Untold Dylan

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”

By Tony Attwood

This is, rather obviously, the song from Dylan to the woman who showed him the way into the Light when he was converted.  At one level it seems very straightforward, and yet with this song I have a very special problem, a problem that arose when I found out that the last time he performed “Precious Angel” was also the first and last time he performed “Caribbean Wind”.

This puzzlement all started because I was interested by the fact that Precious Angel was only performed live 73 times, which puts it at the level of a minor album track.  And yet the conversion to a religion is surely one of the major events in one’s life, the giant leap, not a slight change.  For Dylan at the time it was the most monumental thing that had happened to him, and it is a very fine song.  So why ditch it?  And why ditch it on the day that Caribbean Wind got its one and only dusting down?

What also fascinates me (and this I think particularly comes from looking at Dylan’s songs in Chronological Order, rather than just reviewing them album by album), “Precious Angel” and “Caribbean Wind” were only written one year apart, and they are both about a woman who was close to Dylan, but, we take it in each case, not his lover.  The Precious Angel showed him the path to the true light, and the Caribbean Wind woman showed him something quite, quite different:

Was she a child or a woman, did we go too far?
Were we sniper bait, did we follow a star?
Through a hole in the wall to where the long arm of the law cannot reach
Could I have been used and played as a pawn?
It certainly was possible as the gay night wore on
Where men bathed in perfume and practiced the hoax of free speech

(There are several versions of the Caribbean lyrics – this comes from the Biograph version).

What is so curious is that the Precious Angel who came first “was the one”, but a year on we are drawn into an utterly different world of writing – to me it is one of the most extraordinary paradoxes in Dylan’s whole religious period – and that’s before I even get into contemplating the “hoax of free speech*”.  For there, is Dylan really saying then that we can never be free because God set the whole system up for us to choose to be for Him or against Him?   Seemingly yes with the lines…

Now there’s spiritual warfare and flesh and blood breaking down
You’ve either got faith or you got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground
The enemy is subtle, how be it we are so deceived
When the truth’s in our hearts and we still don’t believe?

So how could Dylan move in one year from

Shine your light, shine your light on me
You know I just couldn’t make it by myself
I’m a little too blind to see

to

Street band playing “Nearer My God To Thee”
We met in secret where we drank from a spring
She said, “I know what you’re thinking, but there ain’t a thing
We can do about it, so we might as well let it be”

and actually say farewell to both songs in the same concert?  (The whole point of Christianity is that there is everything you can do about your thoughts – you can convert to the religion and make yourself pure in the eyes of the Lord).

Of course artists change and go through different phases of their artistic lives – Dylan has done it many times outside of his conversion to Christianity, but this isn’t just an artistic move – this is a move reflecting his whole life and utter belief.  I honestly don’t know, but I just feel in looking at Precious Angel that I have to try and answer the question of what happened to end the performances of Precious Angel and bring on Caribbean Wind.

The Precious Angel herself is almost a saint, a direct messenger from God (if such a thing is allowed in modern times), seemingly perfect in every regard.

Precious angel, under the sun
How was I to know you’d be the one
To show me I was blinded, to show me I was gone
How weak was the foundation I was standing upon?

But now consider the “spiritual warfare and flesh and blood breaking down”

and the subsequent war that is ranging in the Biograph version of Caribbean Wind

I see the screws breakin’ loose, see the devil pounding on tin
I see a house in the country being torn apart from within
I can hear my ancestors calling from the land far beyond

which is slightly disconcerting given that Bob’s ancestors were Jewish not Christian.

So could it be that on 12 November 1980, performing this song for the very last time, and then performing Caribbean Wind for the first and last time, Dylan was involved in some kind of internal battle, with both songs saying farewell to the same woman?  Or saying farewell to the fundamentalist part of his belief system?

Obviously I don’t know, but that abandonment of Caribbean Wind and this sudden farewell to the song that thanked a woman for the most monumental moment in his entire life, is one of the odder aspects in Dylan’s performing life.

Precious Angel is one of those songs that people like to go through and cite the origin and meaning of individual lines and phrases, but I am not at all sure this does us much good in terms of appreciating the music as a work of art.  Sometimes I do agree that picking out the sources of Dylan’s inspirations is helpful, but here, the references about being blind and now being able to see are fairly straightforward.  The lady has shown him the true way, he’s accepted it, and he’s converted.  I am not sure we need to know much more.

