By Tony Attwood

We all know the score: Dylan walks on stage, doesn’t say a word, performs the songs, maybe shares a few comments with members of the band, at the end takes the applause, walks off stage, moves onto  the next show. Quite right that it is called the “Never Ending Tour”.  It could also be called “Don’t speak.”

It wasn’t always like this.  In the early folk days Dylan announced what the songs were about but that quickly stopped.  For a while he lectured the audience on the need to give themselves over to God.   Now, we just get the songs.

But here’s the thing.  Even though he has apparently stopped composing, or at least we can safely say, now he is in his longest non-compositional spell, he is still touring, he’s still gotta keep moving as Robert Johnson announced.   The blues might not be falling down like hail, but he’s sure gotta keep on keeping on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UVgH9JqSnQ

And there is now the absolute ban at the gigs not just on taking pictures but on using phones to record the show.  It is as if Bob really doesn’t want there to be a track record of all these extraordinary new arrangements – for unless they have a complete studio set up back stage which no one has told us about, all the re-workings of the songs are going to be lost forever as each tour comes to an end.

Which is for many of us desperately sad.  Yes of course there are some people who see every tour, and so do catch all the new versions, but even so the memory of each new arrangement will quickly fade.  And there are so many of us who for very practical reasons just can’t get to every show.

So what is going on?

I think the answer lies not in some deep laden well-thought-out plan of Dylan or his record company or management but in something rather different.  Yes, it would be easy to explain this if there were plans to release some more Dylan archive footage from the tours – and of course they might do that: a series of 3-set CDs covering each new tour so you get all the songs that were sung every night, plus on the final CD the odd songs that made it onto the set just once or twice.  Think of the sales of that!

But no, the underlying motivation, I think, is different.  It is something that goes back to the image of the wandering singer, meandering from town to town, never settling down, always on the move.

And then on top of that something that is harder to describe – an unworldliness, a disconnection, a phasing in and out of existence.  And in this little essay I want to try and take us through the process of how the wandering singer meets his other self who phases in and out from separate realities.  But please don’t worry – in the end it turns out to be not nearly as spooky as it sounds.

However the first part is easy to get: the travelling.  Dylan’s hardly the hobo – the opposite in fact – but the image of being on the road moving on has never left him from the earliest days of getting to know The Parting Glass which became Restless Farewell and was so succinctly expressed in One too many mornings (the two songs written one after the other) and so many other songs thereafter.

But there are other elements in this too.  There is Dylan’s belief in the randomness of life, in which events just happen for no special reason and one does keep moving on.  Of course Dylan’s view in his writing has often changed and has for a while expressed the opposite view (the religious period of course represents a devotion to God’s plan which leads ultimately to the Second Coming, and the damnation for all eternity for the unbelievers), but it is there throughout his work, and it keeps on returning.

Song to Woodie  just about the earliest Dylan composition that we have with complete lyrics and music talks about the hard travelling – suggesting both physical moving on and mental processing of the world around.  And it is inevitable that when one moves on and on then stuff happens.

Although of course one doesn’t have to be moving on for random events to take over your life, as Ballad for a friend written at the start of 1962 shows us.   And indeed the infinitely more famous Blowing in the wind written just a short while later takes the theme further – you can’t fully understand what’s going on, it is just all out there.  (Or “Everything’s just everything cos everything just is” as Roy Harper once wrote).

And so you have just got to find it you’ve just got to keep on walking down those roads, on and on.  There is no end.

So with this feeling in mind, the travelling songs continued through that year, such as Down the Highway and Don’t think twice – the latter of which tells us so clearly that it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, because it don’t matter anyhow.  I’ll be gone by the time the rooster crows.

And this travelling on, is central not just to the singer, but it is the expectation of life.  “If you’re travelling in the north country fair…” it is not just Bob that travels – it is everyone.

In 1963 he sings Farewell and tells us he’s Going back to Rome and Ramblin Down Thru the World  and despite this being the time of him being the protest singer, he’s so clearly telling us that nothing is changing (Eternal Circle) and we get to the end of that year with those two consecutive statements of the central theme One too many mornings  and  Restless Farewell.

Of course there are contradictions in all this: It ain’t me babe which clearly says leave me alone, and I’m moving on, was followed quickly by Mama you’ve been on my mind.   But lost love for Dylan is just a subset of the world of moving on – a necessary part of the process.  Is not a world of regret, it is a world of inevitability.  In this world of moving on and moving on there is bound to be lost love – but one doesn’t try and get it back, one keeps on moving, exactly as Robert Johnson said.

Of course part of this vision is the determined desire to be an individual and to express one’s individualism, to be able to stand apart from the world, to live outside the law – such notions go with the whole show.

But one may ask why?  What is it that lies behind this notion of moving on without even leaving footprints (or in practical terms, getting the increasingly aggressive venue crews to treat the paying audience as thieves trying to steal the artist’s work)?

As Gates of Eden and It’s all right ma suggest it is because the world makes no sense, that all one can ever do is look after oneself, try to retain one’s integrity, ignore the critics, don’t follow leaders, don’t answer questions, just move on.  That’s how it is, there is no secret, no deep underlying law, no ultimate goal, you just keep on keeping on.

By 1965 the message was refining itself – for Dylan seemed to have realised that it wasn’t just that keeping moving was the right thing to do, for its own sake, but rather that life itself was total chaos.  “It’s life and life only”.  Indeed “to understand you know too soon there is no sense in trying,” quite simply because “he not busy being born is busy dying.”   How clear does the message have to be?   There simply is no point; all one can do is just keep moving.

But there is a sub-text of course, because nothing can ever be as simple as all that.  In a way the sub-text was there all the time, but it was in 1965 that it became suddenly so much clearer with Desolation Row because it is here, carrying on the theme from “It’s all right ma” we get the notion so clearly that it is not the world that affects us, it is not the world that makes us as we are, but the way that we choose to see the world.   Those guys with their postcards of the hanging see it one way, TS Eliot another, and Dylan… well,

All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name

You don’t change the world, you change the way you see the world – and where Dylan goes is into the half light, where we are all stranded and isolated, all seeing the world in our own way.  Even the night watchman is unsure who among them has a real grip on reality, and is starting to wonder who has got it right.  As for those who are sure they know, well, they are just as  confused as little boy lost.

It was the John Wesley Harding collection which cemented this notion of the disconnection with the world around as a central theme in Dylan’s songwriting – from which we take it, it has been a central theme in his thinking.

Song after song in JWH is about the outsider: the immigrant, the hobo, JWH himself, and of course the characters on the watchtower.

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief

Is the perfect expression of this disconnect from reality, and the need to keep moving on.

This time however Dylan goes further…

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke

Then again in the Drifter’s Escape, the judge has a tear in his eye because he recognises the Drifter’s disconnect from the real world and  the impossibility of the Drifter ever understanding.

But it is the unexpected irony of the cause of the Drifter’s escape that shows us Dylan’s thinking.  There is no rhyme and reason; ultimately no cause and effect

Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courthouse out of shape
And while ev’rybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape

Dylan returned to this central theme of existing beyond society and beyond cause and effect with “New Morning” as he now returned to the remote rural setting although this time without displaced farmers and miners to show us the disconnection. Sign on the window tells us these thoughts are still on his mind.

Sign on the window says “Lonely”
Sign on the door said “No Company Allowed”
Sign on the street says “Y’ Don’t Own Me”
Sign on the porch says “Three’s A Crowd”

And as for Time passes slowly as I said in my review at the time,

“The world is not what you think….The simple land is deceptive – the mountains don’t change but the thoughts and dreams of those who live here can change.  It is as if those thoughts create the world.  There is nothing real here at all… except of course there is.  This is the simple countryside isn’t it?  Streams and log cabins and stuff…”

And  through all this Dylan is grasping that although that is so, maybe there is something else out there, something beyond the world we can appreciate with our five senses, a world that lies out of our grasp. For as he said much later, “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way”.

He has become the distanced observer as in Watching the river flow…

Daylight sneakin’ through the window
And I’m still in this all-night café
Walkin’ to and fro beneath the moon
Out to where the trucks are rollin’ slow
To sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow

Of course sometimes he can re-enter our world and take part in the world’s affairs, but much of the time he is distanced from it all, content to watch because he has now long since realised that the real world is much of the  time what we just imagine it to be and there ain’t too much we can do about it, except dream up something new.

And then finally after maybe 18 or so years of trying, he got to the complete expression of this notion of separation from time and place, this flexibility of time that arrives when there is no longer cause and effect, that the world is you think it to be, when he created Tangled up in blue .

Of course through the 1970s Dylan was changing, because for most of us there is only so much uncertainty in life that one can take, and when it came along Gotta Serve Somebody struck out for the total antithesis of these themes that had dominated Dylan’s thinking before.

But even though that theme of being outside, looking in, of the world not being real was now to be cast aside for the certainty of When He Returns it was still there gnawing away at him, as I hope to prove in my second part of this little exploration of Dylan’s thinking.

Which I hope will follow soon.

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.

I Shall Be Released (1967) by Jochen Markhorst

“Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”

Despondent words with which the well-meaning Red tries to help his friend Andy Dufresne, in one of the many memorable scenes from the best film ever (according to imdb.com), The Shawshank Redemption.

Although these specific words have been devised by scriptwriter Frank Darabont, and are not to be found in the novella by Stephen King (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, 1982), hope is the key word for the plot both in the film and in the book. Andy Dufresne survives jail and builds a future thanks to hope, Red resists for a long time, but eventually dares, hesitantly and insecure, to give in to hope and to follow a dream. Darabont rightly copies the final words literally:

I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.
I hope.

Stephen King often is inspired by Dylan, quotes him in interviews and chooses song fragments as a motto, and this literary gem also seems to be inspired by a song from the bard, by the understated masterpiece “I Shall Be Released”.

On the surface anyway, because of that narrative perspective – a prisoner who stays afloat thanks to hope. And Andy’s attitude to life, get busy living or busy dying, will sound familiar to every Dylan fan. But it is the deeper layer under the plot, the level that elevates both the film, the book and the song to masterpieces.

The title of the story already reveals that this is not a classic, one-dimensional prison drama. Redemption promises a story of guilt, penance and soul liberation – and that is ultimately what it is; the story of the liberation of the man Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding.

That deeper layer shares the book with Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released”. Here too, the image of a prisoner waiting for physical liberation is only the surface, hardly more than a metaphor. Dylan throws in some jargon to evoke that image (released, of course, and framed, wall and put here), but nowhere explicitly states that we hear a detainee in a penitentiary.

The choice of archaic, stately idiom as I shall and unto, and the worn gospel melody bestow on the song a much more comprehensive scope than something as anecdotal as a prison song. Here, the poet expresses the universal desire for meaning, for inner freedom, for an answer to The Supremes’ eternal question Where Do I Go From Here.

The prison metaphor is powerful and well known. One of Dylan’s forerunners, the German writer-philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), also uses it, when he wants to illustrate wherein true liberation, true salvation lies: in the release of earthly, human urges and passions.

Not essentially different from distant ancestors like Aristotle and Epicurus, or followers such as Hegel and Nietzsche, but Schiller ‘proves’ it by placing his tragic heroes in utterly physical unfreedom and allowing them to achieve inner freedom, redemption. His Maria Stuart (1800), for example, is liberated internally, experiencing salvation in her death row, the night before her execution. She sees the light, is released, and smiles at her beheading.

It seems that Dylan receives immediate inspiration again from the ‘Minstrel of the Appalachians’, from the banjo-playing lawyer and folk legend Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973). His influence has been documented before with regard to “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again”, the song with the phrase She said that all the railroad men / Just drink your blood like wine, taken from Lunsford’s classic “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground “(in which Lunsford sings ‘Cause a railroad man they’ll kill you when he can / drink your blood like wine).

Dylan knows that song from the invaluable Anthology of American Folk Music, the three-part double album compilation from 1952 with eighty-four folk, country and blues songs, collected by the eccentric amateur musical anthropologist Harry Smith.

“I Wish I Was A Mole” is on Volume 3, Songs, but Dylan also listens to Volume 2, Social Music. “Rocky Road” from the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, Elsewhere McIntorsh’ “Since I Laid My Burden Down”, “John The Revelator” by Blind Willie Johnson … it is a treasure trove of songs that echo more and less directly in Dylan’s songs. And on side 4 of this double album is that other song by Bascom Lamar Lunsford that has gotten under Dylan’s skin: “Dry Bones” (not to be confused with “Dem Bones”, the Delta Rhythm Boys hit from the 40s).

Lunsford recorded “Dry Bones” in 1928 after learning it, by his own account, in North Carolina from one Romney, a wandering black preacher. It is a powerful, simple song with a colourful, biblical text. The five short couplets browse rather haphazardly through the Holy Scriptures, as through Genesis in the first verse:

Old Enoch he lived to be three-hundred and sixty-five
When the Lord came and took him back to heaven alive

The other stanzas pick from Acts, Exodus and Ezekiel, so criss-cross from the Bible. In the third verse the Dylan fan has a second aha-experience: The Lord said: “Moses, you’s treading holy ground.” – both content-wise and stylistic the blueprint for “Highway 61 Revisited” (God said to Abraham: “Kill me a son”).

