A list of the songs in this concert, followed by a list of previous concert recordings selected for this series, can be found below.
Brighton is a popular seaside resort on the south coast of England, (famous for its stony – as opposed to sandy) beach and its two piers. It’s a location close to my heart as I studied there as a student for three years, many decades ago.
I’ve found two recordings of this concert on-line, so, knowing how on occasion recordings can become unavailable I’ve put both up. But as far as I know, they are identical.
The tour started on 11 March with three nights in Prague, and the 26 March gig was the first night of the tour in England.
There were 13 concerts in the UK with just three nights off in that sequence, until the final gig on 10 April. There was then one concert in Dublin, before the party flew back to the USA and a break for one month, before resuming the tour in San Diego. There was another break in August, and then the guys took it up once more in the United States, concluding for the year on 17 December in Philadelphia.
A list of the songs performed, and a list of all the 17 other concerts featured in this series so far (covering 1961 to 2025) are given below. I hope to continue the series in the coming weeks.
Details of the earlier articles in this series are given at the end.
By Tony Attwood
This series is about the music of Bob Dylan, (as opposed to the lyrics of Bob Dylan), and in the previous nine episodes we have travelled as far as “Ballad in Plain D”, in each case trying to see what innovations Dylan introduced in his music, as opposed to into his lyrics.
And already, one of the many things that comes from a consideration of Dylan’s music as opposed to his lyrics is just how varied Dylan’s approach is. Chord sequences are varied not only (obviously) between songs but also within songs, so are the number of lines in each verse. Plus there is the very unusual occasional introduction of a modulation… Thus it is clear that despite the lack of interest from many journalists Dylan, was indeed very keen from the off, in experimenting to see where he could take his music, as well as where he could take his lyrics.
Also by focussing on the music in the order in which the songs were written, we can see that there really are some huge musical leaps from one song to the next, and surely there cannot be a bigger change musically than happens between the composition of “Ballad in Plain D” which I focussed on in the last episode, and what came next: Black Crow Blues
There is a temptation of course to pass over this song given that it is a 12-bar blues, with a very rough and ready piano accompaniment. And an even greater temptation to do just that when we note that “Black Crow Blues” uses the same melody and virtually the same accompaniment, and indeed seemingly the same out-of-tune piano as “Denise Denise”.
Thus in songwriting terms, we have this sequence of songs which has a sudden crash in terms of both the emotional feel from one song to another. It is as if Bob is using the music to express an emotion and then move on.
Now what is for me, if no one else, so interesting here, is just how different the music is across these songs, and (one may suspect), just how much emotional energy and effort Bob put into each song. “Desnise” and “Black Crow”, really are knockabout songs which sound as if they were recorded in one take just to get the feeling out of Bob’s system. As such they are both musically and lyrically repetitious. For example with Black Crow we have…
Woke in the mornin', wanderin' Weary and worn out I woke in the mornin', wanderin' Weary and worn out Wishin' my long-lost lover Would walk to me, talk to me Tell me what it's all about
through to the final verse…
Black crows in the meadow Sleeping across a broad highway Black crows in the meadow Across a broad highway Though it's funny, honey I'm out of touch, don't feel much Like a Scarecrow today
Interestingly Bob used the same format (and seemingly the same out-of-tune piano) for Denise Denise
Despite being on the “Another Side” album, Bob did no more with this song than this rough and ready piano-bash (if I may be permitted to describe it that way). It very much does sound as if there were just the two takes and that was it – although as I have pointed out before, that doesn’t mean it is not possible to do anything with the song…
My guess is that it was Bob’s musical answer to his own previous composition (“Ballad in Plain D”) and was separated from that song on the original LP as far it could possibly be – Black Crow being the second song on side one, Plain D being the penultimate song on side two. Black Crow also stands out as the only piano-accompanied song on the album.
Next came “I shall be free number 10.”
The original “I shall be free” had appeared on Freewheelin…
I shall be free number 10 then turned up on Another side.
Neither song has ever been played by Bob in public.
The original talking blues seems to date back to at least 1926 if not earlier, and this is about the best recording there is of a very early version – perhaps it is the original talking blues (I’m not an expert on the form – and sorry about the quality – it’s the best I can find).
I suspect Bob became interested in the talking blues because of Woodie Gutherie’s interest in the genre (indeed it is quite possible that this is definitively stated somewhere, only I can’t find it) and I am sure Bob must have known this one…
But the point is that the talking blues basically gets rid of the melody and focuses entirely on the lyrics above a well-established chord sequence and simple rhythm. And given the trauma expressed in “Ballad in Plain D” we can perhaps understand why the next two Dylan compositions Black Crow Blues and I shall be free number 10 abandoned attempts at originality in terms of the music. Coming up with original melodies and accompaniments is a demanding mental process, and unless one is going to write a blues in the Robert Johnson style of everything being hopeless, it is not easy to do without taking an existing form and using it again.
But eventually Bob did get there for he then wrote “To Ramona” and “All I really want to do,” and with “To Ramona” we are at last back to a song which Dylan was willing to perform on stage. In fact he performed in 381 times between July 1964 and June 2017.
However this is not a totally original composition, for the melody and chord sequence is very closely related to the Rex Griffin 1937 song “The Last Letter,”
Obvioulsy, this doesn’t mean that Bob deliberately took that song and rewrote it, for it is certainly possible for a song composer to use the essence of a song he/she has heard in creating a new composition, without realising this is happening. Thus it is possible that Bob “borrowed” from this original, for we know that Bob’s memory for music is utterly prodigious as can be seen in his live performances, and his interest in the popular musical forms of the past (and not just the blues) is well attested. So he might have borrowed the basics of this song deliberately, or by accident. We can’t tell.
There are also articles around that suggest that the song is based on a traditional piece of Mexican folk music. I can’t comment on that but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that “The Last Letter” itself borrows from a traditional Mexican piece in the first place.
As I noted when I first wrote on this topic, both songs are in the 3/4 time signature of a waltz, which is something Bob vary rarely does (“Sara” is the most obvious other example). Dylan does vary both the melody and the chord sequence somewhat from the original, but not much; what we are getting is G, G6, G7, G, G6, G7, D…
Subsequently, the notion arose that the song was sung for Joan Baez, or maybe for Nico (it depends which book on Dylan you read), arises, and this is possible if one just focuses on the music, but it is an idea that breaks down if one starts to translate the original Spanish lyrics into English. My view is that if Dylan borrowed anything, it was the music only.
