Untold Dylan

by Larry Fyffe

He who knows not American history, knows not Bob Dylan. Or, to be more precise, he who knows not the Romantic myths surrounding American history, knows not Bob Dylan.

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow shoots his myth-bearing arrow into the oak tree of American folklore.

On the way to Jamestown, Virginia, Captain Miles Standish is blown off course and lands at Plymouth Rock. Longfellow immortalizes the Indian-killer in ‘The Courtship Of Miles Standish’.

Taking her cue from Longfellow’s poem, another Romantic immortalizes Pocahontas, the Indian princess associated with the Jamestown settlement:

Knowest thou what thou hast done, thou, dark-haired child?
What great events on thy compassion hung?
What prowess lurks beneath your aspect mild
And in the accents of that foreign tongue? ……
But thou, O forests princess, true of heart
When o’er our fathers waved destruction’s dart
Shalt in their children’s loving hearts be shrined
Pure, lonely star, o’er dark oblivion wave
It is not meet thy name should moulder in the grave
(Lydia Sigourney: Pocahontas)

The singer/songwriter gets Star Trek’s Scotty to beam him back to the early English settlement at Jamestown:

I got a house on a hill, I got hogs out in the mud
I got a house on a hill, I got hogs out lying in the mud
Got a long-haired woman, she got royal Indian blood
(Bob Dylan: Summer Days)

Sir Walter Raleigh brings hogs to Jamestown in 1607.

The ‘Desire’ album pays tribute to poet Henry Longfellow, and his Romantic reworking of the history of the later settlement at Plymouth Rock:

…. Oh sister, when I fall into your spacey arms
Can not ya feel the weight of oblivion
And the songs of redemption on your backside
We surface alongside Miles Standish
And take the Rock
(Liner notes: Desire album)

The singer/songwriter lightens up with humour the transformation of ‘the American Dream’ of a new Eden into the reality of materalistic greed -Captain Standish becomes Captain Arab:

I was riding on the Mayflower
When I thought I spied some land ….
Captain Arab he started writing up some deeds
He said ‘Let’s set up a fort
And start buying this place with beads’
(Bob Dylan: 115th Dream)

In the ‘Desire’ song ‘Isis’, Bob Dylan humourously mixes together mythologies in the manner of Gothic Romantic poetry. Searched for, as expressed through various mythologies, is the Oneness of the Universe before it split apart. For example, in Christian mythology, Jesus is considered an integral part of Father Sky, and the Lord unites with Mary, the Earth Mother; the produce of Earth and Sky be Adam and Eve.

In Egyptian mythology, Isis, a Mary-like symbol of a devoted mother, is the product of the Sky goddess and Earth god. She is the wife to her brother Osirus. Set, the jealous brother of Osirus, locks him in a coffin, a tale akin to the Christian story of Cain stoning his brother Abel to death.

Bob Dylan recklessly satires these mythologies and plays with Longfellow’s poetic juxtaposition of material and spiritual values:

I was thinkin’ about turquoise
I was thinkin’ about gold
I was thinkin’ about diamonds
And the world’s biggest necklace
As we rode through the canyons
Through the devilish cold
I was thinkin’ about Isis
How she thought I was so reckless
(Bob Dylan: Isis)

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

by Larry Fyffe

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, under the influence of the the modernist Surrealistc poets, focuses on human nature rather than on external Nature which is envisioned by Wordsworthian poets to be infused with God’s presence.

As far as the English Romantics go, Dylan relates more to William Blake and John Keats who recognize both the bright and dark side in the hearts of Man.

Nonetheless, Dylan is well aware of the vivid and romantic imagery of earlier America times as depicted in the common-rhymed poems of Henry Longfellow, an American Transcendentalist who detects a youthful spirit pervading the natural beauty of the New Frontier (in contrast to the sordid pursuit of material gain):

The longing for ignoble things
The strife for triumph more than truth
The hardening of the head that brings
Irreverence for the dreams of youth
(Longfellow: The Ladder Of St. Augustine)

In the poems of Longfellow, the stoic outlook of Puritanism gives way to the Romantic vision of a better future even with the passing of a loved one:

The shadow of the linden trees
Lay moving on the grass
Between them and the moving boughs
A shadow, thou, didst pass
(Longfellow: A Glean Of Sunshine)

The poet’s sunshiny optimism differs from the Puritan outlook that is overly concerned with thàt long fellow slithering in the grass:

There came a wind like a bugle
It quivered through the grass
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
(Emily Dickinson: There Came A Wind Like A Bugle)

Adding the ominous sounds of distant drums in the sunshine of a new day, the singer/songwriter Bob Dylan splits the difference between the two visions in the following song lyrics:

Struck by the sounds before the sun
I knew the night had gone
The morning breeze like a bugle blew
Against the drums of dawn
(Bob Dylan: Lay Down Your Weary Tune)

In the following poem, there is the positive imagery of a furnace bright that’s creating something new:

The children coming home from school
Look in the open door
They love to see the flaming forge
And hear the bellows roar
And catch the flaming sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing floor
(Longfellow: The Village Blacksmith)

In the song lyrics below, the fiery image is painted in a tone closer to William Blake’s original vision – the portrayal of a wrathful God that serves the interests of those in authority by instilling in everyone guilt, and puritanical values:

I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame
And every time I pass that way, I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey, I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand
(Bob Dylan: Every Grain Of Sand)

The Romantic poet Longfellow cheerfully celebrates the founding of a new Promised Land in America:

The fate of a nation was riding that night
And the spark struck out by that steed in his flight
Kindled the land into a flame with its heat
(Longfellow: Paul Revere’s Ride)

The singer/songwriter tempers the optimism of Longfellow, and satirizes the complacency of modern times:

The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course
The city father’s they’re trying to endorse
The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse
But the town has no need to be nervous
(Bob Dylan: Tombstone Blues)

Any prospect of a Paradise regained is put asunder by the cold-hearted rationalism and materialism of a modern Babylon:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
(Bob Dylan: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine)

In a narrative poem by Henry Longfellow, the duty-bound Indian-fighter Miles Standish of the new English settlement at Plymouth Rock loses his marriage object to a principled yet more emotion-revealing rival; stand-offish Miles comes to understand why that happens and redeems himself:

Wishing her joy of her wedding and lauding her husband
Then he said with a smile, I should have remembered the adage
‘If you would be well served, you must serve yourself’
(Longfellow: The Courtship Of Miles Standish)

Bob Dylan pays tribute to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his Romantic vision of America:

Romance is taking over …
Can ya not feel the weight of oblivion
And the songs of redemption …
We surface alongside Miles Standish
And take the Rock
(Liner notes: ‘Desire’ album)

Reaping the gold of sunshine, Bob Dylan sings:

I got a house on the hill, I got pigs out lying in the mud
I got a long-haired woman, she got royal Indian blood
(Bob Dylan: Summer Days)

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Tony Attwood

This really is a fragment of a song – one of the many that would not have emerged had it not been for the decision to release the complete set.  And it is one of those that could most certainly have proven to be a song of some significance if only Bob had had the time or inclination to carry on.

The fragment however turned up on the Bootleg series Volume 11, and it is certainly tantalising.  Dylan clearly didn’t have the words sorted – it was just an idea.

But what we do have is a realisation of what the song could have been thanks to an album “Bob Dylan Uncovered Volume 2” which includes what to me is a really fine realisation of the song as far as it was written, by Bill Shuren and The Cavalry.  There’s a link to it below – and they really make something of this quick run through.

Bill was actually kind enough not only to take a moment and read this review but actually write back and say thanks.  Now that is a considerate musician and a half.  I appreciate that very much.

I think that this realisation of the song shows just what an extraordinary run of form Dylan was in at this time – his throw aways were much better than most songwriters career highlights.

The lyrics are clearly not finished, and there’s nothing much to be gained from imagining what they would have been – all we can do is note down what they sound like. If you disagree fair enough.

As far as I can see this is a song even Heylin didn’t know about at the time of writing “Revolution in the Air” and I can’t find anything that really helps me put it in the sequence. I’m giving it a place in the chronology of Dylan songs from the 1960s, but it’s just a guess.

Another guess is that Bob came up with “I’m a three time loser, but I’m all right” and then just worked out the rest of it from there – until something else came along and distracted him.

Here’s the lyrics, as far as anyone can get – if you know of a closer rendition please do write in.

Now, when I call her by her name
You know she don’t come
She don’t leave me down easy, child, but I don’t
I caught a man a standing on his way to some
But I don’t have to leave because you know she won’t.

All right, I’m all right
I’m a three time loser
But I’m all right
All right, I’m all right
I’m a three time loser
But I’m all right

Oh, it’s so high, so divisive
It’s all can, I swear to god
You know she’s gonna be the death of me
But she opened my heart
And now she takes in my breath, but I,
You know, she’s sucking out the life and breath of me

All right, I’m all right
I’m a three time loser
But I’m all right
All right, I’m all right
I’m a three time loser
But I’m all right
All right, I’m all right
I’m a three time loser
But I’m all right

The link to the track is at…

http://www.deezer.com/en/track/129007114

Incidentally if you want to hear the whole album of cover versions of Dylan songs it is here.  http://www.deezer.com/en/album/13639958  – it won’t be to everyone’s tastes, and indeed there are some tracks I really don’t care for, but I found parts of the album a very decent listen while I was working on this review.

