Untold Dylan

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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Visions of Johanna: The Old Crow Medicine Show version of Dylan’s masterpiece has me in tears

Visions of Johanna: the meaning of the music, lyrics and re-writes

by Larry Fyffe

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan confirmed yesterday that next year’s
Never-Ending Tour will include concerts on a number of the planets that make up our solar sysem.

Bob comments in an interview about his planned interplanetary mission:

Don’t know what I’d do without it
Without this love that we call ours
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ but the moon and stars

Our intrepid detectives at the ‘Untold Dylan’ offices in New York City have got their hands on the setlists, each designed especially for the planet visited. Every list has a song that pays tribute to the planet they land on. Dylan and His Band will perform the song right after their announcer says, “And now for all you Martians (or Venusians, etc.) out there in the audience, here’s Earth’s recording artist Bob Dylan!”

On Mercury, the planet which in Classical Mythology symbolizes the often- shot-at Messenger, the song will be:

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who do they think could bury you?
(Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

The inhabitants of the planet Mercury have ringing voics, and, especially the females, are known for their smoke-filled eyes.

The planet Venus is a symbol for Sex where Dylan will sing:

Got to hurry back to my hotel room
Where I got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised to be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece
(When I Paint My Masterpiece)

Venus is famous for its warm hotels, many of which house brothels. Sandro Botticelli created the famous painting ‘Birth Of Venus’.

The red planet Mars be a symbol of War; the opening song will be:

The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh, the country was young
With God on its side
(With God On Our Side)

The ‘Red Indians’ on the planet Mars were completely wiped out, but the Martians showed their deep remorse by naming a chocolate bar after them.

The planet Jupiter symbolizes the greatest of all the gods -Zeus; Bob Dylan plans to open the concerts there with:

They shaved he head
She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo
A messenger arrived with a black nightingale
I seen her on the stairs and I couldn’t help but follow
Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil
(Changing Of The Guards)

Apollo’s the god of music. We’ve learned that Bob’s had a vision that a messenger from Mercury might show up, and tip off Jupiter’s King to have security guards keep an eye on the Queen after Dylan finishes his performace.

The mission to the planet Saturn is cancelled due to slow ticket sales: inhabitants there have no ears. A Dylan critic wonders why that would make any difference.

The concerts on the mission to Neptune, the planet that in Classical Mythology symbolizes the Sea, will start with:

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody’s shouting
‘Which side are you on?’
(Desolation Row)

We have no information whether or not there’ll be performances on Uranus and Pluto, and for that we apologize to our readers.

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 song from the New Basement Tapes has the music written by Marcus Mumford, who of course also performs it.

In an interview in Mojo he said, “There’s a conversation within the song, so I enjoyed singing as the object and the subject.   That’s a style you find through reading people like T.S. Eliot who jump around in conversations all the time, and Dylan does that all the time in songs. It also has a kind of outlaw feel to it, and that was fun to play with.”

Now Mr Mumford knows lots of stuff that I don’t, and before I saw his comment my guess was that one day Dylan suddenly thought of the line “Never fall in love with a stranger” and then started sketching out ideas around that.  Had he wanted to finish the song and add the music he would, I suspect, have changed some of the opening lines…. Either to make it make more sense, or to make it more convoluted all the way through.

As it is through the first and second verse we seem to be in a classic lost love song but then after the “if I can’t resist” interlude we get

She knows that our love more than any river flows
And I’m done now, all of my intentions are exposed
Not hidden in my clothes
Or in between my toes

I wanna tombstone pearl handle revolver
Don’t wanna meet a pale man with a halo in his hair

And we are in a very different province, quite possibly a different country and a different time.  Are we really jumping fromthe 20th century back to the Wild West?

So I get the feeling (and of course this is just me rambling around within the lyrics) that Bob would have either cut this section to keep the song very simple and just about the stranger, or taken this section as the core of the song, maybe kept the opening line but made these surreal themes of the revolver and the halo and substance of the song, and explored them in all the other lines.   But that is just my feeling.

As it is we get a mix of lines.  And maybe a reader more versed in American meanings can indeed tell me that there is a particular symbolic signifcance in the gun that the singer seeks (I did a bit of looking up but couldn’t exactly place that model revolver with any famous man in the Wild West.)

So for me the lack of connection between the everyday-ness of the opening has to be resolved in the Wild West – the world of “howdee stranger” and the inward looking nature of the small towns portrayed in Westerns.

But that’s the limit of my knowledge of the era, so I really do need help here if sense can be made of the whole song.

Here are the lyrics in full

On the other hand if this is, as I suspect, very much an unfinished piece, pushing meaning into it is going to a false lead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LDIZlN87fc

Musically though the highlight for me is the A E B chord change with “not hidden in my clothes” etc – that suddenly pulls us up straight and forces one’s attention on the lyrics.  If only I could make sense of the lyrics, or if only Bob had finished them off, if my supposition is correct, then it would move from being an enjoyable outing to a moment of considerable significance in Bob’s writing.

Or maybe it is not meant to make any sense at all.

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

Man Of Constant Sorrow, the autobiography of Ralph Stanley (co-written with Eddie Dean, 2007), is a somewhat two-faced affair. The legendary bluegrass pioneer is a humble, down-to-earth and simple man, but emphasizes that so often that it is getting immodest, self-congratulatory and exuberant. It’s the fans, a grateful elderly Stanley says, who keep him sharp and lively. Fans like Bob Dylan he can not resist adding, a bit boastfully. And he likes to tell that he has recorded “The Lonesome River” together with Dylan. He tells it two times, and both times Stanley mentions: “He said singing with me was the highlight of his career.”

Also twice he recounts the anecdote that Dylan sent him a telegram on the occasion of the celebration in Nashville of his fiftieth anniversary in the music business, in 1996. (The first radio show of The Stanley Brother And The Clinch Mountain Boys was December 26, 1946, WCYB in Bristol, Tennessee). The second time he quotes the contents of that telegram:

“dear dr. ralph.

the fields have turned brown.

not for you, though.

you’ll live forever.

best wishes, bob dylan.”

And with the same childish pride he tells us about that time ‘not too long ago‘ that an anonymous stranger with sunglasses and a hoodie visits the memorial at his birthplace, takes photos and at the local grocery store asks for directions to Ralph Stanley’s home. “Don’t you know who that was,” the shelf stacker asks the cashier, “that was Bob Dylan.”

Boastful or not, Ralph Stanley has, of course, every right to be proud of his career and Bob Dylan’s admiration. That admiration is deep and sincere. In Theme Time Radio Hour radio producer Dylan plays five times a song by The Stanley Brothers, the last time (episode 72, More Birds) introduced by a rousing recommendation:

“We played The Stanley Brothers many many times. You can’t go around when you see a Stanley Brothers record. If you’re at a flea market or a yard sale, and you see a record with their name on it, it’s gotta be good.”

In 1997, Dylan plays three songs from the brothers on stage (“I’ll Not Be A Stranger”, “Stone Walls And Steel Bars” and “White Dove”), the cover of “Man Of Constant Sorrow” on his very first album is due to his love for the Stanleys and in the Newsweek interview (1997) he calls songs like “Let Me Rest On A Peaceful Mountain” his ‘religion’. “The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”

A ‘lexicon‘, a dictionary rather is “Highway Of Regret”, the Stanley Brothers song from which he uses the opening and the third line for “Ain’t Talkin'” (Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’ and Heart’s burning, still yearning), and borrows the second line (Down that highway or regret) for one of his biggest hits, for “Make You Feel My Love”.

The metaphor immediately stands out, among the little original, tear-jerker poetry and worn-out images. Ironically, the lovingly stolen highway or regret is still the most dylanesque, is a metaphor like Desolation Row, Heartbreak Hill, river of tears and Rue Morgue Avenue, which in turn are all probably located in the vicinity of Presley’s Lonely Street.

The sweet character of the rest of the lyrics is also noticed by the most successful ambassador of the song, Adele. Her reservations initially concern her unwillingness to include a cover on her debut album (19, 2008). But her manager is a huge Dylan fan and keeps on bugging her, until she finally listens to that song.

“And then I heard it in New York when he played it for me, and it just really touched me. It’s cheesy, but I think it’s just a stunning song, and it really just summed up everything that I’d been trying to write in my songs.”

Because of that kitschiness the song is usually not very popular with the seasoned fans. The most disappointed do not shun the big words, on fan forums like expectingrain: ‘horrible’, ‘indefensibly mediocre’, ‘disgusting sentimentality’. The slightly more loyal fans sputter that the song is or can be ‘quite nice’ (and refer to live recordings on which things are not that bad), a part hides behind the dubious compliment that the song is a guilty pleasure and a faction pleads that “Make You Feel My Love” truly is a very good song.

The professionals are equally unimpressed. Clinton Heylin dismisses the song briefly and concisely; with dedain he states that it indeed belongs “on a Billy Joel album” (Billy Joel is in fact the first who releases the song, earlier than Dylan, on Greatest Hits Volume III, 1997) and that Dylan’s live performances do not reveal any hidden depths either. Greil Marcus is full of praise for Time Out Of Mind, but ignores this song completely, Greg Kot in Rolling Stone thinks that the album’s spell is broken by this ‘spare ballad, undermined by greetingcard lyrics’ and an acid Ian Bell snaps that the song ‘should have been shipped off instantly, gratis, to Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, and the rest of the balladeers who would take the vapid things to their sentimental hearts.’

That seems a bit all too bold and short-sighted. The song is really not that trivial. The music, for example, manages to push enough buttons to let “Make You Feel My Love” slowly but surely enter the canon. Among the up to hundreds of artists who now have the song on the repertoire are certainly not the least; In addition to the aforementioned megastars such as Adele, Billy Joel and Garth Brooks, it has also been picked up by colleagues like Neil Diamond, Bryan Ferry, Joan Osborne, Timothy B. Schmit and Ed Sheeran. Artists about whom one may have an opinion, but in any case musicians who have an understanding of pop music, catchy melodies and appealing compositions.

