By Tony Attwood

“Born in Time” was written in 1989 and released in September 1990 on Under the Red Sky, but as Heylin points out at great length, and ultimately in mind-blowingly numbing detail, there are at least six recorded versions around, all different, all (apparently) worth hearing.

For what it is worth my view of these various versions of the song is not that Dylan is very specifically trying to make a difference, but rather he is just exploring where this song can go, and then seeing exactly what it can do.   Writers of standard three minute pop songs don’t do this sort of thing, only those who have a lifetime of writing and performance get this far into tinkering with their own work, just to see…

The first point to notice in relation to this song, in my view, is that Dylan’s creative output had overall declined year on year through the 80s.  It’s not an exact drop, but a tendency towards less and less creativity, starting with a high of 21 new songs in 1981 and dropping until by 1986, we have just six songs in a year, and then 1987 being the low point in terms of numbers  (just four songs that we know about from that year) although it was high in quality as the list shows…

• Love rescue me
• Political world
• What good am I
• Dignity 

1988 was the year of the Wilbury’s with just nine songs created, and no clear indication how much involvement Dylan had in the writing, although I’ve listed all nine songs in the 1980s file.

Then in 1989 Dylan was revitalised with 13 compositions, starting with Born in Time before moving on through some absolute classics such as Series of Dreams, Most of the Time, What was it you wanted and Everything is Broken and onwards until we reach Man in a Long Black Coat

Thus this song occupies a pivotal spot at the change over from the Wilburys back into writing specifically for himself.  Given the changeover taking place it is not surprising that Dylan spent so much time (in this song at least) changing things around.

When I started work on this site it was never my intention to become encyclopaedic and review each and every version of each song, but rather my aim was to take the main versions of the main songs, and maybe have a few diversions on the way.  So I am restricting myself here primarily to the Tell Tale Signs version (listed as “Unreleased Oh Mercy!” on the two disk set and the Red Sky version – although there is a link to a third version at the end.

The lyrics of course vary from version to version as Dylan does his usual thing of exploring and experimenting.  But what leaps out particularly in reference to these two main versions that I am looking at is just how different the bridge passages are – only the last four lines of the second bridge remain the same between these versions.

In the Red Sky version we have bridge 1 as

Not one more night, not one more kiss
Not this time baby, no more of this
Takes too much skill, takes too much will
It’s revealing
You came, you saw, just like the law
You married young, just like your ma
You tried and tried, you made me slide
You left me reelin’ with this feelin’

And bridge 2 as…

You pressed me once, you pressed me twice
You hang the flame, you’ll pay the price
Oh babe, that fire
Is still smokin’
You were snow, you were rain
You were striped, you were plain
Oh babe, truer words
Have not been spoken or broken

But in the Tell Tale Signs version we have

Just when I knew
you were gone, you came back
Just when I knew
It was for certain
You were high, you were low
You were so easy to know
Oh babe, now is time to raise the curtain
I’m hurtin’.

And then after the instrumental break

Just when I knew
who to thank, you went blank
And just when the whole
fires was smokin’
You were snow, you were rain
You were stripes, you were plain
Oh babe, truer words
Have not been spoken
or broken.

A huge difference.  And what we have here is a truly wonderful song from a man who has been mashed around by this romance but still is there loving her, forgiving her.  All that happens through the various versions is that Dylan reworks just how much forgiveness is delivered in those two bridge sections.

As I mentioned above I have one internet version; I am not sure if this is the one that Heylin thinks is the greatest recording of them all – it certainly has a huge amount to recommend it.

https://youtu.be/b5EpXuN__BY

By Tony Attwood

One of the great things about Dylan the songwriter is his ability to take a subject and explore it from all sorts of directions.  I guess the most obvious early example of this is that he took the notion of lost love (one of the three fundamentals of popular music, the other two being love and dance) and gave us an extreme version in the songs of disdain (Rolling Stone, Fourth Street etc).

So it happened also with his religious music.  I have written in the review of Pressing On of my feeling that Dylan got caught up in the notion that if he wrote a song of Christian celebration it had to sound like gospel music.  But I also feel that having written “Saved” he did decide to see just how far all this rock and roll religious music could go, and the result was Cover Down.  I don’t mean to say this is a totally new form of music – it just adds an extra level to treatment that Christianity got from Dylan.

In both this case as in Saved we have a song where the chords hardly change – in fact in Saved there is only one chord in verse, until with “I’m so glad” before we get the movement.

Cover Down goes further and although it does have a second chord, and a third that is passed through, it is primarily just one chord with quick visits elsewhere.  A real look back to the early days of electric blues.

The song was never released on record, and simply formed part of the April 17 to May 21 1980 tour.  After that it was put away forever.  Even the official site doesn’t have the lyrics, probably because there is an argument over whether Dylan sings “Cover down, pray through” or “Cover down breakthrough”.  Personally I’m not too worried either way.

For me, whichever phrase I have in my head is the one I hear, and since I don’t really understand what either phrase actually means I just call it Cover Down which is what Bob called it when he introduced it for the first time.

But most of all this seems to be a song which came towards the end of the songs that are pure devotion to the Lord.  It is not the very end, but it is getting close, for after this we get, in the chronological sequence of writing

• Ain’t gonna go to hell for anybody
• Property of Jesus
• Every grain of sand
• Caribbean Wind
• Groom’s still waiting at the alter

Well you heard about Pharaoh’s army
Trampling through the mud
You heard about the Hebrew children
Redeemed by blood
Same spirit dwellin’ in ya
That raised Christ from the dead
If it quicken your mortal body
Then let it run to your head

The same message, and yet in a sense I feel this is something akin to an epilogue – I know Dylan hadn’t finished with religious music by that time but there is something so all encompassing about this song that it sounds to me a bit like a closing of the door.  I think it is the line

Genesis to Revelation
Repent and confess

that makes me think he’s saying, “I’ve covered this from the first book of the Bible to the last, I’ve told you everything I know, what else can I say?”

And I get the feeling (and yes I know this is just me) that he is getting tired of taking texts (Hebrews 4:12 as many before me have pointed out) and lifting the lines to enable him to say

The word of God is sharper
than any double sided sword

It is (for me) as if he wants liberating from the notion that Bob now writes religion and that’s that.  His mind is shouting, “Hey Bob, I’ve got some thoughts of my own,” and in these next songs that is what comes bursting out.

For he also writes,

Demands are laid upon you
And burdens you can’t bear
Sins you can’t even remember
Are waiting to meet you there

And maybe that’s it.  Sins you can’t even remember.  So why not let the gift God gave you spring forth once more, unrestricted by sacred texts, free flowing to express what can be expressed irrespective of where it all came from?

And when Bob writes,

You got an image of yourself
You’ve built by yourself alone
But it will come a-tumbling down
Just like the walls made of stone
You will be separated
From everything you seem to be
You think you’ll be liberated, yeah
But the grave won’t set you free

I wonder if at this moment his own past image of the last couple of years is now under threat.  His self-image of the man who takes all different types of American , Scottish and Irish folk and popular music and gives it new dimensions has for some time been replaced by the image of being a servant of God, but now a new image is knocking at the door.  Because at some moment Dylan started to feel that not only will the grave not set you free, but in terms of creativity nor will utter devotion to Christianity.

Of course this is just me, putting my chronological interpretation into this song – and I would like to stress that none of this is to say I don’t enjoy this song.  I really do.  For me, as a piece of music, it really, really works in a full-blown way.  And I can love the lyrics – especially the last verse quoted above, because that verse could be just about one’s vision of oneself, without any reference to any form of organised religion.

We all have a self-image and it can easily crumble, and in the worst case scenarios people can just wish for death to escape their internal problems.  A belief in the messages of Christianity can be a solution to such problems, but many people find that Christianity is not the solution, and indeed many would argue that any recourse to a set of fixed views only makes matters worse.

That is not me saying “therefore Christianity is bad” but rather to point out the fact that just as for many people a clear view that there is an answer and it is this, is the way forwards, for many other people that view itself turns out to be the problem.  Some people have better mental health and better lives by saying, “the world in phenomenally complex and changeable and there are no absolute answers that are right for all time.”

And that’s why I sometimes think that maybe Dylan was singing “Break through” and not “Pray through”.  Break through to a new way of seeing the world.  But as I said at the start, I am never sure.

It is certainly possible to take inspiration from the Bible, and indeed get great insight from the Bible, but not be a Christian.  But to do that one has to break through the dogma.   Of course I could well be fooling myself, or I could now be manipulated by the Devil in thinking such things, and well, if I’m wrong I’m really going to suffer for my false views for all eternity.

Anyway, here we are, not at the end of Dylan’s religious journey, but approaching the end, and this song really does make an interesting insight into how he saw things at that moment.   Breakthrough or pray through – you pays your money and takes your choice.  Either way, it’s still a great song.

Recent Posts

• “Pressing on.” Who told Dylan that gospel had to sound like gospel?
• Don’t Ever Take Yourself Away. Dylan looks back to Durango, but loses the flavour.
• Time to end this Masquerade: Dylan prepares to open the door on a new era
• Dylan’s “In the Garden”. From Hallowe’en to the arrest of Jesus.

Elsewhere

• Index of over Dylan 300 songs reviewed on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.

By Tony Attwood

Putting Pressing On as the opening of side two of Saved shows how important the song was for Dylan at the time, but on the 1979/80 tour it lasted only seven months and 65 plays and then stopped being performed without ever being brought back.

If one plays the original version from Saved and then a concert version one can see what had happened – the song on stage had got totally out of control, and hearing that concert recording one can quickly see why Dylan had had enough.   The song had moved on, but moved on too far.

The problem is that the chorus

Well I’m pressing on
Yes, I’m pressing on
Well I’m pressing on
To the higher calling of my Lord

is repeated three times each time it pops up.   On the record Dylan has a chance to build up to the verses – there were originally three, but these were cut down to two in an early effort to keep the song more balanced.

On the album recording the song works because it starts at a much lower level.  In the concert version the backing gospel choir have already built up through the concert itself and they had all also got high on it the night before and the night before that.  Thus everyone gets a bit carried away and doesn’t know how to take the music down again, as per the record.  Besides it is pretty hard to do a fade out on stage.

Thus the problem is simple: a song with one line repeated nine times needs very careful management indeed, and very careful management is what we get on the album but not on stage.

What made the situation even harder was the fact that on the tours Pressing On was the show closer and of course that helped a lot because by that time the audience (or at least those in the audience who didn’t mind having a whole concert of new religious songs rather than any secular oldies) felt that they had had the great climax to the show.

I am told (but can’t verify) that when Dylan did drop the song he replaced it with exactly the opposite, suddenly dropping the excitement level and playing as a finale one of the older songs with just him and guitar.  If that is so, it suggests I am on the right track – he knew that the ending of the show and the progression of this particular song, was not right.

But I am still left bemused by the notion of Bob Dylan so lost for words he uses one line nine times, another line three times and then adds just eight other lines.  Quite a thought.

In the first verse we get the singer as Jesus dealing with the perfidious Pharisees, as per the story taken from the Gospel of John.  In the second it is the gospel according to Mark that gives us the text, and the Christian message is there, for those who wish to hear.

And Dylan has heard for as he tells us

Well I’m pressing on
Yes, I’m pressing on
Well I’m pressing on
To the higher calling of my Lord

Of course even for non-believers like me parts of the message can still be highly attractive as in

Shake the dust off of your feet, don’t look back
Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack

It is just that some of us who are not religious think we can do it with what we’ve already got inside us.  We don’t need to have faith in the Lord to achieve these things any more than Dylan needed faith in the Lord to write “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Visions of Johanna”.

