Certainly Dylan knows a lot about the origins of popular music and of folk music so I can’t imagine Bob has not come across the music of Holcomb, but who created that phrase… well, I suspect not Bob, but I also suspect we’ll never know.

Other articles in this series

• Why does Dylan like “Black white and brown”?
• Why does Bob Dylan like “Mystery Train” by Junior Parker (and Elvis Presley)
• “Me and My chauffeur blues” – the foundations of Obviously 5 Believers
• Why does Bob Dylan like “Lucille” by Little Richard, and some Zappa too
• Why does Dylan like Johnny Cash’s Train Of Love..,#
• Bob Dylan’s fascination with Barbara Allen
• Why does Bob Dylan like “Friend of the Devil”?
• Why does Bob Dylan like “Not Fade Away”
• Why does Dylan like “Lonely Avenue” by Ray Charles?
• Why does Bob Dylan really like “Lonesome Town”
• Why does Bob Dylan so adore “So Cold in China”?
• Why and how did “Cottonfields” change Bob Dylan’s life?
• Why does Dylan love “Uncloudy Day”? A bolt straight from the heavens.

by Jochen Markhorst

The successful comedy Bruce Almighty from 2003, with Jim Carrey in a starring role, will never get the status of a real classic. Director Tom Shadyak allows just a little too many corny jokes, banalities and sugary feel-good moments in the film. But it is a semi-classic. About five, six scenes survive in the collective memory, casting Morgan Freeman as God is a direct hit that has raised Freemans status to Olympic heights and above all: beneath all those pranks and Carrey’s overacting the script offers real depth, universal dilemmas and a well-nigh philosophical layer.

The be-the-miracle dialogue of God and Bruce could have been such a highlight, but alas: on the film set an overdose of saccharin is added and in the cutting room the most shiny accents are dropped.

The desperate, overburdened Bruce uses his Divine powers to, in Heaven’s name, answer all prayers, to satisfy all wishes, which of course creates a complete pandemonium. Intense fightings in the city, fires break out, an angry mob looting its way through the streets.

Bruce stands there, sees God as he originally found him, mopping. God looks up at Bruce, not surprised to see him.

BRUCE: They’re all out of control. I don’t know what to do.

GOD: You mind giving me a hand with this floor first?

Off Bruce’s look. . .

DISSOLVE TO: LATER

Bruce’s sleeves rolled up, mopping next to God.

GOD:

“Poor man wanna be rich,
rich man wanna be king,
And a king ain’t satisfied
‘Til he rules everything…”

(to Bruce)

Springsteen. I like a little Boss in my head while I’m workin’

They finish up. God looks back at the sparkling floor,satisfied.

GOD: There we go. Wonderful thing. No matter how filthy something gets, it can always be cleaned right up.

God collects Bruce’s mop.

BRUCE: What happened? I gave everyone what they wanted.

God sets the mops down.

GOD: Since when does anyone have a clue about what they want?

God singing Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands” while mopping, it provides an alienating, yet appropriate, witty and symbolic charge to a scene that is a lot more tedious in the final, stripped version. But the central message remains, of course, maintained and identifies exactly the same human shortcoming as Dylan’s “When You Gonna Wake Up”:

Do you ever wonder just what God requires?
You think He’s just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires.

Further comparisons between the song and the Bruce Almighty script are unfavourable for Dylan. Morgan Freeman is in any case a much more sympathetic, forgiving God, but distinctive is above all: this God provides answers, does not only tell what He does not want, but also reveals what indeed does please Him.

Dylan’s long indictment, on the other hand, breathes the same discontended, short-sighted world view as Jim Carrey’s character before his purification. Displeased, the poet lists a long series of wrongdoings. Innocent people in prison, perverts in the church, criminal doctors, thugs with political power, aggressive men and gossiping women … all proclaimed from a high horse as if the Prophet of Doom Dylan denounces a disease of the time. But, of course, this is not a sharp reckoning with the zeitgeist or a biting analysis of our society; these are all excesses and imperfections that we already know since the Fall. Times may change, but people will not.

Unusual is the swipe at Henry Kissinger, who to the poet apparently symbolizes short-sighted politicians who bring more misery than prosperity. Admittedly, despite his Nobel Peace Prize (1973), Kissinger is not undisputed, but a ‘polluter of thoughts’? An activist Communicator of Truths with Dylan’s intellect and poetic super talent certainly could have chosen a better signifier than the arch-diplomat Kissinger.

Apart from that, the choice of a well-known politician, who has already been pushed to the background at the time of the song’s publication, seems inconsequential because of its ingrained datedness; after all, part of the strength of Dylan’s Nobel Prize-worthy song lyrics is due to its timeless power. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” remains relevant because the young poet is so wise to address nameless senators and congressmen, and not to name the hallway blocking governor George Wallace, “Pay In Blood” transcends the centuries by mirroring anonymously Julius Caesar’s Rome and twenty-first century America, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” endures decades through nonfashionable visual language with universal power – all those Olympic qualities which are lost by elevating to metaphor such a timebound character like Kissinger.

A little more complicated is the choice for Karl Marx as an example of the stranglehold of ‘counterfeited philosophies’. Marx? Fake, phony, false? There is a strong case to be made against Marx’s ideas and the consequences of his reflections, but he was most certainly an original philosopher and, moreover, the most influential in our history. No philosopher has changed societies so radically and turned cultures so drastically as this German.

The aversion of the awakened Christian Dylan is probably due to Marx’s poignant religious criticism (‘opium of the people‘). If so, than the narrator does not recognize the essence of that criticism; it is anti-religion, not anti-God. Marx may have been an atheist, but he had no strong opinion about private belief in a Supreme Being. Very much though about how churches, religions and Christian politicians abuse that private belief – and that is an opinion Marx shares with Dylan, paradoxically enough.

Superficial and failing all in all, all those reproaches, observations and accusations in the couplets. But the real miss is the refrain. ‘When you gonna wake up‘ has the same self-indulgent, pedantic connotation that characterizes trolls on internet forums and discussion platforms. No arguments, no constructive, thought-provoking or inspirational explanations, but only ‘tis not‘ and at best idle phrases like ‘just listen‘, often in capitals and with three or more exclamation marks as ‘comments’.

A lttle sad is the unfounded superiority such a twit tries to emit: “I understand something that you do not understand and I am right to such an extent that I do not have to explain it.” Or, usually if there is religion in play, the helpless, meaningless defense: “You can not understand that.”

A similar reproach can be held against the edifying intention of “When You Gonna Wake Up?”. Okay, preacher, we wake up. Now what? What should we see, understand, acknowledge? We already know all the reported suffering and injustice from the couplets, we have been fighting it for centuries – with varying success, that is true. But still: that does not require awakening or awareness, we really do know that.

In any case, as can be understood from the continuation of the chorus, we should ‘strengthen the things that remain‘ – again a meaningless, unnecessary stating of the obvious. That is what we do. It is human. Both physically (everything we build is maintained, we try to make better, to strengthen), as well as metaphysical: our understanding of the ‘real’ reality is sharpened, tested, fought and rebuilt over the centuries. We build walls, go to war for it and we even descend to terror, that big is our obsession with the notion that we need to ‘strengthen the things that remain‘.

Most embarrassing is the similarity with hollow internet nitwits in the last verse:

There’s a Man up on a cross and He’s been crucified
Do you have any idea why or for who He died?

