Untold Dylan

by Larry Fyffe

Right wingers in American politics, prior thereto and during the 1960’s, see a hard-line Communist behind every bush, as they still do today. The folk-singing ‘Weavers’ member Jackie Alper notes that Bob Dylan spends a lot of time listening to Paul Robson records when he’s at her house in 1962. Ten years earlier, Paul Robeson, a former football player turned civil rights activist, with one foot on Canadian soil, performs before a crowd of nearly 40,000 after he’s ‘blacklisted’, thanks to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and deprived of a passport due to his ‘UnAmerican’ activities. 

One of Paul Robeson’s favourite numbers is a ‘spiritual’ originally sung by American slaves who escaped up north to Canada:

No more driver's lash for me
No more, no more
No more driver's lash for me
Many thousands gone

(No More Auction Block For Me)

 Bob Dylan considers himself blacklisted because he’s prevented from performing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” on the Ed Sullivan Show; he travels to Canada the next year, and records a number of songs for CBC-TV in Toronto.

The young singer/songwrite indirecty mentions Robeson in a song on an album released in 1964:

He said he's gonna kill me
If I don't get out the door in two seconds flat
"You unpatriotic, rotten, doctor, Commie rat"

(Bob Dylan: Motor Cycle Nightmare)

Untold is the profound impact that the Afro-American bass singer has on the Dylan, an impart still apparent in more recent lyrics.

As noted in a previous article, ‘Sweetheart Like You’ makes reference to the film noir ‘All Through The Night”, starring Humphrey Bogart. However, this song is haunted by the ghost of Paul Robeson. Playwright Eugene O’Neill makes Robeson famous by having him star in the movie ‘The Emperor Jones” that is based on an O’Neill play. Dylan’s song ‘Sweetheart Like You” is loosely based on the movie and play.

Influenced by the Naturalist School of Literature, Eugene O’Neill stresses how both heredity and the surounding environment affect human behaviour. Samuel Johnson, who befriends Oliver Goldsmith, opens the door for the Romantic Transcendentalist poets who react against previous writers who consider it dangerous to portray human beings as free-thinking individuals who do not  require authoritarian social control.

Then along comes the English Naturalist Charles Darwin and he shuts the door with his deterministic and empirically based Theory of Evolution. According to a number of writers, including O’Neill, (they turn Darwinian science into an art form), any hope of individual freedom is carried away, grasped as it is in the greedy claws of jingoistic patriotism and imperial capitalism.

Bob Dylan sums things up quite nicely:

They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scroundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you king

(Bob Dylan: Sweetheart Like You)

https://youtu.be/sDigsf8jJMU

Samuel Johnson’s 1775 aphorism is presented by Dylan to the listener (or reader); then it’s Paul Robeson speaking as Brutus Jones:

"For a little stealin', they put you in jail sooner or later
For big stealin', they make you emperor
and puts you in the Hall of Fame when you croaks"

(Eugene O’Neill: The Emperor Jones)

In the movie, the intelligent and muscular blackman Brutus Jones, departs fom his Hezekiah Baptist Church friends in the Ameican South,  and travels up North to New York City as a porter on a train where he starts gambling and womanizing, and ends up in a chain gang for killing a black friend; he clubs a white guard to death, jumps in a dump truck, and manages to steam off to an isolated West Indian island inhabited by blacks. There he gets sold to a white trader, but he outsmarts the island’s black ruler by demonstrating that he can only be killed by a silver bullet. 

Paul Robeson crowns himself ‘Emperor Jones’. Says to the trader:”Phew! This place smells more like a chain gang dump than a palace.” Imitatinng the behaviour of the white authorites that he’s used to back home, Emperor Jones is as exploitive and cruel to the islanders as were the historical slave-holders in the United States. 

Dylan’s song ‘Sweetheart Like You’ begins:

Well the pressures down, the boss ain't here
He's gone North for a while
They say that vanity got the best of him
But he sure left here in style

(Bob Dylan: Sweetheart Like You)

Emperor Jones overplays his hand, realizes he has stayed too long. War drums  beat and he flees into the jungle. Lost in the darkness, Jones goes mad from fear; he doesn’t know what is happening, and he shoots off his silver bullet at phantoms  – he’s been keeping it to kill  himself with should he be hunted down. Meanwhile, the angry islanders have manufactured silver bullets of their own.

At the end of the movie,  the white trader (who appears to get along with the islanders) says to the dead body of Jones:

"Where's all your high-and-mighty airs now, your bloomin' Majesty.
Silver bullets. Blimey. Anyhow, you died in the 'eighth of style."

At the time, American political authorities have problems with the O’Neill movie/play because of its oblique critique of the US Marine invasion of Haiti that forces the government there to allow foreign ownship of property 

(As well, civil rights groups express concerns about ‘The Emperor Jones’):

They got Charles Darwin trapped out
there on Highway Five
Judge says to the high sheriff
'I want him dead or alive
Either way I don't care"
High water everywhere

(Bob Dylan: High Water)

‘High Sheriff’ Joseph McCarthy does his utmost to destroy Paul Robeson’s career.

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

When John Kiernan returns home from shopping, he sees two strangers standing in front of his house. He is not particularily alarmed. “Neil Young fan alert,” he says to his wife Patti Regan. Kiernan and Patti live in Winnipeg, as it so happens to be in the house where Neil Young grew up, and they are used to fans watching their home. While Patti puts the groceries in, John goes to chat with both men. They were a bit older than your typical Young fan, Kiernan remembers later. And while chatting, he notices that guy with the big cap is wearing really beautiful cowboy boots and cool leather pants. He studies his face closer and “it suddenly occurred to me that I was talking to Bob Dylan.”

The landlord asks if Bob wants to see inside the house, and Dylan is eager. Patti takes the men upstairs, to the former boys room of Neil, now a pink painted girl’s room of their sixteen-year-old daughter.

“So this is the room where he was listening to his music,” Dylan muses, “and this was his view.”

The bard hangs around for some twenty minutes, they talk about Neil Young, about the places in Winnipeg where he probably performed with his school band, the weather and life in the North. Then Dylan and his companion get back in the taxi that has been waiting in front of the house all this time, and leave.

“You were pretty cool talking to a huge celebrity,” John compliments his wife.

“What celebrity?” Patti asks.

“Bob Dylan.”

“That’s why he looked so familiar to me!” Patti screams and runs wildly waving and yelling to the neighbours who are raking leaves in the front yard. “There in that cab! Bob Dylan is in the cab!”

This takes place November 2, 2008, and John Kiernan cherishes the memory of the day he could do Bob Dylan a favour.

The in itself futile event touches a chord. The Winnipeg Free Press writes an article on it and in the course of the next weeks, media around the world deem it worthy a report. Understandable, actually; it is moving somehow, the world’s greatest songwriter, who, like an adoring fan is contemplating his idol in some girl’s bedroom.

Dylan’s respect and friendly feelings for Neil Young are well known. The sympathetic name-check in “Highlands” (1997, ‘I’m listening to Neil Young / I gotta turn up the sound’) does not come out of the blue – since the early seventies Dylan says nice, admiring things about the Canadian, occasionally joins him on stage and in his autobiography (Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream, 2012) Young confirms that Dylan sometimes comes over for dinner, that they call every now and then and that Dylan occasionally sends over gifts.

One time, however, in 1985, Dylan’s grapes are sour:

“The only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about ‘72 and the big song at the time was Heart Of Gold. I used to hate it when it came on the radio. I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me every time I listened to Heart Of Gold. I think it was up at number one for a long time, and I’d say, ‘Shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.’ There I was, stuck on the desert someplace, having to cool out for a while. New York was a heavy place. Woodstock was worse, people living in trees outside my house, fans trying to batter down my door, cars following me up dark mountain roads. I needed to lay back for a while, forget about things, myself included, and I’d get so far away and turn on the radio and there I am, but it’s not me. It seemed to me somebody else had taken my thing and had run away with it, you know, and I never got over it.”

This is during Dylan’s dry period, in the years that he hardly makes music. In this particular period he might be more petty, more sensitive in this area, but he does have a point: that thin harmonica, Kenny Buttrey on drums, Nashville, the austere production … yes, it could have been a John Wesley Harding song. Somewhere between “Dear Landlord”, the song in which Dylan sounds like Neil Young, and the last two songs, “Down Along The Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”, which are so alienating, abruptly leaping to pure country, being the only songs accompanied by a steel guitar, like “Heart Of Gold”.

“Dear Landlord” is a pearl that shines even more outside the context of John Wesley Harding. On the album itself, between all those beautiful songs with similar structure, instrumentation and atmosphere, the song tends to drown a bit. Dylan selects it in 1985 for Biograph and here, between “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe” the song comes more into its own.

Dylan’s own comment in the accompanying booklet is just as skimpy as the arrangement: “Dear Landlord was really just the first line. I woke up one morning with the words on my mind. Then I just figured, wat else can I put to it?”

It is a beautiful, dark and foreboding first line. ‘Dear landlord’ is enough to evoke a naturalistic drama, or a bitter Woody Guthrie ballad, proletarians misery and crisis years atmosphere. And the word landlord has a double entendre to it, opens even more vistas – the road is paved towards religious associations or ironic portraits. Subsequently, most of the interpreters are moving exactly in that direction.

The pathetic A.J. Weberman, the stalking fool who even goes through Dylan’s garbage, thinks he can prove that the lyrics are settling accounts with manager Albert Grossman, who actually, literally, is Dylan’s landlord (from Dylan’s house in Woodstock).

Interpretations of the years after Dylan’s Christian phase, that is after 1981, are mainly leaning towards a religious interpretation. Well, at least there are more tangible handles supporting those perceptions: just like in nine songs surrounding this one, in “Dear Landlord” Bible quotations do echo. In majority from the New Testament, by the way, but not only from the four Gospels; Dylan keeps on browsing, through Romans and Corinthians in particular. 1Cor. 7:7, for example: ‘every man hath his proper gift’.

Conclusive none of them are, those dozens of readings. That is not surprising either, if one is to trust Dylan’s own words, taking into account verse 4: my dreams are beyond control. The poet has, after the night has given him the two words dear landlord, unlocked the gates to his subconscious and lets the stream of consciousness flow. It yields these three fascinating couplets, full of Kafkaesque guiltless guilt, clear and lucid, but impenetrable. In addition, Bible fragments, a phrase from an old song by Roy Acuff (when that steamboat whistle blows almost literally derives from “Steamboat Whistle Blues”, 1936) and archaic, Biblical clichés like my burden is heavy and heed these words.

The overall picture is a triptych, depicting three times a pitiful debtor who begs a higher authority to spare him. What that debt consists of and who the landlord is remains open, just like in Kafka’s stories. But granted, a thoroughly Christian setting, a triptych such as The Last Judgment by Lucas van Leyden (1527) fits well.

In 1969, Janis Joplin turns the song into a steamy, soulful blues rock exercise and completely misfires, of course – but it still has the surreptitious attraction of a guilty pleasure. That is less true for the comparable, but slightly safer Joe Cocker (also ’69). The song hangs in the air that year; Fairport Convention also picks it up for the masterpiece Unhalfbricking, but ultimately does not select it. Defensible – Sandy Denny sings great, but the accompaniment of Richard Thompson and his men is a bit lukewarm.

In the twenty-first century the Joan Baez rip-off from Wales Debbie Clarke attracts attention. Far too sterile, but the fact that she dares to choose “Dear Landlord” speaks for her, of course (Manhattanhenge, 2012, produced by the man-behind-Bowie Tony Visconti).

Closer to the source, because much rawer and frayed, is Mirah and the Black Cat Orchestra from Seattle (To All We Stretch The Open Arm, 2004).

For the time being, however, Thea Gilmore’s version, on her dazzling tribute album John Wesley Harding (2002), with beautiful dobro guitar, continues to lead the women’s and men’s competition.

For the time being, because Neil Young has yet to do his thing. Dylan is now over it, over that “Heart Of Gold”. Has even played Young’s “Old Man” on the stage a few times. The way is clear. The steamboat whistle blows.