So it isn’t what can be achieved that is the issue, rather whether the source of the inspiration is from within us or from worshipping the Almighty.

As I said there was a third verse, this one based on Romans, but that got cut and we were left pressing on and on and on and on (as the choir sings).

Musically the excitement turns up in the verse with its quick chord changes between B flat, Dm, E flat, F, Bflat while Dylan having fun at the piano playing on the black notes.  But then with each short verse we know we will soon be back to pressing on and on.

So is it great music?

The problem is that old one of the inter-relationship between the music itself, the words, and the meaning of the words.  And where the meaning of the words doesn’t accord with one’s own perceptions of the world, it gets to be hard going.

Of course I can appreciate the verses and the music evolved around them, but I could do with less of the gospel choir, probably because of what it symbolises and its sheer repetitiveness.   But that’s just me.

Thus I am rather relieved that Dylan has never chosen to bring it back since 1 March 1980.  Unless of course he fancied just singing the verses to a honky-tonk piano.

And why not?  Who was it who decreed that gospel had to sound like, well, gospel?

elsewhere…

• Index of over 300 songs reviewed on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.

Recent Posts

• Don’t Ever Take Yourself Away. Dylan looks back to Durango, but loses the flavour.
• Time to end this Masquerade: Dylan prepares to open the door on a new era
• Dylan’s “In the Garden”. From Hallowe’en to the arrest of Jesus.
• Watered down love. A review of Dylan’s song, and what Pope John Paul II had to say about Bob’s writing.

By Tony Attwood

In 1975 Dylan wrote Romance in Durango, a truly remarkable song, and in my opinion the highpoint of his work with Jacques Levy.  It was one of a series of innovative songs relating fictional events in exotic locations – something that popular music has rarely been used to do and certainly not something composers often get right when they do try.

So what made Dylan return to “Romance” six years later and reuse the essence of the music but without the exoticism in the music, or the intrigue and innovation in the story line, is completely beyond me.

But this is what he did, for “Don’t ever take yourself away” is little more than a reworking of “Romance” with all the good bits left out.

If on listening to the two songs you don’t hear this then do focus for a moment on the music behind “Soon you will be dancing the fandango” and compare and contrast with “to a place where I can’t find you. ”

Or compare “Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun” with “Don’t ever take yourself away”.  Musically the approach is the same.  Yes the tempo and accents are changed, but I can tell you that if they had been written by different people then the composer of Romance would soon be instructing lawyers to take action again the composer of “Don’t Ever”.

The fact that this happens in musical life from time to time arises however not from the fact that composers are thieves but rather because composers hear vast amounts of music both live and in their heads, and it is easy to think (especially when writing music and lyrics) that one has just come up with something completely new, only to find that what one has just “composed” is remarkably similar to a song that one has heard some years before.

Such court cases as do emerge however are fraught with difficulty – after all a lot of music sounds like a lot of other music, and when you are writing a song that is based around a handful of chords and a common cadence at the end of each section it is hard to make a difference.  But I think hear that even the most obdurate judge would be forced to agree, “Don’t ever” is just a rip off of “Romance”.

To take one stand out point, both songs end with a plagal cadence.  A cadence is a combination of two chords at the end of a musical phrase – a plagal cadence involves a chord based on the fourth note of the key and the first.   So if you are writing in C, the cadence is F major / C major.

Dylan uses this fairly rarely in his writing but in both these songs he uses it, with exactly the same melody above it.  Indeed the simple three chord sequence in both songs is almost identical throughout.

Dylan wrote “Don’t ever take” and recorded it in the Shot of Love sessions in 1981, and there it rested, unused and unreleased until it emerged on the genuine bootleg series in 1996.  Then it was used in the Hawaii Five-O TV series in 2011 for which apparently it was newly mixed and mastered.   It doesn’t seem to have found its way onto the lyrics set of the official Dylan site however.

In the song Dylan does throw in one musical trick by inserting an extra an extra line in the second half of the chorus, and then using this extra line in the verses (which have the same musical setting as the verse).  However the twist is that the extra line is squeezed into the same musical space as used for the first half of each verse.

Thus in the chorus

Don’t ever take yourself away
Don’t ever take yourself to
A place where i can’t find you.

While the second half (using the same musical structure) is

Don’t ever take yourself away
I will never leave you
Will never deceive you
I’ll be right there walkin’ behind you.

This additional line three, rhyming with line two (leave you, deceive you) crops up all the way through the song, and it can be an interesting musical technique.  But to work really well it needs to be polished to perfection, and here, in my view, much of the shine is removed with the use of false rhymes as in

There’s no need for blame
And no reason to be ashamed

and the use of rather uninteresting filler lines as in

You’ve been hurt
You’ve been left in the dirt

One can of course express one’s love to a person using the most ordinary of words, because that is a private expression of love and devotion from one to another.  But if that expression is to be made public then I think it really does need to go a little further than that.

So for me

Dearest, if it’s your heart that I won
There’s no need for blame
And no reason to be ashamed
Of that place where we stand in the sun

is a serious disappointment of itself.  It becomes far worse than that, because I can’t hear the song without immediately thinking…

No Ilores, mi querida
Dios nos vigila
Soon the horse will take us to Durango
Agarrame, mi vida
Soon the desert will be gone
Soon you will be dancing the fandango

which quite simply, instantly transports me to another world.

It’s the sort of thing that takes me back to the line that I have put on the home page of this site: “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”    When the horse is taking us to Durango and I am told

Sold my guitar to the baker’s son
For a few crumbs and a place to hide
But I can get another one
And I’ll play for Magdalena as we ride.

and this is the dream I want to be in.  I want to be there to find out what happens, to experience the ride, to see if he makes it.

I suppose with

Don’t ever take yourself away
I will never leave you
Will never deceive you
I’ll be right there walkin’ behind you.

I’ve just been in that dream far too many times before.

What else is on the site

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

The index to all the 596 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

The collaboration with Gerry Goffin in 1995 which resulted in two songs (at least one of which uses a track recorded in 1985 – see below), is, to my mind incredibly important in tracking the history of Bob Dylan’s writing.

1990 produced the last of the Traveling Wilbury recordings, in a series of sessions that included “Where were you last night” – an absolutely terrific song which I feel certain was primarily a Dylan composition.

And then Dylan stopped writing.  Although of course I might have got this wrong, as far as I can tell Dylan wrote nothing between the Wilbury collaborations and the four pieces I have down as being produced in 1995:

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

the last two of which were written with Gerry Goffin.

That must be the longest period in Dylan’s writing career with no original compositions, and if that were all there was to say, it would be a rather bleak story.

But by 1996 he was composing

• Dirt Road Blues (based around the work of Charlie Patton)
• Can’t Wait
• Mississippi
• Highlands

Now if that wasn’t a kick start of a lapsed song writing career, what was it?      A great collaborative album, four years of nothing, four little experiments looking back to old times, a reworking of an old blues and then kerpow….  An extraordinary re-birth.

So to Masquerade, and to Gerry Goffin.  Where to start?  Come to that where to end?

Gerry Goffin certainly deserves, and probably has, a web site akin to this which works through all his songs and contemplates what he was up to, where he was going and above all his magnificent, incredible contribution to popular music.

I grew up with a lot of these songs – here is just a tiny, tiny, tiny fragment of his genius from the early days…

• Will you love me tomorrow?
• Take good care of my baby
• Some kind of wonderful
• Half way to paradise
• When my little girl is smiling
• Chains
• It might as well rain until September

And I have cut out from that tiny fragment of his life the songs of his I don’t particularly care for like from that era, like “Locomotion” and “Hey Girl” – and guess what, because I am not writing a web site of Goffin reviews, for once I don’t have to explain why I don’t like them!

Gerry Goffin wrote, of course, with Carole King – she wrote the music he wrote the lyrics.  And it was a perfect combination – well at least for a while (they were married in 1959 and divorced in 1969).  Hell, they even wrote “Going Back” which I know caused a split in the Byrds, but still remains one of my all time favourites as a youngster.

Anyway, later in life, several more divorces down the road, Gerry Goffin issued a couple of albums of his own of which the second was Back Room Blood, which apparently he said was inspired by his anger at conservative gains in the congressional elections of 1994.

The album was mostly co-written with Barry Goldberg, but included two songs co-written with Bob, the other being “Tragedy of the Trade”.

But some of the music dates back to 1985 according to Heylin and who are we to argue?  He might not know his 3/4 from his 4/4 time, but on this sort of thing he usually gets it right.    However Masquerade was copyrighted in 1995 – so assuming Heylin is right, we can see the level of inability of Dylan at this moment to come up with anything new, just a year before he could write Mississippi.

I don’t particularly recommend anyone listening to this particular song, because I think the rendition on the album murders what is actually an interesting piece of writing complete with multiple meanings.  But for completeness, and if you really want it, here it is

I am not sure exactly where the dividing line is between the two men in terms of the writing of lyrics and music in this piece but take the line

I’m at a loss to entertain you, see the cells are paralyzed inside my brain
I bid adieu, to all of you
I think it’s time to end this masquerade.

And I wonder if that were not necessarily Goffin talking to the American people about its politics, but rather Dylan talking to his fans at this moment in his life.

Maybe the final verse is a reflection of where both of these great songwriters who had worked through such different traditions, had each got to…

I forgot to milk the cow, but I don’t wanna do it now
Like to sleep for a hundred years, till’ this old world just disappears

It really does sound like two old timers giving up, and reading these strange lines it is hard to reconcile it all with the younger Goffin, of whom Carole King said, upon hearing of this passing, “His words expressed what so many people were feeling but didn’t know how to say… Gerry was a good man and a dynamic force, whose words and creative influence will resonate for generations to come.”  Indeed, indeed.

In many regards Masquerade would hardly be worth a mention, and if there were no more Dylan creations afterwards then it would be a barely mention postscript.   But the fact that it was the preliminary awakening which led to Mississippi is one of the most extraordinary compositional re-births in the history of music.

Recent Posts

• Dylan’s “In the Garden”. From Hallowe’en to the arrest of Jesus.
• Watered down love. A review of Dylan’s song, and what Pope John Paul II had to say about Bob’s writing.
• The New Covenant: Covenant Woman. One of Dylan’s more confusing songs.
• You changed my life: why Dylan’s song was left behind

elsewhere…

• Index of over 300 songs reviewed on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.

By Tony Attwood

This is the song that Dylan really liked and held on to from the Christian period – not a song about what happens to those of us who have not converted after the Second Coming, but a simple piece of rhetorical questions about the arrest of Jesus.  It lasted 23 years on the concert tour getting 329 outings – and you don’t play a song that many times unless you really, really like it.

It is also one of very few songs that Dylan has written (in fact as I write this I am struggling to think of any others) in which the form of the music is set to follow the form of the words.  For here we have a step by step progression of the chords rising upwards through the keys, to reflect (as I see it) the step by step movement through the garden and onwards.

It is a tough thing to achieve – to balance the words and that relenting push upwards, and even harder when you have some gospel singers in tow.  That Dylan makes a fair fist of it, is a great tribute to his writing skills, even if (at least to me, if to no one else) after a while it all gets a bit much, this endless, step, step, step.

Music can be step by step, but generally speaking the effect is all very unsubtle.  There is no gentle glide between chords, but the remorseless climbing of the ladder until you have gone through the whole octave and start again.

And in many ways that’s the problem.  When you are doing something like this and starting again and again it seems endless and ultimately musically pointless.

Allen Ginsberg said that when Dylan and he, and some others, had been out trick or treating on All Hallows Eve he had had a harmonium with him, and played the chord sequence there.  And you can understand why, with the guys in masks going around and larking about.  It is suited for the representation of the supernatural beings in masks scaring inhabitants.

But does that really make it suitable as a song about the arrest of God’s son?  I’m really not too sure.   As you have probably gathered by now, for me it just grates.

Let me try and explain a little.

The opening line has the chords B, F#, G#m, G+

Now we are in the key of B, and those first three chords are just fine and dandy – your regular chords from the key of B.  What we then have is G+, and if you have been with me through quite a few of these reviews, you might be taken aback by the “+”.  In fact I can’t think when else Dylan uses an augmented chord – which is what the + stands for.

Instead of play G, B, D (the notes that make up the chord of G) they play G, B, D#.

Now even if they played G, B, D this would be a sudden jolt, because the chord of G has no place in a song in B major.  But to play G+ is to emphasise the step even more.  It is this one moment that defines the whole remorseless movement upwards, which I am not overwhelmed by.

In fact, I can just see Ginsberg and the troupe making an exaggerated step forward like a bunch of clowns in the circus each time they get to G+.

So my problem is that the music is too artificial for such a profound subject.   By the second line we seem to have got ourselves into E flat, by the third we’ve leaped into G, which we then suddenly stay for two lines when the jump up to A, and then another leap we are in B which is where we started.

For me, as a small-time musician, it is pretty horrible – the sort of fun and games one has with children who have just learned to play barre chords on the guitar, or how to move the hands upwards chromatically playing chords on the piano.  There is no subtlety at all; it is a musical exercise.

But clearly Dylan loved it, and loved the arrangement created around the piece.  It most certainly is a very un-Dylan song musically, and as I say I just can’t think what else it comes from and what it leads into.   But then when taking giant steps what else can you do but take giant steps?

Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone said in relation to religious works like this “he’s too inventive, too big for the genre”, but if that is so here, I would say, it is the wrong sort of invention.

The last song I looked at before writing this review was “Things have changed” which has just four chords in it, and which runs smoothly throughout taking us around the subject of dislocation.  It works beautifully, and deserves the Oscar beyond doubt for the subtlety of music and lyrics combined.

Here there is no subtlety either in lyric or music.   Indeed if I strip out the repeats the opening verse reads

When they came for Him in the garden, did they know?
Did they know He was the Son of God, did they know that He was Lord?
Did they hear when He told Peter, “Peter, put up your sword”?

You don’t need 20 odd chord changes to put that message across – in (of course) my opinion.   If I set out the rest of the lyrics below with the repeats taken out, it becomes a simple song, and generally speaking in song writing simple songs don’t benefit from complex musical arrangements….

When He spoke to them in the city, did they hear?
Nicodemus came at night so he wouldn’t be seen by men
Saying, “Master, tell me why a man must be born again”

When He healed the blind and crippled, did they see?
When He said, “Pick up your bed and walk, why must you criticize?
Same thing My Father do, I can do likewise”

Did they speak out against Him, did they dare?
The multitude wanted to make Him king, put a crown upon His head
Why did He slip away to a quiet place instead?

When He rose from the dead, did they believe?
He said, “All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth”
Did they know right then and there what the power was worth?

But on the other hand Bob Dylan is the genius who has written many of the greatest songs of the 20th century.  I’m just a guy who amuses himself writing commentaries upon them, so what do I know?

Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.

Recent Posts

• Watered down love. A review of Dylan’s song, and what Pope John Paul II had to say about Bob’s writing.
• The New Covenant: Covenant Woman. One of Dylan’s more confusing songs.
• You changed my life: why Dylan’s song was left behind
• Blessed is the name: Dylan loved to sing it but never recorded it
• Saving Grace: the origins and meanings within Bob Dylan’s song.

By Tony Attwood

These lyrics pose profound questions about the nature of love, and help us redefine it as something very different to what it is generally held to be, via this string of simple, penetrating statements set to music in a lively upbeat mood. – Simon Rees, March 2007

Four verses (five in concert, but four on  the LP) that all start “Love that’s pure” and a three line chorus.  It all sounds so simple, and yet it is a truly memorable song, not least for the arrangement which for this song works perfectly.  Commentaries on the making of “Shot of Love” suggest there were endless arguments about how the song should sound on the album – and as always Dylan got his own way.

https://youtu.be/HqAHKhZI-tI

And I suspect this time he was right.   This is Christianity as pop, pop as Christianity, and it works.

What really helps the music along is the held B flat as a bass note under the first two lines of each verse.  OK that is a technical musical point I know, but stay with me on this for a moment.  The technique of the held bass note as the chord changes it is not particularly uncommon, but the natural tendency of any bass guitarist would be to play the bass note of each chord, so B flat E flat in the first line repeated in the second.

But by having the bass on B flat constantly when we get to Dylan’s classic descending bass in the third line (E flat, D, C, B flat) we feel a real change a real progression. We’ve been held in one place for two lines, the tension builds, and how zap! the release.  We are now moving on.  Simple but highly effective.

There is a strong musical connection with Clean Up Woman by Betty Wright and on the record one verse is cut but always appeared in the live performances.

Love that’s pure, is not what you teach me
I gotta go where it can reach me
I gotta flee towards patience and meekness
You miscalculate me, mistake my kindness for weakness.

The whole musical arrangement is bouncy and fun as befits such a positive message from a Christian point of view – for as others have said long before me “Watered-Down Love” is Dylan’s singing 1 Corinthian’s 13, describing “love that’s pure”.

If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,  but do not have love, I gain nothing.   Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails.

It is poetic, profound, and as I would immediately admit as a non-Christian, awe inspiring, and Dylan, I think, does an excellent job of turning this into a 20th century song.  Dylan’s version doesn’t have the poetic beauty of the translation of  St. Paul the Apostle’s words, but St Paul didn’t have the benefit of the rock band behind him.  Of course I am not trying to compare Dylan to St Paul, but each version of the message has an uplifting elegance and beauty, suitable for its time.

Dylan also has some fun with his lyrics.  I have always particularly loved

Won’t sneak up into your room, tall, dark and handsome
Capture your soul and hold it for ransom

although the official site changes “soul” to “heart” for some reason.

But I think what has always stuck in my memory from this song is

Love that’s pure, it don’t make no false claims
Intercedes for you ’stead of casting you blame

And it was in considering this so many years ago when it was released, that I first realised that this is what I call real friendship.   For friends, for real friends, the friends you can call on who would go out of their way when you need them, there is never any hesitation in coming to one’s aid.

I can say, as I am now later in life (as it were) that on a few occasions when friends have needed me, I have tried to be there.  Not questioning, but there, if I can do something to help.

Indeed looking from the other side, I can say I have often been disappointed when I have had a person close to me accuse me of something, of which I believe I am not only innocent but which I would never do.  I get frustrated not because I didn’t do it, but rather because in my estimation of myself such an action would be quite unlike me.  I’ve ended up each time saying, “is that the sort of thing you think I might do?” and the answer comes back, “Well I don’t know do I?” to which I reply, “yes, if you know me, you know.  If you think about how I have behaved in the past, does it seem likely that I would suddenly do this?”

So true friendship and love for me is not watered down – it is having faith in your friends, and always being there for them, because you know them, you know what they would and would not do.  Friends…

Will not deceive you or lead you into transgression
Won’t write it up and make you sign a false confession

This sort of friendship – always being there for people when you can help them – is what I can share with the Dylan of this era.  And for me, very personally, it has occasionally brought reward.  Not financial, of course I don’t want that, but by actually out of nowhere long after the event having a person tell me that they still remember something I did for them – something that by now I have long forgotten, something which I just did because, that’s what you do for your friends.

All of which is to say, I can share all this positivity about friendship without being a Christian, and indeed without having a religion.  Atheists can be as honourable and “pure” as Christians.   OK we are going to burn in eternal damnation on judgement day, but up to that moment, we can be quite decent people.

So I guess if I had the talent of Dylan to enable me to write this song, I wouldn’t have got to the final moment of each verse with “You want a watered down love”.  Which would have removed a key element from the entire song, because that moment on “watered down” is held above the complex chord of F11.

It’s a chord you won’t hear very often, and if you are not a musician you’ll just hear and appreciate the tension.  All I am saying my mentioning F11 (a chord made up of the notes F, A, C, E flat, G, B flat – which is a lot of notes, although normally we don’t play all of them, the A in particular getting omitted most times) gives that held moment a musical tension to go with “down”, and it works perfectly.  A lesser composer would have missed that moment.

In considering this song, I found an interesting review in Christianity Today by Steve Turner which is not just about Watered Down Love but about Dylan and Christianity which makes the point that we should not confuse what Dylan says in the songs with Dylan himself.  The point made is that although Dylan moved on from a fundamental view of Christianity, in later albums, “God is a continuous presence, whether mentioned by name or not, and there is a recognition of sin, judgement, and the need for mercy.”

His view is that Dylan “studied the Bible in depth, put his career on the line (for a time) by refusing to play his back catalogue in concert, alienated his friends by accusing them of spiritual blindness, and horrified his record company by recording songs of a Christian explicitness unparalleled in the rock genre,” and that this religious interest can be seen in early songs too.  He cites “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, I would choose “When the ship comes in”, but there are many such examples.

Turner also cites the mystic influences that are all over Dylan’s work, mentioning the Zen inside Bringing It All Back Home, and the later interest in “the tarot, astrology, and Egyptian mythology.”

He continues, “Dylan’s church attendance was sporadic even in his most evangelical days but is now nonexistent. The womanizing and drunkenness that Dylan once saw as evidence of the old life have apparently continued almost uninterrupted,” and concludes “the lack of close Christian fellowship and Bible ministry must have affected the quality and consistency of Dylan’s faith. This may be in part because of Dylan’s restless spirit and continuous touring, but it’s also because churches have such trouble helping celebrities blend in as ordinary members.”

He continues… ‘One of the most startling remarks … comes from Pope John Paul II, when Dylan performed “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the 1997 World Eucharistic Conference in Bologna. “You say the answer is blowing in the wind,” said the pope. “So it is. But it is not the wind that blows things away. It is the wind that is the breath and life of the Holy Spirit, the voice that calls and says, ‘Come!'”

And since this is review number 300 on this site, and I wanted to make it a bit special, it seems rather appropriate to end with a quote from his holiness, especially since my good friend Pat who has constantly encouraged me in this endeavour of reviewing all the major Dylan compositions, is of the Catholic faith.

“It is the wind that is the breath and life of the Holy Spirit, the voice that calls and says, ‘Come!'”

Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

Recent Posts

• The New Covenant: Covenant Woman. One of Dylan’s more confusing songs.
• You changed my life: why Dylan’s song was left behind
• Blessed is the name: Dylan loved to sing it but never recorded it
• Saving Grace: the origins and meanings within Bob Dylan’s song.
• Handle with care: The history and meaning of the Dylan / Wilburys song

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.

By Tony Attwood

‘Behold, the days come, sayeth the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah’ (Jeremiah 31:31).

“And they will not need to teach their neighbours, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already,” says the Lord. “And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.” (Jeremiah 31:34)

“And I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good for them. I will put a desire in their hearts to worship me, and they will never leave me.  (Jeremiah 32.40).

As I understand it the covenant is a bond, a promise, a link of overwhelming significance.  Put into the context of this song a covenant between a man and a woman is a bond between a couple who not only love each other but also share a belief that there is a God, and the Bible represents His teachings.  So it is a triangle – the man, the woman, the teaching of Christ.

And if that were that I could write a little review of this song without much of a problem, especially if we look at the songs that Dylan had composed in 1979 up to the moment he wrote Covenant Woman:

1979

1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I believe in You
3. Ye Shall be Changed
4. Trouble in mind
5. Man gave names to all the animals
6. No Man Righteous
7. Gonna change my Way of Thinking
8. Precious Angel
9. When you gonna wake up
10. When He Returns
11. Saving Grace
12. Blessed is the Name

But…

There is (for me at least) a real link between Covenant Woman and Precious Angel – the two deep love songs of the period.  Both were first performed on 1 November 1979.  Precious Angel got 73 outings and lasted until 12 November 1980.  Covenant Woman got 87 performances which took the song through until 11 June 1981, although most of the performances had occurred by November 1980.

Now that is interesting because Caribbean Wind (written in 1980) got its one and only live showing on 12 November 1980, the day we said farewell to Precious Angel.  The next day The Grooms Still Waiting at the Alter (the next song written after Caribbean Wind) appeared in the show.

It was as if this deep, deep love affair, based not only on the love the woman but also the shared religious beliefs of both participants in the relationships, had mutated into something else – something being expressed in these new songs.

So why Dylan kept Covenant Woman running after Caribbean Wind and The Groom appeared I have no idea, and what implication we can take from this I am not sure.

In one of his final addresses to the nation of Israel, (in Deuteronomy) Moses predicted that Israel would fail to keep the Old Covenant. But the New Covenant is a situation in which the chosen people are finally pleasing to Him.

By this time, the age of individual is long gone.  The Lord has done away with free will by this time: ‘I will put my law in their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people’” (Jeremiah 31:31, 33).

So by this I take it that we should read the opening of the song as a line of supreme importance:

Covenant woman got a contract with the Lord
Way up yonder, great will be her reward
Covenant woman, shining like a morning star
I know I can trust you to stay where you are

and Dylan feels he is part of the supreme almighty deal for mankind…

I’ve been broken, shattered like an empty cup
I’m just waiting on the Lord to rebuild and fill me up
And I know He will do it ’cause He’s faithful and He’s true
He must have loved me so much to send me someone as fine as you

But Dylan is not hanging onto the coat tails – he’s part of the ultimate salvation too.

You know we are strangers in a land we’re passing through
I’ll always be right by your side, I’ve got a covenant too

Musically Dylan delivers some interesting musical tricks, giving us a song in C, with all the chordal accompaniment that you could expect in such a song (the opening line alone gives us C, Am, Em, Dm) while the chorus adds a rather surprising blues B flat.

Of course other reviewers have sailed through this song where I have found its meaning convoluted and difficult to grasp.   Some suggest the song is a homage to Mary, the mother of Jesus.   Others suggest it is about the “covenant” represented by the marriage between a man and women.

Elsewhere there is the suggestion that the Covenant Woman’s identity is a woman called Ena (as in covENAant) which I am not really going to dwell upon.   Elsewhere there is the more likely explanation that the woman in question was the lady who introduced Dylan to the Vineyard Fellowship: Mary Alice Artes.

Of course all are possible, but in the end, the sudden arrival amidst all the Christian songs of 1980 of Caribbean Wind and Groom’s still waiting at the alter suggests something more akin to a love affair that was supposed to be THE ultimate love affair, going wrong.  I wonder if Dylan also had a final re-visit of this situation with You changed my life – the song with the very strange ending.

And now, looking at “You changed” again I wonder if that ending can be explained by reference back to Covenant Woman.   It’s a bit of an obscure theory, but then, so is everything else associated with this song.

Maybe I should just stick with Caribbean Wind.

Recent Posts

• You changed my life: why Dylan’s song was left behind
• Blessed is the name: Dylan loved to sing it but never recorded it
• Saving Grace: the origins and meanings within Bob Dylan’s song.
• Handle with care: The history and meaning of the Dylan / Wilburys song
• Love Rescue Me: the story behind the Dylan / U2 song

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

By Tony Attwood

It appears Dylan had quite a large number of attempts in the studios to get this song right, but finally gave up on it, never played it live, and allowed it only to resurface when the first bunch of outtakes appeared on “volume 1-3”.

It is lively, jolly, bouncy and pushes us along, but the message (at least most of the message) is one that we’ve perhaps heard quite a few times – that the world is a pretty evil place full of traps for the unwary, but give yourself to the Lord and all will be well – no matter how late in the day you give yourself over for forgiveness.

But there are some moments in the song which really make me pause and wonder.  Right in the first verse such as, “Working for a system I couldn’t understand or trust”.  Is he saying that he was trapped inside the capitalist system of record production and concert touring?  Inside the profit motive of the corporations?   Well, yes, aren’t we all.  But most of us don’t write protest songs along the way, and then move on.   That (for me, and of course as always this is just my perception) is the key contradiction in terms of Dylan’s “protest” period in which he wrote about how awful things were in songs like Hollis Brown.

Now that is interesting stuff, but unfortunately (for me at least) the point doesn’t get further explored in this song, and I am not sure where it is explored.

And in the next verse

You do the work of the devil, you got a million friends

Well yes Bob we remember

I got a friend who spends his life
Stabbing my picture with a bowie knife
Dreams of strangling me with a scarf
When my name comes up he pretends to bark
I got a million friends.

And the point is… ah well, you see, I am not sure.  Bob had a million friends (probably ironically) and now who is this “you”.  Is he talking to himself?

Then we have the old surreal imagery that Bob used to do so well

The call of the wild is forever at my door
Wants me to fly like an eagle while being chained to the floor

Who does?  How?  In what context?  I can make a million guesses, but a bit of a clue from the writer at this point would be helpful.  It is a hell of an image.  I just wish I knew what it meant!  Are we back with the capitalists making money out of him, and so tying him down to a terrible life of forever having to write and perform?  That doesn’t quite seem to fit…

And so the piece goes on, we’ve got the hang of it, that descending bass line driving us forward in each verse, and then suddenly…

You changed my life
Came along in a time of strife
You came in like the wind, like Errol Flynn
You changed my life

Errol Flynn was a great swashbuckling actor who was fantastically popular until post-war styles changed, and he found there was no need for his type of character any more.  As Wiki puts it he had “a reputation for womanising, hard drinking and for a time in the 1940s, narcotics abuse.”

He was also associated with the expression “in like Flynn” which was (and indeed is still) a sexual term taken to reflect the way women fell for him, and how easy it was for him to seduce them.  He originally called his autobiography “In like me” but the publisher was worried about 1950s repression in the US and called it “My Wicked Wicked Ways” .  The official Errol Flynn web site run by his daughter, however retains the title “In like Flynn,”

So what are we to make of the simile You came in like the wind, like Errol Flynn, which presumably refers to the Lord?   It makes sense in that Dylan’s conversion seems to have been rapid, rather like Flynn’s supposed ability to seduce a woman, but somehow this just seems a trifle inappropriate when speaking of the Almighty.  To use Flynn’s way with women as a comparator to how God converted Bob… it really seems a bit, well… actually I am lost for words.

Having not listened to the song for quite a while and coming back to it now, it just leaves me with a feeling that it is jolly, happy, but… well, but what???  Bob’s been converted, and good for him, but it is almost as if Leonard da Vinci had given up on the notion of painting the Last Supper and instead drawn a self-portrait.  He did of course paint many such, but he also painted the Last Supper and he kept the two separate. One is not to be confused with the other and that seems to be Bob’s problem here.

Unless the song were to be called “Tangled up in God”.

So, for me Bob’s got confused in his purpose.  Yes his conversion to Christianity was quite something, but somehow the song at the end seems to be more about Bob than God.  And maybe Bob thought something along the same lines, but just couldn’t bring himself to cut that last verse in the recording.  After all, it is what makes it – at least for us pagans.

Recent Posts

• Blessed is the name: Dylan loved to sing it but never recorded it
• Saving Grace: the origins and meanings within Bob Dylan’s song.
• Handle with care: The history and meaning of the Dylan / Wilburys song
• Love Rescue Me: the story behind the Dylan / U2 song
• Saved – a review of the Bob Dylan song.

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

By Tony Attwood

There are no lyrics on the official site but they do list a song called “Blessed be the name” although Dylan clearly sings “Blessed is the name” in the one and only recording I can find of the song (linked below).

First played on 1 November 1979 and last played on 17 May 1980 – 43 renditions, and then put to sleep without release.

The inestimable Eyolf Østrem added a personal commentary (rare for him, so all the more worth reading) for his notes on the song

“Ironically, this is probably the song with which Dylan has made the most energetic attempts at a sing-along kind of rapport with the audience, but – it doesn’t really work, does it…?

“The lyrics for the verses – well, I made an attempt…”

And all of us must be forever grateful for the work since Østrem’s recording of the chords used is by far the best such data that there is.

As for “it doesn’t really work, does it” I guess it all depends what you mean by “work”.  As a singalong no – probably not because most of Dylan’s fans (as far as I know) never adopted his faith.  But as a jolly bouncer of a song it certainly does work well, and if the subject matter were different, or if he had gone on a longer period of integrating religious and non-religious songs, he might well have turned it into one of his classic crowd pleasers through many, many years.   Certainly the band are really in tune with what Dylan is doing and are thoroughly enjoying themselves so musically, yes it absolutely works for me.

The chorus is as simple as it gets, with just two lines

Blessed is the name of the Lord forever
Wisdom and might are his

And we get that lots and lots.  Here’s two verses as a sampler…

When he move his face upon the water
Sit up high on a throne
Like him there is no other
He's God all by himself alone

Well to the just he will be faithful
[let it rain fire and] brimstone down
But he did not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah
Till Lot was safely out of the town

There’s some good hand clapping going on and the three chords behind the song are all you need to get the message across, so for me the whole thing is an enjoyable experience.

Apparently, the audience at the show were moved to shout (when they were not calling for classic Dylan tracks) “Praise Dylan!” but seemingly not in any sort of hostile way.  Just deciding that they would sooner praise an earthly mortal rather than a fire and brimstone immortal who ultimately will kill off all those who don’t follow his laws.

The chorus comes from hundreds of predecessors using the phrase “Blessed be the name” but why the official Dylan site doesn’t want to know about the song, with some lyrics I’m not too sure.

Anyway, back to the origins: the phrase is from Daniel 2:20, “Let the name of God be blessed forever and ever, For wisdom and power belong to Him.

There is a cantata from the 19th century called  Daniel or the Captivity and Restoration. by CM Cady and GF Root (with others credited) which is famous for opening with a very recognisable version of By the Rivers of Babylon.  The fourth song in the cantata is “Blessed be the name of the Lord forever,” and that absolutely must be where Dylan got it from since all other versions don’t have “forever” at the end.

It runs like this

[Daniel]
Blessed be the name of the Lord forever.
Blessed be the name of the Lord
[CHORUS]
The name of the Lord
[Daniel]
Blessed be the name of the Lord forever,
for wisdom and might are his.
[CHORUS]
are His, Oh!
Blessed be the name of the Lord forever,
for wisdom and might are His, are His.
[Daniel]
And he changeth the times and the seasons.
He removeth kings and setteth then up,
He giveth wisdom to the wise,
and knowledge to them,
and knowledge to them,
and knowledge to them that know understanding.
He revealeth the deep secret things,
He knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light
and the light, and the light dwelleth with Him.

So pretty much the Dylan version – published in 1853.

But as I say, I rather enjoy it as a stand alone piece, and it is good that we do have one recording of Dylan’s performance with a well rehearsed band, having this bit of fun.

Recent Posts

• Saving Grace: the origins and meanings within Bob Dylan’s song.
• Handle with care: The history and meaning of the Dylan / Wilburys song
• Love Rescue Me: the story behind the Dylan / U2 song
• Saved – a review of the Bob Dylan song.

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

By Tony Attwood

Saving Grace is one of those songs that Dylan has retained and re-worked in all sorts of styles, but always with the essential meaning of salvation and the duplicitous nature of the Devil.  Thus we have “Well, the devil’s shining light, it can be most blinding” – itself a variant on 2 Corinthians 11 (Satan disguise himself as an angel of light) –  a very Dylanesque approach to this type of song.

And he’s kept on performing it across the years – from 1 November 79 to 29 August 2012 according to the official site, which finds 103 live performances, quite a few of which are on line if you want to go a searching.

For me, however, most of the live variants fall over themselves in an effort to differentiate what they are from the LP original, which works perfectly well in servicing what the song is – a devotional piece sung to the mostly heathen audiences.

Very curiously the song has its musical origins in a totally different piece – “Absolutely Sweet Marie”, and Bob might well have wondered quite where he had heard certain nuances in the piece before.   Marie is a totally secular piece, a faster piece, a song with a slightly different chord structure – but taken with the same rhythms underlying it – plus the odd turn of the melody and chords that links the two together.

Not to mention lines like “But to search for love that ain’t no more than vanity” – which if you placed it inside “Marie” instead of waiting inside the frozen traffic, would still be perfect.

Sweet Marie really is Dylan without the Lord (although he doesn’t realise it) sitting alone beating on his trumpet, but now there’s no more of that – he’s been saved, as the album title tells us.   Marie’s promises turned out to be worthless – the Lord’s promises are eternal and will never be broken.  But (for me at least) that line “Guess I owe You some kind of apology” just calls out to me the line, “Sometimes it gets so hard, you see”.

Of course Dylan has devised so many different ways of singing Saving Grace that much of the time these musical links get lost but even then, through the endlessly changing versions, moments sneak back.  I think maybe he does it just to tantalise.

But this is not to put down the lyrics of Saving Grace

By this time I’d-a thought I would be sleeping
In a pine box for all eternity

is a highly arresting couplet – quite a shocking pair of lines to find in a song, but my problem with the piece is that this level of drama is then dissipated.  Maybe it is too much to ask to keep up such a level of intensity all the way through, but still… this is Dylan, and he has done it before.

Well, the devil’s shining light, it can be most blinding
But to search for love, that ain’t no more than vanity

really do remind me that

Well, your railroad gate you know I just can’t jump it

Sometimes it gets so hard, you see

and again gives us a sense that we are going to get deeper insights, but which somehow just don’t happen, and instead in the final verse we get the line that sounds like Sweet Marie confessing her sins.

The wicked know no peace and you just can’t fake it
There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary
It gets discouraging at times, but I know I’ll make it

and still I want to sing it to exactly the same tune as

Well, your railroad gate, you know I just can’t jump it
Sometimes it gets so hard, you see
I’m just sitting here beating on my trumpet

Or maybe its just me listening to too many Dylan songs, and seeing too many connections.

Recent Posts

• Handle with care: The history and meaning of the Dylan / Wilburys song
• Love Rescue Me: the story behind the Dylan / U2 song
• Saved – a review of the Bob Dylan song.
• When He returns; the one Dylan performance that could convert a sinner such as me.
• To fall in love with you. The greatest of all the lost Dylan masterpieces.

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

By Tony Attwood

How much Dylan is there is the Wilburys?

The answer seems to be there is as much as he wants and as much as we want to hear and it clearly varied from song to song.

Harrison, Petty, Orbison, Dylan, is I must admit, my ultimate super-supergroup.  I have no particular liking for the Beatles, and none of their records, (and I was a school kid when they suddenly exploded onto radio in England, so I had every chance to like them – but I was already playing in a R&B band by then), but I have enjoyed much of the non-Beatle music of Harrison.

Tom Petty has been an absolute favourite ever since I first came across his music, and at every blues dance club I ever visit I ask them to play a blues version of his Free Fallin’.  As for Roy Orbison, I just adored the difference he brought to popular music, and his most extraordinary voice.  Indeed it is such a deep sadness that the man with what to me was the ultimate, ultimate, voice of popular music died in December 1988 just eight months after this song was recorded.

So the guys came together by chance and a sticker (apparently) on one guitar case saying “Handle with care”, stimulated the song.   This is the first ever Wilburys track, seemingly genuinely co-written with the guys in the band calling out lines and gradually evolving the music.   As for Roy Orbison, Tom Petty said in the Mystery Girl documentary, “I was just taken by how amazing this guy was, I mean, just sitting, singing softly on the sofa with an acoustic guitar, his voice was unbelievable.”

Although Handle with Care is a song put together by committee (or so it would seem) it has an unusual construction.   The first two verses are straightforward

Been beat up and battered around
Been sent up, and I’ve been shot down
You’re the best thing that I’ve ever found
Handle me with care

Reputation’s changeable
Situation’s tolerable
But baby, you’re adorable
Handle me with care

But then we have an interlude, which is sung by Roy Orbison…

I’m so tired of being lonely
I still have some love to give
Won’t you show me that you really care?

This section is particularly interesting because of the sudden change of chord structure.  The song is in G but here in the middle 8 the unrelated chord of B7 is thrown in – it is this that gives the Orbison section such a different feel from everything else in the song.

Roy Orbison didn’t write many songs, but the songs he did write are utterly exquisite – remember Pretty Woman, Only the Lonely, Running Scared, In Dreams, It’s Over…  (If you want to explore what this guy could do to turn the construction of a popular song upside down try the coda of Running Scared.)

This then is followed by a middle eight sung by Bob Dylan and Tom Petty…

Everybody’s got somebody to lean on
Put your body next to mine, and dream on

And then we are back to the verse

I’ve been fobbed off, and I’ve been fooled
I’ve been robbed and ridiculed
In day care centres and night schools
Handle me with care

Been stuck in airports, terrorized
Sent to meetings, hypnotized
Overexposed, commercialized
Handle me with care

Then we have the interlude again, and then the middle 8, but this time with Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison singing before another verse…

I’ve been uptight and made a mess
But I’ll clean it up myself, I guess
Oh, the sweet smell of success
Handle me with care

The writing of the song is credited to George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan and I am not too sure how much Dylan there is in this.  One can get an insight however in the same way that art experts look at paintings and consider the brush strokes to see if they are by a particular old master.

I don’t classify myself as being equivalent to an art expert, but I can say that the phraseology of the song is not Dylanesque.    That final verse quoted above has nothing in it at all that looks like Dylan at any stage of his writing career thus far.   And his last two compositions were What good am I and Dignity  which show completely different issues exercising his mind both musically and lyrically.  If I must pick a line that could be Dylan’s I would go with

I’ve been robbed and ridiculed

I am sure you can work out why!

This song represents a man who has had tough times, and now needs careful treatment talking to his new lover and asking that she is kind to him, because of everything he has suffered.  There is nothing in such a concept that I can relate to a Dylan song – but if you can, please do let me know.

Allmusic’s Matthew Greenwald called the song “one of the most memorable records of the 1980s…   Musically, the song is built around a descending, folk-rock chord pattern and some fine major-key chorus movements. George Harrison handles the verses, and there are also two excellent bridges featuring Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan. Orbison’s section capitalizes on his awesome, operatic vocal pipes, and the effect is wonderful.”

It has also been pointed out that the opening chords are “reminiscent of Jeff Lynne’s “10538 Overture”, the ELO single from 1972.”

At the time of making the recording there was no thought that the band would go on from that point, but apparently everyone enjoyed the situation so much that they got back together to make the album, including “Handle With Care” as the promotional track.

I must say I really do love it – as much now as when I first heard it.  There is something so fresh and different about the piece, with the odd unexpected moment that every great song needs.   Consider just once more

Reputation’s changeable
Situation’s tolerable

Who has ever written lines like that before in a pop song?  I’d guess Tom Petty wrote them and I think I hear his influence a lot in the piece – but it probably did need all of them there to make it happen.

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

Recent Posts

• Love Rescue Me: the story behind the Dylan / U2 song
• Saved – a review of the Bob Dylan song.
• When He returns; the one Dylan performance that could convert a sinner such as me.
• To fall in love with you. The greatest of all the lost Dylan masterpieces.
• Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight: the meaning within Dylan’s song

By Tony Attwood

1985 had included some highlights – songs that for other writers would have been the height of their career, but for Bob they seemed to be just part of the struggle eternally to go somewhere new.

If we look at the chronology for the later period of songwriting in 1985, we see it contains (by my reckoning) one masterpiece (Dark Eyes) which one might have thought could be the starting point for a whole new Dylan World, but it was (for me at least) a false dawn, followed by another year which again concluded with a masterpiece (To fall in love with you).  But this masterpiece, unlike Dark Eyes, was never finished, reminding me of Leonardo da Vinci’s wonderful comment “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Maybe that is how Dylan saw “To Fall in Love”.

Or maybe the truth is he felt it sounded too much like Dylan (see Bono’s commentary below)

But looking at this roll out of songs Bob could hardly afford to abandon great art.

End of 1985

• Dark Eyes
• Shake
• Under your spell

1986

• Rock em Dead
• You wanna ramble
• Got my mind made up
• Had a dream about you baby
• Ride this train
• To fall in love with you

But then, although the output was limited by past Dylan standards, something began to stir.  After the incomplete To fall in love with you, we get

1987

• Love rescue me
• Political world
• What good am I
• Dignity 

Now in fact I didn’t intend to write a review of Love rescue me just now, because actually I don’t think it is very interesting.  What I was about to do was write a review of Handle With Care, the first song of 1988.  But to do that, I felt the need to go back and look at the curious mixture of songs that preceded it – which means completing the quartet above, with a look at “Love rescue me”.

The oft-recounted story is that U2 were on the Joshua Tree tour when Bono woke up with the song in his head and feeling that he might just be remembering a Dylan song drove out to Malibu (as you do) and asked Bob if it was indeed one of his (as it would be wonderful to do).  It wasn’t and the two composers finished the piece off.  The song appeared on Rattle and Hum, along with All Along the Watchtower.

The song was recorded at the Sun Studios (although apparently much reworked if not downright knocked down and rebuilt from the Sam Phillips days) but with an engineer who had worked with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley, and apparently some of the early Sun Studio equipment.  The album containing the song was released in 1988.

I have to admit the song does little for me – but then I am not a fan of U2.  Neither the melody nor the lyrics seem to offer a breakthrough moment to transport me to a world that I wish to explore…

Many strangers have I met
On the road to my regret
Many lost who seek to find themselves in me
They ask me to reveal
The very thoughts they would conceal
Love rescue me

If you compare this with Dylan’s songs of getting up and moving on, there’s nothing there.  Compare with Restless Farewell, for example, and (as far as I can see) there is no comparison.

Indeed the middle eight, which suddenly ups the volume, is little more than a bit of ordinary poetry

And the sun in the sky
Makes a shadow of you and I
Stretching out as the sun sinks in the sea
I’m here without a name
In the palace of my shame
Said, love rescue me

It has hints of possibility such as those lines

I’m here without a name
In the palace of my shame

But they don’t seem to go anywhere, nor justify the volume changes.

So a rather ordinary set of concepts, a rather ordinary tune, over the normal three major chords.

But there is a nice story attached to this.  Bono, in a New Musical Express interview about the song and meeting Dylan, said this (apparently)

“He’s very hung up on actually being Bob Dylan. He feels he’s trapped in his past… Like we were trading lines and verses off the top of our heads and Dylan comes out with this absolute classic – ‘I was listening to the Nveille Brothers, it was a quarter to eight, I have an appointment with destiny, but I knew she’d come late, She tricked me, she addicted me, she turned me on my head, Now I can’t sleep with these secrets that leave me cold and alone in my bed’.

“Then he goes, ‘Nah, cancel that.’  He thought it was too close to what people expect of Bob Dylan.”

That would fit with the last verse, which might be part of Dylan’s input.

I’ve conquered my past
The future is here at last
I stand at the entrance
To a new world I can see
The ruins to the right of me
Will soon have lost sight of me
Love rescue me.

Indeed if that was Dylan talking then it is hugely prophetic because this was the moment when, very slowly, Dylan picked up the pieces with

• Political world
• What good am I
• Dignity 

OK it took two years for the new found muse to flourish, (including of course the time he took out with his fellow superstars to become the Traveling Wilburys) but just look at what the great man then delivered to us in 1989.

• Disease of Conceit
• What was it you wanted
• Everything is Broken
• Ring them Bells
• Series of Dreams
• Most of the Time
• Where teardrops fall
• Shooting Star
• Man in a Long Black Coat

As I have had occasion to comment before, for most songwriters such a collection would be the highlight of a lifetime’s work – but for the tiny handful of utter songwriting geniuses from Irving Berlin to Bob Dylan, that’s just a single bunch knocked out in one year.

So, personally, I can find nothing special within Love Rescue Me, but then that’s just me.  But it came just prior to the great composer rousing himself, at first with just a few songs, and then to give the wonderful Roy Orbison a brilliant  send off to the great recording studio in the sky (sorry, awfully trite, but I have always felt warmed by the fact that Roy did conclude his career among those who really and truly valued what he brought to popular music).   And then, for Dylan, a return to his full majesty.

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

Recent Posts

• Saved – a review of the Bob Dylan song.
• When He returns; the one Dylan performance that could convert a sinner such as me.
• To fall in love with you. The greatest of all the lost Dylan masterpieces.
• Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight: the meaning within Dylan’s song

By Tony Attwood

Updated 27 April 2018 with minor changes, a couple of additional links and 3 videos.

From Nov 79 to Nov 81 “Saved” was played by Dylan on stage 83 times, and then no more.  In the subsequent almost 37 years, nothing.  Not one outing.

In fact this was not the only song from the era that suffered this fate, although as we have seen a few have been given a brief resurrection on occasion.  So why not “Saved”?

I think the reason for it being dropped from the schedule so absolutely has been more musical than any thought about what was in the words.  For as a piece of music, Saved is just pure rollicking fun – what those of us who have never been to a Christian revivalist meeting imagine the music at such events must be like.  (Although I have seen the Blues Brothers movies, so I have got an inclination).

Musically the song is a 12 bar blues extended beyond anything I’ve come across before or since – the first chord is held for 16 continuous lines – the chord change coming on “And I’m so glad”.

I guess this is Bob showing that the devil doesn’t have all the good tunes.  But I bet neither the Psalmist nor Saints Paul and John (whose words are used in the song) for all their faith in the eternity of their message, reckoned on their writings giving birth to this sort of treatment, getting on for 2000 years later.

Besides which I suspect that the reason that after two years Bob had had enough of performing it is that the song goes at such a speed and has such a simple musical setting, that in the end there is not much more you can do to it.  Slowed down or made more intricate it would lose the power of its message and the essence of the song.  But at this speed there’s no time to add new harmonies and chords, no way you can get anything more out of the piano (get a pianist to play those repeated chords at this speed and he/she will be talking to you about aching arms and shouting “enough” after five minutes absolute max.)

It is, quite simply what it is, and can neither go further nor retreat, nor morph into something else.

I therefore think I rather agree with the commentary on the Ultimate Classic Rock website that “this is where his religion overshadows his music, turning the album into a sermon to an audience that is nearly certainly unconverted — and never will be, either.”

I am not sure if the album contains, “The best religious songs reach even non-believers” – that is certainly the case for me with When He returns – but Saved is not a patch on that song.

Rolling Stone was harsher saying, “With a single leap of faith, he plummeted to the level of a spiritual pamphleteer.   What made the Gospel According to Bob especially tough to take was his hook-line-and-sinker acceptance of the familiar fundamentalist litany, and his smugness in propounding it. Dylan hadn’t simply found Jesus but seemed to imply that he had His home phone number as well.”

Certainly if you listen to Dylan’s occasional monologues during the shows at this time there is an absolute certainty in his voice, and as with all firmly committed to a religious cause there is no room for argument, logical analysis, evidence gathering or anything much else.

This at least is what I find: my scientific background to forming opinions and seeking the truth, can’t intermingle and co-exist too easily with the fundamentalists because they don’t share my belief in logical analysis, nor do I share their view in the ultimate truth of the word of the Lord.

What Rolling Stone found was a hope in the music that Dylan would eventually walk away from Biblical literalism. As they said at the time, “Maybe he’ll evolve, maybe he’ll just walk away. Whichever the case, stagnation has never been his style, and after Saved, there seems precious little left to say about salvation through dogma.”

And later… “The only miracle worth talking about here is Bob Dylan’s artistic triumph—qualified thought it may be—over his dogmatic theme.”

What this album, and certainly this song, gave us was passion, which is not always there in Dylan.  Nor does it need to be, because sometimes the story telling will talk for itself.  For all the anger in Positively Fourth Street, there is no passion  in “Tell Ol’ Bill”  where there is a message of the hopelessness the slave feels, and the resignation of “anything is worth a try”.

And there is one other thought I would like to take.  This comes from a review in Vanity Fair.    “It helps that, three decades on, Dylan’s proselytizing has become easier to take, or at least contextualize: he sings all kinds of vernacular and pseudo-vernacular music—why shouldn’t he cut a gospel album?”

I guess, looked at like that, it’s fair enough.  Except that having gone back to “Saved” and listened to it several times over, as I do with each song I review for this site, I don’t actually want to play it any more.  I’ve got it, I understand it, I know what he’s talking about, I can hear the music, that’s enough.

For having mentioned “Tell Ol Bill” in passing, I immediately want to go back and listen to it again – having heard it hundreds of times more in my life than I have ever heard Saved.  “Saved” in the end is a jolly, fast, energetic, ok, song.  Which is good.  But it’s not really much more than that.

• What else is on the siteYou’ll find an index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page.  You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.

  The index to the 500+ songs reviewed is now on a new page of its own.  You will find it here.

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Please note the some recordings of the live version of the song offered below are now running with a message saying “not available in your country”.  I am leaving them on in case it is just my country, and not yours.  Some are still working for me.

Here are some that were working in October 2019; checked again in April 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPbWvj9SEcg

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3r1sno

and  This is the absolute classic which takes us through the two great moments of the Christian years.

Now back to the original review

If there were a Dylan Christian song that could convert me I guess it could only be “When He Returns”.  But it is not the album version that moves me, for there I find the piano part horribly overdone – so much so that all the twiddles, the quick arpeggios, the sudden introduction of bass notes, then scampering away to the high trebles – it is all the work of Beckett showing off, and of the producers saying, “hey look Bob can write a piece like THIS!!!”

But fortunately there exists a totally different live version – and this is the piece which if I were convertible to Christianity could be used to convert me.  The link I had before now has broken so here is another one – it has I believe in you first, but is really worth waiting for.

and in case that falls down, try this although I prefer the one above.

https://youtu.be/HbKoBE0nDl4

Watch out though – for there are other versions that really could send me scampering off in the opposite direction.  But this time, the piano part works because Dylan is less of a virtuoso pianist and so stops the piano trying to steal the shown.   Wiki reminds us that “The final take, described by Heylin as “perhaps Dylan’s strongest studio vocal since ‘Visions of Johanna’,” was selected as the master.”    And not for the first time I disagree – it is this live performance that is Dylan at his finest both as a pianist and as a singer.

There is a different version (non-piano) here

The song was only played 46 times between 1979 to 1980, and then got just one later revival in 1981, which is a tragedy given the quality of the show noted above, but I guess Dylan felt that the feeling of the song was not what he wanted to project thereafter.

However I would argue that for a piece as superb you don’t have to follow the message to be able to perform it – at least not in my book.

However Dylan also is quoted as saying to Bono that “I didn’t like writing them, I didn’t want to write them,” so the whole situation is hard to judge.  But I think he did enjoy writing this and I am certain he enjoyed that particular performance.

Just listen to the end of this performance as Dylan slides his right hand up the keyboard – it is a moment of utter jubilation at what he knows was a superb performance of a great piece of music.  Pianists do that when they know they’ve got the performance right (not that I ever had many occasions so to do, but trust me, I’m a pianist).

But here’s a funny thing.   As soon as I heard this song I thought to myself “Restless Farewell” and indeed in one of two of the other live performances that are available on line you can here elements of that “So I’ll bid farewell and be down the road”.

The funny thing is Heylin says, “By the second verse he has resumed leafing through Matthew (perhaps after a quick listen to Restless Farewell).

Many before me have plotted the movement between the Gospel of Matthew and the Revelation of John in this piece and indeed in much of Dylan’s writing at the time, so I don’t need to revisit that journey here, but out of it all he does come up with some utterly superb lines.  Whoever thought that rock n roll could one day lead us to

Surrender your crown on this blood-stained ground, take off your mask

Heylin, as always, is concerned with the detail of recording, and suggests that Dylan might well not have sung over the pre-recorded piano part – as most writers suggest.   But the issue of Restless Farewell – the last song on Times they are a changing – and When He Returns, the last song on Slow Train, are more important than the order of events in recording, so that’s where I want to go.

The musical link is to be found with the line “But the bottles are done And we’ve killed every one” which musically relates to “Don’t you cry and don’t you die and don’t you burn” – although this link is made clearer in some of the live versions than on the record.

But if you just look at the lines from the Parting Glass (the Irish folk song origin of Restless Farewell) such as

“But since it fell unto my lot, that I should rise and you should not”,

you perhaps can imagine those being part of “When He Returns”.

But what is so utterly fascinating here is that the Parting Glass is a song of good memories but is also a song of desperate utter sadness that one is constantly moving on, never managing to keep hold of all the goodness one has.  It thus fitted into the main theme of the Times they are a Changing collection (which only the title song reverses), that times actually are not changing, but constantly repeating and repeating.

As I mentioned in my review of Restless Farewell… at the end the restlessness of the traveller goes, the apology to the women he’s hurt passes by, and it is his lifestyle that is justified by the claim that this is just the way he is.

But to stay as friends
And make amends
You got to have the time and stay behind
And since my feet are fast
And point from the past
I’ll bid farewell and be down the line

But now, all these years later, resplendent in his conversion of faith, Dylan says quite the opposite – we are not trapped by our past we can be saved by conversion to the one true God.

And curiously, isn’t that how Restless Farewell, diverting from its Irish origins, ends?

Well a false clock tries to tick out my time

at the start of that verse points to some sort of dramatic change in life and he continues…

To disgrace, distract, and bother me
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face
And the dust of rumours covers me
But if the arrow is straight
And the point is slick
It can pierce through dust no matter how thick
So I’ll make my stand
And remain as I am
And bid farewell and not give a damn

That straight slick arrow is not defined – is it his protest songs? – those of us who pondered such matters at the time thought it probably was.  But here we are 22 years later and the straight and pointed arrow becomes

The iron hand it ain’t no match for the iron rod

Now there is not this eternal vision that life will continue as is, forever, but rather it will change – and how it will change…

Don’t you cry and don’t you die and don’t you burn
For like a thief in the night, He’ll replace wrong with right
When He returns

And to show us that he hasn’t forgotten how the old songs go Dylan continues

Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through

So whereas in Restless Farewell he simply bids farewell and heads down the road, now with his new thinking he is able to ask

Can I cast it aside, all this loyalty and this pride?

So now the wanderer, forever going down the road leaving others behind, is told to stop the wandering forever because there is no escape.

Surrender your crown on this blood-stained ground, take off your mask
He sees your deeds, He knows your needs even before you ask

Of course the traveller in Restless Farewell had no actual plan, he just felt the need to keep moving just as Robert Johnson did, to escape the blues falling down like hail.  But it is all pointless.

Of every earthly plan that be known to man, He is unconcerned
He’s got plans of His own to set up His throne
When He returns

It is for me, the masterpiece of the era, but it took a recording of a live performance (which of course I didn’t hear until so many years later) to allow me to understand exactly what Dylan was saying.

Thank goodness for the internet.

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

Recent Posts

• To fall in love with you. The greatest of all the lost Dylan masterpieces.
• Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight: the meaning within Dylan’s song
• A Christian song or a song about lost love? Bob Dylan’s “Somethings’ Burning Baby”
• Bob Dylan’s “When you gonna wake up”. A tale of doom and despair

By Tony Attwood

Updated June 2018 with link to the recording of the song at the end of the article and the brief introduction below

“To fall in love with you” is the third most accessed file on this site.  The only articles that have been read more are “Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” and “Times they are a changing”.  From that I conclude that maybe quite a few others share my love of this song.

If you are interested in finding other songs by Dylan which he recorded as demos or sang in concert warm ups but then never released, then you might enjoy our “Forgotten Gems” file.  It contains around 25 songs with links to recordings on line.   Now back to the review of “To fall in love with you”

I have alluded to the fact a few times that I was trained as a musician before turning to being a writer, and in the time of moving from one to the other I did work for a few years as a theatre musician.   During that time I wrote a fair amount of music for theatrical productions, as well as for the rock bands I played in.  Indeed I have continued to write songs for most of my life, although mostly for my own enjoyment and as a way of telling my friends it is time to go at the end of the evening.

I say all this to stress two things – one I do know what it is like to write songs, and two, I make no claims to being a professional.  And all this is relevant here, because both during my theatre years (when the shout did sometimes arise, “Tony can you write a song to go here,” led to me sometimes writing very quickly to order) and subsequently (when I have as long as I want) I have written songs.

And in all this process I have often done sessions either on my own or with fellow performers just jamming around ideas and sequences – which occasionally turn into songs.  Of course at the start one only has a collection of phrases and attempts at rhyme, but with a fair wind the chord sequence can work and the melody can flow over it.  And a few words stick.

This process is a thoroughly valid one for writing a song – and this is where I get back to Dylan, because it is a technique he obviously has used on occasion.  And I can only take it to be ignorance of the varied creative techniques used by many people when writing songs that leads Heylin seemingly to call the process a “half-assed project”.  It is not the only way of composing of course, but it is one, and it can work.  Sometimes no, sometimes yes; but that is how it goes with most creative people much of the time.

You can’t turn a tap and have a work of genius pop out – at least not all the time.  The measure of genius is not that every item produced is a work of sheer brilliance, but that quite a few of them are.  Even the greatest genius has off days.

For Dylan, that day he toyed with “To fall in love with you” was most certainly not an “off day”.  This is a beautiful song, and it is wonderful indeed that we have a copy of the recording.  The lyrics are only partially formed but the chord sequence and the melody is there, and above everything else, Dylan clearly believes in where he is going.  If it had ever been finished it would have been considered one of the masterpieces, of that I am certain.

What is particularly interesting is that it is an 18 bar song, which is extremely unusual, and this makes me think that the recording I’ve linked to above is not a “join in when you are ready” type, but one that had already been rehearsed, or at least has the sequence written down.

I also feel this because the chord sequence is unique among Dylan’s work – much more complex than he normally works with and using a very different approach.

The song is in B, which is very unusual for a start, and if you have ever played a guitar or keyboard you’ll know how unusual this sequence is…

F#  E  F#  E  F#  G#m  F#  E  F#  E  F# G#m  F#  E  B  F#  G#m F#  B  F# G#m F# E F# B.

Even if all that is gibberish to you (and there is no reason why it should other than that) I would like to point out two things.  One is the the home chord of the whole song – B – doesn’t turn up until we are over half way through a verse.  The other is that this is written by a guy whose favourite guitar sequence for an entire song is

E  A  E   B7 A  E

So it is an unusual length with a very unusual chord structure, and yet the guys playing the accompaniment on the version we have really know what’s what – so they must have rehearsed or at the very very least had some musical instructions in front of them.

And although it is true that many of the words are mumbled – and my version below is just picking up what I can hear, and using suggestions from elsewhere, there are a lot of beautiful and exciting ideas and expressions of emotion here.  I am sure you’ll want to change some of my text, especially given that I am listening with English not American ears and brain but even my poor rendition made in consultation with the work of the much more skillful listener Eyolf Østrem manages to capture something of it, I think.

Who knows where this song could have gone – and who knows why Dylan didn’t complete it especially at a time when it seems good ideas were hard to come by?  But at least we have this tantalising sketch to keep forever.

If you just read the lyrics below it is interesting to see how almost every half line could lead us into a whole new song… indeed this is part of the great interest in this piece because not only is the music so interesting, but so are the lyrics.  There are something like fifty take off points within this piece, each of which could create a new song.

In fact it is reminiscent of the comment made in the early days when he once said that he thought the world might not last much longer so he put all the song titles he had into one song.  It is like finding a sketch book of a great visual artist containing pen and ink outlines of fifty great works he never undertook.  It is like opening the door of Dylan’s creative mind, and seeing all the possibilities laid out before us.

It is the sketch of a song with as much power and imagination as It’s Alright Ma, but with love, regret and doubt as the contexts.

It is tantalising, and brilliant both for itself, and for the consideration of why he never finished it.

I see it in your lips I knew it in your eyes

How simple and how magnificent is that.

A tear goes down my day is real
but your drying eye upon the shame
Each needs a road for me from you
what paradise? what can I do?
That die for my and the day is dark
I can’t believe for your touch
What I could find oh time is right
If I fell in love to fall in love
To fall in love with you

The day is dark, our time is right
day in the night deep in the night
I can’t yet be back I heard my- surprise
I see it in your lips I knew it in your eyes
Well I feel your love and I feel no shame
I can’t unleash your horde I call your name
What you’re to me what can I do?
To fall in love to fall in love
To fall in love with you

It just rolls upon the sand
ever this for now I’m made a man
can make you see what I can find
I know it in my days ah in my daily mind
Oh will ages roll will ages fly?
I hear your name where angels lie.
What do I know? for to come it’s true
To fall in love To fall in love
To fall in love with you

How can the doors trust on a nail?
how can I be surprised of most every day?
In the distant road I can’t be the same
I feel no love I feel no shame
I can’t watch the bay out on my own
we’ve a destined man I can attest it all
I didn’t I could find where I could go
To fall in love to fall in love
To fall in love with you

What else is on the site?

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

The index to the 500+ songs reviewed is now on a new page of its own.  You will find it here.  It contains reviews of every Dylan composition that we can find a recording of – if you know of anything we have missed please do write in.

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

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

Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight

By Jerry Hallier

‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’, the final track on the 1983 album Infidels, is a  song that has not attracted much comment from critics and fans since its release.  

There are several possible reasons why ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ hasn’t generated much critical interest: conceivably, many fans see it as just another run-of-the-mill break-up song from an album that is famous for its varied song quality. Then too, the performance of the song may put some people off.  The 1980s’ computerized drum sound appears, to these ears at least, very ill-fitting with the more ‘Dylanish’ slide guitar and organ–led arrangement, and Dylan’s singing at times sounds over-wrought. Maybe I’m wrong but these aspects possibly make it easy for many listeners to take the song for granted as unexceptional and not worthy of any special attention.

Seen this way, I suggest that there is a risk of not hearing what the song is actually saying. A close reading I believe reveals that ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ is among those Dylan tunes where the listener can be wrong-footed by the song’s unreliable narrator.

To begin with, the song’s title and chorus give the impression that the narrator is trying to console his lover who is having some sort of distress about her decision to walk out of their relationship.

But while the chorus indicates that the narrator still wants / needs the relationship to continue, the verses show that, in truth, he is less concerned with his lover’s feelings and more absorbed with satisfying his own needs; indeed, in looking at how he attempts to persuade her to stay it appears more likely that it is the narrator, himself, who is likely to fall apart from the collapse of the relationship.  Taking each verse in turn, it can be seen that the man uses every insincere trick in the book to try to convince the woman to stay.

In the first verse, for example, he tries to convince her that without him she will be vulnerable to the dangers of the world.

You know the streets are filled with vipers

Who’ve lost all ray of hope

You know, it ain’t even safe no more

In the palace of the Pope

From there, he tries to make her feel sorry for him by saying he has squandered his potential to achieve something worthwhile and honourable:

I wish I’d have been a doctor

Maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost

Maybe I’d have done some good in the world

‘Stead of burning every bridge I crossed

Ever the bleeding heart, he then explains that he is inadequate at telling her how much she means to him and wishes he could do so and get anything for her. Unfortunately, despite all these ambitions, he presents himself as an attractive victim who is held back, helpless:

But it’s like I’m stuck inside a painting

That’s  hanging in the Louvre

My throat starts to tickle and my nose itches

But I know that I can’t move

And so it goes on. In the bridge and last verses, he attempts to stoke her paranoia further about the wisdom of trusting anyone else, even her friends, and he tops it off by summoning up her memories of the fun they have had in the past (which, certainly, she will lose if she leaves him).

I also like the way Dylan uses the choruses to allow the narrator to repeatedly invoke some pseudo philosophical twaddle about the significance of the past and the future,  again to further raise doubt in this woman’s mind to leave him.  

Thus, it is difficult not to see the narrator as someone who is fully self-absorbed and entirely willing to use every means he can think of to make the woman feel guilty about leaving him and to manipulate her into staying. Certainly, he never once cares enough to ask her what she feels or wants.

While ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight’ is far from being a great song, neither is it just filler.  Its worth lies in encouraging us to reflect on the self-serving and manipulative behaviours that we all can resort to when somebody we supposedly care about doesn’t want to do as we wish. Given also that man here is unquestioningly selfish, the song also reminds us to be wary of assuming that the narrators in his songs are Dylan himself.

Recent Posts

• A Christian song or a song about lost love? Bob Dylan’s “Somethings’ Burning Baby”
• Bob Dylan’s “When you gonna wake up”. A tale of doom and despair
• Precious Angel: an enigma inside a seemingly straightforward Bob Dylan song.
• Gonna change my Way of Thinking – twice. How Bob Dylan changed his own song

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”

By Tony Attwood

Empire Burlesque was written in three different years as the chronology shows:

1983

• Tight connection to my heart

1984

• Something’s Burning Baby

1985 

• Seeing the real you at last
• I’ll remember you
• Trust Yourself
• Emotionally Yours
• When the night comes falling from the sky
• Never gonna be the same again
• Dark Eyes

What’s more, in between Dylan wrote a whole range of other songs, such as  Neighbourhood Bully and Foot of Pride and 1983 and New Danville Girl / Brownsville Girl in 1984.

What I also find fascinating about Empire Burlesque is that it contains Trust Yourself which on the face of it seems to contradict the Christian stand point of earlier work, and indeed some of the imagery of Something’s Burning Baby – although as I want to point out here, I don’t see this as a religious song.

But from the moment I bought the LP upon release in the UK (and I am rather pleased to say, I still have it, and have just confirmed that it is perfectly playable, although Dark Eyes – by far my favourite song from the album has a horrible scratch on it) I loved the end of this album far more than any other part:

• When the night comes falling from the sky
• Something’s burning baby
• Dark Eyes

For some reason, in the early days of this website I reviewed When the Night, and Dark Eyes, but not Something’s burning baby.  So time to make up for that.

It is the rotating two chords that send us forwards and the opening certainly seems to suggest that this is about the breaking up of a love affair.   And this is interesting, from a man who has often been known for throwing in wholly unexpected chord changes in his work.

https://youtu.be/arP7Ntg4Y9o

We have no doubt about the nature of the song from the off…

Something is burning, baby, are you aware?
Something is the matter, baby, there’s smoke in your hair
Are you still my friend, baby, show me a sign
Is the love in your heart for me turning blind?

And the second verse seems to insist that this is the issue – she has changed, but is it that she has just fallen out of love for him, or is there something deeper here?

You’ve been avoiding the main streets for a long, long while
The truth that I’m seeking is in your missing file
What’s your position, baby, what’s going on?
Why is the light in your eyes nearly gone?

Verse three confirms our suspicions; she’s changed, and he wants to know what it is all about.  Rock n Roll teaches us that its always another man, no matter what the woman says, so we are awaiting the confirmation.

I know everything about this place, or so it seems
Am I no longer a part of your plans or your dreams?
Well, it is so obvious that something has changed
What’s happening, baby, to make you act so strange?

From all that has gone before I take “this place” to be “having a woman go cold on the relationship”, and that contrasts nicely with the “something burning motif” which basically is a straight metaphor for “our love is affair is going up in flames” confirmed by “I see the shadow of a man, baby, making you blue.”

Something is burning, baby, here’s what I say
Even the bloodhounds of London couldn’t find you today
I see the shadow of a man, baby, makin’ you blue
Who is he, baby, and what’s he to you?

The constantly rotating two chords and the lack of a chorus or a middle 8 drive us on all the time, relentlessly pushing the notion that she is lost to the world.  We’ve gone as far as we can like this, so it is time for us to lay the cards on the table and say what is going on.

We’ve reached the edge of the road, baby, where the pasture begins
Where charity is supposed to cover up a multitude of sins
But where do you live, baby, and where is the light?
Why are your eyes just staring off in the night?

Then suddenly although the structure of the song is the same, the melody changes, and there is a new insistence in the words

I can feel it in the night when I think of you
I can feel it in the light and it’s got to be true
You can’t live by bread alone, you won’t be satisfied
You can’t roll away the stone if your hands are tied

Now this verse suddenly contains the first Christian commentary with the “bread alone” reference, Deuteronomy 8:3

And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.

It’s an important element within the Christian faith as Matthew 4:4 also includes it as a comment from Jesus, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

And of course rolling away the stone is a fundamental in the faith with Jesus ordering the stone in front of the tomb of Lazarus to be removed and He rolls away the stone from the tomb at the resurrection.

But then Dylan is straight back to saying that some light has gone out of her life.

Got to start someplace, baby, can you explain?
Please don’t fade away on me, baby, like the midnight train
Answer me, baby, a casual look will do
Just what in the world has come over you?

Next, out of the blue, we get a bit of geographic context, but still the message is overwhelmingly “something is wrong, please tell me what it is”.

I can feel it in the wind and it’s upside down
I can feel it in the dust as I get off the bus on the outskirts of town
I’ve had the Mexico City blues since the last hairpin curve
I don’t wanna see you bleed, I know what you need but it ain’t what you deserve

And the end – partly enigmatic – we don’t know who the “man” that suddenly pops up actually is, just that the singer is still concluding that the relationship is going up in flames.  But he has he will wait for her.  When it is over and done, he’ll still be there awaiting her.

Something is burning, baby, something’s in flames
There’s a man going ’round calling names
Ring down when you’re ready, baby, I’m waiting for you
I believe in the impossible, you know that I do

Now I don’t see a Christian message in this, and I don’t get the feeling, that Heylin professes to see, that throughout Dylan is concerned for the woman’s soul.  I think we must also take note of the fact that the song was being written and re-written as it was recorded, and this approach with Dylan often ends up with songs that are not literal truths but interpretations of the interconnection between the physical world and the emotional world.   And that is certainly what we seem to have here.

There is one reference that Heylin seizes upon – the final lines which relate back to Matthew 17:20 “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

But is that link enough to say that this was exactly what Dylan was referring to when he said,

Ring down when you’re ready, baby, I’m waiting for you
I believe in the impossible, you know that I do

I think not, so I don’t agree Dylan was trying to make it “crystal clear that the smell of burning was coming from down below” as Heylin suggests.   Dylan had already written a clearly non-Christian song (Trust yourself) and I can’t see why, if he wanted to re-establish his Christian credentials he would do it in such an obscure manner.   It makes much more sense for the burning to be a metaphor for the disappearing love affair.

When Dylan has in the past wanted to give us insights into his feeling about the Revelation of St John he really does leave us in no doubt, giving us clear quotes from the Bible.  I think he would have been much more overt had he wanted to write a religious message here.

But it is also worth noting that this song has never ever been played in concert, which is fairly weird to begin with – it is after all a terrific piece of work.

Yes I will agree that there is “apocalyptic imagery”, but the song (contrary to the Wiki review) is not “filled with apocalyptic imagery” just because Heylin says so.  If you go through the piece, verse by verse, that is not what is there.

By Tony Attwood

Dylan is on occasion brilliant at telling us all what is wrong with the world, without him saying exactly what, how, where, when, why….  The songs don’t spell it out, but allow us to see the picture even though it is not fully painted.  A perfect example to my mind would be…

Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more person crying

That single set of five lines conveys so much about the inter-relationship between the individual and the world we find around us that it takes a lifetime to explore every nuance.

Take on the other hand

You got innocent men in jail, your insane asylums are filled
You got unrighteous doctors dealing drugs that’ll never cure your ills

and if you feel like me you might well think, well, yes, ok, and…

You got men who can’t hold their peace and women who can’t control their tongues
The rich seduce the poor and the old are seduced by the young

And at this point you might well think, we yes “the rich seduce the poor” is rather a good way of expressing everything that is wrong with capitalism in five words.  But “the old are seduced by the young” – really?  And how exactly?  If I am to take other lines in the song literally (and that surely is the intention) how am I, a man of what I might perhaps describe as “mature complexion” being seduced, literally or metaphorically by my children or grandchildren, or by young people in general?  I am not quite sure how.

Thus for me the problem is that “Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts” is Bob telling me how to think and what to think, and not doing it in a very exciting or interesting way; he is narrowing the focus down to a single door through which he says I have to travel.  When on the other hand in the past he offered the profound message of caution against everyone who tells us what to think

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call

Here, he was opening up a wave of possibilities and options rather than closing them down.

So in “When you gonna wake up” you have Dylan descending into the “private reasons” he earlier told us could be seen in the eyes of everyone who tells us how to behave.

The whole point of “It’s alright ma” is that life is about people describing the world and telling us how to behave and what to believe.   Interestingly the line “Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts” could have come from the days of “Its alright ma” and the instruction not to follow leaders, along with the injunction “That it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to.”  But now everything is reversed.  The “counterfeit philosophies” are not the ones that liberate us to think our own thoughts and follow our own lives, but rather the original thoughts that told us to do those very things.

That philosophy encoded in “Its alright ma” seems to remind us that it’s not the world that is the issue, but the way you see the world, and Dylan, it seems to me, was often making it clear that we could all see the world in many different ways – it’s up to us which world we can live in.

Now he’s telling us that there is one and only one way to see the world.  And woe betide you if you see it in the wrong way.

My vision of the world, or put another way, the world in which I live, agrees that

You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules

But the rest of it, it just is (for me, and I am not saying this is how it is for anyone else) just another preacher telling me how to live my life, rather than letting me try to be a decent fellow who does a little bit of good in the world.  So when Bob asks

When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up
When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?

I just want to tell him I woke up sometime in my teenage years, and I’ve been pretty much awake ever since.

Musically, there is an interesting point to note in the song, in that it is primarily built around minor chords.  The verse is Am, Dm7, Am Dm7.  The chorus does through in a passing G and F but mostly it is the minors, the chords mostly associated with the sad and depressing.

But it is not the music that is depressing particularly, it is just the message.

Thus there seems a disconnect between the music and the language.  If one looks at the lyrics alone Bob seems angry with me, the listener.  After all saying, over and over and over again, “When you gonna wake up?” is not warm or welcoming, nor is it the sort of abstract at a distance warning of “It’s alright ma” which at least ends with the “life and life only” notion that, well, that’s just how it goes.

For me there is a horrible intolerance in this song, and that is of course the problem with people who believe that they are absolutely right and that there is one thing that is going to sort out everything.

Maybe there is something in me that makes me not want to obey, something deep inside that tells me that “don’t follow leaders” is actually a pretty decent way to run the world, as opposed to the descent into a dreadful fear of what happens at the end of time, when God pulls the plug and says, “right, you didn’t believe in Me so you’ve had it,” and I suffer eternal damnation.

I am sorry that Bob felt such that he wanted to write “Sometimes I just feel so low-down and disgusted,” on Slow Train, but yes I know what he means.  But then I toddle off to a dance or just remind myself that it is not the world, but the way I see the world, that makes it seem like this.  And I’m ok again.  Sometimes it takes a few days, but mostly just half an hour.

So for me, where a song like this gets stuck, as with where a philosophy like this gets stuck, is that it has an absolute certainty that I must have the unearthly power to sort out my life.  But then if the New Testament is right, there’s no point having any debate, because the future is fixed: the Second Coming is coming, and that’s that.

While It’s alright ma leaves me (and I guess a lot of other people) thinking and pondering and questioning and hopefully wondering about their own lives and how they treat others, this song tells us how it is all going to pan out.

On the surface, It’s Alright Ma is doom laden from head to toe.  But the message really is that we can come out of that and escape because we can see the world in different ways, and we can each make a difference to other people’s lives.  But “When you gonna wake up” tells us only of certainty and the end.  And for most of us (atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Jew) that is going to be a pretty depressing end.

Recent Posts

• Precious Angel: an enigma inside a seemingly straightforward Bob Dylan song.
• Gonna change my Way of Thinking – twice. How Bob Dylan changed his own song
• No Man Righteous: Bob Dylan’s (almost) lost song.
• “Man Gave Names to all the Animals” – behind the Bob Dylan song

elsewhere…

• Index of all the songs on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.
• Bob Dylan open discussion group on Facebook.    Or go onto Facebook and search for “Untold Dylan”