Untold Dylan

by Tony Attwood

I chose to call my review of Dylan in 1989 Bob Dylan stalked by the darkness – which is my interpretation of his mood that year.   The writing that year was, to my mind, brilliant, but Bob was looking in very dark places to find his muse.

Not with every song, of course, but consider Disease of Conceit, What was it you wanted, Everything is Broken, Most of the Time and Man in a Long Black Coat.  When has Bob been so persistently dark?

There had to be a response to this, a lighter touch, for his own psychological well-being.  And that is what Bob moved into in 1990 with a totally different sort of song.  Songs such as

• Handy Dandy
• Cat’s in the Well
• 10,000 men
• Unbelievable
• Under the red sky
• Wiggle wiggle
• 2 x 2

It may have given Bob relief from the black hole that he had been peering into to produce those works of genius the previous year, but it was not (by and large) what the public wanted.  This was too much of a contrast, too light, too fluffy.   Why couldn’t we have more from the men in the long black cloaks?  Another Oh Mercy, not a Red Sky.

Well, Red Sky was what we got, and quite probably that gave Bob to escape from the ghosts that seemed to be haunting him, even though it met with very limited critical acclaim.

So it was probably with much relief that Bob could turn to the Wilburys for the second album.

For these sessions Dylan already had available Like a Ship written in 1988 and not used on that album and now contributed five perfectly decent pop songs and one pop masterpiece on top of that previously written fine song.

• The Devil’s been busy.
• If you belonged to me
• Inside Out
• Seven Deadly Sins
• She’s my baby
• Where were you last night

If you have read my comments elsewhere you will know that to my mind the masterpiece in this collection is “Where were you last night”.  Yes it is a straight lost love pop song, a bit of male angst over a woman breaking a date.  Hardly revolutionary stuff for Bob to get his teeth into, but compared with Disease of Conceit this is positively a light hearted romp and I suspect exactly what he wanted.

In short it was exactly the release Bob needed before shooting off on the 1990 round of the Never Ending.

Except that this time the Never Ending didn’t end.  It just kept going simply because Bob had stopped writing.  And I think we can see why from the chronology.  The darkness of the Black Coats was too dark, the relief of Red Sky was not welcomed by critics, and now he couldn’t trust his friends to do the decent thing with all those pop songs he had just written.

Bob is quoted as saying around this time that he had “had it” with songwriting, and if we put together these three episodes in his life the explanation is clear.   He had gone through hard times, had emerged from that to make an album of songs that in many ways looked back to childhood, and then enjoyed himself with some excellent pop work only to find his mate George Harrison not only easing out his vocals on many tracks, but also still refusing to include Like a Ship, while putting in silly nonsense like New blue moon and Wilbury Twist.

It was enough to make any self-respecting artist weep.

But Bob Dylan didn’t need to weep – he had the perfect alternative, the Never Ending, and so it carried on carrying on.  Yes there were a couple of new albums, but they were not of his compositions, and neither were they new compositions, and were very much his choice of music throughout.

So the Wilburys got the darkness of the previous year out of Bob’s soul, but he felt no ownership of the album, never mentioned it, never played any of the songs – and that is a real shame, because “Where were you last night” would be a great song to use on stage.

And thus began the gap years

What is on the site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

This review updated 19 July 2019

This love and theft composition is, I think, best understood by considering it in its chronological context (something which if you are a regular reader here, you’ll be rather used to be saying.

The immediate two predecessor songs in terms of compositional order seem to be Bye and bye and the Floater (Too much to ask).

In Bye and Bye Bob took his inspiration from a Billie Holliday song and Shakespeare’s phrases and mixed them in a way that doesn’t always seem to make too much sense.

Floater saw Bob go overboard on the borrowing, with music taken directly from “Snuggled On Your Shoulders” and lyrics taken from Junichi Saga’s novel Confessions of a Yakuza.

In the case of Moonlight’s title it was taken from a Carter Family song, which has nothing to do with Dylan’s composition (except in the title) and which itself comes from Joseph Augustine Wade.

So, tracking backwards even further, Wade was a 19th century Irish conductor and composer who is particularly remembered his arrangement of  Meet me by Moonlight.  Wade was cited by the American poet and humanist (whom I would expect Bob to know, given the odds and ends I know about Bob’s reading) Walt Whitman.   Whitman’s most famous work was “Leaves of Grass” which was considered quite scandalous when first published.  Elements of his work were used by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams within “A Sea Symphony”.

Those are the connections, but it is only the phrase “Meet me by the moonlight alone” that is used here, as you can hear from this recording of the song by the Carter family.

So what was Bob playing at?

Well, I think he was enjoying himself playing with chords that he rarely if ever used before – chords of the type we might well find in the American popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s.  And (and of course this is my guess) he just wanted some words to fix around them.

https://youtu.be/U6bEiBcFcLs

Certainly the melody of this song is only interesting in parts as time and again the melody just sits on the same note.   That is not to say the music for the verse is not interesting or entertaining it just isn’t entertaining enough for me, when the words go nowhere.

The bridge passage:

Well, I’m preachin’ peace and harmony
The blessings of tranquility
Yet I know when the time is right to strike
I’ll take you cross the river dear
You’ve no need to linger here
I know the kinds of things you like

has only four notes, each sequence of words just sitting on one note.  Nothing wrong with that of course – providing the lyric is interesting, but having those last three lines on just one one note is pushing it a bit.  At least for me.

And maybe it is just me getting a bit old but the lyrics to me don’t seem to have too much to say either.  Yes of course you can take the old image about meeting the love of your life in the moonlight alone and make something of it, but my problem is that Dylan doesn’t make too much of it.

The seasons they are turnin’ and my sad heart is yearnin’
To hear again the songbird’s sweet melodious tone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

This is the opening to the song, and openings to songs generally (in my opinion) ought to have a bit of punch, a way of grabbing attention, something that makes us want to listen.  And I am not sure these do.

Of course there are many popular songs that don’t engage in drama in the opening lines, but to my mind Dylan has always been at his best when either the lyrics grab you by the throat, or else the music does.  Here it doesn’t seem to work for me at any level.

Take the all time classic “The way you look tonight” with its opening

Some day, when I’m awfully low
When the world is cold
I will feel a glow just thinking of you
And the way you look tonight

Very different songs of course, but that shows how great music works through an amazing lyric and beautiful melody right from the off.  (The link above takes you to the scene in the movie where it first appeared.  A classic in my view).

Bob’s images are ok at times…

The air is thick and heavy all along the levy
Where the geese into the countryside have flown
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

But sometimes they really do seem to slip from the heights he has achieve in the past.

The boulevards of cypress trees, the masquerades of birds and bees
The petals, pink and white, the wind has blown

It just seems a little old-hat to me as does…

The trailing moss and mystic glow
Purple blossoms soft as snow
My tears keep flowing to the sea
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief
It takes a thief to catch a thief
For whom does the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me

For Whom the Bell Tolls is such as well-worn phrase, and this song nothing really to do with Ernest Hemingway, who himself re-used it,  it seems strange to find it used here as a pastiche of phrases from elsewhere.  Take a thief is an old saying that goes back at least to 1665.

Doctor lawyer Indian chief comes from a 1945 hit song of that name published in 1945, with music by Hoagy Carmichael and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster.

So this does seem to me a bit of a mishmash of sayings thrown together.   And yet Bob loves or at least loved the song, and played it over 100 times between 2001 and 2008 sometimes with a harmonica intro.

Which really does seem to move that it was the chord sequence that had attracted him.  I know this will mean nothing unless you are a musician, but at least, if you have read other reviews here you will know that you have never seen Dylan write anything like this before.

Bb, Bo, Cm7, C#o
Bb, C9
Bb, Gm7
Dm7, G7, Cm7-5, Dm, F, Bb, Cm7, F

Yes it is interesting and gives the whole song quite a lilt, but (and yet again I feel compelled to say “for me”) this isn’t enough.  Not from the greatest songwriter of the pop/rock era.

