My Own Version Of You part 6: They saw, yet they did not see

Posted on June 15, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         They saw, yet they did not see

I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice 
I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice
Can you look in my face with your sightless eye
Can you cross your heart and hope to die

I’ll bring someone to life - someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel

The PR department of Zeus and his colleagues seems more effective. Zeus and all the other gods are honoured, given temples and offerings, are worshipped, respected and feared. Which is a bit peculiar, viewed rationally – Zeus is de facto the first godfather, a powerful mob boss actually. He offers “protection” in exchange for “sacrifices”, punishes innocents cruelly and unreasonably (for example: when Prometheus steals fire for mankind, humans are punished with Pandora’s Box), and assaults, rapes and kidnaps people – men, women and underaged girls – when he has yet another horny fit. Destroying them just as easily, for that matter.

The Titan son Prometheus, on the other hand, is not only the creator of man, but also the ultimate benefactor. Besides fire, he grants his creation medicine, architecture, metalwork, hope, penmanship and what not. In short: Zeus brings misery, Prometheus blessing. However, his creation, i.e. humanity, does not show itself too grateful. Schools, sports clubs, planets, symphonies, delivery services, dating sites, universities and hundreds more cultural products are named after gods – but never after Prometheus. The arrogant scum on Olympus, as mentioned, have their PR in better order.

We can’t blame the historians. Homer, Aeschylus, Sappho, Ovid, Apollodorus, Plato, and the biggest fan being Hesiod… in all centuries and in all corners of the ancient world, they are, without exception, clear and unambiguous: mankind owes intelligence, progress and health, happiness and prosperity, well-being and welfare, everything in fact, to Prometheus. And this may have been recognised and endorsed by artists in all centuries up to the present day, but certainly not by Tom, Dick and Harry, nor by Joe and John Q. Public.

Dylan is a next artist in line, though only implicitly referring to the ancient Titan. No doubt he has seen Mary Shelley’s subtitle (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus), and that may have put him on the trail, or at the very least triggered associations. After all, that odd sightless eye in this third stanza is quite a giveaway. Some interpreters may see a hint to blind blues legends such as Blind Willie McTell, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Reverend Gary Davis and others, or even to the blind bard Homer, but that would really be a bit too cumbersome a reference – not to say slightly disrespectful in this context. No, the context – a life-creating genius – leads to Aeschylus, to Prometheus Bound (Προμηθεὺς Δεσμώτης, c. 450 BC), leads rather directly to the famous monologue in which Prometheus lists his merits for humanity, stating in line 447:

οι πρώτα μέν βλέποντες έβλεπον μάτην – They saw, yet they did not see

A key sentence, as it marks the moment when Prometheus decides to upgrade those will-less, emotionless, ignorant lumps of flesh who “led their long lives randomly and in total confusion” into what we now call human beings – to give “sight” to the sightless eyes, eyesight to the blind, as Sonny Boy Williamson would say (1951).

Remarkably, Dylan’s stream of thought then flows into a tributary dug out by a more recent predecessor: by Goethe.

Goethe struggled with the Prometheus material for a while in his younger years. Understandably so, because the story is tailor-made for the young Stürmer und Dränger that Goethe was back then. The protagonist a fierce, powerful rebel who rebels against the highest authority, against the Supreme God himself – if Prometheus had not already existed, he would have been invented by the fierce, rebellious poets of Sturm und Drang. In 1773, Goethe first tries to turn it into a play, breaks it off again, then has it published and performed as a “drama fragment” anyway in 1774. This Prometheus will appeal to both Dylan and the narrator of “My Own Version Of You”: a headstrong, creative genius who defies the gods, especially Zeus, with utter disrespect and disdain. He ridicules them, denies them any quality and acknowledges only two superior forces: Time and Fate. Parts of the drama fragment Goethe then reuses for his hymn Prometheus, which soon achieves the status it still has today: it is one of Goethe’s Greatest Hits. And in the apotheosis of that hymn, in the final couplet, we see the soulful relationship with the creator in Dylan’s refrain line after the third verse. I’ll bring someone to life – someone for real / Someone who feels the way that I feel:

Hier sitz’ ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu genießen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich!

Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!
                                       (transl. Sir Walter Scott)

 After Goethe’s Prometheus has spent six irregular, non-rhyming couplets lashing out at the gods, snarling at them about how powerless, poor, unfeeling and arrogant they are, mocking them for deriving their supposed majesty from the sacrifices and prayers of “trusting fools, children and beggars”, he shares the recipe for the perfect creation: emotions. A creature in my image has the feelings I have, can suffer and enjoy, cry and laugh, and has no respect for you – just like me. Or, as Dylan has the creator summarise in his song, “a real being who can feel what I feel.” And again a little later, recapitulating in the song’s closing line, even a stroke more explicit: “Do it with laughter – do it with tears.” A laugh and a tear, or: comedy and tragedy, ultimately the only two flavours of Life itself, the Way of all the World – which, as we all know, is a stage.

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 7: “Although I did not mean myself when I said ‘I’…”

 

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: 

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Hearts On The Oak: Tracing Equine Imagery in Bob Dylan’s Lyrics

Posted on June 15, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

There is something about Bob Dylan songs, when you hear them, you feel like you are galloping through the American countryside on a horse named Nostalgia.

Well, if you do feel that, you are not the first person to sense Bob Dylan’s connection with mother nature and horses.

Image Source: Pexels

Dylan, the raspy-voiced prophet of the 20th century, has a way with words. But in most cases, his lyrics often fly under the radar (unless you’re both a music nerd and a horse racing fan). This got us wondering, how often horses and equine imagery appear in his lyrics.

He might not be singing about horse racing directly, but using horses as metaphors or symbols of power, loss, transformation, freedom, and rebellion.

So, let’s take a path through nostalgia and find out the equine connection that Bob Dylan has hidden in his lyrics.

Horses as Freedom

Let’s address the only song where horses appear in the title. We are talking about the legendary “All the Tired Horses” which was a song from the Self Portrait album.

But to get into the right spirit and open our senses, let’s first talk about the vibe of an untamed horse. We are talking raw, free, and always out of reach energy that somehow evokes deeper emotions. That imagery hits hard in Dylan’s earlier works, especially when you listen to some of his songs in his mid-60s.

This is a song where the lyrics, (or the lack thereof, because he pretty much repeated one line), are simple.

“All the tired horses in the sun / How am I supposed to get any ridin’ done?”

So, what does this song mean, and why it is only one sentence repeated throughout the song?

This is definitely not a line that you’d want to hear when you are diving deeper into horse betting, right? After all, we are talking about a sport where the horses shouldn’t be tired. Spotting a tired horse is a skill included in the best horse betting strategies.

After listening to the song, you can definitely hear the weariness of those horses. But there is a twist, it’s not about horses. It is about exhaustion, about expectations, about being the voice of a generation when you’d rather just take a nap.