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

Bob Dylan And Edward Cummings: The Romantic Revival

by Larry Fyffe

The poet Edward Cummings, inspired by the preRomantic poetry of William Blake and the subsequent Romantic Transcendental Movement, looks back to the innocence of childhood in search of natural love, a journey that takes the poet away from the structured world of mass conformity that’s been shattered in the wake of the madness of war.

With poetry Postmodernist-in-form, EE Cummings reacts by shattering the rules of conventional language in an effort to uncover and rediscover beneath its structure the essence of the mysterious force -natural love – symbolized  by the word ‘God’. The poet removes the institutionalized dogmatic trappings of religion in his quest for the ultimate spirit that infuses material reality.

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, like Edward Cummings, presents a world to his listeners and readers in shattered, fragmented, and broken images:

(Bob Dylan: Everything Is Broken)

Unbound by time, the inherent drive of the individual artist compels him/her to use all creative energy to demonstrate that Ol’ Humpty Dumpy – i.e., a loving society – can indeed, at least in the artistic imagination, be put back together again:

Below, again in tangled syntax, a similar message delivered by the aforementioned Romantic poet, EE Cummings:

Both writers oxymoronically express that time and existence be an unfathomable mystery, tempered by regeneration and love:

(EE Cummings: All Nearness Pauses)

In particular, there is a central anthem associated with running the flag up the pole of the Romantic spiritual reawakening. To wit, the transcendental unification of the One with the Other, is transmitted by God through the playful experiencing of physical sex. As depicted in the following poem:

(EE Cummings: May I Feel Said He)

So it is Cummingsly expressed in the song below:

(Bob Dylan: Dress It Up)

Rap-like poetry, Cummings’ be:

(Childish Gambino: Freaks And Geeks)

Albeit seemingly fragmented, the Absolute Oneness of the Blakean Universe, alliterative Edward Cummings presents in poems suitable for children:

(EE Cummings: Maggie And Milly And Molly And May)

Likewise so expresses the Nobel-winning songwriter:

In the face of the all the broken conventional values of contemporary society, the singer/songwriter invokes the broken syntax of Edward Cummings poetry to convey the impression of an alien and fragmented world:

(Bob Dylan: I’m Not There)

Nevertheless, all is reconciled, according to the hyperbolic poet EE Cummings (and seemingly Bob Dylan too) –  the deepest secret of the Universe is that it be the enigma of Love that’ll prevent the Apocalypse by its keeping the stars apart:

(EE Cummings: Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town)

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

by Tony Attwood

This is yet another Basement song with no information on the official site – it’s never been played by Dylan, and has no official lyrics.  Indeed the inestimable Eyolf Østrem comments that,  “The lyrics seem to be nonsense and exist only to fill in for what would be the real words, if they ever existed.”

But at least we know about the title, especially with Dylan’s interest in movies throughout the ages.

This comes from the movie, “The Sky’s the Limit” made in 1943.   There’s a link below and I can say that having spent my life dancing I sit here thinking oh if only I had been able to dance 2% of that without a slip…   Although some of the choreography I worked on in my time in the theatre ended up in accidents a bit like this.  (And I wonder did they actually have any insurance for the leap onto the bar stool?).

That song contains these lines

As for Dylan, I suddenly had the silly idea that he’s halfway between “One more cup of coffee” and “On the road again” with this song.   As Heylin put it, it is part of a set of “Snapshots from an ongoing process,” so you never know.

Here’s where Bob got to…

This bottle is dried up too
And I’ll be all cried up soon
I can’t see no God on the moon
It’s a long way to go

In a mawkish sort of 1950s way it is a decent song, although Dylan sounds throughout as if he is singing a couple of tones too high for comfort in the chorus.  But then he is right at the bottom of his range in the verses – which is perhaps why he abandoned the piece.  With his range it was just on unsingable.

But I can’t leave this without going back to the opening Fred Astaire line in the extract above, “I’m just walking a tightrope between somewhere and somewhere else.”  Dylan brings that feeling across too.   Whether he consciously remembered the song, whether he had seen the movie, or whether the title was just there at the back of his mind, it is an interesting thought.

I just like to take it on to imagine that Bob had indeed seen the movie, and remembered the song.  Certainly Frank Sinatra recorded the song half a dozen times, which makes me think Bob did know it.  (One Sinatra version was actually used in Blade Runner – and it turns up in all sorts of other places too. If you are familiar with the phrase “Set em up Joe” that comes from here).

And it turned up in loads of other movies, plus everyone around seems to have recorded it.  It is just one of those songs.

Dylan takes it somewhere different, and leaves us with a feeling of what might have been.  It wasn’t, but we can’t begrudge him that.  He has, after all, given us a lot of other things to enjoy.

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

by Tony Attwood

“Going to Acapulco” is one of those songs in which the official lyrics don’t match the lyrics that we hear.  It is most annoying when that happens – but here it is the result of re-writes and re-writes across the years.

The song came to fame in the 2007 movie I‘m Not There – that’s the one with six actors portraying different aspects of Bob Dylan’s personality – was not a great success at the box office.  But the soundtrack is something that did resonate with quite a few fans with over 30 Dylan compositions being covered by those in the film.

And for many people, I think, Jim James rendition of “Going to Acapulco,” backed by Calexico is one of the highlights – perhaps the highlight.  It is certainly worth seeing, with its visual reference back to the “whiteface” Bob wore in the 1975/76 Rolling Thunder tour.

If you love this clip as much as I do, you’re going to have a lovely three minutes.  The sound (at least on my system) doesn’t come out very well, but I thought you might like to see this little extract from the movie too, in case you haven’t seen it.

Here it is in the film…

Well, sometime you know when the well breaks down
I just go pump on it some
Rose Marie, she likes to go to big places
And just set there waitin’ for me to come

Goin’ to Acapulco–goin’ on the run
Goin’ down to see fat gut–goin’ to have some fun
Yeah–goin’ to have some fun

This song is a perfect example of how Dylan makes brilliant music out of such simple chordal basis.

This is the chord sequence with the unexpected changes in bold…

G D
I’m going down to Rose Marie’s
C G
She never does me wrong.
G D
She puts it to me plain as day
C G
And gives it to me for a song.
G G7
It’s a wicked life but what the hell
C Am
Everybody’s got to eat
G D
And I’m just the same as anyone else
C Am
When it comes to scratching for my meals
G C
Goin’ to Acapulco
G F
Goin’ on the run.
G C
Goin’ down to see soft gut
G Am
Goin’ to have some fun.

It is the sudden insertion of the A minor (Am) and the F chords that I have put in bold that really keep the listener alert to what is happening.

There is a fair degree of uncertainty about the date of composition of the song, not least because despite its elegance and originality it didn’t appear in the earlier copyright lists of songs from the Basement Tapes era.  I’m putting it in the list of 1960s songs around the Don’t ya tell Henry time, but I could be quite wrong.

It does seem like the re-writing of two verses came in 1975 when the song was being considered for release – but was then put away again although there was a further bit of re-writing in 1985 to give slight changes such as

If the wheel don’t drop and the train don’t stop
I’m bound to meet the sun

I have no idea what that means, but I think it really sounds good.

There is a review on the internet that says that the song is about a prostitute.  And maybe it is, but I am not too sure that working through such meanings on a song like this really gets us too far.  Dylan has made it quite clear in interviews that he never really expected a lot of these songs to ever see the light of day or the sound emanating from the record player, and so he was able to write anything he wanted without considering its implications or indeed without much thought of t he quality.

If you are not particularly familiar with Dylan’s version from Bootleg Vol 11 and turn to it after listening to the movie version above it is quite a surprise how different it is.

Personally I really don’t think the accompaniment is at all right on the Bootleg version, but these guys were knocking the songs out very quickly so that is completely understandable, but listening now from the luxury of sitting in my study in rural Northamptonshire looking out at the trees and the mist, I really could kill that organist for having no concept of what the song was all about.

That is not to say I know what it is about, but I am sure as hell that this is not a place for lots of twiddly bits (to use the technical musical term).

But as I say the guys were knocking these songs out one after another, and thankfully it was resurrected for the movie.  Having come back to it again I’d place it on the list of “lost” masterpieces – but that would be me thinking of the movie version rather than Dylan’s own rendition.

There are worse ways of getting there
And I ain’t complainin’ none
If the clouds don’t drop and the train don’t stop
I’m bound to meet the sun

Indeed.

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Larry Fyffe

Though an orthodox Christian awaiting the future return of the Messiah, Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge finds temporary relief from worldly pain – a saviour and messianic fervour in opium:

Weave a circle round him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise
(Samuel Coleridge: Kubla Khan)

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan finds a much-needed repose in organized Christianity:

There’s a kingdom called Heaven
A place where there is no pain or birth
Well the Lord created it mister
About the same time he created Earth
(Bob Dylan: I’m Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking)

Nevertheless, high water rises. While organization and its leaders require conformity, many artists appreciate the prophet Jesus because He is a rebel –
‘it is written, but I say unto you’:

I say that someday you’ll begin to trust us
And that your conscience not been slain by conformity
That you stand up unafraid to believe in in justice
But you’re making a liar out of me
(Bob Dylan: Making A Liar Out Of Me)

Once again, Romantic brightness slips beneath the waves of Gothic darkness:

In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years
He read the Book of Revelation
And he filled his cup with tears
When the Reaper’s task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The loviest and the best
(Bob Dylan: Tempest)

In the above lyrics, the singer/songwriter calls upon the Prince of Gothic:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West
Where the good and the bad and the worst
and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest
(Edgar Allan Poe: The City In The Sea)

In paying his tribute to the Anti-Transcendentalist poet, Bob Dylan retains the end-rhyme ‘rest/best’.

