There is an index to current and past series on the home page.
By Tony Attwood
Part of my thesis in this series is that looking at Bob’s songs in the order in which he wrote them (which of course is quite different from the order in which they appeared on LPs) can give us a real insight into the way Bob was thinking about his music – and quite possibly about wider issues that he was considering.
For example, in 1964 and early 1965 Bob appeared to be focused very strongly on individualism, and the concept of moving on, as he composed a very varied set of songs, each of which in one way or another dealt with the individual doing what he wanted to do, irrespective of what his lover, his friends or indeed the rest of society said or did.
And he used this group of songs, all of which flow around the same subject to explore, to a greater or lesser extent, where else he could take the music to accompany his words.
The songs in question, in the order of composition were….
All I really want to do (102 performances, July 1964 to December 1978)
I’ll Keep it with Mine (never performed)
My Back Pages (260 performances, July 1978 to July 2012)
Gates of Eden (217 performances, October 1964 to March 2001)
It’s all right ma (772 performances, September 1964 to October 2013
If you gotta go, go now (9 performances, October 1964 to May 1965)
Farewell Angelina (never performed)
These are all songs of moving on and self-sufficiency, and they are interesting in that they not only adopt the topic of the individual doing what he wants, they also give opportunities for Bob to explore his compositional technique as indeed I have sought to show in my last two articles in this series…
So it is with interest I looked back to see the songs Bob composed after those two majestic pieces each of which changed both Bob’s lyrical topic and the way he composed the music.
And I find it interesting to note that the next song he composed was “If you gotta go” which is a sort of “take it or leave it” song – as it were taking “All I really want to do” but adding the fact that the other option is to stay all night. In fact we could say that while most other composers of popular music were writing about love and lost love Bob was writing about love having nothing to do with it, and the need to move on when you are ready.
Now leaving aside the coughing interruption in “All I really want to do”, what really strikes me even now, is that sudden introduction of the falsetto, surely a very un-Bob-like musical addition to the lyrical line.
Indeed, lyrically the song turns away from the deeper political thoughts of the Gates of Eden and the concept in “It’s alright ma” that “to understand you know too soon there is no sense in trying.” For now it seems there really is no sense in trying, for “all I really want to do is baby be friends with you”. That’s it – there is nothing more to achieve.
The lyrics thus once more take us by surprise, but then so does the music. For while “Gates of Eden” leaves us unsure what key the song is in, and “It’s Alright ma” gives us a song which by and large is without a melody, here suddenly we are back to a three chord song, with a clear melody and easily understood lyrics. But also with the opposite of the love and lost love message that so dominated popular music then, and indeed now.
For in “All I really want to do” we have the individual standing without a lover, but happy to have friends. And this is not the way of the pop music world where love and lost love are the dominant topics.
But there is more. For this time the convention of rhyme is twisted for instead of the rhyme being with the last word of the line it is with an earlier word, with the last word of the line being repeated as with…
I ain't lookin' to compete with you Beat or cheat or mistreat you Simplify you, classify you Deny, defy or crucify you All I really want to do Is, baby, be friends with you
Also intriguing is that the song 6/8 time -= again unusual for a song, as is the form of the song. For although Dylan has once more created a song in strophic form (ie verse – verse – verse etc) he has done it with four lines of verse and then two repeated chorus lines. But even with a fairly familiar form, what strikes us most of all is that this is the reverse of the love song. Most popular songs are love songs, and their form is verse and chorus. This is not an anti-love song- that would be a hate song – but a song that actually says I want to be friends, not your lover.
And of course maybe things are different in this regard in the USA, but here in the UK I rather think it is rare for a man in the UK to say I want to be friends not lovers; I think it is normally the woman who says that – (although I am getting on a bit so I could be wrong in this regard.)
So, an unusual Dylan song. A “let’s be friends” song, with the last two lines of each verse always the same, with a spot of falsetto, with two lines repeated and then a two-line chorus. Are there any other Dylan songs in this musical format?
So then we had Gates of Eden and It’s all right ma, which I have written about recently, and then suddenly Bob goes back to the issue of a relationship for “If you gotta go, go now” – an ultimatum to a potential lover. None of the usual pop song approaches to love – this is as brutal and direct as it can get.
“If you gotta go, go now” was probably Dylan’s last composition of the year (Jack o Diamonds was evolved from the sleeve notes to the “Another Side” album and the date of writing those is uncertain so I am leaving that out.
But in case anyone were to think that Bob had got his new directions out of his system with these radical songs, clearly he hadn’t because the first song of 1965 once again emphasised saying goodbye, moving on, and being oneself. The antithesis of the traditional pop song in fact. Bob also clearly hadn’t finished with using old folk songs, and odd elements of his own past compositions as a base for him music, as his next song Farewell Angelina, was to show. And indeed he was certainly ready to start exploring a few new chords as well. It was in fact as if with “Gates of Eden” and “It’s alright ma” he had spun off in new musical directions, and now was trying to reign himself back in toward his folk roots – but maybe not too much.
There is an index to current and past series on the home page.
Compiled by Tony Attwood
This is number 23 in this series which selects Dylan concerts from the internet, (aiming to offer one from each year), puts them in chronological order, and gives a link to a recording of the show in each case. (I think I miscounted previously, but this looks like number 23 to me).
This one is Madison, Wisconsin: 5 November 2012, the Alliant Energy Centre with Mark Knopfler and his band, and it contains a bit of politicising by Bob during the final song.
Those taking part are
Bob Dylan (vocal, guitar, grand piano & keyboard), Stu Kimball (guitar), Charlie Sexton (guitar), Donnie Herron (violin, mandolin, steel guitar), Tony Garnier (bass), George Recile (drums & percussion)
Mark Knopfler joins in on guitar for songs two to five as noted below.
From an idea by Jochen Markhorst; commentary by Tony Attwood
Prelude: Some two years ago Jochen wrote the article “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You: 7. The Philosophy Of Modern Song”. And more recently Jochen suggested that Untold Dylan should have a look at “The Philosophy of Modern Song” and maybe we should publish a commentary on the book, or perhaps a commentary or two on individual songs that Dylan highlighted.
I must admit I was unsure, but Jochen’s work has played such a major part in making Untold Dylan what it is, I always take note of what he says. And so when he declined the opportunity to write further on the subject I went and listened to the first song highlighted in the “Philosophy” book: “Detroit City”.
Being English, and being old, I actually can recall the song from the 1960s, and most probably what I heard was the Tom Jones version which was a hit in the UK.
And I must admit I did listen to that song with a touch of reluctance – I never felt there was anything in Tom Jones’ music for me, and I certainly don’t own any of his records. But I must confess I also have a thorough (irrational) dislike of any recording in which the singer stops singing and then drops into speaking over the music. Not for me!
So I am biased from the start, although I note that the book contains Dylan’s commentary on 66 songs by other artists so maybe it gets better. And it was the first book Dylan published after getting the Nobel Prize for Literature, which really makes me think I ought to study this book further. Not just because the author just had received that supreme award but also because the University of Northampton have recently suggested I might like to do a PhD with them on the subject of Bob Dylan. We are in discussions.
Thus, I listened, but at once I had to admit I became stuck. The book notes say it all – it is a song of a loser, someone who expects that by being in one place rather than another everything will be all right, instead of thinking, “here I am, it is all down to me, I am going to make this work.”
In fact it was interesting in that regard, in that I have come across many people who have the “if only this changed” syndrome. As in “if only I could get a job,” or “If only I could get a different job” or “if only my wife was less of a flirt,” or “if only he didn’t drink so much,” or….
I suspect most of us have come across such people – the people who seriously believe that all their worries and woes come from this one thing they can do nothing about. And of course, I know that analysing one’s own viewpoint is a really dodgy thing to do, not least because many of us mislead ourselves much of the time. But honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had these sorts of feeling. Yes I wanted to be a pop star. Or a songwriter. Or maybe a book writer. Or maybe a writer of adverts. And in the end I was, not because of any massive talent, but because I just kept trying. And indeed enough to earn a decent living.
And then, to stop myself from being trapped sitting at my desk typing on the computer all day every day, I have nurtured several hobbies which are as far from writing as one might imagine. One of them I’ve mentioned a few times: dancing modern jive. I dance four or five nights a week. Football and rural walks are also in the mix.
My friends know this is what I do, and of course, I occasionally encourage them to try dancing, but rather than give it a go (even if they have nothing particular to do of an evening) they refuse, giving the same old excuses about being genetically incapable of dancing (“two left feet” is the expression used in England – maybe in other parts of the world too).
In short, we live in a world in which many people limit their own ability to do things, by having fixed negative views. Views that might be that “I can’t dance” or as in this song, everything will be fine if only I can go back to my old home town. I was happy there.
And of course, we all know this is nonsense. It’s just an excuse. Like saying “I would have passed that exam if only I’d had a better teacher.” Or “I only failed my car driving test because I had a rubbish car to practice driving in.” Or anything.
We all of us make excuses, but (and I think this is the big point) some people make a lot more excuses than others, and some simply never get up and try. And so their lives become a sort of mono-vision in which they do the same thing day after day expressing the same regrets and negative thoughts, day after day.
You might have experienced that with people’s reactions to Dylan too. “I just can’t stand his voice,” some say, after listening to maybe just one or two songs sung by Dylan, while calming a crying child, feeding the cat or working out where that last $100 went.
In short, I see the individual with the viewpoint that, “if only I could go home everything would be fine” as a person who is a failure. Of course, there are many things each of us can’t do – I can’t paint a picture with any chance of it looking anything other than an utterly embarrassing work done by a seven-year-old, for example. But at least I have tried, and then subsequently instead I found other things I can do.
But in this song, the singer is getting drunk in bars – he’s not even trying! And he’s making me very annoyed!! Indeed even the sickly-sweet music can’t distract me from that message.
Of course, our views of ourselves are never really accurate, but for what it is worth, my self-vision is that I really do try different things, rather than just reject them. I suspect Bob Dylan has that same self-vision (although in his case combined of course with an infinitely larger dose of sheer talent than I could ever muster).
So why does Bob pick this song? I wish someone would tell me. For what it makes me want to do is write a song that says the opposite. That I am here, I have a problem, I am going to deal with it and make the best of everything I can. So I guess my questions at this point are not only “Why does Dylan focus on this song?” but also “What can be said about it?”
I really don’t like the way the song changes key, just jumping from one key to the next without any attempt at modulation – that goes against all my musical feelings (and indeed all that I was taught as a young musician). It is also something Bob never does. And I don’t like self-pity – which again Bob never puts into his songs. I find it sweet to the point of being sickly. And finally, I hate songs where the singing stops and the singer delivers what is meant to be a deep and meaningful spoken interlude. For to me that is neither deep nor meaningful.
I spent yesterday playing “It’s alright ma” as I wrote my article about it and now after a lot of listening to “It’s alright ma” I find “Detroit City” is the antithesis of “It’s alright ma”. At the end of “Its aright”, Dylan says, “It’s life and life only” which I have always taken to mean, no matter what happens, get up and get on with things. If you don’t like it, change it. Or put in the colloquial form in my country, “Shit happens, deal with it”.
All of which leaves me asking, what can one say about a song like “Detroit City”? How can one write about it apart from saying that instead of wanting to face reality and make something happen, the person in the song wants to run away and go back home? Which is the exact opposite of what Dylan has done. Is that maybe Dylan’s point? Have I simply been very stupid, and failed to grasp the issue all along?
Dylan ain’t no false prophet and he brings the Light. But note: I may be here forever / I may not be here at all.
Spring 2025 marks 60 years since the conception of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” and the song is again, still, on the setlist. As well as one of the many pleasant surprises during Dylan’s gigs at the Outlaw Music Festival May 2025: Willie Dixon’s “Axe and The Wind”, a rather obscure deep-cut recorded by George “Wild Child” Butler in 1966 and not released until 1968, without too much success. A remarkable choice, but at first glance it does fit into the list of outsiders Dylan apparently wants to delight his audience with especially during that annual concert series.
In 2024, we heard rockabilly hits such as Sanford Clark’s “The Fool” and Dave Dudley’s “Six Days On The Road”, and the doo-wop classic “Mr. Blue” by The Fleetwoods, and in 2025 Jerry Lee Lewis’ country tearjerker “I’ll Make It All Up To You”, a wonderful version of Bobby Bland’s soul ballad “Share Your Love With Me” and The Pogues’ heartthrob “A Rainy Night in Soho” (the song Nick Cave sang at Shane MacGowan’s funeral in 2023)… The eclectic music taste we remember from Theme Time Radio Hour’s DJ Dylan permeates the setlists and the motivation seems identical: missionary zeal, a mild form of saviour complex perhaps, the urge to dust off gems in order to save them from oblivion.
Dylan – Axe and The Wind – live 15 May 2025
However, with all due respect to Willie Dixon and George “Wild Child” Butler, and to Dylan’s sympathetic – and successful – drive to bring them back into the limelight as well: “Axe and The Wind” is a rather generic blues. The choice seems mainly motivated by the song’s final words:
You can never tell
Which way the axe gon' fall
I may be here forever
I may not be here at all
… which perhaps initially takes us back to the old, mysterious, wondrous 1967 Basement discovery “I’m Not There”, but more intriguingly still: they are words with the same immortality/transiency duality as Dylan’s message to Ralph Stanley, as the congratulatory telegram he sends 9 November 1996 to the jubilant Dr Ralph Stanley. In his autobiography, Dr Stanley reveals the contents and interprets Dylan’s deeper message:
“They had a big celebration for me in Nashville in honor of my fiftieth anniversary as a professional musician. There was a fancy reception at the Country Music Hall of Fame, with all kinds of friends from down through the years and former Clinch Mountain Boys there to greet me. Then I played a show with my band at the Grand Ole Opry. During the show, Opry host Del Reeves announced to the crowd he had a telegram “a special fan” had sent from New York City. The telegram said:
“DEAR DR. RALPH.
THE FIELDS HAVE TURNED BROWN.
NOT FOR YOU, THOUGH.
YOU’LL LIVE FOREVER.
BEST WISHES, BOB DYLAN.”
“That was something I didn’t expect, and it was a wonderful surprise. I know what Bob meant in his message, and it really touched my heart. I know he meant my music would be around long after I’m dead and gone.” (Man Of Constant Sorrow, written with Eddie Dean, 2007)
That same immortality/transiency duality as I may be here forever / I may not be here at all, and Ralph Stanley’s interpretation does make sense: “He meant my music would be around long after I’m dead and gone.” But then, of course, that requires relay runners, disciples who put “The Fields Have Turned Brown” on the setlist or keep it alive in some other way. Relay runners, torch bearers, or, expressed a little more respectfully, prophets.
