Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

First point: what is a protest song?

These four definitions are taken from various on line dictionaries.

Definition 1: a song that expresses disapproval, usually about a political subject

Definition 2: Term which gained currency (first in USA) in 1960s for song which voiced feelings of protest about some social or political injustice, real or imagined, or about some international event which aroused strong emotions, e.g. American part in Vietnam war. A famous example is ‘We shall overcome’.

Definition 3: A protest song is a song that is associated with a movement for social change and hence part of the broader category of topical songs (or songs connected to current events). It may be folk, classical, or commercial in genre.

Definition 4: Protest songs are songs to encourage social movement toward social change. These songs protest about issues such as war, women’s suffrage, civil rights, immigration or current events in the world today.

Now there is a distinction those definitions – because the first two stress the fact that the song highlights some wrong doing or bad state of affairs.  The last two talk of the song as part of the movement to change the world.  The songs encourage change and urge action.

This resonates with me a lot because when I was a very young and incredibly inexperienced writer, I worked with Adrian Mitchell, a leading pacifist and writer about social issues.  Ultimately we wrote a musical together – it was my first published work of music.

He was many years my senior and I was very much in awe of him and listened with great care to his views on the world, which is why I still remember one of his phrases: “The only reason for writing is to change the world”.  That sums up definitions three and four of protest music.

Now Definition 2, with its mention of “We shall overcome” could be seen as writing to change the world – except “We shall overcome” continued “some day”.  It is about belief in the inevitability of historical progress, not in our own ability to change the world.

Of course when it comes to Dylan I have no idea of what he thinks – although it seems to me that the songs like Hurricane are very much about making change happen.  But in terms of a “movement towards social change” which crops up in the definitions above, Hurricane is not so much about social change as about getting one man released from prison (although he was there, Dylan says, because of racial issues).

Indeed I do have a problem with a number of Dylan songs that are called “protest” quite often, but for which there is no attempt to consider where there protest is leading.  As an example I’d quote “Only a pawn in their game” which clearly protests against the system, but in no way suggests anyone can do anything.

In the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll we have the famous ending

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

If we take this at face value Dylan is just telling us to cry at the betrayal of our hopes and dreams by a bent legal system.  There is no call to the masses to rise up and fight.  There is no hope for change.  In fact in both these songs Dylan tells us that the political and legal system in which we live is broken, but he makes no suggestions at at as to whether we can do anything about, whether we should do anything about it, and if we should, what we should do.

Indeed it is a point Dylan often seems to make – I am not telling you what to do.  Except, “Don’t follow leaders.”

We have the same sentiment in Hollis Brown

There’s seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
Somewhere in the distance
There’s seven new people born

These are desperate, desperate, awful images, the painting of bleak hopelessness.  And all given without solution.

What is so curious about these early works from a protest point of view is that Times They Are A Changing which is itself seen as a protest song, is actually nothing of the kind.  It is a song that says that the world is changing, and that there is nothing the old guard can do about it.  Change happens, get used to it.

At the end the song has deeply religious connotations (Matthew 20:16 “So the last will be first, and the first will be last”) but also is the warcry of every teenager who has ever looked bleakly at his/her parents and shouted “You don’t understand!”

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

But this is no call to arms.  The revolution is here.  It’s happening.  Sit down and watch the show.

If we return to earlier songs like “Oxford Town” there is a clear approach that Dylan has even then, which is to handle the protest from a distance – in this case “me and my gal” arrive, they are horrified, they depart.  (Incidentally if you have a mind to, you might like to look at that review, not because I said anything profound, but because of the background – if you don’t know it – and the comments made after by readers of my piece).

(There is one other point here – one of the correspondents writes of the link between Oxford Town and “Nottamun Town”, which I suggested in reply was not right.  What I had forgotten when I wrote that was that the very next song that Dylan wrote was very much based on “Nottamun Town”.  Listening again I think the correspondent was right, I was wrong – and not for the first time!

So straight after Oxford Town Dylan wrote Masters of War which surely we would all agree is a protest song.  And yet I think by this time he was settling into the notion of just telling people that they should see the world from another point of view.  He is not telling us to rise up and overthrow the war machine…

There are two couplets in Masters of War that utterly overwhelm me, even now, so many years after buying the original when it came out…

For even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

and

I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

So Dylan again is never saying “shake off those who oppress you” nor is he saying, “don’t pay taxes, they only spend it on war”.   In fact Dylan virtually never tells us what to do.  At this moment, as I write this, without going through all the material to look for Dylan’s advice, still all that comes to mind is “Don’t follow leaders”.  I know for a while he told us to follow Jesus, but I am setting that aside for a moment because religion is normally considered a different subject from protest.

Yes of course he makes his viewpoint clear at the end…

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

But he is hoping for their deaths, he is not raising the flag and fighting the cause.

When we get to With God on Our Side (and I do know I’m jumping around in the order the songs were written!) we get an even clearer statement of where Dylan has got to…

So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war

Whether it is social change or economic change or political change or the misuse of religion to support inequality, Dylan is the observer.   And this is how he stays, for much later there is Union Sundown

the car I drive is a Chevrolet
It was put together down in Argentina
By a guy makin’ thirty cents a day

And North Country Blues

it’s much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing.

He’s observing, not telling.  He’s making his position absolutely clear, but he is not saying, go out and smash the system.    There is of course occasional hope

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

But it is just hope, a dream, not a call to arms, not a message of action.

It is also interesting that one of the few times Dylan did touch on the political protest movement (Gypsy Lou) he seems to have been making fun of the activists.  It is also interesting that the writers who were his models – such as Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas etc – were men who specialised in seeing the world in other ways, not doing something about it.

So at this stage I conclude: Dylan is not a writer of protest songs in the stronger definition.  He is more an observer of inequalities and injustice.  He looks in and often doesn’t like what he sees.

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

By Tony Attwood

Sign Language was the first song Dylan wrote and completed after the collaboration with Levy that gave us Desire (there is at least one other song, but it is neither complete nor recorded, and I’m ignoring these as I work through Dylan’s songs year by year).

With this look at “Sign Language” we come to the end of 1975; there was one more song in 1976, and then by and large Dylan stopped writing.  Until Street Legal came along.

And for me 1975, such a remarkable year on songwriting for Dylan, ends with an enigma.  Quite what Dylan was doing with this song I have to admit I really have no idea.

It’s on YouTube as a duet with Clapton (if you play this one, don’t click off at the end, as there is a nice duet between the two playing “Don’t think twice” – and then it moves on to other collaborative ventures).  It is not one of the great highlights of Dylan’s performing career but still, worth watching and hearing if you haven’t seen it before.

And there is a second video of the song, this time with Clapton playing it without Dylan being involved.

I am actually not sure Dylan really finished this song; rather I think he was wondering what he could do after the supreme heights that he climbed with Levy in the final collaborations of Desire.

By which I mean, what are we to make of “You speak to me in sign language, I’m eating a sandwich in a small cafe at a quarter to three”.

If we compare this with the opening of the last song written with Levy, we have…

Hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun
Dust on my face and my cape
Me and Magdalena on the run
I think this time we shall escape.

There is comparison in the sense that Levy took the world around the central character and turned it into a way of setting the song quickly.  Dylan was, perhaps, attempting to do the same, but the level is so prosaic (what is there that is interesting about eating a sandwich?) that (for me) it doesn’t work.

And perhaps Dylan felt this, which is why in effect the song writing stopped.  Levy was away on other projects, the album was going to be released at the start of the next year, and so that was that.  Have a break from writing until some new ideas came along, as they surely would.  And indeed did.

The melody and chord sequence are pretty ordinary – musically Dylan seems as diminished in creating the melody, rhythm and chords as he is lyrically – we get a regular chord sequence of G, D, C, Em, C, G and that’s it.  It’s ok, but a song of this nature needs one of the three elements (lyrics, chords, melody) to explore upon us, or at least grip us by the throat and wave us around a bit.  Here’s the version that the excellent Dylan Chords web site gives us.

G             D   C        Em
 You speak to me   in sign language
                D                   Em
As I'm eatin' a sandwich in a small cafe
C                G
 At a quarter to three.

Some of it I must admit I simply don’t get

'Twas there by the bakery, surrounded by fakery
Tell her my story, still I'm still there
Does she know I still care?

No, sorry, I have thought abut it, but really, “bakery fakery”.  It doesn’t work for me at an emotional level.  And it doesn’t work for me at an intellectual level.  And if the idea is that he is talking about refined cakes with cream and all the twirly whirly bits, well, I don’t know…

But there is of course the reference to Link Wray

Link Wray was playin' on a jukebox I was payin'
For the words I was sayin' so misunderstood
He didn't do me no good.

Link Wray was the absolute musicians’ musician.  Iggy Pop,  Neil Young,  Jimmy Page all cited him as a major influence.  Pete Townshend said, “If it hadn’t been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble,’ I never would have picked up a guitar.”

According to Wiki  “Rumble”, was banned in New York and Boston for fear it would incite teenage gang violence.  Maybe that’s why everyone liked it.

But what is so extraordinary is that “Rumble” is an instrumental.  If you don’t know it and want to understand more about the musical influences on Dylan (not to mention everyone else) it is here – and as you listen, just remember that this instrumental was banned).  Oh and don’t get bored after 30 seconds and think, “yeah I get this, I’ve heard this before”… just give it a chance.

If you want to know why all these great men of rock music can still revere Link Wray you should listen not just to this but other recordings of his music.  And if you are British like me, you might care to let the recording run, to hear the original version of Apache.  If you are old enough, that might make you recognise where it all came from.

When Wray died in 2005, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen both performed “Rumble” on stage in tribute.

So there we are – an end to a year, an era has gone by, and one that has left us an album with some sublime moments, but finished on what is for me a curious downbeat.