But the first really earpricking moment is the second verse and the chorus that follows it:

Paul bound in prison, them prison walls fell down
The prison keeper shouted, “Redeeming Love I’ve found.”
I saw, I saw the light from heaven
Shining all around.
I saw the light come shining.
I saw the light come down

The verse is a terse résumé of Acts 16: 25-31, which tells how Paul liberates himself from captivity through prayer that causes the prison walls to collapse. Then he stops the prison guard from committing suicide, who now sees the light and will also serve Christ. Redeeming Love I’ve found – I have found the redeeming love, and so this scriptbook connects, like Shawshank Redemption, “Dry Bones”, Mary Stuart and “I Shall Be Released” physical, external liberation to mental, inner redemption.

By the way: the original recording of Bascom Lamar Lunsford certainly has a poignant esprit, but is also very skimpy and rowdy. The superior version by The Handsome Family really makes the song shine (Singing Bones, 2003).

“I Shall Be Released” seems perfectly tailored for a prominent place on John Wesley Harding. Between those redemption-seeking wanderers, lost souls and ancient archetypes, with that archaic use of words, that Biblical undercurrent and the predominant John The Revelator sphere, the song would have overshadowed “All Along The Watchtower”. But alas, according to Cameron Crowe in the booklet accompanying Biograph (1985) the song was finished too late for inclusion on John Wesley Harding, and it was not until after that, in the Big Pink basement on Stoll Road in West Saugerties, that is was completed. Probably not true; the song was copyrighted October 9, 1967, the album recording did not start until October 17, but what the heck.

In his autobiography (Testimony, 2016) Robbie Robertson also recognises the exceptionality of the song:

A lot of the tunes coming out of the basement had deep humor, but “Tears of Rage” and “I Shall Be Released” were no joking matter. This material wasn’t meant to reflect our lifestyle or the times we were living in. It was really just about trying to write an interesting song.

It is difficult to attach too much weight to Robertson’s words; his book is rather boastful, contains errors and suspicious omissions, regularly tells self-cleaning versions of facts that are reminded differently by traveling companion Levon Helm (This Wheel’s On Fire, 1993) and reliable Dylan biographers and thus, all in all, the testimony does not seem very reliable.

About “I Shall Be Released” Robertson also notes that it is one of the most beautiful tunes Bob has written during our time in the basement, but that astute comment is a clause between two dashes. The main sentence is another pat on his own back: “After ‘I Shall Be Released’, Dylan stood up and said,” That was so good. You did it, man, you did it.” Just before that, Robbie also takes credit for one of the main pillars under the recording with which The Band will make the song public (on Music From The Big Pink, 1968).

After we laid “I Shall Be Released” down on tape, I mentioned to Richard (Manuel) that I thought he could sing that one really well. “Maybe in a falsetto, like Curtis Mayfield might do it. In the same range as your harmony.” I sang a couple lines of the chorus in falsetto, and Richard smiled. “Yeah, I can do that.”

Regardless; Robbie Robertson has been directly involved for many years, sitting right across the table, and for whole periods was 24/7 present in Dylan’s biotope, so his testimonies have historical values one way or the other. The casual observation that “I Shall Be Released” is one of Dylan’s most beautiful songs is true and is also confirmed by the endless series of obeisances. It is undoubtedly among the top 3 of Dylan’s most covered songs, is hijacked by civil rights and political activists and included in the canon early on, mainly thanks to Joan Baez.

Pretty much every cover is at least tolerable and most of them are simply attractive and moving. It is another one of those songs that can hardly be ruined, apparently. A polished approach such as that of the three-woman project Mama Cass, Mary Travers and Joni Mitchell is beautiful, but consider also the version of Bette Midler, which starts in a turbulent way and works towards an exciting, soulful climax as well.

Maroon 5 remains on the track of The Band on Amnesty album Chimes Of Freedom (2012) and is great, just like Joe Cocker (Woodstock, 1969, including Richard Manuel-like backing vocals).

Rightfully famous is Jeff Buckley. After his death, a few recordings of the song pop up – the blood-curdling Live at Café Sin-e is one of the most successful versions of “I Shall Be Released”. Even more poignant power has a bizarre, enchanting recording of a radio broadcast, in which Buckley sings over the phone while musicians in the studio accompany him (WFMU Radio, 1992).

However, the second take of Dylan’s own embryonic basement recording, which is finally officially released in November 2014 (on The Bootleg Series Volume 11: The Basement Tapes Complete), still generates the most goose bumps. Unless, of course, a director’s cut from The Shawshank Redemption ever emerges, one where Morgan Freeman, accompanied by the harmonica his friend Andy got him, in the gloom of his dark cell, delivers a lonely rendition of “I Shall Be Released” .

Unlikely, but one can dream.

You might also enjoy

I shall be released: 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.

You might also enjoy: Bob Dylan and Hank Snow: Little Buddy, Drunkard’s Son, Moving On.(Part 1)

By Larry Fyffe

The influence of Nova Scotian Hank Snow can be detected everywhere in the lyrics of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan:

Please meet me tonight in the moonlight
Please meet me tonight all alone
For I have a sad story to tell you
It’s a story that’s never been told
(Hank Snow: The Prisoner’s Song)

As in the following song lyrics:

The seasons they are turnin’
And my sad heart is yearnin’
To hear again the song bird’s melodious tone
Won’t you meet me in the moonlight alone?
(Bob Dylan: Moonlight)

Of questionable authorship (copyright-Guy Massey), ‘The Prisoner’s Song’ is very popular before Snow covers it; he first hears it on the radio when he’s working on a fishing schooner – the Nova Scotian entertains crew members by singing such songs, accompaning himself on harmonica:

Now, if I had the wings of an angel
Over these prison walls I would fly
And I’d fly to the arms of my poor darlin’
And there I’d be willin’ to die
(Hank Snow: The Prisoner’s Song)

Fellow Nova Scotian Wilf Carter, a trailblazer for Hank in the music entertainment business, records the song as well.

Released on ‘Great White Wonder’, TMQ bootleg (1969)’ is an earlier, but seemingly related traditional song:

If I had wings
Like Noah’s dove
I’d fly the river
To the one I love
Fare thee well, my honey
Fare thee well
(Bob Dylan: Dink’s Song)

Hank Snow makes the following song famous:

Pardon me, if I’m sentimental
When we say goodbye
Don’t be angry with me, should I cry
When you’re gone, yet I’ll dream
A little dream as years go by
Now and then there’s a fool such as I
(Hank Snow: A Fool Such As I ~ by William Trader)

When Bob Dylan switches record labels, Columbia releases his cover of the song:

Now and then there’s a fool such as I
Pardon me if I’m sentimental, came to say goodbye
Don’t be angry, don’t be angry with me, should I cry
When you are gone, I will dream a little dream as years go by
Now and then there’s a fool such as I
(Bob Dylan: A Fool Such As I)

Another Snow record of falling love:

The sweetest thing that ever came into my life was you
The only girl in this whole wide world that turned my grey skies blue
Your tender love like a velvet glove enclosed around my heart
Told me we’d still be lovers when this old world fell apart
But now it’s over, over nothin’
My heart just felt the final curtain fall
(Hank Snow: It’s Over, Over Nothin’ ~ by Jean and Seen)

Sentiments echoed with ironic humour by the boy from the North Country:

I’ve been sitting down studying the art of love
I think it will fit me like a glove
I want some real good woman to do just what I say
Everybody got to wonder what’s the matter with this cruel world today
(Bob Dylan: Thunder On The Mountain)

Further reading:

Thunder on the Mountain: it’s a cruel world in Bob Dylan’s song

Bob Dylan and Geoffrey Chaucer: thunder on the mountain

Bob Dylan’s Thunder on the Mountain: Heylin falls off a cliff, Bob keeps on keeping on

Dylan deconstructed: He’s inside out, upside down, right side up

Bob Dylan and Hank Snow: Little Buddy, Drunkard’s Son, Moving On. (Dylan and Hank Snow Part 1)

By Tony Attwood

Ask someone who knows some Dylan songs (maybe has listened to the lyrics, but is not necessarily a great aficionado of the man’s works), about Bob Dylan’s politics, and the chances are that somewhere in the answer you might get a mention of The Times they are a-Changing.

And that’s fair enough, up to a point –  Bob told us that change was happening all around us and it is ongoing and no one knows where this is going to stop.  A vision that has by and large come true – the change is still going on and on and on, it is accelerating constantly, and there is still no telling where it is going to end.

But listen to the rest of the album and a lot of the change that is mentioned therein is pretty horrible and hopeless.

In track two –  The Ballad of Hollis Brown – the family are starving so Hollis Brown kills them all and then himself. Track three tells us of the futility of claiming we act With God on our Side .   And when we get to One too many mornings we are in the traditional world of the drifter who just keeps on moving on.  In fact there is only one song on the rest of the album that speaks of a bright new future, and that is not a future born out of political change, but rather one of a religious nature with When the ship comes in.

And listening to those two songs together gives me a horrible feeling, much as I adore Dylan’s work.  Because in neither Times nor When the Ship do we work for the change.  In Times the change is inevitable, it is destiny.  And indeed with “When the Ship” once again it is inevitable.  There’s no political movement only inevitability.

Of course inevitability is a well-worn vision.  Marx predicted the inevitable destruction of capitalism and Revelations predicts the inevitability of the Second Coming.  It’s a favourite message of those who truly believe they right.

When Bob did write about what is wrong with the world he meandered. Blowing in the wind   told us that the answer is out there in a rather Zen like manner.  Hard Rain’s a gonna fall gave us the opposite of the ship coming in – I’ve seen it all and its all going to end.  And indeed much of the time, as with Hollis Brown he told us just how bad the world is, not how to make it better.

Only a pawn in their game  Masters of War, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll just tells us this is all utterly awful.  And there’s nothing wrong with that; excellent songs indeed with a very clear message – but it is not saying “rise up my fellow countrymen and overthrow this corrupt and terrible system”.

So when Dylan said, “I don’t want to write for people anymore – you know, be a spokesman…I’m not part of no movement…” he was dead right.  It wasn’t that he abandoned a movement – he was never in one.  An early song like Oxford Town sharpens our awareness of the situation at that moment, but it doesn’t say “rise up.”

And this is the theme – Dylan the observer.  He’s saying, “Look guys, do you realise what sort of world you are living in?” but he is not saying anything about how to sort it out.  In that regard he is not the slightest bit revolutionary, for he was not trying to cause change, he was just observing something that clearly needed change.

In My back pages Dylan tells us he regrets the folly of his youth in suggesting that… well, what?  He tells us in the last verse:

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

But did he ever do that?  Maybe, but if so, only in passing.   “God on our side” says the industrial-military complex is bad, but I think we knew that.

For me, in this regard, Dylan was highly reflective of what was going on in the 1960s and 1970s.  Go on a big demonstration, take control of the streets, shout and chant a lot and then… go home and see if the TV cameras got a picture of you and your mates – or at least your banner.

And so Dylan went home and observed the outside world in a way that was indeed very interesting, often incredibly exciting, and which struck a chord with so many people – but it wasn’t about change.  Indeed It’s all right ma  is just about life as it is – just listen to the end – “it’s life and life only”.  There is nothing else to be done but to endure.

Yes he might think about revolutionary things, but they stay in his head.  And with this we enter a mainstream of Dylan – the observer, seeing the world in a way that is of interest to us, it is a point of view well worth considering – but it is not revolutionary.

Dylan was the observer looking in, with “Times they are a changing” and he is still the observer looking in with Desolation Row.  And there is nothing wrong with that.   The British poet Adrian Mitchell wrote “The only reason for writing is to change the world,” but that has not been Dylan’s view.  He writes because… well because he can, and he’s good at it, and he has interesting visions, but he’s not been trying to found a movement.  He’s not been working hard for social reform all these years.  He’s been working to write songs and perform them.

And why was that?  Because the protest songs are also just observations.  Songs don’t normally make people get up and overthrow the state or disembody their landlord.  They just express a feeling of annoyance.

What Bob Dylan did was take this to another level.  Desolation Row does not express annoyance at the selling of postcards of the hanging but it just reminds us it happened and the level of hatred that caused that is still there (as we can most certainly see today).  And yes if we want to rise up, fine, but please don’t take any photos or make a recording of the concert.

And although “to live outside the law you must be honest” is one of Dylan’s most famous lines, I am not sure too many people who quote that admiringly actually follow it’s suggestion.

However I do feel Bob has left us clues as to what really occupies (or has occupied) his mind about the human condition.  If you are a regular reader of this site you’ll know of my passion for that fairly obscure piece Drifter’s Escape  – and I highlight this song over and again because it expresses something that explains Bob’s distance from the whole notion of changing society.

