Untold Dylan

by Jochen Markhorst

Understandably, son Jakob stays away from his father’s oeuvre, but unfortunate it is all the same. With his Wallflowers he repeatedly demonstrates his talent to upgrade songs of others; very successful covers of “I Started A Joke” (Bee Gees), “Too Late For Goodbyes” (Julian Lennon) and “Heroes” (Bowie) at least make one curious about how Jakob would interpret a “She Belongs To Me” or a “Love Sick”.

Close to his father’s work he comes with the contribution to the soundtrack of I Am Sam (2001), with the cover of the Beatles song “I’m Looking Through You”. It is one of the ‘Jane Asher songs’ by McCartney, one of the songs in which the Beatle processes relationship perils with his then-girlfriend Asher (like in “Things We Said Today”, “You Won‘t See Me” and “For No One”). In the biography Paul McCartney: Miles From Nowhere (Barry Miles, 1997), he also admits this in so many words:

“Suffice to say that this one was probably related to that romantic episode and I was seeing through her façade. And realising that it wasn’t quite all that it seemed. I would write it out in a song and then I’ve got rid of the emotion. I don’t hold grudges so that gets rid of that little bit of emotional baggage. I remember specifically this one being about that, getting rid of some emotional baggage. I’m looking through you, and you’re not there!”

… so McCartney’s own private life inspires the theme, but word choice, staging and content do also reveal that Another Side Of Bob Dylan is on his turntable, and more specifically: “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)”. Textual parallels enough (where did you go versus why did she go, for example), and of course the most striking thing is the similarity between The Beatles’ you’re not the same with Dylan’s she ain’t the same.

Lennon does not stay behind either; “I’m A Loser” is the first Lennon song in which Dylan’s influence can be pointed out so clearly. Not only because of the folky approach and the mature, semi-literary lyrics, but also because of an idiomatic peculiarity, which Lennon himself points out, in his interview with David Scheff in 1980, shortly before his death:

“I’m A Loser is me in my Dylan period, because the word ‘clown’ is in it. I objected to the word ‘clown’, because that was always artsy-fartsy, but Dylan had used it so I thought it was all right, and it rhymed with whatever I was doing.”

Apart from the word ‘clown’, the refrain line I’m not what I appear to be stands out – Lennon writes this song a few days after Another Side Of is released, so a couple of days after he first heard Dylan’s “I Don’t Believe You” with that key phrase she ain’t the same.

Incidentally, with his cover (2003), Eels turns “I’m A Loser” into a full-blooded Dylan song, including a Dylanesque harmonica solo.

I’m looking through you

The title of Dylan’s song does not appear in any of the lyrics, not even in his own song, and in doing so the bard sets a trend. This fourth album is the first album on which Dylan comes up with song titles that add something to the lyrics. So far he names the song, as songwriters have been doing for centuries, after the chorus (“Blowin ‘In The Wind”), the recurring verse line (“With God On Our Side”) or he crystallizes the whole song in the title (“Bob Dylan’s Blues”, “Percy’s Song”), but from now on the period begins when the poet names his works like a painter does. “My Back Pages”, “Motorpsycho Nightmare” and this “I Don’t Believe You” … titles that add an extra overtone to the lyrics, which either deliberately confuse or give more depth. On succeeding records he perhaps carries on a bit too far, making up titles that no longer have any recognizable relation with the song itself. “From A Buick 6”, “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”, “Fourth Time Around”.

Now the title’s link to this song is not that far-fetched, obviously. With I don’t believe you, the protagonist brings his opinion about the opponent’s actions back to the core, like, for that matter, the stamp ‘unreliable, fake’ also fits perfectly on the main characters of “I’m Looking Through You” and “I’m A Loser’.

Two years later, the slogan completely separates itself from the song, when Dylan uses exactly these words against (most likely) the one who shouts Judas! at him, May ’66 in Manchester.

The words I don’t believe you still hang in the air, at that memorable point. Five songs before Judas! the men have played the song, provocatively announced by Dylan (‘It used to go like that, now it goes like this’, to which the audience reacts with some nervous laughter), and then launches a magisterial, scorching and misunderstood version into the room.

The atmosphere remains hostile, with the world’s most famous concert insult as apotheosis. “I don’t believe you,” Dylan says blurrily, then more viciously: “You’re a liar,” and finally grimly to The Band: “Play it fucking loud!”

That short riposte is of great beauty, in particular because of the multitude of opposites within it. Dylan’s emotion changes per sentence – contentwise it goes from cool to blistering to vulgar and at the macro level the contrast between the goosebumps inducing quality of the performance and the hateful, disappointed reception by the audience continues to fascinate. The eleven words acquire the same status as a monumental Dylan song; they are printed on T-shirts, bumper stickers and posters,are retold hundreds of times in review articles, biographies and documentaries and the hunt for the anonymous bawler is closed fairly credibly and convincing in 1999 by Independent journalist Andy Kershaw, who was approached by a sympathetic, modest teacher trainer from Manchester, one John Cordwell.

Cordwell tells that, although he felt betrayed by Dylan’s turn to rock ‘n roll, he was particularly annoyed by the appallingly poor sound quality. On hearing the official CD of that concert in 1999, he says: “Absolutely brilliant. But that wasn’t the set that you heard in the auditorium. It didn’t sound like that.”

Dylan does not consider it worth talking about. However, the source of his famous stage talk, the song “I Don’t Believe You” seems to echo. In 1979, on his first evangelical album Slow Train Coming, in the song “I Believe In You”. I believe in you, he sings there, even on the morning after. That seems a bit disrespectful, in this context. As if the love for the Lord Jesus is a one-night stand that was so great that He may stay for breakfast. The verse line before that is also slightly abrasive: I believe in you even though we be apart. If you have accepted Jesus into your life, He is always with you, is he not? What does the poet mean by ‘even if we be apart’? Alright, with some good will that can be understood as ‘you and I together, separated from everyone else’. That would be rather inconsistent with the use of all other personal pronouns in this text, but then again: Dylan does have a tendency to mess around with pronouns (“Tangled Up In Blue”).

That morning after, however, can not be squeezed in a pious, respectful interpretation – here the poet really juggles with the lyrics of the song that is so very often on his playlist (in 1978, the year before “I Believe In You”, 104 times), the song about the she he does not believe, the next morning, “I Don’t Believe You”.

Dylan’s love for this song is easy to understand. Technically, the bard already delivers a tour de force, even by his own Olympic standards.

The poet chooses a seemingly antique, but surprisingly not very archaic rhyme: the Kipling, named after, yes indeed, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), because of his poem L’Envoi. The rhyme scheme (aabccbdeffe), which has a somewhat medieval touch, like a mixture of the chant Royal and the tight proverbial stanzas, is distinct, but presumably still an own (re)invention by the poet Dylan. In previous songs like “Restless Farewell” and “When The Ship Comes In” we already see him vary, just like the source of inspiration Brecht does in his poetry, on classical verse and rhyme forms, and on this album he explores that terrain further. “To Ramona”, “My Back Pages” … poetic eruptions of a language-loving genius who will know how to create, even without the Kipling example, a mesmerizing masterpiece with such a distinctive rhyme scheme and such a distinctive cadence like “I Don’t Believe You”.

The equally hypnotic melody imposes itself almost automatically, within such a tight structure of quirky changes of metre (almost every second line of the eleven-line couplets has a shift in metre). Irresistible indeed, like whole cohorts of colleagues demonstrate.

Waylon Jennings injects an infectious stomp and a cheerful bar-piano  (Don’t Think Twice, 1970). Glen Campbell carelessly pours out buckets of violins, but oh well, it remains a beautiful song (on Mr. 12 String Guitar from 1966, the album on which he violates six other Dylan songs too). The obscure Westcoast band The Bows And Arrows demonstrates what The Byrds would have made of it (single 1965, to be found on YouTube) and better known, but not necessarily more appealing is the smooth pop gem of the affected Al Stewart (Orange, 1972).

The song remains popular in the twenty-first century. It is on the setlist with the indestructible Lloyd Cole (who manages to give a dark, brooding touch), and Darrell Scott is a successful songwriter (Dixie Chicks, Faith Hill), but also a compelling, virtuoso musician whose “I Don’t Believe You” gets a Desire atmosphere (Modern Hymns, 2008).

Still, the most beautiful cover is an oldie goldie, one that stays close to The Band: the British folk rockers around Sandy Denny, Fotheringay, on their second album (Fotheringay 2, 1970 – but only released in 2008).

All of them, however, fall short in comparison to the master himself. At least the Top 3 of the Ten Most Beautiful Versions consists of versions by Dylan, where one cannot choose between the original version from ’64, one of the many beautiful 1966 performances with The Band or 1978, the Rundown Sessions. Or the studio outtakes from 1969, from the sessions with Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. Or, of course, The Last Waltz with that crushing guitar solo by Robbie Robertson. That masterpiece could well be the template for the final cover that, some fine day, Jakob Dylan will make of one of his father’s monuments.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

by Larry Fyffe

Because this particular figure of speech is more open to interpretation than others, metonymy is often used in Post Modern poetry and song lyrics. Metonymy twists one term into another associated with it as when a part refers to the whole – ‘wheels’ for a car -, or the whole for a part – ‘law’ for one or police officers:

There’s this song verse:

She was thinkin’ ’bout her father, who she very rarely saw
Thinkin’ ’bout Rosemary, and thinkin’ about the law
But most of all, she was thinkin’ ’bout the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts)

Charles Darwin is the missing link to the theory of evolution:

They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five
Judge say to the High Sheriff
‘I want him dead or alive
Either way, I don’t care’
(Bob Dylan: High Water)

A double entendre word sounds similar to one considered vulgar:

I don’t need much, and it ain’t no lie
Ain’t runnin’ any race
Give to me my country pie
I won’t throw it up in anybody’s face
(Bob Dylan: Country Pie)

Brings to mind a play by William Shakespeare:

“Lady, shall I lie in your lap?”
‘No, my lord’
“I mean my head upon your lap”
‘Aye, my lord’
“Or did you think I meant country matters?”
(Hamlet, Act 3, sc. ii)

‘Crown of thorns’ recalls Jesus of the Christian Bible:

She walked up to be gracefully, and took my crown of thorns
“Come in”, she said
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
(Bob Dylan: Shelter From The Storm)

The literary reference to:

Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him
And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns
And put it on his head
(John 19:1,2)

Disciple Judas betrays Jesus to the authorities; they condemn Christ to die of thirst on the cross. Judas represents anyone who befriends a person, and then double-crosses him:

For sixteen nights and days he raved
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest
Which is where he died of thirst
(Bob Dylan: Frankie Lee And Judas Priest)

The literary allusion is to:

And Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve
Went unto the chief priest to betray him unto them
(Mark 14:10)

A wheel connects to a vehicle such as as an automobile, or a chariot:

This wheel’s on fire
Rolling down the road
Best notify my next of kin
This wheel shall explode
(Bob Dylan/Richard Danko: This Wheel’s On Fire)

Relates biblically to:

And it came to pass as they still went on, and talked
That, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire
And parted them both asunder
And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven
(II Kings 2:11)

From out of trope hell, metonymies of all kinds break loose – flinging the doors of perception wide open:

Farewell, Angelina, the bells of the crown
Are being stolen by bandits, I must follow the sound
The triangle tingles, and the trumpets play slow
Farewell, Angelina, the sky is on fire, and I must go
(Bob Dylan: Farewell Angelina)

Suggests a ‘love triangle’; associates the sun with the whole sky; and even the sound of ‘the bells of the crown’ with that of ‘the balls of the clown.’

When the City of Washington is mentioned, politicians be thought of:

Thunder on the mountain, heavy as can be
Mean old twister bearing down on me
All the ladies of Washington scrambling to get out of town
Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down
(Bob Dylan: Thunder On The Mountain)

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

This article follows on from a comment made by Jochen Markhorst in his excellent review of  Buckets of Rain relating to Bob Dylan’s professed adoration of the song “So Cold in China”  In case you missed it, here is the only recording I can find of the song.  You might care to play it while reading on…

So, to begin, there is the question, “Why do we like any one song, any one picture, any one movie, play, or novel more than another?”

There are of course always multiple reasons: some technical which can be explained, how we felt at the time of first encountering the art, or some other emotional issue which may be much harder to grasp.   We might as well ask why some people love the music of Bob Dylan and others can’t stand it – we’re never going to answer that.

Leo Kottke who wrote “So Cold in China” – a song Bob Dylan has praised to the heavens, himself said on stage that his songs come to him by accident and he later tries to figure out where they came from.  Bob Dylan has gone a little further noting all the songs he listened to in his youth and how they worked in his mind to allow him to create the songs we know and love today. Neither can ever tell us exactly how a song is created.

Which is why it should not surprise us if we find that explaining why sometimes one song appeals to an individual person above and beyond all logic about its complexity or construction or widely appreciated beauty.   I can try and explain why I adore the utterly simple “Drifter’s Escape” in which we have just one line of music repeated 12 times, and indeed I have tried on this site, but such explanations are never complete.