But despite this ending, it was nevertheless one hell of a year.  You might not agree with my choice but how about this collection just from one year in the composer’s life…

• Abandoned Love
• Isis
• Black Diamond Bay
• Romance in Durango

For anyone else, that would be the highlights of a lifetime.  For Dylan it was the highlights of one year.

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

By Tony Attwood

And so what I guess is Dylan’s longest and most fruitful period of collaboration with another writer (or have I been focussed on this period for so long I’ve forgotten something – tell me if so) comes to an end with Romance in Durango.  Along with Black Diamond Bay, which it is linked to on the album, it represents the high point of the work with Jacques Levy – and there is no doubt that we are all the richer for it.

Indeed, once again, when we focus on Dylan’s songs in the order that they were written in, rather than the order in which they appear on an album, they do make a lot more sense, in terms of understanding Dylan’s progression in working with Levy.

The notion of writing fictional stories and setting them as songs was developing through the year but was interrupted by the idea of songs about real people.  So after the totally imaginary Isis, we have the real life Joey, Rita May and Hurricane.  Then it is as if the pair of writers closed the door on that and perhaps thought – we can have a lot more fun and a lot less trouble with fiction.  Although of course Dylan’s commitment to Joey and Hurricane cannot be doubted.

It seems to me, by the time the pair got to the end of their work together they had really got the hang of the relationship and were able to launch into much more exciting and interesting fictional works.  If only they had time to develop this side of their work further we could have had a second album of collaborative fiction, rather than having to wait a couple of years for Street Legal (although in the end it turned out to be worth the wait).

But back to this concluding song.   There is nothing really in Hurricane that prepares us for Black Diamond Bay. Then the story and notion of exotic locations continues with Mozambique and then we get Romance in Durango.  Here’s the chronology…

• Isis
• Joey
• Rita May
• Hurricane
• Black Diamond Bay
• Mozambique
• Romance in Durango

with Romance being, as I’ve said, the final collaboration between Dylan and Levy.

Dylan had been in Mexico in 1972/3 but there seems to be little influence on his music from this period – until now.

Levy stated in an interview that the two writers wrote the opening of the song, and then Levy finished it off, perhaps (according to Heylin) to Dylan’s slight annoyance.

This is one of those songs where we have two excellently arranged different versions – the slow version on the album, and the upbeat Biograph live version.  Heylin makes it very clear that it prefers the Biograph version, but I fear he misses something profound in the original album version, namely the extraordinary way in which Dylan plays with the timing.

Indeed I can’t imagine how the song was possibly recorded with the whole band playing together (in Dylan’s preferred style), as there are so many twists and turns to the lyrics are handled.  Sometimes an extra beat appears at the end of a line, sometimes the line takes an extra beat or two at the end.  The time signature changes wildly as we go; I can imagine Frank Zappa rehearsing this to perfection, but not Dylan!

The only thing I can think is that they multi-tracked the whole thing, and then kept the Dylan lyrics and gradually replaced all the instrumentals around that.  Certainly there is a hell of lot happening in there, and the normal odd slips by the instrumentalists that we get on Dylan albums are missing.

But whatever the explanation, what we have here is the summation of the work of these two fine artists, now utterly used to working together.  And I think, despite the way the songs slip into each other on Desire, with Black Diamond Bay seeping out of Durango, it is worth just occasionally playing the sequence in the order the songs were written.  It does give a different understanding to this period of work.

Is there a more evocative opening of any Dylan song than this?

Hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun
Dust on my face and my cape
Me and Magdalena on the run
I think this time we shall escape.

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

What works so brilliantly here is that within eight lines we have the whole picture, just through the simple selected images.  Our minds create the actual images, but the essence of the situation is there, clearly painted in eight lines.   Songwriting at its best

Then the Spanish phrases set the scene… Here are my simplistic translations of the Spanish in case you need them (but really my Spanish is poor to non-existent so please do give me a better version if you can)

No llores mi querida  (Do not cry my darling)
Dios nos vigila (God is watching over us)

Agarrame mi vida (hold me, my love, my life)

And we have the history and culture mingled with the hopes of the poor.

Past the Aztec ruins and the ghosts of our people
Hoofbeats like castanets on stone
At night I dream of bells in the village steeple
Then I see the bloody face of Ramona.

And just as I am sure you can improve on my language skills, so I am sure there must be a reader more versed in Mexican history than me, but I am taking it that Ramona is the leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.  As I understand it she was one of a number of female commanders in charge of directing the army; a symbol of equality and dignity for impoverished women.

At the corrida we’ll sit in the shade
And watch the young torero stand alone
We’ll drink tequila where our grandfathers stayed
When they rode with Villa into Torreon.

Pancho Villa is a revolutionary folk hero, who fought against the regimes of both Porfirio Díaz and Victoriano Huerta.  A torero is a bull fighter (I knew that time studying Latin would come in useful one day!) and Torreon is a city – I had to look that one up, tell me about it if you know why it is important in the context of the song – unless of course it is just a play on sounds having a “young torero” and riding into Torreon.

In this part of the song what we are getting here is not a logical set of historical developments over time, but a jumping around through names of famous outlaws in Mexican history – outlaws who we might or might not sympathise with.  (Why couldn’t Dylan write about historic characters from London – it would be a lot easier for me to review!)

So having run away the couple prepare for marriage.

Then the padre will recite the prayers of old
In the little church this side of town
I will wear new boots and an earring of gold
You’ll shine with diamonds in your wedding gown.

The way is long but the end is near
Already the fiesta has begun
The face of God will appear
With His serpent eyes of obsidian.

Obsidian is a volcanic glass-like rock – I’m not sure I get the image of God with serpent eyes of obsidian, but maybe that’s the point, we’re not supposed to get it.  God’s serpent eyes is one hell of an image however.  And maybe that’s the point for it sets us up for the moment it all goes wrong

Was that the thunder that I heard?
My head is vibrating, I feel a sharp pain
Come sit by me don’t say a word
Oh can it be that I am slain ?

Quick, Magdalena, take my gun
Look up in the hills that flash of light
Aim well my little one
We may not make it through the night.

The outlaw is killed, his lover is left, and I suppose that bleakness is what makes me feel in part that the slower album version works better than the Biograph version.  That and the fact that the Biograph version, having been played live, has got rid of all the edgy changes of rhythm, time, bar length and everything else that makes the original version so extraordinary.

Musically I also think that the original album version maintains the Mexican feel through the use of the instrumentation (for example the trumpet calls) and the rhythms associated with central American music.   The chord system beneath it however is simple

D                                                               A
Hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun
G                                            D
Dust on my face and my cape,
D                                               A
Me and Magdalena on the run
G                                             D

The same chords are used through the chorus.

The song was played 38 times by Dylan between October 30 1975 and October 17 2015.  It is, for me a most fitting and insightful end to an era in Dylan’s writing.  With the death of the outlaw at the end of the song, the curtain comes down on a singular period in Dylan’s career.  When he took up songwriting again, we found we were in a new land.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Attwood

Having been (quite rightly I am sure) called to book over my interpretation of Rita May I approach Hurricane – the next song on the chronological list of Dylan compositionss – and it causes me to pause and consider.  Indeed if I weren’t writing the reviews in chronological order I think I’d most certainly move on and do something else, in order to give myself more time, but thisis where we’ve got to, and I can’t back out now.

What causes me difficulty is that it would appear from a comment made on the site that I got the interpretation of Levy’s intention vis a vis Rita May quite wrong, and I fear I am going to get into deeper water now.

There are two problems.  One is Dylan’s own willingness to bend reality in songs, and the other is the Dylan-Levy collaboration, which I have suggested started out tentatively with Money Blues and then picked up as it went along and was clearly in full swing by the time Hurricane came along.

From what I have read in various commentaries, after Joey, there was a determination to continue with the notion of songs in the “outlaw” mode of writing.   But once again the criticism of the accuracy of Dylan’s outlaw which surfaced with “Only a pawn” and continued through to “Joey” is seen again here.  And again I take it that Jacques Levy wrote the lyrics, and Dylan provided the music, so it is Levy who takes the blame (if we feel that there is blame to be handed out) for not being accurate in a historical sense.

But, a large part of me says, this doesn’t matter at all.  If I look at a picture by any great artist of any person I don’t look and say, “he hasn’t got the nose right” – I take it to be an artistic interpretation of the individual.  Likewise if I look at Picasso’s Guernica I don’t say “what are those horns doing up there top left?” and “what is that light bulb doing there”.  I see it as a staggering symbolic representation of an appalling historic act of barbarism.  I see it as painting and protest; I don’t expect it to be “true”.

So is there a difference between painting as protest and songwriting as protest?  Does a song like Hurricane have to be accurate in a way that Guernica doesn’t, because the arts are of their essence difference?

The answer is, I don’t think so although I am still struggling to write my essay on the notion of protest music, because I can’t get definitions that fit all I want to fit into it.

So all I can do is start with the music – and in terms of performance the version on the album really is something extraordinary; the power, the drive, the energy – Dylan’s vocalisations combined with the most amazing improvised violin counterpart throughout, makes for an utterly remarkable performance.

That the song didn’t translate so well into live concerts is well attested – indeed it stayed on the repertoire for just three months, garnering 33 performances, and then it was dropped totally.

But aside from the sheer drive and energy of the song, we are also transported along by the uncertainty of where we are – a feeling that is perfect for the lyrics.

We start with a minor (Am) and shift to F – back and forth back and forth for four lines of power, drive and uncertainty, until we get to the chorus where are rocking instead from C to F major before chords tumble over each other as we have the last line of the chorus, “Put in a prison cell but one time he could have been the champion of the world”.

But my question remains: as for what Levy and Dylan wrote (and as I say I am taking it that Levy wrote the lyrics) does it matter that there might be variations from the truth therein?  I am not going through these “variations” simply because people who know about such things have done it in much greater depth – from Clinton Heylin through to the web site “Hurricane Carter, the other side of the story” which has the headline “Dylan’s distortion of the facts in Hurricane is appalling, irresponsible and wrong.”

