The idea of the concert series is very simple – a set of links to videos or recordings of a single concert year by year, gathered together so then when complete we can all find at least one concert for each year, really quickly, if we ever so wanted to.
So in a sense it is a little extension to the Never Ending Tour series incorporating the years before and after the Tour itself.
So we are still simply working on having one recording for each year. And a full list of all the concerts we have covered thus far is given at the end of this little piece, with links in each case. But all suggestions are welcome.
There is a full index of concerts below, and with the addition of this rather fine recording I think we now have four concerts from each decade, so now we start again to take this up to five per decade. Some decades already have this, but there are a few gaps to fill in.
I say to the willow tree - don’t weep for me
I’m saying the hell with all things that used to be
“An exceptional song,” says a man who should know, Alec Wilder in his American Popular Song (1972). “It’s on a par with Carmichael’s experiments and was written, I’m sure, far from the maddening crowd of commercial song writers.” This is a huge compliment coming from Wilder, as he considers Hoagy Carmichael to be “the most talented, inventive, sophisticated, and jazz-oriented of all the great craftsmen.” And “Willow Weep For Me”, because that’s what he’s talking about, is “a truly fascinating song.”
The song was undoubtedly injected under Dylan’s skin by Sinatra, via Sings For Only The Lonely (1958), Sinatra’s perfect suicidal mood album. In his autobiography Chronicles, we read Dylan’s undisguised declaration of love for track 9 of that same album:
“I used to play the phenomenal “Ebb Tide” by Frank Sinatra a lot and it had never failed to fill me with awe. The lyrics were so mystifying and stupendous. When Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his voice — death, God and the universe, everything.”
… and for more than sixty years, we have heard echoes of the remaining eleven songs reverberating throughout Dylan’s entire oeuvre. In songs like “Forgetful Heart”, “Dignity” and “Wallflower” resonate word choice and song structure; Only The Lonely songs like “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)” and “Goodbye” are paraphrased and quoted in the Basement, in “Sign Language”, in “Scarlet Town” and in “Don’t Think Twice”, and with some cut and paste work, the classic “Blues In The Night” can be reconstructed in its entirety from Dylan’s Collected Works (there are at least nine Dylan songs with word combinations and paraphrases from that one song).
That’s no different here on Rough And Rowdy Ways. Dylan quotes “only the lonely” in “False Prophet”; So you take the high road / and I’ll take the low from “Goodbye” resonates in “Crossing The Rubicon”; further on in this “My Own Version Of You” we hear in the wee, small hours, the reference to Sinatra’s other collection of tearjerkers, the equally brilliant In The Wee Small Hours from 1955… the impact of Sinatra’s torch ballads is not limited to the unabashed tributes Shadows In The Night, Fallen Angels and Triplicate (2015-17), the albums on which Dylan reinterprets 52 songs from the American Songbook, but has also been seeping into Dylan’s own songs for sixty years.
However, the reference to “Willow Weep For Me” seems to have a little more substance than the “normal”, weightless references. The wee small hours in the tenth verse, or something like in a small café at a quarter to three in the 1970s song “Sign Language” (the setting borrowed from “Only The Lonely”, the time copied from “One For My Baby”) and those dozens of other hints in Dylan’s oeuvre: these are usually nothing more than nice but meaningless nods.
But here in “My Own Version Of You” Dylan plays with the reference: “willow don’t weep for me.” The continuation takes it even a step further, going full Hemingway: “I’m saying the hell with all things that used to be.” Alienating. The narrator seems to contradict himself. Is this the same man who, twelve seconds ago, revealed that he is studying the fossil language Sanskrit? Who has made it his mission to save the best of the past for the future and who, in the last line of this song, will say: “I wanna turn back the years”? In short, the man who extols all things that used to be now wants to send them to hell?
The interlude insinuates a Jekyll/Hyde-like schizophrenia, a man who, on the one hand, feels an evangelical urge to spread the Way, Truth and Light of old songs, ancient literature and whatnot, and, on the other hand, has a severe allergy to repetition, to rehashing things that used to be. Which is certainly an issue for the artist Dylan himself, as we know. Studio engineer Chris Shaw quotes Dylan, and is then un-Dylanesque clear and concise:
“My favourite Bob Dylan song is probably ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. He has this wicked way of playing it live now, and I saw him backstage once after a show, and I said, ‘Hey, I love the new version of “It’s Alright Ma” – but do you ever play it like the original recording?’ And he looked at me, and he said: Well, y’know, a record is just a recording of what you were doing that day. You don’t wanna live the same day over and over again, now. Do ya?”
(Life with Bob Dylan, UK Uncut’s autumn special 2008)
… and even more unequivocally in the same interview, a little further on: “Bob really, really hates to repeat himself. He just hates it.” Still, that applies exclusively and solely to his own work – after all, Dylan repeats other people’s work so exhaustively and frequently that it has become a stylistic feature. Not only by dusting off old songs and performing them as covers, but also by quoting and integrating parts of them into his own songs, by filling his autobiography with phrases and word combinations from other people’s work, by freezing film scenes and copying them in his paintings, by peppering a Nobel Prize lecture with passages copied from SparkNotes, by embellishing his film script for Masked And Anonymous with quotes from things that used to be… no, the artist Dylan is a fan of repetition, and is grateful that the things that used to be have not gone to hell. We can identify the artist Dylan with the indignant narrator from “Summer Days” (“Love And Theft”, 2001): She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.”
An aversion to weeping willows is more in keeping with the machismo of the creative storyteller, the genius who creates a creature who feels the way that I feel and is modelled on parts of Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando. This is a robot commando who has no patience for the sentimentality of a willow weeping for him. No, if he’d want the sympathy of a salix babylonica at all, then it should be from the willow in the most beautiful willow song of the twentieth century, even more beautiful than “Willow Weep For Me”: Joan Armatrading’s “Willow”, one of the breathtaking highlights of Armatrading’s crown jewel Show Some Emotion (1977):
I'm strong
Straight
Willing
To be a
Shelter in a storm
Your willow oh willow
When the sun is out
Alec Wilder may have heard Joan’s willow song (Wilder died in 1980), but if so: he did not make his opinion public. Still, we can of course guess what it would have been: “An exceptional, truly fascinating song.”
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Bob Dylan’s book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, was written, as I understand it, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is not a book I feel I can comment upon, largely because I don’t understand much of what Bob is saying, which of course is a failure on my part, not on Bob’s.
And so after a hesitant start in reviewing the book, I abandoned the concept If you feel you could write a review of the whole book, or individual chapters, please do send me an article – as ever it is Tony@schools.co.uk
But while waiting for someone else’s review of the book, I was drawn back to it by the notion of listening again to the songs Bob picked and seeing if I could find anything to say about them, which might be of interest.
There Stands the Glass” is self-evidently a country song, and it was written by Russ Hull, Mary Jean Shurtz, and Audrey Grisham. Hearing it for the first time my initial thought was, “Why does it take three people to write such a song?” I guess it was one for the lyrics, one for the music of the verse and one for the music of the middle 8 but I could be wrong.
First recorded in 1952, it was a hit for Webb Pierce in 1953. Wiki tells me he was “one of the most popular of the genre, charting more number-one hits than any other country and western performer during the decade. It was Pierce’s fifth release to hit number one on the country chart. It spent 27 weeks on the chart and was at the top for 12 weeks.”
They also note that Bob said, “The star of this song is the empty bourbon glass, and it’s built around the same kind of crack guitar sound as on a Hank Williams record, as well as the magical open-string, strummed chord.” Rolling Stone put it at 127 in the list of the greatest country songs of all time. (Which perhaps explains why I don’t really take to country music).
But moving on: the crack guitar sound: I’m told the “crack” guitar sound on Hank Williams records can be heard on songs such as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,”
It was created by using the electric guitar as a rhythm instrument, emphasizing the pulse without percussion. The guitarist plays the lowest strings on the guitar but with the sound deadened by the fingers touching the string as soon as it has been played. The resultant pulse defines the beat of the song.
At least that is what I have read. The trouble is however I can’t hear that in “There Stands the Glass” at all, which means as a reviewer I am lost. Maybe it is the fact that I don’t like songs that celebrate using alcohol to avoid facing the real world (not least because it doesn’t work but instead leads to habituation), so I approach the song with a prejudice, and as a result perhaps can’t hear what I am listening to. Besides which, I guess no radio station (at least in the UK where I live) would be allowed to play this song these days… Here is the full set of lyrics:
There stands the glass that will ease all my pain That will settle my brain, it's my first one today There stands the glass that will hide all my fears That will drown all my tears, brother, I'm on my way
I'm wondering where you are tonight And I'm wondering if you are all right I wonder if you think of me in my misery
There stands the glass, fill it up to the brim Until my troubles grow dim, it's my first one today
So I start with a prejudice about the subject matter, and I am lost on the subject of what sounds we are listening to. Not very conducive to writing a review! But worse, I think I have a reaction these days against songs where the music and lyrics are so simple – I am tempted to write “excessively simple” although I am not sure one can say that. But I still am pondering why three people were needed to write this!
Is my problem that of writing about alcohol? I do enjoy a drink, but only a few nights a week with a meal, and I wouldn’t have said I had a problem with the subject within songs. Although thinking further on this I can only think of one Dylan song about alcohol – although of course there may be more that slip my mind at the moment. The song I recall is “Moonshiner” – a song which Bob has adapted from a piece normally accredited as “trad”.
But as others have pointed out before me, in his radio selections on the radio show he had included “A Quiet Whiskey,” “Whiskey Blues,” and “I’ve Been Drinking.” He also included songs that referenced specific types of alcohol like “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer,” demonstrating an appreciation for the variety of music and lore surrounding alcohol, (at least according to Far Out Magazine)
So really I need help. Not with my drinking, but with my understanding of why Bob included “There Stands the Glass” in the “Philosophy of Modern Song”. Is it that popular songs have emphasised drink constantly? I mean yes of course there are many songs on the subject but no more than on most other subjects, and certainly far fewer than on the topics of love, lost love and dance.
But I certainly can think of quite a few off the top of my head
Have a Drink on Me
One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
One Mint Julep
Red Red Wine
Tequila
and there are many many more of course. But to come back to “There Stands the Glass” maybe it was the original that Bob liked. I don’t know if that is so, but here it is…
My answer would be, don’t drink, go dancing. But that’s just me.
The history of my love affair with Highway 61 Revisited is probably not that different from most of us: upon discovering the LP in my father’s record collection, I kept putting the needle back to the lead-in groove after 6’13” – longing for “that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind,” as Bruce Springsteen aptly described that first bang of “Like A Rolling Stone”.
Not to take anything away from the beauty of “Tombstone Blues” or, say, “Desolation Row” (on the contrary), but certainly in the first few weeks, the ratio of “Like A Rolling Stone” to the rest of the LP must have been about 20:1.
The rest, of course, soon caught up. Highway 61 Revisited is for many of us the GOAT, a monument without a single dull spot. Unlike, say, Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side Of The Moon, we don’t secretly skip a “When I’m Sixty-Four” or some “On The Run”. No, while still enjoying the fade-out of “From A Buick 6” we are already looking forward to “Ballad Of A Thin Man”, we get already excited for “Highway 61 Revisited” halfway through grooving to “Queen Jane Approximately” and by the time the doorknob breaks in “Desolation Row” we know we want to hear the whole album again.
Some fifty years after that initial excitement all the impressions have sunk in and the processing begins. Or rather: the attempt to put the magic into words, the attempt to peek into the magician’s sleeve. “Like A Rolling Stone” was still a bit too big, too scary, so I started with the last chapter; with “Desolation Row”. I did expect it to be a big chapter, but the richness of the song turned out to be even greater than expected – after 130 pages, it dawned on me that a Highway 61 Revisited book might be very, very ambitious.