I do think however we have to give thanks to Mark Knopfler who seemed to get what was required of him perfectly – not bad for a man who reputedly left the first session saying in a disbelieving voice, “These songs – they’re all about God!”

But I am left absolutely puzzled.   On its own Precious Angel is a song saying thank you to the woman who showed him the way to the one true faith.  But just one year later it seems to me he was saying goodbye to her.  How much more was he saying goodbye to at that point?

*There is some discussion about the “hoax of free speech” line, which some suggest is actually “hope of free speech” and which changes from “practiced the hoax of free speech” to “celebrated free speech” in the published version of the lyrics.

Recent Posts

• 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
• Trouble in Mind: a song Dylan clearly cared for, but never played in concert.

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

“Apocalypse soon if you don’t watch out”.

That was how Rolling Stone described this blues song – a song which has had two presentations, each with completely different lyrics and such a different backing that although both are clearly 12 bar blues, they become completely different songs.

In 2003 Dylan re-wrote the lyrics and accompaniment of ‘Gonna change my way of thinking’ from 1979 and then recorded this new version with Mavis Staples, for the album “Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan”.

After the re-write Dylan clearly loved the new version as he used it as the opener for numerous shows from 2009 on, and from the reports that are available, did so with a verse and drive that are not to be found on the more sparsely accompanied earlier edition.  Certainly the concert recordings that we have back this notion up.

And although this started out as a solid trumpet blast on behalf of Christianity there is a lot of fun and games here to love whether the listener is Christian or not.  Indeed I suspect that I have a much easier time with the piece as a non-believer, than those who follow the gospels have.  But that’s just a guess.

Take the line, “we‘re living by the golden rule, whoever got the gold rules”. It’s a cheeky interpretation of the New Testament’s golden rule of do unto others as you would be done by.   And what is doubly fascinating is that in the very first Christian song Dylan composed “Do right to me baby” he totally got this Golden Rule backwards singing, “if you do right to me baby, I’ll do right to you.”  He clearly got back to the source text and resolved matters since then.

But it’s not that Dylan would have misunderstood at that point, after all “do unto others” comes from the Sermon of the Mount (Matthew 7: 12) and in terms of Jesus’ saying you don’t get much more pivotal than that: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets”.

I find this such a key moment because Dylan’s expression in “Do right to me Baby” was pure blues – in the blues the man fundamentally distrusts the perfidious woman and she has to prove herself, and even then he still probably doesn’t trust her much.  But now as we move on through his overtly Christian period Dylan has got it sorted and understood the message properly.  You have to do the right thing first, according to the way you would like to be treated.  It makes singing the blues quite a challenge.

As the song progressed so did the message.  “Every day you got to give yourself a chance,” takes us that bit further – every day is indeed important and to my mind the people who make the most of their lives do carry this vision inside them.  Every day it is important to do the right thing, to be a good, decent person who helps others in need.  Every day is a chance for new experiences, broadening one’s horizons, learning from the world around us.

But for me, and indeed for many who have approached this song before me, there is one line that leaps out and slaps me round the face so hard I just have to keep going back to it:

Well don’t know which one is worse
Doing your own thing or just being cool
You remember only about the brass ring
You forget all about the golden rule

For anyone who has any understanding of the 1960s and 1970s the phrases “do your own thing” and “being cool” ring out as part of that era.  “Don’t follow leaders” was Dylan’s earlier comment on the former, but it came with a notion of action which is independent, not influenced by social norms, laws, governments, conventions, rather than just doing nothing.

“Being cool” on the other hand was a “live and let live” vision as if there really were no rights and wrongs.  A vision that when you consider it, is all very well if it is used for  criticising outdated morality, but pretty useless as a way of dealing with murder, child molestation, wife beating, racism… well you see what I mean.

In this simple analysis “doing your own thing” wins hands down because it allows one to make moral choices, rather than blindly following leaders.  One’s own thing in the end might be to choose to follow a leader, whether that leader is Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan, Gandhi, or Lao Tzu.  Or not.  It is up to you.

Doing your own thing doesn’t necessarily lead to inner emptiness although it can do.  Being cool most certainly gives nothing except being cool.