Dylan makes reference to the another dark poem of his:

For, alas! alas! with me
The light of life is o’er!
No more – no more – no more –
(Such language holds the solumn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree
Or the stricken eagle soar!
(Edgar Allan Poe: To One In Paradise)

Hope for a Promised Land on Earth fades:

Beneath the thunder-blasted trees
The words are ringin’ off your tongue
The ground is hard in times like these
Stars are cold, the night is young
(Bob Dylan: Tell Ol’ Bill)

End-rhyme are: ‘trees/these’ instead of ‘tree/sea’.

That man is doomed to wait for a peaceful life after death be of little solace – ‘a slave morality’ – to those to whom is promised a Paradise here on Earth:

I love you pretty baby
You’re the only love I’ve ever known
Just as long as you stay with me
The whole world is my throne
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ we can call our own
(Bob Dylan: Beyond Here Lies Nothing)

The love of a beautiful Muse and the love of Art is the individual artist’s true Messiah – the imagination’s saviour in a world gone wrong.

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Tony Attwood

“Dress It Up, Better Have It All” (seemingly known originally just as “Better have it all”) is one of those songs that vanished for many a long year, yet were known about by having been on a list of Basement Tape songs recorded, but not available even as an unofficial bootleg.  

And then finally it turned up officially on volume 11 of the Bootleg series.  So at last we had a recording.  But there still was a problem.  No one quite knows what it is all about.

Musically the song is easy to describe: “a rockabilly 12 bar bouncy blues” seems to cover it, but it is the lyrics that are pretty hard to disentangle.   One or two brave souls on the internet have had a go, but it remains without words on Bob Dylan’s official site, although the site does have a blank page for the song just in case: no lyrics, no performance detail (there seemingly were none).  Just a blank.

Ah well, down to us then.

The song has a double bass playing rather than a bass guitar and there’s the pianist having some fun, and Bob really sounds as if he knows the lyrics, but he just isn’t going to make them clear.

And clearly some people have really got into the song – for certainly it is lively and fun.  There’s a review on Amazon of the track that says, “One of the nicer previously un-bootlegged Basement Tapes”.   But, I wonder what the writer meant by “nicer”.  It’s fun, it’s jolly and it’s incomprehensible.  But “nicer”?

It has been suggested that the song is about a woman who maybe isn’t quite doing what our Bob wants her to do.   But what do you do with a set of lyrics when the opening line is transcribed as 

“Oh, mos’ feet and it hang, can’t you see?” I groan.

On the other hand maybe Bob was trying to make up a song out of random phrases just to see what it came out like.  Except the trouble with that notion is that we can’t actually be sure what we are hearing is the lyrics he is singing.

Such as

Well, hot dog, goody me. Settle on a trail

Indeed perhaps the whole idea is for us to have to work out our own lyrics.  In that case if it had been released as a mainstream track Bob would have insisted that the lyrics were never published so he could see what ideas people came up with in articles, and then if any were any good, he’d use them in another song.  Or indeed in this song.  That would be quite a turn around.  He could stand on stage and say, “here’s a song some of you wrote”.

The Something Else Reviews however does come up with an idea

“Aw, let’s shake it up!” Dylan cackles, as if peering into a future in which fans long inoculated to the enveloping joys of this period could find themselves agape once more.

Well, maybe.

But there is one other point.  Although one can quite reasonably argue that the whole of the Basement Tapes period was an incredibly rich vein of writing for Dylan, this mini-period which contained “Better have it all” was, we should know, particularly rich.

The order in which the songs were written is of course open to debate, but as far as can be worked out what we got around this time was

• Crash on the Levee
• Dress it up, better have it all
• I’m not there
• You ain’t going nowhere
• This Wheel’s on Fire
• I shall be released
• Too Much of Nothing
• Tears of rage
• Quinn the Eskimo – The Mighty Quinn

Now that’s a pretty nifty list containing a number of songs most of us would, I think, recognise as being of an extremely high quality.

Maybe “Better have it all” was just a prelude to this outpouring of quality songs, and it was just sung with whatever words Dylan had in his head (hence the lack of a lyrics sheet), and even if that is all it was, it is still worth hearing as the song that preceded “I’m not there” (another song that maybe didn’t have the lyrics written), and then “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I shall be released”, “Too much of nothing,” and “Tears of rage.”

And let’s not forget that “Too much” reached number 35 in the US charts, “This Wheel” got to number 5 in the UK singles chart, “Quinn” made number 1 in the UK, and well over 60 well known artists have recorded “I shall be released”.

Not bad for a series of songs written one after the one.  Who knows what might have happened to “Dress it up” if Dylan had finished it with a complete set of lyrics.

Here are the lyrics from Metro Lyrics, who are clearly braver than me when it comes to transcription.  The source is Band – Dress It Up, Better Have It All Lyrics | MetroLyrics

They also do a list of Dylan lyrics in the order of popularity of searching for them.

“Oh, mos’ feet and it hang, can’t you see?” I groan.
She says, ‘Oh, wha’ ‘ts arright.” I said, “Jesus, don’t take it at all.”
She’s a past-cold beauty, but she can’t light a cannonball.

Now, down by the river she’s a-hop on her knees,
and I holler to my baby, yelling, “Please, please, please!”
Oh, then I hit her and doubt my chase at all.
Now, no hoax. Let’s go! But it’s that pure soul, and it’s off the ball.

Now, honey, I’m makin’ a hot to road.
Now I’m happy to leaving, but it’s a heavy load.
I said, “Ah, my babe. She don’t meet me no half at all.”
Dress it up. Best to pick up, bub: better have it all.

[Oh, let’s shake it up.]

Well, hot dog, goody me. Settle on a trail
Down apart my knees I can’t find my kerry. Find a nail!
She old top these… oh, better hold mine up.
Please, let’s go, ‘n’ I hope it don’t interrupt.

[Oh, do it again, now. One time for Bozo and his dog.
Hot skimmin’, jumpaway. yay, yay, yay, yay.]

I hope that helped make it more understandable.

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Larry Fyffe

The poems of William Blake and Percy Shelley influence William Yeats, a Modernist latter-day Romantic poet.

Within the electric song lyrics of Bob Dylan, howl the ghosts of William Yeats’ Symbolist poetics:

All perform their tragic play
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia
(William Yeats: Lapis Luzuli)

Here comes her ghost again:

Now Ophelia, she’s ‘neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

Ophelia, where have you gone?

Through hollow lands, and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands
And walk among long dappled grass
(William Yeats: Song Of The Wandering Aengus)

The memory of a departed love who waves her hand from the tall grass:

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

This William Yeats’ message of hopeful endurance echoes in the song lyrics of other artists as well:

Those veins must soon be dry
Live in a heavenly mansion
Not in some foul sty
(William Yeats: Crazy Jane)

Below, the rhyme ‘sky/dry’ replaces ‘sty/dry’:

Janie, don’t lose heart
‘Til every river, baby, it runs dry
Until the sun is torn from the sky
(Bruce Springsteen: Don’t Lose Heart)

The theme: human life is a tragic cycle that repeats itself:

All men have aimed at, found and lost
Black out; Heaven blazing in my head
Tragedy wrought to the uttermost
(William Yeats: Lapis Lazuli)

A theme of many a Dylan lyric:

I cross the Green Mountain
I sit by the stream
Heaven blazing in my head
I dreamed a monstrous dream
(Bob Dylan: ‘Cross The Green Mountain)

In the end, like the nursery rhyme says, we all fall down:

O mind your feet, O mind your feet
Keep dancing like a wave
And under every dancer
A dead man in his grave
(William Yeats: A Drunken Man’s Praise Of Sobriety)

Dylan’s songs express a message similar to the one above – that is, of making the best of a bad circumstance whereby stands the Eternal Footman holding your coat, and he snickers:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the
circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep
beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

Likewise, the Blakean message of youthful innocence lost is let loose by Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
(William Yeats: The Second Coming)

A somber message that echoes in the lyrics of the songwriter:

Don’t fall apart on me tonight
I just don’t think I could handle it
Don’t fall apart on me tonight
Yesterday’s just a memory
Tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be
(Bob Dylan: Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight)

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Tony Attwood

The first thing to say is that this is not a review of “All I have to do is dream” which was written by Boudleaux Bryant  and recorded by the Everly Brothers.  But just because it is out there here is a recording of Bob singing that song.

But now to move on to the song Bob did write: “All you have to do is dream” which turns up on Bootleg 11 and which vimeo has on line (at least at the moment).  Strange thing with that song is if I try and copy the link and put it here it comes up with the “not available” sign, but if I click on the link in Google, it plays.

Failing that you can also try Deezer: http://www.deezer.com/en/track/92722860

Musically it is a bouncy rhythm playing around the simple sequence of G, Am, Bm, Am and back to G with a C, Am variation later on.

