Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

The Edlis Cafe  Facebook group introduces “If I Was a King” from Disc 18 of “Cutting Edge” thus…

The true test of a Dylanista is to transcribe all the words to If I Was A King on Disc 18 of Cutting Edge.

Can you?

And no I can’t.  Mind you my attempts to transcribe several other songs on this site have met with a fair amount of criticism (I’d say it is because I’m English, not American, they would have it that I can’t listen straight), and this song is just impossible to decode with certainty, although I know that one Dutch singer has issued a version of the song, so he’s obviously had a go.

But I can tell you a bit about the music – and give something of an insight into where the indistinct words are coming from.

The essence of the music comes from Absolutely Sweet Marie although obviously at a much slower tempo, and without any reference to the middle 8 that so particularly distinguishes Sweet Marie with its extraordinary change of key.

Now we know that Sweet Marie was recorded on 7 March 1966, in a single session.  The song, according to Heylin, was pretty much written when Dylan got to the studio and had just a few odds and ends in the lyrics to move around.  Heylin also tells us that the middle 8 (which as I pointed out in my review – see the link above – was of particular importance in the song) was added during the session.

Moving on to the North British Station Hotel, Glasgow, (which Heylin demotes to “a Glasgow hotel room) he tells us of “What kind of friend is this”, “I can’t leave her behind”, and “On a rainy afternoon” all being recorded but has not a single word to say anywhere on “If I was a king”.

But he does tell us that it was second cameraman in Pennebaker’s film unit along with film editor Howard Alk that got the recordings of Dylan and Robbie Robertson working on three “song ideas” (Helin’s italics – I am not sure why).

Heylin suggests some have said “What kind of friend is this” was possibly based on “What kind of man is this” by Koko Taylor.  This song was transcribed and copyrighted in 1978 – as were the other two Heylin mentions.  He notes that Dylan slides “in and out of coherence” in all three songs, but also says of the latter two songs, “Copywriting them as two separate songs is a slight swindle.  They are two streams drawn from the same river, as a more complete tape of the session… makes clear.”

Clearly “If I was a king” fits into this scenario – the lyrics being invented, mumbled, changed as we go along, but it wasn’t copyrighted, which suggests that maybe Dylan was remembering an old folk song – one might thing, an old Scottish folk song since that is where he was.

There are many folk songs from the British Isles that use the theme, for example, the Magpie’s Nest from Norfolk in East Anglia,

For if I was a king I would make you a queen,
I would roll you in my arms where the meadows they are green;
I would roll you in my heart’s content and I’d lay you down to rest
Long side my Irish colleen in the magpie’s nest.

This also turns up in Ireland as “The Magpie’s Nest” and has been often used by blues singers.  Blind Willie McTell for example sang,

“I once loved a woman better ‘ere than I ever seen.
Treated me like I was king an’ she was a doggone queen.”

It also turns up in “The Bonny Brier Bush” re-written by Robert Burns – and since Dylan was sitting in a hotel in the country where Burns is the national poet, and symbol of the nation’s identity, maybe that turned his mind to the subject.

But the fact that it has so many musical elements of Sweet Marie in it, and the fact that that Sweet Marie was recorded on 7 March 1966, two months before the Glasgow hotel sessions, suggests either:

a) Dylan had indeed taken part of Sweet Marie from the “If I was a king” ballad in the first place and was just going back to it now that he was in Scotland, or

b) Having written Sweet Marie he was just having a bit of fun seeing where else it could go or

c) He was subconsciously drawing on past musical phrases he had composed and half remembered folk songs.

This last may seem a bit far fetched, but I think virtually every composer will admit to having had moments in which he feels “wow – this is going to be a great piece” only to find (or have it pointed out) a little later that it is “rather like that song you did last year…”

When writing a song, the song gets deeply inside your head, it becomes part of you, it is you, but then as you write other songs it becomes harder and harder to know if that is just an idea or an actual song you’ve already done.

I can’t tell you which of the three options is true, nor why Heylin failed to mention the song in Revolution in the Air when he has spent so long and been so assiduous in tracking down each and every song.  He knows about the session, indeed he spends three pages on it, and yet…

Dylan’s round of song writing in March 1966 was frenetic and included (in as close to order of composition as I can place it)

• Absolutely Sweet Marie
• Just like a woman
• Pledging my time
• Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine
• Temporary Like Achilles
• Rainy Day Women
• Obviously Five Believers
• I want you

plus the songs heard in May in the Scottish hotel.

It was an extraordinary round of writing – not least because of the way in which Dylan was seeking to explore and stretch the form of the music he was writing for the double album.

And these were extraordinary times.   The Glasgow and Edinburgh concerts followed straight on from the Judas concert, but contemporary reports suggest that in Glasgow Dylan’s new style was welcomed.  However there is a report that quite a few members of the audience in Edinburgh brought along harmonicas to play as a protest when the electric set began.  (That might be just a story – I found it in the Daily Record – but it is very Edinburgh, no matter if it is true or false).

Billboard, in reporting “If I Was a King”, says it seems “a bit quaint and old-fashioned compared to the more electrifying material he was recording in this same time frame.”  But then Dylan has often moved back and forth – and the fact that he chose to sing this song twice at this moment must tell us something.

Dylan didn’t play Sweet Marie in Edinburgh – but then… I am not sure if that tells me anything or not.  Having looked it up, I thought I’d report it!

Musically “If I was a king” is hardly revolutionary – a nice rotating melody and chord combination – and if you don’t hear the link with Sweet Marie, just play them one after the other.  If only Dylan had written “If I was a king” first we’d know that was a sketch for Sweet Marie, but with Bob it’s never that simple.

• The alphabetical list of songs reviewed  – just scroll down the page.
• The list of songs in chronological order of composition (1962-1973) is here.
• How Dylan writes songs, the greatest Dylan opening lines and other articles

Continuing the experiment with finding things Dylan did each day of the year.  If you know of any not included do write in and say.

20 April 1961: Bob Dylan played at Gerde’s Folk City, New York.

20 April 1966: Bob Dylan played the Festival Hall in Melbourne, Australia, starting with “She Belongs to Me” and ending with “Just like Thom Thumb’s Blues”

20 April 1980: Bob Dylan played Toronto on the Gospel Tour

20 April 1985, The charity record ‘We Are The World’ by USA For Africa was at No.1 on the UK singles chart. The US artists’ answer to Band Aid included Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, Daryl Hall, Paul Simon, Huey Lewis, Ray Charles, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson.

20 April 2009: Bob Dylan performed Tough Mama live for the 44th and last time.

20 April 2009: The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan published by Cambridge University Press

20 April 2013: Bob Dylan released Wigwam / Thirsty Boots.  It was an unreleased demo of Wigwam, and the first Thirsty Boots recording to be released.

20 April 2016: Bob Dylan played Orchard Hall, Tokyo

Recent Posts

• All the things Dylan did on 19 April
• Something there is about you: Dylan’s 1973 renaissance and the journey Tangled Up.
• What Bob Dylan’s done on 18 April through the years.
• Bob Dylan on this day: 17 April
• Bob Dylan on this day: 16 April
• Hazel: understanding the song, and the live performance

————————————-

• The alphabetical list of songs reviewed is on the home page
• The list of songs in chronological order of composition (1962-1973) is here.
• Bob Dylan Day by Day (only recently started but all things start somewhere)
• How Dylan writes songs, the greatest Dylan opening lines and other articles

This is part of a continuing exploration to see if it is possible to create a Dylan Day by Day file.   We’re in the early days, but there is an index to the days covered so far.

I am certain I will have missed much of importance – please do help fill in the gaps, either by adding ideas for this page – or indeed any date in history.  Or if you have a book in which someone has already done this, let me know, and I’ll move to something more original.

19 April

• 19 April 1961: There are two contrasting entries for this day.   Either Bob Dylan ends his residency at Hibbing High School, Minnesota which he began on 11 April or Bob Dylan performed at Gerde’s Folk City, New York.
• 19 April 1966, Dylan played the Festival Hall Melbourne, Australia
• 19 April 1980, Dylan played Toronto on the Gospel Tour
• 19 April 1983, Dylan recorded in Studio A, at the Power Station, New York in a session produced by Mark Knopfler and Bob Dylan.  There were six versions of Neighbourhood Bully, plus a take of Green Onions and “Trees Hannibal Alps”
• 19 April 1991: First live performance of New Morning, which went on to be played 79 times between now and 2006.  This show as at Saenger Performing Arts Center, New Orleans
• 19 April 2005: Dylan performed at New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark
• 19April 2012, Levon Helm, died of throat cancer aged 71.    He performed with the Hawks and the Band and sang on ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,’ ‘Up on Cripple Creek,’ ‘Rag Mama Rag,’ and ‘The Weight.’
• 19 April 2015: Dylan performed at Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, Orlando, Florida
• 19 April 2016: Dylan performed at Orchard Hall, Tokyo, Japan.

• Bob Dylan on this day: 16 April
• Bob Dylan on this day: 17 April
• Bob Dylan on this day: 18 April

All the songs (over 250) reviewed on this site

The songs in chronological order

By Tony Attwood

“A lover out there; I recall.”

It could be the title for the collection of the 1973 songs in which Dylan deals with current love and past love.  It is of course the heartbeat of a billion songs throughout the history of popular music, but these songs were more than just delightful pieces by a great songwriter.

For these were the sketches and notebooks in which he worked towards the solution of how to write on the theme of past, present and future loves all at once, and at a level of utter perfection.

And here, in these songs we are seeing the opening steps, the initial thoughts, the first considerations, that finally led us to Tangled up in Blue the following year.   We had to wait while he made these notes and worked on these ideas, but oh wasn’t it worthwhile?

