An index to our current and recent series can be found on the home page.

By Tony Attwood

If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music

• 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• 3: From Times to Percy’s song
• 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
• 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope
• 6: Chimes of Freedom and Tambourine Man

In 1964 Dylan seemed keen to keep changing the subject matter of his songs.  The opening song of the year in terms of compositions was Guess I’m doing fine  (which basically says the opposite in the lyrics).  This was followed by a protest song Chimes of Freedom and then what can perhaps be described as a surreal way of seeing the world with Mr Tambourine Man.

Musically Dylan was also exploring where he could take his songs.   In Chimes of Freedom for example we have chords introduced that were certainly unusual – a chord which can only be described as a C9 turns up for example on the word “broken” in the line “midnight’s broken toll”.

In Tambourine Man we have eight-beat and four-beat phrases within the verses and a rhyme scheme is pushed beyond its natural limits where “wandering” is an implied rhyme of “under it.”  And as if that is not enough, in the final verse the number of lines is expanded, while the rhyming scheme is kept and then abandoned.  And although the rhyme scheme is itself a literary device its abandonment has a significant effect on how we feel the music.

But the listener is bound up in the music and simply feels the extension of the verse and the lack of certainty about where everything is going, which is of course in keeping with the opening concept in the lyrics that the singer doesn’t know where he is going, except that in the “jingle jangle morning,” he is following wherever he is led.

My point therefore is that here both the lyrics and the music are taking us in a new direction and that the changing rhyme scheme and changing number of lines in a verse reflect the uncertainty of where we are going.

The uncertainty of who or what the Tambourine Man is continued in the next song Dylan composed, “I don’t believe you” which has the subtitle “She acts like we never have met”.   This of course gives us a sense of confusion before the music begins in that the main title line (“I don’t believe you”) doesn’t appear in the song at all – an approach Dylan returned to later.

At the same time, Dylan uses rotating unusual chords which are clearly explained on the Dylan chords website which includes details of the variant approach in the Rolling Thunder performances.  Here, musically Dylan is using a mix of the C and G chords played on the top three strings of the guitar and adding in a range of rhymes to the lyrics

I can’t understand She let go of my hand    [internal rhyme]
An’ left me here facing the wall            [rhyme with line 4]
I’d sure like t’ know Why she did go [internal rhyme]
But I can’t get close t’ her at all [rhyme with line 2]

Though we kissed through the wild blazing nighttime
She said she would never forget  [rhyme with line 4]
But now mornin’s clear It’s like I ain’t here [internal rhyme]
She just acts like we never have met [rhyme with line 2]

This is in essence a strophic composition in which we have a series of verses; the classic form of story-telling folk songs.  The experimentation therefore is left to the music which of course we can hear with those rotating opening chords in each line.

But in the next composition Bob really does begin to explore the possibilities of the music, for here he introduces the notion of starting the singing after the first beat of the bar so we have the effect of

[Beat]Gypsy gal, the  / hands of Harlem / [Beat] Cannot hold you / To its heat

And this really is a song where Bob is experimenting with the music, for more of an oddity pops up in the penultimate line where Bob sings “Let me know, babe, all about my fortune” which in fact occupies three bars rather than the two bars occupied musically by every other line.  That this doesn’t sound singularly odd is in part because in this song Bob doesn’t sing on the first beat of every line, so we get the effect of

[Beat] Gypsy gal, the  / hands of Harlem
[Beat[ cannot hold you  / to its heat / 
[Beat] Your temperature is too / hot for tamin' / 
[Beat] Your flaming feet are burnin'/  up the street /

Pause (2 beats)

[Beat] I am homeless,  / come and take me  
[Beat] To the reach of your / rattlin' drums 
[Beat] Let me know, babe, / [Beat] all about my / fortune, 
[Beat] Down a-long my restless / palms 

There are actually other ways of writing this out musically, but it is very hard to explain this as anything other than by introducing an unusual number of lines in a verse.  In short, whichever way we explain what Bob is doing musically, the result is, it’s very unusual, and it gives us a feeling of edginess.   (Or oddness).

The lyrics written out on the official site give no clue to this rhythmic oddity, but it is certainly there in the song and does again show Bob’s interest in experimentation within the form of what might otherwise just be another folk song.  A good and interesting folk song, but still, a standard folk song.

Indeed this is further emphasised further by the fact that after this love song to a wonderful gypsy gal, what we get next in terms of the order in which Bob wrote songs is Motorpsycho Nightmare which is nothing less than nine verses of 12-bar talking blues insanity involving the farmer’s daughter who looks like Tony Perkins, (who played Norman Bates in the Hitchcock movie Psycho).

Thus clearly what we have is Bob flitting from style to style – but why he was doing this (and do remember I am dealing with the songs in the order that they were written) – we can only guess.   The answer “because he could” is a possible answer.  But I prefer the notion that he wanted to see just how far the form could be taken with one man and a guitar.  Folk songs until this point had been strophic (verse, verse, verse) or binary (verse, chorus, verse, chorus).   But Bob was inquisitive and an explorer and wanted to go further.  

But we must also note that this inquisitiveness is not only reflected in different styles of music but also in terms of the move from lighthearted the serious subject matter, which of course also required a move in terms of the musical style and form.  Thus next he wrote It ain’t me babe, a plaintive song of farewell, needing a very different musical approach.

Now here the irregularities are set aside.   It is a song of 12 lines, each of two bars of music, and with line two rhyming with line four, line six rhyming with line eight, in the classic song style.

But even then there is one oddity, which is that in the chorus of four lines (that fits perfectly with the rhythmic scheme of the whole song,) there is no rhyme – three lines end with “babe” and one stands alone with the word “door” at its conclusion (as in “someone to open each and every door”).  This feels ok because the “babe” in the final line is paused, allowing us to feel that “door” rhymes with “for” (as in “It ain’t me you’re looking for…. babe)

And yet if that is what we feel, it is still out of sync with the rest of the song where it is lines two and four that rhyme, not line one and four…

Go away from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed
I'm not the one you want, babe
I'm not the one you need

You say you're lookin' for someone
Who's never weak but always strong
To protect you and defend you
Whether you are right or wrong

Someone to open each and every door
But it ain't me, babe
No, no, no, it ain't me, babe
It ain't me you're lookin' for, babe

My point here is that musically, even when Bob sounds as if he is following a standard format of four-line verses he isn’t doing that at all.  For the third section above is not a chorus in the normal sense of the word, in that the first of those final four lines varies and the other three lines all end with the word “babe” and thus cannot be said to rhyme.

In short what Bob is so often doing is varying, developing and evolving the musical forms that he is using, often taking them to their limits.   It can sound on occasion, that he is using a standard form of songwriting, but as we come to look at each song in detail, there is some musical variation within, which, even if we don’t recognise it musically, often can take us a-back somewhat, and hold those lines in our memory in a way that would not happen if the song were conventionally written.

In short, even at this early time in his songwriting career Bob was playing with the form of the song, stretching it, varying, and in essence, seeing just how far it could be pushed without the songs either breaking apart or becoming incomprehensible.

by Jochen Markhorst

X          No one had any idea what to do

Quincy Jones knows exactly what he is doing when he invites Pete Townshend for a session: a rock god’s guitar solo in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” breaks open the gate to the MTV audience.

Townshend declines the honour, but second-choice Eddie van Halen ends up being an even stronger choice. Jones and Jackson get more than they asked for; “Beat It” is one of the best-selling singles of all time, Eddie’s guitar solo one of the most famous of all time. The same is true of Clapton’s contribution to Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, or Jaco Pastorius’ bass magic on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, or thousands of other guest players: the producer (or artist) knows what he wants and invites a guest who can bring it to bear.

With Dylan, it works differently. Conversely, almost. When Mike Bloomfield describes his experiences, he unintentionally underlines the importance and influence of the session musicians present:

“You wouldn’t believe what those sessions were like. There was no concept. No one knew what they wanted to play, no one knew what the music was supposed to sound like— other than Bob, who had the chords and the words and the melody. But as far as saying, “We’re gonna make folk-rock records” or whatever, no one had any idea what to do. None. […] No one understood nothing.”
(If You Love These Blues: An Oral History – Jan Mark Wolkin, Bill Keenom, 2000)

Weird with any other musician, but not with Dylan; we know identical testimonials from, say, Charlie McCoy (on Blonde On Blonde), or Kevin Odegard and Eric Weissberg (Blood On The Tracks), or Augie Meyers (Time Out Of Mind). The most quotable comes from Blake Mills (Rough And Rowdy Ways, so more than half a century after Highway 61 Revisited):

“Dylan doesn’t tell you exactly what to play. He does expect you to play what needs to be played. That may seem the same, but it’s a world of difference.”
(interview Belgian magazine Knack, 9 March 2021)

That consistency nuances the standard narrative about the sweeping mood switch of “Phantom Engineer”. More or less official (in biographies and reflections such as Clinton Heylin’s Revolution In The Air) is witness Tony Glover’s testimony from the booklet accompanying Bob Dylan: The Collection, that 2006 “digital album” on iTunes:

“As most of the musicians and crew split [for a lunch break], Bob sat down at the piano and worked over “Phantom Engineer” for an hour or more. When the crew was back in place, Bob ran down how he wanted it done differently—and in three takes they got the lovely version on the album, “It Takes A Lot To Laugh,” with some tasty guitar and piano builds in it.”

… the more or less official historiography describing how the lone sparrow Dylan diligently shuffled chords, tempos and words for an hour in that huge Columbia studio space to arrive at that brilliant final result.

Heroic and romantic, but it is not very believable. It is totally at odds with Dylan’s working methods as we know them from all the testimonies of session musicians. The decisive factor in the magic of Dylan’s greatest masterpieces always turns out to be the input of the session musicians present. And a huge difference between 29 July-before-lunch and 29 July-after-lunch is just that: two different musicians.

Bassist Joe Macho has been replaced, according to official documents, by Russ Savakus. Savakus is a jazz musician, and has no name in the rock world (yet). Bloomfield noticed this too: “They had a bass player, a terrific guy, Russ Savakus. It was his first day playing electric bass, and he was scared about that” (in the wonderful tribute to Bloomfield If You Love These Blues: An Oral History by Jan Mark Wolkin, Bill Keenom from 2000). It might explain why we so often hear the bassist grinding irritatingly against a fret in the afternoon takes; after all, as a jazz musician, Savakus usually plays a fretless double bass.

Even more doubt-raising is the testimony such as that of Harvey Brooks (a.k.a. Harvey Goldstein): “I played in the studio on Positively 4th Street, It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry, Tombstone Blues,” he tells Record Collector Magazine in 2010, and also Colin Irwin, in his thorough reconstruction Legendary Sessions: Highway 61 Revisited (2008) reports his finding that Savakus, after painfully struggling with “Tombstone Blues”, drops out midway through the day. Confirming Brooks’ statement, who explains that Al Kooper called him midway through the day because “Dylan was having a problem with the bass player”. That afternoon session is Brooks’ first experience with Dylan (“That was really my entrance into the world of pop music, folk music. Never heard of Dylan”), and the remainder of his recollection also is in line with the stories we know from others:

“There was no guaranteed time structure or chord structure. It was in flux. Dylan’s basic instruction was just, ‘Follow what I’m doing.’ He never said anything about chord changes. He’d be writing some of the lyrics for the next tune as we were doing that tune. He would just start it off and we’d start playing it. And all of it was one or two takes, three takes maybe.”

And for the other replacement, pianist Frank Owens, a studio session with these long-haired blues beatniks must be equally uncomfortable, although he has at least some experience with them. Owens, who earns his money mainly as an accompanist to such luminaries as Lena Horne, Johnny Mathis and Petula Clark, has already been called before by producer Tom Wilson a few months ago: we hear him on “Maggie’s Farm” and he is also listed on “On The Road Again” (but that really seems to be Dylan himself on the piano), both recorded for Bringing It All Back Home on 15 January 1965. It makes little impression on him, as evidenced by the recollections he recalls when asked in The Paul Leslie Hour in 2017. According to the recording sheets, Frank Owens was paid four times for a recording session with Dylan in 1965, but he himself only remembers one with certainty:

“There were several sessions but I was on at least one of them. So I think I’m on Highway 61 or Like A Rolling Stone or one of those things like that, you know. So that’s me, yes. I did do that.”

… so those Bringing It All Back Home sessions he doesn’t remember. As every memory, every anecdote he brings up in that long radio interview with Paul Leslie only is consistent with the stories we know about the recording of “Like A Rolling Stone”. He half remembers what the producer’s name was (“Tom something or other I can’t think of his last name” – so that must have been Tom Wilson), he remembers how “Al Kooper got in on a fluke. I don’t know how that happened you know, but he wasn’t supposed to be on this session”, that Paul Griffin played organ, and of Dylan he remembers: “He was going to sing I think it was Like A Rolling Stone, so he had a piece of paper and he would jot down the lyrics of what he was getting ready to do next.” Nor any word, for that matter, about the recording day six weeks later, where his name appears on the afternoon session’s recording sheets for “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” and for “Positively 4th Street”. Nor about the session a few days after that, 2 August, the evening session that yields the H61 recordings of “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”.

Still, we really do seem to hear him. From that first July 29 afternoon take, a splashy tack piano with ragtime runs and vaudeville accents suddenly flutters between the verses. There is unmistakably a Scott Joplin-adept at the keys here – this is the same pianist as on “Maggie’s Farm” in January and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in August; this is Frank Owens.

Playing what needs to be played.

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 11: Dylan opted for the slower version

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

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

Series selected by Tony Attwood

So far in this series of videos and recordings we have covered 13 Dylan concerts and one rehearsal between 1961 and 2025; so this is concert number 14   These recordings are collected from the internet and put into chronological order to help anyone (including me) to hear what happened to Bob’s concerts across time.   A list of the other concerts that we have logged, along with a link to the recording in each case is given at the end.

It is my thought that once we have a range of about 25 concerts it might be possible to write something moderately interesting about how the performance of certain songs have changed over time.

