Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

Prologue

When working on the review of Someone’s got a hold of my heart / Tight connection to my heart it became clear to me (if it wasn’t already) just how many Dylan fans really believed that Dylan had got the re-writing of this song totally wrong.  He had taken a perfectly good song, and if not spoiled it, had done something to make it less of a song than it originally was.

Of course that one example doesn’t mean Dylan has no sense of what’s what in his music.  If he didn’t know how to do it we wouldn’t have such masterpieces as Visions of Johanna, Desolation Row, It’s alright ma and so on, all of which were released on albums soon after being written.

But there are some songs – maybe not that many but I would contend that there are indeed quite a few – which represent Dylan at the height of his powers and which were (for reasons that were not immediately clear) simply not released on a mainstream album.  The most obvious overwhelming examples for me are Caribbean Wind and Mississippi.    Of course not everyone will agree, but if we add “Blind Willie McTell” and perhaps “Dignity” to the list, you begin to see where I am going with this.

The list could go on and on, including Mama you been on my mind and of course there was a period when Dylan deliberately created a whole tape of songs which were offered to other performers with the guarantee that Dylan would not release them.

That we can see as a deliberate artistic decision.  And likewise we can excuse the non-release (at least at first) of Ballad for a friend – a composition of monumental achievement for such a young writer, which was probably set aside by the A&R man as being “too morbid for today’s audience.”  Although that doesn’t explain why Bob didn’t bring it up for inclusion on a later album when he had full artistic control.

And indeed as we move on into the era when Bob wasn’t writing for other people and was in total control of what he would put on each album we find songs such as “Up to Me” not being used.  And even if the album was full of quality songwriting, why not hold it for the next album?   And all that comes before “Abandoned Love” – and believe me if by any chance you don’t know this, you really should go and listen (the review has a couple of very different versions available within it – if the links are broken when you get there, go searching).

And so it goes on through the lists of Dylan compositions including some that are so obscure that they haven’t even appeared on out take collections.  Consider I once knew a man for example – once used as part of a TV show, and then left.   Songs like that just add to the feeling that Dylan has abandoned more brilliant works in his notebooks than most acclaimed songwriters have actually completed and had published.  And I haven’t even got to songs where Dylan on stage has evolved a version that is so brilliant they ought to be included on an album even if there is already a version on a studio CD, (When He Returns being one of my favourite examples).

Why then does this happen?  Why doesn’t Bob see songs like I see them?  And can I really argue with his selection?  He is after all the master songwriter, and I’m just a commentator who writes a few songs for fun.

These are the questions I am trying to answer.  And to make sense of a whole raft of varying ideas I have divided what I want to say into a set of short sections.  I’m hoping this makes the possible explanations for this seemingly odd behaviour easier to follow.

1: Musicians are different from other artists

All creative artists experiment.  Art galleries and museums are full of the sketch books of the great painters (often kept in the basement or revealed for special short-run exhibitions).  Choreographers spend forever working and re-working possibilities of their dances in the rehearsal studios – experiments which are set aside (although often videoed but not released to the public) as the dancers work towards their final performance.

Playwrights might well re-work their plays to accommodate a cast, but the result normally dies with the end of the run.  The play as published remains the play.  Photographers might take a hundred shots of one scene, and discard almost all of them, if not all of them.   Yes, later these photos might be made available for the real enthusiast, but generally it is the one chosen image that remains selected.

So, I contend, all artists in all art forms are liable to create multiple versions of their work.  But it is only in recent times with digitalisation that we have a chance to hear the early and alternative versions of songs which were part of the experimental process.  But what Dylan does in re-working and abandoning pieces of music is the way of song writers.  Indeed there is the reporting of the conversation that Dylan had with Leonard Cohen, with Cohen saying that it took him a year to write a song while Dylan wrote a piece in half an hour.  Cohen would have re-written line after line (even word after word) of the song to craft it as he wanted it.