After “To Ramona”, Dylan wrote All I really want to do And I love the recording below because it seems to signify that all the issues we have been looking at in the last couple of articles, are now over and gone, and that both in his life and in his music Bob really is now moving on…
And this is the point I am trying to make in this series which tries to focus on Bob’s music more than his lyrics. The music of Bob does indeed reflect his personal life. He’s had a terrible time with the failure of a relationship, and that is reflected not just in the lyrics of the songs, but also in the music – as revealed here. No wonder that version got so much applause – exactly as it deserved. Bob played it over 100 times in concert finally letting the song go in 1978. It had done its job.
Thus we can hear Bob’s emotional state in his music, and I think that makes the music doubly worth considering if we really do want to understand how Bob’s creativity has evolved through the years. His songs may or may not at times be autobiographical, but he cannot help but express his emotions of the time in the music he creates. There is hardly anyone, no matter how great a genius, who can write a happy song, when feeling desperately sad. Nor vice versa.
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 13
by Jochen Markhorst
XIII Just a basic whack thud
Chris Smither has many qualities for which we admire him, and one of those many qualities is: his footwork. There are few artists who so hypnotically and purposefully use both feet as a percussive metronome. J.J. Cale comes to mind – though he only used one foot. The Americana-UK interviewer asks about it at the end of an on-point and enjoyable interview for the October 2010 issue. Is it just a random wooden board under your feet or do you bring it specially yourself? Does it have to be a certain size, does it have to be a certain type of wood?
“Interestingly enough, what you really want, or what I want, is a lack of tonality. That’s why I don’t use actual wood. I use particleboard, which is non-resonant, has a very dull uniform sound. Use a nice piece of oak, or maple, it has an inherent tone itself and it will often conflict with the key that you’re playing in. So what I’m really looking for is something which is just a basic whack thud which won’t interfere.”
It’s a Smither signature thing, and happens to fall very well with one of the very best “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” covers at all, Smithers’ 2009 studio recording of the song for one of his very best LPs, Time Stands Still. Chris tilts the song from melancholy to sadness and actually slows the tempo down too far – the shuffle dictating the mood in the original and in almost every cover is gone. But then there is that footwork: the continuous cadence of the wagon over the rails, unobtrusive but unrelenting. The academic dogmatiser might argue that it is more of an adaptation than a cover, and Chris does recognise that:
“The Dylan song has been with me forever. I did play it in public once at a Dylan workshop, but it’s just one that stuck with me from the early days. It just seemed right, you know. And a lot of people are surprised by it and say that’s a different take on it. I didn’t go back to the original; I just did it the way I remembered it, and of course it is different! I didn’t realize how much it had shifted in my mind. It’s kind of sadder the way I do it, but it’s just a testimony to how strong his songs are that you can change ’em that much. And they still hold together. Of course he does that all the time — changes them.”
(interview with Martin Bandyke for Ann Arbor News, 25 October 2009)
But despite the “changes” and the “shift” surely one of the most beautiful covers of the song. Or more likely: thanks to it. With which Chris Smither completes a trilogy, by the way. His “Visions Of Johanna” (Leave the Light On, 2006) and his “Desolation Row” (Train Home, 2003, featuring Bonnie Raitt) are also already in the respective Top 5 of Most Beautiful Covers Ever. You can’t ignore Dylan, Smither explains, although Blonde On Blonde did manage to make him a little unhappy at the time;
“I got to New York the same week that Blonde On Blonde came out and I was meeting all these people and we used to listen to that record, we’d listen to “Visions Of Johanna” and I just… it was depressing. Because you kept thinking to yourself: how am I ever going to do something that approaches that.”
. (interview with Otis Gibbs for Otis’ YouTube channel, 2024)
Forty years later, he has then developed enough courage and self-confidence to attack even the “unapproachable” “Visions Of Johanna”, and has also found the “how to do”. To producer David “Goody” Goodrich and his powers of persuasion (Smither: “He knows how to manipulate me”) we owe the brilliant finds in terms of instrumentation. Smither himself is more of a man of more-is-less, but Goodrich has mastered the paradoxical art of trickling in more instruments verse after verse – mandolin, accordion, bass, mandocello, second voice, karimba – but nonetheless retaining its heartfelt, minimalist charm. Into the stratosphere his cover then comes thanks to a find Smithers attributes to friend and colleague Steve Tilston:
“I sort of shifted the signature on it. I do it in 6/4, you know, that has a sort of a three-feel to it instead of the 4/4 that Dylan’s in. I still like to play that song. I play it fairly often.”
… an subdued waltz rhythm, in other words. To a significant extent responsible for the irresistible melancholy dripping out of the loudspeaker boxes.
As an aside, it is the only Dylan cover where Smither sticks neatly to the lyrics. Well apart then from a few insignificant shortcuts to stay in the metre. On “It Takes A Lot”, he swaps verses and affords minor variations (“Don’t the brakeman look fine” instead of good, for instance), and on “Desolation Row” he goes completely his own way and shuffles words, word combinations and complete sentences to his heart’s content. Interviewer Otis Gibbs tries to compliment him. How do you remember all those lyrics, he asks;
“I cheat. I don’t do them all actually – I compressed it. You know, I combined some verses and rewrote it. I thought rather cleverly. But the funny thing is that there’s so many words to that song that hardly anybody notices that I was messing around with them.”
Which is true. The mesmerising guitar playing, the hypnotic foot tapping, Bonnie Raitt’s misty second voice and über-sad slide guitar, the unearthly horns, the haunting organ and Smither’s vocals suggesting even more convincingly than Dylan’s that he, in fact, is really on Desolation Row… Smither does weave a dream in which you lose sense of reality. And then indeed you no longer notice that to Cinderella “death is quite romantic”, rather than to Ophelia, who takes Romeo away from her as well, and moreover now gets to play the pennywhistles of Dr Filth and the nurse with him; that Einstein makes his appearance already in the second verse (and not until the fifth); that in the last verse he sighs Right now I don’t feel too good instead of Right now I can’t read too good – just to name a few examples of Smither’s carefree “messing around”.
With Smither’s own songs, as we know, things also worked out well. The least we can say of Smither is that he approaches Dylan’s oeuvre and status. Premier League names like Emmylou Harris, Dr John, Bonnie Raitt and Diana Krall cover his songs on their albums, recognition is worldwide and in 2014, record label Signature Sounds even released an all-star tribute album with contributions from illustrious names like Tim O’Brien, Loudon Wainwright and Josh Ritter: Link of Chain: A Songwriters’ Tribute to Chris Smither.