Thus we should not dismiss these sketches on the road to a masterpiece, for these 1973 songs are certainly worth a listen.  In order of composition they are…

• Never say goodbye
• Nobody cept you
• Going going gone
• Hazel
• Something there is about you

Of course they are not all dealing with the same subject precisely – but given a bit of time, and some relief from the roar of the world around, we can surely hear little bits and pieces that ultimately turned one year on into “Early one morning the sun was shining,” that ultimate, ultimate opening line repost to Robert Johnson’s “Well I work up this morning, blues falling down like hail.”  It took 36 years to get from Johnson’s bleak opener, to Dylan’s warm answer, but it sure was worth waiting for.

That these songs from the year before Tangled up in Blue were sketches comes not just from my own personal judgement (which of course can readily and easily be challenged any day of the week) but from the fact that none of these songs became key parts of Dylan shows.

Never say goodbye is shown as never being sung by Dylan on stage (my figures coming from BobDylan.com), Hazel seven times, Nobody cept you eight times, Something there is about you 26 and Going, going, gone, 79, but this latter total was, I am sure, down to the multiple re-writes of both music and lyric.  I have tried to give examples in my review of that particular song (see the link in the list above).

Something there is about you,  lasted as a tour song between Jan 74 and Feb 78, but even so, got few outings, and it does have one most interesting musical feature, in which the bassist plays around with the notion of the complete descending bass.

Step by step bass lines are something Dylan particularly likes, starting on the key note and slowly rising up (as in Rolling Stone) or declining (as in Is your love in vain).   But there are two things that really make this stand out – the bassist keeps varying what he does, and only on occasion does he deliver the whole eight note run.

In verse one for example we get a partial descending bass with gaps

Something there is about you that strikes a match in me
Is it the way your body moves or is it the way your hair blows free?
Or is it because you remind me of something that used to be
Somethin’ that crossed over from another century?

And the last line gives us the clue musically and lyrically of where we are going – not now from the descending bass but from the lyrics.  To my mind the lyrics are generally interesting, but not really spectacular.   But that “another century” instantly makes me think on to the “Italian poet from the thirteenth century.”   Dylan was indeed getting ready to paint his masterpiece, one year ahead.

In the second verse the bassist is playing with us again, and has jumps in the descent – until he gives in at the last

Thought I’d shaken the wonder and the phantoms of my youth
Rainy days on the Great Lakes, walkin’ the hills of old Duluth
There was me and Danny Lopez, cold eyes, black night and then there was Ruth
Something there is about you that brings back a long-forgotten truth

The descent of the bass is finally there, down to the recovery of the long-forgotten truth.

And that long-forgotten truth is….?

Maybe just lying there “Wond’ring if she’d changed it all”.  Maybe it was “standing on the side of the road, Rain falling on my shoes” paying the dues at the crossroads yet again.  Maybe it’s “”Jimmy, Don’t I know your name ?””

Or maybe it is just that book of poems Written by an Italian poet  From the thirteenth century.

But we also have to ask, in passing, who are these people referenced here?  Danny Lopez is another boxing reference from Dylan – the world champion featherweight, and apparently very popular in his day.

Plus here’s a nice extra: Danny is married to Bonnie Lopez and has three sons, Bronson, Jeremy, and… Dylan.

Moving on, in 1994 Ruth Tyrangiel served Bob Dylan him with a $5m law suit, claiming they had lived as husband and wife for 17 years. The case apparently was ultimately settled out of court.  I, obviously, can’t verify any of that.

And so from me that’s it.  The lyrics of this song don’t leap out and stick in my brain, the song has none of the amazing expression of the middle 8 of Going going gone.  Yep, that’s it – but it was, I am sure, part of the movement into Tangled.

As I say, that’s it.  Except that on 27 March 2008 Tara Brabazon, professor of media studies at the University of Brighton (wherein I spent three years) published an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement under the title “Something there is about you”.  It’s not about the song – it is about her husband, Bob Dylan, and (in particular) Scorsese.  Worth a read.  I thought I’d mention it since we’ve reached this song.

All the songs reviewed on this site

The songs in chronological order

The Dylan anniversary list – it has only just started, but it’s getting there

I am continuing the experiment of trying to build a little record of Bob’s activities (and related Dylan events) each day through the year.  This is the third date I’ve tried – 18 April

18 April 1961: Dylan played Gerde’s Folk City, New York.

18 April 1968: Staple singers include Hard Rain in their set at the Filmore Auditorium, San Francisco.

18 April 1976: First of 79 live performances of Going Going Gone, and the first performance of Idiot Wind and If you see her say hello, Seven Days and Shelter from the Storm. At Lakeland, FLorida.

18 April 1980 Toronto on the Gospel Tour

18 April 1983: Dylan recorded at the Studio A, Power Station, New York City, There were six takes and 12 false starts of Sweetheart like You, and two takes of Blind Willie McTell.

18 April 2003 Dylan performed the Granada Theater, Dallas.

18 April 2014, Dylan played Nagoya, Japan

18 April 2015: Dylan played St Augustine Amphitheatre, St Augustine, Florida.

18 April 2016, Dylan played Tokyo, Japan.

Recent Posts

• Bob Dylan on this day: 17 April
• Bob Dylan on this day: 16 April
• Hazel: understanding the song, and the live performance
• Going Going Gone: turning an ok song into one of the greatest moments in rock music

by Tony Attwood

Yesterday I started a little experiment to see if I could find a few anniversaries of events in Bob Dylan’s life just for that specific day.

It seemed quite an interesting thing to do, because it gave me a few perspectives that I hadn’t picked up on in writing the reviews, so I decided to continue a bit further.  Here is 17 April.

The 16 April listing is of course still on the site

• 17 April 1965.   The Freewheelin Bob Dylan entered the British charts on 23 May 1964 and reached number one on this day  
• 17 April 1980: Dylan played Toronto on the “Gospel Tour” and gave the first live performance of Ain’t gonna go to hell for anybody.
• 17 April 2002:  The 329th and final performance of “In the Garden”
• 17 April 2005: Final live performance of “It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry.”  It was the 160th performance.
• 17 April 2015 – Bob Dylan Live at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center

If you have anything to add, please do send it in.  Tony.Attwood@aisa.org

• All the songs reviewed on this site.
• The Dylan songs in chronological order of writing
• All of Dylan’s music on  The Bob Dylan Project

Bob Dylan on this day: 16 April

Bob Dylan on this Day

I thought I might try a little experiment and search for anything I could find related to Bob Dylan on 16 April.   It took much longer than I expected to find things, and I am not 100% sure of all the entries.

But it was an interesting exercise, and I might repeat it for future days.

16 April 1962, Bob Dylan played a five song set at Gerde’s Folk City in New York, including Deep Ellem Blues, Honey just allow me one more chance, Talkin New York, Corrina Corrina and Blowin in the Wind.  It was the first live performance of Blowin in the Wind and the first and last performance of Corrina Corrina and the first for Honey just allow me.  It was also the first performance of Talking New York.

16 April 1966: Bob Dylan played Sydney Boxing Arena, in Australia.  The event is omitted from some lists of Dylan concerts, and Wiki suggests Dylan actually played two concerts on this day.

16 April 1983: Bob Dylan took part in a recording session at Power Station, New York produced by Mark Knopfler and Bob Dylan, including six takes of “Someone’s got a hold of my heart”

16 April 1992: Dylan’s first live performance of Sally Sue Brown.  It was only performed once more.

16 April 2001: “Bob Dylan Blues” by Syd Barrett released in the UK.  Recorded in 1970 and written in 1965 this song was thought lost until it turned up in a collection of tapes held by David Gilmour and released on “The Best of Syd Barrett”

16 April 2016: Four song EP “Melancholy Mood” released (at least in Japan).

Index to Untold Dylan

Bob Dylan’s “Hazel” Reviewed

By Tony Attwood

I’m sad to admit that the thing that always comes to mind for me with this song is that Clinton Heylin’s know-it-all sarcasm only works when he really knows his facts.  And I must admit it – much of the time he does.

But not always, which is why careful examination of all critics’ writings (particularly Heylin who is so thoroughly certain that he is always right) is important.

You see, in “Revolution in the air” Heylin comments “And when he slipped into it for the first MTV Unplugged performance in November 1994, he didn’t return to it on the second night or allow it to feature on the cut-up official CD, perhaps because he knew it sounded better in rehearsal, when he remembered it was supposed to have a harmonica break.”

Now by chance, a recording of the rehearsal actually exists and aside from getting an interesting alternate version of the song, we also get a few moments of the discussion as to what would make the song work better – and yes there is talk of the harmonica solo for several moments and then the comment “what about no harmonica solo?”

The guys knew what they were doing, and Dylan clearly knew it wasn’t working exactly as he wanted it to work – hence the discussion about the bridge section (what I often call, in my English way, “the middle 8”) and quite where the harmonica solo should fit.  It wasn’t a case of remembering or not remembering – it was normal artistic discussion of how the song could work best in this sort of performance.

For me, personally, it is just a song – not particularly inspired, not telling me anything new, and sounding at the start as if it is going to be the 1930 Hoagy Carmichael / Stuart Gorrell classic, “Georgia on my mind”  – it has the same feel and exactly the same chord sequence.

But of course it goes elsewhere, and at least it gets away from the desperate feeling that there is in the song Dylan wrote immediately beforehand – Going Going Gone.  It is as if she has gone, and now has identified the next woman to love – in the course of a couple of days.

Of course these are just songs, not utter reflections of Dylan’s personal biography, but it is all a little simple if not actually condescending in the “I wouldn’t be ashamed” line.  As I sat here listening to the song for the first time in a while I thought, how would I feel if someone said that to me?  Not best pleased.

Hazel, dirty-blonde hair
I wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen with you anywhere
You got something I want plenty of
Ooh, a little touch of your love

And I am not going to make too many friends by saying that lines such as

But it’s just making me blinder and blinder
Because I’m up on a hill and still you’re not there

For me, it doesn’t really work.

All Music calls it a tender song, and indeed it is.  I’m not sure I’d also go with the adjective “refined” for the “musical backing” of the album, nor call this “the most delicate, and articulate” of musical renditions, but then I’ve already fallen out with half the world over Robbie Robertson so it is most certainly me not appreciating what everyone else can hear.