In “Drifter’s Escape” cause and effect break down – the drifter rambles into town and gets accused of something, and then by chance gets away.  It just happens.  There is no revolution, there is no plot, it is just that stuff happens.   And as if to to cement this idea I would point to Dylan’s one song of 1968 – his country is tearing itself to bits and he writes Lay Lady Lay – an elegant song indeed, but unrelated to the reality around him.

And when do we get to the politics again?  Well, I suppose with “George Jackson” in 1971 – but really Bob is mostly concerned with himself – the two songs composed immediately before George Jackson were When I paint my masterpiece and Watching the river flow

But even this passes because by the end of 1973 Dylan composed Wedding Song – a song that rejects labelling and is about setting oneself free.

By 1974 he was getting real personal with Idiot Wind and yes occasionally he did get a trifle political as with Joey but most of the time, no.  And so it continued until 1979 when it really was all over.   Bob found a way of sitting and observing the world around him and commenting on it, in a perfect belief that this was all that was needed.  Because you Gotta Serve Somebody and you can do that by telling the audience to follow the Lord and make sure that when all hell breaks loose (literally) you’re on the right side.

Bob did eventually find a cause he really wanted to support in Farm Aid, and that of course takes us back to Hollis Brown.

But as for politics, well,

We live in a political world 

World of wine, women and song

You could make it through without the first two

Boy without the third you wouldn't last long.

Politics for most people is about changing the world for the better – for some it is for the better of everyone, for others it is for the benefit of their race or class or nation, because their race, class or nation is inherently superior to the rest.  But after religion got a lot less important, the revolution was all over. By 1996 it was Not Dark Yet but it sure was getting there.   By 1999 Bob tells us he used to care but Things have Changed.

And Bob ultimately summed it all up so clear saying, “to myself alone I sing”.  There are no politics.  There is no revolution.  There is no change.  It is what it is.  “I’ve nothing more to tell you now.”

Indeed how could it be any other way?

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

 by Jochen Markhorst 

“A negro named Mage” gets his face a little scratched in a wrestling match with the 15-year-old John Wesley Hardin and does not handle it in a very mature way, as we can learn from Hardin’s posthumously published autobiography The Life Of John Wesley Hardin, “as written by himself” (1896). The next day they meet again by chance and Mage wants revenge. He threatens Hardin with “a stout stick” and says he will kill him and throw him into the creek. The teenager Hardin pulls his Colt .44, says that Mage has to go his way, but in vain. He then shoots several times, Mage goes down and dies shortly thereafter. “That was the first man I ever killed and it nearly distracted my parents.”

In the introduction, the reader is promised that the work will shed new light on the desperado, that it will show that Hardin never murdered wantonly or in cold blood and that these pages will do a certain amount of justice to his memory.

This intention fails. Hardin studied law in prison and that undoubtedly contributed to his ability to express his thoughts, but even with an academic degree he remains an aggressive, hateful and repulsive psychopath, who fails to arouse any sympathy. After that first murder, for example, more black citizens follow, because, “if there was anything that could rouse my passion it was seeing imprudent Negroes.” When he is finally locked up in Huntsville Prison, Texas, in 1878, completely unfairly of course, he counts killing 40 people. The newspaper story that he would have killed six or seven men, just because they snored, annoys him: “That only happened once.”

As may be clear, Dylan’s John Wesley Harding has little in common with Hardin (the g is a misspelling of the bard). Dylan sings of a kind of Robin Hood, helpful and honest, ‘a friend of the poor’, invents an authentic looking reference to an incident in ‘Chaynee County’ (that name does not exist) and finally paints an elusive Harding. The historic Hardin was repeatedly arrested and eventually spent 17 years behind the bars.

Dylan’s preoccupation with outlaws does intrigue. And especially his tendency to upgrade certified nutcases to well-behaved, humane role models. Jesse James gets a single, friendly name check (in “Outlaw Blues”) and in “Absolutely Sweet Marie” he plants the paradox to live outside the law, you must be honest. A first standard bearer then of that motto is John Wesley Harding. The half-beatification of Billy The Kid (1973) may be attributed to Peckinpah or the angelic aura of protagonist Kris Kristofferson, but with “Hurricane” (1975) Dylan rather breaks his neck when he passionately defends a repeatedly convicted murderer and declares him a hero. A low point reaches the singer with “Joey” (1975), the epic hymn to the immoral Mafiose killer Joey Gallo.

Does Dylan sense a note of unease after the release of the record? He never plays the song, neither is he very affectionate or proud when asked about it. More to the point, Dylan is derogatory. It is actually a failed start to an old-fashioned, long cowboy ballad, he reveals in 1969 to Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner. After one and a half verses he does not feel like it anymore, but because it was “a nice little melody”, a tune he does not want to waste, the poet just writes “a quick third verse”. Records it and dum-tee-dum, Bob’s your uncle. “But it was a silly little song.”

It was also the only song that did not seem to fit on the album, Dylan continues, and that is why he places it first and calls the album after the song. That immediately makes it very important, he smiles, and otherwise people would have said it was a throwaway song. The name “John Wesley Harding”? Ah, it fits the tempo and I had it at hand.

Peculiar. It is not the only time Dylan turns away from a song of his own, but there is no song that gets this systematically destroyed by the troubadour.

At least as amazing is the sheer nonsense. The song that does not fit the album is “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”, a second outsider is “Down Along The Cove”. The title song fits seamlessly between those other riders, vagrants and desperadoes. And if it really is only about the rhythm of the syllables, the world’s best songwriter can effortlessly fit in ten alternatives. John Quincy Adams, George Edwin Butler, James Abram Garfield, John Griffith (“Jack”) London … or invent a name if necessary. Joe Franklin Dalton. In the tempo of the song and in the rhythm of the text, there are, of course, endless possibilities.

No, increased insight seems to be a more likely explanation for Dylan’s Judas kiss. In the months after the recording he is probably been made aware about the true nature of Hardin, and an ode to this extreme racist is more painful than ever in the days after the assassination of Martin Luther King (April ’68). Certainly for a renowned civil rights sympathizer such as Dylan. And presumably, his intellectual pride prevents him from admitting in the interview that he had no idea – hence the flight to transparent excuses and the exile to oblivion.

Pity, nonetheless. The song indeed does have a nice little melody and the lyrics are attractive; the same Kafkaesque clarity that leaves the mystery intact as, for example, “Drifter’s Escape”.

Remarkably few followers, too – apparently the colleagues have the same moral reservations as Dylan has after the recording. However, the only really serious cover is very satisfying and can be found on the brave, dazzling project of Thea Gilmore, who released an integral reinterpretation of the entire album in 2011. Her delicate, subtle, very well-kept version of the opening track elevates “John Wesley Harding” into a real overture. The first bars are bare, a sober mandolin instead of Dylan’s guitar, in the second verse organ and harmonica are added, some dry percussion and a bit later guitar, plus the muffled vocals of Thea: what a beautiful song it turns out to be to be.

You might also like

John Wesley Harding: the meaning of the music and the lyrics

Deadwood and Deadman: Bob Dylan and post-modernism

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

Time.com, pitching itself as the absolute arbiter of taste, style and quality announced “Street Rock”  as “one of the 10 worst Dylan songs of all time,” which perhaps tells us more about Time’s view of their place in the world than about Bob Dylan and his music.

The problem is that artists normally don’t have every little sketch released and then compared to their greatest works.  Because self-evidently a lot of what Dylan has done are sketches and explorations, they are not all “Rolling Stone” or “Tambourine Man” or “Visions”.

For the great composers of the classical romantic tradition the early pieces and experimental sketches are there for researchers to listen to; we don’t say that a piece written by the five year old Mozart was “the worst thing he ever wrote,” because no one is concerned with best or worst.

But today best and worst compositions are arbitrarily selected by self-opinionated and self-appointed critics who announce their decisions with a fanfare that attempts to suggest that this is what it is all about.

Yet to do this leads us endlessly down the wrong path.  Oddments like this song, should, in my view, be used to give us insights into Dylan’s interests and explorations, rather like the early works of a great master put on display in an art gallery, on view but consigned to the basement where those really interested will go, while allowing the passing visitor a chance to ignore them and focus on the universally acclaimed works.

And I can say this with some feeling, because although my contributions to musical composition don’t go beyond songs I’ve written and sung in folk clubs, and are clearly the work of an enthusiastic but hardly exceptional amateur, I have written a number of books some of which have sold quite well.  I don’t mind being judged by them (not that anyone is particularly interested in so doing) but I would be bemused and horrified if early sketches of books, rough drafts, and worse still the books that I started but never even finished because I realised they were going nowhere, not only started to appear but then also started being criticised.

They won’t of course because no one is interested in my career – and nor should they be, but the point is all creative people in all genres, both famous and totally obscure, create sketches, play with ideas, work things out, go down blind alleys, have a bit of fun…

Dylan obviously doesn’t mind – at least to some degree – us hearing his early works since he gave his ok to the complete basement tapes being released and there is some very rough incomplete stuff there – but those of us who have listened to all the tracks on the Complete version do so, surely, in the understanding, that for every Wheels on Fire there are ten sketches that led nowhere.

Rolling Stone in reviewing “Street Rock” wrote the ironic headline “Is Bob Dylan Hip-Hop’s Godfather?” and yes, that’s a bit of fun, for they made the point that “hip-hop and Dylan were both gestated in New York, distrust the government, aren’t fond of using their birth names, and have a pretty evocative way with words. And although Dylan recently told Street Newspaper that he doesn’t really listen to rap all that much, he did admit, “I love rhyming for rhyming sake. I think that’s an incredible art form.”

And yes that it fairly obvious with Subterranean Homesick Blues – which has been called “the very first rap song ever” as it is found “distilling bohemian counterculture, war paranoia and the ongoing civil rights struggle into a two-minute barrage of fascinating wordplay.”

The story here is that Dylan used some of Blow’s backing singers and in return for that favour he contributed the intro to “Street Rock”, which opened the album Kingdom Blow.

In Chronicles, Volume 1, Dylan states that Blow introduced him to rap, and he became a fan of Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Ice T and NWA commenting “These guys weren’t standing around bullshitting, they were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and knew what was going on.”

Mike in reply said of Dylan, “He’s one of the first b-boys, if not the first. What more to say?”

Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues is sampled on “Finger Lickin’ Good” — although Bob’s copyright company apparently charged $700, apparently having initially asked for  $2,000.

So back to Street Rock.  Bob Dylan does the opening bit and pops back in from time to time.  There is only an assumption Bob wrote this, but since he mentions it particularly in Chronicles we might take it to be so.

I’m not trying to be the absolute arbiter of what counts as a Bob Dylan composition and what doesn’t, it is just my thought, there’s a bit of original Dylan so it counts as a co-composition for me.  You can, of course, make up your own mind.

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

The portrayal of the Christian Messiah in the Bible shows evidence of the historical influence of the alchemists of Egypt, and the philosophy that is now known as Gnosticism (found in Jewish texts as well). The human eye is an important symbol thereof:

(Matthew 6: 20-23)

Also in the song lyrics of Bob Dylan, listeners can detect remnants of Gnostic thought with its view that mankind is trapped in a world of darkness – modern man, trapped in a material world, has his focus on science, industry, and capitalist greed:

(Bob Dylan: Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window)

In Gnostic texts, Jesus is portrayed as a shape-shifter; He’s capable of transforming Himself into a sharp-eyed eagle. And, in the Holy Bible, Christ possesses the alchemical ability to bring the dead back to life:

(John 11: 41 -44)

Folksingers, rather like artistic alchemists, sometimes re-arrange biblical passages into a secular ones. Below, Dylan adds his arrangement to a ballad of yore:

(Bob Dylan: Poor Lazarus -traditional)

A son of the Enlightenment, Charles Darwin counters medieval ‘biology’, its roots located in the biblical grand theory of a pre-ordained fixed design (called the ‘great chain of being’ in Shakespeare’s day), with a new empirically-based theory of ‘natural selection’ in relation to the existing environment. Poet Lord Tennyson responds with the ambiguous image of an eagle on high that falls like a thunderbolt.

Bob Dylan makes note of the resistance to any change on the part of the high authorities in control of social values – water symbolizing power. Dylan, not without humour, borrows from the traditional folk song ‘Poor Lazarus’:

(Bob Dylan: High Water)

Bob Dylan sides not with the dogma of the high priests of established religion. The singer/songwriter clings to the cliff with crooked claws, holding onto the alchemical portrayal of Jesus: the stone-like darkness lying at the heart of  human nature can be changed if an individual metaphorically wakes up and kindles the light that glows within one’s soul; however, given the dark clouds of social injustice that haunt the world of reality, it’s not an easy thing to do.

In the song lyrics below, the temptation is to take the well-worn path that’s trodden in ‘Poor Lazarus’:

(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)

The path leading to hidden mystical wisdom of ‘gnosis’ is not a simple and straight one, but a long and winding road that’s knotted with ‘eternal recurrences’, a cosmological view that sparkles in the the rings of the ancient Egyptians.