And Dylan is, let’s not forget, such a prophet – the prophet who proclaims the gospel of Deep Truths and of the Light in the Darkness, as he confesses in his own “False Prophet” and on Rough And Rowdy Ways (2020) anyway. Meaning the Light in the Darkness and the Deep Truths we find in songs: Robert Johnson and Big Joe Turner, Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt, Furry Lewis and Leroy Carr, Bob Wills and Elvis, Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmie Rodgers, the Child Ballads and the Baptist Hymns, Tampa Red and Bobby Bland and Shane MacGowan and Jerry Lee Lewis and The Stanley Brothers… they show the Way, tell the Truth and promise the Life, and the Prophet spreads this Gospel.
In May 2025, the Prophet celebrates his 84th birthday, thus facing his own impermanence. It seems both to reinforce his missionary zeal and influence his choice of repertoire. Songs that invite melancholic reflections on the audience’s relationship and shared history with the artist, such as “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Things Have Changed”, songs that we may now understand as announcing a farewell, such as “I’ll Make It All Up To You” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, and songs that the Prophet, with appropriate immodesty, wants to save from oblivion, songs that should be around long after I’m dead and gone, songs like “Desolation Row” and “All Along The Watchtower” and “Blind Willie McTell” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”. The category to which he then apparently includes “It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry”.
Well, the old Prophet has a point there – it is a song for eternity, a song that will be around long after I’m dead and gone. The mail train keeps a-rollin’.
Dylan – It Takes a Lot to Laugh – live 15 May 2025:
———–
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
“No Nobel Prize For Music” is a series of articles reflecting on the fact that when commentators write about Dylan’s compositions they tend to engage fulsomely with the issue of his lyrics, but less commonly consider his music in the same depth. In this series, I try to rectify this to some degree. A list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.
By Tony Attwood
In my recent articles I have been arguing that Dylan’s “My Back Pages” was the moment when Bob very fulsomely announced to anyone interested, that he was going to change his approach to music, and would be moving on. He would, in short, abandon his style of writing songs in the standard folk music style of the 1960s, and move onto something quite different.
That he did this is easy to see with his next composition, “Gates of Eden”, and as I have tried to explore in my last article in this series, Bob not only achieved this through his lyrics but also with his approach to music. For in this song he abandoned the traditional major and minor keys in which pop, folk and rock music had been written for years, moving instead to something more in line with the Dorian mode which had dominated music until to time of JS Bach.
However, Dylan didn’t stick exactly to the strictures of the Dorian Mode in his writing, but allowed himself free reign, which resulted in one of the most revolutionary pieces of music supposedly in the rock genre that had been written up to that point.
But the question then was, how does one follow up on a revolutionary masterpiece? The answer, “by writing another revolutionary masterpiece,” sounds rather obvious, but when we look at the chronology of Dylan’s compositions, this is exactly what he did. For after writing “Gates of Eden” he wrote, “It’s all right ma”.
Indeed if we look at the sequence of Dylan’s compositions at this time, we can see how he suddenly moved across to the notion of leaving and moving on. One only has to play a recording of “My Back Pages” and then a recording of “Gates of Eden” and contemplate the fact that these songs were written one after the other, to perceive the change that had happened within Dylan’s thinking.
And just in case we might be tempted to think that “Gates” was a one-off, a clever idea out on its own, we just then need to listen to It’s all right ma to see that this notion makes no sense at all. The only way to perceive Dylan’s writing of the music at this time is to accept the message of “I was so much older then” as a rejection of that period that many of us go in early days through in which we really think we know it all, and recognise the music starting with “Gates of Eden” as the new dawn in Dylan’s compositional ability.
Of course on this site we have considered “It’s alright ma” over the years from a lyrical point of view, but here I want to think about this song as a musical composition which is part of the new land that Dylan is now exploring – an exploration that began with “Gates of Eden” and now continues apace.
To know exactly how the effect of the music is achieved I can do no better than refer you to Dylan Chords which has (as ever) a masterpiece of analysis enabling anyone who wishes to play it as Dylan does, so to do. And if I may lift a comment from that analysis, if you are not a musician, you can take it that, “The verses mostly consist of a descending bass line played on the fifth string.”
Now my point is not in any way to extend the complete analysis in that article, because of course it cannot be extended, but rather to come back to my key point, that Bob had proclaimed that he was now no longer writing songs in the tradition of the folk music revival, as he had done for his albums “Freewheelin” and “Another Side” but he was now truly travelling a new path: his own path.
This he was doing lyrically with openings such as
Of war and peace the truth just twists Its curfew gull just glides Upon four-legged forest clouds The cowboy angel rides
from “Gates of Eden” and
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
from “It’s Alright Ma”. That we know and has been contemplated here and elsewhere many times. But what I feel we must also note is that Dylan was also changing the construction of the music. In fact, as I have previously noted, all the chordal rules that dominated the folk music revival were jettisoned in “Gates of Eden” and replaced by a chord sequence that sounds more in tune with the modes of the mediaeval period than the major and minor chords of the later centuries.
And now Bob went a stage further and by using the descending bass takes us through a set of chords that cannot be described in simple terms of major and minor, their effect being dominated by the descending bass. If you wish to follow it in a written out form, then Dylanchords gives the best representation I have seen.
D 000232
G/b 02003x (or -0 or -3)
Csus2 030030
Bb6 x1000x (or x10030 or -x)
F/d 000211
G/d 000433
A 202220
but for something simpler you could just add a descending bass line on a guitar or keyboard instrument. Indeed a version on a piano that plays a bass line of
D
Darkness at the break of noon
C#
Shadows even the silver spoon
C
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
B
Eclipses both the sun and moon
Bb
To understand you know too soon
A D
There is no sense in trying
But there is an important point; Dylan bade farewell to the old way of writing both lyrically and musically when he composed Gates of Eden, exactly as he suggested he would in “My Back Pages”. As a result in “Gates” he used the chords that were simply not part of compositions based on the recent folk revival.
However now, as if that had not been enough to make his point, Dylan now started using chords that no one else was using at all – chords that emerged from the descending bass line, while at the same time, the melody was reduced to little more than one note – with the exception of the occasional inflection down a tone or two.
Now this too is an important point. Folk songs, often being performed unaccompanied, are all about the melody and the lyrics, Here melody is abandoned and evereything is dominated by the lyrics holding onto one note as the bass descends deeper and deeper. There is in fact, no melody to speak of, while in earlier songs the melody was much closer to our concept of what folk music melodies should be. Indeed even “Mr Tambourine Man” which is closely associated with “Gates of Eden” and “It’s alright ma” through being released on the same side of the same album, still has an alluring melody, and chords that are clearly related to the key of D in which Dylan performed the song.
But now we have go to the point of a lack of melody, and instead we have a recitation that fits exactly with the lyrics. In effect only three notes are used against the first 100 words….
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying
Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying
Thus this is in fact an abandonment of the main musical elements of a song (by which I mean melody, rhythm and accompanying chords. There is no melody to speak of, in fact, the rhythm is simply the rhythm of the words. (And I would add a point here: if you want to explore further what Dylan has done, take the lyrics of “Mr Tambourine Man” and recite them as if a poem. Then do the same for “It’s Alright Ma” and the effect is totally different – to recite the latter song in any way other than as a continuing drive forward – there is no lyricism implied at all. In short as a poem the lyrics would be the same as they are in the song. They have their own implicit rhythm.
In fact on the recording, the only thing that is changing alongside the lyrics is the bass which descends, giving us a sense that singer and the world he is singing about, are there, held tight wiithin a structure, part of the world but still somehow reflecting upon the world.
Of course, the brilliance of this is enhanced by the contrast of a semi-chorus (semi in the sense that the music is constant but the lyrics change, except for the main part of the title line. But the key point is that musically the final three lines have such a level of contrast with the music of the verses that they do sound as if they are intended to be the chorus, and the major pronoucement of the song, even though the lyrics change each time…
So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing
There is also the extraordinary brilliance of the changed rhythm for the title words in the third line of the “chorus” as each one is accented, followed bythe pause before the crowing glory
As for the rhyming pattern of the song, that is again different from anything we had heard before. It runs
A, A, A, A, A, B
C, C, C, C, B
D, D, D, D, D, B
E, E, F
But there are more complexities within for there are variations in the number of lines within each verse. The six-line verses become five-line verses for example, but the power of the song and Dylan’s delivery of it, are such that we are simply driven along without noticing any such changes in the structure.
Overall what we have is Dylan removing the melody as a key part of the song at this point, but instead letting the driving energy of the recitation take us through to its ultimate conclusion, not as the title suggests, “I’m only bleeding” but rather “It’s life and life only”. And as such with the energy that builds up within the song, we are carried forward in the knowledge that there is no escape. It happens all around us everyday, it moves on and on until we get to the extraordinary message at the conclusion of the song
And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only
which demands a powerful upbeat musical conclusion which the construction of that three-line postscript to each verse delivers.
It is the driving energy within the music matches the lyrics perfectly, which makes us ignore the complete lack of melody, and yet makes this a spectacular song, even though the spectacle we witness is that it is people that are the problem. For as the final lines point out
I’m only sighing
I can make it
It’s life, and life only
And the fact is that were there to be any melody it would get in the way of the power of this message, for the rhythm and the rhyme contain all the power that we need as the message becomes clearer and clearer. This is not a protest song; there is no message of hope for the future if only we rise up and change the world.
In short, there is no dream; simply this is life. This is what we have, this is all you get. Life goes on and on and on – which is exactly what the music does, it stays on that same basic chord with the chord changes primarily implied from the descending bass, so yes there are changes beneath, but they just keep taking us round and round in circles.
Thus the composer who we previously found was telling us that times were not only changing but changing for the better is now telling us that “There is no sense in trying.” The world, it seems, is what it is. It goes its own way. We are born, we die, nothing is sacred, and “It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge.”
Which is why the music has to be reduced to a minimum. A melody within this song would destroy the message, for it would suggest variance and change when in fact thjere is nothing to show him.
And even worse
"if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
which is why that melody is almost all on one note while underneath the bass continues its descent. Because as the ending of the song tells us, this weird and dangerous world out there is the one that we live in every day.
This is number 21 in this series which selects Dylan concerts from the internet, puts them in chronological order, and gives a link to them. And this time I’ve picked the concert that is said by many to be the worst ever Dylan performance.
I’m not going to agree or defend the concert – this series is simply about making it easier to find concerts from across the years in order to be able to consider the way performances have changed. But I would say that if you have a moment, have a listen to “Shelter from the storm”. For me this version offers another insight into the song that I hadn’t gained before.
One other point I would add: in this case though I am not at all sure that the opening track is “New Morning”, but I have left it listed as such as that is what the source says. If you have a different idea please do write in; I’m not sure what it is.
But, to get back to the main point, the aim of course is to have at least one recording of a gig from each year that Bob has been touring. So a list of the concerts to which we’ve already put links is given below.
If there are any concerts you would particularly like to recommend and which are freely available on-line, please do write to me: Tony@schools.co.uk with the details.
1. New Morning????
2. Lay Lady Lay
3. All Along The Watchtower
4. Shelter From The Storm
5. Gotta Serve Somebody
6. Wiggle Wiggle
7. When I Paint My Masterpiece
8. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
9. Trail Of The Buffalo
10. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
11. Mr. Tambourine Man
12. Bob Dylan’s Dream
13. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
14. Everything Is Broken
15. I Believe In You
16. Highway 61 Revisited –
17. What Good Am I?
18. Ballad Of A Thin Man
Here is the list of concerts so far is given below. If by any chance you go to look at one and find the link does not work, I’d be very grateful if you could email Tony@schools.co.uk with not only the link, but also where you are in the world. Thanks.
“I basically do anything or nothing depending on what the song is calling for,” says Charlie Sexton in the interview with Arlene R. Weiss for Guitar International in October 2002. “One of the main things I try to achieve when I’m doing that kind of work, is I just serve the song.” The self-analysis echoes some 20 years later when his employer dishes out a eulogy to Charlie in the New York Times interview of 12 June 2020. It’s as if you can read each other’s minds, says interviewer Douglas Brinkley;
“As far as Charlie goes, he can read anybody’s mind. Charlie, though, creates songs and sings them as well, and he can play guitar to beat the band. There aren’t any of my songs that Charlie doesn’t feel part of and he’s always played great with me. “False Prophet” is only one of three 12-bar structural things on this record. Charlie is good on all the songs. He’s not a show-off guitar player, although he can do that if he wants. He’s very restrained in his playing but can be explosive when he wants to be. It’s a classic style of playing. Very old school. He inhabits a song rather than attacking it. He’s always done that with me.”
… just as it mirrors guitarist Blake Mills’ analysis, following his first studio experiences with Dylan when recording Rough And Rowdy Ways: “Dylan doesn’t tell you exactly what to play. He does expect you to play what needs to be played. That may seem the same, but it’s a world of difference” (interview with Kurt Blondeel for Belgian magazine Knack, 9 March 2021). And in that, in playing what needs to be played, Charlie Sexton is a grand master – in this respect perhaps the best guitarist ever to stand on stage alongside Dylan. Which, by the way, could also be a key to the background of Dylan’s somewhat gloomy but ultimately correct future prediction in the booklet accompanying Biograph in 1985: “I’d like to see Charlie Sexton become a big star, but the whole machine would have to break down right now before that would happen.”
By “the machine” Dylan is referring to the music industry and the commercialisation of rock ‘n’ roll (“Now it’s just rock, capital R, no roll, the roll’s gone”), suggesting that being a great, pure rock ‘n’ roll musician has become irrelevant. But a more prosaic explanation for why Sexton never became a “big star” seems more obvious: nice guys finish last. There is not a trace of controversy around Charlie Sexton – which has been a prerequisite for admission to Olympus since time immemorial. Charlie does not shock with androgynous presentation or sexual ambiguity, does not flirt with religious taboos or challenge societal sacred cows, no sensitive politics, self-aggrandisement or self-destruction… Charlie feels part of the song – he is always subordinate to the song.