But there is another battle here – that of personal individuality.  God, it seems, gave man free will so he has to make a choice.  Make the wrong choice and at the time of the Second Coming (or your own death, whichever comes first) you are in trouble.  But for people like me who don’t believe in the Second Coming or the divinity of Jesus Christ, there are many other choices, and following the individuality that one has been granted through the randomness of one’s DNA, synapses, upbringing and experience, is certainly one of the most profound.  It leads to exploration on the widest scale, and through that the chance, on occasion to do some good things.

But I meander, as is my wont.

Dylan is writing about his own redemption – and through this has led many, many before me to wander off into a whole debate about freedom.  For that alone we should be rather grateful.  And he’s not just given us the chance to have the debate, he’s given us the chance to note his change of heart.

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

That 1964 warning from My Back Pages hangs like a haze over the Christian songs in which life very much is black and white – you are either for Him or against Him.  And how fascinating is it (well, it is to me) that Dylan started singing My Back Pages on stage in July 1978, wrote the original Gonna Change in 1979 but kept on singing My Back Pages on stage until 2012.   260 renditions.

Gonna Change got 79 plays between 1979 and 2011 – the new version coming in, as I noted above, in 2009.  What a battle that seems.  “Life is black and white – good and evil,” shouts one side of Dylan.  “Oh no it isn’t” shouts Another Side of Bob Dylan.  For me, as you will have noted, Another Side is where it is at.

In the first version of Gonna Change Dylan is completely clear where he is.

But there’s only one authority
And that’s the authority on high

But he also gives us a fascinating extra thought, the thought that being a Christian doesn’t mean you have to sing religious songs and live a calm and quiet life.  Obviously not, for this is Bob Dylan on the never ending tour.   So I do love the lines

I got a God-fearing woman
One I can easily afford
She can do the Georgia crawl
She can walk in the spirit of the Lord

Just in case you aren’t too sure, allow me to divert  for a moment and fill in the Georgia Crawl bit.   Although I would consider myself something of an expert on dance (when not engaged in musical things, and not watching football, the evening relaxation is dancing – at least three nights a week, so I know a bit about its history) I had to double check that my memory of what the Crawl is/was is correct.  This is how I see it…

The Crawl was a blues dance with the sort of exaggerated sexual hip movements that many blues dances have – but the Crawl really laid it on thick.  It was highly provocative, and not something most of us would want to try after about the age of 35 for fear of doing something nasty to the back.  The sort of dance which if you took your nine year old for an evening out, and a couple were doing it, you really wouldn’t not where to look or how to answer the questions.

Blind Willie McTell mentioned it in his songs and there is a song “Geogia Crawl” by Henry Williams which has the lines

I can shake it east, shake it west,
Way down south I can shake it the best,
Doin’ the Georgia Crawl, oh, the Georgia Crawl

The second alternative version of Dylan’s song, the one not on the original LP is here – if you leave the recording running you get two versions.

For the last verse in the version above Dylan sings the first verse again.

Change my way of thinking, make myself a different set of rules
Put my best foot forward, stop being influenced by fools

However the lyrics given on the official site include this at the end…

I’ll tell you something, things you never had you’ll never miss
I’ll tell you something, things you never had you’ll never miss
A brave man will kill you with a sword, a coward with a kiss

Now that does fascinate me and I really don’t quite know what to make of it.  Maybe there is a religious connotation, but if so I’ve missed it.

Heylin describes the whole expedition across the two versions as a horrible mess – from first writing to final total re-write.  And yes I think he is right in terms of the lyrics.  A lot of the phraseology like the line about the horse and the one about the table are just nicked from older writings, and mostly it doesn’t add up to much for me.  But musically, unlike Heylin, I really do like both versions, and find I can very easily divorce myself from any meaning there is supposed to be in the lyrics so that I just enjoy the overall event.

It’s not great Dylan, in my very personal opinion, but it is good blues.  And I like a good blues number.

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

• No Man Righteous: Bob Dylan’s (almost) lost song.
• “Man Gave Names to all the Animals” – behind the Bob Dylan song
• Trouble in Mind: a song Dylan clearly cared for, but never played in concert.
• “Ye shall be changed”; old song, old message, old testament, new religion.

By Tony Attwood

No Man Righteous was included in Heylin’s list of “The gems that Bob Dylan discarded” which in the UK was published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

It was recorded for Slow Train Coming, but the recordings have (for once) been kept out of the public awareness.  While the other two outtakes have become public (Trouble in Mind as a B side of a single, and Ye Shall be Changed in the first set of Bootleg albums (1-3) this one remains obscure.  Only one recording by a fan recording a concert, lets us know what it was all about.  I’ve put the link to it below.