The indestructible melody Dylan seems to have borrowed largely from a song that apparently buzzes through his head: “You Belong To Me”.

“You Belong To Me” is a beautiful song from 1952, which Dylan probably admires in the performance of Dean Martin – or else the hit version of Jo Stafford, or Gene Vincent’s rock ‘n roll rendition, or the one of The Duprees, or Bing Crosby, or Patsy Cline … it is a song that is often recorded and is often a hit in the years that Dylan’s music taste is formed, so under his skin it is anyhow. He himself records it in 1992 for Good As I Been To You, but ultimately does not select it. Dylan’s recording eventually surfaces in ’94, on the soundtrack of Oliver Stone’s film hit Natural Born Killers.

Likewise, arguments can be cited against the supposed sweetness of the text. Admittedly, on hearing the song for the first time it does come across as the work of a lazy lyricist who dashes off a bunch of clichés. But at a second listening, and especially when dry re-reading the lyrics, something starts to gnaw. The narrator quite pushy, is he not? And is it not strange that he makes no mention whatsoever of his beloved, not a single word, apart from the intriguing fact that she apparently has some serious doubts (‘you haven’t made your mind up yet‘). Furthermore, the narrator merely sums up what he would do to make her ‘feel his love’. And for that matter: that ‘I will make you feel my love‘ does not sound not very tender either – certainly not after such a dubious vow like ‘I could hold you for a million years‘.

By then, one also starts to notice that it is nothing but abysmal misery. The rain hits her face, the whole world is nagging at her, tears, hunger, black and blue, storm and a ‘highway of regret’… and yet this girl still has her reservations about his ‘warm embrace’, his consolation and any of his offers at all. Smothering, to say the least, if not: stalker alert. No, perhaps it’s a good thing that this lady refuses to commit.

The majority of the covers are pretty much identical. Almost everyone chooses the same pace and similar arrangements, and sugar prevails.

Of all those uniform operations, Adele is indeed one of the finest; the English talent really is a great singer and she seems to have an innate, superior music feeling.

Behind that big leading group of superstars marches a huge platoon of artists of the second category. Ane Brun from Norway (who by the way performs one of the most beautiful versions of “She Belongs To Me”) does it beautifully, fragile and lonely at the Nobel banquet in 2016, much more poignant than the posed kitsch parade of another Girl From The North Country, Sissel Kyrkjebø in 2014.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WGVi72gAdY

A second absolute hit also comes from Scandinavia: the Swedish Pernilla Andersson manufactures a heartbreaking, sparsely arranged “Make You Feel My Love”, driven by a muted guitar, in 2004 on her album Cradlehouse.

The crown is for a man, this time. Josh Kelley from Georgia is a reasonably successful singer-songwriter who wins with his contribution to the soundtrack of the film A Cinderella Story (2004). With some good will one might hear how Jakob Dylan would address this song from his father; Josh’s voice sounds like him and Josh opts for a Wallflowers approach: prominent drums (great drumming arrangement, by the way), sound effects, organ and electric guitars – and no swooning with violins and sensitive piano tinkling or stuff.

Boy, what a most beautiful song of constant sorrow it turns out to be.

Make you feel my love: the meaning of the music and the lyrics

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.

Bob Dylan And Mark Twain (Part III)

by Larry Fyffe

Under the influence of Mark Twain, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan pokes a bit of fun at those who take biblical and mythological tales as actual happenings rather than as figurative explanations of how mankind’s worldly existence came about.

According to the Bible, a settled farmer by the name of Cain, kills his brother Abel, a nomadic wanderer:

All except for Cain and Abel
And the Hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

Eve gives birth to a third son to take the place of her dead one:

And Adam knew his wife again
And she bare a son, and called his name Seth
‘For God’, said she, ‘hath appointed me another seed
Instead of Abel, whom Cain slew’
(Genesis 4:25)

Apparently, Seth is not that much like Cain – he’s practical for sure, but also adventurous, a seeker of knowledge, and, like Abel, a star gazer – he has a Gnostic bent, and considers time to be more than just a seasonal thing as farmer Cain views it.

For Seth, tIme operates in cycles on a larger scale, analogous to little wheels turning inside of a big wheel. Jealous Christians, those dogmatic anyway, come to view time as linear with a beginning and an end. Albert Einstein turns back the clock, and steals Seth’s non-Christian cosmology:

Einstein disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

Seth of the Bible is not to be confused with the Seth (Set) of Egyptian mythology. The Hebrews escape from Egypt, and it’s ‘religion’ wherein jealous Seth kills his brother Osiris who’s married to their sister Isis; in one version of the story, Seth dumps Osiris in a coffin. In the song below, lyrics can be interpreted as the narrator taking on the persona of Seth from Egyptian mythology:

I picked up his body, dragged him inside
Threw him down in the hole, and I put back the cover
I said a quick prayer, and I felt satisfied
Then I rode back to find Isis just to tell her I love her
(Bob Dylan et al: Isis)

Fortunately for mankind, Noah (a descendant of biblical Seth, and an ancestor of Abraham), inherits Seth’s practical skills and his adventurous spirit.

God decides to drown, along with everyone else, all of Cain’s descendants in a flood because they go too far in disobeying his directives; Noah is permitted to save himself, his wife, and all the animals on the Earth – including, supposedly, the American bison. Noah needs a really big boat:

Make thee an ark of gopher wood
Rooms shalt thou make in the ark
And shalt pitch it within and without with pitch ….
And of every living thing of all flesh
Two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark
To keep them alive with thee
They shall be male and female
(Genesis 6: 14,19)

Mark Twain’s ‘Letters From Earth’, as well as a traditional folk song, burlesques the tale of Noah’s ark:

The animals went in one by one
There’s one more river to cross
The elephant chewing a caraway bun
There’s one more river to cross
The animals went in two by two
The crocodile and the kangaroo …
The animals went in three by three
The tall giraffe and the tiny flea …
The animals went in four by four
The hippopotamus stuck in the door
(One More River – traditional)

In the song lyrics below, Bob Dylan alludes to ‘One More River’:

One by one, they followed the sun
One by on, until there were none
Two by two, to their lovers they flew
Two by two, into the foggy dew
Three by three, they danced on the sea
Four by four, they danced on the shore
(Bob Dylan: Two By Two)

The Dionysian eternal recurrence of mankind’s existence through earthy sexuality as expressed above in ‘Two By Two’, and not mankind’s ending up in some gentle afterlife in a sexless Heaven, is a theme Bob Dylan picks up from, among others, Dylan Thomas:

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way
Do not go gentle into that good night
(Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night)

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

It is an anecdote that Leonard Cohen likes to tell, apparently, for it can be read in many interviews. It refers to his late magnum opus, the wonderful song “Hallelujah”, the song that surprisingly but gradually climbed up from little-noticed album track (on Various Positions, 1984) to a classic, to one of his most loved and most covered (more than three hundred versions) songs.

That triumphal march begins in 1991, when John Cale wants to do the song for the tribute album I’m Your Fan. Cale notices at a concert that Cohen sings different words than on the record and he asks the Canadian for the correct lyrics. Cohen, who by his own account never could finish the song and would write over eighty couplets, faxes fifteen couplets.

Cale picks out five of them. “It was a long roll of fax paper. And then I chose whichever ones were really me. Some of them were religious, and coming out of my mouth would have been a little difficult to believe. I chose the cheeky ones.” This variant is picked up by Jeff Buckley, who records an unforgettable version for his first and only album, Grace from 1994. Ten years after his death in 1997, it is released as a single, after being included in Rolling Stone’s list of The Greatest Songs Of All Time (in 2004, at 259).

But Dylan deserves the credit for recognizing the greatness of the song much earlier. He sings “Hallelujah” as early as July 8, 1988, in Cohen’s hometown of Montreal and again a few weeks later, in Los Angeles. The men have known and appreciated each other for a long time, but this really flatters Cohen, which is why he brings it up regularly, in various interviews.

“That was a song that took me a long time to write. Dylan and I were having coffee the day after his concert in Paris a few years ago and he was doing that song in concert. And he asked me how long it took to write it. And I told him a couple of years. I lied actually. It was more than a couple of years.

Then I praised a song of his, “I and I”, and asked him how long it had taken and he said, ‘Fifteen minutes.’ [Laughter]”

It is true, there are many testimonies from bystanders who tell that Dylan so phenomenally fast dashes off song lyrics. George Harrison says that Dylan produces the world hit “Handle With Care” in a few minutes, close comrades-in-arms like Al Kooper, Kevin Odegard and Duke Robillard have throughout the decades all completely similar memories of a Dylan who, in between studio turbulence, card-playing musicians and tea ladies, aside at a coffee table quickly adds a verse or writes a complete song lyric, but still: Leonard Cohen inquires after the wrong song.

He should have asked about “Tangled Up In Blue”. That is the song that according to Dylan took him two years to write and ten years to live, and thereby he refers to his years of marriage with Sara Lownds.

“Tangled Up In Blue” opens Blood On The Tracks (1975), the record that, rightly or wrongly, is considered the most beautiful divorce record in pop history, and one of Dylan’s Great Masterpieces. Most of the lyrics on this album are poignant, moving, poetic and sometimes painfully clear, but this highly acclaimed Tangled is far from unambiguous.

This lack of clarity is first of all caused by the confusing use of personal pronouns (the nameless I, She and He) and secondly by the inconsistency in time, which leads to an ardent puzzling, cutting and pasting of interpreters in order to find a linear narrative. Verse sequence 3-4-5-6-1-2-7 then provides, with some inching, squeezing and pinching, a more or less coherent rise and fall of a love story. Other exegetes quote Dylan’s own words:

“I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it or see all of it together. I wanted that song to be like a painting.”