You might also like:

• Dear Landlord: ending the sequence

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

This is a song by Jackie Leven and Bob Dylan set to a melody that combines (at least to my ears) elements of “One too many mornings” and “Times they are a changing”.  However the story presented on most websites just says “One too many”.

In this case it seems that Leven wrote the lyrics and Dylan (or so these various sites that all seem to have been copied from the same source “suggested the tune of One too many mornings”.   But try as I do, I can’t hear this.  If he was told to use One too many, I think he strayed as he worked – although there is no harm in that.  But it really does remind me of “Times” whenever I listen to it.  Anyway the song is credited to Jackie Leven/Bob Dylan.

So this is what the various websites say…

“According to the ‘The Telegraph’, Jackie met Dylan in a Bar in Berlin on 5th Oct 1988 and they later travelled together by train from Berlin to St Petersburg.

“Jackie showed Dylan some lyrics he had written and Bob suggested he put the lyrics to the tune of ‘One Too Many Mornings’. Jackie did this and the song ‘As We Sailed into Skibbereen’ was released on a 4 track cd single and the album The Argyll Cycle Vol 1. Columbia got the track withdrawn in the uk but not in Germany, so it’s something of a collectors item.”

There is another song called “Skibbereen” which can be found on the internet, and which has been recorded by the Dubliners, but which is totally different.

Skibbereen itself is a town in County Cork, Ireland.  The name is sometimes written or said as “Skibb” which in Gaelic means “little boat harbour”.   The harbour is on the river Ilen which flows into the sea 12km down stream, at Baltimore.

The population of the town is around 2500.

So, it gets added to the list of Dylan co-compositions.  And it really is rather pleasant.

By Larry Fyffe

Jean-Jacques Rousseau utters his famous cry that man is born free but is everywhere in chains, and though he idealizes the ‘noble savage’, he remains a man of Reason. Oliver Goldsmith loosens the chains that bind him to an orderly British class society, and takes up writing for a living; he focuses on the trials and tribulations of lovers who are star-crossed because they dwell in a society that is inequitably structured. 

The idea that humans are part of the natural world – with a desire to be released from the social restraints imposed upon them by an ‘artificial’ society – is blowing in the wind. It’s the aristocracy’s turn to cry:

But nothing mirthful could assuage
The pensive stranger's woe
For grief had seized his early age
And tears would often flow

(Oliver Goldsmith: The Ballad Of Edwin And Angelina)

Himself many times accused of thefts from the works of other songwriters and poets, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan burlesques those who do not realize that the  practice has a long tradition in the world of the arts. As previously noted, Dylan often leaves his fingerprints at the scene of the crime by messing around with the rhymes as well as the lines that he steals from the poems and songs of other writers; he twists the rhymes into his own song lyrics, changing them in varying degrees.

Oliver Goldsmith be one of those writers who is accused of being  a ‘hack’ because he pockets the creative endeavours of others:

Well, I had to go down and see a guy named Mr. Goldsmith
A nasty, dirty, double-crossin' phony I didn't want to have to deal with
But I did it for you
And all you gave me was a smile
Well, I cried for you, now it's your turn to cry for awhile

(Bob Dylan: Cry A While)

 Note the internal rhyme in the last line ~ ‘I/cry’.

And the Dylanesque rhyme twist ~’smile’/’awhile’ ~ that echoes the end-rhyme in the verse below ~ ‘smiled’/ ‘beguiled’:

And spread his vegetable store
And gaily prest and smiled
And , skilled in legendary lore
The lingering hours beguiled

(Oliver Goldsmith: The Ballad Of Edwin And Angelina)

Mr. Goldsmith, the dirty rat, has spied with his little eyes an old ballad:

Thus every day, I fast and pray
And ever will do till I die
And set me to some secret place
And so do he, and so will I

(Gentlemen Herdsmen Tell To Me)

Therein above lies the same rhyme that the later poet Goldsmith gives to Angelina  ~ ‘die/I’.

And then in sheltering thicket hid
I'll linger till I die
'Twas thus for me my lover did
And so for him will I

(Oliver Goldsmith: The Ballad Of Edwin And Angelina)

The star-crossed lovers theme from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” lingers on in another Dylan song:

She touched his head and kissed his cheek
He tried to speak but his breath was weak
'You died for me, now I'll die for you'
She put the blade to her heart, and she ran it through

(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

Dylan steals from himself:

Cry A While ~ ‘Well, I cried for you, now it’s your turn to cry for awhile’;

Tin Angel ~ “You died for me, now I’ll die for you”.

Not that the singer/songwriter would throw up the twist in anybody’s face:

Well, there's preachers in the pulpits, and babies in the cribs
I'm longin' for that sweet fat that sticks to your ribs
I'm gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey, I'll die before I turn senile
Yes, I cried for you, now it's your turn, you can cry for awhile

(Bob Dylan: Cry A While)

There’s ~ “die”/”I”; “cry”/”I”; and for good measure ~ “I’ll”/”senile”.

From the opposite loft, Bob Dylan burlesques the burlesquers, in this case a relatively recent satirical opera:

Last night 'cross the alley, there was a pounding on the walls
It must have been Don Pasquale makin' a two a.m. booty call
To break a trusting heart like mine was just your style
Well, I cried for you, now it's your turn to cry awhile

(Bob Dylan: Cry A While)

The comic opera is about love and theft. Dylan hangs a pun – ‘ booty’ is American street sang for ‘a piece of tail’. The lyrics directly above indicate that the American songwriter is aware that, in the Italian opera, old man Pasquale, in an attempt to stay forever young, gets his wealth – his booty – stolen by a young widow because he scorned her as unworthy for his nephew to marry.

Now it’s your turn to cry for a while. 

What else is here?

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to keep your seat …

When Dylan sings these words, it is only ten years after December 1, 1955, the day that Rosa Parks in a bus in Montgomery refuses to give up her seat for a white fellow passenger. She is returning home from her job, she has bought a ticket and is on the front row of the ‘coloured’ section, the back half of the bus.

At the Empire Theater stop the white-only section fills up – not all whites can sit. Driver James Blake follows the guidelines, walks to the back and orders four black passengers to give up their seats. Rosa refuses, Blake calls the police and from that moment on, America has a heroine: in the end the commotion leads to the abolishment of the segregation laws. After her death in 2005, the first lady of civil rights is the first woman whose body is laid out in the Rotunda, the heart of the Capitol.

“Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35” is much more complex, multicoloured and more serious than a first acquaintance with the carnivalesque party song suggests.

Of course, Dylan does go all out to avoid any suspicion of seriousness. The stories surrounding the nocturnal recording session have indeed grown quite wild over the years, but it is farcical anyhow. Biographers like Howard Sounes report that Dylan orders in alcohol and marijuana, because he does not want to do such a song with a bunch of straight guys. Admittedly, the session is coloured with shrieks and laughter, and sounds like it was recorded in a pub. Equally, the previous rehearsal, which can be heard on The Cutting Edge, does not sound like a tightly directed rehearsal by level-headed professionals.

But tipsy or otherwise intoxicated, no. After Rainy Day Women the session continues for hours and final recordings of three songs are realized (“Obviously 5 Believers”, “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” and “I Want You”) – sober and focused, and in the studio chatter there is neither any trace of burly fun or suspicious fog. The only thing that Al Kooper reports in his superior autobiography Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards about the Rainy Day session is: “Dylan was teaching us Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35 one night when Johnston suggested that it would sound great with a brass band, Salvation Army style. Dylan thought it over and said it might work.”

No word about alcohol and drugs.

So the rather mood-defining idea of ​​the brass players comes from producer Bob Johnston. Session musician Charlie McCoy himself plays some trumpet, calls a friend who plays trombone and when he arrives, the recording can start.

It is a simple and brilliant move by ​​Johnston. The basis of the song is a simple straightforward three-chord twelve-bar blues, and the pun with the double entendre of stoned is pretty much exhausted after one verse plus chorus.

The song therefore benefits from extra ambiance, from an extravagant upgrade. The addition of the corny wind instruments and the Comedy Capers piano part will appeal to Dylan’s sardonic, rancorous state of mind during this period; after his farewell to the acoustic folk music he has been booed around the world for months and confronted with the most insane reproaches, been called Judas, jester and liar, and everyone, even the most nit-witted journalist, feels justified in calling him to account.

Dylan has already responded with some vicious lyrics (“Positively 4th Street”, for example) and overpowered audiences at concerts by playing ‘f*cking loud’, but this time he chooses the weapon every tyrant fears: humour. And for that, the oom-pah-pah arrangement is exactly the coup de grace Dylan needs to knock out the fundamentalist ex-fans – that should end the moaning.

The humour is mainly brought on by the outrageous arrangement, the pun and the horsing around in the background. The verses as such are actually pretty sad. It is a woeful litany of a Calimero, paranoia seems to disturb his perception. He really can not do anything right, this narrator – even if he tries to do good, ‘they’ stone him.

In addition, Dylan gives enough hints to justify a biographical interpretation. They stone him when he plays his guitar, in “Positively 4th Street” there was also such a sneaky interlocutor who hypocritically wishes him good luck and that he feels so lonely, we’ve heard disturbingly often, lately. In “Ballad Of A Thin Man”, “Obviously 5 Believers” and “It’s Alright Ma”, for example. Depressing, all in all.

But he endures it with dignity; the storyteller counters the daily setbacks and inadequacy of life with happy resignation, with humour. Humor ist, wenn man trotzdem lacht, as the German writer Otto Julius Bierbaum teaches, “if you laugh anyway.”

After Blonde On Blonde, Dylan is hardly attacked anymore on his ‘betrayal’ of the folk movement, on his move to electrically amplified rock music. Now, however, on this ‘drug song’. Dylan’s response to questions about Rainy Day Women slaloms, and initially he denies that it has anything to do with drugs. “I never have and never will write a drug song,” he explains defensively and solemnly, and we hear that same tone years later with President Clinton (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”).

“But that song has a lot of other meanings,” Dylan finally says to L’Expresse in 1978, before he reluctantly implies that it also sings drug use: “Marijuana isn’t a drug like the others.”

When Dylan is a guest in a radio program in 1986 and answers telephone questions from listeners, he nibbles out any drug references again: It’s about “when you go against the tide,” but throughout history people have always “taken offence to people with a different viewpoint on things. And being stoned is just a kind of way of saying that.”

The most hilarious though are the Monty Python-like dialogues that unfold in the first hectic weeks shortly after publication, especially at press conferences. And with a praiseworthy persevering radio host in Sweden:

“Rainy Day Women happens to deal with a minority of, you know, cripples and orientals and, uh, you know, and the world in which they live, you realize, you know, you understand, you know. It’s another sort of a North Mexican kind of a thing, uh, very protesty. Very, very protesty. And, uh, one of the protestiest of all things I ever protested against in my protest years.”

That North Mexico will resonate for a while, by the way. A week later, in London, a reporter asks for a title explanation. “Have you ever been down in North Mexico?” Dylan asks. The reporter has to deny. “Well, I can’t explain it to you then,” the bully says, full of pity.

The mysterious title has occupied many. The most academic solution is offered by Clinton Heylin, who finds among all those stonings in the Old Testament: a continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike (Proverbs 27:15).

Yeah well. Okay, in one verse we find both rainy day and woman and ‘stoning’ could be a metaphor for ‘contentious’, but then still: why would a Bible-inspired poet add #12 & 35 to it?

Even more desperate are the readers who stick to the story that two ladies came in during these nighttime sessions, hiding from the rain. A 35-year-old mother and her daughter of twelve.

A convincing key there is not. With good reason: it does not exist. Dylan very well understands that he can not call the song “Everybody Must Get Stoned” and improvises a random one off the cuff, neatly in line with a dozen other song titles. During the rehearsal we can hear him shake another, equally meaningless, title from his sleeve: A Long-Haired Mule And A Porcupine Here – Dr. Seuss could work with that, but what would a Clinton Heylin come up with?