The second H61 book, about “Tombstone Blues” plus an epilogue about the unfinished, rejected song fragment “Jet Pilot”, also clocked in at over 100 pages, which meant that an H61 book was off the table; nine songs, and for the sake of completeness you’d want to include the non-album single “Positively Fourth Street”, and, in addition to “Jet Pilot” also include the outtake “Sitting On A Barbed-Wire Fence”, and knowing that you won’t be able to cover “Like A Rolling Stone” in less than 100 pages either… that H61 book was going to be an unwieldy 1,000-page tome. No, we’ll do it in parts.
After Desolation Row – Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965 (2020) and Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot – Dylan’s looking for the fuse (2021), came the book focusing on the unforgettable canon shot of the album a.k.a. one of the most beautiful singles in rock history, Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden – Bob Dylan kicks open the door (2025), and now Part 4 follows: about the two melancholic moments of calm. One on Side A, the brilliant fermata between the frenzy of “Tombstone Blues” and the brutal neuroticism of “From A Buick 6”. The other on Side B, the hypnotic breather after the commotion of “Highway 61 Revisited”: It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues.
So, only six more songs to go:
“From A Buick 6”
“Ballad Of A Thin Man”
“Queen Jane Approximately”
“Highway 61 Revisited”
“Sitting On A Barbed-Wire Fence”
and
“Positively 4th Street”
In 2030, Highway 61 Revisited will reach retirement age. A great moment to have completed the H61 series. Should be doable.
I think we first mentioned the band Dylan.pl back in 2018 when we picked up on their cover of Jokerman and have noted with much applause a fair amount of their work since. Indeed I’ve been delighted to publish a whole range of articles relating to the band since then..
But then of course times move on, and we head toward different subjects, trying hard not to repeat ourselves (this is of course UNTOLD Dylan) but I was delighted to hear again recently from Filip Łobodziński, at which moment I suggested that maybe he would like to write another piece for us. And very kindly he has agreed. So here is part one. Part two, as you might expect, will follow in a few days….
—————-
By Filip Łobodziński
The whole thing started in 2014 when… oh, wait. It was back in 1979, actually. That year, in April, I translated the first of hundreds of songs which are now in my archive. It was Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. Then came some French and Catalan songs, and then, Romance in Durango, You’re a Big Girl Now… and so it went. Fast forward to 2014 and I have a thick binder full of Bob Dylan’s songs translated into Polish.
In the meantime, in December 1983, I started a band with my friends from the Warsaw University. We called it Zespół Reprezentacyjny (Representative Group) and our repertoire consisted of, mainly, Catalan and French songs (translated into Polish by ourselves) which we found suitable to arrange and perform in a Poland ruled by communists, to mock the regime and encourage people to think and act independently.
The band is still performing today, we have 6 albums released and we plan to record at least one more. But the musical sensibility of the band somehow did not suit the Dylan songs so my translations were neglected.
And then, in 2014, I thought I could perhaps show my Dylan work to the world by singing my translations in the bars; just me and my guitar. The Zespół Reprezentacyjny’s bassist argued against the idea however and offered to be my accompanist. Then another friend of mine asked me, “Filip, why don’t you start a different band dedicated solely to your Dylan output?”
In early December, I contacted a very good guitar player (doing a fantastic job on a variety of guitars, mandolin, banjo, resonator guitar* and harmonica) and a renowned producer and together with a drummer we formed a quartet I dubbed dylan.pl. My original aim was to do Dylan songs in an Americana vein (or as close to Americana as we the Poles could get), i.e. mixing up folk, blues, country, gospel and acoustic rock’n’roll elements. The point was not to replicate the originals but to express ourselves instead through the lyrics, the rhythms and melodies.
Our first rehearsal took place on Dec 27, 2014. A year later, we had already nearly 30 songs in the bag and the first live concert behind us. We were received with serious applause.
Another nine months passed and we finished recording our album. I knew the Polish market was not prepared for Bob Dylan in Polish in the long run so I managed to persuade the record label which agreed to release the album that it should be a double-CD affair. I wasn’t sure if I could hope for another opportunity so I went for the big one.
Since the label was not sure if my voice and name could sell the product they insisted on having guest vocalists. They did not believe in my singing although I’d already had released five albums with Zespół Reprezentacyjny to remarkable sales. But, who’s the boss if not the label? Even our lead guitar player/producer would not argue. We invited six top singers from the world of Polish folk and rock and I let them sing some parts of a few songs. In my opinion, only a small part of those songs could be sung as duets because of their intimate mood but I found that I could give some room for other voices without sacrificing the message. One of our joint efforts is above, and a second below…
Meanwhile, a fifth member was enlisted, a good trombone and accordion player. We were a quintet then.
The idea for the album was to dedicate the first CD to the more “social”, “political” or “commenting” Dylan and the second one to the “intimate” and “reflective” Dylan. The album brought 29 songs, spanning between The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Tempest. I wanted to show as many different sides of Bob Dylan as I could. Short numbers (Father of Night, Time Passes Slowly, Blowin’ in the Wind…) and long ones (Tempest, Highlands), prayers (Ain’t Talkin’, Every Grain of Sand) and stories (Black Diamond Bay, Isis), soft ballads (Señor, To Ramona) and aggressive diatribes (Subterranean Homesick Blues, Gotta Serve Somebody).
One of the best Polish writers, Andrzej Stasiuk, a huge Dylan fan, wrote a beautiful essay for the booklet. And finally, when all the obstacles with the layout and the copyrights were behind us, the album was released exactly on my 58th birthday, March 24, 2017. And it gathered very positive reviews.
To be continued….
————————
*Editor’s note. I like to think I’m fairly well up to date with both music and musical instruments but “resonator guitar” had me beat so I looked it up, (and I mention this just in case you are not sure either). It’s a guitar that “uses one or more metal cones, called resonators, to amplify and modify the sound. Instead of relying solely on a wooden soundboard, like a typical acoustic guitar, the vibrations from the strings are transferred to the resonator(s), producing a distinctive, often louder and more metallic sound.”
So, different from an electric guitar, and also from an acoustic guitar. Now I know, and if you were uncertain, now you know too.
Do you have a view on Dylan, his lyrics or his music which you’d like to put across to our readers? If so, please do drop me a line. We are always open to new ideas and new points of view. Just email Tony@schools.co.uk
By Tony Attwood
The idea of the concert series is very simple – a set of links to videos or recordings of a single concert year by year, gathered together so then when complete we can all find at least one concert for each year, really quickly, if we ever so wanted to.
Since then other ideas have emerged, such as comparing individual songs through the series. Of course Mike has done this through his brilliant Never Ending Tour series: this I guess should be seen as a sort of lesser addendum to that.
But that is for the future, for we are still simply working on having one recording for each year. And a full list of all the concerts we have covered thus far is given at the end of this little piece, with links in each case. But all suggestions are welcome.
Meanwhile how are we doing? Looked at by decades we have
2020s: six concerts
2010s: three concerts
Two thousands: three concerts
The nineties: four concerts
The eighties: four concerts
The seventies: five concerts
The sixties: three concerts
There is a full index of concerts below but for the moment it is clear that the decade that has been missed somewhat is the 2000s (along with the 60s of course). So that is where we need to go…. but I should add another point. The wonderful “Never Ending Tour” series on this site contains concert recordings from 1987 to 2013. You can find the index here.
Wicked Messenger
Times they are a changing
The Wicked Messenger
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Cry a While
Tryin’ to Get to Heaven
It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again
Man in the Long Black Coat
Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
Boots of Spanish Leather
I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
Details of the previous articles in this series are given at the end of the article. Details of all the series were are currently running, and some recently concluded are given on the home page of this site. We always welcome ideas for new series, and indeed offers to write for Untold Dylan. If you are interested please email Tony@schools.co.uk
By Tony Attwood
If we look at the first seven songs composed by Bob Dylan in 1965 we can see one theme suddenly coming to the fore: relationships. Or put another way, “Should I stay or should I go?” Bob puzzled over such matters in songs such as Farewell Angelina. Love is just a four-letter word, Outlaw Blues, and of course Love Minus Zero and She Belongs to Me.
These are often very personal songs – completely different from many of the songs Dylan offered just a year or two before, and as noted before, the music in “Love minus zero” and in “She Belongs to Me” does not stick to either the classic chords of folk songs (as for example Bob does with songs such as “Times they are a changing”) nor to the tradition of the blues, (wherein we often find the addition of a chord from outside the key in which the song is written).
Of course, blues songs often do this – as indeed do composers of quite a lot of pop music – by adding a chord based on the flattened seventh of the scale (so for example including the chord of D major in a song in E major. But Dylan’s added chord is different. His added chord, if thinking in E major, is the chord of F# major.
Clearly the issue of love – not a regular topic in his songs thus far – was on his mind, for the next song he wrote was “It’s all over now baby blue.” Indeed this has been a favourite Dylan song over the years – the 28th most performed song in his concerts, if my adding up is correct, with 607 performances (as of June 2025).
And in terms of those performances I can of course do nothing better than refer you to Mike Johnson’s seven-part series, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, A History in Performance”. If you want to dip into that series there is an index to the articles on Baby Blue at the end of this piece.
Let’s just compare the first with the last that we have from that series of articles on this song. First 1965.
And now by way of comparison, sixty years later: 2025
And so the music has changed quite considerably over those intervening sixty years, and it is only the lyrics that really tell us this is still “Baby Blue.”
But take this 1974 performance, which like the version from 1965 above is a performance by Dylan and his guitar only. Same melody more or less, same chord sequence, same lyrics, but, I would argue, a new meaning.
My point here therefore is that Dylan has used the music (which, to be exact, means the melody, the way the lyrics are related to the melody, and the way the accompaniment then relates to lyrics and melody) to say something different from that which was said at first.
The song is always about the end of a relationship, moving on, walking away, but it now also offers new insights. For example, in the first version the song moves along at a fairly rapid pace and thus it puts the emphasis on those powerful opening lyrics, “You must leave now, take what you need…” This emphasis on moving on does require a fairly brisk musical arrangement of the song.
But also one can argue that in the song’s five verses there are five messages. In verse one the message is that the singer has just reached the conclusion that you must leave. In verse two there is the warning – there are some strange and maybe nasty people out there. For verse three we find some of these people have been damaged, as the world changes. So we are warned: Don’t think everything is going to be the same.
Then in the final verse there is the more urgent plea: don’t try and rebuild the past, the changes are wholesale and there is no going back. The “it” in the title that is all over now, is not, it seems, just the relationship, but rather, everything. Everyone is affected, the entire world is changing. Thus, we might presume, the meaning of the concept of “relationship” has changed too. (Indeed my guess would be that when he first wrote the piece Dylan did take “it” to mean the relationship, but as the decades slipped past, “it” did become “everything”.)
Such a set of lyrics has a profound impact on the song. Obvioulsy Dylan writes a strophic song as he often does (which is to say, it runs verse, verse, verse etc through the five musically identical verses), in order to help the lyrics carry this sense of moving onwards, and also to give focus to the notion of moving onwards, as the world itself changes.
But at the same time this is a strophic song, meaning that each and every verse is the same musically. So the composer is left with the question, how can the music reflect the urgency of the message?
One good way to understand this in any Dylan song is to go back to the original recording, made obviously before all the embellishments that followed in the performances across over 600 concerts. For in listening to the album recording again we can hear what Dylan does musically.