Isis, an Egyptian goddess, is a symbol of a good wife and good mother, represented sometimes by a kite, a bird of prey. According to the Greek essayist Plutarch, Isis brings her mummified husband back to life for a short time in order to mate with him after he’s shut up in a coffin.

Bob Dylan transmutes the plot into a psychological drama in song lyrics below:

(Bob Dylan/Jacques Levy: Isis)

You might also enjoy:

By Tony Attwood

This is a song maybe by Bob Dylan, maybe by Old Crow Medicine Show, maybe by Donna Terry Weiss and maybe not.  I’ll try and untangle it and give you my view, but obviously I have no proof other than the information I can present below.

Here is the Old Crow official video version

Now do take a listen to that and see if it does not remind you a bit of Isis.  The chord sequence is identical as is the beat.

Try this

So I drifted on down from the Iron Ore Range
Across the wide Missouri where the cool waters flow
When I got to Topeka I looked up your name
But they said you rode off with the last rodeo

or

Down in Old Amarillo there’s a light in the window
Where a road weary shadow drifts into the arms
Of a long distance lover then they turn back the covers
And dance the Redova ’til the light of the dawn

OK there is no direct cribbing but the feel of  the music and lyrics just reminds me so much of

I came to a high place of darkness and light
The dividing line ran through the center of town
I hitched up my pony to a post on the right
Went in to a laundry to wash my clothes down

Here’s Dylan’s version from the Pat Garratt days, which seems a pretty definitive statement on who wrote it.

But who wrote it?   Concerning the Donna Terry Weiss story Wikipedia (as of 31 August 2018) goes with this saying

“Sweet Amarillo” is a song written by Donna Terry Weiss. Brenda Patterson released the song on her 1974 album “Like Good Wine”.”

Their source is quoted as “Brenda Patterson – Like Good Wine” Discogs. Retrieved 3 July 2014″ where indeed it does say, “Sweet Amarillo written by Donna Weiss”

But this wouldn’t be the first error made in claiming the copyright of a song, so I am going with the alternative story that Bob Dylan sketched out a song for “Billy the Kid” and then later, much later, gave it to Old Crow Medicine Show as a way of saying “thanks” after “Wagon Wheel” got to number one in the country charts.   While in between these events Brenda Patterson heard the original and developed it.

Ketch Secor of Old Crow said in an interview, “We got an email from Bob Dylan’s manager saying congratulations right around the time Darius Rucker had a No. 1 single with ‘Wagon Wheel.’ It’s not every day that country music recognizes this great pioneer and huge influence, Bob Dylan. Bob doesn’t have many No. 1 songs in any genres. So it was a big deal to get one.

“Bob realized that and sent us a note, and a couple of weeks later, he sent a demo and said, “Here’s a song that I never really finished. It was recorded a few days after ‘Rock Me Mama.’ Give it a try. We’d like the boys, the Old Crows to give it whirl’.

“So I finished the song with Old Crow, and we sent it back to Bob and he said, ‘Hey, that sounds great, but I think Ketch should play the fiddle, not the harmonica, and I think the chorus needs to come in at the eighth bar, not the 16th.’ We did exactly what Bob said, and it’s like the song sprouted wings and flew.

The Old Crow Medicine Show released their version on July 1, 2014. Here is a live recording

So when do we date this?  We have February 1973 for the original recording in Burbank, California and that seems to me to be the date we should give it.

Well the world’s greatest wonder from what I can tell
Is how a cowgirl like you could ever look my way
I was blinded by glory with a half-written story
And a song spilling out off of every page

Sweet Amarillo
Tears on my pillow
You never will know
How much I cried
Sweet Amarillo
Like the wind in the willow
Damn this old cowboy
For my foolish pride

So I drifted on down from the Iron Ore Range
Across the wide Missouri where the cool waters flow
When I got to Topeka I looked up your name
But they said you rode off with the last rodeo

Sweet Amarillo
Tears on my pillow
You never will know
How much I cried
Sweet Amarillo
Like the wind in the willows
Damn this old cowboy
For my foolish pride

Well the thunder’s a-rumbling and the tumbleweed’s tumbling
And the rodeo clowns are painting their face
I’m gunning the throttle for Ilano Estacado
On a wild Appaloosa I’m blowing your way

Down in Old Amarillo there’s a light in the window
Where a road weary shadow drifts into the arms
Of a long distance lover then they turn back the covers
And dance the Redova ’til the light of the dawn

Sweet Amarillo
Tears on my pillow
You never will know
How much I cried
Sweet Amarillo
Like the wind in the willows
Damn this old cowboy
For my foolish pride

Sweet Amarillo
Sweet Amarillo

Here’s another version…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLMbbJyMo5M

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 name of Dorsey William “Billy” Burnette III will be mentioned in an still-to-be-written Great Definite Rock Encyclopedia. Billy is visible to the general public from 1987 to 1995, when he is a member of Fleetwood Mac. Dylan fans know him from the three weeks in February 2003, when he replaces guitarist Charlie Sexton in Dylan’s band, during the eleven concerts in Australia and New Zealand. After that, he plays for years in the band of another legend, John Fogerty. But he is truly immortal thanks to the song written by his father Dorsey and his uncle Johnny Burnette, the founders of The Rock and Roll Trio: “Rock Billy Boogie”. Dorsey and his brother Johnny become fathers around the same time in 1953. Johnny calls his son Rocky, Dorsey chooses the name Billy and together they write a song about their new happiness. It becomes a popular, frequently covered song, and its title gradually turns into “Rockabilly Boogie”, due to the way Johnny Burnette sings it – and that is where the genre designation ‘rockabilly’ originates from.

The young Billy is spoon-fed with rock and roll, when he is seven years old, in 1960, he sings on a Rick Nelson single, “Hey Daddy (I’m Gonna Tell Santa On You)”, plays on countless records and also has about twenty solo albums to his name.

Enough topics of conversation, all in all, for the recordings of the StageLeft podcast in 2015. Burnette is an entertaining narrator, with an inside knowledge of the bigger artists and an open eye for the smaller absurdities. If he perhaps has learned to distinguish a Great Common Denominator from all those big artists with whom he has worked, the interviewer wants to know. “Well I tell you what’s weird with about all these guys that I’ve worked with,” Burnette replies, “ all of them are Gemini’s. Bob’s a Gemini, Stevie Nicks is a Gemini, John Fogerty is a Gemini, so you never know what you gonna get (laughs).”

With that last remark, Burnette is referring to the anecdote he has just told about his tour experience with Dylan:

“I think I learned a 120 song in like a month and a half or something. It was like… we’d only get the setlist five minutes before the show started, no, I got it twenty minutes before the show started, and there would be five new songs on it, which I had to learn really quick. So it was challenging. (…) It was all different. He may change the key from night to night. Because it sounds better in this key today. It was a wild ride, but I really loved it.”

The interviewer would love to hear more about Dylan, but Burnette does not have a lot to offer:

“He is a very private person. But we talked a lot about my dad and my uncle. He was a fan of some of their music. He was a big Rick Nelson fan (the Burnette brothers have worked a lot with Nelson and have also written a few of his hits). So, he really liked that stuff and… I had actually met him in the seventies, and he told me that my Dad’s song, “Tall Oak Tree”, he said he realised that was the first ecology song ever written. And I called my dad the next morning, and I said ‘Hey Dad, I ran into Bob Dylan’. That’s neat, you know.

And then both Billy and Dylan still ignore, out of ignorance or discretion, that Dylan lovingly stole one of the most covered songs by Pa Burnette and Uncle Burnette, “Bertha Lou” from 1957, and has turned it into “Rita May”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMwoxn-WHiQ

At least, that is meanwhile the communis opinio among Dylan biographers, on the fansites, on Wikipedia even and in rockabilly circles; Dylan has copied the music of “Bertha Lou” note by note for that curious little piece of the Desire sessions.

There is, however, something to be said about this. Agreed, Dylan certainly knows “Bertha Lou”. Apart from that interview with Billy, we know his respect for the Burnette brothers thanks to his Theme Time Radio Hour program, in which he runs “Lonesome Train (On A Lonesome Track)” and publicly praises the rawness of The Johnny Burnette Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio.

And “Bertha Lou” is a most famous song, is still played regularly (by Robert Gordon, for example) to this day. But at the same time it is a dima a dozen song. The chords follow a regular blues scheme, the bridge is just as run-of-the-mill and the riff we heard in plenty songs before “Bertha Lou” (“Money” by Barrett Strong, “Brand New Cadillac” by Vince Taylor, Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme “), as well as in later songs (Jack Bedient’s “Double Whammy”, Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac”, “Planet Claire” from The B-52’s).

The same applies to the title. The identical rhythm, a dactylus, of the girl’s names Rita May and Bertha Lou has been used hundreds of times and will always remain popular. Peggy Sue, Billie Jean, Carrie Anne, Maggie Mae, Mary Jane, Susie Q, Bobby Jean, Ida Red, Mary Lou … the list of celebrated girls with first names in this meter is endless.

Just as established as the disputable “Bertha Lou”-connection is the statement that this song is a sneer, or a wink, or at least a joke directed at the writer Rita Mae Brown. However, we do not have much more than the identical first name (originally also spelled as Rita Mae, by the way), to make that click. The song is written shortly after Brown had her breakthrough with the semi-autobiographical novel Ruby Fruit Jungle, one of the first novels with lesbian themes, a very intelligent, witty and moving work. If Dylan and co-author Jacques Levy were really aiming at her, then lines like ‘How’d you ever get that way’ and ‘What’s that crazy place you’re in’ would breathe a quite unsavoury, homophobic flavor, which is rather atypical for both Dylan and Levy .

That is not the only thing that speaks against that Rita Mae Brown link. Dylan sings often enough about known and lesser known contemporaries, and is never ambiguous or foggy. William Zantzinger, Ruben ‘Hurricane’ Carter, Lenny Bruce, Woody Guthrie, George Jackson … these are just a few examples of Dylan’s habit of being completely clear about the identity of the source of inspiration.

And then we also have the written statement from Claudia Levy. When Tony Attwood in his piece about “Rita May” (here on Untold, May 31, 2016) also presumes that Levy and Dylan have crafted a misplaced parody on the writer, and on top of that wonders whether Levy actually does have a bad influence on Dylan, Claudia Levy, Jacques Levy’s widow, can no longer withhold:

Dear Mr. Attwood;

You are terribly wrong about the song, Rita Mae” and Mr. Levy. Mr. Levy had the utmost regard for Rita Mae Brown. He was interested in working with her on a theatrical production. Mr. Levy had been preparing to do an evening of poetry by feminist writers. As you may know, Jacques Levy was a theatrical director, known for doing iconoclastic plays. The song was a parody of prevalent attitudes toward women. He thought “Rubyfruit Jungle” was witty and brilliant. He bought copies of “The Rubyfruit Jungle” to give to friends among them Kurt Vonnegut.

The disgruntled widow misspells a name, the song title and the book title (twice), and it is also a bit strange how she calls her late husband ‘Mr. Levy’, but plausible, music-historical value her tirade has nonetheless. Not so much because of her interpretation that the song would be a ‘parody of prevailing attitudes toward women’ – Claudia was not yet in Levy’s life when the men wrote the song, in 1975, and it is unlikely that the rather obscure song, a petty footnote in Levy’s rich career, has ever been the subject of discussion at the marital dining room table. But after twenty-five years of marriage she has of course gained a well-founded insight into the man’s motives, his sense of humour and his respect for a writer like Brown. That also explains why Levy and / or Dylan change the name (from Mae to May) in the second instance – apparently they want to avoid the association with Mrs Brown.

In the Prism Films interview shortly before his death in 2004, Levy himself casts a sobering light on “Rita May”. In general, he has already mentioned how much Dylan enjoys putting together original rhymes, and that pleasure we recognise in this song anyway: nonchalant – that I want, puffin ‘- nothing and college – knowledge, in particular. But “Rita May” is also specifically mentioned twice. The first time when he, with a charming, boyish grin, reveals that he has some secret treasures from that time somewhere in the house. “There’s a couple of songs that never got on the album. It’s kinda funny. There’s a version of Rita May that’s just a joke.” It gets more substantial when Levy addresses the exotic side of Desire:

There are other things, like Rita May, which is a kind of… Gene Pitney could sing Rita May, you know. It’s a simple fifties rock thing, which is part of my background and Bob’s background too. And in a way… I know this is gonna sound strange, but one of my favourite albums of Bob is Self Portrait. Now, I know that’s the album that is dropped out of everybody’s collection, everybody’s mind. But it is an album on which he tried to go back and do those songs that fit him, that made him who he was. And I like that. I like that album because of that. So that’s the other side of it. It was exotic, but there’s also some aspects of autobiography.

And thus the story behind “Rita May” is closing and rounding. Two thirty-somethings with writing talent are in a nostalgic mood and craft a nice little ‘fifties rock thing’ full of cheerful linguistic pleasure. Rockabilly as rockabilly should be.