Meanwhile, if you feel you have something to say about Bob and his music, and would like to write for Untold Dylan, plesae do get in touch.  Email me at Tony@schools.co.uk

Tony Attwood

• Gotta Serve Somebody
  I Believe in You
  When You Gonna Wake Up
  When He Returns
  Man Gave Names to All the Animals
  Precious Angel
  Slow Train
  Covenant Woman
  Gonna Change My Way of Thinking
  Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)
  Solid Rock
  Saving Grace
  Saved
  What Can I Do for You?
  In the Garden
  Blessed Be the Name
  Pressing On

Concerts previously covered in this series

• 2025 April 2025, Iowa
• 2024: Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 2024 The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 2024  What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• 2019: 14 October Palo Alto.
• 2002: 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime
• 1992  Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• 1986: The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 1978 Earls Court 1978
• 1976: Fort Collins 23 May 1976
• 1976: January 1976: the rehearsals
• 1966: Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• 1961  The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961

By Tony Attwood

If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music

• 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• 3: From Times to Percy’s song
• 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
• 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope

In the last article (Using music to take us to a world of hope) I took a look at the music of such songs as The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,  Lay Down your Weary Tune,  One too many mornings, and Restless Farewell and of course you may well have thought that the title was singularly inappropriate, because those songs express the negative side of the world in which Bob Dylan found himself at the end of 1963.

He had of course given us hope with Times they are a changin, and When the ship Comes In, but he had somewhat backed off this as the year drew to a close and he was in his  lyrics at least, emphasising why the world needed to change, rather than just telling us (as in those two slightly earlier songs) that it was changing.

But in 1964 although the title of the opening composition (Guess I’m doing fine) was utterly ironic, the next song “Chimes of Freedom” suddenly had an uplift for the audience in its vision of the future.   And indeed this occurred not just in the lyrics but also in the music.  It was as if the notion of using music to take us to that “world of hope” was still very much on the agenda.

For there is something in those opening chords of “Chimes of Freedom” that really does take us to another place.   I can certainly do no better than quote Eyolf Østrem’s tabulation of the guitar playing by Dylan – and even if you don’t play the guitar you’ll recognise that what we have here are not the normal major chords of a song that would be written G, D, C etc etc.

G       G/d              D          G/d        C/d    G
Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll
   G/d      C/d      G/d        D            G       C/g    G
We ducked inside the doorway as thunder went crashing

This clearly is an example of Dylan exploring just how much he could get out of a solo guitar accompaniment.   But it is interesting that also in his early live performances, he reverted to performing the song accompanied by the classic major chords only.  This can be seen and heard in this performance from the 1964 Newport Folk Festival.

In fact, in that performance, Bob was varying the melody and timing – not dramatically but enough to make us feel there was something different about the song from that which we heard on the recording.    In fact, although the song is quite clearly “Chimes of Freedom” Bob is already at this very early stage, exploring his creation further.  Perhaps with some aim in mind, perhaps (and I suspect more likely) just to see where it might go.

Certainly, by the final performances of the song in 2012 it was at moments hard to recognise as the piece being that which was recorded almost 50 years earlier.

Maybe it is Bob’s desire to retain the complexity of the sounds of those chords that persuaded him not to play the song in public more than 56 times.  Although of course, it could also be the fact that the Chimes of Freedom did not materialise in the real world, as he had originally imagined they might.

Whatever the reason for Bob not continuing regularly to perform the song over time, what then happened was that Bob had a total change of direction musically and lyrically, for the next song he composed had within it no expectation of future freedom, other than to say it is there if you want to take it for “but for the sky there are no fences facing.”

This song was also a song with a chorus, and not just a single chorus line  – and choruses are something rather unusual in Dylan’s work (although not unknown of course)  – and the chorus comes five times within the song.    However, although this simple description makes this sound like a verse and chorus song, one of the most commonplace structures of a song, the actual approach of the song musically is quite different from that which we might expect.    For although the chorus comes back in the same way each time, the music and meter of the verse both change.

Now this was a total contradiction of everything that was happening in popular music at the time.  One of the most famous songs of the year, and indeed one of the most musically adventurous songs, for example, was “Pretty Woman” sung by Roy Orbison, which had the phrase “Pretty Woman” repeated within it no less than 16 times in a lyric of around about 150 words.

To explore this further, we might remember that normally when we write out the lyrics of a song they are set out in a regular pattern of perhaps four or eight beats.  They don’t have to be four or eight beats, but this by far is the most common approach. Sometimes, for effect, a line (particularly the last line in a verse or chorus) might have more or fewer beats, but if so, that then occurs at the same place throughout the piece, to give it coherence.   But in Tambourine Man we get something else….

Basically we have lines of eight beats (“Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand” [pause] is a perfect example).  But then the sequence ends with a four-beat line as with the word “Sleeping” followed by “My” (which starts the next phrase but musically is in the previous phrase).  This is unusual and interesting… it doesn’t cause the listener to think “what on earth is going on”, and indeed it drives the music forward.   But it does give us the feeling that this is somewhat unusual, rather interesting and certainly a bit different.

This might sound complex, and although we don’t find it in most popular music, it is not a unique approach, although with Dylan the rhyme scheme is pushed beyond its natural limits where “wandering” is an implied rhyme of “under it.”   It isn’t a rhyme at all of course, but we are by then expecting a rhyme, and so with the music moving on, we let it pass – our brains accept it as the rhyme our subconscious by then was anticipating.

This sort of approach is complex for any sort of popular song, be it a folk song or pop or rock song, but there is nothing wrong with complexity; it is just that normally composers of popular music since the creation of rock n roll had worked to keep their music as simple as possible.  (This itself was due in part to the technology of the time – the original pop and rock songs being recorded on 78rpm singles which had a time limit of about three minutes).

However Dylan at this point is about breaking rules, and what he does at this point is extend the final verse both in terms of the number of lines, while keeping the rhyming scheme going in the first half of the verse, but then abandoning it completely.  And it is a tribute to the interest as listeners that we have in the song that we feel that the repeated musical line and the rhyme of “sorrow” and “tomorrow” continues the song’s cohereance.

So in this song the first verse has ten bars of four beats while the last verse has sixteen bars of four beats.  (This is counting a line such as “take me disappearing through the” as one bar of four beats.   You can of course count at twice this speed, and so hear 32 bars of four beats – it doesn’t really matter as long as you are consistent).

But we have two oddities here within this song.  One is a verse of ten bars, and the other is that the last verse is not the same as the first verse.   Both concepts are very unusual – popular music virtually never does this, and indeed the most popular music in terms of the charts most certainly kept everything very simple and just as predicted.

Furthermore, most certainly the world of folk music doesn’t do this for the simple reason that folk music is there for everyone to sing and remember, and hence simplicity is part of the essence.  In the Newport version below the song starts at 1’23”

But now if we charge through the decades we can hear what is I think the final performance of the song.  This recording comes from the seventh and final part of Mike Johnson’s amazing review of this song in performance across the years.

So by 2010, the song had changed beyond belief, now with the descending accompaniment line and that extra musical bounce which occurs occasionally in the melody (listen to “my weariness amazes me“).  The chords though are the same, and of course, the audience picks up what the song is just from that.   But now Bob recreates the song with a world weariness expressed through that slow plodding descending bass, which suggests he is ready to welcome the Tambourine Man himself.

Also, we have an emphasis on the first beat of each bar which almost gives the song a plodding feel as if each step along the way really is both automatic and at the same time really hard going.   Yet when we come to the verse the organ is playing a bouncing chordal accompaniment which adds to the feeling of keeping moving but at the same time just plodding along.

Thus through these musical changes, the song has become something quite different.  Now Bob is welcoming the Tambourine Man as he, Bob, himself is tired of the world, rather than because he welcomes the new world the Tambourine Man offers.  Bob has been there, seen it, done it, and had enough.   The brilliance of the arrangement is that he is able to express this within the same song which invited the Tambourine Man to take him not on the final journey, but on the next journey.

So we can see that it is of course the same song – but the meaning implied through the new accompaniment is quite different.   Just listen to “Let me forget about today until tomorrow”….

Therefore, within the context of this series, my point is that the song has changed from a song of a young man not liking this world and seeking escape, to an old man who has seen it all, and quite simply has no need, and no desire to see it all again.  To re-arrange the song in order to change its meaning in this way is, for me at least, a truly remarkable musical achievement.

And that is the point.   It is the change of the musical arrangement that has achieved this change, nothing else; the lyrics are the same, the chords are the same, and quite often the melody is the same.  But through the arrangement and the style of Dylan’s delivery, the meaning has changed.  And it is this ability to re-arrange songs in this way that I think is a major element of Dylan’s work that is often missed by some commentators.

Therefore as before, I am left with the feeling that if only there was a Nobel Prize for music, the extraordinary work of Bob Dylan, the composer with the ability endlessly to re-arrange his own work, could be more widely acknowledged.  Most popular songs are fixed forever in the style and approach of the original recording, simply because there is not enough within them to give an arranger the chance to do something else.   This is not the case with Dylan, because the music he gives us is invariably 50% of the song, not just an accompaniment to a set of interesting lyrics.

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Previously….

It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue; A History in Performance, Part 1: 1965. Crying like a fire in the sun

Articles relating to earlier songs from the album are listed at the end.

The vagabond who’s rapping at your door

By Mike Johnson

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

• He is addressing America and appears to feed off The Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. (Robin Witting on ‘Baby Blue.’)
• ‘I said what I said,’ (Dylan, ‘False Prophet.’)

Carl Jung maintained that dreams speak to us in the language of the unconscious. That language consists of symbols and non-literal images. The aim of that language is to express feelings, thoughts and experiences inaccessible to the conscious mind and so reveal hidden aspects of ourselves. The aim of ‘dream analysis’ is to decode or translate those symbols and images into language the conscious mind can grasp.

That brings us directly to the question of Dylan’s lyrics and how we should approach them. To my mind, Dylan’s best songs work like dreams and speak directly to our unconscious mind. To what extent, then, should we try to decode those lyrics, tame them to the conscious mind? When does explaining them become explaining them away?

There’s a history of literary criticism at stake here, a standard approach to poetry which requires a ‘dream analysis’ of a poem, translating it into rational, expository prose. The teacher will present a poem and ask the hapless students to write a paragraph explaining the poem, to nail down ‘what the poet is trying to say,’ as if poets were handicapped or verbally challenged in some way, unable to say what they were trying to say. (‘I said what I said’)

Something is always lost in translation. The magic, which lit the unconscious mind, has disappeared. You nail down a corpse from which the spirit has fled.

I face this issue when I come to Dylan’s lyrics, especially ‘Baby Blue,’ where there is a powerful emotional dynamic at work. Consider these lines:

yonder stands your orphan with his gun
crying like a fire in the sun

If I were to approach these lines in the spirit of Jung’s dream analysis, I’d probably start by saying that a fire might cry because, no matter how bright it burns, it is nothing compared to the sun. The flame of the fire is lost in the brightness of the sun. Then I might start picking away at the ‘orphan’, which is perhaps yourself, as a child, the abandoned one, coming back armed for revenge.

I might be tempted to compare those lines with these, later in the song:

the vagabond who’s rapping at your door
is standing in the clothes that you once wore

and draw a line from the ‘orphan’ to the ‘vagabond,’ your former self perhaps, both images approaching the same emotional nexus … and so on and so on. And the longer I go on, the clumsier and more convoluted my thoughts become and the further away from the song I get. Possibly, I am led up the garden path, cleverly tricked perhaps by the lyricist himself who delights in creating mazes and mirrors to fool the conscious mind. (Whereas some poets might write in order to be decoded – Robert Frost – others, like Dylan, seem to delight in sabotaging our dream analysis.)

I may have my piece of expository prose, but is it worth the effort? And even if it was, someone else would come along with their own interpretation. Disputes arise, while the song itself, eluding our grasp, slips away.

I’m not saying that we can’t decode a Dylan song, or analyse it, or interpret it, because, with varying degrees of success, we can. What I’m questioning is the value of it. I enjoy Dylan best when I forget all that, strip away the dream analysis and interpretations and let the song speak directly to my unconscious mind, which is what it is designed to do. The crying orphan with his gun now stands luminous in my mind, bright and fierce, an emblematic archetypal figure. It is what it is. It makes me feel. Feel loss and abandonment, feel alienation from my childhood self, feel on the brink of change. Feel grief.

“How does it feeeeel?” That is the question. Not, “What does it mean?”

As with ‘It’s Alright Ma,’ ‘Baby Blue’ was pushed to one side in the Rolling Thunder tour. The song was performed only twice in 1975, both in Canada at the end of the tour, Toronto on 1^st Dec and Montreal on December 4^th. It may have been a bit of an afterthought, but both performances are worth catching.

This is Toronto. Beautifully paced. Incomparable vocal.  Enjoy.

1975 Toronto

And another superlative performance in Montreal. The sound may be a bit better, at least a bit sharper, than the Toronto performance. The quivering, emotional voice Dylan found for Rolling Thunder suits ‘Baby Blue’ just fine. It sounds like he’s saying these things to try to find his own courage.

1975 Montreal

Dylan did do the song once in 1976, but the recording is poor and the performance unexceptional, so I’m going to gloss over it and jump to 1978, a year which saw his old material, including ‘It’s Alright, Ma,’ get a big makeover. Adapted for a big band.

‘Baby Blue,’ played at most of the concerts that year, sounds like a different song, not because of the big band, that is quite minimal, but Dylan’s extraordinary voice. Pitched in the upper register, with an ecstatic edge that was to mark the coming three years of gospel songs. There is triumph and desperation all mixed up together in that voice.

The first leg of the 1978 tour, Japan, has received all the attention with the Bodokan concert and its subsequent upgrade and re-release, but for my money the last leg of the tour, the American leg, provides the most exciting performances.

This one’s from Chicago, Nov 18^th

1978 Chicago

With this next one from that American leg (exact date unknown), we can hear how the band fits together at the beginning of the song. There’s a hard, brittle edge in Dylan’s vocals.

