Details of the earlier articles in this series appear at the end of this piece.

By Tony Attwood

In the last episode I looked at Farewell Angelina, which is a song in which Bob returned to the simplest form of music that he has used: the strophic approach, which in essence is just verse, verse, verse and so on, for as long as you like.   And noting this is not to criticse Bob or the form: the strophic form is the fundamental of English folk music, on which of course American folk music was based.  The variation of the “middle 8” (or “ternary form” as music scholars call it) came later to give a feel of variance in songs that because of the technology of the 78rpm record, could only last a maximum three minutes at normal quality.   (They could be recorded up to three and a half minutes but the technology was stretched as the maximum length was reached).

Given the changes Bob had been making in the way that he had been writing music in the year before “Farewell Angelina,” going back to the strophic form of verse-verse-verse this was quite a backward step, and here we might well see two explanations for that.

First we might note that Bob did not ever perform “Farewell Angelina”, and his recorded version was only published on Bootleg 1-3.  Second Bob did not actually write the music himself but in fact took it from traditional folk songs, as he himself acknowledged.    So we could conclude from this that Bob never had any intent of performing it himself.  Indeed it could be argued that it was in fact for him, n0t part of his standard songwriting process but rather it was Bob playing with an idea, nothing more.

We may also note that in 1963 Bob had already written two songs concerning the issue of saying goodbye: “Farewell” and “Restless Farewell”.   The word, or the concept, seemed to be an issue of particular interest to him at this time, possibly because with the songs such as “Gates of Eden” he very much was saying goodbye to his earlier form of songwriting, which was in fact to use the same approach to the song as most previous writers had done.

For although Bob had used the form, he clearly knew it did not give him the freedom to delve into the music and come up with the expression of different feelings and emotions.   For that, he seems to have felt, something more was needed.  If you want to delve further into that background I did a little piece on the song some ten years ago which is still on this site.

But what we could never have predicted, and if I may say, I think what many commentators have never noticed, is that what Bob would write next was the most extraordinary song: “Love is just a four letter word” which sounds like nothing he had ever written before – but again did not perform.

Certainly just listening to the range that Joan Baez puts into the song, it clearly had extraordinary potential, although I rather suspect Bob didn’t try to use the full range that Joan finds by raising the opening line by an octave.  Although of course, it may be that Bob suggested that to her.

But leaving the range aside we can immediately hear that this again is a strophic song – which is to say it is verse, verse, verse, but with that really unusual, challenging and indeed interesting melody.  But more than that, Bob uses a technique he has used before, but is rarely used by other songwriters – he changes the number of lines in two of the verses.

The song is based on a standard series of eight lines of music, plus a final ninth line, which occurs at the end of each verse and which is unusual enough in itself.

But the penultimate verse has two extra lines added and the final verse has one more than the earlier verses.   As it happens I can’t think of any other song that has this approach, but I am not going to say “this is unique”, although until someone comes up with something written before this song which uses this effect we may think along these lines.   But of course because most commentators focus on other aspects of the song, this is often missed.

Although to be fair, the range of the melody is extraordinary.

Here’s the first verse for example:

Seems like only yesterday
I left my mind behind
Down in the gypsy café
With a friend of a friend of mine
Who sat with a baby heavy on her knee
Yet spoke of life most free from slavery
With eyes that showed no trace of misery
A phrase in connection first with she occurred
That love is just a four-letter word

And below the final two verses…

Though I never knew just what you meant
When you were speaking to your man
I can only think in terms of me
And now I understand
After waking enough times to think I see
The holy kiss that's supposed to last eternity
Blow up in smoke, it's destiny
Falls on strangers, travels free
Yes, I know now, traps are only set by me
And I do not really need to be assured
That love is just a four-letter word

Strange it is to be beside you
Many years the tables turned
You'd probably not believe me
If I told you all I've learned
And it is very, very weird indeed
To hear words like forever, fleets
Of ships run through my mind, I cannot cheat
It's like looking in the teacher's face complete
I can say nothing to you but repeat what I heard
That love is just a four-letter word

(I should add that Joan Baez did later perform versions in which she omitted one verse and sang the second verse in a strong mock-Dylan style, which I’m not including here.  Personally, I think that version is awful – I leave you to go and find it if you must.  It doesn’t change the music, it just changes the accent and thus the implied meaning).

But back to the main point.   Adding an extra line or two is not that dramatic, of course, but it is in popular music incredibly rare.  Dylan had done it before, as for example in “Tambourine Man”, but then had prior to this composition written a number of songs without this effect, so here he returns to it.   And even though we are of course not counting the number of lines as we listen, most people tend to hear that there is something that bit different, that bit “extended” in these last lines.   We might not immediately say, “There’s an extra line” (or two) but we feel it.

Baez immediately took to the song, which was written by Dylan sometime around 1965, and “Dont Look Back” has a snippet where she sings part of it and says to Bob, “If you finish it, I’ll sing it on a record”.

Baez first included the song on her 1968 LP, “Any day now”, and has recorded it several times since with one of the versions actually creeping into the Hot 100.   It also appeared on “Baez sings Dylan” and on live albums.

As we know Bob did not perform it, possibly because he doesn’t have the vocal range and so his version would then sound inferior to the Baez version.

Dylan never released a recording of this song, and, according to his website, he has never performed the song live either.   Earl Scruggs played it with Joan Baez, and I have seen it written that he released an instrumental version of the song, but I have not been able to find a recording of this, so as things stand, I am a little suspicious of that claim.  It is possible that the version in question, is the one below, with Earl Scruggs playing, and Baez singing.

But let me return to my main point.   What Bob is doing with this song is experimenting again.  He has taken the strophic form in which so many of his songs are written but then played with it in a way that, as far as I know, no one else had previously done, by extending the number of lines and having a rhyming pattern which changes part way through, starting out A B C B, and then moving onto D, D, D, E, F.

Now it can be argued that the rhyme is a lyrical thing, not a musical effect, and that’s true to a degree, but the music has to be arranged to work with this, and if it is not, the whole song falls apart.   At the very least I would argue that this is a musical and lyrical effect – but it is the music here that gives us the song’s unique feeling.

And I would add, it shouldn’t work.  It should sound all wrong.  But it doesn’t!

Previously….

• 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• 3: From Times to Percy’s song
• 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
• 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope
• 6: Chimes of Freedom and Tambourine Man
• 7: Bending the form to its very limits
• 8: From Denise to Mama
• 9: Balled in Plain D
• 10: Black Crow to All I really want to do
• 11: I’ll keep it with mine
• 12: Dylan does gothic and the world ends
• 13: The Gates of Eden
• 14: After the Revolution – another revolution
• 15: Returning to the roots (but with new chords)
• 16. From “It’s all right” to “Angelina”. What happened?

There is an index to our current series and most recent articles on the home page.

In this series the recordings are selected by Tony Attwood. But if you would like to nominate a particular recording for inclusion, please drop me a line to Tony@schools.co.uk

This series is based around searches undertaken to find recordings of Dylan concerts back through the ages, and presented here so that should you ever be looking for a recording of how Dylan sounded in a particular year, there’s a chance you might find it here.  The aim is to have at least one concert for each year.  After that… I’m not sure.

Today’s concert is found on Facebook  and consists of four songs recorded at  Madison Square Garden, on 1 August 1971.  And yes I do appreciate there are only four songs, but the quality of the recording is rather good, so I thought it was worth including.

The four songs in order are….

• Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall
• It takes a lot to laugh
• Blowing in the Wind
• Just like a woman

You can hear this performance by clicking on the Facebook link above.

Here’s a full list of the concerts and events covered so far.

• 2025:  April 2025, Iowa
• 2024: Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 2024:  The Mountain View, California concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 2024:  What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• 2021: The Beacon Theatre NYC, 21 November 2o21
• 2019: 14 October Palo Alto.
• 2012: Wisconsin: 5 November
• 2009:  Paris, 8 April 2009
• 2006: Atlanta 5 May
• 2002: 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime
• 1999: April 7 1999   Lisbon
• 1995: Brighton (“The Brighton Centre”)
• 1992: Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• 1991: Stuttgart.   The worst show ever?
• 1988: 30 June.  New York.
• 1986: The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 1980: 15 January Seattle
• 1978: Earls Court 1978
• 1976: Fort Collins 23 May 1976
• 1976: January 1976: the rehearsals
• 1974:  Largo, Maryland; 15 January 1974
• 1971: Maddison Square Gardens.  1 August
• 1969: The Isle of Wight (four songs).
• 1966: Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• 1961:  The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961

by Jochen Markhorst

• Part 1: Keys t’unlock my mind

II          Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy

All through the summers and into January
I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

I want to bring someone to life - is what I want to do
I want to create my own version of you

A month after his smashing album Bone Machine (1992) was released, Tom Waits is in KCRW’s radio studio in Santa Monica to be interviewed by Chris Douridas for the daily “adult album alternative” programme Morning Becomes Eclectic. It is 9 October 1992 and the station is broadcasting on 89.9 FM from the Santa Monica College campus, some 25 miles from Dylan’s home at 7118 Birdview Avenue in Malibu. But alas, at the time of the broadcast, Dylan is in Pittsburgh for a concert at Duquesne University’s A.J. Palumbo Centre and may perhaps hear a Duquesne Whistle, but certainly not the radio programme. And neither Tom Waits explaining how he constructed his songs for Bone Machine. He had some 60 songs and song fragments, Waits explains:

“You always throw out a lot of songs. Not throw them out, but you cannibalize them. That’s part of the process. Frankenstein that number over there. Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy, immediately. Keep him alive until the head has been severed. It’s part of song-building.”

Well, maybe Dylan’s son Jesse recorded the interview for his dad. The bizarre album cover was created by Jesse, who took and edited a photo of a freeze frame from the music video he made with Jim Jarmusch for Waits’ “Going Out West”, track 10 of Bone Machine. Anyway – we hear Waits in the radio programme use an imperative of the self-styled verb “to frankenstein” to describe his artistic production process. Which is indeed an understandable association: the songs were recorded in the basement of the Prairie Sun Recording Studio, “just a cement floor and a hot water heater,” in Waits’ words, the arrangements are bare, grotesque and alienating, with an emphasis on metallic percussion… the sound of the record is like being created for the soundtrack of a horror movie featuring a mad scientist in some hellish laboratory.

Tom Waits – Going Out West: https://youtu.be/27LLPANAgzw

Waits then milks the metaphor even more plastically than Dylan does in his song: “Keep him alive until his head is off, and then sew the head onto this other guy as fast as you can.” Still, the imagery, Doctor Frankenstein as songwriter, is identical. “It’s part of song-building,” Waits explains anyway just to be sure.

We know the Dr Frankenstein character has been dormant in the back of Dylan’s mind for a couple of decades. In the draft manuscript of “High Water” printed on page 496 of Mixing up the Medicine, we see Dylan noted the hunch “Dr Frankenstein” under an earlier version of the opening couplet. In the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, we even find a completely rejected verse for the song:

Doctor Frankenstein's still up there at his castle on the hill 
If he ain't come down by now 
I guess he never will
Livin' there in the underworld, I ain't sayin' it's wrong or right 
The sun is shining down 
Like it's twelve o'clock at night. 
Like a nightmare up there
High water everywhere.

… noting that Dylan also had the film character in mind here, not the novel character from Mary Shelley’s novel (1818). There is no castle in Shelley’s book; only in film versions is Dr Frankenstein portrayed as an eccentric mad scientist in a castle. We have seen that before, by the way, a literary celebrity as a protagonist whom Dylan apparently knows only from the film adaptation. Similar, for instance, to protagonists in Dylan’s songs like Captain Ahab in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” (he was stuck on a whale – that’s Gregory Peck in the film, in Melville’s book it doesn’t happen) or Cinderella, who puts her hands in her pockets “Bette Davis style” (“Desolation Row”).

As also here in “My Own Version Of You” Dr Frankenstein scavenges the necessary body parts by nightly visits to morgues and monasteries; these are film images. In the book, Dr Victor Frankenstein loots bones from charnel-houses (“I collected bones from charnel-houses”), tissue and organs from “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house” (chapter 4). Dylan apparently has the 1931 film in his mind’s eye, with the doctor digging up corpses in the cemetery with his assistant or, more likely, the Mel Brooks parody Young Frankenstein with the brilliant Gene Wilder and his clumsy assistant Marty Feldman (whose “Walk this way”, by the way, inspired Aerosmith to their world hit) and indeed residing in a “castle on the hill”. But admittedly, All through the summers and into January / I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries sounds a lot more melodic and intriguing than Shelley’s “The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials”. And Dylan is certainly not the only artist who uses the film character as opposed to the book character. Even grandmaster Stephen King writes: “feeling a little like Dr Frankenstein animating his monster in the castle tower” (Duma Key, 2008).

And Stephen King offers another analysis of art production, again similar to what Tom Waits and Dylan’s protagonist offer. In King’s superb semi-autobiographical On Writing (2000):

“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe. Imagine, if you like, Frankenstein’s monster on its slab. Here comes lightning, not from the sky but from a humble paragraph of English words. Maybe it’s the first really good paragraph you ever wrote, something so fragile and yet full of possibility that you are frightened. You feel as Victor Frankenstein must have when the dead conglomeration of sewn together spare parts suddenly opened its watery yellow eyes. Oh my God, it’s breathing, you realize. Maybe it’s even thinking. What in hell’s name do I do next?”