And even that recording was by chance, given that Dylan just performed the song three times in 1979 and 1980.  He did comment to the audience one night that the band was trying it out, and having done so he decided it would be on the album. But then it wasn’t.

So it is interesting that the three out takes, all come from the early stage of the work of recording Slow Train Coming. Dylan was clearly working his way up to the songs that he felt were right for the piece, and with the three outtakes out of the way, he settled down to the real business.

The Book of Romans in the New Testament, lays down the ground rules that salvation comes through following Jesus Christ.   So guys like me, who basically try and live a decent and honourable life (and of course usually fail) can do all the good things possible, but without admitting the the Lord God holds sway over all mankind, and that Jesus Christ was his son, then, come the reckoning as described in the Book of Revelations, we’re done for.  All the business of helping people is for nothing without letting God and Jesus in.

Romans 3:10 tells us, “As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one” while Isaiah 4:6, proclaims “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags.”  And that’s where Dylan starts out.

It’s a fairly upbeat, dance (or at last hip swinging) song but underneath it is what seems to me the dark heart of Christianity.  For salvation I have to believe.  It is what is in my head that counts, not the good deeds that I might do of my own volition.   There is going to be no escape from what happens in the second coming unless I think the right thoughts as well as do the right deeds.

For as TS Eliot so clearly put it, “The last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right deed for the wrong reason.”   But then Eliot also said, “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”   That is the creative artist talking – we can never find out how to get things right, unless we take huge, huge risks.  It is all a bit confusing.

So we come to the essence of this song.  “The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”  (Psalm 14:3)

Dylan takes up the position from the start, so there can be no misunderstanding…

When a man he serves the Lord, it makes his life worthwhile
It don’t matter ’bout his position, it don’t matter ’bout his lifestyle
Talk about perfection, I ain’t never seen none
And there ain’t no man righteous, no not one

In short, I don’t stand a chance on my own, only by serving the Lord can I be saved because the Devil will “even work his ways through those whose intentions are good”.  Which I have always understood to mean that the Devil is so strong that no matter how much I try to be a decent sort of guy, he will corrupt me.  Only by declaring myself for God will I be able to fight the fallen angel.

Now of course some of the song contains concepts that I suspect very many Dylan fans will agree with straight off

Look around, ya see so many social hypocrites
Like to make rules for others while they do just the opposite

That’s the sort of thought that we were used to in the earlier songs – pointing out exactly why we shouldn’t follow leaders.

But at the heart of this song is the notion that we will all have to “account for all the deeds that you done” – which seems a sort of justice in itself, if not associated with the fact that we have to repent and follow the Lord.  Repenting and trying to be a better person on one’s own just isn’t enough in this vision because the Devil is always lurking, ready to take advantage.

So in the end it is all so simple for the follower of this creed.

When I’m gone don’t wonder where I be
Just say that I trusted in God and that Christ was in me
Say He defeated the devil, He was God’s chosen Son
And that there ain’t no man righteous, no not one

For the rest of us however, it is so very tough.  You can be as good as anyone, but without submission to the Lord, you, like me, are doomed.

Indeed as Dylan said at the very start…

When a man he serves the Lord, it makes his life worthwhile
It don’t matter ’bout his position, it don’t matter ’bout his lifestyle
Talk about perfection, I ain’t never seen none
And there ain’t no man righteous, no not one

Recent Posts

• “Man Gave Names to all the Animals” – behind the Bob Dylan song
• Trouble in Mind: a song Dylan clearly cared for, but never played in concert.
• “Ye shall be changed”; old song, old message, old testament, new religion.
• Bob Dylan’s “Do right to me baby”: Christianity but not as we know it

And 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

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

So Bob Dylan, newly converted to Christianity, continues probing the Old Testement and this time is back with Genesis.

This is one of those songs that has been a hit in some places and voted one of the worst ever Dylan songs in others.  To me its just a song, a jaunty little piece but not one I’d ever particularly choose to put on to play.

Coming back to it today for the first time in many many years – probably the first time since a month or so after getting the album – I thought, “it’s ok” but had absolutely no desire then to go back and listen to it again.