1978

The song is dropped in 1979 (when Dylan sang only his new material) and reappears in 1980 for a handful of performances. We can’t go past this Portland performance. I have previously suggested that, regardless of what he was singing, 1980 and 1981 were peak years for Dylan’s vocal. His main instrument. His voice.

This vocal performance is mind-blowingly good – vivid, nuanced, stretched, pain and reconciliation all mixed together. Remarkable. It has me reaching for my ‘best ever!’ placard, which I haven’t used since the 1966 performances. The recording too is impeccable.

The audience is ecstatic. They can barely contain their excitement. Here is their old Bob back! Stripped of big band and girl chorus and the trappings of faith, Bob alone with his guitar and harp, singing out his heart.

This has the feel of an historic moment. In 1965, as the last track on the transitional album Bringing It All Back Home, the song seemed to signal a farewell to an era, the era of Dylan, the acoustic, folk singer. Perhaps the particular poignancy of this 1980 performance is that it also signals the end of an era. It’s all over now for the pre-Christian Bob, everything that came before his conversion – ‘Look out! the saints are coming through.’

1980 Portland.

1981 also saw only a handful of performances, just enough to keep the song alive. The London performance was chosen for the collection Trouble No More (The Bootleg Series Volume 13), which may not have the emotional vibrancy of the 1980 Portland version but is a good solid performance:

1981 London

Next we turn to 1984, which saw a dozen performances of the song. I’ll be picking up the trail in the next article.

Until then,

Kia Ora

Tambourine Man

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

Gates of Eden

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

It’s alright ma

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

by Jochen Markhorst

IX         “It’s not such a terrible song to do”

With the wisdom of hindsight, it is the recording that marks Elvis Costello’s entrance pass to the Pantheon, the opening song of the album with which Costello promotes himself from Great Songwriter to one of the Gods: “Beyond Belief”, from Imperial Bedroom (1982, the album title that, incidentally, seems to have had some influence on Dylan’s naming of Empire Burlesque, three years later). Costello sings the song, which in the first takes is still called “The Land Of Give And Take”, initially “normally”, like the angry young Costello of “Less Than Zero” and “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea”, of “Green Shirt” and “High Fidelity”, the brilliant, aggressive Buddy Holly, sharply and cynically snarling his intelligent lyrics, like the Costello we have loved for five years at that point. But that’s the Costello that Costello is about to shake off:

“I felt that while the playing was fine, the vocal was just a lot of high pitched ranting. The decision to lower the register of the voice by an octave and thereby re-write both title and song, was taken after leaving AIR studios for a bracing stroll along Portland Place. Staff from the nearby B.B.C. would hurry past as they saw me mumbling to myself.”
(liner notes Girls Girls Girls, 1989)

It’s an exceptional song in its own right, of course. Those hypnotically meandering melody lines and especially that brilliant arrangement, the unnerving dynamics of the practically stationary bass on the one hand and the increasingly neurotic, ferocious drumming of an unleashed Pete Thomas on the other. But into the stratosphere comes “Beyond Belief” thanks to that epiphany to descend to baritone, that insight of singing an octave lower and adapt the lyrics accordingly, transforming “The Land Of Give And Take” into “Beyond Belief” – similar in both respects to Dylan’s radical intervention in “Phantom Engineer”.

Revolutionary it is not, of course. On any given day in any given studio on this planet, some musician gets stuck and then decides to seek salvation in radically changing tempo, or key, or instrumentation or whatever. The same applies to Dylan, although it doesn’t seem to be in keeping with his self-image: over the decades, Dylan seems to feel a need to maintain the image of One-Take-Bob for some reason.

It is one of the many, many surprising, insightful anecdotes of the wonderful interview series Life with Bob Dylan, UK Uncut‘s autumn 2008 special. Speaking is Dylan’s regular studio engineer Chris Shaw:

“For him, a recording is a document of the song at that moment in time. My favourite Bob Dylan song is probably ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. He has this wicked way of playing it live now, and I saw him backstage once after a show, and I said, ‘Hey, I love the new version of “It’s Alright Ma” – but do you ever play it like the original recording?’ And he looked at me, and he said: Well, y’know, a record is just a recording of what you were doing that day. You don’t wanna live the same day over and over again, now. Do ya?”

… which Dylan must have said sometime in the early 21st century (Shaw has known Dylan since “Things Have Changed”, 2000), but it’s an attitude Dylan has been exhibiting for decades. “A record is not that monumental for me to make,” he tells Ron Rosenbaum in 1977 for the Playboy interview, “it’s just a record of songs.”

Posed, thankfully. Fortunately, for instance, Dylan does not think at the end of recording day 15 June 1965 “just a recording of what I was doing today,” then putting the last take of “Like A Rolling Stone” in waltz rhythm, in three-four time, on the LP. We are all glad that “Not Dark Yet” was revised a few more times, that the New York “Tangled Up In Blue” recordings from September ‘74 were discarded after the perfect remakes in Minneapolis in December, we are grateful that Dylan thought at the end of 30 November 1965, after five complete takes, “No, there’s more to “Visions Of Johanna”. Let’s try it another way in a few months in Nashville.’

And the same gratitude will be felt by fans at Dylan’s decision to completely overhaul “Phantom Engineer”.

In the first takes, the song still chafes at boogie-woogie, but by the time we get to Take 5, Dylan finally seems to realise that we have Mike Bloomfield in the studio; he leaves the piano, grabs an electric guitar and, like a metronome, rams staccato chords in an uptempo Howlin’ Wolf rhythm, over which Bloomfield then gets to show off his rollicks & frolics. We are in Chicago. We hear Bloomfield coming into his element – those same licks and the same urgency as in “Mellow Down Easy”, for instance, on the record he recorded in this same year 1965, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the same overwhelming fills as in “Good Morning Little School Girl”. By the time we get to Take 9, Bloomfield’s guitar has now captured the spotlight alongside Dylan – it is steaming and mean and exciting, and light years away from the mercurial sound.

For now, Dylan seems content with it. Six weeks later, when he performs the song with Bloomfield 25 July in Newport, he has not changed a thing (except that it is played even faster – but that will be due to adrenaline, rather than artistic considerations). Despite this, the song in this form does not appear on Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan again not thinking “just a recording of what I was doing today”, but apparently still missing something; the first song on the next studio session, four days after Newport, is again “Phantom Engineer”.

That third recording day for H61, Thursday 29 July, six weeks after the previous recording day, the day “Like A Rolling Stone” was realised, begins with a first: producer Tom Wilson has been replaced by Bob Johnston. Which is the biggest change for now; the re-take of “Phantom Engineer” is only slightly different from Newport and the final 15 June takes. A little more rock ‘n’ roll perhaps, but still with a spotlight on Bloomfield. The first take is semi-serious. Dylan starts laughing along the way, and before the last verse the take bogs down. The musicians hesitate and Dylan laughs again, we can even hear him hooting and then chuckling something like “What the … what are we doing to this song, man – it’s not such a terrible song to do”. The giggly mood now created also ruins the next (and last) attempt of the morning session. Dylan mangles the lyrics, we hear laughter, corny humbug (“Rockefeller Center calling!”), and then it’s left at that; the rest of the morning is for “Tombstone Blues”. Which, after a few takes, is done perfectly before the lunch break.

A first radical change after that lunch break does not come out of Dylan’s hat either. Bassist Joe Macho and pianist Paul Griffin apparently have commitments elsewhere, and new producer Bob Johnston has – presumably – picked the replacements from the rolodex: Russ Savakus and Frank Owens. At least… Savakus and Owens are on the payroll and are also listed in all sources as the bassist and pianist of that afternoon session. Quite remarkable, as neither is a rock or blues musician. Also noteworthy is the awkward, cloistered position of both their names on the LP’s back cover:

Bob Dylan, guitar, harmonica, piano and police car
Mike Bloomfield, guitar
Alan Kooper, organ and piano
Paul Griffin, piano and organ
Bobby Gregg, drums
Harvey Goldstein, bass                  Frank Owens, piano
Charley McCoy, guitar                    Russ Savakus, bass

… in which more things stand out, by the way. The misspelling of Charlie McCoy’s first name, for instance, and that the contributions of bassist Joe Macho and guitarist Al Gorgoni are omitted, that Al Kooper’s stage name is only half-honoured (his real name is Alan Peter Kuperschmidt), that Harvey Goldstein is not yet called Harvey Brooks, and the cornyness of “police car” (referring to the Comedy Capers-like police whistle in “Highway 61 Revisited”, no doubt).

Still, it remains a question whether Owens and Savakus can actually be heard on the songs whose perfect take is realised on that fruitful Thursday (apart from “It Takes A Lot” also “Tombstone Blues” and “Positively 4th Street” are realised today). There are now more than a few testimonials and recollections, including from Owens himself, that warrant some considerable doubt….

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 10: No one had any idea what to do

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

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

Concerts previously covered in this series

• 2025 April 2025, Iowa
• 2024: Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 2024 The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 2024  What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• 2019: 14 October Palo Alto.
• 2002: 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime
• 1992  Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• 1986: The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 1978 Earls Court 1978
• 1976: Fort Collins 23 May 1976
• 1976: January 1976: the rehearsals
• 1966: Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• 1961  The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961

In my original set of reviews of Dylan’s writing of this era, I wrote of 1963, “Towards the end of that year Dylan composed a most extraordinary set of songs ranging from two tales of the better world to come (“When the ship comes in” and “The Times they are a-Changing”) along with “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” which portrays racism not as something that is a set of individual incidents but as something utterly entrenched within American society.

Then to finish the year off he wrote two of the most powerful songs of leaving: “One too many mornings” and “Restless Farewell” – which raised the question, who was leaving what?   Were we all moving on in the sense of improving society, or was Bob moving on in despair?   Or indeed (as it seems in listening to those songs then and now) was this a voice saying “as a society, we’re totally lost”?

However, in my earlier review, I focussed primarily on the lyrics – the subject matter of Dylan’s songs.  But in this “If only there had been a Nobel Prize for music” series I have been trying to explore the notion that Bob also changed the way he was writing music at the same time in order to convey a greater depth of meaning in his songs than can be achieved just in the lyrics.  Something that I think has (quite understandably) been largely ignored by commentators who naturally head to the more obvious changes – the lyrical themes of the songs, rather than the musical themes.

In that earlier article, I added that this consideration “raised a question: what on earth could he do to top that?  He had composed 20 highly memorable songs in each of the last two years – could he keep it up?

Certainly in the review of the music Bob composed in 1963 it seems that Bob did indeed take his approach to both music and lyrics down new avenues, but, I have tried to suggest, he did this more subtly  with the music than with the lyrics.

In terms of compositions, Dylan started 1964 with the now largely forgotton song Guess I’m doing fine 

This is a very deceptive song for it contains within it something extraordinarily curious.    In each verse, the song consists of two lines each of two bars, which are then repeated.   In the next verse these lines are answered and then the last four bars consist of the chorus line, spread out into four bars.

Written out it looks very straightforward:

Well, I ain't got my childhood (2 bars)
Or friends I once did know (2 bars)
No, I ain't got my childhood (2 bars)
Or friends I once did know (2 bars)

But I still got my voice left (2 bars)
I can take it anywhere I go (2 bars)
Hey-hey, so I guess I'm doing fine (4 bars)

So two groups of eight bars – a classic bit of folk songwriting.   And yet the song sounds and indeed feels completely strange – and this strangeness is brought about by the fact that verse two opens by sounding and feeling exactly the same as verse one, except that the last line (starting “hey hey”) is spread out over four bars – this being achieved by the extension of the music over the word “fine”.

The fact that there are effectively just three lines of lyrics in that second verse gives the feeling of something odd happening, and it is hard to work out exactly what it is, if all one is doing is listening to the music.

I should also add Eyolf Østrem notes a subtle change to the chords in the fifth verse which passed me by as I was pondering the strange effect that this music achieves using such minimal resources.  As ever I’m eternally grateful for the sharpness of his hearing.

Overall this really was a strange song to compose, although when we consider the subject matter of the two preceding compositions, One too many mornings and Restless Farewell (which are both about packing up and moving on) it does fit with the emotions Bob was expressing at the time; emotions of being ill-at-ease with where he was.

However, rather perversely the musical accompaniment of the song doesn’t express this at all.  The music in fact expresses the image of a person “doing fine” while the lyrics express the opposite….  It is a real case of “grin and bear it”.

I been kicked an' whipped an' trampled on
I been shot at just like you
I been kicked an' whipped an' trampled on
I been shot at just like you
But as long as the world keeps turnin'
I just keep turnin' too
Hey hey so I guess I'm doin' fine.

Along with around half of Dylan’s compositions, this one was never played in public.  As far as I know Bob wrote it, recorded it, and left it.   But it is worth noting for the way that it works as a song.  It is of course totally contradictory – the singer most certainly is not doing fine, even though he says he is, and even though the music is quite jolly (although as we come to understand the lyrics, and appreciate the level of repetition, the situation is anything but “quite jolly.”)

Now I find this rather interesting as the preceding compositions were as I noted above, “One too many mornings” and “Restless farewell” both of which were about things being far from fine.   And having written two pieces of very plaintive music, Bob now continued with the theme that things are not fine, but with a more upbeat musical approach, resulting in this “grin and bear it” image.   It all sounds fine, he says it’s fine, but exactly as with the two preceding songs, things are not right at all.

“Guess I’m doing fine” sounds to me very much like a sketch – an idea that came to Bob and he recorded it, just to have a note of the song.  But having got that idea recorded, the serious work began, as Bob’s compositional abilities took off in ways that I don’t think anyone could have predicted.

Now we have seen that the songs written at the end of 1963 varied between the positive When the ship comes in and The Times they are a-Changing  and the negative Percy’s Song and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.