Dylan fans are not too sad about his inability to become a superstar. Sexton’s contributors to Dylan’s output from 1999 to 2002 as well as those in Charlie’s second stint 2009-2019 are masterful, mood- and colour-defining exercises by the former prodigy who, thanks to his peculiar life trajectory, at 50, in 2018, is a veteran with 40 years of wide-ranging experience. “Charlie is good on all the songs,” Dylan says, and that’s true. Audiences are grateful for the splashy rock injections into classics like “Stuck Inside Of Mobile” in the 2009 tour, fans admire the restrained, tasteful guitar parts on Tempest (“Scarlet Town”!), the ingenious tapestries of sound on “Love And Theft”, sound and old-time mastery on Rough And Rowdy Ways (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”! ), and everyone takes their hat off to Charlie’s breathtaking colouring of “Not Dark Yet” at the 2019 concerts – arguably the most perfect, blood-curdling performances of the song since its conception in 1997.
Not Dark Yet
And who knows, maybe we owe the glorious 2018 return of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” on the setlist to Charlie, too. “He’s not a show-off guitar player, although he can do that if he wants,” Dylan says in 2020, and good employment practice dictates that you have to give your valued employees space from time to time – which Charlie gets in those 84 wonderful performances between Christchurch 2018 and Washington 2019.
The song has become a hypnotic slow blues rocker. The Texan axegrinder in Sexton awakens, and as the tour progresses, we hear more and more of what Sexton learned from Stevie Ray Vaughn and how much DNA he shares with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons; shimmering, cutting off-beat incisions and two daily varying, but always exciting solos (after the second verse and as a finale). A long string of gems, those 84 performances. Berlin 4 April 2019 is brilliant. As is Prague, five days later. From Paris 12 April, the sound quality is less, but here we see Charlie in action:
It Takes a Lot to Laugh Paris April 2019:
Post-Corona, the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2025, means goodbye again to Charlie Sexton and with him to “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” as well. Though it’s a farewell on reflection and on second thought; the very first two concerts of that endless tour still have the song on the setlist, both times as a final encore (Milwaukee and Chicago, 2 and 3 November ‘21). Remarkably, in doing so, the man-who-never-repeats himself chooses exactly the same arrangement, exactly the same groove and exactly the same space for the guitar solo as in 2019. But Bob Britt, for all his qualities, is no Charlie Sexton – or at least, that’s what Dylan seems to think when he dismisses the song after only two attempts. We will not hear the song again in the remaining 248 concerts of the 2021-2025 World Wide Tour.
But once again history repeats itself for the man-who-never-repeats himself: at the start of the next concert series, Dylan’s contribution to the 37 shows of Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival, among such even bigger surprises as The Pogues’ “A Rainy Night in Soho” and “Blind Willie McTell” and Charlie Rich’s “I’ll Make It All Up To You”, we are surprised by the return of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” to the setlist. In again the same slow blues-rock arrangement. And Dylan still misses Charlie; at the first performance, Phoenix 13 May 2025, we see Britt making preparations to fill the space between the second and third verse with a guitar solo, but he is brutally hammered away by a clearly improvised piano solo by Dylan. It’s being evaluated, apparently: at the second concert, two days later in California’s Chula Vista, Bob Britt will then be allowed to do his thing. Though only on the fallow land after the second verse, for now. After the last words of the last verse, there will be no finale, so no second guitar solo either.
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:
A list of previous articles in this series is provided at the foot of the piece.
My last outing in this series: Dylan goes Gothic and the world ends, dealt with Dylan’s dramatic move from his final rejection of the old way of seeing the world, and indeed his old way of perceiving how to write a song, with a review of his announcement of moving on in My back pages and then (in one of his most dramatic changes ever), moving from that classically constructed song to the anarchic Gates of Eden the lyrics of which incorporate seemingly protesting against the entire western world as it now exists, while examining the cult of individualism, and the contemplation of a world that makes no sense.
And perhaps most dramatically and importantly of all, it can be argued that that song was a song outside of the normal structure of major and minor keys,while the opening seemingly meaningless lyrical lines describe a chaotic unstructured world:
Of war and peace the truth just twists its curfew gull just glides Upon four-legged forest clouds The cowboy angel rides
But perhaps even more extraordinarily, for an audience brought up perhaps on the traditions of follk music and rock music, here the music refuses to obey the normal constraints of major and minor keys, or indeed the standard patterns of the pop, rock and the blues. We can hear this particularly well in this 1988 version:
The one thing we can say for sure is that the song is strophic: verse, verse, verse etc through nine verses. These verses are conventionally published as having seven lines…
At dawn my lover comes to me And tells me of her dreams With no attempts to shovel the glimpse Into the ditch of what each one means At times I think there are no words But these to tell what's true And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden
But in effect the performances reveal the song to be made up of four line verses…
At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
into the ditch of what each one means At times I think there are no words but these to tell what's true And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden
Although this structure is maintained, the rhyming scheme itself is varied (which is unusual within popular and folk music). Using the four-line format we start with A A B C, and a consistency for the listener is obtained, by having each verse end with the title of the song.
Indeed by verse four we have an established rhyming pattern of A (lamp), B (Calf), B (laugh), C (Eden)
But in the following verse (“Relationships of ownership”) we have a variation in the rhyme: A A A B (wings, kings, sings, Eden).
After that for the remaining verses, we have a mixture of these three different rhyming schemes. This is not to suggest that in listening to the song either initially or after having heard it many times, we are that conscious of the changing rhyming scheme, but rather that these changes sit in the background of our consciousness as we are faced by a set of lyrics that at first hearing make no obvious sense.
So overall what we have is a powerful guitar part using a set of chords which challenges the conventional notions of key as perceived in folk and popular music, a set of verses set out in traditional strophic form (verse, verse, verse with no chorus, but a repeated end line), lyrics for which the meaning is at best often obscure, and sometimes impenetrable, but at the same time a sense of regularity across nine verses all of which are of identical musical form, and with identical musical accompaniment, and which end with the same four words.
Beyond this musical structure, the meaning of the lyrics can of course be debated, but the meaning, or perhaps one might say the “essence” of the lyrics, is one of a powerful, unending drive – a feeling of continuity expressed particularly by the repeated last line. No matter what we look at, or how little sense it makes, the last line suggests, we won’t really understand anything unless we enter the Gates of Eden (the essence of which is left undefined by the song’s lyrics).
Hence the music, being unerringly strophic, does indeed provide a stability that contrasts with the constantly unexplained and indeed inexplicable images and metaphors. Thus we start with
Of war and peace the truth just twists its curfew gull just glides Upon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides
and end with
At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
into the ditch of what each one means At times I think there are no words but these to tell what's true And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden
The notion in those last lines that our dreams as they stand, without interpretation, are the closest we get to understanding what is inside the Gates of Eden (wherein lies all truth), or perhaps what the Gates of Eden are, give the sense of constancy and continuity beyond this life, which contrasts dramatically with everything expressed in the previous 338 words. But so overpowering and dominating is the overall musical experience for many listeners, that wave after wave of imagery can be accepted, either in this performance which lasts three and a quarter minutes, or in the album version which performed at a completely different speed, is over three quarters as long again.
As a result, when listened to after the performance above the original album version has a bleak empty quality.
Beyond any doubt this song took Dylan, and indeed the music he composed (whether we call it folk, contemporary folk or anything else) into another previously unexplored level of songwriting. And here I think it is helpful to put this composition within the context of Dylan’s other writing at the time.
The songs composed around this time in the chronological order of composition (with a very short description of the subject matter in parenthesis) were.
Gates of Eden (Protest, individualism, a world that makes no sense)
It’s all right ma – (Protest; Individualism, again, a world that makes no sense)
To summarise my previously offered comments within this series of articles, “I’ll keep it with mine” was a song about needing to be an individual and not follow leaders. “My back pages” focussed again on the individual, this time adding the concept that in a world that makes no sense, only the individual counts.
But what has happened here is that Dylan has attempted (very successfully I would suggest) to write the music in a form that is still readily understandable to us. For while others have moved into the field of the avant-garde, Dylan retains the musical form and structure of the folk song, while extending this structure further than has been seen before.
However, in considering the songs we must also note that not only has the form been stretched, the lyrics have moved on to explore areas of consciousness that are not (and indeed I suggest have not been) part of the normal landscape of lyrics for songs of any category or type. But meanwhile, the music, (although fully understandable and acceptable to the audience to whom Dylan was directing his work), is no longer firmly in a recognisable key. And indeed the convention of writing the song’s lyrics out as a set of seven-line verses emphasises this (although of course, I do recognise it could be argued that this convention is established simply to emphasise the different nature of this song from all that has gone before).
So in effect, with this one song, Dylan has torn up the notion of what we might consider a song in the “popular” or “folk” vein to be. He has not done so by taking us into the avant-garde genre, which could have the danger of alienating critics and fans alike, but despite the new ground covered, Dylan made the song accessible enough for those attracted to his music to enjoy it, to want to buy the LP and to want to hear Dylan perform more and more variations of his music on stage.
Indeed, to show just how different this work was from the dominant form of popular music of the day we might note that the album containing this song was released on 22 March 1965. The popular songs of that month included “King of the Road” by Roger Miller, “Can’t you hear my heartbeat?” by Herman’s Hermits, “Stop in the Name of Love,” by the Supremes, “Ferry Cross The Mersey” by Gerry and the Pacemakers, and “Goodnight” by Roy Orbison.
This of course is not a definitive list, but these songs were featured heavily in the selection of the music that was available to an interested radio listener in North America and the UK, at the time Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home” was released.
But Dylan was not the only experimenter at the time in terms of popular music. To take one example, Roy Orbison’s song “Goodnight” which comes from this period and which wsa a chart hit, is a song that breaks away from the tradition of verse-chorus songs, and replaces this by a song which is closer to the through-composed tradition of the Romantic era.
To take another example from this same year we have “King of the Road” in which the emphasis is on retaining the traditional approach of a strophic song while adding variations within the production, with the finger clicks, and variations to the accompaniment, as established by the second verse. Through this, we, as listeners, are invited to appreciate the subject of the piece and his personality. Musically the interest is retained by the additions to the accompaniment, which is then reduced at the end.
The emphasis here is on the overall sound, and the memorable lyrics, with the equally memorable title line, and the fact that the opening verse appears three times within the performance.
The song in short establishes a simple image of a person’s life with a highly memorable melody and unique accompaniment, none of which is part of Dylan’s presentation of “Gates of Eden”. And yet we should note, both songs written and released in the same year.
From this, it is easy to see that Dylan was establishing a completely new and different musical as well as lyrical tradition, far away from popular music, and equally far removed (again both lyrically and musically) from folk music.
Thus the musical form of Dylan’s “Gates of Eden” has some similarities with that of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”, for both are strophic songs (ie verse, verse, verse etc) although Miller’s song is shorter, and has eight verses, of which three are identical. But also we should note that musically, Miller’s song fits completely within the pop song tradition of a song based around three chords that are immediately recognisable as the three main chords of the key in which the song is played.
The rhyming scheme (which in almost all popular songs helps hold the piece together musically, and make it memorable for the listener) is predominantly AABB, although every other verse breaks this to allow the verse to end “King of the Road”.
Thus both are songs from the same year, with both using the musical structure that we can immediately recognise as a song, and yet through Dylan’s use of unexpected chords, a melody we might call “more jagged,” a beat that is persistent and which removes all “swing” from the song, we have two songs in 4/4 time which are utterly different from each other in terms of their music and their lyrics.
But more than this. Dylan offers us a song which appears to challenge every concept about our lives in the 20th century. “King of the Road” suggests that even though some people are without a home or job, they can still be happy; a theme which helps to establish and maintain the viability of capitalism as a reasonable underlying structure in our society. Dylan rejects this notion by making the song’s lyrics difficult to interpret. For Dylan suggests the notion that we can look at the world and see what it all means, is false. For how else can we interpret “Of war and peace the truth just twists, its curfew gull just glides; Upon four-legged forest clouds, the cowboy angel rides”?
And my prime point here is that these are both songs, presented in a form that is instantly recognisable as a “song”. Indeed one doesn’t need to be a musician to say, “This is a song”. But in each case, the message is put across not just by the lyrics, but also by the music. To reduce things to the most simple of terms, “King of the Road” is light, simple, based around three chords and with a sense of swing. “Gates of Eden” is edgy, with a sense of uncertainty and with five chords in the first line alone. Thus in each case the feel of each song is achieved not just by the lyrics, but also by the music.
It is of course impossible for us to hear either song without knowing the lyrics, but if we can try and imagine this for a moment, the implications and meanings of the songs are still there. My point is thus that both Miller’s and Dylan’s music as much as the lyrics tell us the meaning, within and behind the song. In the former, everything is fine, even the huge social and financial differences between the king of the road, and the rest of society. In the latter, the message is, “Don’t be fooled, we have nothing, we know nothing, we are nothing. There is only knowledge and satisfaction beyond the Gates of Eden.”
Which when we start to think about it, produces a momentary challenge for those operating radio stations. Which message are they trying to put across? Of course, they don’t openly debate the issues raised by Gates of Eden, since most radio stations just play the songs related to the three classic subjects of popular music: love, lost love and dance. When songs contain, as “Gates of Eden does” a message about the state of the world and how we might feel about that, the choices of those running radio stations are extraordinarily important.
Likewise when a song opens with one chord (G) followed by two which are not chords related to that opening chord (D minor and F) and then before we can even take that in, returns to the key implied by the opening chord (C, G) we are confused and lost and even if we don’t fully realise it, we are asking “What on earth is going on?” Or indeed “Where am I?”
(And a personal PS: for having spent quite a while writing and re-writing the above article, this recording now speaks to me more directly than any other. So yes, just in case you ever wondered, the writer can be affected by his research and the resultant words. Or at least this writer can).
This is number 20 in this series which selects Dylan concerts from the internet, puts them in chronological order, and gives a link to them.
So as I have said before, there’s nothing original here, except for the fact that I was unable to find another site that had compiled a list of concert recordings, so that if for any reason one suddenly wanted to know what Bob was sounding like in any particular year, or indeed you simply wanted to relive a concert you had been to, or you just like listening to Dylan concerts, you could find something to help you, fairly quickly.
The aim of course is to have at least one recording of a gig from each year that Bob has been touring. So a list of the concerts to which we’ve already put links is given below.
If there are any concerts you would particularly like to recommend and which are freely available on-line, please do write to me: Tony@schools.co.uk with the details.
Today’s concert is Paris, 8 April 2009. There is a particularly interesting recording of “It’s alright ma” which gives a feel that it really is all right, because life is going on no matter what. This is just how it is.
Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again
Sugar Baby
It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
Beyond the Horizon
Highway 61 Revisited
The Times We’ve Known (Charles Aznavour)
Thunder on the Mountain
Like a Rolling Stone
All Along the Watchtower
Spirit on the Water
Blowin’ in the Wind
Here is the list of concerts so far is given below. If by any chance you go to look at one and find the link does not work, I’d be very grateful if you could email Tony@schools.co.uk with not only the link, but also where you are in the world. Thanks.
Details of the articles on Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden and It’s Alright Ma, appear at the end of the article.
By Mike Johnson
[I read somewhere that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the fifth article on the fourth and final track, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series here: ]
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Dylan songs are often not as straightforward as they seem. What could be more straightforward than ‘strike another match, go start anew,’ or ‘leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you’ or indeed the refrain, ‘it’s all over now, baby blue’?
However, when we unpack the first few lines of the song, we find other things going on.
Take the first words: ‘You must leave now …’ This could be an instruction, ‘get on your way’ or ‘get out now’ but it could also be an acknowledgement that fate is moving her on (‘something calls for you’). So he’s not kicking her out, rather she is the one who has to move on and all she has to do is recognize it. Both interpretations are possible. This ambiguity runs through the whole song.
In the second half of the line ‘take what you need, you think will last.’ the kicker lies in ‘you think’ because, in the Dylan cosmology, nothing lasts, no matter what we think. This brings ‘what you need’ into question and makes a mockery of the instruction.
The second line: ‘But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast’ seems straightforward but is open to question. There’s nothing to grab (except perhaps your toothbrush and a few effects) and nothing to ‘keep’ (except perhaps a few memories). ‘Grab’ suggests a somewhat desperate action. We grab for things that are slipping away, or if we are making a fast exit.
In the second verse we find, ‘Take what you have gathered from coincidence …’ This is another back-hander. Gathering suggests a sustained process or slow awakening. In this context, it seems to mean ‘learned.’ But what can we learn or gather from ‘coincidence’? That random stuff happens? What moral can we draw from coincidences? The implication is that there is nothing to gather, which changes the import of the line from apparent heartfelt advice to mockery, once more.
None of this undermines the song, rather it’s what gives the song its bite. Instead of heartfelt advice to a lover who’s leaving (or being kicked out), what we find is a fair bit of needling. This makes the song more emotionally complex than a straightforward interpretation would suggest.
In 1996 Dylan moved from the softer, orchestral effects of 1995, with his keening vocals, to a harder-edged sound once more, only much tighter and sharper than in the early nineties. In the Berlin concert of that year, for example (see The Never Ending Tour articles for that year ), we find Dylan songs getting the hard rock treatment. In that context both ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ provide acoustic relief, and remind the audience of the old acoustic Dylan. The harmonica has gone, replaced by Dylan’s acoustic guitar picking. Both these 1996 recordings explore the slower tempo. The first is from Octover 17th
1996
The second (June 24th) emphasizes that solid, insistent beat that marked the 1995 recordings, and highlights Tony Garnier’s double bass bowing, providing that moody underpinning.
1996
1997 was of course the year of Time Out of Mind, and ‘Baby Blue’ was played only a handful of times, losing out to ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ for evoking the reflective, acoustic mood – even though the full band is playing. Dylan’s supercharged vocal makes this recording from Cardiff worth the listen, but the question arises – does this slow tempo mean that the song becomes too laid back, a little too weary for its own sharp edges? You’ll have to decide.
1997
Again, in 1998, Dylan keeps the song alive with a dozen performances, while his main concern was bringing songs from the new album into play. This one from Rochester is a gem, and one of the highlights of this series, if only because of the superb quality of the video and sound recording. It’s a pleasure to watch. We get to see Dylan’s guitar picking close up, and the evident pleasure he’s taking in singing this song. For my ear Dylan’s vocal is solid but unspectacular.
1998
In 1999 the song came rushing back into favour with some thirty performances. With a few variations, the arrangement hasn’t changed much since 1994/95, that slow tempo and insistent, thumping beat. This one from Wien is as good as any.
1999 (a)
However, Dylan never stops experimenting. This one from my Mp3 files, (1999 but undated) has quite a different feel to it. It has a lighter, somewhat faster beat with more of an orchestral effect from the steel guitar. A controlled but powerful vocal from Dylan.
1999 (b)
2000 was one of the peak years for the NET. Dylan was in full voice, and the band was swinging together like the integrated rock machine they had become. And, talk about swinging, there’s a definite lilt to this one from Glasgow. I find myself thinking back to the strident challenge the song was back in 1965, and the ardent, heartbroken song of 1995 and wonder, much as I like it, if something has been lost in the lilt and the sweetness of the sound by 2000. Perhaps the stridency, and the ardency, have been replaced by sadness and regret. Or perhaps the backing is too sweet for the lyrics? Does this performance lose me in nostalgia because the song has turned nostalgic, or because we can’t listen to later performances of these early songs without feeling nostalgic for the halcyon days of youthful idealism, those halcyon days that Dylan farewells in this song.
2000 (a)
If there is a newer, gentler feeling emerging from the song by this time, beyond laying down a challenge (1965) or pouring out your heart (1995), then it is explored in this remarkable ten-minute version from Helsinki. Unexpectedly, after two years of absence, the harp is back for a sustained solo at the end of the song. Quiet, reflective, whimsical, sad, nostalgia-inducing, subdued grief. Even though it builds over two choruses, it keeps a tight restraint on the sharper edges of the song. Master harpist at work! Dylan’s harmonica explores this complex emotional field, as it did when it pushed grief to its limits in 1995. It’s a different kind of warmth, and maybe a different kind of pain. It’s still all over, baby blue.
Helsinki 16 05 2000
Speaking of sublime harmonica breaks, Dylan returns to the instrument once more in 2001, to an ecstatic audience in this Pueblo recording. The audience reaction turns this harp solo into an epic, which begins restrained but soon lets loose. There is a triumphant tone here, as the harp turns the song into a celebration, perhaps of the love that is passing, or perhaps a celebration of the harp playing acoustic Dylan. As in 2000, he has moved from a dead slow tempo to an easy lilt. The music suggests a stately dance.
2001 (a)
Finally, another recording from 2001, this one from Corvallis. No harmonica to amp the ending of this one. Of special interest in both these 2001 performances is what we can call Dylan’s downsinging, dropping his voice into the low tones, creating a half-talking, half-singing effect.
2001 (b)
In 2002, Dylan will make perhaps the biggest shift of his career – making the keyboards his primary instrument. We’ll be back soon to follow the story of the song into the new NET era.
After those 11 smashing performances at the Rolling Thunder Revue 1975-76, the song seems to sink back into oblivion: one performance in 1978, one in 1984 and two in 1988 – that’s it in the 12 years after 1976. Enough, however, to see Stravinsky’s and Dylan’s shared conception of art confirmed; repeat anyone else you like, only not yourself. After the pure rock version from Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan regaled his Philadelphia audience in 1978 with what his critics at the time disdainfully called “Las Vegas”.
It is the year after Elvis’ death, which hasn’t left Dylan unmoved. With some romantic goodwill, you could see the entire world tour plus the 62 US concerts of the autumn tour as one long ode to Elvis. Dylan wears a white suit and has backing vocalists, his catalogue is big-band arranged, the full stage features Elvis’ bassist Jerry Scheff and Elvis’ saxophonist Steve Douglas, and Dylan’s eyeliner also looks rather inspired by The King. Accordingly Elvis-y is the only execution of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” in that Elvis year 1978. Good old rock’n’roll including two guitar solos, ripping sax, the bass mixed up-front, pounding drums… bring a nickel, tap your feet, as John Fogerty would say.
1978 Oct 6 Philadelphia
A bit puzzling is its isolated position, though. The song is clearly rehearsed, but not to be found on the so-called Rundown Rehearsal Tapes, the quadruple-CD bootleg containing the January ’78 rehearsals for the world tour, and it is never performed in the 114 concerts of that exhaustive tour. Except for that one time in Philadelphia, 6 October. By special request, according to the unclear announcement that raises more questions than it answers:
“All right, we’re gonna do this as a special request for you. It’s for this (….). He’s another guy who’s been doing nothing but writing ever since he started. He’s been writin’ and writin’.”
The performance is driven enough, but apparently does not ignite the fire. Which is also true of the only appearance six years later, in Nantes. Another one-off surprise with no follow-up, at one of the 27 concerts of the 1984 Europe tour. Special guest Carlos Santana joins in, but that doesn’t push the song towards Latin – this time the interpretation chafes at boogie-woogie. However, after a tentative introduction in Berkeley on 10 June 1988, the third concert of what we have come to call the Never Ending Tour, the song has apparently undergone a reappraisal; between 10 June 1988 and 20 November 1999 Newark, “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” is 137 times on the setlist – the song has been promoted to the hard core.
In the process, Dylan – naturally – continues to experiment with form. A languid big-city blues (Utrecht 1993), even slower and bluesier than ever in 1994 (Woodstock, for instance), sandwiched between and dominated by two scruffy electric guitars in Monterey 1995 (a drawn-out rendition of almost seven minutes with undylanesque space for guitar violence), and an old-fashioned cosy one when he assists Clapton on stage: coming already awfully close to wailing Derek & The Dominoes jamming “Key To The Highway” (Eric Clapton & Friends To Benefit Crossroads Centre Antigua, 30 June 1999).
In the twenty-first century, the song then seems to die a gentle death; only nine performances between 2000 and 2018. Though still including two very special ones. The nicest one Dylan serves on 8 August 2003 in New York. As a guest at The Dead’s Summer Getaway 2003 Tour. They share the bill a couple of times that summer, Dylan with his band, Robert Hunter, Joan Osborne and the Grateful Dead, and as an interlude, Dylan does three or four songs with The Dead on such a night. “Alabama Getaway”, “Friend Of The Devil”, “You Win Again”, “Big Boss Man”… short setlists like that. A Dead classic, a song from the blues or country canon of Hank Williams or Jimmy Reed or something, and then usually complemented by a Dylan song or two. But 8 August is Dylan’s eighth and last night, and he apparently wants to say a proper and special farewell: first debuting a peculiar, ragged, Dead-like version of “Tangled Up In Blue”. Fairly chaotic, evidently animating him; he leaves the piano for the first time this tour, buckling up a guitar for the first time and playing “It Takes A Lot” for the first time.
2003 NYC Aug 8 (Grateful Dead)
It’s an American Beauty. The Dead has been playing the song with some regularity since 1972, so now, in 2003, they have performed it about as often as Dylan himself. The irresistible pulse of the drumming duo Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, the Moby Grape-esque wallpaper of three guitars, Phil Lesh’s unflappable, steady swinging bass and the long instrumental interludes shift the whole song into the Dead catalogue, and from the sound of it, a charged Dylan is totally fine with that:
“What makes them essentially a dance band probably begins with the jazz classical bassist, Phil Lesh, and the Elvin Jones–influenced Bill Kreutzmann. Lesh is one of the most skilled bassists you’ll ever hear in subtlety and invention. And combined with Kreutzmann, this rhythm section is hard to beat. That rhythm section along with elements of traditional rock and roll and American folk music is what makes the Dead unsurpassable. Combined with their audience, it’s like one big free-floating ballet. Three main singers, two drummers and triple harmonies make this band difficult to compete with. A postmodern jazz musical rock and roll dynamo.”
(Dylan, The Philosophy Of Modern Song, Ch. 29, 2022)
Following this, Dylan then switches seamlessly, with equal passion and pleasure, to a ten-minute (!) rendition of Jerry Garcia’s “West L.A. Fadeaway”, for which he does briefly retreat back behind the piano (perhaps to consult a lyrics sheet), but on the closing track “Alabama Getaway” he picks up the guitar again for the second and, for now, last time.
Even more striking is Dylan’s contribution to the life work of Wynton MarsalisJazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the orchestra that, under Wynton’s inspiring direction, has been promoting the beauty of jazz around the world for decades now in schools, in concert halls with symphony orchestras, on television and whatnot. In addition, Marsalis and his orchestra have released dozens of albums since 1992, pretty much always stunning and/or fascinating.
Wynton’s big band arrangement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, jazzed-up nursery rhymes like “Old MacDonald” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider” on Jazz For Kids, the enchanting live recording Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton Play The Blues (with a perfect “Forty-Four Blues” and the perhaps finest “Joe Turner’s Blues” ever)… with the Essentially Ellington: The JLCO Recordings, 1999-2025 in 2025, the tally reaches 41 great records, and there is no end in sight.
Dylan’s contribution to Wynton’s mission work can be found on United We Swing, a 2018 compilation album on which Wynton compiles collaborative projects with colleagues such as James Taylor, Lenny Kravitz and Ray Charles. The album opens with the irresistible Five Blind Boys of Alabama and their signature song “The Last Time”, and then follows track 2: the Wynton Marsalis Septet’s 2004 recording with Bob Dylan of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”.
Arranged, unmistakably, by Marsalis. Strictly speaking not a big band (the accompanying band is a septet, after all), but still arranged for big band, by the sound of it – and then in the spirit of Duke Ellington. The bright, short dissonant accents, the off-beat syncopations of the horns… it seems obvious that “Take the “A” Train” was playing through Wynton’s head when he wrote the arrangement. The role of the soloing muted trumpet is passed to Dylan, improvising on his harmonica, and Wynton, like Duke, opts for the predictable but irresistible artifice of having the horns suggest a steam train. Well, I ride on the A train, baby, can’t buy a thrill.
It is a transcendent experience. Wynton’s mission, “to engage a new and younger audience for jazz”, succeeds. And will probably have reconciled those lucky enough to attend the 3rd Annual Jazz at Lincoln Center Spring Gala ‘Teach Me Tonight’ Benefit on 7 June 2004 at the Apollo Theatre on West 125th Street with the price of admission: the cheapest tickets are $1000. It takes a lot to laugh.
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:
Over 10 years ago on this site, writing about “My Back Pages” I noted that in 1965 Dylan made a comment to the effect that he used to know what he wanted to write about before starting a song, but since then he has taken a different route. The implication is that he starts writing and then lets the song itself direct where matters were going.
What I didn’t consider then was how this affected the music, and so in part this series aims to rectify this. It is music that is the focus here. And here we turn to My Back Pages.
Dylan performed My Back Pages some 260 times in concert between 1978 and 2012, which itself is interesting as it was written in 1964, when Dylan was 23, and sung in public for the first time when he was 37.