Still, rainy day woman is a relatively traceable metaphor. A rainy day means, after all, something like the lean years or bad times. Following that thought, a woman for a rainy day would be a poetic depiction of a one-night stand, of a lady one visits out of boredom late at night because she happens to live nearby and there is no more attractive option. By now we know our promiscuous protagonist; on Blonde On Blonde, more nightly passersby, friends for one night, road gigs are sung.

The Louise in “Visions Of Johanna”, the worshipping devotees in “One Of Us Must Know” and “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way”, the adulterous trollop from “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, Sweet Marie (but she is not at home) and damn it, Achilles’ girlfriend keeps the door closed too. It is a whole procession of rainy day women which the singer only on Side Four, in the arms of his Sad-Eyed Lady, can finally leave behind.

The fellow artists consider it a popular party song. There are dozens of covers and most of them like to copy the infectious, festive surface – during concerts, success is guaranteed, with the audience invariably cheering along with the chorus. Sammy Hagar, the Red Rocker, is an excellent example and also The Black Crowes, the band of seasoned Dylan fan Chris Robinson, regularly switches over to Rainy Day Women when Robinson feels the atmosphere is getting too languid.

Studio recordings, however, rarely come close to the original, especially because the monkeying around in the background soon feels artificial and little spontaneous. Also the more radical variants, such as the trance-approach of the British band Saint Etienne and the uninspired copies, such as the stale, perfunctory attempt by Lenny Kravitz, are usually lifeless and unsuccessful. Brian Stoltz’ funky approach (on the tribute album Blues On Blonde On Blonde, 2003) is more bearable, as well as the somewhat alienating bluegrass version by Flatt & Scruggs (on Nashville Airplane, 1968).

Most entertaining is Mavis Staples’ band leader, Rick Holmstrom, who on his album Late In The Night (2007) molds an instrumental, fascinating mix of Chicago blues and Duke Ellington-like jazz from Dylan’s bizarre smash hit, but most infectious is The Old Crow Medicine Show, opening their brilliant 50 Years Of Blonde On Blonde tribute show.

One may try, but it is impossible to keep your seat.

What else is here? 

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

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

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

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

by Larry Fyffe

Usually containing the word ‘like’ or ‘as’, a simile is a trope that creates a vivid comparison between an object (or action), and a different thing that has some similar aspect.

Bob Dylan constructs lots of similes – below, he presents a woman who firmly attaches herself to a man:

Get away from all these demagogues
And these bad luck women stick like glue
It's either one or the other, or neither of the two

(Bob Dylan: Nettie Moore)

Dylan’s quoted words can be interpreted – decoded – as making fun of the literary scholar’s inability to define and clearly separate one figure of speech from another. Indeed, the singer/songwriter earlier pens a similar warning about the ability of metaphors to multiply uncontrollably, entitled ‘The Trouble With Tropes’, but the coded message never gets received nor recorded by Captain (Bill Shatner) Kirk on the USS Enterprise:

Buffalo Bill wouldn't have known what to do
If he got just one look, one good look at you
And I don't know what to do either
Just want to tell you, "it's neither"
Tom say, "Don't take her"
Judas said, "Leave'er her"

(Bob Dylan: Golden Tom, Silver Judas)

In the song lyrics below, a simile (blossom soft as snow) meets up with a hyperbole (a river of tears); a personification (trailing moss); an alliteration (mystic, moss); and vowel assonance (keep, sea, tear):

The trailing moss, and mystic glow
The purple blossom soft as snow
My tears keep flowing to the sea

(Bob Dylan: Moonlight)

The  above moon verse –  a tribute to the neo-Transcententalist poet below:

Here is no question of whiteness
White as can be, with a purple mole
At the centre of each flower

(William Carlos Williams)

Bobby ventures down into the basement; he deliberately mixes up the metaphoric medicine. In the lyrics that follow, the women is depicted as a saint swirling in smoke; she’s poisonous, like mercury, to one’s artistic health:

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?

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

Similes that Dylan employs are not as bright nor as pure white as the ones used by those Romantic Transcendentalists who find in Nature a mystical spirit of vitality:

Through the darkness on the pathways of life
Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air
Tomorrow keeps turning around and around
We live and we die, we know not why

(Bob Dylan: When The Deal Goes Down)

More gleeful is the following simile:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats over vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host, of golden daffodils

(William Wordsworth: Daffodils)

Mixing similes together can have a humourous effect – if you’re a hungry as a pig, a farm animal that eats almost anything, then you should eat one even though it looks like a dachshund:

Well, I asked for something to eat
I'm as hungry as a hog
So I get brown rice, seaweed
And a dirty hot dog

(Bob Dylan: On Road Again)

What else is here? 

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

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

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

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

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

‘Rosemary combed her hair and took a cabbage into town’

No. She didn’t. She took a carriage into town, but it’s easy enough to mishear Dylan. He has a way of bending words, and while he can articulate with great clarity, he can also gulp a syllable or three, or rush words to fit into the musical line or with delayed vocal timing. He can stretch or compress words as desired. Whatever the reason, mishearing Dylan goes with the territory, and the results can be amusing, and occasionally illuminating.

Some mishearings are simply silly, as with Rosemary and her cabbage from the song Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, but at best mishearing can initiate a creative engagement with the text, involving backtracking and rediscovering what he really sang. There is a certain constructedness in a Dylan song, especially evident in those he keeps reconstructing in performance, and by listening we enter, to some extent, into the creative process. Dylan encourages this creative engagement by an elusive sketchiness in terms of narrative and character creation which leaves us lots of room for our imaginations, and to find our song within Dylan’s.

In describing what they term ‘critical deformance’, which involved putting a poem through particular procedures such as reading it backwards, reversing lines, changing the order of verses etc, authors Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels comment: ‘In this perspective, the critical and interpretive question is not “what does the poem mean?” but “how do we release or expose the poem’s possibilities of meaning?”’

Mishearing is not exactly a deformance in the sense intended by McGann and Samuels, which involves a systematic changing of the text. However, arguably, mishearing is an aural deformation of a more accidental nature, but which just might release or expose the song’s possibilities of meaning.

It might also expose something else, what our mishearing’s tell us about ourselves and what we are looking for in a Dylan song:

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
‘Take what you have gathered from cold winds so dense.’

(It’s All Over Now Baby Blue)

No! He doesn’t sing that, but that’s how I heard it for many years, making four words out of one, and when I finally saw the lyrics, I felt sort of disappointed, let down. My ‘cold winds so dense’ conjoured, for me, the lonely back roads of Jack Keroack’s ‘On The Road’ which I was reading at the time. The lonely back roads are the ‘highway’ we find in the previous line, with the kind of wind that was blowing when Dylan and Suzie Rotolo had their photo taken for the cover of Freewheelin’ on a freezing New York day. But what he really sang was, ‘take what you have gathered from coincidence.’

Once discovered, my mistake made me reflect on Dylan’s word choice. ‘Coincidence’ suggests a meaningless, absurd world where significance might only be found, if at all, in the collision of random, chance events. It takes us deeper into the world of illogic than my mishearing, but still… the existential shiver is the same, so my mishearing was in keeping with the song’s affective centre. Or so I like to think.

In any case, it gives us a good excuse to revisit this 1965 BBC live version in which Dylan makes quite a meal out the word ‘coincidence’ – I’m sure if you listen hard enough you’ll hear those cold winds so dense

It’s worthwhile noting that when we first began listening to Dylan albums back in the 1960s we had no way of independently verifying the lyrics. There was no internet, no official lyrics, the first book of Dylan lyrics did not come out until later.

To compound the problem, Dylan was singing words we’d never heard sung before, as they did not belong to the lexicon of pop music. Words like ‘museum’, ‘infinity’, ‘amphetamine’ and, well, ‘coincidence.’

Furthermore, they were often in unexpected combinations equally unfamiliar to our ears. We had to argue it out, and of course listen to the songs over and over. Did he really sing ‘The darkness at the break of noon shadows even the silver spoon’? These were far cry from Ricky Nelson or Bobby Darin lyrics. We hardly knew what we were hearing, nor how to make sense of it.

Add to all that, being poor students, we were spinning our precious mono vinyl on shitty old turntables, with platinum needles that hadn’t been changed since Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, gutless amplifiers and crappy old speakers. It’s a wonder we could hear anything.

I can’t help wondering if Dylan kind of intended this. We quickly moved into an age when lyrics printed on sleeves and slipped into the ablums was all the rage, but, to my knowledge, Dylan only ever did this for Street Legal (1978) and Empire Burlesque (1985). Maybe he wanted us to struggle to get the words, wanted us to listen over and over. Maybe he knew that the lyrics sounded a lot better and more mysterious in performance than on the printed page…

‘Ever since you walked right in the circus been complete
I say good bye to haunted rooms and faces in the street.’

(Wedding Song)

No. ‘…the circle’s been complete,’ is what he sings. But ‘circus’ worked just fine for me, while it lasted. It look me back to Desolation Row, when the circus came to town (those haunted rooms where they nail curtains), and it seemed fitting that, from the persective of the early 1970’s, the arrival of true love should complete the 60’s circus.

I was onto something, I thought; except I wasn’t. At first I was disappointed, again, until I thought of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Circle Game’, and in that light Dylan’s ‘Wedding Song’ engages in a neat bit of intertextuality.

This is not the only circle I turned into a circus. I made the same mistake with Carribean Wind.

‘From the circus (of) ice to the furnace of desire.’

No. It’s ‘circle of ice,’ but I was seeing circuses everywhere. And circles too. Just to add to the fun, we have ‘circled by the circus sands’ in Mr Tambourine Man.

‘Misty Liar is his, a Philistine is what she is
She’ll do wonders and work with your fate
Feed you coconut bread, spice buns in bed
If you don’t mind sleepin’ with your head face down in the plate.’

(Foot of Pride)

No! He doesn’t sing that, although I keep hearing it. In this case, several creative mishearings over four lines leads to a creative misinterpretation. Let’s look at what he really sings:

Miss Delilah is his, a Philistine is what she is
She'll do wondrous works with your fate
Feed you coconut bread, spice buns in your bed
If you don't mind sleepin' with your head face down in a grave.

I constructed a woman quite different from Dylan’s. Misty Liar is the hippy chick who might tell fortunes, play the earth mother with her coconut bread. She’s happy enough to take you to bed, if you don’t mind passing out in her lap.

Dylan’s Miss Delilah is much darker, more sinister figure. She comes out of the Bible, a woman who sold out a man (only later was she seen as arch temptress), and to sleep with her you have to lie down in a grave. That might be your grave. Might be hers. A big price to pay for those spice buns. Both ‘plate’ and ‘grave’ might work as a sexual reference, but Dylan’s brings death onto the scene. I have to let go my playful ‘plate’ now for the real thing, and in the process lose that neat rhyme!

I got into trouble at the end of this song, too:

‘Did he make it to the top, well he probably didn’t drop
Struck down by the strength of the will..

No. That doesn’t really make sense. If he didn’t drop how come he was struck down? It all made sense when I read the actual lyrics. No disappointment this time.

‘Did he make it to the top, well he probably did, and dropped
Struck down by the strength of the will…’

Yes, even Jesus suffered from that old ‘foot of pride.’ In this case my mishearing did not enrich my understanding of the song, just confused me.

I’m not a great fan of Dylan covers, nobody sings Dylan like Dylan, but in the spirit of fun, I couldn’t resist this gutsy version of Foot of Pride by Dirty Ray, described by the uploader as a “blues hack” based in Minneapolis. He’s caught the angry edge of the song, and roughed it up.  The fun part is that Dylan’s enunciation is model of clarity compared to Dirty Ray’s weird word bending. If you don’t already know the words, good luck, now you know how it feels…

They'll stone you when you're tryin' to make a fuck
They'll stone you and then they'll say "good luck"

No! This was a wilful mishearing, because I knew perfectly well that Dylan doesn’t use profanities. ‘They’ll stone you when you’re trying to make a buck,’ works just fine, but, I swear the way he sings it, with that leering implication he’s so good at, it sounds like he’s singing ‘fuck’ instead of ‘buck’, as if he wants us to mishear it. After all, it would be in perfect keeping with the wild, anarchic, irreverent tone of the song. So, I close and my eyes and hear what I want to hear.