So, for a moment, let’s leave aside the argument about accuracy, and instead ponder the issue from the other side, not starting with the event portrayed, but with the artist.  A songwriter writes songs about imginary, half imaginary and real situations.  But in such an art form the real life situation is distorted, changed, altered.  Does it stop being art and becomes simply a lie?

We are quite clear in the song that it is about Rubin Hurricane Carter, and we know that all his life Dylan has been a great boxing fan.  Indeed we recently published on the “Untold Dylan” Facebook group a picture of Dylan with Mohammed Ali.   We know Dylan often takes the side of the oppressed and the underdog, so it is not surprising that Dylan takes the view that there was racism in the legal case which led to a false trial and ultimately a false conviction.

We also know Dylan met Rubin Carter in Rahway State Prison in Woodbridge Township, New Jersey which reveals a considerable closeness to the issue – it wasn’t just something that he picked up on, along the way and then dropped.  And we know about the fund raising concerts.

But what happened?  Why are the details open to debate?

I think the answer is found in a Heylin quote of Levy as saying that,”I think the first step was putting the song in a total storytelling mode, I don’t remember whose idea it was to do that. But really, the beginning of the song is like stage directions, like what you would read in a script: ‘Pistol shots ring out in a barroom night…. Here comes the story of the Hurricane.’ Boom! Titles. You know, Bob loves movies, and he can write these movies that take place in eight to ten minutes, yet seem as full or fuller than regular movies”.

Now the reality is, all of us are used to films of life stories being inaccurate – they have to be in order to become watchable movies, because the reduction of the events of maybe 30, 50 or even 70 years to two hours means a lot is cut.  Indeed when I watched the movie of Stephen Hawking’s life last year I found myself completely swept along by the tale, absorbing it, enjoying it, while also knowing perfectly well (because I’ve read a lot about Hawking and his work) that this was a massive contraction of all sorts of issues, and in some ways almost a parody of his work.

So here’s my next thought: we accept the absolute contraction of people’s lives when a film is made about them, so what is wrong with this in the case of a song?  The argument could be that a song is far too short a medium to reflect something as complex as this… but surely it is no more contracted than putting a whole life into two hours?

The song itself was not without problems particularly in reference to Bello and Bradley and a second version had to be recorded some months later to avoid possible law suits.  There was still one legal case however, but Dylan and co won that.   

Now let me try another approach.  The song suggests that Hurricane could have been the champion of the world, whereas apparently Rubin Carter was ranked ninth in the world at the time of the arrest.  Do we allow that variation without comment?

Indeed do we call it “poetic licence” (which the Oxford Dictionaries define as The freedom to depart from the facts of a matter or from the conventional rules of language when speaking or writing in order to create an effect)?   It is a phrase that has been with us since the 18th century, so we’ve had plenty of time to get used to the idea – and indeed I think as a culture we are totally used to and accepting of the concept – except when it doesn’t suit us to be.

Thus if an artist in any form uses poetic licence to change a description of reality in a way we don’t like – we get angry and protest.  If he/she does it in a way that makes a point we approve of, we are happy.  

Ultimately poetic licence can go too far however and the resultant artwork becomes a parody of the facts of the case – but even here what we believe distorts our view.   Indeed as Picasso said in 1948, in Russia they hated his work and loved his politics, whereas in the US the situation was reversed. Picasso commented “I’m hated everywhere. I like it that way.”  Our view of the world and our prejudice determines everything – especially how we see art.

The comment takes me back to Abraham Lincoln’s comment “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Which of course Dylan turned into..

Half the people can be part right all of the time,
And some of the people can be all right part of the time,
But all the people can’t be all right all of the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
“I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”
I said that.

Which of course is saying not just my dream, but my vision, my view of reality…  You can tell how important I think that phrase is because it is has been on the home page of this site for quite a few years now.

Such comments develop a similar theme – which come down to the fact that you can put your ideas across with artistic licence if you want to, and if you want to share that vision with me, that’s great.  And in the end that is what poets and artists do.

Eventually it was ruled in 1985 that Carter had not received a fair trial and Carter was released.  In 1988 the prosecution said they would not seek another trial and the case came to an end.    But the arguments went on, with those against the version portrayed in Hurricane saying there is no mention of the boxer’s criminal past and a reputation for a violent temper continued their arguments.   But then this is art – art doesn’t have to be accurate.  If you write a love poem you mention the beauty, not the clicky knee.  If you write a defence, you emphasize everything in the defendant’s favour.  To move away from all this would move us away from all poetry, and all art.

But there is one more thing that I want to mention about this song.  What we do get in this work is something that we don’t see too often in Dylan – an onrushing never stopping full speed story line, from the opening

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall

onwards to

Three bodies lyin’ there does Patty see
And another man named Bello, movin’ around mysteriously

Meanwhile, far away in another part of town
Rubin Carter and a couple of friends are drivin’ around

What I think I feel, as I try to step back from a set of lyrics I know by heart is just how this is all storyline, and no reflection…

He said, “I saw two men runnin’ out, they looked like middleweights
They jumped into a white car with out-of-state plates”

And every line adds more to the tale

Four in the morning and they haul Rubin in
Take him to the hospital and they bring him upstairs
The wounded man looks up through his one dyin’ eye
Says, “What you bring him in here for? He ain’t the guy!”

In fact some of the terminology is straight out of a novel

Four months later, the ghettos are in flame
Rubin’s in South America, fightin’ for his name

And so it continues to the ultimate protest about the innocent suffering

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell

It is a phenomenally hard thing to pull off – to keep the format of the song, but having it streaming forwards with the storyline coherent and driving.

In the end I do think poetic licence allows the artist to emphasise one approach against another without setting out the evidence, and without any attempt to consider opposing views.  My view, for what it is worth, is that people who argue to the contrary, fail to understand the nature of poetry.

As Dylan Thomas said, “A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”   And as Plato said in the Republic, ” We are, at all events, aware that such poetry mustn’t be taken seriously as a serious thing laying hold of truth…”

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

By Tony Attwood

There has been a continuing commentary that this Dylan/Levy composition was based on the song “Bertha Lou” (written by Johnny and Dorsey Burnette in 1957) and indeed the structure and style are identical.  But to be fair, the song is nothing more than a fast 12 bar blues with a middle 8 that modulates – something that by the time Rita May was written had been done many times before, not just by the Dorsey brothers.   

Yes there is a direct bit of copying going on  – it comes more from the use of the two word title being a girl’s name and being repeated.  So we get a common fast blues structure, but it is that opening that sticks in the mind and gives each song its feel.

Rita May, Rita May

Bertha Lou, Bertha Lou

Apparently the song was written in the same week by Levy and Dylan as they wrote Joey, and being so utterly different in style and in the nature of the lyrics it might well have been an antidote to all the work on Joey.   If we take it that Levy wrote the lyrics (which probably only took about five minutes) we can take it that Dylan spent the same amount of time simply adapting a commonplace 12 bar variant as the music.

But it was thought to be worthy enough to be issued as the B-side of Stuck inside of mobile and be put on the “Masterpieces” album – although describing this as a “masterpiece” is, I think, a bit over the top.

The few commentaries that have been written on Dylan’s song dismiss Rita Mae Brown (“Mae” is, I believe the correct spelling of Dr Brown’s name) as something of a wild and wacky feminist, but this is wholly unjust from what I can see and from what I have read – a typical bit of mindless newspaper put down, then endlessly repeated through cut and pasting, and so the story gets passed on from one review to another.

For the record Dr Brown (she actually has two doctorates, one in literature and one in political sciences), was an activist in the civil rights movements, and a strong supporter of the anti-war movement and was expelled from her first university for her prominent work in rejecting segregation, and as a result, when she finally was able to return to her studies (in the more liberal New York) she was penniless and homeless.

She is known for being a founder member of The Furies Collective, the lesbian feminist newspaper that once claimed that heterosexuality was the root of oppression and that indeed was part of her work – but only part, and to make that the only thing one says about her work is rather like watching “Comedy of Errors,” and then saying that all Shakespeare wrote was comedies with clever lines but dumb plots.  To label her entirely for a couple of articles is unreasonable, and unworthy of Levy and Dylan.

In an interview in Time, she said, “I don’t believe in straight or gay. I really don’t. I think we’re all degrees of bisexual. There may be a few people on the extreme if it’s a bell curve, who really truly are gay or really truly are straight. But because nobody had ever said these things and used their real name, I suddenly became the only lesbian in America.”

I am not sure that the view is at all correct, but when our response to other people’s analyses of human experience is to jeer and knock off a quick song, then we do everyone a disservice.

This is, I fear, not the only time Dylan did this.  Gypsy Lou does the same sort of thing, but that song can be excused as it was a much earlier work.

Although Rubyfruit Jungle is the one book of Rita Mae Brown that is always mentioned, she has published 14 novels and a long series of murder mysteries and written ten screenplays and four works of non-fiction.   (She is of the same generation as Dylan, and still very much alive).  Indeed in 1982 Dr Brown was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Variety or Music Program for I Love Liberty.   

What is so sad, to my mind, about Levy’s attack on Rita Mae Brown in the song is that if you look at some of the lines from her work you might (if your brain works like mine) see within them some interesting insights.  Here’s a few snippets…

• The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.
• One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
• Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.
• Good judgement comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgement.
• About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won’t like you at all.
• I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.

OK, they are not necessarily profound, but I find some real truths within those simple lines.  And because I have a poor memory in some respects I love “One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.”

So quite why Levy wanted to parody a woman whom we might expect Dylan to recognise as being on the same political side as him, I don’t know, because I don’t know enough about Levy, but neither this nor “Joey” draw me to the man and I am starting to wonder if he didn’t have a more negative impact on Dylan than I’ve thought before.