… showing, incidentally, that King is very well familiar with the source text:

“His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”

Indeed, at the moment suprême, after two years of working to exhaustion, Victor Frankenstein has no feelings of triumph or euphoria, but rather “breathless horror and disgust filled my heart,” causing him to flee from his creation – not knowing what to do next.

Meanwhile, King’s use of the metaphor is more wide-ranging than Tom Waits’, which refers only to “song-building”. King, on the other hand, covers Dylan’s other fields as well. After all, Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles is in part also a “conglomeration of sewn together spare parts”, as is his painting, for which he takes the necessary body parts from Hollywood films, and even more literally, it applies to his sculpturing, for which he actually scavenges the necessary body parts from scrap metal and discarded machinery, reviving those remains by forging them together and recreating them into gates.

More poetic, however, and also more fitting, is the view that the protagonist of “My Own Version Of You” is, like Waits, talking about songwriting. The morgues, where the forgotten songs lie decaying under the dust of centuries until a troubadour like Dylan digs them up again and reanimates them; the monasteries, where the troubadour hears the old Protestant hymns (Dylan: “My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter family songs or variations of the blues form,” Robert Hilburn interview 2003), the troubadour declaring elsewhere, “Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book,” referring to songs like “Let Me Rest On That Peaceful Mountain”, “Keep On The Sunny Side” and “I Saw The Light”… the charnel houses and convents where the song and dance man finds the body parts, the words, tunes, stories and lines “t’unlock his mind” – to frankenstein his songs.

Stanley Brothers – Let Me Rest On That Peaceful Mountain: 

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 3: Next time you come to the bridge, jump

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

Bob Dylan is a name synonymous with a lot of things; they range from poetic brilliance to protest and perpetual reinvention. He was relevant in a time when there wasn’t a modern gaming experience for slots enthusiasts, yet he remains a household name to date. This is a testament to the uniqueness and versatility of his performance. He has been a major part of the musical and cultural landscape for more than six decades now. Initially born Robert Zimmerman, he emerged in the 1960s as the voice of a generation struggling with civil rights, war, and social change. His lyrics, although cryptic, are greatly meaningful and capture the spirit of the times.

However, what’s truly remarkable is that in a world changed by technology, streaming platforms and social media, his relevance has not faded. Instead, it keeps evolving. He keeps resonating with new generations who find his art strangely familiar and endlessly compelling. Ensuring relevance demands a closer insight.

Why does Bob Dylan still matter in this age where cultural trends are fleeting, and attention spans are shrinking? Keep scrolling to find out about the source of his timelessness.

A Brand of Authenticity

In a time saturated with curated personas and algorithm-driven content, his mystique offers a refreshing counter-narrative. Unlike many other artists today who usually update fans through Instagram or TikTok, he remains elusive. Bob Dylan rarely gives interviews, others manage his social media presence, and he reinterprets his songs in ways that amaze even his most loyal followers.

This mystique is, paradoxically, what makes him feel original in an age of oversharing. Younger generations, especially Gen Z, are growing increasingly sceptical of digital façades. They crave originality, rawness, and truth, all of which Dylan delivers, although on his terms. His refusal to play by the rules, both then and now, is itself a kind of protest, one that resonates deeply with digital natives navigating the pressures of online life.

Universality of Themes

One of the major reasons for his continued relevance is the timelessness of the themes he explores. His songs address life, identity, protest, alienation, mortality, and the search for truth. Funny enough, all of these are just as urgent today as they were in the 1960s. Tracks like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin” have an undisputable ability to serve as soundtracks from multiple historical moments. They are not just relics of the past, but commentaries on the human condition generally.

In the digital age, where global crises like climate change, inequality, and political polarization ensue, his lyrics offer both a mirror and a lens.

Intertextuality & Remix Culture

Bob Dylan’s body of work is a masterclass in intertextuality. His lyrics are woven with references to literature, scripture, folklore, and pop culture. Songs like “Desolation Row” and “Highway 61 Revisited” read like modernist works, combining characters and ideas across time and genre. This literary depth connects well with the current trend of remix culture, where creatures on platforms like TikTok continuously restructure, reinterpret, and combine elements from various sources to generate something new.

In a way, Bob Dylan was already doing this before it became fashionable. For example, his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways features nods to Walt Whitman, Anne Frank, and Indiana Jones. All of these features are in the same track, “Murder Most Foul.” This form of cultural sampling feels incredibly modern, even as it draws from deeply historical sources. It aligns with a generation fluent in meme culture and digital bricolage. Thus, proving that his way of storytelling has found a second home in the nonlinear narratives of the internet.

Streaming and Rediscovery

The surge of streaming platforms has played a major role in keeping his music accessible to new audiences. Once restricted to vinyl or cassette, his extensive catalogue is now just a click away. Platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube have helped young listeners discover him without the generational gatekeeping that usually surrounds legacy artists.

The digital space has permitted a thriving culture of analysis, music covers, and discourse around his works. Reddit threads dissect his lyrics, YouTube channels break down his chord progressions, and podcasts chronicle his stories and career. This communal form of engagement, combining fandom with scholarship, has helped to keep him alive in the collective imagination.

Moreover, his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 has added a new layer of legitimacy and curiosity around his work. This is especially true among younger audiences, who may have previously overlooked him as just any musician. Suddenly, he became a literary figure combined with his former identity as a poet with a guitar. This crossover appeal has further deepened his cultural footprint.

A Digital Paradox

Bob Dylan’s persistent resonance in the digital age is a paradox that portrays an important fact about man and the times we live in. He is both a relic, a prophet, a throwback, and a forecaster. His music is filled with allusion and ambiguity, and flies in the face of modern media’s demand for clarity and brevity. Hence, the reason it ensures.

In many ways, his works offer an antidote to the cultural symptoms of our time, from oversimplification to distraction and performative outrage. His music reminds us that art can be a long conversation rather than a viral moment. This makes him not just a historical curiosity. He is a guide, pointing toward a more thoughtful and reflective kind of engagement that the world needs

• Part 1: 1965. Crying like a fire in the sun
• Part 2: 1975. The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
• Part 3: All your reindeer armies.
• Part 4: 1990 – 1995
• Part 5: 1996 – 2001 You think will last.

Part 6: Crazy Patterns

By Mike Johnson

[I read somewhere that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the sixth article on the fourth and final track, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series here: ]

——-

As this series has progressed, we have seen this song change from a strident farewell to an anguished farewell, to something more introspective and contemplative. We have also seen the role of the harmonica in extending the emotional range of the song, whatever the mood.

A more pensive, brooding mood is one thing, but the question I have as we move into the first years of Dylan on keyboard is, has the song, in performance, become a little too lush and gentle? This lushness is reinforced by a full chorus instrumental lead-in and exit from the song, dominated by the dreamy slide guitar. This brackets the lyrics with this instrumental mood.

Where has the stringency gone? The Dylan bite? Rather than a wake-up call, hasn’t it become almost a lullaby? Shrouded in nostalgia, can it still perform as a ‘I’m sending you on your way’ kind of song? What has happened to the boot in the backside?

You, dear readers, will have to make up your own minds on these questions as you listen to the performances in this post. It is, after all, a song with a wide and complex emotional punch. Perhaps it can survive this lavish treatment.

Interestingly, while 2002 was the year Dylan shifted to the keyboards, he stuck to the guitar for this particular song. We have to wait until 2003 before we hear a piano-driven version. Despite all the different approaches, the song has mostly retained its acoustic roots.

The lack of harmonica, with its edgy emotional feel, also reinforces the laid-back, almost balmy atmosphere of this Munich performance. It’s beautiful enough, my question is, is it too beautiful?

2002

One of the YouTube commentators has this to say about the 2002 performances: ‘The silent spaces breaking up most (not all) lines are a crucial part of the power of this version of BB. The soft singing is mystical and vulnerable yet at times becomes accusatory especially when he sings the word YOU at the end of a line. A sense of lived-in wisdom pervades each line. That he is singing to/about himself consciously or unconsciously is evident to this listener.’ (@TheGoodjeffman)

That’s a very perceptive comment. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe this is the way we might speak to ourselves when we are in our darkness, not to put ourselves to sleep but to remind ourselves of a deeper truth.

When we come to 2003, we find the harmonica restored, albeit briefly, at the end, and the piano fattening out the chords. The approach to the song, however, remains the same as in 2002 (Birmingham).

2003

The vocal is pretty rough in that recording, which brings out the backing beautifully. This next recording from Newcastle, also 2003, is clearer in terms of Dylan’s vocals. In my NET series, I suggested that Dylan’s harp style during these years sounded a little like a muted trumpet. Not up close and harsh, but distant and dreamy.

By 2004, Dylan begins to toughen up the vocal performance while the musical ambience pretty much stays the same, although the harmonica disappears. The slight increase in tempo, at least in this Chicago performance, has mitigated the lullaby effect to some extent.

 2004

In 2004 we find Dylan experimenting with the chord structure, resulting in what I called a ‘madrigal’ effect in the NET series, used with other songs as well. It makes for a peculiarly antique sound, and a major shift in terms of the arrangement (East Lansing).

2004

While the song featured consistently through 2002 – 2004, in 2005 we find a mere four performances. I’m never quite sure how to interpret these sudden drops. Is it a sign that Dylan is losing interest in the song, or that other songs have come to the fore? Is it a result of a conscious decision by Dylan, or does it just come about as Dylan just plays what he wants from night to night?

The four 2005 performances reveal no slackening of interest. In this Seattle performance, Dylan delivers a wonderful vocal performance, both rough and tender, offsetting the backing which is as lush as ever. The recording is worth a listen for Dylan’s vocal performance alone. The harp cuts in, as sharp and whimsical as ever. This doesn’t sound like an afterthought. It sounds like the fruition of the previous four years in terms of arrangement and mood.

2005

That performance was no accident. While we get some upsinging on the ‘you’ which may be annoying, this Oakland performance is another masterful rendition of the song in this style.

2005

At this point, Dylan drops the song until 2008, when it reappears for ten performances. I can only assume that this was a conscious decision. Perhaps some songs had to go to accommodate a new tranche of songs from the 2005 album Modern Times. What is not so clear is why he should pick it up again in 2008. These golden oldies tend to rise to the surface as some of the newer songs fade from sight.

As we might expect after such a break, the song returns with a new tempo and arrangement. Dylan has shifted from the piano to the organ. As I explored in the NET series, not all Dylan fans were happy with Dylan’s bouncy, rinky-dink organ sound, and no one would claim 2008 to be a peak performance year. Certainly, this is not my go-to version of the song. It’s hard to resist the thought that Dylan has, at this point, lost his emotional connection to it. Even two jazzy harp choruses can’t save it. If you find yourself tapping your feet in time, you might be getting soft.

2008

In 2009, we get more of the same, still bouncing along (one of the comments describes it as ‘jaunty and boppy’), and the lyrical line doesn’t seem to fit the musical line. The backing instrumentals sound like they’ve been lifted from Together Through Life, released that year, ‘If You Ever Go to Houston’ perhaps.

It clings on with nine performances. This one’s from Sheffield.

2009 Sheffield

Again in 2010 we get the same jaunty arrangement, but, at least to my ear, this comes off a little better than the previous two years. Dylan’s ultra-rough voice gives the performance a certain authenticity, if that’s the right word, and the harp break is sharp and interesting. Curiously, my feet did begin to tap. Oh dear! This one’s from Tokyo.

2010

In 2011, Charlie Sexton rejoined the band as lead guitar and things started to get interesting again. We’ll pick that up in the next article.

Until then

Kia Ora

There is an index to current and past series on the home page.

“No Nobel Prize For Music” is a series of articles reflecting on the fact that when commentators write about Dylan’s compositions they tend to engage fulsomely with the issue of his lyrics, but less commonly consider his music in the same depth.   In this series, I try to rectify this to some degree.   A list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.

By Tony Attwood

1964, as I have tried to show in this series of articles, was the year in which Bob Dylan adopted both the concept of “individualism”, and the notion of “moving on”, as his core themes.   He portrayed the world – or at least western societies, as places that made no sense, where all one could do was to be oneself.  One possible way to achieve this was to keep moving on, while at the same time, he then felt he could start to explore new ways of constructing the musical side of his songs which were the vehicles for expressing his thinking about the world around him.

But Bob also needed to keep the songs accessible to his audience – he was of course touring and playing to vast crowds, and his albums were selling in great numbers, so it must also have been important to him not to go too far, too fast.   He was after all a folk and rock musician, not an avant-garde composer.

Yet within that notion of “moving on” there was a problem, for although Bob could make dramatic changes to his musical form and style (as I have tried to show in recent articles in this series – see the links at the end of this piece), he still had to make the music something that people would want to listen to.   Ideally, since Bob was always committed to performing many of the songs live, the songs needed to be acceptable to the audience that attended his concerts.  Although since they might well have bought the album/s first, that did not mean the songs had to be acceptable at first listen.

Thus as Dylan progressed through his songwriting career, the lyrics might become more obscure, but that would be ok if the music made the composition something that people would listen to over and again, and thus eventually be able to perceive the intended meaning within the music and the lyrics.   And, of course as all of us who have been to his concerts will know, he always had the option of radically re-writing the music, even if the lyrics stayed pretty much the same.

Now this does not imply that Bob was directly thinking along these clear lines, for it is more than likely that thoughts that Bob had about each song could change across time, sometimes being subject to multiple changes, both as shown in the scraps of paper that we have seen with lyrics written out without coherent form, and often being very different from anything that turns up in a song, and through subsequent live versions.