But Dylan doesn’t work like this.  He works fast and then changes arrangements with the band to get the final recording he likes – or he abandons a song because he can’t get it right.  Sometimes (but less often) he goes back and re-works later so that ultimately we get many different versions of songs.  Desolation Row, revived in a new form for the 2017 tour is one perfect example.

Yes Dylan works fast, and as a consequence he often just moves on, ever busy, ever touring.  Rarely is Bob’s interest in the past as it was.  He is much more interested in re-writing the past and delivering the new.  So he would sooner offer us the new, rather than something that for him is old (even if we have never had the chance to hear it before).

But such an explanation is only the beginning.

2: Pop and rock music are open to far more criticism than other art forms because of the popularity

This makes the judgement of music much harder to undertake, because from its origins in the 1950s there has been a near-universal interest in what’s new in rock, not the old, and the new is now emerging at an unprecedented speed.  As a result judgements are made instantly, the reviews are written, and retrospectives tend to have to wait a while.

Yes we still like the old – like many people I’ve got hundreds of CDs in the house, and I play them, but the essence of pop and rock has always been the new.  I think Dylan doesn’t have this vision with other people’s music, but he does with his own.  He re-writes the old successes, but doesn’t bother with the past “failures” (“failures” in his eyes and ears, not ours).

What’s more although the critics are everywhere covering all the arts – but the criticism is much more public in popular music than in other art forms simply because so many people are listening and giving their views.   A new play may open and the critics might give their views, but only a few people will get to see it.  A new CD is released and immediately everyone interested will hear at least extracts from it, judgements will be instant, and the verdict is set.  “Oh Mercy” was brilliant, “Red Sky” was rubbish.  That sort of thing.

It is hard to recover from a bad critical start with an album – whereas the playwright, the director and the producer can go back and make changes, and try again.

As we can see from the Chronology of Dylan’s song writing as shown on this site Dylan has regularly had periods where he has simply stopped writing, before re-emerging with a complete new set of songs.   He seems to be a man who accepts the desire for the new – whether it be a totally new song, or a completely new version of an old favourite.

3: Other popular art does get it wrong too 

Dylan’s activities as a songwriter are incredibly open to public debate in a way that most artists in most art forms are not subjected to.

Take TV series as an example.  The first step in evolving a new series is to set out the format idea and offer it to a few production companies, or a TV station that commissions work.

If the idea gets past that stage (which can be long and tedious and involves a lot of people throwing in their opinions) then next step is the making of a pilot episode.  If that  is considered to be ok by the powers that be, it is shown to an audience in a small theatre, the audience then filling in questionnaires about how they felt about the programme.

Sometimes the idea falls at that stage, sometimes there is the request for changes or even (rarely, but it can still happen) the making of a second pilot, and then if finally all goes well, a series is commissioned.    After that it is all down to the ratings – if they are not good enough, the who idea is dropped after series one – and most certainly a lot of shows get through all the trial stages, make a series and then vanish.

So even with all this checking and cross-checking, TV series can get it terribly wrong.

But Dylan doesn’t have any of this.  Certainly by the time of “Another Side”, if not with the making of “Times they are a changin'” Dylan had complete artistic control in relation to what was going to be on the album.   But he has never had much to base this power on, other than his own genius.  Which is quite a powerful base to call upon, of course, but even utter geniuses can make huge mistakes in terms of their art.

In short, while a lot of art requires a lot of people to come into line and agree that everything should look like this and be like that, with Dylan’s albums from a very early stage, this has not been the case.  He’s made judgements of his own, and it is not a criticism of him to say that sometimes he’s got things wrong.  It is just how it goes.

Now, moving on, for the next points, I want to look at the issue of art and the artist.

4: It is hard to judge your own art

Of course Bob Dylan has more talent in his little finger than I have in my whole being, but even so I’ve more or less managed to earn my living across the years by writing, and I had to learn very early on how hard it was to judge my own creative work.

In the early days I was endlessly surprised by this.  Some writing that I thought was ok, but not much more, was accepted by publishers, newspapers, magazines etc, while other pieces that I thought were superb were utterly rejected and no one would touch them.  Gradually as time went by and in the very specialist field I work in, I became better known – and of course I gained more experience, and I learned who to listen to and how to judge my own work.  There’s nothing unusual in this, all the other people I know in the creative arts have similar experiences – and if not they have by and large given up and take up another job.

What changed my vision of my own work was the combination of the fact that some books simply never ever got published despite my spending months or years on them and offering them to every publisher under the sun, and the occasion in which I submitted a book that got the most vitriolic rejection letter I ever received (and I got quit a few).

This rejection was really vicious.  Being fairly battle scarred by then, and having a little more faith in my own writing than in earlier times, I continued to offer the book around, and soon after got it published by Oxford University Press (just about the most prestigious publisher for the subject).  It became a best seller in its field.

So, sometimes my judgement is right, sometimes not.  I’m not a great writer by any means but I’ve had a lot published, and in terms of both public sales and (in recent years hits on internet sites) I am still very fallible.  Talking to other people in the creative arts, I don’t think this is so unusual.

5: Many artists keep the work private

I don’t think anyone has done a proper survey on the subject but I get the feeling that Dylan is quite unusual in having all his proto-songs available in the public domain.  Partly this is because of his working technique in which he writes songs in the studio and tries them out with the band – sometimes without the words or melody or much else written as yet.

If we take To fall in love with you for example, this is regarded by many (and certainly by me) as a wonderful song, even though the words are clearly only half formed.  Why Dylan chose to abandon it we don’t know, but abandon it he did.  We only know of it because the tape of the session survived.

Have other artists dismissed work of such quality as they have gone along?  I doubt that there are many; Dylan’s ability is to conjure melodies and chords out of nowhere and just play them.  But since much of the time he can do it so easily and with seemingly so little effort, he seems to leave incomplete songs scattered where ever he goes.  Lesser artists abandon less, I suspect, because they have less to abandon.

But perhaps it is more interesting to ask why he doesn’t go back to some of these past masterpieces at a time when he is finding composition more difficult.  He has after all done it on occasion (although not that often).

I think the answer lies in his fascination with and love of the newly created songs.  The old become familiar and are discarded, at least until totally new versions can be released – then they become new again.

6: Dylan believes nothing is fixed

Bob’s attitude takes us back to an age in which nothing was fixed.  The folk singers, the troubadours, the minstrels all played and sang endless variations, which is why Scottish, English and Irish folk songs turn up all over the place, each slightly amended, each reflecting the locality in terms of lyrics, melody, and particularly favoured rhythms.

And quite clearly from all his re-working on tour, Bob does not like the notion of the final, fixed rendition.   With Dylan we are not in the age of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven when every note was written exactly as it is to be performed, but to an earlier age – an age more in keeping with the plays of Shakespeare, endlessly amended and re-written for each group of players depending on the cast.

7: Bob’s working practice

If we now think of  what we know of Bob’s working practice, we can note that he’s the opposite of (to take one example) Dylan Thomas who could spend all day worrying about three words in a poem, trying to decide on exactly the right combination of adjectives and noun for his sentence.

Bob Dylan is noted as quite often writing a song while the band sit around waiting, and then when he’s ready they play it through with him a few times and record it.

There is of course nothing wrong with such an approach, and nothing to say that the slower, more considered approach of other artists is better.  It is the approach that Dylan uses, and clearly it serves him well because he has written multiple masterpieces.   But it does mean that although it can often result in masterpieces it is possible for lesser works to slip through; works that because of their novelty might appear to Bob be songs of major importance at the start, but which actually turn out to be lesser works than were originally considered.

This whole “first take” approach can work wonderfully well but it can also result in recordings which one might feel could have been improved.   Indeed I might be the only person upset by it, but the mistake by the bass player in the final verse of Visions of Johanna, on the original Blonde on Blonde recording has annoyed me from the day I heard it as a youngster when I bought the album.  The bassist forgets that then last verse has two extra lines, and so he plays as he has moved on to the ultimate “And these Visions” line.   Dylan either didn’t notice, or didn’t mind.