Perhaps it is also interesting that the best version of the song going is a bouncy version of the song by another man who seems on occasion to have unpleasant ideas about how to treat other people: Jerry Lee Lewis (see below).

But Dylan was clearly taken with the song in that they recorded no less than 11 takes of it before deciding to leave it off the album altogether.   And yet I can’t quite see why they bothered with it so much.  I mean, if you look back to everything Dylan had written up to this point, why would he get so worked up about lyrics that read…

Rita May, Rita May
You got your body in the way
You’re so damn nonchalant
But it’s your mind that I want
You got me huffin’ and a-puffin’
Next to you I feel like nothin’
Rita May

Rita May, Rita May
How’d you ever get that way?
When do you ever see the light?
Don’t you ever feel a fright?
You got me burnin’ and I’m turnin’
But I know I must be learnin’
Rita May

For me, these early collaborative songs with Levy were not Dylan’s finest moments.  For that we have to wait for Isis, and I am unsure how much of that Levy wrote.  Creating “Joey” as a memorable outlaw who should be considered positively in one song, and then laughing at a civil rights activist who put everything on the line in protest against segregation and the dominance of males in society, and indeed laughing at her because of her sexual beliefs, really doesn’t reveal Dylan in his best light.  That Levy wrote the lyrics is a partial excuse, but not a total one, in my opinion.  Of course you may well differ in your view.

Dylan played the song once in public, on 3 May 1976 and after that left it alone.   Here’s the Jerry Lee Lewis version.

And if you want to hear the song that is so closely related to it, Bertha Lou, here it is.  But as I said, there are so many other songs in the 12 bar variation mode that picking this one as the source really just come down to the use of the name twice as the title.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3600 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

The index to all 602 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

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

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, or indeed have an idea for a series of articles that the regular writers might want to have a go at, please do drop a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article to Tony@schools.co.uk

By Tony Attwood

I start with trepidation, because when I have touched on quintessentially American issues, as for example with “George Jackson” no matter how much and how often I say, “I’m a British guy and thus I can’t get all the nuances and details of American situations, histories, people, and events, but this is how it strikes me…” I get back some comments telling me I haven’t got a clue what I am talking about and should shut up.

But there is a further point here, not just with George Jackson and Joey but also with “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and indeed Hurricane, and that is that these records are released in the UK, and of course across the world, so we have to make sense of them too, if we are to enjoy and understand the music.

They don’t come with notes from Dylan, so we’re all there enjoying or not enjoying the music, and also wondering about the storyline, the background.   It’s not really our fault we come from a different cultural background.

Thus my commentaries on the more contentious songs represent one regular guy from outside the US trying to make sense of what is going on in the music, but without the benefit of being part of the world Dylan writes about.

That is not to say that Dylan should be spelling things out just for us non-Americans, that would be ludicrous.  I think I am just reflecting the battle a lot of people go through in trying to understand the what and the why, as well as getting the overall feel of the music.  In a sense these little reviews of mine are my journey in doing that.  Trying to make sense of the music of a guy who by a large could be from another planet.

Of course when it comes to “Joey” we have additional issues.  Not just the music and the lyrics, not just of who Joey Gallo was and what he did, but also of Lester Bangs and his article “Dylan Dallies with Mafia Chic” subheaded, “Joey Gallo was no hero”.   It is an important piece of musical criticism in my view, which asks the question as to whether Dylan really cares about these people he writes about or is he using these people to ensure his own relevance?  Of course I have no idea what the motivation was, but by this stage in 1975 we most certainly were at the stage of Jacques Levy writing the lyrics and Dylan the music.  Indeed I have seen quotes from Dylan saying definitively that Levy wrote all the words.

Of course Dylan is implicated because he chose to record this song and put it on his album, and indeed in so doing he took off one of my favourites, Abandoned Love.  But it seems his love of the outlaw motif overwhelmed his need to check the accuracy of the story he was told.

The case made in the article (and it is a masterpiece of rock analysis, whether one agrees with any of it or not) is that Dylan has always been interested in his own image, and has created stories and myths to enhance the image of Dylan.  For what it is worth my own view is that this is probably true, BUT, I also follow the psychological theory that suggests that we all do this.  We none of us have access to all our past memories, so somehow our brains pick and choose the memories we consider to be the points that define who and what we are.

However it is quite possible to make this a conscious process, and to recognise that our perceptions of our past (and thus our definitions of who and what we are) are based on incomplete data.  Thus there is nothing wrong with highlighting key positive moments within our definition of what we are.  People who do this, so the theory (the name of which I now totally forget) says, are happier people.   People who don’t actively redefine their memories tend to be more miserable.

So if Dylan does this, then he is just emphasising a trait that many people do subconsciously and a smaller number do consciously.

Bangs’ article gives us a run down (accurate or not I don’t know) of mafia development and claims that Dylan wove his song out of the mythology.   But if that were all it was, it would be just another Bangs article – well written, well argued, and having a bash at a well established artist, piece of music or point of view.  But it is the end of the article – the final column in the Village Voice version which takes us somewhere else.

Bangs had a phone call or meeting (I think it was the former) with Levy and asked him about the writing of the song.   Levy said that he suggested the song to Dylan, and Dylan was excited about the idea, emphasising the point that Dylan was always interested in outlaws, citing the JWH album by way of example.  Levy put forward a strong defence of the Gallo family saying, “I think calling Joey [a hoodlum] is labelling someone unfairly, and he wasn’t a psychopath either.  He was just trying to build something to help his people and family, and I don’t mean in a Mafia sense.”  His view is he and Dylan worked on the song together.

It goes on to say that Joey was the victim of social circumstance, and that it was never proven that the Gallo family killed anyone.  When Bangs argued that Joey claimed to have killed Anastasia, Levy argues back that this was just his bragging style.

So, we have Dylan’s view that Levy wrote the words, and Levy’s view that they knocked around the ideas together.  Either way it seems that as Bangs says, Dylan didn’t do his homework, but then poets aren’t expected to do homework.   Which is probably why Plato banned poets from the Republic, now I come to think of it.

Bangs article is, as I suggest, really worth reading in depth.  Unfortunately what most people know about Bangs and this song is his comment in Creem, “One of the most mindlessly amoral pieces of repellently romanticist bullshit ever recorded.”  Heylin by and large has the same doubts, but being a lesser writer reduces it all to one sentence, “Gallo was just plain nuts.”

Heylin reports on Dylan discussing the choice of song with Larry Sloman (author of On the Road with Bob Dylan) three months before the release, with Dylan saying “I never considered him a gangster.  I always thought of him as some kind of hero… An underdog fighting against the elements.”

Piecing the bits together it does seem as if one way or another Dylan felt he had (in Heylin’s words) “an outlaw ballad as epic as the medieval Robin Hood ballads.”  And of course it is a theme Dylan has picked up on.

The problem is that none of us knows just how moral or immoral Robin Hood was (if there ever was a man whose activities served as the basis for the legend), given that he first turned up in Piers Plowman in the 14th century, and has been modified in legend ever since.

The big difference is that I am not too sure that many people other than Dylan have chosen to defend Joey Gallo, while Robin Hood has evolved into the absolute romantic English hero.  The county of Nottinghamshire (which by chance I visited last night) has (or certainly used to have) on its borders the sign “Robin Hood Country.”  (The traffic was heavy last night so I didn’t notice if those signs are still there as you enter the county). Nottingham Castle does Robin Hood tours, you can spend the day in Sherwood Forest and see the giant oak that (allegedly) the Merry Men met under etc etc etc.  I guess most of us who live nearby have done it a few times.

But Joey Gallo’s image is nothing like this.  The contentiousness of Robin Hood is simply that we have no idea who he was, or whether he was just a symbolic representation of a man who stood up for the poor.

Back with Dylan, we also have to take into account where he was in his writing thus far in the year…

• Money Blues
• One More Cup of Coffee
• Golden Loom
• Oh Sister
• Abandoned Love
• Isis

“Joey” doesn’t seem a natural progression from any of that, which makes it seem most likely that Levy did have a major, if not total involvement in the theme and the lyrics.

Of course not everyone has been critical.   The Allmusic review of the song calls it, “One of the finest songs on Desire” and notes that regardless of the questionable character the song is about, “it’s a beautiful creation. Dylan sings many of the verses, especially One day they blew him down in a clam bar in New York... with heartbreaking skill and timing, and is very persuasive in his evocation of Gallo’s life, whom he sees as a decent, kind man, a “king of the streets” and a man with morals (“But Joey stepped up, and he raised his hand/Said ‘We’re not those kind of men’…)

It then goes further and calls this “Arguably one of Dylan’s finest songs of the 1970s,”…

Rolling Stone however took a different line, arguing that, “When Bob Dylan sings about historical figures, he often gets a lot wrong. “Hurricane” is riddled with errors, and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is almost worse. “Joey” has some issues too, but it’s mainly objectionable for the simple fact that it glorifies a vicious mobster. Judging solely by the song, one would think he was a saint.  It does this across 11 minutes, and is ultimately interminable.”

Between 1987-2012 Dylan played the song at concerts 87 times, mostly, according to Heylin, forgetting the words along the way, including apparently in Brixton in late March 1995, “the night after they buried East End hoodlum Ronnie Kray.”   At least I think most people in the UK who consider such matters have a less forgiving vision of the Kray Twins than we get from Dylan’s vision of Joey.

Perhaps my problem with the song, in all the years before I picked up on who Joey was (and it really wasn’t that easy to get that information in England in the days before the internet unless a magazine like New Musical Express delved into it, and I can’t remember it doing so) was musical.  It just doesn’t have enough musical or fascinating or exhilarating interest for me (and this is of course a very personal view) to carry the length.

There is a slight interest gained from the fact that the song is in G but starts on the chord of C, however this is hardly unknown, and C, D, C, G as an opening chord sequence is hardly revolutionary.   Likewise ending the verse on A minor is intriguing, and carries us forwards, but then, after hearing it the first few times, we just know it is coming.

