Untold Dylan

by Tony Attwood

This song does present a conundrum from the outset in that it was played 46 times on tour in 1980 but the official Dylan site has no lyrics for the song – although it has a page for it.

And a conundrum because it was a fairly successful song, and the band and singers had obviously rehearsed it fully (not always the case with Bob!) and delivered a well packaged performance that Bob obviously liked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF6oUhqI7AQ

That doesn’t mean of course that he would then continue with it, but quite why the lyrics were not recorded, and why a version never made it onto any of the official bootlegs is odd.  Or at least, it started me wondering.

I think I’ve got the answer, but rather than just reveal where I got to, I thought I would like to preserve the journey I have just taken to get there.  If you are impatient with me you can of course jump to the final conclusion…

What I did was that I kept singing it over inside my head until at last two answers of sorts popped up.  I can’t say definitively either are true, but I suspect that both have a part to play in what has gone on here.

The first thing that struck me was that part of the music of “Ain’t gonna” is adapted and re-used in Tight connection to my heart in 1983. It’s my no means a complete re-use, but there are similarities.  So my first guess was that after the performances stopped Dylan thought that it was ok as a show tune, but didn’t have enough to stand alone as a studio piece.  But he clearly liked it, so re-used part of it.

Of course they are not identical songs, but rather there are elements that match.  Take for example the music behind the lines

All that satisfies the fleshy needs
I’ve been down that road, i know what it needs.

and compare with the music for

You’re the one I’ve been looking for you’re the one that’s got the key
But I can’t figure out whether I’m too good for you or, or you’re too good for me.

Elsewhere I have come across discussions as to whether Dylan actually wrote this song – although I can find no evidence to the contrary and I can’t imagine him giving the piece so many outings at the time if it were no one of his.

The song also seems to have come with quite a jaunty introduction, at least on the edition we have recorded, and he and the band seem very happy about the whole affair.

The message of the song is straightforward – I’ll do a lot for anyone, but I’m not going to do something that would contradict the message of the Bible, and which would then send me to hell.  Which seems fair enough – a moral code is pretty fundamental to being a human.

I can persuade people as well as anybody
I got the vision but it caused division
I can twist the truth as well as anybody
I know how to do it, i’ve been all the way through it
But it don’t suit my purpose and it ain’t my goal
To gain the whole world, but give up my soul.

And I just wonder if after the hot flush of Christian fundamentalism wore off this sort of openness was not quite what Dylan wanted to put forward to the world.  After all not many of us are willing to get up and say

I can twist the truth around as well as anybody

Also I guess the fact that Dylan is quite right when he says

I can mislead people as well as anybody

But then I suddenly realised the implication of what Bob says later, and I think this is the clue to what actually caused this song to be dropped, and then partly re-use a couple of years further down the line…

I can write and steal from people as well as anybody

Now here he’s getting a little too close to the argument about his plagiarism of older songs in some of his works.  Quite possibly one of the corporate lawyers pointed out that if that lyric appeared on the official site, then that was an open door for anyone who wanted to sue Bob for ripping off someone else’s song.   You can just imagine what it would be like in court when the prosecution says, “Mr Zimmerman himself admitted that he is a plagiarist…”

In rush the lawyers and say, “don’t ever put those lyrics up on the official site”.

Here’s a version of the song

Also http://www.needsomefun.net/bob-dylan-aint-gonna-go-to-hell-for-anybody/ claims to have two versions.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

These files put Dylan’s work in the order written.  You can link to the files here

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

By Tony Attwood

Dylan wrote just one song in 1968 –Lay Lady Lay after having averaged around 18 songs of note and importance a year across the rest of the decade.  It was by any standard a great song, although it was delivered late – so late in fact that it couldn’t be included in the film that commissioned it.  (Mind you the film didn’t seem to suffer).

But such things happen, and Dylan clearly deserved a year out.  And we could all hope that Bob would return in 1969 revitalised and ready to deliver a few new masterpieces – another Desolation Row perhaps, a venture into a new form maybe, some more enigmatic pieces of the “Drifter’s Escape” and “All along the Watchtower” variety.  Maybe even more Visions.

We certainly did get something new – something that certainly Lay Lady Lay did not prepare us for.   What we got was a further exploration of rural music – this time with a country flavour.   But it was an album that didn’t have any of the enigma of John Wesley Harding.  There was no re-writing of history, no chance of arguing over references and meaning.  It’s a “life is nice” album.

What Dylan had done with JWH was give us tales from the old days but with a depth of mystery that can still provoke arguments.  But here Dylan stripped out the enigma, and instead took as his starting point “I’ll be your baby tonight” but then perhaps thought that was a bit too complex and simplified it further.

There is of course on the album the duet with Johnny Cash, which is of importance in music history, and certainly adds an extra level to “Girl from the North Country,” but as an opening statement on an album from a man known for always giving us something new, this was something old.  An interesting something old, but not what Dylan was known for.

“Nashville Skyline Rag” isn’t what Dylan is known for either.   True it allows the album’s musicians to have a bit of fun, but does it add anything or make us think or give us something new?  No.  That doesn’t make it a poor song, because there is nothing in the rule book that says that Dylan has to give us something new each time – it is just a bit of a surprise that the man who has made his name out of taking the blues, pop and rock in new directions chooses to visit an old direction.

Dylan wrote the songs for the album, and little else at this time.  Some love songs, a bit of lost love and some trivia – here they are

1. I threw it all away
2. To be alone with you
3. One more night
4. Peggy Day
5. Country Pie
6. Tell me it isn’t true
7. Tonight I’ll be Staying Here With You
8. Living the blues

There are some classic Dylan moments in the year’s compositions – and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is a lovely song, but it seems a bit of a let down, in that across two years all we get are nine songs and an instrumental.

Maybe the conclusion is that Dylan was too content.  Maybe he needs to be hurting, full of despair and disdain, deep in dismay to write great songs.  Maybe as others have said, his musical style and approach are just not suited to the total fulfilment of happy family life in the rural countryside.   But if (again as others have said) Dylan had given us an album of mysticism amidst the olden days, and albums of hurt and pain, so now he wanted to offer an album about being happy then ok he did that.  It just doesn’t seem to work for me (and honestly I am not endlessly miserable).

Dylan seemed very happy with his modest output across the last two years of the decade – an output that had nothing to do with what was happening in the country at large, and nothing to do with breaking new ground.   But then, there is nothing in the rule book that says that every album has to reach out to new territory.

But if it is a case of judging the music by having the luxury of historical perspective, then much of the music of these two years must be seen as a failure.  Every minute of every day I am certain there are many people who are playing tracks from the previous Dylan albums, or just singing the songs to themselves, or quoting them.   But how much of these two year’s output is still played, and still quoted?   I suspect not much.

However, maybe that’s just me.  Maybe I just want every year to be 1965.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

These files put Dylan’s work in the order written.  You can link to the files here

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

by Tony Attwood

All musical forms have their own logic, and country music is no exception.  I can say that I don’t like country music, or that I don’t find it inspiring, or that I find its lyrics unappealing, but none of this means that it is better or worse than any other form of music.  For this to be the case we have to have a set of values which we might then say country music doesn’t always meet.

Best for me therefore to say that country music doesn’t really talk to me of any issues that are of interest to me, and doesn’t use a musical form that I find to be of interest.

And so “Peggy Day” is for me, as I guess for a lot of other people who enjoy a lot of Dylan’s output, fairly trivial and pointless.  The fact that it was composed during a year in which Dylan only wrote a handful of songs, and that was in a year which came after the year in which he only wrote one song.  Which suggests that he had lost the drive or desire or perhaps even the ability to write much new, innovative music.

https://youtu.be/74eJW-BlJKI

Of course up to this point Dylan had explored certain old styles of music, and reinvented other forms, but in each case he had added something completely new or at least very distinctive to the genre.  Even the early blues songs Dylan wrote added something to an already full repertoire.  But does Peggy Day add anything to the country repertoire?  I’m certainly not the right person to ask, but if I have to give an opinion I’d say no.   If I listen to Big and Rich turning country music upside down then I would say “most certainly”.  But Dylan simply seems to want to do a gentle reiteration of what has gone before.

Heylin argues that this song was thrown together with no thought – and that is possibly true.  But then we can say that Dylan seemed to be able to do this in the past and come out with a masterpiece.

But when Heylin calls the work “frankly, embarrassing”, I am not too sure what he is trying to say.  Embarrassing to us that Dylan should have written it and presented it on his country album?  Or to Dylan?  I doubt that he felt particularly embarrassed – and this was after all from a top selling album.

But I do think that coming in a year of very little composing after a year of writing just one song, there is an indication that the creative juices had dried up.  If Frank Zappa had written and recorded this we would all have been killing ourselves laughing.  The problem is that with Dylan I don’t think anyone quite knew what he was doing with lines like

Peggy Day stole my poor heart away
By golly, what more can I say
Love to spend the night with Peggy Day

It is all very trivial and isn’t really helped much by the music with a melody that fits around a common country chord sequences (F, D7, Gm, C7) and with a middle 8 that suddenly jumps into the key of A major.

Of course it is not the only song Dylan has released with trivial lyrics, but with Dylan having written so little in the previous 18 months one hoped that he could do more than than this at this moment.  I am no expert on country music, but from the little I know, it doesn’t seem to be a good country song.

I am not sure that the whole album deserves Billboard’s criticism of “the satisfied man speaks in clichés” but I think the Listener magazine got it right by saying, “One can’t help feeling something is missing. Isn’t this idyllic country landscape too good to be true?”

The inevitable answer is quite simply “yes”.  And that raises the three questions.  First why bother to write the song?  Second having written it, why bother to record it?  And third, having recorded it, was there really nothing better to put on the album?

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

These files put Dylan’s work in the order written.  You can link to the files here

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

By Tony Attwood

In 1968 we have just one Bob Dylan composition Lay Lady Lay and one concert – at Carnegie Hall on 20 January.

The full Dylan set list for this one concert, which commemorated the work of Woodie Guthrie consisted of four Woodie Guthrie songs and Big Bill Broonzy’s famous “This train ain’t bound for glory.”

And yet, if we take the notion of Bob Dylan the great protest singer, leader of the protest movement, as being the definition of Dylan, this makes little sense, not least  since 1968 was the year that the United States turned itself inside out and Bob stayed in his house in rural New York state with Sara and their three young children.

One of very few interviews he did during the year included some homely pictures of Bob playing the guitar sitting on a huge tractor tyre leaning against an outdoor bench.  It couldn’t get more homely and rural and the image of the piece was of a home loving man with his family.  It offered no connection with the way the country was pulling itself apart but every connection with Dylan, the family man.

One of the quotes from this year from Dylan was “I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that any more. There’s myself and there’s my song.”

This suggests a finding of himself, and he certainly was in a position to do this, already being phenomenally wealthy, and with a seeming ability to switch the songwriting on and off as he pleased, in any style of music he pleased.  He’d done the blues, protest, the retelling of the past, the surreal, commentaries on the state of the nation, love songs, the songs of disdain, and the tours.  Surely after all that and the composition of over 120 songs that were so good that now over 50 years later we are still discussing them, he was fully entitled to a break.

But also, 1968 was also the year Bob’s father Abe Zimmerman died of a heart attack in Hibbing* aged just 56, and many commentators have since suggested that Dylan felt this event and the expectations there were pressed upon him was all getting too much.   He knew that every note of every song on the next album would be taken apart by critics ever eager to put him down.  He was expected to be brilliant at every turn, and my guess is that he had enough of all that.

After all Dylan didn’t have to do anything.  His albums had sold in vast quantities and people would always pour in to see him perform live.   He had also in the previous year written a whole series of songs that other people were playing and recording – all earning Dylan a fortune.  Indeed from a financial point of view not only did Dylan have no need to work again, nor would any of his children.

Is it therefore unreasonable that in such a situation, after six years of constant creative activity, unbelievable success, and huge (if self imposed) pressure, at a time of having the family and his father dying, Dylan should stop and take stock?

The answer for everyone save for the conspiracy theorists, must be no – that is perfectly ok. Thus Dylan did the obvious: he took a year out.

What is interesting to me is that looking back, far less has been written about this year out, than the events of the motorbike accident year – during which Dylan was far more creative.  But that is how it goes I guess.

And yet even in this year off, he wrote one masterpiece – “Lay Lady Lay” which was originally written for Midnight Cowboy, but wasn’t submitted in time in 1968 to be included in the finished film.  So although it is largely seen as a 1969 song (it was released as a single in July of that year) in terms of composition, it certainly was written in 1968.

In writing this it occurred to me that I ought to go back and remember what else happened in the year Dylan took out.   Here are a few highlights and indeed mostly lowlights…  I don’t mean this as a political commentary as such, rather to reflect the issues that were going on in the world as Bob chose to step back from it all.

Footnote

*In writing about the passing of Bob’s father in Hibbing I was suddenly struck by the lines

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still

I wonder if I’m now reading too much into Not Dark Yet.

The Year

Anyway here are events from the year that seem to me to symbolise what was going on edited from Wikipedia.

• January 5 – Prague Spring: Alexander Dubček is chosen as the leader of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia.
• January 30 – Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive begins, as Viet Cong forces launch a series of surprise attacks across South Vietnam.
• January 31 – Việt Cộng soldiers attack the US Embassy, Saigon.

• February 8 – American civil rights movement: A civil rights protest staged at a white-only bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina is broken up by highway patrolmen; 3 college students are killed.
• February 27 – Ex-Teenagers singer Frankie Lymon is found dead from a heroin overdose in Harlem.

• March 8 – The first student protests spark the 1968 Polish political crisis.
• March 17 – A demonstration in London’s Grosvenor Square against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War leads to violence; 91 people are injured, 200 demonstrators arrested.
• March 26 – Joan Baez marries activist David Harris in New York.
• March 31 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson announces he will not seek re-election.

• April 4- Martin Luther King, Jr. is shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots erupt in major American cities, lasting for several days afterwards.
• April 11 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
• April 20 – English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial Rivers of Blood speech suggesting that without limitations on immigration there will be cataclysmic results for British society.
• April 23–April 30 – Vietnam War: Student protesters at Columbia University in New York City take over administration buildings and shut down the university.
• April 29 – The musical Hair officially opens on Broadway.

• May 13 – Paris student riots: One million march through the streets of Paris.

• June 3 – Radical feminist Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol as he enters his studio, wounding him.
• June 5 – U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy dies from his injuries the next day.
• June 8 – James Earl Ray is arrested for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr..

• July 1 – The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty opens for signature.
• July 25 – Pope Paul VI publishes the encyclical entitled Humanae vitae, condemning birth control.
• July 26 – South Vietnamese opposition leader Trương Đình Dzu is sentenced to 5 years hard labour, for advocating the formation of a coalition government as a way to move toward an end to the war.

• August 20–August 21 – The Prague Spring of political liberalization ends, as 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 6,500 tanks with 800 planes invade Czechoslovakia.

• October 5 – Police baton civil rights demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland, marking the beginning of The Troubles.
• October 14 – The United States Department of Defense announces that the United States Army and United States Marines will send about 24,000 troops back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours.

• November 5 – U.S. presidential election, 1968: Republican challenger Richard Nixon defeats the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and American Independent Party candidate George C. Wallace.
• November 22 – The Beatles release the White Album.

• December 6 – The Rolling Stones release Beggars Banquet, which contains “Sympathy for the Devil.”
• December 24 – Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William A. Anders become the first humans to see the far side of the Moon.  The crew read from Genesis.
• December 28 – Israeli forces launch an attack on Beirut airport.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

by Tony Attwood

After completing the songs for Blonde on Blonde and composing two or three items in a Glasgow Hotel, Dylan stopped writing.  The most obvious reason was that after the supreme effort of writing Blonde while the band waited for each song to emerge, he was utterly exhausted.  The most common reason given was a motorcycle accident, but not everyone believes this to be true.  

Yet in terms of Dylan’s work as a composer it doesn’t really matter at all.  He stopped, that’s all.   Where it does impact on our study of Dylan is in the issue of what Dylan decided to do.

For whatever the reason for Dylan’s cessation in writing and recording, we can readily trace his return to musical activity and his change in style, starting with a series of rough recordings that are not widely available, followed by the two separate series of songs outlined here.  

These songs are particularly interesting because whereas Dylan’s work the previous year was centred around creating the double album, for the first set of songs this year Dylan had no album in mind, although he most certainly could have turned his output into an LP – there was easily enough material of the highest quality here.

Without the album to create, Dylan was free to travel in every direction he felt like.  As I have suggested above, the early songs of this year are incomplete, lost or known only to those with access to the tapes, and many seem to be incomplete.  But we can pick up the story with the surreal tale of Tiny Montgomery – although “tale” might not be the right word.  Snapshot could be better.

Nothing could be more different from that song than the second in the series: Sign on the cross which has been hailed as an “unalloyed masterpiece” and sees it as “Every bit the equal to This Wheels on Fire”.  There is also talk in relation to this song of “The indivisible link between singing and salvation.” Yet if one steps outside the accolades and simply asks “what on earth does all this mean?” or even “what does this represent?” or “what does this signify”, the issue is very unclear here as it is throughout almost all of these songs.

The uncertainty happens again, with the next song this time back with the surreal character theme, in Million dollar bash where everyone gets together for what sounds like a 1960s version of one of the parties held by Evelyn Waugh’s brave new things in the 1930s.  There’s no sense of the real world, no responsibility, no question of any sense of meaning in the lives of the participants.  Just hedonism and a sense of right to have all this money to waste.

But the key point about the difference between the songs is that Million Dollar Bash is surreal, and so it is meant to be obscure.  What is the implication of making a song about religion obscure?  Normally the answer involves a relationship with Taoism or Zen, but this is a Christian song (as per the title).   So I am completely lost.

What is for certain is that there is no sense of a theme in Dylan’s work at this juncture, because next Dylan wrote I’m not there, a supremely beautiful, delicate love song which he left completely unfinished.

But no sooner had he laid down the track than Dylan is throwing away all that beauty with a totally different song that was finished and yet seems so simple and indeed one might say pointless.  Except that nonsense can have a sense – one might refer to Subterranean Homesick Blues for confirmation.

So this time we get…

Cloud so swift the rain fallin’ in, Gonna see a movie called Gunga Din

OK.  And?

It’s not a revolutionary, its not beat poetry. It’s…

Next came This Wheel’s on Fire and if we want to signify what Dylan’s writing is all about at this time the contradiction between these last few songs signifies it totally.  He is in fact quite clearly jumping from theme to theme, from idea to idea, perhaps going back over all the songs he never released, all the old ideas that had not yet come to fruition.

This process of writing without an album in mind proved indeed to be extremely fruitful if confusing.  He didn’t need a theme – he could go anywhere, write anything. The next song  I shall be released goes out on another journey – a plea that someone out there will come along and find him to help him on his way.

Then straight off comes another diversion with Too Much of Nothing which was delivered with two utterly different versions, and suffered a strange change of one of the characters’ names as it was taken up by other artists.   It was also a song that remained utterly unravelled for years – although it is one in which the story line can be revealed with a little bit of digging.

Tears of rage co-written with Richard Manuel is different again, and fascinating as Manuel who wrote the music revealed later that he himself had no idea what the lyrics meant but didn’t have the nerve to ask Dylan for help.

And then Quinn the Eskimo – The Mighty Quinn in which we return to the surreal characters of earlier song, before Dylan stopped this whole sequence.

What was he saying with these songs?  That songs can be about anything, and about anyone, or about nothing and no one?  Quite possibly.   Was he showing us what an amazing virtuoso writer he was?  Most certainly.  Was he setting himself a big big problem as to what he should do on the next album?  Yes I think he was doing that too.

But he solved the question quickly, for Dylan then started writing a series of songs in terms of one of his favourite themes: the outsiders.  It is just that this time he has the outsiders existing not just outside society but also at times outside of time of space as well as outside history and reality.

Dylan himself has said that he wrote the lyrics first, over a space of a few days, many of them on one (or a series of) train journeys.   He then added the music soon after.  And knowing that, and the order of the songs, Dylan’s thinking pattern becomes fairly easy to understand.

The first song in the sequence was not typical – for a start it is much much longer than the other songs which are for the most part three verses and nothing more.   It was almost as if Dylan realised that if he continued to write 11 verse epics for each song, he might not get the album done in time.

But the theme of the songs – that of events being unclear and uncertain, was absolutely set, for after the epic The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest everything settled down to short sharp stories that leave us wondering quite where the world is going (and quite often where it has come from).

Drifter’s Escape (the song that tells us to forget cause and effect and which is a miracle of writing given that musically it consists of two lines over and over).

I dreamed I Saw St Augustine seems to have nothing to do with St Augustine, All along the watch tower is probably best described as a word painting with no intended meaning, while John Wesley Harding not only had his name spelled wrong, his real life was nothing much like the story told in the song.

What was Dylan doing?  Perhaps reacting against the music of the era.   Sgt. Pepper and Zappa’s Absolutely Free were defining the era so Dylan redefined it his way with songs that seemed like they might be real but when you come to look, are not.   If anything he was allying himself with Tim Hardin not John Wesley Hardin.  “How can we hang on to a dream?” could well be seen as the theme for much of this album.

So the songs continued, all in the same format and style, each obscure, each portraying a part of the American world that never quite makes sense.  As I Went out one Morning was followed by I am a lonesome hobo, I pity the poor Immigrant, The Wicked Messenger and Dear Landlord.   And that was it, for the album and the year.   All written quickly, without any music in mind, all then realised as part of the next album.

Except that the album wasn’t complete.  There was space for two more songs.  But Dylan had finished with his theme around Hardin (musician) and Hardin (historical character).  So he gave us two completely different pieces of work, to end the year: I’ll be your baby tonight and Down along the cove.

Perhaps just to say – “and I can also write songs like this”.  And in response to the comment that “There’s no connection with the rest of the album at all,” I guess he would just shrug.

What is particularly interesting is that few, if any, reviews of the album, ever considered the songs as an ensemble.  They were all considered as individual elements.  And yet Dylan had taken a significant detour for this album.  It was just that no one quite knew why.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

by Tony Attwood

At the very end of 1965 Dylan began working on Blonde on Blonde, and according to the information that has been provided by various sources, across the early part of 1966 the pattern of work involved him writing a song while the musicians waited, then teaching them the song, and then recording it several times until he had got a take he liked.

From November 1965 to March 1966 he worked on the songs.  The resultant album was issued sometime around July (curiously there is a fair amount of argument as to when it was actually released!)  Immediately after the recording of the double album was concluded Dylan extemporised one more song – “If I was a king” in a hotel bedroom.

Shortly after the release of the album Bob Dylan had his motorcycle accident, and he stopped writing.

Until writing this article in the series that considers Dylan year by year, taking the songs in the order they were written, I had thought of Blonde on Blonde as a double album I bought in my young days, and I thought of it in terms of what was on each of the four sides of the LP.   Sad Eyed Lady, as we all know, occupied one side.  Visions of Johanna and One of us must know – by far my absolute favourite tracks on the album, were thankfully next to each other and I would pick up the stylus time and again to play those two songs on side 1.  Side 3 had five songs, and so used was I to thinking of them as a sequence, that I reviewed them in the order they appear on the album, on this site, without any thought that maybe that was not the order they were written in.

But having reviewed these songs at odd times in the past few years, for this site, I find that when I come to look at the songs in the sequence they were written, a totally different album emerges.  An album that is much more about Dylan’s frame of mind as he worked through the writing of the songs.  A set of songs that makes me draw a conclusion as to what the motorcycle accident that followed the album was all about.

Here I will try and explain this new “understanding” if I may call it that, that comes from considering the album not in the way it is laid down on the LP or CD, but in the order in which the songs were written.

Visions of Johanna was the only song written the previous year – the last song of 1965.  The song is a monument; for many years my all time absolute favourite Dylan song, replaced only when, for this site, I studied Tell Ol Bill over and over and over, and began to understand what an incredible piece that is.

But to return to Visions, it is a song like no other pop or rock song before it.  A semi-abstract painting. A set of pictures in the mists; suggestions, ideas, implications, half heard sounds.   This was the starting point.

But when one starts on a project as momentous as a complete double album of new material with something as gigantic as Visions, what on earth is the composer going to do next?

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again was what came next, and it seems to be a jolly conundrum with hints of links to WC Handy, but rather like Johanna, nothing very clear.   It’s fun, seemingly a lightheared tribute to the music of the past that Bob loves.

But then, but then….

Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady”  is mysterious and removed from the everyday world like Visions, but this time about a person with whom Dylan is deeply in love.  Johanna, Louise and Little Boy Lost were observed from the distance.  The Lady is seen close up, although her messages and intents are not always clear.

Having written that monument of a song in one night, Dylan moved on and with Fourth Time Around suddenly we are back to the old format of disdain – disdain of the lady, and quite possibly of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood”.   You don’t get much more disdainful that lines like When she said “Don’t waste your words, they’re just lies” I cried she was deaf. 

This is one hell of a transformation.  From Visions in which Dylan peers through the mists with understanding and to some degree sympathy, and where even criticism is muted (OK there is nothing to turn off, but it doesn’t really seem to matter), on to Sad Eyed Lady, so carefully etched and recorded, image by image.

And they, just pure disdain.   And the disdain continues with Leopard skin pill-box hat,  He’s laughing at the lady, there is no sense of understanding here.

I wonder if at this moment Dylan thought the disdain element in his writing was getting too strong for next in the sequence of writing we have one of Dylan’s all-time great songs of lost love and leaving (both themes, it seems to me combined in this epic) with One of us must know (sooner or later).

Humility returns – it is the singer who didn’t meant to treat her so bad.  He really is sorry.

And besides just how much atmosphere do you want in a song?  Consider the lines

I couldn’t see when it started snowing
Your voice was all that I heard

If that isn’t atmosphere within two lines I really don’t know what is.   If I may be permitted to quote myself at this point (and I really do try and avoid this)

One of Us Must Know is the ultimate song of farewell, self justification and (to a small degree) apology.   And anyone who has been left by another whom they so deeply loved must feel this song inside out and from heart and soul.

I didn’t mean to treat you so bad
You shouldn’t take it so personal
I didn’t mean to make you so sad
You just happened to be there, that’s all

I once, years later, have a lady say that same sort of thing to me, although without such a clever use of language, and it is one of the most hurtful things you can ever have said to you.  “You just happened to be there, that’s all” reduces you to nothing.

But to return to the writing of Blonde on Blonde, track by track, if we pause at this point we can surely see there is a little, but only a very little, relief here.  Stuck inside of Mobile, could well be a song about not being able to find new themes and new ideas, and although that is a lighter song, matters don’t really improve thereafter.

And they don’t improve because we now have She’s your lover now which is more than a song of disdain (in that the songs of disdain were written about one person) – this is seemingly about disdain for two people.

The problem with the song however is that it is too similar (musically and emotionally) to Sooner or Later, and so had to be dropped.

Dylan then clearly tried to change his ways, for Absolutely Sweet Marie which was written next at last gives us a lighter note – but I think it is worth pausing here to see just how many songs of disdain, despair and leaving Dylan had processed to get to this point.  He’d ended the previous year with his mysterious epic Johanna, and started this year in a fairly positive if mysterious and fairly light hearted way, but now, unlike every year up to this point Dylan was using songs to deliver a ceaseless attack on people Dylan didn’t like.  He really was getting annoyed with people – and in particular with women.

And if we hadn’t quite got the message, we get “With her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls” from Just like a woman – a love song this ain’t.  It was attack, disdain and dislike, over and over.

Indeed I think that by the time of Pledging my time Bob had had enough.  After all what else makes such a great lyricist write

Well, early in the mornin’
’Til late at night
I got a poison headache
But I feel all right
I’m pledging my time to you
Hopin’ you’ll come through, too

Indeed as the writing continued, with the band waiting for the next song to emerge from the master, the pressures seems to be telling.  In Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine we get

Sometimes it gets so hard to care
It can’t be this way ev’rywhere

Taken in isolation it could just be a line to fit in a song – when we look at the whole cycle of songs being composed one after the other, I believe a different meaning emerges.  He’s really, really feeling the pressure of writing and recording this album, while the band sit around waiting.

The theme continues in Temporary Like Achilles with lines such as ” How come you don’t send me no regards?”   He’s become lost, alone, isolated, unsure.

This state of mind probably explains the most curious departure from the dominant theme at this point into Rainy Day Women – quite unlike anything that he had done before.   One thing is certain – everyone really is now against him big time, and the only way out is for everyone to get stoned.

Obviously Five Believers continues this feeling of isolation.  It is a variant 12 bar blues, and a very simple song, but the message by now has become remorseless.

Yes, I could make it without you
If I just did not feel so all alone

This is a cry for help.

But then suddenly right at the death, Dylan finds his faith again, and composes a much lighter tune – I want you   He’s walked the streets at 3am, and has lost all sense of purpose and all sense of direction, before suddenly he finds at the very end that he does indeed have someone to believe in.

In a very real sense, “I want you” is a simple continuation of the two lines quoted above from the previous song – the admission of feeling alone – and it is interesting (to me at least) to see these songs in the order they were written – and written to order to complete the double LP, to see the mental journey downwards that Dylan takes during this time.

But as the end is in site there certainly is a lighter feel at this moment, although there is still the desperation of the chorus.  In this world of fairground freaks that now seem to populate Dylan’s mind, he just needs someone to hold on to.   It is as if the dreamer, or perhaps the script writer, has dreamed up too many odd characters all the way through the sequence of songs, and now finally he has to admit.  OK all these strange people are here, but I don’t want them.   I want them out of my head.  It is you that I need.

Thereafter it is so, so sad that Dylan never proceeded with If I was a king – the aftermath of the months of writing and recording Blonde on Blonde.  It would be be so wonderful to know where his mind had travelled to, knowing the album was all done and was ready to hit the streets.

After “If I were a king” we hear no more of Dylan, and the most common explanation is that it was the motorcycle crash that stopped him.  Maybe it was, but I can’t help feeling, listening to the Blonde on Blonde songs, not in the order they appear on the album, but in the order in which they were written, that this was a man heading towards a nervous breakdown.

So maybe the bike crash was a minor affair, but the doctor who treated him said, “for the sake of your sanity, stay here.  It’s not your body that’s got mangled, it’s your mind.”  Of course I don’t know, but it seems to fit the facts.

Dylan had composed and recorded in a very short space of time, one of the great, great musical achievements of the pop and rock genre.  But where he had changed from his compositional style of his previous years was the fact that he was no longer alternating between his favoured themes – love, lost love, disdain, the blues, humour, satire, songs of farewell, protest, moving on…  He had become stuck in one vision.  The songs were still great, but I fear his sense of well-being was not quite as high as it might have been.

As a song “Sara” doesn’t really tell the story of that era as it actually was, and many have pointed out that the implied chronology doesn’t work, but the line from that song

I’d taken the cure and had just gotten through

probably does relate to events after this extraordinary period of writing had come to an end.

Dylan had been pushed, or had pushed himself, into writing a set of songs while knowing that the engineers and musicians were just sitting around waiting for him.  It was the ultimate pressure.  Yes, I think he did produce a masterpiece – or at least a masterpiece in parts.  But I also think the cost to him was overwhelming.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

By Tony Attwood

I have noted earlier in this series that Dylan had, during the early part of the 1960s, developed a range of different themes on which he could write meaningful, telling and beautiful songs.  The whole notion of Dylan as a “protest singer” was completely wrong in fact, because he was so much more than that.  Protest was only a minor part of his writing, and simply represented one of half a dozen themes within Dylan’s work.

Indeed not only was he amazingly diverse in his choice of subject matter, he was in 1964 still expanding this, introducing songs about individualism.

Such was his diversity by the end of 1964 that if anyone did wonder about it, they would surely have thought “he can’t go any further can he?”   And the opening song of 1965 would have added to that notion with the beautiful song of farewell (one of Dylan’s favourite themes), Farewell Angelina.   The problem was however that because most (perhaps all) critics of the era only looked at the songs individually, rather than as each song as the continuing exploration of a particular theme or idea, they not only failed to pick up the themes that Dylan liked, but also failed to see the fact that “Angelina” was simply another song (albeit a brilliant beautiful song) in a series of explorations of the “songs of farewell”.

But if that is what we thought, then we were in for a shock, because the next composition was Subterranean Homesick Blues which gave a new musical form to be used with the musical equivalent of the Beat Poetry of Dylan’s pal Allen Ginsberg.

Until this point contemporary “protest songs” were stuck in the style, sound and structure of songs from the pre-war era.  They were in short, folk songs.   While the Beat Poets had gone forward and created a new form of poetry, music had been stuck.  Indeed it can be argued that while “Times they are a changing” made a very significant statement of belief in terms of the mood of young people, musically it was stuck way back in the past.

Then, in one moment Dylan turned this situation upside down, and so added yet another mode of music to his already extraordinary output.

Although Dylan followed this with a return to his familiar blues theme with Outlaw Blues he also delivered within the song a side-swipe at those who criticise his musical output.

And then, as if that were not enough (which it would be for many a writer) Dylan turned the love ballad upside down by adding to the form a set of metaphysical lyrics.  And we should remember that love ballads had never until this point being a serious part of Dylan’s work – he’d done plenty of lost love songs, and songs of leaving, but love songs were thinner on the ground.

In fact Dylan gave us not just one love song in Love Minus Zero but also a second in the form of a 12 bar blues with She Belongs to Me before reverting to one of his most favoured themes of lost love with It’s all over now baby blue.

Then just to show us that the notion of beat poetry having a music of its own was not a simple one-off Dylan delivered Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream – taking Motorcycle Nightmare even further in terms of the realms of the crazed world.

After that, and I have the feeling it was just to make the point, Dylan pronounced that

Well, I woke up in the morning
There’s frogs inside my socks
Your mama, she’s a-hidin’
Inside the icebox
Your daddy walks in wearin’
A Napoleon Bonaparte mask
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, do you have to ask?

With On the Road Again we really have now reached the world of the pop surreal – yet another Dylan form, and the second he has invented in the space of six months.

This theme continued with Maggie’s Farm which you will recall begins

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
Well, I wake in the morning
Fold my hands and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane
It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

Dylan clearly loved his new invention of surreal lyrics, and expanded this now into surreal titles starting with It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry (also known as the Phantom Engineer), which combines the surreal with the every day.  It is as if he is saying that our world is in fact surreal, it is just we are so used to it we can’t see it any more.

Don’t the moon look good, mama
Shinin’ through the trees?
Don’t the brakeman look good, mama
Flagging down the “Double E?”
Don’t the sun look good
Goin’ down over the sea?
Don’t my gal look fine
When she’s comin’ after me?

We don’t quite know where we are, but somehow it feels normal, even if it ain’t.

My guess is that at this moment Dylan realised that he could go anywhere, and create any type of song.  In fact, he had created so many styles and approaches he probably thought he could go on creating them for ever, and certain he now he had one more to give us – a completely new approach which generated some of the most powerful songs Dylan was ever to produce: The Songs of Disdain.   In the near future we were to get “Positively Fourth Street” and “Can you please crawl out your window” but for the moment Like a Rolling Stone turned popular music upside down, and inside out.

For it not only introduced a new approach to the old “lost love” theme, this extended the form of the popular song beyond belief.  And it was long.  Much longer than a pop song.  Indeed it couldn’t be a pop song – because pop songs were two and a half minutes long.

Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal

And anyway, just how viscous do you want your rock songs to be?  Or, in terms of the next song, just how weird?

I wrote in my review of Tombstone Blues

Just how surreal do you want to be?  Just how far can the three major chords that make up the blues be taken?  Consider just one line: “The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse”.

and I can’t put it more clearly than this, with Rolling Stone.   Dylan at this time was totally wound up with disdain (the other side of the coin of the songs of farewell with which he started the year) and at this point it all came pouring out in one go.

As I find myself saying so often in reviewing this period of Dylan’s life, half of this output would be enough to satisfy a lifetime of composition by most songwriters, but Dylan hadn’t yet reached the two other greatest triumphs of the year, the first of which he now composed in terms of Desolation Row

Yes of course it is a protest song (what else can it be when it starts “they’re selling postcards of the hanging”) but it is also a development of a theme within Rolling Stone, that it is not the world that is the issue, but rather it is how you see the world, how you react to the world, what you do within the world, as witness the comment about Ezra Pound and TS Eliot.

Eliot was clearly on Dylan’s mind at this time, for he returned to the issue of Eliot’s private life vis a vis his poetry in “Waters of Oblivion” the following year, with a more subtle but more viscous attack.  Here he appears to touch on Eliot’s remoteness from the everyday world.  April might be the cruellest month, but the 20th century is the cruellest era.

Desolation Row, like Rolling Stone, is a defining element in Dylan’s extraordinary career, not just because of what the song is, in its original form, but because of the reinterpretations possible.  Rolling Stone, because of its solid four square beat, is hard to re-work.  But Desolation Row can have any sort of musical interpretation. Indeed hearing Dylan perform it as a dance number was one of the most extraordinary moments for me in any concert hall anywhere.  The message was plain – we are all just dancing our way to oblivion.

After composing such masterpieces Dylan, perhaps not surprisingly, turned back to his earlier new theme, the songs of disdain, in short order writing Can you please crawl out your window? and Positively Fourth Street.

And then just to remind the world (or maybe himself) of where he came from he returned to the blues with Highway 61 Revisited – the very title of which celebrates the blues and Robert Johnson, but in a way that we have never heard it before.

And so one again I find myself thinking that thus far we have what would have been enough for a lifetime achievement by most writers but was in fact just one year from Dylan, and he still had five songs to go.  He gave us a song of surreal decline from the real world into alcohol and drug abuse with Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues a lost love song with a difference (as in come back to me when you’ve had enough of being away from me, with Queen Jane Approximately) and another song of disdain, but this time about an art critic/academic (Ballad of a thin man).

At this point Dylan appears to turn around to have a bit of fun at the Beatles’ expense with I wanna be your lover before giving us what many consider to be his supreme musical achievement Visions of Johanna

Through this incredible year Dylan has developed a whole stream of new approaches to popular music, creating a form that would give a musical outlet for the visions of the beat poets, the songs of disdain, a musical form for surreal poetry, and a political commentary far broader than anything that could ever have been conceived before with Desolation Row  – enough in fact for a lifetime’s work, and then suddenly we got Visions.

Visions is a different kind of song, and it is an approach to song writing that Dylan utilised for years to come – the equivalent of the painting that hints at the world it portrays but without giving us the totality of the reality it looks at.  The best title I can come up with is the music of suggestion.  Not a very wonderful title, but for the moment it will have to do.

In Visions we never quite know – everything is seen through a mist, as the very opening lines about the night playing tricks describes.  It is a new use of rock music, a new style, a new approach, and indeed a new vision.   Visual artists had been doing it for years and years, but now here it was in rock music.

The significance of this moment cannot be over-estimated, for across the years many, many commentators have tried to take individual Dylan lines and give them specific meanings – especially those commentators seeking to give Dylan’s work from outside the overtly Christian period, specific Christian meanings.  But here, in this first atmospheric song, it is quite clear there is no meaning, there is a picture, a description of a personal world, not an explanation of the rights and wrongs of the world.

It turned out to be an approach to music that Dylan would return to time and time again across the years.  From later years, “Things have changed” is a perfect example – indeed its line “I’m in the wrong town, I should be in Hollywood” tells us exactly what this type of song is about.  We can think of “Tell Ol Bill” in the same way: music as a picture.

It was, in short, a lifetime’s achievement in one amazing, incredible year.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

By Tony Attwood

This article is part of a series in which the  Dylan’s songs, considered in the order in which they were written, are considered as a sequence of writing, in order to see how the themes within his writing evolve.  These articles are indexed in the Chronology Files – Dylan in the 1960s is here.

1963 saw Dylan expand his area of writing.  He became a man who could operate in a whole wide range of song styles, and in musical terms, he had quickly become the ultimate storyteller.  And it also saw him not only work again on the themes he had previously considered (songs of leaving, lost love, protest etc) but also brought into focus new themes such as individualism, and the thought that what defines us as individuals is not the way the world is, but the way in which we choose to see the world.

Towards the end of that year Dylan composed a most extraordinary set of songs ranging from two tales of the better world to come (When the ship comes in and The Times they are a-Changing along with The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll which portrays racism not as something that is part of individual incidents but as something utterly entrenched within American society.)   Then to finish the year off he wrote two of the most powerful songs of leaving: One too many mornings and Restless Farewell.

Which raised a question: what on earth could he do to top that?  He had composed 20 highly memorable songs in each of the last two years – could he keep it up?

The answer turned out to be most certainly yes – not only at the same extraordinary level of writing but also with the same level of variety.

Chimes of Freedom is a song which says that yes, things can change for the better.  But it is also a song that expresses its vision through a form of imagery that Dylan is now exploring in ever deeper modes.   He was, I believe not just influenced by the poets and novelists he was reading, but also by the understanding that the views he wanted to express could not be reported in normal everyday story telling.  We needed to go somewhere else.  As I wrote in my review of this song (and I think it was one of my better insights on this site) “We’ve given control of the world to the wrong people.”

In short, Dylan the story teller has moved into a new territory.  Earlier songs were by and large totally clear in their message.  Now we have layers of symbols on top of them.  Dylan had kicked off the new year by changing his style yet again.

And if that composition were not enough, the follow up (and let me stress again, this is in the order of writing, not in the order of song release) was the amazing Mr Tambourine Man.  Dylan appears to be completely in acceptance that it is not the world itself that is the issue, but the way we see the world.  I’m not sure too many song writers had tried this approach before – and even more amazingly, it was not the only new development of the year.

But even after two such ground breaking songs, Dylan was restless, endlessly wanting to change directions, and so he went for the lost love and blame of I don’t believe you (She acts like we never have met).   Which then is contrasted by Spanish Harlem Incident.

Already the year has become a tour de force, and Dylan kept it up with the crazy surreal Motorpsycho Nightmare  and of then just to remind us that he hadn’t forgotten his triumphs of the end of the previous year a song of farewell: It ain’t me babe.

But I think there was a problem, because with this incredible level of creativity, and seemingly not too many people around who Dylan would listen to in terms of his artistic output (and of course we could argue “Why should he, with an output like this?”) Dylan could both get it right and make horrible mistakes.    Mama you’ve been on my mind is a beautiful song of lost love, but Ballad in Plain D  which was composed next is both highly repetitive and just plain vicious.

Of course songs can use repetition and can make viscous attacks, but I am not really sure this combination of repetition and nastiness actually makes for good listening or good art in this case.

Perhaps Dylan felt he needed to shake this feeling off for immediately after Plain D he came out with a flashback to his earlier days with a return to the talking blues with I shall be free number 10 and then in utter total contrast a tender love song To Ramona

But then, suddenly, Dylan had a change of direction, finding a new theme: individualism.

It started with All I really want to do which is a song of farewell, but which seems to edge away from the spirit of “It ain’t me babe” into a new field talking about himself rather than the woman.

And then, just when we thought it could not get any more varied along comes I’ll keep it with minem which  is for me a break through moment.  Who else could have written…

I can’t help it
If you might think I’m odd
If I say I’m not loving you for what you are
But for what you’re not

This really is a new area of work – a song about the individualism of the writer.  And if we want a single line to sum it all up, how about My back pages – the next song in the sequence with

“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I

This really is about the individual seeing the world from his own unique standpoint.  It is the “it’s not the world, but the way you see the world” vision from the start of the year, put firmly within Dylan’s own view of reality, and himself as a creative artist within that reality.

So my point is that Dylan had evolved his “not the world” notion, and combined it with his interest in songs of farewell, to create a new genre – the songs of individualism.  And I can think of no way other than as a “song of individualism” to describe “My Back Pages”.

From this point of individualism, from the notion that it is not the world but the way we see the world that defines who and what we are, that Dylan now makes one of his greatest leaps of all into Gates of Eden.  Protest, individualism and the notion that nothing makes any sense any more, all twirl together into one gigantic whirlpool from which comes the ultimate Dylan expression of this period It’s all right ma which has actually been reviewed twice on this site (you’ll find both reviews on the A to Z index on the home page).

Listening to this extraordinary sequence of songs through the year one wonders what else there was to be said, but of course this is Dylan we are talking about, and at this time he most certainly knew exactly what was to be said; he combined the song of farewell with his his recently formed interest in the expression of individualism to give us a quirky non-love love song, the antithesis of the two songs that he had just composed: If you’ve gotta go, go now

What a year!

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there.

By Tony Attwood

Dylan exploded onto the music scene as a composer in 1962 writing 20 songs of great accomplishment, most particularly such masterpieces as

• Blowing in the wind 
• Hard Rain’s a gonna fall
• Don’t think twice

These three songs covered different themes, obviously, and Dylan then continued writing through the rest of the year without particularly looking back to those achievements – constantly exploring different approaches.

But certainly the acclaim those songs gained, his strong stance on issues relating to war, and his ability to jump between different themes (ranging from traditional folk themes like moving on and poverty, to the traditional pop theme of lost love), plus his interest in political themes must all have fed into his work as he relentlessly marched forward as a unique composer of folk music.

Most of all Dylan knew how to surprise the awaiting audience with new songs, working around these themes as he created Masters of War early in 1963 and then followed this with two songs about lost love and leaving, (which used almost identical music on which to hang the words): Girl from the North Country and Boots of Spanish Leather

The contrast between these two songs and Masters of War is enormous – it is as if Dylan is showing us that he can indeed move from one theme to another, without taking a pause for breath.

And then as if those three brilliant songs were not enough Dylan composed Bob Dylan’s Dream one of the most evocative pieces imaginable, it sounds as if it should have been written by an old man, or at least a man of middle age looking back on his life, but this is the young Dylan showing an utter maturity in his writing that is remarkable for his age.

Indeed the “Dream” makes me think of Ballad for a friend – not because they are musically alike, but because of the maturity both of the music and the thought behind the song.  These songs sound as if Dylan had had his life and was looking back with fondness and sadness – but as I say, he was only just starting out.

And then (and I seem to be saying “And then” an awful lot) Dylan goes back to his folk roots with Only a Hobo before suddenly taking off in an utterly different direction with a song about boxing (boxing, a subject that was hardly on the agenda for the socially conscious young rebel) with Who killed Davey Moore?    Indeed of that song one can also say not just “who writes songs about boxing?” but also, “who writes a contemporary song using Who killed cock robin?”

All this composition would be several years work for most composers, but Dylan had hardly begun for he then takes in the theme of desolation with Seven Curses and then goes into desperation and hopelessness with God on our Side.

But instantly he is off again into a surreal dream about the third world war, before suddenly talking to us about the way society and the individuals within it are manipulated by empowered.  Before we can blink he is telling us in Eternal Circle that there is nothing we can do, for nothing ever changes, before returning to the plight of people living in rural poverty whose livelihoods are being taken away.

This is, no matter which way you look at it an incredible tour de force.  Not just because Dylan wrote 20 glorious memorable songs during the course of one year, but because in doing that he jumps from subject to subject to subject to…

Well, if you are still not convinced, he suddenly diverts his talent once again and has fun at the expense of a famous beat generation protester and artist with Gypsy Lou before suddenly taking in a Biblical theme (for the first time I think) with When the ship comes in.

The positivity of When the Ship undoubtedly paved the way for The Times they are a-Changing which goes back to the notion found in “Paths of Victory” which says the future will be fine.

Now this is another point at which to pause in the quick run through Dylan’s writing in 1963.   He has been telling us in several songs that things are far from right.  OK in the songs that led up to “Times” Dylan has been upbeat with the Ship coming in, and with Gypsy Lou going round the bend but just before that in Eternal Circle Dylan is telling us nothing can change and that we are all just stuck in our own circumstances – we are all pawns in their game.

And this is where (in Dylan’s second year as a full-speed masterful composer) that we have to stop and consider the fact that Dylan is not writing all these songs because he believes in what the song says.  No more than a novelist or writer of a film script believes in the story that he writes.  The storyteller tells stories because he/she likes telling stories, and finds it fun and can do it well.  The storyteller does not have to preach in each story – stories can be told for the enjoyment of others.

Thus I would argue that many commentators have tied themselves up in knots trying to explain each Dylan song in terms of one consistent moral code or vision of the world.  Having now reviewed over 350 Dylan songs on this site I believe that of course he has his own visions and his own views, but also a lot of the time he just loves telling stories.  When the Ship Comes In, is a story as much as Only a Hobo.

This leads to contradictions with some see as a problem.  As I said in my review of Percy’s Song Dylan appears to be asking for a lighter sentence for a man whose driving has killed four, while just one year earlier he was singing about the maiming of a friend by a driver in  Ballad for a Friend.

Times they are a changing tells us that the new future is just around the corner whereas Hollis Brown tells us the world is falling apart.  Indeed at the risk of becoming incredibly boring, allow me just once more to make the point that on the Times they are a changing album most of the songs tell us that times are very much not changing save for the worst.  Times is an obvious title for the album, but it is also an utterly misleading title.

So my point is that not every Dylan song has a heart-felt message tucked away inside it.  Indeed I think this is the starting point that quickly leads us on to songs that have no overt and clear meaning at all, but which are abstract and semi-abstract reflections of the world.

Of course being Dylan, immediately he has started to explore such themes and contradictions as are in Eternal Circle and Times they are a changing, he’s back pulling at every emotional heart string with The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll before taking us into the world of nature with Lay Down your Weary Tune

And finally as if all this were not enough he then comes up with two of the greatest songs of leaving written in the 20th century: One too many mornings and Restless Farewell.

What is it, we must ask, that drives Dylan through this extraordinary creative output?

Of course he did have a strong engagement with the protest movement and with civil rights, I am not denying that.  Of course he was deeply concerned about the well-being of the rural poor through his upbringing, although he had been considering the urban poor in New York just as much.  Of course he is concerned about justice.   But throughout all this there are two other factors we must acknowledge.  Dylan is a storyteller, and Dylan has access to and knowledge of the vast wealth of music that is the Scottish and Irish folk tradition – and to a lesser degree the English folk tradition.  He knows the songs, he knows the themes, and he knows how to bring them into the modern day.

“Restless Farewell” is one of the absolute masterpieces of the early years of Dylan’s writing – a song written quickly as the whole message poured out of him, a song about getting up and being on the road once again.  It is a song that is a picture; a picture as powerful as anything he had produced up to this point.  A song as magnificent in its achievement as “Ballad for a Friend”, “Hard Rain” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream.”  Indeed if all he had ever achieved had been those four songs he should have been remembered as one of the great songwriters of the 20th century.  But even in this one year there was much more.

So what we have here is a man drawing on many different sources of inspiration, and seemingly quite capable of being able to shift from one musical source to another as well as one lyrical theme to another, and all within a matter of days.

Looking at the list of songs for this year one can fully understand why Dylan became rather fed up with being pigeon holed as a “protest singer”, because such utter masterpieces as “Dream” “Ballad for a Friend” “Restless Farewell” are not protest songs. To call him a protest singer is to ignore these early pinnacles of Dylan’s achievement; these early expressions of his genius.

What is missing in this year is much of a Robert Johnson input – although it would soon return.  Probably it went because Bob was so bursting with ideas and things he wanted to say.  But this year most certainly does see the flowering of the songs of sadness and regret for what has been left behind, and what must be left behind.

Whichever way you look at Dylan in 1963 it was the most incredible, awesome achievement to produce not just this many brilliant songs, but this many songs in such diverse forms and with such diverse visions of the world.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there.

By Tony Attwood

I have “Only a Hobo” down as a 1963 composition, but there is a recording on the internet which lists it as 1962.   We know that it was recorded on August 12 1963 as part of the sessions for the “Times they are a changing” album, but was not used.  It eventually was released on the Bootleg 1-3 album.

Now I am sticking with 1963 for the moment, despite the existence of the recording said to be from 1962 because of the sheet music.  I know it is hard to read on the screen but this certainly seems to say 1963.

This page was described in the auctioneer’s catalogue when sold as…

“Mimeographed copy of sheet music to the song ‘Only a Hobo,’ 8.5 x 11, signed at the bottom in pencil, “Bob Dylan ‘63” adding a line from the song, “He was only a Hobo, but one more is gone!” 

We also know that in March 1963, Dylan recorded the song at Broadside’s office, with Broadside then releasing it on the album, Broadside Ballads, Volume I.  For copyright reasons the song is credited to Blind Boy Grunt.  So maybe 1962, but I think 1963.

This song takes us back to Man on the Street  and forward to the Loneseome Hobo and ultimately with a different perspective Drifter’s Escape – in which the drifter, the hobo, finally wins through and those who treat him with disdain and indifference (the cursed jury of Drifter’s Escape) get their comeuppance.

So the hobo is another of Dylan’s themes, closely related to the blues singer who plays enough to earn food and drink for the night and is on once again.  Related to the character in “One too many mornings.”

And just as the theme is very old in music, so is the music itself.  Here we need to think back to songs like “Only a Miner Killed”, or “Poor Miner’s Farewell,” as well as songs such as “A tramp on the street”.

“Only a miner killed” had lyrics by John Wallace Crawford (known as Captain Jack).  A later variant was recorded by Aunt Molly Jackson…

Poor hard working miners, their troubles are great,
So often while mining they meet their sad fate.
Killed by some accident, there’s no one can tell,
Their mining’s all over, poor miners farewell!

Only a miner, killed under the ground,
Only a miner, but one more is gone.
Only a miner but one more is gone,
Leaving his wife and dear children alone.

Here’s a beautiful modern version of Only a Miner

And by way of comparison here is “A tramp on the street”

And the song, here recorded by the Carter Family which is often considered as the origin of the whole sequence of songs mentioned above…

Dylan’s words are not particularly original or well drawn but for sheer emotive appeal within such a simple format it is hard to fault the work…

As I was out walking on a corner one day
I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay
His face was all grounded in the cold sidewalk floor
And I guess he’d been there for the whole night or more

Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone

From here on the song covers a few more details of the poverty of the man’s existence

A blanket of newspaper covered his head
As the curb was his pillow, the street was his bed
One look at his face showed the hard road he’d come
And a fistful of coins showed the money he bummed

Dylan plays the emotional card for all it is worth in the lyrics, but somehow for me his own versions of the song in the 1963 recordings don’t seem to match in the music what is conveyed in the scenes drawn in the lyrics.  For that, most curiously, we had to wait for Rod Stewart.

It is said in some quarters that after hearing this version Dylan went back to the song and tried to record it again, but still could not achieve what Rod Stewart managed.   Thus this recording is one of the oddities of this type of music.  The person who you might not expect to be able to make the most of the song, produces the final perfect version.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there.

By Tony Attwood

The Chronology Files of Bob Dylan for 1961 show that Bob wrote four songs that are particularly remembered today (although not considered in any way to be masterpieces), three of which are strongly related to life in New York, one a talking blues making fun of the “Bear Mountain Picnic” story, and two which take existing folk songs and adapt them to an urban rather than the traditionally rural setting.

That, by and large, was 1961 – a preparation for the first major year of composition.

1962 was Dylan’s  first year of writing songs that are still recalled today by the public beyond Bob Dylan aficionados, and having got his feet on the floor, Dylan continued to be not just incredibly prolific but also incredibly varied.  Indeed for six straight years Dylan wrote around 20 songs a year that can be called significant compositions, either because they were on his LPs, or because others recorded them, or because they have subsequently been considered “lost gems”.  It was an extraordinary achievement over an extraordinary six years.

So the question is, what was Dylan doing in 1962, his first full year of composing?

My answer simply is that Bob was writing songs around themes and concepts that he knew well from the music he listened to.  And he was borrowing melodies from wherever he pleased, because that is what the musicians of the past whom Dylan so admired, readily did.  They worked and re-worked the traditional music, the traditional lyrics and the traditional themes.

Therefore the question to be answered is, “what were these themes?”

I’ve tried to give a one line sketch after each of the songs of 1962, (with a link of course to the review of the song), and basically they come down to the following themes (allowing of course for the fact that some songs have more than one theme within them.)

Of course this list is flawed.  It is my interpretation of the key element of each song, and then an attempt to bind these songs into groups.  And given that some of the songs are in a group of their own, that’s not very helpful either.  But if you can improve the list, please do.

Dylan’s themes of 1962

1. Death (1)
2. It’s up to each of us how we see the world (1)
3. Leaving, moving on (3)
4. Lost love (2)
5. Optimism (1)
6. Protest (7); broken down into, protest against racism (1); protest against right wing politics (1); Protest against war and the way society is going (4); protest against poverty (1).
7. Robert Johnson style blues (4)
8. The social outsider / rejection of being a hero (3)

Except… as you might imagine I have been pouring over these songs for years, firstly collecting together the songs written just in this year, and then reviewing each one, trying to find antecedents where possible.  And believe me I have turned this list upside down and inside out time and time again, and I fully admit there are other ways of interpreting.  This is just the best I can do.

Some of these themes stayed with Dylan for years to come – particularly such themes as that of the outsider, and moving on.  And of course love and lost love.

But if nothing else the list does show us that the notion of Dylan as the king of protest music, is, at least as 1962 is concerned, an analysis that is flawed.  It is an analysis based only a tiny number of the compositions of the year.

There’s one other point.   In looking at the order in which Dylan wrote the songs (and as always I admit it is not a perfect order), we can see an ebb and flow.  The first seven songs, for example

1. Ballad for a friend
2. Rambling Gambling Willie
3. Standing on the highway
4. Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues
5. Let me die in my footsteps
6. Blowing in the wind 
7. Corrina Corrina

Dylan covers a wide range of different approaches. He didn’t start out as a latter day Robert Johnson, for the first seven songs were all from different arenas.   It was only after that, that having written one Johnson type song (Standing on the highway) he wrong two more, one after the other (Quit your Lowdown Ways and Down the Highway.)

After that we had one lost love song (Tomorrow is a long time) followed by three protest songs, Hard Rain’s a gonna fall, Ballad of Hollis Brown and John Brown

Then came the great song of leaving – the song of the loner walking away, Don’t think twice followed by the most curious oddity of the year: Paths of Victory.   Instead of protesting, or just walking away, suddenly Dylan is telling us that everything will be ok.

But it was just a one off because we then get four songs emphasising the negative side of life, Walking Down the Line, Oxford Town, Kingsport Town, Hero Blues, and rounding the year off, another Robert Johnson blues Whatcha Gonna Do?

What is interesting in all this is that protest music is there in 1962, but it is not the dominant feature – it shares its position with Robert Johnson style blues, and songs of walking away, being the loner.   But mostly Bob is walking down that long lonesome road, babe.

Perhaps Dylan got his protest music reputation not just from “Blowing in the wind” and “Don’t think twice”, but also from the fact that he hardly touched the three central themes of popular music: love, lost love and dance.   Listen to the top 40 of 1962 and those themes dominate the music, as they have done through most of the popular music’s reign as the supreme artistic forms from the 1950s onwards.

Dylan gave us none of this in his breakthrough year save for two lost love songs, “Corina, Corina”, and “Tomorrow is a long time”.

No wonder the world perked up its ears and took notice.  Not only did Dylan sing differently and write different types of songs, he wrote about different subjects.  And you didn’t need any musical education to grasp that.

But let me finish with the middle section of the list of compositions:

• Tomorrow is a long time 
• Hard Rain’s a gonna fall
• Ballad of Hollis Brown

I think many people would pronounce that Hard Rain was the stand out song of the year – and yet when you look at the songs composed immediately before and after Hard Rain you can see there is little (if any) connection.   Hard Rain is an absolute monument to Dylan’s genius in itself, but we have little to guide us as to where exactly this explosion came from.

Perhaps the answer is “Let me die in my footsteps” which got Bob thinking along these lines.  But certainly when we look at the songs in the order written it is most curious to see just how close Paths of Victory was after Hard Rain.

Hard Rain however stands in isolation – there was little before it to prepare us for the song, and no real aftermath.  It is just there, on its own.

Here is the complete list of compositions in order…

1962 

1. Ballad for a friend (Blues; Death)
2. Rambling Gambling Willie
3. Standing on the highway (Blues)
4. Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues (Right wing protest)
5. Let me die in my footsteps (We’ve forgotten how to live – protest about nuclear war)
6. Blowing in the wind  (It’s not the world, it’s the way you see the world)
7. Corrina Corrina (Lost love)
8. Quit your Lowdown Ways
9. Down the Highway (Lost love, Song of Leaving)
10. Tomorrow is a long time (Lost love)
11. Hard Rain’s a gonna fall (War protest)
12. Ballad of Hollis Brown (Rural protest)
13. John Brown (War protest)
14. Don’t think twice (Song of Leaving)
15. Paths of Victory. (The future will be fine)
16. Walking Down the Line
17. Oxford Town (Racism Protest)
18. Kingsport Town (lost love, moving on)
19. Hero Blues (I just want to be me, not your hero)
20. Whatcha Gonna Do?  (Robert Johnson blues)

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there.

By Tony Attwood

Two versions, one from November and one from December 1962.  One is on the Witmark Demos and the other is linked below; I am not sure which is which.

But I do think the non-Witmark version is several thousand light years ahead of the Whitmark, in terms of blues feel and emotion.  It is Bob Dylan as the modern Robert Johnson, whereas the faster Whitmark version has an element of “yee-haa” in it, as if Bob himself isn’t taking it all seriously.

Trying to describe the notion of the “feel” of the blues is hard; but it does have something to do with the speed, and the way the guitar accompaniment in the version below is not a solid plod-plod-plod chordal style of the Witmark version but has far more off-beat additions.  Here the guitar part tells us as much as the lyrics; in the Witmark version, it is simply there to hold the beat.

The voice in this slower version is much more in sympathy with the lyrics – there is no sense of hurrying through the verses: it is all about the feeling.  And of course it is not harmed by the fact that Robert Johnson himself, on one of his more together days, might have played the guitar like this.

The song is utterly simple – the opening line and its completion sung three times followed by the concluding lines – which vary in the slower version from the official text provided on the Bob Dylan site.

Tell me what you’re gonna do
When the shadow comes under your door
Tell me what you’re gonna do
When the shadow comes under your door
Tell me what you’re gonna do
When the shadow comes under your door
O Lord, O Lord
What shall you do?

I think it is an overwhelming shame that this song in this slower version was dropped from Freewheelin’.  As a final track it would have been a great rounding off to the whole album – although I would not want to suggest what should have been dropped.

But rather than go down that route, just play this slower non-Witmark version, and marvel at a very young white urban blues singer who had mastered the genre so totally at such a tender age.

This is absolute, natural talent – and if you want to hear how it developed, and how Dylan could get it right in terms of a faster song, do move over to the to the Witmark album and listen to Gypsy Lou .  Within a few months this guy musically could take those blues apart and go anywhere, do anything.  As I say, totally untutored, absolute natural talent.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there.

by Tony Attwood

Hero Blues is, to tell the truth, nothing special, and in my original list of compositions of 1962, I didn’t include it.  It was only because I realised that Dylan had revived it some years later that I thought it ought to be in the chronology.

In short it’s a 12 bar blues which has gone through a few re-writings, composed in 1963, amended in 1964 and then again as a full band version in 1974.  The original acoustic version finally appeared on the Witmark Demos CD.

Here’s the Freewheelin outtake

During the rewrite the song changed and became darker than originally composed, but that’s not really the thing that made me think we ought to include it here.

Rather it is the fact that Dylan actually thought that this should be included on “Times” instead of the overwhelmingly important and beautiful “One too many mornings”.   I have been sitting here for hours wondering why, trying to find an explanation, and really I can’t save that what Dylan wants to say at this moment is always more important than the overall artistic merit of some other song.

As for the full band version, maybe the revival in interest in the song came because Dylan wanted to say something about hero worship to his audience – that would make sense in relation to the fact that the song was chosen as the opener for the couple of concerts where it appeared.

Certainly the theme of a woman wanting her man to be a big time hero is one that has seemed on occasion to be something that concerns Dylan.   In the end Dylan didn’t use this song to express this view, but rather “I shall be free number 10” which opens with

I’m just average, common too
I’m just like him, the same as you
I’m everybody’s brother and son
I ain’t different from anyone
It ain’t no use a-talking to me
It’s just the same as talking to you

“Hero Blues” is only different because it is nasty while “I shall be free 10” seems less angry, slightly more reflective, lighter and with more humour.

Yes, the gal I got
I swear she’s the screaming end
She wants me to be a hero
So she can tell all her friends

In this song it is all the woman’s fault – she expects the man to be the superhero and be the man she ordered from the robotics store, rather than a regular human being.  (Actually I ought to try and write something along those lines – with the robot bit in it).

She reads too many books
She got new movies inside her head
She reads too many books
She got movies inside her head
She wants me to walk out running
She wants me to crawl back dead

You need a different kinda man, babe
One that can grab and hold your heart
Need a different kind of man, babe
One that can hold and grab your heart
You need a different kind of man, babe
You need Napoleon Boneeparte

and so on.   It’s not that important, and I wouldn’t mention it all, were it not for the fact that we nearly didn’t get “One to many…” which was absolutely one of my all time favourite folk songs when I first heard it and which I can still listen to and find interesting.

If you have not heard the Witmark album version do go back and listen – it is of course on Spotify, but you really should have the album.   The two versions (Witmark and the electric re-write) really are quite different.

Overall the song was played 5 times between 1963 and 1974 here’s the 74.  And for that we should give thanks so that we have the lines

You need a different kind of man, babe
One that can hold and grab your heart
You need a different kind of man, babe
You need Napoleon Boneeparte

Oh yes.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there.

By Tony Attwood

It is quite clear that during 1962 Dylan was exploring the various types of folk genre just to see what he could do with them, and included in the range of songs he experimented with he found a particular link with the personal tales of woe and moving on – something that became a theme he loved to explore throughout his songwriting career – from “One too many mornings” through to “Tell Ol Bill” and onwards.

Looking back we should not be surprised about this since Dylan has never lost his desire to be the modern day troubadour.  And indeed I think it never goes amiss to remind ourselves of the origins of the troubadour – the travelling minstrels of southern France (and parts of Italy) in the 12th and 13th century, singing of chivalry and love, although they could also be vulgar.

The Never Ending Tour is indeed Dylan harking back to a tradition that is 800 years old, and I believe we are forever in his debt that he stood up against the new 20th/21st century approach which sees the artist stuck within the recording studio for most of his career, hardly venturing forth, and most certainly not re-writing the songs day after day.

Indeed I personally despair when I heard criticisms of moments such as “Rock em dead” and I once knew a man.   Yes of course there is a place for the well-rehearsed and ultimately artificial studio recording, where we get the music after the engineers have spent their hours removing every scratch as the guitarist moves across the strings.  But let us not forgot how all this started.

Back with Kingsport Town, this type of folk song has long been popular with travelling singers because it gives the singer a certain cachet – the singer portrays himself as having been around the world and suffered all sorts of hardships and problems, and he (or she but generally he) has washed up here, in this bar, and tells his tale.

Of course this is the antithesis of the troubadours who described the lives of the great nobles and ladies in their castles, but the function is similar. In both cases the singer is saying that he has seen the world and is returned to tell stories of it.  It is just that in one case the world is the world of the lords and ladies, and in the other it is the world of the lonesome traveller, betrayed in love.

It is an approach that in England goes back to the Middle Ages, during which time villages were totally isolated from the rest of the country and mostly from each other.  “Born here and die here” was exactly what it was like for everyone and nothing changed the endless monotony of life other than the changing seasons, the religious festivals, and the occasional visitor.

Since at that time a small town 20 miles away was as remote as the then unknown China, the tales were fanciful, but the singer gave himself some credence by placing himself within the adventures of which he told.  If he had had great fortune, then his ragged clothes and asking for free food and drink in return for the singing would be hard to explain.  So the songs of being misled, let down and cheated came into fashion.

Of course the style has changed across the years, but Dylan still taps into this tradition, even though he is now sitting in a New York folk club or coffee bar, and so strong is the tradition his lyrics can be accepted even though palpably untrue…

The winter wind is a blowing strong
My hands have got no gloves

In fact Dylan never lost his love of the genre – just think of

The river whispers in my ear
I’ve hardly a penny to my name

Not only is the theme the same so is the scansion of the lines.  Indeed if you took the lines

I wish to my soul that I could see
The girl I’m a-thinking of

and were told it was a rejected verse from Tell Ol Bill you might well believe it.

The story continues

Don’t you remember me babe
I remember you quite well
You caused me to leave old Kingsport Town
With a high sheriff on my trail

and its only problem is that now, when we pay attention to the lyrics and the melody, we know that over time, and with the same sort of theme, Dylan was able to do so much more. In effect the song sounds like a try out for the music he was later to produce.

But it is quite extraordinary – if you can hear the melody of Tell Ol Bill you can easily sing the verses of this song within that.

Who’s a-gonna walk you side by side
And tell you everything’s alright
Who’s a-gonna sing to you all day long
And not just in the night

The origins of the song, as others have pointed out, is “Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little feet” and further back, “Lass of Loch Royal.”   Incidentally if you are not familiar with the Scottish origins of this type of song, and have a couple of spare minutes do listen to this superb rendition of Loch Royal by the incomparable Maddy Prior.  While of course it is not for me to tell you what to do, may I suggest you do nothing else, stop looking at the computer screen, and just listen to the music?  Just this once.  Just for a couple of minutes.

So I’ll leave now these windows and likewise this hall
And it’s deep in the sea I will find my downfall

It is in lyrics like this that this whole type of music developed so that Dylan, centuries later could write Kingsport Town as part of a long-running tradition.

I’m going to add something else that turned up while I was doing the usual background work on Kingsport Town, which is is “Hard Times of Old England”.  I’ve had a copy of the Steeleye Span album which has this song on it since, I guess, the 1970s, but never before heard this version.  If you are interested in what can happen to this type of music, do give it try.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site and day to day news about Dylan.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there

By Tony Attwood

This is another Dylan song that appears in slightly differently guises on the Whitmark album and on Bootleg 1-3.  A two chord song in which again Dylan manages to play the chords against the melody in a way that doesn’t seem quite right.  It is certainly different from that which we might expect.  On an earlier song review I suggested that Dylan was unsure what the chords were – but now going back through the songs of 1962 I can see that this was his technique – and it is an unusual technique indeed.

Below I give some details of the many, many people who have recorded the song, and the different versions they have come up with.  But the key thing they have all done is lost that odd chord against the melody contrast which heightens the difference between the lightness of the tune and the sadness of the lyrics.

In short they keep the jaunty and fun nature of the music, and have little input into the very downtrodden existence expressed in the words.

Now I must admit I’m not too sure what

My feet’ll be a-flyin’
To tell about my troubled mind

actually means and that might result in me having got the whole song wrong.  Does it mean that he can still go on travelling even though everything is wrong, or he has to be moving on because everything is wrong?  I guess it doesn’t really matter, because the key point is, everything is wrong.  But I like to think the flying feet are the cause of the upbeat nature of the song – he’s jogging along away from the latest misadventure.

That is certainly how all the other artists that have tackled the song have treated it.

So we have a situation in which his gal is ill, he’s spending money as fast as he gets it, he stays up all night til the dawn, and he’s just moving on and on and on.  Indeed like “Restless Farewell”, and “One too many mornings”, there is no option but to keep moving.  That theme of Irish and Scottish folk music that seems to go back to the origins of the musical forms itself is the heart and soul of the piece.  Keep moving.

The song is in essence very simple in construction:  verse / chorus / verse / chorus all the way through, and was first recorded in November 62 for Broadside.  The second version was recorded in March the following year.

What is so interesting is that through the life and vigour of the song, Dylan manages to keep up our interest, and indeed want us to hear the song again, despite the simplicity of the lyrics.   In both the verse and the chorus Dylan gives us the same line three times, leaving no real room for development.

Listening this afternoon, as I have been, to multiple versions of the song by other recording artists, I think this is the essence of the song that is so readily lost.

The Joan Baez version on Baez sings Dylan (it also appears on Any Day Now), doesn’t quite work for me, somehow there is so much accompaniment that the drive of Dylan’s original versions is lost; it becomes too much of a pop song.

Pete Seeger and Arlo Gutherie have great fun with it on “Together in Concert”.  The joke at the start goes on too long for it to be that funny sitting at home listening to the record, but was obviously funny in the gig.  But it does deal with the troubled mind vs flying feet issue and its good to hear it – although I can’t imagine too many people being willing to play the whole introduction more than once.  .

In fact there are so many versions of this song available (try the Odetta version from Odetta sings Dylan for example) that all I can do is suggest you get a Spotify account if you don’t have onee and shut yourself away for a rainy afternoon and explore them.   You’ll find Ricky Nelson’s country version which sounds as you would expect it to, and the Dillards have a bluegrass version for which the song seems perfectly written – how weird is that!   And there’s the Heebie Jeebies, oh and a light modern jazz version by the Gene Norman Group.  They are all there; it is just extraordinary how many people have recorded this song.

Of course this is how folk and blues had to be – ready for endless reinterpretation, because so much of it was never written down, but it is a masterstroke to manage to keep our interest up in such a construction when heard on an album.

Well, I’m walkin’ down the line
I’m walkin’ down the line
An’ I’m walkin’ down the line
My feet’ll be a-flyin’
To tell about my troubled mind

I got a heavy-headed gal
I got a heavy-headed gal
I got a heavy-headed gal
She ain’t a-feelin’ well
When she’s better only time will tell

In fact the “Walkin down the line” chorus comes five times but an additional level of interest occurs with the way the third verse through the repeating of “rolls and flows” as well as giving us an extra internal rhyme with “holes” (and the assumed rhyme with “clothes” which is cheating a bit but no one is going to carp).

My money comes and goes
My money comes and goes
My money comes and goes
And rolls and flows and rolls and flows
Through the holes in the pockets in my clothes

But one must also mention the rhythm of the guitar work in Dylan’s version.  It is something that I am sure is not unique to Dylan, but which he worked on – a strong downbeat chord and then up and down strokes repeated for the second chord.

It is a technique he uses elsewhere, and it is not extraordinarily difficult to do, but it is here the Dylan experiments with what I have suggested is the wrong chord against the melody.  It all adds to the effect.

It is not a major piece of work, but is certainly a perfectly listenable song, and one that we can be grateful has been preserved and re-issued, even if it took a few years for this to happen.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there

by Tony Attwood

There is of course no single agreed set of hymns to sing in Christian services, and so there are hundreds – probably thousands – of hardly used songs that turn up in some hymnals, and not in others.   And indeed just as there are people like me who think it is interesting to do a critique of each Bob Dylan song so there are people who review hymns and calculate how many hymnals each song turns up in.

“Palms of Victory” is a hymn that doesn’t score very highly on this list, but it is included in some collections of hymn books. 

It is suggested that Reverend John B. Matthias, a travelling preacher, wrote the song sometime towards the end of the 18th century – a hymn that is also noted in some sources with the alternative title “Deliverance will come” – the line in the hymn at the end of the chorus.  However it is normal for the writers of a song that is good enough to have been passed down over the years to have written, and left behind, others lessser works.  No one who writes a quality song, only writes one song.  But there seems to be nothing to indicate that Rev Matthias wrote other songs, so the claims seem (to me at least) rather week.

But the hymn did become appropriated by the folk music outriders – most notably the Carter Family who recorded it in the 1920 under the title “Wayworn Traveller”, and so we have two possible sources for Bob Dylan for “Paths of Victory” – either a hymn book (and yes, of course I know he was not a Christian at this time) or a folk recording.

Whatever the source, Bob took the song, changed the words, sang the new version on TV and had the result published in “Broadside”.

Since then country music has also adopted the original, and it also metamorphosed into a protest song about hunger called “Pans of Biscuits”.

The chorus of Paths of Victory really says it all…

Trails of troubles
Roads of battles
Paths of victory
I shall walk

And the new world is just around the corner

The trail is dusty
And my road it might be rough
But the better roads are waiting
And boys it ain’t far off

But there is another link between “Times” and “Paths” beyond the fact that it is going to be so much better in the future, and it is that the vision that this new and better world is inevitable.  You can’t escape it, it is going to happen.  Your sons and your daughters are already beyond your command, and if you can’t live in the new world then you are done for.

We see this message originating in “Paths” because as much as we wait for an explanation as to what is making this new world possible, (and come to that is there anything we can do to help it move along), all we get is the fact that we don’t have to do anything, it is there, it is happening.

The gravel road is bumpy
It’s a hard road to ride
But there’s a clearer road a-waitin’
With the cinders on the side

That evening train was rollin’
The hummin’ of its wheels
My eyes they saw a better day
As I looked across the fields

and so on, verse after verse.

What also really struck me in coming back to this song after many years of not listening to it, was the connection between the message here and the message Dylan preached during his years of preaching an over Christian message.   In the Christian era the message was: the Second Coming of the Lord (with all the misery and suffering that entails for unbelievers) is on its way.  It is inevitable.  The path is set and you can’t do anything about it and people like me who don’t believe are done for.

Although the cause is spelled out in the Christian songs, (contrasting with this song and with Times), the inevitability is there.  To me, and of course this is just me, it is interesting that Bob had this message and returned to it, amidst his many songs about life being awful and the world isn’t going to change.  And it is interesting that I am not sure I have read anyone put this hypothesis forwards before.

Of course I am not saying he has always been like that – some of the the New Morning songs had a vision of a cheerful new world, as did pieces like “Country Pie” – but once again the path was just there.

Anyway, not one of my favourite songs of Bob’s not least because it is so repetitive – short verse, chorus, short verse, chorus.  We get the chorus seven times and nothing happens, nothing changes.   Certainly I think the record company was right not to take the piano version – that really is too rough and too basic, because although over time Dylan did become a decent pianist who could invent interesting accompaniments he was not able to do that in the early 60s.  The guitar version is better, but after the third “life is going to be great” verse and the inevitable chorus I’d had enough.

There is one other interesting point about the guitar version however and that is the way Dylan larks around with the chords.  It is as if he were trying to find a way to make the whole piece work better by implying more complex chords than there naturally are.  There are only three chords in the song, but a number of times we get the “wrong” chord against the melody.  It’s an interesting effect, but not enough to rescue the piece from its combination of repeated chorus and chirpy cheery message.

Others have tried the song out as well…

And if you really like weird… (really do try this, it is quite extraordinary – this is where the sousaphone comes in – I really have never heard a Dylan song accompanied by a sousaphone before)

And even the Byrds had a go but still couldn’t really rescue the piece, in my view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0brX4W8FG9Y

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there

by Tony Attwood

It didn’t take long (once he got to writing full time) for the rest of the world to find out that one could do all sorts of things with Dylan songs, and “Quit your lowdown ways” – a song that is now pretty much forgotten, showed this most certainly.   Dylan possibly wrote this in part as a Robert Johnson tribute, but then Dylan’s pal Noel Stookey came along and did a complete rearrangement of the piece for his band, Peter, Paul and Mary and Dylan had another hit.

You’ll probably have a copy of Dylan’s version on Bootleg 1-3 (volume 1 track 10) but what you probably won’t have is a copy of PPM’s third album “In the Wind” which came out in October 1963 – about 18 months after this song was written.  The album was reissued on CD in 1990, so there are still copies to be found if you want to search – and assuming you are not too horrified that I am suggesting that Dylan fans should be listening to Peter Paul and Mary.

But, nevertheless…

From the album “In the Wind” came the Peter Paul and Mary single “Blowing in the Wind” which is said to have sold 300,000 copies in its first week, getting to number 2 on the Billboard charts in 1963.   The single sold well over one million copies in the US alone, and assuming Dylan by then had an even semi-decent contract for his song writing, he would have been financially made for life, had he never written another song.

And if that were not enough, the follow up single (“Dont think twice”) got to number 9 in the pop singles charts.  More fame, more financial success for the songwriter – and of course for the band.

And for PPM the success of this album was not over yet for it won Best Performance by a Vocal Group at the 1964 Grammy awards and reached number 1 in the album charts, thus ensuring a huge audience for songs like “Lowdown Ways” that Bob’s own recording would not achieve.

The story is that Bob later fell out with PPM over their recording of Waters of Oblivion, but the more I read about the comings and goings of the era the more I doubt that this was the huge bust up for all time with Bob’s old pal.  And I certainly have reservations as to whether the lyric change (which was at the heart of the argument – if there was an argument) was down to Noel Stookey.

Here’s Peter Paul and Mary’s version of “Quit your low down ways” – although they were not the only people to re-arrange the song.  Even the Hollies had a go, but I’m not providing a link to that recording.  If you want it you can go searching.

Looking back across such a distance in time, and knowing what happened to Bob when he was converted to a fundamentalist form of Christianity, I really do have to smile when I hear the opening lines…

Oh, you can read out your Bible
You can fall down on your knees, pretty mama
And pray to the Lord
But it ain’t gonna do no good

You’re gonna need
You’re gonna need my help someday
Well, if you can’t quit your sinnin’
Please quit your low down ways

How his views changed.

These lines in fact are lines that can be found in many blues songs of the era, such as “Milk Cow Blues” recorded by Kokomo Arnold from an original written by Sleepy John Estes.   The lyrics turn up in the third verse of this classic 12 bar blues from 1934.  Do listen if you have a moment because you’ll then also hear the use of the unexpected extended lyrics that Dylan uses to such effect in his version of the song.  I’m sure this was the source of “Lowdown”, although not necessarily this version.

Robert Johnson also recorded a 12 bar blues with this title, but it seems to me to be too far away from what Dylan came up with to be the original source – although Bob would undoubtedly have known it.  There is also a spiritual “Your lowdown ways” which is closer to Dylan’s work in some regards but I can’t see a copy on the internet for the moment.  If you find one, could you put up a link?

In essence the song tells the woman everything she can try, but no matter what she does (going to the White House, going to the desert, hitch hiking on the highway)  she’s going to need his help.   As such it is a fairly misogynistic view of the world, which of course is what the blues was in the 1930s.

This live version below (after the advertising) varies from published lyrics after verse 1.    If you like it leave it running as the recording runs on to “I sure’d hate to be you on that dreadful day” and then some.

But I want to finish this little commentary by going back to Peter Paul and Mary.  Generally their re-working of Dylan’s songs is often not mentioned – it was somewhat too commercial, not quite the real thing… and yet musically the re-workings are musically excellent, the harmonies perfect and the net result that Dylan not only became very rich very quickly, but also that his music (which is after all what it is all about) was brought to a much large audience than otherwise might ever have been the case.  And they add an extra dimension to each song they tackled, just as Hendrix did with the Watchtower.  It is a different dimension from Hendrix of course, but it is nonetheless valid for that.   What is Bob doing in 2017 if not reinterpreting other people’s work?

But even if you try nothing else from PPM do listen to their version above of Low Down Ways, and then their approach  to Too Much of Nothing – there’s a link to the recording of the song within the article as well as an explanation as to what the big argument was about.  I don’t know if I will convince you, but just in case, do give the recordings a couple of minutes.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x55kalp

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there

By Tony Attwood

This is the version of Rambling Gambling Willie that you might know from its revivals…

but stay with us, because there is another Rambling Gambling Willie which we’ll come to later.

The outsider, the outlaw, the loner, death.  Four concepts that dominated Bob Dylan’s thinking about songs, as he moved away from the first experimental compositions of 1961 into the total flowering of his talent in the following year.

And what appears to be the first two songs that Dylan wrote in 1962 take us through the two musical genres that attracted Dylan so much – the ballads from the Scottish and Irish tradition and the blues of Robert Johnson.

Dylan had already produced a blues so utterly perfect in Ballad for a friend , it was perhaps not surprising that he instantly turned to his other muse – the Scottish and Irish ballads, and the concept of the outsider.  Not the outsider as a down and out dying on the street as in Man on the street but a hero of the olden days, outside the law, but with the heart of gold.  In effect the myth of Robin Hood, as everyone brought up in England knows it.   (Incidentally Sherwood Forest is a real place, and less than an hour’s drive from where I live in the East Midlands.  The forest is still there and you can go and see the old oak tree under which Robin and his men supposedly gathered.)

Dylan’s composition comes from Brennan on the Moor – a song which I’ve known for much of my life, and which indeed I taught to my daughters as they were inducted into the array of song books and musical instruments that littered the house in their younger days.    There is a version of it by the Clancy Brothers online.   Brennan was an Irish Highwayman who was hanged in the early 19th century and whose exploits became romanticised.

The lyrics of this song vary enormously of course – here’s one version

Oh it’s of a brave young highway man this story I do tell
His name was Willie Brennan and from Ireland he did dwell
It was from the Kilworth Mountains he commenced his wild career
And many a wealthy nobleman before him shook with fear
Oh it’s Brennan on the Moor, Brennan on the Moor
Oh brave and undaunted was young Brennan on the Moor

Which we can compare with Dylan’s

Come around you rovin’ gamblers and a story I will tell
About the greatest gambler, you all should know him well
His name was Will O’Conley and he gambled all his life
He had twenty-seven children, yet he never had a wife
And it’s ride, Willie, ride, Roll, Willie, roll
Wherever you are a-gamblin’ now, nobody really knows

The music is very similar indeed, and there is a strong connection in the lyrics too – not least by the fact that in both songs we have “Willie” although they were of course totally different characters.

Dylan’s character is based on Wild Bill Hickock (known as “Willie O’Conley” in the song) and it was intended to be part of his second album.  Interestingly, that album that we have always known as Freewheelin, was originally called Bob Dylan’s Blues, at least until late July 1962, when Dylan recorded “Rambling, Gambling Willie”.

The version in this video is really worth comparing with the version on Bootleg 1-3 and the Whitmark Version.  I guess it is an early version and came before either of the two recordings that are in the Bootleg series.  Perhaps someone can put me right on what this version is.

Returning to the version of the lyrics that is used in the two Bootleg series recordings, Dylan goes to some length to tell us what a great guy Willie was…

He gambled in the White House and in the railroad yards
Wherever there was people, there was Willie and his cards
He had the reputation as the gamblin’est man around
Wives would keep their husbands home when Willie came to town
And it’s ride, Willie, ride Roll, Willie, roll
Wherever you are a-gamblin’ now, nobody really knows

It is in fact a romantic conception of the man – we are led to admire his gambling, not have any sympathy with the people from whom he took money…

Sailin’ down the Mississippi to a town called New Orleans
They’re still talkin’ about their card game on that Jackson River Queen
“I’ve come to win some money,” Gamblin’ Willie says
When the game finally ended up, the whole damn boat was his
And it’s ride, Willie, ride Roll, Willie, roll
Wherever you are a-gamblin’ now, nobody really knows

Indeed even when Willie is taking money from regular working folk whose families would then presumably have no food for their children, we are asked to admire Willie…

Up in the Rocky Mountains in a town called Cripple Creek
There was an all-night poker game, lasted about a week
Nine hundred miners had laid their money down
When Willie finally left the room, he owned the whole damn town
And it’s ride, Willie, ride Roll, Willie, roll
Wherever you are a-gamblin’ now, nobody really knows

And finally we do get to hear about why we should feel so good about him…

But Willie had a heart of gold and this I know is true
He supported all his children and all their mothers too
He wore no rings or fancy things, like other gamblers wore
He spread his money far and wide, to help the sick and the poor
And it’s ride, Willie, ride Roll, Willie, roll
Wherever you are a-gamblin’ now, nobody really knows

Eventually Willie gets shot by a man who accuses him of cheating and he has the traditional dead man’s cards in his hands, the aces and eights.  And so the last verse tells us that when your time has come, that’s it, there is no escaping the cards, or death.

So all you rovin’ gamblers, wherever you might be
The moral of the story is very plain to see
Make your money while you can, before you have to stop
For when you pull that dead man’s hand, your gamblin’ days are up
And it’s ride, Willie, ride
Roll, Willie, roll
Wherever you are a-gamblin’ now, nobody really knows

That’s the song, but I would like to finish by focusing for a moment on the guitar work on the version that appears on Bootleg Series 1-3 (track 8) and the way Dylan’s singing works around it.

The guitar work is not exactly repeated verse by verse, and Dylan’s singing changes to, with very subtle rhythmic and accent changes.  Just listen to what Dylan does with “noBody knows” in the penultimate verse. In just listen to how Dylan sings those two words throughout the whole song.  That’s not the only way Dylan is varying the music as he goes, but it is an easy to hear example.

What’s more the chords that Dylan uses are not the obvious ones to accompany the melody, if you really want to hear just how Dylan makes this song develop, play it on the CD and then immediately flip back to the start and play it again – you’ll hear just how far Dylan has upped the intensity.

In short Dylan squeezes much, much more out of the music of this song than any lesser performer ever would both in terms of his guitar performance and his singing.

Had the Bootleg 1-3 version been released on Freewheelin it would have added another dimension to the appreciation of his work that accompanied the album as it was released.  It’s a fine adaptation of a classic song, but more than that it is an example of just how much Dylan could do with the guitar and lyrics this early in his career.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there

by Tony Attwood

The four original songs that stand out from this year (the first in which we can recognise Dylan emerging as a singer/songwriter of note) consist of three humorous pieces and a commentary on the inhumanity of modern city life (Man on the street).   None of the songs use original melodies or chord sequences, but all of them use traditional material to make their point.

And really “the point” is what it is all about in 1961.  Dylan is giving a focus to elements of everyday life that in three cases social satirists would claim as their own territory, and in the other case focuses on the injustices and lack of humanity that is part of modern urban living.

Listening to the songs now there is a brightness and freshness about them, as well as an originality.  Of course maybe someone else was doing parodies of New York life in terms of the money making of Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,  the adoption of a Jewish celebratory song and dance by other cultures in Talkin Hava Negeilah blues, the hidden horrors of urban life and our continuing carelessness of life Man on the street and then back to the first point again with Hard times in New York Town.

Maybe someone else was covering all this ground, but if so, I am not sure who.

Thus the melodies Dylan used were the same as had been heard before, but through this Dylan is saying, we can use existing styles of music to put across new lyrical messages.

Indeed it is interesting that Dylan started with the lyrics and indeed focused totally on them.  The music seemingly was less important – and as the blues and folk music songsmiths of the earlier decades had each borrowed from their predecessors, why shouldn’t he?

Of course Dylan could have stayed at this point and been forever a singer who used folk music as a way of protesting about life’s injustice or indeed laughing at the stupidity of others through song.  Had he done so he would have been recognised as a talent, but not as THE talent of his age.  It was because he could take this starting point and then move on that he has become so rapidly became so widely recognised and so highly acclaimed.

1. Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues.
2. Talkin Hava Negeilah blues
3. Man on the street
4. Hard times in New York Town

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there

by Tony Attwood

Updated 25 Sep 2020 with defunct video replaced

The fourth and final song from Dylan in 1961 is “Hard Times in New York Town” which takes the melody, accompaniment and opening of “Down on Penny’s Farm” and then instead of making it about hard times for rural workers, turns it into a satire on tough life for people in the cities.   Thus it both parodies the music of 40 years before while at the same time offering a new perspective – a perspective that was developed in songs such as Man on the street.   With that song and Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues Dylan is saying to his audience, that music can be used to make fun of, and point out more seriously, the level of problems that exists in the city.

Put another way he is saying, a lot of the blues was about rural poverty, but there are songs to be made about urban poverty too – either seriously as with Man on the Street or as satire.

But at the same time he is saying that the musical forms that existed before the war can be used now to point out what is wrong with the world around us, while occasionally giving us a smile.   The smile is greater if we realise exactly what he has done (transforming a rural song into an urban song), but even if we don’t realise, it is still an interesting development.

First off here is “Down on Penny’s Farm” – this is one of the earliest recordings still widely available, recorded here by the Bentley Boys of whom very little is known.

It has been said that that this song is also the inspiration for the 1965 song ‘Maggie’s Farm’.  I’ll need to revisit my review of “Maggie’s Farm” to try and work that suggestion through.

Meanwhile here’s the opening verse of the original…
.
Come you ladies and gentlemen, and listen to my song,
I’ll sing it to you right, but you might think it’s wrong;
May make you mad, but I mean no harm,
It’s just about the renters on Penny’s farm.
It’s a-hard times in the country,
Out on Penny’s farm.

And now Dylan’s re-write

Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song
Sing it to you right, but you might think it’s wrong
Just a little glimpse of a story I’ll tell
’Bout an East Coast city that you all know well
It’s hard times in the city
Livin’ down in New York town

I’m not enough of an expert on American folk music of the 1920s (in fact I am not an expert on it at all) nor on rural American in the 1920s (ditto) to know if George Penny existed, or if the name is just a symbol for every rotten farmland owner, but certainly the original song tore into him…

Hasn’t George Penny got a flattering mouth?
Move you to the country in a little log house;
Got no windows but the cracks in the wall;
He’ll work you all the summer and rob you in the fall.
It’s a-hard times in the country,
Out on Penny’s farm.

and later

Here’s George Penny, he’ll come into town
With a wagon load of peaches, not a one of them sound;
He’s got to have his money or somebody’s check;
Pay him for a bushel and you don’t get a peck.
It’s a-hard times in the country,
Out on Penny’s farm.

and at the end, when the mortgage money is demanded

Down in his pocket with a trembling hand,
“Can’t pay you all, but I’ll pay you what I can.”
Then to the telephone, the merchant makes a call,
He’ll put you on the chain gang, (if) you don’t pay it all.
It’s a-hard times in the country,
Out on Penny’s farm.

Pete Seeger also recorded the song –

And there are plenty more recordings around.

So what Bob Dylan did was take this and update it to become a contemporary piece about his adopted city.  The humour is simple but effective – New York is a lovely friendly city, just watch people knock you down and then kick you again.

Old New York City is a friendly old town
From Washington Heights to Harlem on down
There’s a-mighty many people all millin’ all around
They’ll kick you when you’re up and knock you when you’re down
It’s hard times in the city
Livin’ down in New York town

The point is that it is just as hard living in New York and being exploited by the rich as it was in the 20s in the rural areas.

Well, it’s up in the mornin’ tryin’ to find a job of work
Stand in one place till your feet begin to hurt
If you got a lot o’ money you can make yourself merry
If you only got a nickel, it’s the Staten Island Ferry
And it’s hard times in the city
Livin’ down in New York town

New York has got the reputation of the place to be, sophisticated, exciting etc etc but really its a horrible place.

I’ll take all the smog in Cal-i-for-ne-ay
’N’ every bit of dust in the Oklahoma plains
’N’ the dirt in the caves of the Rocky Mountain mines
It’s all much cleaner than the New York kind
And it’s hard times in the city
Livin’ down in New York town

Finally however Dylan predicts that he will be ok, no matter what….

So all you newsy people, spread the news around
You c’n listen to m’ story, listen to m’ song
You c’n step on my name, you c’n try ’n’ get me beat
When I leave New York, I’ll be standin’ on my feet
And it’s hard times in the city
Livin’ down in New York town

In the recording below Dylan performed this on a radio show with Cynthia Gooding.  At the end of the recording she was, “When you are rich and famous are you still going to wear the hat?”   Dylan says in reply, “I’m never gonna be rich and famous.”

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/  It is also a simple way of staying in touch with the latest reviews on this site.

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

• Dylan songs of the 1960s
• Dylan songs of the 1970s
• Dylan songs of the 1980s
• Dylan songs of the 1990s
• Dylan songs of the 21st century

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there