And although we might take it that Dylan didn’t want to perform the piece at first is because it is very much a “closing the door on the past” type of song, rather than a song about now or the future, there is perhaps another reason for the lack of performance at first. And that could be that musically it is a simple strophic four line song, across six identical verses with no musical variation throughout.
The song itself consists of four lines of two rhyming couplets, the last line (Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”) being the same for each verse.
Musically there really are no surprises. The song is played in C major, and all the chords used in the song are the chords that can be found in any music theory book as being the chords that are “natural” within the key of C. Which is to say, chords that can be made out of the notes in the scale of C major: C major itself, plus A minor, Eminor, F major, and G major.
To explain this a step further: if you were to play the scale of C major on the piano, you would only use the white notes. Play any of those five chords noted above (each of which can be found in this piece), and again you will find yourself only playing the white notes. They can all be formed out of the notes of the scale of C major. It thus sounds like a standard folk song, with no blues or rock input.
But what gives the blues and a lot of rock music its special feel is its deviation from the rigours of staying within the key – if playing in C major then adding chords such as B flat major and maybe Eb major into the accompaniment. These are chords that can’t be formed from the notes of the scale of C major and which thus take the music away from the classic feel of traditional folk.
But as I say, Dylan would have none of that here. He is simply writing and performing a song in the classic mode.
What’s more, the chord sequence of the opening line “Crimson flames tied through my ears, rolling high and mighty traps” takes us through the complete sequence of these chords (C, Am, Em, F, G, C) while the second line does the same but ends on the G – a standard way of showing us the verse is only half way through. OK, it is true, we don’t have D minor in that sequence, and that is the one other standard chord that can be formed just from the notes of C major scale, but five out of six chords used is itself quite unusual, and makes it very clear where we are.
Then, in addition, in the final line the sequence C, Am, C, F, G, C is repeated to show us this is the end of the verse. After that, with no lyrics we get the G major chord again, to show us there is more to come. It is the classic way of pausing between two verses.
But, in a strange sense, we have a lyrical and musical contradiction here. The lyrics are telling us that he’s moved away from the folk protest movement, wherein he expressed the idealism of “Times they are a Changing” using a very similar set of chords. There are no “blues” notes or blues chords – this is straight folk.
In short, Dylan has composed a straight folk song, performed in a straight folk manner, to say he has had enough of that idealism that was expressed in the straight folk approach, (which eschewed the use of any blues notes). He then recorded the song in June 1964 and did nothing more with it until he performed it in July 1978. It thus did seem very much a farewell note, and remained as such until he was indeed 14 years older and could perform it with additional meaning.
If you are interested in this, you might wish to have a read of Joost’s article from 2017 on this site to explore the implications of all this a step further.
But for now we can take it that when Bob wrote that chorus line “but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now” he did mean “I’m reborn, I am fefreshed, I am going somewhere else, somewhere that befits a person looking out on the world afresh.
Within that message is the thought that he has been misled by false idealism, but now reality has returned, and the musical form that is classical folk with its standard folk chords with no blues or modulation, is no longer the musical form he needs. Nor is the notion that the music should be utterly unchanging throughout the piece.
And then….
Well, having got that out of his system, Bob changed, and how! Indeed I would suggest that unless you have studied the list of Dylan’s songs in the order that they were written you might be a bit surprised. Because having written “My Back Pages” Bob then wrote…
Gates of Eden.
It was first performed on 24 October 1964 and to date has been performed by Bob 217 times, although he has not touched upon it since 2001.
Now I think that because we generally tend to think of Bob’s music in terms of albums we (or perhaps I really ought to say “I”) can forget some of the incredible dramatic moments in which Bob moved from one form of creativity to another.
And yet there is a link here because part of a sequence of six compositions of Dylan’s in the latter part of 1964 all of which focussed on the same issue: individualism. These songs have other contexts within them as well, but in each case they have at their heart the expression of the individuality of the performer.
Now it is of course true that these songs have within them other issues and messages – “All I really want to do” is also a song of farewell, while “I’ll keep it with mine” is a song about the need not to follow leaders.
“My back pages” differentiated itself from the others through its focus totally on the disillusionment of the singer in lines such as
“Equality,” I spoke the word as if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now
The youthful demands for equality and justice have gone, and the composer sees the world afresh. And so next he wrote something utterly different…. “Gates of Eden” Nine verses which is essence tells us that everything is wrecked as “All and all can only fall, With a crashing but meaningless blow…” There might be another world, a better world, and not a world of this reality where everything has crumbled but if there is, he’s not quite sure where it is.
And so with such a dramatic change what of the music?
Of course Bob could have continued to write as before, leaving the lyrics to express his new mood and new vision, but that would have made much less of an impact on the audience, and actually little sense musically.
And so, musically, Dylan suddenly did the most dramatic thing with his music: he abandoned the whole concept of major and minor, and moved into the Dorian Mode.
Now even if you are not a musician, I’m guessing you will know about major and minor. Songs in the major keys tend to sound happier and lighter than songs in the minor keys. (There’s nothing inherent in the music that makes us think this; it is simply what we have got used to).
Every note in western music, from A up to G sharp, can have two scales based upon it – one major and one minor. If you want to explore this further there are many articles on line that do it; here’s one you can try for starters. JS Bach was the giant of music whose name is forever linked with establishing the new direction of music using the major and minor keys as he wrote the “48 preludes and fugues” (often known simply as “the 48” – two pieces in each of the newly established keys.)
Prior to the arrival of the new major and minor keys we had the modes now sound mediaeval to us, and few composers write in them today. But for his great transition away from his own past, into thoughts on a more global or even cosmic scale, Dylan turned back to the modal approach and wrote “Gates of Eden”.
After three songs about saying farewell, not following leaders, and above all highlighting the benefits of individualism, we not only got a horror story about the modern world, but in order really to make us sit up and notice, it is written outside of the world of major and minor keys. And it works because Dylan is saying, this neat division between the positive world of major chord, and the negative sad world of minor chords, is itself false. We are trapped in a world that makes no sense in the traditional way, because there is no longer right and wrong. This is simply a world gone utterly wrong in every regard. A world in which there is nothing we can do to put things right.
In fact, this is the world as it was perceived in mediaeval times, when it really was a world that mankind could not change because there was no technology there to achieve change. So all people could do was pray to the gods or God they believed in.
But now the message that nothing makes sense, nothing works, or perhaps, everything is wrecked, is a message in which we can’t understand anything because “there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.” And since we most very certainly are all very much outside the Gates of Eden, there is nothing we can do to make sense of any of this.
Thus this is a song about the desperate world that we inhabit – a world of lies, of horrors, of unreality, where friends are strangers, and strangers are friends.
So how does one portray this world, in a musical form that we can understand, and which we can tolerate listening to, but which is written to express the horrors of the era in which we live?
The classic idea would be to write in a minor key because songs in the minor key are invariably felt to be sad. But Dylan is far too good a musician just to give us the obvious. So he starts with a major chord, but immediately the vocal goes to a note not in that chord. The guitar plays G against “Of war and peace”, but the vocal lines sings the notes D and F and F is not part of the chord. Immediately we are confused. And then to rub it in, the guitar moves to D minor, which accommodates the note F, but is not one of the chords that exists in the key of G.
Now I appreciate if you are not a musician this is all getting a bit confusing, but the point is simple: Dylan is not giving us either the notes of the melody nor the chords of the accompaniment that we expect. But he is not offering chaos – notes and chords at random. The twist is that the notes sung don’t immediately fit the chord, but then the chord is changed to accommodate this. Then as if giving in the melody line falls moving along a classic three-chord blues change of F, C, G. But we are very clearly not listening to a traditional blues song!
It is symbolic, and gives musician and non-musician alike a feeling of edginess, uncertainty and darkness, or at the very least something not being at all right. A feeling amplified by the appearance of the chord of D major (not D minor) at the end of the penultimate line.
But less we should think that this signifies everything being OK, we find that it is played against the word “black”.
G Dm
Of war and peace the truth just twists
F C G C/g G
Its curfew gull it glides
G Dm
Upon four-legged forest clouds
F C G C/g G
The cowboy angel rides
G Bm' Am G
With his candle lit into the sun
G Bm' C D
Though its glow is waxed in black
G Bm' Am G C/g
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden
We are of course on this site publishing a whole series on what became side B of “Bringing it all back home” which has multiple versions of Bob performing this song (links to this song, appear at the end of this piece). Therein there are multiple examples of this song. I’ll just pick one for the moment. And as you listen, perhaps you might for a moment just recall that the song written before this was “My back pages”. And maybe like me, feel it is worth contemplating what such a change from one song to the next, tells us about Bob Dylan at that moment.
And as you listen to this, perhaps you might spend a moment just contemplating once more the sequence of compositions we are considering here….
This is number 20 in this series which selects Dylan concerts from the internet, puts them in chronological order, and gives a link to them.
So as I have said before, there’s nothing original here, except for the fact that I was unable to find another site that had compiled a list of concert recordings, so that if for any reason one suddenly wanted to know what Bob was sounding like in any particular year, or indeed you simply wanted to relive a concert you had been to, or you just like listening to Dylan concerts, you could find something to help you, fairly quickly.
The aim of course is to have at least one recording of a gig from each year that Bob has been touring. So a list of the concerts to which we’ve already put links is given below.
If there are any concerts you would particularly like to recommend and which are freely available on-line, please do write to me: Tony@schools.co.uk with the details.
Today’s concert is a particularly fine recording dated from 30 June 1988: New York.
Subterranean Homesick Blues
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
You’re a big girl now
Tangled up in Blue
Masters of War
I shall be released
Stuck inside of Mobile
Lakes of Pontchartrain
A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall
Eileen Aroon
Boots of Spanish Leather
Silvio
Gates of Eden
Like a Rolling Stone
Times they are a changing
All along the watchtower
Maggie’s Farm
I do hope you find this collection helpful. And you never know we might even end up with 60 or so videos from across the years. My eternal thanks to those people who have made the recordings available, and please do note I am not trying to take away any of the kudos from you for having made the recording available. I am forever grateful.
Extra note…
Before I found that particular recording, which because of its quality obviously has to be in the collection, I did find couple of concerts from this time available on the internet, and because recordings come and go I thought it might be safest to put these up too.
XVI “Repeat anyone else you like, only not yourself!”
The anarchic nature and Calvin’s lust for disorder and chaos speaks from the slightly insane look of his eyes in the last panel. He is picturing the mayhem, that much is clear. A live performance of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece probably would have disappointed him, though. Closer to his ideal came the premiere of another illustrious classical piece, Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps in Paris, 29 May 1913. During that premiere tumult broke out, there was shouting and throwing and fighting, and the gendarmerie had to restore order in the hall.
In the subsequent mythologisation and oversimplification of the event, Stravinsky’s music is usually identified as the culprit, as the casus belli. It was said to have been so different, ferocious, rhythmically complex with atonal and dissonant passages, that the audience’s sense of art and mental grasp were offended. A fairly ineradicable reading; in variants, it is thus dished out to this day whenever Le Sacre du Printemps is mentioned anywhere.
It is incorrect. Reliable reconstructions and witness accounts have long since shown that not the music but rather the ballet had been the trigger for the riot. The choreography by the greatest dancer of the 20th century, Vaslav Nijinsky, disconcerted the conservative part of the audience. Instead of the usual tutus and swan fluttering and graceful sautés, Nijinsky had the Ballet de Russes perform in peasant clothes, stomping their feet, inelegantly tossing limbs around… the hooting and whistling of the audience were so loud, according to reviews, that they even drowned out the music, forcing Nijinsky to shout the count to his dancers. Whether he also screamed play it fucking loud to the orchestra, history does not tell.
The parallels with the premiere of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” are unmistakable. Dylan introduced the song in that short set at that illustrious Dylan-goes-electric concert at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, when the song was still called “Phantom Engineer”. “People remember it differently,” says Theodore Bickel in a 2011 interview for the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, “but I remember it well,” after he, too, recited that pumped-up version of the Battle of Newport. The version in which the audience reacted with dismay to the new Dylan, insulted and indignant, booing him off stage.
“There were a lot of boos,” as festival boss George Wein confirmed in 2018. “The pro-rock world is trying to say there was more cheering, but no: there were more boos.”
The version hinted at in the film A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024) as well, but which has long since been nuanced: the booing was focused primarily on the lousy sound quality, and secondly on the short duration of the set (three songs), not so much on the songs and the fact that they were played electrically. The sound recording of “Phantom Engineer” does sober up in that respect, too. We hear a last snippet of “normal” cheering after the previous song, “Like A Rolling Stone”, during the following performance we hear nothing special from the audience, and after the song, the last song of the electric set, there is “normal” applause. The hoots and whistles don’t rise until the audience sees Dylan leaving the stage.
Bob Dylan at Newport – Phantom Engineer:
At this premiere the song still sounds as it was recorded days before, during the first Highway 61 sessions: rushed, up-tempo and spotlighting Mike Bloomfield’s assertive guitar. Then, after the final recording, “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”, as the song is now officially renamed, disappears from the setlist – 93 concerts around the world until the motorbike accident in July 1966, but not a single “It Takes A Lot”. No concerts in 1967, only a contribution to a Woody Guthrie Memorial in 1968, only the Isle Of Wight concert in 1969, no gigs in 1970, and only one performance in 1971… and that’s where Dylan plays “It Takes A Lot” for the second time in his career. Twice even: at both the early and late session of The Concert For Bangladesh. With a very special band, at that: George Harrison on guitar, Ringo Starr on tambourine and (inevitable in 1971) Leon Russell on bass.
It Takes a Lot to Laugh Concert for Bangladesh 1971:
The performance is a surprisingly faithful copy of the album version. Equally set in with acoustic guitar, Harrison’s electric guitar just as subservient as Bloomfield at the time, tempo similar (only slightly faster), harmonica solo after the second verse and harmonica solo as the finale, and exactly the same lyrics – presumably Dylan didn’t want to make things too difficult for his one-off backing band.