The same can be said of the end of the chorus.  Having used the classically correct chords for a song in G all the way through, Dylan throws in the chord of F under “What made them”.  Another nice twist, but he’s done it before.

One review from the Vinyl District had this interesting comment:

Had Dylan celebrated Gallo as a fascinating figure while honestly acknowledging he was a pathological killer, I’d have no trouble with “Joey.” Instead Dylan chose to transform Gallo into a kind of Mafioso saint, which is why “Joey” fails as art (despite the fact that its melody is really kinda catchy) and is totally dishonest at heart. 

And there is a part of me that is with that, except I don’t find the melody “kinda catchy”.

Here’s one other thing I found:  In a readers’ poll conducted by Mojo magazine, “Joey” was rated the 74th most popular Bob Dylan song of all time.  In a Rolling Stone survey of the 10 worst Dylan songs of all times, “Joey” got listed along with “If Dogs Run Free” and “Wiggle Wiggle”.

So…

There was talk they killed their rivals, but the truth was far from that
No one ever knew for sure where they were really at
When they tried to strangle Larry, Joey almost hit the roof
He went out that night to seek revenge, thinking he was bulletproof

The war broke out at the break of dawn, it emptied out the streets
Joey and his brothers suffered terrible defeats
Till they ventured out behind the lines and took five prisoners
They stashed them away in a basement, called them amateurs

The hostages were trembling when they heard a man exclaim
“Let’s blow this place to kingdom come, let Con Edison take the blame”
But Joey stepped up, he raised his hand, said, “We’re not those kind of men
It’s peace and quiet that we need to go back to work again”

Well, maybe.  Maybe not.  I’m an English guy, writing this looking out across the Northamptonshire countryside.   And I rarely believe what I read in the papers.

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

By Tony Attwood

Let me say from the start, I utterly love this song and always have, and that makes it harder to give anything remotely like a balanced review.  But I shall try.

According to Heylin Abandoned Love was the last song Dylan wrote before meeting up with Jacques Levy, which is odd, because when we look at the songs of the year in chronological order of writing it was clearly written at this point …

• Money Blues
• One More Cup of Coffee
• Golden Loom
• Oh Sister
• Abandoned Love
• Isis

If Heylin is right then Levy did not have any involvement in those earlier songs.  Yet BobDylan.com shows Oh Sister as “WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN AND JACQUES LEVY” and Romance in Durango the same – as with Money Blues.

My order of the songwriting is identical to Heylin at this point so what is going on?  It is hard to say although in writing the reviews of those earlier songs I have suggested that if Levy is there, his influence is minimal.  Certainly Abandoned Love was recorded on 31 July 1975, although not released until Biograph, and we know it was earlier performed at The Bitter End cafe on Bleecker Street in on 3 July 1975, during a show with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott which was recorded illicitly.

Joe Kivak has written a piece about the show which I would highly recommend.  He concludes

It was an incredible feeling to be in that small club listening to Bob Dylan perform a new song. We all felt we were watching history in the making. After he finished, he returned to his seat near the back of the club and quietly watched the rest of the show. Jack appeared so speechless and overwhelmed by Dylan’s performance that he started his next song with Bob’s buzzing guitar.

There is a recording of this remarkable performance on YouTube and I do recommend it…

All Music doesn’t review the song but attempts to cover every aspect of the song’s meaning by simply listing the song as “Yearning”, “Feeling blue”, “In love”, “Grief”, “Reflection” which makes my currently stalled Classification file on this site look almost sensible.

Indeed I would argue that if you play the piece, especially the studio recording, it is hard to hear it as any of these.  This song is bouncing along, and no matter what the words say it is hard to find it “yearning” or full of “grief” with such a musical background.  It seems to owe more to some Irish folk songs in which the subject is death, doom, destruction, poverty etc, and yet the whole piece sounds rather jolly.

The opening line of the studio version (not included in the live version) tells us exactly what is going on….

My heart is telling me I love you still…

OK, that is yearning, but then we are off both in terms of the lyrics.

I can hear the turning of the key
I’ve been deceived by the clown inside of me
I thought that he was righteous but he’s vain
Oh, something’s telling me I wear the ball and chain

Right, that is clear – he has been fooling himself, in love with the notion of being in love, upset by the parting, not by the loss, tied to the past by his own false visions.

My patron saint is a-fighting with a ghost
He’s always off somewhere when I need him most
The Spanish moon is rising on the hill
But my heart is a-tellin’ me I love you still

The head rules by the heart brings sorrow, as the saying goes, and he’s been brought sorrow although you wouldn’t know this by the singing of the song.  But the truth is he can’t even bear to see her.  Yet he needs to see her one more time before he finally bids farewell (although something tells us that even if he did, he’d still try and get back to her, rather than bid a tragic farewell.)

I come back to the town from the flaming moon
I see you in the streets, I begin to swoon
I love to see you dress before the mirror
Won’t you let me in your room one time ’fore I finally disappear?

Now he admits that most people can cover up what they are, but he’s as open as a child who cries when a toy is taken away…

Everybody’s wearing a disguise
To hide what they’ve got left behind their eyes
But me, I can’t cover what I am
Wherever the children go I’ll follow them

He pretends to be free, he talks about the beauty of freedom, but he doesn’t want to be free.  OK even if he can’t spend one evening with her watching her in the mirror, can’t he just have one last smile?

I march in the parade of liberty
But as long as I love you I’m not free
How long must I suffer such abuse
Won’t you let me see you smile before I turn you loose?

But no, this is pointless, he is resolved.  If I go searching I will never find what I want.   Searching for the long gone past is hopeless…

I’ve given up the game, I’ve got to leave
The pot of gold is only make-believe
The treasure can’t be found by men who search
Whose gods are dead and whose queens are in the church

Actually that last line above is quite something.  I’ve pondered it time and time again, and can find a dozen meanings, but which one Dylan intended I have no idea.  I guess I’d settle for the Zen way of looking at things – if you search for someone or something to worship you won’t find it in venerating dead heroes and keeping women on a pedestal.

But maybe not.

Now at this point we have a split.  Here is the version sung on the original live recording…

We sat in an empty theatre and we kissed
So send out for St John the Evangelist
All my friends are drunk they can be dismissed
My head tells me it’s time to make a change
But my heart is telling me I love you but you’re strange

So why St John?  Maybe no reason, or maybe because he was the only one of the apostles who was not killed by his faith (that’s always struck me as quite a thought – but then I look at these things from outside as I am not a Christian).  St John’s the survivor, unlike the singer’s mates are useless.  And we are back to the heart being ruled by the head and bringing sorrow?

And so he concludes that she should put on her disguise, come down from on high and let him feel and live with her beauty and love before he walks away forever.

So step lightly darling near the wall
Put on your heavy make up wear your shawl
Wont you descend from the throne where you sit
Let me feel your love one more time before I abandon it.

By the time of the studio recording we have

We sat in an empty theatre and we kissed
I asked you please to cross me off your list
My head tells me it’s time to make a change
But my heart is telling me I love ya but you’re strange

Here his is just saying, she has the power, please just cross him off the list of men she influences so he can walk away.  He needs her to stop maintaining that power.

One more time at midnight, near the wall
Take off your heavy makeup and your shawl
Won’t you descend from the throne, from where you sit?
Let me feel your love one more time before I abandon it

So there it is.  Utterly superb in my humble opinion.  It is perhaps when we recognise that the next song Dylan wrote was Isis that we appreciate the power he is vesting in this woman.  Indeed we could say Isis is almost here in this song, on the throne, ruling, controlling.  She’s next on stage.

Musically, what makes the song feel so unusual is the fact that we have two extra bars at the end of the last line of each verse.  Combined with the unexpected chord structure in which the lines don’t end on the expected chord.  That combined with the lyrics which are such fun and so unexpected, makes this a tremendous composition.

The song is in G and the chords run

• G   D   Em
• C   G   D
• Bm      C
• G   D  C   G

If there is another song like it in chord sequence I don’t know it.  Added to this we have the total change of timing with the last few words of the final line sung twice as fast as the rest.

The excellent Dylanchords.info web site prefaces the notation of the two versions as

Bitter End Version

The (Vastly Inferior) Biograph Version

The trouble is that excellent though Dylanchords is, they tend not to give explanations for the occasional comments like this, and the writer/s is/are such fine musicians I’d love to know more about what they think.

The Biograph version is also on line (at least at the moment)

I hope you enjoy it all half as much as I do.  If you do, you’ll have a happy day.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3600 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

The index to all 602 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

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

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, or indeed have an idea for a series of articles that the regular writers might want to have a go at, please do drop a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article to Tony@schools.co.uk

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

By Tony Attwood

If we leave Money Blues out of the equation for the moment (because everything about it is odd and difficult to equate with Jacques Levy) then Oh Sister is the first collaboration song between Levy and Bob Dylan, and yet once again we have problems.

We can hear the same sort of reflective moodiness that there is in One More Cup of Coffee written just before this song, and there seems to be little Levy in place here.

In addition, one wonders how on earth Levy would have become involved in the whole Joan Baez / Bob Dylan fighting through songs affair, which came along and which seems to incorporate

• Diamonds and Rust
• Oh Sister
• O Brother

I’m going to start with this interchange between the two because it seems to me not only of some considerable importance within the song, but also something of significance; after all what other folk / pop / rock musicians have had a duel through songs written to each other in such a public way.

Diamonds and Rust was written in 1974 and if you don’t know it or want to be reminded try this …

I’ve chosen this version because it was recorded soon after writing, and because it starts with the comment “by far the most talented crazy person I ever worked with” which appears to be a note to the effect that the song is about Dylan.