Sorry to be so negative, but truly I can get so much more out of some of Bob’s 12 bar blues than I can out of this.  I’ve done my best to find something there, but in the end, I just can’t.

What else is here?

An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here.  There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan.  The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.

We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

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

by Tony Attwood

Up to 1979 Dylan’s albums were big.   Very big.  Or to put it another way, very very big.  Etc etc.   Year after year, album after album, they went Silver, Gold and Platinum in all the major markets from Freewheelin to Slow Train Coming.

And then the endless run of high success stopped.  Of course the albums still got the sort of sales that would make mere mortals think they had achieved their lifetime’s fulfilment, but compared with what had gone before, the audience reaction was poor.

Of course during this phase there was an intermediate stage of some success…

• 1980 Saved: The album went Silver in the UK
• 1981: Shot of Love: Again Silver in the UK
• 1983: Infidels: Another Gold album in the USA

But then a further decline with Empire Burlesque (1985), Down in the Groove (1988), and Knocked Out Loaded (1986), all delivering much much poorer sales.

I called my review of Bob’s writing in 1989 “Dylan stalked by the darkness” and I do think that is a fair reflection of what he was writing then.   And it is true that Dylan did find his way back once more with Oh Mercy (1989) which went to Gold in the US and UK, but then in 1990 Under a Red Sky got Silver in the UK, but nothing in the US, and so in essence, Bob retaliated by ceasing to write songs.

And yet although the songs of 1990 are not ones remembered as Dylan classics (the children’s emphasis of some of the Red Sky songs did not go down well) it also included the second (third) Wilburys outing, and among the songs one magnificent pop song: Where were you last night.

But clearly Bob had had enough, and so he simply stopped writing.

Thus whereas the tours in the past had been a part of the whole process of composition, with new songs being tried out on stage in the afternoon rehearsal as the sound levels were checked, and gradually worked on in hotel rooms, now even these new pieces ceased to emerge.

The albums however were still being produced.  In 1991 we had the first three official Bootleg CDs as a box set, and 1992 there was the confirmation that Bob really was not writing any more with “Good as I’ve been to you”, while in 1993 he followed this up with “World Gone Wrong”.   Nothing wrong with either album, except that they were not full of songs written by Bob Dylan.

Meanwhile Bob was touring, touring and touring, although from as early as April 1992 there were signs of strain, when he twice found himself unable to complete the singing of “Desolation Row”.   I am not a diarist and so don’t have any notes, but I do recall that the shows I saw during this period sometimes left me… well, underwhelmed is about the best I can say.

And as a composer, Dylan had absolute full-blown writer’s block.  It had happened to him before where he had struggled to compose new songs – although he always came back with a bang in the end.   This time it seems he didn’t even struggle – he just gave up the notion of writing anything new.

By 1994 the tour contained little that was new, although the band performed what I think was the all-time record of 104 shows in the course of the year.   He did then take it a bit more slowly – in 1996 for example it was 86 shows, and at some stage around this time he started writing again.

In the latter part of 1996 Bob was back in the recording studios and “Time Out of Mind” was released in 1997.  In May that year Bob was admitted to hospital mid-tour with chest pains.   As he expressed it a little later, he was starting to think he was soon going to meet Elvis.  He really had toured a venue too far.

We have four co-compositions that are listed in some sources as being from 1995:

• Well well well
• Howlin at your window
• Tragedy of the trade
• Time to end this masquerade

but I retain my view that these all originate from sketches and lyrics from years earlier.  Either way, with the exception of the first of these, I am not sure that they add too much to the world’s collection of songs.

But Bob did come back.   Time Out of Mind went Platinum in the US and Gold in the UK.  Bob had started writing again, although, as it turned out, the most stunning, amazing, brilliant song that he had recorded in September 1996 was left off the album and we wouldn’t get to hear Mississippi  for a while.   But still, we had a new album.  And Bob had survived a pretty nasty health scare.  Maybe he’d get back to his best….

What is on the site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This review updated November 2019.

by Tony Attwood

“Song to Woody” is counted by some as Bob Dylan’s first composition – although that needs to be clarified.  Bob did write some pieces before this date although mostly they were thought to be lost.   However  we have now tracked down three such songs from 1959 and/or 1960, and reviewed them on this site…

• When I got troubles (blues but with hope for the future… maybe)
• I got a new girl (love, but maybe she’s twotiming me)
• One eyed jacks (blues?)

And although Song to Woody is universally seen as a Dylan song it must be made clear that the melody and chord sequence are clearly based on the Woody Guthrie song “1913 Massacre”.  Dylan claims it as his own, but not I believe in any sense of misleading us, for Woody Guthrie also purloined old songs and reused them for his own devices.  That was the folk tradition.

Dylan has played the song, not just in his early coffee bar playing days, but 53 times in concert between its composition in 1961 and 2002.  Indeed a live recording of the song from 2000 appeared on the “Things have changed” CD.  So it is clearly a song that he too treats with considerable affection.

The song appeared of course on the 1962 “Bob Dylan” album.  Here is a recording of Woody Guthrie’s original.

Dylan was not making any attempt to hide the original source of the song at the time he wrote it, because he was also playing “1913 Massacre” in his appearances in November 1961.  So let’s start with that.

1913 Massacre appeared first in 1941, one of the many songs Guthrie recorded for the Folkways record label.  It is a song about the deaths of miners and their families on 24 December 1913 in the “Italian Hall Disaster”.

And of course in remembering this earliest of Dylan songs we should also recall David Bowie’s “Song for Bob Dylan” which includes “Now hear this, Robert Zimmerman, I wrote this song for you”.

There is the Bob Dylan recording available here – and I must say listening to it now (having not gone back and played Dylan’s first album for a while) I really am amazed at the maturity of Bob’s singing and playing – all at the age of 19.

As for the lyrics, Dylan goes his own way from the start…

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down
I’m seein’ your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

Woody Guthrie however started quite differently

Take a trip with me in 1913,
To Calumet, Michigan, in the copper country.
I will take you to a place called Italian Hall,
Where the miners are having their big Christmas ball.

In a very real sense Dylan’s song is a tribute to all the blues and folk singers who had already influenced him:

Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind

And we also get our first reference to the endless traveller who moves on and on – a theme that I have tried to comment on in a number of the reviews on this site.  It is a theme that comes from the traditions of Irish and Scottish folk music; the theme of a man who just has to keep travelling, simply for the purpose of travelling.  My piece on Restless Farewell, and “Parting Glass” delves into this a little further.

And here was that reverence for travelling on and on, expressed right at the start.

I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too

What makes this so interesting is that in the end Bob Dylan devised his own version of Robert Johnson’s 1937 classic “Hell Hound on My Trail”….

I got to keep movin’, I’ve got to keep movin’, blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail
Umm-mm-mm-mm, blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail
And the day keeps on worrin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail

And he did this through the Never Ending Tour.  Indeed the next post I shall be putting up on this site is the review of Bob Dylan 1991 to 1995 when he simply stopped writing and just toured and toured and toured, until he made himself ill with touring.  No new songs were written, it was just a never ending tour.

Thus in the end Bob did live the final line of Song to Woodie with the hard travelling.  But as always with Bob he did it in his own way.

What is on this site

You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

The index to all the 590 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 2000 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, please do drop me a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article.  Email Tony@schools.co.uk

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

By Tony Attwood

I am placing these four songs (New Blue Moon, Wilbury Twist, Poor House and Cool Dry Place) together in one review, as I don’t think they really count as Bob Dylan compositions.  He was there of course and he joined in, but while there are other songs that are clearly 90% if not 100% Dylan (“Where were you last night” is the absolute stand out example) these don’t seem to me to be songs from the master.

However his name is on them, and so they deserve a place in our complete listing of all Dylan songs, as was the case with the first Wilburys album, where again I tried to separate out those that seem to me to be less than fully Dylan works.