It speaks about feelings using horses as a metaphor, and even though there is lack of information about the true meaning of this song, there is a good chance that Dylan is singing about himself. He and all of his emotions are tired.

The Cowboy Archetype

Bob’s fascination with Americana—particularly the Wild West—is practically a genre of its own.

In “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door“, from the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack, we’re right in the thick of that dusty outlaw world. The imagery is subtle but potent:

"Mama, take this badge off of me / I can’t use it anymore."

No horse mentioned directly here, but let’s be real—you’re feeling the slow-motion fall off a saddle. The frontier setting, the resignation of a dying lawman—it all evokes the horse’s silent presence, a symbol of the life that once galloped and is now slowly riding into the dusk.

Then there’s “Isis”, where Dylan goes full mythical cowboy—crossing deserts, chasing love, and possibly resurrecting the dead. While no actual horse is name-dropped, you’re not trekking “through the desert down to the pyramids” on foot, are you?

Nah. You’re on a white horse with tangled reins and unresolved feelings.

The Haunting Horses of “Time Out of Mind” and Beyond

In Dylan’s later albums—especially the moody, gravel-throated ones like Time Out of Mind or Modern Times—horses start to feel ghostlike. They appear in metaphors, in dreams, in the rearview mirror of fading Americana. They’re not always center stage, but their hoofbeats echo in the background.

Take “Things Have Changed”, the Oscar-winning song where Dylan muses:

“I used to care, but things have changed.”

Again, no horse mentioned outright, but the energy. Pure lone rider. This is the vibe of someone who’s seen too many races, lost too many bets, and finally stopped saddling up for causes that never crossed the finish line. There’s a weariness to it—a man who’s stepped off the track but can still hear the thundering gallop in his dreams.

In these later years, the horse becomes a symbol of memory. Of power once held, or illusions once chased. They’re never cute or decorative. Dylan’s horses are aged and weathered—like the man himself. They know things. And they carry that knowledge in their gait.

Horses in the Dylan Mythos

If you zoom out from the lyrics and look at Dylan the persona, horses make even more sense.

Bob Dylan has always been a wandering figure—part cowboy, part outlaw, part prophet. And nothing says “poetic American wanderer” like a horse on the horizon.

Even the way he phrases things in interviews can feel like he’s just ridden down from some lonely mountain, pausing only to whisper metaphors that leave journalists blinking in confusion.

In that way, horses are part of the mythology of Dylan. They fit into the larger narrative of Dylan as the eternal traveler—crossing genres, eras, and expectations on horseback. Even if we don’t always see the reins.

Horses might not appear frequently in his lyrics, but his songs definitely give us that horse-riding vibe.

 

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Bob Dylan, the concert series – Regensburg, 11 November 2015.

Posted on June 14, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

By Tony Attwood

The idea of the concert series is very simple – a set of links which each contain a link to a video or recording of a single concert year by year so then when complete we can all find at least one concert for each year really quickly, if we ever so wanted to.

Since then other ideas have emerged, such as comparing individual songs through the series.   Of course Mike has done this through his brilliant Never Ending Tour series: this I guess should be seen as a sort of lesser addendum to that.

But that is for the future, for we are still simply working on having one recording for each year.

This is Regensburg, Germany on 11 November 2015.   The set list is below.  Songs not written by Bob Dylan have the name of the composer/s and lyricist (if different) in brackets – if I’ve made a mistake with any of these please do write in.

Here’s the set-list.   And of course thanks to those unnamed people who recorded it.  The quality is excellent.  If you want recognition, do write in and I’ll add it.

  1. Things have changed
  2. She Belongs To Me
  3. Beyond here lies nothin’
  4. What’ll I Do (Irving Berlin)
  5. Duquesne Whistle
  6. Melancholy Mood  (Vick R. Knight and Walter Schumann)
  7. Pay in blood
  8. I’m a fool to want you  (Frank Sinatra, Jack Wolf, and Joel Herron)
  9. Tangled up in Blue
  10. High Water
  11. Why Try to Change Ce Now? (Cy Coleman and Joseph Allen McCarthy)
  12. Early Roman Kings
  13. The Night We Called it a Day  (Matt Dennis, Tom Adair)
  14. Spirit on the Water
  15. Scarlet Town
  16. All or Nothing at All.  (Arthur Altman,  Jack Lawrence.
  17. Long and Wasted Years
  18. Autumn Leaves (originally Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert.  The lyrics we hear used here, were written later by Johnny Mercer).
  19. Blowing in the Wind
  20. Love Sick

————————–

Here’s the list of concerts covered so far.  We’re currently adding a couple a week.  If you feel there’s a concert we should particularly add to the list because of its particular quality please do write in and let me know.

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No Nobel Prize for Music: the connundrum of the song that gets worse

Posted on June 13, 2025 by Tony Attwood

My apologies for the technical problems on this article – I think I have resolved them by removing the links to examples from the Never Ending Tour series – so the article is now readable.  I’ve now included a link to what I consider the most perfect live version of Love Minus Zero in this revised version of the article.

—-

This series looks at Bob’s compositions from a musical point of view considering the songs in the order that they were written, Details of earlier articles in this series are given at the foot of this piece.

By Tony Attwood

After composing “Subterranean Homesick Blues” Bob returned to an even more basic style of composing.  For while Subterranean used the approach of a 12-bar blues composition, the lyrics were varied throughout, thus taking the focus away from the fact that musically the piece was just based around the standard three-chord format found in all 12-bar blues.  But having navigated that problem successfully Bob seemed to be attracted by the notion of ever more simple music, as he came back to an even more basic blues format,  For here, lyrically, we have one line repeated, and then an answering line and that’s it: Outlaw Blues is the absolute classic basic form of composition.  You can’t get more basic than that.

Bob played the piece once on stage on 20 September 2007: that was as part of a two-song interlude played with Jack White.  Jack White returned the compliment although with a more exciting instrumental break than Bob would ever contemplate.

As many have said, the song is a set of references to the life of a man on the run.  The weather is extremely cold, he falls over, he has nowhere to live, he is an outlaw, he wants to be somewhere else but doesn’t know where, and even the identity of his lover has to be kept secret because of social prejudice.  But musically Bob can find nothing new in expressing these thoughts, and so it becomes one of those strange Dylan compositions: he wants it on the album, but perhaps realising there isn’t that much in the song, he chooses not to play it in public.

Lyrically, we can take this song to be a personal statement of the artist against society – the artist saying I am going to create my work as I want to create it, and I certainly am not going to start explaining it to you!  Why should I?  And yes up to a point that is ok, except if the artist has a message or at least a feeling she/he wants to put across, there has to be something there that appeals to us.

So this is, in essence, a non-musical composition by Bob, and one can argue that because the 12 bar blues format has existed for around 150 years and is nobody’s copyright.  Bob is using a musical form that has existed for a long time and putting lyrics over the top with a minimal amount of melody.  (Incidentally, if you are not familiar with exactly what a 12-bar blues is, there is an explanation from the Open University here)

But to return to the list of songs Bob wrote, and their musical content, if “Outlaw Blues” had no original musical content, then what followed that song in terms of Dylan’s composition most certainly was the reverse.   Love Minus Zero / No Limit indeed has a gorgeous melody based over a four-chord accompaniment, and through a number of  rearrangements it has evolved in several different ways.