That does shed some light. “Tangled Up In Blue” poetically tells us that the storms of life leave their marks and that we are becoming a different person along the way. Dylan rightly chooses the collage technique and gives sufficient hints to justify a biographical interpretation. Sara was not only a model but also Playboy bunny (She was workin ‘in a topless place), and indeed still married when they first met. In his early years Dylan sometimes plays in a joint on Montague Street and he lives with a couple in the neighbourhood, he is originally from Minnesota (the Great North Woods) and recalls his Girl From The North Country. For the title explanation, Dylan has also lifted a more prosaic tip of the veil: to the journalist Ron Rosenbaum he reveals that he wrote the song after having immersed himself in the music of Joni Mitchell’s Blue for a weekend.

One could go on like this for a while, but it is not all too relevant for the lyrical power of this song. Dylan the Poet expresses here how this protagonist’s life too is defined by the oldest cliché, how a life can be summarised in the three words Searching For Love – love is all there is, as he sang a few years earlier. You find love, you lose it, and you go on. Keep on keepin’ on, headin’ for another joint.

To make it even more difficult for the Dylan interpreters: there is no song in his catalogue with which Dylan has scraped and tinkered so much. In September 1974 he records the first two versions, which still are largely told in the third person. There are some small textual differences between the two versions, the first version is ultimately chosen for the LP. Dylan then stays with his family in the North over Christmas. He shares the recordings from New York, a few hours before the records will be pressed, and brother David expresses concerns. Dylan agrees and re-records five songs with local musicians. Tangled receives the most radical make-over on all fronts (different keys, different instrumentation, tempo), and, by extension, also lyrically. That version is released on Blood On The Tracks.

In the following years, Dylan continues to rewrite and ultimately declares the 80s version (to be heard on Real Live from 1984) the final. Hardly any line is maintained in this re-issue. That is not the only clue to reveal Dylan’s own fascination; to this day the song belongs to his most performed. On the list of indefatigable Dylan watcher Olof Björner from Sweden it occupies the fourth place for years now, with more than a thousand performances, after “All Along The Watchtower”, “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Highway 61 Revisited”. Björner’s painstaking monk’s work registers all official concert performances since 1958. Statistically, Tangled should actually even rank a bit higher; the first fifteen songs on that list are, except for Tangled, all written between 1963 and 1968, and thus have a lead of up to twelve years. A “Blowin’ In The Wind”, for example, is twelve years older, but since long has been taken over – Dylan has sung “Tangled Up In Blue” over a hundred times more often than that monument.

And it does not stop there, Dylan’s own fascination. In his wonderful book Why Dylan Matters, Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas points out the return of the image of the waitress in 1997, in the overwhelming song “Highlands” on Time Out Of Mind. In the alienating intermezzo halfway through the song, in those seven couplets that create a kind of one-act play for two in an empty restaurant in Boston, we recognize the male protagonist from “Tangled Up In Blue”. He is in the ‘wrong time’, he picked the wrong time to come, says the waitress, who has thrown him back in time through her looks and behavior, back to 1974.

Just like her predecessor, she carefully studies the restaurant guest (She studied the lines on my face vs. She studied me closely), we are back in an empty catering facility and when he draws her portrait at her insistence, he must strangely enough draw it from memory, although she is still standing in front of him. There is absolutely no resemblance, she says a moment later, throwing the drawing back at him. On the contrary, the satisfied artist speaks to her, there most certainly is – after all, he has made a lifelike portrait of that waitress in that topless place. The final verse, when the waitress asks which female authors he has read, illustrates once again that the narrator is in a different time zone. “Erica Jong,” he answers triumphantly. Jong’s controversial Fear Of Flying is from 1973.

Fellow musicians share Dylan’s enthusiasm for the song. There are more than a hundred cover versions in circulation, but here too, more than ever, is the harsh truth: it is not easy to step out of the master’s shadow. Most artists fail to hold the tension, the urgency – if the artist, like Dylan, colours the seven couplets in the same way seven times, then it does require some mastery to avoid tediousness. Only the master craftsman is able to restrict himself, as Goethe taught, and here too only a few remain standing. Jerry Garcia, Dickey Betts and especially a remarkable Ben Sidran (Dylan Different, 2009) are doing very well.

The best cover though, by far, is from the Indigo Girls, on their live album 1200 Curfew (1995). Particularly respectful and lovingly executed, with a beautiful progression in the arrangement, tastefully dosed singing together and a very successful turnaround in rhythm and orchestration in the sixth verse (I lived with them on Montague Street) – they most certainly do not restrict themselves. And right they are.

Leonard Cohen never dared to. In 1985 “Tangled Up In Blue” is number two in his personal top five, as can be learned from the book In His Own Words by the devout Cohen fan Jim Devlin (number one is Ray Charles’ “Take These Chains From My Heart”) and the song is untouchable. Cohen often and heartily professes his awe for Dylan’s masterpiece, but not on stage. In interviews, yes. And majestic, poetic actually, is his commentary on Dylan’s Nobel Prize: It’s like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.

Elsewhere:

Dylan’s “Tangled up in blue”.  The meaning of the lyrics and music of the original version

Tangled up in Blue: Bob Dylan’s utterly transformed “Real Live” version

by Larry Fyffe

Who among us can resist munching on a pun? A sure food it is to shore up lyrics, according to singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. There’s more double-entendre word play in Dylan’s song lyrics than there are grains of sand fluttering on the branches of a beech tree.

Nod a ‘howdy’ to Buddy the Kid:

(Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan’s Blues)

Or try to measure up to Santa Claus, and the size of his bag of treats:

(Bob Dylan: On The Road Again)

Drop a line in; see whether or not the Fisherman’s Daughter bites:

(Bob Dylan: Golden Loom)

Visit the House across the road, and say ‘Hi’ to Heidi the Whore:

(Bob Dylan et al: Hidee Hidee Ho)

Metonymy is a trope that that substitutes an adjunct for the whole:

(Bob Dylan: Ballad Of A Thin Man)

Bob Dylan’s pen is punishing everybody:

(Bob Dylan: Tiny Montgomery)

Apparently, size matters:

(Bob Dylan: The Mighty Quinn)

Time to invite Our Lady of the Lay over for lunch:

(Bob Dylan: Lay Lady Lay)

Or, perhaps, take ol’ Mother Goose horseback riding in the park: 

(Bob Dylan: Country Pie)

Seriously, Dylan’s song lyrics are all messed up, and confused; the songster  simply oughta say what he’s talkin’ about. For example, I have no idea what ‘country pie’ in the above song actually means.

Maybe some of our ‘Untold’ readers can help us out.

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

“Lost on the River” is both the subtitle of The New Basement Tapes series, it is also one of the songs that exists in two forms – each utterly different from the other.  Number 12 is Elvis Costello’s version, Number 20 is by Rhiannon Giddens and Marcus Mumford, and although both work to the same set of lyrics they are two utterly different songs.

Here are the lyrics

The tears of a woman are hidden within
As she moves from one to the next, her spirit grows thin
And when she falls in love with one, it’s hard but it’s true
But it’s oh so much harder when that man is you

I got lost on the river, but I got found
I got lost on the river, but I didn’t drown

One stormy day I was out at sea
The waves they rolled and tumbled over me
I spied dry land and a tall pale tree
I knew that soon that’s where I’d like to be

My sweetheart left me for another one
And now I wait for the next rising sunI got lost on the river, but I got found
I got lost on the river, but I didn’t drown
I got lost on the river, but I didn’t go down
I got lost on the river, but I got found

What I found after listening to that track a couple of times was that although I was initially taken by surprise over the way the melody worked (I expected the second musical line to be a repeat of the first – how right they were not to give that) by the time the song finished it felt utterly natural.

Also I find the phrase “I got lost on the river” really poignant and meaningful – the symbolism rings true, and that is one of the things Dylan has always done so well; finding the phrase that has the whole variety of meanings that can take you anywhere.

This is a live version, with a long introductory section – it lasts one minute 40 seconds if you want to bypass it.  The instrumentation is particularly interesting because of the use of an electric cello – something I’ve not come across before.  I am not too sure about the effect – it seems to me to distract from the beauty of the song, but it certainly has an impact.

When I first came to Elvis Costello’s version (called #12) I surprised having heard the Giddens and  Mumford version, but I then found myself playing the Costello version far more than Giddens version.

But they have both evened out – and I’ve ended up very happy indeed that we have both versions to contemplate.  One day one, another day the other.  Somehow Costello seems to give a message of hope which isn’t in the Giddens version at all – at least as I hear it.  Same lyrics of course, different message.

The acoustics on the Costello live version are not so good but it’s still worth hearing.

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

A lot of great things can be said about “Blowin’ In The Wind” and in the Top 10 of the achievements of Dylan’s first classic is the fact that the song finally drove Graham Nash out of The Hollies. In his autobiography Wild Tales (2013), a rather embarrassing and humourless, but fascinating ego document in terms of rock music history, Nash recalls in Chapter 7 the run-up to the break. He gets to know David Crosby and makes a musical click, he falls in love with Joni Mitchell who overwhelms him with her songs, and at home in England he and his Hollies rise with “Jennifer Eccles” to the top of the hit parade. “It embarrassed me to hear that fucking song on the radio. Now we had to promote it as well. I felt like such a whore.”

In those days the boys propose to record a whole album with Dylan covers. Nash hesitates. Dylan is great, that is not the point, and David Crosby did great things with Dylan songs with his Byrds. “But an entire album of Dylan covers? Something about it sounded cheesy.” Eventually he is persuaded by producer Ron Richards, who does believe in it.

“But once we got into the studio, everything went wrong. The guys decided to make Dylan swing. The arrangements whitewashed the songs, giving them a slick, saccharine, Las Vegasy feel. They emasculated them, obliterated their power. We did a version of “Blowin’ in the Wind“ that sounded like a Nelson Riddle affair. It was a hatchet job, just awful.

“That was it, as far as I was concerned. No more Dylan. I put my foot down. I was convinced the Hollies had lost their focus. I thought we weren’t getting anywhere and perhaps we needed some time apart.”