The first two of the four songs here sound to me (and indeed to most commentators, I think) like bits of fun that the guys just put together.  The theory is that “Like a Ship” which is clearly a Dylan song was not included because that would have made the album more Dylan than anything else.  But replacing it was hard because the rest of the band really were not delivering.  Hence “Blue Moon” and “Twist”.  The other two songs sound like Tom Petty compositions.

New Blue Moon

This is a variant 12 bar blues with an added middle 8.  The “variant” of the 12 bar blues structure comes for the most part by adding minor chords in between the basic 12 bar structure.   The middle 8 modulates briefly and then takes us back to the main key.

It’s all ok, but really needs lyrics that are a lot more inspired to make it a song of particular merit or note…

I don’t want nothing
Nothing but you
And I’m waiting
Looking for a new blue moon

doesn’t really cut it for me.  Nor does the middle 8 (or if you prefer, the bridge)

So many moons have come and gone
And none of them were blue
Too many times the sun came up, but
It came up without you, you, ya yoo hoo ooh

Wilbury Twist

And again we have a 12 bar blues structure with a middle 8.

Put your hand on your head
Put your foot in the air
Then you hop around the room
In your underwear
Ain’t ever been nothin quite like this
Come on baby do the wilbury twist

The variations that the band put in do make it of interesting for a moment or two, and the band calling out the responses again gives us a flashback to the 1950s and 1960s, but it really is a bit of a throwaway, saved by quite a bit of effort in the production.

Poor House 

You only have to hear the instrumental introduction to know this is Tom Petty with that bit of country feel (especially in the instrumental break).

As a song about a divorce it is fine, I guess, although during my two bouts of divorce I didn’t feel as bouncy as this, although certainly second time around I fully expected to end up in the modern day equivalent of the poor house.

You walk in, half past nine
Lookin’ like a queen
Serving me with papers
Calling me obscene

Woman, I’ve tried so hard
Just to do my best
They’re gonna put me in the poor house
And you’ll take all the rest

Up all day, down all night
Working on the job
Everything I do is wrong
I always end up robbed

Yep, been there, had that happen to me.  And there is a nice twist a little later

If I drove a pulpwood truck
Would you love me more?
Would you bring me diamonds
And hang around my door?

My ex really couldn’t get the hang of me being a writer, rather than having a “proper” job, so yes I rather like that, but “I rather like that” is nowhere near the equivalent of wanting to play the song several times and then put it on a collection so that it turns up every now and then.  Indeed in writing the reviews of the Wilburys III, these songs, which I haven’t really listened to much since the days when I first got the album, still make me just think, “OK”, whereas the Dylan songs make me want to listen over and again.

And that isn’t just me being a Dylan fan.  I do enjoy the music of Tom Petty, and have most of his albums with and without the Heartbreakers, and if I noted that Runnin Down a Dream was showing on TV I would at the very least record it to watch again sometime this week, if I couldn’t actually watch it live.  But even Tom seems somewhat off form.

Cool Dry Place

This song is… well, not to put too fine a point on it a 12 bar blues with a middle 8.  Since by and large 12 bar blues are just about the easiest of songs to write (although that doesn’t mean they will always be very memorable) this tells us a bit more about what was going on here.

I don’t think the guys had too many new ideas and so worked on some lyrics, fitted them into the 12 bar format and then added a middle 8, and that was their contribution to the album.

At least in this 12 bar, which works with the classic “woke up this morning” the lyrics are more unusual. The story is that Petty saw the “keep in a cool dry place” sign, and wrote the lyrics around the notion of musical equipment and instruments getting damaged in a flood.  Or something like that.

It’s fun, but again, there is no drive I find to go back and listen again – although obviously I do play each song through a number of times to write the review.

I drove around the city
Looking for a room
That was high above the water
Where my things could be in tune
There was no one to help me
Nobody even cared
I had to got through hell
To get those things up there
I paid my first subscription
Then I joined the idle race
And they said ‘store it in a cool dry place’

I got guitar, basses, amplifiers and drums
Accordions and mandolins and things that sometimes hum
Cymbals and harmonicas, capos by the score
And lots of things in boxes laying all around the floor

Yep, ok Tom, that’s fine but…

But what I did, having now finished my review of all the Wilburys songs was go back and play “Where were you last night” several times over.   It is original, it is interesting, it takes us somewhere unusual in the middle 8 break, and the lyrics, although about an oft-used event of a woman letting a man down by not turning up, still holds an interest.  Especially that lovely line, “You sent someone in your place instead.”   One could write a whole novel based on that one line again.  In fact…

Anyway, there it is.  It’s all ok, and I can happily listen to it – I mean I am not going to rush out of the room when it comes on – but if only the rest of the gang could have put in the same effort as Bob.

What is on the site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Every member of the Wilburys is credited with co-writing this song which was the opening of Volume 3 and the first single hit for the band from the album.

It is listed as a Dylan composition on BobDylan.com but without any lyrics or other details, and it turns up in the Dylan copyright files, and I have found a couple of commentaries that suggest that in its original form it was a song sung from start to end by Bob, which makes it sound even more like a Bob composition.

And yes there are certainly moments of Dylan’s ventures into the world of the surreal that make it seem like one of his songs

My baby
She’s got a body for business
Got a head for sin
She knocks me over
like a bowling pin.
She came home last night and said,
“Honey, honey, honey it’s hard to get ahead.”
My baby

It isn’t meant to mean anything at all, apart from giving us a fair insight into the personality and looks of the lady in question.  In that sense it is very similar to a lot of 1950s music – and the title sums it all up.

Indeed to a degree it is possible to hear this as a sort of  “Rainy Day Women”  from the time before everybody got stoned, and instead just marvelled at the fact that they could sing suggestively about a woman on a record without getting arrested.  So it’s a tribute song to a past genre.

It’s also the sort of song that celebrates fast cars and has the lead guitar making car-like sounds.  One almost expects the band to branch out into, “I’m a road runner honey” and start singing “beep beep”.

Certainly it is not knocking or parodying the music it is based on – rather it is celebrating it and revelling in it.  And I have to admit I have seen a number of 50s tribute bands play in clubs and pubs in England who do this sort of music very well.   Everyone remembers the good old days and has a good time.

So I suppose what makes me less than 100% enthusiastic about this song is that with all this talent on display, might the band not have done something a little bit more than produce a record along the lines of what quite a few tribute bands can do?

That’s not to knock what is here, but rather to say yes, it’s fine. But…

I suspect Bob knocked it out in 20 minutes flat and thought it would be fun to do.  Heylin suggests that the rest of the gang had very few new musical ideas between them, so they would be happy to go along with anything Bob brought in.  He brought in “She’s my baby”, and they took the original tape and recorded their bits over it.

And that is about it.

What is on the site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Attwood

Shake Shake Mama, from Together through life, is a classic variant blues song for which the lyrics were written by Bob Dylan and Robert Hunter (of Grateful Dead fame), the music being credited to Bob Dylan.   It has never been played on tour.

The song itself has links to Rollin and Tumblin, and Summer Days, by Dylan and indeed according to Eyolf Østrem it is related to “Weeping Willow” by Blind Boy Fuller.   I don’t get that last reference, but Eyolf Østrem knows stuff about guitar playing I can’t even imagine in my dreams, so I am sure he is right.  And besides Weeping Willow is a great song – do find it on the internet and listen – a great pleasure.

But back to this song.

A classic 12 bar blues written in B would go like this

• First line: B
• Second line (same lyrics as first line) E / B
• Third line: F#, E, B

The variant blues of which this is an example runs

• First line: E / B
• Second line (same lyrics as first line) E / B
• Third line: F#, E, B

So the change is simply the way the first line is accompanied – with the E chord added, not the B chord alone.

As for the lyrics, one might perhaps wonder why Robert Hunter was needed at this point especially if we look at the first verse…

I get the blues for you, baby, when I look up at the sun
I get the blues for you, baby, when I look up at the sun
Come back here, we can have some real fun

So it is a lost-love blues, as confirmed by verse 2.