That is also recognised by one of the greatest pioneers of rockabilly, Jerry Lee Lewis. In ’79 The Killer records a smashing, steamy cover of “Rita May”, the only cover altogether worth mentioning, and, according to tradition, shows his unworldliness when he asks producer Bones Howe: “Who wrote that song?”

“Bob Dylan,” Howe replies with a broad grin, for he is sure Lewis will be mighty surprised. But The Killer shows no recognition at all. “That boy’s good,” Jerry Lee Lewis says, “I’ll do anything by him.”

Rita May by Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy: the antidote to Joey or once more misguided?

A footnote from Tony Attwood.  I’m always very willing to be proven wrong, and in writing all these Dylan reviews I’ve been proven wrong many a time.  But over the 10 years of running this site I have just very occasionally had a phone call or email from someone in the business who makes it clear he/she does not want to be quoted in anyway, or have what he/she tells me attributed, but the individual wants to say “you’re dead right on that one”.  Or the reverse!  And I had one such call in relation to this song which made it clear Dylan was in retrospect unhappy with it.

Of course this is not proof, and I’m not going to provide more info, because that was the deal, so I’m happy to publish Jochen’s article which is as always packed full of interest.  And of course you can decide for yourself.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

Bob Dylan And Wilf Carter

by Larry Fyffe

In the popular song below, there are references to a traditional American folksong which has a number of variations – titles include: ‘Rye Whiskey’, ‘Jack-o-Diamonds’, and ‘Moonshiner’:

Bye, bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee
But the levee was dry
And them good ole boys
Were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin’ this’ll be the day that I die
(Don MacLean: American Pie)

Wilf Carter, from Nova Scotia, Canada, (like Hank Snow, and both having similar young lives there) becomes known as ‘Montana Slim’ when he travels to the United States to advance his career in the entertainment field.

Carter popularizes the traditional American folksong:

Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey, I’ll cry
If whiskey don’t kill me, I’ll live till I die
If the ocean was whiskey, and I was a duck
I’d swim to the bottom, and never come up
But the ocean ain’t whiskey, and I ain’t no duck
So I’ll play Jack-o-Diamonds , and trust in my luck
(Wilf Carter: Rye Whiskey)

[The Wilf Carter version only seems to be available on Spotify, so you’ll need an account if you don’t have one (it’s free).]

American ‘Tex’ Ritter sings the same folk song, but overdoes the drunk act when doing so:

Jack-o-Diamonds, Jack-o-Diamonds, and I know you of old
You robbed my poor pockets of silver and gold ….
And it’s whiskey, rye whiskey – whiskey, I cry
Don’t get a rye whiskey, I think I will die
It’s a beef steak when I’m hungry, whiskey when I’m dry
A greenback when I’m hard-up, it’s a heaven when I die
I’ll go to yonder hollow, build me a still
Give you a gallon for a five dollar bill
(Texas Ritter: Rye Whiskey)

Bob Dylan, from Minnisota, arranges the lyrics under a different title, this way:

I’ll go to some hollow
And set up my still
If whiskey don’t kill me, I don’t know what will ….
Let me eat when I’m hungry
Let me drink when I am dry
A dollar when I’m hard-up
Religion when I die
(Bob Dylan: Moonshiner)

[Note – Moonshiner is one of those songs which appears on the official Dylan site under the meaningless phrase WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN (ARR).  It is a traditional song.]

“Yodelin’ Slim” Clark, from Massachusetts, who names one of his sons Wilf Carter, sings:

If I don’t get rye whiskey, surely I will die ….
Her parents don’t like me, they say I’m too poor
To them who said, ‘don’t weather her door’
If her parents don’t like me, my money’s my own
And them that don’t like me can leave me alone
(Slim Clark: Rye Whiskey)

In any event, whichever variation Bob Dylan arranges, it’s related to a ballad that’s recorded by a folk singer from New York:

Controlled by her parents until she’s a wife
A slave to her husband the rest of her life ….
Oh, my parents don’t like him because he is poor
They say he’s not worthy of entering my door
He works for a living, his money’s his own
And if they don’t like it, they can leave him alone
(Joan Baez: Wagoner’s Lad)

Bringing it forward to another song:

Well, I sat down beside her, and for a while
I tried to make her my wife ….
I had to pull back from the door
I wish I could have spent every hour of my life
With the girl from the Red River Shore
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

And back home to the Maritimes:

Seems I still see the old covered wagon
And the first day I ever met you
Never dreaming our meeting would bring sorrow
And the Red River Valley blue
I will rest in the Red River Valley
Where we parted and bid fair adieu
But remember the Red River Valley
And my Red River Valley blue
(Wilf Carter: Red River Valley Blues)

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

“The Love that Faded” is a song with the music composed by Bob Dylan around the song notes that were found after Hank Williams died.  It appears on “The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams” album, which is available on Spotify.

Bob has written the song in the style of Hank Williams – indeed to my ears, not particularly tutored in this type of music it could well be Dylan singing a Hank Williams original.  But I’m not at all an expert on this.

The whole album is in a respectful style – and if you want to wander through the whole album you might particularly enjoy Jack White singing “You know what I know” which is quite a bit of fun.

For the story behind this album I have to rely on Wikipedia which tells us that Hank Williams died aged 29 while travelling to a concert that was due to take place on New Years Day in Ohio.  It is said that in the car was a notebook of lyrics to songs that the artist had not yet recorded.

The lyrics then (if I have got this story right, and I am not sure that I have) were lost but turned up again in 2006 and were found by a janitor working for Sony.  Dylan wrote the music to one song, and the others were completed by Alan Jackson, Norah Jones, Jack White, Lucinda Williams, Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Patty Loveless, Holly Williams, Levon Helm, Jakob Dylan, Sheryl Crow and Merle Haggard and were released as ‘The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams’.

Jack White said later, “I did a project with Bob Dylan: he put together 20 or 25 people to finish writing Hank Williams songs that only had lyrics and didn’t have music.

“I looked through all the piles of lyrics, and one of ’em just kept speaking to me. Sometimes you think it’s gonna be really hard to find my spot, and then it picks it for you. You don’t even have to choose it; it just picks it for you.”

Here are the lyrics to the song that Bob wrote the music for…

The love that faded left me only tears
Days that were happy turned into lonely years
Vows that we made turned into lies
My life is empty, my lonely heart cries

I tried to forget that we’ll never be
Nothing left for me but dust in the breeze
My way is lonely but I think I’m lost
My love was wasted, I’m paying the cost

Brown eyes, blue eyes they’re all the same
None are for me, I’ve lost their game
Tomorrow has nothing but worries and cares
The love that faded left me only tears

Just like the rose your love faded away
Now my lonely heart must break and pay
Nothing now but heartaches through years
The love that faded left me only tears

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

Everybody knows that Canadian Maritimers rule the world even though the popular music industry, dominated by American promoters, underplay the fact.

The persona that Bob Dylan takes on when he starts out on his musical journey is that of Hank Snow of Nova Scotia.

Hank Snow’s father works for low wages in lumber mills, but poverty leads to the family splitting up; Hank is treated badly by his parental grandmother. He rejoins his remarried mother whose mail-order guitar he learns to play, but his step-father mistreats him.

Later on, Hank works on a fishing boat. A fan of the southern ‘Singing Brakeman’ Jimmy Rodgers, whose life is rather like that of the Nova Scotian, Hank Snow moves to the southern United States at the age of twenty-one, and eventually becomes an American citizen. Naturally, Hank and his songs remain very popular with Canadians, especially in the Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island.

Movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, actor Donald Sutherland, singers ‘Stompin’ Tom Connors and Anne Murray, as well as poet Elizabeth Bishop, are famous figures in the arts and entertainment field who come from the Maritimes.

As a youngster in snowy Minnisota, Bob Dylan listens to the Maritimer’s songs, such as:

Kneeling close by the side
Of his pal and only pride
A little lad these words he told to me
He was such a lovely doggy
And to me he was such fun
But today as we played by the way
A drunken man got mad at him
Because be barked in joy
He beat him and he’s dying here today
(Hank Snow: Little Buddy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjfIpM7YlmY

The sorrowful words of that song, Dylan retains in his memory:

The windows are boarded
With paper mache
And even the dog
Just ran away
(Bob Dylan et al: Shirley Temple Don’t Live Here Anymore)

Strongly influenced by a Jimmie Rodgers’ song, Hank Snow pens the following lyrics:

Oh why are you lying up here in the cold
What makes you lie on this hard bed?
My father’s a drunkard, and he beat me today
My darling old mother is dead
I’m hiding from my father, and please, sir, don’t tell
He beat me ’cause I would not steal
He said he would kill me the next time I failed
And I’m so afraid, sir, that he will
(Hank Snow: Drunkard’s Son)

(It’s pointed out by others that Dylanologist Clinton Heylin confuses the song above by Hank Snow with the song written and sung by Jimmie Rodgers).

The lasting effects of Hank Snow’s lyrics (Dylan covers Snow’s “I’m Moving On”) show up in the following lyrics:

And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured
I’ll always do my best for her, on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fightin’ to be warm
“Come in”, she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
(Bob Dylan: Shelter From The Storm)

And again in this song that Dylan sings with Johnny Cash:

If you go when the snowflakes fall
Where the rivers freeze and summers end
Please see for me if she’s wearing a coat so warm
To keep her from the howling winds
(Bob Dylan: Girl From The North Country)

Below another song, a cover by Hank Snow, that the young Dylan listens to:

That old rain is cold and slowly fallin’
Upon my window pane tonight
And though your love is even colder
I wonder where you are tonight
(Hank Snow: I Wonder Where You Are Tonight – composer~Johnny Bond)

Bob Dylan, a bit later, warms up the cold weather with some ironic humour:

Well, I got the fever down in my pockets
The Persian drunkard, he follows me
Yes, I can take him to your house, but I can’t unlock it
You see, you forgot to leave me with the key
Ohh, where are you tonight, Sweet Marie?
(Bob Dylan: Absolutely Sweet Marie)

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

The composition Jack O’Diamonds has been reported as being composed by Bob Dylan and Ben Carruthers, and it has a very interesting origin and evolution.  Whether this is a “real” Bob Dylan composition, I’ll leave you to decide – but it has been mentioned in dispatches – my thanks to Aaron G for his comment which led me into this.

According to Second Hand Songs “Carruthers took it upon himself to create a song based upon some poetry/prose that Dylan had penned for the sleevenotes of his ‘Another Side Of Bob Dylan’ album. Carruthers (as well as being an actor) had worked as a secretary for Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman and it’s believed this connection made the whole thing possible.”

The story starts with Blind Lemon Jefferson – or possibly with earlier folk singers, I regret my knowledge of the early blues/folk genre although ok at times doesn’t tell me exactly where this song first came from.

Alan Lomax who knows far more about this music than I ever will says in “Our singing country” (1941) that it was a Texas gambling song that was popularized by Blind Lemon Jefferson (which is good enough for me).   It was apparently sung by railroad men who had lost money playing conquian (a game known in England as rummy) and the song comes from a family of similar songs originating in Britain.

If you are interested in the way these songs mutated across the years and across the centuries here is The Waggoners Lad which, different though it now sounds actually does come from the same original source.  (However this is a diversion, added because I particularly like this version)

But back to Jack O Diamonds and our main theme here…

Here are the opening lyrics sung by Blind Lemon Jefferson

Jack O’ Di, Jack O’ Diamond
Jack O’ Diamond’s a hard card to play
Jack O’ Diamonds once in time
He did rob a friend of mine
Jack O’ Diamonds is a hard card to play

Bet the Jack against the Queen
It’s gonna turn your money green
Jack O’ Diamonds is a hard card to play

Dylan did not record the song, as far as I know, but the sleeve notes to Another Side of Bob Dylan contain this (to make it easier to read I am combining the lines which on the sleeve notes are mostly two or three words long – and I am only giving the opening lines).

This is just the opening extract from Dylan’s poem on the sleeve notes…

jack o’diamonds / jack o’diamonds / one-eyed knave / on the move

hits the street / sneaks. leaps / between pillars of chips / springs on them like samson

thumps thumps / strikes / is on the prowl / you’ll only lose / shouldn’t stay

jack o’diamonds / is a hard card t’ play

 That is the first verse. 

Finally here are the lyrics from the Fairport Convention song

Jack O’Diamonds, one-eyed knave
On the move, hits the street
Bumps his head, on the ground
Well, he’s a scout, you’re born to lose
Shouldn’t stay

Jack O’Diamonds is a hard card to play

Jack O’Diamonds, yeah Jack O’Diamonds
This one-eyed prince, wears a single glove
Oh sure, he’s not that lovely
Jack O’Diamonds broke my hand
Left me here to stand

etc

So, bits of an old blues, a fraction of Dylan’s sleeve notes, and a new melody. I am not sure if this really warrants Bob being credited with the lyrics.  Certainly Bob has never returned to the song – which is hardly a definitive comment about its authorship, but I think it helps lead us in the right direction.  To my mind there is some Bob here, but not that much.