The rest is history; Graham Nash fulfills his last obligations, The Hollies record the horrible Hollies Sing Dylan without him and by then he has left for America, to join David Crosby and Stephen Stills.

At the time of that Hollies cover the song is already the monument that it still is today and always will remain. “Blowin’ In The Wind” is what the Mona Lisa is to Da Vinci, Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’) to Shakespeare, the Symphony No. 9 in D minor to Beethoven and The Thinker to Rodin – not necessarily the best work of a genius artist, but the best known, the work that immortalises the artist.

The exceptional class of the work is recognized immediately after the conception. The most alert response is from The Chad Mitchell Trio, who records the song first, four months before Dylan. The record company does not dare to release it on single, being rather hesitant about the use of the word death in the song. Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman takes advantage of that blunder.

His artist menagerie also includes the successful trio Peter, Paul And Mary and that neat trio knows what to do with the song. Their serious, stately version is a huge hit and that brings in some money. To Dylan’s astonishment, as Peter Yarrow remembers: “I told Bob he might make $5,000 from the publishing rights. He was almost speechless; it seemed like a fortune.”

The song, the open and repeated tributes and recommendations by Peter, Paul And Mary and, later on, the promotion to protégé of Joan Baez, launch the career of the young bard. A few months later, at the Newport Folk Festival in July ’63, Dylan is already the undisputed crown prince of the folk community.

“Blowin’ In The Wind” is raging around the world by then and has already left a crater in the United States. The black community also picks up the song, probably in part due to the gospel undertones of the melody. It contributes to the unifying, universal power of the song – apart from the non-specific, poetic vagueness of the lyrics, the chosen music also has a race- and culture-transcending quality.

Coincidence, of course. Dylan has not planned this success and can not foresee that the song will grow into the hymn of the civil rights movement, of the Sixties as such, even. But: a calculating cold-blooded strategist could not have figured it out craftier. The melody comes from an old slave song from the nineteenth century, “No More Auction Block”, which Dylan admits easliy, like in the interview with Marc Rowland, in 1978.

In a radio broadcast of National Public Radio, October 2000, comrades from day one, Happy Traum and Bob Cohen (from The New World Singers) recall more details:

One night at Gerde’s Folk City, Dylan heard The New World Singers perform a Civil War era freedom song, one that Bob Cohen still remembers.

“It was very dramatic and a very beautiful song, very expressive. And Dylan heard that and heard other songs we were singing. And some days later, he asked us, he said, `Hey, come downstairs.’ We used to go down to Gerde’s basement, which was—is it all right to say?—full of rats, I don’t know, and other things. And he had his guitar, and it was kind of a thing where when he added a new song, he’d call us downstairs and we’d listen to it. And he had started—and he wrote, (singing) `How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?’ And the germ of that melody of “No More Auction Blocks” certainly was in that.”

Success has many fathers, but Bob Cohen’s story is credible. Not only because Dylan himself, unasked, calls that song as a source, but also because he tells in his autobiography Chronicles that he was ‘pretty close’ with The New World Singers at that time.

The unifying quality is evident from the eagerness with which black artists, and not the leasts, put the song on the repertoire. It motivates one of the greatest names, Sam Cooke, to write that other hymn of the civil rights movement, “A Chance Is Gonna Come”, the song that shortly after Cooke’s premature death in December ’64 will reach mythical significance. In his thorough biography Dream Boogie: The Triumph or Sam Cooke (2005), Peter Guralnick reconstructs the influence of “Blowin’ In The Wind” on Sam Cooke:

“When he first heard that song he was so carried away with the message, and the fact that a white boy had written it, that . . . he was almost ashamed not to have written something like that himself.”

An earlier, equally serious biographer, Daniel Wolff (You Send Me: The Life and Times or Sam Cooke, 1995) agrees:

“The soul singer and former gospel star was further inspired when he heard Peter, Paul and Mary singing Dylan’s song on the radio. The folk trio piqued Cooke’s commercial ambitions. Their recording proved that a tune could address civil rights and go to No. 2 on the pop charts. For Cooke, the result of these racial and artistic challenges was “A Change Is Gonna Come“.”

In Chronicles Dylan admires the power of expression of that song, he regularly honours Sam Cooke in his Theme Time Radio Hour, even produces a respectful reverence (“I Feel A Chance Comin’ On”) on Together Through Life (2009) and sings a beautiful rendition (Apollo Theatre, 2004), but he never discusses his own contribution to Cooke’s masterpiece. Modesty, probably.

The amazement that a white boy can write something like this, Sam Cooke shares with Stevie Wonder. Little Stevie’s version reaches the top 10 of Billboard in ’66, and even the first place on the R&B list. That an anti-war song can score that high is already meritorious, but according to Stevie the real achievement is that a white folk protest song can penetrate deep into the black neighbourhoods of the big city.

However, some objections could be made to both qualifications. For one, the source of the melody from that ‘white folk protest song’ is a black slave song, and second, the lyrics are far too general to stick the label anti-war song on it. The archaic cannonballs that the singer wants to banish forever already have stopped flying long ago (and are more likely metaphorical, anyhow) and the many unnecessary dead from the last lines may just as well refer to victims of unspecified violence, do not explicitly refer to war in any case.

The other fourteen lines protest, in various areas such as cowardice, stubbornness and self-centeredness, at most against human, moral failure in general.

The chosen images are so universal, poetically vague and age-old (from the bible book Ezekiel, for example), that the song allows a multitude of interpretations. In extremis one might defend, ironically enough, that Dylan actually wanted to write a diss, wants to dismiss the left-wing muddleheads with their impractical ‘solutions’ for world peace.

Those so-called solutions of you, the poet argues, are as elusive and airy as the wind. This possible interpretation is not that crazy. Dylan definitely has an intrinsic aversion to warmongering, racial segregation and discrimination, but just as strong a distaste for the humourless, self-glorifying, rigid do-gooders and starry-eyed idealists who claim the front seats of the civil rights movement. A year later he will opt out of all those peace marches, the protest meetings, the charity performances.

The naive, quasi-profound but terribly superficial croaking of all those self-important posers – Dylan really does not want to belong. They have to content themselves with Joan Baez. The famous photograph of Daniel Kramer, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez with Protest Sign, Newark Airport 1964 (it is actually a poster promoting Booth’s House of Lords Gin), makes that visible: where Joan Baez flawlessly controls the pose and air of the Principled Warrior for the Righteous Cause, in Dylan’s eyes boredom, ridicule and cynicism jostle for predominance. It ain’t me, babe, one can almost see him think.

But the writer’s intention ultimately is unimportant. “Blowin’ In The Wind” is an art transcending masterpiece that elevates and connects people, which is quoted by judges, popes and presidents and will still be sung by our great-grandchildren.

Except for those of The Hollies, obviously. They are not allowed.

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.

Blowing in the Wind: the meaning of the music and the lyrics

Part one of this series can be found at Take What You Have Gathered From Coincidence: Bob Dylan (Part 1) (And more Duncan and Jimmy)

By Larry Fyffe

The Bible tells of herders, nomadic they wander in large pastures with flocks of sheep, and also it speaks of settled down, fenced-in garden farmers:

And Abel was a keeper of sheep
But Cain was a tiller of the ground
(Genesis 4: 2)

Cain kills Abel, apparently because he thinks God likes the meat eater best.

Karl Polanyi, in his book ‘The Great Transformation’, asserts the enclosures of the ‘commons’ in England marks the beginning of government imposed capitalism – land, labour, and money become commodites; human social relationships become secondary; the Industrial Revolution follows; the ‘little guy’ gets the short end of the stick.

Frederick Turner, in ‘The Significance Of The Frontier In American History’, points out that immigrants thereto get a second chance at success in the vast open expanses of the ‘Old West’; however, the same fate befalls them. Paradise is lost, then it’s regained, only to fall again – time goes round and round.

Employing irony and black humour while accessing the Bible, mythology, traditional songs and folk tales, history books, and movies, singer/songwriter Bob Dyan deals with the times that are a-changing as they be rocked by circumstance, luck, and fate.

In the Western movie ‘Bend Of The River’, Glyn McLyntock (James Stewart) is a Missouri gunslinging raider who wants to reform. He says, “I ran into these folks in Missouri. Thought I might try my hand at farming or ranching if I can find me some cattle.” More of a wanderer, Cole Emerson (Arthur Kenndy) likes gold. He says to Glyn: “I figure we’re even. Maybe I’m one up on you.”

Sings Dylan:

I didn’t know that you’d be leavin’
Or who you thought you were talkin’ to
I figure maybe we’re even
Or maybe I’m one up on you
(Bob Dylan: Drifting Too Far From Shore)

The song ‘Pirate Jenny’ contains the line, “But you’ll never guess to who you’re talkin’.”

In the Western move ‘Shane’, a gunslinger (Alan Ladd) wants to reform and become a farm hand; he gets some advice from farmer Joe Starrett (Van Heflin): “A homesteader can’t run but a few beef, but he can grow grain, and then has a garden and hogs and milk, he’ll be all right.”

Shane remarks, “I don’t mind leaving, I just like it to be my idea.”