Now he looked so immaculately frightful as he bummed a cigarette
And he went off sniffing dreampipes and reciting the alphabet

(Desolation Row)

No. I was thrown when I read that what he really sang was, ‘And he went off sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet.’ Dreampipes made sense to me at the age of sixteen.  A pipe filled with nice dreamy stuff (nod-wink), like the pipe offered to the singer in ‘Tangled up in Blue’. It was fitting. But drainpipes? That’s toxic. That’s very unromantic. It changes the whole feeling of the sketch presented to us. It’s so much stronger than my predictable ‘dreampipes’ that I want to run away and hide. And I loved that song for so long mishearing that line.

‘You can hear empires spin…’

(What’s a sweeheart like you)

No! A wonderful mishearing as it ties in with the broader focus of the album, Infidels, and songs like ‘Man of Peace’ and ‘Union Sundown.’ But what he really sings is ‘You can hear them tyres spin.’ Again I’m humbled. That’s much more dramtic and concrete than my ‘empires’.

That’s just a sample. I keep discovering new mishearings. Even while writing this blog I read that the end of ‘Can’t Wait’ reads:

‘I thought somehow that I would be spared this day’

and I’ve never heard that. I hear:

‘I thought somehow I would be spared this fate.’

I’m convinced enough that I’m hearing correctly to become suspicious of the official lyrics… Play it again Joe, let’s hear what he really sings. Here is the famous 2011 Milan version. Although I think there are better versions, Dylan is obviously having fun hamming this one up. Looks like he wants to laugh. And, I’ll eat my hat if he doesn’t sing ‘fate’ and not ‘day.’

Let us know your favourite mishearings, and how you felt when you found out the actual 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.

Notes:

New Post idea> Dylan scolarship  in the Age of Climate change: A guilty pleasure.

Catharsis

Stoic but affirmations filled. It’s all right ma. Flat nasal delivery vesus open throated howling. They both work for me, tho the 1974 version is more cathartic

Dancing to dylan.

Bob Dylan and the underworld: in the land of shady deals, the scent of corruption

Carribean wind, where are you tonght, cry awhile, when the deal goes down, foot of pride, sweetheart like you, the slease bar

 A kind of quest… By Aaron Galbraith

I was having a read through Tony’s 2015 review for If You Gotta Go (Go Now) and it spurred me to write a quick look at several of the more interesting versions of the track that have came out over the years. I’m going to ignore Manfred Mann and Fairport Convention’s excellent singles as these are both well known and well loved.

As Tony noted The Beatles influence it might intrigue you to know that the very first release of the song was on a 1965 7” single by a group called The Liverpool Five. Curiously, none of the five were from Liverpool in fact they hailed from London and had a penchant for Beatles’ style poses in their promotional photographs and record sleeves!

 Anyway, here it is and a very fab version it is too!

Unfortunately they turned out to be one of the least successful British Invasion bands and the single didn’t chart anywhere! I have to say I do like the version and am bit surprised it didn’t give them a much deserved hit.

With the exception of the Manfreds and the Fairport covers the other most famous version has to be The Flying Burrito Brothers (yet another failed single for this track). Great countrified version here, I love both Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman so this is right up my street.

And then there is this by Mae West

I’m not really sure what to say about this, except it’s kinda mad!  This would definitely rank in anyone’s top 10 oddest Dylan cover versions. I wonder what Bob made of this one! 

West’s version was released on the 1966 Way Out West album. The album also contains covers of Day Tripper and Twist And Shout among others. Great album cover too!

Here’s a great rollicking version by the Cowboy Junkies, some great drum fills and splendid vocals. This was originally released as a b side to the Southern Rain single, and later on a b sides and rarities compilation album. It’s so good it was also included on the great Dylan covers album May Your Song Always Be Sung Vol 2. They also use the lyric “it’s not that I’m asking you to take part in any kind of quest” as opposed to “it aint that I’m questionin’ you to take part in any quiz’ – hence the title of this article!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pHVO6geVvv4

My all time favourite cover version takes the track down a completely new and previously undiscovered path. It was released as a bonus track on the tribute album ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute To Bob Dylan’s ‘Bringing It All Back Home’’. This recording is by J. Tillman (AKA Father John Misty), this one blew me away the first time I heard it and still does today whenever it pops up on my playlist. Give this a listen, you won’t believe where he takes this one. Spellbinding.

 Then there was an official Dutch only 7” by Bob himself which leaked out in 1965. Again, no chart action and it’s a release that not many know about, the original single will set you back a few quid on eBay. As it’s a different version to any other releases and it’s never came out in cd as far as I’m aware… luckily YouTube is your friend again for this one!!

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.

OK, now having got that noted, there is a song by Trapper Schoepp with the same title, the melody of which has a slight resemblance to the melody of the anthem (if that is the right word) above.  And it has lyrics written in part or full by Bob Dylan.

The Dylan lyrics come from one of Dylan’s notebooks – a notebook of the type that was used for the New Basement Tapes series.

These lines which consist of three verses have the same title as the state song, including the comma, and were written in 1961, so not too long after he first signed for Columbia.  Apparently the lyrics in their original form were offered at auction in 2017, but then were sold privately.  However Trapper Schoepp saw the lyrics and then created the song, with a reference back to the state anthem.

Speaking of this he said, “I imagined this drifter being rocked to sleep in a train car to this three-four waltz rhythm.   And he’s just hearing this song in his head ‘On, Wisconsin’ that’s bringing him back home.

“The words are playful and bring to mind some early Woody Guthrie lyrics and other folk songs Dylan might have been listening to in his early 20s.  I have to give a nod to Quinn Scharber, who played the clean jazzy lead guitar parts, which puts the song in the ’50s ballad territory.”

There is on line a copy of the notebook lyrics – reproduced here.   I’m sorry they are not clear – that is the best I can do with my limited technical ability.

Schoepp then recorded the song and forwarded it to Bob Dylan’s publishing company.  He reports what happened then as…

“So I’m laying in bed one night, and my manager sends me an email that simply reads, ‘Dylan has it now.’ I immediately got pretty excited about that.”

The management team had, it seems, given the ok to the song and forwarded to Bob for final approval.  He gave it meaning the record could be released as a co-written song.

It now appears on Primetime Illusion – an album that focuses on modern city life.

Here’s a live version with a spoken introduction about the origins.

You might also enjoy

Bob Dylan: Forgotten Gems and Lost Songs

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

“One of my deficiencies is my voice sounds sincere,” Paul Simon says in the interview with Rolling Stone (April 2011). “I’ve tried to sound ironic. I don’t. I can’t. Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. He’s telling you the truth and making fun of you at the same time. I sound sincere every time.”

Simon is a bit too modest about the limitations of the colour of his singing voice, but that much is true: the irony, the sneering and the sarcasm that Dylan especially in the mercurial years ’65 -’66 manages to deliver in his singing, fall outside Simon’s range. On the other hand, he is a grandmaster, similar to Randy Newman, in the field of supercooled understatements, dry humor and feigned naivety. “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover”, “Paranoia Blues”, “Have A Good Time” … Paul Simon’s palette really does have more colours than just sincere.

He does not reveal where he ‘tried to sound ironic’, but Simon refers in his next breath to Dylan, so the link with “A Simple Desultory Phillipic” (1965 and 1966) is soon made. Whether he sounds ironic there, well, that is debatable, but at the very least he does his utmost to sound like Dylan. In any case, it is a Dylan pastiche for which time has been kind. At the time it was somewhat faint, misunderstood (ironically as a despicable attempt to free ride on Dylan’s success) and occasionally appreciated with some kindness, but in the twenty-first century, fan circles and biographers look back with more love. Sometimes a little too himmelhochjauchzend (Shelton calls it a ‘vicious burlesque’, AllMusic’s Matthew Greenwald thinks it is ‘hilarious’, on fan sites fans even praise it as ‘one of the best political songs ever’ and ‘great and hilarious’), but the song certainly is funny.

There are two versions. The first is from Simon’s London period, is acoustic and clearly inspired by Bringing It All Back Home. Simon copies “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” on his guitar and rattles verses over it like:

I was Union Jacked, Kerouac’d
John Birched, stopped and searched
Rolling Stoned and Beatled till I’m blind
I’ve been Ayn Randed, nearly branded
Communist ‘cos I’m lefthanded:
That’s the hand I use, well, never mind!

The recording ends up on the peculiar solo album The Paul Simon Songbook (1965), recorded in London without Art Garfunkel, which quickly had to meet the sudden demand for a folky Paul Simon. It is a rattling, shabby jumble of songs from the flopped Wednesday Morning 3.A.M. (“The Sounds Of Silence”, for example), new songs and songs that will be re-recorded a year later for Simon & Garfunkel’s breakthrough album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme.

The latter category includes “A Simple Desultory Phillipic”. For that second version, Simon reworks the lyrics; he changes a lot of names. The first couplet now starts with:

I been Norman Mailered, Maxwell Taylored
I been John O’Hara’d, McNamara’d

But that is not the most radical change; drastically revived is the musical frame. Dylan has released Highway 61 and Blonde On Blonde and that inspires Paul Simon to the original intervention to update the music; he copies the mercury sound and this time chooses as a template for the music: “From A Buick 6”. A challenge, because Simon is of course notorious for his sheer neurotic production perfection, but it has to be said: for once it sounds pretty gritty – by his standards.

On a side note, following Dylan’s success, producer Tom Wilson constructs a ‘folk rock’ remix of the flopped Sounds Of Silence (behind Simon’s back, incredibly). It is a huge world hit, in some reference works even (somewhat disputably) celebrated as ‘the quintessential folk rock release’. The astronomical sales figures lead to the hasty reunification of Simon and Garfunkel and ultimately to the elevation of the duo to pop legends.

“From A Buick 6” is sometimes dismissed as filler, as a nice little in-between on an album full of eternal classics. True, between songs like Rolling Stone, It Takes A Lot and Thin Man, the Buick shines less brilliantly than she would do alone, somewhere on an abandoned parking deck in the moonlight. Disconnectung the song from that overwhelming album side A, however, does more justice to “From A Buick 6”: one of those quicksilver pearls from the heyday of a genius artist, a bittersweet, rude blues rock full of semi-familiar references and freak metaphors.

The title, like most songs on Highway 61, has no direct relationship with the text. The Buick 6 series was produced from 1914 to 1930, so at most that title has a kind of emotional link with the roots of the song’s music. And at home the Zimmermans used to have a Buick; in Chronicles the bard remembers family trips to Duluth with the ‘old Buick Roadmaster’, the car in which Dylan has learned to drive, the brand to which he remains faithful in later years. Thus, the poet might  associate a Buick 6 with something like ‘old and familiar’ or ‘of lasting value’.

The song itself is loosely based on “Milk Cow Blues” by Sleepy John Estes from 1930, a song from which Dylan often draws. Killing you by degrees, for example, returns in “Where Are You Tonight?”, Some said disease, some said it was a degree’in  echoes in the opening of “Legionnaire’s Disease“, and the first lines of “From A Buick 6” are inspired by Estes’ classic too:

Now asks sweet mama

Lemme be her kid

She says, ‘I might get boogied

Like to keep it hid’

Apart from that, there is also the content similarity: both blues songs thematize adultery. But the poet Dylan chooses – of course – hallucinatory images and more colourful metaphors than Estes.