(In live versions sometimes There’s a Man up on a cross and He’s been crucified for you / Believe in His power that’s about all you got to do of You know who He is and you know why He died, or variations thereof).

Insight and wisdom insinuating words without sharing any insight or wisdom, just like those indignant Caps Lockers are doing in the comment sections.

But it is actually a very complicated question, both theologically and philosophically. Why did Jesus die? “For our sins,” we all learned obediently in Sunday school and we all can rattle off well. But what does that mean? No theologian, church father or exegete can answer that satisfactorily. The original sin is not a biblical concept at all, just to turn into the first dead end street. Yes, from the inscrutable chapter Romans 5, with some juggling, something like an inherited sin and something about the mercy of Jesus Christ could be crafted. Clever boy who knows how to extract from those words ‘why and for who He died.’

No, even that final episode from Dylan’s song does not reveal to what we need to wake up, which insights we will receive.

Despite all naivety and mushiness of Morgan Freemans God, Bruce Almighty does convince. This preacher does give answers, after all. Of course, that be-the-miracle basically does not go much deeper than an unsophisticated aphorism like change the world, start with yourself, but at least it does not hide behind empty, complacent ‘advice’ like Just Wake Up and at least he does reveal ‘what God requires’: be the miracle yourself, do not seek help from above, but give help down.

The music saves the song. Like all songs from Slow Train Coming, the enthusiastic Dylan and the old master producer Jerry Wexler put this song in a particularly attractive jacket, too. The funky, übercool arrangement, the great horns and the soulful organ all work great, but the alternative approach of the live versions, such as the two versions of The Bootleg Series 13: Trouble No More (2017), the one rough and rocking (Oslo ’81), the other (Toronto ’80) with an exciting, tight drive, is just as successful; the song remains compelling.

The lyrics, however, remain equally daunting; the song is hardly covered. The only noteworthy interpretation is more an adaptation than a cover, but still an extremely nice adaptation: the one by Lee Williams and the Spiritual QCs, one of the most successful gospel quartets of the past decades. It is a soulful version, carried by the superior singing of the four men in a Slow Train Coming-like arrangement (2006, Soulful Healing, which also offers an irresistible “In The Midnight Hour”).

But then again, the gentlemen come from Tupelo, Mississippi, from Elvis’ birthplace. Elvis, Dylan, Jesus … maybe not the Holy, but surely a Holy Trinity.

Lee Williams and the Spiritual QCs:

You might also enjoy “When you gonna wake up”: a tale of doom and despair”

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

 Note: Part one – Stuck inside Rome with the Jerusalem Blues Again Part I appears here.

Notwithstanding AJ Weberman’s vicious attack on singer/songwriter Bob Dylan that depicts his turning away from protest music as the abandonment of his Jewish background in favour of the golden rewards of modern Babylon, the humorous tragicomic writings of Sholem Aleichem clearly have an influence on a number of Dylan’s song lyrics.

Sholem Aleichem’s tales might be compared to the sun-lit outlook of the Romantic Transcendentalist poets combined with  the dark, satirical writings of Mark Twain. ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ is a modern musical based on Aleichem’s ‘Tevye, The Dairyman’ –  In Russia, where Jewish orphans are conscripted into the army, Tevye loses his milk business, and finally relents in his attempt to stop his frustrated daughters from abandoning Judaic tradition, and instead they marry for ‘love’ in order to distance themseves from Yahweh, the God that choses to make them poor and persecuted:

May you be like Ruth and Esther
May you be deserving of praise
Strengthen them, oh Lord
And keep them from the stranger's ways

(Fiddler On The Roof: The Sabbath Prayer)

https://youtu.be/618IKgQ2wys

For many of the Hebrew faith, as expressed in Dylanesque black humour, it’s off to modern Babylon, off to America :

Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of birches
I'll recruit my army from the orphanages
I been to St. Herman's churchyard, I've said my religious vows
I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows .....
Gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up North
I'll plant and I'll harvest what the earth brings forth
The hammer's on the table, the pitchfork's on the shelf
For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourelf

(Bob Dylan: Thunder On The Mountain)

That his song themes are inconsistent is a mistake made by a number of analysts of Bob Dylan’s song lyrics since all he’s saying is it ain’t easy being hermetic (spiritual) in a gnostic ( material) world:

I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
With worthless foam from the mouth
I can tell that you are torn
Between stayin' and returnin' 
Back to the South
You've been fooled into thinking
That the finishin' end is at hand
Yet there's no one to beat you
No one to defeat you
'Cept the thought of yourself feeling bad

(Bob Dylan: To Ramona)

Figuratively speaking, Dylan considers historical Time to be cyclical. If the American South is transformed into a reference to a map of Hebrew history – Judea with its capital at Jerusalem is the bottom southern abode of Yahweh, and Samaria is the top northern agricultural land of the golden calf. On the macro-social level and the micro-individual level, the basic problem of human existence is the eventual finding of a proper balance between physical urges and spiritual values, symbolized by the coming of the Messiah:

Universalized, mankind is still waiting, going mad, because he’s not yet figured out what is bad and what is good:

Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the back roads headin' South
Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot, babe
It's a wonder you still know how to breathe ....
Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind
Blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We're idiots, babe
It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves

(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

Dylan takes on the persona of Job-like Tevye in a tale, a dream, not about a milkman, but about a fisherman:

I had a job in the great North woods
Working a a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the axe just fell
So I drifted down to New Orleans
Workin' for a while on a fishin' boat
Right outside of Delacroix

(Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Blue)

In an instant, an island in Louisiana transforms into a Delacroix painting of an artist’s descent into madness that merges with a poem by Charles Baudelaire:

The intoxicating laughs that fill the prison
Invite his reason to the strange and the absurd
Doubt surrounds him and ridiculous Fear
Hideous and multiform, flows about him

(Charles Baudelaire: On ‘Tasso In The Madhouse ‘ By Eugene Delacroix)

Dylan’s an expert at deliberately doubled-edging diction: 

Now everything's a little upside down
As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped
What's good is bad, what's bad is good
You'll find out when you reach the top
You're on the bottom

(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

,

By Tony Attwood

I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing ’em.
~Big Bill Broonzy

For the first 11 years of my life I lived in London, and even though it was a multi-cultural multi-ethnic city, I had no contact with any members of the black community – my school and the area I lived in were totally white.   At 11 the family moved to Dorset, a rural county on the south coast, in which there was no sign of a black community anywhere at all.  I recall one lad of Indian descent, but the rest of the people I knew were English middle class white.

And yet, I can recall hearing “Black, White and Brown” somehow – maybe around the age of 15.  It certainly wouldn’t have been played on the radio stations we could get, so it must have been in a folk club – and of course I still recall it.  It shows just how powerful this song is.

The author was Big Bill Broonzy, one of the key Chicago blues singers, who up to the second world war and in the years immediately thereafter, recorded over 250 songs.  These included “Key to the Highway,”  “Hard Hearted Woman,”  and “When Will I Get to Be Called a Man” and he is registered as the composer of many more songs.

Mostly he played with small bands often with a saxophone, clarinet or trumpet helping the melody along – and of course giving a jazz feel to some of the songs.

Later in life he helped younger musicians get a foot on the ladder – people like Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Memphis Slim.   Many of the rock stars of the 1950s onwards cite him as an influence.