Dylan sings:

You give me somehing to think about, baby
Every time I see ya
Don’t worry, baby, I don’t mind leaving
I just like it to be my idea
(Bob Dylan: Never Gonna Be The Same Again)

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

The song lyrics of Bob Dylan often suggest figuratively that you throw the dice, take your chances, and see how things turn out:

Gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up north
I’ll plant and I’ll harvest what the earth brings forth
The hammer’s on the table, the pitch fork’s on the shelf
For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself
(Bob Dylan: Thunder On The Mountain)

Matters often turn out badly for Dylan’s persona, caught as he is between visions of Pocahontas and the bright lights of modern Babylon:

I got a house on a hill, I got hogs all out in the mud
I got a house on a hill, I got hogs lying out in the mud
Got a long-haired woman, she got royal Indian blood ….
Well, I’m leaving in the morning just as the dark clouds lift
Gonna break in the roof, set fire to the place as a parting gift
(Bob Dylan: Summer Days)

With tongue planted firmly in his cheek, Dylan ponders that perhaps Cain makes the right choice when he gets rid of Abel; Cain settles down; as well, small town life is tranquil:

I was in Wauwatosa, the truth I will tell
It’s a milk and cheese and cream
Yes, known it all my days
And I’m goin’ back to my home town
I’m leavin’ right away
(Bob Dylan/Trapper Schoepp: On Wisconsin)

Just maybe – the little house on the prairie, far away from Whore Of Babylon, is the place to be:

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me ‘Pa’
That must be what it’s all about
That must be what it’s all about
(Bob Dylan: Sign On The Window)

Footnote: the Bob Dylan/Trapper Schoepp song “On Wisconsin” is not yet reviewed on this site, but will be shortly.

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

“You’re willing to pay him a thousand dollars a night just for singing? Why, you can get a phonograph record of ‘Minnie the Moocher’ for 75 cents. And for a buck and a quarter, you can get Minnie.”

That comment from Groucho Marx in Night at the Opera (1935) takes us back to the origins of the two versions of Bob Dylan’s “Hidee Hidee Ho” that appear on the New Basement Tapes.

It’s a song that I feel a certain historic relationship with because my mum used to sing the lyrics starting “Hidee hidee ho” to me as a child (my father played in a dance band and my mum knew all the songs of the 1930s, as they remained popular in the war years and 1950s.

So I knew about Minnie the Moorcher, which is where the phrase comes from.   The man best associated  with the song is Cab Calloway (who wrote it with Irving Mills) and years and years later in 1980 he could still perform it as this extract from the Blues Brothers film shows…

But even this doesn’t take us back to the origin – because Minnie was based on Willie the Weeper from 1927 performed by Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon.

That version didn’t get exposure because of its drug references, so it is Minnie not Willie we remember.   And it seems Minnie was a real person – or at least that is what was claimed in a 1951 obituary of Minnie Gayton who had the nickname “The Moocher” because of her habit of begging for food from grocers.   But more than likely the desperately unfortunate Minnie of real life gained her nickname from the record.  

So, anyway, Cab Calloway gave the world the hit “Minnie the Moocher” in 1931 and the line “Hi De Hi De Hi De Ho”.  The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.  Many versions of the song existed as in performances the singer and the band extended the song and audience interaction.

Here is a very early film version of Calloway singing the song – I do hope you have a moment to watch and listen to this clip.

So popular was Minnie there were lots of other Minnie songs written – I particularly remember that we had a 78rpm record of “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day”

Anyway, that’s where it all starts, and Bob Dylan took the phrase from the song and used it in one of his poems which was then retrieved from the sketchbook that was in turn used to create the New Basement Tapes albums.

In fact it was used twice – each time with almost the same lyrics to give us Hidee Hidee Ho #16 and #11.

Now I have written those in the reverse order from the norm, simply because I think 16 is a much much better version, and if you are only here for a moment, I hope you’ll play that one (if you don’t have the album that is).   This version comes from Rhiannon Giddens and Elvis Costello working to Bob Dylan’s words.  The other is by Jim James, and I’ll come to that in a moment.

So for #16 we have Rhiannon Giddens – lead vocal, Elvis Costello – acoustic guitar, vocal,   Taylor Goldsmith – acoustic guitar, vocal, Jim James – bass, vocal, Marcus Mumford – mandolin, vocal, Jay Bellerose – percussion.

Here it is

https://www.facebook.com/showtime/videos/10154815564775486/

And the lyrics

Hidee Hidee Ho making love wherere we go
Hidee Hidee Hee making love just you and me

Hidee Hidee Ho making love wherere we go
Hidee Hidee Hee making love just you and me

How could she reject me
Send me on my way
How could she suspect me
Of leading her astray

I met her accidentally
And I asked to see her home
She told me she wouldn’t mind
And then commenced to roam

Hidee Hidee Ho (making love wherere we go)
Hidee Hidee Hee (making love just you and me)

I took out my little pen knife
And showed it at this rake
He looked at me as if to say
You’re making a mistake

I do not frighten easily
Yet no weapon I possess
No matter what you thinkin’, son
You better second guess

Hidee Hidee Ho (making love wherere we go)
Hidee Hidee Hee (making love just you and me)

Hidee Hidee Ho (making love wherere we go)
Hidee Hidee Hee (making love just you and me)

Hidee Hidee Ho (making love wherere we go)
Hidee Hidee Hee (making love just you and me)

There is an extraordinary plaintive wistfulness in this realisation of the lyrics that seems to capture the essence of the words perfectly.  It’s a recording I can play over and over without ever getting tired of the song.

As for #11 this is the version written by Jim James and recorded with himself on lead vocal and mellotron, with Elvis Costello on slide guitar, Rhiannon Giddens on violin and vocal, Taylor Goldsmith on acoustic guitar, Marcus Mumford mandolin, Jay Bellerose drums, Zach Dawes bass, Griffin Goldsmith drums, Bo Koster piano, plus SI Istwa and Jessica Kiley on background vocal.

The lyrics are slightly different – but it is the music that goes in an utterly different direction.

How could she reject me
Send me on my way
How could she suspect me
Of leading her astray

I met her accidentally
And I asked to see her home
She told me she wouldn’t mind
And we commenced to roam

Hidee Hidee Ho (making love wherever we go)
Hidee Hidee Hee (making love just you and me)
Hidee Hidee Hoo (making love just me and you)

I took out my pen knife
And showed it at this rake
He looked at me as if to say
You’re making a mistake

I do not frighten easily
Yet no weapon I possess
No matter what you thinkin’, son
You better second guess

Hidee Hidee Ho (making love wherever we go)
Hidee Hidee Hee (making love just you and me)
Hidee Hidee Hoo (making love just me and you)

Hidee Hidee Ho (making love on the highway bump)
Hidee Hidee Hee (making love in a pile of rope)
Hidee Hidee Hoo (making love on the driveway ramp)

This version relies on the contrast between the gentility of the music (particularly the additional voices in the chorus) and the violence suggested within the lyrics.  Somehow it makes me uncomfortable.

Of course that is just my reaction – I am not for a second suggesting that just because I don’t feel at ease with this version it is in anyway a lesser musical representation, it is just my reaction.  Perhaps it is so far away from the pure fun of Minnie the Moocher I remember from my earliest years that I can’t quite come to terms with it, whereas there is something in the melody of the #16 version that draws me in.

We also have a live version of #11 – if you have read through my ramblings above you will not be surprised to know this doesn’t draw me in to #11 any further.  But it is just my view.

But let me end with something quite different.   The music of the 1920s is not my only contact with that era because I also see PG Wodehouse as the greatest of all the British writers of humour – equalled only by Douglas Adams.   And PG Wodehouse was of course writing his Bertie Wooster novels.

The first Bertie Wooster story appeared in 1915 and thus the series was well underway by the time Minnie the Moocher appeared.   I am not convinced that in any of the original stories (as opposed to TV and film adaptations) Bertie actually does play Minnie the Moocher on the piano but in the brilliant TV series featuring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry this scene occurs.  If you like British humour, you might enjoy this…

(Or put another way it still has me rolling around and I’ve seen the whole programme half a dozen times.)

I hope you found something of interest in this review.  Writing it gave me a lot of pleasure and fun.

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

“As I stumble on lost cigars of Bertolt Brecht,” Dylan writes in the last of his 11 Outlined Epitaphs (1963), in which he lists, in addition to reflections on change, a whole series of influential artists. Forty years later, the poet again underlines Brecht’s influence, and more elaborately, in his autobiography Chronicles. Explicitly too, this time; almost five pages long Dylan confesses his awe for the Brecht song “Seeräuber Jenny” (Pirate Jenny) and states that from now on he tries to write songs “totally influenced by Pirate Jenny”.

This fascination is due to Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s former girlfriend, who at the time had a job at a music production, at George Tabori’s Brecht on Brecht. Rotolo also remembers how her boyfriend was struck by “Pirate Jenny”: “He sat still and quiet. Didn’t even jiggle his leg. Brecht would be part of him now, as would the performance of Micki Grant as Pirate Jenny.”

That particular song will echo in “When The Ship Comes In”, but what is more: it does affect Dylan’s view of art. “Woody had never written a song like that. It wasn’t a protest or topical song and there was no love for people in it.” He then describes how he dissects the song, tries to find out its magic, compares it with Picasso’s Guernica and admires it as a “heavy song” that was “a new stimulant for my senses”, it has “resilience” and an “outrageous power”.

Maybe Dylan is paying too much credit to Brecht – his introduction to “Pirate Jenny” takes place in the late spring of 1963, when he starts to get rid of topical songs on his own – but on the other hand he conceals the impact that another song from the same Brecht production must have made: “The Song Of The Moldau”.

Das Lied von der Moldau (music by Hanns Eisler, lyrics Bertolt Brecht) is originally from one of Brecht’s later pieces, Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg, and is also translated and edited by Tabori for Brecht On Brecht. It is a short song (three verses of four lines, the third verse being a repetition of the first) and especially the second verse rings a bell:

Times are a-changing. The mightiest scene

Will not save the mighty. The bubble will burst.

Like bloody old peacocks they're strutting and screaming,

But, times are a-changing. The last shall be the first.

The last shall be the first.

About three months after hearing this, Dylan writes “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.

The impact of this iconic song is unrivaled. The title is now a proverb, the number of covers can not be counted and it belongs to the extremely select group of songs that permeates a statement by the Supreme Court of the United States. “The-times-they-are-a-changin’ is a feeble excuse for disregard of duty,” Judge Antonin Scalia writes in a 2010 dissent – and that is only the second time a song quote reaches this supreme authority (the first is also from Dylan, from “Like A Rolling Stone”).