Indeed looking at the way Bob’s writing swung from the positive to the negative one can hardly be surprised that he finished the year with two songs of leaving everything behind and moving on: One too many mornings and Restless Farewell

And it is certainly possible to see “I guess I’m doing fine” as Bob’s further contemplation of his own situation.   He is indeed doing well, but also feeling restless, and in need of a change.  He is perhaps asking, “Can I do something meaningful about this by singing about Hattie Carroll, or have I really had enough?”  He expresses the latter view in Restless Farewell.

But then Bob did find an answer both lyrically and musically, and it was the answer that said he could stand up and fight.

Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

by Jochen Markhorst

VIII       The words are all mighty

Well, I wanna be your lover, baby
I don’t wanna be your boss
Don’t say I never warned you
When your train gets lost

Our great storytellers do like a cyclical narrative structure. The Odyssey begins on Ithaca and ends on Ithaca. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a continuously self-repeating family chronicle anyway, and also ends as it began, with yet another Ursula having a child by her cousin. Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet opens with a ship emerging from the fog and ends with that same ship vanishing again into the mist. Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Goethe’s Faust, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, the cafeteria in which Pulp Fiction begins and ends, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca with the Manderley estate… And, to stay closer to Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time A West (1968) begins and ends with a train. A train that, as in Dylan’s song, is so much more than just a train.

Leone’s film opens with a tantalizingly long waiting scene on an otherwise empty platform of a dilapidated railway station in a godforsaken desert setting, and when the train finally arrives it brings Death to the three bad guys waiting there for Harmonica. In the final scene, the train announces birth in a noisy, teeming setting: the train brings Life to the desert town Claudia Cardinale founds here, Sweetwater. An antithesis made all the sharper by Leone’s circularity, by having the film begin and end with the train.

It seems that Dylan did only in hindsight acknowledge this identical structure as a successful compositional frame, with the narrator arriving by train in the opening line, and the antagonist departing by train in the closing line. The later revisions of the second and third stanzas, which perfectly “round out” the song à la Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude do indicate as much, after all. In that lunch break on 29 July 1965, so before Dylan makes the final, rather radical changes (both in tempo and lyrics), he rewrites both stanzas to match the first verse: a Robert Johnson salute, an amorous allusion and a train reference. The child/ghost/angel is dropped to make way for the brakeman and the Double E, the baggage car with the 40 compasses disappears in favour of the Johnson quote wintertime is coming.

Similar literary considerations then seem to have led to the most dramatic and pronounced change: the title.

The title remains “Phantom Engineer” up to and including the last take – so also on the recording sheets from the last, final recording session Thursday afternoon, 29 July. The album will be in shops on 30 August, so pretty soon after that final recording session, Dylan must have decided to change the title. Into a – within Dylan’s oeuvre – rather unique title, at that.

Titles that give an extra charge to the song are something Dylan often chooses in these months. “From a Buick 6”. “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”. “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”… word combinations that unusually do not appear in the song lyrics.

Titles that sometimes add value and clarify the lyrics (“Spanish Harlem Incident”, “Positively 4th Street”), much the way Picasso calls a painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or as Zadkine calls a sculpture The Destroyed City, but which more often than not give the song an alienating, enigmatic connotation (“Obviously Five Believers”, “4th Time Around”). And are often, as we can hear a few times thanks to the studio banter on The Bootleg Series 12 – The Cutting Edge 1965-66 (2015), spontaneous fabrications, invented on the spot, knocked off, usually larded with chuckles (“On the Road Again”, “A Long-Haired Mule And A Porcupine”, “Alcatraz To The Ninth Power”).

“It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” falls outside those categories, and is unique in Dylan’s oeuvre. Not only because it is an entirely standalone title, but also for the aphoristic couleur, the proverbial nature of it. At most, “Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” come close, but those are both derivations, semi-fabrications of word combinations we already know. This one is different.

A flash of inspiration presumably, knowing Dylan. In the most obvious scenario, Dylan drives home to West Saugerties after 4 August, after the final H61 sessions, to his wife-to-be Sara and her baby daughter Maria. Sara is already more than three months pregnant with Dylan’s first child (Jesse, 6 January 1966), Dylan did that much-discussed, earth-shattering electric gig in Newport between recordings last week, and he doesn’t have another commitment until 28 August (Forest Hill Tennis Stadium in Queens)… he has earned a few days of me-time. But somewhere in the back of his mind, the slight dissatisfaction with the title of “Phantom Engineer” still itches. These are the dog days. In these weeks of August 1965 we have only one single day with temperatures dropping below 27°C (80°F – the average daily temperature in these 25 days off is 84°F, almost 29°C). Dylan is hanging on the porch, languidly. Leafing through the works of Khalil Gibran:

“It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone… but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.”

When he reads those words the bells go off. Dylan’s superior sense of language, his instinct for rhyme & reason, and his powers of association rarely leave him, and neither do they this time – Gibran’s aphorism articulates a perhaps somewhat old-fashioned, but nevertheless cast-iron, universal wisdom – the amorous variant of “trust comes on foot but leaves on horseback”. Whereby Gibran stays closer to the age-old source of that proverb; already in the fifteenth century we find all kinds of variants of Sickness comes on horseback, but goes away on foot in Germanic, French and Anglo-Saxon areas, so: first fast, then slow. The inspired Dylan sees the link of Gibran’s aphorism to his song, integrates his motif “train”, and switches to the 20th-century variant, to first slow then fast. “It may take some time to forge a connection, but one departing train is enough to lose that connection”, something like that. On a first whim, he then rearranges Gibran’s oneliner into “It takes a lot to love, it takes a train to cry”, immediately notices that to love does make it a bit corny, and in the same breath finds the semi-homophone to laugh… yes, better. Well, pretty perfect actually.

Speculation, obviously, but really not too far-fetched; Dylan was presumably introduced to the Lebanese American’s work early on via devout Gibran fan Woody Guthrie. Leaving lasting traces, incidentally. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” from 1962 already has suspiciously strong Gibran traces, and on Rough And Rowdy Ways (2020) we can still hear echoes, too. From Gibran’s mega-bestseller The Prophet then especially; “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one,” for example, which we hear paraphrased in “I Contain Multitudes” (I sleep with life and death in the same bed).

And what’s more: Dylan acknowledges his love for Gibran’s parables and poetry in the summer of 1968 with Big Words, in the interview with John Cohen for Sing Out!:

“The only parables that I know are the Biblical parables. I’ve seen others. Khalil Gibran perhaps… It has a funny aspect to it – you certainly wouldn’t find it in the Bible – this type of soul. […] Gibran, the words are all mighty but the strength is turned into that of a contrary direction. There used to be this disc jockey, Rosko. I don’t recall his last name. Sometimes at night, the radio would be on and Rosko would be reciting this poetry of Khalil Gibran. It was a radiant feeling, coming across it on the radio.”

“Soul”, “mighty words”, “radiant” … words of a fan. “Inspiring” he might also have added.

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 9: “It’s not such a terrible song to do”

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

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

By Tony Attwood

I can take no credit for the links to this collection of videos given below; it has merely come about because on occasion I have been searching for a video from a certain year, and wished I could find a page that did the hard work for me by providing an index.

There have of course been such pages put up from time to time, but their quality of recordings is variable, and of course on-line videos come and go.   So I started keeping a note of the videos I had found interesting and simply created a list.

Today I have just added another one: the 1976 show, which is rather interesting as we already had the 1976 rehearsals on the list.

Thanks of course to everyone, amateur and professional who has put up a video of a show.  As historical material these recordings are invaluable.

The index of shows we have put up links to is given below and after that today’s new addition.   If you would like to recommend a video to add to the list please do drop me a line: Tony@schools.co.uk

• 2025 April 2025, Iowa
• 2024: Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 2024 The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 2024  What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• 2002: 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime
• 1992  Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• 1986: The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• 1978 Earls Court 1978
• 1976: Fort Collins 23 May 1976
• 1976: January 1976: the rehearsals
• 1966: Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• 1961  The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961

And here’s the new one for today.

By Tony Attwood

• If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• If only there had been a Nobel Prize for music 3: From Times to Percy’s song

By the time Bob Dylan wrote Percy’s Song he had got well into the notion of the protest song.  Indeed however one analyses the songs that Dylan composed in 1963, the vast majority had at least an element of protest within them.  And to save you looking back to where we looked at these songs before here’s a list of those songs I would consider to be within the realms of “protest” from this period.

1. Walls of Red Wing
2. You’ve been hiding too long. 
3. Seven Curses
4. With God on our Side
5. Talking World War III Blues
6. Only a pawn in their game
7. North Country Blues
8. Troubled and I Don’t Know Why 
9. When the ship comes in
10. The Times they are a-Changing
11. Percy’s Song
12. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

Now in looking at these songs as a group it seems to me that Dylan was not only writing lyrics that contained what we tend to classify as protest commentaries, he was also varying the way the music was written, in order to emphasise the change in the lyrical approach.

These were not always huge changes to the musical structure and form but they were there and they had an important part to play in terms of what the music was doing in order to back up the themes of the lyrics.

After Hattie Carroll, one of Dylan’s strongest pieces of protest to date, in terms of the lyrics, Dylan finished the year with three more compositions.   In these three songs, in the lyrics, he expressed the view that the natural world is superior to anything that mankind could create and that the only logical response to being in a time like this is to move on.   These songs were:

• Lay Down Your Weary Tune
• One too many mornings
• Restless Farewell

With “Lay Down” Dylan himself expressed the view in his notes printed on the album “Times they are a changin” that he was trying to capture the feeling of a Scottish ballad that he had once heard on a 78rpm record.  He didn’t identify the song in question, and it is more than likely that by the time he wrote the sleeve notes he had forgotten which song it was, (although there has been much debate about which song it might have been).

One possibility is “The Water is Wide” which Dylan himself performed in1975

Another source that is quoted is “I Wish I wish” a song that Bob clearly knew because he used its lyrics for part of “Bob Dylan’s Dream” in 1963.   There are multiple versions of “I wish” around, although I suspect I have been listening to the wrong ones in trying to trace the source of Bob’s inspiration!  Bob however did perform a version of “The Water is Wide” which is close to “Lay Down Your Weary Tune.”

“One too many mornings” is most likely taken from “Deliverance will come” a traditional folk song which is often traced back to John B. Matthias (1767-1848) but which may well have antecedents beyond that date.

“Restless Farewell“, is a song he wrote, we are told, as an angry response to a Newsweek reporter who in late October 1963 published a story about Dylan of which Dylan did not approve.  In this case, the musical source is said to be the Irish folk song “The Parting Glass,” a Scottish song dating back to the 17th century.

What we can see with these songs is that with greater or lesser variation Dylan was not using the dominant musical forms and approaches of his time, but instead deliberate using the musical forms of other countries and previous eras.

Now of course what we don’t know is exactly which versions of which songs Bob listened to and worked from, but we can see a linkage between the songs themselves.

These three songs, “Lay Down your Weary Tune”, “One too many mornings,” and “Restless Farewell” are all about setting the past aside, and in such a situation one might expect the obvious next step for Bob to take at this point would be to write music which was new.  And that of course was to come, but for now, in each case he returned for his sources to traditional pieces.  It was as if he was taking the traditional visions, and writing new songs in that style from days gone by.

This of course contrasts with “The Hour that the Ship Comes In,” which I looked at in the earlier piece From Hattie Carroll to the Incoming Ship where I argued that it would appear that Bob wrote original music to match his bouyant positive message, but then only performed the piece very rarely indeed, despite the obvious success of the composition.

Dylan’s writing at the end of 1963 is thus most curious in a way that I feel most commentators have not considered.    He had written one of his most successful songs ever (“Times they are a changin”) which had a strong, positive message about the future and for which, as far as I know, he developed an original melody to go with the lyrics.  It says the future can be better than the past, and we can make it happen.

And yet then having not only written that song which clearly works in every way, and as far as I can see was an immediate success when first performed on 26 October 1963 at Carnegie Hall, Bob then turned away from that positive message and the strident “voice” of “Times” and wrote “Percy’ Song”.

Now Percy’s Song is a much more gentle piece, and contrary to “Times” is about the failure of justice.  “Hattie Carroll” returns to the strident approach but again about the failure of justice. “Lay Down” is about the failure of everything manmade, “Mornings” is about giving up and moving on, and so is “Restless Farewell.”   In fact, and rather bizarrely, after wriitng his most positive piece to day, he writes about negativity.   Everything is now about failure and the need to keep moving.   Which of course was the message the songs of Robert Johnson were giving Bob.

Now I postulated above that the songs Bob composed, and which we are looking at here, reflect a view that there is nothing mankind can do which nature cannot do better.  Robert Johnson gives us the slightly different visio, that whatever we do we are going to be in trouble.   So perhaps to find the answer to questions about what was driving Bob in these musical directions, we should look at the end of “Restless Farewell”, as I have noted before in writing about that song.  For if Robert Johnson was anything, he was utterly restless.

Musically Bob is back to that less-than-common 12/8 time which I noted before, and however one writes out the lyrics, the rhyming scheme is irregular.  Indeed if we write out the lyrics so that each line of lyrics is one bar of 12/8 time we get this….

Oh, ev'ry girl that ever I've touched, 
I did not do it harmfully
And ev'ry girl that ever I've hurt, 
I did not do it knowingly
But to remain as friends You need the time 
to make amends And stay behind
And since my feet are now fast, and point away from the past
I'll bid farewell and be down the line

There are indeed eight lines of lyrics when written this way, but this is not how most transcribers write the lyrics, because they are not contemplating the progression of the 12 beats and the use of the triple time which makes the song so unusual.

But what I think Bob is doing here is reflecting the irregularity of Robert Johnson’s timings and rhythms, but doing so in a way that takes the edginess of Robert Johnson’s music, and combines it with the gentility of European folk songs from earlier centuries.

In short, he is combining different traditions in unique ways.  And all this was happening just in a short period at the end of 1963.  Bob had created a great worldwide hit song, but his interests and his resultant subsequent compositions, were taking him to very different musical places.