No concerts in the last two years of the Seven Lean Years 1967-1973 either. Then, when Dylan finally reports back to the front, the drought is over. Well, technically anyway – more than a single trickle in the hard rain it is not. In Dylan’s comeback, the 1974 Tour of America with The Band, a series of forty concerts, “It Takes A Lot” appears one single time on the setlist (Toronto 9 January). We are then converted back to up-tempo, more rock than blues, and it stays that way for a while: at the Rolling Thunder Revue 1975-76, the song is on the setlist eleven times, and “It Takes A Lot” has become a pure rock song – courtesy of Supreme Spider From Mars Mick Ronson, the blonde guitar god who made such a crushing impression on log writer Sam Shepard:
“Ronson, on the other hand, really gets off on this monster crowd. His initial style is broad and theatrical anyway, coming from English “rave-up” and David Bowie. He begins to uncork all the flash he’s been holding back throughout the tour. Giant, spread-eagle leaps into thin air. Triple vertical spins, wrapping the guitar cord around him like a boa constrictor, slashing at the guitar with huge full-arm uppercuts. Platinumblond hair spraying in all directions. Then stalking around the stage, stiff legged, Frankenstein macho strutting, shaking the neck of the guitar with his vicious chord hand as though throttling his weaker brother. All the time, never losing a lick.”
(Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook p. 166, 1977)
It Takes a Lot to Laugh live at Boston Music Hall – Nov 1975:
Audiences are grateful and excited for a Dylan who is more electric than ever – great artists evolve faster than their audiences, after all. Which soulmate Igor realised as well, faced with all the hatred after the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps:
“I cannot, I simply c a n n o t write what they want from me—that is, repeat myself—repeat anyone else you like, only not yourself!—for that is how people write themselves out. But enough about L e S a c r e . It makes me miserable”
. (Stravinsky, letter to Alexandre Benois, 1913)
… Stravinsky crystal-clearly and emotionally articulating Dylan’s conception of art half a century avant la lettre.
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:
Preface: Please note in the original posting of this article I became completely confused over who and what the band are. I’ve now removed references to the band and will allow you, my reader, to find them and not be confused by anything I said before.
This was a recording that I had never heard before – and of course that is more a reflection on my lack of research and knowledge than anything else. But just in case it is new to you, and in case you missed the article, here it is again…
This track truly knocked me out. Well, ok not truly in the sense of literally, but I found it one of the most extraordinary covers of Dylan’s work that I have ever heard. And given that I have written my own series on Dylan’s covers on this site, I think it is fair to say I have done a fair amount of thinking about and listening to (not to mention pontificating on) Dylan covers.
What’s more, I am spending quite a bit of time at the moment thinking about Dylan’s music, as opposed to his lyrics (you may in passing have noted a little series of my own “No Nobel Prize for Music” in which I try to reflect on the way Bob has innovated musically.) So covers of Dylan’s songs that radically change the music while keeping the lyrics in place are occupying quite a bit of my thinking hours just now.
Of course in this regard I am helped enormously by Jochen’s extraordinary knowledge of the covers of Dylan’s songs, and also obviously by Mike Johnson’s work for this site, for example, recently covering the entire Never Ending Tour, and currently the “History in Performance” series. Here’s a link to all 144 articles in The Never Ending Tour series; the latest “History in Performance” article with links to those previously published is here.
Now what brings me to mention all this, is quite simply the above track, one of three cover versions in Jochen’s continuing series on “It Takes a lot to Laugh” – a series which I’m fairly sure Jochen will be publishing as a book in the near future, (and there will be links to buying it once it is available).
So, having given the background, here’s the point: Why, having heard so many versions of this song over the years does one particular cover version, which I had never heard before it appeared in that article, so affect me? It can’t possibly be the lyrics, or the general musical approach because I bought “Highway 61 Revisited” when it was first released in England in 1965. (I was a school kid then, so yes it makes me ancient, but not impossibly so). And indeed one of the bands I played with did perform a (vastly inferior) version of the song a few times.
So to explain…
First the opening. I think most of us don’t really focus on openings much; we know what the song is and we are waiting for the vocals to start. But this opening makes us focus. It is gentle and calm. Almost anyone who can play an acoustic guitar could get this. Except it is deceptive – I am a guitarist (not brilliant, my instrument has always been the piano, but even so I can still play), and I did have to listen to it several times to get that opening just right. So I am intrigued. And yes I am looking at that cover picture, which somehow seems in keeping with the opening. “Where are we going?” is the question I am asking, which as it happens is quite right for a song that opens, “Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby, Can’t buy a thrill.”
And then in comes the vocal after around 15 seconds. 15 seconds, not long, but enough time to give us that relaxed feel, which can make us feel at one with that picture above.
Perhaps now I must admit that I then got confused over exactly who and what the band was/is. For it seems there is Ygdrassil and there is Yggdrasill, two quite separate bands. It has been pointed out to me that in the original posting of this message I got them confused. So I am now deleting the references to the band, so we can just focus on the music.
And as I said in the original piece in which I confused two different bands, I was and am influenced by that gentle musical opening, not by the lyrics. The simple guitar for seventeen seconds, and then the two voices in perfect simple harmony. Except even by the end of the first line (“Can’t buy a thrill”) one of the voices delivers a different, unexpected harmony. And that is wonderful because we all know the song so well, and we appreciate the calmness of the tree of life (or just of the music if we don’t know the meaning of Yggdrasill). But as soon as we are into the second half of the first line the unexpected happens, without disrupting the music at all and we know we are on a journey.
I won’t bore you with the musical explanation of what the upper voice does in line one, but believe me it is unexpected as it includes as its upper note (at “Can’t buy”) a note that is not in the chord the guitar is playing. And this just doesn’t happen by chance; this is either painstakingly worked out, or a singer of such instinct that we really do need to listen, and then when the performance is done, cheer and applaud.
And those unexpected harmonies continue, but more than this, the lower voice does not follow Dylan’s original melody – and yet the vocal line utterly fits. Of course, we are helped by the fact that we have all heard the song a million times, so we know what’s what, but this is the point. They are not starting from the notion that we don’t know the piece: exactly the opposite in fact. They are performing for us, the people who know Dylan’s work – even if many listeners won’t have the musical background to know exactly what they are doing. It feels right and sounds right, whatever your musical background.
OK so by the time we get to the third line (“And if I die…”) we are expecting not a radical difference from the original, but gentle variance, and we get that. Just listen to what happens on the word “hill”. 99% of singers would hold that word on one note, but not here. That fractional variation tells us that being on the top of the hill, is not all, is not everything, it is not ultimate stability, for anything can happen, which gives extra meaning to “And if I don’t make it….”
Of course, we know that line; we know every line. But now if we are really paying attention, we have an extra nuance. There’s only one note change in the harmony on the word “hill” but it is enough to tell us that all is not settled, there is not just uncertainty about “if I die” but also about the hill itself.
“If I don’t make it” is a harsh following line, and that is sung solo, but then “you know my baby will” is a soft gentle conclusion, and for that, we are back to harmonies.
A brief pause of a couple of chords – but even this is planned, for the second chord is extended far beyond anything we might have expected. At 58 seconds there is that tiny adjustment of chords, and we are held suspended for four beats, before “Don’t the moon look good…” The guitar is the same but the harmonies change.
And then “Don’t the sun look good” which is sung straight – no flashy extras until that long-held note with “sea” – and that (in my mind if no one else’s) forces in that picture of the sunset across the calm ocean on a beautiful evening. OK, maybe I am helped by having lived part of my life at the edge of the sea, and could stand on cliffs and see exactly that. But even if not, hopefully, the message is there for everyone.
Then what is effectively an instrumental verse, with a subtle change before we come to the third verse. We all know it by heart of course. We all know that there are just three verses. We also know that surely with such subtlety so far they are neither just going to repeat what has been done, nor are they going to fly off in some other direction just to be different.
But we also feel there is a problem. This version of the song projects a warmth and oneness between the singers and the earth on which they stand. We have only just been asked “Don’t the sun look good…” and had that instrumental pause which keeps up that feeling.
And yet we all know what is coming….it is winter. And none of what we have just had musically and lyrically fits with winter, nor indeed with frost. But just listen, if you will, the lines “Now the wintertime is coming, The windows are filled with frost.” Musically, and harmonically these lines continue as before. For them the upcoming frost, and the winter, make no difference. The warmth and gentility of the song is preserved – the singers are not in the slightest affected, and so nor are we. (As it happens I am writing this on a beautiful sunny day in middle England, with an utterly blue sky, my study giving me an outlook, south, onto my garden at the end of which three giant poplar trees reach up to the sky, the upper branches swaying gently in the wind far above me. I really am at one with this arrangement of this song, at this moment).
OK there is an extra strength in the music (not much but it is there) with “I went to tell everybody, But I could not get across”, and this is maintained in the next line “Well, I wanna be your lover, baby, I don’t wanna be your boss” but the overall gentility is maintained by one of the vocal lines taking in that slight meander around the final note. It is a sign of warmth, of openness, of possibility…. There is beauty and light, but nothing is utterly fixed. Possibility abounds.
I suspect a lesser band, and/or a lesser arranger, a lesser singer (sorry I don’t know who created the arrangement) would have held the harmony, but either through planning or simply because “it felt right” the word “boss” although starting with strength, loses its force through that meandering harmony.
“Don’t say I never warned you” sung as a solo line has the harshness in the vocalisation that the lyric requires, but even then, “When your train gets lost” manages to take us down gently. Yes, the singer is saying, if you let this go, you will get lost, and I will be so sorry about that, and sorry not just for myself but also so sorry for you, but life is like this. This is what happens.
And so we move on to verse three. And of course. as this song was written 60 years ago we know this intimately, we know what comes next, we know where it ends. And that is a big challenge for anyone recording an early Dylan song such as this. We know it too well, we don’t need to hear the end. But now, oh yes we do, we must continue to the end, we want to know how the last moments are made to work.
The first time we hear, “Don’t say I never warned you” is at 2’47”. But there is over half a minute of music left, and that warning is there, unforgotten, unmistaken, forever. You had the opportunity the singers are saying, but now it has gone. Yes the wintertime indeed, is coming.
I must admit that my intention was to round off this article with a copy of Dylan’s original. I know, we all know it inside out and upside down, but it sort of seemed like a way to draw it all to a conclusion. But as I set up the link I played the original, and found to my surprise, that I didn’t want to hear it. For in the last couple of hours as I have planned and written this piece I have moved far away from Highway 61. I am now somewhere quite different and have no desire to be taken back.
[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 fourth 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: ]
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I have some wonderful sounds lined up for you this time around, Bobcats, but moreover there is a story to tell, a story of how this song rose from the messy performances of the early nineties, like a phoenix from the ashes, to its full glory in 1995.
To understand this story fully, however, we need to grasp that ‘Baby Blue’ is a love song. A particular kind of love song, what I have called love’s last song. Love’s last excruciating song. One more kiss, one more night, one more weekend, after which ‘it’s all over now.’ There is nothing quite like the exquisite sorrow of that farewell moment. Love’s last moment. The moment in which love dies. You know the big lie: I never want to see you again.
‘Baby Blue’ was a love song all along, it just wasn’t so obvious in those early, strident performances of 1965 when it came across as a farewell song, with the tone of an ex-lover delivering the hard, unpleasant truth. You go your way, I’ll go mine, to quote a song that was to come a year later. The tenderness of the song was not evident. Jerry Garcia discovered it in the melody. His guitar accompaniment to Dylan and the Dead’s 1987 performance had a bitter-sweetness to it (See Part 3 of this series), but you had to search for it in later performances. It showed itself in the passionate 1980 performance (See part 2 of this series), which I chalked up as a ‘best ever,’ but is not fully explored by Dylan, or perhaps discovered by him, until the mid-1990s.
One of the heroes of the story of the song’s emergence is the harmonica. At its best, Dylan’s harmonica picks up from where his lyrics leave off, amplifying and elaborating the emotional nexus that drives the song. That nexus pulls together disparate threads of feeling. When writing about the song in my NET series I commented that while Dylan doesn’t cry on stage, his harmonica does. It does the crying for him. There are tears lurking behind the apparent brashness of the lyrics. There’s heartbreak behind the ‘strike another match, go start anew.’ He is trying to be brave but the harp gives him away every time. The song has provoked some of Dylan’s best harmonica work; it doesn’t spring from nowhere. We’re going to hear Dylan exploring and pushing those sounds until the revelatory 1995 performances.
So let’s get started. It doesn’t begin that well, although ‘Baby Blue’ doesn’t suffer as badly as some of the songs during this period. I have written before about the difficult years of 1991 and 1992, about what happened to Dylan’s voice and the messy, ‘garage band’ style of the years leading up to Dylan replacing GE Smith on guitar and bringing in a steel guitar and dobro. You just have to think of the album Under The Red Sky (1991) to get the idea. It was this change, and Dylan’s slowly emerging voice, that laid the foundations for the profound mid-nineties performances.
But first, this 1990 recording is one out of the box. Keeping it acoustic, quivering and heartfelt, the song’s potential is all there even as his voice is getting a bit thin and strained. And the harp is there for an extended break. It too is thin and rasping, but the potential for emotional exploration and elaboration is evident. At this point it is scratching at the emotions, almost as if seeking to draw blood. (Paris, Jan 31st 1990)
1990 (Paris)
By 1991 problems are emerging. The arrangement, turning it from acoustic to full band after the first verse, sounds wooden. The recording is good as far as Dylan’s voice goes (possibly a soundboard recording), but he messes up the lyrics and tends to flatten the song into a monotone. It doesn’t soar and it doesn’t dive deep. To be fair, I think he’s searching out new melodic pathways for the vocal, and in that respect, we have to see the performance as a partial success. The harmonica break that ends the performance does its job, is jagged and dissonant, but fails to excite.
1991 (a)
This is a better performance from 1991 (date unknown), Dylan is trying to stretch his voice and we sense the emergence of a structure in the harp break, starting subdued and building to a climax. In terms of what comes later, this is an interesting performance. He’s reaching for something here.