It is used in television series, commercials, films, Steve Jobs quotes it at the introduction of the Macintosh computer and is still sung – sometimes edited – to make political statements. Quite recently by Billy Bragg, for example, turning it into an anti-Trump piece.

That impact was intended, we understand from Dylan’s own commentary on the song in the liner notes of Biograph (1985): “This was definitely a song with a purpose (…). I wanted to write a great song.” That preconceived singleness of purpose is also evident from the well-known anecdote told by fellow musician Tony Glover. Glover finds a first set-up for the song in Dylan’s typewriter and asks, apparently less than impressed: “What is this shit, man?” Dylan shrugs and answers: “Well, you know, it seems to be what the people want to hear.”

It is a rather defensive rebuttal, perhaps even cynical, but time proves Dylan right. It indeed is a song that people, still, want to hear. And it proves Dylan’s mastery, the mastery of the cherry-picking thief or thoughts.

The lyrics are timeless. The maestro is smart enough to choose general, universally valid wording, even with references to current affairs. The third verse, for example:

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall

That of course refers to the embarrassing, recent incident on June 11, 1963 in Alabama, when Governor George Wallace stands at the door of the University to symbolically and physically block the entry of two black students. The poet, however, does not mention a name, a date, a place, only adds that a fight is going on (there’s a battle outside and it’s ragin’) and thus achieves that he can still sing it with significance 47 years later – in the White House, for the first black president.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M4DTGhGF4k

The other couplets have the same, eternal quality and that is not only due to this deliberately unclear unfocusedness. Dylan gets more agile in cherry-picking, as he admits in the 11 Outlined Epitaphs, on the cover of the LP: yes, I am a thief of thoughts. Here he makes a collage of clichés from Scottish and Irish folk songs from past centuries with their Come all ye … opening lines, he uses the prefix a- as an archaic intensifier like in ancient ballads, picks quotations from the New Testament (Thus the last will first, and the first are the last, Matthew 20:26, among others) and borrows excerpts from Brecht songs.

In doing this, Dylan also follows in the footsteps of Bertolt Brecht in terms of working methods. The great German playwright leans on other people’s work too, copies and translates exuberantly from foreign literary canon, draws without reservation from literature from all ages and also without blushing puts his own name under the contributions of others, especially Elisabeth Hauptmann, with whom he has an on-off relationship. Which does not detract from his mastery, of course. Just like Dylan, Brecht is a goldsmith, a craftsman who is able to construct a shiny piece of jewellery from bits and pieces.

The same applies to the melody. Analysts point to the melodic similarity with “One Too Many Mornings”, on the same record. Also “Paths Of Victory”, another Dylan song from this period, has some striking resemblances with The Times – if you adjust the time signature, that is (to 12/8). All three of them melodies have an age-old déjà entendu, and Dylan confirms this in November 2003, in the interview with Robert Hilburn in Amsterdam: “You use what’s been handed down. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ is probably from an old Scottish folk song.”

Those words resonate in Scotland, where proud, Scottish Dylan followers immediately start looking. The name of Hamish Henderson (1919-2002) pops up, whose “The 51st (Highland) Division’s Farewell to Sicily” then is appointed as having been the model.

In Great Britain this “discovery” ends up in the media in polished form, with highly acclaimed and skilled musician Rab Noakes being quoted with a semi-scientific analysis:

“When I studied the song I realised that the phrasing is identical to Henderson’s piece and you could sing Dylan’s words on top of either tune. Although there are differences in the main melodies, the chorus tune that became The Times Are A-Changin’ is almost identical.”

In addition, there are some biographical lines detectable between Dylan and Hamish Henderson (via The Clancy Brothers, for example), and there we are. After publications about this find (including in The Telegraph and The Scotsman in 2004), the alleged copying of that Farewell To Sicily (or “Banks Of Sicily”) slowly but surely degenerates into a musical-historical fact. With increasing certainty, even well-established authors like Clinton Heylin mention the song as a source. In 2011, the respectable BBC, on the occasion of a festival in honour of Henderson, states in no uncertain terms: “The American songwriter Bob Dylan has said that the Scot’s song The 51st (Highland) Division’s Farewell to Sicily influenced his song The Times They Are A-Changin’” and the serious Sunday Herald mentions casually, in parentheses, in the otherwise beautiful article What The Folk Is Folk, 7 May 2017, about folk music: “… and Bob Dylan (who based The Times They Are A-Changin on parts of The 51st Highland Division’s Farewell to Sicily). “

And thus, in a mere thirteen years, a somewhat too enthusiastic claim of a few Scottish Dylan bloggers evolves into a seemingly undisputed music-historical fact, so undisputed that the Herald only in passing (in brackets) needs to remind us.

However, it is fake news. Listening to one or more of the many versions of Banks Of Sicily on YouTube has a sobering effect – it requires quite a low tolerance margin to hear traces of The Times.

But however it be, that Dylan has played with, scraped from melodic fragments of old Scottish ballads – that might be true. The Times does have such an indestructible, timeless, beautiful melody.

This is also demonstrated by the appreciation of the many, many artists who have the song on their repertoire. Hundreds of covers exist, which have in common that they are always tolerable, but also rarely add something to the original. Tracy Chapman, for example, and The Byrds, and the beautiful version of Keb ‘Mo. Overly ambitious attempts to find a new approach are cramped and fail (Barb Jungr, Steve Marriott).

Herbie Hancock is the exception. The dreamy tinkling of the brilliant jazz musician does theoretically not square with this assertive song, but the collaboration with The Chieftains is surprisingly good; The Times gets a contemplative, reflective layer that fits perfectly (on The Imagine Project, 2010) – illustrating Tony Attwood’s observation that this most famous protest song by the world’s best-known protest singer actually does not protest anything.

You might also be interested in

What’s so wrong with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin”?

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

In some of his song lyrics, Bob Dylan tosses in a koan, or paradoxical riddle for listeners to solve:

Duncan And Jimmy walk side by side
Nobody walks between them
Duncan And Jimmy walk side by side
Has anybody seen them?
(Bob Dylan: Duncan And Jimmy)  (see also below)

The answer is ‘no’ because they are one and the same person – Jimmy Duncan
is the composer of the following song:

A smile from your lips brings the summer sunshine
Tears from your eyes bring the rain
I feel your touch, your warm embrace
And I’m in Heaven again
You are my special angel
Through eternity
I’ll have my special angel
Here to watch over me
(Bobby Helms: My Special Angel ~Jimmy Duncan)

Dylan alludes to ‘My Special Angel’ in the song below:

When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love
When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love
(Bob Dylan: Make You Feel My Love)

That the lyrics to ‘Make Me Feel Your Love’ contain the same words – ‘rain’, ‘feel’, ‘your’, ‘tears”, ‘warm embrace’ – as are heard or read in Jimmy Duncan’s song is bound to be dismissed as mere coincidence by many readers of this article.

Nevertheless, there’s the Dylanesque ‘”Rhyme Twist”, imperfect ‘start rhymes’, and ‘end rhymes’ though they may be: in Duncan’s song -‘here’/’tears’; in Dylan’s – ‘appear’/’tears’. Dylan gives the listener (or reader) ‘face’ to rhyme with ’embrace’ while Duncan leaves it a widow.

Coincidences, perhaps. However, as Dylan often does in other song lyrics of his, the theme is inverted by having the male involved be the ‘special angel’.

No leaf-eater is he like farmer Cain, but a red-blooded, meat-eating sheep herder; he’s ready, willing, and Abel – forget about the feeling of her loving ‘touch’, there’s the feeling of his ready-for-action ‘love’ machine!

The Romantic theme of Abel’s wild and wide open range world, where men are men, and women are women, displaced by Cain’s enclosed agriculture-based society that’s more appealing to women, appears in a number of song lyrics by Bob Dylan. Figuratively speaking, Frederich Nietzsche’s ‘over-man’ is gone, and it’s you and I who have killed him.

In the song following, the narrator dumps his adventurous Romantic side and returns to his loving wife who’s got a sunshine smile on her lips: she’s his ‘special angel’; the Dylanesque rhyme twist – ‘rain’/’again’; ‘rain’/’insane’.

I picked up his body, and dragged him inside
Threw him down in the hole, and put back the cover
I said a quick prayer, and I felt satisfied
Then I went back to Isis just to tell her I loved her ….
Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child
What drives me to you is what drives me insane
I still can remember the way that you smiled
On the fifth day of May in the drivin’ rain
(Bob Dylan, et al: Isis)

In the lyrics of his songs – much of the time, but not all of the time -, Bob Dylan
rejects the noir neoRomanticism of Nietzsche:

You angel you
You got me under your wing
The way you walk and the way you talk
I feel I could almost sing
(Bob Dylan: You Angel You)

https://youtu.be/hJGtzG16qE0

Footnote from Tony: I really wish I had spotted the link between Duncan and Jimmy and the composer of My Special Angel (written in 1957), but I didn’t and Larry did.  Top marks to you Larry.  But at least it has given me an excuse to put the link into Duncan and Jimmy once again.

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

Florida Key takes the lyrics of Bob Dylan and adds the music of Tayylor Goldsmith to give us a ballad.  A beautiful ballad.  A ballad very much worth listening to.  But still a ballad that gives me a problem, because it has a line I don’t get.

Now normally something I don’t get in terms of Dylan is either because I have misunderstood (but this time the lyrics have been released so that is not the problem) or else it is an American expression that has never passed to my part of England and so I don’t understand the phraseology.

Except I have been trawling the internet and I can’t find this phrase anywhere.  So now, dear reader, I have to ask you.

What are big silver goats in the lines that read…

Just standing on the curb watching for boats
While them boys and girls pass by on their big silver goats
I’m getting out while the getting is good
In my ship of steel or in my ship of wood

I have seen one suggestion that it is something to do with surfing.  I even found a website called sufinggoats.com but I’m rather thinking I have been chasing a wild goose rather than finding capra aegagrus hircus of the silver persuasion.