As for what it is all about, Robert MacMillan, the writer of Haiku 61 Revisited gives a pretty good summary:

In many regards the writer is perfectly correct – the lyrics sound AND feel better than they appear.  Take a look at the opening..,

If the farmer has no silo
And his fuel cost runs up high
Well, that’s just how much I would love you
If you’d just only let me try.

It’s clear however what he is talking about throughout…

Yes, but look what an earful I get and it’s all awful too
Every time I try to go get me a little tickle.

And it doesn’t take him too long to get down to basics.

So poor little girl, come blow this horn
Hard as any whole night seems
It’s very easily done actually
All you have to do is dream.

If it is what turns you on, all well and good. I have to say it doesn’t do much for me.

A complete list of Dylan’s songs of the 1960s including all the Basement Tape songs, with links to the songs reviewed thus far, can be found on Dylan Songs of the 60s.

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

by Tony Attwood

In this article the lyrics are taken from those provided in the excellent “Expecting Rain” with a few very minor changes of my own.  

A new song by Dylan – or better said, the release of a song that most of us have heard before – is a big moment, and I suspect this must be one of the absolute highlights of the forthcoming boxed set of Dylan’s religious songs.  If you’ve not heard it yet, it is currently linked to Rolling Stone and many other on line magazines.

As lots of us said upon first hearing it is very similar to Where are you tonight?  written at the end of 1977.  Others have noted the similarity to “You Can’t Always Get what you want” by the Rolling Stones, or Dylan’s “Angelina”.

As for the context, of course I am not quite sure of the exact order these songs were written in, but here is my best guess for 1980.

• Are you ready?
• I will love him
• Cover Down 
• Ain’t gonna go to hell for anybody
• Property of Jesus
• Every grain of sand
• Caribbean Wind
• Groom’s still waiting at the alter
• Yonder comes sin
• Let’s keep it between us
• Making a liar out of me
• City of Gold

Now if you look at that list you’ll see this was a rich vein of form that Bob was in at that time: you’ve got Every Grain of Sand, Caribbean Wind, Groom’s still waiting, Yonder Comes Sin, and I’d also put “Let’s keep it between us” right up there.   So if you were going to find a missing masterpiece then this is most certainly a good place to look.  And if you are looking for something more “religious” than some of those songs, Bob ended the year with “City of Gold” – so he was still religiously inclined, even though he’d moved away from making every song a religious song.  Indeed there are actually elements of “Making a liar” in “City of Gold”, although I’d like to listen to both a dozen more times before taking that idea further.

But I have to say, if I were working for the record company, I’d made a CD available just of these 12 songs from this year, because this is one hell of a collection.  For any other song writer this would be the ultimate highlight of a career to have written this collection.  For Bob it was just another year.

So with this song in mind, the question is, who is Bob addressing his words to?

As we’ve seen so often on this site, trying to analyse a Dylan song line by line is a mug’s game because much of the time the overall vision encapsulated within the words is far more insightful than individual lines.

Therefore if we want to go beyond the individual lines (which with Dylan can so often be misleading) we do have to get some sort of context.  However to do this is so hard because so many of the lines are so good – and it is always possible that there is not meant to be any connection between the lines – maybe they are just each individual impressions.

However if this song was written to one person, that is one hell of a person Bob was addressing.  A young, struggling man or woman, who has learned so much, and who knows so much, and who has so much within him/herself to admire.  The mother of his children?  Or maybe to his young self?  Although other times he is seeming to write about someone no longer with us.  Or is it just no longer with him?

All options are possible, but I also keep coming back to the notion that Bob is addressing his own heritage – all the songs he has written and all the songs he will write.  I know I can’t prove it but I just love the notion that he is doing this.  He is in fact writing to himself about himself, and criticising himself.

Now that would be a huge challenge, but Bob is up to that, not least because this song has some wonderful lines in it, including this one utterly amazing stand out line

The hopes and fears and dreams of the discontented

And that adds to the notion that he is talking to himself, for isn’t that what Bob carried from the days of second album onwards?

So there are the possibilities: he’s talking about himself, he’s talking about the mother of his children…   But I want to try a different route, because this notion really does hit me very strongly, after hearing the song for a couple of days…

Bob is talking to his audience.

In this view Bob starts by telling his audience that they are all educated people who know what’s what.  And in loving his music and putting deep meanings into his lyrics they do have the best of intentions, and he can’t fault them for that, but that is not what really what he has been writing about.   They might not be able to effect change personally, but they really are trying to understand and trying to do the right thing…

I tell people, you just going through changes
And that you’re acquainted both with night and day
That your money’s good and you’re just being courageous
On them burning bridges knowing your feet are made of clay
Well I say you won’t be destroyed by your inventions
That you brought it all under captivity
And that you really do have all the best intentions
But you’re making a liar out of me

Bob was around 39 years old when he wrote this song, and most of his fans would probably at that time have been a bit younger than him.  Here he has the greatest respect for his fans and their desire to make a better life and a better world, but making him into a superstar who can actually tell them what to do and what to believe, well that is not right.  That is not what he is doing at all.  Just remember, “Don’t follow leaders.”

Well I say that you’re just young and self-tormented
But that deep down you understand
The hopes and fears and dreams of the discontented
That threaten now to overtake your promised land
Well I say you’d not sow discord among brothers
Nor drain a man of his integrity
That you remember the cries of orphans and their mothers
But you’re making a liar out of me
But you’re making a liar out of me

This then follows on my earlier commentary that maybe Bob’s message across many of his songs, (if there is an overarching message at all) is that it is all a mess, and that if anyone can sort out the future it is the young, the idealists – we have the third verse in which he changes tack, and seems to turn his ire on religion and religious leaders – the flesh and blood of the Communion (1 Corinthians 11:24-25).

The relgious leaders can be trusted, but if they are seeking to use Dylan as a symbol of the Christian church (which still goes on, as I have commented elsewhere) then they are indeed making a liar out of Bob, because that is not what he is about at all.

Well I say that, that ain’t flesh and blood you’re drinking
In the wounded empire of your fool’s paradise
With a light above your head forever blinking
Turning virgins into merchandise
That you must have been beautiful when you were living
You remind me of some old-time used-to-be
I say you can be trusted with the power you been given
But you’re making a liar out of me

All in all he is full of praise for those who fight for a better world, but just doesn’t want them to do it by quoting Dylan.  To say of someone “That you stand up unafraid to believe in justice” is surely among the highest praise that can be given to a person, but as always Bob asks for the person striving to make this world a better place, that he or she does not quote Dylan along the way.

So many things so hard to say as you stumble
To take refuge in your offices of shame
As the earth beneath my feet begins to rumble
And your young men die for nothin’, not even fame
I say that someday you’ll begin to trust us
And that your conscience has not been slain by conformity
That you stand up unafraid to believe in justice
But you’re making a liar out of me
You’re making a liar out of me

The final verse has the suggestion that Bob was talking to an individual all the way through, and not all his fans as I have been suggesting, and of course that is possible, as indeed it is possible that he is speaking to different people in different places in the song – to his lover, his fans, the media, the mother of his children.

And he is careful to ensure that his criticism in the repeated lines at the end of each verse are not in any way the same as when he expressed disdain in some songs ten or more years before.  He’s saying, you are not misrepresenting all my words, but by taking my writings in a particular way, you are getting me wrong.

Well I can hear the sound of distant thunder
From an open window at the end of every hall
Now that you’re gone I got to wonder
If you ever were here at all
I say you never sacrificed my children
To some false god of infidelity
And that it’s not the Tower of Babel that you’re building
But you’re making a liar out of me
You’re making a liar out of me
Well you’re making a liar out of me

As I say, in the end it comes across to me as another way of saying “Don’t follow leaders,” especially in this case the leader is him.  And he doesn’t want that.  And the world doesn’t need that.  Because there are good people out there who can take things forward.

What else is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Larry Fyffe

Many of the song lyrics of Bob Dylan reveal the influences of poets TS Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Percy Shelley:

When Bob Dylan read a bit of TS Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’ on the air, he introduced the the poem by saying it ‘commenorated the death of Abraham Lincoln’:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
(TS Eliot: The Wasteland)

Actually, the poem to which Dylan refers is one by Walt Whitman:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
And the great star early drooped in the western
sky in the night
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with every returning spring
(Walt Whitman: When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloomed)

Whitman commemorates Lincoln’s death in another poem too:

But O heart! heart! heart!
O bleeding drops of red
Where on the deck my Captain lies
Fallen cold and dead
(Walt Whitman: O Captain! My Captain!)

In a number of his song lyrics, Dylan makes reference to Walt Whitman’s poetry:

All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she
catches the main words only
Sentences broken, ‘gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry
skirmish, taken to hospital
At present low, but soon will be better ….
While they stand at the home at the door he is dead already
(Walt Whitman: Come Up From The Fields Father)

Below again, a connection to the American Civil War:

A letter came to to mother
Came today
Gunshot wound to the breast
Is what it did say
But he’ll be better soon
He’s in a hospital bed
But he’ll never be better
He’s already dead
(Bob Dylan: ‘Cross The Green Mountain)

The Modernist poetry of TS Eliot, Bob Dylan also draws upon:

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton
Still and white
(TS Eliot: Rhapsody On A Windy Night)

Ezra Pound and TS Eliot emphasize, instead of abstract language, the use of sense-evoking images:

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
From from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

And the use of images in poetry to create a sense of movement:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
(TS Eliot: The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock)

Dylan does the same in song lyrics:

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants too
(Bob Dylan: All Along The Watchtower)

The exotic and gothic imagery of Romantic poet Percy Shelley be there in Bob Dylan’s song lyrics as well:

As within a furnace bright
Column, tower, and dome, and spire
Shine the obelisks of fire
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies
(Percy Shelley: Euganean Hill)

As in the following:

There’s a woman on my lap, she’s drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes
I’m looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies
I’m well dressed, waiting for a train
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

Bringing it all back home to the lines from ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ quoted above:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing
(Percy Shelley: Ode To The West Wind)

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Tony Attwood

In once sense “Silent Weekend” is quite remarkable, for it is just about the only rock song that I know which deals with narcissism and emotional abuse.