Black Brown and White is one of his most powerful and most famous songs, and tragically in recent years it has been taken up by neo-fascist organisations in Britain as a straight recommendation of how Britain should be.

Here’s another version

Just listen to either (or better still both) of the versions of the song it becomes obvious why Dylan likes the song – it contains the elements of so much of Bob’s early music.  There is the racial prejudice commentary and the ironic humour mixed together – exactly the sort of thing that Bob was experimenting with in the 1950s.

Here are the lyrics.  The Jim Crowe reference in the last verse is to Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white dominated state legislatures and which remained in force until 1965.    The laws mandated racial segregation through the doctrine of “separate but equal”. 

Here are the lyrics…

This little song that I’m singin’ about
People you all know is true
If you black and gotta work for a livin’ now
This is what they been sayin’ to you

They said if you white, you’s alright
If you is brown, stick around
But if you’s black, oh brother
Get back, get back, get back…

I was in a place one night
They was all havin’ fun
They was all buyin’ beer and wine
But they would not sell me none

They said if you white, you’s alright
If you is brown, you can stick around
But if you’s black, mm mm brother
Get back, get back, get back…

I went to an employment office
I got a number and I got in line
They called everybody’s number
But they never did call mine

They said if you white, you’s alright
If you is brown, you can stick around
But if you’s black, mm mm brother
Get back, get back, get back…

Me and a man was working side by side
And this is what it meant
They was payin’ him a dollar an hour
But they was payin’ me fifty cent

They said if you was white, you’d be alright
If you is brown, you could stick around
But if you’s black, whoa brother
Get back, get back, get back…

I helped win sweet victories
With my plow and hoe
Now, I want you to tell me, brother
Whatchu gonna do about the ol’ Jim Crow

And if this is new to you, you might also like to venture here….

Here are some other articles from this series

• Why does Bob Dylan like “Mystery Train” by Junior Parker (and Elvis Presley)
• “Me and My chauffeur blues” – the foundations of Obviously 5 Believers

• Why does Bob Dylan like “Lucille” by Little Richard, and some Zappa too
• Why does Dylan like Johnny Cash’s Train Of Love..,
• Bob Dylan’s fascination with Barbara Allen
• Why does Bob Dylan like “Friend of the Devil”?
• Why does Bob Dylan like “Not Fade Away”
• Why does Dylan like “Lonely Avenue” by Ray Charles?
• Why does Bob Dylan really like “Lonesome Town”
• Why does Bob Dylan so adore “So Cold in China”?
• Why and how did “Cottonfields” change Bob Dylan’s life?
• Why does Dylan love “Uncloudy Day”? A bolt straight from the heavens.

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

It is a beautiful melancholic title, the title of Richard Fariña’s only novel: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (1966).

He did not make it up himself, but borrowed it from a song by the early blues giant Furry Lewis, from “I Will Turn Your Money Green”.

With Fariña’s traveling companion Dylan, the song also echoes through, albeit some decades later. The second verse of “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” (Time Out Of Mind, 1997) opens with When I was in Missouri / They would not let me be – the opening lines of the same “I Will Turn Your Money Green”.

https://youtu.be/hZ-qmRS3-a4

Richard Fariña is a short, well-nigh cinematic and almost mythical intermezzo in Dylan’s life. The dropout student is already around in Dylan’s circles in the early 1960s. The men meet when Richard is still married to the popular folk singer Carolyn Hester (Dylan plays harmonica on her third album, in 1961). They become friends and the friendship gets an extra layer when Fariña remarries in ’63 with Joan Baez’s beautiful sister, the then seventeen-year-old, enchanting Mimi. That happiness does not last long; April 30, 1966, two days after the publication of his only novel, Richard is killed in a motorcycle accident in Carmel Valley, California, on a borrowed bike.

The book by David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (2001) is a comprehensive and occasionally somewhat larmoyant [maudlin] historiography about the lives of the foursome, especially about those years in which that special carom of creative talent around the sisters Baez takes place.

Hajdu is rather stuck in the debatable conviction that Fariña was the real creative genius and Great Guide, but nevertheless the work offers a rich look at Dylan’s years with Baez, documented, among other things, with revealing and candid letters from Baez’s private correspondence.

That song by Furry Lewis is not the only line that can be drawn between “Up To Me” and Fariña. The title similarity between Dylan’s song “Up To Me” and Fariña’s novel is evident, and besides that the lyrics also offer small references. Thunderbird is also the name of the bookstore where Fariña has a signing session a few hours before his death, the second line, Death kept followin’, trackin’ us down, recalls the two motorcycle accidents where one (Fariña) finds death and the other, Dylan, escapes. And with some lenient interpretation, there are some lines of verse which can be read as a reply to Fariña’s farewell salute to Bob Dylan, the bittersweet song “Morgan The Pirate”.

That song is released posthumously, on the album Memories (1968). The liner notes on that album are usually mistakenly attributed to Mimi, but they are written by Maynard Solomon, producer and founder of Baez’s record company Vanguard. The notes claim that this song is Fariña’s last song and ‘waves farewell to Bob Dylan.’

In the lyrics, sung by Mimi over an uptempo folkrock song propelled by electric guitars, the melancholy seems to dominate, but through the melancholy Richard administers some quite nasty blows:

It's bye bye buddy have to say it once again
I appreciate your velvet helping hand
Even though you never gave it I am sure you had to save it
For the gestures of the friends you understand
Now you've gotten even higher
And become your own supplier
And the number one denier of the one or two hard feelings

One or two hard feelings left behind

In this last verse the poet suggests that he loses Dylan to the drugs, in the verses before he accuses him of opportunism, disloyalty and deceiving the public.

Sir Henry Morgan, Morgan the Pirate (1635-1688), was one of the most successful pirates in the service of the English Navy and the terror of the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean. A link with the lyrics is hard to find and why Fariña names a song about Dylan after the legendary buccaneer, is puzzling too. Because he considers Dylan a marauder, song stealer, thief of thoughts? Maybe they went to film together (1960).

If the song has made some impression on Dylan, then not so much that he has written a clear reply to it. But, as with any artist, reflections and resonances from the man’s life creep into his work. At any rate, the protagonist in “Up To Me” defends himself against the kind of accusations as expressed in “Morgan The Pirate”; if I’d lived my life by what others were thinkin’, the heart inside me would’ve died and the following I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity.

Too thin, all in all, to classify “Up To Me” as an answer song, but that the song expresses a confetti rain of private concerns from a reflective narrator, that much is obvious.

Those reflections also invite to look for lines to Dylan’s biography and can be found indeed. Especially that last verse, of course:

And if we never meet again, baby, remember me
How my lone guitar played sweet for you that old-time melody
And the harmonica around my neck, I blew it for you, free
No one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me

… which is at least a retrospective on a past love relationship, and is thankfully abused by most of the exegetes as a further ‘proof’ that Blood On The Tracks thematises Dylan’s marital problems and upcoming divorce.

Here too, however, love affairs in the life of the private person Dylan undoubtedly belong to the many impressions that one way or the other trickle down into his artistic output. But Dylan does not write songs à clef or confessional poetry. Masterpieces like “Tangled Up In Blue”, “Simple Twist Of Fate” or this “Up To Me” are much more facetted than that.

Narrative “Up To Me” also appears, but unlike those seemingly epical songs on Blood On The Tracks, this song starts in medias res, in the middle of an action. Not early one morning, the sun was shinin’ nor they sat together in the park as the evening sky grew dark, but wham-bam: everything went from bad to worse, money never changed a thing.