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 7

by Jochen Markhorst

VII        It Hurts Me Too

Well, I wanna be your lover, baby
I don’t wanna be your boss
Don’t say I never warned you
When your train gets lost

 Alfred Kralik (James Stewart) is now manager of the shop where they both work when he finally reveals to shop-girl Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan) that he is the mysterious man with whom Klara has been having such an intimate, heartfelt correspondence all this time. Alfred wants to be her lover, not her boss. Thus bringing the plot of The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940) to a happy ending. Yes, indeed: in 1998 Nora Ephron reworked the movie into the hit film You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. But by then we are almost sixty years on and a love affair between an executive and a subordinate is a lot more problematic – in Ephron’s film, for safety’s sake, man and woman are no longer colleagues in the same company, but both executives at competing shops.

In the intervening years and in the decades, or even centuries before The Shop Around the Corner, it is anything but offensive, and even a romantic, plot-driving ideal: the manager with the secretary, the prince with the citizen, the squire with the maid, the surgeon with the nurse, and when Dylan writes his song in the spring of 1965, he has just seen Captain Von Trapp break up with the baroness to marry his children’s governess Sister Mary, Julie Andrews. For centuries we have, in short, found it super romantic when the boss wants to be not the boss but the lover. And we actually still do – despite the twenty-first century enshrining in company protocols, army regulations and even laws that amorous liaisons within an authority relationship are forbidden, it remains popular in all telenovelas, soaps and Bollywood productions. Or perhaps all the more so: der Reiz des Verbotenen, as our German friends call it – the forbidden attraction.

In songs, however, master & servant never is a romantic constellation. Bosses do appear, but really always as The Evil One, or as representative of the life the protagonist now leaves behind, as a recipient of resignation, or to illustrate the hero’s rebellious disposition – who now says the boss can go f*ck himself, or something like that. “Summertime Blues”, Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man”, “Wake Me Shake Me”, “John Henry”, songs like that. As a love object never, anyway. And if so, then only in a figurative sense – “he or she is is bossing me around,” or, as Elvis warns in “Britches”: “Who wears the britches is the boss / That’s a gal, that’s a gal in britches.” A warning he himself doesn’t take too seriously, by the way: “But in the middle of the night when the moon is shining bright / Ah, you’re the boss” (“You’re The Boss” in Viva Las Vegas, 1964). Then again, that’s Ann-Margret, so that doesn’t really count.

Dylan seems to realise that too, that originality of I wanna be your lover, baby, I don’t wanna be your boss in a lyric. It is the only line of the final couplet that has stood from Day One, never changing, and which he continues to sing throughout, not only in all studio takes, but also in all live performances. Indeed, it is even the only line in his oeuvre that he reuses.

“Bob really, really hates to repeat himself. He just hates it,” reveals engineer Chris Shaw in 2008 in the Uncut special dedicated to the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs. Shaw should know – he has been involved with both the Bootleg Series and Dylan’s regular studio albums since “Things Have Changed” (1999) through to Rough And Rowdy Ways in 2020. It is clear from the context that Shaw is referring to less tangible things like sound or the shuffle or – even more elusive – the “feel”, but an aversion to repetition obviously extends to lyrics as well; Dylan, like any poet, will not want to reuse notable word combinations in other songs, would surely never sing “one hand waving free” or “infinity goes up in trial” or “at the time of my confession” in any other song.

But during the recording of the “scooped up” songs that would later be cobbled together on Self Portrait (1970), other laws temporarily applied. That reviled album, which Dylan himself also repeatedly dismisses with derogatory qualifications like “joke” and “a lot of crap”, and which he claims was meant as a deterrent, as a deliberate attempt to put an end to his stifling popularity, contains enough moments that make it a treasured album for many despite everything – even well before its more or less official rehabilitation with the release of The Bootleg Series 10 – Another Self Portrait (2013). If only because, for a whole next generation, it is a first introduction to classics from the canon. “Alberta”, “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know”, “Little Sadie”, “Gotta Travel On”, “Copper Kettle”, and perhaps the greatest of them all: “It Hurts Me Too”.

“It Hurts Me Too” is a monument and all the gods have it in the repertoire. From The Stones to the Grateful Dead, Clapton to Junior Wells, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, not to mention all the songs that use “It Hurts Me Too” as a template (like Dylan’s 1966 “Pledging My Time”). The song is first recorded by – and usually attributed to – Tampa Red in 1940, but is pumped up into the outer limits of the stratosphere first and foremost by Elmore James in 1957, and again in 1962.

Lyric variations aplenty, of course. To Elmore, for instance, we owe the rewrite of the first verse, which has become sort of the standard by now;

You say you hurting, you almost lost your mind
The man you love, he hurts you all the time
When things go wrong, go wrong with you
It hurts me too

… but none of the dozens of variants has the words Dylan sings in 1970 as the second verse:

I want you baby just to understand
I don't want to be your boss babe, I just want to be your man
When things go wrong, so wrong with you
It hurts me too

… with which Dylan adds further music-historical lustre to the monument: it is the only recording in which the greatest song poet of the past 60 years repeats himself. Which he really, really hates, thus making his derogatory, scathing self-reviews with “joke” and “a lot of crap” even more convincing on reflection – he really, really means it.

Official monument status, by the way, “It Hurts Me Too” won’t be given until 2012, when the song will be inducted into the Blues Hall Of Fame in Memphis. Pretty late, as a matter of fact. The Blues Hall Of Fame has been elevating songs to the peerage since 1983, an average of three a year, and “It Hurts Me Too” in Tampa Red’s rendition is, 42 years after the list’s inception, only song number 69 on that list. For what that list is worth; Jimi’s “Red House” is not on it, for instance – Jimi Hendrix is not on there at all – and neither is “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”. Nor any other blues by Bob Dylan, the hardest-working and most respected bluesman of the past sixty years – which is a bit strange for a foundation that claims to have as its mission: preserving history, celebrating excellence, supporting education, and ensuring the future of the music.

——————–

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 8: The words are all mighty

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

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

By Tony Attwood

• If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music part 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship

In the previous articles, I’ve noted some of the key issues in Bob Dylan’s compositions through which he changed the way the music of folk and rock songs was composed.  These changes included expanding the length of the song overall, and the length of individual verses.   Bob also introduced a range of new rhyming schemes and moved away from the traditional strophic (verse, verse, verse) and ternary (verse, verse, middle 8, verse) arrangements of the music.

He also explored emphasising the last line of a verse by repeating it and rather obviously, dramatically increasing the number of words that could be used within a song – which although a lyrical change, meant that the music itself now had to change to accommodate the additional lyrics.

However such changes always come with the danger that they can feel forced, as if the composer is making changes for the sake of being different, and it is a measure of Dylan’s success that most of us never feel this.  If we take “Times they are a-changin'” it is doubtful that many people realise the five six-line verses change their rhyming structure:

In verse one lines 1, 2, 3 and 5 rhyme (roam, grown etc)

Where the rhyming pattern does change, we tend not to notice it because of the effect of the strophic form – that is verse, verse, verse etc, with just the title line at the end and this seems like a highly structured song in terms of the lyrics (quite simply, change is happening now, and cannot be stopped), in terms of the time signature and the melody.

But the change is not just to the lyrics for the time signature here is 12/8, which means in each line of lyrics we have four sets of three beats:

Come gather round people where ever you roam

This doesn’t change at all over the years, quite probably because it would be impossible to maintain the essence of the song by taking it out of the 12/8 time.   So Bob has done something quite different.

In the 2009 version of the song, we can hear that familiar 1,2,3 beat as always, but the melody has now changed beyond recognition in many of the lines, including the melody for the last line of each verse.  Even the rhythm changes at times, for in verse three, “For he that gets hurt, will be he who has stalled; The battle outside ragin’, Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls” has a completely different set of emphases from anything we have heard before.  The way “soon”, “windows”, “rattle” etc are emphasised almost seems like a parody, as if Bob is saying, yes all this changed, but I am not sure if it made anything better.

That of course is my interpretation, but whatever reason you find for Bob changing the song in this way, change it he has.  (This recording comes from the Never Ending Tour series on this site).

2009

My contention here is thus that not only was “Times they are a changin'” a piece of music which challenged popular music’s standard approaches when it was written, through its rhyme structure, and its use of the 12/8 time signature, it was a piece of music that Dylan then changed later, by amending the melody, and placing an extra emphasis on the first of each of the three beats, to give a more plodding feel to the song.

Through these musical changes, I would argue, the meaning of the song has changed.  Whereas at first we might reasonably have taken the song to mean that there is hope in the future, because the younger generation has slipped the bonds of their forebears, and are creating a new world in a new way, and this is to be celebrated, this much later version musically suggests that since we are all just plodding along, going through the motions, believing something is happening, and not only do we not know what it is, (as was the case with Mr Jones) there might not actually be anything happening at all.   We are simply plodding along.

Of course, this is my own interpretation, and interpretations must always be treated with caution, but I would argue it is a valid interpretation, while the notion that Bob is still singing the same song with the same meaning as he was when he first wrote it, is very, very difficult to sustain in the light of these recordings.

Normally of course Bob’s songs are considered in isolation, or via the album on which they appeared, but if we do continue to consider the songs in the order in which they were written, what we now find is something very curious.  For, as far as we can tell, the next song written by Bob Dylan was Percy’s Song.   In one sense this a song on the same theme as “Times” in that it is about the failure of the system in which we live.

But there is more here, for this is really quite an extraordinary song – the music is utterly gentle and one might say almost delicate and yet contains the most horrific message, at the line “What happened to him could happen to anyone”.

It is in fact about the ineffectiveness of people in trying to change the system.  And in a very real sense this is utterly the opposite of Times they are a changin, for in Percy’s Song  there is nothing at all that can be done – the song is left with “With no other choice except for to go”.

Musically the composition comes from the traditional ballad “The Twa Sisters” and lyrically from another traditional ballad “Geordie”.

And I played my guitar through the night to the day
Turn, turn, turn again
And the only tune my guitar could play
Was, "Oh the cruel rain and the wind"

Thus my point is, to repeat it, if we wish to understand Bob’s music, we should not be looking at individual songs, but rather at the sequence of songs in the order of composition.   And here we see, “Times they are a changin” being immediately contradicted by a song about an appalling injustice which cannot be overturned.  There is no appeal, and everything is lost.  Nothing is changing.

These two songs are utterly contradictory in their visions, and yet the structures of the songs have certain similarities, such as the repeated lines in each.   But where they are so different is that “Times” has a strident quality in the music which within it carries the message of moving forward in hope.   The relentlessness of the 12/8 beat gives a strength to the words “Come gather round people wherever you roam” – the message is clear – group together, work together, support each other.

But in Percy’s song the meaning is quite different as it ends

And I played my guitar through the night to the day
Turn, turn, turn again
And the only tune my guitar could play
Was, "Oh the cruel rain and the wind"

What I think is extraordinary is not only that Bob could write two utterly contradictory songs one after the other (one saying the world is changing, and the other suggesting it isn’t, and worse it can’t be changed), but he could adopt completely different musical forms to convey the messages.   One might expect the horror of Percy’s song to be accompanied by more strident music but it is not.  It is just the music that never changes – the music that says “this is what the world is”.

Thus we have in quick succession Bob writing two songs with completely contradictory messages and in each case using different musical approaches.

We might ask why, and how he did it, but I think also just noting that at this early stage in his career that he could do this, gives a real insight into Bob and his music.   He could change his message and his musical approach in a trice.   And that I think gives us an insight into how his compositions and performances developed from throughout his career.

Bob, in short, has always been interested in different musical forms and messages, and having seen one side of the situation, he can not only quickly see the other he can also write about it.   One song is about the forthcoming liberation from the tyranny of the past, the next is about how the traditional ways still control us and there is nothing we can do.

And this was not just a one-off moment of two songs written in short proximity, contradicting each other.  For it was about to happen again.

Percy’s song was performed by Bob just once, on 26 October 1963 at Carnegie Hall.

The series continues.

It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – A History in Performance, Part 1: 1965 –

Crying like a fire in the sun

By Mike Johnson

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

This is the first article on the fourth and final track, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series at the end of this article: ]

Compared to ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ with, to date, 903 performances, and ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ with 772 performances, ‘Baby Blue’ lags behind with only 595 performances (Gates of Eden has the least at 217 performances).  But ‘Baby Blue’ has done something none of the other songs from Bringing It All Back Home have done, namely, crashed through the 2019 barrier to be one of the few older songs performed on the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.

In fact, as I was starting to work on this article Dylan performed the song again at Tulsa, the first concert of 2025 on March 25^th. The song is still alive, first appearing in the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour in 2024, being played multiple times in that year.

So I decided to break with my previous tradition and start with this Tulsa performance before tracking back to the origins of the song’s life in 1965.

2025 Tulsa

It has been slowed right down, surrounded by clusters of piano notes, and sung in a hushed, sepulchral voice. Perhaps inevitably, it sounds more like a farewell to a lifetime on the road than to a particular relationship. It drips with mortality, as the eighty-three-year-old faces a slow but inevitable decline. And it’s as heart-rending as it’s ever been, perhaps more so with the accumulation of the years as evidenced in the world-weariness of Dylan’s voice, the sad, soaring notes, the dark troughs on the low notes, the elegiac and haunting piano still stabbing at grief.  None of us want it to be over.

Time and time again Dylan has warned us against reading autobiographical significance into his songs, but fans and writers go on doing it regardless, convincing themselves that this song written for, say, Joan Baez, as if that really matters. As if that explains everything. It doesn’t.

Such explanations serve to limit the song, put shackles on what is a powerful ballad of farewell, what I have called love’s last song. As such it transcends any particular situation to become a more general, more universal heartbreak – an evocation of the death of love. An evocation that can speak to us, in our own lives, if we don’t relativise it as yet another episode in the Bob & Joan soap opera. It speaks most powerfully to me when I strip it of those associations, and I realise that I am the one ‘crying like a fire in the sun.’