The “silent treatment” that the song refers to is usually delivered by a wholly self-absorbed individual, and it has the aim of putting the abusive person in control while avoiding any attempt at resolving whatever caused the difficulty.  It is in fact a form of punishment  which generally relates to tiny or even imagined slights, as for example, when one person in the relationship turns up, or comes home, slightly late.

Quite often the trauma that the silent treatment gives is exactly what the narcissistic person wants to get: a sense of control.  The damage that can be suffered by a person in receipt of such behaviour over a period of time can be enormous, sometimes even ending in a total mental breakdown.

Narcissistic people who engage in this form of activity generally choose people who have high levels of emotional intelligence, who have conflict resolution skills, and are willing to compromise at all levels to overcome the trauma.  Unfortunately each attempt at resolution just gives the narcissist more power.  The efforts are met with disdain and contempt.  If you have ever heard the phrase, “If you really loved me you would understand,” (without any further explanation or any variation on that), you may well have witnessed this.

The fact is the person with the huge psychological problems is the narcissist, but the person who gets hurt is the decent, open, reasonable other party who wants to solve the problem.

So not a normal topic for a rock song, but Dylan has a good bash.  It’s a 12 bar blues format and a middle 8 with a modulation in the standard pop mode.  So nothing particularly special from the music – but the lyrics really do take us on an unusual journey.  In essence it is, “You were five minutes late so I am going to give you a weekend of hell so I can establish control.”

Given that the lyrics are not completely clear in their meaning, especially towards the end, it is possible Dylan is also talking about psychological projection which occurs when people deny that they possess certain unconscious impulses or qualities and instead attribute them to others – most commonly the person they are with.

In a typical example, one person (in my example the woman) in a relationship might spend many hours a week speaking on the phone to her friends or relations, but when her partner has a single half hour phone call with a friend or relation, she blames him for being unreasonable and forgetting she is here.

The opening verse sets out fairly and squarely where we are

Silent weekend
My baby she gave it to me
Silent weekend
My baby she gave it to me
She’s actin’ tough and hardy
She says it ain’t my party
And she’s leavin’ me in misery

But then come the odd lyrics.  On the official Dylan site we don’t get the lyrics that turn up on the recording – at least not the lyrics on Bootleg Vol 11.   The website gives us

Silent weekend
My baby she took me by surprise
Silent weekend
My baby she took me by surprise
She’s rockin’ and a-reelin’
Head up to ceiling
An’ swinging with some other guys

This really takes us away from the main thread of the song – the psychological issues that it deals with, but the actual verse 2 on the album does seem to keep the sense of the song moving along.  It is something like this

Silent weekend
My baby she took me by the heart
Silent weekend
My baby she took me by the heart
She’s thinkin’ about disposin’
But I know I know she’s dozin’
And she’s tearin’ it all apart

So the singer is stuck, because short of a very solid period of psychological support and help people either with narcissism or who engage in psychological projection (or both) they will just keep on and on doing it.  Indeed they normally genuinely think it is the other person who is causing all the problems, and will spend forever claiming they are the injured party and how he/she has made life so awful.  If they change partners they do it again, and then bemoan the fact that they always meet the wrong sort of guy, whereas of course it is the narcissist who is the cause of all the problems.

Dylan moves on…

Silent weekend
Oh Lord, I wish Monday would come
Silent weekend
Oh Lord, I sure wish Monday would come
She’s uppity, she’s rollin’
She’s in the groove, she’s strolling
Over to the jukebox playin’ deaf and dumb

The Middle 8 with modulation deals with the man’s attempts to resolve the situation

Well, I done a whole lotta thinkin’ ’bout a whole lot of cheatin’
And I, maybe I did some just to please
But I just walloped a lotta pizza after makin’ our peace
Puts ya down on bended knees

But of course bended knees never work, because with people with these psychological problems, the drive to cause the problems is their prime motivation.

Silent weekend
Man alive, I’m burnin’ up on my brain
Silent weekend
Man alive, I’m burnin’ up on my brain
She knows when I’m just teasin’
But it’s not likely in the season
To open up a passenger train

There’s some fun lines in this song such as

She’s uppity, she’s rollin’
She’s in the groove, she’s strolling
Over to the jukebox playin’ deaf and dumb

and later…

I just walloped a lotta pizza after makin’ our peace
Puts ya down on bended knees

I’m not sure I get the passenger train reference though but Bob’s creative spirit was on a high.  I guess the song was never fully worked through or finished though, and if it had been, it could have been a cracker.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

With Dylan, there’s no pinning him down.

by Tony Attwood

In a rather interesting piece of pop and rock research the American news and culture website Quartz collected data from the AllMusic site on 53,630 artists, of which about 25,600 were listed as having influenced or been influenced by at least one other artist.

You can read how they collected the data and see the full sets of data on their web site with the link above, but for now here is the top of the “100 most influential musicians” list with the number of citations in each case.

1. Beatles 1230
2. Dylan 669
3. Rolling Stones 557
4. Bowie 432
5. Velvet Underground 425
6. Beach Boys 442
7. Kinks 384
8. Neil Young 374
9. Jimi Hendrix 371
10. The Byrds 360

I find that interesting because these individuals and bands have been an influence on me but I know that many of my friends across the years don’t really rate them or even know them all.  For example I was rather taken with finding Brian Eno at number 13.  His is a name not one that everyone (who would know the list above) would immediately recognise, I think.

As Quartz says, the “Names at the top may no surprise—consider it an obligatory homage for any modern-day rock artist to list The Beatles as an influence in press interviews, for example—but the rankings get more interesting when you look a bit further down the list.

“The Velvet Underground is several times more influential than more easily recognizable “top” artists like Nirvana and Bruce Springsteen; Madonna, one of the biggest pop stars of the last few decades, is not high up at all.”

What it suggests is that “influence” is completely different from “popularity”.  In other words artists are influenced by innovators, whilst popularity is based on something completely different.  It is obvious when you think about it – I guess I had simply never thought about it.

Which leads me to ask myself: what is it about Dylan that has given him such an influence?

By this I don’t mean just that he is a great songwriter, I wonder what else there is in Dylan that make musicians see Dylan as such a huge influence on their own work.

Why do so many song writers rank Dylan as the greatest influence on their songwriting?

Of course I don’t have the resources to ask them, but I came up with these possibilities…

1: Because he writes about subjects that were taboo before he came along.

I have mentioned this before in articles but it is so fundamental I think it is worth repeating.  The most obvious example is Dylan’s songs of disdain.  While others have written about lost love, and there are all the traditional blues about the duplicity of women, Dylan picked on individuals and has really gone on the attack.

Ballad in Plain D, Like a Rolling Stone, Please Crawl Out Your Window, Positively 4th Street…. if Dylan takes a dislike to you it is a good idea to get out of the way.  Fast.

But listen also his use of nursery rhymes, his political pieces, his songs about boxing, his tales of the downtrodden farmers.  Dylan has shown that with rock music nothing is out of bounds.

2: Because he keeps up the touring and has an absolute fascination with being on the road.

Dylan’s fascination with endless touring is not only expressed in the Never Ending Tour, but also in terms of his songs of leaving and moving on – a tradition he picked up particularly from Irish folk music, although it is to be found in many other genres.

It is not the case of moving on for a purpose, but rather just moving on because that’s what you do.  The Irish song “The Parting Glass” is worth a listen if you don’t know it.

But it is more than that.  It is his desire to experiment continuously, even if the experiments don’t work.  He’ll never stop trying.

3: Because he covers such a huge range of different approaches to the art of the song – some of which have rarely been considered before.

In February 2016 I had a bash at looking at different approaches to art in all its forms, and then how these approaches relate to song, and then how Dylan has, or has not, faced them.

What I found was that he really does seem to have faced up to many of the challenges of making the song an art form that can approach all the different types of art that exist in Western Society.  In short he has raised the popular song to a much higher art form than it ever was before.  He has revolutionised the popular song but seeing it through each of these types of art…

• Representational art
• Symbolic art
• Abstract Art
• Surreal Art
• Hidden meanings in Art
• Fictional Art
• Religious Art and Propaganda

The complete article is on the site here.

4: Because he endlessly re-works his songs into new versions which I don’t think anyone else has ever done with their own songs, to such an extent before.

Some of these new renditions become almost like new songs, others, well, sometimes I wonder why he kept the new arrangement.  But hearing Desolation Row as a dance song remains one of the highlights of my times watching Dylan perform, and he has done this sort of thing so many, many times his ability to re-invent himself seems endless.  And how much I wish I had been there to hear the piano and organ reworking of “When He Returns”.