The style figure contributes to the cinematic character of the song. In the literature, such an opening without an introductory exhibition can be found often enough (Paradise Lost by John Milton, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Edgar Allen Poe in The Tell-Tale Heart and equally in the epic poetry of classics such as Homer and Virgil), but it is much more common in the film noirs and thrillers. The Usual Suspects (1995), Kill Bill (2003), and especially in the crime films from the 40s and 50s. As in almost every film Dylan mentions in his autobiography Chronicles. “Joe, you’re under arrest,” is the opening of Rio Bravo (1959).

The Defiant Ones (1958) opens with the singing of someone in the back seat, out of view, and in the front the driver says to the co-driver: “Will you listen to him? We oughta make him ride up front. See how much singin’ he’ll do then.” The stranger, the protagonist Sidney Poitier, sings W.C. Handy’s “Long Gone” from 1920, a song that he will sing a few more times. The film seems to be summed up in the first verse of “Up To Me” and the song “Long Gone” gets a name-check (I know you’re long gone, I guess it must be up to me). And in the middle of the story starts La Strada (1954), so admired by Dylan:

Gelsomina! Mother says to come home right away. There’s a man here. He came on a big motorcycle. He says Rosa is dead.

The second big difference with the epic songs on Blood On The Tracks is the lack of a continuous storyline; not only the song itself, all twelve verses of “Up To Me” are equally abrupt overtures of film scripts, of film noirs, romantic dramas and psychological thrillers. The suggestion of a continuous storyline is there, sure. The protagonist is a retrospective I-figure in all twelve stanzas, the poet sprinkles reference words and indicative pronouns that seem to refer back to something that was told in a previous verse, conjunctions at the beginning of the verse insinuate that a thought from a previous verse is continued (‘And’, ‘So’).

However, it is only the suggestion of a plot. Unlike in the twin sister of “Up To Me”, in “Shelter From The Storm”, no comprehensive, coherent picture looms up; “Up To Me” appears to consist of puzzle pieces of twelve different puzzles, where at most – with some difficulty – one can distinguish ‘farewell’ or ‘love break’ as the overarching theme in ten of the twelve verses. The evoked images push the associations like a flaring pigeon swarm in all directions, and the images do not group themselves. Perhaps this song is the song that Dylan thinks about when he makes a mystifying point in Chronicles:

‘Eventually I would even record an entire album based on Chekhov short stories – critics thought it was autobiographical – that was fine.’

Probably a red herring, but true: blooming orchids, departing trains, a stale perfume smell, an officer’s club and an unhappy lover waiting outside all night … many images from “Up To Me” could just be borrowed from Chekhov’s stories. Though still slightly off: stale or attenuated smells are recurring at Chekhov, but it is always the stale smell of tobacco or cigars. Perfume is always ‘enchanting’, ‘intoxicating’ or ‘penetrant’. Orchids are not mentioned in any work, nor an officer’s club, no bluebirds or post office workers, only nightly languorous, unfortunate lovers sometimes do come along – but then again, that would apply to half of the world literature.

No, this is not a ‘song like a painting’, a song whose parts tell a different story than the whole. Only the music itself and the protagonist hold it together, but establishing a larger whole remains guesswork.

It does not detract from the beauty. The twelve miniatures contain beautiful one-liners (when you bite off more than you can chew you pay the penalty), enigmatic sub-characters (the old Rounder in the iron mask slipped me the master key), the softest put-down in Dylan’s catalogue (she’s everything I need and love but I can’t be swayed by that) and intriguing musings with beautiful metaphors. “We heard the Sermon on the Mount and I knew it was too complex / It didn’t amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects.” The Sermon on the Mount complex? He can hardly mean Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – that one excels in plain language and clear messages. The opposite of Dylan’s “Up To Me”, actually.

The verses are larded with half-known, sometimes archaic expressions that the poet picks from ancient songs, forgotten films and classical poetry. A rounder is an extinct expression for a vagabond, a designation we only know from old songs (“Cocaine Blues”, “Delia”, “Lady And The Tramp”, from songs by Dylan’s old heroes like Dock Boggs and Blind Willie McTell). The verse with ‘Dupree’ and ‘Crystal’ in the ‘Thunderbird Café’ sounds like the plot of a Tennessee Williams film and the ‘bluebird’ is sung in hundreds of songs, but the concept of the blue bird of happiness who is singing in this song , comes from the play L’Oiseau blue (1908, adapted for film seven times, so far) by that other Nobel Prize winner, by Maurice Maeterlinck.

In short: “Up To Me” is one more of those sparkling, chameleonic Dylan songs from the hors category in which we also classify songs like “Desolation Row”, “Things Have Changed” or “Not Dark Yet”. And one of those songs in which we recognize the artistic kinship with fellow Nobel laureate T.S Eliot, with the cut and paste in a masterpiece like The Waste Lands. ‘A heap of broken images’, as T.S. puts it in line 22 of that work.

The overall consensus on why Dylan passes this masterpiece for Blood On The Tracks is: it is too similar to “Shelter From The Storm”. The first official release of Dylan’s recording is in 1985 for the Biograph collection box. In the accompanying booklet, Cameron Crowe writes: “A companion piece to Shelter From The Storm, performed in the same spare style.” And Crowe also sees the final verse as ‘proof’ that Dylan is autobiographical here, but Dylan himself closes that comment off, with the rebuttal we often hear: “I don’t think of myself as Bob Dylan. It’s like Rimbaud said: ‘I is another’.”

Much earlier we have already been able to get acquainted with the song in the version of Roger McGuinn. Dylan gives his old friend the song for his most beautiful solo album, Cardiff Rose (1976), on which it is also, despite all the beauty surrounding it, the highlight. The ex-Byrd opts for an electric, very lively, almost enthusiastic country-rock approach and proves once again that he has the rather rare skill to raise a Dylansong. Or maybe even more so: producer Mick Ronson. Both men have just toured with Dylan, with the Rolling Thunder Revue, and from there they also take back to the studio star musicians Rob Stoner, Howie Wyeth and David Mansfield, to record Cardiff Rose in Los Angeles. During that tour, the remarkable talent Ronson has already shown that he can give especially successful, enriching twists to Dylan songs (to “Going, Going, Gone”, for example). Here, with the enormous influence that he has as a producer and multi-instrumentalist (Ronson plays guitar, zither, flute, piano, organ, percussion and accordion), he can perfectly decorate such a Dylan song to his taste. Successful, undeniably; even unyielding Nobody-Sings-Dylan-Like-Dylan zealots nod thriftily, but approvingly to this cover.

The only other cover that comes close to this one is from Roger McGuinn again. In the twenty-first century he records a folky, hypnotic version of “Up To Me” for a tribute album (Dylan Covered, Mojo Magazine September 2005). More monotonous and acoustical then his pièce de résistance from thirty years earlier and again close to the beauty of Dylan’s original – even without Ronson McGuinn can deliver a masterpiece.

Roger McGuinn 1976:

Roger McGuinn 2005:

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.

Bob Dylan And Edward Taylor: If There’s An Original Thought Out There, I Could Use One Right Now (Part II)

by Larry Fyffe

You may also enjoy Part one of this series.