As a result of this, it is a valid argument that within Bob’s musical universe there was a continuing contradiction: a desire to venture into new forms, as we saw with “Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright Ma”, alongside a deep interest in being, and desire to be, understood.   Which could well have combined into a desire not to go too far too fast into his new ways of thinking about what songs could put on albums, and which ones he could perform live.

And from all this, what we must bear in mind is that if nothing else, Dylan clearly saw himself as a performing musician who could take his music out to his audience while at the same time pushing the boundaries of the music and the lyrics.

And we should also note that as we look back on Bob’s work, clear sequences appear.  He may well at times have jumped from one theme to another, but quite often, when we study the chronological order in which the songs were written (as opposed to the order in which they turned up on albums) we see Bob was often less inclined to jump in this manner.  More commonly, the lessons learned in completing one song appear to have been taken forward to the next, both in lyrical form and in the music.

Thus we may note that as his last composition of 1964, Bob offered us the song of leaving,”If you gotta go,” and so for the first song written in 1965 it is not surprising we have another song of goodbye – “Farewell Angelina.”   They are very different songs, but behind each one, there is the same lyrical theme of moving on.

However as we can hear, although the theme of the lyrics continues, the approach of the music does once again move on in a radically different manner.   For where we can hear vibrancy and energy in “Gates of Eden”, “It’s all right ma” and “If you’ve gotta go” in which the individual’s choice is asserted, suddenly, in the next song, although the theme is again moving on, finding a new way, and finding a new world, the approach is more tenuous.  It is more, “I can keep moving on, but…”

Thus instead of simply moving on, or pronouncing that this is how it is, the singer in “Farewell Angelina” is pausing to say farewell rather than just going, or simply announcing, “this is how it is”.  He must move on, because that is what he does, but…

To accommodate this change in focus, Bob once again changes his musical style.   “Farewell Angelina” is in every regard a much simpler song than those written before this composition.

And if one listens to “Farewell, Angelina” sung by Bob (and especially if one listens to this version below, perhaps heaving it for the first time in many a long year), the impact on the listener can be overwhelming.  For there is an extraordinary plaintiveness in the song created by the simple strumming of the solo guitar.   There really is nothing to prove, the singer is simply saying goodbye, exactly as he said in 1962 with “Don’t think twice”, but with far, far less certainty as to what is around the next corner.

Thus here perhaps more that in any song that Dylan had written up to this point the lyrics put across a certain desperation and indeed a certain level of hopelessness.  And if you have heard the song so many times that it is hard to step back from past encounters, just consider

There’s nothing to prove,  ev’rything’s still the same
Just a table standing empty, by the edge of the sea

Just how bleak do you want a song to be?

What is interesting is just how much effort Bob was putting into songs of farewell at this time.   For in 1963 alone Dylan composed “Girl from the North Country”, “Boots of Spanish Leather”, “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, “One too many mornings” and “Restless Farewell” – all songs of leaving and moving on.

In 1964 we were given “It ain’t me babe,” “Mama you been on my mind,” “Black Crow Blues,” “My back pages”… in most of which moving on and regret were linked.

Now for most of us, the version of “Farewell” we will be familiar with is that by Joan Baez and here in fact it only requires the first two bars of the accompaniment to give us an utterly different feel.  For in this version, the music (and it is entirely the music that makes the difference) gives us a sense of a cheerful wave goodbye – which is not in Dylan’s version at all.

Dylan is helped in conveying a message of almost sad desperation of his moving on by the chords he uses, alternating C with the plaintive, uncertain F major 7.    Joan Baez (and her arranger of course) not only put light a bounce in the music, but simplify the chords to C and F.   Of course if you are not familiar with what a difference there is between the chord of F (which contains F, A, C as its notes) and F major 7 (which adds a E at the top) trying playing them on a piano.  There really is a difference.

If we turn (as ever) to Dylan Chords it is made clear that Dylan is playing F major 7, which I certainly don’t hear in the Baez version, where by playing F instead, she makes the song sound more positive and less uncertain.  Here’s Bob’s version.

    C        Fmaj7 C       Fmaj7         C
Farewell Angeli  - na The bells of the crown
          C         Fmaj7 C    Fmaj7               C
Are being stolen by ban - dits I must follow the sound

Joan Baez also makes quite a few changes to the lyrics that we hear on Bob’s original version.  Some of these are difficult to understand – “the trembling sky” replaces the sky that is changing colour, while later the sky is not folding but falling, and so on.   But the biggest change is that one verse written by Dylan is removed totally.

"The camouflage parrot, he flutters from fear
When something he doesn't know about suddenly appears
What cannot be imitated perfect must die".
Farewell Angelina the sky is flooding over I must go

Of course, we don’t know why, she dropped that verse, although the line “What cannot be imitated perfect must die” sounds very much like a criticism of people who re-arrange Dylan’s composition, but maybe it doesn’t matter, because those who came after Dylan performed the song in a different way, and imposed new meanings.

But still, that verse contains a challenge for anyone undertaking a cover version of Dylan’s original, because of the lines, “The camouflage parrot, he flutters from fear When something he doesn’t know about suddenly appears What cannot be imitated perfect must die…”   No, best not to try and deal with that on stage.

Obviously a cover artist is, to some degree, an imitator, and the comparison of the cover artist with the parrot is far from pleasant, so maybe that is why the verse is lost.  But it does make the point that Dylan’s solo version is much more in keeping with the lyrics than what came later.  For indeed Joan Baez delivers a version of the song which takes the meaning of the lyrics in a totally different place.

In fact, it is this song perhaps as much as any other that shows us how much the musical arrangement of the lyrics can change the entire meaning of the song.   Although it must also be admitted that anyone listening to the Baez version of the song, even without knowing about the missed-out verse, may be somewhat bemused by the relationship between lyrics and music.

As for the music, a typed set of lyrics to the song in the Bob Dylan Archive contains a handwritten note at the top of the document that reads, “Ewan McCall tune,” and this probably relates to “Farewell to Tarwathie” (see the top of this article), a song written in Scotland in the 19th century and popularized by MacColl.

Although of course the overlap of such songs is enormous, and there is also a link with the song “Wagoners Lad,” and I suspect many others…

But whatever the origins, and no matter how often I hear the song, I end with the lines “Farewell Angelina The sky is erupting, I must go where it’s quiet.”

Not just because that is indeed part of the song, but I think it was part of Dylan’s need at this time, to move on and contemplate exactly where he was taking his music, and where he wanted to go.

Previously….

• 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• 3: From Times to Percy’s song
• 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
• 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope
• 6: Chimes of Freedom and Tambourine Man
• 7: Bending the form to its very limits
• 8: From Denise to Mama
• 9: Balled in Plain D
• 10: Black Crow to All I really want to do
• 11: I’ll keep it with mine
• 12: Dylan does gothic and the world ends
• 13: The Gates of Eden
• 14: After the Revolution – another revolution
• 15: Returning to the roots (but with new chords)

There is an index to current and past series on the home page.

Events  in this series are selected by Tony Attwood

Maybe the Concert Index is a better title because the whole aim of this is to enable anyone to look up a concert for any year immediately and know that it is going to be of reasonable enough quality to get a feel for the show.

Of course that means we have 65 years to cover and so far we have done 23 – so over a third of the way through.  And each decade has three concerts highlighted except two,  we are putting half of that omission right with 2006.

If you want to get a greater insight in the specifics of how Bob developed his work across the years, we have the excellent “Never Ending Tour” series which covers the whole tour in 144 episodes.   There is an index here.

This is Atlanta 5 May 2006

1. Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine
2. Mr. Tambourine Man
3. Lonesome Day Blues
4. Positively 4th Street
5. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
6. Make You Feel My Love
7. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
8. Cold Irons Bound
9. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
10. Highway 61 Revisited
11. Girl From the North Country
12. Summer Days
13. Like a Rolling Stone
14. All Along the Watchtower

Concerts previously covered.

• 2025:  April 2025, Iowa
• 2024: Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 2024:  The Mountain View, California concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 2024:  What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• 2021: The Beacon Theatre NYC, 21 November 2o21
• 2019: 14 October Palo Alto.
• 2012: Wisconsin: 5 November
• 2009:  Paris, 8 April 2009
• 2002: 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime
• 1999: April 7 1999   Lisbon
• 1995: Brighton (“The Brighton Centre”)
• 1992: Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• 1991: Stuttgart.   The worst show ever?
• 1988: 30 June.  New York.
• 1986: The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 1980: 15 January Seattle
• 1978: Earls Court 1978
• 1976: Fort Collins 23 May 1976
• 1976: January 1976: the rehearsals
• 1974:  Largo, Maryland; 15 January 1974
• 1969: The Isle of Wight (four songs).
• 1966: Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• 1961:  The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961

There is an index to current and past series on the home page.

Previously: “The Philosophy of Modern Song”  Why did Bob choose THIS song?

by Tony Attwood

This song from 1978 by Elvis Costello was, according to Wikipedia if no one else, written as an ironic response an to Costello’s period with the Stiffs Live Tour and was indeed according to Costello inspired by “Subterranean Homesick Blues“.    Bob reviewed it in the article “This song speaks new speak” which is chapter two of The Philosophy of Modern Song.

And of course both musically and lyrically we can find a link with Subterranean Homesick Blues, with lines like “There’s nothing underhand that she wouldn’t understand” and “All the things you bought for her, could not get a temperature.”

Thus in passing it is interesting to hear Costello’s response and compare it with where Bob took that song via this recording from our Never Ending Tour series selected from 2002, which is to say 37 years after it was written..

This article in the book ” The Philosophy of Modern Song,”  is the one where Bob talks about being the alienated hero who has been taken for a ride by the quick-witted little hellcat.   Bob also says “Pump it Up” is full of swing, athough that is something I don’t find, for swing to me is about rhythm with the accent on the second and fourth beats of the bar.   But then, I come from a different continent and Costello on the other hand is pumping out an accent on every beat so maybe that is swing now.  But anyway, if Bob says it, he’s much more likely to be right than I am, so of course I give way.

Bob also asks in this article, “Why all the trivial talk and yakety yak?” and that indeed is a good question, for yes I would certainly agree this is what we are surrounded with.  It is however something Elvis Costello worked hard through his life as a composer and performer to push aside.

However I think that for Bob that question is rhetorical, for what posing the question does do is remind us that Elvis Costello has through his career shown a lot  of high-level belligerence, which is of course what punk rock has always brought.  Or at least I should say, that’s how I remember the era.

Clearly the Dylan song had a real impact on Elvis Costello for he is the one who has cited “Subterranean Homesick Blues” as inspiration for his 1978 song “Pump It Up” (which was actually a top 30 hit in the UK).  Of the song Costello said, “It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand-new toy. That’s what I did.”

Whatever Bob Dylan thinks of Elvis Costello’s writing in general, he is full of admiration for the revolution that Costello helped promote in the UK, noting that, “Back then English people appeared in suits and ties no matter how poor they were.  With this manner of dress, every Englishman was equal.”

If Bob is critical of the music at all it is that Elvis Costello “exhausted people.  Too much in his songs for anybody to actually land on.  Too many thoughts.  Way too wordy.   Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves.    Here however it is all compacted into one long song.”

“Pump it up” was released in 1978 and thus we came to hear it 13 years after Bob’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (which Bob played 120 times on stage).

Indeed the song Bob does value above all others in Elvis Costello’s work seems to be “Pump it Up”, which was according to many authorities was itself inspired by “Homesick Blues”.   Dylan says it was the song that gave Elvis Costello “the licence” to do pretty much what he wanted, which Bob notes as including playing chamber music, writing songs with Burt Bacharach. as well as writing ballet and orchestral music.

And this is where I admit my ignorance and also yet again pay thanks both to Bob and all those who know more than me, because I didn’t know about this album, which apparently was recorded off and on between 1995 and 2022 and released in 2023.

One fact I did know however, but which I mention because it may have passed you by, and we are on this topic, is that Costello wrote a number of songs with Paul McCartney

Indeed his work has been incredibly varied across the years.   Here’s one of the latest recordings I can find from him.

There is an index to current and past series on the home page.

by Jochen Markhorst

I           Keys t’unlock my mind

 Parables are so useless, writes Kafka in the autumn of 1922. The wise always talk merely in parables, which are of no use in everyday life. For example, the sage says, “Go to the other side,” but then doesn’t mean to go to the other side of the street or something, he means some fabulous yonder, which he then cannot explain more precisely either. All these parables really just want to say that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible and that we already knew. “Why do you resist that?” someone asks. “If you’d follow the parables, you’d become a parable yourself and you would be freed from your daily worries.’

Another said: “I bet that is also a parable.”
The first said: “You have won.”
The second said: “But unfortunately only in parable.”
The first said: “No, in reality: in parable you have lost.”

(Kafka, Von den Gleichnissen – “On Parables”, published 1931)

Side A of Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) features three songs, and “My Own Version Of You” concludes the trio. An overarching theme that began to emerge on track 2, “False Prophet”, now seems to be confirmed: artistry. Or, a bit more fitting: Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, the words with which the blind bard Homer opens the Odyssey, the words also that Dylan reads on his Nobel Prize almost three thousand years later and with which he then concludes his acceptance speech (albeit translated slightly differently: “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story”).

After the opening track “I Contain Multitudes”, which defines the who, the being of the artist, and the following song “False Prophet”, which thematises the what, the mission of the artist, we now arrive at the how, the work of the artist: “My Own Version Of You” seems to be the poetic manual for the creation of a song. And the form Dylan chooses is the parable, the long-winding metaphor explaining an idea – or an allegorical parable actually; a me-person, the artist apparently, speaking to a personified work of art (“you”), explaining how he is going to create his own version of “you”.

It is – quite undylanesque – not too veiled. Not, as Kafka laments, something incomprehensible expressed incomprehensibly. In words and writing, Dylan has been explaining for decades how he comes to the creation of many of his songs. In the 11 Outlined Epitaphs (written in 1963) we already read the unashamed confession:

Yes, I am a thief of thoughts
not, I pray, a stealer of souls
I have built an’ rebuilt
upon what is waitin’
for the sand on the beaches
carves many castles
on what has been opened
before my time
a word, a tune, a story, a line
keys in the wind t’ unlock my mind

… in which the very young upcoming Nobel laureate makes a creating self thus already confessing to being an idea thief, explaining how he crafts his songs, “building and rebuilding on what is already there”, and revealing where he finds his inspiration: words, tunes, stories, lines are all keys to “unlock his mind”.

In interviews, he is no less clear. Sometimes more assertive than other times (“Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff,” Rolling Stone 2012), but the thrust has been the same for over sixty years: “You make everything yours. We all do it.” In 2003, Dylan even illustrates his method with an appealing example:

“I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly — while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”

Bob Nolan – Tumbling Tumbleweeds

… with the now famous “Bob Nolan method”. By then, it had long since become a sport in fan circles to find the sources of words, lines, tunes and stories in Dylan’s songs, led by Albuquerque’s Supreme Source Finder, Scott Warmuth. Fascinating enough, as it provides insight into the creative process of one of the greatest artists of the past 100 years, but in itself not surprising. Nevertheless, the noisy Plagiarism-Of-Inspiration discussion that flares up at the turn of the century is rather polluted by a perceived “gotcha” sentiment. Polluting because, after all, Dylan has been quite forward on how he constructs his songs since 1963. So the decision to call the album he released around that time (2001) “Love And Theft” seems like a good-natured nod to all that ill-informed and acted indignation.

In 2020, the process then inspires Dylan to fill an entire album side around the theme. We just heard, in the song before, the result of a tune “unlocking my mind” – after all, “False Prophet” was written using the “Bob Nolan method”. In this case, Billy ‘The Kid’ Emersons plays “If Lovin’ Is Believin’” in Dylan’s head, and at a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song. The method, incidentally, which he applies even more rigorously when he listens to Boz Scaggs‘ version of you, to Boz Scaggs’ cover of Jimmy Reed’s “Down In Virginia”, which Dylan has his band virtually replay note-for-note on Side B of Rough And Rowdy Ways, in order to sing changed words, to sing “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” over it.

And before “False Prophet”, we have heard what happens when a line “unlocks the mind”, since the opening song sprung from a single line of poetry by Walt Whitman, from I contain multitudes from Whitman’s long poem “Song For Myself”. Which Dylan explained less poetically, but in the same spirit as in 1963, to Douglas Brinkley of the New York Times in 2020: “In that particular song, the last few verses came first. So that’s where the song was going all along. Obviously, the catalyst for the song is the title line.”

Not a one-off method, as we have long known. A word, a tune, a story, a line. A line that opens “I Contain Multitudes”, a tune creating “False Prophet”, and the key to “My Own Version Of You” was obviously a story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). But Jeff Slate still wants to hear it again. In 2022, that is, when Dylan has already been explaining for 60 years now how he cobbles together his oeuvre. When you listen to a song, Slate asks in the Wall Street Journal interview in December 2022, do you always keep your ears open for “potential inspiration”?

“That’s exactly what I do,” zegt Dylan. “I listen for fragments, riffs, chords, even lyrics. Anything that sounds promising.”

He listens for keys t’unlock my mind, as it were.

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 2: Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy

————-

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

There is an index to current and past series on the home page.

By Tony Attwood

Part of my thesis in this series is that looking at Bob’s songs in the order in which he wrote them (which of course is quite different from the order in which they appeared on LPs)  can give us a real insight into the way Bob was thinking about his music – and quite possibly about wider issues that he was considering.

For example, in 1964 and early 1965 Bob appeared to be focused very strongly on individualism, and the concept of moving on, as he composed a very varied set of songs, each of which in one way or another dealt with the individual doing what he wanted to do, irrespective of what his lover, his friends or indeed the rest of society said or did.

And he used this group of songs, all of which flow around the same subject to explore, to a greater or lesser extent, where else he could take the music to accompany his words.

The songs in question, in the order of composition were….

• All I really want to do (102 performances, July 1964 to December 1978)
• I’ll Keep it with Mine (never performed)
• My Back Pages (260 performances, July 1978 to July 2012)
• Gates of Eden (217 performances, October 1964 to March 2001)
• It’s all right ma (772 performances, September 1964 to October 2013
• If you gotta go, go now (9 performances, October 1964 to May 1965)
• Farewell Angelina (never performed)

These are all songs of moving on and self-sufficiency, and they are interesting in that they not only adopt the topic of the individual doing what he wants, they also give opportunities for Bob to explore his compositional technique as  indeed I have sought to show in my last two articles in this series…

• No Nobel Prize for Music 13: Gates of Eden
• No Nobel Prize for Music 14: After the Revolution (It’s alright ma)

So it is with interest I looked back to see the songs Bob composed after those two majestic pieces each of which changed both Bob’s lyrical topic and the way he composed the music.

And I find it interesting to note that the next song he composed was “If you gotta go” which is a sort of “take it or leave it” song – as it were taking “All I really want to do” but adding the fact that the other option is to stay all night.   In fact we could say that while most other composers of popular music were writing about love and lost love Bob was writing about love having nothing to do with it, and the need to move on when you are ready.

Now leaving aside the coughing interruption in “All I really want to do”, what really strikes me even now, is that sudden introduction of the falsetto, surely a very un-Bob-like musical addition to the lyrical line.

Indeed, lyrically the song turns away from the deeper political thoughts of the Gates of Eden and the concept in “It’s alright ma” that “to understand you know too soon there is no sense in trying.”   For now it seems there really is no sense in trying, for “all I really want to do is baby be friends with you”.  That’s it – there is nothing more to achieve.

The lyrics thus once more take us by surprise, but then so does the music.  For while “Gates of Eden” leaves us unsure what key the song is in, and “It’s Alright ma” gives us a song which by and large is without a melody, here suddenly we are back to a three chord song, with a clear melody and easily understood lyrics.  But also with the opposite of the love and lost love message that so dominated popular music then, and indeed now.

For in “All I really want to do” we have the individual standing without a lover, but happy to have friends.    And this is not the way of the pop music world where love and lost love are the dominant topics.

But there is more.  For this time the convention of rhyme is twisted for instead of the rhyme being with the last word of the line it is with an earlier word, with the last word of the line being repeated as with…

I ain't lookin' to compete with you
Beat or cheat or mistreat you
Simplify you, classify you
Deny, defy or crucify you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you

Also intriguing is that the song 6/8 time -= again unusual for a song, as is the form of the song.  For although Dylan has once more created a song in strophic form (ie verse – verse – verse etc) he has done it with four lines of verse and then two repeated chorus lines.  But even with a fairly familiar form, what strikes us most of all is that this is the reverse of the love song.   Most popular songs are love songs, and their form is verse and chorus.  This is not an anti-love song- that would be a hate song – but a song that actually says I want to be friends, not your lover.

And of course maybe things are different in this regard in the USA, but here in the UK I rather think it is rare for a man in the UK to say I want to be friends not lovers; I think it is normally the woman who says that – (although I am getting on a bit so I could be wrong in this regard.)

So, an unusual Dylan song.   A “let’s be friends” song, with the last two lines of each verse always the same, with a spot of falsetto, with two lines repeated and then a two-line chorus.  Are there any other Dylan songs in this musical format?

So then we had Gates of Eden and It’s all right ma, which I have written about recently, and then suddenly Bob goes back to the issue of a relationship for “If you gotta go, go now” – an ultimatum to a potential lover.   None of the usual pop song approaches to love – this is as brutal and direct as it can get.

“If you gotta go, go now” was probably Dylan’s last composition of the year (Jack o Diamonds was evolved from the sleeve notes to the “Another Side” album and the date of writing those is uncertain so I am leaving that out.

But in case anyone were to think that Bob had got his new directions out of his system with these radical songs, clearly he hadn’t because the first song of 1965 once again emphasised saying goodbye, moving on, and being oneself.   The antithesis of the traditional pop song in fact.    Bob also clearly hadn’t finished with using old folk songs, and odd elements of his own past compositions as a base for him music, as his next song  Farewell Angelina, was to show.   And indeed he was certainly ready to start exploring a few new chords as well.  It was in fact as if with “Gates of Eden” and “It’s alright ma” he had spun off in new musical directions, and now was trying to reign himself back in toward his folk roots – but maybe not too much.

There is an index to current and past series on the home page.

Compiled by Tony Attwood

This is number 23 in this series which selects Dylan concerts from the internet, (aiming to offer one from each year), puts them in chronological order, and gives a link to a recording of the show in each case.   (I think I miscounted previously, but this looks like number 23 to me).

This one is Madison, Wisconsin: 5 November 2012, the Alliant Energy Centre with Mark Knopfler and his band, and it contains a bit of politicising by Bob during the final song.

Those taking part are

Bob Dylan (vocal, guitar, grand piano & keyboard), Stu Kimball (guitar), Charlie Sexton (guitar), Donnie Herron (violin, mandolin, steel guitar), Tony Garnier (bass), George Recile (drums & percussion)

Mark Knopfler joins in on guitar for songs two to five as noted below.

Setlist:

• 01. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight 1:00
• 02. Man In The Long Black Coat (with Mark Knopfler on guitar) 5:22
• 03. Things Have Changed (with Mark Knopfler on guitar) 9:25 *
• 04. Tangled Up In Blue (with Mark Knopfler on guitar) 14:39 *
• 05. Rollin’ And Tumblin’ (with Mark Knopfler on guitar) 21:28 *
• 06. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall 28:10
• 07. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum 34:59
• 08. Chimes Of Freedom 40:10
• 09. Highway 61 Revisited 46:50
• 10. When The Deal Goes Down 53:38
• 11. Thunder On The Mountain 59:30
• 12. Ballad Of A Thin Man 1:06:33
• 13. Like A Rolling Stone 1:13:05
• 14. All Along The Watchtower 1:20:19 — (encore)
• 15. Blowin’ In The Wind 1:26:42

The series so far

• 2025:  April 2025, Iowa
• 2024: Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 2024:  The Mountain View, California concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 2024:  What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• 2021: The Beacon Theatre NYC, 21 November 2o21
• 2019: 14 October Palo Alto.
• 2012: Wisconsin: 5 November (this article)
• 2009:  Paris, 8 April 2009
• 2002: 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime
• 1999: April 7 1999   Lisbon
• 1995: Brighton (“The Brighton Centre”)
• 1992: Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• 1991: Stuttgart.   The worst show ever?
• 1988: 30 June.  New York.
• 1986: The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 1980: 15 January Seattle
• 1978: Earls Court 1978
• 1976: Fort Collins 23 May 1976
• 1976: January 1976: the rehearsals
• 1974:  Largo, Maryland; 15 January 1974
• 1969: The Isle of Wight (four songs).
• 1966: Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• 1961:  The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961

From an idea by Jochen Markhorst; commentary by Tony Attwood

Prelude: Some two years ago Jochen wrote the article “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You: 7. The Philosophy Of Modern Song”.  And more recently Jochen suggested that Untold Dylan should have a look at “The Philosophy of Modern Song” and maybe we should publish a commentary on the book, or perhaps a commentary or two on individual songs that Dylan highlighted.

I must admit I was unsure, but Jochen’s work has played such a major part in making Untold Dylan what it is, I always take note of what he says.  And so when he declined the opportunity to write further on the subject I went and listened to the first song highlighted in the “Philosophy” book: “Detroit City”.

Being English, and being old, I actually can recall the song from the 1960s, and most probably what I heard was the Tom Jones version which was a hit in the UK.

And I must admit I did listen to that song with a touch of reluctance – I never felt there was anything in Tom Jones’ music for me, and I certainly don’t own any of his records.  But I must confess I also have a thorough (irrational) dislike of any recording in which the singer stops singing and then drops into speaking over the music.   Not for me!

So I am biased from the start, although I note that the book contains Dylan’s commentary on 66 songs by other artists so maybe it gets better.   And it was the first book Dylan published after getting the Nobel Prize for Literature, which really makes me think I ought to study this book further.  Not just because the author just had received that supreme award but also because the University of Northampton have recently suggested I might like to do a PhD with them on the subject of Bob Dylan.   We are in discussions.

Thus, I listened, but at once I had to admit I became stuck.  The book notes say it all – it is a song of a loser, someone who expects that by being in one place rather than another everything will be all right, instead of thinking, “here I am, it is all down to me, I am going to make this work.”

In fact it was interesting in that regard, in that I have come across many people who have the “if only this changed” syndrome.   As in “if only I could get a job,” or “If only I could get a different job” or “if only my wife was less of a flirt,” or “if only he didn’t drink so much,” or….

I suspect most of us have come across such people – the people who seriously believe that all their worries and woes come from this one thing they can do nothing about.   And of course, I know that analysing one’s own viewpoint is a really dodgy thing to do, not least because many of us mislead ourselves much of the time.  But honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had these sorts of feeling.  Yes I wanted to be a pop star.  Or a songwriter.   Or maybe a book writer.  Or maybe a writer of adverts.   And in the end I was, not because of any massive talent, but because I just kept trying.   And indeed enough to earn a decent living.

And then, to stop myself from being trapped sitting at my desk typing on the computer all day every day, I have nurtured several hobbies which are as far from writing as one might imagine.  One of them I’ve mentioned a few times: dancing modern jive.  I dance four or five nights a week.  Football and rural walks are also in the mix.

My friends know this is what I do, and of course, I occasionally encourage them to try dancing, but rather than give it a go (even if they have nothing particular to do of an evening) they refuse, giving the same old excuses about being genetically incapable of dancing (“two left feet” is the expression used in England – maybe in other parts of the world too).

In short, we live in a world in which many people limit their own ability to do things, by having fixed negative views.  Views that might be that “I can’t dance” or as in this song, everything will be fine if only I can go back to my old home town.  I was happy there.

And of course, we all know this is nonsense.  It’s just an excuse.   Like saying “I would have passed that exam if only I’d had a better teacher.”  Or “I only failed my car driving test because I had a rubbish car to practice driving in.”   Or anything.

We all of us make excuses, but (and I think this is the big point) some people make a lot more excuses than others, and some simply never get up and try.  And so their lives become a sort of mono-vision in which they do the same thing day after day expressing the same regrets and negative thoughts, day after day.

You might have experienced that with people’s reactions to Dylan too.   “I just can’t stand his voice,” some say, after listening to maybe just one or two songs sung by Dylan, while calming a crying child, feeding the cat or working out where that last $100 went.

In short, I see the individual with the viewpoint that, “if only I could go home everything would be fine” as a person who is a failure.  Of course, there are many things each of us can’t do – I can’t paint a picture with any chance of it looking anything other than an utterly embarrassing work done by a seven-year-old, for example.  But at least I have tried, and then subsequently instead I found other things I can do.

But in this song, the singer is getting drunk in bars – he’s not even trying!   And he’s making me very annoyed!!  Indeed even the sickly-sweet music can’t distract me from that message.

Of course, our views of ourselves are never really accurate, but for what it is worth, my self-vision is that I really do try different things, rather than just reject them.   I suspect Bob Dylan has that same self-vision (although in his case combined of course with an infinitely larger dose of sheer talent than I could ever muster).

So why does Bob pick this song?   I wish someone would tell me.   For what it makes me want to do is write a song that says the opposite.   That I am here, I have a problem, I am going to deal with it and make the best of everything I can.  So I guess my questions at this point are not only “Why does Dylan focus on this song?” but also “What can be said about it?”

I really don’t like the way the song changes key, just jumping from one key to the next without any attempt at modulation – that goes against all my musical feelings (and indeed all that I was taught as a young musician).  It is also something Bob never does.   And I don’t like self-pity – which again Bob never puts into his songs.   I find it sweet to the point of being sickly.   And finally, I hate songs where the singing stops and the singer delivers what is meant to be a deep and meaningful spoken interlude.  For to me that is neither deep nor meaningful.

I spent yesterday playing “It’s alright ma” as I wrote my article about it and now after a lot of listening to “It’s alright ma” I find “Detroit City” is the antithesis of “It’s alright ma”.   At the end of “Its aright”, Dylan says, “It’s life and life only” which I have always taken to mean, no matter what happens, get up and get on with things.  If you don’t like it, change it.  Or put in the colloquial form in my country, “Shit happens, deal with it”.

All of which leaves me asking, what can one say about a song like “Detroit City”?  How can one write about it apart from saying that instead of wanting to face reality and make something happen, the person in the song wants to run away and go back home?  Which is the exact opposite of what Dylan has done.   Is that maybe Dylan’s point?   Have I simply been very stupid, and failed to grasp the issue all along?

by Jochen Markhorst

XIX       Mail Train Kept A-Rollin’

Dylan ain’t no false prophet and he brings the Light. But note: I may be here forever / I may not be here at all.

Spring 2025 marks 60 years since the conception of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” and the song is again, still, on the setlist. As well as one of the many pleasant surprises during Dylan’s gigs at the Outlaw Music Festival May 2025: Willie Dixon’s “Axe and The Wind”, a rather obscure deep-cut recorded by George “Wild Child” Butler in 1966 and not released until 1968, without too much success. A remarkable choice, but at first glance it does fit into the list of outsiders Dylan apparently wants to delight his audience with especially during that annual concert series.

In 2024, we heard rockabilly hits such as Sanford Clark’s “The Fool” and Dave Dudley’s “Six Days On The Road”, and the doo-wop classic “Mr. Blue” by The Fleetwoods, and in 2025 Jerry Lee Lewis’ country tearjerker “I’ll Make It All Up To You”, a wonderful version of Bobby Bland’s soul ballad “Share Your Love With Me” and The Pogues’ heartthrob “A Rainy Night in Soho” (the song Nick Cave sang at Shane MacGowan’s funeral in 2023)… The eclectic music taste we remember from Theme Time Radio Hour’s DJ Dylan permeates the setlists and the motivation seems identical: missionary zeal, a mild form of saviour complex perhaps, the urge to dust off gems in order to save them from oblivion.

Dylan – Axe and The Wind – live 15 May 2025

However, with all due respect to Willie Dixon and George “Wild Child” Butler, and to Dylan’s sympathetic – and successful – drive to bring them back into the limelight as well: “Axe and The Wind” is a rather generic blues. The choice seems mainly motivated by the song’s final words:

You can never tell
Which way the axe gon' fall
I may be here forever
I may not be here at all

… which perhaps initially takes us back to the old, mysterious, wondrous 1967 Basement discovery “I’m Not There”, but more intriguingly still: they are words with the same immortality/transiency duality as Dylan’s message to Ralph Stanley, as the congratulatory telegram he sends 9 November 1996 to the jubilant Dr Ralph Stanley. In his autobiography, Dr Stanley reveals the contents and interprets Dylan’s deeper message:

“They had a big celebration for me in Nashville in honor of my fiftieth anniversary as a professional musician. There was a fancy reception at the Country Music Hall of Fame, with all kinds of friends from down through the years and former Clinch Mountain Boys there to greet me. Then I played a show with my band at the Grand Ole Opry. During the show, Opry host Del Reeves announced to the crowd he had a telegram “a special fan” had sent from New York City. The telegram said:

“DEAR DR. RALPH.
THE FIELDS HAVE TURNED BROWN.
NOT FOR YOU, THOUGH.
YOU’LL LIVE FOREVER.
BEST WISHES, BOB DYLAN.”

“That was something I didn’t expect, and it was a wonderful surprise. I know what Bob meant in his message, and it really touched my heart. I know he meant my music would be around long after I’m dead and gone.”     (Man Of Constant Sorrow, written with Eddie Dean, 2007)

That same immortality/transiency duality as I may be here forever / I may not be here at all, and Ralph Stanley’s interpretation does make sense: “He meant my music would be around long after I’m dead and gone.” But then, of course, that requires relay runners, disciples who put “The Fields Have Turned Brown” on the setlist or keep it alive in some other way. Relay runners, torch bearers, or, expressed a little more respectfully, prophets.

And Dylan is, let’s not forget, such a prophet – the prophet who proclaims the gospel of Deep Truths and of the Light in the Darkness, as he confesses in his own “False Prophet” and on Rough And Rowdy Ways (2020) anyway. Meaning the Light in the Darkness and the Deep Truths we find in songs: Robert Johnson and Big Joe Turner, Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt, Furry Lewis and Leroy Carr, Bob Wills and Elvis, Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmie Rodgers, the Child Ballads and the Baptist Hymns, Tampa Red and Bobby Bland and Shane MacGowan and Jerry Lee Lewis and The Stanley Brothers… they show the Way, tell the Truth and promise the Life, and the Prophet spreads this Gospel.

In May 2025, the Prophet celebrates his 84th birthday, thus facing his own impermanence. It seems both to reinforce his missionary zeal and influence his choice of repertoire. Songs that invite melancholic reflections on the audience’s relationship and shared history with the artist, such as “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Things Have Changed”, songs that we may now understand as announcing a farewell, such as “I’ll Make It All Up To You” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, and songs that the Prophet, with appropriate immodesty, wants to save from oblivion, songs that should be around long after I’m dead and gone, songs like “Desolation Row” and “All Along The Watchtower” and “Blind Willie McTell” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”. The category to which he then apparently includes “It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry”.

Well, the old Prophet has a point there – it is a song for eternity, a song that will be around long after I’m dead and gone. The mail train keeps a-rollin’.

Dylan – It Takes a Lot to Laugh – live 15 May 2025:

———–

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

“No Nobel Prize For Music” is a series of articles reflecting on the fact that when commentators write about Dylan’s compositions they tend to engage fulsomely with the issue of his lyrics, but less commonly consider his music in the same depth.   In this series, I try to rectify this to some degree.   A list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.

By Tony Attwood

In my recent articles I have been arguing that Dylan’s “My Back Pages” was the moment when Bob very fulsomely announced to anyone interested, that he was going to change his approach to music, and would be moving on.  He would, in short, abandon his style of writing songs in the standard folk music style of the 1960s, and move onto something quite different.

That he did this is easy to see with his next composition, “Gates of Eden”, and as I have tried to explore in my last article in this series, Bob not only achieved this through his lyrics but also with his approach to music.  For in this song he abandoned the traditional major and minor keys in which pop, folk and rock music had been written for years, moving instead to something more in line with the Dorian mode which had dominated music until to time of JS Bach.

However, Dylan didn’t stick exactly to the strictures of the Dorian Mode in his writing, but allowed himself free reign, which resulted in one of the most revolutionary pieces of music supposedly in the rock genre that had been written up to that point.

But the question then was, how does one follow up on a revolutionary masterpiece?   The answer, “by writing another revolutionary masterpiece,” sounds rather obvious, but  when we look at the chronology of Dylan’s compositions, this is exactly what he did.   For after writing “Gates of Eden” he wrote, “It’s all right ma”.

Indeed if we look at the sequence of Dylan’s compositions at this time, we can see how he suddenly moved across to the notion of leaving and moving on.   One only has to play a recording of “My Back Pages” and then a recording of “Gates of Eden” and contemplate the fact that these songs were written one after the other, to perceive the change that had happened within Dylan’s thinking.

And just in case we might be tempted to think that “Gates” was a one-off, a clever idea out on its own, we just then need to listen to It’s all right ma to see that this notion makes no sense at all.   The only way to perceive Dylan’s writing of the music at this time is to accept the message of “I was so much older then” as a rejection of that period that many of us go in early days through in which we really think we know it all, and recognise the music starting with “Gates of Eden” as the new dawn in Dylan’s compositional ability.

Of course on this site we have considered “It’s alright ma” over the years from a lyrical point of view, but here I want to think about this song as a musical composition which is part of the new land that Dylan is now exploring – an exploration that began with “Gates of Eden” and now continues apace.

To know exactly how the effect of the music is achieved I can do no better than refer you to Dylan Chords which has (as ever) a masterpiece of analysis enabling anyone who wishes to play it as Dylan does, so to do.  And if I may lift a comment from that analysis, if you are not a musician, you can take it that, “The verses mostly consist of a descending bass line played on the fifth string.”

Now my point is not in any way to extend the complete analysis in that article, because of course it cannot be extended, but rather to come back to my key point, that Bob had proclaimed that he was now no longer writing songs in the tradition of the folk music revival, as he had done for his albums “Freewheelin” and “Another Side” but he was now truly travelling a new path: his own path.

This he was doing lyrically with openings such as

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides

from “Gates of Eden” and

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

from “It’s Alright Ma”.  That we know and has been contemplated here and elsewhere many times.   But what I feel we must also note is that Dylan was also changing the construction of the music.   In fact, as I have previously noted, all the chordal rules that dominated the folk music revival were jettisoned in “Gates of Eden” and replaced by a chord sequence that sounds more in tune with the modes of the mediaeval period than the major and minor chords of the later centuries.

And now Bob went a stage further and by using the descending bass takes us through a set of chords that cannot be described in simple terms of major and minor, their effect being dominated by the descending bass.  If you wish to follow it in a written out form, then Dylanchords gives the best representation I have seen.

D     000232
G/b   02003x (or -0 or -3)
Csus2 030030
Bb6   x1000x (or x10030 or -x) 
F/d   000211
G/d   000433
A     202220

but for something simpler you could just add a descending bass line on a guitar or keyboard instrument.  Indeed a version on a piano that plays a bass line of

D
Darkness at the break of noon
C#
Shadows even the silver spoon
C
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
B
Eclipses both the sun and moon
Bb
To understand you know too soon
A                     D
There is no sense in trying

But there is an important point; Dylan bade farewell to the old way of writing both lyrically and musically when he composed Gates of Eden, exactly as he suggested he would in “My Back Pages”.   As a result in “Gates” he used the chords that were simply not part of compositions based on the recent folk revival.

However now, as if that had not been enough to make his point, Dylan now started using chords that no one else was using at all – chords that emerged from the descending bass line, while at the same time, the melody was reduced to little more than one note – with the exception of the occasional inflection down a tone or two.

Now this too is an important point.   Folk songs, often being performed unaccompanied, are all about the melody and the lyrics,   Here melody is abandoned and evereything is dominated by the lyrics holding onto one note as the bass descends deeper and deeper.    There is in fact, no melody to speak of, while in earlier songs the melody was much closer to our concept of what folk music melodies should be.  Indeed even “Mr Tambourine Man” which is closely associated with “Gates of Eden” and “It’s alright ma” through being released on the same side of the same album, still has an alluring melody, and chords that are clearly related to the key of D in which Dylan performed the song.

But now we have go to the point of a lack of melody, and instead we have a recitation that fits exactly with the lyrics.   In effect only three notes are used against the first 100 words….

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying

Thus this is in fact an abandonment of the main musical elements of a song (by which I mean melody, rhythm and accompanying chords.   There is no melody to speak of, in fact, the rhythm is simply the rhythm of the words.  (And I would add a point here: if you want to explore further what Dylan has done, take the lyrics of “Mr Tambourine Man” and recite them as if a poem.  Then do the same for “It’s Alright Ma” and the effect is totally different – to recite the latter song in any way other than as a continuing drive forward – there is no lyricism implied at all.   In short as a poem the lyrics would be the same as they are in the song.  They have their own implicit rhythm.

In fact on the recording, the only thing that is changing alongside the lyrics is the bass which descends, giving us a sense that singer and the world he is singing about, are there, held tight wiithin a structure, part of the world but still somehow reflecting upon the world.

Of course, the brilliance of this is enhanced by the contrast of a semi-chorus (semi in the sense that the music is constant but the lyrics change, except for the main part of the title line.  But the key point is that musically the final three lines have such a level of contrast with the music of the verses that they do sound as if they are intended to be the chorus, and the major pronoucement of the song, even though the lyrics change each time…

So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing

There is also the extraordinary brilliance of the changed rhythm for the title words in the third line of the “chorus” as each one is accented, followed bythe pause before the crowing glory

As for the rhyming pattern of the song, that is again different from anything we had heard before.   It runs

A, A, A, A, A, B
C, C, C, C, B
D, D, D, D, D, B
E, E, F

But there are more complexities within for there are variations in the number of lines within each verse.   The six-line verses become five-line verses for example, but the power of the song and Dylan’s delivery of it, are such that we are simply driven along without noticing any such changes in the structure.

Overall what we have is Dylan removing the melody as a key part of the song at this point, but instead letting the driving energy of the recitation take us through to its ultimate conclusion, not as the title suggests, “I’m only bleeding” but rather “It’s life and life only”.  And as such with the energy that builds up within the song, we are carried forward in the knowledge that there is no escape.  It happens all around us everyday, it moves on and on until we get to the extraordinary message at the conclusion of the song

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

which demands a powerful upbeat musical conclusion which the construction of that three-line postscript to each verse delivers.

It is the driving energy within the music matches the lyrics perfectly, which makes us ignore the complete lack of melody, and yet makes this a spectacular song, even though the spectacle we witness is that it is people that are the problem.  For as the final lines point out

I’m only sighing

I can make it

It’s life, and life only

And the fact is that were there to be any melody it would get in the way of the power of this message, for the rhythm and the rhyme contain all the power that we need as the message becomes clearer and clearer.   This is not a protest song; there is no message of hope for the future if only we rise up and change the world.

In short, there is no dream; simply this is life.   This is what we have, this is all you get.  Life goes on and on and on – which is exactly what the music does, it stays on that same basic chord with the chord changes primarily implied from the descending bass, so yes there are changes beneath, but they just keep taking us round and round in circles.

Thus the composer who we previously found was telling us that times were not only changing but changing for the better is now telling us that “There is no sense in trying.”  The world, it seems, is what it is.  It goes its own way.   We are born, we die, nothing is sacred, and “It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge.”

Which is why the music has to be reduced to a minimum.  A melody within this song would destroy the message, for it would suggest variance and change when in fact thjere is nothing to show him.

And even worse

"if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine

which is why that melody is almost all on one note while underneath the bass continues its descent.   Because as the ending of the song tells us, this weird and dangerous world out there is the one that we live in every day.

We are descending.

Previously:

• 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• 3: From Times to Percy’s song
• 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
• 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope
• 6: Chimes of Freedom and Tambourine Man
• 7: Bending the form to its very limits
• 8: From Denise to Mama
• 9: Balled in Plain D
• 10: Black Crow to All I really want to do
• 11: I’ll keep it with mine
• 12: Dylan does gothic and the world ends
• 13: The Gates of Eden

Compiled by Tony Attwood

This is number 21 in this series which selects Dylan concerts from the internet, puts them in chronological order, and gives a link to them.   And this time I’ve picked the concert that is said by many to be the worst ever Dylan performance.

I’m not going to agree or defend the concert – this series is simply about making it easier to find concerts from across the years in order to be able to consider the way performances have changed.  But I would say that if you have a moment, have a listen to “Shelter from the storm”.  For me this version offers another insight into the song that I hadn’t gained before.

One other point I would add: in this case though I am not at all sure that the opening track is “New Morning”, but I have left it listed as such as that is what the source says.  If you have a different idea please do write in; I’m not sure what it is.

But, to get back to the main point, the aim of course is to have at least one recording of a gig from each year that Bob has been touring.  So a list of the concerts to which we’ve already put links is given below.

If there are any concerts you would particularly like to recommend and which are freely available on-line, please do write to me: Tony@schools.co.uk with the details.

• 1. New Morning????
• 2. Lay Lady Lay
• 3. All Along The Watchtower
• 4. Shelter From The Storm
• 5. Gotta Serve Somebody
• 6. Wiggle Wiggle
• 7. When I Paint My Masterpiece
• 8. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
• 9. Trail Of The Buffalo
• 10. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
• 11. Mr. Tambourine Man
• 12. Bob Dylan’s Dream
• 13. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
• 14. Everything Is Broken
• 15. I Believe In You
• 16. Highway 61 Revisited –
• 17. What Good Am I?
• 18. Ballad Of A Thin Man

Here is the list of concerts so far is given below.   If by any chance you go to look at one and find the link does not work, I’d be very grateful if you could email Tony@schools.co.uk with not only the link, but also where you are in the world.  Thanks.

• 2025:  April 2025, Iowa
• 2024: Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 2024:  The Mountain View, California concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 2024:  What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• 2021: The Beacon Theatre NYC, 21 November 2o21
• 2019: 14 October Palo Alto.
• 2009:  Paris, 8 April 2009
• 2002: 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime
• 1999: April 7 1999   Lisbon
• 1995: Brighton (“The Brighton Centre”)
• 1992: Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• 1991: Stuttgart.   The worst show ever?
• 1988: 30 June.  New York.
• 1986: The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 1980: 15 January Seattle
• 1978: Earls Court 1978
• 1976: Fort Collins 23 May 1976
• 1976: January 1976: the rehearsals
• 1974:  Largo, Maryland; 15 January 1974
• 1969: The Isle of Wight (four songs).
• 1966: Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• 1961:  The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961

by Jochen Markhorst

XVIII    “I just serve the song”

“I basically do anything or nothing depending on what the song is calling for,” says Charlie Sexton in the interview with Arlene R. Weiss for Guitar International in October 2002. “One of the main things I try to achieve when I’m doing that kind of work, is I just serve the song.” The self-analysis echoes some 20 years later when his employer dishes out a eulogy to Charlie in the New York Times interview of 12 June 2020. It’s as if you can read each other’s minds, says interviewer Douglas Brinkley;

“As far as Charlie goes, he can read anybody’s mind. Charlie, though, creates songs and sings them as well, and he can play guitar to beat the band. There aren’t any of my songs that Charlie doesn’t feel part of and he’s always played great with me. “False Prophet” is only one of three 12-bar structural things on this record. Charlie is good on all the songs. He’s not a show-off guitar player, although he can do that if he wants. He’s very restrained in his playing but can be explosive when he wants to be. It’s a classic style of playing. Very old school. He inhabits a song rather than attacking it. He’s always done that with me.”

… just as it mirrors guitarist Blake Mills’ analysis, following his first studio experiences with Dylan when recording Rough And Rowdy Ways: “Dylan doesn’t tell you exactly what to play. He does expect you to play what needs to be played. That may seem the same, but it’s a world of difference” (interview with Kurt Blondeel for Belgian magazine Knack, 9 March 2021). And in that, in playing what needs to be played, Charlie Sexton is a grand master – in this respect perhaps the best guitarist ever to stand on stage alongside Dylan. Which, by the way, could also be a key to the background of Dylan’s somewhat gloomy but ultimately correct future prediction in the booklet accompanying Biograph in 1985: “I’d like to see Charlie Sexton become a big star, but the whole machine would have to break down right now before that would happen.”

By “the machine” Dylan is referring to the music industry and the commercialisation of rock ‘n’ roll (“Now it’s just rock, capital R, no roll, the roll’s gone”), suggesting that being a great, pure rock ‘n’ roll musician has become irrelevant. But a more prosaic explanation for why Sexton never became a “big star” seems more obvious: nice guys finish last. There is not a trace of controversy around Charlie Sexton – which has been a prerequisite for admission to Olympus since time immemorial. Charlie does not shock with androgynous presentation or sexual ambiguity, does not flirt with religious taboos or challenge societal sacred cows, no sensitive politics, self-aggrandisement or self-destruction… Charlie feels part of the song – he is always subordinate to the song.

Dylan fans are not too sad about his inability to become a superstar. Sexton’s contributors to Dylan’s output from 1999 to 2002 as well as those in Charlie’s second stint 2009-2019 are masterful, mood- and colour-defining exercises by the former prodigy who, thanks to his peculiar life trajectory, at 50, in 2018, is a veteran with 40 years of wide-ranging experience. “Charlie is good on all the songs,” Dylan says, and that’s true. Audiences are grateful for the splashy rock injections into classics like “Stuck Inside Of Mobile” in the 2009 tour, fans admire the restrained, tasteful guitar parts on Tempest (“Scarlet Town”!), the ingenious tapestries of sound on “Love And Theft”, sound and old-time mastery on Rough And Rowdy Ways (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”! ), and everyone takes their hat off to Charlie’s breathtaking colouring of “Not Dark Yet” at the 2019 concerts – arguably the most perfect, blood-curdling performances of the song since its conception in 1997.

Not Dark Yet

And who knows, maybe we owe the glorious 2018 return of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” on the setlist to Charlie, too. “He’s not a show-off guitar player, although he can do that if he wants,” Dylan says in 2020, and good employment practice dictates that you have to give your valued employees space from time to time – which Charlie gets in those 84 wonderful performances between Christchurch 2018 and Washington 2019.

The song has become a hypnotic slow blues rocker. The Texan axegrinder in Sexton awakens, and as the tour progresses, we hear more and more of what Sexton learned from Stevie Ray Vaughn and how much DNA he shares with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons; shimmering, cutting off-beat incisions and two daily varying, but always exciting solos (after the second verse and as a finale). A long string of gems, those 84 performances. Berlin 4 April 2019 is brilliant. As is Prague, five days later. From Paris 12 April, the sound quality is less, but here we see Charlie in action:

It Takes a Lot to Laugh Paris April 2019:

Post-Corona, the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2025, means goodbye again to Charlie Sexton and with him to “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” as well. Though it’s a farewell on reflection and on second thought; the very first two concerts of that endless tour still have the song on the setlist, both times as a final encore (Milwaukee and Chicago, 2 and 3 November ‘21). Remarkably, in doing so, the man-who-never-repeats himself chooses exactly the same arrangement, exactly the same groove and exactly the same space for the guitar solo as in 2019. But Bob Britt, for all his qualities, is no Charlie Sexton – or at least, that’s what Dylan seems to think when he dismisses the song after only two attempts. We will not hear the song again in the remaining 248 concerts of the 2021-2025 World Wide Tour.

But once again history repeats itself for the man-who-never-repeats himself: at the start of the next concert series, Dylan’s contribution to the 37 shows of Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival, among such even bigger surprises as The Pogues’ “A Rainy Night in Soho” and “Blind Willie McTell” and Charlie Rich’s “I’ll Make It All Up To You”, we are surprised by the return of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” to the setlist. In again the same slow blues-rock arrangement. And Dylan still misses Charlie; at the first performance, Phoenix 13 May 2025, we see Britt making preparations to fill the space between the second and third verse with a guitar solo, but he is brutally hammered away by a clearly improvised piano solo by Dylan. It’s being evaluated, apparently: at the second concert, two days later in California’s Chula Vista, Bob Britt will then be allowed to do his thing. Though only on the fallow land after the second verse, for now. After the last words of the last verse, there will be no finale, so no second guitar solo either.

We still miss someone.

It Takes a Lot to Laugh Phoenix May 2025:

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 19 (final): Mail Train Kept A-Rollin’

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971

Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

By Tony Attwood

A list of previous articles in this series is provided at the foot of the piece.

My last outing in this series: Dylan goes Gothic and the world ends, dealt with Dylan’s dramatic move from his final rejection of the old way of seeing the world, and indeed his old way of perceiving how to write a song, with a review of his announcement of moving on in My back pages and then (in one of his most dramatic changes ever), moving from that classically constructed song to the anarchic Gates of Eden the lyrics of which incorporate seemingly protesting against the entire western world as it now exists, while examining the cult of individualism, and the contemplation of a world that makes no sense.

And perhaps most dramatically and importantly of all, it can be argued that that song was a song outside of the normal structure of major and minor keys,while the opening seemingly meaningless lyrical lines describe a chaotic unstructured world:

Of war and peace the truth just twists its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds The cowboy angel rides

But perhaps even more extraordinarily, for an audience brought up perhaps on the traditions of follk music and rock music, here the music refuses to obey the normal constraints of major and minor keys, or indeed the standard patterns of the pop, rock and the blues.   We can hear this particularly well in this 1988 version:

The one thing we can say for sure is that the song is strophic: verse, verse, verse etc through nine verses.  These verses are conventionally published as having seven lines…

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

But in effect the performances reveal the song to be made up of four line verses…

At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse 
       into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words but these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

Although this structure is maintained, the rhyming scheme itself is varied (which is  unusual within popular and folk music).  Using the four-line format we start with A A B C, and a consistency for the listener is obtained, by having each verse end with the title of the song.

Indeed by verse four we have an established rhyming pattern of A (lamp), B (Calf), B (laugh), C (Eden)

But in the following verse (“Relationships of ownership”) we have a variation in the rhyme: A A A B (wings, kings, sings, Eden).

After that for the remaining verses, we have a mixture of these three different rhyming schemes.   This is not to suggest that in listening to the song either initially or after having heard it many times, we are that conscious of the changing rhyming scheme, but rather that these changes sit in the background of our consciousness as we are faced by a set of lyrics that at first hearing make no obvious sense.

So overall what we have is a powerful guitar part using a set of chords which challenges the conventional notions of key as perceived in folk and popular music, a set of verses set out in traditional strophic form (verse, verse, verse with no chorus, but a repeated end line), lyrics for which the meaning is at best often obscure, and sometimes impenetrable, but at the same time a sense of regularity across nine verses all of which are of identical musical form, and with identical musical accompaniment, and which end with the same four words.

Beyond this musical structure, the meaning of the lyrics can of course be debated, but the meaning, or perhaps one might say the “essence” of the lyrics, is one of a powerful, unending drive – a feeling of continuity expressed particularly by the repeated last line.  No matter what we look at, or how little sense it makes, the last line suggests, we won’t really understand anything unless we enter the Gates of Eden (the essence of which is left undefined by the song’s lyrics).

Hence the music, being unerringly strophic, does indeed provide a stability that contrasts with the constantly unexplained and indeed inexplicable images and metaphors.   Thus we start with

Of war and peace the truth just twists its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides

and end with

At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse 
                      into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words but these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

The notion in those last lines that our dreams as they stand, without interpretation, are the closest we get to understanding what is inside the Gates of Eden (wherein lies all truth), or perhaps what the Gates of Eden are, give the sense of constancy and continuity beyond this life, which contrasts dramatically with everything expressed in the previous 338 words.  But so overpowering and dominating is the overall musical experience for many listeners, that wave after wave of imagery can be accepted, either in this performance which lasts three and a quarter minutes, or in the album version which performed at a completely different speed, is over three quarters as long again.

As a result, when listened to after the performance above the original album version has a bleak empty quality.

Beyond any doubt this song took Dylan, and indeed the music he composed (whether we call it folk, contemporary folk or anything else) into another previously unexplored level of songwriting.   And here I think it is helpful to put this composition within the context of Dylan’s other writing at the time.

The songs composed around this time in the chronological order of composition (with a very short description of the subject matter in parenthesis) were.

1. I’ll keep it with mine (Don’t follow leaders; individualism)
2. My back pages (Individualism)
3. Gates of Eden (Protest, individualism, a world that makes no sense)
4. It’s all right ma – (Protest; Individualism, again, a world that makes no sense)

To summarise my previously offered comments within this series of articles, “I’ll keep it with mine” was a song about needing to be an individual and not follow leaders.  “My back pages” focussed again on the individual, this time adding the concept that in a world that makes no sense, only the individual counts.

But what has happened here is that Dylan has attempted (very successfully I would suggest) to write the music in a form that is still readily understandable to us.  For while others have moved into the field of the avant-garde, Dylan retains the musical form and structure of the folk song, while extending this structure further than has been seen before.

However, in considering the songs we must also note that not only has the form been stretched, the lyrics have moved on to explore areas of consciousness that are not (and indeed I suggest have not been) part of the normal landscape of lyrics for songs of any category or type.  But meanwhile, the music, (although fully understandable and acceptable to the audience to whom Dylan was directing his work), is no longer firmly in a recognisable key.  And indeed the convention of writing the song’s lyrics out as a set of seven-line verses emphasises this (although of course, I do recognise it could be argued that this convention is established simply to emphasise the different nature of this song from all that has gone before).

So in effect, with this one song, Dylan has torn up the notion of what we might consider a song in the “popular” or “folk” vein to be.  He has not done so by taking us into the avant-garde genre, which could have the danger of alienating critics and fans alike, but despite the new ground covered, Dylan made the song accessible enough for those attracted to his music to enjoy it, to want to buy the LP and to want to hear Dylan perform more and more variations of his music on stage.

Indeed, to show just how different this work was from the dominant form of popular music of the day we might note that the album containing this song was released on 22 March 1965.   The popular songs of that month included “King of the Road” by Roger Miller, “Can’t you hear my heartbeat?” by Herman’s Hermits, “Stop in the Name of Love,” by the Supremes, “Ferry Cross The Mersey” by Gerry and the Pacemakers, and “Goodnight” by Roy Orbison.

This of course is not a definitive list, but these songs were featured heavily in the selection of the music that was available to an interested radio listener in North America and the UK, at the time Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home” was released.

But Dylan was not the only experimenter at the time in terms of popular music.  To take one example, Roy Orbison’s song “Goodnight” which comes from this period and which wsa a chart hit, is a song that breaks away from the tradition of verse-chorus songs, and replaces this by a song which is closer to the through-composed tradition of the Romantic era.

To take another example from this same year we have “King of the Road” in which the emphasis is on retaining the traditional approach of a strophic song while adding variations within the production, with the finger clicks, and variations to the accompaniment, as established by the second verse.   Through this, we, as listeners, are invited to appreciate the subject of the piece and his personality.   Musically the interest is retained by the additions to the accompaniment, which is then reduced at the end.

The emphasis here is on the overall sound, and the memorable lyrics, with the equally memorable title line, and the fact that the opening verse appears three times within the performance.

The song in short establishes a simple image of a person’s life with a highly memorable melody and unique accompaniment, none of which is part of Dylan’s presentation of “Gates of Eden”.  And yet we should note, both songs written and released in the same year.

From this, it is easy to see that Dylan was establishing a completely new and different musical as well as lyrical tradition, far away from popular music, and equally far removed (again both lyrically and musically) from folk music.

Thus the musical form of Dylan’s “Gates of Eden” has some similarities with that of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”, for both are strophic songs (ie verse, verse, verse etc) although Miller’s song is shorter, and has eight verses, of which three are identical.  But also we should note that musically, Miller’s song fits completely within the pop song tradition of a song based around three chords that are immediately recognisable as the three main chords of the key in which the song is played.

The rhyming scheme (which in almost all popular songs helps hold the piece together musically, and make it memorable for the listener) is predominantly AABB, although every other verse breaks this to allow the verse to end “King of the Road”.

Thus both are songs from the same year, with both using the musical structure that we can immediately recognise as a song, and yet through Dylan’s use of unexpected chords, a melody we might call “more jagged,” a beat that is persistent and which removes all “swing” from the song, we have two songs in 4/4 time which are utterly different from each other in terms of their music and their lyrics.

But more than this.  Dylan offers us a song which appears to challenge every concept about our lives in the 20th century.  “King of the Road” suggests that even though some people are without a home or job, they can still be happy; a theme which helps to establish and maintain the viability of capitalism as a reasonable underlying structure in our society.   Dylan rejects this notion by making the song’s lyrics difficult to interpret.  For Dylan suggests the notion that we can look at the world and see what it all means, is false.  For how else can we interpret “Of war and peace the truth just twists, its curfew gull just glides; Upon four-legged forest clouds, the cowboy angel rides”?

And my prime point here is that these are both songs, presented in a form that is instantly recognisable as a “song”.   Indeed one doesn’t need to be a musician to say, “This is a song”.   But in each case, the message is put across not just by the lyrics, but also by the music.   To reduce things to the most simple of terms, “King of the Road” is light, simple, based around three chords and with a sense of swing.   “Gates of Eden” is edgy, with a sense of uncertainty and with five chords in the first line alone.   Thus in each case the feel of each song is achieved not just by the lyrics, but also by the music.

It is of course impossible for us to hear either song without knowing the lyrics, but if we can try and imagine this for a moment, the implications and meanings of the songs are still there.  My point is thus that both Miller’s and Dylan’s music as much as the lyrics tell us the meaning, within and behind the song.  In the former, everything is fine, even the huge social and financial differences between the king of the road, and the rest of society.  In the latter, the message is, “Don’t be fooled, we have nothing, we know nothing, we are nothing.  There is only knowledge and satisfaction beyond the Gates of Eden.”

Which when we start to think about it, produces a momentary challenge for those operating radio stations.   Which message are they trying to put across?   Of course, they don’t openly debate the issues raised by Gates of Eden, since most radio stations just play the songs related to the three classic subjects of popular music: love, lost love and dance.  When songs contain, as “Gates of Eden does” a message about the state of the world and how we might feel about that, the choices of those running radio stations are extraordinarily important.

Likewise when a song opens with one chord (G) followed by two which are not chords related to  that opening chord (D minor and F) and then before we can even take that in, returns to the key implied by the opening chord (C, G) we are confused and lost and even if we don’t fully realise it, we are asking “What on earth is going on?”  Or indeed “Where am I?”

(And a personal PS: for having spent quite a while writing and re-writing the above article, this recording now speaks to me more directly than any other.  So yes, just in case you ever wondered, the writer can be affected by his research and the resultant words.  Or at least this writer can).

Previously:

• 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• 3: From Times to Percy’s song
• 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
• 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope
• 6: Chimes of Freedom and Tambourine Man
• 7: Bending the form to its very limits
• 8: From Denise to Mama
• 9: Balled in Plain D
• 10: Black Crow to All I really want to do
• 11: I’ll keep it with mine
• 12: Dylan does gothic and the world ends

Compiled by Tony Attwood

This is number 20 in this series which selects Dylan concerts from the internet, puts them in chronological order, and gives a link to them.

So as I have said before, there’s nothing original here, except for the fact that I was unable to find another site that had compiled a list of concert recordings, so that if for any reason one suddenly wanted to know what Bob was sounding like in any particular year, or indeed you simply wanted to relive a concert you had been to, or you just like listening to Dylan concerts, you could find something to help you, fairly quickly.

The aim of course is to have at least one recording of a gig from each year that Bob has been touring.  So a list of the concerts to which we’ve already put links is given below.

If there are any concerts you would particularly like to recommend and which are freely available on-line, please do write to me: Tony@schools.co.uk with the details.

Today’s concert is Paris, 8 April 2009.  There is a particularly interesting recording of “It’s alright ma” which gives a feel that it really is all right, because life is going on no matter what.   This is just how it is.

You might also like to see the Never Ending Tour 2009 part 1.

1. The Wicked Messenger
2. Lay Lady Lay
3. Things Have Changed
4. When the Deal Goes Down
5. Til I Fell in Love With You
6. Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again
7. Sugar Baby
8. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
9. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
10. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
11. Beyond the Horizon
12. Highway 61 Revisited
13. The Times We’ve Known  (Charles Aznavour)
14. Thunder on the Mountain
15. Like a Rolling Stone
16. All Along the Watchtower
17. Spirit on the Water
18. Blowin’ in the Wind

Here is the list of concerts so far is given below.   If by any chance you go to look at one and find the link does not work, I’d be very grateful if you could email Tony@schools.co.uk with not only the link, but also where you are in the world.  Thanks.

• 2025:  April 2025, Iowa
• 2024: Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 2024:  The Mountain View, California concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 2024:  What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• 2021: The Beacon Theatre NYC, 21 November 2o21
• 2019: 14 October Palo Alto.
• 2009:  Paris, 8 April 2009
• 2002: 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime
• 1999: April 7 1999   Lisbon
• 1995: Brighton (“The Brighton Centre”)
• 1992: Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• 1988: 30 June.  New York.
• 1986: The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 1980: 15 January Seattle
• 1978: Earls Court 1978
• 1976: Fort Collins 23 May 1976
• 1976: January 1976: the rehearsals
• 1974:  Largo, Maryland; 15 January 1974
• 1969: The Isle of Wight (four songs).
• 1966: Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• 1961:  The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961

• Part 1: 1965. Crying like a fire in the sun
• Part 2: 1975. The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
• Part 3: All your reindeer armies.
• Part 4: 1990 – 1995

Details of the articles on Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden and It’s Alright Ma, appear at the end of the article.

By Mike Johnson

[I read somewhere that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the fifth article on the fourth and final track, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series here: ]

————

Dylan songs are often not as straightforward as they seem. What could be more straightforward than ‘strike another match, go start anew,’ or ‘leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you’ or indeed the refrain, ‘it’s all over now, baby blue’?

However, when we unpack the first few lines of the song, we find other things going on.

Take the first words: ‘You must leave now …’ This could be an instruction, ‘get on your way’ or ‘get out now’ but it could also be an acknowledgement that fate is moving her on (‘something calls for you’). So he’s not kicking her out, rather she is the one who has to move on and all she has to do is recognize it. Both interpretations are possible. This ambiguity runs through the whole song.

In the second half of the line ‘take what you need, you think will last.’ the kicker lies in ‘you think’ because, in the Dylan cosmology, nothing lasts, no matter what we think. This brings ‘what you need’ into question and makes a mockery of the instruction.