He could make an album called “Dylan plays Dylan” of a collection of songs that have been utterly reworked on the Tour, and I guarantee it would at the top of the charts for a year and a half.

5:  Because he has endlessly been working his way through different genres

Bob has shown a couple of generations that nothing is out of bounds.  You’re a folk singer, fine, pick up the electric guitars.   You just been playing electric rock, great, take it right back and play simple three verse songs that tell tales of the past.  Be funny in your songs.  Be ludicrous.  Be incomprehensible.  Try and merge pop art, the beat movement and rock n roll – and do it successfully.  Suddenly veer off into country and western which at least in terms of its lyrics is the opposite of where you’ve been.  Start singing religious songs, rework old classics into new songs, take the hits of the 1920s and 1930s and rework them, sing Christmas songs.

Has anyone ever done all that before?  I don’t think so.

6: Because he has never been afraid to experiment no matter what critics say. He has never stood still.

Part five above would not be possible if Bob Dylan was afraid of the critics.  He’s not – and he never has been.  It is not that since he became rich and famous he decided to do what he liked, but rather he has always done what he liked right from the start when he created an album called Times they are a Changing which contained a collection of songs that were primarily about nothing much changing.

7: Because he refuses to explain

Occasionally Bob does tell us a bit about some of his songs, but when he does you know that the next time he does an interview, he’ll say the opposite.

Most musicians have accepted the media on the media’s terms.  Bob Dylan demands that the media accept him on his terms.   Ask him what a certain song means and maybe if you have his attention for a while he’ll tell you, but you’ll never know if it is what he means.

Except maybe at the Musicares conference that we covered on this site.  If you are interested in Dylan’s most serious summary of how he writes songs that speech is an absolute must read.

8: Because he’s a friend of two Presidents.

Jimmy Carter and Barak Obama.

I know it has been quoted a million times but it is such a wonderful quote I want to do it again.  President Obama on the first time Bob Dylan came to the White House to perform at what in Britain we would call a “Command Performance”.  (Sorry don’t know what the phrase is in the USA).

The President said,

“Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you’d expect he would be. He wouldn’t come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practising before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to that.

“He came in and played ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.’ A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I’m sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves.

“And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought:  That’s how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don’t want him to be all cheesing and grinning with you. You want him to be a little sceptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat.”

9: Because he’s cautious about explaining or pontificating about his works.

Except during one period when he turned logic upside down by telling us in a lecture during his concerts about the meaning of the religious songs, when the meaning was totally obvious.  How very Dylan.  The time you don’t need an explanation you get one.  The rest of the time he doesn’t even announce the title.

10: Because he is so so incredibly knowledgeable about literature and the musical past.

I must admit I had only a partial knowledge on this score before Larry came along and started writing for this site.  I picked up some references here and there, elements from poems I had read or studied, classical works, but it was not until recently that I realised just how wide spread these references were.

There is a partial index of Larry’s work, in which articles on this site about influences on Dylan are listed by the writers Dylan is referencing or using.

Conclusion

So why do so many musicians rate Dylan so highly?  I suspect for some it is because of just one of those reasons.  For some it might be several.  For others it could be something completely different.

And that’s the point.  As the President said, with Dylan, there is no pinning him down.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Tony Attwood

“Minstrel Boy” is an extraordinary Dylan song that really doesn’t sound like a Dylan composition.  Indeed if I were to hear it without any knowledge of the song, I don’t think I’d guess it was Dylan at all.

There has been considerable discussion as to when it was written.  The copyright information suggests 1969 – when it was performed at the Isle of Wight Festival.  But Dylan has suggested it came to him during the Basement Tape period.

We have two versions of it: one from Bootleg 11 and one from Self Portrait and both are really worth a listen if you don’t know the song.  It is just so unexpected.

The suggestion is that Bob was hitting back at everyone who was wanting more and more product, more and more songs, more albums, and all at a time when he wasn’t too sure he really wanted to write much more.  He felt controlled, pushed around, a minstrel boy holding out his hand for scraps, made to play like a servant in medieval times before his masters.

Who’s gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?
Who’s gonna let it roll?
Who’s gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?
Who’s gonna let it down easy to save his soul?

In this simple understanding of the song, Dylan is “Lucky” having got to the top of the rock, the personality hill, but he really feels bad about everything that he sees, because he’s just had enough.  And his personal propulsion unit has no reverse gear…

Oh, Lucky’s been drivin’ a long, long time
And now he’s stuck on top of the hill
With twelve forward gears, it’s been a long hard climb
And with all of them ladies, though, he’s lonely still

The change of tempo and rhythm between the chorus and verse is particularly impressive, and if not unique in Dylan’s songs, it is certainly unusual.

And if there was ever any doubt as to who he was singing about, he is, as he says at the end, still on the road.

Well, he deep in number and heavy in toil
Mighty Mockingbird, he still has such a heavy load
Beneath his bound’ries, what more can I tell
With all of his trav’lin’, but I’m still on that road

As it turns out, that was just about it for this style of writing, but it was an avenue that Bob could have taken further had he wanted, I am sure.

So often in writing the reviews of less famous Dylan songs I find myself suddenly thinking of another piece written maybe years before or years after, in which I get the feeling Bob has returned to the same thoughts as before.

I’m not too sure how I can justify the claim of a link between “Minstrel Boy” and “Well well well” but it just feels like there is something that crosses time between the two songs…

take care of your body like you care for your soul
don’t dig yourself into a hole
until you’ve paid the price you can’t know what it’s worth
the air water fire and earth

We’re all moving on all the time, but really, we all have basic needs that have to be satisfied, and when those needs are not looked after, no matter who we are, we are in trouble.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Tony Attwood

Quite why the wonderful people at Sony Music, Columbia Music and BobDylan.com collectively chose to put the “alternate version” of “Don’t ya tell Henry” on The Bootleg Series 11 is something that I’ve never been that sure about.  We already had the version from the original Basement Tapes LP, and it was going to turn up on the complete Basement Tapes multibox set thing, so did it need another outing?

Well, who am I to say?  And my view that the Bootleg 11 version is a jam, a messing about, a trombonist trying to find where the rest of the gang are, is not particularly relevant.  The song obviously means a lot to the Band, and they are not guys whose view is to be dismissed lightly.

For a long time I had the feeling that this song couldn’t just be about a fishing trip, and I came to suspect that there was some American slang or hidden meanings that I just don’t understand lurking in all this.

And that feeling is further established by this commentary that was published on Something Else Reviews:

“Dylan would scribble something out like Don’t Ya Tell Henry, then everyone would wander downstairs at this house outside of West Saugerties, New York, and put things to tape. Dylan (and, to some degree even then, Robertson) had begun immersing himself in Southern gothic tales, murder ballads, scarifying folk and morality plays, but it was [Levon] Helm — the native of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas — who brought some sense of historical context to such pursuits. These weren’t exotic curios to him; they were like muscle memory. That’s why this version of “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” with Levon out front, is so clearly superior.”

These are the connections that I am not getting, even after being told about them.  But both Nick Deriso who wrote the SomethingElse review and I can agree on some things.  This is, as he says, a “wandering, nonsense-talking sot as he ambles from the river around to the beanery…”

But, he adds, “somewhere beyond that winking fun, there looms something that feels like very bad karma for this too-intrepid adventurer.”

And indeed that’s not really what I get.  And that’s my fault, I’m sure.   The review continues…

“This is some of the deepest funny music that anyone has ever made,” long-time Village Voice critic Robert Christgau says in the film Down in the Flood: Associations and Collaborations. “One of the reasons it’s so satisfying is that there is all of this truth and wisdom, and struggle and pain in it. But the funniness sort of triumphs. It prevails. That makes it feel very good.”

The Something Else review has a lot more to say and the site also has a recording of The Band at Woodstock playing this song – scroll down that page to find the link.

The original version (original in the sense that it came out on the LP in 1976) is seemingly rehearsed, coherent at least in the playing (if not in the meaning of the lyrics) and quite a jolly bouncy piece.  The alternate version is, well, not something I have played between getting the CD and writing this review quite a bit later.

The most obvious explanation is indeed that it is about a fishing trip.  Less obvious is that it is about Apple Corps – the Beatles company.  I’m not sure why or how. Maybe that’s a dumb idea.  Oh and there are arguments as to when the recordings were made: 1967 or 1975.

The lyrics published on BobDylan.com are from the Volume 11 version, not the more coherent original Basement Tapes LP version.  In case you are not fully familiar with the song here it is the opening as published on the Dylan website.

I went down to the river on a Saturday morn
A-lookin’ around just to see who’s born
I found a little chicken down on his knees
I went up and yelled to him, “Please, please, please!”
He said, “Don’t ya tell Henry
Don’t ya tell Henry
Don’t ya tell Henry
Apple’s got your fly”

And if you really are keen to know about the history of this song, there’s a live version of it by the Band on the internet – although the recording is not exactly what we used to call hi-fi.

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

And by the way if you don’t know SomethingElseReviews you really might enjoy a flip through their work.  It’s very good stuff.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

by Tony Attwood

One of the great things about writing reviews of some of the more obscure Dylan songs from the Basement Tapes era is the tracing back of the influences playing on Bob’s mind as he quickly made up the lyrics and evolved the song into where ever he felt it could go.