Well, it’s early in the evening, and everything is still
Well, it’s early in the evening, and everything is still
One more time, I’m walking up on a heartbreak hill

As for the “chorus” which uses the same melodic and chordal approach we get

Shake, shake, mama; like a ship going out to sea
Shake, shake, mama; like a ship going out to sea
You took all my money and you give it to Richard Lee

And Richard Lee is…

Well yes, your guess is as good as mine.  I suppose it could be Colonel Richard Lee who emigrated from Shropshire to Virginia and became the largest landowner in the state, and was apparently the great-great-great grandfather of Robert E Lee and the great-grandfather of President Zachary Taylor.

And then we have “Judge Simpson” – is this the judge who was accused of lying under oath in a case involving his intern?

I have no idea, and I am hampered by not having a deep enough knowledge of American affairs.  But the writers have it in for the judge…

Down by the river, Judge Simpson walking around
Down by the river, Judge Simpson walking a-round
Nothing shocks me more than that old clown

It is interesting just how often Bob does write about judges – I remember seeing a list of hundreds of instances in his writing of judge themes.   The one I always think of first is the judge in “The Drifter’s Escape” but the list goes on and on.

I’m motherless, fatherless, almost friendless too
I’m motherless, fatherless, almost friendless too
It’s Friday morning on Franklin Avenue

There’s a Franklin Avenue in Milton Keynes a modern city about 30 miles from where I live – if you head north up the M1 from London towards Leeds you pass it at junction 14.  But there is one in Los Angeles – and indeed a Franklin Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.

Are we supposed to know which is which, or does it really not matter.  Were the two lyricists just having a spot of fun?  Did they set all this up so that people like me would spend a few hours hunting for clues?  Quite probably.

The song ends with

Shake, shake, mama; raise your voice and pray
Shake, shake, mama; raise your voice and pray
If you’re goin on home, ya better go the shortest way

And what exactly does that mean?   Does it mean her immortal soul is in danger, or that there are drunks out and kids with knives out and about on the street?

That’s the problem.  When we start analysing there is nowhere to go because we have no points of reference.  So maybe the analysis is not relevant here, and all we need to do is sit back and enjoy the fun.

Which brings me to a last point: it is fun.  So why not give it the occasional outing at a gig?

You tell me, cos I don’t know.  But I enjoy it, and am very happy to listen to it.  But then, I like these rockabilly blues songs.

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

1989 for Bob Dylan was the year of visiting dark places both real and imagined.  A year of getting stuck in the mud.  A year of dreams, wherein reality fades in and out until finally it can’t be recalled any more.  A year, ultimately, of the fear of being lost forever.  Of being so far gone there is no way back.

This year, perhaps more than any other, really does need the Chronology – the list of Dylan compositions in the order they were written, not in the order they were released on albums.  For it is only by hearing them in the order of writing that we can see Bob’s movement of this year, as he is drawn along by the tide rather than striding out along his own path.  Only by hearing the whole collection can we understand the individual compositions.

Indeed if ever in some strange fantasy land Bob’s record company came to me and said, “Hey Tony, we’d like you to create an album of Bob’s songs that has some sort of overall meaning beyond being a compilation of your favourites” I’d say, “here’s an album called ‘1989: The dark is just beginning”.  But the tracks have to be in the order in which they were written.”

That running order tht I demand is

Now the series of songs makes sense when heard in that order, and we can see, for example, why “Series of Dreams” didn’t make it onto an album.  It makes sense within the context of my mythical album “1989” but far less sense anywhere else.  For “1989” is an album about dreams and nightmares.  About reaching out to reality, and then being betrayed by it so totally that in the end it isn’t there.

In this sequence of songs more than in any other I can think of, the old certainties are long, long since gone.  We can communicate no longer.  We can try, but no matter how hard we try, our attempts to communicate end up as futile gestures.   Most of the time we can get through, but ultimately we are devoured by the Man in the Long Black Coat, the ultimate embodiment of the dark.

Born in Time which started this year gives us a hint of what was to come as Bob tells us of loss, loss, total loss

You were snow, you were rain
You were stripes, you were plain
Oh babe, truer words
Have not been spoken
or broken.

The theme of people by-passing each other stayed with Dylan through the much of the year for as we move on to songs like “What was it you wanted?” it is there again, but by this time our attempts at communication and at grasping the meaning are overpowered by our feelings of the utter uncertainty of the world around us.

Think mist, misunderstanding, two people by-passing each other, just missing each other in the fog, passing on opposite sides of the road never knowing the other was there; a world in which nothing is clear…and just in case we still haven’t got it, just listen to those echoes of the harmonica.  Talk about skeleton keys in the rain…

“What was it you wanted?” is planted right at the heart of this series of uncertainties, as the fog not only wraps itself around the people, but also about their meanings and their very existence.  Now we can’t even be sure we are still where we thought we were…

Is the scenery changing
Am I getting it wrong
Is the whole thing going backwards
Are they playing our song?
Where were you when it started
Do you want it for free
What was it you wanted
Are you talking to me?

Isolation is total.  There is nothing save disassociation, falling apart, the failure of all communication and understanding, and it sure isn’t what pop and rock songs normally delve into.

Bob certainly was experimenting in this year as What was it you wanted is followed by other explorations such as Everything is Broken and then the Series of Dreams.

Most of the Time takes another twist on this world of dislocation, for here Little Boy Lost is back and admits

I don’t even notice she’s gone
Most of the time

and we know, of course, that is just an absolute and total piece of self-deception, made possible by the ever enclosing all-pervading dark.

That dreadful emptiness is so totally encapsulated within the song it is hard to imagine how Bob could have suddenly popped up with TV Talking Song but he did because this is another way to encapsulate the total meaninglessness of existence.  The trick is that it all appears to make sense but doesn’t, as that final brilliant outpouring of the year with  Man in a Long Black Coat shows us totally.   The dark makes no sense at all.

But people don’t live or die people just float
She went with the man in the long black coat.

Rarely has Dylan written more poignant, sad, desperate lines.   There’s nothing, simply nothing; everything is broken.  Take away the hope and all is lost.  We live in a world of nothingness.  We have no idea what we wanted, why we wanted it, where we were when we wanted it, or where we thought we might be going.

This is, for me, an amazing collection of songs that talk of desperation and loss, and which allow the listener to move inside the songs and appreciate what it is like, but then move outside of the songs again and look at it all as if we were watching a movie, and all without remaining trapped within.

If “Visions of Johanna” is written from the perspective of the outside observer watching Louise, Johanna and Little Boy Lost, this is the year Dylan got inside the head of Little Boy Lost and looked out at the world around him.

He was no longer a little boy for now he has grown up, but he iss still utterly, totally, desperately, lost.

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Attwood

Seven Deadly Sins is one of the songs on Travelling Wilburys Vol 3 that has the sound and feel of being a Dylan song.  Indeed the video (below) makes this quite clear in the way that it focuses on Bob from the start to  the finish.

Quite how the song was recorded and re-mixed, and how much time Bob spent with the band, is a little open to dispute, but in the absence of other evidence it is probably safe to go along with Heylin’s notion that all the rest of the band felt the whole thing was a good idea, but they didn’t really have too many songs ready for the occasion.  So Bob did his songs.

The word “cheesy” comes to my mind by which I mean, rather corny.  You only have to listen to the opening line to know that it is a tribute to a slow 1950s doo-wop type of music that might be associated with a B side of a 78rpm by the Platters or the Teenagers.

There’s no harm in a tribute to this type of music, but to my mind there is a lot of doo-wop that is far superior to this.  But then I guess if Bob was contemplating something more original he probably would have kept it for himself.   Starting out with “Seven, Seven, Seven” as a way of building the harmony is rather … ordinary.

I say this because normally that build up of the harmonies by a doo-wap group heralds a song about love, lost love or dance.   I am far from being an expert on doo-wap, so I am struggling for examples, but “At the hop” by Danny and the Juniors comes to mind as a faster song which builds the harmonies in the same way and then tells us

Well, you can rock it you can roll it
You can slop and you can stroll it at the hop
When the record starts spinnin’
You chalypso when you chicken at the hop
Do the dance sensation that is sweepin’ the nation at the hop

Danny and The Juniors – At The Hop (1958) – YouTube  (I love the way they made the guys dress up in suits in order to mime).