On the other hand, an incomplete explanation can be better than none, if for no reason other than the fact it can be a basis for further explorations.

As for “So Cold in China” – musically this is dead simple: a variant 12 bar blues.  It comes directly from the music of the 19th century, via Robert Johnson and on to all those who followed.

The traditional 12 bar blues has a lyrical line that is sung against one chord, and which is then repeated against a second chord.  The third line has new lyrics – it is the answering line – and it uses both those chords plus one more. In classic guitar arrangements the chords run

1st line: E
2nd line: A E
3rd line: B7 A E

In the variant form that Leo Kottke uses the first two lines are musically the same, using from the notation above A E, each time.

If you want to hear Dylan do use this variant 12 bar blues listen to Rollin’ and Tumblin’

So Leo Kottke uses the same formation, but what he does is achieve something with the structure that I have not come across anywhere else, and while Bob has listened to much more blues than I have, there is a big chance that Dylan hadn’t either.  

Which is a good starting point for liking a piece, thinking, “Wow, how did he make that song out of that structure?”

Second, we know that a central part of much of Dylan’s lyrical work involves using phrases which don’t have an exact meaning, or indeed don’t have any meaning at all, but which attract us because they sound as if they ought to have a meaning.

When these ideas turn into poetry or song lyrics they appeal to some listeners and readers and not others.  It depends on whether your brain at this point is getting that feeling that the words have a more profound implication than is at first apparent.

To take a very simple example, if I write

Waking at midnight
I tried to give you the moonlight and then
I slept again
Hoping to reach you in my dreams

You might find something there that is deeper than the words.  It is not that you are thinking “how could he give her the moonlight?” but the emotion of giving the moonlight to the one you love combined with the more prosaic “I slept again” is of some passing interest.

Now that is a very simple example.  What Dylan regularly does, and what Leo does here is give an utter disconnect – in this case between “China” and the most common of blues phrases “Well, my baby left me”.

So he is relating back to the blues, and he is singing in a blues format and he’s is using the classic notion that the weather and his emotions are all at one.  In the most simple terms he could write “since my baby left me it’s been raining night and day”. The weather and one’s mood – in literary appreciation we called it “pathetic fallacy”.  Think Wuthering Heights with the thunderstorms and Heathcliffe’s moods.

But because the song is so short we are jerked upright – WHY CHINA?  Of course we have no idea. It seems so crazy. I mean, it is never cold in ALL China.  It’s a very large country – its 5,500km north to south. OK you might not know that but you’ll know it’s very big.

Here is another thing: this is the blues but there is no rhyme:

So cold in China, the birds don’t sing
So cold in China, the birds don’t sing
Well, I didn’t feel mean until my baby left me

And then again why does he feel mean rather than sad?

But that’s only the start for he moves on to France – we think maybe this is going to be a geographical tour of sadness, and verse two is really standard blues

Been to Turkey, been to France
Been to Turkey, been to France
Been all around, taking my last chance

But then it turns really desperate

Does darkness follow in my every step?
When I’m for living am I really dead?

Now that really is the blues.

And there are indeed herein a number of lines here that Dylan himself could easily have written.  Take for example

The sun goes out in a lonesome sky
The wolves they howl and begin to cry

Now all that would make this a song to remember.  We might contemplate two riders approaching and the wind began to howl.  

BUT….

But we have only just begun because not only is the 12 string guitar playing utterly gorgeous it is gentle and at odds with the lyrics.   Just listen to that guitar and then think “Wolves howling?” No chance, not to that music. We have a dichotomy – just as we did with Dylan’s original recording of All Along the Watchtower.   Hendrix gave us the wolves howling – but the are most certainly not there in the original Dylan version.

And this is just the start because when one stops hearing the words and the guitar and listens to the melody, that is when the total chaotic contradiction of this piece hits one smack in the face.

If you listen to the introduction you’ll hear there is a very slight slow down in the first verse comes in with its utterly gentle, but typically blues melody.

Verse two goes the same way and we’re thinking ok this going to be a standard blues.  A very beautiful blues which contrasts utterly with the tragedy of the lost love theme, but still, it’s the blues.  Until suddenly we get

taking my last chance

Leo’s voice rises, perfectly, to an unexpected note.  It fits, it’s quite correct in terms of what notes the singer could use against that chord, but it is a big, big surprise.  A one off? We wait.

And then we are transformed with Does darkness follow in my every step?   Because now that melody is going somewhere no blues would ever go.

Does darkness follow in my every step?

How can this be.  A line as black and hopeless as that has an utterly exquisite melodic line?  What is going on?

Personally I want more but in the next verse the third line is sung in the standard way

The wolves they howl and begin to cry

He’s playing with us.  He’s toying with my emotions.  What’s going on? Am I supposed to be crying or laughing.

My emotional response to this simple 12 bar blues is phenomenally complex, so much so that I play it over and over, to receive that emotional hit every time I here that change of melody, to ponder and wonder at the opening line of So Cold in China, and to marvel at the fact that something so very very different could be got out of a simple 12 bar blues – a format used and reused a billion times in the last 100 years.

And if I may be so bold, I think perhaps Bob felt such emotions too with this song.   Always we come back to the title “So cold in China”. Do you know another song with that title, or that sort of line anywhere in it at all?  It hints of mystery – as does the whole song. We really want to know more.

Thus it gives the blues a meaning that it never had before.  And that is why, in my view, Dylan really loves it. In his writing he rarely does this with melody – his voice is not built for that.  But think about “She Belongs to me” and painting the daytime black. That’s another approach to challenging the 12 bar blues and taking it places no one had ever thought of before.   Leo and Bob on the same journey, but finding different road maps.

Well, I didn’t feel mean until my baby left me

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

(“The image that was here has been removed due to copyright infringement.”)

Leo Kottke is an exceptional world-class guitar player, whose records have led to open mouths and despondency among industrious guitar students since 1969. His singing talents are less skyscraping (in his own words: as “geese farts on a muggy day”), but that is amply compensated by his witty monologues on stage. His chats between the songs sometimes fan out to unfathomable distances and are always very humorous. Kottke has a flawless comical timing, a dry witty presentation and an irresistible, Cleese-like facial expression. At a 2008 concert in Sparks, a suburb of Reno, the master guitarist recounts his meeting with Bob Dylan:

“I met Bob Dylan when he was recording Blood on The Tracks. And I talked to him for about an hour and a half … but I didn’t know it was him. I would have said things … differently.

“There was a book , came out just a couple of years ago, about those sessions. That’s how I found out. I got a call from a newspaper in Minneapolis: ‘What did you and Bob talk about?’

“I said: ‘Bob who?’

“And they told me.

“I said: ‘I’ve never met him.’

“Well, there were these three witnesses, and these guys were… and I remembered, all of a sudden. This guy, who had walked up, you know, coming up the hall, there were three studios in this building, and he said: ‘Well, what do think of this project?’

“I told him what I thought.

“And I also raved about everything else, up until then and just about…

“I was backstage when he played in Denver recently. But I didn’t say anything to him.”

The book that Kottke is referring to is of course A Simple Twist Of Fate by Andy Gill and Kevin Odegaard. That forgotten, long conversation with Kottke is mentioned in passing:

When Chris and his wife, Vanessa, arrived at the studio, they found Bob in the control room, deep in conversation with celebrated folk guitarist Leo Kottke about a song of Leo’s called “So Cold in China,” which Bob admired.

The love for that specific Kottke-song Dylan has declared more often. In January 1977, Melody Maker publishes a long article about the ‘Lion Of The Guitar’ Leo Kottke, in which, among others, Kottke’s technician Paul “Shorty” Martinson is interviewed. Martinson is also the technician at the Minneapolis re-recordings for Blood On The Tracks and tells that he asked Dylan at the time if he had ever heard of Kottke. “Dylan said yeah and enthused about a Kottke track, “So Cold In China,” on his very first album on the Oblivion label, of which only 1,000 copies were pressed.”

The record, Kottke’s debut album 12 String Blues (1969), which was released in an extremely limited edition, has been recorded live in a Minneapolis coffee house, the Ten O’Clock Scholar, whereof Dylan will have warm memories. He also played there himself, when he was Robert Zimmerman and that is explicitly mentioned in the liner notes: Still, as in a now distant past for a younger Robert Zimmerman or John Koerner, the Scholar audience is appreciative and quiet.

Dylan’s enthusiasm for “So Cold In China” probably has more to do with nostalgia or with the creation of the song than with the power of the song itself. It is a beautiful song, no doubt, but it is not so earth-shattering that it would justify Dylan’s raving years later. The song has, to him anyway, other charms. Undoubtely, Dylan read Kottke’s own commentary on the song on the cover of that collector’s item with interest: “The title and therefore the idea for the song were stolen from someone who sang it in the Ontario Place in Washington, when Mississippi John Hurt was still working there.”

It is likely that the encyclopaedicly versed amateur music historian Dylan tells him there in the control room, at that meeting in 1974, from which song Kottke copied the line So cold in China, the birds do not sing: from “Long Lonesome Blues”, a Blind Lemon Jefferson song from 1926. And that explains Dylan’s fascination for a song like “So Cold In China”. Lovingly stolen song fragments, patriarchs of the blues like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi John Hurt, and, on top of that, recorded in his own youth club – both the artist and the man Dylan are touched here.

After that witty anecdote, at that concert in 2008, Kottke implores that he has always listened to Dylan endlessly, and still does. “Well, now and then”, anyway. That confession, and the fact that his heart and the vast majority of his repertoire are rooted in folk music, makes the lack of Dylan covers all the more poignant. One time he takes a shot at one, on “Girl From The North Country”, and that interpretation is nice – no more. However, the real Kottke fireworks could be expected from that one song that is tailor-made for him: the ambivalent, heartbreaking and intimate bluesfolk “Buckets Of Rain”.

It is a beautiful finale to a beautiful record, together with “Desolation Row” and “Sad-Eyed Lady” perhaps the most successful swan song in Dylan’s discography. After all those songs of lost love and despair, the master chooses a melancholic final piece, decorated with confusing, dylanesque contradictions, with naive frankness and inscrutable metaphors. Liner notes writer Pete Hamill partially undervalues the lyrics when he says that it is humourous, “a simple song, not Dante’s Inferno”, but he does have a point in that the song indeed has the effect of a comic relief, a predominant but still-message. The essence of every verse is after all: and yet, in spite of everything, I love you.

In doing so, the poet skims along cutesy teenage poetry. The second verse, for example: a cynical critic will argue that in fact it says no more than roses are red, violets are blue, but our love will always be true. And somehow Dylan felt a little uneasy, too. On a bootleg recording of the famous session with Bette Midler (for Songs For The New Depression, 1976) he apologizes to Midler for the line I like the way you love me strong and slow with the words: “I must have written that when I was ten.”

It is an unusual and uncommonly harsh comment from the master – and presumably rather prompted by a misplaced outpouring of machismo than by genuine self-criticism. “Buckets Of Rain” brings a balance to Blood On The Tracks, gives the nuance precisely by these plain, almost sweet love declarations that so strikingly contrast with the distress. The third verse is the finest example of that disunity; everything about you is beautiful and lovable, and this loss hurts, everything about you is bringing me misery.

The poet decorates his outpourings with a melange of idiosyncratic idiom and playful blues quotes. Meek Dylan borrows from the New Testament, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”, Matthew 5:5), thus retaining a reference to that Sermon. In the beautiful but deleted “Up To Me” the reference is direct (“We heard the Sermon on the Mount and I knew it was too complex”), here Dylan builds a painful antithesis with meek on the one hand and hard like an oak on the other.

Playful, colourful and impenetrable is the nursery rhyme Little red wagon / Little red bike. The little red cart has been rolling through music history for decades. In 1936 Georgia White records “Little Red Wagon”, country singer Buddy Jones sings “Red Wagon” in ’41, Elvis’ great example Arthur Crudup lends the chorus for his own “That’s Your Red Wagon” (1945) of which one of Dylan’s heroes, Bob Wills, in 1946 in turn makes the western swing “It’s Your Red Wagon”. The scholars do not agree on a deeper meaning of that red car. One party suspects a sexual connotation, another explains that the expression means something like that is your business. Both interpretations are nonsensical here. Dylan the musician seeks and finds in this verse a nice sounding repetition, as every verse in this song relies on repetition (buckets – friends – like – life and do).