‘Baby Blue’ belongs to a cluster of songs written around this time that may be called farewell, or break-up songs. This cluster includes, ‘Don’t Think Twice,’ ‘Boots of Spanish Leather,’ ‘Restless Farewell,’ ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe,’ ‘Ramona,’ ‘Farewell Angelina,’ ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine,’ and probably others that haven’t sprung to mind. Of course, this kind of song is deeply rooted in the country, blues, cowboy, and pop traditions. Somebody is always leaving while somebody else is crying into their cups.

Rather than trying to trace these songs to some relationship or other, I would trace it to a particular feeling, a feeling evident in these lines from ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’:

With hungry hearts through the heat and cold
We never much thought we could get very old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
And our chances really was a million to one

And:

How many a year has passed and gone?
Many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a first friend
And each one I've never seen again

In other words, everything is transitory, especially youth; loss is inescapable, change inevitable, innocence fleeting. Those lines were written before most of the farewell songs, but prefigure them. As he sings in Ramona another early ‘challenge’ song:

Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do

A sentiment very much in harmony with ‘Baby Blue.’

It’s to do with rootlessness, homelessness, lonesome whistles blowin’, the seductions of nostalgia, the furiously precarious nature of existence (‘he not busy being born…’) and love. All things pass. Even love. What you don’t lose will be ripped from you. That is a condition of our mortality.

The lover who just walked out your door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor

If you want to salvage anything out of the hectic, hurdy-gurdy swirl of life ‘you’d better grab it fast.’ He’s laying down a challenge, but the real challenge is what life brings.

These are the dimensions of feeling opened up in this cluster of farewell songs, and, for my ear, none does it quite so well as ‘Baby Blue’ with its undiluted poignancy. These feelings don’t go away in later songs, like ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘Sooner or Later,’ and ‘Just Like a Woman,’ but these later songs morph the farewell genre into more confrontational, ‘attack’ songs with other threads running through them, like glee, self-justification, hurt, and a magnificent condemnation of falsity.

I have written at length on Baby Blue in my NET series, most particularly, 1995 Part 2: The Prague Revelation – Salt for salt, Peak Prague and I would invite you to check out my comments there.

As you’d expect, Baby Blue started out sounding very different from the contemplative 2025 version. More brash and confident. It was first performed in February 1965, so we can assume it was written in that year of great flowering:1964. These early performances have been pretty well covered, so I don’t intend to linger over them. I expect you may well be  familiar with them.

For 1965, we have a couple of absolutely essential performances. Perhaps the best of these is from the Newport Folk Festival in July of that year. Passions were running high because of Dylan’s electric set; his first ever. Focus on those electric sounds shouldn’t distract us from the forthright and authoritative acoustic set that followed. Dylan was well riled up when he came to perform Baby Blue, a performance that misses nothing of the song’s challenge, or its heartbreak.

Because of the context, you can read this performance as a challenge to his audience: I’m not who I was. I’m striking another match. I’m starting anew. Can you do the same, baby blue?

1965 Newport Folk Festival

Dylan didn’t vary his delivery of the song much in 1965. It’s worth, however, checking one more outstanding performance, this one from Liverpool in May.

1965 Liverpool

Before leaving 1965, I would be remiss if I left out this house party performance during Dylan’s UK tour. This is footage from the film Don’t Look Back, so you will probably know it. Donovan sings ‘Catch the Wind’ then Dylan sings ‘Baby Blue.’ He has a triumphant grin on his face as he delivers the song. He is revelling in his genius. He knows perfectly well that he is knocking their socks off. ‘Catch the Wind’ is a pretty song, but has none of the bite of ‘Baby Blue.’ Some think he’s putting Donovan down. I don’t think so. He’s just so much better. ‘Look out! the saints are coming through.’

1965 – House party with Donovan   (Dylan starts at 2’50”)

The shift in tone from 1965 to 1966 is subtle yet profound. The tempo’s the same, the chords are the same, the words are the same, even some of the intonations are the same, but the tone is darker. It’s still a challenge laid down to a former love, but it’s more introspective, less steady on its feet (a touch of syncopation), and more final. Dylan’s voice is softer, silkier, more insinuating than confrontational.

For performances, I don’t think we can go beyond the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, May 17^th performance captured in The Bootleg Series Vol 4. The near miraculous harmonica solo alone puts this as one of Dylan’s finest-ever performances (I can’t seem to quit this ‘best ever’ hunt that dogged me while writing the NET series). I think, brilliant as some coming performances are, we have to wait until 1995 until we get such a blistering emotional statement and soaring harp.

And how the two harmonica solos toy with our feelings, raising us up to the sharpest highs and swooping us down into the anguished, bluesy lows. That harp pulls on us and buries us.

1966 : Manchester

We could leave it there, but I’m drawn to the Sydney performance (April). These Australian concerts are particularly bleak and unadorned. We don’t find the perfection of the Manchester performance of the following month, but for raw feeling this one is unmatched.

1966, Sydney

I should leave 1966 right there, and quit while I’m still ahead, but I can’t resist Dylan’s zonked-out intro to the Paris performance. One of the comments says, ‘You don’t have to smoke the whole bag, Bob.’ I dunno. Sure goes down well with a bottle of wine. A birthday performance.  The song starts at 1’25”

1966 Paris

Now we face the big jump from 1966 to 1974 when Dylan did no touring. But he sure came back with a roar, with the Band and a new, mature voice to go with the old songs. A vibrant, quivering voice as Dylan discovers vibrato.

‘Baby Blue’ was only performed half a dozen times in 1974. He speeds up the song, knocking a whole minute off its performance time. Does he race through it too fast? You can decide. I find it a bit disconcerting, but on the other hand he’s in such good voice! Somehow it doesn’t feel too rushed. (Inglewood, February 14th,)

1974

Good as that is, it’s not to conclude that Dylan was starting to lose contact with the song. In 1975, the first year of the Rolling Thunder Tour, he would perform the song only twice. It had to make way for new material from Blood on the Tracks and Desire.

It’s to 1975 we will return in the next article in the series on Untold Dylan. I’ve some great sounds lined up for that one.

In the meantime

Kia Ora

Tambourine Man

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

Gates of Eden

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

It’s alright ma

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

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 6

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         Those old Baptist hymns

I been into the baggage room where the engineer's been tossed
I stomped on a 100 compasses, God knows what they cost
I wanna be your lover, baby, I don't wanna be your boss.
I sure can't help it if this train gets lost.

The last verse of “Phantom Engineer” opens with the psychedelic lines with which Dylan remains satisfied for quite some time. They are more or less maintained on that first day of recording, 15 June, and on the second and final day of recording six weeks later they also still appear to be to the master’s liking. It is only after the lunch break, in the very last takes, when the tempo is also halved to the dreamy, slightly muggy version that will elevate the final version to the stratosphere, that Dylan suddenly says a radical goodbye to the engineer, the baggage room and the stomping on the compasses.

The Cutting Edge gives us five recordings in which we hear that alienating mise-en-scene. The only thing that changes in them, between the first take on 15 June and Take 3 of 29 July, is the number of compasses. From 100 to 40 – hundred compasses we only hear in the first take, then Dylan throws away sixty compasses and the first-person has to satisfy his destructiveness on the remaining forty compasses. Not too drastic or remarkable really – except that it has a funny correlation with an intervention in a song Dylan is recording these same days: “Highway 61 Revisited” (2 August). In that song’s first takes we still hear “I got a thousand red white blue shoestrings”, which has been changed in the final version to I got forty red white and blue shoestrings.

Phantom Engineer (Live at Newport – July 1965):

A similar operation, then, to change a numerical code for “very many” to “forty”. Prompted, presumably, by the euphony of the word forty. At least, it is a number we encounter so often in songs that it eludes probability and chance, and becomes statistically relevant. Not least with Dylan himself, by the way. “Miles”, for instance, in Dylan’s discography are sometimes many, sometimes two hundred, in two songs ten thousand, three times a million and four times thousand, all of which, of course, are not so much exact distance terms, but simply synonyms for “many”… and then three times forty (in “Long and Wasted Years”, “Things Have Changed” and “Lonesome Day Blues”). Which, among all those bulk numbers, suddenly seems oddly specific.

Then again, the Christian Dylan exegetes may want to argue that 40 is a “Biblical number”, as they are prone to do with every seven and every three and every twelve, but here with even less relevance. Sixty years after “It Takes A Lot”, we may have well reached the point to conclude that Dylan is not a Thirteenth Apostle, and apart from that, we cannot, with the best will in the world, see an edifying, evangelising symbolic quality in smashing 40 compasses (rather the opposite).

No, euphony is most likely the decisive trigger. Which seems pretty universal; “forty” is equally loved by poets, songwriters and literati. Through all the centuries: in the oldest variants of “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” (Dylan’s template for “Seven Curses”), the maid does not have to be ransomed by gold or silver, but by “forty saddled horses, forty oxen with their yokes and forty geese with their goslings”; “Sir Patrick Spens” drowns forty miles off Aberdeen and the pirate “Charles Gibbs” robb’d full forty gallant vessels – to name just three examples of many from the Child Ballads. Kerouac (On The Road) is remarkably often “forty miles” from his next location, Burroughs, in Junky, more often than not holds back coincidentally forty pounds of weed or has forty dollars in his pocket. Dylan in his Tarantula calls a poem “Forty Links of Chain”, and a conversation with one Abner just so happens to last exactly forty minutes…. we need not, in short, ascribe mysterious symbolic qualities to Dylan’s choice of forty compasses.

More charge suggest the remaining words of these first, later rejected, lines. The engineer thrown into the baggage room seems to echo the fate of Casey Jones. Reports of his fatal accident always mention the fact that the baggage car was located behind the loco and tender – whether his body was actually tossed there the historiography does not mention, but the word baggage jumps out, in any case.

With the compasses, Dylan seems just as satisfied – at least they are maintained for just as long as the tragic engineer. Understandable, as it is a strong visual image with attractive, ambiguous connotations and, moreover, not yet milked – all too common is “compass” as a metaphor not in songwriting. Fitting also in the mercurial oeuvre of these years, among images such as the broken doorknob (“Desolation Row”), the crumbling statues made of matchsticks (“Love Minus Zero”), the empty-handed painter (“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”) and telephones that don’t ring (“Highway 61 Revisited”), among those dozens of images that insinuate failing communication or emotional emptiness. Besides, destruction of directional saviours, of compasses, has the same liberating power as “don’t follow leaders” (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) or “You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)” – a wonderful, very Dylanesque image, all in all, which like, say, “watch the parking meters” after “don’t follow leaders” gets an again very Dylanesque banalising, ironic addition with God knows what they cost.

Therefore, the deletion of these lines that at least survived the six weeks from 15 June to 29 July does not seem motivated by dissatisfaction with the words or the images themselves. In the previous stanza, we saw that Dylan made a structural change to achieve compositional consistency, to mirror the triplet Robert Johnson – erotic ambiguity – train from the first stanza. And to exactly the same end he now seems to decide in this last stanza. Less thought-out apparently, but still: in the lunch break on that session day 29 July, Dylan not only comes up with the brilliant inspiration to cut the song’s tempo in half and thus quicksilvering it, but – kill your darlings – also to scrap the engineer, the baggage room and the forty compasses. In favour of the missing Robert Johnson reference:

Babe, it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors
Wintertime's comin', it's gon' be slow
You can't make the winter, babe, that's dry, long, so
You better come on in my kitchen, 'cause it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

… “Wintertime’s comin’” from the last verse of Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen”, one of his plaintive blues songs, according to biographer Elijah Wald “his first unquestionable masterpiece”, the song in which sister Annye Anderson hears echoes of “those old Baptist hymns” (in Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, 2020), the song also from which some joker got lucky seems to echo a year later in the last verse of “Pledging My Time”, in somebody got lucky.

Robert Johnson – Come on in my Kitchen:

Today, 29 July 1965, the sought-after compositional consistency then delivers the desired Robert Johnson reverence to “It Takes A Lot”, retaining the original rhyme (been tossed/they cost being changed to with frost/across):

Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across

And it’s not even a crazy thought that Johnson’s song also provides the inspiration for the slowdown; at the same time as the lyric intervention, Dylan brings the tempo down to 92 beats per minute… remarkably close to the 82 bpm of “Come On In My Kitchen”. And alright, with that I could not get across, the poet still maintains a small, shaky bridge to those smashed and then discarded compasses, to “being lost”. A bit regrettable it still remains though.

———

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 7: It Hurts Me Too

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

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

By Tony Attwood

(Preliminary note: I do know that I included this street performance of Hattie Carroll in an article under a week ago.   But I include it again because it is one of the most extraordinary cover versions of a Dylan song I have ever heard.  I’ll try and restrain myself better in future).

This article continues from If only there had been a Nobel Prize for music, part 1

In various earlier articles, I have tried to trace what Bob has done as he has moved away from the love and lost love lyrical themes that have dominated pop and popular music since the development of the phonograph, into songs in which the music and the lyrics are of equal significance.  And Bob has done this by varying a whole range of factors, including

The length of the song.  Gone are the days of two and a half minutes (a concept created by the technology of the 78rpm record).

The length of the verse.  With Dylan we found we could have verses that can have different numbers of lines as the song progresses – something virtually unknown in popular music or folk music before Bob came along.

The changing rhyme scheme.   Previously the rhyme scheme within each song was more or less fixed, and might be written as A A B B or A B C B with each letter representing a rhyme.   But this notion of there being only a handful of acceptable rhyming schemes restricts what the music can do.  Thus as Bob has varied rhyme schemes or even abandoned them part way through a song, he has evolved ways of changing the feel of the song without in any way losing the concept that we are in the same song.

Of course, it can be argued that the rhyme scheme is part of the lyrics, a notion that would in some degree exclude it from my approach that says that Bob should be seen as a musician as well as a poet, but the rhyme of a song really does affect the way the music runs, as much as the sound of the lyric at the end of the line.  The rhyme scheme plays a part in determining how we “feel” the music.   Non-rhyming lines (including lines with the same word at the end of each line) in which the music is the same, keep us on edge, in the way that rhyming lines don’t.