And it ends with this verse, which I really do think is a masterpiece within the folk pop genre…

Now you’re telling me you’re not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
Because I need some of that vagueness now
It’s all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly
And if you’re offering me diamonds and rust
I’ve already paid

Skip forwards to Oh, Sister written in the first half of 1975 – so not too long after – and we have Dylan singing it at the John Hammond concert in September before a specially invited audience, including Joan Baez.

Dylan introduced the song (which you can hear on the video below) with the line “I want to dedicate this to someone out there watching tonight I know, she knows who she is”

Here’s the video

The song ends

Oh, sister, when I come to knock on your door
Don’t turn away, you’ll create sorrow
Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow

Now that might be enough of an interchange for most people, but no, Baez came back with O Brother! on “Gulf Winds” the only album she created which was entirely written by herself.  She says in her autobiography, “And a voice to sing with” that for the most part the songs were written while on tour with the Rolling Thunder Revue with Bob Dylan.

The song is available here, but it is not a perfect recording.  Go and download the song to hear a proper version.

You’ve got eyes like Jesus
But you speak with a viper’s tongue
We were just sitting around on earth
Where the hell did you come from?
With your lady dressed in deerskin
And an amazing way about her
When are you going to realize
That you just can’t live without her?

Take it easy
Take it light
But take it

And just in case you are not convinced this is a repost to the earlier songs

Your lady gets her power
From the goddess and the stars
You get yours from the trees and the brooks
And a little from life on Mars
And I’ve known you for a good long while
And would you kindly tell me, mister
How in the name of the Father and the Son
Did I come to be your sister?

But this is not Baez being all nice and saying its all ok

You’ve done dirt to lifelong friends
With little or no excuses
Who endowed you with the crown
To hand out these abuses?
Your lady knows about these things
But they don’t put her under
Me, I know about them, too
And I react like thunder

I love this song, not just because it sounds good but because Baez gets into the meat of the fight between two artists in a way that rarely happens – and certainly never happens when a journalist toddles along and asks inane questions.  This is good, insightful stuff.

I know you are surrounded
By parasites and sycophants
When I come to see you
I dose up on coagulants
Because when you hurl that bowie knife
It’s going to be when my back is turned
Doing some little deed for you
And baby, will I get burned

I won’t go on and quote it all through to the end, but consider this as a reply to Dylan:

My love for you extends through life
And I don’t want to waste it
But honey, what you’ve been dishing out
You’d never want to taste it

This exchange and the seemingly endless exchange between fans on the website arguing about the meaning of Oh, Sister, are the two sides of understanding this song.   If 1000 people have written about the meaning of Dylan’s song, they have come up with 1000 different meanings, from incest, to a commentary on women in general, and of course a whole host of religious meanings (this is after all a Dylan song).

Dylan played the song in concert for a while (67 performances between October 1975 and July 1978) but then let it go, even though it got a good reception when played.

The copy of the lyrics supplied on the official Dylan web site has Father with the capital F, and His later, to suggest he is talking about God’s blessing on the relationship.

Oh, sister, am I not a brother to you
And one deserving of affection?
And is our purpose not the same on this earth
To love and follow His direction?

When we consider the direction of these lyrics, with the blessing of the Almighty on the relationship, and perhaps on their combined creative talents, the power of Baez’ reply is overwhelming.  For Dylan the truth is mystical…

We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
We died and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved

Baez however wanted nothing to do with that…

My love for you extends through life
And I don’t want to waste it
But honey, what you’ve been dishing out
You’d never want to taste it

Dylan’s taunt is that that he might not be there in the future – a sort of “you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone” taken up to a spiritual level…

Oh, sister, when I come to knock on your door
Don’t turn away, you’ll create sorrow
Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow

But if Baez knows anything she sure does know who she is.

The Rolling Stone review of the album suggested that “the bulk of the songs are nightmares, visions of a man on the run from something he can’t define, or else stories about the fear of having nowhere to turn (as in “Oh, Sister” and “One More Cup of Coffee”).”

But watching the performance of the song with Baez in the audience I don’t get the feel of that at all.

Instead I am, even at the end of a couple of days of studying the piece, very much with the commentator on line who said, “I can’t be sure, because, sadly, I wasn’t in the room with Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy when they wrote this song. But I have the distinct feeling that this is the one song on Desire where Levy’s contributions amounted to little more than exclaiming ‘Beautiful!'”

So do we have “a deceptively simple plea for human kindness from one person to another,” which is then rebuffed by those most cutting lines?

Well, yes, that is where I have ended up.

In this context

We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
We died and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved

doesn’t have any religious context, but rather reflects on the lives of creative artists who, in the endlessly demanding world of popular arts today, have to create more and more and more of a higher and higher quality, or else instantly get subjected to talentless critics writing a year’s worth of work off with a “he’s lost it” one line throwaway.

When it comes down to it, Dylan is saying, “hey lady we were ok” and she’s saying “no man, you were awful, don’t kid yourself.”

As for the music “Oh, sister” Dylan uses a musical trick he developed on the last two albums of using the classic chord structure of non-blues popular song (in this case G, B minor, C, G) but then in the middle 8 using the much more blues orientated F, C, G combination, ending with the powerful held “saved” on D.

It is powerful stuff, but the meaning remains in shadows.  Which is most certainly not the case with either of Baez’ songs to Dylan.  It is as if he is trying to excuse himself by wrapping the song up in religious or symbolic suggestion without very clear meaning.

And he might have got away with it, if it had not been for those two Baez songs either side.

What else is on the site?

We have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 3600 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

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

The index to all 602 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

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

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, or indeed have an idea for a series of articles that the regular writers might want to have a go at, please do drop a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article to Tony@schools.co.uk

And please do note our friends at  The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, plus links back to our reviews (which we do appreciate).

By Tony Attwood

The writing of songs in 1975 started with Money Blues (as we have seen, which now I come to look back, maybe didn’t have much input from Jacques Levy), followed by One More Cup of Coffee, and Golden Loom, which were not related to Levy’s input.  Indeed, looking at those three songs now, they increasingly seem to me to be a prelude to the Levy songs – a prelude that caused the Dylan/Levy songs to be written as they were.

Both Golden Loom and One More Cup have a vision of a life that is outside the norm, most certainly outside the hurly-burly of life.  Golden Loom, written after One More Cup developed the “beyond this world” feel of One More Cup, which as Dylan himself pointed out, is Romany orientated.

Dylan told Robert Shelton that he had been in France with David Oppenheim, when his host suggested they visit a local gypsy festival in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in Provence, France, on Dylan’s birthday where he came across a Gypsy King in declining old age, abandoned by most of his wives and children.

But as it turns out that is only part of the story, for in June 1975 Dylan then met Scarlet Rivera  “wandering in the streets of the Village” according to Heylin.  Rivera was unknown at the time although has since made a dozen or more albums.  Her violin playing certainly had a profound influence on the way the song developed.

The song develops its “gypsy” feel through using the harmonic minor (very much a western classical concept, and itself nothing to do with Romany music) in which Dylan uses the chords that emerge from the descending version of the scale (A minor, G, F, E).  It is not a Romany scale in the true sense (such as the Hungarian Gypsy Scale or the Phrygian dominant scale).

There are many commentaries which suggest that the song is related to Dylan’s break up with his ex-wife, particularly because during this year Dylan also wrote Sara.

This of course might be true, but really would someone who wrote

Sara, Sara
You must forgive me my unworthiness

would also write and include on the same album

But I don’t sense affection
No gratitude or love

about the same person.  Of course he might, but I think the case is not proved – at least not proven for me.

The lady in this song is beautiful but remote and distant, and very much not one who gives her emotions to another…

Your breath is sweet
Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky
Your back is straight, your hair is smooth
On the pillow where you lie
But I don’t sense affection
No gratitude or love
Your loyalty is not to me
But to the stars above

And so the singer is on his way to the valley, after something as prosaic as a cup of coffee.  Whether the valley below is Hades or whether it is simply a case of popping off down the hillside… well that’s for each individual listener to decide.

For me, you don’t leave the great love of your life, or the guru you’ve just found, by saying, “I’ll just have one more cup of coffee.”  Rather, you might do that, having had a jolly afternoon or evening and so then you say…

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee ’fore I go
To the valley below

The influence of the visit to the gypsy camp, as per the story of the old king, now surrounded by the remains of his family, comes through strongly in the second verse, emphasised all the way through by the violin playing.

Your daddy he’s an outlaw
And a wanderer by trade
He’ll teach you how to pick and choose
And how to throw the blade
He oversees his kingdom
So no stranger does intrude
His voice it trembles as he calls out
For another plate of food

The whole Romany notion of fortune telling, mystery and illiteracy is explored in the third verse, particularly with its last two lines…

But your heart is like an ocean
Mysterious and dark

She is thus the unknown, and unknowable, remote woman.  An interesting experience for an afternoon, not the love of his life.

Emmylou Harris who sings the vocals told this story about making the album, which gives us a very good insight into the way Dylan has always liked to make recordings…

“There was a fellow at Columbia that was a fan, who was like an executive producer, and I think Dylan told him ‘I need a girl singer.’ Don DeVito was his name and I got a call that Dylan wants you to sing, but that wasn’t true because he just wanted a girl singer. I mean we basically shook hands and started recording. I didn’t know the songs, the lyrics were in front of me, and the band would start playing and he would kind of poke me when he wanted me to jump in. Somehow I watched his mouth with one eye and the lyrics with the other. You couldn’t fix anything. What happened in a moment was on the record.”

There is also the story that the introduction of the bass part, which has of course become part of the essence of the song.  This came about because violinist Scarlet Rivera wasn’t ready.

The bassist, Rob Stoner told Mojo magazine in October 2012: “The beginning of ‘One More Cup of Coffee’… that wasn’t arranged for me to do a bass solo. Scarlet wasn’t ready. Bob starts strumming his guitar – nothing’s happening. Somebody better play something, so I start playin’ a bass solo. Basically the run-throughs became the first takes.”

The song was performed 175 performances times between 1975 to 2009 by Bob and his Band.  There is a version with Emmylou Harris on the internet here.   Rather oddly it has a pic of Joan Baez, but I’m sure she’s not on the recording.

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

By Tony Attwood

Update: we’ve found a recording that can be uploaded.  The Jacques Levy version seems to have gone from the internet but here is a tribute version.

1975 is the year Bob Dylan worked with Jacques Levy – so in coming to the first song that they wrote together it seems appropriate to say a few words about Levy.

Levy was born in New York 29 July 1935, died (of cancer) 30 September 2004 aged 69.

He studied for a doctorate in psychology from Michigan State University and later practised as a clinical psychologist, but always had an interest in the theatre and music.  In 1965 he directed Sam Shepherd’s play, Red Cross. Two years on he directed Jean-Claude van Italie’s America Hurrah.

Jacques Levy next came to fame as the director of  “Oh! Calcutta!” in 1969 (which ran until 1972), and the story goes that Roger McGuinn of the Byrds thought Levy could be a fine librettist for a project he was working on.  As a result they wrote Chestnut Mare, although the main project came to nothing.

So started the route to meeting and eventually working with Bob Dylan and seven tracks on Desire which were co-written by the two men.  It is also reported that in 1975, Levy stage-managed the Rolling Thunder Revue.

But his work with Dylan didn’t stop his theatrical work.  In 1983 he directed the musical comedy Doonesbury, and in 1988 he wrote the lyrics for the stage musical of the film Fame.  From 1993 he was English professor and director of theatre at New York’s Colgate University and during this time he also worked on Marat/Sade (1994), Bus Stop (1997) and Brecht On Brecht (2000).

In all Dylan and Levy are recorded as having written nine songs together listed (in alphabetical order) as

• Black Diamond Bay
• Catfish
• Hurricane
• Isis
• Joey
• Money Blues
• Mozambique
• Oh, sister
• Romance in Durango

The first to be written was Money Blues, which was recorded on 28 July 1975 in the second Desire session at the Columbia Recording Studios, New York.  It was the second song recorded on the day, and it was only run through once – a typical “warm up” song as the musicians get themselves together and the engineers start to get the balance and sound right.

According to Wikipedia’s “List of songs written by Bob Dylan” which has (as of May 2016) 522 songs listed, Money Blues is unreleased but with the “Lyrics printed in Lyrics: 1962–1985, under Desire.”

There is one recording I’ve found, by the band Chronicles – a Dylan tribute band.  You can see it here, but the video is somewhat odd with all the people passing in front.  In the end I just wanted to hear the music.  But maybe that is me.  What we don’t know is whether the band simply interpreted the music as a classic 12 bar, or whether they had some inside information as to how it sounds on that single unreleased take.

What I don’t get however is why two such able lyricists should get together and write this.  I can see why they might record it as a warm up, but to go on and bother to write the lyrics down… and assign them to the two songwriters, seems odd to me.

And in fact I’d say maybe this is not a Dylan/Levy composition at all, but a Dylan warm up piece.  But maybe Levy, having agreed that the two men could work together, just started to improvise some lyrics.  Maybe he sang them on that one recording – although that too seems odd.

Or was Dylan still having a swipe at Sara, especially in the first verse…

Sittin’ here thinkin’
Where does the money go
Sittin’ here thinkin’
Where does the money go
Well, I give it to my woman
She ain’t got it no more

After this it gets to sound like it is having fun at the expense of the blues format… the sort of thing you might find in a Broadway show about the blues…

Went out last night
Bought two eggs and a slice of ham
Went out last night
Bought two eggs and a slice of ham
Bill came to three dollars and ten cents
And I didn’t even get no jam

By verse three it’s all getting a bit ordinary, and very blues standard…

Man came around
Askin’ for the rent
Man came around
Askin’ for the rent
Well, I looked into the drawer
But the money’s all been spent

And quite honestly the next verse does not add too much to human understanding.

Well, well
Ain’t got no bank account
Well, well
Ain’t got no bank account
Went down to start one
But I didn’t have the right amount

Before it gets too silly for words.

Everything’s inflated
Like a tire on a car
Everything’s inflated
Like a tire on a car
Well, the man came and took my Chevy back
I’m glad I hid my old guitar

And then the sexual innuendo.  The song’s character is rather unpleasantly looking to become a pimp.

Come to me, mama
Ease my money crisis now
Come to me, mama
Ease my money crisis now
I need something to support me
And only you know how

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.

We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics.  If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

By Tony Attwood

“Buckets of Rain” was the last but one song to be written for Blood on the Tracks and appears last on the album.  In a constructional sense I am reminded to John Wesley Harding which ends with Down Along the Cove and I’ll be your Baby Tonight, two songs which really don’t have too much (if anything) to do with the rest of the album).  Here on Blood on the Tracks, we get a plaintive reflective love song, and a 12 bar blues.

But there is more, for Dylan does like to throw in something different at the end, and this song certainly is different from what has gone before.  Indeed Dylan treats it as different.  He once played it as an opener at a concert on November 18 1990 but that was that – it was different enough to leave alone otherwise.

But maybe he became fully aware that the song’s music comes pretty much directly from Bottle of Wine by Tom Paxton, a very well known song in folk circles which opens…

Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine
When you gonna let me get sober?
Let me alone, let me go home
Let me go back to start over

Ramblin’ around this dirty old town
Singin’ for nickels and dimes
Times getting tough, I ain’t got enough
To buy a little bottle of wine

It is indeed possible to write a whole piece without realising that the song is lifted from elsewhere.  It is only when someone plucks up the courage to tell you…

“Bottle of Wine” is today treated as a rather quaint song which everyone can join in, the irony of the folk club (generally) where everyone sings along being held in a pub being lost despite verses like

Pain in my head and bugs in my bed
Pants are so old that they shine
Out on the street tell the people I meet
“Won’tcha buy me a bottle of wine?”

being completely lost on those who engage in such activity.   It is desperate stuff made to sound jolly.

Dylan of course took the music elsewhere with a lighter shade of lyric, with lines like

Like your smile and your fingertips

and then wakes us up suddenly with

Everything about you is bringing me misery.

Indeed the first verse spells out the contrast very clearly…

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets comin’ out of my ears
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand
You got all the love
Honey baby, I can stand

So instead of the desperation of the alcoholic we have the man who sees the world passing by and accepts it, changing himself as each situation demands, and thus losing himself in the world around him.

I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear
If you want me
Honey baby, I’ll be here

But always we have this two way affair of delight and anguish

I like your smile
And your fingertips
Like the way that you move your lips
I like the cool way you look at me
Everything about you is bringing me misery

Quite what the red wagon and bike have to do with anything I am not sure but the ending is upbeat.

I like the way you love me strong and slow
I’m takin’ you with me
Honey baby, when I go

In a sense it is a summation of much that has gone before – the two sides of a love affair, the love, the despair, the ups and downs and ultimately as it is all over, the determination to pick oneself up again and move on.   This time, unlike the time he thought about missing the new woman when she left, he’s taking charge.  It is HIM, the singer, who is taking the woman when HE leaves.  He’s back on track.  It’s a summing up.  Time to move on.

“Life is sad, life is a bust, all you can do is do what you must,” isn’t much to say but it is something after all the turmoil.  After all, not everyone makes it through such a dark night.

There is that plaintive last line though, “can’t you tell” as if after all this he still can’t read people aright.  But that too is how it goes.  Nothing shakes your faith in people like a divorce.

Musically, the song is another one which is recorded with opening tuning – which means the guitar is retuned away from the normal tuning of the strings.  It gives a different flavour to the sound, and a chance once more to play with those odd chords that we have noted on the way through the album.

As I say, Dylan was left with just one song to write for the album, “Meet me in the morning” and it is interesting to see that he wrote the complex and long songs first, ending with the two simple pieces – a song based on “Bottle of Wine” – a simple piece of folk if ever there was one – and the other a standard 12 bar blues.

By the end of his writing surge in 1974, all the large complex work had gone.  He was tidying up the bits and pieces in his head, and wrote music to fit.

So with this song, musically the year was almost over, and with one more composition the whole album could be considered done and dusted.  All that was left was to select the order of tracks on the LP.

Index of all the songs on the site

Dylan’s opening lines: an index

How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.

By Tony Attwood

The first aim of this site – to review all the important Bob Dylan songs – remains the same, but I have just had a few days off that because as always new things keep popping up.

We first got diverted into the notion that seeing the songs in the chronological order they were written in will help understand Dylan’s development as a composer – and it most certainly has.  We’ve reached 1973 in the index, with every single song reviewed, and very shortly I will put up the index to 1974 and then fill in the review gaps.

Dylan songs in Chronological Order

Then we moved on to thinking Dylan’s best opening lines.  That index of first lines in order has approach 100, most particularly with Dearbhla’s help, and that is continuing to grow.

Dylan’s opening lines, an index

Along the way the idea of doing a Dylan anniversary index cropped up, and a little bit on that was done, but it was so massive a task I’ve put it on hold, although I can see how it should be done, and I have most of the data.  It just needs writing up.  This one is going to have to wait.

And then along came Dylan’s best lines that are not first lines.

We have put a few on the Untold Dylan Facebook group (just search for Untold Dylan on Facebook or else go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/

Incidentally, if you are interested, we’ve had a discussion on the influence of Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie on Dylan on the Facebook group too.  I do hope you can join us.

If you would like to help out on any of these projects please do write to me: TonyAttwoodofLondon@gmail.com

by Tony Attwood

OK in the great scheme of things 50 ain’t that many but even so, it is a great start.

Today we are debating whether it was Robert Johnson or Woody Guthrie who had the greatest influence on the early Dylan – and how we can tell.

Anyone can post, there is no moderator, so we can just go where the debate takes us.  And it really serves a purpose of allowing members to be able to direct the discussion to anywhere they want.

I do hope you will consider joining.   Just go to

https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/

or on Facebook you can try typing in Untold Dylan – although we have had reports that this does not always work.

Hope you find it interesting.

Tony

If you post a comment on this site (which of course you are always welcome to do) it will appear under one of the articles.   Which is fine, but then only those people who read that article will see your comment.

I want to try and broaden the discussion through setting up a Facebook open discussion group.

You can join it either by typing in “Untold Dylan” in Facebook or going to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/ 

It’s just an experiment – just as this site started out as an experiment.  But now it has grown.

And grown.

Tony

By Tony Attwood

Oxford Dictionaries has a Dirge as a lament for the dead – especially one that is part of a funeral.  But it can also be just a mournful song – although the dictionary also casts it as “a  song or piece of music that is considered too slow, miserable, or boring” giving the example “after his ten-minute dirge, the audience booed.”

I think we might take the middle definition – a mournful song.  Rob Fraboni the recording session’s engineer suggests that Dirge was written during the recording sessions, unlike the other songs on Planet Waves which Dylan composed beforehand.

There is also the suggestion that Lou Kemp’s girlfriend Martha had the temerity to say to Dylan, on hearing “Forever Young,”  “Are you getting mushy in your old age?”  The tape log apparently has the song titled as “Dirge for Martha” but it became “Dirge” by the time the album was put together.

Whether anyone would have the temerity to say such a thing to Dylan is interesting.  If I found myself around the same recording studio I think I’d be hiding in the corner shaking, in case he realised I was there and threw me out.  But these youngsters eh?

Anyway, as I understand it, Lou Kemp has been a friend of Dylan’s from the Duluth boyhood days, and Kemp has been on tour with Dylan.  It is also said elsewhere the Lou Kemp managed a number of Dylan tours in the 1970s, so maybe this all makes sense.

If so, Dirge is not written for or about any particular woman – it was just a riposte to a throwaway comment of a close friend’s girlfriend and was put in, perhaps, because the number of songs available for Planet Waves was limited.  They needed one more so Dylan took the joke and turned it into a song. As I have noted elsewhere, with earlier albums Dylan could often put songs in, take them out, to get the balance of the album right.  But here there was no surfeit of songs – so in it went.

Notably, Dirge is one of the songs that has appeared on a mainsteam album but never been performed in public.   The official BobDylan.com site lists something like 629 Dylan songs in its index, of which 287 have never been performed live, not even once.

So it is not alone in this regard – we can think of “Down the highway” from Freewheelin, “Don’t fall apart on me tonight” from Infidels, and “Dirt Road Blues” from Time out of Mind – and I’ve just looked up the index for “D”!

I like the explanation that Dylan wrote the piece just to show he could be bleak and morbid, and it fits with the fact that musically there are similarities between this piece and “This Wheels on Fire” which uses the musical approach to come up with a completely different type of songs.

But to stay with the words for a moment, it is impossible to think of anything more depressing and end-of-worldish than the opening

I hate myself for loving you and the weakness that it showed
You were just a painted face on a trip down to suicide road
The stage was set, the lights went out all around the old hotel
I hate myself for loving you and I’m glad the curtain fell.

In the second verse I am guessing (in my usual naive English way) that Lower Broadway is Downtown Nashville, the one-time home of the honkytonk bars… now “a renowned entertainment district for country music.”

I hate that foolish game we played and the need that was expressed
And the mercy that you showed to me, whoever would have guessed
I went out on Lower Broadway and I felt that place within
That hollow place where martyrs weep and angels play with sin.

But after this there is an other world remoteness about the lyrics, which have the feeling of fiction.  None the worse for that of course, it is a very fine piece of writing – but it is the writing Dylan can do very quickly – the description of the down and out and life gone wrong.   The way of writing he learned from all those years with the blues.

This is the World Gone Wrong once more both in general terms about the world in which he lives…

Heard your songs of freedom and man forever stripped
Acting out his folly while his back is being whipped
Like a slave in orbit he’s beaten ’til he’s tame
All for a moment’s glory and it’s a dirty, rotten shame.

His own desperation with the world around him, rather than a particular person is played out in these verses,

There are those who worship loneliness, I’m not one of them
In this age of fibreglass I’m searching for a gem
The crystal ball upon the wall hasn’t shown me nothing yet
I’ve paid the price of solitude but at least I’m out of debt.

And then the personal antagonism…

I can’t recall a useful thing you ever did for me
‘Cept pat me on the back one time when I was on my knees
We stared into each other’s eyes ’till one of us would break
No use to apologize, what difference would it make ?

And I think that the final verse with its Doom Machine tells us most certainly that this is not a personal piece.  Dylan doesn’t use phrases like that, which sound more 60s protest than 70s personal, unless he is talking of the world at large.

So sing your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine
The naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen
Lady Luck who shines on me, will tell you where I’m at
I hate myself for loving you but I should get over that.

It has for a long while bothered me that there is nowhere on this site for issues that fall outside the boundaries of the songs reviewed or the specific topics that have been brought up by friends of the site.

Of course if you feel there should be an article or series on a specific topic you can email me as always, but I wanted to see if there was any benefit in having a broader forum.

So I have created an Untold Dylan discussion group on Facebook.

At this moment I am the only member but I am hoping others will find it (just search for Untold Dylan) and maybe bring up issues that are on their minds vis a vis Dylan but which do not get mentioned within the confines of discussions on what is already on the site.

If you do find the group and want to encourage others to join, please do tell people, and write something.

Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

Unlike some of his full-on years in the 1960s, 1973 for Dylan was a year primarily of writing, and then recording the songs that became Planet Waves.   Tough Mama was written after On a Night Like This – a song that has the same sort of upbeat, here it is, take it or leave it, charge-along and have-some-fun, approach to music and life.

It was recorded on November 6, along with  “Hazel,” and “Something There Is About You.”   Three songs about women and their mystery, although Tough Mama seems more confused about what’s going on and where the singer wants to be, than the other songs.

At the time of my writing this in 2016 Dylan has played it 44 times on stage.   So it didn’t get totally lost, but it is not a song to which Dylan is dedicated.

Musically it is very cleverly constructed, mixing two different styles in a way that runs smoothly but surprises.

It is in D and uses the sorts of chords you would expect, such as B minor and A.   But then at “His working days are through” Dylan sounds like he is modulating to another key, but isn’t only to hit us with a chord of C major resolving to G.

My point is that most of the song uses the normal chords of pop which derive from folk music.  The repeat of Tough Mama at the end uses the flattened seventh, taking us into a different style of music – more R&B than pop/folk.

This is indeed the way Dylan was writing at the time – song after song tricks us with its musical construction on this album – that, and the sound of the Band, are hallmarks of the style at this moment.

And what of the structure?  It is five straight verses.   No middle 8 to break it up, just five sung verses plus the instrumental verse.  Are they all about the same woman – the tough mama, dark beauty, sweet goddess, and silver angel?  Or is it all just a build up to the last verse where the opening changes to “I’m crestfallen” but returns at the very end to “Sweet Goddess.”

If I had to take a bet I’d say it’s a farewell song, the farewell coming completely in the fourth verse.  He’s addressed the woman in every way, and now marries her

Silver angel
With the badge of the lonesome road written on your sleeve
I’d be grateful if this golden ring you would receive

But then she goes away and nothing makes sense any more.

I’m crestfallen
The world of illusion is at my door

So he’s not going to perform to requirement, everything that held him in one place is gone – eternity stretches in front of him.   He’s had enough.  He’s not going to play any of his songs to the people who try and buy a piece of him.

I ain’t a-haulin’ any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore
The prison walls are crumbling, there is no end in sight

But what to do?   Everyone knows him, but he doesn’t want to do music any more

I’ve gained some recognition but I lost my appetite

But hey, here’s another woman – let’s just skip town and become anonymous.

Sweet beauty
Meet me at the border late tonight.

I’m sure that isn’t exactly right, because I think this is a song of Dylan’s in which the words come out without a necessary order and give us snapshots of the same situation from different perspectives without Dylan wanting to put all the lyrics into a single focus.  It is as much like the same situation seen from five different points of the compass as anything else.

There is no point on trying to work out exactly who “Sister” is and who the “steel driving crew” are or symbolically represent.  They are just symbols of a life gone by.

But we should not lose sight of the joyous, rebellious, challenging way Dylan sings the repeat of the first line in the penultimate line of each verse.  He’s punching the air with his fist – this is the sound of relief and release.

In a real sense the people sung about are shadows as the singer moves from place to place, moment to moment.  Who knows if they are real, invented, or memories?  And does it matter?  Not really.  He is just moving on.

One web site I read in preparing this little review suggested that “If you want to take things to more of an extreme, one might suggest that “Tough Mama” is the prologue to the epic that is “Isis”, where the narrator offers a golden ring and states that it’s his duty to take her to “the field where the flowers bloom” – that sounds like a meadow to me.”

I’m not sure on that one, I’m still hearing Tangled up in Blue, because in this song everything truly is tangled up – including all the different women, or all the different aspects of the same woman.

But I do take the point that the same reviewer made in saying. “Of course, the stuff of myth is one thing, but Dylan’s real life was already beginning to intrude on his songwriting, and it’s pretty tempting to read into a song like this and attempt to pick out elements that have to do with what was going on with Bob at this time in his life.

“Is he the Lone Wolf that “went out drinking – but that was over pretty fast”? (After all, once Bob hit the road again after his divorce, especially during both RTRs, the drinking would return with a vengeance.) What exactly does Dylan mean when he says he “stood alone upon the ridge, and all [he] did was watch”? Is he singing about himself when he says “I gained some recognition, but I lost my appetite” (surely a reference to his wilderness years)?”

Good questions all round.  Maybe someone has the answers.

All the songs reviewed on this site

The songs in chronological order

Articles about aspects of Dylan’s work