Anyway, Bob’s lyrics are probably as meaningful at the start as those of  Artie Singer, John Medora, and David White.

Seven, seven, seven–deadly sins
That’s how the world begins
Watch out when you step in
For seven deadly sins
Seven deadly sins
That’s when the fun begins
(Seven deadly sins)

But then there is the twist – because Bob isn’t going to tell us about the deadly sins from the Bible (envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth and wrath) but rather his own list…

(Sin number one) was when you left me
(Sin number two) you said goodbye
(Sin number three) was when you told me a little white lie

(Sin number four) was when you looked my way
(Sin number five) was when you smiled
(Sin number six) was when you let me stay
Sin number seven was when you touched me and told me why

So the lady gets it both ways – one set for leaving him and one set for coming back again with a PS for giving him an explanation.  And that is it.  It’s all right for a couple of plays, but I wonder has anyone played it over and over (as I most certainly did when I first heard “Where were you last night?”)

The problem is that the song has just one musical idea and one lyrical idea, and neither of them is strong enough to carry the song through into something that we want to hear over and over.  It’s a bit of fun.  Nothing wrong with that, but it is just a bit of fun.

The chord sequence in the chorus is the standard for slow doo-wap – in this case A, F#m, D, E (or to be very precise E6).

The verse also has a standard sequence for this type of music; the piece modulates in almost classical style from A to D and then off we go.

D, E, A, A7

D, B7, E, F#m, E7

The only other comment I can make is that I read one review of the song which suggested it is a waltz.  Maybe I am getting senile but I can’t possibly see how this is a waltz – to me it is in standard four time, plodding along at 1, 2, 3, 4 throughout.

Yes, its ok as a knockaround, but it is a shame that all this stupendous talent could not have spent a little more time and put together something more original, as they did on the first album, and as I have intimated, as Dylan did later on this album with “Where were you last night.”

If this turned up on the Basement Tapes it would be fine, but this was a supergroup and I just think they could have done better.

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Attwood

It seems to me there are two explanations here.  Either I don’t quite see the point of Bye and Bye beyond it being a chance to quote some Shakespeare, sing a bit of a Billie Holliday song, and play diminished chords, or there is no point.  I’m not sure which.

But this it Bob, so I am it is just me being a bit stupid.   Anyway, let’s take the points in order.  First off, the Shakespeare comes from As You Like It,

Bob sings

Well, I’m scufflin’ and I’m shufflin’ and I’m walkin’ on briars
I’m not even acquainted with my own desires

and some 400 years before that Shakespeare in As You Like It had Rosalind say

No, some of it is for my child’s father. O, how
full of briers is this working-day world!

and elsewhere in the same scene

I do beseech your grace,
Let me the knowledge of my fault bear with me:
If with myself I hold intelligence
Or have acquaintance with mine own desires,
If that I do not dream or be not frantic,–
As I do trust I am not–then, dear uncle,
Never so much as in a thought unborn
Did I offend your highness.

The scene is the one in which the Duke reveals he is jealous of how people look at Rosalind so is going to send her into exile – the sort of crazy thing that seemed to happen in these stories.   But Bob’s song doesn’t really have anything much to do with Shakespeare or those images, so I am not quite sure if there was any point here.

As for the diminished chord this is a particular type of four note chord found in swing, but not normally used in pop, and never used in blues.  And I think rarely if ever used in Dylan – but I’d have to go through every song to say exactly where he might have used it before.

Finally, the original song on which Bob seems to have based the whole idea, here it is

What Dylan does however is remove much of the melody to no really good effect so we do have long sections where the tune seems to vanish totally to give us singing on one note.

Besides this Bob is being fairly dark compared with both the Shakespeare and the Holliday.   One review suggested that it has “the sentiments of a scary stalker”.

That might be a bit harsh as an understanding of lines like

“The future for me is already past / You were my first love, you will be my last.”

but then it could also just be a melancholic reflection on his feelings.

But on the other hand … I hear a love song in the first two verses

Bye and bye, I’m breathin’ a lover’s sigh
I’m sittin’ on my watch so I can be on time
I’m singin’ love’s praises with sugar-coated rhyme
Bye and bye, on you I’m casting my eye

I’m paintin’ the town—swinging my partner around
I know who I can depend on, I know who to trust
I’m watchin’ the roads, I’m studying the dust
I’m paintin’ the town making my last go-round

However  then we get the Shakespearean couplet

Well, I’m scufflin’ and I’m shufflin’ and I’m walkin’ on briars
I’m not even acquainted with my own desires

Then an intermediate section which seems to suggest that he knows he is fooling himself

I’m rollin’ slow—I’m doing all I know
I’m tellin’ myself I found true happiness
That I’ve still got a dream that hasn’t been repossessed
I’m rollin’ slow, goin’ where the wild roses grow

Well the future for me is already a thing of the past
You were my first love and you will be my last

After which it all goes a little crazy…

Papa gone mad, mamma, she’s feeling sad
I’m gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more
I’m gonna establish my rule through civil war
Gonna make you see just how loyal and true a man can be

And I have to admit I don’t really get this at all unless this is an attempt to put the whole of As You Like It, into a song.  Quite an amazing idea if it is.   Would someone like to explain this to me because your reviewer has finally found himself beaten.

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob  Dylan And Arthur Rimbaud

By Larry Fyffe

In the sunlight, able to roam the organic countryside in his youth, Bob Dylan’s naturally drawn to the poetry of the Romantic nature poets, i.e., Robert Burns:

“Well my heart’s in the Highlands, gentle and fair
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart’s in the Highlands
I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go”

The world of youthful innocence loses out to the world of adult experience in the concrete city, and the songwriter’s perspective darkens all round:

“Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page
Same old rat race, life in the same old cage”
(Dylan: Highlands)

The melancholic poetry of John Keats, with sight of beechen-green bowers lost, is more attuned to the somber situation:

“The walls of pride are high and wide
Can’t see over to the other side
It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay
And sadder still to feel your heart torn away”
(Dylan: Cold Iron Bounds)

Bob Dylan turns to the surrealistic, often vulgar, visions of poet Arthur Rimbaud, especially to the Symbolist’s upside-down, right-side up transformation of children’s fairy tales (like “Cinderella”, “Sleeping Beauty”, and “The Ugly Duckling) that deal with Christian-backed black-and-white morality, a morality that promises paradise for good little boys and girls:

“One fine morning, in the country of a very gentle people
A magnificent man and woman were shouting in the public square
‘My friends, I want her to be queen’
‘I want to be queen’
She was laughing and trembling
He spoke to their friends of revelations, of trials completed
They swooned against each other
In fact, they were regents for the whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses
And for the whole afternoon as they moved toward groves of palm trees”
(Arthur Rimbaud: Royalty)

And likewise, as the poet personifies:

“I kissed the summer dawn
Before the palaces; nothing moved
The water lay dead
Battalions of shadows
Still kept the forest road
I walked, waking warm and vital breath
White stones watched
And wings rose soundlessly”
(Arthur Rimbaud: To The Dawn)

Now the singer/songwriter with a fairy tale of his own:

“Saddle me up my big white goose
Tie me on’er and let her loose
Oh me, oh my
Love that country pie”
(Bob Dylan: Country Pie)

And another, with a less happy ending:

“Cinderella, she seems so easy
‘It takes one to know one’, she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style…..
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row”
(Dylan: Desolation Row)

And from a glass-slipperless Cinderella to the Ugly Duckling-in-reverse:

“Well, I took me a womam late last night
I’s three-fourths drunk, she looked all right
Till she started peelin’ off her onion gook
She took off her wig, said: ‘How do I Iook?’ “
(Dylan: I Shall Be Free)

The singer also puts a Dylanesque twist on children’s rhymes:

“Handy Dandy, sitting with a girl named Nancy, in a garden feeling kind of lazy
He says ‘Ya want a a gun? I’ll give you one’; she says, ‘Boy, you talking crazy’
Handy Dandy, just like sugar and candy
Handy Dandy, pour him another brandy”
(Dylan: Handy Dandy)

The nursery rhyme version of  ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’:

“Let the wind blow low, let the wind blow high
One day the little boy and the little girl
were both baked in a pie”
(Bob Dylan: Under the Red Sky)

Footnote:  You might also be interested to read further on Rimbaud in the article “You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go: the line most commentators miss.“

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

This article was originally just about 1987 but on 13 May 2017 was re-written to take in 1988 as well, and answer the (very justifiable question) about the dating of songs around the time of Political World

In 1986 Bob was experimenting and looking for a new muse, a new way forward, a new style, a new approach.  To my mind, as I said in the review of that year, I don’t think he found what he was looking for.   The first two compositions of 1987, or perhaps it is the only composition of 1986 and the first of 1987 for me, show this unsuccessful searching continuing.   Neither Love rescue me nor Congratulations do anything for me at all.