Fairport Convention recorded Jack o’ Diamonds, with the wonderful Judy Dyble singing, for their first album released in 1968, and a second version with Sandy Denny singing was released in their Live at the BBC set.

Here is the original Ben Carruthers version

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tBIqd_u0lkM

And the original Fairport version…

So a Dylan song?  Well, up to a point maybe, but I am not sure it is mainstream.

On the other hand the finer points of who wrote what has never been part of Bob’s concern, so I guess we needn’t get too hung up about it here.  I’m now including the song in my list of Bob’s songs with a note about the input from others. Maybe the correct authorship should state:

Traditional blues with added material by Dylan and Carruthers.

Judy very kindly forwarded me a video of her singing “Faded Elvis” which I’d like to share

And as it has given me a chance to mention Judy Dyble – if you don’t know her work and you have a spare 45 minutes you could try Judy’s latest album is Earth is sleeping, which is on Spotify.

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+ songs 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.

An older couple strolls through a park in Rome, when the man is suddenly struck by a shocking insight: he does not love his wife at all. He shares this awareness with her, but it does not impress her that much – she stopped loving him long ago. “So you want to get divorced,” she deduces, undisturbed, and swiftly settles the necessities. “Give me money for the rest of the holiday and off you go.” Insecurely, the man obeys. But he does not feel liberated. Hours later he is still sitting in the dark on an ancient stone in the Colosseum, still a bit dazed. Perhaps it was all A Little Too Sudden, as the 1977 short story of Herman Pieter de Boer is called. It can be found in the collection De Kellnerin.

The Rotterdam writer is inspired here by one of the many possible perspectives of “Simple Twist Of Fate”: the song can be understood as the swan song of an extinct love, a description of the physical breaking point, the point where the lovers actually part. The song does not let him go, hereafter. In 1983 De Boer writes the hit “Annabel” for Hans de Booij (top 5 in Belgium and The Netherlands) and this time he chooses another, more popular scenario: too late, the man realises that the one-night stand who just left was probably the love of his life (“But two hours later I was still awake, lying on my back”).

Also possible. Just like her big sister, “Tangled Up In Blue”, Simple Twist is not only ambiguous, but constantly on the move, too. The words change per performance, Dylan swaps personal pronouns, sometimes pushes the text in one direction (and then suggests that the lady’s love is paid for:

She raised her weary head and couldn’t help but hate / Cashing in on a simple twist of fate),

then in another direction, when he reveals that the woman is called “Suze” (I remember Suze and the way she talked, June ’81 in London), the hotel where that last (or first and only ) night is consumed, is a strange hotel, a riverfront hotel, cheap, renovated and little, and sometimes gets a name: Grand Hotel, Rio Grande Hotel and Sainte Claire Hotel. The latter, by the way, being a notorious haunted hotel in San Jose – a strange hotel indeed.

It could be argued that the song, at least in its original design, was written with the first great love Suze Rotolo in mind. The subtitle in that sketching stage is “Fourth Street Affair” and that is not very cryptic – it refers to the apartment in which he and Suze live until August ’63, 161 West 4th Street. The reverie in the autobiography Chronicles, that Suze might have been his spiritual soul mate, lays out a second line (“I still believe she was my twin”) and it is also remarkable that Dylan uses the word fate here, when he records his memory of the end of the relationship with Rotolo: “Eventually fate flagged it down and it came to a full stop”.

It does not affect the strength of the poem, of course. Even with all those text changes, hardly any loss of quality occurs. The first verse and the perspective shift of the last verse are maintained, as is the walk along the old canal, and that is sufficient, apparently; many roads lead to Rome.

Joan Baez, the first person to record a cover (on Diamonds And Rust, 1975), stands out because of her good-natured, very witty imitation of Dylan’s vocal style in the fourth verse, but also by fiddling around with the lyrics. Joan does not like parrots, that much is evident by now. When she ventures into Donovan’s “Legend Of The Girl Child Linda” (1967) together with her sister Mimi and Judy Collins, she mixes up the verses, gulls and doves are allowed to stay, but the verse with the parrot, where parrots are talking their words with such ease, has disappeared.

In retrospect, the parrot allergy is apparent already in 1965, when Baez is very lucky that Dylan throws her “Farewell Angelina”. Since 1991, since The Bootleg Series 1-3, we know for certain that Joan has also rejected verses from that song: yes indeed, the verse with the camouflaged parrot. And the only other parrot in Dylan’s oeuvre, the one that emerges in “Simple Twist Of Fate”, Baez now also sneaky eliminates. Due to the comical parody of Dylan’s nasal vocal style in the fifth verse, it is hardly noticeable that she cunningly changes that original line of text and walks along with a parrot that talks into small waves whisper to the rocks.

The origin of the aversion is unclear. In her autobiography And A Voice To Sing With, Baez lavishly dwells on her illnesses, neuroses and anxieties, but she never once mentions psittacosis or ornithophobia (infectious diseases contracted from infected parrots).

Furthermore, the saxophone does not play in the distance, but “somewhere nearby” and the revision of the last verse seems to be a model for the later versions by the master himself:

People tell me it’s a crime
To feel too much at any one time
All it cost me was a dime but the bells refuse to ring
He was born in the spring but I was born too late
Blame it on a simple twist of fate

The Literals will be pleased with the gender change. Finally the birth in the spring is ‘right’ (Dylan was indeed born in the spring – Suze, Sara and Joan are all born too late, in autumn and winter).

But it is, as Dylan says in the radio interview with Paul Vincent (San Francisco 1980), not detrimental, not decisive for the content of the song. Nor for the beauty. Far more decisive is the classical form. In these days, the poet Dylan is rather addicted to his own version of an antique ballad form inspired by François Villon (1431-1463), recognisable by the repetition of a single line at the end of each stanza. On Blood On The Tracks he chooses this form for five of the ten songs (in Tangled, You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome, Shelter and Jack Of Hearts) and also the outtake “Up To Me” is written around such a recurring verse.

The music is gorgeous. Simple enough, that descending melody line, but the fusion with the text is a brilliant find. It gives a magical sparkle to the rhyme scheme that on paper almost looks like an everyday rhyme (a a a b b c c). The sparse use of the minor chord is masterful too. Everyone else would, given the melancholic lyrics, play the entire song in minor. Song Maestro Dylan senses that he adds to the fascination when he plays in the major, briefly slipping to minor in every fourth line – when the main character feels alone, when he gets hit by the heat of the night, when he feels empty inside, when he is despairing if she would ever pick him again.

Finally, a true bonanza is the arrangement. That was soon found, apparently: at the first recording session an acoustic version is already being tried and three days later, September 19th ’74, at the second and last Simple Twist session, it is already final. Dylan’s guitar and his literally lyrical vocals, Tony Brown on bass and a beautiful harmonica solo – it is in working within limits that the master reveals himself, as Goethe taught us.

The majority of followers trip over this decree, over those limits, the less-is-more commandment. Beautiful covers, no question about it – but that sacred trinity of singing, lyrics and music is lost in the sublime blues version of the mourned Sean Costello (with Levon Helm on drums, 2004), Jeff Tweedy’s Desire approach, the chilling, majestic thriller of Concrete Blonde (Still In Hollywood, 1994), the dreamy, irresistible Jerry Garcia (live with the Jerry Garcia Band, 1991) … it is a long line of great renditions that do not come close to the original.

The covers that do come close are sober. Diana Krall, for example. The very talented Mrs. Elvis Costello has distinguished herself previously in Dylanland – in 2015, for example, with missionary work for the ignored wallflower “Wallflower”. She takes on Simple Twist alone, at the piano and equals the original’s quantity of goose bumps with her enchanting singing art (2012). On a sympathetic little hobby project from Portland, the 4-song-EP Buckets Of Rain (2011), there is a fascinating, bone-dry version by the little-known St. Even to be found. A bit dressed up, granted (background vocals, occasional strumming on a scanty guitar, a stark piano), but this one time it works out quite well, partly thanks to the intimate living room sound of the recording.

Ah well, the song is practically indestructible… some lonesome lady with a guitar suffices, as Mrs. Stevie Ann shows in a Dutch TV show, in 2011.

Joan Baez:

Sean Costello: 

Jeff Tweedy:

Concrete Blonde: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WguPSDx1fc

Jerry Garcia Band: 

Diana Krall: 

Stevie Ann: 

See also

• Simple twist of fate: a knife twists inside a simple song
• Prithee look back, there’s blood on the tracks
• Figurative Language in Blood on the Tracks
• Blake, Keats, And Spots Of Ink
• Bob Dylan Has His Blake 

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+ songs 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 now 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.

Preface by Tony Attwood

I have received information from James Dring which updates the original article on this song published here in 2008.  I’m adding this today (1 May 2023) prior to the original article so that if you are referring to the original article below (which has been left intact) you can see the update, and my original thoughts (which were based on such data as I could find at the time I wrote them).

I’m doing it this way just in case you do see someone quoting the original article, so that you can (hopefully fairly easily) put together the whole story.   My apologies to everyone for my misleading original.

Letter from James Dring

Dear Mr Attwood

I write concerning a piece on your wonderful Untold Dylan site dated 24 Aug 2018 about Dylan’s “lost” song The Ballad of the Gliding Swan. First, you provide a link to the minute-long fragment of the song that exists followed by a transcription – but the transcription is substantially different from the audio. In case it’s of use, here is a correct transcription of the fragment’s five verses:

Tenderly William kissed his wife
Then he opened her head with a butcher knife
And the swan on the river goes gliding by
The swan on the river goes gliding by

Lady Margaret's pillow was wet with tears
Nobody's been on it for twenty years
And the swan on the river goes gliding by 
The swan on the river goes gliding by

"I've got a sad surprise," the doctor said
"A twenty-pound baby without any head"
And the swan on the river went looking by
The swan on the river goes gliding by

Well, the preacher was a-yellin' and sellin' his hope
The price was too high so I said "Nope"
And the swan on the river went laughing by
The swan on the river went gliding by

When will the swan begin to sing?
We’re so weary of everything
And the swan on the river goes gliding by
The swan on the river goes gliding by

Jim Dring

———–

Jim then sent me a second note which resolved the whole issue concerning the origins of the song.

“Yesterday I watched the BBC doc Dylan in the Madhouse with close attention, which satisfactorily answers the question of who wrote the song. It was written by the play’s author, Evan Jones (who reads his original lyric to camera), but then substantially re-written (though hardly improved) by Bob.”

————–

Below is my original article published on 24 August 2018.  If you read it through, please do note the corrections above.

“The Ballad of the Gliding Swan” Bob Dylan’s lost song, found.

By Tony Attwood

In the early 1960s the BBC produced a series of short Sunday night plays. It was an era when the country only had two TV channels to choose from – the more upmarket and sometimes innovative BBC funded by the state, and the more downmarket, commercially funded, ITV.

The restriction on what was available meant both a conservative approach to what could be broadcast but also a certain amount of experimentation in drama.  The Corporation needed to have an audience to justify its existence, but it was not tied to ratings all the time as ITV was.  And many of its actors, writers, producers and directors had come to the Corporation out of London’s theatreland – and thus there was a desire to see how far the boundaries of television could be pushed.

So the BBC was the more likely channel to produce a play in which “A man mysteriously locks himself in a room in a boarding house leaving only a note saying he has decided to retire from the world. His worried sister and the other boarders then try to discover why.”

The play was written by Evan Jones and it is said in some quarters that he wrote the lyrics of the song that Bob Dylan sang for  the show.  I’m not sure – but I am including the song on this site, because there is at least some doubt.  It could have been Dylan – at least in part if nothing else.  The play also contained the first recorded version of “Blowing in the Wind”

Here are the lyrics – and if one goes back and listens to the songs that Dylan wrote at this time such as Ramblin Gamblin Willie  I think there is a real connection in terms of style within the lyrics as well as in the music.  So there is a chance that a lot of the lyrics are Bob’s.  (There is a list of all of Bob’s songs from the era, with a review of each in the 1960s section of the site).

Tenderly William kissed his wife
Then he opened her head with a butcher knife
And the swan on the river goes gliding by
The swan on the river goes gliding by
Lady Margaret’s pillow was wet with tears
Nobody’s been on it for 20 years
And the swan on the river goes gliding by
The swan on the river goes gliding by
Little billy brown will shake with fright
He’s got a new daddy and mommy every night
And the swan on the river goes gliding by
The swan on the river goes gliding by
“I’ve got a sad surprise” the doctor said
“A 20 pound baby without any head”
And the swan on the river went lookin’….

The Director, Mr Saville was tracked down a few years ago by The Independent on Sunday newspaper and said in an interview, “He just struck me as someone who had a few things to say about the world and I loved the way he put over his songs. I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to match this wonderful play with someone with equally extraordinary potential. I managed to convince the BBC to bring him over. When it came to reading through the play – and this character had a lot of lines, he was very anarchic – he said, ‘I can’t say this, I’m not an actor. All I can do is sing songs.’ I thought, ‘oh great, now is the time to tell me’.”

Apparently the play was then rewritten to separate the singing parts from the spoken parts and David Warner, who had recently joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, was quickly drafted in.

The other songs performed in the production were “The Cuckoo” and “Hang Me Oh Hang Me”.

At the time there was no thought about the BBC archiving its films for posterity or indeed even for repeats but a partial copy did turn up many years later – hence we have  this recording.

Wikipedia adds the note that “The play was planned to be recorded in one session on 30 December 1962, but it overran and the Technical Operating Manager told cast and crew to go home, even though they were willing to complete the filming. London was in the grip of a major blizzard and it was not possible to arrange a further session until 4 January 1963, when the play was completed, and it was transmitted on 13 January 1963.”

Evan Jones went on to a magnificent career as a screenwriter writing scripts for Modest Blaise, and Funeral in Berlin.  He died aged 85 in 2012.

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

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

by Larry Fyffe

In the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s songs are bird symbols derived from the writings of the ancient alchemists.

A precursor of modern chemistry, alchemy searches for a means to transmute base metals into silver or gold. From the four basic elements – earth, wind, fire, and water, there develops a pseudo-psychology that seeks a proper balance among these basic elements in the human body.

The steps in the search for this special knowledge of how to escape from the outward darkness of the physical body to inner enlightenment is at first a professional secret. Those who practice these transmutational steps – then and now – are today referred to as ‘Gnostics’.

According to the alchemists, the first step in the seach for self-knowledge, or ‘gnosis’ – in the biological/psychological realm – is symbolized by the black crow or raven, a bird attracted to the earth, but which also circles the sky.

In the following song lyrics, Bob Dylan expresses that sometimes he feels like he has the persona of a black crow:

Black crows in the meadow
Across the broad highway
Though it is funny, honey
I’m out of touch, don’t feel much
Like a scarecrow today
(Bob Dylan: Black Crow Blues)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvq45Ss33pw

Then there’s the symbol of the white swan, a bird that’s observed mostly swimming on the surface of the water rather than in flight, still not capable of detaching itself altogether from the earthly darkness wrought by ignorance of the knowledge of how to experience goodly enlightenment:

The singer/songwriter surrounds the symbol of the white swan with black humour:

Tenderly William kissed his wife
Then he opened her head with a butcher’s knife
And the swan on the river went gliding by
Lady Margaret’s pillow was wet with tears
Nobody’s been on it in twenty’s years
(Bob Dylan et al: The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan)

The third step of the gnostic staircase is symbolized by the peacock whose tail feathers flash a rainbow of colours; it’s not all inner brightness yet but it’s getting there:

The cry of the peacock, flies buzzing in my head
Ceiling fan broken, there’s a heat in my bed
Street band playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’
We meet at the steeple where the mission bells ring
(Bob Dylan: Caribbean Wind)

The fourth stage away from the dark outer flesh of the physical body to the inner light of the spiritualism is symbolized by the pelican. The pelican (the female of which was thought to feed her own blood to her young) is similar to the albatross depicted in Samuel Coleridge’s famous poem – a symbol of self-sacrifice, Christ-like.

In the song below, Bob Dylan takes on the persona of such a symbolic bird, but he is determined not to sacrifice his body, and with it his inner spirit, as he rides the warm southern winds :

I’m circling around in the Southern zone
I pay in blood, but not my own
(Bob Dylan: Pay In Blood)

Finally, the Phoenix is a mythical bird which rises up from the metaphorical ashes of its physical body into imaginative heavens where, in the words of poet William Yeats, the silver apples of the moon merge with the golden apples of the sun – and the process of gnosis is complete:

You’re gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I’ll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the one I love
You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go
(Bob Dylan: You Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

In his artistic creations, Dylan makes use of the symbols of alchemy and what they stand for. To what degree, if any, he is personally a Gnostic mystic is a matter of conjecture.

Please note: we hope to have a review of “The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan” available on the site tomorrow.

Earlier articles in the series (in order of publication)

• Bob Dylan and Gnosticism The Starting Point
• Bob Dylan and Gnosticism: Johannine Visions
• Bob Dylan and Gnosticism: The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
• Bob Dylan and Christian Gnosticism
• Hebrew Gnosticism in Dylan’s song lyrics
• A frankly delivered Gnostic message: Dylan’s “Every grain of sand”

Already in the first English translation of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 1823 by Edgar Taylor, the bloody, cruel originals are watered down. Later, in the twentieth century the edifying theories of influential child psychologists like Bruno Bettelheim and especially the cutifying treatments by Disney, threaten the horror content of the source texts.

These source texts are the fairy tales as collected and recorded by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812) the blood splatters against the walls, the evil undergoes the most lugubrious punishments and we do not care about a few corpses less or more. The feet of Cinderella’s step-sisters, for example, are fairly spared in Taylor’s translation. The first step sister has to sacrifice only one toe to fit in the shoe (“So the silly girl cut off her toe”), and the second step sister gets the foot wrung into the shoe by her angry stepmother with bare hands – although, granted, some blood flows (“But her mother squeezed it in till the blood came”).

The Grimm Brothers do not worry about the delicate children’s souls. Without any fuss the first daughter’s toes are all cut off and equally resolutely number two’s heel is chopped off – at any cost one of them has to fit in that shoe. Plus, in Grimm’s version the ladies are severely punished, too. Driven by opportunism, the vicious stepsisters limp into the wedding-party of Cinderella and her prince on the last page. They soon regret it; the pigeons attack both shrews and peck out their eyes.

But Taylor insipidly confines himself to one single toe, deletes that gruesome ending altogether and puts an end to the fairy tale well before the wedding, when the prince leaves Cinderella’s home for the third time, this time with the right bride behind him on his horse. In other translations and adaptations it gets even sweeter; Cinderella forgives her stepsisters and on the wedding ball they are coupled to two distinguished gentlemen.

Halfway through the twentieth century, translators E.V. Lucas, Lucy Crane and Marian Edwards return to the blood and the horror, and they get away with it. Some poetic liberties on their return to the source the ladies still grant themselves. In the rhyme that the birds chirp to warn the prince against deception, for instance. Twice the prince rides with a wrong bride past the hazel with Cinderella’s feathered friends, and both times the pigeons call:

Rucke di guck, rucke di guck, 
Blut ist im Schuck: 
der Schuck ist zu klein, 
die rechte Braut sitzt noch daheim.

To the first translator, Edgar Taylor, that is way too scary and he composes bloodlessly:

Back again! back again! look to the shoe! 

The shoe is too small, and not made for you! 

Prince! prince! look again for thy bride, 

For she's not the true one that sits by thy side.

But later, the female trio translaters is not that anxious and almost literally interpretes:

Prithee, look back, prithee, look back, 

there's blood on the track. 

The shoe is too small; 

at home, the true bride is waiting thy call

This translation, with illustrations by Fritz Kredel, hits the American market in 1945 and is an instant sales success. Not very surprising; after the Bible, Kinder- und Hausmärchen is the best-selling book of all time. On the bookshelf in Woodstock, where the young family of Bob and Sara Dylan lives, is probably the reprint from 1965.

To the puzzlers who think Blood On The Tracks is the Big Ultimate Dylan Divorce and Heartbreak Album (buddha), the similarity between the Cinderella quote and the title of the album is attractive. The blood on the path represents that the prince is on the way with the wrong maiden and that he must get rid of her. Bingo, these exegetes think. By 1974 Bob Dylan reaches the conclusion that his marriage with Sara is on a dead end, he lays his soul on the table in songs like “Simple Twist Of Fate”, “You’re A Big Girl Now” and especially “Idiot Wind ” and calls the album I Am On The Road With The Wrong Woman.

The popular, widespread notion that Blood On The Tracks is autobiographical and thematises the dilapidated state of his marriage, annoys Dylan. He admits early, in a radio interview with Mary Travers (Mary from Peter, Paul and Mary) in April ’75, that the songs express pain. In his own words, he is surprised that people enjoy the album so much: “It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, you know, people enjoying the type of pain, you know.” And there is the first defensive reaction, when Travers half-heartedly suggests that it could be autobiographical:

MT: Well, perhaps maybe the word “enjoy” is the wrong word. Maybe a better word is to say that you’re moved. I was moved by the album. You know, there were things that I could relate to in that album that grew as sense to me. You made sense to me on that album. I felt that it was a much more, well, for me, I felt it was much more “first person” as opposed to third person.

BD: Well, it makes it more clearly defined, but it still doesn’t necessarily make it any better than, than, doing it, ‘cause you can do it in second, third, fourth person too, you know, it’s all the same, sure it is. Um. I know what you mean though.

Not quite coherent (the ‘fourth person’ does not exist, not in any grammar), but the drift of Dylan’s reply is clear: whenever an ‘I’ speaks, you may also fill in a ‘you’ or a ‘he’, that does not make any difference. And implicitly: this is not about me, Bob Dylan. Je est un autre, says Rimbaud, and Dylan fully subscribes to that statement, also in so many words, in his autobiography Chronicles (“When I read those words the bells went off”).

On the other hand, the bard provides ammunition more than once, especially in longer interviews with journalists with whom he seems to feel at ease. As with Craig McGregor, March 1978 in Australia:

CM: I meant more, you write songs about Sara – I wonder whether you can channel your private emotions into your music, that’s one of the reasons you’re able to write songs. You suffer, and that comes out into your songs.

BD: (Pause) That particular song, well… some songs you figure you’re better off not to have written. There’s a few of them layin’ around.

Initially the men talk about the closing song of Desire, about “Sara”, the song of which Dylan at other times asserts with dry eyes that it is not about Sara, but here Dylan admits almost carelessly that it happens to him more than once – that he incorporates his own experiences and private feelings into his songs.

In the years that follow, Dylan grows increasingly assertive and explicit when confronted with the interpretation that the album is about himself and his marital affairs. This culminates in the booklet in the Biograph collection box (1985), in which he even starts cursing: these ‘fools’, these ‘stupid and misleading jerks’ who, with their ‘unimaginative mentality’ think that it is about him and his wife. After that he again asserts that he does not write confessional songs.

He does not convince the Dylanologists. And his son Jakob does not make it easier in an interview, May 2005 with Anthony DeCurtis for The New York Times:

When I’m listening to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” I’m grooving along just like you. But when I’m listening to “Blood on the Tracks,” that’s about my parents.

Words that resonate, in the Dylan community, and still Jakob’s most quoted words. But it is not entirely pure. In the process of the quotation being eagerly pumped around, this ‘proof’ that Blood On The Tracks indeed ís autobiographical, the nuance is lost that it is an indirect quotation. It is true that it is printed in that interview with Jakob, but precisely this quote only appears in an intermezzo in which journalist DeCurtis notes what Andrew Slater, the former manager of Jakob’s band The Wallflowers, has told him about what Jakob supposedly said years earlier. It is hearsay, not words that the journalist has recorded from the mouth of Jakob Dylan.

If we assume that Blood On The Tracks is not an encrypted, indiscreet ego document, the question about the title will remain open. Very open; the word track has four or five different meanings, each one opening a new range of interpretation possibilities.

Dylan’s fascination for trains suggests that he himself thinks of the meaning ‘rails, train track’ when using the word tracks. From his first album on, it is a coming and going of trains, tramps walking along the tracks, conductors, wagons, steam whistles and stations. In the roughly three hundred songs that Dylan wrote before Blood On The Tracks, thirty trains pass by and there are as many train-related references (station master, down the line, coachman, railroad tracks, railroad men, railroad gate and railroad gin, to name a few), so Dylan’s self-reflection in the radio interview with Elliot Mintz, 1991, does have some ground: “That’s just my hang up, you know, trains.”

Chekhov might be a clue, on condition that we take Dylan’s hint from Chronicles seriously:

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

The most famous Blood On The Train Tracks is the blood of Anna Karenina. But alas; that is Tolstoy, and neither does it flow in a short story. In Chekhov’s work dozens of trains pass by, but apart from a single reference in an insignificant sideline, never with bloody consequences. And that one referral is once again based on the tragic fate of the unfortunate Anna Karenina (in The Duel, 1891).

But then again, Dylan has of course built a solid reputation of screwing up the names of writers and their works. In Chronicles, for example, he mentions Pericles’ Ideal State Of Democracy (the statesman and general Pericles did not write books at all) and he casually cites “Sophocles’ book on the nature and function of the gods” – in reality Sophocles only wrote tragedies. And likewise in interviews we come across such, intentional or unintentional, slips. As in the same interview with Craig McGregor (New Musical Express), in March 1978:

CM: Listening to Tangled Up In Blue, I got the feeling it’s like an autobiography; a sort of funny, wry, compressed novel…

BD: Yeah, that’s the first I ever wrote that I felt free enough to change all the… what is it, the tenses around, is that what it is?