Very nice, but even nicer would be a Dylan tribute album by Smither, and then please produced by David “Goody” Goodrich. Four songs we already have. Apart from the ones mentioned above, a wonderful, Little Feat-like “Down In The Flood” from 1972 – with input from Bonnie Raitt as well as assistance from Dylan veterans Ben Keith, Maria Muldaur and Happy Traum.
Smither’s only Dylan cover without foot tapping, though.
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:
The Concert Series Episode 17. Commentary by Tony Attwood.
The Isle of Wight 1969
A list of the concert videos included in this series is given below, and I am now at the stage of trying to fill in the gaps, and there is no bigger gap than not having a video of the Isle of Wight gig, not least because I was there. But of course, the further back we go the harder it is to find any recording – although for this gig we do have a video of four songs from the event.
So from what I remember the event ran over two (or maybe it was three) days. For people in England the Isle of Wight is a well-known place – an island with a population of around 140,000 off the south coast of England (and thus with a decent climate) with regular ferries from Southampton, Lymington and Portsmouth. It is a county in its own right.
This is episode 17 of the series of videos and recordings of Dylan concerts (and one rehearsal) between 1961 and 2025. A list of the previous articles, each of which focuses on one concert (except the one featuring the rehearsals) is given below.
So the point is that these recordings for “The Concert Series” are collected from the internet and put into chronological order below to help anyone (including me!) to hear what happened to Bob’s concerts (as opposed to individual songs) across time.
Meanwhile, if you feel you have something to say about Bob and his music, and would like to write for Untold Dylan, please do get in touch. Email me at Tony@schools.co.uk Also all articles on this site are open for comments, as long as the comments are about the article.
Tony Attwood
Isle of Wight 1969
The festival was held in August 1969 at Wootton Creek, and reports suggest maybe 150,000 people attended to hear Bob Dylan, The Who, Free, Joe Cocker, the Moody Blues and other bands of the day. It marked Bob’s full return from retirement.
As I recall from this long ago there was a real spirit of the fact that we were the peaceful people who could attend these events, have fun, relax and even tidy up afterwards. I can’t recall the name of the lady I went with, but I wish I could.
I’ve put up two videos from the gig and a second short video as well just in case any of these vanish from the public domain at any time. For one thing I think the gig was important in terms of getting Bob back on stage, and the because I particularly like to record this memory from my youth within the series. I like the fact that as a student I was out, exploring and taking in the major events of the day. I don’t have any memorabilia from these events, so this film is rather nice for me. Holding on to bits of the past seems increasingly important as the years go by.
There are only four songs on the video – and of course if you know of any other openly available videos of this event please do forward them or let me know where they are available. The songs are….
I threw it all away
Highway 61 Revisited
One too many mornings
I Pity the poor immigrant
And just in case the video above vanishes here is a copy of Highway 61 on its own.
This series was completely different from and separate from the current concert series, but if you are interested in hearing very specific songs from the past, it might be of interest.
Details of the previous eight episodes of this series are given at the end.
Now to begin with, you might perhaps be bemused. This is a series about music, and Bob Dylan’s musical achievement. And yet here I am taking up a whole article on a song containing 13 by and large unchanging verses as the singer expresses his deep sadness about not being able to hold a relationship together. It is dead simple, and any half- competent folk singer could bore an audience stupid by the end of verse two – or three at the latest. If there is something to be found here, surely it is in the lyrics, not the simple melody repeated 13 times.
And yet, and yet…
To start with the lyrics, since they dominate most people’s consciousness of the song, if we look at Dylan’s compositions of 1964 purely from the point of view of the lyrics we might conclude that part way through that year he was obsessed by relationships. We have It ain’t me babe (a song of farewell performed 1120 times on stage), Denise Denise (a song about a lady, never performed by Dylan) Mama you’ve been on my mind (another lost love song, performed 201 times on stage) and then this monumental Ballad in Plain D (never performed even once on stage).
“It ain’t me babe” and “Plain D” both made it onto the “Another Side” album, the others didn’t. “Plain D” runs to 438 words, lasts eight minutes 18 seconds. There was a second Dylan version it seems, but the recording online only gets as far as the sister, and then is faded out, and doesn’t seem to add anything notable to our understanding of the song (at least in my opinion). So I am bypassing that.
But what is interesting about the song musically is that it modulates. The piece does start and end sounding as if it is in D, (although to achieve the effects Bob has, it is actually played in C with a capo on the second fret – thank you to the inestimable Dylan chords for that awareness). But maybe Bob’s guitar playing is perhaps a technicality when compared with the main difference between this song and most folk or pop or indeed rock songs – for it modulates. Which means it changes key.
And before I go on I’d like to try and emphasise these points. It’s not in Plain D in that it is actually played in C (thank you again as ever to Dylan Chords for making that very plain). But to make my own point, “modulation”( which is common in much western music), is very rare in folk and most pop music.
Without going into the nuances of Bob’s performance the chords are
A D Bm D
I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze
Bm C G
With the innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn
D Bm D
I courted her proudly, but now she is gone
A7 D
Gone as the season she's taken.
The modulation (that is the change of key) comes in the second line and is effected by using the chord of B minor (Bm) which is a chord that is found both in songs in the key of D major and songs in G major. So when we have “lamb” sung against the chord of B minor, that doesn’t feel or sound strange. But that movement to C major at “gentle” tells us that we have indeed changed keys – since the chord of C major doesn’t naturally occur in the key of D, and thus musicians feel the modulation. Non-musicians more likely feel that the music at this point is “a bit odd” (as one friend put it to me).
But the oddness doesn’t linger for then we are straight back to D – the key we started in and the verse ends on D, just to emphasise that this is exactly where we are.
Musically the modulation and the return to the tonic at the end help the listener stay focussed – although whether focussed enough to want to play this long recording regularly I don’t know. I bought the album when it came out, but mostly avoided playing this track.
But I think Dylan was conscious of the issue he had created with such a long track consisting of 13 vocal verses and one instrumental verse (played by the harmonica) – which is one reason for introducing the modulation. For that key change takes us a little by surprise, and helps us work through and keep focussed on what might otherwise be 13 identical verses.