And this is really where we can see Bob finding his own way of playing with, manipulating, and indeed re-inventing a work of his own, as it takes the notion of the song as something that is never fixed but is eternally re-written (as of course all songs are as the instrumentation moves further and further forward.  In fact, for me, I think it goes too far as the accompaniment between each sung line removes the feeling of continuity within the lyrics.  The song stresses the constancy of the woman, not her changeability, and thus I now simply get nothing out of “There is no success like failure and failure is no success at all” in this version.  But that’s probably just me.

And this leads me to think it is worth immediately jumping back to see how Bob did perform it at the very start.  There are one or two minor melodic changes but beyond that only the harmonica part is really different.  But now Bob just seems (to me) to be extending the song for the sake of extending the song before the four verses he originally created.

However, this is interesting because it shows how Bob will experiment with a song in various directions, perhaps just to see where it goes, and emphasises yet again, that not every experiment works.

If you return to the Never Ending Tour Series and look at 1996 you will find remarkable changes happening to this song.  Indeed as I noted when I wrote about this version before in the “Never Ending Tour Extended”, series, it sounds “as if Bob finally found a tape of the original song and remembered what he had originally meant the piece to be.  The addition of the double bass and second guitar helps enormously to add a certain stability to the performance that was perhaps drifting away previously.    Now once more there is love, desire, dedication, and indeed worship of the lady.

“It is as if before, Bob was singing to a picture of the lady.  Now he has been reunited with her and wants to tell her about his feelings while also telling us all about what she is, and about his love of her.”

Was she real, or was she fictional, or indeed was she fictional but became real to Bob through the creation of that song?  As I said before, I don’t mind, because this recording makes me feel despite everything there is still beauty in this world.  And I feel that extra today since I spent yesterday with friends at a church in London honouring the memory of a man who meant a lot to all of us there.  When emotions like this pour forth, they can stay for quite a few days.

These moments are indeed part of life, and somehow even though we were paying tribute to a deceased hero of ours, and Bob years before was singing of a woman he loves, the feeling and the warmth of Dylan’s song still shines through and intertwines with my feelings from yesterday.

But, and I think this is part of the point here, Bob’s endless drive to experiment and change can, on occasion, lead him away from the beauty that he has created.  For example, I only played a recording from 2012 once in my house when it was included in the Never Ending Tour series.

In my originial version of this article I included a copy, but then the file corrupted totally.   Maybe even the internet doesn’t like it, so I’ve now cut it from this piece.

Of course, not liking one version is just me and my personal prejudice of wanting this still to be the beautiful love song it originally was, a song of devotion, a song of saying “there really is no one else like you anywhere”, while this revised accompaniment and arrangement strips all that away.

Obviously it is not Bob that is wrong, I am the person who cannot adjust to this re-worked version.  But to save myself from taking to drink to quell my displeasure, thankfully I have  that 1996 version above, which now, having written this piece, I shall play once more

Is it sacrilege to say that some of Bob’s arrangements can actually destroy the beauty he previously created?  No, I don’t think so, because to argue otherwise puts Bob in the ludicrous position of being a creative giant who can never do any wrong.  But if you agree with me that sometimes Bob can make awful mistakes in the way he re-arranges his own music, that does raise a different point: for Bob seems to value the act of re-creating his work, over the question of how good each new version is.   That is, that the act of re-working his songs is more important than the resultant music that comes from the re-write.

Of course, you can disagree over this piece and say that the 2012 version (which of course you can find on the Never Ending Tour series of articles is as good as the previous ones.  Or it could be argued that Bob has done so many re-writes that he has lost the ability to judge his own work.   Either way, I think the issue needs exploring, and I am not too sure that many people who write or talk about Dylan’s work are looking at this issue.  I am arguing both that Bob can take something that was beautiful, and make it less beautiful, and that sometimes he doesn’t seem either to know that he has done this, or how to find his way back to the beauty he once found.

Here is the link to the article containing what I think is the best live version.

Never Ending Tour: The Absolute Highlights: Love Minus Zero – 1992

Other articles in this series…

Previously….

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My Own Version Of You (2020) part 5: The whole world is a cactus

Posted on June 12, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

by Jochen Markhorst

V          The whole world is a cactus

I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice
I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice

 Jacques Dutronc reaches immortality and eternal fame in 1968 with the now perhaps a bit dated-sounding but still irresistible hit “Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille”. And well alright, also because the lucky devil was songwriter, lover and for some years even the husband of Françoise Hardy. But in this part of Europe, we already knew him before “Paris s’éveille”. In 1966, when Dutronc has just been paired up with his regular lyricist Jacques Lanzmann, a producer is dissatisfied with beatnik singer Benjamin’s performance of a Dutronc song, and he asks if Dutronc, by then already a widely recognised driving force behind the success of yé-yé, can’t record it himself. The single reaches second spot in the charts, is the start of Dutronc’s long and highly successful solo career, and “Et moi, et moi, et moi” is now part of the canon. To this day, the song keeps returning in covers, arrangements, parodies. Our English friends know the translation “Alright, Alright, Alright” with which Mungo Jerry scored a big hit (number 3 in 1973).

Jacques is asked to record an entire album (like most Dutronc LPs self-titled, but for convenience we usually call this one Et moi, et moi, et moi, 1966) and draws two more successful singles from it: “Les Play Boys” and the hit that half of Europe must think of when they hear Dylan sing I get blood from a cactus: “Les Cactus”. As attractive as almost all the songs from Jacques’ four 60s albums – swinging, melodic garage rock, hopping back and forth between chansons, The Kinks and ’65 Dylan. With Dylan, Dutronc (or rather lyricist Lanzmann) shares a fondness for the sound of words and unobtrusive wordplay, often enough at the expense of syntax and even semantics. Unexpected recognition from the highest echelons scores the song in 1967, when Prime Minister Georges Pompidou quotes the song – with source – in parliament: “J’ai appris que dans la vie gouvernementale, il y a aussi des cactus – I have learned that in government life, there are also cacti”, ironically winking at the opening couplet;

Le monde entier est un cactus
Il est impossible de s'assoir
Dans la vie, il y a qu'des cactus
Moi je me pique de le savoir
Aïe aïe aïe! 
Ouille!
Aïe aïe aïe!
The whole world is a cactus
It's impossible to sit down
There are only cacti in life
I pride myself on knowing it (litt: “I prick myself”)
Ai ai ai! 
Ouch!
Ai ai ai!

… and then three more stanzas in which poor Jacques gets all punctured by those damn cacti; they are in his bed, in his pants, in his fellow man’s smiles and in their bonjour. Even in their cacti are cacti.