Just consider the impact of this in the song we were looking at in the last article

Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen
She was 51 years old and gave birth to 10 children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger

Those end-of-line words give an edge of desperation to the music so that we hear the ceaselessly repeated line of music as painful.   If the music had been jolly the immediate complaints of many would be “But it doesn’t rhyme”.  In this case, however, no one makes that complaint.

Changing the structure of the song.   With Bob we can often find that we are no longer working to the A A B A format, (or verse, verse, middle 8, verse as I have been describing it) but instead, as also I have been trying to show in recent articles, we can come across the variant verse (known as the middle 8) not where it normally appears (between the second and third verse, and then subsequently alternating with the verses through the rest of the song).   For now, it can turn up between the third verse and before the fourth, and then no more as we just get verse, verse, verse etc.

This movement away from the accepted structure of pop and rock again puts us on edge, because we don’t know where the song is going, except we feel that things are not going to end well  – which is exactly the point of “Hattie Carrol”

Adding to the importance of the last line of music by repeating it.   This is not a major change, and it is taken from earlier folk music, but it has an impact and has not been that much used in popular music.   Thus the last line of each verse of “Times they are a changing” is always the same.   It seems obvious when it is done, but it was not that often done before Bob came along.

Massively increasing the number of words in the song    As we noted there are just 52 words in “White Christmas” which means there is precious little chance of changing the music as we go through the song.   But massively increasing the number of words gives many more opportunities for the music to change within the song.   Bob explored increasing the number of words and out of this idea he found that he could amend the music as he went as well..

Varying the message, including a message that everything in the world is going wrong, rather than an insistence that everything is fine because “I love you” was an incredibly powerful step.  Of course there had been sad songs before, songs of lost love and death, but few if any which explored all the tangled emotions that we can experience as people, when the world seems to be transformed, or indeed no longer makes any sense.

When one stats investgiating an idea like this we soon find that the music has to be transformed to meet this added dimension.  “Visions of Johanna” is almost ten times as long as White Christmas, because it expresses a world of contradiction and incompleteness as in…

We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it

Of course Bob didn’t adopt all these new approaches to lyrics and thus to the music he created immediately, for he started out writing what we might call “straight songs”, even when taking on board lyrical subjects that were certainly not commonplace in popular or folk music before he came along…. Gypsy Lou is a song about art and protesting for example.   Two lines of music, a chorus, and a harmonica break is basically all there is.   And yes I know there’s a mistake in the performance, but I do love the way Bob approaches the song in this version.

Indeed if we were just to listen some of Bob’s early recordings we might think he would never get away from the verse / chorus / verse approach, complete with repeated lines within the chorus.

Troubled and I Don’t Know Why 

When the ship comes in however does seek to take us in a new direction by having the repeated title line halfway through each verse, rather than at the end of each verse as had always been traditionally the case.

But now here is the point: as I noted in earlier articles, “When the ship comes in” was only performed three times in public despite being very unusual in the context of folk songs, having a great buoyant melody, and an intriguing message of hope.

But could it be that, fun though the music is, Bob really was at this moment looking for songs that did something else musically, as well as in terms of the message it portrayed.  Or maybe at the time, it felt a little bit too religious.  But maybe also Bob realised that he could go a lot, lot further still, in terms of where he took the music.

The series continues.

Details of previous articles on this theme of Dylan the musician, and how he worked to change some of the very fundamentals of folk music that existed when he strarted writing are given at the end of this article.

By Tony Attwood

In a recent piece I continued my argument that in his early days Bob Dylan avoided the obvious and took us into worlds unknown not just through the topics he covered in his lyrics, but also in the way that he wrote the music for those lyrics.

And yet, perhaps because writers on the subject of Dylan don’t always know too much about the structure of music, or maybe because they do but rather pompously believe that their readers can’t understand musical form and variation, (or maybe even because they think their readers don’t want to read about the way music is constructed), almost all the emphasis in most articles about Dylan has been on Bob Dylan’s lyrics, with Bob Dylan’s lifestyle coming second (thanks to Heylin), followed in third place with details of what Bob played on stage and the structure of Bob’s music (when discussed at all) coming a very, very poor fourth.  In fact sometimes I think there is more written about the weather at the gigs than the musical arrangement.

So given this site is “Untold Dylan” (rather than “What everyone else has said about Dylan but in a different way”), I’m writing at this moment primarily about Dylan’s music – and how he varied the standard approaches to music that he found dominating the world of folk,  pop and rock music as he began to compose.

But this approach brings a problem, for because I have not found many other writers considering the music of Dylan per se, I’ve been unsure how best to construct the argument that the dominant “let’s focus on the lyrics” approach does not give us a full understanding of Dylan’s work.

Of course, I am by no means the first to try to see Dylan’s work from a different point of view.  To give just one example, the in-depth analysis of Dylan’s individual songs contained within Jochen’s consideration of “It takes a lot to laugh,” really does get far beyond the lyrics as lyrics, and into the world of what lies beneath the song as performed and recorded.  Likewise, Mike’s “History in Performance” series gives us an exquisite vision of how Bob evolved his songs across time through the on-stage performances.  As indeed did Mike’s earlier series on the Never Ending Tour.  (Links to series are generally contained on the home page).

But what I am trying to find here is an even deeper understanding of the way the songs are constructed – which I hope might ultimately lead to a deeper understanding of the songs as music, in the way that Mike and Jochen have given us with their analyses of the lyrics – and which as Jürg Lehmann also explores through his earlier series on cover versions which took us to a whole different level.

Now these considerations are indeed important, because Dylan songs have been, and continue to be re-worked by Dylan himself and other artists.   It is as if Dylan provides us with a basic grid of a musical interpretation of the lyrics, ready for himself and others to then play with, seeking what comes out in the end.

And I know I have given my favourite example of this multiple times, so please do skip forward if you are now bored with it, but if you have not heard this before, or like me can never hear it enough, just consider this example below.  If you want the whole journey of this song’s mutation it is here.

And I keep quoting this just not because I love this arrangement, but because it seems to me to be one of the greatest journies of re-writing that I have come across with Bob.

Now of course, none of this is not to deny the importance of the lyrics of Dylan’s songs, nor indeed to suggest that he was not worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The lyrics are a central part of what Dylan has done, but if that is the heart and soul of the matter then surely he would have been a poet and nothing more.  But no, he is a songwriter – and most certainly the greatest songwriter of the modern age.  And also, for many years (at least until his voice inevitably started to go) the greatest interpreter of those works.

I say this not just because of the songs that Bob himself wrote, but the way in which he revealed to the world that the musical forms we know as pop, rock, modern folk and so on, could be taken in totally new directions both lyrically and musically.   But the problem we have had is that most writers on the topic of Dylan have focussed almost totally on the lyrics.

That this approach of not considering music and lyrics as a unified and unchangeable part of each song has not been adopted by many contemporary writers is perhaps because they have been influenced by the notion that the music (in the context of “popular music”) is simple and thus the lyrics are the only thing to be discussed.  Thus they have maintained the myth that Dylan’s work is of merit exclusively because of his words.  Indeed that ultimate accolade  – the Nobel Prize – was of course for literature, but this was entirely due to the fact that Nobel Prizes are only awarded for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economic Sciences.  They could have thought of giving Bob the Nobel Prize for Peace, and maybe they did think about that, but in the end, they opted for the only other possibility at their disposal: The Nobel Prize for Literature.

And so the prejudice of commentators on popular, rock and folk music – that really it’s all in the lyrics – was again maintained.  The music it seems is hardly to be considered.

But, I contest, that argument simply doesn’t stand up to interrogation.  For it seems to me that Bob from his earliest days, Bob has looked for ways to make changes to both of these all-pervading structures (lyrics and music), and he has done brilliantly, for it has been achieved without the music becoming incomprehensible to his audience.T

Thus to give one other example of what Bob can do, try this version of “Things have changed” – the quality of the recording is not so good at the start, but it does improve so it is worth listening to it all the way through.    And I hope you can hear like me that the meaning of the lyrics does indeed change through this change in the music.

If you have found this interesting you might also appreciate…

• How Bob Dylan turned the entire notion of how a song should be written, upside down.
• The songs got longer the form started to bend, we needed patience
• Dylan’s songwriting: does it matter who wrote the music (and were we missing a deeper meaning?)
• Bob Dylan, truth and fiction from 1963 to 1995. The Restless Farewell.
• Breaking down the rigidity of the popular song. Dylan in 1963
• How Bob Dylan has avoided the obvious and has taken us into worlds unknown

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 5

by Jochen Markhorst

V          He smelled like cigarettes and Dixie Peach

Don’t the brakeman look good, mama, 
Flagging down the “Double E”?

 Robert Johnson may be untouchable, but Howlin’ Wolf comes pretty close. In the 21st century, in Theme Time Radio Hour, DJ Dylan plays a Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett song six times, and doesn’t shy away from superlatives. “This next song is entirely without flaw and meets all the supreme standards of excellence,” for example (announcement of “My Friends” in Episode 17, Friends & Neighbours). And in the decades before and since, Dylan professes his admiration just as unreservedly, in both word and deed. In “Mississippi” (2001) he quotes You know another mule is kickin’ in your stall from “Evil (Is Going On)”, “Going Down Slow” gets a subtle name-check on 2020’s Rough And Rowdy Ways (twice, in fact, both in “Key West” and in “Murder Most Foul”), as in “Caribbean Wind” (1980) for that matter, and like these, we find more whole and half reverences in Dylan’s oeuvre.

In the summer of 1965, Howlin’ Wolf is whirling in the studio air as well. We hear Mike Bloomfield, a devout fan of his fellow Chicagoan anyway, playing the lick from “Smokestack Lightning” in Take 4 of “Tombstone Blues”, and we hear another echo of the same record to which the world owes “Smokestack Lightning”, of Wolf’s unforgettable 1959 debut record Moanin’ in the Moonlight. It is a record that has often been on Dylan’s turntable, by the sound of it. Apart from “Evil (Is Going On)”, it includes classics like “I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)” and “Forty-Four”, songs whose aftershocks we will continue to hear (in “Call Letter Blues”, for instance). And today we hear an echo of the closing track of Side A, from “All Night Boogie (All Night Long)”, from which Dylan copies the opening line Come here baby, sit down on daddy’s knee to the very first version of “Phantom Engineer”:

Don't the angel look good, babe,
Sittin' on his daddy's knee?

… the middle lines of the middle verse, the ones Dylan struggles with the most. Before we get to the final Lyrics version, he tries and rejects six variations:

June 15, 1965:

Don't the angel look good, babe,
Sittin' on his daddy's knee?

Don't the ghost look good, mama,
Sittin' on this madman’s knee?

Don't the angel look good, mama,
Sittin' on this madman’s knee?

Don’t the ghost look good, babe,
Sittin' on this madman's knee?

Don't the ghost child look good, mama,
Sittin' on this madman's knee?

July 29, 1965:

Don’t the brakeman look good,
Being where he wants to be?

Don’t the brakeman look good, 
Flagging down the “Double E?”

It gives a small but fascinating insight into the poetic puzzling of a creative genius at one of his mercurial high points. For this middle verse, he apparently insists on sticking to the rhythmic repetitio don’t the […] look good. The moon and the sun are fixed – although in the eight versions we know thanks to The Cutting Edge they keep swapping places. In the first version, the moon shines through the trees and the sun sets over the sea, in the next the sun shines and the moon sets, and they keep going back and forth after that (with the most awkward variation being takes 6 and 9 of 15 June: “don’t the sun look good, baby, coming down through the trees”). Anyway: the sun and moon are stayers, courtesy of Bob Wills and Leroy Carr.

But the filling in of the repetitions between the two celestials proves less steadfast. In the five variations of 15 June, when the song is still fresh and young and uptempo and booked as “Phantom Engineer Number Cloudy”, the ghost of Casey Jones still seems to be floundering around in Dylan’s stream of consciousness. “Angel”, “ghost”, and “ghost child”, featured on either the daddy’s knee borrowed from Howlin’ Wolf or the madman’s knee – these are images dripping with symbolism, evoking a machinist on his way to his death. The primal version, with the “angel” on “daddy’s knee” is then perhaps a bit too corny, a bit too cheap country sentimentality, the song poet feels. Flipping then to the other extreme: the angel is replaced by a “ghost”, daddy by a “madman”. Granted, all corniness has evaporated – but now things are getting a bit too hysterical again, the ad-libbing Dylan seems to think. And shoves the angel back onto the knees again, then again the ghost, and eventually even a “ghost child”… no, none of this works, he thinks.

He takes his time. The next take is 44 days later. And in those six weeks, Dylan seems to have made up his mind about this verse and made an academic decision: the lyrics shall be neatly balanced. In every verse a reverence to Robert Johnson, in every verse an erotic ambiguity, and what we were still missing in this verse is now also inserted: the train reference. What kind of train reference seems unimportant. Well, brakeman then. The brakeman floats on the surface of Dylan’s inner baggage anyway. He has already sung a few brakemen in recent years; in “Freight Train Blues” on his debut album, and in 1961 “Railroad Bill” is in his repertoire as well – two of many songs in which a brakeman comes along.

But given his outspoken respect and admiration for “The singing brakeman” Jimmie Rodgers, Dylan probably chooses “brakeman” rather instinctively when he wants to integrate a random train reference into a song lyric – while at the same time looking for words for “crossing the boundaries between country and blues music”. Moreover, like any folk artist, he can sing along with Rodgers’ evergreen “Waiting For A Train”, in which the brakeman is the antagonist of a hapless hobo (I walked up to a brakeman to give him a line of talk / He said if you’ve got money I’ll see that you don’t walk). Originally a B-side to 1929’s “Blue Yodel No. 4”, the B-side soon eclipsed the A-side and grew into one of the most popular country classics – the song is on a pedestal with and in the repertoire of premier league players like Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash (who opens his Jimmie Rodgers tribute show in 1962 with it), Boz Scaggs, George Harrison and Jerry Lee Lewis. And with the man who is alpha and omega of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”, although Dylan couldn’t have known that in 1965.