Maybe for me the problem is enhanced by the fact that although I don’t dislike reggae, I don’t particularly care for it, and in fact the only reggae record I ever bought was “Breakfast in Bed” by Lorna Bennett – which is at the lyrical end of reggae.  (And I was pretty young when I got that).

So there’s not much here to grab me personally, not least because there isn’t much in the song.  We get the chorus six times, and the chorus itself has the line “Man gave names to all the animals” in it twice, and the phrase “in the beginning” three times.   So a Dylan song with the same phrase 18 times in the course of four minutes?  That’s not very Dylan, and by and large I end up feeling it is a bit of a waste of such a supreme talent.

As for the verses – they are ok in a “hear them once and smile” or “sing them to the children” type way (which is actually what I did and they quite liked the song as we did the sounds and signs along the way).

He saw an animal that liked to growl
Big furry paws and he liked to howl
Great big furry back and furry hair
“Ah, think I’ll call it a bear”

And why not?  There’s nothing to say Dylan has to be the presenter of works of artistic merit all the time.   And of course he can write what he wants.  But it just seems a bit weak to put on an album.

As I suggested at the start, different countries saw it in different ways.  The song was a chart hit in France and Belgium, while Rolling Stone made it the fourth worst Dylan song of all time.  The actual Rolling Stone list in case you are interested is

1.  Wiggle Wiggle
2. Gotta Serve Somebody
3. Rainy Day Women
4. Man Gave Names to All the Animals
5. Joey
6. If Dogs Run Free
7. Lay Lady Lay
8. Ugliest Girl in the World (with Robert Hunter)
9. Ballad in Plain D
10. It must be Santa

But the song itself has been covered by a lot of artists and become a children’s book.  And musically it is very simple with an easy tune based over E minor and B, with the A chord in the third line of each verse giving us that sense that we are going to get the revelation right hereafter – and up the fun bit pops in the final line of the verse.

Dylan played the song 155 times on stage over an 11 year period, and Michael Gray praised it as one of the standout tracks on Slow Train Coming.  So in the end it is a matter of taste.

As a children’s song it is good fun and children love to sing along and act out each animal, and why not?

Recent Posts

• Trouble in Mind: a song Dylan clearly cared for, but never played in concert.
• “Ye shall be changed”; old song, old message, old testament, new religion.
• Bob Dylan’s “Do right to me baby”: Christianity but not as we know it
• Slow Train: this Dylan song isn’t at all what it is sometimes taken to be

And 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

I know that the original versions of most of the books I write are nothing like the final outcome.   It takes the writing of the book to get a feel for the whole project – and I always find that final feel is utterly different from the feel I had at the very start.

There is no way I would ever consider myself to be on the same planet as Dylan when it comes to creativity, but it is perhaps a little reassuring to hear that he too could sometimes have problems at the start of a new series of recordings just as I do at the start of a new book.

The first session of what was to be Slow Train Coming was held on April 30 1979 and according to reports it didn’t go well.  Much of the day was dedicated to recording “Trouble in Mind,” and eventually it was cut from the album.  Reports suggest there was considerable argument about how the process would work, even if Dylan should be wearing headphones…

According to the producer of the album Jerry Wexler “Bob began playing and singing along with the musicians.   We were in the first stages of building rhythm arrangements; it was too soon for him to sing, but he sang on every take anyway. I finally persuaded him to hold off on the vocals until later, when the arrangements were in shape and the players could place their licks around—not against—Bob.”

The song that gave them all the trouble is available (see the link below) for us to consider.  A blues piece in a minor key using the sequence E minor, G, A minor, C, D, A minor, but it is the lyrics that are most curious not the music.

The beginning and end are personal “I got to know, Lord, when to pull back on the reins” in the first verse and “Lord, keep my blind side covered and see that I don’t bleed,” at the end.  We are also back in the Old Testament again, but this time mixed with The Epistle to the Ephesians.

But the rest is all non-personal stuff, and I think the heart of the matter comes with the line “He’s gonna make you a law unto yourself” – He being the Devil.  And I guess that is what all this comes down to.  Dylan is taking the religious view that one cannot simply be a good person and try to do the right thing, by oneself.  One has to do it with the Lord as Jeremiah reports:

Thus we have the contradiction: two people can both live moral and thoroughly decent lives, helping not hurting, being kind and good, but if one of them does it through the Lord then he/she will go to heaven, and if the other has chosen the wrong god or has no religion, he/she will burn in eternal hell.

So it all builds up to the final verse…

When my life is over, it’ll be like a puff of smoke
How long must I suffer, Lord, how long must I be provoked?
Satan will give you a little taste, then he’ll move in with rapid speed
Lord, keep my blind side covered and see that I don’t bleed

Which is basically a plea for help; a view that I, as a man, can’t do this by myself, I need you beside me.

Which is pretty much where the song starts out as well,

I got to know, Lord, when to pull back on the reins

As such the chorus is the key to the whole piece:

Trouble in mind, Lord, trouble in mind
Lord, take away this trouble in mind

Which seems to me to say, I’m a bit screwed up here, can’t get my mind straight, so I need someone to help me solve the problem – or rather not just someone, but the ultimate Lord.

There is a recognition that the individual can make choices, but because there is the eternal fight between good and evil, man can’t make his own choices on his own.  He’ll get mixed up because Satan is always messing with him, so he needs to choose God.

Here comes Satan, prince of the power of the air
He’s gonna make you a law unto yourself, gonna build a bird’s nest in your hair
He’s gonna deaden your conscience ’til you worship the work of your own hands
You’ll be serving strangers in a strange, forsaken land

It is a very bleak view of mankind, and our ability to be good simply through our own efforts.  We are in the end the playthings of the gods, but with enough decision making left to be able to choose one way or the other.

Much of the song though is fairly ordinary – the “don’t do it just because everyone else is doing it” sort of thing that parents say to their children when they are afraid that the kids are getting in with “the wrong sort”.

Well, your true love has caught you where you don’t belong
You say, “Baby, everybody’s doing it so I guess it can’t be wrong”
The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie
Then you’re all the time defending what you can never justify

From a poetic point of view, from my own personal point of view, the ending really does work (although I am told it was deleted from the single version of the song), and the final line

Lord, keep my blind side covered and see that I don’t bleed

really ought to be much more recognised than it is as a great Dylan line.  But elsewhere, for me, the song is just a blues.  The deep intensity of feeling that Dylan clearly had in writing the piece just doesn’t make it on the long journey between the studio and my head.

And maybe in the end Dylan knew this too.  He’s never played it in concert.

Recent Posts

• “Ye shall be changed”; old song, old message, old testament, new religion.
• Bob Dylan’s “Do right to me baby”: Christianity but not as we know it
• Slow Train: this Dylan song isn’t at all what it is sometimes taken to be
• Black Diamond Bay; a second view

And 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

As we travel through Bob’s compositions of 1979 we are now into full blown Bible related songs, this one (on the surface at least) taken directly from 1 Corinthians 15:52…

 Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

And Bob said…

Ye shall be changed, ye shall be changed
In a twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet blows
The dead will arise and burst out of your clothes
And ye shall be changed

It’s one of three songs that Dylan recorded for Slow Train Coming which was then dropped.  It was finally issued on the third volume of The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3.

It’s a song saying that modern life doesn’t offer much except blood sweat and toil, but don’t worry, if you follow the right faith then when the second coming of Christ occurs you will arise with Christ and everything will be fine, because you have followed the correct path.

So you have worked really, really hard but there is an emptiness inside you “that can’t be filled” until you find the one true religion.

OK, that much I get, and I can understand the Christian message, but then

All your loved ones have walked out the door
You’re not even sure ’bout your wife and kids no more,

So this is an appeal to a man who has be let down by everyone – including his own family.  And of course there are people like that, but this clearly is not a clarion call for everyone, but for the individual with nothing to lose.

Which is interesting because among the many famous lines Bob has donated to the world we have

Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

So I guess the best we can say is, different times, different places to go. Although I can’t help thinking that if we changed one letter we have

Go to Him now, He calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

Now we have…

Just surrender to God and He’ll move you right here where you stand, 

It has been said that around this time Dylan took the moment of the second coming quite literally so that suddenly, rather as in a sci-fi movie (sorry I don’t mean to be disrespectful here, I am just expressing it as it seems to me, the non-believer), all the believers are removed from the world into God’s paradise, and everyone else is left looking at each other wondering where all the good guys went, and what the hell is going on.  Well, actually, it is Hell that is going on.

Maybe that is what it means, but I don’t think the song itself actually says that we are supposed to take lines such as

In a twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet blows
The dead will arise and burst out of your clothes

completely literally.  I think the focus on the song is about the individual deciding to choose salvation him or herself and then reaping subsequent rewards.

The path you’ve endured has been rough
When you’ve decided that you’ve had enough, then…

So instead of going to “him” now he calls you, in Rolling Stone, the person in this song goes to Him now he calls.

But… I still have further issues, for musically I find much more of interest here because the song is based quite closely on “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” from Blonde on Blonde in 1966.

Now when I reviewed that song, I said that the chord sequence which starts on a minor chord and moves around the nearby minors before coming back to the major key chord was “A perfectly reasonable chord to use in this key, but very unusual for rock.   And its not something he does in any other song I can think of.”

Well, I didn’t think of “Ye shall be changed”.   But I should have, because both songs are telling someone that they have got it wrong – the only difference is that in 1966 Bob was telling the person to whom he was speaking that

time will tell just who fell
And who’s been left behind
When you go your way and I go mine

But now he knows the right way.  And so

You say you love me
And you’re thinkin’ of me
But you know you could be wrong
You say you told me
That you wanna hold me
But you know you’re not that strong

becomes (using a very similarly structured song)

You harbour resentment
You know there ain’t too much of a thrill
You wish for contentment
But you got an emptiness that can’t be filled

OK, so we have Dylan using an old  theme (go to him now he calls you) but changing it from the secular Rolling Stone, to the religious Ye Shall Be.   And to do this he is reusing an old Dylan chord sequence (Most Likely You Go), and its musical style.

The song does improve (to my ear) greatly when we get to “In a twinkling of an eye” – where we have the rotating chords F, B flat, E flat, A flat, and a different melody, but even here I find, again for me, personally, that the “Dead will arise and burst out of your clothes” line doesn’t work.

But now I have further problems, because not only is Dylan re-using an old idea of his, and an old song of his, he is also incorporating his old religion into his new religion.

What I thought of when I heard this was the Old Testament (ie Jewish) prophet Isaiah.  As in Isaiah 26.19 “Your dead will live, their corpses will rise, and those who dwell in the dust will shout for joy. Your shadow is a shadow of light, but you will bring down the ghosts into the underworld.”

Now of course I am not so dumb as not to know that the Old Testament is part of the Christian religion, it is just that I expected that having changed from Jew to Christian, Dylan might at this point be writing about the Second Coming from a truly New Testament point of view.

In the end, I think Dylan was absolutely right to drop this song from the album and not sing it in public, because it is a mish mash of ideas and music from old songs, and a prophet from his old religion, while trying to express his devotion to his new religion by taking the verse out of Corinthians, and putting all those bits together, it just doesn’t work.

It is of course perfectly valid to say,

You can’t live for today
When all you’re ever thinking of is tomorrow

but believing that, one can just as likely find a better life by Zen contemplation or indeed by going out and having a dance or supporting a football team or listening to your favourite rock star.

In effect I am saying I think Dylan was trying to write about his new faith too early, just by taking lines from the Bible and turning them into songs.  With this one, it didn’t work.  At least not for me.

Recent Posts

• Bob Dylan’s “Do right to me baby”: Christianity but not as we know it
• Slow Train: this Dylan song isn’t at all what it is sometimes taken to be
• Black Diamond Bay; a second view
• Legionnaire’s Disease: the meaning behind the music and the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song

And 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

The first anyone ever knew of what some now call Dylan’s first Christian song was on the last night of a 115 date world tour – something which in itself to mere mortals seems incomprehensible – on 16 December 1978.

Except that on closer inspection, and considering the progress of 1978 in its chronological order, it wasn’t really that religious.

For example, the line “if you do right to me baby, I’ll do right to you” is more 1956 rock and roll than 1st century Bible.   For surely the whole point of Christianity’s moral code (at least as I see it, and of course I might be wrong) is that you most certainly do not wait for someone to do the right thing to you, before you do the right thing to them.  You always do the right thing.

And indeed if they then treat you badly, you just turn the other cheek and walk on.

Indeed one doesn’t have to be a Christian to have this sort of moral code.  It is what many of us would simply see as being a decent, honourable, good human being.   You don’t exploit, you don’t take advantage, you do the right thing, the honourable thing, no matter what the other person does to you.

And for me this is the problem with the whole song – it actually, when you get down to it, isn’t very Christian.  The very first line “don’t wanna be judged” is not what it is all about as far as I was taught.  Christianity is about being judged when the final reckoning comes.  That’s why it is called “Judgement Day”.  The Christians who have been true to the faith and the teaching of the Lord pass into heaven and the rest of us… well, best not think about what happens to the rest of us.

OK, so maybe that first line which in full reads “Don’t wanna judge nobody, don’t wanna be judged,” is not meant in terms of the Second Coming but in terms of everyday – but then again surely the Christian every day is judged according to how well he/she fulfils what the New Testament requires people to be.

Basically even I as a non-Christian know that Matthew 7:12 says “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you,for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”  I remember learning that as a child in north London.  You do good first, irrespective.

Of course this misuse of the Bible could be seen as artistic licence – after all the chorus does get it right with

Ya got to do unto others
Like you’d have them, like you’d have them, do unto you

Thereafter much of the list of things Dylan doesn’t want hasn’t got too much to do with the specifics of the Bible.  OK he doesn’t want to shoot anyone, which I think most of us would feel is a fairly good idea, he doesn’t want a slave or to be a slave, he doesn’t want to bury anyone or indeed marry a woman already married which would certainly be against UK law anyway, although maybe not in all other places.

By this time I get the feeling Dylan was just finding lines to fit, so I am not so sure that the not wanting to burn anyone actually has any real Book of Revelations and hell-fire connotations.  Revelations is where hell-fire and damnation comes from, and where people like me end up, but Dylan not wanting personally to burn anyone seems like nothing other than (once again) a line that fits.   As for the not cheating, not defeating, that could have been written into any 1960s folk song.

Don’t wanna burn nobody, don’t wanna be burned
Don’t wanna learn from nobody what I gotta unlearn
Don’t wanna cheat nobody, don’t wanna be cheated
Don’t wanna defeat nobody if they already been defeated

After which I find it gets a bit silly.  Some of the points above are rather important – like the notion of treating people as you would wish to be treated yourself; a fundamental in basic human decency.  But where exactly does

Don’t wanna wink at nobody, don’t wanna be winked at
Don’t wanna be used by nobody for a doormat

fit into all this?  Interestingly the next lines are

Don’t wanna confuse nobody, don’t wanna be confused
Don’t wanna amuse nobody, don’t wanna be amused

and this is where I really do think we just having a load of lines put out, some of which are about what Dylan personally wants and doesn’t want, others of which just happen to fit to make the rhyme and rhythm work, without any reference to religious text.

After all, what is so wrong with amusing people – surely we are all better off when we laugh.  What is so bad about being amused?  OK it might be trivial, nothingness, gentle pap on TV, but we all of us need a break from the serious things in life sometimes, don’t we?

Yes it is a good idea not to betray people, but instead to be honest, but really, what sort of world are you in if you “dont wanna miss nobody”.  We might not like the pain of separation, but that is part of life, and really, do we not want to be missed?  I like to think that I am not too selfish and too self-centred a man, but hell, I really would be distressed to think my children and friends wouldn’t miss me when I’m gone.

At least for a while.

By this stage the emotions of the song seem to me to be deteriorating rapidly – don’t want to put your faith in no one… I have a certain faith in my doctor, and in my friends to stand by me when I need them.  And in my daughters.  That is kind of important.

In the end I find myself listening to just a set of jingle jangle ideas that happen to fit into the rhythm and layout of verse one.  Musically the leaving of the chord change until the end of each line, instead of playing it either a beat earlier, or not at all, makes the whole piece much more interesting from a musical perspective, but other than that it is a rocking two chord song (E7 A7) with the extra chord (G) thrown into the chorus.  It’s easy on the ear but not a brilliant piece – not a piece that would have been remembered had anyone other than Dylan written it.

Releasing it to the world on that last night of the tour, it was then a major part of the next tour, and continued to be played until 18 November 1980, at which time, after 73 renditions, it was gently put really where it needed to be put; to rest.

Here’s a live version…

Recent Posts

• Slow Train: this Dylan song isn’t at all what it is sometimes taken to be
• Black Diamond Bay; a second view
• Legionnaire’s Disease: the meaning behind the music and the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song
• “Stop Now” and “The Wandering Kind”. What lies behind two of Dylan’s “lost” songs

And 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”