The melody and approach of the song has been traced back by many writers to the traditional English songs, “The False Bride” and “Once I had a sweetheart” and these of course exist in many forms, depending on which part of England they were originally noted in by those who dedicated their lives to finding and notating the traditional songs of England. And since then it has been recorded in its original form…
But to return to Dylan, what else has he done musically which is so unusual? First, he’s run 13 verses in the same basic form. That really takes us back to the days of 15th Century English folk music. Second, he changes the chord sequence slightly as he goes, maybe just to keep our interest, maybe to keep up his interest, maybe because he really feels each change does indeed reflect the changing lyrics
Bob has also added an instrumental verse with a very plaintive harmonica and a conclusion, which is very much in the folk tradition, but far less common in contemporary music.
Furthermore, throughout the song the chordal accompaniment changes often moving away from the modulating second line of C, Am, Bb, F, to the chord sequence which drops the Bb. This happens regularly and so by verse 13 we are half-expecting (even if it is only subconsciously) a variation and we do get it with the complete omission of the Bb chord which has made such an impact on the music in the earlier verses.
This comes as Bob is singing ‘Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me, “How good, how good does it feel to be free”? And I answer them most mysteriously ‘Are birds free from the chains of the skyway”?’
This really is a very extraordinary work. Highly repetitive, much longer than other songs on the album, having variation but often in quite a subtle way, modulating in most verses, and never performed live, even in a shortened version.
And it leaves us with a question, does it have to be that long? True, it is not an absolutely strophic piece since the chordal accompaniment does change regularly, if subtly. And the lyrics do take us to some strange metaphors – at least I think this is a metaphor….
With unseen consciousness, I possessed in my grip
A magnificent mantelpiece, though its heart being chipped
Noticing not that I'd already slipped
To the sin of love's false security
Perhaps above all I am left with is the thought that there is a magnificent piece of songwriting here, and if it had been a much shorter piece it might have been performed by Bob. Likewise, if it had been a piece that could be performed with an ensemble, then in its existing length it might have become a concert piece. Or if the verses had been eight lines with varied chordal accompaniment and melodic variation, again it could have been a welcomed concert piece.
But of course, the point is that the singer is lost and morose, knowing what he has thrown away, and how much of it was his fault. And I am left with the thought that if only that had been written after Tambourine Man Bob might well have attempted to play it with the band, and with all the musical variations that would have made it a piece that would have gripped audiences the world over.
Sadly, if that is the case, it came too soon, and I suspect many a Dylan fan has played the one recording of the song rarely over the years. But if you are still here, maybe you could try this….
[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 third article on the fourth and final track, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series here: ]
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The ability to switch from one language register, or modality, to another is a feature of Dylan’s song writing. From one line to the next he can switch from intensely lyrical language to common sayings, idioms and cliches. In the third verse of ‘Baby Blue’ he delivers this astonishing line, ‘all your reindeer armies are all going home,’ to be followed, a couple of lines later, with, ‘the carpet too is moving under you,’ an image derived from the common saying ‘to pull the rug or carpet out from under someone’s feet.’ The Cambridge Dictionary defines that as ‘to suddenly take away help or support from someone, or to suddenly do something that causes many problems for them.’ It is an action that destabilises a person.
(Note: my proofreader, Janscie Sharplin sent me this comment ‘Iinterestingly, when I checked the repeated ‘all’ in the reindeer armies line, almost all the lyric sites had ‘ your empty handed armies’ instead, which wasn’t nearly as good cos it repeated the previous verse. But the ‘official’ Dylan site had the reindeer. Wonder what happened there, a mistake in some performances?)
I can’t help thinking that it is the song itself that is pulling the rug out from under a certain someone’s feet, even that line itself. In other words, the song is not merely describing that vertiginous feeling, but inducing it. Sometimes we have to ask, not what is a song saying, but what is it doing.
The last verse is a mix of common and extraordinary language:
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
The intensely lyrical lines two, three and four are bracketed by two everyday images. Stepping stones and striking another match evoke common and familiar sayings, while those middle lines are mysterious and strange. It’s the juxtaposition of these elements that helps give the song its force. The requirement to move on, to leave the past behind, is both mundane and singular.
I finished the last article, (Part 2) with a couple of stunning performances from 1980. We now jump to 1984, to Rotterdam, April 6th. This marks the first attempt since 1978 to give the song a full band backing, a step away from acoustic versions. He puts a bit of a bounce into it also. I’m not sure about it. It’s a fine, jeering vocal performance, but it’s a bit too dumpty-dum for me, perhaps a bit too up-tempo. There is a messiness here. The emotional intensity seems to have been compromised as Dylan rushes through the verses, but others may not agree.
The extended harp break is of interest with Dylan using the instrument, as he so often does, to push the emotion of the song to new levels. The harmonica will become increasingly important as Dylan guides the song into the 1990s.
1984
Better all around, is the following recording from the same year (date unknown). Not only is it a clearer and better recording but, by slowing the hectic pace, Dylan is able to deliver a more considered and moving version. It swings without falling into the dumpty-dum. Finally, a successful rock version of this acoustic song. All it lacks is the harp break.
1984
Dylan dropped the song for 1985 and 1986, his Tom Petty years, but it resurfaced again in 1987 when Dylan performed it with The Grateful Dead and with Petty’s band, The Heartbreakers.
For his Grateful Dead performance, Dylan slows the song down once more, drops the harp break in favour of Jerry Garcia’s lyrical guitar playing – Garcia finds the sweetness in the melody – and uses an exaggerated version of his famous ‘undulating’ tones, half-singing (with vibrato) half calling. Asalways, it’s good to see Dylan performing, a fair quality video. Not too bad at al
1987 (with Grateful Dead)
For my ear, however, that is eclipsed by this performance with The Heartbreakers. Maybe it’s that piano accompaniment by the ever-inventive Benmont Tench, whose contribution makes these 1987 performances memorable, or the drastically slowed down tempo, or Dylan’s compassionate vocal, or maybe all these elements combined that give rise to this arresting Helsinki performance.
1987 Helsinki (with Heartbreakers)
That wasn’t the only great performance with the Heartbreakers. A few days before the Helsinki concert we find this one from Nuremberg. It’s the same arrangement as in Helsinki but Dylan sings in a higher register, delivering an outstanding vocal performance. Both these 1987 performances show how well the song responds to the slower tempo, a lesson Dylan will apply later in the 1990s. But he didn’t play the harmonica.
1987 Nuremberg
1988 was the first year of the Never Ending Tour, a year in which Dylan’s vocal style changed again to a strangely forced, supercharged, almost breathless sound, chopping up lines into brief phrases or single words, breathing after every word or three. It sometimes sounds as if he is deconstructing rather than singing the songs. It’s astonishing how different his voice is, thicker and angrier, from 1987. There were thirteen performances of the song in 1988, compared to ten in 1987. He’s not losing sight of the song, but nor is he featuring it regularly.