Missed by academic examiners of Bob Dylan song lyrics is the Dylanesque ‘rhyme twist”, a literary device employed by the singer/songwriter whereby he tips off the observant listener or reader as to the works of another artist that he sources:

With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims
And your match-book songs, and your gypsy hymns
Who among them would try to impress you?

(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

No one, as far as I know, points out that the obvious referent in the above lyrics is Edward Taylor, the American Puritan poet who is nevertheless influenced by the witty, sometimes downright skeptical, Baroque poets. Their poems often examine the psychological tension between blind emotion and mindful reasoning.

Baroque (Metaphysical) poets utilize far-fetched comparisons (conceits), and complex imagery to express esoteric ideas:

You want clear spectacles: your eyes are dim
Turn inside out , and turn your eyes within
Your sins like motes in the sun do swim ...

(Edward Taylor: The Accusation Of The Inward Man)

Note the Dylanesque ‘rhyme twist’: ~ ‘dims’/’swims’ in Sad-Eyed Lady; 

~ ‘dim’/’swim’ in The Inward Man.

Indeed, it appears that Bob Dylan picks up the idea of the ‘rhyme twist’ from another favorite poet of his:

What the hammer, what the chain
In what furnace was thy brain
What the anvil, what dread grasp
Did it's deadly terrors clasp? ...
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night

(William Blake: The Tiger)

Who among us would not be impressed by the the similarity of Blake’s lyrics to those of Taylor’s below:

Upon what base was fixed the lath, wherein
He turned this globe, and riggalled it so trim
Who blew the bellows of his furnace vast
Or held the mold wherein the world was cast?

(Edward Taylor: The Preface)

The end-rhyme ‘twist’ is illustrated by the two poems ~ ‘grasp’/’clasp’; 

~ 'vast'/'cast'.

And also take notice of the ‘bright’/’night’ end-rhyme in the Baroque-imaged song lyrics below that might otherwise be considered a coincidence:

And stopped inside a strange hotel
With the neon burning bright
He felt the heat of the night
Hit him like a freight train

(Bob Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)

Luck, bad or good, plays a big part in Bob Dylan’s portrayal of the modern times in which he exists. A sure thing it is that God’s grace saves those through their faith alone in Edward Taylor’s fiery Puritan world:

One sorry fret
An anvil spark, rose higher
And in thy temple falling, almost set
The house on fire
Such fireballs dropping in the temple flame
Burns up the building. Lord forbid the same

(Edward Taylor: To The Soul Occasioned By A Rain)

A number of songs by Dylan are ‘jeremiads’ that lament a corrupt world in which man-made things are, but should not be, admired, idolized, or misused:

And I will utter my judgments against them
Touching all their wickedness, who have forsaken me
And have burned incense unto other gods
And worshipped the works of their own hands

(Jeremiah I:16)

Though goodly works are considered important by Jewish-grounded Bob  Dylan, many a song of his deals with emotional faith that has been burned and betrayed:

The priest wore black on the seventh day
And sat stone-faced as the building burned
I waited for you on the running boards
Near the cypress trees, while the springtime  turned
Slowly into autumn

(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

Editorial footnote:

Apologies for the long period without posting on this site while I was in Australia.  A set of ludicrous technical problems were to blame.  However we are back now in England, and resuming work here, and on our “Untold Dylan” Facebook Page

Tony

My sincere apologies for the long delay since the last post.

I am currently in Australia and had arranged to be able to post occasionally from here, as indeed I have done in each of the previous years when visiting my daughter.

But a fault plug has caused problems both with my phone and my laptop computer leaving me in some difficulties.

I hope to be able to post against shortly, but if not, service will be resumed when I return to the UK in early April.

Tony Attwood

22 March

By Tony Attwood

“Mystery Train” was written by Junior Parker in 1953 as a Memphis blues, and it is this version that Bob Dylan has clearly been listening to whhe he recorded his own version with a view to having it included in the Shot of Love album.

Here’s Bob’s edition of the song…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY1mhyC2iJk

The song itself originally comes from the tradition that gave us songs like “Worried Man Blues” which near the end has the lines

The train arrived sixteen coaches long
The train arrived sixteen coaches long
The girl I love is on that train and gone

Re-using lines from other songs of course is a long tradition in folk and blues, and I doubt that Junior Parker really thought much about what he was up to putting those lines in his song.

Indeed the thinking behind the song, if there was any, is quiite hard to disentangle because as others have mentioned in considering the piece, there is no “Mystery Train” mentioned in the lyrics of “Mystery Train” the song.

So we get to..

Train I ride sixteen coaches long
Train I ride sixteen coaches long
Well, that long black train carries my baby home

but quite why the length of the train is important or significant is never made clear.

It was almost inevitably recorded for Sun Records in Memphis, (where else would it have been made?) in September / October 1953.  The song was not a hit, altough Junior Parker’s previous record “Feeling Good” had been a R&B hit. 

However it certainly did make the composer some money when Elvis Presley recorded it – although by this time Sam Phillips was noted as co-composer.  The Elvis version was released in 1955 as the B side of “I forgot to remember to forget” and by 2003 Rolling Stone had the song listed as number 77 in the list of the greatest songs of all time.   The single reached the top 10 of the Billboard country and western chart and became the first song that gave Elvis a position as a country music star across the US.

Which brings us to the question of why.  Why did Bob think of putting this song on his album?   Here are the lyrics…

Train, train
Comin’ round the bend
Train, train
Comin’ round the bend
Well that long black train
Good Lord she’s gone again

Train, train
Runnin’ down the track
Train, train
Runnin’ down the track
Well it’s got my baby
And he ain’t comin’ back

Train, train
Runnin’ down the line
Train, train
Runnin’ down the line
Well he took my baby
Lord knows he’s ??

Train, train
Runnin’ down the line
Train, train
Runnin’ down the line
Well she took my baby
Good Lord she’s mine all mine

Hey, hey
Hey hey hey

So we might well conclude that there is nothing in the lyrics that stand out when considering the sort of writing Dylan engaged in.   Rather I think it must be the concept of the song – that old Dylan favourite of the railways and moving on, which I’ve mentioned a number of times in this series.

And not just any old moving on – it is the whole moving on concept without knowing where the end point of the journey is.

As I have often mentioned, the classic deliniation of the types of lyrics in popular music gives us three types of song: love, lost love, and dance.   And here we are with lost love – and that classic blues and rock n roll form of lost love – the perfidious woman just gets up and goes.

Plus in Dylan’s version we have the real sound of the train, the clanking of the wheels on the tracks, the howl of the whistle – it is all symbolised therein.

What Bob does is take us to the original concept of the song (not the Elvis version) and tease out every single painful moment of the train taking the woman that the singer posseses.

Of course there is no modern equality of the sexes here: “she’s mine all mine”.

I think the version Bob gives us here is an absolute masterpiece of the blues with added rock; it is just how this music should be.    And my, don’t the singers and musicians sound like they feel it and mean it.

It’s a fantastic rock blues of the era, and a classric rendition.  Thank goodness for outtakes.

Other songs from this series are listed in the Why does Dylan like index

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

by Larry Fyffe

Like many other writers, including the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, Bob Dylan looks back to the works of previous artists for creative inspiration –  such as old folk songs and nursery rhymes…

"Oranges and lemons"
Say the bells of St. Clement's
"You owe me five farthings"
Say the bells of St. Martin's
"When will you pay me?"
Say the bells of Old Bailey
"When I grow rich"
Say the bells of Shoreditch
"When will that be?"
Say the bells of Stepney
"I do not know"
Says the great bell at Bow

(Oranges And Lemons ~ traditional; – a “farthing” was an English coin worth one quarter of a old penny – about one thousandth of a pound).