To begin the harmonica played right at the start gives a slight edge, a slight element of uncertainty. It is not unknown to have the harmonica play right from the start, but it is unusual, especially as the harmonica note is gone almost as quickly as it begins. Likewise, the guitar is playing just one chord. Quite often, where the band plays before the vocals appear, they give a feel of the song, across several chords, but here it remains just the one chord. The music is moving at some speed but with just one chord it is going nowhere, for there is no melody and hence no changes to be found. We are here, we are stuck.
And then suddenly as the vocals start, (contradicting that feeling of stasis with “You must leave” and we realise that there is a second guitar part playing a simple counter- melody, and Bob opens with the line “You must leave now take what you need….” and he sings it not on the key chord but on the dominant 7th chord.
Of course, by now some of us have been listening to this song for 60 years, but even so, to come back and focus on the elements within that recording can be a shock.
That dominant 7th chord which opens the accompaniment to the melody, is the chord that normally is heard towards the end of a verse leading us back to the tonic chord – the chord that is at the heart of the piece. In this case the piece of music is in C major, and it opens on G7 (the dominant) and then the melody falls back down as the chords progress from G7 through F to C.
In effect this is the reverse of what happens in most songs. Generally, if the song is written in C major, then the chord of C major is the first chord we hear. There is no absolute rule about this, but in folk, pop and rock music this is normal. Likewise if the song is about the affair ending, it opens with a reminiscence of how good it was in the past.
Take “Times they are a changing”. It is in the key of G and the song starts on G. The first line (Come gather round people etc) has the chords G, E minor, C, G. Thus G is firmly established at the start and the end of the line.
But here in Baby Blue, most of the first line is G7, the lyrics are “take what you need” and at the end of the first line we fall back to C major. It is as if we are on the edge of the cliff, but take a step back, both emotionally and physically, and end up a safe distance away contemplating how to let life continue (“you think will last”).
And then, extraordinarily, the next line repeats the process, and we are back at the end of the cliff and have to been drawn back once more.
G7 F C
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.
Of course this is not something that can be repeated too often, especially as there are five verses that are musically identical, and so we are drawn back, and effectively in the next two lines we have moved away from the cliff face and are sitting down on the grass looking at the cliff edge and out to the great unknown. But even there the most appalling danger lurks.
Dm F C
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Dm F C
Crying like a fire in the sun.
It is a brilliant contrast from the taking of what is needed and getting out, to the reflection upon those who are left behind, uncomprehending. (Could the orphan really be saying, “if you leave I’ll shoot myself”? Or is it “if you go I’ll shoot you”? Both are equally horrific).
And then the completely unexpected, we get E major; a chord that has nothing at all to do with the key Bob is peforming in. Not only is it unexpected, the lyrics proclaim this is a warning of what is to come.
E F G7
Look out the saints are comin' through
Dm F C
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.
And then that final calming last line. The lyrics tell us it is all over now, and taking the music firmly back to the key of C (by using D minor, F and C, chords directly associated with C major) we instinctively know we are home. Besides, the saints have arrived; they’ll sort it out.
Likewise, the melody which has reached the heights with “Look out” now returns to lower levels and we end up almost an octave below where we started. This is both lyrically and musically, an absolute roller coaster.
This is not to say that Dylan invented a new technique here; what he does is unusual, but I suspect others must have done the same before. But what is important to note at this point is that Bob is already mega-famous, and has already developed a number of other new approaches – not least moving from the folk music basis of a singer and guitar to playing accompanied by other instruments too.
No, what Bob does at this point is that he is taking issues that are of interest or concern to him, and writing about them in a new musical and lyrical way, but without giving us any background. We don’t know why this group of people are in chaos. And indeed, if we did not know “Baby Blues” as we do now, and heard the opening chord and bouncy rhythm for the first time, we’d be assuming that a jolly love song might follow. But no, the opening line “You must leave” knocks that assumption aside, as does the melody starting high and then delining, before by line three being in a lower register, as if offering an aside. Except the character now introduced has a gun! And yet the music is still quite bouncy and jolly in style.
It is this an utterly extraordinary set of contradictions that Dylan introduces for the first time, that sweeps us up into a new world. It is now of course impossible to recapture what it was like for those of us old enough to have been there some 60 years ago when we played side two of the album for the first time. But we can still get a slight feel for what was happening:
Tambourine Man suggests we are on a magic swirling ship. But that swirling ship is shipwrecked at the Gates of Eden and those aboard are forced to consider the broader and deeper issues of war and peace rather than having a nice gentle song played for us.
And although “It’s all right ma” suggests everything is fine, and if this is a description of “life and life only” then indeed we are in the darkness being serenaded by a deeply grim masterpiece. “Where is the jolly tambourine man now?” when we need him, when it is seemingly indeed all over now. Or is it worse than that. Are the depths to which we have been taken part of a never-ending spiral? It might be all over now, but then it starts anew. And another circle will turn; the vagabond is wearing your clothes, and who is to say that the world won’t turn once more and those clothes will come back to the original owner? It’s all over, except that it never is over. We play the album again. It just repeats.
The magic swirling ship has taken us to the gates of Eden, where all hopes are false hopes. I am bleeding, and it really is all over until we are forced to start again. Side two of the original LP is indeed a comprehensive musical masterpiece. A description of life in all its horrors. How, one wondered at the time, could this extraordinary genius, ever climb such heights again?
It’s quite a while since we did a review of Bob Dylan’s compositions over time on the subject of gambling, but I am always willing to oblige when the subject comes up, (as indeed it did in the Untold Dylan office this week), because I’m instantly drawn, not to a Bob Dylan song, but to one of the songs he put in his own personal top ten of songs written by other people. But more on that in a moment.
The subject came up from UK BTC casino and I was rather pleased about that as it led me onto the question: what was that song about gambling that Dylan liked so much?
Just in case you don’t know what song that eventually led me on to is I’ll keep you waiting til the end of this little piece, with a promise that all will be reevealed, along with a reminder to pay more attention in future! But in the interim, it’s not a bad idea to go over one of two of Bob’s songs in the genre, and pick out one or two recordings that perhaps you might have missed.
The earliest data we have on Bob writing a song about gambling is “Rambling, Gambling Willie” which appeared on the Whitmark demo of 1962.
Of the various versions of the song that Dylan recorded the one above is the one that I like best. It does have a pause in it where Bob seems to have lost his place, but I’m still glad it has been preserved.
The next up in the gambling songs came “Black Diamond Bay” which Bob only performed once live on stage. There’s no recording of that performance I can find, but in picking up again on this theme of Dylan and gambling, I do have a chance to put up on this site quite possibly for the first time (sorry if I am wrong but I I really can’t remember) this wonderful recording of “Huck’s Tune”.
There are many interpretations of the song, but the one I particularly like is about knowing when to stop, whether it is in a personal relationship or in gambling or indeed (I would argue) in every aspect of life. It is (for me if no one else) one of the most stunningly moving songs Bob has ever written.
It only got seven performances which makes it quite remarkable that we do have one of those. There is a slight pause at the start, but it is worth staying with. It’s one of those songs that really deserves many, many more live versions in my view. But of course, as ever, Bob knows best.
There are of course many, many more Dylan songs that touch on gambling, some obvious (because they have the word Gambling in the title, which is always a bit of a giveaway), some less so, but when I come back to this theme I do have to include my absolute favourite. I’ve used this cover version before, but we’ now published nearly 4000 articles on Untold Dylan so the occasional bit of repetition must be allowed I think.
This is a version of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts. And putting it up again means if you missed it before, here it is….
But now, having decided to be slightly quirky in this review, I feel I can go a step further because when Bob Dylan created his own list of favourite songs composed by other people he included a Warren Zevon song ‘Desperados Under the Eaves’. Now that is not a gambling song, but when I listened to that song I became interested in Zevon, and was quickly led on to his song, ‘Lawyers, Guns, and Money.’ Now I have mentioned that song in the past, but since I last featured it, I have come up with a live version, which I thought might well do as an article closer.
Interestingly (to me if no one else) for this live recording, they’ve changed key from the recording. And I do love the way an extra bar is added in places. In fact I love all of it. Especially the notion of going through all this and claiming to be an innocent by-stander. Fabulous.
I first knew of Warren Zevon, because of “Werewolves of London”, but nothing more, so it was learning of Dylan’s admiration, took me further into his music. He was, it seems, born in the same year as me but died of cancer 20 years ago. (And that is quite an unsettling thought: how come I, just a regular guy who enjoys all this music, managed to survive? Beats me.)
I’ve featured the song before, but here’s a live version recorded for TV that I don’t think I’ve put up previously. Of course, certainly in the UK at least, today you don’t have to go to Havana to have a flutter which makes life easier. And I do so love this song.
As ever, I hope you found something in this piece that you enjoyed.
In his final part in the series of articles on the Dylan song “False Prophet” (published on this site), Jochen wrote:
“Having resisted the label “prophet” for more than half a century, Dylan now then confesses: well alright, I am a prophet. Not a false one, a real one. And let me show you the way to the Light: Ricky Nelson and Jimmy Wages, Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson and Roy Orbison, your guides from the underworld.”
And although I made an attempt a little while back to start reviewing, or maybe dissecting (or maybe better said, just fumbling around with) Dylan’s book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song” I really felt I was failing to get a grip with the work, so I stopped after just a couple of articles.
But I have been drawn back to a rock song specifically mentioned in that series of articles: “Take Me from This Garden of Evil”.
At the time I thought I could review the song within the context of what Dylan wrote in “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” but then after several days of false starts I had to conclude that I couldn’t write the piece, for the simple reason that I couldn’t follow Dylan’s argument within the book. What I then meant to write, but somehow never got around to, was “if you know what Dylan was saying about ‘Garden of Evil’, and can explain it to someone like me who doesn’t get it, please do write an article (preferably without calling me a complete idiot, although I will allow that if you really think that is helpful to your argument) explaining Dylan’s thinking. Email it to Tony@schools.co.uk and mention this article, so I know where you are starting from.
But life goes on, and yesterday, apropos nothing in particular, I decided to take another listen to “Take me from this garden of evil,” and also felt it was time to listen to some other works by Jimmy Wages. After all, if Bob reckons he is worth a chapter, he really has to be something, and I am the one missing out.
I also thought that if I did end up thinking it takes us somewhere, maybe I could try and consider one or two more from “The Philosophy”. And this I must stress is because I don’t fully get quite a few of Bob’s arguments in “The Philosophy”. So you are most welcome to have space here and put me right on all of this.
But first, Jimmy Wages
What strikes me about the music in this song is that it is constantly “not quite right” by which I don’t mean that the composer didn’t know what he was doing, but rather that he was deliberately doing the unexpected. As a result, the song which sounds upon a casual listen like a regular rock n roll piece played on guitar, bass and percussion (I don’t think there are other instruments involved, and I think that is for a very good reason), it is in fact, nothing of the kind.
To begin, the opening guitar solo which occupies the first six seconds does not use chords that are used anywhere else in the rest of the song – which is very unusual for rock n roll. It also gets me alert – not because I am transfixed by what chords a composer uses, but because the whole intro and then the opening of the song, sounds so unexpected and interesting.
For what we get in that briefest of solos is the chord of A and then the chord of A minor, before we are immediately hearing a regular rock n roll piece in D. OK the chord of A major is regularly found in a piece written in D, although A minor isn’t. But more than that: A minor never turns up again. Which may seem a technical point, but it does add to the feeling that there is something strange here, as it is immediately followed by another unexpected twist. In effect we have an intro that in terms of chords has nothing to do with the rest of the song.
As for the song, after that intro, it sounds and feels like it is a classic 12-bar blues which would mean that first line of lyrics is repeated but on the IV chord (in this case G) before reverting back to D, which we get. But then instead of the final line of the verse being on the expected chord of A, it stays on G, before resolving to D. The chord of A, from the introduction, like the chord of A minor, doesn’t get a look in.