The song hasn’t really been covered much, nor performed much by Dylan – maybe it is that opening, or maybe it just doesn’t say anything very new.  Not that being new is all there is in a post-modern world – far from it, but the music that accompanies “a little touch of your love” has been done a few million times too often before to grab me.  It is a musical cliché and it sounds like a musical cliché.

And just as others have not recorded it, and Dylan hasn’t sung it much, and so not many people have reviewed it.  Every Dylan Song website has got it however, and looking at the review there suddenly I’m on the other side when they say, “Dylan spends the middle eight groping around for the proper vocal key”.  No I don’t think he does – I think he knows exactly what he is doing.

But overall I’m not too far away from the conclusion there:

“Even the lyrics kind of leave something to be desired (“ooh, just a touch of your love”, indeed), which is a slight disappointment considering how accomplished the songwriting on this album is otherwise. Maybe I’m making too much of this song – I can’t imagine Dylan and the Band imagined this song to be much more than a trifle anyway – so I’ll just move on.”

I do get the feeling with Planet Waves that there was a lot of work going on to try and find the songs to complete the album. From 1967 when Dylan had written over 20 songs of note that we still remember, to just one in 1968, seven in 1969 of which at least one is considered by many to be a filler.  There were 13 in 1970 (and they include All the tired horses and Winterlude) , but then it is back down to two (three if you include George Jackson) in 1970, and Forever Young and the Billy the Kid pieces in 1972.

So to leap up to eleven in 1973 was itself demanding, and even with eleven there is no way that Dylan had the chance to pick and choose what to use, as he had with earlier albums.

In the end I’m left with the feeling that this is ok, but is only there because albums needed to be a certain length, otherwise the punters complained.

Hazel, you called and I came
Now don’t make me play this waiting game
You’ve got something I want plenty of
Ooh, a little touch of your love

All the songs reviewed on this site

The songs in chronological order

By Tony Attwood

In the earlier articles in this series I put forward an idea for categorising the types of songs that exist, and the origins of Dylan’s approach and style

• How Bob Dylan writes songs: Part 1 – The types of song
• How Bob Dylan writes songs: Part 2 – The origins of Dylan’s approach and style

In that latter article I drew from the speech Dylan made at the MusicCares awards ceremony, and I continue to draw from that because it seems to me to be one of the few occasions in which Dylan is spelling out a detailed, consistent and above all prepared message.

As the article “The Language and influence of the Early Bob Dylan” (Oxford Dictionaries; Oxford University Press) points out,

“Bob Dylan seems to enjoy joking with reporters and interviewers. He has claimed to have grown up in New Mexico (he didn’t), and that he changed his name to Dylan because his mother’s maiden name was Dillon (it wasn’t). He has said that at the time he changed his name, he hadn’t read much Dylan Thomas, and if Thomas had been that influential, Dylan would have put his poems to music. In other interviews he has confirmed that Dylan Thomas was indeed the reason behind the name-change. Dylan leaves us to speculate.”

So we need to take care with what Bob tells us.  But the MusiCares Gala was a landmark, for several reasons.  One is that it was recent (2015) and thus invited Dylan to look back across this lifetime of achievement in songwriting.  Another was that he expressed in his speech a deep regard for MusiCares and the way it helped musicians.  As he said,

“Anyway, I’m proud to be here tonight for MusiCares. I’m honored to have all these artists singing my songs. There’s nothing like that. Great artists. Who all know how to sing the truth, and you can hear it in their voices. I’m proud to be here tonight for MusiCares. I think a lot of this organization. They’ve helped many people. Many musicians who have contributed a lot to our culture. I’d like to personally thank them for what they did for a friend of mine, Billy Lee Riley. A friend of mine who they helped for six years when he was down and couldn’t work. Billy was a Sun rock & roll artist.”

And also, this was a 30 minute speech, not a throw away set of lines to individual question, and Dylan read his speech – he had thought about and prepared his answers.

And finally, in the audience was American President Jimmy Carter, whom Dylan personally thanked for being there.  I don’t think Bob messes around where President Carter is concerned.  Indeed it was President Carter who quoted Bob Dylan in his “Our Nation’s Past and Future” address made when accepting the Presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in New York City on 15 July 1976.

My vision of this nation and its future has been deepened and matured during the nineteen months that I have campaigned among you for President. I have never had more faith in America than I do today. We have an America that, in Bob Dylan’s phrase, is busy being born, not busy dying.

In his speech Dylan very strongly made the point that the music that he wrote was influenced by the music that he heard and the music that he then sang.   Thus at one point he says

“I sang a lot of “come all you” songs. There’s plenty of them. There’s way too  many to be counted. “Come along boys and listen to my tale / Tell you of my trouble on the old Chisholm Trail.” Or, “Come all ye good people, listen while I tell / the fate of Floyd Collins a lad we all know well / The fate of Floyd Collins, a lad we all know well.”

“Come all ye fair and tender ladies / Take warning how you court your men / They’re like a star on a summer morning / They first appear and then they’re gone again.”

“If you’ll gather ’round, people / A story I will tell /  ‘Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw / Oklahoma knew him well.”

“If you sung all these “come all ye” songs all the time, you’d be writing, “Come gather ’round people where ever you roam, admit that the waters around you have grown / Accept that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone / If your time to you is worth saving / And you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone / The times they are a-changing.”

“You’d have written them too. There’s nothing secret about it. You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that’s all enough, and that’s all I sang. That was all that was dear to me. They were the only kinds of songs that made sense.”

In preparing and presenting this web site with all the reviews that have accumulated over the past few years I do take this to be a most significant statement.  Dylan is proclaiming that he didn’t work out deep or secret meanings within the phraseology of his songs; the lyrics and the music came to him out of all the songs he had been singing.

Dylan then cited the opening of Deep Ellum Blues (a traditional song popularised by Grateful Dead) which celebrated the arts and entertainment region of East Dallas.  It was the area which in the 1920s was a major centre of jazz and blues musicians, with Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Huddie Ledbetter, and Bessie Smith performing thereabouts.

Dylan commented, “When you go down to Deep Ellum keep your money in your socks / Women in Deep Ellum put you on the rocks. Sing that song for a while and you just might come up with, ‘When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter time too / And your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you through / Don’t put on any airs / When you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue / They got some hungry women there / And they really make a mess outta you’.”

“All these songs are connected. Don’t be fooled. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. It’s just different, saying the same thing. I didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary.”

So Dylan is saying, that lines such as When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez simply came to him after listening to the music in such intensity, rather than the lyrics having a specific meaning.  He didn’t sit down to write about a specific thing, but the connections and ideas appeared in his head, making the songs at times real at times abstract.   I believe that when it comes down to it, it is how many people write.

Dylan continues,

“I didn’t think I was doing anything different. I thought I was just extending the line. Maybe a little bit unruly, but I was just elaborating on situations. Maybe hard to pin down, but so what? A lot of people are hard to pin down. You’ve just got to bear it.”

Now I don’t think this is an explanation for every song Dylan has written, not at all.  In particular it doesn’t tell us much more than we can guess about the trilogy of mainly Christian songs, but it does tell us a fair bit about the songs that are more difficult to understand.

If we take a song like Farewell Angelina, Dylan is saying that a subliminal process emerging from having listened to and sung so many songs before the moment of writing, is what influenced the words, rather than Dylan having plotted specific meanings.

I’m not saying this is a total explanation of what has gone on in the writing of all these songs that are analysed here, but it is an explanation that must be taken into account, given the context I outlined above.

I’d also argue that it fits in well with Dylan’s long-term habit of writing and developing songs in the studio – often simply leaving the musicians hanging around while he writes and re-writes and changes songs.  And it reveals why some songs are abandoned even after recording, as not being worth continuing with.   All the previous music and lyrics subliminally mixes together into a new song.  Because Dylan is a brilliant songwriter, quite often that turns into a song that works.  But sometimes not.  And because there was no clear plan – just an evolution of a song from past thoughts – he never knows until the end whether it has worked or not.

This view also offers an insight into why some songs are included on albums which most commentators think are throwaways which really shouldn’t be there: Dylan can “hear” the history of the evolution of the songs which we can’t because we don’t know all the antecedents and we were not there.  Plus it gives us some thoughts on the fairly free and easy way in which Dylan has used other songs as source material for his own – in his view every past song mixes together in his head and comes out in a new form.

And finally I’d suggest we get an insight here into some of Dylan’s more confusing songs like Tangled up in Blue, in which time and perspective seems to shift throughout the song.  Read the song line by line and there is confusion.  Accept the song as itself an evolution of thoughts that have arrived at different times from different directions, and suddenly it makes sense.

To be prosaic, it is the difference between reading a novel from start to finish, and looking at all the ingredients of a cake being mixed up in a mixing bowl.   Dylan’s interest, quite often, has been in that swirling mixture, not in the linear progress of a story.

If you see what I mean.

All the songs reviewed on the site, in alphabetical order

Dylan’s songs in chronological order of writing.

By Tony Attwood

Although the Shot of Love album was less religious than the previous two albums Dylan recorded, it most certainly included a number of very solidly Christian songs – including rather obviously obviously Property of Jesus.

It is a song that appears to have been worked and re-worked, but then having been recorded was not used on the tours, so maybe Dylan never really felt it was finished.  Or maybe he had worked it out of his system.

The title phrase is probably relates to 1 Corinthians 7, 20, which is often presented as “Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them,” although obviously different editions of the Bible have different translations.

The passage goes on to say that if you are a slave, be happy to stay a slave, but if you can remove yourself from slavery that’s ok.   It seems to me (as a non-Christian) to be part of the conservative nature of Christianity, allowing social situations no matter how awful (and to me slavery is certainly at the most awful end of the spectrum) to remain because what primarily matters is life hereafter, not life now.  Social revolution, of the type preached in Times they are a changing, it certainly isn’t.  Nor is it Masters of War.