For the melody and the rhythm of the lyrics Dylan dives, by and large, a little less deeply into history: the mold for “Buckets Of Rain” has been formed in 1965 and is the popular “Bottle Of Wine” by Tom Paxton, an old comrade from Greenwich Village:

Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine
When you gonna let me get sober
Leave me along, let me go home
I wann’a go back and start over

Paxton is often named in the same breath with Dylan and is just as often recognized as forerunner or even booster of Dylan’s career. Not by the least, too. Dave Van Ronk, the ‘mayor of MacDougal Street’, says about him:

“Dylan is usually cited as the founder of the new song movement, and he certainly became its most visible standard-bearer, but the person who started the whole thing was Tom Paxton … he tested his songs in the crucible of live performance, he found that his own stuff was getting more attention than when he was singing traditional songs or stuff by other people … he set himself a training regimen of deliberately writing one song every day. Dylan had not yet showed up when this was happening, and by the time Bobby came on the set, with at most two or three songs he had written, Tom was already singing at least 50 percent his own material. That said, it was Bobby’s success that really got the ball rolling. Prior to that, the folk community was very much tied to traditional songs, so much so that songwriters would sometimes palm their own stuff off as traditional.”

Dylan himself does not deny the influence either. In Chronicles he remembers Tom Paxton as an example of the rare artists who wrote their own songs, honours one of his most beautiful songs (“The Last Thing On My Mind”) and analyzes: “Because they used old melodies for new words, they are well accepted.” This trick in particular inspires the upcoming talent and he will continue to apply it throughout his career.

Paxton’s work also emerges with some regularity. On the Bootleg Series 10: Another Self Portrait we hear that Dylan records Paxtons “Annie’s Going To Sing Her Song” in 1970, in the mysterious poem An Observation, Revisited from ’76 the bard writes under the pseudonym R. Zimmerman In my mind I keep hummin’ Tom Paxton’s / “Peace Will Come” and to that song the master again refers a year later in “Changing Of The Guards” (Peace will come / With tranquility and splendor on the wheels of fire).

And especially in “Buckets Of Rain”, for which Paxton’s own version of “Bottle Of Wine” is the model. Not the hit version of that song, though; the song is known in the driving rock version of The Fireballs (top 10 hit in 1967), but that one discarded the attractive guitar plucking which makes Paxton’s original and later Dylans “Buckets Of Rain” so irresistible.

Countless covers exist of Dylan’s gem. YouTube can hardly handle the stream of enthusiastic living room amateurs. Half of all known and lesser known singer-songwriters have it on the repertoire and the number of recordings by experienced artists is endless. In this sea, one thing stands out: a cover of “Buckets Of Rain” is always fun. Apparently the song has just such a granite, indestructible power as for example “Not Dark Yet” or “Mama You Been On My Mind” – it is almost impossible to ruin the song.

Former mentor Dave Van Ronk interprets lovingly and intensely, neighbour Maria Muldaur is sultry, jazzy and slightly vulgar (on her otherwise not very successful Dylan tribute Heart Of Mine, 2006) and the Buckets of Mary Lee’s Corvette unsurpassed venture, the integral version of Blood On The Tracks, is one of the many highlights on that album (2002). Grandmaster Jimmy LaFave is by now hors concours (Road Novel, 1998, with a beautiful, subdued harmonica part and ditto organ) and that also applies to David Gray, the British prodigy who turns every Dylan cover into an aesthetic masterpiece (A Thousand Miles Behind, 2007).

Disputed may be the charm of the country twang that Neko Case gives some live versions, but her studio version (on the compilation Sweetheart: Love Songs, 2005) is above criticism. The ladies are doing well either way – in a (questionable) top three, Wendy Bucklew (After You, 2002) does belong, too. The male competition up there comes from Iowa: the folk veteran Greg Brown is withered, witty and melancholy – almost at the level of Dylan’s original (the same applies to his “Pledging My Time” on A Nod To Bob Vol. I, 2001).

But eagerly awaited still is of course Leo Kottke, for that extra dimension: virtuosity.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

by Larry Fyffe

Synesthesia is a literary technique whereby ambiguous senses of words, and the five conventional physical senses – hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching – are meshed together to create striking images that transmit layers of meanings to poem and song lyrics.

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, with the help of his cook Nettie Moore, mixes chopped pieces of the alphabet, skin, ears, eyes, noses, and tongues into a cauldron of synesthetic soup.

Sipping a spoonful of this steamy broth makes a person’s ears shed tears:

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets coming out of my ears
(Bob Dylan: Buckets Of Rain)

And sends sugary flavours to them:

Now your sweet voice
Calls out from some old familiar shrine
(Bob Dylan: Spirit On The Water)

Eyes hunger:

You’ve given me nothing but the sweetest lies
Now hold your tongue, and feed your eyes
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

They salivate at the sight of shapely Nettie Moore:

Don’t know why my baby never looked so good before
Don’t have to wonder no more
She’s been cooking all day, it’s gonna take me all night
I can’t eat all that stuff in a single bite
(Bob Dylan: Nettie Moore)

And the effect of eating the soup wears off:

I’ve gained some recognition, but I lost my appetite
Dark beauty
Meet me at the border late tonight
(Bob Dylan: Tough Mama)

Slurp some more of the soup, and nostrils see the passing of time:

Like the rose of the summer that blooms in the day
Time passes slowly, and fades away
(Bob Dylan: Time Passes Slowly)

Time circles around and around, sometimes forward, sometimes backward:

I’m old Tom Moore from the bummer’s shore in the good old golden days
They call me a bummer, and a ginsop too, but what cares I for praise
I wander around from town to town, just like roving sign
And all the people say, “There goes Tom Moore in the days of forty-nine”
(Bob Dylan: Days Of Forty-Nine~J. Miller et al)

And the synesthetic broth transforms you into Nettie Moore’s husband:

In a little white cottage
Where the trees are ever green
And the climbing roses blossom at the door
I’ve often sat and listened
To the music of the birds
And the gentle voice of charming Nettie Moore
Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is over
While a spirit sad around my heart has come
And the busy days are long
And the nights are lonely now
For you’re gone from our little cottage home
(Bobby Horton: Gentle Nettie Moore~Pike, et al)

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Before I started doing any reading around this song I wondered how Dylan and Ginsberg could write a song together, both being lyricists.   And I was further puzzled when I noticed that Eyolf Østrem who knows a thing or three about Dylan’s music has this song noted in terms of composers as “Words and music Allen Ginsberg/Bob Dylan-Allen Ginsberg”

That seems to imply that the words are all Ginsberg and the music is a joint composition.

But the song itself is pretty much “Twist and Shout” written in 1961 by Phil Medley and  Bert Berns (although that second name is changed on some later recordings). The song was originally recorded by the Top Notes, later recorded by the Isley Brothers, and after that the Beatles had a go at it.

So did Dylan and Ginsberg really work together as composers and/or lyricists to create a re-run of such a popular song?  It seems to be stretching a point, which then makes me wonder if the joint credit is because Dylan had some input on the lyrics as well as the music.

The song was recorded on 17 November 1971 and appeared on Allen Ginsberg: First Blues in 1983.   It seems that the idea was to release this on Apple Records (which is slightly ironic given that it is a music adaptation of a song that many people mistakenly think was written by two of the Beatles).

Also involved in the recording besides Ginsberg and Dylan were Peter Orlovsky, Happy and Artie Traum, David Amram, and guitarist Jon Sholle. Bob Dylan is noted as playing guitar, piano and organ.

Allen Ginsberg wrote this about the recording:

“These 1971 sessions came about because Dylan had come to hear a poetry reading at NYU’s Loeb Auditorium, standing in the back of the crowded hall with David Amram. We were on stage with a gang of musician friends, and Peter improvised, singing, “You shouldn’t write poetry down but carol it in the air, because to use paper you have to cut down trees.

“I picked up on that, and we spent a half an hour making up tuneful words on the spot. I didn’t know 12-bar blues, it was just a free-form rhyming extravaganza. We packed up, said goodbye to the musicians, thanked them and gave them a little money, went home, and then the phone rang.

“It was Dylan asking, ‘Do you always improvise like that?” And I said, ‘Not always, but I can. I used to do that with Kerouac under the Brooklyn Bridge all the time.’ He came to our apartment with Amram and a guitar, we began inventing something about “Vomit Express,” jamming for quite awhile, but didn’t finish it. He said, “Oh, we ought to get together in a studio and do it,” then showed me the three-chord blues pattern on my pump organ. A week later in the studio Dylan actually did the arrangement, told people when to do choruses and when to take breaks, and suggested the musicians cut a few endings on their own to be spliced in.

“Vomit Express was a phrase I got from my friend Lucien Carr, who talked about going to Puerto Rico, went often, and we were planning to take an overnight plane a couple of weeks later, my first trip there. He spoke of it as the “vomit express” – poor people flying at night for cheap fares, not used to airplanes, throwing up airsick.”

All of which is fine, and who am I to doubt the great poets of the age, except that for me the phrase “showed me the three-chord blues pattern on my pump organ. A week later in the studio Dylan actually did the arrangement” really doesn’t ring true.  Any pop or rock or blues musician who has been in the business five minutes could tell you at once what the chord sequence is and how to play it.  It is so utterly standard.  I can’t see how Ginsberg could play an organ and not know the chords of this piece.

But, of course I wasn’t there and Ginsberg is the famous poet, so I’d better shut up.  Except to say that if you listened to the song all the way through and then decided to play it all again, I wonder how you feel.  I played it twice to write this review, but really didn’t need to play it again after that.  At least not for a long time. But that’s probably just me.

Here’s the recording.  The lyrics are below.

I'm going down to Puerto Rico
I'm going down on the midnight plane
I'm going down on the Vomit Express
I'm going down with my suitcase pain.

You can take an ancient vacation
fly over Florida's deep-blue end
rise up out of this mad-house nation
I'm going down with my oldest tender friend

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

We know each other now twenty years,
seen murders, and we wept tears
Now we're gonna take ourselves a little bit of free time
Wandering round the southern poverty clime

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

Start flyin' with all the poor, old, sick ladies
Everybody [in the plane] [drowded] and drunk, and they're crazy
Flyin' home to die in the wobbly air
All night long, they wanted the cheapest fare.

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

When we're down on the air field, I've never been there,
Except once walkin' around the air field in the great, wet heat,
Walk out, smell that old mother-load of shit from the tropics
Stomach growl [love], oh friends, beware.

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

Me and my friend, no we won't even drink,
And I won't eat meat, I won't fuck around
Gonna walk the streets alone, [cars] will blink and wink
Taxi's, buses and US gas all around.

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

Start [read] poetry at the university, meet kids,
look at their breasts, touch their hands, kiss their heads
seen from the heart, maybe the four buddhist normal truths
"Existence is suffering", it ends when you're dead --

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

Go out, walk up on the mountain, see the green rain
imagine that forest, finds, get lost,
sit cross-legged and meditate on old love pain,
watch every old love turn to gold.

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

See raindrops and the jungle rainbow, dancin' men;
brown legs walk around on the mud road
far from US smog, war, again
Sit down, empty mind, vomit my holy load

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

Come back to earth, walk the streets in shock
Smoke some grass and eat me some cock
kiss the mouth of the sweetest boy I can see
who shows me his white teeth and brown skin joy

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

At this point the chorus is sung out of time with the music.  Which is actually incredibly hard to do.

Go find my old friend, we'll go to the museum,
talk 'bout politics with the cats, and ask for revolution,
get back on the plane and chant high in the sky
Back to earth, to New York garbage streets and fly

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc

I'm gonna come back with frighteneds in the hot
at New York's electrical eternity here
pull the air-conditioner plug from the wall
sit down with my straight spine and pray

I'm going down to Puerto Rico etc.

by Jochen Markhorst

No hard feelings, for their part. The listening preferences of the three African Grey Parrots (Psittacus erithacus) Léo, Zoé and Shango are being monitored in 2012 by researchers at the University of Lincoln on possible love for music, and they appear to enjoy UB40, U2 and Joan Baez.

Bach is a hit too, and an absolute favourite is a piece of film music by Bernard Herrman (that whistled melody from Twisted Nerve, borrowed by Tarantino for Kill Bill – the scene in which the one-eyed Daryl Hannah is walking the nightly hospital corridor on her way to finish off The Bride), but electronic, violent dance music like The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy are hated by our feathered friends; then they start screaming ‘in a scared and distressed way’. To melodies like those of Joan Baez, however, they sing and dance along with excited squawks and human words.

The love is not mutual. The first time we catch Joan Baez on a parrot aversion is in 1967, when she takes a plunge into Donovan’s “Legend Of The Girl Child Linda” (1967) together with her sister Mimi and Judy Collins. She re-shuffles the couplets, gulls and doves are allowed to stay, but the verse line with the parrot, where parrots are talking their words with such ease, has disappeared.

The second time is a few years later, when Baez is the first artist to record a cover of “Simple Twist Of Fate”. In the fourth verse, she switches briefly to a witty parody of Dylan’s nasal singing style, so that in the fifth verse one hardly notices that she changes the original line of text and walks along with a parrot that talks cunningly into small waves whisper to the rocks.

It is no longer a coincidence – the parrot allergy is visible with retroactive effect already in 1965, when Baez is so fortunate that Dylan throws her “Farewell Angelina”. Since 1991, since The Bootleg Series 1-3, we know for certain that Joan has also rejected words from that song: yes indeed, the verse with the camouflaged parrot.