D
Well a friendly face in a friendly place
Is what I like to see
G
Yeah, a friendly face in a friendly place
D
Is what I like to see
G
Well if you don't hurry, get away from here
D
This little girl is gonna set my pace
Now given that the lyrics are simply the singer telling his girlfriend to get here quick or else he is going to start “making out” as I think the term was with this new girl, this might sound like a load of totally unnecessary technical hogwash if you are not a musician. But even if that is so, I suspect you will feel that there is something different about the song. The changes are very slight – changing chords in one place a bit early, and not moving to the chord of A (the dominant chord as it is called by musicians for this key), and so on…. It sounds like regular rock n roll, but somehow, even though we do get back to the chord of D, it is odd. Edgy. Not quite right. But really, really fun and engaging nonetheless.
So yes, it is these subtle changes that make the difference, and it really doesn’t matter if you don’t know about which chord is which, because they give that feeling that there is something very different going on within this short song. Something is in fact slightly out of sync. Which is not to say anything is wrong, and certainly not at all unpleasant but it is just a bit unexpected. And it is all achieved by an introduction using a chord we don’t expect, and a chord change in the piece of music itself which is also just that bit different.
Thus instead of a 12 bar blues in the classic format, we get something just that bit more edgy. And maybe most non-musicians would never quite know what makes the difference, but that doesn’t matter if you feel the difference, the slight hint of uncertainty…. It is those changes of chords at different times, and the use of chords that are not quite where we expect them to be, that achieves this. It is an almost 12 bar blues but not.
As a result of this, the instrumental solo also sounds slightly unexpected – we intuitively expect it to be following the established pattern of chord changes (because that is what normally happens in rock n roll) but it doesn’t.
And then at the end we get the unexpected, “I don’t have long to ponder” and unexpectedly, the song stops.
Now I must admit that before Dylan introduced this song to us, I had no idea about Jimmy Wages, but going and looking I found Miss Pearl which usees the same rhythmic trickery…
I found an article on Jimmy Wages on the website of Bear Family Records which tells us that “Jimmy Wages was one of the great finds in the Sun vaults. A man of singularly warped vision and a true musical primitive, he was a little too deep into left-field even for Sun in its heyday.”
Apparently Jerry Lee Lewis backed Jimmy Wages on one session with Sun Records After that he “became a club act, touring as far afield as California.” He is quoted as saying “I’m just one who tried and didn’t make it,” adding “I got a lot of company.”
But now listening to this third example of his work, looking back we can see why he didn’t make it. Those time changes are just too much! The speed of the song makes it hard to dance to, and the time changes make one feel something isn’t right – which was probably the idea. And there are other songs in the catalogue with the same title. He was in fact being dragged away from the music he instinctively loved, and forced into something he was not.
Jimmy Wages was born in 1931 and passed away in 1999 aged 68. Today he is remembered not for the records that were released but for the much more experimental (some reports say “wild” recordings for Sun which remained unreleased for so many years. There is a list of his recordings here. But following the rejection of his wonderful variations on how the rhythm of rock songs could work, he was pushed toward more conventional music and his unique talent was lost..
But some of his early work can still be found, and those odd rhythmic changes can be found, even though he did reduce them over time.
This is a 12 bar blues which actually turns into an 11 bar blues, which no one else even seems to have attempted let alone pulled off. And we must remember that with recordings from this era, everything was taken as a single take – which is to say that these odd rhythms were part of the performance.
So yes, I still don’t fully get what Bob is saying, but I’m so pleased to have been introduced to the early music of Jimmy Wages
VII “Although I did not mean myself when I said ‘I’…”
I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind
I want to do things for the benefit of all mankind
Karl May in 1906. Photo courtesy Karl May Museum, Radebeul, Germany.
“What if my readers think that by “I” I mean myself? Wouldn’t they consider me a liar and a fraud? No, surely not – any reasonable person understands that my main characters are imaginary, and that the “I” speaking is also imaginary. Right?”
One of the best-selling German authors of all time (after the Brothers Grimm, of course) is Karl May (1842-1912); sales figures of his “travel stories” featuring Indian chief Winnetou and his Western friend Old Shatterhand, and his Arabian travel stories featuring the main character Kara Ben Nemsi (“Karl, son of the Germans”) are estimated at around 200 million. By way of comparison, that is about the same as Dan Brown or J.R.R. Tolkien, and double that of names such as Ian Fleming, Lewis Carroll or Hermann Hesse. However, May’s career path is radically different from all those other names in the Top 100 most-read authors ever: May started out as a common con artist, an incorrigible thief with particularly poor criminal skills – he was caught time and time again and eventually, when he was released from prison for the last time at the age of 32, he had already spent half of his adult life behind bars. Eleven so-called Steckbriefe, “wanted posters”, are still kept in various Saxon police archives (only the last one, which also featured a photograph of Karl, led to his arrest). The first (Penig, 23 July 1864) is the most intriguing:
—————–
Unbekannter Betrüger, angeblich ein Arzt aus Rochlitz. Alter: 21 bis 23 J.; Größe:68-69″; Statur: mittel u. schwach; Gesicht: länglich, blaß; Haare: dunkelbraun; Nase u. Mund: proport.; Stirn: hoch und frei; Kleidung: schwarzer Tuchrock mit sehr schmutzigem Kragen, dunkle Bukskinhosen, lichte Bukskinweste, schwrzseidene Mütze u. Schnürstiefel. Er hat eine Brille mit Argentangestell u. an einem Finger der rechten Hand 1 Ring getragen; von freundlichem, gewandtem und einschmeichelndem Benehmen, hat sich der Betrüger, welcher übrigens den in hiesiger Gegend üblichen Dialect gesprochen, auch noch den Anstrich einer wissenschaftlichen Bildung zu geben gewußt. Aus einem von ihm geschriebenen, zur Ansicht an Amtsstelle bereit liegenden Recepte, läßt sich, da die darauf vorkommenden lateinischen Worte fast ohne Ausnahme correct geschrieben sind, recht wohl schließen, daß der Betrüger eine mehr als gewöhnliche Schulbildung erhalten haben mag.
—————–
Unknown fraudster, allegedly a doctor from Rochlitz. Age: 21 to 23 yrs; height: 68-69”; build: medium and weak; face: elongated, pale; hair: dark brown; nose and mouth: proportional.; forehead: high and clear; clothing: black cloth coat with very dirty collar, dark buckskin trousers, light buckskin waistcoat, black silk cap and lace-up boots. He wore glasses with silver frames and 1 ring on the finger of his right hand; friendly, skilful and ingratiating in his manner, the fraudster, who incidentally spoke the dialect common in this area, also knew how to give himself the appearance of having a scientific education. From a prescription he wrote, which is available for inspection at the office, it can be concluded that the fraudster may have received a more than ordinary school education, as the Latin words on it are almost without exception spelt correctly.
But during his last detention, he forms a deep bond with prison chaplain Kotcha, to whom he owes his “innere Wandlung, inner transformation.” He starts writing and is almost immediately successful; he sends his writings to his parents, who let “Kolportagebuchhändler, (pulp bookseller) Münchmeyer read them. Münchmeyer smells money, publishes them, and that is the beginning of Karl May’s dizzying writing career.
At least, that is what May reports in his “Selbstbiografie”, his autobiography Mein Leben und Streben (“My Life and Aspirations”, 1910). But, like so much else in May’s memoirs, it is not true. Writing was not possible in the Waldheim reformatory, and May’s version of how he ended up in prison, innocently of course, does not correspond at all with the official history. May embellishes his own biography many times more wildly and implausibly than Dylan did in the early years of his career. For example, he fabricates the notion that he was blind for the first five years of his life due to a vitamin A deficiency. And amazingly he is also a linguistic prodigy: he learns one language after another, Indian dialects and even Arabic in no time at all. All necessary, he explains, to make his mission a success: Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi are role models, men “who possess the highest intelligence, the deepest nobleness of the heart and the greatest skill in all physical exercises.”
May views the “unstoppable decline” of the red race as a terrible tragedy and denounces the enmity between the Orient and the Occident. May seeks connection, preaches that the human race is one, emphasises the importance of friendship and communication, and illustrates his point by portraying noble, intelligent Indians and noble, intelligent Arabs: he writes his works “zum Wohl der Menschheit – for the benefit of all mankind”.
Still, he is and remains a liar and a deceiver, albeit now within legal limits. In his autobiography, he seemingly presents himself as rather like the suffering Dylan of the future, as a man who finds it annoying that his readers identify the “I” in his novels with the author, but there are more than enough testimonies from contemporaries who say that May, at presentations, lectures and other gatherings, allowed himself in a quasi-coquettish manner to be “caught”, reluctantly revealing that he himself was indeed hiding behind the “pseudonyms” Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi and had experienced all those adventures himself. Perhaps motivated by commercial considerations – give the people what they want, after all – but even in the memoirs he wrote at the end of his life, he left that door open:
“Ja, ich war sogar fest überzeugt, trotzdem ich mit dem ,,Ich” mich nicht selbst meinte, doch mit bestem Gewissen behaupten zu können, daß ich den Inhalt dieser Erzählungen selbst erlebt oder miterlebt habe, weil er ja aus meinem eigenen Leben oder doch aus meiner nächsten Nähe stammte.
Yes, I was even firmly convinced that, although I did not mean myself when I said ‘I’, I could say with a clear conscience that I had experienced or witnessed the content of these stories myself, because they came from my own life or at least from my immediate surroundings.”
“These stories came from my own life.” Yeah, right. Well, if not with Dylan, then Karl May can at least identify with an imaginary self from a Dylan song, with the Dr. Frankenstein-like self from “My Own Version Of You “, that is. Both learning Arabic to improve their minds, both working for the benefit of mankind. Words and images that Dylan, adding another fictional layer to the imaginary self, does not borrow from Dr. Frankenstein, but from the narrator of Mary Shelley’s novel, from the “I” in Frankenstein – The Modern Prometheus: Captain Robert Walton. In his first letter, Walton writes to his sister at home in London:
“You cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation , by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite.”
… though the exhausted and dying Victor Frankenstein says something similar in Chapter XXIV, quoted by Walton: “You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your names adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind,” both times referring to finding a navigable passage near the North Pole – which would be pleasant indeed, but still somewhat less spectacular than Karl May’s ambition to reconcile all peoples and all religions.
Even more evident is Dylan’s borrowing re the study of exotic languages. In Chapter VI, Frankenstein tells of his fellow student Clerval, who shares none of Frankenstein’s passion for natural sciences, but nevertheless, there is a connection between them: “The Persian, Arabic, and Sanscrit languages engaged his attention, and I was easily induced to enter on the same studies.” However, Frankenstein considers it nothing more than “temporary amusement” and has no higher ambitions, unlike Clerval, Karl May, and Dylan’s narrator in “My Own Version Of You”.
Which brings us, after a labyrinthine detour, back to the unscientific but nonetheless intriguing question: imaginary “I” or autobiographical “I”? Well, despite all the lies, deceit and romanticisation: after his wild years (or the Vagantenjahre, as May’s benevolent biographers euphemistically refer to his criminal career, “the vagrant years”), Karl May did indeed have a sincere ambition, just like “I, Kara Ben Nemsi” and just like “I, Old Shatterhand”: to reconcile cultures and unite races.
And the Frankenstein-like narrator from Dylan’s songs unearths cultural treasures, restores and rebuilds them, and passes them on to the next generation – for the benefit of all mankind. Which, admittedly, is an imaginary “I” that is indistinguishable from the autobiographical “I, Bob Dylan”. The autobiographer who, in Chronicles, talks about his passion for learning “Robert Johnson’s code of language”, his fascination with “singers who seemed to be groping for words, almost in an alien tongue”, and who explains once again in his Nobel Prize speech: “By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular.”