It stays as a rock song, pretty much working the arrangement he’d hit upon in 1984, abandoning the slow, soulful approach of 1987 (Birmingham, Sept 8th). Still no harmonica.
1988
Dylan rarely, if ever, played the harmonica in 1988, but in 1989 the instrument came back strongly, often played at its squeakiest, the very top notes, hard and biting. ‘Baby Blue’ came back with a vengeance too, clocking up twenty-nine performances.
In 1989 we have a return to form, if you want to see it that way. ‘Baby Blue’ is stripped back to its acoustic roots, is closer to the original tempo, and the somewhat unruly audience likes that.
It’s a fine vocal, while the subdued, mournful and bluesy harp break is outstanding.
1989 (Upper Darby Oct 15th)
There were other brilliant performances in 1989. It’s worth checking out this one from Cleveland.
1989 (Cleveland, Nov 2nd)
What’s outstanding is how different the harp break is from the Upper Darby performance, which was intense and reflective. At Cleveland, the harp is scratchy and anguished, the emotion jagged. It rips through your brain. It occurs to me that this discordance is very punky – it could hardly be more abrasive.
This punkiness could be the key to understanding what came next in the three years 1990 – 1992, the era of the Untouchables (how the band came to be known), an era in which, perhaps, Dylan discovered that he could not destroy his songs no matter what he did to them. Bob and his thrash band. We’ll return soon to see how ‘Baby Blue’ fared in the hands of the Untouchables.
In the meantime, make sure the carpet doesn’t start moving on you.
On Dutch radio, the 2020 single receives airplay to this day, “Gypsy Woman (She Is Homeless)” the cover of Crystal Waters’ ultimate dance hit from the summer of 1991, performed by Mell & Vintage Future from Volendam. It is a version that fits into a long-running, successful trend that has persisted for more than 20 years now: stripping down, dragging out and depressing up-tempo songs. Debatable, but the most likely main culprit for setting the trend seems to be Michael Andrews. Commissioned to provide the soundtrack for the cult film Donnie Darko (2001), Andrews delivers a brilliant score with 16 instrumental tracks. Plus a cover, which he has his mate Gary Jules sing: “Mad World” – a chilling, minimalist interpretation of the rhythmic, highly danceable 1983 Tears For Fears hit. After the late release of the soundtrack (2004), it became a deserved global hit. Which, apart from for financial reasons, is also particularly artistically pleasing to both spiritual fathers Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal:
“It was actually quite amazing to hear when it first came along. We both think it’s truer to the lyrics than our version, in the sense that the recording is very dark. I think we became popular because of the sort of juxtaposition of quite serious and intense lyrics with actually a kind of pop sound. So our versions of songs tended to be a bit more upbeat whereas that is really the emotion of the lyric.”
(Curt Smith in Top 2000 a gogo, 2023)
Gary Jules – Mad World
It inspires. Ane Brun, the girl from the north country Norway whom Dylan fans have come to appreciate through her stunning covers of “Girl From The North Country”, “Make You Feel My Love” and especially “She Belongs To Me” scores in 2008 with a hushed version of Alphaville’s old synth hit “Big In Japan”, Dave Lichens astounds with a nigh on gregorian arrangement for piano and choir of Blind Melon’s indie classic “No Rain”, Sleeping at Last lays a chillingly bleak veil over the very happiest song of the 1980s, The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”… and so, in the 21st century, since Gary Jules, the charts of the 1980s and 1990s have been plundered by solemn weeping willows, who remarkably often stare ponderously over misty expanses of water in the accompanying music videos.
Sleeping at Last – I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles):
The covers are often enough beautiful, and often enough expose unexpected beauty by credibly tipping the whole song (such as “Mad World” and T.V Carpio’s “I Want To Hold Your Hand”), but at least as often fail to meet the quality requirement implicitly articulated by Curt Smith: “That is really the emotion of the lyric.” “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” is a truly marvellous song, but the cover’s sort of juxtaposition, as Smith calls it, is disturbingly bizarre. Cary Brothers transforms Level 42’s “Something About You” into an ethereal, magical and, above all, sad gem. Thus seemingly to mock the grateful joy that oozes from the lyrics, now suggesting – unintentionally, we may assume – sarcasm.
The trend approximates what Al Kooper initiates that Thursday afternoon, 29 July. Since 15 June, they have played the song a dozen times in the studio, four days ago they rehearsed and performed it in Newport, this morning three more times… “Phantom Engineer” is under the skin of mainstays Bloomfield, Kooper and Dylan by now. Solid enough at least to vary, to improvise a cover of the song, as it were. But: still within the framework, within “the emotion of the lyric”. Until now, “Phantom Engineer” was a hi-speed bullet train racing from St. Louis to Chicago without stops. The afternoon version is still a train, but now more of a slow train coming, departing from the Mississippi Delta, shaking and jolting and tumbling to New Orleans via Clarksdale, Vicksburg and Jackson – the band is replacing one train ride for another.
This loyalty to the “emotion of the lyric” is maintained in the first well-known cover of the song, the one from Super Session (1968). “I pulled out the fast arrangement,” says Al Kooper – the mail train picks up steam again, racing away from country, back to the urban blues again. Elevating the song to the canon en passant, thanks to the record’s impressive sales figures.
The floodgates then really open after Super Session. Blue Cheer, Martha Vélez, Marianne Faithfull, Leon Russell… all fine covers, all pretty much keeping the stomp of the original while adding their own touches. The first real deviation is recorded in 1970 by The Lyman Family, the cult-like hippie group around Mel Lyman. The cover is a slow, folky, acoustic reinterpretation from which the melancholy drips, and is thus a first, early exercise of the reconstruction form that is becoming so popular in the 21st century. Not exactly fitting, but still piquant: Mel Lyman is the guy who at the time in Newport calmed the excited tempers after Dylan’s electric earthquake with a 20-minute wordless harmonica rendition of “Rock Of Ages”. Excruciatingly drawn-out and equally one-dimensional, but folk purists could appreciate it still, if only as an antidote after Dylan’s betrayal:
“And from a lone mike on stage, the thin plaintive cry of a harp sobbed “Rock of Ages!” Rock of ages, cleft for me… it sang, over and over, the same simple chorus, the same refrain, and the audience fell in step. It was a plea, a hymn, a dirge, a lullaby. Twenty times, thirty, more, and always the same beseeching, stroking, praying, pleading; then slower, softer, and, as the supplication trailed away, the park was empty and people were on their way home.”
… says Robert J. Lurtsema in The Broadside of 18 August 1965. Irwin Silber, the publisher of Sing Out! and Dylan’s most disappointed, embittered fan puts it a bit less poetic, but still with a superlative: “The most optimistic note of the evening.” And in the August ‘65 issue of his magazine, so right after Newport, he gladly gives all space to opposing forces. To Theodore Bickel’s highly quotable sneer, for example: “You don’t whistle in church — you don’t play rock and roll at a folk festival.”
What Irwin thought five years later about Mel Lyman recording the festival catastrophe “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” for his LP Avatar, history does not record. Lyman sucks all the rock ‘n’roll out of the song – which Irwin probably appreciated very much.
To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 12: You don’t whistle in church
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
This is episode 16 of the series of videos and recordings of Dylan concerts (and one rehearsal) between 1961 and 2025. A list of the previous articles, each of which focuses on one concert (except the one featuring the rehearsals) is given below.
A complete guide to what I like to think is our definitive series covering the Never Ending Tour is here This series totals 144 articles and includes around 1000 audio recordings. A guide to the very persona “Absolute highlight” series taken from the Never Ending Tour series, is given below.
The recordings in this current series (“The Concert Series”) are collected from the internet and put into chronological order below to help anyone (including me!) to hear what happened to Bob’s concerts (as opposed to individual songs) across time.
Meanwhile, if you feel you have something to say about Bob and his music, and would like to write for Untold Dylan, please do get in touch. Email me at Tony@schools.co.uk Also all articles on this site are open for comments, as long as the comments are about the article.
In 1964 Bob Dylan’s lyrical themes in his opening seven compositions had been varied ranging from reflections on internal pain with Guess I’m doing fine to love with Spanish Harlem Incident to rejection and farewell in It ain’t me babe – with a touch of humour along with way via Motorpsycho Nightmare, And in the midst of this he also created one of his almighty masterpieces in Mr Tambourine Man, a song which almost defies classification in terms of its lyrics. My argument in this series is that this variety of lyrical themes encouraged Bob to explore a variety of musical themes and musical possibilities while staying within the general ambit of popular music.
But Dylan was from the start of his career in writing music, very experimental, and in the last episode of this series I touched on “It ain’t me babe” and noted how Dylan was bending the musical form that he used to its very limits.
And perhaps it was as a reaction to this, the next song Dylan composed was a 12 bar blues, which sticks exactly to the 12 bar format of a melody line sung once against the tonic chord (often written in music as I), once against the subdominant (written IV) resolving back to the tonic, and then a final answering line which runs from the dominant chord (V) back to the tonic. In the key of C major that takes us through the chords of C, F and G. It is exactly how we expect a 12 bar blues to sound in terms of the chords. What makes it different in this song is the “chugging” sound of the harmonica.
Thus the piano part that Bob plays is an absolutely standard boogie-wooogie style where the left hand plays the three notes of the chord rising and falling in succession, and right hand is pumping away with the chords. But in addition to this Bob is singing – and when he isn’t, he is pumping out the rhythm on a harmonica. It’s not a song most of us remember from the Dylan catalogue, but it’s fun to hear once in a while.
As for the character of the “Denise” in the song, she is something of an enigma. She is smiling inside out, he is already lost, she calls out his name by mistake, he looks at her and sees himself…. It is a song of dislocation.
But also it sounds like a light-hearted interlude, an “interlude” not least because it was composed between “It ain’t me babe” and “Mama you been on my mind” – two much more profound reflections on relationships. Indeed it could have been improvised just for the recording.
However the next song, “Mama,” although unreleased at the time of composition, appeared on the Bootleg 1-3 triple CD and it is worth going back to this studio recording, rather than listening to the live performance that is available on the internet, as the studio recording which turned up on “1-3” gives a real insight into the way Bob was further exploring what he could do, musically, at this time.
In my view, Bob was clearly experimenting with the way the music in his compositions could be extended in order to match the angst expressed in the lyrics. And this, I feel, is seen by the chords that he is using. As before I am quoting Dylan chords for the chord sequence…
C E
Perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat
Am D7/f#
An' cov'rin' the crossroads I'm standing at,
C /b Am G C/g
Or maybe it's the weather or something like that,
G G6 G7 C G
But mama, you been on my mind.
And there is more because the third line in verse two is musically different from the third line in verse one…. (again chords are taken from the authoritative Dylan chords site)
C /b Am G C/g
Or maybe it's the weather or something like that,
G G6 G7 C G
But mama, you been on my mind.
This variation continues as can be seen in verse three, and as a result of these constant although minor changes, musically the song feels like it is on the edge from the very start (reflecting the “crossroads” that the singer is “standing at”) by opening clearly in C major for we tend to expect the first chord of a song to be representative of the key that the song is performed in, and more often than not it is the tonic – thus C major being the opening chord of a song in C.
(Although we might note that Bob had already broken this rule with “Tambourine Man” which starts on the subdominant – chord IV of the key one is playing in.)
So to summarise in this song Bob starts with the key chord of C, but then immediately Bob moves to the chord of E major, a chord which has nothing to do with a song written in C major. (By which I mean one of the notes of the chord of E major is not available in the scale of C major – this being the note G sharp.) This then is totally unexpected the first time we hear it, and gets us metaphorically on the edge of our seats. It is the musical equivalent of a movie which opens with a couple clearly in a relationship and one says, “I love you” and the other turns and walks away. It is not what we expect.
And as if that were not enough, he changes things again in subsequent verses. Not with major changes to the music, but enough to give those who don’t immediately relate the accompaniment to a set of chord changes, a feeling of unease, and of nothing being stable.
Of course, the actual chord sequence is not unique to Dylan; that is not the point, for although the sequence is very unusual and thus unexpected, the constant minor variations on the accompaniment add to the feeling of unease. We can say that very few songs open with a sequence of chords running C, E, A minor. It is not a Dylan invention, but it is rare. But also very few songs have these sorts of minor variations in the music of each verse.
And then again I would suggest it is very unusual (if not actually is novel) to move in the way that Dylan does onto D7 while then holding the song there. For through this sequence, we can reach the end of the second line and musically still be totally unsure of what key we are in. This reflects the fact that we are unsure of the mental state of the singer and the person about whom he is singing. The chord sequence perfectly reflects the lyrics which are about uncertainty.
Now given the many millions of pop and rock songs that had been written by this time, finding a chord sequence with which to open a song, which had not only not been used before as an opening, but which actually works musically, is indeed something of an achievement. And maybe somewhere there is a song that opens in this way. But I am pretty sure that even if there is, there is not a song that then has these chordal variations through the start of each subsequent verse.
But we are left with uncertainty after just two lines of music, and so to resolve this Dylan then uses the chords of C, Am, and G all of which are clearly in the key of C major which is the key he started in, but so readily departed from. So yes by the end of the verse, we have a clear feel of where we are – but still that sense of uncertainty. Such changes are rare, and even then where a songwriter wants to use the technique of jumping into an unrelated key in this way, it is done later in the verse not at the start.
Musically this is therefore very unusual, but if we look at the lyrics we can understand why Dylan has gone down this route.
Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
The introduction of the “sun cut flat” and the “crossroads” confuse, but also work as a symbol for the singer’s uncertainty. Thus the emotion of the song, and the unexpectedness of the chords (even if what is actually happening in the chords is not something a non-musician is likely to understand) work together. But the verse does get resolved back to the everyday return to what we expect through the final two lines. Effectively these take us back to the key we thought we were in.
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind
The pattern is now set for an edginess in the opening lines and a resolution in the final two lines as seen again in verse two.
I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind
The lyrics of the song are very different from the norm of pop songs at the time where love and lost love were the themes. Indeed within the context of the times some of the lines are bordering on being shocking as with “It don’t even matter to me where you’re wakin’ up tomorrow.”
And in an era where expressions of love or moaning about lost love, are the prime issues within popular music these lyrics such as, ‘I am not askin’ you to say words like “yes” or “no”,’ are completely out of the norm. As is the expression of confusion in “I’m just breathin’ to myself, pretendin’ not that I don’t know” Here again the change in the music brought out by the unexpected change of the chords, through the utilisation of a chord that is not part of the key each verse starts and ends in, is very powerful and relates the music to the lyrics.
Then just to make sure we have got the message, the final verse opens with
When you wake up in the mornin’, baby, look inside your mirror
You know I won’t be next to you, you know I won’t be near
This is most certainly not how pop lyrics work, and that key change at the start of each verse makes the point all the way through. It does not matter if the listener knows that Dylan is suddenly using a chord that is not in the key he is performing in, it still feels like a disjointed jump and thus will nonetheless feel odd to most people – which is exactly the point, because the message of the singer, is not the message found in most popular songs.
I can’t say for sure no one has ever done something like this before, but certainly, I have not found it. To my mind, this composition represented a musical revolution, both in terms of the lyrics.
Of course, Dylan then did re-write the song to make it possible for him to perform it with Joan Baez
G D Em
Maybe it's the color of the sun cut flat
Am
An' cov'rin' the crossroads I'm standing at,
G D Em C
Or maybe it's the weather or something like that,
G D G
But mama, you're just on my mind.
… and so the meaning is diluted. But what lasts in the memory is Dylan’s version in the studio. And decades later it can still send shivers down the spine.
The many similar stories of studio musicians over the decades, the specific memories of the H61 sessions of Frank Owens, Al Kooper, Harvey Brooks and Michael Bloomfield, and our own ears: it seems clear now that we owe the sudden, extraordinary, mercurial beauty descending on “Phantom Engineer” after lunch to the banal fact that Kooper and Bloomfield deliberately slowed down a bit to introduce both newcomers to the song.
Al Kooper especially then: although Kooper is listed as the organist, the afternoon session is the first and only “Phantom Engineer” session without an organ. And the first and only session with acoustic guitar. An acoustic guitar with a guiding role even: the opening is for that guitar, which thus sets tempo and groove for the whole song. It seems obvious that that is Al Kooper; not only because we no longer hear the organ, but also because the guitar is played suspiciously “clean” with that undylanesque frivolous tinkle on the high strings, and because the guitar is actually Kooper’s weapon of choice. After all, Kooper only sneaked behind the organ at the time because he saw his hopes of joining a Dylan session dashed when Dylan came in with Mike Bloomfield;
“The guy just shuffled over into the corner, wiped it off with a rag, plugged in, and commenced to play some of the most incredible guitar I’d ever heard. And he was just warming up! That’s all the Seven Lick Kid had to hear; I was in over my head. I embarrassedly unplugged, packed up, went into the control room, and sat there pretending to be a reporter from Sing Out! magazine.”
(Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards – Al Kooper, 1998)
But that was six weeks before today, that was at that legendary “Like A Rolling Stone” session. Meanwhile, Kooper has penetrated the inner circle, we survived the Battle of Newport together, and Dylan insists on having him at the H61 sessions – by now he does dare to pick up a guitar again despite Bloomfield being around. In addition, we hear Dylan playing his most concentrated and lyrical harmonica solos of all the sessions; apparently he has his hands free.
So a different scenario from that which Tony Glover would have us believe, with that anecdote about Dylan toiling at the piano while the others are gone for lunch. Unlikely anyway as Glover explicitly mentions Dylan sitting at the piano – if Dylan were to be the architect of the mood swing, the tempo slowdown and the quicksilver of the post-lunch performances, he surely would have designed his conversions on the guitar and then demonstrated them to the returning colleagues on the guitar as well – after all, the acoustic guitar is now the conductor. It is more plausible that Glover watched Dylan merely trying to incorporate and try out his radical textual changes – and indeed, the piano suffices for that.
In this more obvious scenario, Kooper then sets the pace, in all likelihood out of collegial concern: to give Harvey Brooks and Frank Owens some time to get to know the song and give them room to find a fill-in – Dylan never says anything, after all. A producer-like role to which Kooper seems naturally inclined. A few months later, in Nashville during the recording for Blonde On Blonde, that role is assigned to him more explicitly and semi-officially – Kooper and Dylan practising the songs, the two of them by themselves in the hotel room, Dylan then reporting to the studio only after Kooper has set the song up for Charlie McCoy and the rest of the Nashville Cats. But today, then, it seems to be a first, spontaneous action on his own initiative.
It Takes a Lot to Laugh – penultimate take:
After Harvey Brooks‘ name, however, despite Brooks’ own recollection, we still should put a question mark. It really still seems to be the same bassist as the bassist on the “Phantom Engineer” and “Tombstone Blues” takes of the morning session, i.e. still Russ Savakus; up to and including the last, final take, we hear the grinding of the strings against the frets. It is not until the following song, “Positively 4th Street”, that we hear a completely different sound and a completely different approach to the bass. Suddenly, we no longer hear a single grind, in any of the three complete takes, nor in any of the four breakdowns. Instead, we now hear a warm, cool swinging and remarkably unobtrusive, servient bass. This is definitely a different bass player – so “Positively 4th Street” must be marking the switch from Savakus to Brooks.
Positively 4th Street – 1st complete take:
Guitarist Michael Bloomfield, meanwhile, seems to be taking Al Kooper’s cue. Gone are the sharp licks and energetic exclamations. Instead, after lunch, Bloomfield plays a truly servile, country-like, melody-following part. Modest fills, no solo and even a hint of an occasional Bakersfield twang… in all three complete takes of that decisive afternoon session, Bloomfield gracefully leaves plenty of room for Dylan’s harmonica and Owens’ piano.
Just as gracefully Kooper conceals years later, when he writes his autobiography Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, that he is the architect of the change of direction that turned out so sublimely:
“When I’d played on Highway 61 Revisited, we’d cut some songs two or three times with different arrangements each time. One such song was Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh It Takes a Train to Cry.” We originally recorded it as a fast tune, but Dylan opted for the slower version cut a few days later as the keeper for his album. I pulled out the fast arrangement and taught it to everyone and we had song number two.”
So: “Dylan opted for the slower version,” as Kooper reminisces about his first struggles with repertoire for the legendary LP Super Session, the record he makes in 1968 with Bloomfield and Stephen Stills. And with Harvey Brooks, by the way, who contributes the atmospheric, jazzy closing track “Harvey’s Tune”. That same Side 2 then opens with Kooper’s reinterpretation of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”. It’s a still radiant, goosebump-inducing cover that effortlessly succeeds in defending its place in the Top 5 Best “It Takes A Lot” Covers. Thanks to Stephen Stills‘ guitar and Harvey Brooks’ superb, electrifying bass playing. Playing what needs to be played. Once again demonstrating that a Dylan song stands or falls with the artistry of the hired workers.
Bloomfield, Kooper, Stills – It Takes A Lot To Laugh:
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
This is episode 15 of the series of videos and recordings of Dylan concerts (and one rehearsal) between 1961 and 2025. A list of the previous articles is given below.
A complete guide to our series covering the Never Ending Tour is here This series totals 144 articles and includes around 1000 audio recordings.
The recordings in this current series (“The Concert Series”) are collected from the internet and put into chronological order below to help anyone (including me!) to hear what happened to Bob’s concerts (as opposed to individual songs) across time.
Meanwhile, if you feel you have something to say about Bob and his music, and would like to write for Untold Dylan, please do get in touch. Email me at Tony@schools.co.uk
Tony Attwood
The Concert: Capital Centre, Largo, Maryland, USA. 15 January 1974
The band….
Bob Dylan (vocal, guitar, harmonica)
Robbie Robertson (guitar)
Garth Hudson (organ & piano)
Richard Manual (keyboards)
Rick Danko (bass)
Levon Helm (drums)
The songs….
Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)
Lay Lady Lay
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
It Ain’t Me, Babe
Ballad Of A Thin Man
Stage Fright (Robbie Robertson)
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (Robbie Robertson)
King Harvest (Has Surely Come) (Robbie Robertson)
This Wheel’s On Fire (Rick Danko – Bob Dylan)
I Shall Be Released
Up On Cripple Creek (Robbie Robertson)
All Along The Watchtower
Ballad Of Hollis Brown
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
Wedding Song
Just Like A Woman
It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Rag Mama Rag (Robbie Robertson)
Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever (Don Hunter – Stevie Wonder)
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 needYou 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.
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.
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:
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 SomebodyI Believe in YouWhen You Gonna Wake UpWhen He Returns
Man Gave Names to All the AnimalsPrecious AngelSlow TrainCovenant WomanGonna Change My Way of ThinkingDo Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)Solid RockSaving GraceSavedWhat Can I Do for You?In the GardenBlessed Be the NamePressing On
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 hasreturned 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.
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 1st Dec and Montreal on December 4th. 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 18th
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.
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….
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
This series of videos and 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 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
This event took place at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. 14 Octber 2019
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.
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.
What makes this song so memorable is, of course, the lyrics, a perfectly constructed assault on the way society has removed hope and freedom but that if we can stand up for those who are lost within society’s grip there is a better life to be had for all of us.
The song is therefore a solid repetition of the same musical pattern throughout which allows the singer to reinforce the message, with each verse ending each time with the statement that things can be better.
Given the solid, recognisable nature of the message of the song, it is perhaps not surprising that the music follows a much more set and standardised form than we saw in many of Bob’s songs of the previous year.
There are four solid beats in a bar, and this never varies. The rhyme scheme is more complex than normal for Bob (A B C B D D D E) but this remains the same throughout. It is in fact a very unusual structure, and may actually be unique, but contains within in a very recognisable and common approach to the first four lines with the second and fourth line rhyming.
Then we have the change for the next three lines which all rhyme with each other
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
represented by the D D D in the rhyme scheme above. And finally, we hvae the title line, at the end, which doesn’t rhyme with anything.
Most of us, I guess, have heard this song so often that we no longer recognise or think about the way Bob constructs and delivers the power of these three lines – a power which is enhanced by the repetition of the title in the final line. But if we can stand back for a moment and listen afresh that power is still there, and is delivered by those rhymes.
The fact is the song is six verses and 438 words long, which is very long when compared with most songs written in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But it is held together and derives its power from the recognised rhyme scheme of the first half of each verse, and those repeated rhymes in the second half. Indeed in the earlier part of each verse we hear a standard lyrical format and a standard rhyming scheme (A B C B), but the power of the song derives from those three rhyming lines that come afterwards.
And more than this the lyrics end on an absolute upbeat notion of the fact that we can change the world. Not that the world will change, not at all. But the message that we can change the world….
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
If you just listen to the way the third of those four lines is sung you surely can’t but hear the power. Every syllable is sung on the same note until the drop of one tone in the second syllable of “universe”, so that it almost becomes a relief that hear that repeated musical line which ends each verse in the same way.
Thus musically and lyrically the song speaks of the achievement of liberation, and the “chimes of freedom” becomes a musical and visual aura in whose protection we can rest. The music has played its part in this as much as the lyrics. Which left Bob, just one problem. Having taken us to such heights and delivered such a promise, how on earth could he follow this up?
At least he had given himself one clue: breaking the rules was clearly a good idea.
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.
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:
