Untold Dylan

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – A History in Performance, Part 6: 2004 –  2013. It blows the mind most bitterly.

• Part 1 1964 – 74 – From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
• Part 2: 1975/81 – Stuffed graveyards and false gods.
• Part 3: 1984 –  One who sings with his tongue on fire.
• Part 4: 1988 –  The darkness at the break of noon
• Part 5: 1999 –  2004. Stuffed graveyards, false goals.  

By Mike Johnson

[I read somewhere once that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the sixth article on the third track, ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series listed above.

Like ‘A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall,’ ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ is a report on experience. These two protest songs, Dylan’s greatest to my mind, have a lot in common. In both songs, a young man reports to a mother figure what he has seen and heard in the big bad world. In ‘Hard Rain’ the mother figure has to implore her ‘darling young one’ to tell her what he has discovered, whereas in ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ the singer spills it out in a jet of anguish without having to be asked. He assures his ‘Ma’ however that he is not going to be overwhelmed or done in by the ‘darkness’ of the world. He will survive, he will endure.

Stoical resistance is a term that springs to mind with regard to the underlying message of ‘It’s Alright, Ma,’ but we mustn’t forget that it is laced with anger, a moral outrage at the world where ‘goodness hides behind its gates.’ (Are these, by any chance, the gates of Eden?) In this world, ‘disillusioned words like bullets bark,’ which is a good description of the song itself.

Pushing fake morality (‘To push fake morals, insult and stare’) is nothing new, Jeremiah railed against it centuries ago, and surely that hypocrisy rules our contemporary world as much if not more than it did when the song was written. I am reminded of another song written much later (‘Slow Train Coming’ 1979) with an almost identical message:

Big-time negotiators, false healers and woman haters
Masters of the bluff and masters of the proposition
But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency

These lines could fit into ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ without too much trouble, and I would once more argue for the consistency of Dylan’s critique of society over his career. Try these lines from ‘Unbelievable’ (1991)

They said it was the land of milk and honey
Now they say it's the land of money
Whoever thought they'd ever make that stick
It's unbelievable you could get this rich this quick

Again, the sentiment fits ‘It’s Alright, Ma,’ a song we can now see as something of an urtext for these later songs, songs that will assail, again and again, the rank materialism of our age.

As we have seen, the song began as a solo acoustic number, but slowly evolved into a stadium rocker, which is what we find when we get to 2005, the point we have now reached. All traces of the acoustic origins of the song are gone, as you can hear in this recording from the fifth night of the Brixton residency of that year. It’s a powerful performance, full of swing and swagger, it’s dark and swirling, and may well be the best of the Sonny Boy Williamson rock riff versions. Not only is this a powerful vocal performance, but don’t miss the wonderfully sudden violin break at about 4.30 mins.

2005

From the earliest performances Dylan has spat the words out at breakneck speed, but I can’t help but feel that this particular riff has him babbling the words a little too fast at times, reminding me that I have never been quite convinced that this riff suits the extended vocal lines of the song, particularly with a brisk tempo.

In 2006 Dylan moved from the piano to the organ – although I can’t hear the organ in this recording – and again played the song multiple times The first thing I noticed, comparing this performance with 2005, is the much slower tempo. Slower and more deliberate, although there is still a tendency to babble out the words, which is fine if you already know them – and I did miss that violin break.

2006

The song stayed very much alive in 2007. The first thing I noticed was that Dylan had finally dropped the Sonny Boy Williamson riff and returned to the original chord structure of the song, now transformed into a rock riff of its own. There is no return to its acoustic roots. I prefer this performance from Albuquerque, July 22^nd. Dylan is in great voice and powers the song along.

2007

We have two excellent YouTube videos from 2007, one from Birmingham (April 17^th) and the other from Glasgow (April 11^th). There is little to choose between these in terms of performance. I have chosen the Glasgow one as you can see more of the band than Birmingham. I notice Donnie Herron on the violin, although I don’t hear it that well – it’s just a part of the mix. Interestingly, Dylan returns to the guitar for this one, giving his audience a flash of the Dylan of old, the guitar playing menace.

2007 (Glasgow)

Again, the song features strongly in 2008, and we have two necessary performances from that year. We’re still with the original chord structure, but the addition of the banjo pushes the song in the direction of country rock. These 2008 performances are more restrained than what we have seen but, if we go right back to the 1960’s performances, we find a pleasing balance between passion and restraint that created the musical tension that drives the song, a tension that is arguably lost with the rock riff versions. Dylan may be trying to recapture that tension in these 2008 performances.

The first is a recording I used for my NET series (https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/23960) and is a passionate and committed vocal.

2008 (A)

I’m including this second recording from 2008 because I love the way it kicks along and has something of a sinister edge, that ominous tone that suits the song so well – maybe it’s that bit of an echo in Dylan’s voice that does it. And you can tap your feet to that banjo. Even get up and dance.

2008 (B)

Dylan keeps the ball rolling in 2009 with multiple performances once more. This one I used in my NET series

The vocal is very up-front in this recording. The banjo has gone, turning this one into a solid rocker.

2009

And then, suddenly, in the midst of this fascinating evolution, it disappears. Vanished from the setlists for three years. Why did he drop it, and why did he bring it back in 2013 for a mere two performances? We certainly don’t get the sense of Dylan losing connection to the song the way he did with ‘Mr Tambourine Man.’ It was powering along and then

Bang!

it’s gone.

And when it did return in 2013 for those two performances, both within a couple of days of each other in October, it was completely renovated. A new approach, a new arrangement, a new sound. There is no lack of interest or innovation.

This is the final performance from Stockholm, Oct 12^th. The violin is back, and it all sounds good, but maybe Dylan thought it was a little too bouncy, a little too upbeat and countrified for the scathing social comment that drives the lyrics. We can only speculate. I like the descending riff, and feel that this could have been the beginning of a new evolution of the song. But no. This is it. The last we see of it. One of the greatest songs of the twentieth century.

2013

Finally, as an afterthought, you might enjoy this remix by J Period from 2015. It’s only a fragment, but takes us back to Dylan’s 1960’s voice. It’s fun.

Remix

So that’s it for ‘It’s Alright Ma.’ A sudden, unexpected end. But I’ll be back soon with the last song on side B of Bringing It All Back Home – ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’

Catch you then.

Kia Ora

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         He knows all those songs

Don’t the moon look good, mama, shinin’ through the trees?
Don’t the brakeman look good, mama, flagging down the “Double E”?
Don’t the sun look good, goin’ down over the sea?
Don’t my gal look fine, when she’s comin’ after me?

“You also cover Leroy Carr’s “Alabama Woman Blues,” which you’ve played in concert in the past. Around 12 years ago, you listed it as one of your 10 favorite songs of all time. What do you find so alluring about it—or at least about Carr’s original recording of it?”
“I think it was where it hit me in my own life. It was one of the first songs I heard as a teenager, not really knowing anything about Leroy Carr. But there’s something about the sadness of that song. There’s a certain atmosphere to his recording. Something about it is so poignant, moving, simple and sad. My version is much more out there and upbeat, but you really should listen to Leroy Carr’s version.”

(Clapton, GuitarWorld, 19 May 2016)

Eric Clapton’s I Still Do oozes melancholy. Starting with the album’s title. “It’s a quote from my auntie,” Clapton tells interviewer Paul Whitehouse, in the promo video for the album’s 2016 release. Auntie is on her deathbed. Clapton pays a farewell visit and thanks her for all the good care and love she gave him, back when he was a troublesome, difficult child. “Well, I liked you,” Auntie says, “and I still do.”

The album is basically a “regular” Clapton album that follows the formula: a few self-written songs, a few covers (as usual from J.J. Cale and from Dylan – in this case a wonderful “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” sounding like a forgotten outtake of Ry Cooder’s masterpiece Chicken Skin Music) and a few blues classics.

So the melancholy is evoked not so much by the track list, but mainly by the sound. Working with master producer Glyn Johns again for the first time in forty years (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Eagles, to name but a few), Clapton has mostly experienced veterans around him. Men like Andy Fairweather Low and Paul Carrack and Henry Spinetti (Dylan’s drummer on Down In The Groove, 1988), and one of Dylan’s “secret heroes” (according to the Biograph booklet, 1985), Paul Brady. All men who are already approaching seventy, who have been making music at Premier League level for more than half a century and whom you no longer need to explain what a song needs. Which we hear pre-eminently in the classics: Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway”, Skip James’ “Cypress Grove” and in the opening, in Leroy Carr’s indestructible “Alabama Woman Blues”, the song with the now over-familiar closing lines

Don't the clouds look lonesome across the deep blue sea
Don't my gal look good when she's coming after me

It is one of the best examples for Dylan’s 2008 radio lesson, a great example for “certain phrases are used over and over in the folk process, and are crossing the boundaries between country and blues music.” Well, would have been a great example, but the DJ never mentions songs of his own. In 1930, Leroy Carr records “Alabama Woman Blues”. Charley Patton also knows the song and records “Poor Me” four years later, in the last recording session before his early death in 1934: Don’t the moon look pretty shinin’ down through the tree? And apparently those lines with the lonely clouds, the moon and look good resonate with Bob Wills when he records his rip-off of Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues” in 1947:

Well, good evenin', don't that sun look good goin' down
Well, good evenin', don't that sun look good goin' down
Don't your home look lonesome when your lover ain't around

… “Brain Cloudy Blues”, the song Elvis seems to hear when he records his version of “Milk Cow Blues”, and the song Dylan plunders for both “Quit Your Lowdown Ways” and “Rocks And Gravel”, both in 1962. And “Rocks And Gravel” is then still a bit more than a song that just reuses “certain phrases” here and there; the entire song is cut and pasted from front to back. The first stanza is borrowed from Mance Lipscomb’s “Rocks and Gravel” (1961, but Mance’s song is in turn a rip-off of “Rock And Gravel Blues” by Peg Leg Howell from 1928); the continuation comes from Leroy Carr’s “Alabama Woman Blues” (Did you ever go down on the Mobile and K C line / I just want to ask you, did you ever see that girl of mine), just like the lonely clouds and the closing line copy Leroy Carr’s Don’t my gal look good when she’s coming after me, the closing line of yet again “Alabama Woman Blues”. The closing couplet of Dylan’s cut-copy-and-paste piece “Rocks And Gravel” is then:

Don't the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea,
Don't the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea,
Don't my gal look good, when she's comin' after me?

Leroy Carr remains a loyal supplier, by the way. Even into the 21st century. In “Blues Before Sunrise” from 1934, for instance, we hear halfway through:

Today has been such a long and lonesome day
Today has been a long and lonesome day
I've been sitting here and thinking
With my mind a million miles away

… which we hear return almost verbatim as the first verse of Dylan’s “Lonesome Day Blues” from 2001.

Still, in the end, neither Leroy Carr nor the almost literal copying of the moon shining through the trees from Charley Patton’s “Poor Me”, but rather Bob Wills’ “Brain Cloudy Blues” seems to be the station from which Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” departs. And not so much because of those certain phrases, but mainly because of that peculiar addition on the first recording sheet: “cloudy”. We hear how on The Cutting Edge producer Tom Wilson gives the go-ahead with the words “Phantom engineer number cloudy take one,” and we hear Dylan chuckle – it seems that Wilson is making an in-joke, referring to something that has just been discussed or happened; an educated guess is that Dylan mentioned Wills’ song or maybe even played a few bars of it. Or perhaps that Wilson thus hints that he sees through Dylan’s theft, and Dylan giggles because he is caught.

Anyway: Leroy Carr, “Milk Cow Blues”, Bob Wills’ “Brain Cloudy Blues”, Mance Lipscomb, and Dylan’s own “Rocks And Gravel”… this one verse illustrates not only the DJ Dylan’s words about certain phrases used over and over, but also what G.E. Smith, Dylan’s guitarist in the 1988-90s tells us in the fascinating interview with Ray Padgett for Flagging Down The Double E’s, Ray’s brilliant Dylan newsletter of 2 March 2025:

“We still had cassettes back then, and on the bus he’s playing these cassette tapes of all this great old traditional stuff, because by then he knew I was really into it. He said, “This is a good song, you should learn this one.” “And this one, see how this turned into this, and then Hank Williams wrote–” You know, he totally knows the history of all that music in the United States. He knows all those songs. Just off the top of his head.”

“This turned into this”… it is as Dylan later says in his famous MusiCares speech (2015): “All these songs are connected. Don’t be fooled. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. It’s just different, saying the same thing.” And then that connection is not a neat serialisation, not a relay-like succession where from Song 1 something is carried over to Song 2, and from Song 2 then something again to Song 3. No, “Milk Cow Blues”, Robert Johnson, “Brain Cloudy Blues”, Elvis, “Casey Jones”, Mance Lipscomb, Charley Patton’s “Poor Me”, “Rock And Gravel Blues”, William “Brother Bill” Burroughs, The Foggy Mountain Boys, “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” and Dylan’s own “Rocks And Gravel”: it is a labyrinth, a pit full of wriggling snakes biting each other’s and their own tails.

Why exactly these particular songs, one might still ask. “Well, I liked them,” he’d say most likely, “and I still do.”

———–

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 5: He smelled like cigarettes and Dixie Peach

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

By Tony Attwood

I ended my last commentary The songs got longer the form started to bend; we needed patience with the question how on earth has Dylan….

“…managed to persuade so many of us to listen to (and one might almost say “adopt”) a song that paints the world as being in such an utterly disjointed and decayed state?   For “Visions” is not a protest song like “Masters of War” or  “Times they are a-changin’” – it is a song of collapse and disintegration.    And yet it is one of his most popular and successful songs of all time.

I then offered up by way of conclusion, a recording of none of those songs, but Laura Marling singing “A hard rain’s gonna fall”.   Which maybe if you read my piece, made you think that I’d either lost it totally, or simply made a silly mistake.

But actually, I was trying to prove my point, without explaining it… in short leaving me something to say in this, the next article.

For my point is that in these early years Dylan was learning, through his writing of multiple songs (36 published songs in 1962, 31 in 1963) how to write songs in different ways.  The form was pretty much the same each time (mostly verse-verse-verse, occasionally verse and chorus, and occasionally verse with a repeated line), but the essence of the songs was still experimental, which is what has allowed others since Dylan, to take his songs into new pathways musically.

In doing this Bob stuck to strophic (ie a verse format repeated throughout the song), or verse and repeated lines (Times) or later verse and additional lines (Johnanna).

Now I have to admit that I do not know any other songwriter who developed his writing in such a manner.  And here I would love your help.  Because, if you know of other songwriters who did (either back in the 1960s or any time since) what Bob did in songs like “Tambourine Man” in varying the length of verses, and with the use of repeated rhymes, then please do tell me.

What we can see even without such comparisons however is the experimentation that Bob goes through as he looks for ways to extend his songwriting through this technique.

Take the “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol”.  That song is based primarily on three chords: C, A minor and E minor.  That’s unusual but within the structure of a song in the key C major these are conventional chords.  However musically it leaves us unsure of what key the song is in.  It could be C major or it could be Eminor, but eventually, most of us who think about such things feel it to be in C major.  But it is a very unusual C major since most of the time the song is accompanied by minor chords.  That’s legit, but weird.

In short, already Dylan is something very unusual with the music: a song in a major key which spends most of the piece in the minor.

And that is not all, here again, Dylan goes exploring, in terms of musical form.  The first two verses are nine lines long, the third verse is 10 lines long and the final verse is 14 lines long.  Whoever did that before?

All of this is a challenge to normal, conventional music which says that each verse of a song should be the same length.  But more than that, it should be the same length but NOT nine lines long.

And then consider the rhyme pattern

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.
And the cops was called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.

We have two rhyming couplets there (lines three and four, and lines eight and nine).  And the fact that one of those pairs takes us into line nine shows us how far Bob has moved on from conventional songwriting.   Not only did songs not previously just have two rhyming pairs of lines and others without rhyme, but songs didn’t have nine lines in a verse.

But by the last verse we have travelled even further.  Now we have a 15-line verse!  We can make out some rhymes – I am stretching it a bit by including “caught em” and “bottom”, and it is possible at the end to argue that the last two lines I have set out, are not the last two lines, as many transcribers turn those into three lines.

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom,
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'.
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished,
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face for now's the time for your tears.

But however we look at this, the old concept of rhyming and regular line length and structure has been thrown away, and replaced by something new.

Thus my point is that Dylan, having moved away from taking other people’s music, and keeping his own compositions very simple with simple techniques such as a repeated last line (such as in “Times they are a changing”) Bob had very quickly moved into a near free form of, and a new approach to, songwriting.

Now I was going to contrast the above rhyme scheme with that of Don’t Think Twice written in the previous year.  But at this point, coming to look at Don’t Think Twice again, I think we can see the same games being played with the rhyme scheme even in that early composition, although the music itself is more regular.  (“Don’t think twice” was written about a year before “Harrie Carrol”).

It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If'n you don't know by now
And it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It'll never do somehow
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm a-traveling on
But don't think twice, it's all right

Here the rhyme scheme is

A B A B

C D D E

You can, if you really want to stretch the point, argue that “dawn” rhymes with “gone” but really I think that is going too far.  Unless you are from a part of the world where “gone” really does rhyme with “dawn”.

What I think we have got, when we come to look, is Dylan experimenting with the structure of the songs from his earliest years in serious songwriting, in terms both of the lyrics (in the sense of what the song was about), but also in terms of the way he made the lines rhyme.   And here I think that very few, if any, other songwriters of this time were doing that.  And yet for some reason, very few commentators show any interest in this.

Which is interesting since in popular music that period – and I am tempted to say any period – the rhyme scheme was central to the construction of most songs except the “art” songs of composers in the classical romantic tradition such as Hugo Wolf.

For example, the song “White Christmas” plays with the rhyme structure a bit, but the rhymes are still clearly there:

Verse 1: “Know” rhymes with “snow”

Verse 2: “Write” rhymes with “bright” rhymes with “white”

Now I am not saying Dylan invented the notion of playing around with rhymes, (in “Hound Dog” the word “time” rhymes with “mine” – which is almost a rhyme, although not strictly so), but I am saying he went much further than anyone else in these early songs – and remember the rhyme in songs was, until Dylan came along, at the very heart of the song structure.

And I think to round this off one might also note that what is by common consent one of the most famous songs of the Beatles, who were, I think you might agree, fairly famous for their songwriting in the 1960s, was…

Oh, yeah, I'll tell you somethin'
I think you'll understand
When I say that somethin'
I want to hold your hand

Oh, please, say to me
You'll let me be your man
And please, say to me
You'll let me hold your hand

And when I touch you
I feel happy inside
It's such a feelin' that my love
I can't hide

So my point is that Bob was not just experimenting with what he could write about, he was also experimenting with the whole notion of rhyme, and with the whole concept of how a song should be structured, not least by regularly changing the length of each verse.

Yet these revolutionary musical approaches and musical changes were and still are often ignored in reviews of Dylan’s work because, in my view, of the insistence of most commentators in focussing only on the lyrics, and not at all on the music or the structure.  Bob was, from the start, challenging the entire concept of how a song could be structured, and this I think is utterly amazing.   He hadn’t been writing songs for that long, and yet he was turning the whole notion of how a song was put together, upside down.

If you have found anything here of interest, you might also like to glance at….

• • The songs got longer the form started to bend, we needed patience
  • Dylan’s songwriting: does it matter who wrote the music (and were we missing a deeper meaning?)
  • Bob Dylan, truth and fiction from 1963 to 1995. The Restless Farewell.
  • Breaking down the rigidity of the popular song. Dylan in 1963
  • Why does Bob Dylan so often re-write the music of his songs?

by Jochen Markhorst

III         La petite morte

Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby / Can’t buy a thrill
Well, I’ve been up all night / Leanin’ on the windowsill
Well, if I die / On top of the hill
And if I don’t make it / You know my baby will

 The spirit of Casey Jones and the spirit of Robert Johnson mould the form as well, or so it seems. Four-line stanzas with the simplest rhyme scheme. The “Casey Jones-variants” are simple enough; all written in the pair rhyme aabb, and even simpler is the mono rhyme of the classic blues couplets, though these are usually three-line (a repeated opening line plus a bouncer). But Robert Johnson does occasionally resort to the four-line aaaa. For example, in track 4 of that legendary record King of the Delta Blues Singers that so impressed Dylan, “Walkin’ Blues”:

I woke up this mornin' / feelin' round for my shoes
Know 'bout 'at I got these / old walkin' blues,
Woke up this mornin' / feelin' round oh, for my shoes
But you know 'bout it I / got these old walkin’ blues

Likewise twelve-syllabic verse lines, likewise four-line stanzas, likewise rhyme scheme aaaa… it could just be that Dylan uses “Walkin’ Blues” as the railway tracks to guide his mailtrain of thought across. Without the repeated verse lines, of course – he has used that particular trick before (very recently as a matter of fact; “Outlaw Blues” and “She Belongs To Me”, six months ago) and besides: he has converted to Beat Poetry, Dylan is more ambitious, these days.

We hear that right after the “Casey Jones opening”. Well, if I die / On top of the hill is an alienating derailment. It seems cut-up, it seems as if Dylan is pasting a randomly chosen film quote into his lyrics, or at least a sentence patch borrowed from some low-culture product. A B-western with Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, or Blind Boy Fuller’s “I’m Climbin’ On Top of the Hill”, or maybe even from the Big Bang of rock ‘n’ roll, Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” (And I caught Maybellene at the top of the hill). Though a borrowing from the über-sad ballad “Two Soldiers” still seems the most obvious source (the blue-eyed Boston boy with the curly hair who meets his death on top of the hill), as that age-old folk song is high on Dylan’s list of favourites. Not important of course; on top of the hill, combined with if I die or not, is far too generic to attribute to a source, and is presumably instinctively chosen by Dylan precisely to trivialise. In fact, the word combination is so common that Dylan – very unusually – repeats himself a month later when he writes “Tombstone Blues”:

I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill
I’d set him in chains at the top of the hill
Send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after

in which “top of the hill” also rhymes with thrill and is the setting of a death scene again.

Besides the desired banalising effect, the blues-exploring Beat poet is undoubtedly attracted by the by-catch: the erotic connotation. Dylan has immersed himself in Johnson’s lyrics, even transcribing them all, and is entranced by the “free association, the sparkling allegories, bigass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction,” as he explains in Chronicles, and acknowledges that in 1965 he was trying to copy “the lyrical imagery”. So he has encountered them all: You can squeeze my lemon ‘til the juice runs down my leg and I flash your lights, mama and I’m bound to check your oil and Your calf is hungry, I believe he needs a suck and all those other euphemisms for genitals and intercourse. And also the same sub-variant that Dylan seems to insinuate here: the failing lover. With Robert Johnson, Dylan sings along to “Phonograph Blues”, to

Beatrice, I love my phonograph
honey, you have broke my windin' chain
And you've taken my lovin'
and give it to your other man

… as “Poor Bob” laments in one verse, only to choose different “lyrical imagery” to express the same thing in the next:

Now, we played it on the sofa, now
we played it 'side the wall
My needles have got rusty, baby
they will not play at all

Phonograph Blues – Robert Johnson:

“Nonsensical abstraction” may semantically not be entirely conclusive, but it covers quite nicely the idiomatic turns those old blues giants had to wriggle into to avoid vulgarities. A “lyrical imagery” that, by the time Robert Johnson uses imagery like “calf” and “oil” and “phonograph” and “rusty needles”, is already starting to go berserk. By the time Johnson records his songs (late 1930s), his predecessors and his colleagues have pretty much looted the entire fruit basket (peaches, grapes, lemon, banana, apple), the entire zoo plus the safari park and petting zoo (rooster, rattlesnake, poodle, mare, bumble bee), every physical activity (ride, roll, shake, gravel, rock, drive, bang) and the Food Department too (sugar, ham, honey, syrup, pie, jelly, meat, milk). It is, in short, getting increasingly difficult to come up with something new if you want to capture “intercourse” in lyrical imagery.

However, all those culinary, zoological and fructarian variations are, for all the imagery, hardly ambiguous. Dylan’s preference, as is well known, is keeping things vague, and vagueness he achieves with if I die on top of the hill. Even within its ambiguity: surely, you can understand it as a euphemism for “orgasm”, la petite mort, but also as “failure”, as premature ejaculation or impotence – to which the sequel if I don’t make it seems to hint. But just as effortlessly, you can initially deny any sexual connotation.

After all, Casey Jones is in fact, leaning on the window sill, on his way to his death. Agreed, not on a hilltop, but we could attribute some metaphorical quality thereto. But then, in the next stanza the narrator communicates the already less ambiguous don’t my gal look fine when she’s comin’ after me? and the last stanza shuns any ambiguity: I wanna be your lover, baby, I don’t wanna be your boss. Reasoning back then, the vagueness from the first stanza does indeed seem like an intimate confession: the narrator laments his premature ejaculation or his erectile dysfunction.

Which still does not promote the song to being a dirty blues, although Dylan does wink at it, at the very least. And then opts for the less usual failing lover as narrator. By far the majority of dirty blues songs, of course, have boastful, horny, virile narrators who, in songs like “Shave’ Em Dry” or “Sixty Minute Man” or “Keep On Churnin’ (Till the Butter Comes)”, sing of not only the pleasures of sex, but also one’s own Olympic lover’s qualities. Still, we also are familiar with the more tragic variation, the song told by the failing lover. The aforementioned “Phonograph Blues” by Robert Johnson, for instance, or Bo Carter’s “My Pencil Won’t Write No More” (remarkably also recorded by the hoochie-coochie man himself, Muddy Waters). And in that subcategory, we may now conclude, we can place ‘”It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” as well.

It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry – Chris Smither: https://youtu.be/2Yv3QR2_C1Y

Poor Bob.

—————-

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 4: He knows all those songs

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

• Bob Dylan, truth and fiction from 1963 to 1995. The Restless Farewell.
• Breaking down the rigidity of the popular song. Dylan in 1963
• Why does Bob Dylan so often re-write the music of his songs?
• The songs Bob wrote and then ignored: Tell ol Bill

By Tony Attwood

In a number of recent articles, I have been exploring the issue of the way in which Bob Dylan wrote music in the 1960s.   We all, of course, know that quite often he borrowed music that already existed and manipulated it for his own purposes, while adding original lyrics.  I have been wondering why he worked like this.   Was he lacking in confidence in his own songwriting, or was it just easier to take the music of an existing song, and tweak it a bit?  Or is there something else involved – something which maybe was influencing the way Bob would write the musical accompaniments to his songs?

It is an issue that I feel has rarely been touched upon by commentators who devote most of their time to writing about the lyrics.   And as I have tried to admit through this series, I am not completely sure of the answer myself, but I do just have an inkling that this series might be taking us to a new view of Dylan’s songwriting from the perspective of the music, rather than just the lyrics.

Dylan’s approach of borrowing existing music was very much in keeping with the way in which traditional folk music had evolved across the centuries, and it was obviously something Bob could do with ease, and really without too many people being particularly worried about, or even interested in, what he was doing.   As a result, from the start the focus tended to be on his lyrics; few articles have been written about the music per se, and most of those that have been published have simply focussed on the notion that Bob was not writing original music, but taking other people’s (or traditional) music to accompany his own lyrics.  The fact is occasionally noted, but few if any conclusions are drawn.

And besides, does it really matter that Bob didn’t write the music for some of the songs he recorded and which show him as the sole composer of words and music?

In one sense, clearly it does not matter – whoever it was who wrote the music doesn’t actually change our appreciation of the song.  The song as recorded by Dylan or as performed in concert, was very much there for us to appreciate and (should we be of that mind set) enjoy.   I don’t appreciate “Restless Farewell” any more or less because it is a Bob Dylan song rather than a song composed by someone I have never heard of – or indeed if it were listed as “traditional”.  I appreciate it for what it is.

But if it doesn’t matter that Bob didn’t write the tune to “Restless Farewell” when does it matter who wrote the song?

First it matters in the case of royalties.  I’ve mentioned before that I write songs, and that in my earlier times I had some hope of becoming a professional songwriter.  It never happened, almost certainly because I am not as talented as I like to imagine I am, and it didn’t matter too much because I found I could make money writing advertisements instead.

But on the other hand, it matters from the point of view of the accurate telling of how things are.  I have said in these various articles, that Bob wrote “Times they are a changing” both in terms of lyrics and music.   I’m not sure anyone has written in to contradict me, but of late I’ve been doing some digging (or “research” as we call it when being academic) and found suggestions that the music of Times is taken from “The 51st (Highland) Division’s Farewell to Sicily” by Hamish Henderson.

And then I also find a reference to the fact that the “Farewell” came from a piece played on the Scottish bagpipes “Farewell To The Creeks” in the first world war.  In the video below it starts at around 38 seconds.

And here is another version

Now there are two things to argue about here.   One is, are these songs actually the origins of the melody of “Times they are a changing”?  And if they are, and if Bob heard one of them and then consciously based his song on one of these originals, does it actually matter?  That is to say, are we to be annoyed or frustrated by the fact that he didn’t write “Traditional – arranged Bob Dylan” on the copyright note?

And now I start chasing this issue down, what I find is that there are three different issues circling around.  One is, did Bob hear one of these performances and then write “Times” knowing that he was copying the song?  A second is did he know of these ancient songs but copy one of them unconsciously?   And a third point is, does any of this matter?

Certainly, it might matter if I listened to one of the recordings above and then wrote my own lyrics to it, and performed it on a record as a composition of my own, and then the company looking after Bob’s affairs decided to sue me for breach of his copyright.  What fun we would have in court!  (That is of course an ironic statement).

However, in reality, the main issue for me would be that most people would probably assume I had nicked the tune from Bob’s recording, and was trying to pass it off as my own, – which really wouldn’t do my already minuscule reputation as a song writer much good.

What all this brings to the fore is a basic point, which I have alluded to before.  Songs are not novels – they are much, much simpler than that, and therefore some similarities are bound to crop up between one song and the next.   We don’t have this sort of argument when it comes to concertos and symphonies because they are infinitely more complex.  But the song is, by and large, simple, because in essence it arises from the notion of one person singing either unaccompanied or with a single instrument playing alongside the voice.  Of course some has taken the song to new levels: Schubert is the obvious example

Thus, obviously, the notion of the song has ebbed and flowed.  Pop music in the era of early Elvis Presley recordings took us back down to a period of absolute minimalism as Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller took to extremes….

But later popular music recovered and by the time we got to the era of Dylan’s early recordings we might argue that “Times they are a changin'” is a unique song because of the combination of the lyrics and the melody.

Yet Bob has never been satisfied, for while no one ever seems to have done a serious re-arrangement of Hound Dog for any reason other than pure effect, Dylan challenged all our notions about contemporary music, when he started to re-arrange his own compositions.

Now sometimes that move toward rearrangement simply gave us a slightly different way of hearing Bob’s music while leaving much of the essence of the music the same.   Thus when we hear “All along the watchtower” in its original form we recognise it at once….

What hits us, even if we have no musical education or experience, is the three rotating chords played over and over again to a simple melody.   What we might not notice if we don’t play the piece is that the notes of melody clash with the chord sequence.

So what makes Bob’s composition interesting and indeed very memorable is not just that it is just three chords (just like Hound Dog), nor that it is just two lines of melody constantly repeated (just like Hound Dog), it is that the melody clashes with the chords and that is what makes the music so singular, and makes the song so memorable.

“Times they are a changing” on the other hand, is a much more conventional piece, although this time primarily based on just two chords and with a melody which is clearly aligned to those chords.  But what makes Times so utterly memorable are the lyrics and the incredibly powerful title line.

The lyrics start, as of course we all know, like a “Come All Ye” by saying “Come gather round people wherever you roam” and continues with its message that not only are times changing, but that the people who have been used to knowing and believing they are in power, are slowly realising they aren’t any more, because “your sons and your daughters are…” well, you know how it goes.

Thus what makes “Times” so exciting and challenging is not the novelty of the music, nor the opening of the lyrics (“Come gather round people wherever you roam” is after all just a variant on the traiiditonal “Come all ye fair and tender ladies” but with a much less interesting tune).  No, it is the message that says, no matter what anyone does, the old order is losing power and control.

Indeed if you want entertainment from the music, Times is not the place to go, as this example of “Come all ye fair” makes absolutely clear.

In fact what makes Times they are a changing” work is the ordinaryness of the music and the lyrics combined with that most powerful of all messages; the fact that it is not that we are making things different, it is that it is happening by itself, and there is nothing that can be done to stop it.  The lyrics are simple, the music is simple, but the message is profound.  “If you think you have power, forget it.  It’s over.”

So to come back to the issue of originaliity, what Bob realised, or perhaps stumbled upon, was the fact that the message of “Times” was so powerful and so revolutionary (including also, as it does, the thought that the times are changing all by themselves and nothing can be done to stop this) that he could use a very ordinary melody with the slow solid pounding beat that the 12/8 time signature brings.

If you go back to the “Farewell to the Creeks” videos and listen to the music, you can hear that 12/8 beat there too, meaning the music is running 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 exactly as Times does

Come gather round people where ever you roam
     1    2   3   1   2    3   1  2   3  1....

So what I am arguing is that Bob took elements of songs and combined them to make a new song and slowed it down.  But then, (and this is the crowning glory of Times they are a-Changing) he used this very simple and basic musical form, which dates back centuries, to challenge to the entire ethos of Western civilisation.  For the message contained in the song is, “We’re not creating a revolution; it is simply happening”.

And the fact is, as Bob also suggested, that those people who have held onto power for so long might not even notice this revolution is happening until it is too late.  But it is there…

The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

So to come back to the music, and whether it is copied from older folk songs, which indeed to some extent it is, the point of the music here is that by putting it in 12/8 time, as much folk music from earlier eras was written, Bob is stressing that just as this music is of the older times, and has been surpassed, so the thinking of past years is now also being set aside.  But the most ancient ideals of liberty and freedom, remain.

Thus, I would argue that having the song in 12/8, even if the vast majority of people don’t actually realise it is in an unusual time signature for the 1960s, is itself a signal.  Just as, in a different way, the ceaseless repetition of the three chords in “Watchtower” is also a message (in that case of the similarity between one day and the next for those watching from the watchtower.)

Dylan undoubtedly wanted to make that point of life going on and on in the same way, for indeed…

There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke

Yes indeed.  Life goes on and on, just as the music of Watchtower is simply one line going round and round.  This is where we have got to, but now the times are changing.  And so the music must start changing as well….

by Jochen Markhorst

II          The Ghost of Casey Jones

I been into the baggage room
Where the engineer's been tossed

Steel guitarist Bill Schlotter acknowledges that Rod Morris (1919-1980) may not have been as great a musician or as great a singer as, say, Roger Miller, but: what a songwriter. In the 1950s, Schlotter was the regular steel guitarist of Rod Morris And His Missourians in the studio and on stage, and he recorded a dozen or so songs with him for Capitol Records and later some more for Morris’s own label Ludwig Records. The record contract, Schlotter knows, was only offered because Capitol wanted to bring in the songwriter Rod Morris – the artist Rod Morris they then accepted as part of the deal. He recorded skillful country swing songs. Most of them are actually quite nice, but have since dissolved into the mists over the Waters of Oblivion. Except for the evergreen “Bimbo”, of course, the mega-hit for Jim Reeves, and maybe Slim Whitman’s “North Wind”. Schlotter’s paean to Morris’s writing skills even outlines a Dylan avant-la-lettre:

“Rod was a talent, a great talent. That’s why Capitol wanted him so bad, ’cause his writing ability was unquestionably great. He could sit down and hear some off the wall saying and write a song. Even during a recording session. They said, ‘That song’s too short.’ So he sat down at the piano and wrote another verse to it. Just uncanny how he could write.”

Pretty close to the exceptional working method and uncanny writing talent as described by eyewitnesses of Dylan’s studio sessions. And one of those songs Morris shakes out of his Stetson seems to echo somewhere in the back of the mind of the walking music encyclopaedia Dylan when he writes the first song for Highway 61 Revisited in the spring of 1965, for the time being calling it “Phantom Engineer”: “Ghost Of Casey Jones”, the B-side of “I’d Trade My Place Up In Heaven” (1958). Well, seems to be haunted by the same ghost, at least.

“It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” is the first song of the first Highway 61 Revisited session, 15 June 1965. The session lasts three hours. The second hour Dylan, producer Tom Wilson and the six session musicians then attempt to get an acceptable version of “Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence” on tape; the last hour is spent on the first, embryonic takes of the earthquake “Like A Rolling Stone”. The next day, 16 June, is entirely devoted to “Like A Rolling Stone” (yielding THE version), and after that Dylan is busy with other things for a month and a half. The final version of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” is only realised towards the end of the third session day, more than six weeks later, on 29 July. The fourth session in fact; 29 July is divided into a morning session and, after a lunch break, an afternoon session – the fourth and final take of that afternoon session is the “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”-version that goes on the album.

On that Thursday afternoon at Columbia Recording Studio A, the song is still called “Phantom Engineer”. Or, to be even more precise: the first recording sheet reads “Phantom Engineer Number Cloudy”, the one from the last session “Phantom Engineer”. An educated guess is that Dylan initially set the song up as a semi-epic ballad, something like “Ballad Of A Thin Man”, or “Mr. Tambourine Man”, songs in which a protagonist is placed “in some sort of predicament”, and then just wait and see what happens – as grandmaster Stephen King teaches us in On Writing (2000). And Dylan today opts for an engineer on the mail train – which inevitably leads the flow of thought to Casey Jones.

John Luther “Casey” Jones was killed trying to stop his train and save the lives of his passengers. The collision occurred on 30 April 1900 when Jones’ train, “Ole 382”, collided with a stationary freight train near Vaughan, Mississippi. His friend and colleague Wallace Saunders wrote a song about it, thus immortalising Casey – the song almost immediately found a place in the canon.

Dylan learns the song from John Koerner, as he writes in Chronicles (“I learned a lot of songs off Koerner. John played “Casey Jones,” “Golden Vanity” – he played a lot of ragtime style stuff”), but by the spring of 1965 he undoubtedly also knows the versions by Johnny Cash, by Pete Seeger, by Bing Crosby, and more. In 1992, he recorded the song himself with David Bromberg, and as a DJ in 2007, he plays one of the primal versions on his radio show: Furry Lewis’ 1928 “Kassie Jones”. The DJ seems to know the primordial version from 1900 as well, penned by Alan Lomax, and that one might just be the version that fertilised him in these mercurial days – at least, it is the only version that features the professional term “flagging down”: Lawd, they flagged him down but he never looked back (according to all official accident reports, Casey Jones ignored or missed the warnings of Flagman Newberry, who is said to have pointed out the danger with flag signals), and it is one of the few versions that explicitly says Casey’s train carries mail (“Cause I’m way behind time with the Southern mail”).

All in all, it seems fairly obvious that Dylan is thinking of Casey Jones as soon as he brings up a train engineer in a song. And of that one picture of Casey leaning on the windowsill. However, he has already left the folk scene; this will not be an epic ballad like “Rambling, Gambling Willie” or “Ballad of Hollis Brown” or “The Death of Emmett Till”. Dylan in these days has converted to the Beat Poets, to Kerouac, Michael McClure and Ginsberg, and to bookseller/poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose shop City Lights in San Francisco he visited in 1965. Robbie Robertson is there and keeps his eyes open:

“Allen Ginsberg had put this gathering together, and I had come to appreciate the strong link between Bob and the Beat poets. Before Bob, nobody had written songs overflowing with the kind of imagery he conjured; he shared with these writers a kind of fearlessness when it came to pushing limits….”
(Robbie Robertson – Testimony, 2016)

… and a fearlessness that Dylan especially shares with William “Brother Bill” Burroughs, with whom he has an unfortunately barely documented date in a Greenwich Village café in the days leading up to the conception of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”, in late March, early April 1965.

Burroughs’ impact on Dylan’s songs in the mercurial years is undeniable. Apart from the name-check in “Tombstone Blues” (“Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill”) and Dylan’s outspoken admiration in interviews, we also see how much he tries to imitate the chaotic, alienating cut-up technique not only in his prosa (Tarantula is on visual page level alone, graphically, a twin sister of Burroughs’ Nova Express) but also and especially in his songs. We find dozens of borrowings of unreal word combinations and striking idioms – too many in any case to attribute to chance. In the embryonic phase of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”, for example, “phantom” in particular seems to owe a debt to reading Burroughs. “Phantom” is one of those striking words that Burroughs uses dozens of times, and then – even more strikingly – often as Dylan does today: as an adjective to a noun, often enough function designations. With Burroughs, we find a phantom gun, phantom interrogators, phantom voices, phantom porters, phantom tendrils, phantom motor scooters, and more.

Apart from those external triggers we then have, of course, Dylan’s own eternal preoccupation with trains. “That’s just my hang up, you know, trains,” as Dylan says in 1991’s radio interview with Eliot Mintz. “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” is already the thirteenth Dylan song in which a train comes along, and in the album’s liner notes, too, a train is again alpha and omega: “On the slow train time does not interfere” is the opening, “Vivaldi’s green jacket & the holy slow train” are the closing words (before that odd coda, in which Dylan weirdly echoes Harry Haller’s last words from Herman Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf – “I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart” vs. Dylans “quazimodo was right–mozart was right”).

Anyway: Robert Johnson, The Foggy Mountain Boys, “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” and “Rambling On My Mind” and “Ghost Of Casey Jones”, Furry Lewis, Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs and a train… all the undercurrents are in motion. Dylan has a setting and a protagonist, the song will now write itself.

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 3: La petite morte

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971

Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

Publisher’s note: “It’s alright ma” is the third song to be considered in the “History in Performance” series.  A full index of the articles relating to “Mr Tambourine Man” and “Gates of Eden” appears at the end of this article.  Previously in relation to “It’s alright ma” we have published

• Part 1 1964 – 74 – From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
• Part 2: 1975/81 – Stuffed graveyards and false gods.
• Part 3: 1984 –  One who sings with his tongue on fire.
• Part 4: 1988 –  The darkness at the break of noon

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – A History in Performance, Part 5: 1999 –  2004. Stuffed graveyards, false goals

By Mike Johnson

Preface: I read somewhere once that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the fourth article on the third track, ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series here:

———

‘It’s Alright, Ma’ is a song celebrating emergence. Emergence from all the lies and bullshit. Alongside that, it celebrates resilience – we can make it! We can ‘crash’ off our shackles, look around and say ‘What else can you show me?’ Other than lies and bullshit, that is. Can you show us the real and the true? Maybe even the sacred.

In this respect, the song is as vital today, perhaps even more so, than it was when it was written back in 1964. This is how the song ends:

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
what else can you show me?

I can’t think of a better image for resistance than walking ‘upside-down inside handcuffs.’ The handcuffs may be real, or shackles of the spirit, but that’s just ‘life and life only.’ We don’t have to put up with it.

That is the radical message of the song. Move beyond the ‘stuffed graveyards,’ the ‘false goals’ and the ‘pettiness.’ There is life on the other side of lies and bullshit. In that respect, the song is full of hope. There are better things to come. Resist, push back, don’t give up.

In the last article, we saw that, after the blistering performance in 1992, at The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, Dylan dropped the song for seven years – we don’t know why, or why he picked it up again – so it’s to 1999 we must how turn. In that year it was performed some fifteen times. While Dylan is playing the acoustic guitar, he’s playing with the full band. It kicks off with a blues riff that I first heard on Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Help Me’ but was not uncommon. Dylan was to stick with this riff for some years and, I have to confess upfront now, I’ve never been totally convinced that it fits easily with the verse structure of the song. Dylan seems to have to babble through the lines to get them to fit. This is not so evident in 1999, however, in this performance from the Milwaukee concert, Oct 30^th.

1999

He messes up the lyrics a bit, but it’s on its way to becoming a rock-blues. The light, pattering beat prevents it from becoming too heavy and cumbersome, which is the danger in that Sonny Boy Williamson riff.

In 2000, the song comes back even stronger with some forty performances. We get the feeling here that Dylan is truly rediscovering his old classic. He keeps the riff nice and nifty, playing it on the acoustic guitar to deliver convincing performances. This one’s from the wonderful Newcastle concert, Sept 19^th.

2000

I don’t see the point in needlessly repeating similar performances, but I can’t resist putting in this beauty from London, Oct 5^th 2000. An excellent recording of an excellent performance.

2000

2001 was another ace year for the song in its new arrangement with over thirty-five performances. Tony Attwood has used this recording for his ‘Absolute Highlights series 10,’ making some interesting comments on the performance, and it (sorry no date for this one) could well be the apex of this particular style and a great vocal.

2001

Dylan kept up the pace in 2002 with multiple performances of the song. We have an interesting development in 2002, the year Dylan moved from guitar to keyboards, with Dylan trying out two distinct arrangements. 2001 – 2003 was a period of restless innovation for Dylan as he began to integrate “Love and Theft” songs into his performances and sought new ways to present his old material.

This first recording (again, date lost on this one, sorry) I used for my NET series sees Dylan slowing the song down and anchoring it more firmly in the Sonny Boy Williamson riff.

2002

However, on October 13^th, in Tahoe, Dylan presents a brisk, upbeat arrangement with a descending guitar riff, briefly abandoning the Sonny Boy Williamson riff. It’s a distinctly countrified version, an interesting experiment that Dylan didn’t repeat. Perhaps the arrangement is too brisk and upbeat, a little too jolly for the subject matter of the song. It sounds too cheerful. Where has the menace gone?

2002 (Tahoe)

In 2003 Dylan returns to the Sonny Boy Williamson riff, slows down the tempo so that he doesn’t have to gabble the words, and we have a highly effective arrangement of the song. It is, however, no longer a ‘folk song’ and there’s not much left of the acoustic sound that has characterised it up to this point. It is now a rock blues. It swings. It’s almost stately. It has grandeur, but no longer slashes by, shredding our minds as it goes.

Luckily, we have this excellent video of this fine performance from the Sheffield concert, Nov 20^th.

In 2004, which saw some thirty performances of the song, we find the same arrangement as 2003, although there are subtle but important differences. The drumming is heavier, the slow tempo thumpier, it’s lost some of its swing, and the problems inherent in that rock riff become evident. Can it carry a long song like this without becoming wearying? It can’t catch us up with that excitement that characterised the best of the acoustic style. It’s a good time to slip back to Part 2 of this series and re-listen to the 1981 performances.

In comparison to those, this 2004 version, from Glasgow June 24^th, lumbers along, buried in the rock riff.

2004

Is this magnificent song headed for sclerosis?

We’ll be back shortly to find out.

In the meantime

Kia Ora

Gates of Eden: A History in Performance, Part 1: 1964 Ancestral voices prophesying war

The Gates of Eden – A History in Performance, Part 2: 1974 – 1991 A crashing but meaningless blow

Gates of Eden Part 3: 1991 – 2001. Where Babies Wail: A Spooky Grandeur

Mr Tambourine Man – A History in Performance, Part 1: A masterpiece is born

Mr Tambourine Man – A History in Performance, Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.

Tambourine Man: A History in Performance, part 3 – Chasing Shadows

Mr Tambourine Man, a History in Performance: 4. 1978-1986. Far From the Twisted Reach

Mr Tambourine Man – A History in Performance, Part 5: 1986-1993: Evening’s Empire

Mr Tambourine Man – A History in Performance, Part 6: 1994 – 99: My weariness amazes me

Mr Tambourine Man – A History in Performance, Part 7: 2000 – 2010: the jingle jangle.

By Tony Attwood

Western societies seem to me to have a mixed, not to say utterly confused view of truth and fiction. Parents tell children not to lie, but at the same time watch fictional tales on TV and maybe occasionally help children distinguish real life from fantasy, but not always accurately.  Conspiracy theorists create explanations for what we can and can’t see around us, without evidence to back up their “facts”, and seemingly a lot of people believe the theories.  And quite a few don’t.  Fairy stories as entertainment for children, remain popular.   So does science fiction for adults.

Now most of us do seem to get through life knowing how to distinguish fact from fiction most of the time, although it can be annoying when others get it wrong.  I can still recall playing a song I’d written in my teens, in a folk club, and announcing that it was a piece I’d written, and being told later that my girlfriend who had been in the audience, that she heard the people next to her say, “I don’t believe he wrote that.”   I was frustrated, and it took a while to realise actually, there was not only no way I could prove that I had written the piece but also no need to.  If they’d been seriously interested they could have searched for another folk song just like mine, and which predated it (although I don’t think there was one).  But without that proof, it was their word against mine.

So does it matter what is and isn’t true?  It’s a question that seems relevant about Dylan, given that at one stage in his career, he was telling everyone who asked that Zimmerman wasn’t his real name, he hadn’t seen his parents in decades etc etc, when in fact they had recently been to a concert to see him perform.

Of course for many of us, what is true and what isn’t seems to matter quite a lot.  But why should it matter to us if what is true and what is not, doesn’t matter to Bob?  Or should we take his comments as a way of challenging us to think about truth?

Over the years I’ve obviously come to learn that some people do tell the truth and some don’t, and I reach the conclusion that I prefer the company of people who tell the truth because the truth seems important to me.  Mind you I also hate people who play practical jokes, and in one way Dylan’s tales about his past were at one stage (for me) little more than a pack of lies most people sought to excuse.

But (finally to get to my real point) does any of this really matter too much, especially when it comes to writing songs?  And if it does matter, where is the dividing line?

If Bob writes a song which opens “While riding on a train going west I fell asleep for to take my rest” does it matter if that is not true?   I guess for almost all of us, no, it doesn’t matter.  But does it matter if “Restless Farewell” was written by a person unknown, or adapted from a song by someone else, or written by someone else, and then claimed for authorship by Bob Dylan?

To a degree, I would say yes it does, because there is money to be made from the song, but back in the days when travelling minstrels played songs in different villages presumably it didn’t matter who wrote it, or who claimed to write it.  In fact does the truth matter as to who wrote a particular song matter at all?

That’s a question I find a bit troubling because I know that if someone ever took one of my songs and recorded it and made lot of money out of the song, I would primarily like some recognition and then secondly, some of the money, even though I have to admit that I don’t actually need either.  My pals seem to think I am a decent enough guy, and I know I have enough money to live on.

Bob as we know, took a lot of songs that he had heard elsewhere, reworked them a bit, and then played them in concerts and later often recorded them.   And as we have seen looking back through the songs in his early career he (or maybe it was the record company acting on his behalf) sometimes claimed his rights to be asserted as that of the songwriter, meaning he would get a royalty payment for each time the song was recorded and the record sold, each time it was played on the radio, and so forth.

But what took this all a bit further was an interview with Andrea Svedberg in 1963 in which Bob said he didn’t know his parents but knew his name was not Robert Zimmerman.   This approach of telling downright lies continued, off and on, for a few years.

Quite why Bob has often been mysterious about his own history is not clear, at least to me, but it most certainly does go back to the days in the 1960s when he was first developing his career.  And maybe it came from nothing more than a blurring of the lines as to who wrote what in relation to traditional folk songs and what rights a contemporary performer had over that song.

This is a conundrum which can affect all artists no matter what their stature.  Try writing a song about life, a man, a woman, a strange situation or anything else like that, and you will most likely find your friends believe that you are writing about the world as you see it.  No matter how many times you tell them this is not the truth, it is just a song you’ve written, just like some people write short stories, they still won’t believe you.  I certainly have had the very unfortunate experience of a lady of whom I was fond, hearing one of my songs about a totally mythical woman, and then saying “so that’s what you really think of me,” and ending the relationship, despite my having told her a dozen times the characters in my songs as an amateur songwriter are as fictional as the characters in my novels (who no one ever seems to find real!)

Which leads to a problem.  While most of us are able to accept fiction as fiction on TV or in novels or in the cinema, with a song, and indeed with statements made to the media about our parents and our past, people expect the truth.    When the critics start saying, “X claims that these songs are about no one in particular, but if you listen closely you can see that….” that is what people start to believe.  How many songs have you come across where someone has said, “This is about his ex-girlfriend,” without any serious evidence to back that up?

In short, the songwriter tends not to be believed in the way that the dramatist or film-maker can, when she or he says, what a work of art is or is not about.

Heylin touches on this in relation to Restless Farewell, where he claims that “this is one instance where narrator and writer are one and the same”.  Which brings us right up to the problem of the people who write about poets and songwriters with utter assertions and precious little evidence.

Heylin in Revolution In The Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan: Volume One calls Restless Farewell “a memorable declaration of independence from ‘unknowin eyes’, signalling a desire to write only ‘for myself’. Never again would he knowingly expose himself to anyone looking to bury him in ‘the dust of rumors’.”

Maybe that is right, maybe not, or just maybe it is only the start: a desire by Dylan to write for himself without any concern about where the ideas, music and lyrics come from; in short without any worries about copyright.

Of course, as others have said it could also be a song about “all the misgivings he feels about the direction of his life, his work and his career, which, in this song, brim over ‘into a wistful adieu to his former friends and foes”.  (Gill, 1998, “Classic Bob Dylan: My Back Pages””.)

The point is that evidence from various sources can be used to promote multiple different points of view not only as to what individual songs are about, but also why Bob wrote them, why he wrote them as he did, and why he chose to keep one song and not another, or one arrangement and not another.  And why he chose to keep performing the song.  Or not.

So when Shelton points out in relation to the album, “The singer realises that his times are also changing, and if he can go on to quote “Oh a false clock tries to tick out my time” maybe many want to believe that – whatever interpretation they want to put on that highly enigmatic phrase.

But, and really this is my key issue, we can’t be sure, and with a person like Dylan who seems to love false trails, as well as regularly changing his mind, there is no proof.  We don’t know if Bob wrote about sons and daughters being beyond your command, or if he was speaking of the world as he saw it, or using some words that fitted the musical line that he had created perfectly, or just telling us what we want to hear at the time.   (Just as I as a teenager most certainly wanted to hear “your sons and daughters are beyond your command).

Which brings us back to the point: what did Bob mean when he wrote…

Oh, a false clock tries to tick out my time
To disgrace, distract, and bother me
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face
And the dust of rumors 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

Because he is a songwriter do we have to believe that he meant this?  In which case do we have to accept that he meant everything he wrote?  Which then asks the question, why can’t song writers write fiction, like novelists and short story writers? The lines may seem to fit our vision of how he must have felt at the time with so much interest in his work being expressed, and such a rapid rise to fame, but that does not mean that he meant it.  Maybe he thought he’d give the media something else to think about.  Maybe he just wrote it.

However, I would also argue that it doesn’t matter, because what matters to me, as a member of the audience, is that the lines mean a lot to me., personally  And in songwriting as in poetry that is what matters.

But if it doesn’t matter what Bob meant (if anything at all) when he wrote the lines then what do we now say about the connection between this song and “The Parting Glass” on which it is based? In “The Parting Glass” the song speaks of leaving home.  Perhaps, as some argue, “Restless Farewell” is about leaving one’s identity behind and creating for oneself something new.   Or maybe not.

However, at this point I do pause because this is a concept that many people find frightening.  Our whole notion of personality and the “self” is based on consistency of observation.  “You can never trust X,” is said because we believe that a person will carry on being the same in all situations so we can make judgements and talk about personality.  “That’s so unlike her,” is said because we can and do have expectations about how “she” will behave and we are troubled when she doesn’t accord to our set view.

As a result, if “Restless Farewell” is about leaving one’s personality or identity behind and becoming a new person, this suddenly becomes one of the most radical songs ever.  Dylan in parting is not leaving his family, or his friends, or even starting up a new life in terms of playing music in a new way.  He is leaving his old world behind totally.  He is walking away from all that had gone before.  He is walking away from himself.  And that is frightening.

And here’s another strange thing.   Dylan only performed this song once, as you probably know.   It was the live performance as part of the Sinatra: 80 Years My Way television programme.  We are told Frank Sinatra specifically asked for that song.

Ever since that moment, I have been puzzling on why such an eminant singer should make that specific request for a performance of one of the more obscure Dylan compositions.  It is a wonderful song, which is one good reason, but was it also that the title reflected Sinatra at that moment of his departure from the stage.  Or was there something deeper?

By Tony Attwood

Author’s note: through my own lack of focus, caused by the postman knocking at my door, I published this article before I had made  the final adjustments.  The corrected version was published at 1140 GMT on 21 March.

My rambling review of Dylan’s songs of Dylan’s compositions of 1963 in terms of where the music came from, is almost complete, with just three songs left, (which I have mentioned previously)…

1. Lay Down your Weary Tune
2. One too many mornings
3. Restless Farewell

… all of which are songs of leaving and moving on and all of which have clear antecedents as I mentioned in my last piece (and there is a set of links to those articles at the end of this piece).

Of “Lay down your weary tune” Dylan himself said he was trying to capture to essence of Scottish folk music and songs showing this influence could include “The Water Is Wide”, “O Waly, Waly” and “I Wish, I Wish”.  But here we must be clear – these are “influences” not songs that Dylan copied from, and virtually all songs are influenced by previous music in some way or another.

And this raises the question, which, if any, of the songs Dylan composed in 1963 could be said to be truly original in a musical sense?

Now I am ready to be shot down here, but I am going to venture this list of titles as being musically original enough to Dylan to be cited as Dylan musical compositions, as opposed to those based on earlier compositions

1. Going back to Rome 12 bar blues
2. As I rode out one morning  Based on  W. H. Auden poem As I Walked Out One Evening
3. Dusty Old Fairgrounds A fast prelude to “Times they are a Changin”
4. Only a pawn in their game
5. North Country Blues
6. Gypsy Lou
7. When the ship comes in Influenced by “Pirate Jenny” from Brecht and Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera”
8. The Times they are a-Changin’

Now of these, the 12-bar blues, “Going back to Rome,” is not really a musical original since there are millions of 12-bar blues around, and the variation between one and another is slight.

But this raises another question.  Dylan spoke extensively about the influence Robert Johnson’s music had on him, and he has cited a few examples of Johnson’s music in this regard.   But I rather think that not too many people have gone back to Johnson’s songs to see exactly what influence they had on Dylan.

For example, take the song “Crossroad.”   This was written in 1932 but not recorded by Johnson until  November 1936, when Johnson recorded two takes of the song.

A casual listen will probably suggest that this is a 12 bar blues, although if you are really focused but not actually counting, you might feel there is something a bit odd about it.  Or better said, a lot that is rhythmically very unusual about it.

And this oddness comes about it because this is not a 12 bar blues but a 15 bar blues, and the question immediately is asked, whoever else ever wrote or sang a 15 bar blues?

Dylan acknowledges this – and indeed by chance (and believe me we don’t co-ordinate these things at all) just yesterday Jochen was quoting Dylan on the subject of Robert Johnson saying” He was so far ahead of his time that we still haven’t caught up with him. His status today couldn’t be any higher. Yet in his day, his songs must have confused people. It just goes to show you that great people follow their own path.”

In fact as noted Johnson made two  takes of the “Crossroads” song and the lyrics changed as he went along.  Here are the lyrics for take 2 taken from the Genius website

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, "Have mercy, save poor Bob if you please"

Mmmm, standin' at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
Standin' at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
Didn't nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by

Mmmm, the sun goin' down boy, dark goin' catch me here
Oooo ooee eeee, boy dark goin' catch me here
I haven't got no lovin' sweet woman that love and feel my care

You can run, you can run, tell my friend boy Willie Brown
You can run, tell my friend boy Willie Brown
Lord that I'm standing at the crossroad, babe I believe I'm sinkin' down

Now the point is that although Bob said that he studied Robert Johnson’s music (and of course we have no reason to doubt the validity of that statement) it takes a few moments to understand how, where and when Bob started to utilise this notion of not making the structure of every line and verse the same.

In this regard my immediate thought here turns to Tambourine Man.  Here the first verse is six lines with the rhyme pattern A A B C C B

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming

The next verse runs to seven lines

A A B C D D E

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it

The third verse runs

A A B, C C C B

Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun
It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin’
And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing

And finally we geta rhyme sequence of A A B B C C D, E E, F, G, H, D

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, 
far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, 
out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach 
of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, 
circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today 
until tomorrow

So yes, if Robert Johnson’s music taught Bob anything it was surely about the ability of songs being sustained through different lengths of line, different numbers of lines in a verse, and an ever-changing rhyme scheme.

The point is that Bob however took this so much further than Robert Johnson, going way beyond the 12 bar blues to achieve his effects.

Now this seems to me to be interesting in many ways.  One is while many writers on the subject of Dylan’s work have gone to great lengths to talk about Johnson’s influence, they don’t seem to me to have really traced the impact.   (Although I could of course have missed the relevant books or articles completely, and if so please do put me right, because I really do want to trace how Bob came to write as he did).

And this is important, I feel, because I can instantly think of another place in which Bob extended the verses, in the Johnson style, and that is “Visions of Johanna”.

What Bob is doing is taking the route that Robert Johnson first explored showing that despite the insistence of pop composers to the contrary, verses do not all have to be in identical form.

The rigidity that was set aside by Robert Johnson, but which returned with a vengeance for the decades of the two-and-a-half-minute popular song, was finally one more rejected by Bob Dylan, (in this case in May 1966).

• Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
• Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
• Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
• Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
• Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
• Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
• Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
• Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
• North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
• Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”
• Why does Bob Dylan so often re-write the music of his songs?
• Dylan the composer: “Percy’s Song” and “One too many mornings”
• When Bob said Times are changing, it is quite likely he didn’t fully realise how.
• Bob Dylan: the composer of music  “When the Ship Comes In”

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (1965) part 1

by Jochen Markhorst

I           Like I’d been hit by a tranquilizer bullet

Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby
Can’t buy a thrill

 DJ Dylan is quite fond of Big Joe Turner, and has professed that love for more than sixty years now. “Joe Turner is always surprising me with little nuances and things,” Dylan tells Jeff Slate in the 2022 Wall Street Journal interview. In Dylan’s oeuvre, we hear snippets and scraps from Big Joe’s songs like “Cherry Red” (the big brass bed that will end up in “Lay, Lady, Lay”), “Bull Frog Blues”, which delivers I left you standin’ here in your back door crying to “Standing In The Doorway”, and classics like “Rebecca” and “Boogie Woogie Country Girl” become reference records for Dylan’s songs in the 21st century. In Episode 75 of his radio show (2 April 2008, Cold), the DJ delves a little deeper into the Big Joe Turner record he just played, “The Chill Is On”:

“There’s also a line in that song: I been your dog ever since I been your man. Certain phrases are used over and over in the folk process, and are crossing the boundaries between country and blues music. A phrase like that one, or: I’m going where the chilly winds don’t blow can be heard over and over.”

… “certain phrases used over and over”, “crossing the boundaries between country and blues music” – exactly what Dylan has been doing for more than 60 years now. Which he often enough – indirectly – reveals in his radio show, as in Episode 57, Head to Toe, when he plays an old favourite, “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” by The Monroe Brothers from 1936. “They were like the speed metal of bluegrass,” the radio-maker says admiringly before starting the record, and a few moments later the listener immediately understands to what the artist Dylan owes “Maggie’s Farm”:

I ain't gonna work on the railroad 
I ain't gonna work on the farm
I'll lay around the shack till the mail train comes back
I'm rollin' in my sweet baby's arms

Little doubt; we know that “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” is under Dylan’s skin as early as 1961 (we know of two living room recordings on which he sings the song), and in those years the song has already long been a standard on the setlist of all the greats. Dylan is familiar with the versions of The Monroe Brothers, whose variant seems to be the template for Dylan’s own rendition, he hears the interpretation of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in Greenwich Village, and listens to the one by The New Lost City Ramblers (on New Lost City Ramblers Vol. 3, the record that will become such prolific inspiration for Dylan’s songs anyway), but he is presumably particularly enamoured of the Foggy Mountain Boys, Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt – Dylan copies the way Lester deploys the song to “Maggie’s Farm”.

Foggy Mountain Boys  – Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms: 

The third line then seems co-responsible for the emergence of the mail train, for the setting of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”, or at least for ingraining that setting into Dylan’s working memory. Co-responsible: in the same months in 1961 that “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” is on his set list, producer John Hammond gives Dylan an advance copy of one of the most influential albums of the 20th century, King of the Delta Blues Singers;

“From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.”
(Dylan, Chronicles, Ch. 5 “River Of Ice”, 2004)

… the record with sixteen classics, sixteen songs recorded by Robert Johnson in five sessions in November 1936 and in June 1937, the record that, with songs like “Traveling Riverside Blues”, “Cross Road Blues” and “32-20 Blues”, laid the foundations for entire generations of rock, blues and folk artists. Graphically, Dylan honours the monument on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, the musician Dylan records “Milk Cow’s Calf’s Blues” as early as 1962 (during the first Freewheelin’ sessions, April ’62), “Kind Hearted Woman” and “Rambling On My Mind” are welcomed onto his set list. Dylan is, in short, crushed. And poetically articulates the crushing in Chronicles:

Bob Dylan – Ramblin’ on my Mind:

“The record that didn’t grab Dave very much had left me numb, like I’d been hit by a tranquilizer bullet. Later, at my West 4th Street apartment, I put the record on again and listened to it all by myself. Didn’t want to play it for anybody else. Over the next few weeks I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition.”
(Dylan, Chronicles, Ch. 5 “River Of Ice”, 2004)

… and with many more words; in this final chapter of his fictionalised memoir the autobiographer Dylan devotes 2318 words to the impact Robert Johnson had on him in 1962 – and in 2020, nearly 60 years after the acquaintance, he still professes that admiration, in the New York Times interview with Douglas Brinkley:

“Robert was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time. But he probably had no audience to speak of. He was so far ahead of his time that we still haven’t caught up with him. His status today couldn’t be any higher. Yet in his day, his songs must have confused people. It just goes to show you that great people follow their own path.”

In Chronicles Dylan then explains quite specifically how that influence manifests itself. “I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns,” he writes, “the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, bigass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction.” And one page later: “In about 1964 and ’65, I probably used about five or six of Robert Johnson’s blues song forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things.”

The only example Dylan then cites is “a song of mine, Highway 61 Revisited, which itself was influenced by Johnson’s writing,” but we can effortlessly find more examples of that lyrical imagery. In “It Takes A Lot”, for instance – and right from the opening: “Well, I ride on a mailtrain”. In his little room on West 4th Street, Dylan listens to Robert Johnson for weeks on end, “cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player,” so he hears track three from Side B come by dozens of times, “Ramblin’ On My Mind”, and jumps up each time at

I'm going down to the station
Catch that old first mail train, see
I'm going down to the station
Catch that old first mail train, see

And then, when Dylan reports to Columbia Studio on 15 June 1965 for the first session for the album he is recording with a real blues band with real blues musicians to return to the Blues Highway, to Highway 61, Dylan already knows what the setting will be for the first song he plans to record today: Bill Monroe’s and Lester Flatt’s and Robert Johnson’s mail train, “crossing the boundaries between country and blues music”.

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 2: The Ghost of Casey Jones

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

By Tony Attwood

If you are a regular reader of Untold Dylan, then first, thank you, I really do appreciate it.  And second, you will I am sure have noticed that while the contributions of those other writers who are kind enough to write various series of articles for the site are generally planned and organised before they hand over their material to me for publication, my pieces are far less well planned and as a result can meander somewhat.

And this is most certainly true of late as I have been puzzling over the issue of the way Dylan, in his early years of fame, set about writing the music (rather than the lyrics), of his songs.

Before I began this, I did do some searching around for books on Bob’s music (as opposed to lyrics) in the early days of his career.  But I found precious little that could help me tackle this subject.   And so, as indeed I am sure has been most apparent, I am writing a series of articles without actually knowing where it is going to take me.

Yet despite working in the dark, as it were, I remain deeply fascinated by the way Dylan has constantly written and re-written his music – something few other musicians working in the pop and rock field have done – or at least done so extensively.

And so the first question I set myself in pondering this point is why Dylan has done this.  The answer I have come up with is that he does it because this is what happened with the traditional music of England which so fascinated Dylan once he discovered it in the 1960s.  I believe (with no direct evidence from Bob of course) that this interest led to the notion that music changing across the years, decades and centuries, could be carried on today by contemporary musicians – and indeed could be undertaken by himself  And so this is what he has done.  When we go to Bob’s latest concert it is not just to see him again, but to see if he has transformed any more of his songs into something utterly different.

What fascinates me further is that not only has any other musician gone as far as Bob has with such an endeavour, few writers have tackled this issue of Bob’s regular re-writing of his music.   And this was why my recent series, sometimes called “Bob Dylan the composer” has been looking into the origins of the music of some of Bob’s early songs, most notably those from 1963.  In case you are interested I’ve put a list of the recent articles from this series at the end.

However today I decided enough writing had been done for the moment on individual songs, and it was time to try and pull this notion together, if for no other reason that to allow me to see where I had got to.  In short, I started wondering why Bob, in 1963 primarily, was utilising other people’s music to fit his lyrical ideas.

To begin with, to look at this one needs of course a list of Dylan’s songs from that year, and fortunately we published just such a list for each and every year of Bob’s composing.    The page covering the 1960s with links to our early reviews of each song is here.  I don’t know if anyone else ever finds it useful, but I’m so glad the effort was put in, as I’m endlessly going back to see when songs were written, rather than when they were recorded.

And in looking back at the list, and considering Bob’s musical input, what became clear to me was that although by 1963 Bob already had a very clear vision of what made a great lyric, and indeed a very profound ability to write excellent song lyrics, he appears to have been far less certain as to his own ability to write original music.   For while sometimes he does create songs that are seemingly new, in the musical sense, he often dips back into using someone else’s music – at least as a starting point.

So what I have now done (and this may of course just turn out to be for my own benefit but you never know…) is taken the list of songs composed in 1963 and tried to summarise the origin of the music (and I stress, just the music, not the lyrics) in a few words

1. Masters of War based on Nottamun Town
2. Girl from the North Country based on Scarborough Fair
3. Boots of Spanish Leather based on Girl from the North Country
4. Bob Dylan’s Dream based on Lord Franklin
5. Farewell based on Leaving of Liverpool
6. Talkin Devil  unfinished song, origin unknown
7. All over you Title taken from James Bond film “Goldfinger”.  Song unfinished
8. Going back to Rome 12 bar blues
9. Only a Hobo based on “Man in the Street” and on “Poor Miner’s Lament”
10. Ramblin Down Thru the World based in part on Woody Guthrie’s “Ramblin Round”
11. Who killed Davey Moore?  Based on Who Killed Cock Robin
12. As I rode out one morning  Based on  W. H. Auden poem As I Walked Out One Evening
13. Dusty Old Fairgrounds A fast prelude to “Times they are a Changin”
14. Walls of Red Wing Based on “The road and the miles to Dundee”
15. New Orleans Rag Based on the format of ragtime music
16. You’ve been hiding too long. Based on “Ballad for a Friend” and “Oxford Town”
17. Seven Curses  Based on “Come all ye bold Highwaymen”
18. With God on our Side Based on “The Patriot Game”
19. Talking World War III Blues Based on Woody Guthrie style of talking blues
20. Only a pawn in their game
21. Eternal Circle Based on “Come all ye bold highwaymen”
22. North Country Blues
23. Gypsy Lou
24. Troubled and I Don’t Know Why Based on “I’m Troubled” and “What Would the Deep Sea Say”
25. When the ship comes in Influenced by “Pirate Jenny” from Brecht and Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera”
26. The Times they are a-Changing
27. Percy’s Song  Paul Clayton song called “The Wind and the Rain” 
28. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll Music based on folk song “Mary Hamilton”
29. Lay Down your Weary Tune.  Dylan himself said he was trying to capture to essence of Scottish folk music.  No exact song has been identified but some have suggested “The Water Is Wide”, “O Waly, Waly” and “I Wish, I Wish”
30. One too many mornings A variation on “Times they are a changing”
31. Restless Farewell  Based on “The Parting Glass”

Now this is a very crude set of links, that I know.  Many versions of older folk songs exist, and you may well find one that sounds nothing like the song that I have linked it too – and on this basis my list needs refining.  But my fundamental point here – which I am exploring as I write it (as I have noted several times) – is that while Bob at this early juncture in his career as a composer, was able to create interesting and often powerful lyrics, seemingly with some ease, and often with enormous success, his compositional skills were behind the lyrical skills.

However the notion of taking earlier songs as a basis for his work was well founded, I think, because we can see between these reuses of older songs, new songs emerge.  Indeed if you have had a look at my list above you might have noted that no antecedent is given for several songs in the latter part of the list.   Songs such as “Only a Pawn in their Game,” “North Country Blues,” “Gypsy Lou,” and most notably “The Times they are a-Changin”.

It is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that Bob edged his way to writing his own music with some caution, but it was the success of these original songs which showed him that yes indeed, not only was he brilliant at writing lyrics, he could also write good original music as well.

Of course there is no evidence from Bob himself on this point, but if I may, I would also cite my article from yesterday on Tell ol Bill    We do have (and in that article I have referred to) a recording of the Tell ol Bill session in which various approaches were tried out, and that gives us some insight into Bob’s way of writing the music, once the words are already there.

In my very humble view, I think Bob got it very wrong in that case, for as I have so often said on this site, I think he wrote a brilliant composition and found the perfect arrangement of it, but then he felt it was not up to the standard he wanted.

But the main point with the recording of the Tell Ol Bill session is that we can hear Bob trying out all sorts of different approaches.   With the lyrics, he seems to know from the start, how they should work.  But with the music, he is not always able to make the absolute judgements that he can with the lyrics.

Of course, that’s just my view, and although I’ve had a lifetime largely involving creative activities, I am as aware of ever that I might well be wrong, but I do see a link between Bob’s very tenuous steps toward being a composer of original music, and his subsequent interest in looking at ways to re-write the music, or at the very least the musical arrangement of his songs.

For as you will hear if you play the recording of the Tell Ol Bill sessions, those lyrics don’t change, but the music moves through a variety of different styles and approaches.

• All directions at once: Tell Ol Bill
• Dylan’s “Tell Ol Bill”: roots in a blues ballad, rhymes from the Romantic poets
• Tell Ol’ Bill: Dylan digs deep into the song’s origins to create a brilliant film song
  

Previously in this series, which is becoming known (to me at least) as Dylan, the composer,  I’ve looked at…

1. Blowing in the Wind and No More Auction Block
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
3. Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
4. Girl from the North Country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
5. Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
6. Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
7. Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
8. Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to Eternal Circle
9. North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
10. Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”
11. When the Ship Comes in: from Pirate Jenny onward.
12. When Bob said Times they are changing it is quite likely he didn’t fully realise how.
13. Dylan the composer: “Percy’s Song” and “One Too Many Mornings”

The songs Bob wrote and then ignored. 

• Ballad for a Friend and the issue of originality
• Dirt Road Blues and Too Much of Nothing
• The utterly brilliant Angelina, plus Maybe Someday, Under you spell
• The album title songs Dylan wrote and ignored: JWH, Nashville Skyline.
• The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles
• No time, time passes and Dirge
• World Gone Wrong, She’s your lover, Foot of Pride
• Abandoned Love and Up to Me
• Concluding thoughts and knocked out examples 

By Tony Attwood

When an article appears with the title “Concluding thoughts” then it is a fair bet that it is the last article in the series.  And so I intended the last article in the list above to be, but I remained disappointed that I couldn’t find anything new to say in relation to one of my own utter favourite Dylan songs in the written but not released catagory: “Tell Ol Bill”.  And so I left it.

There is a passing relationship with a traditional American song in this composition – but really it doesn’t go much beyond the title…. but I dealt with that and everything else I could think of in the earlier article “All Directions At Once 66: Tell Ol’ Bill”

And I didn’t return to Tell Ol’ Bill, much as I love the song, for the recent little series “The Songs that Bob Wrote and then Ignored” because indeed, I had written so much (or as one colleague said to me “raved so much”) about the song that there seemed nothing more to say.

But now we have the Tell Ol Bill Sessions on the internet and we can hear just how much work Bob was willing to go through to try and get a version that he felt was valid for an album.   And even if you are not particularly attracted to the song, I would recommend just popping into this series of recordings, in order to get an insight into the way Bob works, and the level of work put into finding the right version – even though in this case he did not think of it as worth releasing, or indeed playing.

Take for example the version that begins just after the 11-minute marker.   If this was the only version we ever heard, I’d be there saying “I can see why he abandoned it.”

But then suddenly after what I personally find a rather plodding version, just after 18 minutes we get a version that clearly is en route to the final destination of the song.    That version stops after a while, but it does show the jump Dylan can make in terms of arrangements.  A radical change to the percussion and we are off in a new direction.

We can’t hear all the discussions, but it is clear that Bob is hearing possibilities in the song that no one else is.   So on 21’30” minutes we are getting a little closer – and it is interesting that after so many tries already Bob can still find it in himself to deliver the song in a new way.

At 24 minutes we are off again – and just listen to Bob’s singing – he has been singing this over and over (and he must have sung it many times before bringing it to the studio for this attempt to get a version that he wants to release) and yet he can still find new life in the piece.

Of course, I don’t think each idea works – like the sudden break in the 24 minute version, but then what do I know?  What I would say is this recording is remarkable because it does give us insights into ideas that are tried right through but then abandoned never to be heard again – until the release of this collection.

What I would also add is that around the 30-minute mark however, we are getting remarkably close to that final “take nine” edition of the song.   But I really don’t like the piano part with its repeated note.  Was that Bob playing?  If so, what on earth is he trying to do?

But what is interesting is that around 33 minutes Bob seems to be taking the song in a totally new direction, and although that doesn’t lead to the final version, it does have some elements within it that make it to the end.  And this is at the moment when the comment is made “Maybe we should change it all… everything”.   Thankfully that did not prevail.

However on 35 minutes we are starting to hear a different version again… Bob starts it up and the band follow – although we are now getting minor chords where previously we were getting majors.   The effect is (for me at least) unnerving, for minor chords give such a totally different feel from that achieved using the major chords of most of the other versions.  But as we know, Bob is always willing to try something else…

And in this minor key approach, there is something that fits with the lyrics – although the recording of the minor key version breaks down, it leaves a feeling… a sense … of something extra that could be brought into the song; it is out there and just needs to be caught….

But then, yet again on 38 minutes, we are back to a more bouncy version.

Now I know this is a long listen, and really most of us don’t want to spend such much time on failed versions of a song, but what we can do is hear this extraordinary song emerge.  For around the 39 minute mark we really are hearing the song where it could get to and then suddenly at 39 minutes 30 seconds, we have it.

What the “it” is, is a combination of a solid beat, but with Bob still singing in the soft way that he adopted through the earlier recordings.  It is a real contrast, which it seems ought not to work, and yet, somehow, it does.

But just in case you really don’t want to hear how Bob works and re-works the song, you can of course skip to the final version – the one over which I rave and rave, and which Bob thought was not worthy of inclusion anywhere, or even worthy of playing on stage.

As I have said so often before, why this song was not released and not played in concert is quite beyond me.  My view is that for any other artist this could be seen as the high point of his musical achievement.  But for Bob it was just another song that was written, worked on over and over, and then thrown away, never to be played in public.

As I once said, this is Visions of Johanna with a beat.

The river whispers in my ear
I've hardly a penny to my name
The heavens have never seemed so near
All of my body glows with flame

The tempest struggles in the air
And to myself alone I sing
It could sink me then and there
I can hear those echoes ring

I tried to find one smiling face
To drive the shadows from my head
I'm stranded in this nameless place
Lying restless in a heavy bed

Tell me straight out if you will
Why must you torture me within?
Why must you come down off of your hill?
And throw my fate to the clouds and wind

Far away in a silent land
Secret thoughts are hard to bear
Remember me, you'll understand
Emotions we can never share

You trampled on me as you passed
Left the coldest kiss upon my brow
All my doubts and fears have gone at last
I've nothing more to tell you now

I walk past tranquil lakes and streams
As each new season's dawn awaits
I lay awake at night with troubled dreams
The enemy is at the gate

Beneath the thunder blasted trees
The words are ringing off your tongue
The ground is hard at times like these
The stars are cold, the night is young

The rocks are bleak, the trees are bare
Iron clouds are floating by
Snowflakes falling in my hair
Beneath the grey and stormy sky

The evening sun is sinking low
The woods are dark, the town isn't new
They'll drag you down, they'll run the show
They will see you black and blue

Tell ol' Bill when he comes home
Anything is worth a try
Tell him that I'm not alone
And that the hour has come to do or die

All the world I would defy
Let me make it plain as day
I look at you and now I sigh
How could it be any other way?

Highlands (1997) part 4 (final)

by Jochen Markhorst

• Part 1: Wild rose in the heather
• Part 2: You can hear the air around it
• Part 3: That long rambling talking thing

IV         She studied the lines on my face     

I’m in Boston town, in some restaurant
I got no idea what I want
Well, maybe I do but I’m just really not sure
Waitress comes over
Nobody in the place but me and her

 We owe to the esteemed Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas a special, fascinating plot interpretation of that alienating intermezzo halfway through the song, those seven stanzas forming a kind of one-act play for two in an empty restaurant in Boston. In his wonderful Dylan study Why Dylan Matters (2017), Professor Thomas points to the return of the image of the waitress. A return from that other monumental song in Dylan’s catalogue, from “Tangled Up In Blue” (Blood On The Tracks, 1975).

Now we also recognise the male protagonist from “Tangled Up In Blue”. Now, in “Highlands”, he is in the “wrong time”, you picked the wrong time to come, says the waitress, who by her looks and her behaviour has thrown him back in time, back to 1974. Just like her predecessor, she observes the restaurant guest intently (She studied the lines on my face vs. She studies me closely), we are again in an otherwise empty catering facility, and when she insists on drawing her portrait, he has to draw it, strangely, from memory, although she is standing right in front of him. It doesn’t look a thing like me, she says a little later, a bit indignantly. On the contrary, the satisfied artist contradicts her, it most certainly does – after all, he has fabricated a fine portrait of the memory of that waitress in the topless place at the time. The last stanza definitively illustrates that the narrator is in a different time zone when the waitress asks which female authors he has read: “Erica Jong,” he replies triumphantly. Erica Jong’s controversial Fear Of Flying is from 1973.

She goes away for a minute
And I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street but nobody’s going anywhere

Bob Dylan – Highlands:

It is the second time in Dylan’s oeuvre that an assertive bar lady is given a supporting role. So the first is that lady in a topless bar taking the protagonist home and making such a smashing impression with the work of a thirteenth-century Italian poet.

Twenty-two years later, her colleague in some Boston restaurant gets the spotlight, with word choice and plot suggesting that the protagonist is thinking of the same lady as in “Tangled Up In Blue”.

And four years after this we seem to encounter her a third time. In the sixth verse of “High Water” on “Love And Theft” the lady in the restaurant scene is then given a name, “Fat Nancy”, and there is again a suspicion of déjà vu. The tone, this time;

I asked Fat Nancy for something to eat, she said, “Take it off the shelf—
As great as you are, man,
You’ll never be greater than yourself.”
I told her I didn’t really care

Each time, the protagonist has a laborious, jolting dialogue with the lady present. In Tangled, the first-person can only mumble unintelligibly at a direct, simple question like “Don’t I know your name?” and remain awkwardly silent at an inviting opening like “I thought you’d never say hello”. In Boston, like a Kafka story, the conversation stumbles from denial to misunderstanding to rebuttals and back again (“got any soft boiled eggs?” “we’re out of them”, “draw a picture of me” “I don’t have my drawing book”, etc.): the same pattern as the brief interlude in “High Water”.

It’s not the only striking thing that seems to hint at Dylan doing some retrospection in “Highlands”. It is a sub-motive at the very least, or so it seems. Time Out Of Mind is a double album released thirty-one years after Dylan’s first double album Blonde On Blonde, and again the last record side, side 4, is reserved for one single song. Back then “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, in which a young, lovesick narrator sings a lady from the Lowlands. Now “Highlands”, in which an old, disillusioned narrator longs for the loneliness of the Highlands. Unattainable they both are, by the way; “Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes” as the narrator sang thirty years ago, willing to wait, though. Worn out, but nevertheless more optimistic, the narrator is thirty years later:

Well, my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind
And that’s good enough for now 

… a beautiful, peaceful, thoroughly melancholic ending to a wonderful song. And if Dylan keeps up this rhythm, we will hear what happened to this protagonist on side 4 of the next double album, sometime around 2028.

——-

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

By Tony Attwood

Previously in this series, which is becoming known (to me at least) as Dylan, the composer,  I’ve looked at…

1. Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
3. Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
4. Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
5. Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
6. Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
7. Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
8. Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
9. North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
10. Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”
11. When the Ship Comes in: from Pirate Jenny onward.
12. When Bob said Times they are a changing it is quite likely he didn’t fully realise how.

In the last article I included a recording of Times they are a changin’ performed 32 years after its composition, by which time Bob had performed it perhaps 500 or more times in concert.  The 12/8 time is still there, recognisable through the slow pulsing beat, and the lyrics are the same, but the melody has changed considerably, as has the tempo.  It would be too much to say it had become a new song, but the level of change between the original recording and that performance is reminiscent of what happened to folk songs prior to the days of recording technology.   Only with folk songs different performers changed them; here Dylan was doing his own transformations.

And it is worth contemplating for a moment just how radical this notion of re-writing one’s own hits was, for in the years leading up to Dylan’s emergence, the recorded version of a popular song was considered to be the definitive version of the song.  When people went to a pop or rock concert they expected to hear and see the band perform as they knew the song from the record.   This in turn, often led performers on TV to mime their hit songs while the released recording was played.  Indeed, there often was little attempt to hide the fact of the miming, since quite clearly there were no cables running from the guitars to amps.

However I don’t recall ever reading that Dylan mimed one of his own songs for the sake of a broadcast, and indeed I think that would be completely against his whole concept of what music is about: it is about the performance.   Besides, he has changed the arrangements of his songs so often that miming would surely be against the whole concept of song creation that Dylan has propagated, although if you have come across a clear instance of Dylan miming, please do let me know.   Even better if there is a video of such an event; I’d love to see it.

Of course, one of the great benefits of the regular revision of the songs has been that Bob could keep performing them across the years without either he or us getting totally bored with the pieces.  Indeed, when we note that three songs have been performed in concert over 2000 times live, and another seven have been performed over 1000 times live, this surely becomes a necessity for the mental well-being of both Bob and the band.  The regular gigs could not have existed without the changes.

But it is easy to forget just how unusual this notion of re-arranging was when Bob started doing it.  Indeed in Chronicles Bob does explore his idea that live performances should revise existing arrangements and performances all the time, suggesting clearly that he realised others didn’t appreciate why he was doing what he was doing.  And I would argue that this is unusual.  I am sure other artists and bands have since taken up this idea – and if you’d care to give me a few examples, I’d be grateful, but I do think Bob was one of the first, if not the first, to go out of his way to return to the folk music tradition of re-inventing the songs as one travelled around the country giving performances.

My key point here is that Bob did this musically.   Although some verses were missed out, and some mistakes were made, I think (just relying on my memory here) that Bob by and large left the lyrics alone – although I do recall “Rolling Stone” and “Blowin in the Wind” getting some changes lyrically.

But we can compare a couple of versions of “One Too Many Mornings” first from 1965 with its utterly plaintive message…

… with a performance one year later where the instrumental opening before Dylan sings (at around 17 seconds) seems to owe more to “Like a Rolling Stone” than it does to the BBC Studios version one year earlier (above).

I am not sure (or perhaps better said, I haven’t seen this expressed) why Bob has regularly done this.  Is it because he has a new vision for what the song means, or just because it can be done (as in, “hey lets see what happens if we give it a beat”).  But it is something as we can hear above, that he has done from the very early stages of his career.

Now of course, we know that folk songs and the early blues all changed over time, simply because they were songs handed across from one performer to another.  Some of the changes would have been made deliberately to “improve” the song, some made deliberately to accommodate the vocalist’s range, some because of which instruments were available, and some happened because the travelling musician/s couldn’t remember how the song used to go.   Bob, however, as we can hear from the example above, took this on as a core idea in his work from the early days of touring.  The songs were not static: they were living, breathing creations, which like their creator, could develop and evolve over time.

But at the same time, we have to recognise that Bob was also writing new songs, and exploring different approaches as he did.   And as a little bit of fun while I was writing this, I asked a couple of knowledgeable Dylan pals what song Bob wrote straight after “Times they are a changin’.”

Now of course there can always be some arguments about what came when, but in reality I was the only one who knew, and that was because I’d just looked it up.  And indeed I have to admit I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t looked it up, even though I’ve written the chronology in the past.   Here is what I think is the right answer.

Now the point I would make is that this song has nothing in common with “Times They Are A-changin’,” which came immediately before.   It is also true that Bob credited Paul Clayton with the melody and that credit suggests that yes, Bob wrote the lyrics but was still unsure about his ability to find melodies to accompany what he could do lyrically, despite what he had achieved with “Times they are a changin'”

In fact it is often reported that the music Dylan created to the lyrics was taken from the Scottish ballad  “The Twa Sisters” but really, I think this is stretching things a bit….

Although I think I can hear a closer resemblance from this next version, and that makes me think there perhaps was another version (there are indeed many, many versions) that Bob heard, but I am suspecting at this moment that this is one of those tales where someone says, “Bob’s music comes from x” and everyone else keeps saying that.  But please do correct me if you have found a source that sounds a little bit like Bob’s version.

The song relates the story of a fatal car crash and a subsequent manslaughter conviction and 99-year sentence in Joliet Prison that is handed down to the driver (a friend of the first-person narrator). The narrator goes to ask the sentencing judge to commute his friend’s sentence, which he considers too harsh, but the sentence stands. The story of the hard-hearted judge is reminiscent of the Child ballad “Geordie”.

The song has 16 verses but only two new lines in each verse (the other two being “Turn, turn, turn again” and “Turn, turn to the rain and the wind” and takes up the theme, common in the folk music of previous sentences, in which a friend of the singer is sent to prison for 99 years.  The singer locates the judge and says that it can’t be possible for his friend to have committed such a crime, but the judge will have none of it, and the singer is sent away.

It is in fact a classic tale of either blatant injustice or justice having no heart – and the fear among the less educated that the world has no understanding of them and their lives.   They were at the mercy of the rich, the powerful, and events.

The song has of course, mutated many, many times, and I am not at all sure which version Bob heard but I rather think (without any direct evidence) it might have been one of the versions that went like this….

So what we have, not for the first time, is Bob being confident in his lyrical writing, but less confident in his composition of music – although this we might remember, was immediately after composing “Times they are a changing”.

Perhaps what is the most interesting and informative element in this moment of Bob’s writing career was that following this sad tale of the 99 year prison sentence, Bob’s next song was another song of injustice, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.

And it does strike me that there is a point to be made here, and that is that on occasion, knowing the sequence in which Bob wrote the songs, we can see connections between them.  This is not always the case, but it appears that “Times they are a-changin'” did not lead Bob to write more songs about a bright and positive future created by the young, whose parents did not understand their own offspring, but instead led him to write not about a bright future, but about the injustices in the past and present.  Why Bob’s writing did take this turn, I’m really not too sure, but maybe you can help explain it or maybe it will come to me in due course.

What is true is that the success of “Times” which appears to be a completely original Bob Dylan song in terms of the music, did not lead him immediately to create more songs with his own music, for there again part of the song came from the folk tradition – in this case “Mary Hamilton”.  Somehow Bob didn’t seem to believe in himself as a composer, even after writing “Times”.

The series continues.

• Part 1: Wild rose in the heather
• Part 2: You can hear the air around it

by Jochen Markhorst

III         That long rambling talking thing

It is, of course, not that surprising, Henry Rollins being so moved by Time Out Of Mind and by “Love And Theft”; after all, he is hearing himself. Or rather: his own words. Some of Rollins’ verses seem to inspire whole songs (“Million Miles”), in the masterpiece “Mississippi”, at least four fragments seem to have been borrowed from him, both in the outtakes and in eight of the eleven Time Out Of Mind songs, Scott Warmuth finds Rollins quotations, and again in “Highlands”, pretty obvious. The fragment “All the young men with their young women looking so good / Well, I’d trade places with any of them / In a minute, if I could” as well as “I think what I need might be a full-length leather coat / Somebody just asked me / If I registered to vote” are lovingly stolen. And diluted, more fragments qualify for the Rollins label. A terrifying line like Insanity is smashing up against my soul, for instance, does smell an awful lot like the work in the poetry collection See A Grown Man Cry, like a ferocious six-liner as

Alone looking for the quickest way to get to pain
I am my soul smasher love call death trip
I slashed the wrists of Destiny and took total control
I watch the night strangle the sun
Hail night
Darkness, my brother

… “a few bad turns” Dylan also reads in Now Watch Him Die, as well as “I have new eyes” (“I got new eyes” in the last verse of “Highlands”), and there are more whole and half borrowings like that.

“Highlands” is particularly peculiarly structured. Twenty quatrains, which for some reason on paper are all represented as quintains;

I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone’s always yelling turn it down
Feel like I’m drifting
Drifting from scene to scene
I’m wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?

… for example, which is of course just a simple four-liner, both in recitation and in rhyme;

I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone’s always yelling turn it down
Feel like I’m drifting, drifting from scene to scene
I’m wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?

A “restructuring” that can be done for all twenty verses plus choruses. After all, all twenty stanzas are modelled on the template, on Robert Burns’ “My Heart’s in the Highlands”: four-liners in the simplest rhyme scheme aabb.

Which is not a peculiar thing, of course. Concealing the “real” form is something Dylan, or his editor, does with prodigious tenacity in every decade and every edition of Lyrics, God knows why. No, the peculiar thing is the function structuring, the chaotic formal tripartite structure:

• Choruses: 1, 4, 7, 15, 20
• Lyrical couplets: 2, 3, 5, 6, 16-19
• “Boston one-act play”: 8-14

Bob Dylan – Highlands:

So, during seven stanzas, the song seems to have a traditional verse-verse-refrain structure, then this framework is interrupted by an epic intermezzo of seven stanzas, not to return to the original structure afterwards. This seems to be mainly due to inattention, by the way: it seems that Dylan simply forgets a refrain – if he had added only one refrain, a refrain after stanza 17, the traditional verse-verse-refrain structure would have been maintained.

The eight lyrical couplets are interchangeable. They are, in any case, not connected by a plot, but they are eight separate tableaus, connected only by the voice of the narrator: by an elderly first-person narrator who eight times expresses uneasiness, fatigue and unfulfillable longing. Most tableaus seem to be triggered by a Rollins fragment, which is then developed into a quatrain by an associating, improvising Dylan. Rollins’ “shake the bars in front of my windows” (from Now Watch Him Die), for example, seems to trigger Dylan’s opening line “Windows were shakin’ all night in my dreams”, “feel like a prisoner” from the second verse can literally be found in See A Grown Man Cry, and like this, Rollins traces can be found in each of the eight lyrical stanzas. Dylan confirms the improvised character of the song by his explanations during a press conference in London, 1997:

Q: On your album, the song Highlands seems very improvised. How well prepared are you when you go into the studio?

BD: “Well, I think that long rambling talking thing… I think I’ve recorded things like that before, real early on. In that type of form, a person can say whatever they want because the form is simple. I wouldn’t say it was improvised, but a lot of different thoughts were connected in a lot of different ways that might necessarily not be what they seem to be on the paper when they were written. This is like thoughts, you know, that could be connected over a two-month period of time.”

Beautiful tableaux, visually strong and moving enough, but in itself not that special; “just dylanesque” as it were, comparable to language, tone and content of, say, “Cold Irons Bound” or “Standing In The Doorway”. No, the real attention grabber, the distinctive strength of the song is of course, that bizarre “Boston interlude”.

Bill Lamm – (I Hate To See) A Grown Man Cry:

To be continued. Next up Highlands part 4 (final): She studied the lines on my face

 ————

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

By Tony Attwood

Jakob Brønnum and Eyolf Østrem have examined refrains in their substack series and  I am of course a long way behind them, but hoping eventually to catch up – although trying to examine Dylan’s music from slightly different directions.  And of course, as I am writing each one of these articles and then publishing it, I am not quite sure where I am going or if I will reach similar conclusions.  I’m probably as surprised as some of my readers at where we end up.

Anyway, previously in this series, which is becoming known (to me at least) as Dylan, the composer,  I’ve looked at…

1. Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
3. Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
4. Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
5. Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
6. Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
7. Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
8. Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
9. North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
10. Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”
11. When the Ship Comes in: from Pirate Jenny onward.

and we have noticed that Dylan used repeated chorus lines and phrases in songs occasionally in 1963, most obviously with “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind,” and with “With god on our side,” and very clearly indeed with “the hour that the ship comes in” from the song of almost the same name.

Now these were not the only two songs with such a key repeated line.  “Blowing in the Wind” the previous year had used it, and it is quite possible that Dylan picked up the thought from that composition, thinking it was a handy way to hold a complex song together.   So it was that With God on our Side and Only a pawn in their game both used the same technique a little earlier in the year, and what we can see is that Bob liked the idea of the emphasis that this repeated line gave.   Of course, this wasn’t his invention, for a variation of it can be found in “This land is your land” by Woodie Gutherie where the title line appears repeatedly, and there obviously are many other examples.  My point is thus not that Bob invented the notion of a repeated line, but that he grabbed it and used it in ways that others had not considered before.  In fact I’ll put an example of one of the most brilliant line re-uses ever at the very end, just in case you’ve not come across it before.

But back to the plot: obviously, I can’t tell if the use of this technique or re-using a line in Bob’s very next composition was a deliberate ploy, or it just happened because Bob found a line that he liked, but quite obviously we do have it again in “Times they are a changing” although this time at the end of each verse.  In the “Ship”, the repeated line turns up half was through the verse.  In “Times” it is very definitely the last line of each verse and all the more powerful for that.  It sums everything up.

But both songs have a meaning in the lyrics which links them just as strongly as the technique of the repeated title line.  “Times they are a changin'” is both the title and the message, and the repetition of the line makes it certain that we are not going to forget that message.  I did wonder at the time how many frustrated teens, stopped from doing what they wanted, simply said to one or other (or both) parents, “Times they are a changing” before marching out, despite being told not to.

What is also interesting musically is the reversion in “Times they are a changing” to the 12/8 time signature of “With God on Our Side”.  Although triple time (which means pieces of music that have a 3 beat pulse in them rather than the 4 beat pulse that is common to most contemporary popular music) has been used in popular music from time to time over the years (we might think for example of “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles) it is not that common.   And although 6/8 is not the same as 3/4 there is a certain linkage between the two, which makes some listeners feel that a piece in 6/8 is actually a fast 3/4.

In Times, however, there is a clear 12/8 rhythm, with the emphasis on 1, 4, 7, 10, with the biggest emphasis being on 1.

      1  2    3     4   5  
Come gather 'round people
  6 7 8   9    10, 
Wherever you roam
 11 12 1   2     3  4  5   
And admit that the waters
6   7   8   9    10
Around you have grown
11  12  1   2  3    4
And accept it that soon
5       6  7       8   9  10    
You'll be drenched to the bone
11  12   1,2  3  4  5   6    7  8, 9 10, 11    
If your time to you is worth savin'
12       1  2    3    4   5
And you better start swimmin'
6          7    8   9  10, 11
Or you'll sink like a stone
12      1,2,3  4    5  6 7,8,9 10, 11      
For the times they are a-changin'

12    1  2    2   4  5    6
Come writers and critics who....

Of course, this is a simplified approach – in that for example, the first syllable of “critics” at the end of the above example can be sung quickly on the fourth beat and held, but either way, the word “who” definitely comes on the sixth beat.

This is very unusual in popular music generally because 12/8 is tough to dance to without dancing as a waltz, but that didn’t matter here of course, because Bob was not writing a song to dance to and anyway, people don’t dance to protest songs.  But…

“Times they are a changin'” is not a protest song.   For in a protest song, the essence of the lyrics is not just that change is happening or about to happen, but rather that change is happening because of us.  We are changing the world from the old way in which those with money control everything to their own advantage, to a new just and fair society, or something along those lines.

But “Times” doesn’t say this at all.  It says that

...the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'

We are not making it happen, there are no revolutionaries as such. It is just the old regime being supplanted by the new regime, which will be a lot better.

Now there is, of course, a hint that the change itself might not be peaceful as in “The battle outside ragin’ Will soon shake your windows And rattle your walls,” but that is just a hint. And it would have been hard to make it much more than a hint, given that the record companies were being run by people who would remember the attempt to surplant our way of life, by the government of Germany.   So there is no call to arms, and there is no sign of revolutionaries coming along and sweeping away everything that has gone before.   Rather, there is a statement that change is happening, it is happening naturally, and above all there ain’t nothing you can do about it.

Of course this appealed greatly to the younger generation of which I was a part at the time (and oh! the irony of writing this now in my 70s, and having the enormous joy and pleasure of my grandchildren exploring the world, fighting against what they see as the irrelevant old ways, ignoring any suggestion that a grandfather might be able to offer some advice etc etc).  But I think in the era when the song was written, many of us ignored what the lyrics actually said (that change happens no matter what).  And if we could ignore that in the lyrics, we most certainly could ignore any implication there might be in the fact that the time signature made it sound like a waltz.   A revolutionary waltz?  Whoever thought of such a thing!

What did both attract me, and worry me, at the time the song was first heard in the UK was  the ending

The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last

… for I thought yes, I want the old ways kicked out in favour of a new world in which creativity and inventiveness would be valued equally with the virtue of hard work and knowing one’s place, but really, the band I was in was certainly not going to play a waltz, and I certainly wasn’t going to be found listening to a waltz!

And this was not just because we felt a waltz was 1930s, not progressive 1960s, but also because none of us had the talent of Bryan Ferry and co to turn the song into a four beats in a bar rocker (ie 4/4 not 12/8).

What strikes me is that this wonderful Ferry version contains a subtle underlayer, but despite this, there is still there, the threat to the older generation which is absolutely not in the Dylan original.   When Mr Ferry sings, “the order is rapidly fading” this is revolutionary.  When Bob sings it, it is like suggesting that an old-timer stays on the pavement so as not to be run down by passing traffic.

Thus, despite all the solidity expressed within the song both musically and lyrically in relation to the concept of natural progression, musicians have taken the song and had great fun with it.  And if you are listening to my examples, please do give the one below enough time to get through the first verse and then into the second.

In short what Bob had created, although I suspect neither he nor anyone else at the time quite realised it, was a piece of music (in fact many pieces of music) that could have one meaning when expressed in one way, but a different meaning when performed with the same words, but with a completely new arrangement.

Now, I have heard it argued that every song can be rearranged into something different but I would also argue that there are two issues here.  One is that just because Bob chose to give the world “Times” or, indeed, any other song, in one arrangement, that does not mean it is the best arrangement for all time.  The other is that I am not sure Bob is always a very good judge of what the possibilities are for his music.  And, of course, in that regard I am not the first to make such a comment.

But the implications of this are profound.  There are millions of well-known popular songs that really are trapped in their original arrangement because they don’t have anything within them that allows radical re-interpretation.   But that is not the case with many Dylan songs, and “Times” was neither the first, nor the last, that could be utterly transformed – not just into a new arrangement, but also into a new meaning.

In Bob’s original, the implication of the 12/8 time and the performance on Bob’s album is that this is the reality: times change, but at a fairly sedate pace, although the old folk (especially those in power) inevitably like to hold on to the past.   In reworkings of the song we find that by changing the rhythm and style of the accompaniment, the meaning of those lyrics now change.

The Bryan Ferry version of the song itself says, by transforming the song from 12/8 time into a solid 4/4 beat, that we are marching onwards to a new world, but this time we are the driving force.  In Dylan’s original version, the driving force was some sort of ill-defined natural change that has happened throughout human history.

And such a thought opens up a really radical notion, that Bob didn’t really see the possibilities of this song he had created or, indeed, perhaps of any of his songs.

Of course, over time that changed, and Bob has become a master of re-writing his own music, and indeed I have repeatedly slipped in, under the smallest of pretences, my own utter, utter favourite bit of Bob rewriting Bob.   If you are kind enough to read my ramblings regularly, you’ll know what’s coming and won’t have to play it, although I hope you will.  But if you are unsure what’s coming just sit back and enjoy this.  Because Bob The Arranger is a central part of Bob Dylan’s work, and a part of his legacy that is often ignored and it is a concept I want to explore further in this series.

If you have been, thank you for reading.

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – A History in Performance, Part 4: 1988 –  The darkness at the break of noon

By Mike Johnson

[I read somewhere once that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the fourth article on the third track, ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series here:

If you have been following this series you may have noticed that I like to begin each article with a comment on some aspect of the song before getting into the performances themselves. In this post I’d like to begin by considering the first line of the song: ‘The darkness at the break of noon.’

What is this darkness? I suggest it is not the same as the darkness in this line from ‘Love In Vain’ (1978) – ‘When I am in the darkness, why do you intrude?’

That darkness I take to mean that introspective space we can get into, our own personalised rabbit hole, dark night of the soul.

Nor is it quite the same as the darkness in this line from ‘Precious Angel’ (1979) when, with regard to his ‘so-called friends,’ he sings:

But can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high
When men will beg God to kill them
And they won’t be able to die

That I take to mean the cosmic, apocalyptic darkness that Christians believe will fall during the last days of the world.

‘The darkness at the break of noon’ which ‘shadows even the silver spoon’ to my mind refers to the shadow of hypocrisy and bad faith that serves to occlude the sacred. The sacred is nowhere to be found, no matter where you look in this world given over to materialist values. That is the message to be found in the lines I quoted from ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Gutherie’ in my second article on this song:

Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill
And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house

What is the ‘it’ you can’t find? The really sacred – the true and the real. And the innocent. The ‘flesh coloured Christs that glows in the dark,’ seems to refer to the commodification of religion. That’s a false glow. That line reminds me of ‘turning virgins into merchandise’ (Making A Liar out of Me –1979). Lost innocence. It’s amazing how consistent Dylan’s critique of society has been over the years.

The ‘silver spoon’ is a reference to inherited riches (born with a silver spoon in your mouth, as the saying goes). This spiritual darkness in ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ shadows the light of midday and all earthly riches. It is the veil of illusion and lies that separates us from reality.

This veil of darkness lies over the whole song. The condemnation of materialist values couldn’t be plainer – ‘money doesn’t talk, it swears’ – and sooner or later, we will have to shed that veil and ‘stand naked’ in sight of God, no matter who we are, even if we’re ‘president of the United States.’ You won’t be able to hide behind wealth and privilege or ‘fake morals.’

All that is not sacred is false and phony, advertising and propaganda.

Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

Dylan performed the song only three times in 1988, the first year of the Never Ending Tour, and I was going to pass over it until I realised that there were a couple of interesting aspects to the Los Angeles performance. Except for 1978, when the song came roaring in with a big band backing, Dylan had stayed with an acoustic presentation, often just solo guitar.

The first thing to notice in this 1988 recording is the backing. An augmented acoustic? An early attempt to turn it into rock song, perhaps.

Around three minutes into the song, delivered with the same almost breathless energy that marks these 1988 performances, Dylan seems to lose track of the lyrics. He does a good job of blurring it over, but what’s interesting is that when he comes out of it, he’s singing the verse ‘One who sings with his tongue on fire…’ The first time we’ve heard it since the 1960s. I suspect it was not intentional, but with Dylan you can never tell. (Los Angeles, Aug 4^th)

Dylan brought the song back into prominence in 1989, when it was performed over twenty-five times. We’re back with a purely acoustic sound again. I’m uncertain as to the date of this recording but is, to my mind, better than what I could find on YouTube. It rattles along, and Dylan sounds fully committed to the song.

1989

1990 was a big year for the song, with over forty performances. This one from Berlin July 5^th is as good as any. Despite a subtle bass and the gentle pattering of drums, Dylan keeps it acoustic. The song becomes an acoustic centrepiece in concerts largely given over to rock songs and GE Smith’s twanging electric guitar.

1990

 In 1991 the song almost disappears again, being performed only once, in London (Feb 12^th). Again, I can’t know why Dylan didn’t perform it again that year except to speculate that because he did eight concerts in London, and likes to do at least some different songs each night, he could have pulled ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ out of the bag. By 1991 his voice is starting to crack, but he delivers a vibrant performance, marred only by flubbing the lyrics again towards the end of the song. Of special interest are the guitar breaks with two acoustic guitars going for it.

1991: London

1992 was the year of The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, held at Madison Square Garden, New York in October 1992,  an event that Neil Young described as ‘a Bobfest.’ A range of performers, including Stevie Wonder and Johnny Winter, came forward with their chosen Dylan song. The concert was professionally recorded and released on a double album. It is significant, I think, that Dylan, who was the last performer, chose ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ as the song to represent him and his thirty years of performing and recording. It is after all, arguably, his greatest protest song.

It’s an electrifying performance. A flat, nasal delivery, with Dylan sounding as if he was tearing the song out of his throat. If you haven’t already heard it, you have a treat in store. Undiluted Dylan.

1992

He performed it half a dozen times in 1992, but nothing quite lives up to that Anniversary Concert recording.

At this point something strange happens. While we have become used to Dylan seeming to blow hot and cold on the song, almost dropping it some years, and stacking the setlists with it other years, that doesn’t prepare us for him abandoning the song for seven long years. We thought we’d lost it. Then, in 1999, it comes back from the dead, but will be radically re-imagined musically. Why did Dylan drop the song? And why did he pick it up again after all that time? There’s no knowing.

But it’s to 1999 that we will turn in the next article. We might find the answer there.

In the meantime, watch for those who would ‘push fake morals, insult and stare.’

Kia Ora

By Tony Attwood

This series looks as the way Bob Dylan evolved from being a man who would arrange older folk songs, and on occasion, take existing melodies and write his lyrics around them, into an extraordinarily effective composer of both lyrics and music.  That is where he started out, but somewhere along the way Bob became a composer of music (as well as a lyricist) in his own right.

Previously in this series I’ve looked at…

1. Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
3. Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
4. Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
5. Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
6. Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
7. Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
8. Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
9. North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
10. Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”

Next comes “When the ship comes in” which naturally has a lot of commentaries written about it.  However, none that I have seen suggest directly anything other than the notion that the music is a Bob Dylan original composition.

But there are hints and suggestions, perhaps because with Dylan there are always hints and suggestions, that ideas behind the song were drawn from elsewhere.   For example, Bob Dylan commentaries that there is a link drawn between “Pirate Jenny” from the “Threepenny Opera” and Dylan’s song.  In the video below, the music starts on the 30-second mark.

Of course this is not suggestive of an exact copy by Bob Dylan of music from elsewhere, but we could be talking about an influence, (and all composers are subjected to influence) as the rhythm of the song is much the same as that used by Dylan.  It could be the sort of situation where the rhythm of the melody of one tune is retained in the mind and gets mutated to fit the next set of lyrics.

And let’s be clear – there is nothing illegal or even generally considered “wrong” in a composer, or indeed a poet or novelist, being “influenced” by what has gone before.  To be utterly original is not only nigh on impossible, given how much has been written before, but also often pointless.  There is still much to be made out of taking what has gone before and seeing where else it can go.

Thus staying with the origins of Bob’s interest in “Pirate Jenny”, it has also been noted that Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo was the set director for an amateur production of the play, and indeed it has been often noted that Dylan attended the rehearsals. Here are the lyrics to the opening of Pirate Jenny.

You people can watch while I'm scrubbing these floors
And I'm scrubbin' the floors while you're gawking
Maybe once you tip me and it makes you feel swell
In this crummy Southern town

It is quite possible to sing those lines to the music of the opening four lines of “When the Ship Comes In.”   The melody of each song is quite different of course, but the pulse is the same, and for many song composers it is the pulse of the song that is the thing that is first set down, as a guide to how further verses will work.  Even if you have no musical background, you can perhaps sing “You people can watch while I’m scrubbing these floors” to the music of “Oh the time will come up when the winds will stop.”

Of course, that is not proof of where Bob got the rhythmic pulse of the song from, but it is a possibility and this allows us to postulate that this could be the origin.  But if we do say that then it is important to be clear that this is not at all “copying” to the extent we have noted in some other early Dylan compositions where virtually a whole melody is taken and re-used with new lyrics.  It is, in fact, what many songwriters do; they listen to a lot of music, to the rhythms, to the melodic passages, to the chord changes and so on, and some of this will stick in the mind, and get reused as a new idea or a new set of lyrics starts to emerge.   In short, if Bob were to have been influenced by “Pirate Jenny” then that was all it was – an influence, not a copying.

Indeed, as we pursue this line of thought, there are certainly lines in “Pirate Jenny” which maybe point again toward the “Ship” such as

Then one night there’s a scream in the night
And you’ll wonder who could that have been

which perhaps you can hear in your mind to the tune of the Ship instead of the lyrics

Then they'll raise their hands sayin' we'll meet all your demands
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered

Furthermore, “Pirate Jenny” as the title suggests, does have ship images in it as with

There’s a ship
The Black Freighter
with a skull on its masthead
will be coming in

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin’.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.

And in Revelations 7.1 we have

“And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.”

So as I have tried to note before, we must accept that most authors and composers generally draw on what are called “sources”; not always of course, and not in every book or song, but nevertheless it is common practice for writers in all formats to be influenced by what others in their field have done.  Almost every writer in every format is listening to and noting where others have gone, and we certainly know that Bob has always had an encyclopedic knowledge of music in multiple formats.

I have recently noted in an article on this site, that despite the obvious popularity of the song “When the ship comes in” Bob only performed it three times on stage and of course, as ever, we don’t really know why.  The simplest answers are that having recorded the song, he didn’t really fancy it anymore and that there is not too much you can do to re-arrange the song while still keeping it as the song that we all know (and indeed love).

But what I think we can also conclude is that this is, without much doubt at all, truly a Bob Dylan original song, with music (unlike many seen up to this point) totally by Bob Dylan.  There are influences, but every composer is influenced.

We do, however, on this occasion, have a comment from Dylan himself on the composition of the song, although it was made almost 20 years later, so it may not be that reliable. And as it turns out, is not particularly helpful!  For it is reported that “in 1985, he [Dylan] told the highly acclaimed film maker Cameron Crowe, “This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced, of course, by the Irish and Scottish ballads …’Come All Ye Bold Highway Men’, ‘Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens’.”

And this is where I have a problem, because although I can find references in the literature (presumably taken from this comment) to Bob having taken “Come all ye bold highway men” as a source for some of his own work, I can’t find any references to that song anywhere.   And this is despite having had quite an engagement with traditional folk music of the British Isles in my musical life.  It is simple not a song I know.

Now of course, that latter point is neither here nor there, I’m moderately knowledgeable about the folk traditions of the British Isles, but not an expert.   But beyond that it seems that the internet doesn’t seem to have much on that song either.

So if you can find a recording of someone singing “Come all ye bold highway men,” which is not an obvious contemporary piece, please do leave a link to it in the comments section, as I have drawn a blank.  And if we all draw a blank, I think we might begin to consider the notion that there was no Scottish or Irish ballad called “Come all ye bold highway men” which has survived the ravages of time, to be a valid one.

Previously:  Highlands (1997) part 1: Wild rose in the heather

Highlands part 2: You can hear the air around it

by Jochen Markhorst

“Probably the last time I bought a record that was just brilliant all the way through was Nick Cave,” Henry Rollins tells in an interview with DVD Talk, in 2004. “I wrote him a letter after I played it and said you and Dylan are like the only guys writing songs right now. I think the last two Dylan records have just been incredible – Time out of Mind and Love and Theft. Those were just amazing.”

Further on in the same interview, he explains what touches him, apart from the songs, even more: the sound. Henry Rollins is a man of knowledge and moreover blessed with the gift of words, so he can perfectly articulate what touches him so, in terms of sound: “I miss the space, I miss the sound of a guitar in a room where you can hear the air around it. Who makes records like that still? Tom Waits does, Bob Dylan does.”

It demonstrates a kinship with Dylan, as evidenced by the words of session musician Jim Dickinson, the keyboardist on “Highlands”:

“One thing that really struck me during those sessions, Dylan, he was standing singing four feet from the microphone, with no earphones on. He was listening to the sound in the room.”

… almost the same words Rollins uses to describe his preferred sound, the sound he hears on Time Out Of Mind. Which is also confirmed by engineer Chris Shaw;

“And I’d say about 85 per cent of the sound of that record is the band spilling into Bob’s microphone, because he’d sing live in the room with the band. Most of the time without headphones. That’s why the record has this big, I think, almost kind of swampy sound to it, and he loves it, he really goes for that sound.”

… the sound that Dylan hears on those famous “reference records”. In an interview with Robert Hilburn, September 2001, Dylan leads the Dylanologists to Charley Patton;

“I had the guitar run off an old Charley Patton record for years and always wanted to do something with that. I was sitting around, maybe in the dark Delta or maybe in some unthinkable trench somewhere, with that sound in my mind and the dichotomy of the Highlands with that seemed to be a path worth pursuing.”

… but that seems to be a misdirection; a Patton recording with a similar riff cannot be found. It can be found at Slim Harpo, though. Who is also mentioned elsewhere by Dylan as an example of the “reference records” with which he tried to put producer Lanois on the right track. Similar riffs as in “Highlands”, which is a quite generic riff in itself, can be heard more than once on Slim Harpo’s records. “That’s Why I Love You” comes close, for instance, and “Tip On In” even more so, as well as in sound – in fact, all those old Excello recordings have the “air”, the “space” that Dylan and Rollins love so much. Reduce the tempo of “Tip On In” by 75%, and you’re pretty close to “Highlands”.

Slim Harpo – Tip On In:

It is not unlikely that Dylan is simply mistaken, with his Patton hint. Fans and followers often think that Dylan is putting up smokescreens on purpose or having fun fooling journalists, but we have seen for 60 years now that Dylan is not familiar with details of his own discography, mixes up facts about recordings, such as the names of session musicians, and only superficially remembers circumstances surrounding recording sessions. It simply doesn’t interest him enough. He rarely, if ever, listens back to his own records, as he has said repeatedly for the past sixty years. During interviews, he often makes mistakes in dates and tracklists, which occurs again when asked about Time Out Of Mind and “Highlands” in 2001, more than four years later. Only nine months after the recordings, in September 1997, he does not remember exactly anymore:

“I don’t think we had a full ensemble playing on that, as I remember. There can’t be more than four people playing. I can’t say that the musicians didn’t know the song or the lyrics. I don’t know…,”

… he says to Edna Gundersen. And in 2001, with Mikal Gilmore for Rolling Stone, he is half wrong when he says about “Highlands”:

“That particular song, we worked with a track that I had done at a sound check once in some hall. The assembled group of musicians we had down at the studio just couldn’t get it, so I said, “Just use that original track, and I’ll sing over it.” It was just some old blues song I always wanted to use, and I felt that once I was able to control it, I could’ve written about anything with it. But you’re right – I forgot that was on that record.”

That peculiarity, that exceptional technical fact, “a track that I had done at a sound check once in some hall” concerns the recording of “Dirt Road Blues”, as we know thanks to both Daniel Lanois and drummer Winston Watson. For “Highlands”, a pre-recorded loop is indeed also used, but it was fabricated by Lanois and Tony Mangurian, while playing along with a reference record, and further edited by Lanois and Dylan at the Teatro in Oxnard sometime in late 2016

Bob Dylan – Dirt Road Blues (Version 1)

In short, it is not too daring to question Dylan’s memories and statements about the recording process and song inspiration. Nor is it deliberate deception – recordings are simply not that important to Dylan. His head was in the Highlands, probably.

To be continued. Next up Highlands part 3: That long rambling talking thing

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Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door