Leaving that aside, and I am sure you will put me right, this is a song that has been described as “natural” and “effortless” in performance and yes that’s right.   For me it is not one that stands out among the New Basement Tapes, in that it is not a song I want to play over and over again like Duncan and Jimmy for example, but it is beautifully realised.

Does it sound like a Dylan song?  Well, no.  But there was no requirement in the brief that the songs should sound like Dylan – indeed as we have seen on some occasions the lyrics themselves have been moved around.  Nothing is precious in this project.

But it actually doesn’t read to me like Dylan lyrics.  I’m not suggesting they are not the words of Bob, but rather that on the day he noted these down, he was perhaps trying  to do something different, trying out a different style or approach.  In which case maybe the goats was just a word to make the whole thing rhyme.

And that is something we have to remember – we have no notion as to whether in other circumstances Bob would have said, “right here’s a song I’m ready to run with” or said “no, that didn’t work, forget it” or “hmmm could be something here, let’s start adding some music and see what lyrics work and which ones have to go.”

It could be any of those, or any variation on any of those.

From what I am told Collins Avenue etc are actual streets at Miami Beach, and the situation in the second verse is a very clear statement of a break up argument situation.  And that is the story – it is a lost love song, and he’s really really lost.  In Miami Beach.

It really is moving, a lovely piece of music, but I wish I hadn’t started thinking about the goats.  If someone would like to put me out of my misery I would be grateful.

Miami woman so fine and fair
I try and try but I can’t get anywhere
I sail out under the sun
Looking for my darling, my only one
I sail all day, and when the day is done
She’s still the one I want to see
I must find that Florida Key

Collins Avenue, Fifth Street and Main
I walk up and down but it’s all in vain
My only darling is gone
Took everything and put it out on the lawn
And Jim came and got it and he gave it to John
It’s getting harder and harder to be me
I must find that Florida Key

Just standing on the curb watching for boats
While them boys and girls pass by on their big silver goats
I’m getting out while the getting is good
In my ship of steel or in my ship of wood
One more time I’m gonna do just like I should
See, this could only happen to me
I must find that Florida Key

Need a little sunshine in my beer
Thinking ’bout eloping
Nothing’s locked, never will be
Everything is open

There’s only one thing that lurks in my mind
It’s nothing here, nothing I’ve left behind
There’s something up front, something I hope to find
I’m gonna set sail again tonight
Round the horn and in the clear moonlight
Or at least I’m sure it’s going to be
Soon as I find my Florida Key

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

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (1963)

by Jochen Markhorst

The English artist David Gray makes three rather unnoticed albums before becoming a millionseller in 1999 with his fourth album White Ladder. The single “Babylon” is a top hit, the song “Please Forgive Me” is the real highlight and by now the counter shows seven million copies sold. In Ireland it is the best-selling record of all time; every fourth household must have a copy of White Ladder in its record collection.

The name Dylan hardly ever pops up in the cheering reviews. Only a few compare the Gray’s gritty voice with the bard, but no one recognizes the influence of Dylan. David does give a big hint, though: the title of his album is derived from verse 15 of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, I saw a white ladder already covered with water.

On his albums he never honours Dylan openly, but concert visitors are occasionally surprised with a reverence; Gray plays beautiful covers of his hero. Not very often, but still. “One Too Many Mornings” and “Meet Me In The Morning” several times, a few times “Buckets Of Rain”, “Jokerman” and “Like A Rolling Stone” both a single time, as well as “To Ramona”. Noteworthy is the one time that “No More Auction Block” passes by – that is the age-old song that enters music history when Dylan uses it as a model for “Blowin ‘In The Wind”. But from Hard Rain Gray stays away, for the time being.

It is a subtly chosen reference. Hard Rain is, of course, a packed song, filled to the brim with mostly loud, bizarre, sensational tableaux, and therein remains somewhat snowed under this serene, quiet image of a wet white ladder.

The richness of the lyrics has at the time the impact of a high-explosive shell and still is rarely equalled. The much-cited Dylan quote in the liner notes, “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole song” is actually an accurate, striking characterization. The thirty-three verses (chorus not included) are intrinsically unrelated and indeed offer thirty-three powerful, vivid, plastic images, each of which could be a decor, a plot twist or an introduction to thirty-three powerful, narrative ballads.

The rest of that quote on the back cover is a now refuted attempt to mythologize. In it, the poet declares to have written the song during the Cuban crisis and that the resulting mortal fear was the trigger to squeeze all those possible songs into this one song. Hogwash; Dylan plays Hard Rain on September 22, 1962, in Carnegie Hall, a month before those thirteen days in October when the world holds its breath.

It is not alienating, however, that constructed link with an imminent Armageddon – Hard Rain is indeed apocalyptic. The majority of the evoked images call calamity, are lugubrious, desolate, battlefield poetry. Dead oceans, tens of thousands of miles in the mouth of a graveyard, heavily armed children, blood-dripping tree branches, a flood, a dead pony, a dying poet, a burning woman, poisonous bullets and a masked executioner … this is not a cozy child-friendly colouring page, at any rate.

The Book of Revelations, the Bible book in which John of Patmos describes his infernal visions of the end-time, seems to be the direct source of inspiration. Like John, the poet Dylan is sensitive to the expressiveness of numbers, for example. Twelve misty mountains, six crooked highways, seven sad forests, ten thousand speakers and a hundred drummers; the bookkeeper’s precision corresponds to John’s tendency to count accurately. The twelve tribes, the lamb with the seven horns, the first six seals, ten thousand times ten thousand angels – even the numbers are correct. A similar analogy is the summing-up of those unrelated, partly gruesome images. In terms of content, they also correspond a few times. The floods, the roaring thunder, dying seas, famine and the spectator on the mountain – all of them images that we also encounter in Revelation. But the most eye-catching is the perspective: the eyewitness who reports the grotesque ruin scenes, summarized in the most desolate verse in the entire oeuvre of the Nobel Prize laureate, where black is the colour, where none is the number.

The scholars all agree on the second great source of inspiration. The question-and-answer structure, including the words where have you been, comes from the seventeenth century Child Ballad no. 12, “Lord Randall”. Any other similarities with that masterly, haunting Scottish ballad there are not, neither contentwise nor melodic, but that repeated question at the beginning of each verse is so characteristic that there is no question as to how the thief of thoughts has come up with that hypnotic form. Dylan will use it one more time, in “Who Killed Davey Moore?” and then this specific form is exhausted.

That does not apply to the discovery of stringing together a collage-like series of symbol-pregnant images. The text suggests an epic quality, insinuating that a story is told here. On request, the narrator reports where he has been, what he has seen and heard, who he has met and what his further plans are. This is like coherent historiography. However, his report is so poetically wrapped, articulated in such an expressionist distortion of reality, that every attempt to discover a storyline (like “Lord Randall” has), is killed in that lyrical bombing. Only one image remains intact: doom.

The poetry provides the song timeless value and at the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan the song immediately jumps out. Not so much because of the duration – twice as long as the average song – but especially because of this, this literary quality. It is no coincidence that this work is chosen, more than fifty years later, to be sung at the Nobel Peace Ceremony (by a touching Patti Smith). After all, it is the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded “for having created new poetic expressions”.

Initially the maestro seems reluctant to explore this art form further, after the creation of this masterpiece. It takes until “Gates Of Eden” (1965) before Dylan creates a similar poem full of new poetic expressions. But then floodgates open. “It’s Alright, Ma”, “Farewell Angelina”, “Tombstone Blues” and so on into the twenty-first century with songs like “High Water” and “Scarlet Town”; the dozens of songs in which Dylan subordinates the narration to the accumulation of multicoloured, often very visual impressions are among his most fascinating.

The Olympic quality of Hard Rain attracts quite a few colleagues. The song is often covered, but rarely well, unfortunately. One of the best known is the adaptation by Bryan Ferry, scoring a big hit in 1973 (Top 10 in England) and still having many fans on the forums and on YouTube.

Remarkable; the somewhat stylized, driving approach of the poseur Ferry, with neurotic violins and all, would theoretically not fit well with the raw original – but indeed, an indefinite attraction this version still has. More inventive than the friendly stomp of Leon Russel (1971) and the very similar Melanie (1993) in any case. And much more tolerable than the unimaginative, perfunctory mood of usual suspects like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and The Staple Singers. Curious is reggae colossus Jimmy Cliff (“Where have you been, my brown-eyed son”), in 2011 on the EP Sacred Fire.

A second life, or third actually, Hard Rain gets in the late 80s, when Edie Mrs. Paul Simon Brickell sings the song for the soundtrack of the film hit Born On The Fourth Of July. It is a pretty stale, flat cover of a moderately talented singer, but it does touch a chord; in the aftermath of the success of the soundtrack, a next generation picks up the song again. This mostly results in acoustical, serious renditions with a hardly tolerable art college fragrance (Jason Mraz, Walk Off The Earth, Lucinda Williams), but also in one that comes close to the monumental original. In 2007 the veteran Ann Wilson (the singer of that hard rock dinosaur from the 70s, Heart), in association with the youngsters Shawn Colvin and Rufus Wainwright, comes up with a beautiful version, passionately sung, masterfully arranged and lovingly produced (on Hope & Glory).

Just a small step higher is, finally, the little-known troubadour David Munyon, who at the age of fifty-seven is blessed with a fragile old voice, with the skill of a tried and tested warrior and the wisdom with which he knows how to convey the odd impressions of that horrifying journey (on Big Shoes, 2009).

Matched he may be, perhaps, perhaps, someday by David Gray, who demonstrates on A Thousand Miles Behind (live, available only through his site or at concerts) how well he can handle Dylan songs. The commandment of the master, thou shalt know my song well before thou startest singin’, keeps him away from “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. For now.

You might also enjoy “Hard Rain’s a gonna fall” – the meanings behind the music and the lyrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiOnyZ5UClQ

By Tony Attwood

By any analysis, Bob Dylan’s lyrics “Duncan and Jimmy” is best described as a fragment, an idea, a little something he dashed off while having a coffee and waiting for the next big song to pop along into his head.