Dylan’s I-person has a graveyard woman at home, a lifeless homebody, who takes care of the children while he paints the town red with his soulful mama, with a dazzling lady who is brimming with life. Her special quality is her ability to re-energize him when he is down and out. The sadness that can bother the narrator, the poet does not express with the usual blues clichés like ‘down and out’ of ‘feelin’ blue’ or ‘I’m so lonesome’, but with sparkling imagery like lost on the river bridge – a beautiful and completely original image for the lonely and forlorn state of a man who is torn between a life on the right bank, with the mother of his children, or on the left bank, with the woman who makes him happy.

Nevertheless, the song leads a rather obscure existence. Dylan himself hardly ever plays it (twice, both times in ’65), there are not too many covers and the film world also ignores the song. With one exception: the catchy, charming social drama Kisses, a masterful Irish film from 2008. Two young teenagers in love run away and experience a ferocious, frightening and enchanting night in Dublin. The boy is called Dylan and Bob Dylan is (therefore) a thread in the film. “From A Buick 6” is chosen as soundtrack to the scene in which the two, after sharing a half bottle of beer, run rowdy and rioting through the city.

Fortunately, among the few covers there are some very nice ones.

On the remastered version of Johnny Winters’ Still Alive And Well (1973), the song is a bonus track, in a version that one can expect from the albino guitar god: dirty, raw and no-nonsense.

The talented Chuck Prophet writes beautiful songs (for, among others, Solomon Burke, Heart and Kim Carnes), has success in the 80’s with his band Green On Red and as a solo artist does not shy away from experimenting. “From A Buick 6” has been on his setlist for years, always catchy, but is most remarkable when he does it almost entirely alone; carried by a particularly attractive guitar lick, accompanied by a rhythm box and more declamating than singing through a voice distortion. In the background, wife Stephanie Finch pushes the keys of her wonder organ – maybe that should have been shoved a bit further into the background.

Veteran Gary U.S. Bonds is responsible for one of the best covers, though we owe it to Bruce Springsteen, who, together with Steven Van Zandt, directs the resurrection of Gary. The duo writes songs, selects covers, plays along and produces Bonds’ comeback album Dedication (1981), one of the most successful comeback albums in pop history. Bonds, Little Steven and The Boss approach “From A Buick 6” as a venerable, monumental pop classic and that works quite well; Dylan’s in-between snack suddenly has the allure of an “I Heard Through The Grapevine” or a “Twist And Shout”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV7qIwzVyVY

The cover can also be found on the very nice collection How Many Roads; Black America Sings Bob Dylan (2010).

But the most loving, affectionate, authentic and moving rendition is produced by the Canadian treasure Ken Hamm, solo on his sheet-metal Dobro on his 1998 album Galvanized! Incidentally, the album contains more aha moments for the Dylan fan. Besides a beautiful “Duncan And Brady” also interpretations of blues classics like “From Four Until Late” and “32-20 Blues”, of songs that descended into Dylan’s oeuvre, into “Going Going Gone” and in “Call Letter Blues”, for example.

Mr. Hamm is really Bringing It All Back Home, though.

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

Which side of the big Titanic metaphor is singer/songwriter Bob Dylan on?

Do his song lyrics reflect a Hermetic view of the cosmos, or a Gnostic one? It’s a question many an examiner of Dylan’s music ask, but few forward a convincing answer. And no wonder since the two philosophical points of view have become so entangled with one another over the centuries.

Basically, most followers of the Hermetic school hold that there is an Absolute  principle governing the Universe, and that it’s discoverable through reason and intuition; that is to say, science and religion are not really incompatible: there is a unitary plan to be found within the workings of the Cosmos.

Many of the orthodox religions, including the Abrahamic ones, call it “God’s plan.”  Whether Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed, they be messengers sent from the transcendental God behind all of Creation to assert that physical matter is a divine inspiration designed for the benefit of mankind.

At first, earth, air, water, fire are conceived by humans to be the basic elements of the Universe, and then the development of the ‘science’ of alchemy and magical fluids shifts the focus more and more to man’s reasoning ability.  For example, preRomantic poet William Blake seeks to balance modern Reason with earlier Spiritualism.

Later, Transcendental Romanic poets sense the presence of a vitalistic spirit pervading the physical world. Optimism, symbolized by light, and founded on a better understanding of the Oneness of the Universe becomes the order of the day. Science be not a demon, nor sexual desire a sin. 

On the other hand, most forms of mystical Gnosticism, at least for the unenlightened, place a dark cloud over the sun. There is a transcendental God of sorts; however, the Absolute One is even more distant than the Supreme Clock-Maker Being conjectured by the Deists of the Enlightenment Age.  Not only is the Monad far removed from mankind, but fragmented, and unknowable to all but a few lucky ones – interplanetary traveller Emanual Swedenborg, with his neoGnostic doctrines, being one of them.

According to these Gnostics, the ‘spiritual’ world of goodness is basically closed off to mankind because she or he is trapped in physical existence – confused, and ignorant, if not downright evil and sexually obsessed. 

Knowledge for the most part becomes existential, and  pessimistic. Why? Because the Creator of the physical world is far from a benevolent God – instead, He’s a demiurge. 

To make matters worse, getting in touch with the goodness of the Absolute Monad with help from the lucky ones who have broken through to the Other Side ~ who are in communication with the shape-shifting, and often mythological, messengers emanating from the Male/Female Monad ~ is extemely difficult for most earth-bound human beings to achieve.

At times, Bob Dylan, or at least his persona, with the help of the right kind of female essence, displays a Hermetic Transcendentalist side:

If not for you

My sky would fall

Rain would gather too

Without your love, I'd be nowhere at all

Oh, what would I do

If not for you

(Bob Dylan: If Not For You)

At other times, Dylan recognizes a much darker Gnostic side:

Idiot Wind

Blowing through the buttons of our coat

Blowing through the letters that we wrote

Idiot Wind

Blowing through the dust upon our shelves

We're idiots, babe

It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves

(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

Common to Bob Dylan (and poet William Blake) is the use of the figurative device known as ‘anaphora’ – the repetition of the same words at the beginning of successive lines of a poem or song.

In conclusion, Bob Dylan mixes messages in his magical medicine bottle that float back and forth between the positive Hermetic and the negative Gnostic poles of musical electricity. 

Take a sip – it’s all good.

You might also enjoy “Idiot Wind – 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.

Tell Me That It Isn’t True 

by Jochen Markhorst

“I Heard It Through The Grapevine” is the first song of the legendary Motown duo Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield and an indestructible classic right away. No chance hit either; they write dozens of songs, and among them there are quite a few monster hits and masterpieces. “Papa Was A Rolling Stone”, “War (What Is It Good For)”, “Just My Imagination”, “Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home)”, just to name a few.

Initially, Grapevine is written for and in August ’66 recorded by The Miracles, but only the third version, with Gladys Knight & The Pips (September ’67), will be released on single and it reaches number two on the Billboard Chart. In the meantime, in the spring of 1967, Marvin Gaye records his now classic version for his breakthrough album In The Groove. Diskjockeys continue to run Gaye’s album track and finally, in October ’68, Motown decides to release that version as a single too. The song immediately rises to number one and stays there for nine weeks, until the end of January ’69. It is Motown’s biggest hit so far, scores high in the various All Time Best Songs lists and is inevitable in documentaries and films about the late 60s (although often the driven, drawn-out cover by Creedence Clearwater Revival is chosen) .

When Dylan, in his hotel room at the Ramada Inn in February ’69, quickly knocks together a couple of songs for the next recording day in Nashville, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” still echoes through the streets, cafes and hotel lobbies. And with that, established Dylanologists such as Clinton Heylin and Tony Attwood argue, the inspiration for the undervalued “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” has been explained.

Definitely thematically, but also in terms of content, the similarities seem undeniable. Just compare the opening lines of the world hit,

I bet you’re wonderin’ how I knew
‘Bout your plans to make me blue

to Dylan’s words:

I have heard rumors all over town
They say that you’re planning to put me down

… and the link is clear. Still, it is unlikely that Grapevine is the real source of inspiration – at best it is the trigger to the song that is much deeper in Dylan’s genes, to the artist who is much closer to him, to Hank Williams’ “You Win Again”.

Dylan’s admiration for Hank Williams is devout. In the autobiography Chronicles, he expresses his admiration for Luke the Drifter without restraint:

“In time, I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there. Even his words — all of his syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records, and I listened to them a lot and had them internalized.”

Agreed, perhaps an all too sophisticated word choice, and that forms like marble pillars is not entirely coherent, but his meaning is clear: to Dylan, Hank Williams belongs to the Really, Really Great Ones, in terms of status comparable with Woody Guthrie and Elvis.

In the hundred episodes of his radio program Theme Time Radio Hour Hank is frequently played (eight times), never without obeisances: “One of the greatest songwriters who ever lived,” ttrh 17, and: “Made some of the most beautiful songs about living in a world of pain,” ttrh 7. And he loves to play them, too. From the Basement Tapes Complete we know Dylan’s version of “Be Careful Of Stones That You Throw”, the song Dylan learned from Hank Williams’ alter ego Luke the Drifter, and of course “You Win Again”.

“You Win Again” is a bitter country blues that Williams records one day after his divorce from Audrey Williams and expresses the betrayal that Hank feels. “The songs cut that day after Hank’s divorce seem like pages torn from his diary,” biographer Colin Escott says.

The opening words of this particular song resonate much more clearly than those of Grapevine in “Tell Me That It Is Not True”:

The news is out, all over town
That you’ve been seen, a-runnin’ ’round

His adulation of Hank Williams in Chronicles illustrates the impact of these words: “When he sang ‘the news is out all over town,’ I knew what news that was, even though I didn’t know.” And one line hereafter we see that Dylan is now making the same associative leap as in 1969: “I’d learn later that Hank had died in the backseat of a car on New Year’s Day, kept my fingers crossed, hoped it wasn’t true.”

In interviews from that time Dylan emphasizes that these songs, the songs on Nashville Skyline, come from within:

“The songs reflect more of the inner me than the songs of the past. They’re more to my base than, say John Wesley Harding. There I felt everyone expected me to be a poet so that’s what I tried to be. But the smallest line in this new album means more to me than some of the songs on any of the previous albums I’ve made.”

(interview in March ’69 with Hubert Saal for Newsweek)

And in the Rolling Stone interview with Jan Wenner that takes place in May, Dylan tells enough humbug (“When I stopped smoking my voice changed… So drastically, I couldn’t believe it myself”), but credible is the statement that he arrives in Nashville with only a few songs in his pocket, and dashes off the other songs on the spot. Clinton Heylin, who is completely on the wrong track by supposing that “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” is a parody of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, analyzes accurately again that the song belongs to the songs which, like a Basement Tape, in a short creative flash bubble up out of nowhere. Apart from Dylan’s own words and the studio logs, the simplicity of the text also appears to support that assumption.

Indeed, there is no trace of Blonde On Blonde’s poetry, not an inch of John Wesley Harding’s depths. Clichés from the country idiom, rhymes like the ones that have been bouncing off these studio walls in Nashville thousands of times, although the poet seemingly deliberately, sometimes, turns to irony: he’s tall, dark and handsome (it’s not too realistic that a betrayed lover describes his rival as an irresistible Cary Grant).

Nevertheless, it is a beautiful, if not: professional song and it is not entirely understandable that its status has remained so far behind “I Threw It All Away” and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”. The master himself also ignores the song for a long time; it takes thirty-one years, until March 2000, before he plays it on stage for the first time. But then Dylan actually seems to recognize the beauty of this old shelf warmer. “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” will remain on the setlist until 2005 and is finally adequately rehabilitated after some eighty performances.

Satisfactory, but too late for an overall revaluation. The rest of the music world neglects this unsung Dylan pearl, so this work belongs to the rather select club Dylan songs of which hardly any covers have appeared. From Beck circulates a mediocre living room recording and he is the only artist from the Premier League that plays the song at all.

The Rosewood Thieves, folk rockers from New York, the indie rock band Kind Of Like Spitting (on Professional Results, 2014) and the remarkable Jolie Holland are worth mentioning from the lower echelons. Jolie Holland, who is rightly classified as New Weird America, is blessed with a smooth, drawling vocal style and repeats her idiosyncratic homage to Dylan on her album Wildflower Blues (2017); there she conjures up Dylan’s forgotten “Minstrel Boy”.

Just like Jolie Holland, Richard Janssen from Utrecht has a faible for Dylan’s orphaned disposables. In 1998, for a so-called 2 Meter Session, he records a beautiful “If Dogs Run Free”. Ten years earlier, with his Fatal Flowers, one of the best Dutch bands of the 80s, he records the most beautiful cover of “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”, also for a 2 Meter Session on vara Radio. The Fatal Flowers are in the history books thanks to the very nice hit “Younger Days”, but the other songs also stand the test of time well. The recording of “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” is successful enough as to be selected in 2002 for the nostalgic collection album Younger Days – The Definitive Fatal Flowers.

He truly was tall, dark and handsome, our Richard Janssen.

You might also enjoy: Tell me that it isn’t true: the meaning behind the words and music.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

by Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

‘I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world’

I’m writing this at dawn on January 3. There’s a new moon, bright and hard, with the shadow of the old clearly seen. Venus standing off to one side in stark clarity. It’s deceptively quiet here, in the wooded valley where we live, but there’s a planet out there facing another year of madness and peril. As Dylan says, ‘it’s tough out there…’ I look around for the fortune telling lady but I don’t see her.

Of all the perils facing us in 2019 and beyond, global warming is the most overwhelming to contemplate. I have trouble with global warming, not with accepting the scientific consensus and the reality of it, but coming to grips with my life in terms of it.

‘I think when my back was turned

the whole world behind me burned’

 Psychologists and social commentators have identified a new syndrome they call climate-change melancholy, a debilitating mix of pessimism, helplessness and anger. It goes with a ‘what’s the use of anything?’ mood; it’s all going down in the flood or up inflame.

‘The air burns

and I’m trying to think straight’

But I can’t think straight. Meaninglessness is de rigueur. “People are crazy and times are strange”. Why do anything at all; we ain’t goin nowhere. High water everywhere. And what’s with all this Bob Dylan stuff? Shouldn’t I dedicate my meagre writing talents to a worthy climate change blog that’s trying to make a difference, quit this slumming it with Bob Dylan, do something useful to the world?

Isn’t this ratting around in another man’s songs a privileged indulgence, along with cinnamon lattes on New Year’s morning and regrets over lost love? What good am I?

The air is getting hotter

There’s a rumbling in the sky

 That’s right! And I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs, so to speak, playing over and over my latest Dylan performance obsession, his 2018 brooding version of Cry A While. A nasty, back-stabbing, double-crossing kind of song, with these grand, heavy, marching chords, rebooting my brain before the sun comes up. It must be someone else’s turn to cry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7_kXM4fTwQ

And maybe that’s the point; for all that ‘darkness at the break of noon’ pessimism there is a resilience in a good Bob Dylan song, a celebration of our capacity to bounce back.

In the grim days of the cold war, following the Cuba crisis, a brave young voice of defiance could sing, ‘but it’s all right ma, it’s life and life only,’ or ‘it’s all right ma, I can make it.’ While ‘It’s all right Ma’ is a devastating attack on all things false and phoney, there is an affirmation in it. For a kid just five years younger than Bob, it was a message of hope and resistance. And later, in the seventies, when a whole lot of shit caught up with our generation, Dylan reminded us that no matter how much blood there is on the tracks you just keep on keeping on. Look at the inbuilt resilience of spirit in Buckets of Rain (my line arrangement):

Life is sad

Life is bust

All you can do

Is do what you must

You do what you must do

And you do it well

 That says it all. When it comes to climate change melancholy, Bob Dylan is my medicine.  It’s like what they say about the blues. Those old blues singers that Dylan loves so much didn’t sing the blues to make themselves sad, but as a cure to their sadness. They sang to uplift themselves. The blues is lit by humour and stoical resistance, full of complaints about whisky and women, and Dylan picks up on that beautifully.

The ancient Greeks coined the term “catharsis”, which refers to the elevating effect of a good tragedy. Catharsis is a kind of emotional discharge.

Dictionary.com defines catharsis as ‘the purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music.’ In short, listening to Dylan is inspirational. Even the darkest of songs, like Senor, give me courage to face the sun coming up and the unbearable light it brings to the world. Gives me courage to face the year, the madman cavorting the White House and other obscenities too numerous to mention.

‘Well, the road is rocky and the hillside's mud

Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood…’

Of course. Reality as always has too many heads, and we must do what we must do and keep walking the road, even the darkest part.

when the cities are on fire

with the burning death of men

just remember that death is not the end

Amen to that.

You might also enjoy “Cry a while”: gathering all the old blues into one song

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

Recently, with the help of Jochen I started musing on songs that Dylan has commented on – songs that he didn’t write but which he particularly likes.   So far I’ve looked at two of them in these articles

• Why does Bob Dylan really like “Lonesome Town”
• Why does Bob Dylan so adore “So Cold in China”?

Jochen also reminded me of Lonely Avenue by Ray Charles, which in turn took me back to the story that Bob Dylan’s voice was going to be available on car satnav systems.  I don’t know if that ever happened, but the notion of always turning onto Lonely Avenue was one that a lot of commentators latched on to at the time.

Lonely Avenue has a vital place within rhythm n blues music as it was the first Doc Pomus (real name Jerome Felder) song to gain attention across the US and Europe.   Indeed there is a biography of Doc Pomus called “Lonely Avenue”.  He’s one of the songwriters whose life was so varied and wild it is hard to believe it is all true, but I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself.  Here it is the music that concerns me.

But you’ll probably know Pomus’ music from such classics as Save the Last Dance for Me, This Magic Moment, A Teenager in Love etc etc, and it is often mentioned that Bob Dylan visited Doc Poums.

Here’s the Ray Charles version of Lonely Avenue…

https://youtu.be/FUE3Z-LoWyQ

In one way, loving this song is pretty much essential for anyone brought up on R&B from the 1950s, and listening to it again now the openness of the song immediately strikes one.

There is no escape from the beat it just pounds on and on and on and on 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – there is no way around this.  It symbolises the room without sunlight.  It is relentless in pushing across the image of the man isolated, alone, feeling desperate: the ultimate blues of the 1920s transmuted into the blues style of the 1950s, sung, of course, by a man with a most brilliant blues singing voice.

The backing by the female singers works perfectly too, giving us the echo of woman he has lost still in the room but not there. It would be so easy to overdo that, but it is timed perfectly.   Here are the lyrics…

And if you are listening and reading at the same – note how in verse two the melody doesn’t change at all, although the chords move on.  A perfect clash

Now my room has got two windows
But the sunshine never comes through
You know it’s always dark and dreary
Since I broke off, baby with you

I live on a lonely avenue
My little girl wouldn’t say I do
Well, I feel so sad and blue
And it’s all because of you

I could cry, I could cry, I could cry
I could die, I could die, I could die
Because I live on a lonely avenue
Lonely avenue

Now my covers they feel like lead
And my pillow it feels like stone
Well, I’ve tossed and turned so every night
I’m not used to being alone

I live on a lonely avenue
My little girl wouldn’t say I do
Well, I feel so sad and blue
And it’s all because of you

I could cry, I could cry, I could cry
I could die, I could die, I could die
Because I live on a lonely avenue
Lonely avenue

Lonely avenue
Lonely avenue

Now I’ve been so sad and lonesome
Since you’ve left this town
You know if I could beg or borrow the money
Child, I would be a highway bound

I live on a lonely avenue
My little girl wouldn’t say I do
Well, I feel so sad and blue
You know its all because of you

This is pure, relentless emotion of the bleakest kind, helped very much by the way the melody works.  And the bleakness is enhanced by the repetition not just of the chorus but also of the second verse

I live on a lonely avenue
My little girl wouldn’t say I do
Well, I feel so sad and blue
And it’s all because of you

There is also the way the song just starts without any preface – we are straight in there, the image is solid and there is no escape.  Bang, we’re stuck in the room without the door having opened.

And it would have been tempting I guess to have a fade out at the end – but the producer didn’t do this – he ended the song with a chord – I think it is a 13th but I fear my ears are no longer sharp enough to be sure.   But whatever it is it symbolises the discord of the man’s life.

If ever there was a song that has the sound that represents the lyrics this is it – at every level.  The beat that is relentless at the start just represents the monotony of the singer’s life in a way that envelops the listener.  There is no escape; this is the world.

Of course Dylan would never write a song like this – but I can absolutely see why he still remembers it all these years later.  It works to perfection.  It simply hits you and then wraps the listening up inside it.

There really is no escape.

Here’s the remastered version

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

Previously in this series:

• Dylan and Rudyard Kipling appears here (Part 1)
• I Don’t Believe You: Bob Dylan And Rudyard Kipling (Part II)

The Victorian perspective of poet and writer Rudyard Kipling has a lasting influence on Western culture:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too ....

.... you'll be a man, my son

(Rudyard Kipling: If)

Bob Dylan grows up in days when men are depicted as men; women as women:

Trust yourself

Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best

Trust yourself

Trust yourself to do what's right, and not be second-guessed

(Bob Dylan: Trust Yourself)

The rhythmical waves of Kipling’s ideal values ripple yet through the song lyrics of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan:

Of all of them blackfaced crew

The finest man I knew

Was our regimental 'bhisti', Gunga Din

He was Din, Din, Din

You limpin', lump o' brick-dust, Gunga Din

(Rudyard Kipling: Gunga Din)

Bob Dylan adds the name of a latter-day member – Roger McGuinn of the Byrds:

Clouds so swift, and the rain fallin' in

Gonna see a movie called 'Gunga Din'

Pack up your money, pull up your tent, McGuinn

You ain't goin' nowhere

(Bob Dylan: You Ain’t Going Nowhere)

And film actor Anthony Quinn:

When Quinn the Eskimo gets here

Everybody's gonna doze

Come all without, come all within

You'll not see nothin' like the mighty Quinn

(Bob Dylan: The Mighty Quinn)

Other lines by the disillusioned Victorian poet have already been mentioned:

We have done with hope and honour; we are lost to love and truth

We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung

And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth

God help us, for we knew the worst too young

(Rudyard Kipling: Gentlemen-Rankers)

Kipling knows his Keats:

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoyed

For ever panting, and forever young

All breathing passion from above

(John Keats: Ode On A Grecian Urn)

And Dylan his Keats, and his Kipling:

May you build a ladder to the stars

And climb on every rung

May you stay

May you stay forever young ...

May you grow up to be righteous

May you grow up to be strong

May you always know the truth

An see the lights surrounding you

(Bob Dylan: Forever Young)

Kipling alludes to a nursery rhyme:

We're poor little lambs who've lost our way

Baa! baa! baa!

We're little black sheep who've gone astray

Baa-aa-aa!

Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree

Damned from here to eternity

(Rudyard Kipling: Gentlemen-Rankers)

To wit:

Baa, baa, black sheep

Have you any wool?

Yes sir, yes sir

Three bags full

(Nursery rhyme: Baa Baa Black Sheep)

And Dylan too:

And the mountains are filled with lost sheep

Ring them bells for the blind and the deaf

Ring them bells for all of us who are left

Ring them bells for the chosen few

(Bob Dylan: Ring Them Bells)

Whether the sheep are Jewish or Calvinist, we’re not sure!

In the burlesque adventure movie ‘Gunga Din’, based on Kipling’s poem by the same name, the water-bearer Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe) dies a hero’s death –  saves Sergeant Cutter, played by Cary Grant.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

The world is a play scene
Each plays his role and gets his share

In the Dutch speaking world well-known poetry verses from Joost van den Vondel from 1637, but even at that time they were not original.  Forty years earlier, for example, Shakespeare writes in As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts

… with which the English bard actually ruminates what he already said a few years earlier in The Merchant Of Venice:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage where every man must play a part.

And before that Erasmus already asked: “For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director motions them off the stage?” (Praise of Folly, 1511), but Shakespeare probably owes the fatalistic wisdom to Petronius. His quod fere totus mundus exerceat histrionem (‘almost the whole world are players’, 1^st century AD) is the motto above the front door of Shakespeare’s theatre, The Globe.

Dylan’s derivative, only a pawn in the game, is a slightly more cynical variant of this fairly pessimistic metaphor. After all, it denies the greatest gift from the Creator, the existence of a Free Will. That comparable, but more vicious image of a gaming piece pushed back and forth by higher powers is not too revolutionary in itself (the comparison with chess is quite obvious, especially in war dramas and in spy novels), but in this context , in a sociological indictment, a rather brilliant and haunting find.

The motivation for writing “Only A Pawn In Their Game” is known and is explicitly mentioned in the first lines;

A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name

June 12, 1963, while getting out of his car at home, the black civil rights activist Medgar Evers is cowardly shot in the back by the white racist Byron De La Beckwith. He dies in the hospital a little later.

At this point in his career, Dylan does not yet have an allergic reaction to labels like ‘protest singer’ and ‘champion of the Civil Rights movement’, to his reputation as a socially inspired activist, so that same week he writes his song about the crime. Three weeks later he sings it for the first time publicly, during a political meeting in Mississippi.

The event ensures attention from the New York Times (July 7, 1963, page 43). With quite a few editorial errors, unfortunately. Under the heading ‘NORTHERN FOLK SINGERS HELP OUT AT NEGRO FESTIVAL IN MISSISSIPPI’ it says that Pete Seeger is accompanied by Theodore Bikel and one Bobby Dillon, ‘who, like Mr. Seeger, are white’. Apparently, one of the most memorable songs of that day is “Only A Pawn In Their Game”, but it is attributed to a ‘local singer’:

Joining Mr Seeger in leading the songfest, in which most of the audience joined at one time or another, were Theodore Bikel and Bobby Dillon, who, like Mr. Seeger, are white. There was also a Negro trio, the Freedom Singers, from Albany, Ga. All paid their own expenses for the trip and sang without a fee.
One of the more popular songs presented by a local singer was one dedicated to Medgar W. Evers, the Mississippi field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who was slain last month in Jackson, Mississippi. A Greenwood man, Byron de La Beckwith, has been indicted in the shooting.
The refrain of the song was that the man who shot Mr Evers didn’t know what he was doing and should be forgiven: “He’s only a pawn in their game.”

… and the content analysis is not too sharp either. In the refrain it is said that the killer ‘didn’t know what he was doing’ and that he ‘should be forgiven’, the reporter from New York thinks. A trainee, presumably.

The special power of this song is in fact that the poet manages to write an individual-transcending ballad about a despicable, hateful murder. Finger-pointing, perhaps, but the poet does not point his finger at a cruel killer, at a tragic victim of circumstances or at a pitiful casualty, as in topical songs like “The Death Of Emmett Till”, “Ballad Of Hollis Brown” or “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll”. In this song both the victim and the assassin remain a symbol, an archetype. The listener will not learn anything about Medgar Evers; the murderer does not shoot an individual, but a name – he does not know his victim either, only knows what he symbolizes. After the first two lines, the following forty-two lines concentrate on the killer’s fate, who remains nameless (‘he ain’t got no name’). The poet presents him as an archetype, too. This is an exchangeable pawn that follows the rules of the game, without having control over it – that is why not he is the one to blame, but this society is, this culture, this set of values and norms.

It is an intelligent, sharp sociological analysis, as recognized by traveling companion Pete Seeger too (in Mojo 100 Greatest Dylan Songs #49, September 2005):

“The song says just putting the murderers in jail was not enough. It was about ending the whole game of segregation. It was the first song I heard that connected the position of the black field hands with that of the poor whites in the south.”

This ability to recognize an incident as a symptom, and to use it as an illustration of social criticism, is one of the things Dylan has just learned from Bertolt Brecht. As we can conclude from his own Chronicles and from Suze Rotolo’s A Freewheelin’  Time, the play Brecht On Brecht has made an overwhelming impression on the young bard. To the song “Pirate Jenny” alone, Dylan dedicates five pages in his autobiography, claiming that from now on he tries to write songs “totally influenced by Pirate Jenny”. But he also paid attention to the rest of the performance. Brecht On Brecht is a kind of ‘best of Bertolt Brecht’, skilfully put together by the legendary dramaturge and Brecht expert George Tabori. Apart from songs, the piece consists of excerpts from plays, poems and essays. And Dylan will have nodded in agreement with wisdoms like

When nothing is right in the right places , you’ve got disorder.

and

I am a playwright. I show you
What I have seen. In man’s markets
I have seen how man is bought and sold.
This is what I show you, I the playwright.

… just like Dylan, probably consciously, absorbed Brecht’s style of poetry; Brecht keeps the listener awake by Verfremdungseffekte (‘estrangement effects’), frustrating the expectations of the listener. Stylistically, the German lyricist and playwright achieves this with tricks copied by the song poet Dylan here: by occasionally not rhyming, by varying the number of verse lines per verse and by deliberately changing the meter at unexpected moments.

Technically it is therefore a ‘difficult’ song and it is consequently almost never covered. The braveheart who dares to do it, does it either a capella, or tries to smoothen the song, tries to ‘correct’ it with a bit of tampering. The obscure Lenny Nelson Project, for example (1988), and a sympathetic Alison Lewis during a Medgar Evers commemoration in 2014, and the best one, Black Crowe Rich Robinson on the soundtrack for the remarkable documentary film The People Speak (2009) – by occasionally skipping or adding a syllable, especially in the first two lines of each verse, they manage to ‘balance’ the verse lines.

Uncomfortable, just as the song is meant to be, of course. A narrative, social criticism, intelligent, angular, uncomfortable … “Only A Pawn In Their Game” is definitely the most Brechtian song in Dylan’s oeuvre, even more than the “Pirate Jenny” carbon copy “When The Ship Comes In”. And when Dylan plays the song on August 28 during the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King gives his famous I have a dream speech, all the world is his stage.

If the video below is not available for your country the recording can be heard here.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1em7qHwYyI4

“Baby coming back from the dead” is a song that doesn’t get a listing in Heylin at all, but is reported as being recorded in 1985.  It turned up on the bootleg album “After the Empire” in full glorious engineered sound.

Those who know about such things suggest (as the bootleg name indeed says) this was made after Empire Burlesque, and recorded at Cherokee Studios in May 1985.

This recording shows Dylan doing what most rock bands do (or at least the ones I have known – and I should add none of them mega famous) – working on ideas simply by playing them over and over and seeing where it all goes.  It is the sort of song that many a band would have loved to use as an opener at a gig just to get the audience warmed up and bopping away.  And the sort of sound many of them would have died to get.

Certainly the sound production is excellent, and Dylan clearly liked the notion of this 12 bar blues as they kept it going for eight minutes and even managed to end all together.

Despite the fact that the main lyrics are just two lines, the moment where the band takes it really low (Dylan saying the classic “easy now” at one point) and then rebounds near the end of the piece, is truly exciting.  It shows exactly what can be got from one simple idea when you have the best musicians behind you who will do exactly what their leader says.

Although it has been hinted at, no one really knew (before the release of this collection) what Dylan was really doing in the studio around this time.  As the listing below shows, the recording of songs for his two albums was mixed up (rather than just recording one album, going on tour, and then recording the next).  And looking at the songs composed by Dylan around this time it is clear that he was seeking new directions all the way through.

The fashion of music crticis (for such people did exist in 1985, generally coming out at night and skulking around in the shadows before writing negative reviews of whatever gig they could get a free ticket for) was to suggest that Dylan was yesteryear’s news, a man struggling to regain his cutting edge.  But as everyone realised after the internet was invented, it was the critics themselves who were yesterday’s news.

Certainly when we look at the new songs that can be placed as being written in 1985, being “past it” was anything but the truth in terms of Dylan, and I think for quite a few of us, the rejection of Dylan as having any relevance to the 1980s by the media was a major factor in alienating us from that media.  Thus it was, it turned out, the media that was increasingly irrelevant not Bob Dylan.

Others who know far more than me about such matters have suggested that Bob Dylan was (rather obviously) on vocal and guitar, along with Vito San Filippo (bass), Raymond Lee Pounds (drums), Carolyn Dennis, Madelyn Quebec, Elisecia Wright (backup vocals).  Who was on keyboards is not known – or at least I haven’t seen anything that looks like more than pure speculation on the issue.

It is also said in some reviews that Dylan lacked judgement in not taking some of the ideas from this collection forward – and indeed it is a tragedy that we never got to hear this particular song live at gigs, or indeed have a chance to hear it before the bootleg version came out.

But I would argue that when you are being panned by the critics as Dylan was, it is very hard to know what to do next even for an absolute genius like Dylan.   For this was not the only song that was given a knock out performance just once (in this case in the studio) – we might also think back to “I once knew a man” which was performed on TV the once in 1984, and then left.  He was creating them, playing them, and moving on.

It is also possible to forget what a varied collection of songs Dylan wrote or co-wrote that year.  Here’s the list that I have for the year – with this song to placed somewhere within.

1. Maybe Someday (Knocked out loaded)
2. Seeing the real you at last  (Empire Burlesque)
3. I’ll remember you (Empire Burlesque)
4. Trust Yourself  (Empire Burlesque)
5. Emotionally Yours (Empire Burlesque)
6. Steel Bars 
7. Well well well
8. Howlin at your window
9. Tragedy of the trade
10. Time to end this masquerade
11. Worth The Waiting For (date uncertain)
12. Straight A’s in Love
13. The Very Thought of You
14. Waiting to get beat (Empire Burlesque outtake)
15. When the night comes falling from the sky (Empire Burlesque)
16. Never gonna be the same again  (Empire Burlesque)
17. Dark Eyes (Empire Burlesque)
18. Shake (Farm Aid)
19. Under your spell (Knocked out loaded)

Now not all of these are great works of art at all, but it does contain what is for me one of the great Dylan compositions (“Dark Eyes”) and also one of the very greatest co-compositions (“Well Well Well”).

Those two alone would be enough to make any other writer remembered – for Dylan they tend to be forgotten because the media has decided this was a bad Dylan year.

I’ve no idea when in the year this song was written, so when I update the Dylan compositions in the 80s file I will just have to place it somewhere that feels about right in 1985 and mark it as a guess.  But guess or no, this is certainly a load of fun which any singer songwriter could be very proud of indeed, and most would make a regular fixture as a song in their eternal come back tours.

Fortunately for us Dylan never had comeback tours as he simply never went away.

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.

.

Part one of Dylan and Rudyard Kipling appears here.

by Larry Fyffe

When singer/songwriter Bob Dylan sources a poem to augment his song lyrics, he often pays a tribute to the author of that poem. Whether consciously or subconsciously, Dylan ‘twists’ a rhyme from the poem into his song. That is, he fidddles with a rhyme that appears in the original poem.