A Welsh poet copies the format of the lyrics above:

"O, what can you give me?"
Say the sad bells of Rhymney
"Is there hope for the future?"
Cry the brown bells of Merthyr
"Who made the mine owner?"
Say the black bells of Rhondda
"And who robbed the miner?"
Cry the grim bells of Blaina

(Idris Davies: Bells Of Rhymney)

The poem also reveals another influence. The voice of William Blake is clearly heard. Blake be influenced by the writings of neoGnostic spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg although the down-to-earth British poet disagrees with the Swede’s cosmological view:

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night

(William Blake: Tyger, Tyger)

The criticism by Idris Davies of the greed fermented by the capitalist system is reflected in the narrative song mentioned below:

Big Jim was no one's fool, he owned the town's only diamond mine
He made his usual entrance, lookin' so dandy, and so fine

(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

The American singer/songwriter returns to Bible – St. Peter regrets forsaking  Jesus; Martha witnesses Jesus raising her brother from the dead; and princess Catherine dies a martyr’s death due to her Christian beliefs:

Ring them bells, St. Peter
Where the four winds blow ...
Ring them bells, sweet Martha
For the poor man's son ......
Ring them bells, St. Catherine
From the top of the room

(Bob Dylan: Ring Them Bells)

Dylan often uses biblical imagery – below, to rage against the perceived moral relativism of the anti-Christian writings of the German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche:

I heard the sound of thunder,  it roared out a warning

(Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall)

An influence on American satirist Lord Buckley is an American Gothic poet who dwells on death:

Oh, the bells, bells, bells
What a tale their terror tells
Of despair
How they clang, and clash, and roar
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air
Yet the ear, it fully knows
By the twanging
And the clanging
How the danger ebbs and flows

(Edgar Allan Poe: The Bells)

Given the certainty of death, Bob Dylan struggles to maintain a bright outlook on life:

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I'm not sleepy, and there is no place I'm goin' to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle-jangle morning, I'll come following you

(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

A British Baroque poet renders lyrics that are not so happy-go-lucky:

Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bells tolls
It tolls for thee

(John Donne: For Whom The Bell Tolls) 

Bob Dylan has no problem confessing  that he steals from the poet above:

It takes a thief to catch a thief
For whom does the bell toll, love?
It tolls for you and me

(Bob Dylan: Moonlight)

Nevertheless, he keeps on truckin’, and tries to paint over the darkness of the night-time:

I can hear the church bells ringin' in the yard
I wonder who they are ringing for?
I know I can't win
But my heart just won't give in

(Bob Dylan: Standing In The Doorway)

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

Brian Wilson is traumatized and mentally unstable, plagued by fairly serious psychological disorders, is deaf to an ear and one of the greatest pop composers of the twentieth century. I Am Brian Wilson (2016), the autobiography, by necessity sketches an imperfect, incomplete picture – Wilson recognizes that entire periods of his life have disappeared in a fog of drugs, depression and medication. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, the book is a moving portrait of a man who looks back on his life with grateful modesty, self-mockery and sometimes even irony.

The modesty is identical to the humble, admiring tone Dylan can adopt in Chronicles, the awe he demonstrates for artists of whom the reader thinks: but Mr. Dylan, you yourself are miles above them.

Brian Wilson tells how he is having lunch in New York in 2006 with two friends. He has already seen Carole King at another table, but of course he does not dare to address her. Then Brian has to go to the bathroom.

“I went to the men’s room, opened the door, and the first person I saw was Barry Mann. Now I thought I was dreaming, maybe. Pass the Brill Building, walk to lunch, imagine you see Carole King, and then see Barry Mann? He co-wrote so many great songs with his wife, Cynthia Weil. “Uptown” and “We Gotta Get out of This Place” and “I’m Gonna Be Strong”. I said ‘hi’ to Barry and took him to the table to meet the guys. I asked him if he wanted to sit with us.

“I’d love to,” he said, “but I’m sitting over there with Carole.” There was a silence at the table, which I guess he thought meant he had to explain. “Carole King,” he said. “And Cynthia.”

“Cynthia Weil?” I said. I was still thinking of all the songs they wrote  together. I don’t know which one was in my head by that point. Maybe “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” or “Walking in the Rain”. Barry laughed. “Walk over there with me.”

To his unspeakable joy Brian is greeted warmly and embraced by Carole King and Cynthia Weill. On cloud nine he floats back to his table, overjoyed.

“Can you believe running into Barry Mann in a goddamned men’s room in New York?” I said. “I’ll be goddamned. We’re in the room with three of the greatest songwriters ever.”

Just like with Dylan in similar passages, it is not an act. Every pop music-loving reader will put Brian Wilson in the pantheon of the songwriters quite a few floors higher than Mann, Weill and King, but Wilson does not claim he has the right to stand even in the shadow of those names.

Great is his respect for Dylan too, who is mentioned a few times in these memoirs. The son he gets with his second wife, Melinda, he calls Dylan and when he holds him for the first time, Brian sings softly “Mr. Tambourine Man” to him. “The name felt good.” Before that he already quoted, awfully modest but still very proud, what kind words Dylan once said about him:

I don’t go around collecting things that people say about me, but there is one I like. It’s from Bob Dylan, and it’s one of the nicest compliments, and one of the funniest.

“That ear – I mean, Jesus,” he said, “he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.” I might.

A remarkable anecdote concerns a gathering at Wilson’s home in Los Angeles, prior to that wondrous contribution from Dylan to Wilson’s song “The Spirit Of Rock And Roll” (1987). The meeting is just as unlikely coincidental as that meeting with Barry Mann:

Once I was in Malibu emergency room getting a weigh-in and this guy walked up to me. He had curly hair and was on the short side. “Are you Brian Wilson?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Bob Dylan.” He was there because he had broken his thumb. We talked a little bit about nothing. I was a big fan of his lyrics, of course. “Like a Rolling Stone” was one of the best songs, you know? And “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and so many more. What a songwriter! I invited him over to my house for lunch the next day. That was a longer conversation. We just talked and talked about music. We talked about old songs we remembered, songs before rock and roll. We talked about ideas we had. Nice guy. He added vocals to a song I was working on around that time called “The Spirit of Rock and Roll”.

But that was a rare bright spot. Most of the time that house in Latigo Shore was bad.

That broken thumb is a little documented injury, but Dylan himself also mentions something like that, in Chronicles, opening chapter 4, the chapter Oh Mercy. ‘It was 1987 and my hand, which had been ungodly injured in a freak accident, was in the state of regeneration. It had been ripped and mangled to the bone and was still in the acute stage — it didn’t even feel like it was mine.’ In the same chapter, Dylan reflects on most songs from the album Oh Mercy, including the dark pearl “What Good Am I?”

The lyrics he wrote, as he recalls, somewhere in the beginning of ’87, at night, at home in Malibu. Dylan summons observations from the previous days, but can not really put his finger on a source of inspiration for these particular words. ‘Maybe seeing the homeless guy, the dog, the cops, the dreary play and maybe even the antics of Guitar Shorty might have had something to do with it. Who knows?’