In 2020, when Robert Johnson’s stepsister Annye Anderson publishes her memoir Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, driven by the conviction that justice is not being done to the memory of her beloved older brother, critics agree: the book written by Mrs Anderson together with music historian Preston Lauterbach sheds an as-yet-unknown, enriching light on Johnson, his life and especially his musical influences. He played anything, says Anderson, anything people wanted to hear: “I remember him asking all the guests, and even the children, ‘What’s your pleasure?’” And then he would play a Fats Waller number, or “Pennies from Heaven”, Gene Autry or Count Basie or “Sugar Blues” or Louis Armstrong… Johnson was a walking jukebox. But his sister loved country, and especially Jimmie Rodgers:

“We had that record “Waiting For A Train.” I sang that with Brother Robert all the time. […] Nothing could take the place of the trainman, Jimmie Rodgers. I learned to sing along with those Jimmie Rodgers records. I couldn’t yodel, but I’d sort of hum it. Brother Robert could really yodel. He identified with Jimmie Rodgers through the “TB Blues”—we had two older half-siblings die of TB in Memphis around the time Jimmie Rodgers passed from it.”

The memoir concludes with a marathon interview conducted by the trio of music historians Peter Guralnick, Elijah Wald, and Preston Lauterbach with Mrs Annye C. Anderson, and in it Jimmie Rodgers and “Waiting For A Train” come up again:

“He was blues, he was folk, he was country. Jimmie Rodgers was his favourite, and he became my favourite. Brother Robert could yodel just like he did. We did “Waiting for a Train” together.”

“He was blues, he was folk, he was country”… unintentionally, Mrs Anderson articulates an unmistakable, artistic kinship with Dylan. With an extra colourful touch as she recalls her last memory of her brother:

“Walking with him to Third Street, Highway 61, where he’d hitch a ride across the Harahan Bridge, going over the Mississippi River. I still think of how it felt to hug him. He put his skinny arms around me. His clothes felt starched and pressed. His face felt smooth. He smelled like cigarettes and Dixie Peach.”

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 6: Those old Baptist hymns

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

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

The full recording of one of Bob’s current series of concerts is now available on the internet, so I thought I would add it here, as part of our series reviewing Bob’s concerts across the ages.  The full concert is at the end of this post.   Other articles in the concert series include

• April 2025, Iowa
• Earls Court 1978
•  Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• Dylan and Petty, Australia 1986
• Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961
• January 1976: the rehearsals
• Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime

First, for this recent concert, here is the song list.  Throughout Bob is playing piano.

• 1: I’ll be your baby tonight.
• 2.  It Ain’t me Babe
• 3: I contain multitudes
• 4: False Prophet
• 5.  When I paint my masterpiece
• 6.  Black Rider
• 7.  My own version of you
• 8.  To be alone with you
• 9. Crossing the Rubicon
• 10. Desolation row
• 11. Key West
• 12.  Watching the River Flow
• 13.  It’s all over now Baby Blue
• 14.  I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you
• 15.  Mother of Muses
• 16.  Goodbye Jimmy Reed
• 17. Every Grain of Sand.

Now I must admit I am not a fan of this show.  What puts me off this performance, and indeed where Bob is now, is that in order to accommodate his voice, Bob is slowing down many of the tracks, and removing much of the melody, replacing the singing with a “declaiming” style, which simply isn’t to my taste.

That of course is my problem, but here is the whole concert so you can judge, and enjoy.

And what I thought I would do here, to explain my own viewpoint (but not in any way to try and change your view) is compare that last song with this version of Every Grain of Sand, with that from 2007 which was highlighted in our Never Ending Tour series.

2007 Every grain

And perhaps as I don’t feel very positive about this performance I might re-introduce my own list of “absolute highlights” from the Never Ending Tour, not because I think that somehow my view is superior to anyone else’s but rather, in case there is any song in the list below which you would like to hear again and wonder which version I chose.  As you can see I got a bit carried away and did one song twice.

But might I also direct you to the History in Performance series which is currently covering Side B of “Bringing it all back home” in more depth and with more examples than I think has ever been done before (although of course I haven’t checked every nook and cranny of the internet).

The third part of  “It’s alright ma” has just been published here with a complete index to the previous articles (packed with recordings) on that song.   Gates of Eden is here.  And the final part of Tambourine Man is here, again with an index through the series.

The (very personal) Absolute Highlights series, taking from the Never Ending Tour

• • 1: John Brown 1987
  • 2: Desolation Row. 1990.
  • 3: She Belongs to Me
  • 4: Tangled up in Blue
  • 5: I and I – power without meaning
  • 6: It ain’t me babe – go lightly.
  • 7: Perfection in desolation – Gates of Eden
  • 8: Girl from the North Country.
  • 9: When He Returns
  • 10: It’s alright Ma
  • 11: Satisfied Mind
  • 12: Visions of Johanna
  • 13: Dark Eyes
  • 14: Man in the long black coat
  • 15:  Don’t think twice (2000)
  • 16: Silvio (1998)
  • 17: Gates of Eden (2000)
  • 18: One Too Many Mornings 2001.
  • 19: It’s all over now baby blue 1994
  • 20: The Wicked Messenger
  • 21: Positively 4th Street (1994)
  • 22: I and I
  • 23: Restless Farewell
  • 24: Botony Bay
  • 25: Blind Willie McTell
  • 26: Desolation Row
  • 27:  Love Minus Zero – 1992
  • 28: Spanish Boots in Prague
  • 29: The Levy’s Gonna Break
  • 30. Idiot Wind

By Tony Attwood

My recent articles (see a few links at the end of this piece) concerning Bob Dylan’s early years of songwriting in the 1950s and 1960s have been, by my own admission, a ramble, because for once on this site I have started out publishing a series without knowing where it is going or what it is trying to prove – beyond the fact that we ought (in my opinion) to be spending much more time thinking about Dylan’s music rather than just focussing eternally on his lyrics.

Part of my emerging argument can be seen (I think) in How Bob Dylan turned the entire notion of how a song should be written, upside down and other recent articles under my name.  And I recognise you may well have opted out of them given that Mike and Jochen have of late been offering much more considered and much more exciting pieces.

But my concern remains, and I want to try and summarise where I have got to thus far, because unformed and unresearched as it is, the concept still seems both very important and very under-researched.   It is this:

What was Bob Dylan's approach to music when he started writing songs 
in 1959/60, and how did this approach evolve in the early years of 
his writing?

And I do want to explore this, because so many thousands of books and millions of articles have been written about Bob’s lyrics, it seems to me odd, that there have been so few articles considering the musical side of his work at the same time.

In many of the articles that have been published, of course it is true that lyrical issues overflow into the musical issues, and writers have recognisedd this – but in my view we are swamped by analyses of the lyrics.   And important though they are, and as pleased as I have been to publish many such, they are only half the story.

So I am asking myself: what is it about the music of Dylan that is important?  Or put another way, why has he written songs, rather than just written poetry (which is how many of the commentators on Bob’s work, treat the lyrics – or so it seems to me).

And to get this subject going I want to begin with the rhyme scheme.  Everyone around in the 1950s for the launch of rock n roll, knew that there had to be rhymes, because songs always included rhymes, but they could be played with – a bit.   Take “Rock Around the Clock” for example.  Without thinking about it one might well be inclined to say that the rhyme was A A B B (hon, one; tonight, daylight) but in fact the consists of five lines when normally written out, although 12 bar blues structure makes this sound absolutely fine.

Put your glad rags on and join me, hon
We'll have some fun when the clock strikes one
We're going to rock around the clock tonight
We're going to rock, rock, rock, until broad daylight
We're going to rock, going to rock around the clock tonight

Some of course took this to be way too complicated for teenagers, and so simplified it even more until we got in subsequent songs things like…

You ain't nothing but a hound dog crying all the time
You ain't nothing but a hound dog crying all the time
You ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine.

And yes I do know that “time” and “mine” don’t actually rhyme, but for the purposes of rock n roll they did.

But what Bob did was to break away from simplistic rhymes, just as he did with the whole rhyme scheme, the length of verses, the rhythm.  “Masters of War” and “Times they are a-changing” for example are both in 12/8, which means the beat for “Come gather round people wherever you roam” is

3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3.

Masters of War plays with this “four groups of three” effect in a more pounding and forceful way

1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2     3  1   2   3  1 2 3 1 2 3 1 
              Come you masters of war
2     3    1    2   3   1
You that build the big guns

And so having changed the whole way the rhythm works, Bob could change the rhyme scheme too – for in the first verse there is no rhyming scheme.

That song eventually has a scheme in which line 2 rhymes with line 4, and line 6 rhymes with line 8 and this applies all the way through the remaining seven verses.  It is just verse one that is the odd one out.

These are changes from the norm that we don’t expect, for most of the popular music that had come before had been in straightforward four beats in a bar, with straightforward rhyme schemes which apply throughout.   But Dylan made these changes work in terms of music and made them sound natural.  Of course it is true that many others had used time signatures other than the straight four beats in a bar many times over, but four beats to a bar was by far the most common approach – but not that many songwriters had played with the rhyme scheme as Bob has done.

So my point is that although the prime focus has always been on Dylan’s lyrics, this has led, I think, to a view that the music is not particularly adventurous.   And yet if one looks back just to yesterday’s article concerning the way that “It’s alright ma” has evolved on stage, shows us that this is a complete misconception.

At the risk of overdoing the point let me remind you of one of the versions of “It’s alright ma” which we published yesterday, and if you have a moment, this time in listening, please focus not on Bob’s voice but the arrangement of the instruments.   Focus, if you will, on that descending instrumental line behind Bob’s verse.  I don’t think they get it completely coordinated at the start but by the second line it really is running perfectly.   What we have is a “melody” that is now little more than a declamation, but with all the musical interest now transferred to the accompaniment.   I am finding it hard to think of antecedents to this approach.

Now within this context, we have to remember that across the years there have been precious few commentaries that focus on Bob Dylan the music arranger – it is always Bob Dylan the songwriter.   But listening to that arrangement above (and of course it is just one of many) I feel yet again that we should indeed be thinking far more of Bob as a musical arranger just as much as anything else.

Which brings me back to the music within Bob’s songs.   In one way it is tempting to feel that Bob has not been a great innovative composer of music, but I think this is wrong.  When we start considering all the different aspects there are in songs, we can see that the singular focus on the lyrics, that many have contemplated, misses a major part of the work.

The variations in the rhyme schemes within a song, the changing length of the verses, the use of unusual rhythmic schemes, the rearrangement of the accompaniment, the occasional unusual chord sequences, all of these and more changes are within the music, but largely ignored because of the insistence of focussing on just the lyrics.

But to jump back, now consider this version of “Who Killed Davey Moore” – which has a musical approach quite different from the later released version.

And in fact I think that Dylan’s music does demand much deeper investigation.  Now I have tried to mention this on occasion on this site, and in this regard, I want to quote myself (generally the sign of a writer on the slippery slope, but I really can’t find a better way to say this than I did a few years back)….

As I went out one morning

“… it is indeed interesting that he wrote the music not in a normal major or minor key of the type that we hear in 99.99% of our music today, but in a mediaeval mode.  I think it is the phrygian mode – if you want to experiment sit at the piano and play the white notes only from E up to the next E.  That scale of eight notes doesn’t sound major or minor, but actually sounds rather old and mediaeval.   That is the phrygian mode – it was quite a thing in the 15th and 16th centuries…”

One of the benefits of Bob’s experimental approach to music, both in his original writing and then (perhaps more importantly) in the subsequent re-arrangements that he has developed is that it has shown many musicians the options that exist within Dylan’s music for the songs to be re-written.    Consider this extraordinarily atmospheric version of Bob’s “Seven Curses”

This is by Gavin Ghee and was recorded in June 2021.  It takes Seven Curses into a totally new world – and gives us a piece of music that I for one can play over and over again.  Indeed a song that I, in writing about Bob, had really set aside as an early composition (it was written in 1963), and which I suspect many fans had likewise thought of as ok, it is interesting, but not in the top rank.  Yet it turns out to be an utter masterpiece once it is re-arranged.

As far as I know, Bob didn’t contemplate the arrangement, but that’s not my point here.  My point is that Bob wrote a song that had the potential in it to be re-arranged, and as a musician myself I can tell you that very many songs do not have this potential within them.  Take them out of their original box, and they fall apart.

But as this arrangement shows, with this Dylan song (and there are many others) a re-arrangement can bring completely new life and meaning into a song.  Indeed if you have been kind enough to read my ramblings on the subject of re-arrangements you will know the excessive praise I have thrown at the re-arrangement of Tweedle Dum.

And my point remains – if we only consider Bob’s lyrics, or we only consider the songs as they occur in their original form, we are missing a fundamental issue in Bob’s work.   For I don’t think anyone else involved in popular music in any of its form, has engaged in this level of re-arrangement or multiple songs before, in this way.

So in considering Bob’s music, I think we should be considering not just the way he writes the original version, but also the fact that he somehow builds into many of his songs, ways in which they can be re-engineered – (if I can use that word about the creative musical process).

That this process has been ignored by so many writers, is because this is a process that focuses totally on the music – and for some reason most writers on Bob don’t like to write about his music.

But Bob has not been primarily a poet, nor even a poet who sets his poetry to music.  He has from the start been a songwriter, and in my view, we can understand him so much better if that is how we contemplate his work.

If you have found this interesting you might also appreciate…

• How Bob Dylan turned the entire notion of how a song should be written, upside down.
• The songs got longer the form started to bend, we needed patience
• Dylan’s songwriting: does it matter who wrote the music (and were we missing a deeper meaning?)
• Bob Dylan, truth and fiction from 1963 to 1995. The Restless Farewell.
• Breaking down the rigidity of the popular song. Dylan in 1963