CM: The person…

BD: The he and the she and the I and the you, and the we and the us – I figured it was all the same anyway – I could throw them all in where they floated right – and it works on that level.

CM: It’s got those nice lines at the end, about “There was music in the cafés at night / And revolution in the air” and “Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters wives / I don’t know how it all got started, I don’t know / what they do with their lives.”

BD: I like that song. Yeah, that poet from the 13th century.

CM: Who was that?

BD: Plutarch. Is that his name?

True, Plutarch sometimes resides in Rome, becomes a Roman citizen in later years and is known by his Latin name, but: he is a Greek and lives in the first century. Even the job title ‘poet’ is not correct; Plutarch does not write poems, but biographies and philosophical essays, in Greek, by the way. With that malapropism, Dylan at the same time puts into perspective the research of the descriptors that scroll back and forth in the works of Dante and Petrarch (who live in the fourteenth century, really) to find a line to “Tangled Up In Blue”. Matching the atmosphere of the song and the words And every one of them words rang true / And glowed like burnin’ coal sooner brings Boccaccio to mind, actually, but just as little luck there: wrong century again (1313-1375).

Inaccuracies and false scents enough, all in all, to not take Dylan’s own reference to ‘the short stories of Chekhov’ too literally. He could just as well have meant ‘Russian literature from previous centuries’ or ‘Tolstoy’, and therefore the album title could have been inspired by the reading of Anna Karenina. Not entirely incongruous; Anna’s jump before the train is driven by frustrated love and jealousy, two leading motifs in the songs on Blood On The Tracks.

A third meaning of tracks is grist to the mill to a poet who, according to Joan Baez, is ‘so good at keeping things vague’: album tracks, the individual songs on a record. With this semantic charge, Dylan uses the word track just as often meaning ‘song’; in Chronicles alone he means eight times ‘song recording’ when he writes a track, and in the published interviews we also encounter it dozens of times as a synonym for ‘song’.

In that case Blood On The Tracks becomes something like ‘there is blood in these songs, my heart and soul lie in these songs’, which of course is a welcome interpretation for the autobiographical signifiers.

Not at all unambiguous, all in all, this polysemic album title. Considering the long list of Dylan’s album titles, the poetic vagueness of a title like Blood On The Tracks is not necessarily a trademark of the bard, but it is not exceptional either. We know that since his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Dylan is allowed to come up with the titles himself (until that time the boys and girls from CBS’ marketing department consider it their task) and we know that Dylan cares:

Well, I always like to tie the name of the album in with some song. Or if not some song, some kind of general feeling. I think that just about fit because it was less in the way, and less specific than any of the other ones there. Certainly couldn’t call the album Lay Lady Lay. I wouldn’t have wanted to call it that, although that name was brought up. It didn’t get my vote, but it was brought up.

(Rolling Stone interview, november 1969)

Since 1965, Dylan has recorded about 30 official, regular studio albums and given them a name. Half of them are linked to a song title (Highway 61 Revisited, Slow Train Coming, Tempest), some names indeed express a traceable ‘general feeling’ (Self Portrait, Bringing It All Back Home) and with a dozen titles Dylan is admittedly ‘less specific’, but the title is still ‘in the way’, the chosen title is an extra challenge to interpret the album and the songs. Blonde On Blonde is the first example and in the 70s Dylan succumbs three times for the temptation to put an alienating, misty icing on the cake: Desire, Street Legal and this Blood On The Tracks.

Despite this mistiness, the word combination gradually penetrates the public’s collective memory. A British collection of stories about criminal activities on the railroad is called Blood On The Tracks (David Brandon and Alan Brooke, 2017), as well as the first episode of Unravel, an Australian podcast by investigative journalists on unsolved crimes (2018), the first thriller in the Sidney Rose Parnell series by writer Barbara Nickless (2016), the fifteenth episode of the TV series Werewolf (1987), various artworks by musicians, painters and sculptors, research reports by molecular biologists and medical specialists, an episode from the game version of Guardians Of The Galaxy, and so on. Brian S. Willson, the Vietnam veteran and peace activist who, in a demonstration on the tracks in front of a munitions transport, remains demonstratively seated, gets run over and loses both legs in 1987, shows a macabre sort of mental toughness by calling his memoirs Blood On The Tracks (2011).

The title is, in short, starting to get disengaged from Dylan’s masterpiece. The fanatical teenagers who chase the Silver Blood On The Tracks Trophy in the Tell-Tale Series of the Guardians game at their Xbox will largely be unfamiliar with “Idiot Wind”. The zealous cell biology students who plough through their professor’s neuroscientific study, Blood On The Tracks by Konstantinos Meletis, 2003, probably will not be able to sing along with “Buckets Of Rain”.

But that the timeless masterpiece of the Nobel Prize winner will cross their paths sooner or later, is certain. That does not take more than a simple twist or fate.

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

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

Bob Dylan and Edar Allen Poe: the howl in the songs, can be found here.

By Larry Fyffe

Throughout many of his songs, Bob Dylan mixes the Judeo-Christian good God and evil Devil working in the world side by side with the horrible spirits of Gothicism, and the dark and light forces circling hither and about as depicted in some forms of Gnosticism.

Poet and storyteller Edgar Allan Poe is a source of both Gothic and Gnostic thoughts and images from which Dylan draws:

What a tale of their terror tells
Of despair!
How the they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour ….
Yet the ear distinctly tells
In the jangling
And the wrangling
How the danger sinks and swells
By the sinking and the swelling in the anger
of the bells
(Edgar Allan Poe: The Bells)

Ghostly Gothic fog-filled visions of Poe re-appear in the lines below:

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning, I’ll come following you ….
And take me disappearing through the smoke rings
of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves
The haunted frightened trees
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

In the lines below, Gnostic aural images and rhythms depict light within the darkness, life juxtaposed with death, symbolized by the personification of the ringing bells:

They are ghouls
And their king it is who tolls
And he rolls, rolls, rolls
Rolls
A paean from the bells
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells
And he dances and he yells
(Edgar Allan Poe: The Bells)

Singer/songwriter Dylan praises the light that shines in the darkness:

Out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of
crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

Bob Dylan celebrates that John Lennon’s goodly spirit, after his physical death, lives on in the singer’s works of art:

Shine your light
Movin’ on
You burned so bright
Roll on, John
(Bob Dylan: Roll On, John)

Poe’s legacy lives on in the following song lyrics which express, again in the sound imagery of bells, the sorrow that’s oft felt by the living when someone passes from the physical world:

And listen to the chimes of trinity
Tolling for the outcast
Tolling for the gay
Tolling for the millionaire
And friends long passed away
(Chimes Of Trinity: MJ Fitzpatrick – composer/writer)

Dylan gets creative energy from the poetic lyrics of Poe, and the song lyrics of
Fitzpatrick:

As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned, and the forsaked
Tolling for the outcast burning constantly at stake
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
(Bob Dylan: Chimes Of Freedom)

Sadly for some, death is an escape from a world of woe:

For on its wing was dark alloy
And as it fluttered fell
An essence – powerful to destroy
A soul that knew it well
(Edgar Allan Poe: The Happiest Day, The Happiest Hour)

According to Bob Dylan, religion, art, or a lover provides at least temporary shelter from such dark and stormy night thoughts, as though one were a raven at her window with a broken wing:

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail
Poisoned in the bushes, and blown out on the trail
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn
‘Come in’, she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm’
(Bob Dylan: Shelter From The Storm)

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+ songs 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 now 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

According to one article I have found Ronnie Wood seemed  to be expecting some lyrics from Bob Dylan when they worked together on Wood’s album “Not for beginners” which included as its final track “King of Kings” – written by Bob Dylan.

Ronnie Wood said, ‘Part of the reason we get on is that we’re both Geminis, but he’s a far more reclusive and unpredictable one than me. To give you an idea, when he came round to do his bit on my album, he refused to sing. I’m like, “What about these lyrics, Bob?” and he goes “You ain’t gettin’ no words out of me!”’

Which I suppose explains this instrumental composition “King of Kings” by Bob Dylan.  Ronnie Wood continued, “There are days – like in Kilkenny – when he’ll talk the hind leg off you, and others when the duffel coat gets put on and that’s your lot. I’ve known him a long time now but I still can’t pre-guess his mood.

Speaking of playing in Live Aid with Bob Dylan Ronnie Wood said, “Before Live Aid, we spent a couple of days in my New York house rehearsing everything in his back catalogue. I tell you, myself, Keith (Richards) and Ian (McLagan) have never worked so fucking hard in our lives. What does he do as we’re walking on? Suggest we start with the one bloody song we haven’t learned! “Does that mean we shouldn’t do it?” he says, and I go, “Yeah, it does mean that!”

Which sounds pretty much like the Bob we have got to know.  In another Woods interview about Bob, the Guardian newspaper says, “The Rolling Stones played the Desert Trip festival in California with Dylan the weekend after he was awarded the Nobel prize, and told the Guardian he had seemed happy, but sheepish about it.

“He kept calling me Sir Ronnie,” Ronnie Wood said … “and when Charlie walked in he said, ‘And Sir Charlie, too! Everyone from England is a sir, right?’ We said, ‘Yeah Bob, but it’s not like … it’s really good about your Nobel prize.’ And he went, ‘You think so? It’s good, huh?’ And we said, ‘You deserve it.’ And he said, ‘That’s great – thanks.’

“He didn’t really know how to accept it, but he thought he had done something pretty good,” said Wood.

As for this instrumental, I find it very moving, and indeed since I first discovered it earlier today I have been playing it over and over (and yes, my knowledge of Dylan’s work is not as profound as one or two people have suggested – I really didn’t know about this song until I was tipped off).

It is not so much that it goes somewhere that other songs have never been, but rather it knows exactly where it is, and doesn’t try to be somewhere else.  It is a wide shallow river rolling across a rocky river bed – a river that has just come from the moorlands, and you know that you can sit on the bank of the river and just watch it, and it will be the same now as it is tomorrow or the next day.  It is eternal and beautiful and you really don’t want to leave its shore and go back home, even though you know you can come back again, and again.

And yet only if you can keep it in your vision, it will remain and be your constant companion. If you walk away it will be lost.

Shortly after Bob didn’t go to a White House reception for the winners of the Nobel Prize arranged by President Obama.  White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at the Wednesday press briefing: “Unfortunately, for those of you wondering, Bob Dylan will not be at the White House today, so everybody can relax.”

And with this song we can relax, as the river eternally rolls.

Thank you Bob.   I love it.

What else is on the site?

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

The index to the 500+ songs 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 now 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

Steel Bars is a song that Bob Dylan wrote with Michael Bolton for his Time, Love & Tenderness album.

Commenting very briefly on this song Heylin makes two points.  One was that Dylan was at a very low point in his writing career when this song was created, and he suspects that the managements of Dylan and of Michael Bolton and Bob Dylan put the two men together.

The second point is made by citing the old comment, “No one ever lost money by underestimating the tastes of the public.”  I think that is a cheap jibe, but still, there are reasons to think this is a song to listen to and then set aside.

Heylin does condescend however to suggesting that four lines from the song are recognisable as Dylan writing on cruise control.

I'm bound forever, till the end of time

Steel bars wrapped around this heart of mine

Trying hard to recognise

See the face behind the eyes.

The prime source for what happened in the creation of this song is Boulton’s own commentary, part of which comes from the Rolling Stone article Bob Dylan’s greatest collaborations

‘Many were shocked when they saw the liner notes to Michael Bolton’s 1991 hit album Time, Love and Tenderness and saw that the final track was co-written with Bob Dylan. “Someone who works with Dylan called me up and said, ‘Bob Dylan would like to write with you,’ ” Bolton said. “I was awed. I told him, ‘I don’t even know how I could write a lyric when working with you … I’m too intimidated.’ But then we started messing around with some chords and wrote ‘Steel Bars,’ a song about obsession. It took us two sessions to write, and when I left, I was told, ‘Bob likes you and he wants you to come back.’ “

The video below has a brief extract from a live performance and then after a re-load pause runs the record

Incidentally, and for clarity, this is absolutely not the same song as Stone Walls and Steel Bars which Dylan has performed some 30 odd times on stage – and which is an arrangement of a traditional song.  I just wanted to make that clear, as I have read one commentary that seems to get the two songs mixed up.

The ever excellent Dylan chords site says of this song

‘These definitely are classic “Dylan Lyrics” (shows his well hadn’t run dry), I knew it when I heard it, that it was Dylan. I wonder though, if the melody and the chords are all his, I sure hope so. Great song. Nice key change too.    Lyrics can be found at bobdylan.com.’

An article in courant.com says, “Before he became famous for his soul-choked voice, Michael Bolton made his living as a hit songwriter, having considerable success collaborating with other hit writers such as Dianne Warren and Desmond Child, and producing hits for everyone from Kiss to Cher.”

The article continues “Nowadays the New Haven-born artist, who will be celebrated Thursday in a gala homecoming show at the Hartford Civic Center, tends to keep his best songs for himself.”