But before I go further I am going to have to explain my thinking about the dates of writing these songs – and indeed a comment on the dating has alerted me to the fact that I was so wound up with talking about the music when I first wrote this review of the year, I didn’t explain my thinking on the dates.

I don’t think there is much doubt that Love Rescue me was written in 1987 – there is a recording of it from that year.  I suspect Congratulations comes from this time as well, but Dylan makes no mention of when he wrote it – his own commentary focuses on the next album.  Heylin places it in 1987/8 and I go with that.

Political World was not recorded until early 1989, but there is evidence that it was undergoing rewriting at that time, and indeed had already undergone quite a bit of re-writing.  What Good am I was also not recorded until 1989, but Heylin is quite sure (and this is the area where I do accept Heylin, since ploughing through notebooks and tapes is what he does) that

a) Political World was written before “What Good am I” and

b) the lyrics for “What Good am I” (if not the full melody) were written in early 1988 (“Still on the road”, page 406).

There is also a clear understanding in Heylin that “What Good am I” was written before “Dignity” and that “Dignity” (according to Chronicles) was written in January 1988 – but again it was not recorded until 1989.

Generally speaking Dylan songs have only been copyrighted after they have been recorded, and so this explains the dating system.

I am not saying these dates are perfect, and of course much depends on whether you date a song from the first appearance of the lyrics with a proto-melody that later changes, or whether you date it from the emergence of a version that is recorded with the band.  By and large (and where possible) I am working from the former.

So, to return to the issue of the songs over these two years, after “Love Rescue Me” and a lot of time not composing, suddenly, in that most extraordinary way that Bob can do it, he exploded, not once, not twice, but with three utterly different songs which really did express from three different perspectives, all that was on his mind.  They are different from the songs written previously in 1986, different from the songs of 1985, and different from each other.

They are however three, connected, but different, triumphs.

Political world is remarkable because as a song it shouldn’t work at all – virtually no melody, one chord only, but it powers along with the new found message which informs all three of the remaining songs in 1986: this world really has gone wrong.

And to be clear this is not the world gone wrong because people don’t follow Jesus Christ, not the world waiting for the redemption of the Second Coming, but just a world gone very very wrong.

We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
Houses are haunted, children are unwanted
The next day could be your last

We live in a political world
The one we can see and can feel
But there’s no one to check, it’s all a stacked deck
We all know for sure that it’s real

This is followed by the same message but from an utterly personal perspective: What good am I?   As I said in my review of the song, written a couple of years back, this is a real self-battering.  It is not just the world gone wrong, now it is the man gone wrong too.  The title asks it all, and the answer is very dark indeed.

And then we come to Dignity: what we need to get out of this social and personal mess is the ability to hold onto ourselves, to keep our sense of self-worth, but not let it blow out of all proportion.  For the issue we all face is not the issue of the world around us (although that can be horrible enough) but the way we perceive the world.  If we can have a genuine self-respect based on honourable behaviour we can survive.

In “What Good Am I” Dylan is saying is that in the end the only way out of the Little Boy Lost position he posits, is honesty out of which we get engagement, sympathy, kindness, support, understanding, empathy… these are the qualities of the really human and humane person.    Each verse says it all; take this for example

What good am I if I know and don’t do
If I see and don’t say, if I look right through you
If I turn a deaf ear to the thundering sky
What good am I?

What he then does is goes one step further and says, it is dignity (of which honesty is a pre-requisite) which encapsulates all these elements of being a good person.   If you have  engagement, sympathy, kindness, support, understanding, empathy, you can have dignity.

This is an astounding trilogy of songs, of which the full emotional impact and musical genius can only be understood if heard as a trilogy.  And the tragedy is that we don’t hear them as a trilogy, because they have never been released that way.  It is only by seeing the chronology of Dylan’s writing that we can understand.

Dylan, in these three superb songs, written one after the other, is engaging in the ultimate questions of the world: if the world itself is a mess, what should our personal response be.

I adore all three songs, but since I have set myself the bizarre task of choosing one from each year I nominate What Good Am I as my highlight of the year simply because not only is it great music, but it also attacks issues that are not dealt with in such a powerful way in any other song I can think of.

The nearest I can get to a song that touches on this topic with the same success as Dylan manages comes with “No Regrets” written by Tom Rush, and recorded by many many artists including the Walker Brothers.  Not because the songs sound alike (of course they don’t), but because in “No Regrets” the singer is utterly overwhelmed by regrets and desperately wants the woman back even though he says over and over “Don’t want you back”.   The point is, he is asking “what good am I?” as well, and finding that the answer is “not much at all”.

“No regrets” has always been for me an utterly powerful if not overwhelming song, in the same way that “What Good am I?” makes me just sit still and ponder my frailties.  Both remind me how hard I need to work to be even a moderately decent person.

But for Bob “What Good am I?” was part of an amazing journey through a trilogy of songs.  If you have a moment, and have never done it, play these three songs in sequence, and perhaps if you have a moment more, explore for yourself the profound meaning that they bring together, unifying the social and personal worlds, as they do.

Dylan then headed off into the world of the Wilburys, and I have looked at the whole pattern of those songs in the articles relating to the recording experience.  I see the Wilburys as fun, and two of the songs Tweeter and the monkey man and Like a Ship are good compositions, but I don’t see them as being up there with the greats.

Indeed I think the argument could be made that the Wilburys adventure actually diverted Dylan from what could have been a very strong period of writing following  Political world,  What good am I and Dignity.    I rather suspect that if there had been no Wilburys we might have seen a brilliant extension of that slowly emerging trilogy of songs that experienced the world in another way.

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

The feeling of angst and loneliness wrought by a society of spectator-consumers, with its ‘hollow men’, and its culture of tiresome repetition, TS Eliot captures through the images he uses in his poetry:

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

In his music and song lyrics, Bob Dylan seeks out a watchtower from which to sound the alarm, to warn his listeners not to accept passively the negative social consequences engendered by an economy of mass produced mediocrity:

“You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you”
(Dylan: Like A Rolling Stone)

Bob Dylan injects into his songs a feeling of vitality and movement that is lacking in TS Eliot’s city of the walking-dead:

“All along the Watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants too
Outside in the distance, a wild cat did growl
Two riders were approaching
The wind began to howl”
(Bob Dylan: All Along The Watchtower)

Allen Ginsberg revitalizes the form and content of poetry, and Dylan does the same with popular music from folk to rock-and-roll, in order to awaken the ‘hollow-eyed’ people to what is happening to them, surrounded and trapped as they are in an alienating militaristic and industrialized environment:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked
Dragging themselves through negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix”
(Allen Ginsberg: Howl)

Dylan utilizes the literary technique of the objective correlative to give substance to what the songwriter considers the spirit of vengence and anger prevailing over, and breaking the spirit of love and compassion that survives in modern times; the howling wind, the associated symbol of this  anger:

“The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven at my window with a broken wing”
(Dylan: Love Minus Zero)

Allen Ginsberg acknowledges his indebtedness to the imagist and symbolic poetry of Wiliam Blake in name, and by example:

“Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dymno in the machinery of the night…..
Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes, hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-like tragedy among
the scholars of war”
(Ginsberg: Howl)

Bob Dylan, the songster, by example:

“They walked along by the old canal
A little confused I remember well
And stopped by a strange hotel
With a neon burning bright
He felt the heat of the night”
(Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)

In his poetic lyrics, under the influence of Joseph Conrad, TS Eliot, habituated to the heart of darkness, cannot bear the light, so likewise expressed in the following song lyrics:

“So loud the music grew and grew
With ever greater pain
I stepped back in the shadows
For I could not stand the strain
I tried to look, my eyes were blind
I tried to speak, but could not find
The words to say”
(The Strawbs: Blue Angel)

For Wiliam Blake, Jesus and Lucifer are symbols of rebellion against the established order, rays of light, of hope, in the oppressive darkness. A sentiment expressed by Bob Dylan and other musicians:

“But the silver tongued devil’s got nothin’ to lose
I’ll only live till I die
We take our own chances and pay our own dues
The silver tongued devil and I”
(Kris Kristofferson: The Silver Tongued Devil And I)

Kristofferson studied the poetry of William Blake at university.

Now from a band that Dylan connects with:

“I set out running but I take my time
A friend of the devil is a friend of mine
If I get home before daylight
I just might get some sleep tonight”
(Grateful Dead: Friend Of The Devil)

Not to mention from Mick Jagger:

“Please to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer”
(Rolling Stones: Sympathy For The Devil)

And then there’s Bob Dylan himself:

“Somebody seen him hangin’ around
At the old dance hall on the outskirts of town
He looked into her eyes when she stopped him to ask
If he wanted to dance, he had a face like a mask
Somebody said from the Bible he’d quote
There was dust on the man in the long black coat”
(Dylan: Man In The Long Black Coat)

Says the Bible:

“How art thou fallen from the heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How are thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”
(Isaiah 14:12)

That the God of the Bible allows Mankind to be deceived into doing the devil’s work, and to follow Jesus, to rebel in the search of higher self-knowledge, is a lesson not lost on Bob Dylan: it’s a consistent theme of his art:

“Shake the dust off your feet, don’t look back
Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack
Temptation’s not an easy thing, Adam given the devil reign
Because he sinned, I got no choice, it run in my vein…..
Well, I’m pressin’ on
To the higher calling of my Lord”
(Dylan: Pressing On)

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Attwood

Article updated 13 September 2019

This 12 bar blues variation comes from Love and Theft, and was played 159 times on stage between 2001 to 2016.  Clearly Bob enjoyed it, as he always does with these blues variations.

In relation to this song Heylin quotes Dylan saying he would take a song he knew and then “at a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song”.   Heylin continues “In this instance the point when the words began  to change came some time after the first verse, lifted verbatim from Leroy Carr’s Blues before Sunrise”

I did earlier suggest that this was not the case, but Larry has helped me out on this one, as Dylan does use the line “I’m (just) sittin’ here thinking with my mind a million miles away”

But that 1934 classic doesn’t sound anything like Dylan’s song, which is itself more closely related to Muddy Waters “Lonesome Day”, which Heylin also mentions.

But I still have my suspicion about the whole Heylin review because although he does get the reference to the WC Fields movie “The Fatal Glass of Beer” with the line “It ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast” Heylin makes a mistake which I am absolutely certain about.

For anyone who loves the early days of the talkies, and in particular the comedy of WC Fields, this short movie is a classic, and it contains a classic line, “It ain’t a fit night out…”  That line became so famous, people would for years (on both sides of the Atlantic) quote it.  Most people knew it, and knew what happened.

But Heylin quotes the scene as one in which Fields gets water thrown over him – but it was snow – and the snow is a fundamental part of the film.   It’s a detail, but it feels important to me.

The short film has Fields and his co-star say the “man nor beast” phrase around half a dozen times, and each time a handful of snow hits him straight in the face.  By the fourth time Fields doesn’t even get to the final word before the snow hits.  It is incredibly silly, and funny for aficionados of Fields’ movies and shows the sort of deadpan acting he most certainly was a mega mega star in his day.  (The Bank Dick is his most famous film – if you are tempted to try one of his films try this one, and if you like his one liners there are many of them on the internet.  I quite like, “Last week I went to Philadelphia but it was closed.”)

But I am not sure that these sources (apart from Fields, Heylin finds several others such as Virgil’s Aeneid) really matter.  The point is surely in the first verse…

Well, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day
Yeah, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day
I’m just sittin’ here thinking
With my mind a million miles away

That tells us where Bob is and what he is doing.  He’s letting his mind wander, here, there and everywhere else.  His thoughts drift and vary about all the things that have happened to him.  He’s left his lover, his family has either died or left, his friend has come and gone, and he tries a bit of homespun philosophy.

Well, the road’s washed out—weather not fit for man or beast
Yeah the road’s washed out—weather not fit for man or beast
Funny, how the things you have the hardest time parting with
Are the things you need the least.

And what if we have got some WC Fields, Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer” and Junichi Saga’s “Confessions of a Yakuza” all quoted herein?  OK, one up to Heylin for spotting these – I only recognised the WC Fields, and that because I was introduced to his movies as a child by my father – but surely the point is better made that Dylan is thinking back to the old times, be they personal events or a film or the books.

Isn’t that what the 40 miles verse implies…

I’m forty miles from the mill—I’m droppin’ it into overdrive
I’m forty miles from the mill—I’m droppin’ it into overdrive
Settin’ my dial on the radio
I wish my mother was still alive

And for the man sitting around doing nothing except day remembering the old days it all sounds and feels as if somehow the world has passed us by and we maybe never got fully involved…

Last night the wind was whisperin’, I was trying to make out what it was
Last night the wind was whisperin’ somethin’—I was trying to make out what it was
I tell myself something’s comin’
But it never does

In the end the singer’s contemplation of his past seems to end with a day dream of him becoming the Messiah…

I’m gonna spare the defeated—I’m gonna speak to the crowd
I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys, I’m going to speak to the crowd
I am goin’ to teach peace to the conquered
I’m gonna tame the proud

But somehow amazingly in the midst of all this, he’s still got his lady.  She needs him and he needs her, even if everything else in life has fallen apart.

Well the leaves are rustlin’ in the wood—things are fallin’ off of the shelf
Leaves are rustlin’ in the wood—things are fallin’ off the shelf
You gonna need my help, sweetheart
You can’t make love all by yourself

It is a great fun blues to play with your pals.  That doesn’t make it a great song, but it of its type it is a very good song, and doesn’t deserve the sort of put down with errors that Heylin offers.  If in years to come when Bob is but a memory, they want a blues song to encapsulate Bob’s compositions in the genre, Bob’s everyday compositions that he so loved to play on tour, his one certainly does the trick.

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

In the poems containing William Blake’s personal mythology, Air/Wind represents the breath of life within the individual, the vitalistic spirit, tangled up in an unbalanced state along with three other elements: Water (power), Fire (emotion), and Earth (imagination).

The psyche’s imbalance expands to the social structure at large, and results in cold and distant reason, reinforced by violence, (symbolized by the Tiger), dominating human life to the detriment of intuition, and the emotion of alturistic love (symbolized by the Lamb).

In modern times, on the macro-level, the Industrial Revolution rationalizes the mass production of goods, while objective science takes over the search for knowledge.

The written poems of William Blake transform the precise language of science into the flexible metaphors of art:

“Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly”
(William Blake: Love’s Secret)

For Blake, since the wind blows in all different directions, it’s a metaphor for the never-ending struggle to balance the situation one is in with the desire for individual freedom, a dilemma out of which there is no easy means to escape, no absolute answer thereto, excepting death.