It is, in short, “this is how it is, and that’s all right because salvation comes later.”

The song has been called satirical, but I think I am really failing here because I don’t hear it as satire at all.  It seems to me to be a straightforward message saying you can make fun of this guy because he is now a Christian and you can sneer at the Christian faith and the faithful, but what you think is better is actually a lack of humanity, and a lack of Christian ways, it is in fact a heart of stone.

And therein lies the problem for me.  The Corinthians phrase is for me a perfect example of a heart of stone – just stay in your poverty or desperation, and let the rich stay in their luxury, because God has put each of us in this position and He knows what he is doing, really grates with me.  Of course that is my problem not yours, but I thought I’d just tell you where I am.

And of course as a non-believer I might have got this horribly wrong, but that’s how I see it.  There’s a comment box below for you to put me right.

Musically it is not particularly exciting either: the verse is just sung against the chord of B flat without a particularly significant melody.  The chorus does a bit more work with the descending three chord sequence of G minor, F, E flat repeated three times before it is all resolved back onto the B flat chord for another verse.  And then off we go again.

I suppose I also have problems with the song because of lines like, “Go ahead and talk about him because he makes you doubt,” and it is simply a concept I can’t share.  If Dylan is telling a story such as Rolling Stone, or painting a picture like Johanna, I can enter inside that.   I don’t have to have despised anyone as much as Dylan despised the friend on Fourth Street, to understand the feelings.  I can share what he is thinking.

But I don’t find people make me doubt.  Not at all.

Also I don’t laugh at people who live much simpler lives than me.  The most moving day of my life, apart from the funerals of my mum, my dad, and my aunt, was spent in the company of a Swami who had such overwhelming ease, relaxation, insight, understanding, and just about everything else that is good, that I could not have conceived such oneness with the world around.  I didn’t laugh at that Swami – I marvelled at her peace and tranquillity, and have constantly tried to regain that through meditation in many ways.

Do people laugh at Christians behind their backs?   I don’t see it in England, but maybe it happens.  I can however get very slightly annoyed because the country I live in imposes Christianity upon me to a slight degree (most particularly because along with Iran, the UK has its clergy in the law making assembly – the House of Lords in the UK’s case – and thus they influence the laws).   So we have very odd divorce laws here which still look back to the rules laid down in the Bible – and I wish we didn’t.   But that’s about it.

So whereas “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend” rang true with me when I first heard it, and still does today, “Stop your conversation when he passes on the street, Hope he falls upon himself, oh, won’t that be sweet” just doesn’t touch me at all.  I’m not there, I don’t get it.

And yes I know a lot of people are superstitious, but I am not too sure what that has to do with it all and when we get to

Because he can’t be bribed or bought by the things that you adore

I am afraid Bob’s rather lost me.

Of course that is my fault, not Bob’s, but that’s just where I am.  Who wants to bribe a Christian?  Who is bribing me?  I adore my three daughters and my grandchildren.  I care deeply for my close friends and I try to go as far as is required to help them when they need me.  They don’t ask me often but when they do, I really do try to be there.  And although I would never presume I think they would always do the same for me.

I don’t know that I adore physical property, but I do value the piano that I play each day, and which belonged to my late father… but such thoughts seem to have taken me further away from Dylan’s thinking rather than closer.

So what is the whip that is keeping me in line?  What tribute do I pay that he doesn’t?  Are we talking taxes?  Surely not.  Are we talking cigarettes and other habitual substances?  I doubt it, given Bob’s love of the poison.

I suppose the real moment when I utterly lose it with the song is in the penultimate verse.

Say that he’s a loser ’cause he got no common sense
Because he don’t increase his worth at someone else’s expense
Because he’s not afraid of trying, ’cause he don’t look at you and smile
’Cause he doesn’t tell you jokes or fairy tales, say he’s got no style

Common sense is by and large nonsense.  Common sense tells us that gravity doesn’t exist because we can’t see it.  Common sense tells us the earth is flat and the sun moves not the earth.  Common sense tells us that we can understand the world without any theory.

But what is a religion if it is not a theoretical construct to explain the world?  In which case the religious and the scientific person (which is where I put myself) are at one – they both have theories.  It is just that they are different types of theory.  One demands evidence, one demands faith.

Anyway, it’s just me, I’m sure.  But it is not, I would add, because I object to religious music or songs about religion.   I can grasp the almighty edifice and monumental beauty of the B minor mass, but sorry, this song is just a song.  I guess I can see why Bob kept it out of the performance repertoire.

All the songs reviewed

The songs of Dylan in the order they were written.

By Tony Attwood

In my earlier article on how Dylan writes songs I outlined the notion that there are at least seven different types of art ranging from representational art to religious art.  In that article I quoted from Dylan’s interview for Rolling Stone in which he gave a fairly clear indication of his religious convictions.

Now I want to move on to the speech Dylan gave at the Musicare Awards in which he gave as detailed account as he ever has on his writing and where the songs come from.  This speech was interesting, for it was Dylan’s chance to contradict the Rolling Stone interview and say, for example, “You’re right – all these characters in these songs are all coded messages to do with the need to follow what is laid down in the Bible,” but he didn’t.  Instead he continued the theme of the interview, revealing the influences that worked upon his songs.

Right at the start of the speech he said,

“These songs of mine, they’re like mystery stories, the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then, and I think they’re on the fringes now.”

The stories Dylan refers to are generally known (at least in the UK) as the Mystery Plays or Miracle Plays – cycles of plays in verse which dramatised stories from the Bible.  Each town or city had its own cycle of plays – the most famous being the 48 play cycle from York.  They would be performed over a number of days, and in the larger towns in several locations around the town.

What one has to remember is that the audience of the day so no other dramatic entertainment, so when the characters (including God) got onto stage, this was real to the audience.  They literally had never seen anything like it.  Think perhaps of little children going to a theatrical performance for the first time today.  To them, there is nothing to distinguish what they are seeing on stage with what they see day by day.  All is real.

There is indeed a lot of evidence that the plays were performed across the country, so Shakespeare may well have seen them in Stratford on Avon as a child, and known of them in London when he moved there in the late 16th century.

The Miracle Plays were also the blockbuster productions of their day, costing huge amounts to put on, and often sponsored by guilds where the story could be used to show a trade or profession in a particularly positive light.  As a result the performances were entertainment, advertising, and the truth of the Christian story all mixed up as one.

Today we don’t necessarily associate religious festivals with humour and energy, but the Mystery Plays had lots of these.  Over the years the plays evolved and were re-written, and their “ownership” if there was any, was by the current performers.

Drama was the key, and so the fall of Adam, the murder of Abel and Noah’s flood etc were there to be used as New Testament events – and were often liked because of their vitality.

Thinking of this it is not too hard to see what Dylan was saying; he’s taking the myths and legends of his time and re-working them into stories, using the dominant medium of today that appeals to his chosen audience – the popular song – just as the Mystery Plays took theatre as their method of presentation.

If we just look at a few of the songs from 1962, the year in which Dylan wrote the first songs that are still widely recognised today, we can see that he is indeed this sort of story teller – and one blessed with an ability to tell stories in an incredibly varied way.

Ballad for a friend tells us of the death of a friend, while Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues makes fun of the far right wing.  Blowing in the wind  tells us to look out to the wider world to find what we want, but Corrina Corrina brings us back to the heart with a simple tale of lost love as does Tomorrow is a long time     And all this comes before the anti-war protest song Hard Rain’s a gonna fall and the desperate sadness and awfulness of life for the impoverished farmer in the Ballad of Hollis Brown and all this is followed (in terms of the order the songs were written in) by Don’t think twice the archetypal song of leaving, and then the protest against racism, Oxford Town – again told not as a “this is terrible dont do this” song, but as a story.

What Dylan is saying here is that he’s a story teller, and just as the original performed entertainments were in the style suitable for the day (religious tales acted out on temporary stages) so he started out as the storyteller with his guitar.

That then is the background – how he saw himself – as the story teller talking to the masses.   But in the next section of the same speech Dylan also gave us a clue as to how the songs came out as they did.  As he said,

“These songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. Contrary to what Lou Levy said, there was a precedent. It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock ‘n’ roll and traditional big-band swing orchestra music.

“I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.

“For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one  song and sing it next in an hour if I’d heard it just once.

“If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written “How many roads must a man walk down?” too.”

Dylan was undoubtedly referring to two things here.  One is the obvious link between “John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man” and “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” and the other is the overall concept of the song in talking about the world around us, the world we experience.

Dylan continued…

“Big Bill Broonzy had a song called “Key to the Highway.” I’ve got a key to the highway / I’m booked and I’m bound to go / Gonna leave here runnin’ because walking is most too slow. I sang that a lot. If you sing that a lot, you just might write, Highway 61.”

Of course there’s no immediate link between Key to the Highway and “He asked poor Howard where can I go, Howard said there’s only one place I know, Sam said tell me quick man I got to run, Howard just pointed with his gun, And said that way down on Highway 61,” but there is the sold link with the blues (Highway 61 being the blues highway) and

When the moon peeks over the mountains
I’ll be on my way.
I’m gonna roam this old highway
Until the break of day.

Of course Dylan is exaggerating when he says, that “You’d have written [Highway 61] too if you’d sang “Key to the Highway” as much as me, but he is again giving us two big indications to what his work was all about.   It was seeing himself as the theatrical story teller, and the man who was utterly immersed in the folk and blues music that had gone before him.

He is talking here not only about themes, but also about feel – the particular implication that the lonesome highway has for the men and women whose music he listened to time and time again and into whose culture he moved.

Thus we have a clear indication from Dylan as to where he sees himself coming from and what his music is about: Dylan the storyteller, Dylan the inheritor of America’s popular musical traditions, Dylan the travelling showman tracing his performances back  to mediaeval England.

I’ll continue my investigation in the next article

All the songs reviewed on this site

Dylan’s work in the chronological order in which the songs were written.

By Tony Attwood.

Nobody Cept You was planned as the final song for Planet Waves and then dropped.  It was played eight times in concert in 1974 and then dropped, so we can take it that after a bit of initial enthusiasm, Dylan didn’t really like the song any more.

The opening lines on first hearing does not really warn us of what is going to come later

There’s nothing ’round here I believe in
Except you, you
And there’s nothing to me that’s sacred
Except you, yeah you

The woman being sacred to the singer can be just a way of saying he is love with her.  And the musical approach seems to emphasise that notion.

You’re the one that reaches me
You’re the one that I admire
Every time we meet together
My soul feels like it’s on fire
Nothing matters to me
And there’s nothing I desire
Except you, yeah you

We hardly notice “every time we meet together” at this point, nor the reference to “soul” – it all seems to be conventional pop use of the term, nothing to do with life after death.

So taken this far, and taken at face value, in terms of the lyrics, it really isn’t that wonderful, and although the notion of being deeply moved by a hymn and comparing that to a woman (as happens next) is interesting and unusual, it’s still an “I love you babe” kind of song, at least first time around.

There’s a hymn I used to hear
In the churches all the time
Make me feel so good inside
So peaceful, so sublime
And there’s nothing here to remind me of that
Old familiar chime
Except you, uh huh you

By this stage however there’s also a feeling that something is not right.  She reminds him of a hymn that made him feel good.     So she’s not making him feel good herself, she reminds him of a hymn that made him feel good.

This is odd because just a moment ago we heard that

Every time we meet together
My soul feels like it’s on fire

This is present tense.  He is still meeting with her.  She makes him feel good now – and she reminds him of a hymn that made him feel good in the past.  OK, we can go with that but maybe by now we are starting to hope for some clarification.  After all the music is still so jolly.

The third verse however takes the churchy stuff into a bit of a strange land.  It is not so much that the character in the song did play in a cemetery (kids after all can play anywhere and don’t necessarily understand the implications of context), but Dylan in this jaunty song is saying… what?  That she’s passed away?

Used to play in the cemetery
Dance and sing and run when I was a child
Never seemed strange
But now I just pass mournfully
That place where the bones of life are piled
I know something has changed
I’m a stranger here and no one sees me
’Cept you,  you

Or is he a ghost?  OK I know this is getting fanciful, but as I try to make sense of the lyrics two things happen.  One is the jolly music seems totally out of place for the second half of the song, and the other is that the timing makes no sense.

So is he now in love with the memory of the woman?  Or is she the only one who remembers him?  Or do we have an early look at writing songs out of chronological order, which became the trade mark of the next album, and which reached its high point with Tangled up in Blue?

Now that is an interesting surmise, because in the previous song Dylan wrote (Never Say Goodbye) there are just the slightest elements of that.  Plus there are the lines

Time is all I have to give
You can have it if you choose

which could be a commonplace “all I have is yours” but now in the context of Nobody Cept You is starting to look a little strange.   But back to Nobody Cept You.

Nothing much matters or seems to please me
Except you, yeah you
Nothing hypnotizes me
Or holds me in a spell
Everything runs by me
Just like water from a well
Everybody wants my attention
Everybody’s got something to sell
Except you, yeah you

Now that verse makes sense in terms of how difficult it is for someone famous to have a relationship with people newly met – instead of being introduced as “my mate Bob” he is introduced as “This is Bob Dylan – THE Bob Dylan”.

Most songwriters, if writing about the past, would have written about “the memory of you” – and “lost love”, as I have said so many times on this site, is one of the three classic approaches to pop lyrics (love and dance being the other two).  But Dylan seems to be tangling us up completely while making it (through the music) seem as if nothing has ever changed.  Remember all this began with

You’re the one that reaches me
You’re the one that I admire
Every time we meet together
My soul feels like it’s on fire

By the end that feeling seems to be different.

—————-

All the songs reviewed on the site, in alphabetical order

Dylan’s songs in chronological order

By Tony Attwood

George Jackson was written in 1971 – one of three songs written that year.   Wiki insists there were two but the Chronology pages on this site show three:

• When I paint my masterpiece
• Watching the river flow
• George Jackson

and I’m sticking with that.   Wiki just lists dates songs were released – what I am trying to do is focus on when Dylan actually wrote the songs.

As I am sure you know, but for completeness let me just say, George Jackson was a leader of the Black Panthers.  Right, that’s that bit done, but after that I have a lot of problems.  As I have said many times on this site, I’m an English guy, who has visited the US on a number of occasions, but would never in a million lifetimes suggest I know or understand what goes on in US history or the US psyche.

So the best I can do is note that the portrayal of George Jackson by Dylan in the song as being a man of love is not the one that comes across in many accounts.  Heylin’s account of the writing of the song and the portrayal of Jackson within it suggests that Dylan had been interested in the Soledad Brothers and had had conversations with Howard Alk who was making a film about the Panthers and others who were knowledgeable about the situation.

But, Heylin argues, there were multiple versions of what the Panthers were and how they operated.  Dylan’s version has Jackson as the innocent victim; Heylin and many others give details that suggest otherwise.  Several writers point out that the $70 robbery was not what Jackson was in prison for this time – that was in 1959 when he served a year for armed robbery of a gas (petrol) station. In January 1970 Jackson killed a prison guard.

Let me stress again, I don’t know about the Panthers, I am just contrasting the images put in the song, and Heylin’s report and what I’ve read in my encyclopaedia.

What we do know pretty much for sure was that the song was very quickly written, recorded and put out as a single, with a different version on each side.  (There is a suggestion that if a different B side had been put on the single, the radio stations might have taken the safe option and played that, instead of Jackson, so the two versions were run).

Interestingly (for me at least) the song did appear on iTunes for a while but was then withdrawn, and apparently Dylan has never performed the song in public.  But less this seems like a conspiracy to remove the song it does apparently appear on the Bob Dylan Complete Album Collection Vol 1.

What is particularly interesting to me is that Dylan should, at this period when he was writing few songs, and when the two songs that immediately preceded this song were about life as an artist contemplating the world, suddenly move back into the world of protest.

But this is not protest in the sense that Dylan did it before.   If you search for the last significant protest song Dylan wrote before this one you might reach the conclusion it was Desolation Row in 1965 – a masterpiece if ever there was one.  And in every respects a huge, huge song.  Huge in the ground it covers, the musical complexity, and just the sheer size of the composition.  Before that, maybe It’s Alright Ma and before that Chimes of Freedom.  All complex pieces of music with deep intricate lyrics.

Here everything is simple – four short lines and a longer chorus, followed by an instrumental section.

The “Every Dylan Song” website makes the point that when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were shot Dylan was “baking bread and teaching his children the ABCs or what have you. It’s just funny how these things work, I guess.”

And yes, I feel that way too.  And I’d agree with the writer of the site that this song doesn’t reach any poetic heights.  Indeed I’d go further and say it doesn’t try to reach any poetic heights.  Now of course there is no rule that says that songs should.  “She loves you yeah yeah yeah” isn’t exactly great poetry, but a lot of people still remember the Beatles.  I can listen to “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog” and enjoy it, but that’s not the same.  Dylan is, most of the time, different from the rest.

To me, this song is really not quite right, somehow not quite Dylan.  If I think about Davey Moore, I understand that Dylan’s song is not wholly accurate as a reflection of what happened on that night.  But the way the song is constructed as a re-working of the Cock Robin nursery rhyme with its questioning, is interesting, intriguing and clever.  But this song is none of those.

Musically it is fairly ordinary – the verse has little melody to speak of, and is carried along with the chord changes, starting in G and ending on A minor, and the sequence is reflected in the chorus, again ending on A minor.  It’s an unusual and interesting sequence (G, D, C, Em, Am) but not that interesting as to make it the foundation of the whole piece.

Now that doesn’t matter, in my view, if the lyrics really give us something new and interesting.  But we get

I woke up this mornin’
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head

And I ask myself what this has to do with me?  OK I am a white Englishman, so not too much maybe, but the whole thing is not universalised, and nor is it interestingly personal.  Nor is it metaphorical, or intriguing or intricate.  It is not any of the things that Dylan normally does.

And when I now find that the next verse

Sent him off to prison
For a seventy-dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key

isn’t actually based on the reality, then he doesn’t really get to me.  There has to be something special somewhere in the song.  These are simple words with a simple tune and a simple message that others suggest is actually unfounded.

There is one interesting moment however, right at the end.

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards

Now that is very simplistic, and it has been said before, but it is still interesting.  If only Bob had started there, and worked outwards, and perhaps taken a lot more time, we might have had something more.  The controllers and the controlled.  How control works in this world on a social, on a psychological, on a political, and on a physical level.  Now there’s a big song in that.

All of the songs reviewed on this site.

Dylan’s songs in chronological order of writing.

By Tony Attwood

The idea of making up a list of the ten best opening lines to Dylan songs came to me out of nowhere, and it just struck me as something rather interesting to explore.  And immediately I started I knew that people who are kind enough to lend a few moments of their day to reading this site will come up with much better suggestions that I can.

So I thought I’d start it off… and what struck me after two minutes thinking was that it was far too easy to pick the opening of a song just because I liked the overall mood and feel and message of the song, not because of the opening line.

That is to say, the opening line filled my mind with the whole song, rather than having great merit in itself.  “Every step of the way, we walk the line” is like this.  I love “Mississippi” but looking at that line in isolation I am not sure it is a great line.  Very good, and a find opener, but in isolation I am not sure it stands out.

The same problem can occur with discussions of the opening lines of books.  But Jane Austen’s,  “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” (Pride and Prejudice) is magnificent even if you don’t have a clue about the story.

Same with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,” (Tale of Two Cities), and “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” (1984).  They wap you in the face and you have to stop.

Or “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”  So it goes – these openers stand up on their own.  They are the monuments of opening.  And because I am writing this I am going to indulge myself with my all time favourite book opening… – it is from “The Crying of Lot 49” by Thomas Pynchon.

“One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”

Yes, well, not everyone’s cup of tea, but it does it for me.

So my question to myself was, can I find similar monuments in Dylan’s opening lines which stand alone, irrespective of what comes later.

Here we go…

But first, the question of why I left out one obvious one: “Darkness at the break of noon.”  The official Dylan site writes that as one sentence, but … there’s no verb, which may be very pedantic of me, but I want “Darkness at the break of noon shadows even the silver spoon” as the actual sentence.

It could be my number one choice, but I have a real problem with the image – there is too much for my poor brain to take in.  Darkness at noon is one thing, the silver spoon with all it symbolises is another, and yes I get it, this end of the world sorts out everyone no matter what power, influence and money you have.  But somehow… it is just too much all in one go for me.   I guess I want my opening song lines a little less powerful.

But that’s just me.   Here’s my top ten.

10: Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside

I find that in this list I want to say “this is so unusual” and I think that applies to every song on the list.  The point is Dylan takes us straight into the story.  We are dropped into the situation.  In the opening we don’t know if the gentlemen are integral to the story or are just part of a background scene.   But we have the picture – not men but “gentlemen”, discussing we presume by the riverside.  Southern United States?  Or could it be the town of St Neots in Cambridgeshire, about half an hour from where I live?   We pick our own location and plant the scene there.

9:  Nobody feels any pain

As an opening to a pop rock song this is extraordinary.  What a statement.   Of course the opening line could be “Nobody feels any pain tonight as I stand inside the rain,” but I hear the end of the line at “pain”.

A mere mortal might have got as far as “I don’t feel any pain,” but it is the “nobody” that is all-enveloping.  Sometimes I have heard this as a universal statement – “we’ve all stopped feeling the pain”.  Sometimes it is just the moment.

8: ‘There must be some way out of here,’ said the joker to the thief.

Loved it from the first time I heard it.   Everyone is entangled up in this mess, but somehow we really must be able to solve this.  Who are these guys anyway, and how come they are both stuck in there.   It is an opening line of the highest level – giving us a situation, and idea and the people.

It is a line that I link to my favourite song on the album – the Drifter’s Escape.  But to include the Drifter’s opening lines I need four lines…

“Oh, help me in my weakness”
I heard the drifter say
As they carried him from the courtroom
And were taking him away.

And that’s pushing it a bit, but the Drifter and the J0ker and the Thief are all trapped – although thanks to divine intervention the Drifter gets out.  The Joker and the Thief are constantly trapped as the song ends

Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl.

Maybe the next article should be Dylan’s best ending lines.

7:  You got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend

“Who starts a song like this?”  I guess I want to say this about most of the first lines I’ve chosen, but this has a particular significance.

I have mentioned before in passing that when I did my M.Phil at the University of London my supervisor was Professor Keith Swanwick who wrote one of the very first serious academic books considering pop music, and it was he who said 99% of pop songs are about love, lost love and dance.

This is the announcement of the opposite – what on this site we’ve called the Songs of Disdain.

How powerful do you want your opening line to be?

6: My love she speaks like silence.

I suppose this is the antithesis of Positively Fourth Street, the most adoring, gentle love song, describing the lover who has Zen like qualities, who exists on but also beyond this world.

What Love minus zero does is paint the most gorgeous picture of the perfect woman, perfect that is as long as you don’t want to date a political activist and everything is gathered together in this perfect opening line.

I tried to come to terms with Zen in my 20s but without success, but did get a deeper understanding when much later I was introduced to Tao Te Ching, and I’ve tried to use it as a guiding force ever since.   The woman in this line is the woman who lives within the Tao.  “Live without possessiveness, act without presumption…”   It really is all in that one opening line.  A total philosophy encapsulated in six words.

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

When discussing this article with friends before I started tapping the keys, I mentioned this line, and eyebrows were raise.  And there is a good question to be asked here because Tell Ol’ Bill has been my favourite Dylan composition for many a long year.  .

So am I breaking my own rule about not letting the song influence the choice of line?

I would argue not, because for me that simple opening paints another of those perfect Dylan pictures.  I know this guy – but from that one line I know him in some detail.  He’s not a down and out, a vagabond, because he appreciates the sound of the river, BEFORE he speaks of his poverty.

In short it is a personal version of “My love she speaks like silence”.  As the lover in Love minus zero has perfection through being and non-being, doing and non-doing, so the man by the river has found tranquility and a unity with nature, alongside which we just know, without even going on through the song, that he is still looking, exploring, understanding, reacting to the world.  Otherwise what does the river whisper about?

It takes us back to a theme Dylan has touched on elsewhere – the unity with nature that represents a perfect harmony while we still try and live in the real world – all encapsulated in one line.

4:  Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?

Another challenge because I have always adored Johanna, and indeed am still working on my eternally delayed novel about Louise, Johanna and Little Boy Lost.

But that opening – just look at it on its own.  Has there ever been a song like that which throws you into the situation with such determination and such assuredness?

In a sense this is a parallel to Tell Ol Bill because in one line we are set inside the scene – the tricks of the night played on the imagination, the sounds that you never pick up amid the chaos of the day.   Only much later in his writing does Dylan complete the journey to harmony by having the river whispering in his ear.  Here there is tension – exactly the tension you don’t need when you are trying to relax.

3:  If your memory serves you well, we were going to meet again and wait

When I first heard this line I just repeated it to myself and said, “What?????” about two thousand times.   While the classic pop song tells us who’s who and what’s what from the start, Dylan often throws us straight into stories where we have to work out who the people are.  But this is not just people, this is these people’s past, and clearly some sort of disagreement about… who knows.

There is a whole novel packed into that one opening line.  We don’t know the people, we don’t know their lives, we don’t know their past, we don’t know why they were going to wait, but Dylan is not going to compromise here.  This is it folks, get used to it.

You’re in and your face hits the reality.  Thwack!  It’s like parachuting into the middle of a city you don’t know, within a culture you don’t understand, and someone instantly says, “Have you got it?”

2:  They’re selling postcards of the hanging

I couldn’t believe that as a line when I first heard it as a teenager – and that was long before I realised it was true.  1920 in Dylan’s home town of Duluth.  That rather adds to the power.

But even without that knowledge, whoever could have conceived of writing a piece of popular music with such a line.  It tells you everything you ever need to know or want to know about the inhumanity of man to man and the glorification that some can seek within that inhumanity.

In this line Dylan has done mankind a significant service, keeping alive a horrific moment so that none of us who admire Dylan’s work will ever be more than a moment away for realising how appalling the life form to which we belong, can be.   Civilisation?  It endlessly hangs by a thread.

1:  Someone’s got it in for me, they’re posting stories in the press.

From the universal of Desolation Row, to the personal of Idiot Wind.  I’ve noted above how many times Dylan can take us in one line into worlds that other songwriters never even consider, let alone write a whole song about, and here it is personal.  It is the opposite side (I’m not sure how many opposite sides one line can have – quite a few I guess) of “The river whispers in my ear”.

Is it paranoia, or is it true?   Most musicians who achieve fame have endless stories invented about them – it is what the popular press does.  More so than ever now that we have blogs.  But Dylan adds a twist – it is “Someone”.  One guy.   He does actually move away from the one with “I wish they’d cut it out quick” but that’s a detail, and besides “they” could refer to the press.

I hear it and read it is one person.  One person attacking Dylan with wild stories.

I guess because I spend a bit of time writing blogs (I also write a blog about the football – soccer – team I support in England, and English football is full of rumour, false allegations, malicious gossip and endless libels) so I get to study quite a bit of the made up stuff.

And the great thing here, as so often with Dylan, is we are straight into a situation in one line, but because it is just one line, we don’t know the details.  But boy, we really want to know.

That’s the ten.   If you have been, thanks for reading.  I rather enjoyed doing this.  I hope you got something out of it too.

Untold Dylan has reviewed 250 Dylan songs, and the reviews continue to be added.  The index to the reviews in alphabetical order is on the home page – just scroll down past the latest news.

An index to Dylan’s songs in chronological order of writing (rather than recording) appears here.  It currently goes up to 1973, but is being extended regularly.

By Tony Attwood

It is interesting to note that many Dylan fans hardly know of the music that Dylan wrote and performed for the Pat Garrett movie.

Perhaps the scene was set by Jon Landau writing in Rolling Stone that “it is every bit as inept, amateurish and embarrassing as Self Portrait. And it has all the earmarks of a deliberate courting of commercial disaster, a flirtation that is apparently part of an attempt to free himself from previously imposed obligations derived from his audience.”

Sally O’Rourke, writing in 2010 said, “In 1972, Bob Dylan was an artist in crisis.”  It is the popular image.  And yes, Dylan had slowed down dramatically in his writing career as the Chronology files show.  But hell, in 1972 Dylan had written When I paint my masterpiece, and Watching the river flow.  Two superb songs.   OK only two, and not the 20 a year he had been knocking out, but for 99.99% of songwriters those two songs in one year would have been heaven.

If the public or the critics expected 20 works of art a year for ever, they really knew nothing about art and artists.  No one keeps going at that rate.  If you want to know about an artist slowing down in terms of the production of great works, take a look at Picasso after Guernica.

So he hadn’t had a number 1 hit since  Lay Lady Lay  but then that song was the only song of note he wrote in 1968.

Just to put this in context, in the song writing circles that I have occasionally hovered on the edges of, it has oft been said that if you have a number one hit in the US you never have to work again.   And here of Dylan the writer is complaining that he hadn’t had a number one since 68.

The creation of great art cannot be turned on and off like a tap – if it could we could teach it in schools and everyone could do it.   Great artists don’t normally keep turning out the great works year after year.  Even Shakespeare, having suddenly turned the tap on in 1590 (aged 26) turned it off again in 1612 (four years before his death).

But great artists do pick up thoughts and ideas as they go along, and out of Pat Garrett we can be fairly sure we got the first Blood on the Tracks song, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”.

Since the days when it was commonplace to say Dylan was finished Knocking on Heaven’s Door has been rescued and seen as a very decent song – or indeed far more than that.  But such a view misses the fact that Billy the Kid contained another piece of music that is of particular value.

There are three reasons why this song isn’t so widely recognised.  One is because it is associated with a venture that was largely derided by critics who seem to think that they have the ability to cast an immediate view upon an album (an extremely hard thing to do).  Two because the song I’m alluding to has only once been played in public (and played with an arrangement that to my ears unfortunately diminished the value of the song, in my view).  And three because it has never cropped up on any collections or been recorded by anyone else.

That song is Billy – it comes in four versions: Main Title Theme, Billy 1, Billy 4 and Billy 7, and it is Billy 4 to which I would particularly urge you to turn your particular attention.  But if you have a moment more please do start with Main Title Theme.

The Main Title Theme is an instrumental which relies on an acoustic guitar and a melody improvised by a second acoustic.    Plus, although there are only three chords used, there is variation which, after the first minute when the second guitar begins to play a more fulsome melody, gives a deeper sense of the music having a meaning of its own.

Later a bass guitar enters and instead of just emphasising the chord sequence takes on a melodic line of its own.  It is played by Booker T Jones – of Booker T and the MGs.  It’s worth hearing just for that; there ain’t many people who could do what Booker T does.

I have seen comments about Main Title Theme ranging from talk about having had it played while walking down the aisle at a wedding to being the music played over and over again after a tragic death.  Somehow despite the fact that it is clearly improvised and very simple it seems to have a deep, deep impact.  Even if you never listen to anything else from this album, do take in this song in peace and quiet.  Just play it, sit there and close your eyes.  The work demands nothing less.

Beyond doubt much of the magic of this simple song also comes from having Bruce Langhorne playing on the album.

Langhorne played with Dylan on his early albums up to Bringing It All Back Home, and is particularly known for his work on tracks such as “She Belongs to Me,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.”  Indeed it is said on Biograph that Langhorne was Mr. Tambourine Man, Dylan commenting later, “On one session, Tom Wilson had asked him to play tambourine. And he had this gigantic tambourine. It was like, really big. It was as big as a wagon-wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind. He was one of those characters…he was like that. I don’t know if I’ve ever told him that.”

Back with the music to the movie, Billy 1 has a similar feel to the end of the Main Title theme, but with harmonica added before the lyrics come in – and actually it is a very decent Dylan song, and doesn’t deserve to have the forgotten life that it has taken on.  Maybe the problem is that the harmonica is inexplicably slightly out of tune with the band, or rather vice versa.

Then we are into the lyrics for the first time.  Each verse is musically identical – there is no “bridge” or “middle 8” although in the performance Dylan does vary each verse slightly.

So a beautiful and moving instrumental, and an interesting Billy 1.  But then the world changes and we get Billy 4.   These are the lyrics (each version of Billy is slightly different, and the lyrics published on the official site are different again – the lyrics here are my version from hearing the album – sorry if I have got anything wrong).

There’s guns across the river about to pound you
There’s a lawman on your trail, he’d like to surround you
Bounty hunters are dancing all around you
Billy, they don’t like you to be so free

Camping out all night on the veranda
Walking the streets down by the hacienda
Up to Boot Hill they’d like to send you
Billy, don’t you turn your back on me

There’s mules inside the minds of crazy faces
Bullet holes and rifles in their cases
There is always one more notch in four more aces
Billy, and you’re playing all alone.

Playin’ around with some sweet señorita
Into her dark chamber she will greet you
In the shadows of the mazes she will meet you
Billy, you’re so far away from home

They say that Pat Garrett’s got your number
So sleep with one eye open when you slumber
Every little sound just might be thunder
Thunder from the barrel of his gun

Gradually around this point other instrumental accompaniment is peeking through – we hear the second guitar, as Dylan then gives us a harmonica break before moving on

There’s always some new stranger sneakin’ glances
Some trigger-happy fool willin’ to take chances
And some old whore from San Pedro to make advances
Advances on your spirit and your soul

The businessmen from Taos want you to go down
So they’ve hired Mr Garrett to force you to slowdown
Billy, don’t it make ya feel so low-down
To be hunted by the man who was your friend?

Go hang on to your woman if you got one
Remember in El Paso, once, you shot one
Up in Santa Fe you bought one
Billy, you been runnin’ for so long

Gypsy queens will play your grand finale
Down in some Tularosa alley
Maybe in the Rio Pecos valley
Billy, you’re so far away from home

This was the first new music of Dylan’s since New Morning in 1970.  That it has been overlooked so utterly is undoubtedly due to the Rolling Stone review, the fact that it was a musical score, which of course has other demands on the writer (but which some Dylan fans, already bemused by previous changes of direction could not accept) and the fact that up next was Blood on the Tracks – and once that came out, everything else was forgotten.

The actual film by Peckinpah got varied reviews, and didn’t become highly regarded until later – not least because the original cut was rescued and shown again.  And it is interesting to consider the fact that Dylan and Peckinpah were both fighting the people who issued their work: Peckinpah with MGM, Dylan with Columbia.

One commentary says that the movie is “an allegory for the death of the ‘60s. Freedom and revolution were being wiped out by greed and reactionary politics, and the heroes of the era—including Dylan—were fading into irrelevancy.”

Well, maybe.  I don’t think so because I don’t lose my heroes that quickly, no matter what they do or don’t do, but the key point here is that Dylan was taking stock, casting around, and then using what he found to create Blood on the Tracks, starting as I’ve said with “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”.

So I find the album very interesting, and worth a review.  What I can’t really recommend is the live recording of Billy 4 from Stockholm in March 2009.  But it is on the internet so here is the link…

Maybe you will find yourself tomorrow
Drinking in some bar to hide your sorrow
Spending the time that you borrow
Figuring a way to get back home

All the songs reviewed on the site

The songs of Dylan in chronological order.

By Tony Attwood

I have to confess I find it hard to listen to Tears of Rage these days knowing that the co-writer, such an incredibly talented musician, became an alcoholic and drug abuser and committed suicide.   The waste of every human life is so awful – but it seems to hit my consciousness harder when I can listen to the man’s work and perceive such overwhelming ability.

But I guess the work of a critic is to separate such thoughts from a review of the song – a song in which Richard Manuel wrote the music to Dylan’s words (which Manuel indicated quite clearly were written out by Dylan first, but without any explanation for the meaning).

Indeed as Richard Manuel said in an oft quoted remark,

“He came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper … and he just said, ‘Have you got any music for this?’ … I had a couple of musical movements that fit … so I just elaborated a bit, because I wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn’t run upstairs and say, ‘What’s this mean, Bob: Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse?”

But for me the quandary is deeper than this.  Quite what “be the thief” means is never clear – is he stealing her life by doing that thing parents do in trying to get their children to behave as they behave, and think what they think?  Or was she very much a girl who was obedient in her younger day but then suddenly upped sticks and left?

Another very personal thought that crosses my mind comes from my own experience, which perhaps I may share at this point.  I have three daughters – now all grown up ladies leading their own lives.  The eldest two have families and live within half an hour’s drive of my home.  But the third lives in Australia – the other side of the world from England where I live.

That actually doesn’t bother me; she comes to England occasionally, and I can go and visit her when I feel so inclined, and those visits become completely memorable and stay with me for all the time we are apart.  Indeed the last time I was there I sat in her apartment during part of each day while my daughter was out at work, writing reviews of Dylan songs and staring at the beauty of the Pacific Ocean.

But I know some families can’t take it when one of the clan goes to the other side of the world, and actually say things like “Why is he/she doing this to us?” as if it is a deliberate act by the offspring to hurt the parents.  And I wondered whether this was the implication here.  We nurtured you, you were always such a good girl, so now why do you want to hurt us so much by leaving?

Or is it that the “false instruction” is conversion to a religion that takes her away from the family?  Or the reverse – a love of money and pleasure in a very well paid job, as with the lines

And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse

It is hard to disentangle but the chorus lines do endlessly make us sad, and I always end up thinking of the parent who just so desperately wants to see his child again…

Tears of rage, tears of grief
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We’re so alone
And life is brief

As we all know, this is one of the songs that was recorded at the Big Pink, just before the John Wesley Harding recordings were going to happen, and is most certainly one of the songs from the collection that gets the most attention.  The Band’s version on their first album has the composer on lead vocal and is very highly regarded throughout much of the pop and rock world.

So it clearly is a song of great merit, for the musical construction, the ambiguity of the words, the remarkable version on the Band’s album.

There is a commentary by Andy Gill which speaks of the vocals being “Wracked with bitterness and regret, its narrator reflects upon promises broken and truths ignored, on how greed has poisoned the well of best intentions, and how even daughters can deny their father’s wishes.”   He also sees the song possibly commenting on the betrayal felt by many American Vietnam war veterans.

But when we start going down that route much depends whether you interpret Independence Day as being a coincidence – it just happened to be Independence Day when she was born or christened or baptized or … or whether you see that as the heart of the symbolism of the whole piece.  Or whether, and this is where my thought pops up – Dylan just happened to come up with those opening lines

We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day 

and thought, “that’s interesting” and worked on from there.

But many commentators do like to hold to the view that Dylan generally puts secret messages into the song, so there are comments that the “life is brief” theme takes us to the Old Testament once again.  Or maybe we are in the arena of Ars longa vita brevis – “Art is eternal, life is short”.  Which is why the song’s chorus is so utterly desperate – please come now, I’ve not got much time left.

I guess the problem that I have is I don’t really see how a father can be betrayed by his daughter short of her handing him over to the enemy during an uprising.  One bring’s one’s children into the world, one gives them all one has to give, and then one gives them their freedom.   When we have a family we create free spirits who can go their own way and do their own thing.   And just as a parents love has to be unconditional, so is the gift of freedom to make their own choices.

To try and unravel this sort of conundrum of the meaning I’ve been turning increasingly to the notion of what Dylan was actually writing about around the time a particularly problematic song arose.  In this case the chronology (with the briefest possible summary of each song) is…

• I shall be released – I’m trapped, please release me
• Too Much of Nothing – She’s trapped by waters of oblivion (she possibly being TS Eliot’s first wife trapped in the mental hospital)
• Tears of rage – I’m trapped in my misery by my daughter’s departure
• Quinn the Eskimo – The Mighty Quinn – Ev’rybody’s in despair Ev’ry girl and boy…
• The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest -events happen but without any explanation, precedent or (quite often) logical consequence.
• Drifter’s Escape – the drifter is trapped until a bolt of lighting hits and the prisoner is set free.

These little comments of mine after each song are of course just snippets from the review, but to me they are the essence of the whole series of songs – being trapped, and if there is a chance of release from the entrapment it occurs only by chance.   Aside from the theme of being trapped there is also a certain theme of the randomness of society running through all these songs culminating in the way the Drifter gets out of jail free…

Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courthouse out of shape
And while everybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape

Of course these are just my explanations and I do recognise that a thousand other explanations are possible.  But if you follow this line, you’ll appreciate the randomness of events – the father has done everything right (as he sees it) and then she’s off.  How can she do this to him?

Maybe this was the world that Dylan saw when he suggested that “Everybody must get stoned”.

But which ever way we go, the notion that the parent is grieving over the path that his offspring has taken, seems to be the most viable one. It’s also the simplest, and that generally means it is the right one.

All the songs reviewed on this site

The Songs in Chronological Order 1962-69

Articles about Bob Dylan on the site

By Tony Attwood

On 13 April 2009 the English newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, published an interview with Bob Dylan by Bill Flanagan in its Culture section which included two sets of questions with reference to This Dream of You.

In the first section the interviewer says,

“This Dream of You has this wonderful South of the Border feel, but at the same time, I detect echoes of Sam Cooke, the Coasters, the Brill Building, and Phil Spector.

“Were those records from the 50’s and 60’s important to you? Did you try to capture some of that flavour in This Dream of You?”

Bob Dylan replies,”Those fifties and sixties records were definitely important. That might have been the last great age of real music. Since then or maybe the seventies it’s all been people playing computers. Sam Cooke, the Coasters, Phil Spector, all that music was great but it didn’t exactly break into my consciousness.

“Back then I was listening to Son House, Leadbelly, the Carter family, Memphis Minnie and death romance ballads. As far as songwriting, I wanted to write songs like Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. Timeless and eternal. Only a few of those radio ballads still hold up and most of them have Doc Pomus’ hand in them. Spanish Harlem, Save the Last Dance for Me, Little Sister … a few others. Those were fantastic songs. Doc was a soulful cat. If you said there was a little bit of him in This Dream of You I would take it as a compliment.”

I think that gives us quite a clue as to how to place this song – by listening to Spanish Harlem and Save the Last Dance and as I will hopefully show in a moment, at least one other Doc Pomus song.

Indeed, to me there is an extra hidden clue here, and one that has not particularly been picked up by other commentators of the song.  (Although I am always worried when this happens, in case no one else has mentioned it for the simple reason that it is soooo wrong, and I am making an idiot of myself.  But we shall see.)

Despite Bob’s comment about the 70s onwards, there was a period in the 1970s and 1980s in which Doc Pomus wrote songs with people such as Dr John.  Also interestingly at the same time Doc Pomus was working with one of Bob Dylan’s favourites, Willy DeVille.

Pomus is quoted as saying the songs of that era were for “…those people stumbling around in the night out there, uncertain or not always so certain of exactly where they fit in and where they were headed.”

Immediately I was reminded of Dylan’s phrase…

“For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe…”

So we find Doc Pomus writing…

Sometimes I wonder
Just what am I fighting for?
I win some battles
But I always lose the war
I keep right on stumbling
In this no-man’s land out here

Now compare with Dylan.

How long can I stay in this nowhere café
‘fore night turns into day
I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you
Which keeps me living on

And later Doc gives us…

I keep on fallin’ in space
Or just hangin’ in mid-air

and again

If it ain’t dead
Maybe in the here after
Instead of tears
I’ll learn all about laughter
But meanwhile I’m stuck out here

Later in the interview the question is posed about where the location of the song is, and Dylan comments

“…if you have those kind of thoughts and feelings you know where the guy is. He’s right where you are. If you don’t have those thoughts and feelings then he doesn’t exist.”  In short, if you appreciate the position of “…those people stumbling around in the night out there, uncertain or not always so certain of exactly where they fit in and where they were headed,” then you get this song.

So it is all about the feelings.  If you have loved a woman who is popular you can feel “Save the last dance”.  If you have felt lonely and lost, stumbling around in the night, not knowing where you fit in, then you have lived this song.  If you have never felt that, no you can’t.

The interviewer, persisting, and seemingly not really getting what Bob is saying, then says “The character in the song reminds me a lot of the guy who is in the song Across The Borderline.” 

Dylan replies, “I know what you’re saying, but it’s not a character like in a book or a movie. He’s not a bus driver. He doesn’t drive a forklift. He’s not a serial killer. It’s me who’s singing that, plain and simple. We shouldn’t confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, ‘My character this, and my character that.’ Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don’t have to explain it to me….

“The more you act the further you get away from the truth. And a lot of those singers lose who they are after a while. You sing, ‘I’m a lineman for the county,’ enough times and you start to scamper up poles.”*

So the singer and the song become entwined, not because the singer is singing about his own experiences at first but because he gets to understand and become part of those experiences through singing the song.

Thus the song is not about Dylan’s experiences, any more than Jimmy Webb was a Wichita Lineman or repeatedly needed to get to Phoenix.   But the brilliant songwriter makes the experiences and emotions of those who are in the song become part of his world through writing and singing the song.  We feel the isolation of the Wichita Lineman we feel the isolation of sitting all night in the nowhere café.   It doesn’t mean we’ve done it.

The expression of the opening…

How long can I stay in this nowhere café
‘fore night turns into day
I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you
Which keeps me living on

is thus not an expression of what happened to Dylan – it is a fictional story that becomes real for us, and indeed for him, through his performances.

This is the only song on “Together through Life” that was written wholly by Bob Dylan, and not with Robert Hunter.  The theme thus is regret of what is lost, the power of the memories of the past and the feeling of utter isolation, and it is interesting to compare this with the comments on religious belief from Dylan that I quoted in the last article, which dealt with how Dylan writes song.

It is suggested in some reviews that the “you” in the song could be the Almighty or the Son of God, but there is nothing in Dylan’s commentary to suggest that – and in truth precious little in the song to suggest that.  We can take it one way or another, it is up to the listener, but if we want to get an insight from Dylan, we need to follow that though about Doc Pomus and look at his writing.

So I am more inclined to see this as a “film noir” moment – something will happen, we know it, because we are watching the movie, except that Dylan just captures that waiting moment without giving us the rest of the lines, without introducing the characters, without letting us see the next scene.

But those opening lines

How long can I stay in this nowhere café
‘fore night turns into day
I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn

are themselves utterly evocative (for me at least) of a movie – I can immediately picture the actual scene.  It is the sort of experience that has never happened, will never happen to me, but I can feel it, appreciate it, be part of it, wonder about it.

This is the feeling of the loner, or the drifter, or the man who has run away – that constant theme in Dylan – the man who knows that the next thing that will happen could well turn out to be very bad.  Somehow he wants to stop time, but of course can’t.  It is as Doc Pomus said…

I keep right on stumblin’
In this no-man’s land out here

It is also very much a continuing Dylan theme – as in Highlands where he says

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

Indeed one could argue that if there is a dominant theme throughout Dylan’s entire songwriting career – a theme that no matter how often he leaves it, he comes back to it –  it is this loneliness, leaving, isolation, fear, moving on, getting stuck, theme.  This inability to escape no matter how hard he tries…

I look away, but I keep seeing it
I don’t want to believe, but I keep believing it
Shadows dance upon the wall
Shadows that seem to know it all

The inability to escape, no matter how hard he wants to…

Everything I touch seems to disappear
Everywhere I turn you are always here
I’ll run this race until my earthly death
I’ll defend this place with my dying breath

In this the dream is the hope which keeps him going, despite it all.  Everything else is temporary.

All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you
Which keeps me living on

But the shadows torment him, and it is interesting that the music takes its most unexpected turn as we deal with the shadows, moving away from the established chords in the key of D major, and suddenly finding ourselves wandering in the very odd sequence of Bm7 diminished, E7, Am, A7 for the line

Shadows dance upon the wall, shadows that seem to know it all.

Dylan recovers for each verse but each time he is still full that same self doubt that asked

How long can I stay in this nowhere café

and now asks

Am I too blind to see, is my heart playing tricks on me

and again

From a cheerless room in a curtained gloom

This is indeed as Bob confessed, his tribute to Doc Pomus and his own return to his ever recurring theme – although as a final footnote we might note that “curtained gloom” is a phrase in a line from Dylan’s favourite civil war poet Henry Timrod who in Serenade wrote

And let the zephyrs rise and fall
About her in the curtained gloom,
And then return to tell me all
The silken secrets of the room.

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*Footnote.  I mentioned this comment of Dylan’s about a lineman to a friend, but it wasn’t immediately understood – probably because in England we don’t have the word “linemen”.  Indeed the definition on Google when you type the word in, is singularly unhelpful, as it refers to people who lay railway track, or people who play in a particular position in American football.   In Wichita Lineman it refers to a person who maintains telegraph and telephone lines.  As wiki tells us, “The occupation evolved [in the USA] during the 1940s and 1950s with expansion of residential electrification”.

But I’m sure you knew that.

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All the songs reviewed on this site

Dylan in the 1960s in chronological order

Articles about Bob Dylan and his songwriting.