Thus everything about Bob is “do it and move on” – an attitude which most of the time means that…

8: Bob fiddles and then stops

Bob does make important amendments and improvement to his work of course – and we have access to some of the recordings to show us his working practices.   And sometimes this serves him very well – as with “Tell Ol’ Bill” where there is no doubt that the final version is the masterpiece.   Across the set of recordings the piece changes amazingly, ending up in the minor key (which turns out to be perfect for the message and the melody) with a new piano arrangement. The final version is quite different from where it started.

But it doesn’t always work that way.  And this I think leads us to a key point…

9: Bob rejects some of his best because they are not quite as good as he knows they can be.

This leads us on to something quite different: Dylan, as we have noted, and like virtually all creative geniuses whose working practices have been recorded by biographers and commentators, works and re-works some of his pieces.  But I think sometimes he simply doesn’t release excellent works because somehow they have a flaw that he sees.  The song isn’t quite as he perceives it in his head.   There is something wrong, but he can’t quite sort it.    He can’t overcome that flaw, so he lets it go because there are other songs beckoning. Other times, lesser works are as good as they can get, and so Bob releases them.

In short the struggle to get Mississippi to sound exactly as he knew it could sound was ultimately too much.  He gave up, dropped it from the album, thinking (perhaps) that maybe one day he would come back and try again.

10: He has bursts of creativity and contractual obligations

Bob clearly works in bursts.  While in the early years he worked consistently and we have reports of him writing and re-writing songs while living a life of leisure in Europe, later we have Bob creating songs in the studio under pressure as the band sit around waiting for the new song to emerge.  In such circumstances it is not surprising that his level of judgement is sometimes amiss.  Given more time, he might have made a different call.

I don’t think this explanation works all the way through, but I think occasionally it is part of what is going on.

11:  Bob’s total control has helped him explore, experiment and evolve, but it has its downside.

Of course I’ve never met him, never been in his studio to watch him work, so I don’t know for sure, but in the reports of musicians of who have worked for Bob I get the clear impression that no one can tell him what to do.

And I sympathise with that.  I’ve worked with creative artists of whom I am in absolute awe, and I’ve worked with creative artists of whom I am afraid.  In neither case would I have dared say a word.  (And no, I’m not saying who – you never know, the next phone call might be from one such offering me some writing work; I don’t want to screw that chance up, even if it is a long shot).

Of course the total control system is generally good, for it stopped record company executives telling him that he couldn’t release “Rolling Stone” because there is a band called the Rolling Stones, or because DJs won’t play anything that is over three minutes long, so the positives outweigh the negatives by and large.

12:  Like all creative geniuses Bob gets carried away with ideas

For a person like Bob, the new always outweighs the old.   And in a sense this final notion is a combination of many that have gone before.  When Bob is in the mood to create new songs and finds that the muse is with him, that is what he wants to do.   But also there is a drive to get the songs recorded and done.  One take quite often, sometimes two or three.  When there are seven or eight it is because something really isn’t working with the song and he just can’t get it right.

That is frustrating, and in the end Bob moves on to the new.  The song he is dissatisfied with is left behind as new ideas drive him on.   Plus that eternal desire inherited from Robert Johnson that one has “gotta keep moving”.

Mississippi, Caribbean Wind, I once knew a man, Ballad for a Friend, Blind Willie… and many more that you can select from the 450+ songs listed on this site that never made it onto the mainstream albums.

Conclusion

My view, and of course it is no more than that, is that the reason some of the great songs are abandoned and lost is somewhere in that list of 12.  Maybe one day it is one of those explanations, maybe sometimes it is several.

But if I had to choose just one, I would say it comes from that Robert Johnson drive.  You’ve just gotta keep moving.

By Tony Attwood

The lyrics of neither “Roll on John” song are on Dylan’s site, and the site says Bob has only played the 2012 version twice.   Certainly I heard it once in Blackpool, but the set list I looked up doesn’t include the song.  Maybe I imagined it.

So where do we start?  Well, here actually with Bob singing Roll on John in 1962 (and do play this if you don’t know it, it is superb – and I will get to the Tempest song in a moment).

The lyrics are not the original lyrics that I recall from the traditional song, and in the interview Bob says that one or two verses are his own.

I think this song goes back to before Palmer Crisp but he recorded it in 1946, and it was recorded later by the Greenbiar Boys.   But there are earlier versions with very different lyrics, so I guess “Roll on John” is one of those phrases that people use – particularly in the US.  It is not commonplace in English in the UK as far as I know.

Here are the lyrics from the version Bob sang in 1962

Roll, roll, roll on John,
Don’t you roll so slow.
How can I roll when the wheels won’t roll?

I asked that girl, won’t you be my wife?
She fell on her knees, she began to cry.

The more she cried, the worse I felt,
‘Til I thought my heart would melt.

I looked at the sun, was a-sinking low.
I looked at my baby, she was a-walkin’ down the road.
I looked at the sun, was a-turning red.
I looked at my baby, but she bowed her head.

Don’t the sun look lonesome, oh lord lord lord, on the graveyard fence?
Don’t my baby look lonesome, when her head is bent?

Roll on John, don’t you roll so slow.
How can I roll when the wheels won’t roll?

The notion of it being even in part a Dylan song as Dylan claims in the interview does not cut ice with Heylin who doesn’t mention the song at all in “Revolution in the Air”.

But I would say even if you came to this page just to read about the “Tempest” song, do play the link above.  It is really worth it.

Anyway: Dylan and Lennon.  We know that Dylan influenced Lennon who is noted as saying, of Freewheelin,  “For three weeks in Paris, we didn’t stop playing it. We all went potty about Dylan.”

In an article in The Atlantic, Scott Beauchamp and Alex Shephard give an interesting viewpoint on why Dylan influenced Lennon.

“Dylan came from a world of New York coffee houses and Old Left socialists who demanded some level of intellectual weight from their artists. People listened to his music sitting down, quietly taking it all in….

“Almost immediately, Lennon began to write more introspective and acoustic songs, first in “I’m a Loser,” which was recorded in August of 1964. He finally mastered the folk form with the fully Dylan-esque “Norwegian Wood,” released on 1965’s Rubber Soul…

The two men met just twice, in 1966 and again in 1969 and subsequently Lennon claimed to have stopped listening to Dylan.

Dylan in 1966 released “4th Time Around” as a response to  “Norwegian Wood” which some saw as a “playful homage” and others a “satirical warning to Lennon about co-opting Dylan’s well-known songwriting devices.”   The Wiki review of the situation says, “the last line of “4th Time Around” (“I never asked for your crutch / Now don’t ask for mine.”) played into Lennon’s apparent paranoia about Dylan in 1966-67, when he interpreted this line as a warning not to use Dylan’s songs as a “crutch” for Lennon’s songwriting.”

Dylan’s Tempest “Roll on John” is then reinterpreted as “a sad lament in the tradition of tragic ballads about larger-than-life folk figures such as Stagger Lee or John Henry. Roll On John isn’t a sad song about a friend that died. And it’s not a sonic fist-bump from one icon to another. It’s Dylan acknowledging that Lennon has become legend—another mythic character to populate his songs.”

There are lines in Dylan’s Tempest “Roll on John” which lead to an easy interpretation such as “They tied your hands and they clamped your mouth” in reference to the record company requirements that Lennon was supposedly not to make political statements (for example about Vietnam) while in the Beatles.

And Dylan indeed quotes Lennon (“I read the news today oh boy”) but whether the reference to being on an island for too long is actually a derogatory reference to Britain or being on Manhattan for five years or something quite different, I’m not at all sure.   And although many see “Come together” as a reference to the Beatles song, I’m still not quite sure of the poetry as the song rolls on…

Slow down you’re moving way too fast
Come together right now over me
Your bones are weary, you’re about to breathe your last
Lord, you know how hard that it can be

Indeed towards the end I (and yes, just me, I’m not suggesting this is what anyone else thinks) find the song loses its way.  I absolutely adore the melody, chord sequence and delivery for about four verses and then start to feel there’s just too much.   And the sudden veering off into Blake doesn’t really work for me – especially since The Tyger is such a famous and such a brilliant work, changing it seems… well something to be done with great care and caution – and perhaps never to be done at all.

If you want to go further you will also be able to find on the internet a 10,000 word review of the Tempest “Roll on John” by Kees de Graaf

Mr de Graaf is not a commentator with whose work I am familiar but I was taken by his comment that “so much praise and eulogy for a mortal human being sounded over the top.”

But he changes his mind and suggests the two men, “certainly respected each other and the relationship they had, can best be described as good acquaintances”, and that perhaps is where we diverge.

He continues, “this song is reminiscent of some sort of medieval dream-vision poem in which the poet enters into some kind of trance at the start of the poem, loses all sense of time, and loses contact with the present world and enters an entirely different, ancient world, a world where the difference between the conscious and the subconscious and the difference between reality and fiction is continuously obliterated,” and this is where we diverge beyond the earlier divergence.

We diverge because I see Bob in later years as a guy with a brilliant turn of phrase and an ability to write metaphysically, but also a man who was quite often quite happy to take a phrase from a book or film, simply because it sounds good.   I don’t have any problem with that at all, in fact in a world where everything is connected, but equally many of us seem ever more disconnected from each other, it seems to me the perfect way to write.

Dylan wasn’t close to John Lennon, but that doesn’t stop him writing in a way that suggests maybe he was.  And there’s nothing amiss with that because what each knew of the other was his reputation and music.

Dylan wrote a song to Woody Guthrie knowing his music and stories, but not the man (until the end of his life). And Bowie wrote “Song for Bob Dylan” which he said in an interview was saying “okay if you don’t want to do it, I will”.

All such things are possible.  Sometimes however perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into it all.  Songs can still be just nice ideas, and lyrics can be, well, just lyrics.

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

Odds and Ends is a curiosity – a straight forward 12 bar blues with Dylan half singing half speaking the lyrics – which include references to orange juice.  And such references I guess could be a reference to the much more refined and prepared song from the Band “Orange juice blues”.

But this is not to say that “Odds and Ends” is just an improvised piece – at least it doesn’t sound like it with the harmonies at the end – although these could be the result of overdubbing later I guess.   However I do think Dylan had written out the lyrics, but I am not at all sure they tell us anything or take us anywhere in particular.

The chorus of the opening song—”Odds and ends, odds and ends/Lost time is not found again”—functions as “a kind of editorial comment on the entire Basement Tapes“, according to Andy Gill, but I suspect Dylan was just larking around, writing lines that sound as if they mean something but really don’t.   I think it is just one of those phrases that sounds good, but really doesn’t have too much to, in the final analysis.

There is quite a debate as to when the song was written and recorded – emphasising that the chronology at this point could be some way out in relation to what song came after which.

Whether Dylan really is saying that he has had enough of all this recording lark in the final verse is, I think open to a spot of interpretation.  After all the final verse

Now, I’ve had enough, my box is clean
You know what I’m sayin’ and you know what I mean
From now on you’d best get on someone else
While you’re doin’ it, keep that juice to yourself

might be as meaningless as the second verse

Now, you take your file and you bend my head
I never can remember anything that you said

Just as there is no special interest taken in the music – it is after all just another 12 bar blues without a melody – so I am not sure we should take any special interest in the words.

On my list I have put “Odds and Ends” at this point in the sequence of writing/recording:

• Sign on the cross
• Odds and Ends
• Clothes line saga

but Heylin raises the question that this tape was actually recorded after the John Wesley Hardin sessions, which means any significance that I might try to draw from the order of writing at this point ought to be set aside.

It’s on the list, and reviewed, because I’ve set the task of reviewing all the songs – but in honesty I am not sure this one adds to much to the sum of human understanding.

What is on the site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Attwood

I 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.