With the reader of I Am Brian Wilson, however, a completely different source of inspiration emerges: the narrator from “What Good Am I?” looks quite a lot like the I-person in that autobiography.

The most obvious give-away is the deaf ear, which the narrator turns to the ‘thundering sky’, an image that the poet uses only once in his entire oeuvre – in the same song he writes a few weeks after his encounter with the single-sided deaf Wilson.

The other Aha-moments go a bit deeper than that superficial, physical similarity. We get to know Wilson as a man who is tormented on all fronts by (among other things) fear of failure, by the question of whether he is good enough. He himself describes such an anxiety attack with the words frozen in place, just like the I from the song self-analyzes: ‘and I freeze in the moment like the rest who don’t try.’ Remarkably comparable are both main characters in the shortcomings they see in themselves. Wilson regrets how he has hurt relatives by ignoring them, how he has consciously shut himself off from someone else’s grief, uses similar words (“When I hear those voices, I try to shut them out”) and has turned away from his terrible father and not even attended the funeral (‘I just turn my back while you silently die’).

Personal matters the poet Dylan knows or does not know about, but it is very likely that the observing, sensitive Dylan carries with him impressions of that strange, moving Beach Boy, that spring 1987.

The song is beautiful anyway, and one of the much-vaunted highlights on Oh Mercy. The music, Dylan tells, only arises in the studio, about two years after he wrote the lyrics and stored them in a drawer.  “We really had to hunt for a melody,” he recalls, and actually seems unhappy with the end result. “I liked the words, but the melody wasn’t quite special enough — didn’t have any emotional impact.” Dylan then agrees to settle with the positive opinion of producer Daniel Lanois.

Lanois is right, as he often is. The song is, indeed, not very melodic, but very effective and gruesomely beautiful. No lack of ‘emotional impact’, in any case.

Other greats agree. To Tom Jones, the song even means an unexpected turning point and a major upgrade of his career. The Welshman records “What Good Am I?” 2010 for his acclaimed album Praise & Blame. It is a beautiful, sultry cover and it yields the ultimate compliment: it pleases the master himself. Jones is one of twelve artists who are selected by Dylan to come over and sing a Dylan song at the MusiCares event in 2015.

In his autobiography Over The Top And Back (2015) Tom Jones remembers that honour with still bewildered gratitude, in the chapter that he also names What Good Am I. When, after the performances, he sits at a table and listens to that overwhelming speech by Dylan (‘the most remarkable piece of oratory I’ve ever heard from a musician’), he sits there ‘enthralled – enthralled and also amazed to have played a humble part in that evening.’

The somewhat too dramatic version of Dylan veteran Barb Jungr is less successful (Every Grain Of Sand, 2007), but the monument Solomon Burke, who in 2002, at the age of 62, has had just such a startling career relaunch as Tom Jones achieved, is pleasantly soulful and passionate (on Make Do With What You Got, 2005).

The Swedish greatness Louise Hoffsten is especially brave. At the presentation of the Polar Prize 2000 she visibly nervously delivers, under the eye of a critically observing Dylan in the front row, a fairly safe, but nevertheless very attractive, acoustic reading. And she plays the harmonica.

The most likeable, and perhaps the most beautiful cover, comes from Dylan’s natve region, from The Pines in Minneapolis and can be found on the very nice tribute album A Nod To Bob 2 (2011). It is a sparkling live version from a band which seems to have Dylan in the blood.

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 Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Like everything he does, Dylan’s harmonica playing has been controversial, but not a lot of serious comment has been devoted to it. Plenty of put-downs. The first item to come up on a google search is a Reddit discussion of Dylan’s harmonica playing with almost every comment negative and to my mind, misdirected. Here is a typical example:

‘So many Dylan songs have harmonica solos in them, but many are actually atrocious to listen to. I think his harmonica playing is often, at best, superfluous. He plays in a manner that – I hope intentionally – is discordant and grating to listen to, and he sometimes puts the instrument at the very end of a song with no warning, as if to say “Fuck it! I’m Bob-Goddamn-Dylan!”  Contrast this with artists like Tom Petty or Donovan, who use the instrument to produce a soothing, pleasurable tone. Am I taking crazy pills, or what gives with Bob Dylan and his harmonica playing?’

This post is an attempt to answer that last question, and present the positive case, for I have always loved Dylan’s harmonica playing and have always been disappointed when albums like Street Legal don’t feature it. I think much has to do with how our ears are attuned to music, and what we expect when we listen to a song. If we’re looking for a ‘soothing, pleasurable tone’ then we’re best off staying well clear of Bob Dylan, for even his most gentle and melodic songs are seldom soothing, and the pleasure than arises from listening to them comes from quite a different source.

I was brought up among jazz aficionados, weaned on on sax players like John Contrane (who never smiled), Charlie Parker (who could play faster than anybody else), Sonny Rollins (who could play two saxophones at  once) and so on, with a nod to the trumpeters like Louis Armstrong. To these jazz cats, Bob Dylan was a two chord wonder, and any mention of his harmonica playing would raise a sneer. The verdict was unanimous: he couldn’t play the instrument. In his early songs Dylan developed what I call a ‘peppering’ technique in which many notes are played very fast, apparently at random. After listening to one such song, I listened to some Charlie Parker and what I heard were a whole lot of notes played very fast apparently at random. Any suggestion, however, that Dylan might also have a little jazz in his veins earned me some pitying looks from my jazz cat friends.

Audiences, however seemed to appreciate it, and Dylan’s ‘squeaky’ harmonica, mounted on a neck brace, quickly became a part of his waif-like, on-the-road image. In this wonderful version of Don’t Think Twice, from the 1964 Philharmonic Hall performance, we find a good example of the ‘peppering’ effect, and the audience’s appreciation of it.  Note, by the way, the wonderful soaring vocal.

It was clear from the start that while he often used the harmonica as a way of filling in some beats between verses, blowing just a few notes, that thin, vulnerable, amateur-sounding harmonica was an essential component of the feeling tone of a song. It was an integral part of appearing ‘young and unlearned’, the frail kid talking truth to power with nothing but a guitar and a quavery harmonica he doesn’t seem to know how to play. It was all part of the image.

Consider once more this performance of Blowin’ in the Wind from 1963, and note how those whimsical little jazzy bits between the verses contribute to the forlorn nature of the song and the unanswerable questions it poses:

To my mind, however, it’s not until we get to Mr Tambourine Man that the peppering effect fully comes into it’s own as an integral component of the song and the themes of the song. The dancing harmonica solos in many great performances of this song during the 1966 tour reveal a mastery of the instrument, with those apparently random notes sewed into the Harlequinesque, carnivale ambience created. The notes can be rough, jagged, piercing, a little crazy, the choruses held together by long swooping blues notes; almost out of control, obsessive and repetitive, but miraculously brought back under control again. Then rising to a climax of high squeaky notes dancing poignantly on the circus sands at the end. Clearly there is a lot more going on here than just filling in a few desultory notes between verses. The emotional range of the song, and its ability to affect the audience, has been extended. These are fey sounds, friends!

Someone told me that while most blues harpists get their wah-wah-wah sound, with vibrato, by sucking on the instrument while cuddling it with two hands, Dylan tends to blow rather than suck, and his style has evolved through not handling the harp (that came later) because of playing the guitar at the same time. I don’t have the knowledge to be sure of that, but I do know that Dylan’s harp playing is so distinctive I can spot it within a few notes.