Such digging around as is needed to find some of these points of origin can hit lots of blank walls, but just occasionally I find myself listening to absolute gems that either I had missed in my earlier years or heard, but having been distracted from by the events of growing up, having a family, loving the children, and trying to make a living, I’d forgotten about.

Take “Baby won’t you be your baby”.  This is based around a traditional American song “Mama don’t allow” slowed right down with some variations in the tune and of course new words.  But underneath it all, “Baby” is “Mama don’t allow”.

As with all songs that have become part of the tradition of folk music, the lyrics vary, but here’s how the old song is normally heard these days…

Mama don’t allow no music playin’ round here, 
Mama don’t allow no music playin’ round here, 
Well, we don’t care what Mama don’t allow 
Gonna play that music anyhow, 
Mama don’t allow no music playin’ round here.

Mama don’t allow no guitar playin’ round here,
Mama don’t allow no guitar playin’ round here,
Well, we don’t care what Mama don’t allow 
Gonna play that guitar anyhow, 
Mama don’t allow no guitar playin’ round here.

Now while I can generally have a bash at pointing to the origins of folk songs in the British and Irish traditions I’m on much shakier ground with American folk music, so forgive me if I am wrong, but the earliest recording I’ve been able to trace is a 1928 recording, by Riley Puckett.  From this it is clear that the song has mutated dramatically over the years, but it is at its heart the same song that travelled having travelled through the century we still know as “Mama don’t allow”.  Here it is

Over the years it was one of those songs that everyone had a go at.  By the early 1960s, before the Basement Tapes, it had changed quite a lot.  Flatt and Scruggs made a 45rpm of it…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7mXpgGgpkM

But if you have five minutes to spare I would really recommend a wonderful live version of this song by JJ Cale.  It has mutated further, but this is just such a lovely relaxed rendition I wanted to include it…

Anyway, enough raving over JJ, and back to Bob.  What he does is slow the whole song down from its normal frantic pace, takes it to a speed closer to the 1928 version and give it new words, which for some reason are not on the official Bob Dylan site.   But the eternally reliable Eyolf Østrem has done the job for them.  Here they are…

Well, I looked as far as I could see, baby
I looked as far as I could see, baby
Well, I looked as far as I could see,
All mankind in misery,
Baby, won’t you be my baby?

From the start we’re in gloom and doom territory.  It’s all falling apart, there’s nothing we can do about it, but you and I should stick together in this mess.

Well, I looked east, I looked west, baby
I looked east, I looked west, baby
Well, I looked east, I looked west
There was nothing I could see that I liked the best
Baby, won’t you be my baby?

So that does it for the people who are into Zen Buddhism and Taoism, as much for western civilisation with its emphasis of growth, wealth, and ultimately destroying the environment.

Go down the land, drop your heavy load, baby
Go down the land, drop your load, baby
Go down the land, drop your load,
Just don’t look back, it’s a dead end road
Baby, won’t you be my baby?

There’s no point in accumulating wealth because it’s a mess everywhere and as Bob ultimately got around to telling us in Things have changed, the world will explode.  “Dead end road” and “world will explode” – its been a constant through much of Bob’s writing.

Now east and west the fire will rise, baby
East and west the fire will rise, baby
East and west the fire will rise
Shut your mouth, close your eyes,
Baby, won’t you be my baby?

But Bob fears there might be a bit of credibility lacking in his plea…

Oh, I been off savin’ your time, baby
I ain’t tryin’ to mess, I’ll just save your time, baby
I ain’t tryin’ to mess, just save your time,
But it’s your life, it’s not mine
Baby, won’t you be my baby?

It’s not great music, but it’s ok… and the argument that lyrically we were on a journey that ended up with “All Along the Watchtower” certainly has some merit.

Heylin quotes Dylan talking to Mary Travers (of Peter Paul and Mary who of course benefited so much from Dylan’s writing until they had a falling out over the recording of “Too Much of Nothing”), in which looking back at the Basement Tape songs Dylan said, “it was just songs which we’d come to this basement out in the woods and record… The songs were written in five, ten minutes.”

He also said much later, to Denise Worrell (again quoted in Heylin) “I thought they were what they were – a bunch of guys hanging out down in the basement making up songs.”

So there we have it: a slowed down version of one of the absolute bedrock classics of 20th century American folksongs,  changed from an expression of annoyance about parental restrictions to a foretelling of the end of the world.

Quite a journey.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

by Larry Fyffe

The spoken Romantic ‘Beat Poetry’ of Vachel Lindsay, a social conservative who thinks of America as a decadent Babylon, presents black Africans and American ‘Indians’ as ‘noble savages’ from another world.

He contrasts the ideals that human beings in modern America claim they aspire to with the reality of their actions, a thematic path down which singer/songwriter Bob Dylan wanders:

Last night at black midnight I woke with a cry
The windows were shaking, there was thunder on high
The floor was atremble, the door was ajar
White fires, crimson fires, shone from afar
I rushed to the dooryard. The city was gone
My home was a hut without orchard or lawn
It was mud smear and logs near a whispering stream
Nothing else built by man could I see in my dream
(Vachel Lindsay: The Ghosts Of The Buffaloes)

Likewise below, imagery of a simpler time, with ‘hogs’ replacing Vachel’s ‘logs’:

I got a house on a hill, I got hogs all out in the mud
I got a house on a hill, I got hogs out lying in the mud
I got a long-haired woman, she got royal Indian blood
(Bob Dylan: Summer Days)

The song presents the theme that the burden of resonsibility for the welfare of others has been more and more shifted from the shoulders of individuals to those of God and Government – farther from the dream of an Eden-on-Earth drift the thoughts of modern man:

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice
My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness
I, the unloving, say life should be lovely
I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness
(Vachel Lindsay: Why I Voted The Socialist Ticket)

Hypocritical officialdom, rather than powerless individuals, gets lots of the blame in song following:

You fasten the trigger
For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
When the death count get higher
You hide in your mansion
As the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
(Bob Dylan: Masters Of War)

The theme occurs in the following poem:

This is the sin against the Holy Ghost
This is the sin no purging can atone
To send forth repine in the name of Christ
To set the face, and make the heart of stone
(Vachel Lindsay: The Unpardonable Sin)

That theme echoes in the next song by Bob Dylan, but there is also implied the refusal to accept responsibility for his/her own behaviour on the part of the individual who’s got little power:

Oh, the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh, the country was young
With God on its side
(Bob Dylan: With God On Our Side)

Dogmatically religious, Vachel Lindsay dislikes jazz and blues music even as he uses those music styles to get his ‘good old days’ conservative message across to Jazz Age audiences:

When Jezebel put on her tiaras and looked grand
Her three-piece pajamas and her diamond bosom-band
And stopped the honest prophets as they marched
upon their way
And slaughtered them and hung them in her hearty
wholesale way
She liked her wicked chops
As she pulled out the stops
And she ordered the saxaphones to play
(Vachel Lindsay: The Curse Of The Saxaphone)

Dylan paints a surrealistic picture of Babylonian America under the sway of Jezebel riding upon her golden calf:

The ghost of Belle Starr, she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun, she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper, who sits
At the head of the Chamber of Commerce
(Bob Dylan: Tombstone Blues)

Bob Dylan ĺooks at the darker side of America, particularly it’s institution of slavery, through the watery eyes of poet Walt Whitman. Dylan holds on to the possibility of a moral healing in the future though it’s fading fast in the face of modern-day economic and political reality:

Gunshot wound to the breast
Is what it did say
But he’ll be better soon
He’s in a hospital bed
But he’ll never be better
He’s already dead
(Bob Dylan: ‘Cross The Green Mountain)

In his blighted Romantic poetry, Walt Whitman writes:

Sentences broken, ‘Gunshot wound to the breast
Cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital
At present low, but soon will be better’ ….
Alas poor boy, he will never be better ….
(Walt Whitman: Come Up From The Fields Father)

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Tony Attwood

I was writing recently about lines from Bob Dylan which are taken from within his songs (ie not titles or opening lines) and which really have moved me.

And pondering whether I could take this any further forward, I saw a comment on this site about Black Diamond Bay and what a tremendous piece of music it is, and I immediately thought of one line from that song.  It seems a totally innocuous line on the surface, but it still carries a punch and a half for me.   And so then I wondered if it was significant in a broader context.

Now I doubt if anyone else has ever particularly noticed it.  It reads…

There’s really nothin’ anyone can say

The final verse of the song is an absolutely astounding piece of writing – having told us the story of the strange goings on among the locals and tourists in Black Diamond Bay we are then told that despite these extraordinary, literally earth shattering events

Didn’t seem like much was happenin’,
So I turned it off and went to grab another beer
Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear
And there’s really nothin’ anyone can say
And I never did plan to go anyway
To Black Diamond Bay

The horror stories from around the world ultimately leave us unmoved, we carry on our own lives.

It’s a valid point, but the man singing the line “There’s really nothin’ anyone can say” is the man who has had more to say about a lot of stuff than most people: Bob Dylan.  But I began to wonder, does Bob believe that things can change?

Clearly in a religious context he does or at least he did for a while, for he wrote so many songs telling us that if one will simply repent and accept the Lord God as, well, the Lord God, then we will be saved.   I am simplifying of course, and don’t want to get distracted by this point, but basically the message has always seemed to me to be, repent and love the Lord and then come judgement day you are ok.  Sinners like me have had it.  That’s all there is.