Alright, not Arabic or Sanskrit, but close enough.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Do you have a view on Dylan, his lyrics or his music which you’d like to put across to our readers? If so, please do drop me a line. We are always open to new ideas and new points of view. Just email Tony@schools.co.uk
By Tony Attwood
The idea of the concert series is very simple – a set of links to videos or recordings of a single concert year by year, gathered together so then when complete we can all find at least one concert for each year, really quickly, if we ever so wanted to.
Since then other ideas have emerged, such as comparing individual songs through the series. Of course Mike has done this through his brilliant Never Ending Tour series: this I guess should be seen as a sort of lesser addendum to that.
But that is for the future, for we are still simply working on having one recording for each year. And a full list of all the concerts we have covered thus far is given at the end of this little piece, with links in each case. But all suggestions are welcome.
Today’s concert was held on 20 January 1968. This, we are told by those who have put the recording on-line, was Bob’s first public appearance since 1966. It was at the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert at Carnegie Hall, New York City, New York.
… and the two links in there are to Facebook pages containing a recording from that concert.
As noted we also have found a recording of Dear Mrs Roosevelt
Here’s the list of concerts covered so far. We’re currently adding a couple a week. If you feel there’s a concert we should particularly add to the list because of the particular quality of a recording or indeed any other reason, please do write in and let me know.
From my calculations, we need another concert from the 2000s to ensure every decade has at least four years represented.
This series looks at Bob’s compositions from a musical point of view considering the songs in the order that they were written. Details of earlier articles in this series are given at the foot of this piece.
By Tony Attwood
By 1965 and the writing of “Love Minus Zero”, Bob had written something like 102 songs, and of those about 14 relate in some way love as a major theme in the lyrics. (At least that is the total that shows up on the chronological chart created on this site, and by and large it has served us quite well as the site and its readership has grown.)
But of those, by my reckoning, only two were actual love songs. The other songs with love within the lyrics are better described as “lost love” songs. Now if you really want to check my counting and my definitions you can do so through that link above where in a fairly clumsy but perhaps still useable way, I have given the briefest possible summary of the meaning of each song. And if I am wrong and the number of lost love songs is slightly higher or lower, the fact is that the songs about “lost love” outweigh the songs about love by about 50 to 1.
This is not a thought that I have mentioned here before, although I have found it very interesting because, of course, it is quite often possible to reclassify many Dylan songs as being in essence about something different. But I spent quite a while doing the classification and even if a few of the songs I have classified in other ways can be considered differently, and even if many people say “it is impossible to classify a Dylan song in this way,” I still get some insight from this review.
Put simply: Bob writes about many different subjects, but certainly, in this early period of his lyric writing, when he touches on love as the central theme (which happens about 14% of the time) he almost always writes and sings about lost love.
From the early trio of 1962 songs (each seemingly written one immediately after the other) onwards to Corrina Corrina,Honey just allow me one more chance, and Rocks and Gravel and on and on to “Love is just a four letter word” in 1965, lost love, and love gone wrong, are fairly common themes for Bob. “Love” pure and simple, is hardly touched upon.
In fact by 1965 the notion for Dylan that “love” as a concept is a myth – that it doesn’t exist at all – has arrived, with Love is just a four letter word. “Is love real?” the poet asks, and the answer seems to be fairly clearly, “no”. Which pretty much separates Bob as a songwriter, from all the other songwriters – as if he were not already separated enough by his genius.
But then after a quick diversion into the world in which the artist in general, or perhaps the poet in particular, takes on everything and everyone else (I refer to Subterranean Homesick Blues and Outlaw Blues created in 1965), everything changed. Because even if love has existed it exists no more, “Farewell Angelina” ends…
Machine guns are roaring, the puppets heave rocks
At misunderstood visions and at the faces of clocks
Call me any name you like, I will never deny it
But farewell Angelina, the sky is erupting
and I must go where it is quiet
Angelina, it seems from the song, and whoever she was, was indeed once loved. But times were againsst the couple. Yet that song gave us a clue as to Bob’s view of love.
The camouflaged parrot, he flutters from fear
When something he doesn't know about suddenly appears
What cannot be imitated perfect must die
Farewell Angelina, the sky is flooding over
and I must go where it is dry
Of course, there are many ways to interpret that but for me it has always meant that Angelina was the singer’s one love, she is gone and can never appear again, and he knows that now, somehow, he must stop crying, he must move on. He cannot take the pain but he knows, there will never be another.
And yet, and yet, that was not it at all. Because two of the next three songs Dylan composed were love songs – seemingly Bob’s first love songs (as opposed to lost love songs). And even if you disagree and would classify some of the earlier 100 or so compositions as love songs, the song composed in between Love Minus Zero and She Belongs to Me was clearly a song about moving on – one of Bob’s main themes. That song is California. It is a song of walking away:
But if we listen to that song above, and to “Love Minus Zero”, it is hard to believe that not only the same composer wrote each one, but the same composer wrote these songs one after the other. And yet he did. California is a straight 12-bar blues. Musically the songs written either side, each add just an extra chord, and yet through that change the feel of the music is utterly different. Here’s a performance of “Love Minus Zero” that I particularly enjoy, and having listened to the piece above, it helps me calm down at this point.
But I must admit and as I have tried to acknowledge in the past, the date of compositions with Dylan songs can often be uncertain. Yet I retain the view that even if the dates of compositions are challenged, there is a real significance here, for the number of songs written, and the number of lost love songs among the 102 compositions, so far exceeds the number of love songs, it seems Bob primarily saw love as a painful farewell, or a restriction on his liberty.
Why Dylan suddenly moved into writing love songs I will perhaps come back to another time. But what interests me is whether in making this change of subject matter, Bob changed the way he wrote the music.
And here it is interesting indeed (at least to me) that musically these two love songs are so closely linked while the song not on this topic, but written in between these two love songs, (California) is utterly different musically, in every regard. And yet, all three songs are linked in one way, for all three of these songs are strophic (ie verse, verse, verse etc) and they spend most of their time accompanied by the chords I, and IV.
What’s more each of the two slow songs also throws in a chord we don’t expect. In “Love minus zero” we get the D minor chord at the opening of “Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire” and “Valentines can’t buy her”. In “She Belongs to Me” the piece is in G but suddenly in the penultimate line, we get the unrelated chord of A major added. However so expert is the composing that it almost seems like a slip, for as quickly as she has taken the “Dark out of the nighttime” on that chord of A major, we are back on track with “and paints the daytime black” on the chords of C and G.
These are simple changes. Indeed the chord of D minor is one that can often be heard within pieces of music composed in C major. And although the chord of A major isn’t one that naturally occurs in a piece in G major, adding it in is hardly revolutionary. It gives us a slight element of surprise, a slight wondering about where we are, which fits exactly with the line “She can take the dark out of the night-time” but the line is resolved immediately back to the chords that we expect.
“She Belongs to Me” is one of those songs that opens itself up to being performed in many ways at many speeds, with any sort of accompaniment one wants. Which as many composers would agree, is pretty amazing for such a simple song. Three chords, two lines of lyrics per verse, one of which is repeated, and yet one can do so much with it.
Thus we have two gentle songs of love and admiration. And in both cases the women have everything and they know they have everything. In one case “My love winks, she does not bother, She knows too much to argue or to judge,” and in the other “She never stumbles, She’s got no place to fall. She’s nobody’s child, The Law can’t touch her at all.”
One can indeed only sit and admire, and quite possibly, even at the distance a sound recording brings, imagine that one could also love the lady if only we had met.
And yet, in between writing these two songs, Dylan did compose something else – although it is more than likely there was an overlap in the writing. The song was noted in our reviews of Dylan songs in the order they were written as an alternative to “Outlaw Blues”. You can find a recording and review here: California by Bob Dylan. It is a straight 12 bar blues, and sounds very much as if Bob was trying to shake himself free of those two love songs!
“Love Minus Zero” was played 365 times in concert, “She Belongs to Me”, 491 times. Both clearly songs Bob loved and enjoyed. And quite rightly so. He had suddenly, out of nowhere, decided to write two love songs – something he was most certainly not used to doing. They came out of nowhere, and they were both simple pieces of music and yet both masterpieces.
I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice
I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice
Can you look in my face with your sightless eye
Can you cross your heart and hope to die
I’ll bring someone to life - someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel
The PR department of Zeus and his colleagues seems more effective. Zeus and all the other gods are honoured, given temples and offerings, are worshipped, respected and feared. Which is a bit peculiar, viewed rationally – Zeus is de facto the first godfather, a powerful mob boss actually. He offers “protection” in exchange for “sacrifices”, punishes innocents cruelly and unreasonably (for example: when Prometheus steals fire for mankind, humans are punished with Pandora’s Box), and assaults, rapes and kidnaps people – men, women and underaged girls – when he has yet another horny fit. Destroying them just as easily, for that matter.
The Titan son Prometheus, on the other hand, is not only the creator of man, but also the ultimate benefactor. Besides fire, he grants his creation medicine, architecture, metalwork, hope, penmanship and what not. In short: Zeus brings misery, Prometheus blessing. However, his creation, i.e. humanity, does not show itself too grateful. Schools, sports clubs, planets, symphonies, delivery services, dating sites, universities and hundreds more cultural products are named after gods – but never after Prometheus. The arrogant scum on Olympus, as mentioned, have their PR in better order.
We can’t blame the historians. Homer, Aeschylus, Sappho, Ovid, Apollodorus, Plato, and the biggest fan being Hesiod… in all centuries and in all corners of the ancient world, they are, without exception, clear and unambiguous: mankind owes intelligence, progress and health, happiness and prosperity, well-being and welfare, everything in fact, to Prometheus. And this may have been recognised and endorsed by artists in all centuries up to the present day, but certainly not by Tom, Dick and Harry, nor by Joe and John Q. Public.
Dylan is a next artist in line, though only implicitly referring to the ancient Titan. No doubt he has seen Mary Shelley’s subtitle (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus), and that may have put him on the trail, or at the very least triggered associations. After all, that odd sightless eye in this third stanza is quite a giveaway. Some interpreters may see a hint to blind blues legends such as Blind Willie McTell, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Reverend Gary Davis and others, or even to the blind bard Homer, but that would really be a bit too cumbersome a reference – not to say slightly disrespectful in this context. No, the context – a life-creating genius – leads to Aeschylus, to Prometheus Bound (Προμηθεὺς Δεσμώτης, c. 450 BC), leads rather directly to the famous monologue in which Prometheus lists his merits for humanity, stating in line 447:
οι πρώτα μέν βλέποντες έβλεπον μάτην – They saw, yet they did not see
A key sentence, as it marks the moment when Prometheus decides to upgrade those will-less, emotionless, ignorant lumps of flesh who “led their long lives randomly and in total confusion” into what we now call human beings – to give “sight” to the sightless eyes, eyesight to the blind, as Sonny Boy Williamson would say (1951).
Remarkably, Dylan’s stream of thought then flows into a tributary dug out by a more recent predecessor: by Goethe.
Goethe struggled with the Prometheus material for a while in his younger years. Understandably so, because the story is tailor-made for the young Stürmer und Dränger that Goethe was back then. The protagonist a fierce, powerful rebel who rebels against the highest authority, against the Supreme God himself – if Prometheus had not already existed, he would have been invented by the fierce, rebellious poets of Sturm und Drang. In 1773, Goethe first tries to turn it into a play, breaks it off again, then has it published and performed as a “drama fragment” anyway in 1774. This Prometheus will appeal to both Dylan and the narrator of “My Own Version Of You”: a headstrong, creative genius who defies the gods, especially Zeus, with utter disrespect and disdain. He ridicules them, denies them any quality and acknowledges only two superior forces: Time and Fate. Parts of the drama fragment Goethe then reuses for his hymn Prometheus, which soon achieves the status it still has today: it is one of Goethe’s Greatest Hits. And in the apotheosis of that hymn, in the final couplet, we see the soulful relationship with the creator in Dylan’s refrain line after the third verse. I’ll bring someone to life – someone for real / Someone who feels the way that I feel:
Hier sitz’ ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu genießen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich!
Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!
(transl. Sir Walter Scott)
After Goethe’s Prometheus has spent six irregular, non-rhyming couplets lashing out at the gods, snarling at them about how powerless, poor, unfeeling and arrogant they are, mocking them for deriving their supposed majesty from the sacrifices and prayers of “trusting fools, children and beggars”, he shares the recipe for the perfect creation: emotions. A creature in my image has the feelings I have, can suffer and enjoy, cry and laugh, and has no respect for you – just like me. Or, as Dylan has the creator summarise in his song, “a real being who can feel what I feel.” And again a little later, recapitulating in the song’s closing line, even a stroke more explicit: “Do it with laughter – do it with tears.” A laugh and a tear, or: comedy and tragedy, ultimately the only two flavours of Life itself, the Way of all the World – which, as we all know, is a stage.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
There is something about Bob Dylan songs, when you hear them, you feel like you are galloping through the American countryside on a horse named Nostalgia.
Well, if you do feel that, you are not the first person to sense Bob Dylan’s connection with mother nature and horses.
Dylan, the raspy-voiced prophet of the 20th century, has a way with words. But in most cases, his lyrics often fly under the radar (unless you’re both a music nerd and a horse racing fan). This got us wondering, how often horses and equine imagery appear in his lyrics.
He might not be singing about horse racing directly, but using horses as metaphors or symbols of power, loss, transformation, freedom, and rebellion.
So, let’s take a path through nostalgia and find out the equine connection that Bob Dylan has hidden in his lyrics.
Horses as Freedom
Let’s address the only song where horses appear in the title. We are talking about the legendary “All the Tired Horses” which was a song from the Self Portrait album.
But to get into the right spirit and open our senses, let’s first talk about the vibe of an untamed horse. We are talking raw, free, and always out of reach energy that somehow evokes deeper emotions. That imagery hits hard in Dylan’s earlier works, especially when you listen to some of his songs in his mid-60s.
This is a song where the lyrics, (or the lack thereof, because he pretty much repeated one line), are simple.
“All the tired horses in the sun / How am I supposed to get any ridin’ done?”
So, what does this song mean, and why it is only one sentence repeated throughout the song?
This is definitely not a line that you’d want to hear when you are diving deeper into horse betting, right? After all, we are talking about a sport where the horses shouldn’t be tired. Spotting a tired horse is a skill included in the best horse betting strategies.
After listening to the song, you can definitely hear the weariness of those horses. But there is a twist, it’s not about horses. It is about exhaustion, about expectations, about being the voice of a generation when you’d rather just take a nap.
It speaks about feelings using horses as a metaphor, and even though there is lack of information about the true meaning of this song, there is a good chance that Dylan is singing about himself. He and all of his emotions are tired.
The Cowboy Archetype
Bob’s fascination with Americana—particularly the Wild West—is practically a genre of its own.
In “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door“, from the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack, we’re right in the thick of that dusty outlaw world. The imagery is subtle but potent:
"Mama, take this badge off of me / I can’t use it anymore."
No horse mentioned directly here, but let’s be real—you’re feeling the slow-motion fall off a saddle. The frontier setting, the resignation of a dying lawman—it all evokes the horse’s silent presence, a symbol of the life that once galloped and is now slowly riding into the dusk.
Then there’s “Isis”, where Dylan goes full mythical cowboy—crossing deserts, chasing love, and possibly resurrecting the dead. While no actual horse is name-dropped, you’re not trekking “through the desert down to the pyramids” on foot, are you?
Nah. You’re on a white horse with tangled reins and unresolved feelings.
The Haunting Horses of “Time Out of Mind” and Beyond
In Dylan’s later albums—especially the moody, gravel-throated ones like Time Out of Mind or Modern Times—horses start to feel ghostlike. They appear in metaphors, in dreams, in the rearview mirror of fading Americana. They’re not always center stage, but their hoofbeats echo in the background.
Take “Things Have Changed”, the Oscar-winning song where Dylan muses:
“I used to care, but things have changed.”
Again, no horse mentioned outright, but the energy. Pure lone rider. This is the vibe of someone who’s seen too many races, lost too many bets, and finally stopped saddling up for causes that never crossed the finish line. There’s a weariness to it—a man who’s stepped off the track but can still hear the thundering gallop in his dreams.
In these later years, the horse becomes a symbol of memory. Of power once held, or illusions once chased. They’re never cute or decorative. Dylan’s horses are aged and weathered—like the man himself. They know things. And they carry that knowledge in their gait.
Horses in the Dylan Mythos
If you zoom out from the lyrics and look at Dylan the persona, horses make even more sense.
Bob Dylan has always been a wandering figure—part cowboy, part outlaw, part prophet. And nothing says “poetic American wanderer” like a horse on the horizon.
Even the way he phrases things in interviews can feel like he’s just ridden down from some lonely mountain, pausing only to whisper metaphors that leave journalists blinking in confusion.
In that way, horses are part of the mythology of Dylan. They fit into the larger narrative of Dylan as the eternal traveler—crossing genres, eras, and expectations on horseback. Even if we don’t always see the reins.
Horses might not appear frequently in his lyrics, but his songs definitely give us that horse-riding vibe.
The idea of the concert series is very simple – a set of links which each contain a link to a video or recording of a single concert year by year so then when complete we can all find at least one concert for each year really quickly, if we ever so wanted to.
Since then other ideas have emerged, such as comparing individual songs through the series. Of course Mike has done this through his brilliant Never Ending Tour series: this I guess should be seen as a sort of lesser addendum to that.
But that is for the future, for we are still simply working on having one recording for each year.
This is Regensburg, Germany on 11 November 2015. The set list is below. Songs not written by Bob Dylan have the name of the composer/s and lyricist (if different) in brackets – if I’ve made a mistake with any of these please do write in.
Here’s the set-list. And of course thanks to those unnamed people who recorded it. The quality is excellent. If you want recognition, do write in and I’ll add it.
Things have changed
She Belongs To Me
Beyond here lies nothin’
What’ll I Do (Irving Berlin)
Duquesne Whistle
Melancholy Mood (Vick R. Knight and Walter Schumann)
Pay in blood
I’m a fool to want you (Frank Sinatra, Jack Wolf, and Joel Herron)
Tangled up in Blue
High Water
Why Try to Change Ce Now? (Cy Coleman and Joseph Allen McCarthy)
Early Roman Kings
The Night We Called it a Day (Matt Dennis, Tom Adair)
Spirit on the Water
Scarlet Town
All or Nothing at All. (Arthur Altman, Jack Lawrence.
Long and Wasted Years
Autumn Leaves (originally Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert. The lyrics we hear used here, were written later by Johnny Mercer).
Blowing in the Wind
Love Sick
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Here’s the list of concerts covered so far. We’re currently adding a couple a week. If you feel there’s a concert we should particularly add to the list because of its particular quality please do write in and let me know.
My apologies for the technical problems on this article – I think I have resolved them by removing the links to examples from the Never Ending Tour series – so the article is now readable. I’ve now included a link to what I consider the most perfect live version of Love Minus Zero in this revised version of the article.
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This series looks at Bob’s compositions from a musical point of view considering the songs in the order that they were written, Details of earlier articles in this series are given at the foot of this piece.
By Tony Attwood
After composing “Subterranean Homesick Blues” Bob returned to an even more basic style of composing. For while Subterranean used the approach of a 12-bar blues composition, the lyrics were varied throughout, thus taking the focus away from the fact that musically the piece was just based around the standard three-chord format found in all 12-bar blues. But having navigated that problem successfully Bob seemed to be attracted by the notion of ever more simple music, as he came back to an even more basic blues format, For here, lyrically, we have one line repeated, and then an answering line and that’s it: Outlaw Blues is the absolute classic basic form of composition. You can’t get more basic than that.
Bob played the piece once on stage on 20 September 2007: that was as part of a two-song interlude played with Jack White. Jack White returned the compliment although with a more exciting instrumental break than Bob would ever contemplate.
As many have said, the song is a set of references to the life of a man on the run. The weather is extremely cold, he falls over, he has nowhere to live, he is an outlaw, he wants to be somewhere else but doesn’t know where, and even the identity of his lover has to be kept secret because of social prejudice. But musically Bob can find nothing new in expressing these thoughts, and so it becomes one of those strange Dylan compositions: he wants it on the album, but perhaps realising there isn’t that much in the song, he chooses not to play it in public.
Lyrically, we can take this song to be a personal statement of the artist against society – the artist saying I am going to create my work as I want to create it, and I certainly am not going to start explaining it to you! Why should I? And yes up to a point that is ok, except if the artist has a message or at least a feeling she/he wants to put across, there has to be something there that appeals to us.
So this is, in essence, a non-musical composition by Bob, and one can argue that because the 12 bar blues format has existed for around 150 years and is nobody’s copyright. Bob is using a musical form that has existed for a long time and putting lyrics over the top with a minimal amount of melody. (Incidentally, if you are not familiar with exactly what a 12-bar blues is, there is an explanation from the Open University here)
But to return to the list of songs Bob wrote, and their musical content, if “Outlaw Blues” had no original musical content, then what followed that song in terms of Dylan’s composition most certainly was the reverse. Love Minus Zero / No Limit indeed has a gorgeous melody based over a four-chord accompaniment, and through a number of rearrangements it has evolved in several different ways.
And this is really where we can see Bob finding his own way of playing with, manipulating, and indeed re-inventing a work of his own, as it takes the notion of the song as something that is never fixed but is eternally re-written (as of course all songs are as the instrumentation moves further and further forward. In fact, for me, I think it goes too far as the accompaniment between each sung line removes the feeling of continuity within the lyrics. The song stresses the constancy of the woman, not her changeability, and thus I now simply get nothing out of “There is no success like failure and failure is no success at all” in this version. But that’s probably just me.
And this leads me to think it is worth immediately jumping back to see how Bob did perform it at the very start. There are one or two minor melodic changes but beyond that only the harmonica part is really different. But now Bob just seems (to me) to be extending the song for the sake of extending the song before the four verses he originally created.
However, this is interesting because it shows how Bob will experiment with a song in various directions, perhaps just to see where it goes, and emphasises yet again, that not every experiment works.
If you return to the Never Ending Tour Series and look at 1996 you will find remarkable changes happening to this song. Indeed as I noted when I wrote about this version before in the “Never Ending Tour Extended”, series, it sounds “as if Bob finally found a tape of the original song and remembered what he had originally meant the piece to be. The addition of the double bass and second guitar helps enormously to add a certain stability to the performance that was perhaps drifting away previously. Now once more there is love, desire, dedication, and indeed worship of the lady.
“It is as if before, Bob was singing to a picture of the lady. Now he has been reunited with her and wants to tell her about his feelings while also telling us all about what she is, and about his love of her.”
Was she real, or was she fictional, or indeed was she fictional but became real to Bob through the creation of that song? As I said before, I don’t mind, because this recording makes me feel despite everything there is still beauty in this world. And I feel that extra today since I spent yesterday with friends at a church in London honouring the memory of a man who meant a lot to all of us there. When emotions like this pour forth, they can stay for quite a few days.
These moments are indeed part of life, and somehow even though we were paying tribute to a deceased hero of ours, and Bob years before was singing of a woman he loves, the feeling and the warmth of Dylan’s song still shines through and intertwines with my feelings from yesterday.
But, and I think this is part of the point here, Bob’s endless drive to experiment and change can, on occasion, lead him away from the beauty that he has created. For example, I only played a recording from 2012 once in my house when it was included in the Never Ending Tour series.
In my originial version of this article I included a copy, but then the file corrupted totally. Maybe even the internet doesn’t like it, so I’ve now cut it from this piece.
Of course, not liking one version is just me and my personal prejudice of wanting this still to be the beautiful love song it originally was, a song of devotion, a song of saying “there really is no one else like you anywhere”, while this revised accompaniment and arrangement strips all that away.
Obviously it is not Bob that is wrong, I am the person who cannot adjust to this re-worked version. But to save myself from taking to drink to quell my displeasure, thankfully I have that 1996 version above, which now, having written this piece, I shall play once more
Is it sacrilege to say that some of Bob’s arrangements can actually destroy the beauty he previously created? No, I don’t think so, because to argue otherwise puts Bob in the ludicrous position of being a creative giant who can never do any wrong. But if you agree with me that sometimes Bob can make awful mistakes in the way he re-arranges his own music, that does raise a different point: for Bob seems to value the act of re-creating his work, over the question of how good each new version is. That is, that the act of re-working his songs is more important than the resultant music that comes from the re-write.
Of course, you can disagree over this piece and say that the 2012 version (which of course you can find on the Never Ending Tour series of articles is as good as the previous ones. Or it could be argued that Bob has done so many re-writes that he has lost the ability to judge his own work. Either way, I think the issue needs exploring, and I am not too sure that many people who write or talk about Dylan’s work are looking at this issue. I am arguing both that Bob can take something that was beautiful, and make it less beautiful, and that sometimes he doesn’t seem either to know that he has done this, or how to find his way back to the beauty he once found.
Here is the link to the article containing what I think is the best live version.
I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice
I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice
Jacques Dutronc reaches immortality and eternal fame in 1968 with the now perhaps a bit dated-sounding but still irresistible hit “Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille”. And well alright, also because the lucky devil was songwriter, lover and for some years even the husband of Françoise Hardy. But in this part of Europe, we already knew him before “Paris s’éveille”. In 1966, when Dutronc has just been paired up with his regular lyricist Jacques Lanzmann, a producer is dissatisfied with beatnik singer Benjamin’s performance of a Dutronc song, and he asks if Dutronc, by then already a widely recognised driving force behind the success of yé-yé, can’t record it himself. The single reaches second spot in the charts, is the start of Dutronc’s long and highly successful solo career, and “Et moi, et moi, et moi” is now part of the canon. To this day, the song keeps returning in covers, arrangements, parodies. Our English friends know the translation “Alright, Alright, Alright” with which Mungo Jerry scored a big hit (number 3 in 1973).
Jacques is asked to record an entire album (like most Dutronc LPs self-titled, but for convenience we usually call this one Et moi, et moi, et moi, 1966) and draws two more successful singles from it: “Les Play Boys” and the hit that half of Europe must think of when they hear Dylan sing I get blood from a cactus: “Les Cactus”. As attractive as almost all the songs from Jacques’ four 60s albums – swinging, melodic garage rock, hopping back and forth between chansons, The Kinks and ’65 Dylan. With Dylan, Dutronc (or rather lyricist Lanzmann) shares a fondness for the sound of words and unobtrusive wordplay, often enough at the expense of syntax and even semantics. Unexpected recognition from the highest echelons scores the song in 1967, when Prime Minister Georges Pompidou quotes the song – with source – in parliament: “J’ai appris que dans la vie gouvernementale, il y a aussi des cactus – I have learned that in government life, there are also cacti”, ironically winking at the opening couplet;
Le monde entier est un cactus
Il est impossible de s'assoir
Dans la vie, il y a qu'des cactus
Moi je me pique de le savoir
Aïe aïe aïe!
Ouille!
Aïe aïe aïe!
The whole world is a cactus
It's impossible to sit down
There are only cacti in life
I pride myself on knowing it (litt: “I prick myself”)
Ai ai ai!
Ouch!
Ai ai ai!
… and then three more stanzas in which poor Jacques gets all punctured by those damn cacti; they are in his bed, in his pants, in his fellow man’s smiles and in their bonjour. Even in their cacti are cacti.
So Dutronc, though hyperbolically, uses “cactus” the way we have used “cactus” since the Middle Ages: as a metaphor for hard, painful, forbidding. And to that symbolic charge the protagonist also seems to be referring when he draws the blood for his creature from cacti: “the duel, the worthless life, pain in the heart, staying in the saddle, love in vain, the grim reaper,” as Dylan tries to articulate the song’s impact in his long declaration of love to Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” in The Philosophy Of Modern Song. In those regions, the gory western songs, we also seem to be in this verse. Blood, cactus, gunpowder, and in the next line the reference to the card-playing and dice-playing gamblers, in the saloon no doubt… the blood flowing through the veins of my version of you is apparently the blood of black country romance, of “They’re Hanging Me Tonight”, “Billy the Kid”, “Cool Water” and “Big Iron”, the blood dripping from Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959).
Alienating still is make gunpowder from ice. Probably picked up from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (chapter V, “I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder”), and with some tolerance, the associative leap to Dr Frankenstein can then be followed; this is the chapter in which Gulliver visits the grand academy of Lagado and is shown around the laboratories of one mad scientist after another. The first has been working for eight years on a project “for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers”, the next leads in an infernally smelly laboratory “an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food”, another is a blind professor who teaches his likewise blind students to distinguish colours by taste and smell (with no visible success), and so on. Gulliver does not want to weary the reader with “with all the curiosities I observed, being studious of brevity”, but perhaps the grand academy of Lagado also has a workroom in which a senior scholar tries to bring someone to life.
The ponderousness of this shaky bridge to “My Own Version Of You” suggests that the verse with the cactus and the ice was dredged up from Dylan’s famous “very ornate, beautiful box”, the box in which he keeps dozens of scraps of paper with loose ideas, melodic word combinations and useful names. We know of its existence thanks to Larry Charles’ lack of discretion, the director and co-screenwriter of the Dylan vehicle Masked And Anonymous (2003): “He takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that. He has all of these ideas and then just in a subconscious or unconscious way, he lets them synthesise into a coherent thing.” A name like “Uncle Sweetheart”, for example, which the men then use for a film character, but Charles also recalls phrases we will later hear in Dylan’s songs. He finds a strip of paper with “I’m no pig without a wig”, which is rejected for the script, but then turns up in the Dylan song “High Water”.
A second clue is the slight deviation from the sung version. Officially, on the site, the line reads “I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice”, but that is not what Dylan sings: “I get blood from a cactus – gunpowder from ice” – in the studio and on stage, he omits “make”. A singer’s intervention, obviously: now the metre is correct, a classic four-foot anapaest (da da DUM – da da da DUM – da da da DUM – da da da DUM), the metre into which the next verse is squeezed as well (I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice).
The whole world may be cactus, but in his verse Dylan does cut off any prickly protrusions.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
[I read somewhere that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the seventh and last article on the fourth and final track, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series here: ]
In the previous article we found Dylan struggling to breathe life into ‘Baby Blue’ in 2009 and 2010. When lead guitarist Charlie Sexton re-joined the band in 2011, the Never Ending Tour began a renaissance which would continue up to 2019, when Covid put a stop to public performances. If you have followed my NET series will be familiar with this rising curve, and how Dylan’s immersion in Frank Sinatra in 2015 transformed his vocal style.
Unfortunately for our present study, Dylan was not able to bring this newfound vitality to ‘Baby Blue,’ and he continued to struggle with the song. This is reflected in the gaps in performance of the song, and the relatively low number of performances each year. He did about a dozen performances in both 2011 and 2012, then dropped the song until 2016 when he picked it up again for about a dozen performances and then, after a single performance in 2017, dropped the song again until 2019 which saw a mere four performances. It was then dropped again until the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, when he picked it up again, this time with much more success, in 2024 and 2025.
Our story thus does have a happy ending, with stunning performances in 2024/25, but it’s a bit of rocky road getting there. Because I’m writing a history of performance, I’m dutybound to cover the 2011 – 2019 performances, but I have to confess they are not my favourites.
2011, however, saw this interesting performance with Mark Knopfler on lead guitar, and we have an excellent video of that performance. If you’d never heard any of his earlier renditions of the song you might find this one catchy enough in a foot-tapping way, but it comes nowhere near the emotional intensity of some of the previous versions.
2011
In 2012, the year Tempest came out, Dylan shifted from the organ back to the piano. This minimal version, with its charming harp break, has its attractions, but the bouncy, upbeat tempo keeps the song from reaching for the deeper emotions that drive it. He’s keeping the song going, but the 2012 performances are not going to set anybody on fire.
2012
Now we jump to 2016, which saw the song return quite strongly with some twenty performances. Dylan’s voice has certainly improved in terms of range and emotional power, but the arrangement has not changed. Still the same upbeat tempo, with the same limitations we have been witnessing. You may think I’m being a bit tough on Dylan here, as this version certainly has its charm, and I guess I’m comparing it, somewhat unfairly perhaps, to the glories of the past, but I am just not moved by the song as I have been. It sounds like a pleasant fill-in on the setlists, a reminder of the past without the soaring emotions of past performances.
2016
I’m going to skip over the single 2017 performance, as it doesn’t offer anything new or interesting, to jump to 2019, the last year of the NET. In 2019 there is a new arrangement, but the tempo remains the same, inappropriately upbeat (at least to my ear), and the harp break at the end can’t lift it out of its rut. This song can be so much more than this foot-tapper.
2019
Six years later, in 2024 Dylan returns to the song. While he keeps the tempo, we sense that the fire and resilience are still there. Hope never dies. You can hear the hope flaring in the upsinging. With some thirty performances in that year, it’s clear that Dylan has rediscovered the song. Just where it’s leading we won’t find out until 2025.
2024 (a)
That Bournemouth performance is no accident. Here it is again in the same year, from Prague, with a wonderfully jagged, jazzy harp break. We can feel the blood flowing in the veins of the song once more.
2024 (b)
In 2025, however, and I’m writing this in June of that year, we find a completely transformed understanding of the song, and a totally new approach. He abandons the foot-tapping tempo altogether, slows the song right down, packing it out with clusters of piano notes, and employs the half-reciting, half-singing that marks his late vocal style.
The song becomes something new. The passion is back, but with a different flavour. Reeking of nostalgia, it becomes a frame through which we can approach the history of the song, and its origins as a song of farewell. More than that, however, it becomes a valedictory piece, a farewell to a lifetime of performance.
Just as the 1965 original bade farewell, not just to a particular woman, but an era, the era of Dylan the acoustic protest singer, following ‘My Back Pages’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ in signalling a change in direction for the young ‘spokesman of his generation.’ He was about to strike another match and start anew, filled with sorrow and hope, sorrow for what has passed, hope for what is to come.
Sixty years later we arrive at another farewell, that which is fitting for an eighty-four-year-old who may be bidding farewell to his whole career. Every performance could be the last, and he sings it as if he may never sing it again. It’s this finality of these 2024/25 performances that make it a tear-jerker for me personally. Is it really all over now? Is there not perhaps another album, another year or two of performing? The heart-rending harp solo at the end tells the same story. ‘Baby Blue’ has been sent down the road, weeping, but our tears have different roots, stemming as they do from a lifelong love of Dylan and his years of service (you gotta serve somebody) up there on stage pouring out his heart.
Can this really be the end? We can’t know, but these 2025 performances bring us to face that possibility.
This brings me full circle. I began my articles on ‘Baby Blue’ with the Tulsa performance of 2025. It had only just appeared on YouTube. Since then, and to April, there have been seventeen performances, the song having leapt back up into the setlists. The promise of that Tulsa performance is being fulfilled in subsequent performances. Try this one from Kalamazoo.
2025
Sadness becomes the final layer of this complex love song. It now sounds more like a poem than a song, and we bid farewell once more, both to this song and this series on the four songs from side B of Bringing It All Back Home. I plan to do one more article with final thoughts on these songs, and will try to see them as a whole.
I’ll take Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando
Mix ‘em up in a tank and get a robot commando
If I do it upright and put the head on straight
I’ll be saved by the creature that I create
“I’ll be your Valentino,” Freddie Mercury sings in “Seaside Rendezvous” (A Night At The Opera, 1975), and again a year later in “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy”. “Never been no Valentino,” Tom Waits notes regretfully (“Better Off Without A Wife”, 1975) and The Four Seasons have wild fantasies: “In my dream I’m bigger than Valentino” (“Silver Star”, also from 1975 – sung not by Frankie Valli, by the way, but by drummer Gerry Polci). And like this, there are hundreds more songs, poems, film scripts and novels in which “Valentino” is used as a mark of quality. In short, the stage name of the young-deceased Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi has long since dissociated itself from its bearer – and like, say, “Adonis” or “Don Juan”, has become a synonym for attractive man or heartbreaker.
In the early 1950s, a new member joins the Don Juan Association: Marlon Brando. The intensity and sexuality with which he plays Stanley Kowalski in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is the entrance ticket, his blushing bare chest in Julius Caesar (1953) secures him a seat in the board of directors, and after the leather jacket in The Wild One (1953) he can take over the gavel; “Marlon Brando” as a five-star designation for a desirable man is from now on established. And thus from now on used as an updated alternative to “Valentino”. Peggy Lee herself gives the go-ahead in 1961 in her self-written evergreen, “I Love Being Here With You” (I like Brando’s eyes), which was even recorded by Ella Fitzgerald. And then the floodgates open. Van Morrison (“Wild Children”), Madonna, R.E.M., David Bowie, Elton John and Leonard Cohen: the trendsetters of the 20th century perpetuate the label, and in the 21st century, “Marlon Brando” has become commonplace. And remains so. The Killers, Robbie Williams, Slipknot, Mark Knopfler… when Dylan uses the name for characterisation in “My Own Version Of You” in 2020, he joins a long line.
Peggy Lee
There is a huge difference, though. Madonna, Peggy Lee and John Mellencamp (“You’ve Got To Stand For Somethin’”, 1985) and all those others mean the wild one, the sexy hunk, the Brando of whom Joan Baez swoons so infectiously:
“It must have been two years later that someone took me to see a double bill of Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Shortly after, I saw The Wild One. Goodbye world. I was struck by blue lightning. There he was, the magnificent dark horse who was a winner, the punk, the hurt child, the rebel. The most appealing man I’d ever seen. A veritable sex extravaganza, tough and tender, granite and satin.”
(Joan Baez – And A Voice To Sing With, 1987)
… but Dylan explicitly refers to the Godfather Brando, the actor who had to put twenty pounds back on before the picture could start, according to his autobiography (Songs My Mother Taught Me, 1994). Granted, Don Corleone has a tender side as well, definitely is both satin and granite, but by no means a veritable sex extravaganza. Dylan obviously wants to avoid that, the sex appeal, given the specification of the other half of his “robot commando”: Scarface Pacino.
After all, in The Godfather Al Pacino is indeed sexy, a hurt child, a magnificent dark horse – having all the qualities of the troubled Johnny Strabler from The Wild One and the brooding darkness of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Which Pacino hardly acted, if Brando’s testimony in the autobiography is to be believed. “Wonderful actor,” Brando says there about his colleague, but “when I met him on The Godfather, he was quite troubled.” Pacino’s own recollections in Sonny Boy – A Memoir (2024) confirm Brando’s observation: “I was going through a difficult time, feeling like I had the world on my shoulders, knowing that any day the axe could fall on me.” Understandable, as Pacino knows Paramount considers him unfit. The studio bosses want to replace him, and even his guardian angel director Coppola is starting to have doubts as well. “Feeling unwanted, feeling like an underling, was an oppressive experience,” and that feeling persists right up to and including the restaurant scene in The Bronx, the scene in which Michael transforms from the dreamy, immaculate Benjamin to the dark avenging angel who executes mobster Sollozzo and the corrupt police officer McCluskey;
“Francis showed the restaurant scene to the studio, and when they looked at it, something was there. Because of that scene I just performed, they kept me in the film.”
Equally awkward are Pacino’s memories of Brando. He is starstruck. Brando is too big. Coppola insists the two of them should have lunch together to get to know each other, but it is not a success. Brando sits on the bed in the room where they will shoot the hospital scene and eats chicken cacciatore with his hands. “His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face. And that’s all I could think about the whole time.” He remembers Brando being friendly and asking all sorts of questions, but he doesn’t really reach the starstruck Al. “He looked at me in a quizzical way, as if to ask, what are you thinking about?”
Anyway, Godfather Pacino, Al’s Michael Corleone is unfit for Dylan’s robot commando. The Dr Frankenstein from Dylan’s song needs Scarface Pacino, the manic psychopath Tony Montana from the gory hit film in which the impressive number of 207 “fucks” is achieved (1.22 per minute). The film also from which Dylan seems to borrow another “my own version of you” on Side B of Rough And Rowdy Ways: the unorthodox music of “Black Rider” does at the very least seem to be inspired by “Tony’s Theme” from the Scarface soundtrack.
It is a strange combination then, Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando: a self-destruction machine with a safety catch. A creature “who will save me”. One half the strategic, reserved Don Corleone, the man Brando characterises as a decent person regardless of what he had to do, as a modest, quiet man. “The part of Don Corleone lends itself perfectly to underplaying,” Brando analyses, and that is true. The diametric opposite of the other half, of what Tony Montano demonstrates. “Bigger than life and everything about it was exaggerated,” as Pacino reflects in Sonny Boy:
“That crazy character, the smoke and the blood and the three-hundred-pound machine gun. […] You can’t forget Tony Montana was heading to the sun like Icarus, flying higher and higher until he exploded. Too damn unwieldy.”
Dylan’s robot commando, the work of art created by the narrator of “My Own Version Of You”, is apparently a combination of extremes, a dangerous creation combining yin and yang, or, as Dylan defines the perfection of Sinatra’s “Strangers In The Night” in The Philosophy Of Modern Song:
“Now you’re yoked together, one flesh in perpetuity – into the vast eternity – immortalized.”
——————
To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 5: The whole world is a cactus
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Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
A list of previous articles in this series appears at the end of the piece.
By Tony Attwood
In the last article (How Dylan turned the strophic form into something new) I took a look at “Love is just a four letter word,” and unless you know the details of the order in which Bob wrote songs my thought is that you may not have been able to guess what came next. For “Love is just a four letter word” is musically, a gentle, engaging piece, and we might have expected a further development alpong those lines.
What Bob wrote next was a song the music of which can be described in all sorts of ways but for which the word “gentle” would never be one of those songs. Cash Box described it as a “rockin’-country folk blueser with a solid beat and catchy lyrics.” But I am not quite sure that does it justice.
One thing is certain, it is impossible to get further away from “Love is just a four letter word” in terms of musical feel. For the next song Dylan wrote was Subterranean Homesick Blues.
I have often thought that we can get a clearer view of what Bob was thinking by listening to the first recording of the song – the acoustic version
For much of the piece the guitar does nothing but play the chord while there is no attempt to add anything to the “melody” which actually isn’t a melody at all. It is in fact one note sung against a chord played over and over. True Bob does change chords a couple of times, and in this version we have some instrumental breaks, but the key thing is that it is repeat, repeat, repeat. So although the song is based on the notion of a 12-bar blues in a minor key, all the feeling of the 12 bar blues is taken away. This is simply pounding the beat without even the extra emphasis on the first beat of each bar.
By seeing the songs in the order they were written and focussing on the music, we can appreciate just how greatly Bob was experimenting. “Love is just a four letter word” which I looked at in the last piece has a beautiful melody. And it was probably a melody Bob felt (or actually found) he could not sing, because of the range. So he gave it to the one person he knew who would always be able to sing across such a range – Joan Baez. Bob never made a recording (at least as far as I know).
But then, following that beautiful melody, and the gentle joking of the lyrics, he wrote a song basically on one note. And to replace the gentle rhythms and movements of “Four Letter” we get nothing but a pounding beat. This is the antithesis of what went before.
And the question that we ought to ask here, but which from my own reading I have not found asked (although of course, I may have missed it somewhere) is “why?” Why prove the point? Why prove that one can write a song in which the first eight bars are all on one note, when you have previously written a song with the most elegant, smooth, gliding melody (and in case you didn’t read the last piece, here it is again).
And to go further – why play this song with no melody 120 times in concerts across the next 14 years, but never once play “Four LetterWord”?
Well there are some practical reasons. One is because “Four Letter” became associated with Joan Baez. Another is that “Subterranean” was actually a hit single in the USA – not a huge hit, but still Bob’s first hit. But perhaps more than anything Bob was announcing that he could write a song in which the first eight bars were all on one note and all with the same chord accompaniment – and people would still listen!
As for the music, I have once or twice indicated how much in awe I am of the work of Eyolf Østrem and I couldn’t help but take a look at what he had to say about the song, which, according to my hearing, is a simple three chord piece, and I am glad to say he agreed. It is almost all on A major, with a quick burst of D and E chords; in short it is as it sounds, dead simple; a slight variation on the 12 bar blues.
Now I don’t know who changed the arrangement from the first version above to the actual version that crept into the charts, but you’ll recall how it came out. But even with this limited amount of musical resources in the original Bob was still, later on, able to play with the original, and I think have some fun himself.
What I find interesting is that although the band have a fairly free improvisation around the music in the instrumental verse, Bob himself has found a new way of playing the song with a new set of variations which keeps it lively and still keeps us focussed on lyrics we’ve heard so many times before. Somehow by changing the essence of the music the meanings of the lyrics have changed too.
And of course, once the song is released into the wild everyone can have a go although few have the talent of this young man….
Obviously Bob re-recorded it with the band and we got the version we know, and by this time he and the band had worked out how to handle a song primarily on one chord and mostly without any melody. It was indeed in many ways an anti-song; quite a challenge.
But let me return to my main point. What Bob is doing with this song is experimenting again. He has taken the strophic form in which so many of his songs are written but then played with it in a way that, as far as I know, no one else had previously done, by extending the number of lines and having a rhyming pattern which changes part way through, starting out A B C B, and then moving onto D, D, D, E, F.
Now it can be argued that the rhyme is a lyrical thing, not a musical effect, and that’s true to a degree, but the music has to be arranged to work with this, and if it is not, the whole song falls apart. At the very least I would argue that this is a musical and lyrical effect – but it is the music here that gives us the song’s unique feeling.
It is also one of those songs that (for me at least) once Bob says (as he did in 2004), “It’s from Chuck Berry, a bit of ‘Too Much Monkey Business’,” that becomes obvious. I just didn’t realise before he said it.
And I would add, it shouldn’t work. It should sound all wrong. It should be horribly tedious and boring both in the original and in the reworked version, but it doesn’t and it isn’t! It always works. I still enjoy it.