Yet despite being a fragment it is, for me at least (in my little world sitting here in the English countryside) abolutely enormous fun, captured completely by the musicians who have brought it back to life.

It is the classic hobo story – but with a smile and a laugh – these guys might not have a cent between them, but they are the classic pair of hobos having nothing, having everything and most of all having a great time.

And that is what comes across in the music created as a old time banjo Appalachian style song that just belts out the fun 100%.

For there is something incredibly attractive of the notion of the pair of buddies who cannot be separated.  So much of the blues is the one man alone, taking on the world, but here we have something else: these two guys have the world in their hands, because they are the best buddies who can always be trusted by each other.  The ultimate friends.

Fill up the glasses and take your stand
Tip your hat to the world
Button up the bowtie and dance around
Once again with the fat Hawaiian girl

Duncan and Jimmy walk side by side
Nobody walks between them
Duncan and Jimmy walk side by side
Has anybody seen them?

Freighter man, freighter man
Which way’s that freighter gonna run tonight
Will it take me down to Jacksonville
Or just leave me be wherever it seems right

Duncan and Jimmy walk side by side
Nobody walks between them
Duncan and Jimmy walk side by side
Has anybody seen them?

So fill up the glasses and take your stand
Tip your hat to the world
Button up the bowtie and dance all around
Once again with the fat Hawaiian girl

Duncan and Jimmy walk side by side
Nobody walks between them
Duncan and Jimmy walk side by side
Has anybody seen them?

This is my favourite version – the instrumental breakdown near the end symbolising the chaos of life lived in the world of pure chance, but it all comes out right in the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJGtzG16qE0

There is a pair of lines in the middle of the song that symbolises the whole situation…

Will it take me down to Jacksonville
Or just leave me be wherever it seems right

The world as a world of chance – just take whatever comes along and it will all be ok, you don’t have to plan, you don’t have to think, you are in fact completely carefree, completely sure that the world will be fine, because the friendship at the heart of life can never be betrayed.

If you can get 10% of the enjoyment out of this simple song that I get, you’ll be having a happy day.

Just go and enjoy it.

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

It is not really Joan Baez’ forte, writing songs, but at least once she rises above herself: “Diamonds & Rust” from 1975 really is a wonderful song. Definitely on a musical level, although the beauty may be due more to the sparkling arrangement than to the strength of the composition, but remarkably successful this one time are the lyrics and especially their tone.

The lyrics of Baez are usually somewhat too larmoyant or one-dimensional and humourless (“To Bobby”, for example), lyrics that are, in Dylan’s words, ‘lousy poetry’. “Diamonds & Rust” is pleasantly mild-mocking, honestly poignant, melancholic and poetic, a song in which Baez looks back, without any bitterness, at her time with Dylan, at that time they lived together in that crummy hotel over Washington Square (Hotel Earle on MacDougal Street and Wavery Place, a four-minute walk from 161 West Fourth Street, incidentally) and she remains on the right side of sentimentality from start to finish.

Equally remarkable is the origin story. That story the singer tells in the song itself: out of nowhere Dylan reports by phone, from a booth in the Midwest (on February 4, 1974 Dylan is with The Band in Denver – that would be an educated guess) and in 2010, in the Huffington Post, she adds another detail. “He read me the entire lyrics of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, that he’d just finished.”

It inspires her to totally re-work the song she was just working on and to change it to “Diamond & Rust”; “It had nothing to do with what it ended up as.”

The inspiration comes, obviously, first and foremost from the unexpected conversation itself. But secondly perhaps also from the constellation of the acting persons in Dylan’s song: two attractive women and an inscrutable, mysterious stranger – it is only a small bridge to the triangle Sara (or Suze), Joan and Dylan. For the costuming of those persons, Dylan then apparently looks at his pack of tarot cards, from which he seems to draw more often in the 1970s. His mysterious hint from 1977, in the interview with Jonathan Cott, who tries to push him into all sorts of tarot symbolism, seems a vague confirmation: there’s a code in the lyrics, meaning the song lyrics of Blood On The Tracks. The continuation of that outpouring (“there’s no sense of time”) is comprehensible, but that code has not been cracked yet – if there is one, of course.

Dylan, in any case, inhibits the over-enthusiastic reach for The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (A.E. Waite, 1910). “I’m not really too acquainted with that, you know,” he says a half year later to the same Cott in a follow-up interview, when the journalist starts to blabber about all the tarot symbolism he has discovered in Dylan’s lyrics. And a few years later, in an interview with music journalist Neil Spencer, he repeats that evasion almost verbatim: “I didn’t get into the Tarot Cards all that deeply.”

Undoubtedly some echoes will have trickled down, that much is true. The names for example. The lily and the rose are the only flowers at the feet of The Magician, “the divine Apollo, smiling with confidence, with radiant eyes”, the tarot figure in whom Robert Shelton too thinks seeing traits from Bob Dylan (Melody Maker, July 29 1978) and to whom more references can be found (on Street Legal, in particular). And once in that tarot tunnel, references are to be found in each of the sixteen couplets. But in the end all those references are probably in the category that Dylan is referring to in his Nobel speech: “I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.”

Sobering words, in line with earlier relativizations with which Dylan dismisses the all too exuberant and pompous exegesis of his lyrics. Above all, it has to sound good, he says in the same speech – I have been influenced like everyone else, and it can mean anything.

This also applies to the symbols in this song. The lily and the rose, Lily and Rosemary, is one of those combinations that we can already find in the Bible, in the Song of Songs (2:1, “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys”), a Bible book that is probably deeper under Dylan’s skin than those tarot cards.

In terms of content, the story is not easy to follow. The plot looks classic enough; on the surface it is a weekday cowboy novel with all the clichés involved. A mysterious stranger, a bank robbery, there is poker, the local landowner has an extramarital affair with the beautiful show girl, a public hanging, a saloon, a judge… images and archetypes we know from every western with or without John Wayne.

Fascinating the plot then gets because of Dylan’s tampering with time, much as he does in “Tangled Up In Blue” and “Simple Twist Of Fate”: a collage-like series of related impressions, the chronology is interrupted by short atmospheric images and introductions of the main characters.

The Jack of Hearts appears on the scene and turns the head of danseuse Lily, with whom he apparently already shares an amorous past. She is the mistress of the local big shot Big Jim, who is not exactly charmed by Lily’s crush. That leads to the climax, which takes place in Lily’s dressing room. Big Jim kicks open the door and pulls his revolver, but is stabbed from behind, presumably by his wife Rosemary, whose knees also get weak over the Jack of Hearts. It all comfortably distracts from the work of Jack’s gang members, who are prising open the wall of the bank, two doors down. Rosemary is hung the next day, Jack is gone with the booty and the fair Lily is left behind, contemplating.

A cinematic whole, all in all, and indeed two attempts have been made to translate the ballad into a film script. Neither of these scripts has produced a film, unfortunately.

That cinematic and the chosen impressionistic narrative style can certainly be attributed in part to Dylan’s recent experiences with Sam Peckinpah, the director of Pat Garett & Billy The Kid. That film offers Dylan his first serious acting experience (in the supporting role “Alias”) and puts him on the map as a film music composer, when “Knockin ‘On Heaven’s Door” becomes an acclaimed world hit, but the narrator Dylan has also been paying attention. Peckinpah is a cyclic narrator; he likes to finish his films at the beginning, and Peckinpah likes to tell choppily, with little time jumps and drawn-out intermezzos – just like Dylan is now shaping his ballad. The story begins and ends in a quiet cabaret, both with the sound of refurbishment work in the background, and unfolds with interruptions to introduce the main characters – except for the mysterious Jack of Hearts, who is mentioned in every verse, but about whom we come to know virtually nothing.

Cinematographic qualities also have the words the poet chooses in the descriptive, atmospheric intermezzi. If the camera leaves the action for a moment, having a quick glance at the scene and registering the entry of the judge, it lingers with Rosemary for a while: Rosemary started drinkin’ hard and seein’ her reflection in the knife. Harrowing, foreboding stage direction. It evokes dark premonitions and at the same time the sympathy of the viewer for the cheated Rosemary. Peckinpah could have handled it, such an ominous image, but alas, the director is busy these days, with Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

The music colleagues are reluctant to tackle the song. The story comes first, of course, and that slows down the desire to put energy and inspiration in a cover. Although there are dozens of amateur attempts to be found on YouTube, none of them surpasses amateurism.

Among the few professionals there are only two who may reside in Dylan’s shadow. Joan Baez first of all, who obviously can claim a kind of property right, or at least a right of use. Her version on the live album From Every Stage (1975) has the same big plus as the aforementioned “Diamonds & Rust”: beautifully arranged.

The same compliment can be given to Tom Russell, together with Joe Ely and Eliza Gilkyson on the album Indians Cowboys Horses And Dogs (2004). Both artists, Baez and Russell, struggle with the length of the song and search for musical solutions to hold attention, to add tension, not to lose momentum. That can often be observed at Dylan covers. A gifted performer like Dylan can repeat the musical accompaniment of any verse from “Tangled Up In Blue” or “Shelter From The Storm” or this Jack Of Hearts from beginning to end without any variation; his performance skills do the job. A Tom Russell, for example, is less talented, but has other skills – the ability to dress up the song so well and multicoloured that the music holds the listener (alternating singers, exquisite organ by Joel Guzman).

The artists who fail to do that, who like Dylan do not or hardly vary the musical accompaniment, usually disappoint: Mary Lee’s Corvette (on the otherwise very enjoyable tribute project Blood On The Tracks) and the sympathetic Rumpke Mountain Boys. Nice, but three minutes is quite enough.

To be fair: even the master himself does not dare to tackle the song live, apart from one unrecorded performance together with Joan Baez, during the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976. And, of course, that intimate recital from a telephone booth in the Midwest.

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

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