I have also commented before about the oddity I find in the LP “Times they are a-changing” in that the title song is about the world changing no matter what anyone does while the rest of it is pretty much about the world being as it is, and that’s that.

On the title track we have to “accept it that soon, you’ll be drenched to the bone”.  And so we have to swim along with the tide.  Us writers are warned not to speak too soon, for the change is going on, and we really don’t know where it is going.  And we can’t affect anything.

Our elected representatives are told not to get in the way or try to stop things – it is all happening.  And as for worried parents, all they can do is accept the new way and not do anything either.   In fact there is a lot of not doing anything.

Indeed as the last verse tells us “the order is rapidly fading.”   Change is set in time, and that’s how it is.  As for the rest of the album, it follows the same view: the road is set there ain’t nothing we can do.   Hollis Brown and his family die because rural poverty and deprivation never changes.  As long as people believe they have God on their side, there will be wars.  Those who want to keep moving on will just keep on moving on, the mining communities of North Country Blues will continue to die…

The one song that matches the hope of a new future that is shown on the title track, is “When the Ship Comes In” and yet even here there is nothing for us to do to make the world better.  We just wait for that magic moment for the ship to come in.

Charge forward through the years to “Things have changed” and you get the same notion, except that he has experienced so much that he can say that “Only a fool in here would think he’s got anything to prove.”

Indeed if you want a poetic couplet that conveys the whole message that there is nothing we can do try this one…

The human mind can only stand so much
You can’t win with a losing hand

Followed by the absolute statement of fatalism

Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet

And if you still haven’t got it

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie

Or try “Tangled up in Blue”.   It is a song in which things happen, not a song in which anyone does anything to make things better, except maybe you could argue that he does do something – he walks away from her.   He meets her by chance, they drift apart, he gets jobs here and there.  Even at the end he’s still on the road heading for another joint.

Or if you still don’t believe this notion, try the song Dylan has played on stage more than any other: “All along the watchtower” – played over 2250 times.  “There must be some way out of here” – except no one has any idea what it is.  The end of the song says it all

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl

It is just that stuff happens.

Of course much of this comes from the blues – the blues is in essence the music of the powerless, the drifting men for whom there is nothing except work, being cheated by fate, drink and sex.  That’s it, that’s all you have, there is nothing you can do about it.  It’s a pretty awful message for the women too.

But let’s jump to more recent times – and as with my song selections above I am staying with songs that Dylan performs on stage a lot.   Take “Summer Days” (just under 850 plays on stage at the last count.)

Well, my back has been to the wall for so long, it seems like it’s stuck
Why don’t you break my heart one more time just for good luck

And as that song bounces towards its end

Yes, I’m leaving in the morning just as soon as the dark clouds lift
Gonna break the roof in—set fire to the place as a parting gift

My point is that from his earliest days to now, the central theme of Bob’s work is that the world is a pretty screwed up place and there is nothing anyone can do about it.  That is the message to a woman who wants to love him, that is the message to all of us.

And if we consider broader things, well, Bob’s just hanging on in there because it’s all right ma, it’s life and life only.  That’s how it is.  Forget progress, it’s just a mess.

This is not to say Bob is not brilliant at all this.  The couplet at the end of “Love Sick” is a masterpiece of despair.  I’ll add the two lines before, to give the context.

I’m sick of love; I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love; I’m trying to forget you

Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you

Of course maybe he’s right, and maybe he’s always been right, that there is nothing any of us can do to make things better.  Maybe that really is just how it goes and how it is.

There’s something approaching a complete summation of this attitude that everything is screwed and there’s nothing you can do about it in “Watching the River Flow”

People disagreeing everywhere you look
Makes you wanna stop and read a book
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
That was really shook

In one real sense what I would love “Watching the River Flow” to be about is a Taoist reflection on life and the ability of the mind to sit back and observe and contemplate and be at one with the world, but Bob takes it in another direction (as of course is his utter right – he’s the genius, I’m just the commentator).  And he’s thoroughly fed up.

The other great song from 1971 – “When I paint my masterpiece” has the same spirit of dejection and almost fatalistic hopelessness.

Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent
When I paint my masterpiece

Working on this website, trying to take in everything Dylan has written, trying (very inadequately I know) to get a grip on his genius and understand what drives him, I endlessly find myself coming back to lines such as

Maybe someday, you will understand
That something for nothing is everybody’s plan

Now if you have been reading here for a while you may have read my ravings over the live performances of “When He Returns” which I rate as one of the greatest renditions of any of his compositions Bob has given us.

The iron hand it ain’t no match for the iron rod
The strongest wall will crumble and fall to a mighty God
For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears
It is only He who can reduce me to tears
Don’t you cry and don’t you die and don’t you burn
For like a thief in the night, He’ll replace wrong with right
When He returns

Bob’s mafia that tours the internet taking down illicit copies of his performances have got rid of most of the live versions of this song, ahead of the release of one of them on the forthcoming boxed set, but of late several more have popped up.  Listen to it quickly before it goes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPbWvj9SEcg

It’s not the same as the piano and organ version I’ve raved about before, but it is still worth listening to, and marvelling.

And here he is back on the piano with the organ accompaniment in the absolute ultimate classic performance : http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3r1sno

So yes, Bob can be positive, can direct, can tell us what (in his opinion) we ought to do to make life better.  He can also, disavow his old edict “Don’t follow leaders” – one of the few notions he has offered outside of his Christian period as a guidance of what we might do – although of course as soon as you follow that notion you are disregarding it.

Now obviously I know there is nothing in the A to Z of how to be a genius that says you have to tell those who marvel at your abilities how to run their lives.  What Dylan writes is up to him.  And I suspect it is this disassociation from messages of hope for change has led him to write the wonderful semi-abstract observations such as “Visions of Johanna” and “Tell Ol Bill” which if I were forced to pick two songs from his complete songbook, I would pick as the ultimate creations.  Semi-abstract observations.

In the end I guess I don’t need Bob to tell me things are going to be all right, when I have music like that.   But I still utterly marvel at what he did achieve in the religious period, when he was incredibly positive.   Here’s one more, before they take it down.  This is the absolute classic.   If only Bob could just occasionally take that positivity and express it in music in relation to a non-religious theme.

But then, who am I to tell the great man what to do?

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

By Tony Attwood

When discussing “Times they are a changing” with a journalist from Melody Maker magazine Dylan is reported to have said that the song was “about the person who doesn’t take you seriously but expects you to take him seriously.”

Does Dylan demand that we take him seriously?   Much of the time he doesn’t really seem that bothered, although during the religious period of his writing he most certainly did want his message to be taken very seriously indeed.

This song thus is just about the antithesis of that area of thought, for it is hard to see anything within it that demands even concentration, let alone serious consideration.  By and large it is a good job that Dylan hasn’t demanded that we take this period of his work seriously.

The lines of the first verse tell you all you need to know.

You know, there’s two ol’ maids layin’ in the bed
One picked herself up an’ the other one, she said:
“Get your rocks off!
Get your rocks off! (Get ’em off!)
Get your rocks off! (Get ’em off!)
Get your rocks off-a me! (Get ’em off!)”

I can understand why a band sitting around just playing stuff, might decide to leave the tape running – providing of course they have got lots of tape.  And maybe they decide to keep the tape because by then Bob is incredibly famous and so all the sketches can be of use to historians who study such things.

But quite why anyone would bother to put this on an album – even an album of outtakes – is something I don’t get.   It’s not original, it is not interesting musically and it sure ain’t interesting lyrically.

Curiously though the phrase “Get your rocks off” was used again later…

“Rocks off” was also the opening track of the Rolling Stones album “Exile on Main Street”

But back to Dylan, You can of course leave the track playing to see what happens to verse two, but in case you really have had enough after verse one I’ll put the lyrics below.  (Forgive me if I omit the chorus, which is unchanging throughout.)

And to add a little more I’ll try and find other links from the song…

Well, you know, there late one night up on Blueberry Hill
One man turned to the other man and said, with a blood-curdlin’ chill, he said:
“Get your rocks off! (Get ’em off!)

Blueberry Hill is of course one of the all time classics from the period of the evolution of rock n roll, one of the points where the blues was introduced to public consciousness on a much broader scale than ever before.

It was actually first recorded by Gene Autry in 1940 and was part of the movie “The Singing Hill” (Gene Autry was incredibly famous as “the singing cowboy”) but the version most of us remember comes from Fats Domino in 1956.  Elvis Presley recorded it a year later.

You probably know it, but I thought I would throw it in, as a bit of relief from “Get your rocks off”.

But let us return to the theme of the article…  Verse 3

Well, you know, we was layin’ down around Mink Muscle Creek
One man said to the other man, he began to speak, he said:
“Get your rocks off! (Get ’em off!)

Now I have no idea if there is a Mink Muscle Creek – and in writing “muscle” I am following what is on the BobDylan web site.  But there was an Australian heavy metal band called Mink Mussel Creek and maybe Bob had heard them.  Who knows.

Well, you know, we was cruisin’ down the highway in a Greyhound bus
All kinds-a children in the side road, they was hollerin’ at us, sayin’:
“Get your rocks off! (Get ’em off!)

Yes well, even us Brits know about Greyhound busses.

But the best thing is to listen to it (if you must) on the bootleg album and then leave the CD playing, and thus listen to Sante Fe.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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