“Farewell Angelina” is probably one of the Big Sur songs, one of the songs the bard writes when he stays with Baez in Carmel. He only records it once, at the first Bringing It All Back Home session, January 13, 1965 – the quite attractive but still unexplored version we know from The Bootleg Series 1-3 (and more recently from The Cutting Edge). One take only. Obviously Dylan knows pretty quickly that he will reject the song. In 1991 Elliot Mintz is still puzzled and asks the maestro about his motives.

Dylan pussyfoots around: “You can’t use them all, you know, there’s a limit, you know, you just…”

“So, you’re saying basically there was no specific reason, that there was just no space on the disc for it, that there were other songs that you thought were better?” Mintz asks.

Now the singer suddenly takes another turn: “Well, on something like that you’re really asking the wrong person, because at that time nobody had really given me that much control over my records, and what was on and what was off.”

That sounds like a half-truth. In 1965 Dylan is already Columbia’s golden boy, his arm is strong enough to impose his will. But we also know that, especially in those years, he does not think an album is that monumental to make, “it is just a record of songs.” Indifference regarding the track selection is a more likely scenario – he happily leaves that task to the producer. Which does not, however, explain why Dylan so easily rejects the song; he will never play it again.

Maybe the poet – and also producer Tom Wilson – felt a certain redundancy; “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” has the same concept and the same sky is folding metaphor, the triangle tingles imitates the jingle jangle of the Tambourine Man and the King Kong and elves-verse is just a bit over the top, perhaps.

The beautiful melody is an amalgam of old and new: in Baez’ record collection, Dylan finds piles of LPs with old Scottish ballads, including “Farewell To Tarwathie”, a beautiful whaling ballad. Judy Collins will later also pick up the song, on Whales & Nightingales (1970), where she will be accompanied by the singing of a couple of humpbacks.

The following track is her cover of “Time Passes Slowly” (which appears earlier than the original), and that is a lot more tolerable.

Incidentally, “Farewell To Tarwathie” is not some an old ballad, but actually a falsification – the folk giant A.L. Lloyd (1908-1983) often ‘discovered’ ancient folk songs that he really had crafted himself. Ironically, in this case, probably based on two American Cowboy Songs from the Lomax collection (1938), “The Railroad Corral” and “Rye Whiskey”. Dylan will be familiar with the versions by Pete Seeger, whose “Wagoners Lad” also can be heard in “Farewell Angelina”.

He himself uses the melody in the unfinished “I Rode Out One Morning”, of which a living room recording has been preserved.

Beautiful as the song may be, the greatness of the song is not the melody. It is the poetic richness of the text. Literature-historical “Farewell Angelina” is located on or around the Big Bang of the surreal, kaleidoscopic masterpieces (It’s Alright Ma, Tambourine Man). In the footsteps of Rimbaud, Dylan further develops the collage-like lyricism in which the individual, often unrelated verses evoke series of images that together express one mood, one sensation.

This early, small masterpiece already excells in this regard. The theme will reappear: the intimacy of an everyday love break set against the backdrop of an derailing, unhinged world. The poet awakens half-forgotten images from our memory and from everyone’s cultural baggage (the Pied Piper of Hamelin, war images, card game metaphors), paints powerful, intriguing stills (a table stands empty by the edge of the stream) and pours it into a masterly form. The varying refrain line with the bizarre celestial phenomena and the austere farewell words is delightful, in any case. “It’s so visual,” the poet will sigh later, looking back at “Visions Of Johanna”. For the one-year-older “Farewell Angelina” that observation applies in extremis.

The most striking feature is the figure of speech the poet Dylan will use more often in the coming years, and which helps ensure that his poetry becomes Nobel Prize worthy: the catachresis, or abusio, the ‘wrong-use’, the unknown, innovative combination of incompatible words, which nevertheless has the old familiar strength of proverbs or clichés. The poet recently played with the power of the abusio; in Angelina’s more outgoing sister Baby Blue, in “Mr. Tambourine Man”, in “Spanish Harlem Incident” and “Gates Of Eden” and here, in “Farewell Angelina”, we see the first explorations, the run-up to the perfection of a “Visions Of Johanna”.

Here it is still cautious, but striking. Especially in the the sky is … -metaphors at the end of each verse. The first one, the sky is on fire, is still an ‘ordinary’ metaphor, as it is also used by the likes of Goethe, Shakespeare and Homer, a combination of words that even can be found in the Bible.

The next, the sky is trembling, is already more unusual. A compassionate Dante feels at the entering of Hell ‘trembling air’ (Here, for as much as hearing could discover, there was no outcry louder than the sighs that caused the everlasting air to tremble, Canto 4:25), the nineteenth-century Scottish poet W.E. Aytoun describes in his Edinburgh After Flodden (1848) the phenomenon of the Northern Lights with the words All night long the northern streamers / Shot across the trembling sky, but it is unlikely that the thief of thoughts has used either source, or is familiar with them. In any case, it is a beautiful ‘wrong-use’, an unusual combination that sounds familiar; combinations of thunder or rumbling in the sky with trembling earth are, after all, well known.

That familiar feeling also applies to the sky is folding in the third verse. Dylan knows the expression from his hero Tampa Red, the blues giant whose work he likes to perform on stage (and who for “It Hurts Me Too” alone deserves a monument).

This personification, which Dylan will use again in Baby Blue, Tampa Red sings in “Got To Leave My Woman” (1938), but of course gets here, in “Farewell Angelina”, a different connotation, in this verse full of card game metaphors (Tampa Red sings big sky’s folding to indicate that the night is coming to an end).

The last three, the sky is embarrassed, the sky is flooding over and the sky is erupting, are catachreses at the level of crying like a fire in the sun or the ghost of electricity: unknown and in fact ‘impossible’ word combinations that nevertheless sound familiar, evoke images and are coherent within the text.

For years we have had to do with the interpretation by Joan Baez. Good enough to recognize that the song is a masterpiece, but her version is also too safe, too dull – it demonstrates mainly what Baez does not make from the song. The adaptations by John Mellencamp, Nana Mouskouri and the Grateful Dead spin-off New Riders Of The Purple Sage do not really cause goose bumps either. The first time real dramatic power is to be found, is with the regretted Jeff Buckley, who plays an intense, widespun Farewell live on a radio station in 1991.

It is matched, or maybe even surpassed in 2010, by William Fitzsimmons on the tribute disc Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute to Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home. Multi-instrumentalist Fitzsimmons opens macabre, almost unearthly, gradually allowing a little warming – a dry banjo, a second voice, a single piano key – but it never reaches a pleasant, comfortable temperature. The lonely, snowy, icy, deserted Overlook Hotel from The Shining rises. But: with parrot. Granted, a Norwegian Blue, bereft of life, pining for the fjords, nailed to its perch in the cage, in an otherwise empty lobby, but still: with parrot, as it should be.

You might also enjoy from this site: Farewell Angelina – the most perfect rendition ever.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan announces upcoming tour of the planets

Though we know that the concerts of singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan that were planned for the planet Saturn have been cancelled due to slow ticket sales, the editors at the Untold Dylan offices here in New York City have the set lists of the songs that were to be performed on the upcoming Planet Tour by Dylan and his Band.

Also, note that it has been decided by Dylan’s management team that no concerts will be held on the pseudo-planet Pluto (claimed by some to be named after a Disney cartoon that features a dog); nor on the planet Uranus (pronounced like “your anus”) because of a contract dispute with the advertisers over some awkward wording that was to be used in the promotion of the interplanetary tour.

Anyway, according to poet and mythologist Robert Graves, in regards to ancient Greek/Roman mythology, Cronus (Saturn) gets overthrown by his son Zeus (Jupiter) who castrates his father; Cronus’ testicles and semen fall into the sea, and daughter Aphrodite (Venus) is born on a half-shell from out of that foam.

An Egyptian myth is comparatively similar – the offspring of Father Earth and Mother Sky, Seth castrates his brother Osiris who is married to their sister; Isis is able to retrieve her husband’s testicles, and gives birth to son Horus.

While capped in the cone head-dress of Osiris, Dylan had planned to lead off the concerts on Saturn with:

We came to the pyramids all embedded in ice
He said, “There’s a body I’m trying to find
If I carry it out, it’ll bring a good price”
‘Twas then that I knew what he had on his mind
(Bob Dylan, et al: Isis)

Poet Robert Graves’ mysticism is rooted in Gnosticism. He authors ‘The White Goddess’, and his female cousin – Olivia – founds ‘The Fellowship Of Isis’:

Can God with Dinae sport and kiss
Or God with rebel demons fight
Making a proof as Jove or Dis
Force, essence, knowledge, that or this
Of Godhead infinite?
(Robert Graves: Knowledge Of God)

According to ancient Geek/Roman mythology, Dinae and Jupiter (Jove) produce Perseus who slays the Medussa with the help of Minerva’s shield; Dis (Pluto) is the mythological god of the Underworld.

Bob Dylan pays tribute to the Great Goddess (She of the sky be linked to Isis of the fiery sun, and to Isis’ brother/husband Osiris of the dark underworld) – in contrast to the orthodox Judeo-Christian God Who lacks a female companion:

You’re the one that reaches me
You’re the one that I admire
Every time we meet together
My soul feels like it’s on fire
(Bob Dylan: Nobody ‘Cept You)

Especially in the arts, as time passes, the daughter from Cronus’ seaform – the motherly Venus – ; as well as the virgin mother of Jesus – Mary – both become associated with Isis:

You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes, the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed
(Joan Baez: Diamonds And Rust)

In the following song verse, Bob Dylan takes on the persona of Jove attacking Cronus. The persona lashes out at money-grubbing evangelists who just pretend to be Christians:

I’ve been through hell, what did it prove
You bastard! I’m supposed to respect you?
I’ll give you justice, I’ll fatten you purse
Show me your moral virtue first
Hear me holler, hear me moan
I pay in blood, but not my own
(Bob Dylan: Pay In Blood)

A bit of ironic diction – “I’ll fatten your purse” translates to, ” I’ll give you a good swift kick in the testicles.”

See also: Bob Dylan And Robert Graves: The Great White Wonder

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Here is the recorded version of this slow traditional blues

Obviously the lyrics are those from Dylan’s 1967 notebook, while the music is composed by Marcus Mumford.  The song appears as one of the extra tracks on the complete album, but not on the shorter album.

Here are Dylan’s lines…

The whistle is blowing, and the train is going
Just what’s gonna happen next, well, I’m not one to say
I’m sitting here yearning while those wheels keep turning
“I’ll be gone by tonight,” she told me today

And next door to the cornstalk, by the side of this sheet rock
I will wait for the morning like a dog in the moon

Blow, blow on
Blow, blow on

Oh the minutes go slow now, and I hope it don’t snow now
‘cause it’s quiet and still and that train’s out of sight
All we need is a fat storm to blow by the platform
Oh dear me, that woman, that woman’s always right

Blow, blow on
Blow, blow on

Blow, blow on
Blow, blow on

The whistle is blowing, and the train is going
Just what’s gonna happen next, well, I’m not the one to say

I can’t imagine anyone but Dylan writing

All we need is a fat storm to blow by the platform

or indeed the lines

The whistle is blowing, and the train is going
Just what’s gonna happen next, well, I’m not the one to say

but for me these lines are not enough to sustain the whole piece – which ends up sounding a bit like an album filler – the song a band would put onto the CD just to make it look like you got your full hour’s worth.

And who knows, if Dylan had returned to the song a little later he might well have decided to keep just those stand out fun lines and build the whole song around them.  Then we could have had something completely different.

As it is Marcus Mumford didn’t have that much to work from, which is why the chord sequence is by and large one that every musician will at once know from other songs.

The band of course are excellent, as you would expect from names like…

Marcus Mumford – Lead Vocal, Acoustic Guitar
Elvis Costello – Electric Mandocaster, Vocal
Taylor Goldsmith – Electric Guitar, Organ, Piano, Vocal
Jim James – Bass, Vocal
Jay Bellerose – Drums
Alana Haim – Background Vocal
Danielle Haim – Background Vocal
Este Haim – Background Vocal
Binki Shapiro – Background Vocal

And a live version

One More Cup Of Coffee (1976)

by Jochen Markhorst

Desire is a key word in Bizet’s masterpiece, the opera Carmen (1875). The pitiful Don José endured the shame and inconvenience of the prison thanks to the flower Carmen had thrown at him, dry and withered in his breast pocket, and when he smells it, he only feelsone desire:

jene sentais qu’un seul désir,

unseul désir, un seul espoir:

te revoir, ô Carmen, oui, te revoir!

…one single desire and one single hope; that he will see Carmen again. The outcome is known. After Carmen definitively dismisses him, the distraught José stabs her and immediately afterwards breaks down, sobbing over her lifeless body.

It looks as if the character of Carmen was the model for the adored one in “One More Cup Of Coffee”. The narrator sings a likewise unfaithful, hard-hearted, hedonistic gypsy who, like Carmen, practices fortune-telling, can sing beautifully and has a black heart.

For the description of her beauty, however, the poet Dylan is not inspired by Bizet, but apparently by Solomon, by the Song of Songs. The song is, like for example “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, set up like a medieval blason, the poetic form in which the poet, like Solomon in the Song of Songs, systematically checks off the physical characteristics of the adored – in pulsating, vibrating metaphors, of course.

Form and rhythm the poet copies fairly precisely; praises like

thy thighs are like jewels

and

thy belly is like a heap of wheat

or

thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine like purple

are all quite easily exchangeable for that amorous flattery in Dylan’sfirst verse:

Your breath is sweet

Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky

Your back is straight and your hair is smooth

…but in terms of content it appears that the trends have changed, in the course of three thousand years. Solomon apparently finds it very complimentary to compare the hairdo of his lover with ‘a herd of goats‘ and her eyes with the ‘fishponds in Hesbon‘, for example. Indeed, the times they are a-changin’.

Goingthrough the Songof Songs, there are more hints to be found that this Bible book is under Dylan’s skin. ‘I am sick of love‘ is literally there (5:6), the same words as in “Love Sick”.Cometh up from the wilderness (8:5), echoes in “Shelter From The Storm”, the rose of Sharon in “Caribbean Wind” and for “Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart” Dylan picks an identical lily among the thorns from Song of Songs 2:2.

But after the first four lines with Song of Solomonistic coaxing, the poet Dylan takes a different turn from Solomon, and starts to cut up the exotic Venus: despite all outer beauty she is a loveless, ungrateful creature.

Dylan reveals the inspiration for the rest of the lyrics during the concerts between 14 November and 16 December 1978 and also in interviews (with Paul Zollo, SongTalk, 1991, with Shelton in ’78, Jonathan Cott in ’77 and in Australia with Karen Hughes in ’78).

The heart is a visit to a gypsy king in southern France. That story tells Dylan twenty-two times on the stage and seems to be rather romanticized, but in the core it probably is historically correct.  Every year in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer a religious pilgrimage for gypsies takes place, which Dylan visited on his thirty-fourth birthday, together with his host David Oppenheim, the painter. Dylan wraps his memories of that visit in picturesque, sheer cinematic terms:

“A few years ago I went over the South of France when the gypsies have their festival. It happens to be their high holy holiday, like Christmas time. Anyway, that particular day happens to be the day I was born on. It’s my birthday also. I’d heard about that for years and I went over to check it out. Just like that, I did.

“So I arrived, over a town on the ocean, in the south of France. And all the gypsies were there. They were there from Hungary, Romania, France, England, Germany, all them countries. Just all along the beach. What they do for their holiday is just party for a week. So, I managed to meet the king of the gypsies over there. I don’t know how old he was, he was wearing a derby hat when I met him. He had 16 wives and 125 children.  And I was very impressed of that.

“Anyway, I stayed around and partied for a week, I didn’t sleep, did everything there was to do at least twice. And when it was time to leave he said, “What you want, Bob, now when our ways are gonna part?” All I needed was just to stay up one more day, just to get back to the North of France, so I asked for just please give me one more cup of coffee for the road. So they give it to me in a bag, I took it and headed off down.”

Dylan tells this story in slightly different versions. Sometimes with details that add to the unbelievability (such as his remembrance that he is near the ocean and looks out over a large valley – in the Camargue there is neither an ocean nor there are ‘large wide valleys’), but the story makes clear which feelings Dylan himself has about “One More Cup Of Coffee”: foreign, displaced, lost.  Of “Isis” it reminds anyway, but perhaps even more of “Señor”, which during these days also invariably is introduced with a similarly bizarre, fierce, exurbant story.

Thus, the poet has given the chorus an autobiographical basis. However, in the interview with Paul Zollo, thirteen years after these stage talks, he wipes it off the table again. Those days in southern France have “probably influenced the writing of that song”, but

“TheValley Below probably came from someplace else. My feeling about the song was that the verses came from someplace else. It wasn’t about anything, so this ‘valley below’ thing became the fixture to hang it on. But ‘valley below’ could mean anything.”

Right. Solomon seems to mean the female pubic area. But even the less Bible versed will probably have a more sinister association with valley: Psalm 23:4, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, the Psalm that Dylan will also paraphrase in the unified effort withU2, “Love Rescue Me” (1987). Or, even worse, the Valley of Hinnom, Gehenna, the valley in which at the time of Solomon an eternal fire was kept burning and in which children were sacrificed to Moloch – the valley that was also called the valley below Jerusalem.

Ultimately,however, this word combination most likely entered the mind of a song and dance man like Dylan via one of the many, many songs in which a valley below is sung. The ancient, popular folksong “Early In The Morning”, for example (Early one morning / Just as the sun was rising / I heard a young maid sing/ In the valley below), that in the 60s in Bonanza alone is sung three times. Or via Dottie Rambo’s gospel classic “(In The Valley) He Restoreth My Soul”.

Buffy Sainte Marie’s “The Piney Wood Hills”, Dave Dudley’s “Silver Rails” (whose”Coffee, Coffee, Coffee” should be in Dylan’s record case too), “Watching The Apples Grow” by Stan Rogers, Connie Smith’s top hit “Cincinatti Ohio”… well, on every shelf in Dylan’s vast record collection there are undoubtely about five, six valleys below.

The same applies to that cup of coffee. Radio maker Dylan devotes an entire episode of Theme Time Radio Hour to coffee (season 1, episode 5, Coffee), in which he plays fifteen songs with coffee-drinking protagonists, but not the song that is closest to him: “I’ll Just Have A Cup Of Coffee (Then I’ll Go)” by Claude Gray from 1960.

The outlandish connotation of the couplets also colours Dylan’s recitation. The singer chooses Oriental-style decorations that are reminiscent of a muezzin rather than gypsy music, but it is effective; it accentuates the song’s exotic, atypical colour. The same mystical splendour has the goose bumps-inducing intro, which according to bassist Rob Stoner spontaneously originated from discomfort: “That wasn’t arranged for me to do a bass solo. Scarlet wasn’t ready.  Bob starts strumming his guitar – nothing’s happening. Somebody better play something, so I start playin’ a bass solo” (Mojo, October 2012).

But the driving force of the song is the couplets’ slow, inevitable downfall. “If you ever want to write a hit, don’t feel ashamed, do a descending bass line,”as Sir Paul McCartney teaches.

The song’s popularity with colleagues is understandable. Many copy the exotic atmosphere. Frazey Ford, for example, and Calexico with RogerMcGuinn. Robert Plant lays down a base of tabla-like percussion, lets the acoustic guitar play arabesques and underneath a slightly neurotic synthesizer doodles flute tones. As if the Gypsy Kings are playing “Tomorrow Never Knows”, but the cover nevertheless has a special charm (Dreamland,2002).

The best-known cover is the barren, deforested, driving version of The White Stripes on their eponymous 1999 debut album, and turns into a rock song. In this category, Nutz, a forgotten band from Liverpool, has a more traditional approach; their version is a dramatic, muscular, firm stadium rocker and enjoyable still (HardNutz,1977).

The most beautiful interpretation is from the Texan axe shredder Chris Duarte, who manages to unite all the beauties of both the original and the best covers in a sultry, hypnotic, austere masterpiece (Romp,2012). Carmen, Solomon and the gypsy king are dead, but Stevie RayVaughan is still alive. Especially on Duarte’s live recordings.

Claude Gray:

Nutz:

Chris Duarte:

by Larry Fyffe

At long last, the full story that Bob Dylan only partially reveals in the song “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts” can be told.

Turns out the backstage manager of the “Cabaret” (a night club which features a chandelier that comes all the way from Norway) is named Hard-Boiled Herman (aka, Louie the Lug – a small-time gambler he was at one time, according to police files); he now works for Big Jim, the candlestine owner of the night club mentioned above; Herman’s love interest is his own daughter Lily.

Father and daughter are originally from the French island of St. Pierre. Lily’s presently the singer and dancer at Big Jim’s bar. Herman sings with her when she performs. To insure that she does not lose her job, Lily feigns a sexual interest in the owner of the club, who’s got a wife; Jim gives a diamond ring to Lily:

The hangin’ judge came in unnoticed, and was being wined and dined
The drillin’ in the wall kept up, but no one seemed to pay it any mind
It was known all around that Lily had Jim’s ring
And nothin’ would ever come between Lily and the king
No, nothing ever would except maybe the Jack Of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

Because he’s quite sure that Big Jim’s fooling around with his daughter, manager Herman is jealous of his two-timing boss:

The backstage manager was pacing around by his chair
“There’s something funny goin’ on”, he said, “I can feel it in the air”
He went off to get the hangin’ judge, but the hangin’ judge was drunk
As the leading actor hurried by in a costume of a monk
There was no actor anywhere better than the Jack Of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

The Jack Of Hearts, back from the island of St. Pierre, decides to rob the “Cabaret” to get revenge on Louie because the rum-runner knows that the Lug roughed up Lily because his daughter cared for Jack when he was sick while on one of his runs to the French island off the coast of Newfoundland.

Big Jim’s jealous of the Jack of Hearts because of Lily’s interest in the rum-runner. So Jack and Lily hedge their bets by conspiring to kill Big Jim, and frame Lily’s incestuous father for the murder. Lily asks Jim to show her his big gun, and she unloads the bullets when he’s not looking; then she goes to her dressing room, and makes herself up to look like Rosemary, Jim’s hapless wife. Knowing Herman will soon be going out on an errand, Jack dresses up like Lily’s father, his disguise hidden by a monk’s cloak:

No one knew the circumstances, but they they say that it happened pretty quick
The door to the dressing room burst open, and a cold revolver clicked
And Big Jim was standing there, you wouldn’t say surprised
Rosemary right beside him, steady in her eyes
She was with Big Jim, but she was leanin’ to the Jack Of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

Stared at by Lily, disguised as Rosemary, you’d say Big Jim’s confused, and ‘Herman’, with a knife that the Jack of Hearts has ‘lifted’ from the Lug’s tool box, stabs the owner of the “Cabaret” – just as the hangin’ judge stumbles in through the dressing room door:

The next day was hangin’ day, the sky was overscast and black
Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back
And Rosemary on the gallows, she didn’t even blink
The hangin’ judge was sober, he hadn’t had a drink
The only person on the scene missin’ was the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

The Jack of Hearts rushes out of the nightclub, looking like Hard-Boiled Herman, aka Louie The Lug. Ever since then, the backstage manager has been hiding out. He’s back on St. Pierre because he’s got a price on his head for murdering Diamond Jim:

The Cabaret was empty now, a sign said, “Closed for repair”
Lily had already taken the dye out of her hair
She was thinkin’ ’bout her father who she rarely saw
Thinkin’ ’bout Rosemary, and thinkin’ about the law
But most of all, she was thinkin’ ’bout the Jack Of Hearts
(Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

After it’s repaired due to the hole drilled through the wall, Lily sings her favorite song at the “Cabaret” with her new partner – the Jack Of Hearts:

There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the lands of my dreams
Where the nightingales are singing
And the white moon beams
(King and Elliot: There’s A Long, Long Trail A-Winding)

Sometimes, just for a lark, the happy pair sweetens up the music pie:

Jokerman dance by the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman
(Bob Dylan: Jokerman)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLA7DpleDtM

Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

• Lily Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts (as I understand it): an alternative vision. By Ann Alenjandro
• Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts: revealing the source of this and other Dylan songs. Part 1.  by Larry Fyffe
• Bob Dylan And Damon Runyon: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts And Other Songs (Part II) by Larry Fyffe
• Source Of Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts (Part III)by Larry Fyffe
• Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts: revealing the source of this and other Dylan songs.  By Larry Fyffe
• Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts: the meanings behind Dylan’s song By Tony Attwood (updated Nov 2017)
• Lily O’Valley, Mary Magdalena, and The Jehovah of Hearts: Bob Dylan mixes up the medicine By Larry Fyffe

by Tony Attwood

This is one of the five songs not placed on the standard version of the New Basement Tapes album, but is avaialable on the deluxe edition, and has music by Taylor Goldsmith.

It’s just under three minutes of sweetness, singled out by the pounding beat and a twist in the tail in the lyrics.

Now, concerning these lyrics, my first stumble came with Mack girls – it appears that “Mack” is a moderately popular girls’ name in the USA – I’ve not come across it in England, although of course I only know ladies of my generation – and sometimes their children, so maybe it has been introduced this side of the Atlantic more recently.

The urban dictionary doesn’t help me too much either – I am told a “mack” can be a person who is smooth, slick etc – although the dictionary seems to imply a “mack” is male.  I think I need help on that one, but I am going to guess the Mack Girls, are women who draw a man into their lives for their own benefit, rather than out of love and affection.

The theme is not unknown in Dylan – that he (that is to say the person represented as the signer of the song) becomes influenced by others, and instead of following his own instincts goes astray.

But of course this is not the Dylan we know most of the time where his strength is his independence.  Yes he does get pulled away from his true way by the hungry women who really make a mess out of you, but most of the time he is more than able to fight his own way and tell others to go and crawl out their window.

As for why the singer wants then, having made all the effort to get there, he immediately wants to leave St Louis and go to Wichita I have no idea – again my Englishness counts against me.  But I did look it up, and the journey is around 450 miles and takes about seven hours by car.

So why Wichita?  Of course I have no idea – I only know about the lineman (always loved that song – one of my all time favourites for the melody and chordal accompaniment alone) – but I did a bit more digging and am told that  Wichita “is the birthplace of Pizza Hut and White Castle fast-food chains.”  Also the “first electric guitar was played at the Shadowland Ballroom in Wichita by Wichitan Gage Brewer in 1932.”  If that is right, maybe that’s the key.

But actually I guess this was a little ditty that Bob knocked out when feeling a bit low – and there’s the little twist (or perhaps a joke) at the end – he spends all the song wanting to go to St Louis, and immediately he has got there he’s going to get married and then leave.

I think you really do have to know the cities, or maybe the mythology and feel of the cities, really to understand what is going on – unless really there is nothing here at all.

If I ever get back to St. Louis again
There’s gonna be some changes made
I’m gonna find old Alice and right away where I left off
It’s gonna be just as if I’d stayed

That old organ grinder’s gonna wind his box
And the knife sharpener’s gonna sing
When I get back to St. Louis again
I’m gonna buy that diamond ring

Diamond ring
Diamond ring
Shine like gold
Behold that diamond ring

If I ever get back to St. Louis again
Everybody’s gonna smile
One of the Mack girls dragged me up to Washington
I got stuck there for a while

She gave me more misery than a man can hold
And I took her bad advice
Now I don’t aim to bother anyone
I have paid that awful price

Diamond ring
Diamond ring
Shine like gold
Behold that diamond ring

If ever I get back to St. Louis again
That diamond ring is gonna shine
That old burlesque dancer is gonna bum around
And everything’s gonna be fine

I’m gonna settle up my accounts with lead
And leave the rest up to the law
Then I’m gonna marry the one I love
And head out for Wichita

Diamond ring
Diamond ring
Shine like gold
Behold that diamond ring

Here’s the recording.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

The successful and influential comics series Preacher (66 parts, 1995-2000) is the frenzied, fiercely fanning, bewildering and highly original story of the priest Jesse Custer. Custer has gained control over a half divine, half demonic force, “Genesis” and takes off in search of God, who is missing.

This storyline, and the richness of colourful antagonists and imaginative sidelines, attract many film companies. Miramax, HBO, Columbia Pictures … rights are bought, scripts written and actors selected, but in the end nobody dares to do a filming. Religiously still too controversial, and sometimes perhaps a little too dark. Finally, in May 2016, a screen version is released: a ten-part television series on AMC. It is a success, the second, thirteen-episodes season follows in June 2017 and in June 2018 season 3.

The eighth episode of the second season ends, true to the spirit, bizarre. Custers traveling companion and comrade Cassidy, a movingly faithful, cheerful and immortal vampire of Irish descent, approaches the bed where his elderly son lies dying. Cassidy stares at the old man, at his son, with an unusually serious, intense look and sings with a heavy Irish accent:

Way down in Tipperary where cow plop is thick 

Where women are young and the lads all come quick

There lived pretty Charlotte, the girl we adore

The pride of Dear Erin, the Scarlet Haired whore

It's Charlotte the harlot, the girl we adore

The pride of Dear Erin

The Scarlet Haired whore

“Charlotte The Harlot” is an ancient scabrous song that is sung in dozens of variants, increasingly foul-mouthed, everywhere in the English-speaking world. Dylan undoubtedly knows the version of the godfather of the Greenwich folk scene, Oscar Brand, on his Bawdy Hootenanny (1955).

Folk musician Brand is not only the organizer of the Newport Folk Festival but also the presenter of the world’s longest running radio show, Oscar Brand’s Folksong Festival. To him we owe Dylan’s radio debut, October 29, 1961, the broadcast in which the young Bob fantasies all sorts of humbug about his carnival days (“I learned it from a farmer in South Dakota and he played the autoharp. His name is Wilbur. Met him outside of Sioux Falls when I was there visiting people and him, and I heard him do it.”) and in which he plays “Sally Gal”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBRklqq7A80

Fifty years later, Charlotte the Harlot reaches Dylan’s oeuvre, in the intriguing and often misunderstood song “Soon After Midnight” on the acclaimed album Tempest (2012).

When it is released, the album receives – obviously – considerable attention and without exception positive reviews. In those same critiques, however, “Soon After Midnight” usually gets the short hand of the stick. The Guardian and Rolling Stone do not even mention the song at all, The New Yorker, Billboard and the New York Times think it is a love song and sense heartbreaks in it, and only Uncut and The Sun suspect malicious revenge and a sinister turnaround.

The opening line puts the listeners on the wrong track, that much is true. ‘I’m searching for phrases to sing your praises’ is sweet, wistful and cute. Dylan borrows it from the doo-wop and crooner idiom of the 50s. Sinatra’s “Too Marvelous For Words”, Sarah Vaughan’s “Words Can’t Decribe” and “I Don’t Know How To Say I Love You” by The Superlatives, for example. Just as Dylan takes something from somewhere in every verse. “Money Honey” is made famous by The Drifters. Dylan runs the song in his radio program Theme Time Radio Hour, and he also plays it on stage a few times himself.

“Moon Got In My Eyes” is recorded by both Bing Crosby and Sinatra, “On The Killing Floors” is an evergreen that Dylan probably knows since Howlin’ Wolf (1964), and otherwise he heard Clapton’s performance, or Jimi Hendrix’, or the brilliant version from his musical partner Mike Bloomfield (with Electric Flag, 1968). In any case, the master has enjoyed the film O Brother Where Art Thou by the Coen Brothers. Certainly the soundtrack, which features “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” by Chris Thomas King: “I was delighted with this album and even watched the movie,” Dylan says at a press conference in Rome, July 2001.

By the time the killing floors occur, in the third verse, the attentive listener begins to realize that this is not just a love song, that this is not some desolate whiny bigot, outside pining lonely between dusk and dawn, but that something else is going on. In his later work, Dylan the poet occasionally steps into the shoes of a dark, or at least an unpleasant, unreliable narrator. “Mississippi”, in which song he also searches for words to ‘do you justice in reason or rhyme’, “Floater”, “Huck’s Tune”, “This Dream Of You”, just to name a few – all of them songs with dubious storytellers.

This time it gets really ominous. Prior to the date with the current fairy queen, this narrator has left at least three ladies dying in their own blood, ladies who in his eyes are all whores: the money honey, Charlotte the Harlot and the Maria dressed in green (the alleged ex-prostitute Maria Magdalena is usually depicted in green clothing). He does not fear her fury; he has faced stronger walls and he is not in a hurry – it is shortly after midnight, his day is only beginning, and ‘I don’t want nobody but you’.

It is, in short, a real murder ballad. Not a love song, not a song that, as the reviewer of Pitchfork thinks, belongs to “Blood On The Tracks”, because of some bitter, vicious heartbreak, but a song like “Mac The Knife”, or “Where The Wild Roses Grow”, or “Little Sadie”, songs in which the protagonist is a murderous psychopath.

Literary, Dylan’s murder ballad surpasses most of the songs in that category. After all, those are often quite straightforward, unambiguous ballads about bloodthirsty maniacs who tell us without any remorse how and why they slaughter their victims.

Delia was cold and mean, so I tied her down and fed her two bullets (“Delia’s Gone”). My Flora was talking to some other guy, so I messed him up (“Lily Of The West”). “Soon After Midnight” relates to songs like these as a brooding Hitchcock thriller to a bloody western of Peckinpah. Dylan contrasts idyllic, innocent or even heart-warming phrases (the opening lines, ‘my heart is cheerful’, the ladies ‘chirp and chatter’) with ominous, macabre asides (‘the moon in my eyes’, ‘I’ve been down on the killing floors’, ‘they are dying in their own blood’). The upcoming murder remains, however, as in the more subtle thrillers, beyond the reach of the cameras. The contrast is reinforced by the misleading musical decoration; it is sweet, seductive and slightly melancholy, just like Dylan’s delivery.

The lyrics may be lovingly composed out of bits and pieces that the poet Dylan has raked left and right for this haunting, horrifying snapshot of a waiting sex murderer in the dark, for the music he has done less effort. The musician Dylan has copied almost unfiltered “A New Shade Of Blue” from The Bobby Fuller Four. Rhythm, tempo, chord progression, bridge and even arrangement are almost identical, only the main melody differs slightly. Dylan does have a weakness for the Texan who died young (at the age of 23, in 1966), who earned his place in the Pantheon with “I Fought The Law”. In Theme Time Radio Hour he drops by three times, the radio host comments appreciative: “One heavy cat.”

That unconcerned copying may also inhibit the urge to produce a cover. The site nobodysingsdylanlikedylan.com does register some twenty covers, but these are without exception completely uninteresting hobby projects on YouTube by dabbling amateurs or untalented tribute artists.

For now, the only exception is the talented, beguiling Aoife O’Donovan, performing an intimate, lonely “Soon After Midnight” in Massachussettes, March 2017. Even more beautiful is, incidentally, her cooperation with Sarah Janosz and Sara Watkins on “Ring Them Bells”, March 2015. Overshadowed, however, are both alluring covers by a memorable “Farewell Angelina” at the Hollywood Bowl, August 2015 – with Yo Yo Ma (!) on cello.

You might also be interested in Soon After Midnight: Bob Dylan’s Other World

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

You might also enjoy

• Bob Dylan and Arthur Rimbaud Part I
• Bob Dylan and Arthur Rimbaud Part II
• Bob Dylan and Arthur Rimbaud Part III
• Bob Dylan and Arthur Rimbaud Part IV

By Larry Fyffe

Without darkness, there’s no light; without life in the hustle and bustle of crowded, dirty cities, there’s no romantic dreams of a tranquil life with Nature in the countryside. PreRomantic poet William Blake depicts the innocence of youth corrupted by the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of the Industrial Revolution, and burlesques Emanuel Swedenborg’s separation of the spiritual and physical aspects of the human existence; William Wordsworth searches, outside the city, for reconnection with the vital spirit that pervades Nature.

Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan draws upon the translated poems of the French Symbolists:

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
But there’s no way I can compare
All them scenes to this affair
(Bob Dylan: You Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

PreSurrealist poet Arthur Rimbaud is a little boy lost who scatologically buries Wordsworth’s idealism. Rosemary is a flowery symbol of of hope, and a lily, one of death that, like excrement, stinks:

In short, is a Flower, Rosemary
Or Lily, dead or alive, worth
The excrement of one sea-bird?
(Arthur Rimbaud: On The Subject Of Flowers)

The French Symbolist poet comes under the influence of the Gothic personified-filled sentiments of American poet Edgar Allan Poe:

The rosemary nods upon the grave
The lily lolls upon the wave
Wrapping the fog about its breast
(Edgar Allan Poe: The Sleeper)

The above ghostly imagery re-appears as pollution in the poetry of a Modernist:

The yellow fog rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs it’s muzzle on the window-panes
Licks it’s tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the pools that stand in the drains
(TS Eliot: The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock)

Bob Dylan out-Rimbauds Rimbaud, out-Eliots Eliot – double entendres the following song lyrics:

Now, I’m startin’ to drain
My stool’s gonna squeak
If I walk too much farther
My crane’s gonna squeak
(Bob Dylan: Please, Mrs. Henry)

Dylan takes Rimbaud’s flower symbols, and transforms them into characters in a narrative song wherein ‘dye’ links up with ‘die’:

Lily had already taken all the dye out of her hair
She was thinkin’ ’bout her father, who she very rarely saw
Thinkin’ ‘ bout Rosemary, and thinkin’ ’bout the law
But most of all, she was thinking ’bout the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

Lily, a symbol of death, is oft employed by Arthur Rimbaud:

It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your hair
Brought strange rumours to your dreaming mind
It was your heart listening to the song of Nature
In the groans of the trees, and the sighs of the nights….
And the poet says that by starlight
You come seeking in the night, the flowers that you picked
And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils
White Ophelia floating, like a great lily
(Arthur Rimbaud: Ophelia)

Rimbaud’s angst of a wasted life is not lost on Bob Dylan:

Ophelia, she’s ‘neath my window, for her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday, she’s already an old maid

According to Dylan, akin to Rimbaud, it’s better to settle for reality than dream of a Garden of Eden that exists only in your mind:

All these people that you mention, yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to re-arrange their faces, and give them all another name
Right now, I can’t read too good, don’t send me no more letters, no
Not unless you send them from Desolation Row
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

Aaron  Galbraith

One thing an artist of a certain age and standing might attempt to do is to release an album of re-recorded or reworked versions of their own songs. Looking through my own CD collection I found these ones that I particularly enjoy:

• Joni Mitchell – Travelogue
• Electric Light Orchestra – Mr Blue Sky
• Kate Bush – Director’s Cut
• Peter Gabriel – New Blood
• Steve Hackett – Genesis Revisited I & II
• Paul Simon – In The Blue Light
• Van Morrison – Reworking The Catalogue
• Brian Wilson – I Wasn’t Made For These Times

Now is this something that Dylan is likely to do himself? Perhaps… however like most things he has been doing it for years already!

Here are a few examples of Dylan covering himself that I have come across over the years. My criteria for inclusion being a) they have been officially released and b) they are not from a live album.

The earliest example that I have come across appears on, that’s right, you guessed it, Bette Midler’s 1976 album Songs For The New Depression. It is a duet with Bob on Buckets Of Rain.

What we have here is a very showbiz-y version with Bob’s vocals prominently featured, and yes for some reason they do decide to sing “Nugget’s Of Rain”. Judging by Bob’s little half laugh towards the end and Bette vamping away “Bobby…Bobby” it sounds like a splendid time was had by all in the studio.

Next up we have an interesting take on The Ballad Of Hollis Brown released on Mike (brother of Pete) Seeger’s 1994 album Third Annual Farewell Reunion.

With Bob in fine voice and Mike’s banjo bringing a certain menace to the track I’d rank this one as pretty good and certainly worth the time of all involved and worthy of a listen.

Moving on, we have Bob’s contribution to the soundtrack of the 1999 TV movie “The 60s”. Here we have a duet with Joan Osborne on Chimes Of Freedom.

Whilst I don’t feel that the pair’s voices work all that well together, Bob’s electric guitar and the addition of the Hammond Organ makes this early 60s classic sound like it comes from the later Highway 61 era.

Released on the Grateful Dead’s splendid Dylan covers roundup album Postcards Of The Hanging In 2002, we have a version of Man Of Peace recorded in 1987. I don’t have my copy of the CD to hand right now but if memory serves me this was recorded during rehearsals for The Dylan And The Dead tour.

A fine performance by all, with some quality soloing mid way through, its right up there with the original album track and is in my opinion better than most of the live album released from the tour.

Now here is something extra special, A Hard Rain’s A- Gonna Fall recorded in Tokyo with a full orchestra backing. I know, I said I wouldn’t include any live tracks, but this one if so different from the original that it makes it impossible to exclude, and it was officially released but only on the Dignity CD single so might be new to a few people.

I can’t really say to much about this version as it blows me away every time I hear it. Truly amazing.

Dylan also went on to re-record several of his classic tracks for the Masked & Anonymous film, but as only 2 of these songs made the soundtrack album I can only include these two: Cold Irons Bound…

and Down In The Flood.

Both excellent versions with the touring band backing Bob wonderfully. Hopefully one day we will see a release of all the tracks he recorded for the movie.

Last up we have Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking recorded with Mavis Staples for the Gotta Serve Somebody album in 2003. An amazing version which betters the original in so many ways for me. Unfortunately it doesn’t exist on YouTube but can be found on Spotify. You really should check this one out if you haven’t heard it already…even if you have, give it another listen now!

https://open.spotify.com/track/0ssPo81sHtsS1VfFn4DtjH?si=TaRP3hZvQBCqxTHq0_VgpA

I’ll leave you with this version of Most Of The Time recorded around the time of Under The Red Sky album. I believe this was only ever released as a promo single. Listen and enjoy this amazing alternative version of a great track!

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Quick like a flash is a song written by Bob Dylan in his notebook to which Jim James added music.  It is part of the New Basement Tapes collection.

It has been suggested that “Quick Like a Flash” (only found on the deluxe edition) sounds like it is ready to roll as a soundtrack a Tarantino opening credit sequence in the near future.  That is possible, but I am not totally convinced.

Quick like a flash, we got to border that bus
Go down on the hump and screw it
We don’t need your opinions take a look at us
When we find something good, we’re true to it

Revenge is sweet when we take a trip or two
Put ol’ Peter in the pocket
Then pull in or out and paint ’em blue
Put a bow tie on ’em, and sock it

Crossharp’s coming just once that’s all
Oh baby, wontcha please come use him
Gang up on the punk and a big checker haul
Poor little punk, don’t bruise him

And that is how the soundtrack is played out.  But such lines would be very un-Dylan and in the line he has written

We don’t need your opinions take a look at us
When we find something good, we’re true to it

we get a song that is about having ideals and principles.  Except, of course quite a bit of the song is not like this (or at least doesn’t seem to be like this).

For example

Quick like a flash, we got to border that bus
Go down on the hump and screw it

On the other hand for a very short set of lyrics there is a lot here that is obscure, such as

Then pull in or out and paint ’em blue
Put a bow tie on ’em, and sock it

I suspect the most likely explanation of this song is that Dylan was simply jotting down lines, and would have then edited some out, having decided what the song was going to be about – if anything.  What influences us of course is the music that has now been added – music which takes the song in a very particular direction.   But to see what Dylan meant we really do need to go back just to the lyrics.

I’ll settle for it being just a sketch, which in other circumstances might have donated lines to other songs.   And it sure would have been good to have seen a whole song based around

We don’t need your opinions take a look at us
When we find something good, we’re true to it

A criticism of the ever changing world of politicians perhaps.

———-

by Jochen Markhorst

Dylan himself is not too flattered when he is compared to a clown or a joker. In 2015 the manuscript of “American Pie” is auctioned (for $1.2 million), and author Don McLean finally, after 44 years of stubborn silence, elaborates on the meaning of the lyrics. Not in detail, but still…

McLean is interviewed in the catalog, he talks about inspiration, genesis, message and morality of the legendary song, but tacitly leaves the deciphering of cryptic metaphors to the catalog’s author. The King means Elvis, obviously, Helter Skelter refers to the murderous maniac Charles Manson and yes, the jester on the sidelines in a cast is Bob Dylan.

Two years later, interviewer Bill Flanagan confronts the elderly bard:

In Don McLean’s “American Pie“, you’re supposed to be the jester.

Yeah, Don McLean, “American Pie”, what a song that is. A jester? Sure, the jester writes songs like “Masters of War”, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”, “It’s Alright, Ma” – some jester. I have to think he’s talking about somebody else. Ask him.

Flanagan lets the subject rest, but he could also have mentioned Lennon, who in 1980 called his old Beatles song “I’m A Loser” a song from his ‘Dylan period’ because the word ‘clown’ appears in it. If Dylan rejects a comparison with a jester, he has in any case made the use of the words joker, jester and clown salonfähig; according to Lennon, it was rather artsy-farty before Dylan used it in lyrics.

Lennon has a point. In Hard Rain there is already one sobbing in an alley, who later, in “Stuck Inside Of Mobile” turns out to be Shakespeare (with his pointed shoes and bells), in “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Like A Rolling Stone”, “All Along The Watchtower”, “Queen Jane Approximately”, “Wedding Song”, “Abandoned Love”… clowns, jokers and harlequins indeed are popular supporting actors in Dylan’s songs.

And of course the climax is that enigmatic, wonderful, directionless song from the early 80s, “Jokerman”.

It is an intriguing role, the elusive, romping around court jester.  Especially for an elusive, self-proclaimed apolitical song and dance man. The court jester does not belong anywhere, seems to be somewhere at the bottom of the social ladder, but on the other hand he is the only one who, with impunity, can mock, criticize and contradict the highest authorities, up to and including the king. The poet Dylan who, certainly in the early 80s, is quite obsessed with right or wrong, faith or disbelief, all or nothing (as Pope Francis says), a poet who seems to posit with inner conviction: there is no neutral ground… that poet will be fascinated by such a social aberration. But it seems to go wrong if he promotes the outsider, that attention junk on the sidelines, to leading actor.

The poet recognizes this, in the SongTalk interview with Paul Zollo in 1991:

Dylan: That’s a song that got away from me. Lots of songs on that album [Infidels] got away from me. They just did.
ST: You mean in the writing?
Dylan: Yeah. They hung around too long. They were better before they were tampered with. Of course, it was me tampering with them. [Laughs] Yeah. That could have been a good song. It could’ve been.
ST: I think it’s tremendous.
Dylan: Oh, you do? It probably didn’t hold up for me because in my mind it had been written and rewritten and written again. One of those kinds of things.

So Dylan himself writes the song off, and that is a bit too radical. The opening, for example, is truly beautiful, and still holds:

Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Distant ships sailing into the mist

Words that evoke a poetic scene and the promise of an autumnal story. Perhaps about an abandoned lover who is feeding the seagulls on the beach, it is foggy, the lighthouse is burning, at sea the ships disappear out of sight. Word choice provides the misty, ambiguous Dylanesque connotation; Jesus stood on the water and brake the bread, the poet paraphrases Ecclesiastes 11:1 (‘cast thy bread upon the waters’), the lighthouse is an ‘idol with an iron head and glowing eyes‘, the disappearing ships suggest that the protagonist has had to bid a definitive farewell.

Likewise, the lines after that are from a Dylan in his usual, unusual form, a sample of the cherry-picking thief of thoughts whom a Nobel Prize will be awarded. Born with a snake in both fists refers to Heracles (not entirely correct, the snakes attack Heracles in his cradle, not at birth) and thus elaborates on that image of Jesus in the opening line, who after all also has a God as father and an earthly woman as a mother.

Born while a hurricane was blowing, oddly enough evokes “Jumping Jack Flash” (‘I was born in a cross-fire hurricane’) – here it is starting to get surprising. And freedom is just around the corner has the same aphoristic power as the other, antique one-liners scattered over Infidels (Samuel Johnson’s They say that patriotism is the last refuge / To which a scoundrel clings from “Sweetheart Like You”, for example) and which we will encounter more in this particular song.

A second eyebrow raising, after Jumping Jack, then is caused by that seemingly completely random inserted antique one-liner in the second verse, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Originally from Alexander Pope (from the poem An Essay on Criticism, 1711), a writer whose influence is identifiable more than once in Dylan’s oeuvre.

More popular is the quote as a song title – in 1940 Johnny Mercer writes “Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear To Tread)” and Dylan is undoubtedly familiar with the versions by Ricky Nelson (who scored a big hit in 1963), by Elvis and of course Sinatra’s hit single from 1940. In between, artists like Tony Martin, Glenn Miller, Etta James and Brook Benton also hit the charts with their versions, so it is most likely that the daring fools and the fearful angels crept under his skin through all that airplay.

It is an elegant, somewhat old-fashioned but beautifully packaged aphorism, no doubt about it, but any correlation with the rest of this verse, or with the lyrics at all, is hard to find. And with that, Dylan’s own observation, that’s a song that got away from me, is illustrated.

The lyrics are full of granite verse lines (‘the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame‘), poetic pearls (‘So swiftly the sun sets in the sky, / You rise up and say goodbye to no one‘) and dark, apocalyptic, Hard Rain-like imagery (‘False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin, / Only a matter of time ’til night comes steppin’ in‘), but unlike in Dylan’s Great Masterpieces it does not come together, there is no coherence.

Songs like “Hard Rain,” or a “Shelter From The Storm”, or a “Things Have Changed”, to name just three random examples, also consist of an accumulation of seemingly unrelated images, one-liners and aphorisms, but from that a comprehensive picture rises, which has a coherence that keeps the listener captive.

Inadvertently, this lack of direction is illustrated by the many, many attempts of interpretation, discussions and polemics among both the fans and the professionals: no common thread is detectable.

The mere mention of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah‘, for example, leads to derailing discussions about whether the poet can be accused of homophobia. The multitude of biblical references is a godsend to the stubborn faction Christian Dylanologists who pertinently want to prove in every verse that Dylan is a God-sent evangelist, that Dylan the Poet is actually Apostle Robertus, an edifying manipulator of crowds.

And of course the title ‘Jokerman’ also opens floodgates. The desperate exegetes argue that “Jokerman” is a work closed within itself; the title then reveals that the entire lyric is a prank from that joker, who fools us by suggesting that a completely meaningless text has a deeper meaning. Others who also see the key in the nature of the fool produce diluted interpretations of that view. The joker represents Man, who can be both a saint and a sinner, just like the joker in the card game can take on any colour. Or Dylan paints a self-portrait: after all, he too is a manipulator of crowds, takes on many forms (‘shedding off one more layer of skin’) and believes in the laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

Oh well. It is indeed a song that slips through the fingers. The music is beautiful enough – the live debut of the song, on television in David Letterman’s show with remarkable accompaniment by members of the unknown Latino punk band The Plugz, the outtakes of Infidels or the final album version; all equally compelling.

Still, there are hardly any covers. Apparently the colleagues do not get a grip on it either. The contribution of the obscure Built To Spill from Idaho to the sympathetic tribute project Bob Dylan In The 80s: Volume One (2014) is based on that Letterman version and is very nice.

Curious is the ‘cover’ by an Indian club of musicians, Divana from Rajasthan, on the equally curious project From Another World: A Tribute To Bob Dylan (2013). On that album, world musicians from different corners of the planet (Cuba, Egypt, Romania, Iraq) play Dylan’s oeuvre on traditional instruments, with at least intriguing results. The Dylan songs are usually unrecognizable, sometimes hilarious (“I Want You” by the Burma Orchestra Saing Waing from Myanmar, for example), but still, yes … intriguing is the best description.

The only really pleasant, recognizable and above all successful cover is from an old friend: Eliza Gilkyson on her partly in the Netherlands, partly in the US recorded live album Your Town Tonight (2017). Gilkyson turns it into a pleasant swinging country ballad, and surprisingly, that fits the song perfectly.

You might also enjoy…

Jokerman: the meaning of the music and the lyrics

By Larry Fyffe

The visions of singer/singwriter Bob Dylan are best described as Gnostic. Tangled as he is in an enclosed physical space of darkness, Dylan seeks to escape by means of his works of art to the light of a spiritual eternity, to soar on the wings of his one true love, and render some meaning, through his conscious and subconscious mind, to a Universe that has none; to go where no popular artist has gone before:

My love, she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true like ice, like fire
People carry roses
And make promises by the hour
My love, she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero)

Apparently, God’s an Existentialist, and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are on His side:

Now, Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
She shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds her mirror
(Leonardo Cohen: Suzanne)

Many of Dylan’s double-edged song lyrics show existence on earth to be absurd; it’s a dark place, worthy of light-hearted, and dark-hearted humour – filled with flowers, garbage, and puns:

I took out my little penknife
And showed it to this rake
He looked at me as if to say
You’re making a mistake
(Bob Dylan et al: Hidee Hidee Ho)

Bob Dylan, big hearted though he may be, doesn’t overlook the fact that the world is one of violence and unfaithfulness, of knives and roses; he cuts you up with his pen, and then he stabs you with a big Jim Bowie knife:

The next day was hangin’ day
The sky was overcast and black
Big Jim lay covered up
Killed by a penknife in the back
And Rosemary on the gallows
She didn’t even blink
The hangin’ judge was sober
He hadn’t had a drink
The only person missin’ on the scene
Was the Jack Of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

Other times, it’s Merry Laughter who gets you in the guts:

I said, “Tell me what I want”
She say, “You probably want hard-boiled eggs”
I said, “That’s right, bring me some”
She says, “We ain’t got any, you picked the wrong time to come”
(Bob Dylan: Highlands)

And if you like variety:

Well, I asked for something to eat
I’m hungry as a hog
So I get brown rice, seaweed
And a dirty hot dog
(Bob Dylan: On The Road Again)

But in all seriousness – don’t call me Shirley, and don’t shoot the piano player:

Where the old drugstore was
Is now a museum
Everyone’s changed
You can hardly see’em
All the piano players
Have gone off to war
[Bob Dylan et al: Mr. Alice (Shirley Temple) Doesn’t Live Here Anymore]

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

This is, according to the record kept by my computer, article number 1000 on Untold Dylan.   The very first article  a review of Mississippi – one of the all time great Dylan compositions in my opinion.

Article number 1000 however doesn’t have the same pazzazz in its lyrical creation.  There is no “Every step of the way, you walk the line”.  No quartet of lines that just stick forever in the mind like

Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around

No, what we have here are, well, lines that simply don’t tell me anything much.  And let me emphasis at once that this is just my view – I’ll be delighted to get a deeper vision of this song if you can show me the way in.

Take the opening lines for example

There are many kinds of fish that swim in the sea
There’s others that swim in the dark
And of those troupers and trouts and dolphins and whales
The one you must watch is the shark

The reality is that Taylor Goldsmith doesn’t really have too much to work with here.  (He also worked on “Kansas City,” “Liberty Street,” “When I Get My Hands on You,” “Florida Key,” and “Diamond Ring,”  and performed on bass, guitar, mellotron, organ, and piano).  But here there is nothing much – so full marks for having a go.

Here are the full lyrics – and if you don’t know the result of the music you might like to have a read through first to think what you might have done with this…

There are many kinds of fish that swim in the sea
There’s others that swim in the dark
And of those troupers and trouts and dolphins and whales
The one you must watch is the shark

Card shark (yes, m’am)
Get ‘m in the nose
That ol’ card shark

Now I sat me down to have some fun
I jumped in the tank for a spell
I boogalooed in the bunkhouse and saw some bandits on the run
I went down to get water from the well

Card shark (yes, m’am)
Get ‘m in the nose
That ol’ card shark

Now set ‘m up, Samba
Sit on it awhile
Toss in the towel and have a kick
Stick it in the rear and roar for a bit
And waddle down the road like a brick

Card shark (yes, m’am)
Get ‘m in the nose
That ol’ card shark

I have to say that faced with such lyrics it is hard to imagine what anyone could do with them to create a piece worthy of being on an album.  Indeed one wonders if Bob actually looked at the notebook before giving permission for the band to set to work.

I mean would you want to be known for those lyrics?

So there you have it.

I am not too sure if anyone else has attempted to do a review of the song – but if so, maybe they could make more of it than I can.   Anyway, there it is, article number 1000.   Card Shark.

If you have been, thank you for reading.   The full list of the New Basement Tape songs with links to the reviews appears in the 1967 section of Dylan in the 60s.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

We owe the thin, wild, mercury sound to a flash of  inspiration from producer Bob Johnston. After exhausting, unsatisfactory and mostly unsuccesful recording sessions at the Columbia studios in New York, Johnston proposes to move to the CBS studios in Nashville and to return to the recordings over there, but this time with seasoned session musicians from the country world. An unorthodox idea, to put it mildly.

The super cool New York hipcat Dylan making music with friendly, stetson wearing porch crackers in lumberjack shirts? Manager Albert Grossman foresees an image catastrophe and sends for the producer: “If you ever mention Nashville to Dylan again, you’re gone.”

But Dylan is up for it, and on Valentine’s Day 1966 the sessions begin. With on day one, after “Fourth Time Around”, “Visions Of Johanna”, the song that has been keeping him busy for months – but for which he can not find the je-ne-sais-quoi.

On The Cutting Edge the process of creating becomes almost tangible. Disc 9 and 10 contain the recordings from New York, from which we already have heard take 8 (the one from No Direction Home), and the difference is, indeed, enormous. In New York the band remains sharp, edgy, hard-rocking, but also a bit nagging, whining.

The exceptional class of the song is apparent from the start, from the very first rehearsal, and from take 4 the performance is already much more than acceptable – in terms of drive and dynamics clearly still within the scope of Highway 61 Revisited, with the addition of a Stones-like energy. Most of all in the rhythm section, with a distinctive, exciting, rolling bass part by Rick Danko and poisonous, gritty slashing by drummer Bobby Gregg. The vicious stabs from Robbie Robertson’s guitar also seem suspiciously similar to what Brian Jones sometimes displays with The Stones. Wonderful enough, and on this path a rock classic like a “Gimme Some Lovin'” is emerging – only a bit more poetic, obviously.

But it is not what Dylan hears in his head. Irritated, he breaks off take 6. “No! That’s not the sound, that’s not it.” He strikes another chord, looking for words to make clear what he wants to achieve. “It’s not hard rock. The only thing in it that’s hard is Robbie.”

The band starts to play again, but now Dylan suddenly notices at least one weak spot: the bass. He wants to get rid of that driving, hectic avalanche: “In stead of bammbammbamm just baaahm.”

Danko bammbamms again.

“No, no: baaahm!”

Danko goes baaahm one time, Dylan is satisfied, so here we go again. And Danko just plays the same old thing over again, only a bit softer. The irritation in Dylan’s voice is audible.

From the eighth take, the harshness slowly dwindles. The harpsichord is a bit more pronounced, Robertson refrains, but strangely enough, Dylan sings now more rushed. At take 13 the song is almost completely relying on the keys; the harpsichord is now the turbine, Al Kooper on the organ sets the lyrical accents. The drummer is domesticated by now, but Rick Danko will not be curtailed. Up until the last attempt in New York, the fourteenth take, the bass continues to hit more than two notes per beat.

Dylan gives up.

Three months later, journalist Shelton accompanies Dylan in a two-engine Lockheed Lodestar, a private plane. The recordings for Blonde On Blonde have been successfully completed in Nashville. Looking back at the virtually fruitless sessions in New York, Dylan analyzes: “Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn’t get one song … It was the band. But you see, I didn’t know that. I didn’t want to think that.“

But it is true, and Bob Johnston understood that perfectly – after the meager result of those ten sessions, the despondent Dylan is open to any suggestion, even to go to that studio in the outback where those hillbillies record their songs about adulterous tramps.

Right from the start in Nashville, the dreamy, mercury-like beauty descends. Robertson’s electric guitar has retracted its nails, Koopers organ now has a thin, vibrating sound and above all: Joe South’s bass, the beating heart of this Johanna, shakes loose the subcutaneous dramatic power of the song.

A false start, an abortive attempt, another false start and then the first complete take is immediately the final take (the first one where Dylan plays his harmonica intro). Dylan’s relief in the last bars is unmistakable.

The poetic power of the lyrics is undisputed. But on what Dylan expresses, we still do not agree, after more than half a century. Of course, the richness of the full-bodied text cordially invites to industrious work by ambitious Dylan interpreters. Look, Greil Marcus says, the heating pipes of the Chelsea Hotel still cough today. And there a revision of the Mona Lisa has really been made; ‘The one with the moustache‘ is from Dadaist Marcel Duchamp. Johanna is the Anglo-Saxon translation for the Hebrew word for hell, Gehenna. And the jewels and binoculars on the donkey have almost reached a proverbial status by now – but we will never have a clue on what exactly that proverb expresses.

Biographical interpretation remains the most popular. The discussion focuses on the questions about who Louise is, and who Johanna could be. Joan Baez and Sara Lownds? Edie Sedgwick and Suze Rotolo? In any case, the poet sketches a contrast between a sensuous, present Louise and an unattainable, idealized Johanna, and lards the sketch with dream images, beautiful rhyme play and impressionistic atmospheres.

In the genesis weeks, November ’65, the working title of the song is “Seems Like A Freeze-Out”. This confirms the idea that Dylan wants to paint an impression here – a sketchy representation that freezes a fleeting moment from a hectic life. Completely in line with what he promises a year before this in the liner notes of Bringing It All Back Home:

“I am about t sketch you a picture of what goes on around here sometimes. tho I don’t understand too well myself what’s really happening”

“It’s so visual,” the maestro adds (in the booklet with Biograph, 1985).

Above all, however, it is true lyricism; the poet expresses emotions. Influence of the admired poète maudit Rimbaud is demonstrable; the disorientation of the narrator, the chaos and his loneliness, his melancholy insight that he loses something he never had. Similar, for instance, to Le bateau ivre, that melancholy, lonely, chaotic masterpiece of the French symbolist:

Si je désire une eau d'Europe, c'est la flache

Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé

Un enfant accroupi plein de tristesses, lâche

Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai.

(If I want one pool in Europe, it’s the cold

Black pond where into the scented night

A child squatting filled with sadness launches

A boat as frail as a May butterfly.)

And, like Rimbaud, Visions can not be interpreted, but it does bear the scent of a narrative – the lyrics suggest that something interesting, something intimate is being told here. Dylan the Poet is here at his best. He sometimes misfires with lyrics that seem to have been written with his Dylan-O-Matic on the écriture automatique-pilot (“I Wanna Be Your Lover”, to name just one example) – admittedly atmospheric, visual, but contentless sequences of unfathomable associations, with extremes into tiring nebula. But Visions balances between narrative lyricism and surrealistic word play, balancing on the edge of clear, lucid balladry and hermetic, closed poetry… which contributes to the nocturnal alienation the work manages to grasp, those wee small hours of Sinatra.

In short, “Visions Of Johanna” is a fascinating masterpiece, the Renoir in Dylan’s catalog, the favourite song of fans and connoisseurs like biographer Clinton Heylin and the English court poet, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.

Remarkably many colleagues dare to risk an interpretation of Dylan’s tour de force. Robyn Hitchcock claims that Johanna made him want to become a songwriter, and he is certainly not the only one who puts the song on a pedestal – though his airy, soft version really is not his most successful tribute. Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia approaches the song each performance as a relic and sometimes loses himself in trance-like sessions that can last more than fifteen minutes, Marianne Faithfull emerges out of the gutter in 1971 and leaves heroin and Mick Jagger behind to record a creaking, but moving “Visions Of Johanna”.

The most successful cover, arguably, is from Chris Smither, on his album Leave The Light On (2006). Smither sings a little sloppy, which works rather poetic, plays a languid, smooth guitar part underneath it, and while gently rippling onwards, producer David Goodrich adds more guitars, mandolin, accordion to the hypnotic waltz, until the melancholy drips out of the loudspeaker boxes. Far from thin and wild and mercury, granted, but sure as Gehenna quite Rimbaudesque.

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