While that thin, vulnerable, lonely sound was an essential component of John Wesley Harding, and later Blood on the Tracks, the use of the harmonica waned during the 1970s. It never quite fitted with the violin during the Rolling Thunder Tour, or with the big band sound of 1978. The harmonica seemed to fit better with the more intimate, acoustic Dylan than the stadium rocker – but that too would change as Dylan’s sound evolved in the late 1980’s and into the 90’s, when his harmonica work again became important.

The gospel period is a frustrating one for the harp enthusiast. He only lets loose on one song, ‘What Can I do For You’, and in 1981 on old classics like Forever Young and Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

Clutching the harp in two fists, Dylan delivers a wrenchingly emotional performance, an outpouring of gratitude. Those readers who have Trouble No More can hear a sonically superior version to the You Tube clip, but beware, the CD included in the box set contains only half the song, the first harp solo having been cut! (Sacrilege!)

The harmonica featured only occasionally during the Tom Petty years in the mid to late 1980s, again not suited to Petty’s heavy, stadium style sound, nor do you hear it much in Dylan’s work with the Grateful Dead. However, in the second year of the NET, 1989, some strange piercing sounds were once more heard from the stage. Something new had entered the music. When I first heard the harp work on ‘Rank Strangers’, even after years of listening for, and to, Dylan’s harp, I didn’t recognise what I was hearing. I thought maybe GE Smith was playing above the frets or something. Take a listen to this. The first, astonishing harp solo begins around 3 mins 30 secs, but is repeated with variations after a brief guitar interlude. Incredibly, the harp solo ends with three notes from the dawn bugle call of the US military, known as Taps or ‘Day is Done’, repeated over and over.

I swear to all the jazz cats out there that I’ve heard Contrane and Parker do this, squeezing the reeds between their lips seemingly in effort to reach above audible sound, certainly above the normal range of a sax. Of course Dylan can’t squeeze the reed as on a sax, as the reeds are encased in tin, but by forcefully blowing the very top notes, and eliding between them, he succeeds in creating an unearthly, screaming sound in perfect counterpoint to the ghostly moan of the song. Again, it depends on how you’ve trained your ear, and the sounds you respond to; where I find sheer musical genius, others might hear metal scratching on glass… There are many other examples of similar style playing from that year, often with a feeling of improvisation about them, as if neither Dylan nor GE Smith quite knew where the song was going or when it would finish.

In the 1990’s, Dylan’s harp playing crept back into force. In 1992/3, the band began to sound quite jazzy and improvisational, with arrangements looser than Dylan normally prefers. The band pulls out the stops in this 1992 performance of ‘All Along the Watchtower’. Dylan’s voice was pretty scratchy during this period, and the vocal is unexceptional, but he clearly enjoys his whimsical harp interlude at the end of the song, so light and airy against the heavy beat of the music, while also giving way to the song’s urgency. The audience loves it too!

It is, however, in 1995 that Dylan’s harmonica playing reached new heights. Famously, Dylan had a cold at the Prague concert that year, which kept him off the guitar, but it didn’t stop some amazing vocals and unprecedented harmonica work. The pop and rock music of the 1980s veered towards creating sonic landscapes, orchestral sounds, and we don’t normally associate Bob Dylan with this kind of music, but in this grand and grandiose version of ‘Man in The Long Black Coat’ you hear Dylan and his band aiming for a full orchestral effect, which is where the harmonica comes in, lifting the song into one huge wall of sound. It’s a pity that the recording devices, or the original sound system for all I know, was not up to capturing the full range of this magnificent achievement – not to mention the limitations of MP3s! The fluctuation from soft to hard sound goes into distortion, but I think you can listen through that to what it might have sounded like, and it’s a sheer blast, with long sustained harmonica notes pushing the music ever higher, finally floating above the wall of sound, thin and insistent, and ultimately as haunting as the song itself. The first solo is just a warm up for the climax to follow the last verse.

For Dylan, the harmonica becomes another kind of voice, one which can take his own vocal sounds and extend them.  In the last two decades Dylan has brought his harp playing to a new level of mastery, and that will be the subject of my next blog in a week or two. In the meantime, let us know your own favourite Dylan harp work, and what it adds to the song. And if you hate it, then, well… quit those crazy pills!

Kia Ora

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

Persian poet Omar Khayyam, with his “jug of wine and thou”, holds on to the physical side of the human animal while the Zarathustra-influenced Mawlana Rumi seeks to ignite the divine spark within the individual:

When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth
But find it in the hearts of men

(Mawlana Rumi ~ translated) 

Rumi is a ‘roomie’ type of character – not the ‘rummie’ kind, for sure:

The dark thought, the shame, the malice
Greet them at the door, and invite them in
Be grateful for whatever comes

(Rumi: The Guest House)

The Surfi poet of yore uses music and dance as an earthly means to communicate with the spiritual Oneness of the Universe that lies, often dormant, within the physical body – “fire” be his key symbol:

Oh music is the meat of all who love
Music uplifts the soul to realms above
The ashes glow, the latent fires increase
We listen, and are fed with joy and peace

(Rumi: Remembered Music) 

The mystical Persian poems of Rumi influence the writings of the Romantic Transcendentalist poets, and the lyrics of a present-day band of musicians:

When I awoke, the dire wolf, six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window, all I said was, "Come on in"
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
The wolf came in, I got my cards, we sat down for a game
I cut the cards to the  Queen of Spades
But the cards were all the same

The Queen of Spades, a symbol of death, the eternal servant that awaits us all – while we sing the blues:

Oh, the women on the levee, honey, hollerin', "Whoa, haw, gee"
The men on the levee, hollerin', "Don't murder me
Please, baby, please, baby. Please, don't murder me"

(Lead Belly: I’m Down And Out ~ traditional)

The black queen – a Gothic symbol that singer/songwriter Bob Dylan employs:

Well, I return to the Queen of Spades
And talk with my chambermaid
She knows that I'm not afraid to look at her
She is good to me
And there is nothing she doesn't see
She knows where I'd like to be
But it doesn't matter

(Bob Dylan: I Want You) 

In modernistic Freudian terms, the Grateful Dead’s ‘dire wolf’ represents the animal side of humankind – the Id- , the Darwinian monkey that dwells within us. In one song, based on Egyptian mythology, Bob Dylan’s persona tries to escape from his Id:

I picked up his body, and I dragged him inside
Threw him down the hole, and put back the cover
I said a quick prayer, and I felt satisfied
Then I went back to Isis, just to tell her I love her

(Bob Dylan: Isis)

Isis, the Sun-Queen Queen, stitches her twin and husband back together after he’s torn apart by their canine-like brother Seth. In the Holy Bible, the reverse happens – God does not like it when the settled down Cain does away with his brother, the pipe-playing shepherd Abel; God puts His cane to Cain:

And Abel was a keeper of sheep
But Cain was a tiller of the ground

(Genesis 4:2)

In the following lyrics, Dylan’s persona wishes not to suffer Cain’s fate:

One of these days, I'll end up on the run 
I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone
I'm going inside, roll the shutters down
I just wanna say that Hell's my wife's home town

(Bob Dylan: My Wife’s Home Town ~ Dylan/Hunter)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrgXpz7e-Uw

The lyrics of Dylan’s songs are seldom as simple as they first appear.