Bob Dylan employs the poetic device in his song lyrics:

“As I went out one morning
To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s
I spied the fairest damsel
That ever did walk in chains”
(Dylan: As I Went Out This Morning)

Dylan hopes for a future change in the weather for the better, but the direction of the  wind indicates that the case may be otherwise:

“Yes, and how many years can people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just dosen’t see
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind”
(Dylan: Blowin’ In The Wind)

Dylan, echoing Blake: love need not to be expressed by words that flow breath-like through the teeth, but instead by the vitalistic spirit that shines forth so brightly from within:

“My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true like ice, like fire”
(Dylan: Love Minus Zero)

But, though it’s best to celebrate life, Dylan sings that there are external forces that can be harmful over which one has little control:

“The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing”

Bob Dylan pulls up images from the poems of William Blake to show that he doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing; the singer sees some signs of hope, however:

“And them Caribbean winds still blow from  Nassau to Mexico
Fanning the flames in the furnace of desire
And them distant ships of liberty on them iron waves so bold and free
Brings everything that’s near to me
nearer to the fire”
(Dylan: Caribbean Wind)

Almost always double-edged, Dylan sings that not even his art will save him from physical death, from taking his last breath; it’s a tale told an idiot, signifying nothing:

“Idiot wind
Blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe”
(Dylan: Idiot Wind)

The hour is getting late, but the Romantic idealism about liberty that William Blake expresses in his rebel-devil poetry, cheers on double-horned Bob Dylan in his fight against the reactionary views of TS Eliot in the captain’s tower:

“May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift”
(Dylan: Forever Young)

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

I have often talked with friends about the fact that none of us knows what goes on in the parts of the world around us which are out of our normal vision.  You might have an idea of what an orchestral rehearsal is like, or what a crime scene investigation is like, from seeing something on TV, but this is undoubtedly sanitised and not what it is really like.  Not least because you don’t see the bits in-between the action.

But everywhere people who share an enthusiasm get together to do whatever it is they enjoy doing, and they don’t bother to tell the rest of the world about it – or if they do, they never tell the true story because in effect you have to be there to appreciate it.

I have taken friends and family to football (“soccer”) matches in stadia large and small and despite having seen it on TV they are bemused, amazed, overwhelmed at the noise, passion, anger, laughter, regulations, language, tribal rituals etc.

I have seen people who have never been to a jive dancing club come in and just stand at the door with their mouths open.  They might have watched “Strictly” (a very popular BBC TV dance programme) but nothing prepares them for what we do.  The way we get up close, know what each other is doing, and then nonchalantly say “thanks” and move on to another partner…

If you have never been out in the open sea in a yacht, if you’ve never been on a big political protest march or rally, if you’ve never worked in the theatre, if you’ve never collected money for a charity… you just can’t imagine what it is really like.

There are many such examples that could be given, but I will stop here because I can now get to my point about this song.  If you have never played in a band that is not specifically rehearsing for a live performance, but instead is just kicking ideas around and having fun, you won’t know what it is like, and may well find it hard to understand why the guys spent so many hours larking about with silly songs like “I’m your teenage prayer”.

Why would Bob write down all these lyrics, and evolve this tune and set of three different chord sequences JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT?

It’s a bit like me going jiving several nights a week.  I’ve no thought of being a professional dancer, I am way too old anyway, but I am there because I meet my friends and because it is fun.  And likewise, in my years playing in unsuccessful semi-pro bands we had evenings where we played around like this, just because we could and because it was fun.   Some of our friends were in the pub, some were playing football (soccer), some were chatting up members of the opposite sex.  One guy spent his time putting together radios from spare parts.  Just because it was fun.

So when I read the comment that, “If the song or these sessions were really just a goof, these guys wouldn’t have kept trying to build a tune instead of enjoying the laugh,” I have to disagree profoundly.

Think of it, perhaps, like an alternative to spending an evening with friends down the pub or in a bar.  People do it for the friendship, for the chatter, to get out of the house, to pass the time, but not because it is going to lead somewhere.  They do it because this is their life.

So it is here.  It is for itself, not because it is going somewhere.

This song is based around three commonplace chord sequences from 1950s doo-wap.  The verse starts out with

C, Am, F, G

an absolute classic progression.

Then the first change

C, C7, F, D7

And then the middle 8 (bridge)

F, D7, C, C7, F, D7, G…

These are classic moves which anyone familiar with 1950s music would know and be able to play without even thinking – no rehearsing necessary.  You hear the first change and then you know, as a musician, exactly where it is going.

There is a real glory to be had by playing along on such occasions, seeing where the music goes, and… larking about, which is what happens here, as Richard Manuel (I believe) throws in his own very dubious sounding extra lines with their highly improper suggestions of an older man approaching a very much younger woman.

That of course is not funny, although it was a lot less not funny (if you see what I mean) when it was recorded.  But the joke (if you find it amusing) is entirely in the way the lines are spoken by the second voice.  What is being suggested by the second voice is unacceptable.  What is suggested by Dylan’s singing is that he’s a wannabe kid at the small town club, up on stage, hoping that the local girls will find him attractive.

As the haiku that was created around it says

I’m your teenage prayer,
Just the kind of boyfriend that
You always wanted.

That’s Dylan’s version. The second voice subverts it all and becomes what we would have called in my youth the sound of “a dirty old man”.  (I’m not sure if the meaning of that phrase translates into American, but its the best I can do).

Normally of course such larking around is never recorded and never kept but this is a fun record of Dylan at this time having fun with his musician pals.

Take a look and when it’s cloudy all the time
All you gotta do is say you’re mine
I come runnin’ anywhere
Take a look at me baby
I’m your teenage prayer

Take a look at me baby
I’m your teenage dream
Take a look at me baby
I’m your teenage dream
(Yes and I’m a dream)

There is nothing here but the guys passing the time of day, but its good that they captured what they did and how they did it.  Like having a chance to watch a great actor in early rehearsals, this is a most valuable artefact.

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order below on this page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Larry Fyffe

As far as PreRomantic poet William Blake was concerned, the essential elements composing the Universe  (earth, air, water, and fire), poetically speaking, are unbalanced within the human psyche:

“Does the spring hide its joy
When buds and blossoms grow?
Does the sower
Sow by night?
Or the ploughman in the darkness plow?”
(Blake: The Earth Answers)

According to Blake, Mother Earth, having given birth to a creature able to imagine, to contemplate its own existence, has been undermined by the rise of the male component of power (water) with its spirit (air)of rationalism, a characteristic associated with Apollo, the Sun God, in Greek mythology.

The female component, accused by the new order, of being the authoress of her own demise due to her unrestrained curiousity, the value of intuition and emotion are down-graded; dogmatic religion and the scientific method established as the accepted means to acquire knowledge.

It is incumbent on the true artist, asserts Blake, is to alert human beings about their ‘fallen’ state:

So too, Bob Dylan:

“There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief
Business men, they drink my wine
Ploughmen dig my earth
None of them along the line
Know what any of it is worth”
(Bob Dylan: All Along The Watchtower)

Because of her beauty, the Victorian poet Robert Graves, like the Romantic poets before him, idealizes the Goddess Mother Earth, associated with the close-by, ever-changing Greek Moon Goddess Diana:

“All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo’s golden mean –
In search of which we sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom we desired above all things to know
Sister of the mirage and echo”
(Robert Graves: The White Goddess)

As said, Blake envisions Mother Earth as representing the Imagination; Transcendental Romanticism results.

Bob Dylan, on the macro as well as the micro, or the individual Muse level does too, but his desire for renewed artistic expression leads him to escape from the countryside to the city, to Desolation Row, in search of a different perspective, a fiery view that comes from more than a small-town blacksmith shop –  but with some regret:

“Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand
And rivers that ran through every day
I must have been mad
I never knew what I had
Until I threw it all away”
(Dylan: I Threw It All Away)

But throw it all away he did, and with the inspiration of a newfound female Muse, his creative spirit takes flight, creating a music-based synaesthesia-filled art form that links together the fragmented  images of the always-awake cityscape that stimulates all the senses, all the time:

“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’rd tryin’to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind”
(Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

What is on the site

1: Over 390 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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