So Dutronc, though hyperbolically, uses “cactus” the way we have used “cactus” since the Middle Ages: as a metaphor for hard, painful, forbidding. And to that symbolic charge the protagonist also seems to be referring when he draws the blood for his creature from cacti: “the duel, the worthless life, pain in the heart, staying in the saddle, love in vain, the grim reaper,” as Dylan tries to articulate the song’s impact in his long declaration of love to Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” in The Philosophy Of Modern Song. In those regions, the gory western songs, we also seem to be in this verse. Blood, cactus, gunpowder, and in the next line the reference to the card-playing and dice-playing gamblers, in the saloon no doubt… the blood flowing through the veins of my version of you is apparently the blood of black country romance, of “They’re Hanging Me Tonight”, “Billy the Kid”, “Cool Water” and “Big Iron”, the blood dripping from Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959).

Alienating still is make gunpowder from ice. Probably picked up from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (chapter V, “I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder”), and with some tolerance, the associative leap to Dr Frankenstein can then be followed; this is the chapter in which Gulliver visits the grand academy of Lagado and is shown around the laboratories of one mad scientist after another. The first has been working for eight years on a project “for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers”, the next leads in an infernally smelly laboratory “an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food”, another is a blind professor who teaches his likewise blind students to distinguish colours by taste and smell (with no visible success), and so on. Gulliver does not want to weary the reader with “with all the curiosities I observed, being studious of brevity”, but perhaps the grand academy of Lagado also has a workroom in which a senior scholar tries to bring someone to life.

The ponderousness of this shaky bridge to “My Own Version Of You” suggests that the verse with the cactus and the ice was dredged up from Dylan’s famous “very ornate, beautiful box”, the box in which he keeps dozens of scraps of paper with loose ideas, melodic word combinations and useful names. We know of its existence thanks to Larry Charles’ lack of discretion, the director and co-screenwriter of the Dylan vehicle Masked And Anonymous (2003): “He takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that. He has all of these ideas and then just in a subconscious or unconscious way, he lets them synthesise into a coherent thing.” A name like “Uncle Sweetheart”, for example, which the men then use for a film character, but Charles also recalls phrases we will later hear in Dylan’s songs. He finds a strip of paper with “I’m no pig without a wig”, which is rejected for the script, but then turns up in the Dylan song “High Water”.

A second clue is the slight deviation from the sung version. Officially, on the site, the line reads “I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice”, but that is not what Dylan sings: “I get blood from a cactus – gunpowder from ice” – in the studio and on stage, he omits “make”. A singer’s intervention, obviously: now the metre is correct, a classic four-foot anapaest (da da DUM – da da da DUM – da da da DUM – da da da DUM), the metre into which the next verse is squeezed as well (I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice).

The whole world may be cactus, but in his verse Dylan does cut off any prickly protrusions.

 

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 6: They saw, yet they did not see

—————-

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:

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It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, A History in Performance, Part 7: 2011 – 2025.

Posted on June 11, 2025 by Tony Attwood

Previously in this series…

All over now

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 seventh and last 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: ]

 

In the previous article we found Dylan struggling to breathe life into ‘Baby Blue’ in 2009 and 2010. When lead guitarist Charlie Sexton re-joined the band in 2011, the Never Ending Tour began a renaissance which would continue up to 2019, when Covid put a stop to public performances. If you have followed my NET series will be familiar with this rising curve, and how Dylan’s immersion in Frank Sinatra in 2015 transformed his vocal style.

Unfortunately for our present study, Dylan was not able to bring this newfound vitality to ‘Baby Blue,’ and he continued to struggle with the song. This is reflected in the gaps in performance of the song, and the relatively low number of performances each year. He did about a dozen performances in both 2011 and 2012, then dropped the song until 2016 when he picked it up again for about a dozen performances and then, after a single performance in 2017, dropped the song again until 2019 which saw a mere four performances. It was then dropped again until the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, when he picked it up again, this time with much more success, in 2024 and 2025.

Our story thus does have a happy ending, with stunning performances in 2024/25, but it’s a bit of rocky road getting there. Because I’m writing a history of performance, I’m dutybound to cover the 2011 – 2019 performances, but I have to confess they are not my favourites.

2011, however, saw this interesting performance with Mark Knopfler on lead guitar, and we have an excellent video of that performance. If you’d never heard any of his earlier renditions of the song you might find this one catchy enough in a foot-tapping way, but it comes nowhere near the emotional intensity of some of the previous versions.

2011

In 2012, the year Tempest came out, Dylan shifted from the organ back to the piano. This minimal version, with its charming harp break, has its attractions, but the bouncy, upbeat tempo keeps the song from reaching for the deeper emotions that drive it. He’s keeping the song going, but the 2012 performances are not going to set anybody on fire.

2012

Now we jump to 2016, which saw the song return quite strongly with some twenty performances. Dylan’s voice has certainly improved in terms of range and emotional power, but the arrangement has not changed. Still the same upbeat tempo, with the same limitations we have been witnessing. You may think I’m being a bit tough on Dylan here, as this version certainly has its charm, and I guess I’m comparing it, somewhat unfairly perhaps, to the glories of the past, but I am just not moved by the song as I have been. It sounds like a pleasant fill-in on the setlists, a reminder of the past without the soaring emotions of past performances.

2016

I’m going to skip over the single 2017 performance, as it doesn’t offer anything new or interesting, to jump to 2019, the last year of the NET. In 2019 there is a new arrangement, but the tempo remains the same, inappropriately upbeat (at least to my ear), and the harp break at the end can’t lift it out of its rut. This song can be so much more than this foot-tapper.

2019

Six years later, in 2024 Dylan returns to the song. While he keeps the tempo, we sense that the fire and resilience are still there. Hope never dies. You can hear the hope flaring in the upsinging. With some thirty performances in that year, it’s clear that Dylan has rediscovered the song. Just where it’s leading we won’t find out until 2025.

2024 (a)

That Bournemouth performance is no accident.  Here it is again in the same year, from Prague, with a wonderfully jagged, jazzy harp break. We can feel the blood flowing in the veins of the song once more.

2024 (b)

In 2025, however, and I’m writing this in June of that year, we find a completely transformed understanding of the song, and a totally new approach. He abandons the foot-tapping tempo altogether, slows the song right down, packing it out with clusters of piano notes, and employs the half-reciting, half-singing that marks his late vocal style.

The song becomes something new. The passion is back, but with a different flavour.  Reeking of nostalgia, it becomes a frame through which we can approach the history of the song, and its origins as a song of farewell. More than that, however, it becomes a valedictory piece, a farewell to a lifetime of performance.

Just as the 1965 original bade farewell, not just to a particular woman, but an era, the era of Dylan the acoustic protest singer, following ‘My Back Pages’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ in signalling a change in direction for the young ‘spokesman of his generation.’ He was about to strike another match and start anew, filled with sorrow and hope, sorrow for what has passed, hope for what is to come.

Sixty years later we arrive at another farewell, that which is fitting for an eighty-four-year-old who may be bidding farewell to his whole career. Every performance could be the last, and he sings it as if he may never sing it again. It’s this finality of these 2024/25 performances that make it a tear-jerker for me personally. Is it really all over now? Is there not perhaps another album, another year or two of performing? The heart-rending harp solo at the end tells the same story. ‘Baby Blue’ has been sent down the road, weeping, but our tears have different roots, stemming as they do from a lifelong love of Dylan and his years of service (you gotta serve somebody) up there on stage pouring out his heart.

Can this really be the end? We can’t know, but these 2025 performances bring us to face that possibility.

This brings me full circle. I began my articles on ‘Baby Blue’ with the Tulsa performance of 2025. It had only just appeared on YouTube. Since then, and to April, there have been seventeen performances, the song having leapt back up into the setlists. The promise of that Tulsa performance is being fulfilled in subsequent performances. Try this one from Kalamazoo.

2025

Sadness becomes the final layer of this complex love song. It now sounds more like a poem than a song, and we bid farewell once more, both to this song and this series on the four songs from side B of Bringing It All Back Home. I plan to do one more article with final thoughts on these songs, and will try to see them as a whole.

Until then

Kia Ora

 

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My Own Version Of You IV: Tough and tender, granite and satin

Posted on June 10, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         Tough and tender, granite and satin

I’ll take Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando
Mix ‘em up in a tank and get a robot commando
If I do it upright and put the head on straight
I’ll be saved by the creature that I create

 “I’ll be your Valentino,” Freddie Mercury sings in “Seaside Rendezvous” (A Night At The Opera, 1975), and again a year later in “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy”. “Never been no Valentino,” Tom Waits notes regretfully (“Better Off Without A Wife”, 1975) and The Four Seasons have wild fantasies: “In my dream I’m bigger than Valentino” (“Silver Star”, also from 1975 – sung not by Frankie Valli, by the way, but by drummer Gerry Polci). And like this, there are hundreds more songs, poems, film scripts and novels in which “Valentino” is used as a mark of quality. In short, the stage name of the young-deceased Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi has long since dissociated itself from its bearer – and like, say, “Adonis” or “Don Juan”, has become a synonym for attractive man or heartbreaker.

In the early 1950s, a new member joins the Don Juan Association: Marlon Brando. The intensity and sexuality with which he plays Stanley Kowalski in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is the entrance ticket, his blushing bare chest in Julius Caesar (1953) secures him a seat in the board of directors, and after the leather jacket in The Wild One (1953) he can take over the gavel; “Marlon Brando” as a five-star designation for a desirable man is from now on established. And thus from now on used as an updated alternative to “Valentino”. Peggy Lee herself gives the go-ahead in 1961 in her self-written evergreen, “I Love Being Here With You” (I like Brando’s eyes), which was even recorded by Ella Fitzgerald. And then the floodgates open. Van Morrison (“Wild Children”), Madonna, R.E.M., David Bowie, Elton John and Leonard Cohen: the trendsetters of the 20th century perpetuate the label, and in the 21st century, “Marlon Brando” has become commonplace. And remains so. The Killers, Robbie Williams, Slipknot, Mark Knopfler… when Dylan uses the name for characterisation in “My Own Version Of You” in 2020, he joins a long line.

Peggy Lee

There is a huge difference, though. Madonna, Peggy Lee and John Mellencamp (“You’ve Got To Stand For Somethin’”, 1985) and all those others mean the wild one, the sexy hunk, the Brando of whom Joan Baez swoons so infectiously:

“It must have been two years later that someone took me to see a double bill of Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Shortly after, I saw The Wild One. Goodbye world. I was struck by blue lightning. There he was, the magnificent dark horse who was a winner, the punk, the hurt child, the rebel. The most appealing man I’d ever seen. A veritable sex extravaganza, tough and tender, granite and satin.”
(Joan Baez – And A Voice To Sing With, 1987)

… but Dylan explicitly refers to the Godfather Brando, the actor who had to put twenty pounds back on before the picture could start, according to his autobiography (Songs My Mother Taught Me, 1994). Granted, Don Corleone has a tender side as well, definitely is both satin and granite, but by no means a veritable sex extravaganza. Dylan obviously wants to avoid that, the sex appeal, given the specification of the other half of his “robot commando”: Scarface Pacino.

After all, in The Godfather Al Pacino is indeed sexy, a hurt child, a magnificent dark horse – having all the qualities of the troubled Johnny Strabler from The Wild One and the brooding darkness of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Which Pacino hardly acted, if Brando’s testimony in the autobiography is to be believed. “Wonderful actor,” Brando says there about his colleague, but “when I met him on The Godfather, he was quite troubled.” Pacino’s own recollections in Sonny Boy – A Memoir (2024) confirm Brando’s observation: “I was going through a difficult time, feeling like I had the world on my shoulders, knowing that any day the axe could fall on me.” Understandable, as Pacino knows Paramount considers him unfit. The studio bosses want to replace him, and even his guardian angel director Coppola is starting to have doubts as well. “Feeling unwanted, feeling like an underling, was an oppressive experience,” and that feeling persists right up to and including the restaurant scene in The Bronx, the scene in which Michael transforms from the dreamy, immaculate Benjamin to the dark avenging angel who executes mobster Sollozzo and the corrupt police officer McCluskey;

“Francis showed the restaurant scene to the studio, and when they looked at it, something was there. Because of that scene I just performed, they kept me in the film.”

Equally awkward are Pacino’s memories of Brando. He is starstruck. Brando is too big. Coppola insists the two of them should have lunch together to get to know each other, but it is not a success. Brando sits on the bed in the room where they will shoot the hospital scene and eats chicken cacciatore with his hands. “His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face. And that’s all I could think about the whole time.” He remembers Brando being friendly and asking all sorts of questions, but he doesn’t really reach the starstruck Al. “He looked at me in a quizzical way, as if to ask, what are you thinking about?”

Anyway, Godfather Pacino, Al’s Michael Corleone is unfit for Dylan’s robot commando. The Dr Frankenstein from Dylan’s song needs Scarface Pacino, the manic psychopath Tony Montana from the gory hit film in which the impressive number of 207 “fucks” is achieved (1.22 per minute). The film also from which Dylan seems to borrow another “my own version of you” on Side B of Rough And Rowdy Ways: the unorthodox music of “Black Rider” does at the very least seem to be inspired by “Tony’s Theme” from the Scarface soundtrack.

It is a strange combination then, Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando: a self-destruction machine with a safety catch. A creature “who will save me”. One half the strategic, reserved Don Corleone, the man Brando characterises as a decent person regardless of what he had to do, as a modest, quiet man. “The part of Don Corleone lends itself perfectly to underplaying,” Brando analyses, and that is true. The diametric opposite of the other half, of what Tony Montano demonstrates. “Bigger than life and everything about it was exaggerated,” as Pacino reflects in Sonny Boy:

“That crazy character, the smoke and the blood and the three-hundred-pound machine gun. […] You can’t forget Tony Montana was heading to the sun like Icarus, flying higher and higher until he exploded. Too damn unwieldy.”

Dylan’s robot commando, the work of art created by the narrator of “My Own Version Of You”, is apparently a combination of extremes, a dangerous creation combining yin and yang, or, as Dylan defines the perfection of Sinatra’s “Strangers In The Night” in The Philosophy Of Modern Song:

“Now you’re yoked together, one flesh in perpetuity – into the vast eternity – immortalized.”

——————

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 5: The whole world is a cactus

——————

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:

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No Nobel Prize for Music: Bob reaches the Subterranean

Posted on June 9, 2025 by Tony Attwood

A list of previous articles in this series appears at the end of the piece.

By Tony Attwood

In the last article (How Dylan turned the strophic form into something new) I took a look at “Love is just a four letter word,” and unless you know the details of the order in which Bob wrote songs my thought is that you may not have been able to guess what came next.   For “Love is just a four letter word” is musically, a gentle, engaging piece, and we might have expected a further development alpong those lines.

What Bob wrote next was a song the music of which can be described in all sorts of ways  but for which the word “gentle” would never be one of those songs.   Cash Box described it as a “rockin’-country folk blueser with a solid beat and catchy lyrics.”   But I am not quite sure that does it justice.

One thing is certain, it is impossible to get further away from “Love is just a four letter word” in terms of musical feel.  For the next song Dylan wrote was Subterranean Homesick Blues.

I have often thought that we can get a clearer view of what Bob was thinking by listening to the first recording of the song – the acoustic version

For much of the piece the guitar does nothing but play the chord while there is no attempt to add anything to the “melody” which actually isn’t a melody at all.   It is in fact one note sung against a chord played over and over.  True Bob does change chords a couple of times, and in this version we have some instrumental breaks, but the key thing is that it is repeat, repeat, repeat.   So although the song is based on the notion of a 12-bar blues in a minor key, all the feeling of the 12 bar blues is taken away.  This is simply pounding the beat without even the extra emphasis on the first beat of each bar.

By seeing the songs in the order they were written and focussing on the music, we can appreciate just how greatly Bob was experimenting.  “Love is just a four letter word” which I looked at in the last piece has a beautiful melody.   And it was probably a melody Bob felt (or actually found) he could not sing, because of the range.   So he gave it to the one person he knew who would always be able to sing across such a range – Joan Baez.  Bob never made a recording (at least as far as I know).

But then, following that beautiful melody, and the gentle joking of the lyrics, he wrote a song basically on one note.   And to replace the gentle rhythms and movements of “Four Letter” we get nothing but a pounding beat.  This is the antithesis of what went before.

And the question that we ought to ask here, but which from my own reading I have not found asked (although of course, I may have missed it somewhere) is “why?”   Why prove the point?   Why prove that one can write a song in which the first eight bars are all on one note, when you have previously written a song with the most elegant, smooth, gliding melody (and in case you didn’t read the last piece, here it is again).

And to go further – why play this song with no melody 120 times in concerts across the next 14 years, but never once play “Four LetterWord”?

Well there are some practical reasons.   One is because “Four Letter” became associated with Joan Baez.   Another is that “Subterranean” was actually a hit single in the USA – not a huge hit, but still Bob’s first hit.   But perhaps more than anything Bob was announcing that he could write a song in which the first eight bars were all on one note and all with the same chord accompaniment – and people would still listen!

As for the music, I have once or twice indicated how much in awe I am of the work of Eyolf Østrem and I couldn’t help but take a look at what he had to say about the song, which, according to my hearing, is a simple three chord piece, and I am glad to say he agreed.  It is almost all on A major, with a quick burst of D and E chords; in short it is as it sounds, dead simple; a slight variation on the 12 bar blues.

Now I don’t know who changed the arrangement from the first version above to the actual version that crept into the charts, but you’ll recall how it came out.   But even with this limited amount of musical resources in the original Bob was still, later on, able to play with the original, and I think have some fun himself.

What I find interesting is that although the band have a fairly free improvisation around the music in the instrumental verse, Bob himself has found a new way of playing the song with a new set of variations which keeps it lively and still keeps us focussed on lyrics we’ve heard so many times before.   Somehow by changing the essence of the music the meanings of the lyrics have changed too.

And of course, once the song is released into the wild everyone can have a go although few have the talent of this young man….

Obviously Bob re-recorded it with the band and we got the version we know, and by this time he and the band had worked out how to handle a song primarily on one chord and mostly without any melody.   It was indeed in many ways an anti-song; quite a challenge.

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.

It is also one of those songs that (for me at least) once Bob says (as he did in 2004),  “It’s from Chuck Berry, a bit of ‘Too Much Monkey Business’,” that becomes obvious.  I just didn’t realise before he said it.

And I would add, it shouldn’t work.  It should sound all wrong.  It should be horribly tedious and boring both in the original and in the reworked version, but it doesn’t and it isn’t!  It always works.  I still enjoy it.

Previously….

 

 

Previously….

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The Concert Series: London. 28th June, 1981.

Posted on June 8, 2025 by Tony Attwood

Each of these articles features either a recording of a complete concert or (where there is not one available in the UK, where I have my internet connection) the next best thing I can find.   I’m hoping to be able to put together a link to one concert for each year, just so that if you are looking for a concert from a particular year, you’ll be be able to find it here.   Links to the concerts so far is given below.

Tony Attwood

The songs

  1. Gotta Serve Somebody
  2. I Believe in You
  3. Like a Rolling Stone
  4. Till I Get It Right (cover)
  5. Man Gave Names to All the Animals
  6. Maggie’s Farm
  7. Simple Twist of Fate
  8. Ballad of a Thin Man
  9. Girl From the North Country
  10. Dead Man, Dead Man
  11. Slow Train
  12. Mary From the Wild Moor (cover)
  13. All Along the Watchtower
  14. In the Summertime (live debut)
  15. Mr. Tambourine Man
  16. Solid Rock
  17. Just Like a Woman
  18. Watered-Down Love
  19. Forever Young
  20. When You Gonna Wake Up?
  21. In the Garden
  22. Blowin’ in the Wind
  23. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
  24. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

Here’s the list of concerts covered so far.  We’re currently adding a couple a week.

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My Own Version Of You part 3: Next time you come to the bridge, jump

Posted on June 7, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

by Jochen Markhorst

III         Next time you come to the bridge, jump

It must be the winter of my discontent
I wish you’d taken me with you wherever you went
They talk all night - they talk all day
Not for a second do I believe what they say 
              (LP: Not for a minute do I believe anything they say)

I want to bring someone to life - someone I’ve never seen 
                                           (LP: I’m going to make…)
You know what I mean - you know exactly what I mean

 “I like to see Shakespeare plays, so I’ll go — I mean, even if it’s in a different language. I don’t care, I just like Shakespeare, you know. I’ve seen Othello and Hamlet and Merchant of Venice over the years, and some versions are better than others. ”
(Dylan in the 2015 AARP interview)

Dylan’s Shakespeare love is well-documented and professed often enough; his catalogue is littered with references, winks, quotes and borrowings. Much more than an idle name-check, like Shakespeare, he’s in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells in “Stuck Inside Of Mobile”, or an irrelevant nod (like the fifth daughter on the twelfth night in “Highway 61 Revisited”) it’s usually not. Slightly more weight have borrowings like Ophelia in “Desolation Row” and Romeo and Juliet in “Floater”, or copied word combinations like eat fire, ill at ease and abuse a king in “Too Much Of Nothing” (from Julius Ceasar, Othello and Pericles, respectively). And we may put the even heavier stamp “influenced by” on songs like “Love Minus Zero”, “Seven Curses” and “If You See Her, Say Hello”, on songs that seem to owe the Shakespearean tone colour and elegance to the bard from Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Shakespeare paraphrase with which the second stanza of “My Own Version Of You” opens (“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York”, the opening monologue of Richard III, 1591) seems at first glance to fall into the first category: an irrelevant wink, chosen rather randomly. Dylan could also have chosen, say, “Life’s but a walking shadow” or “All that glisters is not gold” to express similar gloom with a Shakespeare quote. But given the context – this song, and the overarching theme of this record side – surely the weightless inaccuracy my discontent rather than Shakespeare’s our discontent seems not so much an inaccuracy as a deliberate intentionality: the no-false prophet integrates a reference to yet another forgotten page from the American Songbook, to Alec Wilder’s “The Winter Of My Discontent”, gratefully welcoming the double-whammy.

Alec Wilder is indeed one of those names featured on the to-do list of a prophet who wants to proclaim the via, veritas, vita, the Way, the Truth and the Life of songs. An arranger and conductor, Wilder was at the beginning of Sinatra’s solo career in the early 1940s, producing seven consecutive Top 10 hits for Ol’ Blue Eyes. Sinatra himself is also a fan of the composer Wilder; when, after much begging and pleading with his employer Columbia, he gets it done that he is allowed to live out his non-commercial conducting ambitions, he chooses six of Wilder’s pieces (Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder, 1946). Moreover, Alec Wilder writes the music and lyrics for the evergreen “I’ll Be Around”, one of the highlights of Sinatra’s monumental In The Wee Small Hours (1955), one of the songs Dylan seems to use in 2002 for the cut-and-paste song “Waiting For You” (with the refrain line “And I’ll be around, waitin’ for you”).

Sinatra continues to record Wilder songs. “Where Do You Go?” in 1959, for example. And “Where Is the One?”, the song recorded by Sinatra for Where Are You? (1957) and chosen and recorded sixty years later by Dylan himself for Devil Dolls, the second record of the triple album Triplicate, Dylan’s third and final “Sinatra album” (2017). Others are equally happy with Wilder; Tony Bennett records several Wilder songs (“It’s So Peaceful In The Country”, for example), and Peggy Lee “While We’re Young”. With which Wilder is discontented, by the way. He writes Peggy a short note: “The next time you come to the bridge, jump!” – apart from being a talented composer, Wilder was also a sharp critic with a gift for words. He even wrote a standard work that is undoubtedly also on Dylan’s bookshelf: American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (1972), which bears witness to the same missionary zeal as Dylan does, writing with the same love about lyricists like Johnny Mercer, about songs like “You Go To My Head” and about composers like Irving Berlin as Dylan professes in word and deed.

“The Winter Of My Discontent” is a lesser-known song by Wilder. It is passed by Sinatra, and first picked up by Shannon Bolin with Milton Kaye and His Orchestra (1955), but Dylan is presumably more enamoured of Anthony Newley’s version (1964) or, even more so, Helen Merrill’s 1967 version. Indeed, the opening lines, the rhymes and the gloom all suggest that the song is yet another one of those songs that deliver word, line and story to Dylan “t’unlock my mind”:

This is the winter of my discontent
Like a dream you came and like a dream you went
Before I had a chance to know what rapture meant
Came the winter of my discontent

… he is in a deeply dark phase of life, he is in a disconsolate state of mind: “you” has left and will never return, after which the remaining stanzas still thicken the dreary state of the narrator. There is “no joy, but only deep despair”, ruins are burning and “there is no love at all”, and the singing prophet will be particularly struck by the bridge:

The world is full of dissonance
The scheme of things is wrong
The air resounds with the resonance
Of a harsh and spiteful song

My life is wrong and full of discord, all around me is hate and wickedness, the air shimmers “with the resonance of a harsh and spiteful song” … it is a bridge that by itself already invites to jump.

Thankfully, Dylan’s narrator is more assertive and less cynical. They can blab all they want – not for a second do I believe what they say. And he knows how to combat misery, trouble in mind and feelin’ blue: bring someone to life. We know exactly what he means.

—————

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 4: Tough and tender, granite and satin

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:

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Reflections in the mirror: suddenly Visions of Johanna conquers my mind

Posted on June 6, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

By Tony Attwood

Some 17 years ago, in June 2008 the Guardian (a liberal-facing English daily newspaper, which is still with us, and rather unusually has a website that makes all its articles available free of charge) published an article by the Australian writer Germaine Greer under the headline, “Why do people think Bob Dylan was a great lyricist? That creep couldn’t even write doggerel.”

Greer, in case you missed her career, is an Australian writer known for her feminist writings and indeed is I think still recognised as one of the major voices of feminism in the 1960s to 1980.  I am far from being competent to write on that subject, but I am told she was part of the “secondwave feminism” movement.

In academic terms she was quite highly regarded in England and the USA, holding various university posts, including one at Cambridge University.  

Her article criticising Dylan  is still online if you want to read it in full, but to give you the flavour of it, it opens saying, “I battled students who wanted me to teach Bob Dylan rather than Donne or Yeats. Ever since, I have had screeds of stuff sent to me by people who thought that rhyme equalled reason, to whom I had gently to explain that their agonised posturings wouldn’t pass for poetry. I blame Dylan. In my eyes, he wasn’t fit to tie Woody Guthrie’s shoelaces. I have never forgiven him for keeping his fans waiting at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969 for three hours, from 9 o’clock till midnight, before he would sing a word. Creeps sometimes make good poets, but Bob Zimmerman isn’t one of them.”

Now in reading that one is perhaps justified in calling it a “rant”, in that it puts passion first and logic later (if anywhere at all), while expressing lots of anger.   For here one can see immediately that the writer is using the technique of confuscation by bringing different issues together which are not necessarily, and certainly not obviously, linked.  That Bob kept his audience waiting has nothing to do with whether Woodie Guthrie was a better songwriter, nor indeed with whether Bob is or was a good poet.  Or indeed whose fault it was that Dylan appeared late.  Reports from the time suggest there were serious technical problems, and that Dylan himself became very agitated about the delays.  I don’t know of a definitive account but either Greer hasn’t done her homework and just wants to imply it was Bob’s fault, or she couldn’t care less for accuracy.

And indeed perhaps I might go on from here to say that most of the time Dylan has not portrayed himself as a poet.  Yes Tarantula has poetry in it, but that’s not why we know Bob, any more than writing out the lyrics of “Visions of Johanna” gives us the full feeling of the piece.   It is a song.   He is a songwriter.  He doesn’t pretend to be a poet; he’s written poems, I’ve written poems, my children have written poems, but none of us call ourselves poets.

So let’s take a look at the article, and what we can make of it now.   What Ms Greer said of Dylan’s work….

“Fustian of this ilk crosses my desk every week. It’s not verse, not even doggerel. Nor is it prose, because it doesn’t make sense. Its combination of pretentiousness and illiteracy isn’t surprising, which would be something; it’s just annoying. God knows why the texts put to 20th-century music began to be called lyrics rather than words. Words is fine with me. Historically, a lyric is a poem in song form, and poets from Wyatt and Surrey to Heaney have been very good at writing them. Many of our best lyrics were written for music, some of them dittied – that is, written to be sung to a pre-existing tune. Others are songs that carry their music within them. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience is his undisputed masterpiece, and five minutes with this tiny sample will show why:”

O rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Now if we go back to Ms Greer’s initial statement, “It’s not verse, not even doggerel. Nor is it prose, because it doesn’t make sense,” we have something that is quite interesting, in that it is a set of statements without any justification or logical argument.   It is really little more than, “I don’t like this because it is not what I am used to,” combined with a touch of “this is the definition of this word that I like, and anyone who disagrees with me is of lower intellect.”

I am more taken by Andy Gill quoted in the wiki article, whose view of the song is that it is “forever teetering on the brink of lucidity, yet remaining impervious to strict decipherment”.    And reading that line again I find myself thinking “Yes, yes, yes”.

But I do so while at the same moment recognising that having had this song in my life all this time since the release of the album, it still means something to me.   It may well be a sad reflection on myself and my thought patterns, but yes even after all these years I can still find thoughts troubling me.

Now an old man I sometimes ponder what I have done with my life, I ask myself if I should not have done more, written more, written different things, taken more risks, taken fewer risks, pursued this lady with more vigour, run faster from that lady who was pursuing me with more ardour than I wanted, been more forceful in trying to get my songs recognised instead of giving up on songwriting when money started arriving in response to my prose, spent so much time supporting my football team….  Probably all of that, and a lot more.

But these are internals – the worries and thoughts and memories of an old-ish man – and yet still the song is as relevant as it was when I bought the album as a teenager.

So was Ms Greer completely wrong to attack Bob and his lyrics?   Yes in one particular way, I think she was.  Because she was then, and probably is now, stuck in the view that there is a hierarchy of poetry and song lyrics which allows us to say that one work of art is greater than another.

Shakespeare was a genius because now lots of people say so.   But he wasn’t in his day.  His works were performed by The King’s Men, and got good receptions, and clearly King James I liked them.   But when in 1599 he left the company and moved back to live in Stratford, he stopped writing.  As far as we know, no one came banging on his door, asking him to produce more plays and sonnets.  Indeed it was another 150 years before the reputation that Shakespeare has today was openly being expressed.

So my point is, opinions change, and art is created within varying contexts, appreciated by different people in different ways a different times.

Thus when Ms Greer states that, “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet” is a statement without any justification or logical argument, it is perfectly reasonable to reply, “Does it matter?”   For we can also move into discussions about how different people value different art at different times.

So my answer would be no, that doesn’t matter at all, because I find now (as I found when I first heard the line in 1966) it means something to me.   It speaks of nights when troubled by thoughts I would rather not have, I have laid awake in bed, my mind swirling into improbabilities and flittering half-thoughts and worries that I could not sweep aside.  It told me, when I heard that line, that I was not alone in having trouble getting to sleep, after coming home late in the night.   I wondered how my girlfriend could go straight to sleep and I couldn’t.  I was puzzled and worried.  Was I a freak in some way not being able to go to sleep?

In short, that one opening line spoke to me, and here I become ever more puzzled by the critic’s comments, for she says, that is one of the two key aspects of lyrics is “its mystery”.

So yes maybe, to quote Greer’s words, “The theme of love and death that permeates our entire literary tradition lies coiled upon itself in this tiny poem, capable at any moment of setting off a chain reaction in the mind.”

But then I might say for me that, “The theme of pondering what other people think also permeates our entire literary tradition and lies coiled upon itself in this one song, capable at any moment of setting off a chain reaction in the mind.”

Would I be wrong in that statement in relation to “Visions of Johanna”?  Ms Greer wrote that “When Morrissey sings a Morrissey song, he knows exactly what colour every part of every word is meant to be, and whether it crosses the rhythm to build up tension, or cannons into it to gain emphasis.”

But we really do need to remember that a Dylan song like “Visions of Johanna” is quite different because it is a song of uncertainty, of tricks, of denying reality, of temptation, of not having enough money to keep the heat and light running, of background music that is nothing more than, as its name says, background,  of not having the lover that one craves, of a mysterious “other” out there, in the shadows, of being trapped by the past….

Yes I think it does not harm to remember sometimes what a song is about.  As long as we have the wit to understand.

 

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No Nobel Prize for Music: How Dylan turned the strophic form into something new

Posted on June 5, 2025 by Tony Attwood

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 yesterdayI left my mind behindDown in the gypsy caféWith a friend of a friend of mineWho sat with a baby heavy on her kneeYet spoke of life most free from slaveryWith eyes that showed no trace of miseryA 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 meantWhen you were speaking to your manI can only think in terms of meAnd now I understandAfter waking enough times to think I seeThe holy kiss that's supposed to last eternityBlow up in smoke, it's destinyFalls on strangers, travels freeYes, I know now, traps are only set by meAnd I do not really need to be assured
That love is just a four-letter word

Strange it is to be beside youMany years the tables turnedYou'd probably not believe meIf I told you all I've learnedAnd it is very, very weird indeedTo hear words like forever, fleetsOf ships run through my mind, I cannot cheatIt's like looking in the teacher's face completeI 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….

 

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The Dylan Concert Index: August 1971

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Tony Attwood

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.

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My Own Version Of You part 2:   Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

by Jochen Markhorst

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:

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Bridging Generations: Why Bob Dylan Still Resonates in the Digital Age

Posted on June 3, 2025 by Tony Attwood

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

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It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – A History in Performance, Part 6: 2002 – 2010

Posted on June 3, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

 

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

 

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No Nobel Prize for Music 16. From “It’s all right” to “Angelina”. What happened?

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Tony Attwood

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….

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The Concert Series – (or perhaps the Concert Index)

Posted on June 1, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

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.

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The Philosophy of Modern Song 2: Pump it Up

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

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.

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My Own Version Of You (2020) part 1: Keys t’unlock my mind

Posted on May 30, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

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:

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