1991 (b)
In this first recording from 1992, we find Dylan trying out his new lineup, the lineup which would carry the song through to its peak year in 1995. The effect of Bucky Baxter on steel guitar can be heard. He will go on to soften Dylan’s sound still further. It’s all a bit new and raw at this point, but the potential is there. Once more the harp probes the emotions, but the tempo is a little too brisk for a properly reflective harp performance. Dylan’s voice, in the higher registers, is thin and sounds strained. He might have been able to pull off what he’s aiming for here in 1981, when he could confidently hit the higher registers, but now not so much. (May 14th)
1992
It’s a pity I don’t have the date for this next one, but I suspect it’s from later in the year, and Dylan’s approach to the song has markedly changed. It’s unusual for a song’s arrangement to change radically during a tour (although it did happen, spectacularly, in 2002 when Dylan dropped the guitar and took up the keyboards). With that insistent, thumping bass intro, which anchors the song firmly in its tempo, we take a big step towards the 1995 performances. It’s still a lot faster than it will be in following years, but we feel as if the song is finding its feet as a new song, if you like, a love song full of regret and yearning. There’s no harmonica break, which allows Baxter to stretch his legs, developing the orchestral effects made possible by the steel guitar, another feature of future performances
1992
In 1993 we jump on the rising curve and the fun really starts, the story gathers pace. 1993 was the year of the epic, five-minute songs turned into ten-minute marathons. The band had shaken down and was working sweetly, there was a sense of musical adventure, extended solos, jazzy guitar breaks and drawn-out endings. It was also the year in which Dylan began to push his electric guitar playing, often taking the lead. The era of Dylan as Mr Guitar Man had arrived.
‘Baby Blue’ gets swept along in all this. It is uncompromisingly acoustic and there is a lot of fine, intricate, lyrical guitar work here. Dylan’s voice is still not so great. He hasn’t broken through that thin, scratchy sound yet, but that breakthrough is coming. He’s testing his voice, pushing it.
This performance runs to 9.40 mins mainly because of the almost three-minute harp break, an extended foray into the song’s emotional nexus, subtle, nuanced, drawing out every thread of feeling. If you need reminding of what love’s goodbye feels like, this harp break will do it for you. Amazing to think that it can get better than this, but it can. (Marseille, June 29th)
1993
We get another almost three-minute harp solo in this one from Naples, June 26th. These harp solos are exploratory rather than definitive. It’s remarkable how different they are from each other. What is of special interest here is Dylan’s voice. It’s beginning to take on that luminous clarity that will mark his vocals over the coming two years.
1993
1994 was the first of two stellar years as our story moves to its climax. We have the Woodstock recordings and MTV’s Unplugged. If you want to hear how Dylan’s voice developed, compare the Supper Club recordings with Unplugged. Dylan didn’t sing ‘Baby Blue’ for Unplugged, but we have a wonderful performance from Woodstock.
I recommend this version as the sound quality is superior. This is no audience recording, but a remastered FM broadcast. Enjoy.
1994 (Woodstock)
The key to the success of this is the slowed tempo, and that insistent, thumping beat we first heard in 1992. That tempo and beat provide the framework for the extended musical reflection of the harmonica. Ah! there is the sadness, another strand. The ache of a love about to be lost. The tears are starting to flow. (There is a video of this performance on YouTube but the sound quality is inferior.)
Woodstock was not the only superlative performance in 1994. We’re back with audience recordings, and yet this one from Kiel, Germany (July 25th) gets my vote. Hard to match this kind of perfection (I take my hat off to the bootlegger). Some sweet, anguished guitar sounds and a delicate, floating harp. Dead slow tempo allowing every note its space. After thirty years love’s last song finds its grief. The lyrics become almost a sad commentary on the sort of things people say when one is moving on. And is he singing it to someone else or himself? As love and longing linger, isn’t he the one who needs to ‘strike another match.’
Maybe a song can come back at you like that.
1994 Kiel
Now to 1995 and the climax of our story. This tour-de-force of a song turns into a sublime love poem. The emotional intensity of the song is fully realized in a remarkable series of performances. We now have the bass reinforcing the steady, relentless beat. Dylan builds the vocal carefully to a powerful culmination in the last verse. The harp is let loose to soar. No longer quiet and reflective, as in 1993/4, the harp burns bright and hard. Or cuts deep depending on your metaphor. Tears flow freely. It too builds to a culmination with the final phrase repeated to the edge of excruciation. How can I let go? Goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye
In my NET series I highlighted the remarkable Prague performance. I suggested it was one of Dylan’s finest live performances of all time. We’re lucky to have a video of it now. Not perfect but it gives us the feel. (March 11th)
1995 Prague
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij-VKdZGazQ
I now realize, however, that the Prague performance was only one of a series of outstanding performances. Perhaps we can have too much of a good thing, but I’m going to offer two more. This Philadelphia performance comes at the end of the year (December 17th), ten months after Prague. A sort of emotional doubling down is going on here. The tone of the final harp solo moves from grief to celebration, perhaps driven on by a responsive audience. What is remarkable is how different this harp solo is from Prague. In Philly, you don’t break down crying but break free, walk away determinedly with your head held high. A different kind of resolution.
1995 Philadelphia
Finally back to London, March 31st to catch an excellent performance but sans harp. I miss the harp, it’s the cherry on top, but this gentle version highlights the guitars, Dylan delivers a thoughtful vocal. This one is a nice epilogue to our story.
This story ends here. The rising curve has delivered us to these knockout 1995 performances. But it is a story within a larger story. The story of the song does not end here, and I’ll be back soon to pick up the trail.
No shortage of female candidates. In the 21st century, too, one tribute album after another is being released. Maybe even more so. Joan Osborne’s Songs Of Bob Dylan (2017); Emma Swift’s wonderful album Blonde on the Tracks (2020); Barb Jungr fills Every Grain Of Sand (2001) and Man in the Long Black Coat (2011) with mostly very successful Dylan covers (plus handfuls of Dylan songs on her “regular” albums); Bettye LaVette releases Things Have Changed (2018); Chrissie Hynde helps us get through corona with Standing in the Doorway (2021, with wonderful versions of deep cuts like “In The Summertime” and “Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight”); Cat Power Sings Dylan (2023, on which Cat reconstructs the complete 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert); and then there are the dozens of female contributions to compilation albums like the unsurpassed Subterranean Home Sick Blues: A Tribute to Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home (2010, with highlights “She Belongs to Me” by Ane Brun and Julie Doiron’s “On the Road Again”). That’s 86 Dylan titles in this incomplete listing alone… but none of the ladies dare to attack “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”.
The exception is Lucinda Williams. The veteran is getting a second life in the 21st century and is more prolific than ever; since 2014, the year she turns 61, she has already released four Grammy-winning albums, she tours tirelessly, endures a horrific stroke in 2020, publishes an autobiography, and in the meantime fills seven albums with her hobby project Lu’s Jukebox. Which is a particularly likeable, largely highly attractive series, originally created to get through the corona wasteland.
In that lost year 2020, Lucinda decides on an on-line concert to honour Tom Petty. The world is in lockdown, concert halls remain closed and concertgoers all sit at home at their computers. And watch and listen to Lucinda Williams in the tiny Ray Kennedys Room & Board Studio in Nashville with accomplished die-hard mercenaries as backing band. It is a success, and so is the subsequently released recording Runnin’ Down A Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty. The idea for a series is obvious. And after Volume 2 – Southern Soul: From Memphis To Muscle Shoals, it’s Dylan’s turn: Bob’s Back Pages: A Night Of Bob Dylan Songs (2021), the only tribute album with a cover of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”.
Dylan is under Lucinda’s skin. Almost literally, if we are to believe her:
“The whole experience, like when I saw Highway 61 studying the cover and reading all the credits and the liner notes. It was like being inside the music.”
(interview with Roger Catlin for The Vinyl District, December 2024)
Lucinda is 12 when one of her father’s students visits his professor at home with Highway 61 Revisited under his arm: “Everyone needs to hear this album right now! This is amazing!” Just the picture on the cover, this lanky young man with tousled hair and a Triumph motorbike T-shirt, makes her fall in love instantly. Then she puts the record on.
“It blew my little 12-year-old mind. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know what some of the words were about. There was something that connected with something in my brain or in my soul. I was hooked after that.”
More than fifty years later, her Bob’s Back Pages is an emotional, tasteful processing of that first mind-blowing experience. Eleven Dylan songs, crisp, sheer mercurial sound, great musicianship and a few goose-bumps inducing interpretations. “Meet Me In The Morning”, “Everything Is Broken”, “Man Of Peace”, “Political World”… exciting, steamy, macabre readings. But the very two songs from H61, from the album that unleashed the first hormonal storms in bobby-soxer Lucinda, disappoint. Well alright, “Queen Jane Approximately” may be unadventurous, but is otherwise not annoying either (and has a great organ part). “It Takes A Lot”, however, doesn’t make the Top 5 Best It Takes A Lot covers – and that’s down to Lucinda, unfortunately. The band is superb. Lugubrious swelling intro, like a train approaching, the bass and drum part of Grand Funk Railroads’ “Some Kind Of Wonderful” (but with the tempo halved, of course), scruffy guitars… but on this song in particular, Lucinda’s usual elocution skills let her down. Über-affected groaning, exaggeratedly crunchy Southern accent, misplaced accentuations (“dommai gal look fine wenn she… comin’ AFTER me”, or “windohs ah filled wid fro-ho-ost” – to cite just two examples)… no, we really shouldn’t say a bad word about the wonderful Mrs Lucinda Williams, but in this case the usual, justified admiration is hard to muster.
(The sound of the album is superior, but the video recording is more entertaining)
In the competition for the last two remaining spots in the Top 5 some outsider from unexpected quarters then shows up: Ygdrassil, two girls from Groningen, the northernmost north from the north country Netherlands, release their fourth album Nice Days Under Darkest Skies in 2002 and score with their crushing, Kate & Ann McGarrigle reminiscent harmony vocals and Nick Drake reminiscent songs. Fourteen beautiful, sober and mostly moody songs, songs that reviewers then usually call “fragile”, and somewhere halfway through Side 2 “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” shines. Dylan’s song is completely swung around, reduced to an intimate folk song. Just a lone guitar in support – but more would indeed be less; the magic of harmonising Annemarieke Coenders and Linde Nijland suffices.
More extreme is possible still. Yo La Tengo may by now consider themselves among the elite of Dylan interpreters. Dylan songs have been in their repertoire since Day One, since the 1980s, and are always at least enjoyable, and often enough overwhelming. In 2007, their Dylan status is more or less officially recognised, when they contribute two songs to the I’m Not There soundtrack; a rousing restoration of the ignored cuckoo “I Wanna Be Your Lover” with remarkable love for the sound – the sound of the early Rolling Stones (including Brian Jones licks and Mick Jagger’s snarling stabs), a copy of an Al Kooper organ and Dylanesque honking on a harmonica; smashing, all of it. And even better is the second contribution: a modest, dreamy, sultry version of “Fourth Time Around”. Rather close to the original, but that’s how one of the bands strongholds comes out best: Georgia Hubley’s shrouded, utterly mesmerising vocals.
Which is one of the great strengths of Yo La Tengo’s “It Takes A Lot” as well. BBC’s John Peel loves it and promotes the song in 1999. “Here’s another track from my birthday CD,” he says on BBC Radio One on 30 September, referring to the present he received for his 60th birthday: a CD filled with his favourite songs, covered by his favourite artists. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy opens with Elvis’ “Crying In The Chapel”, we hear wonderful covers of “And Your Bird Can Sing”, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Interstellar Overdrive” and, of course, Peel’s all-time favourite “Teenage Kicks”, and then the bouncer is “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”. “One of my favourite songs,” says Peel, “and a gorgeous performance by Yo La Tengo.”
The trio from Hoboken tilts the song further than any cover. Gone are the groove and the licks and the rock’n’roll. The background is an industrial drone, the base a minimalist bass and the colour comes from metallic accents on a restrained guitar, that’s it. No percussion or keys. The soundtrack to a psychological horror. And then Georgia Hubley’s vocals: spectral, otherworldly. It’s Susie Salmon (played by then-15-year-old Saoirse Ronan) in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, the girl who, from an afterlife, tries to come to terms with her horrific death and wants to prevent the serial sex killer from making another victim. “My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was 14 years old when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. I was here for a moment and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.”
With the rock’n’roll, Yo La Tengo also removes the sex from Dylan’s song. In this arrangement and with these vocals it becomes a totally different song with a totally different connotation. Verse lines like
Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across
… and, for example, the closing line Don’t say I never warned you when your train gets lost now have lurid, otherworldly connotations. “I was here for a moment and then I was gone.”
“Reinterpretation” might be a more appropriate stamp than “cover”, but either way: a place in the Top 5 of Best It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry Covers. So concluding, in no particular order:
Bloomfield, Kooper, Stills – Super Session
Chris Smither – Time Stands Still
Fairport Convention – Festival Cropredy 2002
Ygdrassil – Nice Days Under Darkest Skies
Yo La Tengo – Sleepless Night
Five beautiful covers, each fanning out into a different direction. Very similar to how Dylan lets the song fan out in all directions in the weeks, years and decades after the song’s premiere in Newport…
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:
This is (I think) number 19 in this series which selects Dylan concerts from the internet and gives a link to them. So there’s nothing original here, except for the fact that I was unable to find another site that had compiled a list of concert recordings, so that if for any reason one suddenly wanted to know what Bob was sounding like in any particular year, one could find the answer quickly.
The aim of course is to have at least one recording of a gig from each year that Bob has been touring. A list of the concerts to which we’ve already put links is given below.
If there are any concerts you would particularly like to recommend and which are freely available on-line, please do write to me: Tony@schools.co.uk with the details.
The recording quality on this particular concert really is good considering the way these recordings have to be made.
Here are the songs performed…. A link to all the other articles in this series is given below.
The history of music in the 20th century was one of experimentation and innovation, alongside the evolution of new technology. For the traditional “serious” musical forms of the classical-romantic era, wherein such giants of composition as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven had defined what could and could not be done, their music could now be heard by all who wanted to hear, whenever they wanted to hear it.
At the same time, folk songs and blues – the music of the people which was rarely, if ever, written down – suddenly found itself transformed through the fact that it could be heard on recordings. It thus attained a solidity it had never had before, as well as a much larger audience
It is impossible to overestimate the impact the development of recording techniques had on music, for through this technical innovation, the performances that were recorded started to become the definitive performances, simply because they were recorded, and could be heard over and again.
Dylan, as we know, was one of the very few composers in what became known as the “popular” form of music, who turned against this: he wanted the freedom write, re-write and re-invent his songs, and although the record company insisted of course that he put versions on record, for Dylan they were never the definitive versions, as he endlessly sought to re-write the arrangements, and indeed often the lyrics, melodies and chord sequences for his performances.
At the same time as this technological evolution was happening, so popular music continued to evolve from earlier popular forms such as dance music, and combined with different ethnic forms such as the blues, to develop in a multiplicity of ways. Then as radio stations took to playing recorded music (initially in the USA, but later elsewhere) the music of both contemporary and historic artists to a much wider audience.