A blatant example:

Well, my sense of humanity is going down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain
(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)

Dylan varies ‘drains’/ ‘pains’ a bit:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk
Or empied some dull opiate to the drains
(John Keats: Ode To A Nightingale)

Another example of the Dylanesque Rhyme Twist:

If I was with her too long
Or have done something wrong
(Bob Dylan: I Don’t Believe You)

The rhyme ‘long’/’wrong’ echoes ‘long’/’song’ found in the poem quoted below:

You have heard the song
How long, how long?
(Rudyard Kiplng: L’Envoi)

Jochen Markhorst notes that the song “I Don’t Believe You” closely follows the rhyme scheme of the poem “L’Envoi” (“abccbdeffe” – near rhymes notwithstanding):

I can’t understand (a)
She let go of my hand (a)
And left me here facing the wall (b)
I sure like to know (c)
Why she did go (c)
But I can’t get close to her at all (b)
Though we kissed in the wild blazing night-time (d)
She said she would never forget (e)
But the morning is clear (f)
It’s like I ain’t here (f)
She just acts like we never have met (e)
(Bob Dylan: I Don’t Believe You)

Now the poem ~ for the sake of clarity, its structuring is unlocked:

There be triple ways to take (a)
Of the eagle and the snake (a)
Or the way of a man with a maid (b)
But the fairest was to me (c)
Is a ship’s upon the sea (c)
In the heel of the North-East Trade (b)
Can you hear the crash on her bows, dear lass (d)
And the drum of the racing screw (e)
As she ships it green on the old trail (f)
Our own trail, the out trail (f)
As she lifts and ‘scends on the Long Trail – the trail that is always new? (e)
(Rudyard Kipling: L’Envoi)

Again, the song lyrics – Indeed, Dylan on one level might even be talking about tangling with Kipling’s Victorian poem the night before:

It’s all new to me (a)
Like some mystery (a)
It could even be like a myth (b)
It’s hard to think on (c)
That she’s the same one (c)
That last night I was with (b)
From darkness, dreams are deserted (d)
Am I still dreaming yet? (e)
I wish she’s unlock (f)
Her voice once and talk (f)
‘Stead of acting like we never have met (e)
(Bob Dylan: I Don’t Believe You)

The ‘Kipling’ poem has a Tennyson ‘Ulysses’ tilt to it:

Fly forward my heart, O my heart (a)
From the Foreland to the Start (a)
We’re steaming all-too slow (b)
And it’s twenty thousand mile (c)
To our little lazy isle(c)
Where the trumpets-orchids blow (b)
We have heard the call of the off-shore wind (d)
And the voice of the deep-sea rain (e)
You have heard the song (f)
How long, how long? (f)
Pull out on the trail again (e)
(Rudyard Kipling: L’Envoi)

It’s well-known that Bob Dylan sings traditional folk songs, and reads the works of poets, especially those who write in the vernacular:

Tell Ol’ Bill when he comes home
Anything is worth a try
Tell him that I’m not alone
That the hour has come to do or die
(Bob Dylan: Tell Ol’ Bill)

The Dylanesque Rhyme Twist be ‘die’/’try’ for ‘die’/’why’:

Someone had blundered
Theirs not to make reply
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do and die
Into the Valley of Death
Rode the the six hundred
(Lord Tennyson: The Charge Of The Light Brigade)

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

Herodotus tells in Book III of his Histories about the power-lusting empire-builder Cambyses, the king who wanted to expand his Persian empire. In the south of Egypt he recruits Ethiopian-speaking Ichthyophagi, ‘fish eaters’ from the Elephantine Island on the Nile, who have to explore the area in Ethiopia. Loaded with gifts, they introduce themselves as messengers to the king of the Ethiopians, “the greatest and most beautiful of all men,” who effortlessly sees through them as spies. Nevertheless, the king introduces them to the secret of the beauty and the long, long life of the Ethiopians:

When the Icthyophagi showed wonder at the number of the years, he led them to a fountain, wherein when they had washed, they found their flesh all glossy and sleek, as if they had bathed in oil – and a scent came from the spring like that of violets. The water was so weak, they said, that nothing would float in it, neither wood, nor any lighter substance, but all went to the bottom. If the account of this fountain be true, it would be their constant use of the water from it which makes them so long-lived.

(Book III, Thalia, chapter 23)

A-ha. So the source of rejuvenation is a Fountain of Eternal Youth. Herodotus is a serious scientist, the ‘father of historiography’, his mention does carry some weight. So from Alexander the Great crossing the Land Of Darkness, to the Spanish conquistadores searching for the mythical islands of Bimini, to the illusionist David Copperfield in the twenty-first century: humankind continues to search for that mythical spring. Forever young is and remains an irresistible ideal.

Immortality less so. Myths like those of the Flying Dutchman and Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, teach that not being able to die is a curse, a punishment from a god or a devil. Dylan also teaches that lesson in “Seven Curses”. The seventh, the most horrible cursing that befalls the false judge is: seven deaths shall never kill him.

Hence, in the song “Forever Young” the narrator is not wishing this frightening immortality for his child, but he expresses the wish that he may remain ‘young’ in a metaphorical sense; free from weakness, sourness, cynicism, from being washed out and from fatigue, free from, in short, the decay we blame on aging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuYqL-uzMes

Familiar, age-old blessings. Every parent will recognize them, and similar blessings can be found in the Old Testament. And most of all, they are sweet, unambiguous and optimistic – far from anything the cynical, super cool hipcat Dylan from 1965 could have written.

It seems to be a somewhat sensitive area to the poet himself, too. As demonstrated by the unique maneuver to put a second, slightly less sweet version on the album. And according to legend, we also owe the acetic acid of the bicarbonatic “Dirge” indirectly to the sweetness of “Forever Young”.

A female friend of Dylan’s childhood buddy Lou Kemp, a Martha, is said to have said after hearing the test recordings of “Forever Young”: “Are you getting mushy in your old age?”

It is an apocryphal story and at first glance not too credible. This takes place in November 1973, when Dylan has been hardened for years and years by harsh, global and often unsubstantiated criticism, when Dylan has already been chastised by complete concert halls, has been written off for thousands of pages in leading magazines and publicly been called to account in Baez songs, by Bowie and whonot.

It is, all in all, not very likely that some superficial bullying by a single silly little dimwit could touch Dylan. On the other hand, producer Fraboni also mentions the ‘Martha incident’ and he remembers his horror when Dylan decides to cancel the album highlight “Forever Young” altogether. After Fraboni’s dismay, Dylan wants to at least record a different, bolder version of “Forever Young” and eventually, after much squabbling, agrees with that strange – and in Dylan’s oeuvre unique – compromise to put both versions on the record. From that witness report can be concluded, therefore, that this unknown girl has managed to strike a sensitive nerve, that Dylan too does not feel completely at ease with the mushiness of the song.

It does not affect the popularity of the song. “Forever Young” is one of Dylan’s most covered songs, a favourite with both fans and non-fans, and – despite that alleged embarrassment – is in Olof Björner’s list of songs performed over 500 times.

Explicit is also the greed with which the International Trade House Dylan & Co. Inc. claims the copyrights, as is evident from the slightly shameful sabre rattling around Rod Stewart’s ‘cover’.

When Stewart, together with two of his band members, writes his “Forever Young” in 1988, he realizes that it is very similar to Dylan’s song. He is familiar with the legal assertiveness and willingness to claim of Dylan’s management, so Stewart is so wise as to test the waters first and sends a test pressing to New York. Generously, Stewart is granted 50% of the royalties.

It is an uncomfortable, because ambiguous, phenomenon, that claim behaviour of Dylan. After all, he himself is the greatest thief of all, a self-proclaimed thief of thoughts, who plunders the work of others in all areas – literary, in his visual arts and in his song art. But Hootie & The Blowfish has to pay a lot when the band quotes from Dylan songs in the world hit “I Only Want Be With You”, Apple has to settle in 1994 for the use of the brand name ‘Dylan’ when the company uses that name for a programming language (even though Dylan, bizarrely enough, nicked the name himself) and now Stewart has to deliver for “Forever Young”.

Another raffled edge this issue gets when Rod Stewart is sued in 2015 by the heirs of Armetia ‘Bo Carter’ Chatmon, for his cover of the song “Corrina, Corrina”. In the indictment filed in Atlanta, Stewart is accused of knowingly infringing copyright or not having taken the trouble to check whether the song belongs to the public domain.

Dylan plays the same song on The Freewheelin’, and even unconcerndly steals the song, in words and writing, by registering it to his name. In quite misty terms, by the way: the label on the record reads ‘adapted and arranged: B. Dylan’, on his website and in Lyrics is stated ‘written by: Bob Dylan (arr.)’, And in 1994 the copyright is, as is the custom, renewed.

For unknown reasons, this is ignored by the Chatmon / Carter heirs. When the case against Rod Stewart fails, they try again a year later, October 13, 2016. This time in Tennessee and this time against Eric Clapton (who recorded the song as “Alberta, Alberta”), but the heirs eventually, on June 27, 2018, again come away empty-handed.

The remarkable thing is that the much more impertinent, unashamed, much earlier Dylan remains untouched. Perhaps we can see here demonstrated the profound truth from Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones (1920):

For de little stealin’ dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin’ dey makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall o’ Fame when you croaks,

… the aphorism Dylan also, very appropriately, steals. Paraphrased, for “Sweetheart Like You” (Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you a king).

Regardless. “Forever Young” is a beautiful, fragile song that has a moving power in almost any performance, by almost any artist. Johnny Cash, Norah Jones, Eddie Vedder, The Pretenders, Deacon Blue … oh well, every true artist who knows how to avoid pathos and melodrama hits the mark.

Special added value the song receives when the eternally young Pete Seeger contributes it to Chimes of Freedom: the Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International (2012), at the age of ninety-two.

The producers have to travel to Seeger’s hometown of Beacon, New York, because the elderly singer wants his choir of local school children, The Rivertown Kids, singing along. The recording, beautifully orchestrated, with the fragile talk-singing, elderly folk legend is perhaps not the most beautiful, but undeniably the most moving version of “Forever Young”. And a strong indication that the Fountain of Eternal Youth is probably not to be found in Ethiopia, not on the mythical islands of Bimini and not in an Asian Land of Darkness, but somewhere along the banks of the Hudson, near Beacon, New York.

You may also enjoy…

• Forever Young: the meaning of the music and the lyrics
• Forever Young: the alternative view
• Blake, Keats, And Spots Of Ink: Spinning Reels Of Rhyme
• Forever Young by Joan Baez.  Suggested in our Greatest Cover recordings list.

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

“Nowhere to go” also known as “When everybody comes to town” is listed in many places as a Bob Dylan – George Harrison co-composition which was in the long list of songs to go onto All Things Must Pass, but then not used. 

It exists only as a demo from the time Harrison made recordings of all the songs he was considering for the album.  The Dylan Harrison composition that was used was “I’ll have you any time”.  This song is not mentioned under either title in Heylin’s work on Dylan’s compositions.

The recording was made at Bob Dylan’s home in Greenwich Village in April 1970, although there are suggestions that the piece was written in 1969.

The song was included in a bootleg album called “Beware of ABKCO” a title which links the song “Beware of Darkness” and the fraught relationship the Beatles had with the publishing corporation Abkco – who at one stage sued the Beatles and in which one of the cases was settled by the group paying the publishing of $4 million.

Commenting on the period of writing this song Harrison noted that Bob Dylan was being very quiet and seemed very low on confidence at the time but things improved when the two musicians began playing music together around Thanksgiving.   (There are details of the occasion in the book “I me mine” by Harrison).

Simon Leng has suggested that Harrison showed Dylan a few chords that Dylan was not using in his songs and out of that conversation this song was created.

In this telling of events Harrison has been talking to Dylan, asking to be allowed into the private world Dylan had created around himself (“Let me in here”) to which Dylan replies “All I have is yours”

And from here somehow the two composers, through exchanging lyrics and chords subsequently emerged with this second song.

However to me (and as always this is just my thought on the matter) the chord sequence seems to have been pushed and pushed further and further to include as many unexpected chords as possible so that the song itself loses its coherence.  There is no rule that says you can’t have a dozen or more different chords in a verse, but pop and rock music was based on just three chords and the further away from that one gets the more one has to work to create a coherence that can be grasped by a pop/rock audience.  That doesn’t mean three chords is all we have but it does suggest that a certain caution is needed if one wants to keep the elements of popular music in what one is writing.

The chords we have here in the verse are…

G#m    G       F#m        Am       E          C#7

F#m      F       E             F#m    Am

It is indeed even hard to know which key the song is in.  As I say there is nothing in the rule book that says you can’t do this, because there is no rule book – but then on the other hand “Blowin in the Wind” only has three chords (although a fourth is sometimes added in performances).

Here are the lyrics of Nowhere to Go.

It really does sound to me like a quick Dylan lyric with Harrison throwing in every chord that might fit, and that doesn’t always work.  At least not for me.