The second line: ‘But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast’ seems straightforward but is open to question. There’s nothing to grab (except perhaps your toothbrush and a few effects) and nothing to ‘keep’ (except perhaps a few memories). ‘Grab’ suggests a somewhat desperate action. We grab for things that are slipping away, or if we are making a fast exit.

In the second verse we find, ‘Take what you have gathered from coincidence …’ This is another back-hander. Gathering suggests a sustained process or slow awakening. In this context, it seems to mean ‘learned.’ But what can we learn or gather from ‘coincidence’? That random stuff happens? What moral can we draw from coincidences? The implication is that there is nothing to gather, which changes the import of the line from apparent heartfelt advice to mockery, once more.

None of this undermines the song, rather it’s what gives the song its bite. Instead of heartfelt advice to a lover who’s leaving (or being kicked out), what we find is a fair bit of needling. This makes the song more emotionally complex than a straightforward interpretation would suggest.

In 1996 Dylan moved from the softer, orchestral effects of 1995, with his keening vocals, to a harder-edged sound once more, only much tighter and sharper than in the early nineties. In the Berlin concert of that year, for example (see The Never Ending Tour articles for that year ), we find Dylan songs getting the hard rock treatment. In that context both ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ provide acoustic relief, and remind the audience of the old acoustic Dylan. The harmonica has gone, replaced by Dylan’s acoustic guitar picking. Both these 1996 recordings explore the slower tempo. The first is from Octover 17th

1996

The second (June 24^th) emphasizes that solid, insistent beat that marked the 1995 recordings, and highlights Tony Garnier’s double bass bowing, providing that moody underpinning.

1996

1997 was of course the year of Time Out of Mind, and ‘Baby Blue’ was played only a handful of times, losing out to ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ for evoking the reflective, acoustic mood – even though the full band is playing. Dylan’s supercharged vocal makes this recording from Cardiff worth the listen, but the question arises – does this slow tempo mean that the song becomes too laid back, a little too weary for its own sharp edges? You’ll have to decide.

1997

Again, in 1998, Dylan keeps the song alive with a dozen performances, while his main concern was bringing songs from the new album into play. This one from Rochester is a gem, and one of the highlights of this series, if only because of the superb quality of the video and sound recording. It’s a pleasure to watch. We get to see Dylan’s guitar picking close up, and the evident pleasure he’s taking in singing this song. For my ear Dylan’s vocal is solid but unspectacular.

1998

In 1999 the song came rushing back into favour with some thirty performances. With a few variations, the arrangement hasn’t changed much since 1994/95, that slow tempo and insistent, thumping beat. This one from Wien is as good as any.

1999 (a)

However, Dylan never stops experimenting. This one from my Mp3 files, (1999 but undated) has quite a different feel to it. It has a lighter, somewhat faster beat with more of an orchestral effect from the steel guitar. A controlled but powerful vocal from Dylan.

1999 (b)

2000 was one of the peak years for the NET. Dylan was in full voice, and the band was swinging together like the integrated rock machine they had become. And, talk about swinging, there’s a definite lilt to this one from Glasgow. I find myself thinking back to the strident challenge the song was back in 1965, and the ardent, heartbroken song of 1995 and wonder, much as I like it, if something has been lost in the lilt and the sweetness of the sound by 2000. Perhaps the stridency, and the ardency, have been replaced by sadness and regret. Or perhaps the backing is too sweet for the lyrics? Does this performance lose me in nostalgia because the song has turned nostalgic, or because we can’t listen to later performances of these early songs without feeling nostalgic for the halcyon days of youthful idealism, those halcyon days that Dylan farewells in this song.

2000 (a)

If there is a newer, gentler feeling emerging from the song by this time, beyond laying down a challenge (1965) or pouring out your heart (1995), then it is explored in this remarkable ten-minute version from Helsinki. Unexpectedly, after two years of absence, the harp is back for a sustained solo at the end of the song. Quiet, reflective, whimsical, sad, nostalgia-inducing, subdued grief. Even though it builds over two choruses, it keeps a tight restraint on the sharper edges of the song. Master harpist at work! Dylan’s harmonica explores this complex emotional field, as it did when it pushed grief to its limits in 1995. It’s a different kind of warmth, and maybe a different kind of pain. It’s still all over, baby blue.

Helsinki 16 05 2000

Speaking of sublime harmonica breaks, Dylan returns to the instrument once more in 2001, to an ecstatic audience in this Pueblo recording. The audience reaction turns this harp solo into an epic, which begins restrained but soon lets loose. There is a triumphant tone here, as the harp turns the song into a celebration, perhaps of the love that is passing, or perhaps a celebration of the harp playing acoustic Dylan. As in 2000, he has moved from a dead slow tempo to an easy lilt. The music suggests a stately dance.

2001 (a)

Finally, another recording from 2001, this one from Corvallis. No harmonica to amp the ending of this one. Of special interest in both these 2001 performances is what we can call Dylan’s downsinging, dropping his voice into the low tones, creating a half-talking, half-singing effect.

2001 (b)

In 2002, Dylan will make perhaps the biggest shift of his career – making the keyboards his primary instrument. We’ll be back soon to follow the story of the song into the new NET era.

Until then

Kia Ora

Previously in this series….

Tambourine Man

• Part 1: A masterpiece is born
• Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.
• Part 3: Chasing Shadows
• Part 4. 1978-1986. Far From the Twisted Reach
• Part 5: 1986-1993: Evening’s Empire
• Part 6: 1994 – 99: My weariness amazes me
• Part 7: 2000 – 2010: the jingle jangle.

Gates of Eden

• Part 1: 1964Ancestral voices prophesying war
• Part 2: 1974 – 1991A crashing but meaningless blow
• Part 3: 1991 – 2001.Where Babies Wail: A Spooky Grandeur

It’s alright ma

• Part 1:  1964 – 74 –From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
• Part 2: 1975/81 – Stuffed graveyards and false gods.
• Part 3: 1984 – One who sings with his tongue on fire.
• Part 4: 1988 –  The darkness at the break of noon
• Part 5: 1999 –  2004. Stuffed graveyards, false goals. 

by Jochen Markhorst

XVII     Well, I ride on the A train, baby

After those 11 smashing performances at the Rolling Thunder Revue 1975-76, the song seems to sink back into oblivion: one performance in 1978, one in 1984 and two in 1988 – that’s it in the 12 years after 1976. Enough, however, to see Stravinsky’s and Dylan’s shared conception of art confirmed; repeat anyone else you like, only not yourself. After the pure rock version from Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan regaled his Philadelphia audience in 1978 with what his critics at the time disdainfully called “Las Vegas”.

It is the year after Elvis’ death, which hasn’t left Dylan unmoved. With some romantic goodwill, you could see the entire world tour plus the 62 US concerts of the autumn tour as one long ode to Elvis. Dylan wears a white suit and has backing vocalists, his catalogue is big-band arranged, the full stage features Elvis’ bassist Jerry Scheff and Elvis’ saxophonist Steve Douglas, and Dylan’s eyeliner also looks rather inspired by The King. Accordingly Elvis-y is the only execution of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” in that Elvis year 1978. Good old rock’n’roll including two guitar solos, ripping sax, the bass mixed up-front, pounding drums… bring a nickel, tap your feet, as John Fogerty would say.

1978 Oct 6 Philadelphia

A bit puzzling is its isolated position, though. The song is clearly rehearsed, but not to be found on the so-called Rundown Rehearsal Tapes, the quadruple-CD bootleg containing the January ’78 rehearsals for the world tour, and it is never performed in the 114 concerts of that exhaustive tour. Except for that one time in Philadelphia, 6 October. By special request, according to the unclear announcement that raises more questions than it answers:

“All right, we’re gonna do this as a special request for you. It’s for this (….). He’s another guy who’s been doing nothing but writing ever since he started. He’s been writin’ and writin’.”

The performance is driven enough, but apparently does not ignite the fire. Which is also true of the only appearance six years later, in Nantes. Another one-off surprise with no follow-up, at one of the 27 concerts of the 1984 Europe tour. Special guest Carlos Santana joins in, but that doesn’t push the song towards Latin – this time the interpretation chafes at boogie-woogie. However, after a tentative introduction in Berkeley on 10 June 1988, the third concert of what we have come to call the Never Ending Tour, the song has apparently undergone a reappraisal; between 10 June 1988 and 20 November 1999 Newark, “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” is 137 times on the setlist – the song has been promoted to the hard core.

In the process, Dylan – naturally – continues to experiment with form. A languid big-city blues (Utrecht 1993), even slower and bluesier than ever in 1994 (Woodstock, for instance), sandwiched between and dominated by two scruffy electric guitars in Monterey 1995 (a drawn-out rendition of almost seven minutes with undylanesque space for guitar violence), and an old-fashioned cosy one when he assists Clapton on stage: coming already awfully close to wailing Derek & The Dominoes jamming “Key To The Highway” (Eric Clapton & Friends To Benefit Crossroads Centre Antigua, 30 June 1999).

In the twenty-first century, the song then seems to die a gentle death; only nine performances between 2000 and 2018. Though still including two very special ones. The nicest one Dylan serves on 8 August 2003 in New York. As a guest at The Dead’s Summer Getaway 2003 Tour. They share the bill a couple of times that summer, Dylan with his band, Robert Hunter, Joan Osborne and the Grateful Dead, and as an interlude, Dylan does three or four songs with The Dead on such a night. “Alabama Getaway”, “Friend Of The Devil”, “You Win Again”, “Big Boss Man”… short setlists like that. A Dead classic, a song from the blues or country canon of Hank Williams or Jimmy Reed or something, and then usually complemented by a Dylan song or two. But 8 August is Dylan’s eighth and last night, and he apparently wants to say a proper and special farewell: first debuting a peculiar, ragged, Dead-like version of “Tangled Up In Blue”. Fairly chaotic, evidently animating him; he leaves the piano for the first time this tour, buckling up a guitar for the first time and playing “It Takes A Lot” for the first time.

2003 NYC Aug 8 (Grateful Dead)

It’s an American Beauty. The Dead has been playing the song with some regularity since 1972, so now, in 2003, they have performed it about as often as Dylan himself. The irresistible pulse of the drumming duo Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, the Moby Grape-esque wallpaper of three guitars, Phil Lesh’s unflappable, steady swinging bass and the long instrumental interludes shift the whole song into the Dead catalogue, and from the sound of it, a charged Dylan is totally fine with that:

“What makes them essentially a dance band probably begins with the jazz classical bassist, Phil Lesh, and the Elvin Jones–influenced Bill Kreutzmann. Lesh is one of the most skilled bassists you’ll ever hear in subtlety and invention. And combined with Kreutzmann, this rhythm section is hard to beat. That rhythm section along with elements of traditional rock and roll and American folk music is what makes the Dead unsurpassable. Combined with their audience, it’s like one big free-floating ballet. Three main singers, two drummers and triple harmonies make this band difficult to compete with. A postmodern jazz musical rock and roll dynamo.”
(Dylan, The Philosophy Of Modern Song, Ch. 29, 2022)

Following this, Dylan then switches seamlessly, with equal passion and pleasure, to a ten-minute (!) rendition of Jerry Garcia’s “West L.A. Fadeaway”, for which he does briefly retreat back behind the piano (perhaps to consult a lyrics sheet), but on the closing track “Alabama Getaway” he picks up the guitar again for the second and, for now, last time.

Even more striking is Dylan’s contribution to the life work of Wynton Marsalis Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the orchestra that, under Wynton’s inspiring direction, has been promoting the beauty of jazz around the world for decades now in schools, in concert halls with symphony orchestras, on television and whatnot. In addition, Marsalis and his orchestra have released dozens of albums since 1992, pretty much always stunning and/or fascinating.

Wynton’s big band arrangement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, jazzed-up nursery rhymes like “Old MacDonald” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider” on Jazz For Kids, the enchanting live recording Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton Play The Blues (with a perfect “Forty-Four Blues” and the perhaps finest “Joe Turner’s Blues” ever)… with the Essentially Ellington: The JLCO Recordings, 1999-2025 in 2025, the tally reaches 41 great records, and there is no end in sight.

Dylan’s contribution to Wynton’s mission work can be found on United We Swing, a 2018 compilation album on which Wynton compiles collaborative projects with colleagues such as James Taylor, Lenny Kravitz and Ray Charles. The album opens with the irresistible Five Blind Boys of Alabama and their signature song “The Last Time”, and then follows track 2: the Wynton Marsalis Septet’s 2004 recording with Bob Dylan of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”.

Arranged, unmistakably, by Marsalis. Strictly speaking not a big band (the accompanying band is a septet, after all), but still arranged for big band, by the sound of it – and then in the spirit of Duke Ellington. The bright, short dissonant accents, the off-beat syncopations of the horns… it seems obvious that “Take the “A” Train” was playing through Wynton’s head when he wrote the arrangement. The role of the soloing muted trumpet is passed to Dylan, improvising on his harmonica, and Wynton, like Duke, opts for the predictable but irresistible artifice of having the horns suggest a steam train. Well, I ride on the A train, baby, can’t buy a thrill.

It is a transcendent experience. Wynton’s mission, “to engage a new and younger audience for jazz”, succeeds. And will probably have reconciled those lucky enough to attend the 3rd Annual Jazz at Lincoln Center Spring Gala ‘Teach Me Tonight’ Benefit on 7 June 2004 at the Apollo Theatre on West 125th Street with the price of admission: the cheapest tickets are $1000. It takes a lot to laugh.

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 18: “I just serve the song”

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Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door