Thus, music became increasingly diversified, although at the same time some cultural groups found the music of other cultural groups unintelligible. Popular singers were deemed unable to sing while the music of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen was considered incomprehensible. You can find their work across the internet but here’s an example to save you time…
Meanwhile, popular music likewise diversified, and here a more vigorous cultural battle arose with some music being classified by belligerent groups as the “music of the devil”, some, such as the music of modern jazz, the avant-garde or the music of experimental artists such as Frank Zappa was considered “unintelligible” and in some countries unfit for broadcasting. Indeed in countries such as the UK, government control over radio broadcasting continued for many years, thus restricting the spread of awareness of new musical forms.
And this was a rather curious issue, because the music aimed at the mass population tended to convey a message that everything was, or could be fine, and as such it supported the status quo. I’ve quoted “White Christmas” as one of the prime examples of the genre; one of the most popular songs of all time, I expressed the simple view that everything was, or soon would be, fine. There was nothing to struggle for; our world needed no change.
But of course some musical forms – most particularly the blues and folk music – carried the message that everything was far from fine, and it was these two forms combined with the arrival of radio stations in the USA playing music 24 hours a day that paved the way for the evolution of new forms of music, and which could allow people to hear music of a different style, incorporating different visions of life.
And inevitably, a few composers such as Frank Zappa and Bob Dylan then went further, taking the conventions of the styles of music that they were interested in, and then expanding and combining them using approaches that had rarely been heard before. We might at this point remember “Constant Sorrow,” and note that here Dylan was deliberately extending the length of some lines, yet achieving this without breaking the construction of the song – the rhyme and the regularity of the chords continuing to make it easy for us to appreciate where we are in the song and how each line fits into the pattern of the music.
However there is a boundary beyond which the manipulation of the form goes so far that the music itself becomes something different – something that inevitably will at first be, for the average listener, harder to understand and accommodate. And of course when this happens it brings forth a dichotomy. The singer/songwriter wishes to break new ground, but also wishes to keep his/her audience, and these two drives can be found to be pulling in different directions.
And just how interested Bob was in such concepts was the theme of the earlier article in this series, which took a look at All I really want to do which is a song about expressing one’s individuality, and not following the contemporary manner of focussing on expressing love, as was found at the time in folk, pop and rock songs.
Although it is of course not the done thing for the author to refer the reader to the author’s own writing, perhaps I might break that rules with reference to my articcle on I’ll keep it with mine because it was on re-reading that piece written almost ten years before, that I decided to take on this series about the music rather than the lyrics.
So quite often we find examples of Bob clearly wanting to experiment both with the music and the lyrics, while sometimes liking a composition of his own enough to try radically different approaches, although on occasion only to conclude that none of these experiments were working well enough to put on an album, or indeed to perform to the wider public.
However, that does not stop such songs becoming part of the official Dylan collection, which means others then have the freedom to work some more on the song, and try making a recording of the song, despite the fact that the composer had given up on it. And this is what I think happened with “I’ll keep it with mine”.
The problem with this song is that the music and the lyrics simply don’t fit, which leaves the musicians forever trying to work out how best to perform the song. As Eyolf Østrem writes in relation to the Bootleg series version quite reasonably wrote, “The bass moves in mysterious ways. The piano has the bass line | g-a-c-d | e-d-c-a | g-a-c– | d—| at the beginning of the clip, whereas the bass guitar tries its best to figure out how the song goes, without consistently failing nor succeeding.”
What adds to the problem for me is that in the Biograph version, Bob is playing the out-of- tune piano that he has used elsewhere and which has the honky-tonk effect, while tapping his foot on the beat, and putting in the occasional harmonica break.
But his problem overall is that the lyrics often contain too many syllables to fit with what is available in the music. The beat, in short, is defeated. Consider the opening lines,
You will search, babe, at any cost But how long, babe, can you search for what is not lost?
Forget the tune if you can, for the moment, and just look at those words. The first line has a musical pause at “babe” bringing in “at any” after two beats, meaning that the four beats of that bar are used up, and so “cost” – a word that is extended, fills most of the next bar.
At one level, that works fine – “cost” is an important word, and is going to rhyme with “lost” in the next line so we need to keep it in our short-term memory to help us make sense of the pattern of the song.
But the line “but how long babe, can you search for what is not lost” now has too many syllables in it. “Long” because of its meaning and sound, needs to be stretched out, but it ends up making “what is not lost” a gabble at the end of the line. Dylan does make it work, but at a stretch, and as a listener we are unsure of how the metrics of the song are working. In short, we have lost the beat.
Then we get “Everybody will help you” in which “Eve-ry” gets two beats, forcing “body” to be pushed together onto one beat, and Bob makes this work by extending the number of beats in the bar. That is fine for Bob, although it might feel uncomfortable for the listener, but even Bob comes unstuck with the extra syllables with the line “Not for what you are but for what you are not.”
Of course we can still make sense of the song with the lyrics set out as below, but it is immediately clear that the number of beats in the bar varying as they do, is not helping the song to be understood, nor helping it to sound as if it is offering a coherent message.
You will search, babe, at any cost But how long, babe, can you search for what is not lost? Everybody will help you some people are very kind But if I can save you any time Come on, give it to me I'll keep it with mine
I can't help it if you might think I am odd If I say I'm loving you not for what you are but for what you're not Everybody will help you discover what you set out to find But if I can save you any time Come on, give it to me I'll keep it with mine
The train leaves at half past ten But it'll be back in the same old spot again The conductor he's still stuck on the line And if I can save you any time Come on, give it to me I'll keep it with mine
The effect is disconcerting, and for anyone trying to perform the song today, it really does take quite a lot of rehearsal to get it right, even when the pianoist and singer are the same person and no one else is involved (which is to say no one else dependent upon your time-keeping.)
Such variation in the song’s rhythm is interesting and certainly worthy of experiment, and Bob’s solo version works because he knows where he’s going; his hands on the piano and his voice delivering the vocals can work as one. But if you just listen to the first recording below, you can probably hear that occasionally there’s an extra bounce in the playing of the bass as the musician is trying to keep a grip on where Bob is going. It is as if the notion of this being a sad, plodding song in 4/4 time is suddenly picking up a bit of bounce. Which is rather odd.
We can perhaps perceive the problems within the song also just by looking at line two in each verse; we can see that no matter how the lines are performed, they end up with a different number of beats in each line. Five in the first verse, six in the second and four in the final verse.
But how long, babe, can you search for what is not lost?
If I say I'm loving you not for what you are but for what you're not
But it'll be back in the same old spot again
Now there is no problem with doing this in poetic forms, but when it comes to a song, we automatically expect an accompaniment which has the same number of beats in each line. Of course, a composer can decide not to proceed in this way, but if that is what happens then for most of us, brought up on the regularity of songs, it all feels a bit weird, not to say uncomfortable.
Judy Collins however, with a fully rehearsed backing group, did to some degree turn the composition into a regular pop song, extending bars to make the music and lyrics fit, but for me it is not fully successful and I am left with the thought that the essence of the song has somehow been tampered with, to make it more easy to listen to – and I am not at all sure that was Bob’s idea in writing it in this way.
You will search, babe, at any cost But how long, babe, can you search for what is not lost? Everybody will help you Some people are very kind But if I can save you any time Come on, give it to me I'll keep it with mine I can't help it if you might think I am odd If I say I'm not loving you not for what you are But for what you're not Everybody will help you Discover what you set out to find But if I can save you any time Come on, give it to me I'll keep it with mineThe train leaves at half past ten But it'll be back in the same old spot again The conductor He's still stuck on the line And if I can save you any time Come on, give it to me I'll keep it with mine
What I take from this piece is that Bob really was, this early in his career seeking to push not just the lyrics boundaries, but also the musical boundaries. This song was never intended to be released, I feel, but I am glad it was, because as a record of what Bob was exploring musically it is invaluable.
The Top 5 Best Covers of any Dylan song is dominated by the ladies. Who are also more often than not at Number 1. Indigo Girls’ “Tangled Up In Blue”, the “I Believe In You” from Sinéad, Dixie Chicks’ “Mississippi”, Severa Gjurin’s “Not Dark Yet”, Emma Swift’s “I Contain Multitudes”, the “Is Your Love In Vain?” by Barb Jungr, and let’s not forget The Roches’ brilliant “Clothes Line Saga” cover… “There’s a density and a gravity to a Dylan song that you can’t find anywhere else,” as Nick Hornby writes (31 Songs, 2003), and for reasons that remain unexplained, female colleagues in particular manage to maintain or even extrapolate those exceptional qualities of a Dylan song (as The Roches do).
But “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” is one of those rare songs where the ladies struggle to make it into the Top 5. The Top 3 seems fairly undisputed: the Super Session cover by Al Kooper and Stephen Stills, the irresistible Chris Smither and Richard Thompson’s Fairport Convention.
Fairport Convention has had a Dylan reputation to uphold since the 1960s – the British folk rockers’ many renditions are usually great. On the first LP (Fairport Convention, 1968), Richard Thompson still only indirectly pays tribute to his hero by incorporating Dylan texts into songs (“Jack O’Diamonds” and “It’s Alright Ma, It’s Only Witchcraft”), but after that, Dylan is unequivocally honoured on every 60s LP (and on stage too). “I’ll Keep It with Mine” (What We Did On Our Holidays, 1968); “Si Tu Dois Partir” (a version unmotivated translated into French of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”), “Percy’s Song” and “Million Dollar Bash” on Unhalfbricking in 1969 (plus the outtake “Dear Landlord” later appearing on the CD reissue); and the outtake “The Ballad of Easy Rider” on the Deluxe Edition of 1969’s Liege & Lief.
In the decades that follow, Richard Thompson and company remain faithful to Dylan. We hear a compelling “George Jackson”, a funky “Down in the Flood”, “Country Pie” as an explosive country rocker and a homely “Open the Door Richard”, just to name a few. The seventeen Dylan covers on the 2018 compilation A Tree With Roots – Fairport Convention And The Songs Of Bob Dylan offer a fine sampling and a wonderful folk-rock record.
For a good recording of Thompson’s interpretation of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” we have to wait until the 21st century: Cropredy 2002. The Friday session on 9 August of the annual, now three-day August festival Fairport’s Cropredy Convention is nostalgic; original members Ashley Hutchings and Simon Nicol and even short-lived primal member vocalist Iain Matthews (1967-69) join Thompson and play a nostalgic set – i.e. lots of Dylan. “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, “Jack O’Diamonds”, “Million Dollar Bash”… and in between:
“We’re gonna do a song – if you were lucky enough to see us way back then: we did this song quite a lot live. Never recorded it. See if you remember this one,”
… says bassist Ashley Hutchings announcing that Top 3 performance of “It Takes A Lot”. It’s a perfect exercise. As in the original, tempo and groove are set by the guitar, in this case Thompson’s Stratocaster, but Thompson-style: with a whimsical, cool swinging, quirky pattern. Master George Galt’s harmonica flutters hesitantly around it, and then Hutchings lays the concrete foundation. More than thirty years the song has been in the Fairporters’ system, and it pays off. That, and the men’s superior craftsmanship, of course. And that’s without mentioning the lived Dylan love. A love that Dylan already reciprocates as DJ on his Theme Time Radio Hour three times (playing three Richard & Linda Thompson songs), and in 2013 wholeheartedly when he plays Richard’s pièce de résistance “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” on stage. Which Richard takes in with appropriate pride, some self-mockery and English understatement:
“I didn’t really believe Bob Dylan covered one of my songs… why would he? When it sank in, I thought, ‘Well, that’s fantastic. I’ve covered 75 of his; he’s covered one of mine.’ I think that’s the right ratio.”
. (Ray Padgett’s Pledging My Time, 2023)
It Takes A Lot To Laugh – Fairport Convention:
Little room at the top, all things considered, for the ladies. The usual suspects forego the song anyway: neither the 21st-century prima donna of Dylan covers, Babr Jungr, nor the Dylan torchbearers of the 20th century, Joan Baez and Cher, have “It Takes A Lot” in their repertoire. A prime candidate from the premier league is Dylan disciple Marianne Faithfull, but she chooses the song at an awkward moment in her life and career: 1971, in the years she spent mostly sitting on a wall in Soho under marmalade skies, looking with kaleidoscope eyes at all the clean white sheets stained red. She is quite literally plucked from the wall by Decca producer Mike Leander, who miraculously manages to get full-time junkie Marianne to sing an entire album;
The picture of me on the album cover shows how I actually looked then. Pale, thin and sickly. I looked like death. My voice is so weak on Rich Kid Blues, I can’t bear to listen to it. It’s the voice of somebody incredibly high, probably on the edge of death, making a record. It’s always like that. Johnny Thunders sounds like that. There’s no energy. Anybody who heard that record would have just said, “Well that’s that. We’ll never hear from her again.”
. (Faithfull; An Autobiography, 1994)
“Strange and ghostly,” Marianne calls the recording, and that’s about right. Three Dylan covers: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” on Side A, Side B opens with “Visions of Johanna” and then comes “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”. Her self-criticism makes sense. Decca and Mike Leander hear that too, so the recordings are put on a shelf, Marianne receives a firm handshake and is back on her wall two days later. Only after Broken English revives her career in 1978, reviving Marianne herself as well in the years that follow, being clean and popular, does Decca finally dare to toss the record onto the market (in 1985).
As it turns out, it’s not so bad. “Incredibly high”, “weak voice”, “on the edge of death”… all true, but nevertheless (or rather: precisely because of this) the record has a strange, somewhat perverse appeal. Her detachment works superbly on “Visions of Johanna”, for instance, in which she still manages to lay down nuance, flickers of emotion and chilling resignation from beginning to end – which is also true for “Sad Lisa”. The hollow, lugubrious overtones, by the way, are partly artificially staged by producer Leander. Most of the songs have sparse, stripped-down arrangements; in “Corrine Corrina” and in “Long Black Veil”, the tempo is scaled back even further and the reverb slider is opened a touch more; and song titles like “Beware Of Darkness” and “Crazy Lady Blues” are, of course, not chosen by chance either.
“It Takes a Lot to Laugh” brings a light note, surprisingly. Fairly up-tempo, a cheeky, sharp solo guitarist (Chris Spedding, would be an educated guess), a cheerfully thrumming bass, skilful piano and ditto drums – all of which contrasts pleasantly with Marianne’s flat, disinterested delivery.
However, she does not make the Top 5. If only because she, stoned and all, immediately messes up the opening line: “Well, I ride on a million train baby”.
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:
