Untold Dylan

This piece has been updated several times.  The latest update was 23 September 2017.  Since 2015 this has been the most read article on this site.

By Tony Attwood

In September 22, 1962, Dylan performed “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” for the first time.  It is a song which as many have observed comes from the style of the traditional Anglo-Scottish border ballad “Lord Randal”  which uses the question and answer pattern, “O where ha you been, Lord Randall my son?/ And where ha you been my handsome young man?”

And yet, as I will try to show in this consideration of Hard Rain, the resultant song was not only nothing like Lord Randal in terms of its conceptual embrace, it was nothing like anything else Dylan was writing at the time or would write immediately thereafter.  

During 1962 Dylan wrote at least 21 songs that are still remembered and played by fans today.  There are more which have been left behind as notes, incomplete recordings and amendments of folk songs.  But 21 will do for now.

Here’s the list

1. Ballad for a friend
2. Rambling Gambling Willie
3. Standing on the highway
4. Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues
5. The Ballad of Donald White
6. Let me die in my footsteps
7. Blowing in the wind 
8. Corrina Corrina
9. Quit your Lowdown Ways
10. Down the Highway
11. Tomorrow is a long time 
12. Hard Rain’s a gonna fall
13. Ballad of Hollis Brown
14. John Brown
15. Don’t think twice
16. Paths of Victory.
17. Walking Down the Line
18. Oxford Town
19. Kingsport Town
20. Hero Blues
21. Whatcha Gonna Do? 

And there is Hard Rain sitting half way through the year.  Not just a year of incredible productivity but also a year in which the songs that we now particularly remember were so varied musically and lyrically.    From the blues to love songs, from anti-racism to the extraordinary heartfelt song about a friend dying which started the year, from songs of leaving to protest against the way the rural poor have been treated.  It is all there.

And if that were the complete list it would be a pretty big accomplishment, but that isn’t my point.  But what interests me is that nothing other than Dylan’s variety of work and the quantity of extraordinary compositions prepares us for Hard Rain.

So how can a song like this suddenly appear.

Of course it didn’t – every creative act has some sort of context.  A songwriter might start with an idea of what the song is about, or a single line (which leads to the idea of what the song is about), or a melody, or a chord sequence, or a guitar accompaniment or maybe even just a thought.

Here it was the lyrics, and we know from the reports in Heylin and elsewhere that Dylan described the song as a poem at first.  We also know that he kept on changing individual lines within the song over time.   (We also have reports that Bob was in the habit of knocking out a new song on the typewriter, fixing in some sort of melody and accompaniment and then rushing off to the Gaslight Club and playing it – just like that).

And here it started as a very unstructured poem, and then he put the melody and chords to the song, and there it was.  It came out of nowhere, and for a while at least it led nowhere.

There was no question of leaning on Lord Randal after Dylan had got the original concept. The young Lord talks with his mother, and we discover he has been poisoned by his lover.  Dylan was after something else.

There is a modernised version of Lord Randal on YouTube

So what Dylan took was the device – just as Lord Randal either took or gave the device to  the English nursery rhyme Billy Boy with the question, “Where have you been all the day Billy Boy Billy Boy?” That was a song that lasted well into the 20th century – I can recall my mother singing it to me when I was a child.

The reason Dylan could take that specific version of the device was because the song was noted by Francis Child – Harvard University’s first Professor of English, who supervised the publication of a 130-volume collection of the works of the British poets, including eight volumes of English and Scottish Ballads.   (That’s not a slip of my typing finger – it really was 130 volumes long).

Professor Child and Frederick Furnivall then went on to found The Ballad Society, with a view to publishing other important early ballad collections.

Child considered that folk ballads came from a more democratic time in the past when society was not so rigidly segregated into classes, and the “true voice” of the people.  I’ve no idea if Dylan knew of the history of the discovery of the song – but it would be nice to think so, because whatever else it is, Hard Rain is a song about the ordinary people, each and everyone of us, fighting the tyranny of the oppressor.

As others have said many times before me, the lines just come tumbling out one after the other.  We know it was amended in those early days, but even so, the impetus seems to have been unstoppable once the notion of the original structure had been taken.

It was the sleeve notes on Freewheelin’ album that first reported the story that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the inspiration for the song – something later denied by Dylan, and seemingly impossible since the song was written before the crisis.  The sleeve notes also make the oft quoted comment, “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.”  It can’t be true, but its a good thing to say.

In a 1963 radio interview Dylan said, “In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pellets of poison are flooding the waters’, that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers” which is an interesting addition to our insight, to say the least.  That battle is still being fought, for I have a very close friend with a doctorate in history who refuses to read any contemporary newspaper because of their distortion of reality.  I do read them, but then write a regular highly critical blog pointing out the distortions in one specific realm the papers cover.  We disagree on how to respond, but we both have taken up the fight against the modern press – so Dylan’s message from 1963 is still with us.

We also now know some more about the changes that occurred to the song, for as it happens that as I write this, an early version of the song with some of Dylan’s notations is up for auction.

The changes we can note are not particularly profound – rather the sort of changes that virtually all young poets would undertake when looking at one of their works.  The “six purple mountains” become the less surreal and more atmospheric “twelve misty mountains”

The original opening was “Where have you been, my blue eyed boy, Where have you been, my darling young son.”

And it wasn’t a hard rain that was gonna fall, but “And it’s a hard, It’s a hard, It’s a hard rain must fall.”

Musically the song is as powerful and innovative as it is lyrically.  There is an insistence in the lines between the first two and last two of each verse, pounding away to the IV V I chords sequence.  (That is G, A, D in the key the song is normally performed in).

What makes it so infernally powerful and demanding is the fact that V – I (the last two chords in the repeated sequence in the middle of each verse) is a standard resolution of a song.  It signifies an ending, not a mid-point.  But Dylan uses it, and then instantly goes back and gives it to us again and again and again.  The insistence of the message is overwhelming and all-powerful.  We think it is done and he’s off again.

As a result we lose all sense of where the end is, we lose sense of time and where we are, which is exactly the point of the song – we are in the midst of this deluge of words and images.

(This version of Hard Rain was used in the TV series Peaky Blinders)

Additionally of course it is the Song of Adjectives.  Misty, crooked, sad, dead in verse one alone.  

And the song of numbers.  Twelve, six, seven, a dozen, ten thousand (three times)…

And as one returns to the song after all these years it is clear that Dylan had listened not just to one ancient border song but lots of them, and that he was taking the first tentative step out of folk music towards a musical equivalent of what Ginsburg and co were doing – the first step on the journey that eventually led from Blowing in the Wind to Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine – the Subterranean Homesick Blues and the musical response to the beat poets.   Indeed Dylan did say every single line of Hard Rain is a different song.  Maybe he was right after all, and I’m wrong to dismiss that.

But this was nonetheless a momentary sighting of the land he seemed to want to reach.  After writing this epic the landscape quickly faded out of reach and he was back using the traditions of folk and blues, and not in any way matching up to the new world order of Ginsburg et al.

Of course he got there in the end, but this was the first brave, and as it turned out, tentative, step.  What is clear was that Dylan in writing this magnificent piece, didn’t know what to do with it, so he went back to what he knew.  The tried and tested more minimalist world of Hollis Brown.  Never has there been a greater contrast.

And that is not just in the form of the lyrics, but also the music, for Hard Rain uses a most unusual technique, varying the number of lines in the middle section.

In verse one we have a nine line verse (five in the middle, starting with the misty mountains).  Verse  two is 11 lines, seven in the middle, starting with the new born babe).  Verse three (just to make sure we were not getting the hang of these changes) is the same again – 11 lines.

The it’s a ten line verse with six in the middle (“I met a young child beside a dead pony”), and we finish with the all encompassing 16 line verse (12 in the middle) “I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’”

The extension of the last verse is singularly powerful.  Of course as listeners, we haven’t counted the number of lines in each verse but somehow we know this is going on and on – not just by the feel but by the change from “where” to the four subsequent lines before the two chorus lines.

It is also the power and determination of the singer to go out and change the world that accorded with the times – at least for some of us.  I was too young to go out and change the world (what with my mum telling me to be in by 9.30 and the homework to do each night, not to mention the piano practice and me teaching myself the guitar) but it was in my head that somehow I might one day be able to do something against all this grotesque injustice. 

Of course everything then split into bits between those turning up at the freak show of the  Million Dollar Bash, and those who continued the struggle, and those who joined political groups, and those who read revolutionary poetry…

In the end my view was simple – if we could liberate the creativity within everyone we could take people out of their entrapment into a broader world.  But that’s another story.  Quite what Dylan’s view in the end was, I’ve never been sure.  The songs are clues, but the clues are too contradictory.

And  as we come back and listen again after all these years the power and energy are there as great and as demanding as ever.   These words have been with me since I was a kid at school, and they still, still, make me shiver.

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

Looking back, I can’t say I did it very well.

But at least I tried.

You might also find Bob Dylan’s Hard Rain’s a gonna fall. Behold desolate, battlefield poetry of interest

What is on the site

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

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

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

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

Dylan’s Lyrics about Women – Have they Evolved?

By Dearbhla Egan

I am going to spare you the tedious and markedly uninteresting details of each and every woman that may or may not have been the subject of Dylan’s love songs.  The subject is so hackneyed and unnecessary a great deal of the time.  I merely wish to explore a few of the many, many songs Dylan wrote about women over such a broad span of time in order to see if there is any notable progression in his attitudes, language, tolerance and understanding of women as he developed both as a singer-songwriter and as a man.

Dylan was just 21 years old when he wrote ‘Don’t think twice, it’s Alright’ in 1962.  It was one of the songs included on his second Album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (released 1963) and a standard in concert and in many compilation albums that would follow in later years.  Dylan at that time had two preoccupations in life, the first being music, and the second, like any young man of his age, being women.  Where women were concerned, there is evidence to suggest that Dylan had been around the block quite a few times already from an early age so it does not come as any great surprise that he was in a position to write such a song so eloquently.

What I like about this song is that it really reflects my own memories of how young men in that age- group behaved when let down badly in love.  He is letting out some of the anger and disappointment but there is a sense of control, that he is holding back a lot because, ultimately, the cool thing to do is to be cool! There is a lot of ‘couldn’t-care-less’ language in there when the truth is, he could not care more.

…….. It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin’ anyway
So don’t think twice, it’s all right….

…….‘I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

I chose to mention ‘Don’t think twice’ first because it just seems to fit with who and what he was at that age.  Therefore there is a kind of purity in the lyrics that are true to the man and how he was actually feeling when he wrote it.  It is my contention that while Dylan wrote a great number of love songs, there were a relatively small number that had this quality about them.

However, not long after this, he wrote a very different kind of love song in 1964, It Ain’t Me, Babe, where there was absolutely no ambiguity about his anger towards the female subject of the song.  I would go so far as to say that if such a woman were to actually exist, she would have to be deemed some kind of monstrous anomaly and would probably be best locked away for her own safety and the safety of mankind.

There are three verses in the song each of which make no apologies about putting this woman down and in her place right up to the last and most vitriolic verse where he sings:

Go melt back in the night
Everything inside is made of stone
There’s nothing in here moving
An’ anyway I’m not alone
You say you’re looking for someone
Who’ll pick you up each time you fall
To gather flowers constantly
An’ to come each time you call
A lover for your life an’ nothing more
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe

Well, this was surely a sharp slap in the face for someone.  Not alone does he say he does not need her but deliberately degrades her into some kind of stereotypical, empty headed woman who needs him to ‘gather flowers constantly’? I really don’t believe that the 24 year old Dylan could possibly have perceived women in this way but what better way to insult someone than to publicly refer to them like this.

That being said, perhaps I am giving him more credit than he is due because if we jump ahead to 1978 when he was 38 years old with a long and complicated romantic history behind him he wrote and released ‘Is your love in Vain?’ on the album ‘Street Legal’.  Some of the lyrics of this song really defy belief and had they come from the hand of a much younger Dylan they may not have been so badly received by the critics and fans alike.  What could he have been thinking of when he wrote:

Are you so fast that you cannot see that I must have solitude?
When I am in the darkness, why do you intrude?
Do you know my world, do you know my kind
Or must I explain?
Will you let me be myself
Or is your love in vain?

And

All right, I’ll take a chance, I will fall in love with you
If I’m a fool you can have the night, you can have the morning too
Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow
Do you understand my pain?
Are you willing to risk it all
Or is your love in vain?

I’m guessing that even his most ardent female fans would not have filled in the application form for that one! But this is real Dylan. His romantic lyrics move between extremes of great resentment, loss and even hatred to love that is so intense, so passionate it almost defies description.  There are no grey areas in romantic relationships where he is concerned. I love you or I do not.  You love me or you do not.  Of course he has friends who are a separate concern and he pays homage to them in a different way.

But moving back again, just a little, I would like to mention ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ written in 1969 for the ‘Nashville Skyline’ album.  I am almost reluctant to mention the song as it has been so overplayed and people are not inclined to like it for this reason.  But I think it is important for the purpose of this review to mention this song.  Now, the 29 year old Dylan has learned, through personal experience, how sexual connections work, whether they are casual or on going.  This song is like the images we see in nature where the male of the species will carry out a ‘performance’ to win over the favour of the female.  This is Dylan as Peacock.

We would do well to remember that there is a reason why this song was such a huge hit and became so overplayed.  At its conception, Dylan was breaking new boundaries both in the manner in which he sang but also, and more importantly, in the words he wrote.  There was no innuendo or subtlety here.  He was saying very frankly, come to bed with me and I’ll give you the night of your life.  This kind of forthright language concerning sex was unheard of prior to this and for many young people at the time it was an act of rebellion to own and listen to the song.  But Dylan was not playing games here.  The song really exuded sensuality and sexuality and the simplicity of the lyrics was the shining glory.

Lay lady lay
Lay across my big brass bed
Stay lady stay
Stay with your man a while
Until the break of day
Let me see you make him smile

His clothes are dirty but his, his hands are clean
And you are the best thing that he’s ever seen

Stay lady stay
Stay with your man a while

Why wait any longer for the world to begin
You can have your cake and eat it, too
Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he’s standing in front of you

Speaking for myself, 35 years ago, this would have done it for me!

In ‘Shelter From the Storm’ written in 1975 for the album ‘Blood on the Tracks’ the 35 year old Dylan places the female subject of the song as more of a metaphor than a reference to any actual person.

Here he seems to be referring to woman as ‘mother’ in a traditional way.  She is the person, the home we return to when everything is lost and the darkness, full of unthinkable terrors, threatens to consume us.  He is filled with respect for this ‘woman’ who constantly offers him refuge from a world that is filled with chaos and states that he will always owe her and never forget her.  There is a reference in the song to a mistaken tryst between him and the woman but it changes nothing. This is the voice of a more mature man, perhaps recognising that the women he has known have often been the source of much solace and he needs to remember that as well as the bad times.

………And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured
I’ll always do my best for her, on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm.
“Come in,” she said,
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”…………

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail,
Poisoned in the bushes an’ blown out on the trail,
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.
“Come in,” she said,
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”…………..

Well, I’m livin’ in a foreign country but I’m bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
“Come in,” she said,
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”

It truly would be possible to write on this subject to the point of writing a book.  There is so much rich material to work with and the temptation is to go along with this and in all likelihood, never finish this review.  But, I am not going to take the long road on this occasion.  I will stick with what I intended which was to explore if there is evidence in the lyrics of Dylan’s love songs of any progression, maturing or other change in his attitude to women as he became older with a great deal of human experience behind him.   It is important to remember also that while he was writing some of the later material he was also deeply involved in a personal spiritual and religious journey that was bound to impact on his world view and his perception of women at that time.

Bearing in mind the songs I have discussed and the hundreds that it is impossible to cover here I have concluded that there is a final song that says to me that the 24 year old Dylan who wrote ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ eventually, at the age of 52, wrote a song that is a beautiful and understanding homage to women.  The song is ‘Sweetheart Like You’ from the album ‘Infidels’, released in 1983 and in this song he looks into the heart and soul of the woman.  He sees her worth and merit as a human being and decries the fact that she is not getting the respect and recognition that she deserves.  In this song Dylan shows great insight into the human condition and I would certainly regard this as a love song that does justice to all women.

I think it serves to disprove the notion that Dylan was stuck in an emotional rut because of the failure of so many meaningful relationships.  It seems to me that the loss of love in his life was the emotional catalyst for wonderfully inspired songs written in late middle age.  Dylan might need to take stock and quit doing concerts, but as for writing, as long as he can hold a pen it just gets better and better.  I think the lyrics of this song prove the point.

“Sweetheart Like You”

Well the pressure’s down, the boss ain’t here
He gone North, for a while
They say that vanity got the best of him
But he sure left here in style
By the way, that’s a cute hat
And that smile’s so hard to resist
But what’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ?

You know, I once knew a woman who looked like you
She wanted a whole man, not just a half
She used to call me sweet daddy when I was only a child
You kind of remind me of her when you laugh
In order to deal in this game, got to make the queen disappear
It’s done with a flick of the wrist
What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ?

You know, a woman like you should be at home
That’s where you belong
Taking care for somebody nice
Who don’t know how to do you wrong
Just how much abuse will you be able to take ?
Well, there’s no way to tell by that first kiss
What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ?

You know you can make a name for yourself
You can hear them tires squeal
You can be known as the most beautiful woman
Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal.

You know, news of you has come down the line
Even before ya came in the door
They say in your father’s house, there’s many mansions
Each one of them got a fireproof floor
Snap out of it baby, people are jealous of you
They smile to your face, but behind your back they hiss
What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ?

Got to be an important person to be in here, honey
Got to have done some evil deed
Got to have your own harem when you come in the door
Got to play your harp until your lips bleed.
They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you king
There’s only one step down from here, baby
It’s called the land of permanent bliss
What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this ?

Index to all the articles on the web site

By Tony Attwood

It has never been part of the rules that the poet has to know what his best lines are.  Most poets are saved from the inquisition because either we don’t have the earlier versions of their work, (at least until they have finished writing for good) or they are merely dealt with in doctorates, and not given over much to public scrutiny.

But not Dylan; he loses out on both counts.

Because of Heylin et al we know that he once sang lines like

World’s coming to an end, wise men standing around like furniture

People bringing the Lord’s name into every senseless conversation

Felt around for the lightswitch, felt around for her face, been treated like a wild animal on a wild goose chase

But whichever version you find, there is power and fun, hostility and absurdity. Just consider the “official” opening of the song

Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement,
Heard the last moan of a boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated.
She was walking down the hallway while the walls deteriorated.

This is heavy blues and bad dream country.  This is drug related or the product or an over-active imagination.  Who is the groom, and why is he, rather than traditionally jilted bride, left at the alter?  From the very start we want to know.

One explanation given is that “Christ is the bridegroom and the bride for whom he waits is the Church, representing the Christian faithful.”

I have read reports that this is related to John 3:28: “He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. So this joy of mine has been made full.”   But in reality I still don’t quite see what that has to do with the whole song.

Maybe the images surrounding such a metaphor are a pretty odd way of saying nothing specifically religious, but they come out of the reading of the gospel. One day the concept of the groom being left at the alter came to his head, having read John’s gospel, and Dylan picked up the guitar and lines came tumbling out.  Not everything is crafted over weeks and months.

East of the Jordan, west of the Rock of Gibraltar,
I see the burning of the page, Curtain risin’ on a new age,
See the groom still waitin’ at the altar.

This is seriously odd, and you can take your pick of a whole range of options.  I’ve read lots of them in last week but I can’t say that any of them have me thinking, “ah, so that’s where Dylan is”.

The Groom comes from a period in which Dylan composed “Property of Jesus,” “Yonder Comes Sin,” and “Caribbean Wind” as well as writing new arrangements of some of his earlier songs such as”Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell (For Anybody).”  It was left off Shot of Love, and then returned to it for later editions.

Rolling Stone magazine, when it did its feature on “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Songs of the 1980s” suggested that although the 80s were not Dylan’s strongest decade as a writer, it was an era in which “Dylan’s quality control hit an all-time low” – at least in an early part of the decade.

Their prime complaint is the inclusion of Lenny Bruce is Dead and Dead Man, Dead Man.on the album and not this song.

It is a common complaint – that Dylan doesn’t know his own best work, and yet such a complaint ignores two fundamentals.  One is that Dylan very clearly often conceives his albums as whole pieces, not a collection of “the best songs I’ve written of late”.

The other is something that affects all artists of high merit.  They are invariably so deeply engrained within their work that they cannot perceive these works of art as those not involved in the creative conception will do.   Songs don’t materialise in one single play through – at least most of the time they don’t.  They grow inside the composer, often unplayed, untried, until emerging semi-formed and then need coaxing and crafting out.  The experience of this internal germination, and the external crafting and manipulation is profound.  It might last a day or a month or a year, but however it comes about, it is a profound experience.

Often the writer is left feeling that somehow he has not expressed in sound everything that he felt and thought during the gestation process, and so what to us mere mortals might sound like a supreme treasure, is rejected from the collection because it isn’t right yet.

I suspect in this case, the song sounded ok to Dylan, good enough to issue indeed, but out of phase with the rest of the album.  It would not be the first time.

So, “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” came out as a single, and Dylan later changed his mind and put it on the album.  Rolling Stone’s article says, “it fits perfectly into the album,” and that is a matter of opinion.  I don’t think it does – but sadly Rolling Stone didn’t really explain why they thought it would fit.  Mere assertion doesn’t ever help us much.  We need to look further.

For example, in a 1983 interview in New Musical Express (a UK weekly)   “The purpose of music is to elevate and inspire the spirit.  To those who care where Bob Dylan is at, they should listen to Shot of Love. It’s my most perfect song. It defines where I am spiritually, musically, romantically and whatever else. It shows where my sympathies lie. It’s all there in that one song.”

Now compare and contrast Property of Jesus with

Put your hand on my head, baby, do I have a temperature?
I see people who are supposed to know better standin’ around like furniture.
There’s a wall between you and what you want and you got to leap it,
Tonight you got the power to take it, tomorrow you won’t have the power to
keep it.

This is a song of the disconnected images of nightmares, it is the creatures at the Million Dollar Bash going haywire on meths and tormenting each other.  I don’t think it has much connection with most of the rest of the album.

One description I read, as I did my research on this song, speaks of the “chaotic absurdity” of the piece, the “breathing in hot pursuit of the listener across the switchback longs and shorts of the verses and the punching ups and downs of the chorus melody.”

And yes, I’d say that is a fair description.  The lines vary in length ludicrously, the rhymes are bizarre, and all around us the world is falling to pieces.  So tht concept of the switchback works for me.  I don’t need an actual meaning for the bride at the alter any more than I do for Bob’s passing interest in “Gibraltar” (which I’ve visited three times, and a charming place it is too,) nor do I need to know who these people are, to appreciate the cracks in the pavement.

Cities on fire, phones out of order,
They’re killing nuns and soldiers, there’s fighting on the border.
What can I say about Claudette?  Ain’t seen her since January,
She could be respectably married or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires.

Fair enough Bob, if that’s how you see it.  Dali had visions like that too; chaotic, surreal, violent, ambiguous and absurd.  All at once.

And if you want a political context, then how about the funding of the Contras in Nicaragua which eventually was banned by Congress, but President Nixon, being who he was, continued it.

Thus when I heard

Try to be pure at heart, they arrest you for robbery,
Mistake your shyness for aloofness, your silence for snobbery,
Got the message this morning, the one that was sent to me
About the madness of becoming what one was never meant to be.

I thought of the Contras, that mix of counter revolutionary ideals and human rights violations.  But then, as I have said so often, I’m English, and I got the news about Nixon and his fun and games in a European context filtered by our news media, and by my experiences as a young man.  I was reminded of what I had read of the chaos of war, or messages getting through or not getting through, of the way war changes noble ideals into horror stories…

So yes I can see “She was walking down the hallway while the walls deteriorated, as “the world is falling apart.”

Or maybe, “this the way the world ends – not with a bang but with ceaseless unmitigated chaos.”  And yes, looking at where we have got to since the times when Dylan recorded the song, he could be right.

Index to all the songs reviewed.

By Tony Attwood

Dylan has often turned to the step by step base line in his music, the base guitar either working its way down part of the scale, or up it.

The descending bass used here turns up in Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, I want you, Caribbean Wind, Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine, Stuck inside of Mobile etc etc   That this is a classic Dylan musical device has of course been picked up by many before me.  Indeed Bowie very particularly chose to use it in “Song for Bob Dylan,” way, way back.

Some find Working Man’s Blues of overwhelming import in the Dylan canon, others such as Heylin don’t.  Heylin says, “There is a laziness that manifests itself in the way Dylan wanders from thought to thought, resorting to the lexicon to fill in any blanks…”

The #2 part of the could relate to any one of a number of sources.   Working Man Blues by Merle Haggard could be one of the key influences, but the two songs have little in common – in fact musically they have nothing in common.

Heylin takes us back to Big Joe Williams “Meet me at the bottom”.  Or we could go in a different direction and find one of the strangest bits of borrowings which comes from “June’s Blues”, by June Christy, which if you have a mind to, I’d recommend you have a listen to – and please don’t be put off by the start if this is not your style.  The way June Christy handles the lyrics in the first verse is unexpected, but at least go past the trumpet break and listen to the third verse.  I’ve read that Dylan played Christy on some of his radio programmes.

So all sorts of references musically, and as with Christy, with the lyrics.  Also apparently there is a line from Henry Timrod (1829-1867) “to feed my soul with thought” – but I still, after ages of trying, can’t see what the attraction is in Timrod’s work.  It is I guess my utterly different cultural upbringing – my loss, I’m sure.

I did get the reference of course to Long Tall Sally (“I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall”) which of course comes from Robert Johnson “Hot Tamales (They’re Red Hot)”, but then the amount of Johnson that has survived is small, so it is easy to remember.  And besides, that is my cultural heritage!

So, is it “all he’s got left in the tank” (Heylin) or one of the great masterpieces?   Or just a collection of borrowings?

For me, neither – it’s a middle ranking song with some nice ideas but moments that are uncomfortable for me.  But this is just me, I often get that uncomfortable feeling always comes around when Dylan says things like

They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad

And maybe this is why I always turn back to The Drifter’s Escape and Visions of Johanna, and indeed It’s all good, because they are not trying to force complex impossible-to-resolve issues into the simplicity of the structure of a popular song.  Instead they let the mists of uncertainty roll in and around the music, allowing us to take out our own elements and issues – and encouraging us to laugh at others who ludicrously simplify the world (It’s all good) rather than trying to simplify the world ourselves.

Heylin says, “There is a laziness that manifests itself in the way Dylan wanders from thought to thought, resorting to the lexicon to fill in any blanks…” and for once I agree with the old buzzard.  It does seem a bit of a cut and paste job built around that familiar descending base.

In verse one he’s thinking of the Good ol’ Days, and how the modern world ain’t up to much.

There’s an evenin’ haze settlin’ over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek

He wants a bit of comfort in his old age now he’s handed the fight over to those younger than he who can take up the cause

I’m listenin’ to the steel rails hum
Got both eyes tight shut
Just sitting here trying to keep the hunger from
Creeping it’s way into my gut

Not insisting that others must take up the cause of the working man – your choice…

You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

He’s thinking of the old days, how he was a fighter for the cause…

Now, I’m sailin’ on back, ready for the long haul
Tossed by the winds and the seas
I’ll drag ‘em all down to hell and I’ll stand ‘em at the wall
I’ll sell ‘em to their enemies

The enemy is at the gate in fact, and I suppose my own personal problem is that Dylan’s did that so, so, so much better in 2005.

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

OK, it is not the same type of song, but

Now the place is ringed with countless foes
Some of them may be deaf and dumb
No man, no woman knows
The hour that sorrow will come

Compare and contrast (as they used to say in English literature examinations where I come from)…

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

I suppose what I adore in Tell ol Bill is the uniformity of the composition while Working Man seems to me to have bits and pieces in it.  For the life of me I can’t understand the coupling of

I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death

It is almost as if Dylan was reminded of Long Tall Sally, liked the line and left it there without any particular reason for doing so other than he likes it.

So the Working Man has lost it all

Well, they burned my barn, they stole my horse
I can’t save a dime
I got to be careful, I don’t want to be forced
Into a life of continual crime
I can see for myself that the sun is sinking
How I wish you were here to see
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me?

He thinks of the person he has lost, of the world that is gone, of all his belongings that have gone and I am still reminded of that much more robust fight by one man against a different, but just as evil, force.

The evening sun is sinking low
The woods are dark, the town ain’t new
They’ll drag you down, they’ll run the show
Ain’t no telling what they’ll do

But while Tell Ol Bill is a constant struggle by one man against everything around him, in Working Man it can get a bit confusing

Now I’m down on my luck and I’m black and blue

and from the same verse

Got a brand new suit and a brand new wife
I can live on rice and beans
Some people never worked a day in their life
Don’t know what work even means

What has work got to do with it?  Is he happy with the marriage or down on his luck? How different is the ending to

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

Of course they are very different songs, but both written within a year or so of each other, both are about a man running out of options, a man alone trying to sort out what is going on, how to get through, how to get out.  A man without money, on his own calling out to one person (at least I think that is what WMB is about).

It is just that for me, one of those two songs is an utter success, and the other, somehow just doesn’t make it.

So when I read on one site “Workingman’s Blues #2 is a standout track” I just don’t see it.   That review says, “Workingman’s Blues managed to be both timeless and utterly contemporary, with its opening lines a poetic snapshot of renewed hard times,” and of course that is the wonder of music – like visual art you can make up your own mind.  It is just that for me, no, if you want that poetic snapshot of renewed hard times, you take

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

But I do think some of my difference of opinion from that of others is cultural.  One review said, “The chorus has a wonderfully elegiac, empathetic tone, just right for a late-night picket-line singalong.”  I can only imagine the writer had been on very, very different late night picket lines from me in my youth.

The song is of course about Modern Times – the throwing away of the past, and some of the people who made the past with it.  But also (and this is just me) at times it is about nothing much – just a collection of lines from other sources (there is inevitably Ovid, because where Dylan goes a-searching for Timrod he also seems to find Ovid quite often.)

Chris Gregory in a review on line writes, “Like Visions of Johanna or Desolation Row or Idiot Wind or Jokerman or Blind Willie McTell it can be subjected to many different interpretations,” and that I suppose is where I disagree most of all.  The issue isn’t just, can you interpret the songs differently? but what approach is being used, and how successful is the approach.  For me, Idiot Wind isn’t a song like this at all – it is a clear commentary in which the opening line “Someone’s got it in for me…” tells us everything that is going on here and it has a clear unity throughout.

Likewise “Johanna” brings down the mists from the first moment, “Aint it just like the night to play tricks.”

Here though, “There’s an evening haze settling over town Starlight by the edge of the creek” this is the everyday world.  And when you are telling tales of the everyday, you need to be extraordinary in your rendition of it.  Dylan can do it, but for me, personally, not here.

By Tony Attwood

I have to say I’ve had a great time reviewing this song, not least because no one that I know says, “it’s all good”.  But I recalled a song from around 2007 by Seasick Steve called “It’s all good”.  It is nothing like Dylan’s song and apparently of no relevance.  But it is just wonderful where these reviews lead, even when they are blind allies.

But back to the phrase, just ‘cos I don’t know anyone that says it, that doesn’t mean no one in Britain says it, and a couple of requests for help from younger people of my acquaintance told me it was used widely.  So there we are – just me utterly out of date.

Writing a song based on one chord with the band playing a series of catch phrases sounds easy but to make it work is incredibly hard, as is playing such songs.  I remember Bo Diddley doing it and getting away with it, but not that many can.

https://youtu.be/8mMHE6KkS7k

Here the musicians do, because of the way the accordion plays and carries them through (this guy knows his Cajun bounce).   Just listen to the two chords at the end of each line of Dylan’s singing in the first lines.  He’s playing the chord that the whole piece is based on, and then a second chord that moves away (to the sub-dominant, if you want to know).   That is exactly the opposite way around from what you would expect.

Then in verse 3 (starting “Wives are leaving their husbands”) he stops and does the reverse.    This hidden effect that you won’t notice normally is the heart of what makes this piece beat along and stay so interesting.

Anyway, I have now consulted the urban dictionaries and it seems that “It’s all good” means “No worries,” in Australia, and “No problem” in England.   Or perhaps as one commentator said, “what people who are a little too old say to sound cool.”  Fortunately I don’t think I ever try to sound cool.

Actually, once I started looking I found loads of interesting definitions to the phrase.  I particularly liked “a lame response to adverse conditions which shows no concern to others.”  In other words it is a platitude which allows the speaker to get past the world without raising a concern, a thought, or any emotions at all.  As one writer said, “a favourite with inarticulate teens.”

It was, I am told, popularised by MC Hammer, and like all platitudes it is there to avoid debate or discussion.

Dylan said in one interview that the song started, “Probably from hearing the phrase one too many times,” and one can imagine that being the case.

The world is falling apart, you are being pulled to bits, and all you can say is “It’s All Good,” which is a pretty poor reflection on humanity.  “Brick by brick they tear you down, and a teacup of water, is enough to drown,” and we are drowning in this overwhelming flood of pointlessness and political humdrum.

Can we do anything about it?  Well, in the old days, Bob might have said “rebel”, then he might have said “worship” and now?   Even the Resistance is scuppered, there’s nothing we can do.  “Its all right ma, it’s life and life only.”

Talk about me babe, if you must
Throw on the dirt, pile on the dust
I’d do the same thing if I could

Everything is reduced to the ridiculous, the awful, the polluted, the corrupt…

Big politician telling lies
Restaurant kitchen, all full of flies

All the traditions have gone, the whole concept of family that we built civilisations on for 5000 years have crumbled, but that’s fine, that’s just how civilisation ends…

Wives are leaving their husbands, they beginning to roam
They leave the party and they never get home
I wouldn’t change it, even if I could

We tried to build a society built on the laws of God, built on the concept of the family, built on the notion of politics and look where it got us

The widow’s cry, the orphan’s plea
Everywhere you look, more misery

And then as the song moves towards an end, the enigma that I have never quite resolved…

I’ll pluck off your beard and blow it in your face
This time tomorrow I’ll be rolling in your place
I wouldn’t change a thing even if I could

Just where has Bob got to at that point?  To whom is he talking?  Who has a beard?

You tell me.

Index to all the songs reviewed on Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

It has been suggested that Dylan’s 2009 song Jolene, written with Robert Hunter as was much of the album, is a song that somehow relates to Dolly Parton’s 1973 hit about the woman who can have any many she wants.  I don’t think this is right at all, for there is another, quite different, more authentic, and much more interesting story behind the song.

https://youtu.be/fgLUIee8sLU

However I will start with Parton and her song, because that is the issue that has occupied a lot of commentators.

Jolene in Dolly Parton’s original is a woman of beauty and sophistication who because of her beauty and style is the dominant figure in any relationship.

Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green

Your smile is like a breath of spring
Your voice is soft like summer rain
And I cannot compete with you, Jolene

She is the sort of woman that Johnny Mercer thought of when he wrote “I search for phrases to sing your praises” in “Too Marvellous For Words.”

But Dylan’s Jolene is a woman of a different style.  True it starts out in this way although Dylan’s language is far more earthy and basic.

Well you’re comin’ down High Street, walkin’ in the sun
You make the dead man rise, and holler she’s the one

But then quickly moves on

I’ll sleep by your door, lay my life on the line
You probably don’t know, but I’m gonna make you mine

Here we have the man begging the woman, and determined he’s going to win.  But with Parton’s song Jolene just pops along and takes what she wants because of her natural beauty.

There also seems to be a worry about why Dylan and/or Hunter chose the name Jolene.  Of course they knew the Parton song was there, and, it has been argued, once a name reaches a certain level of significance then it can’t be used again.  You can’t have another Jolene, it is said, any more than you can have another  Maybelline, or Mrs. Robinson.

So people have looked for a connection between Dylan and Parton, and the connection found is that Parton apparently issued an album of other people’s famous songs in which she sang along with the originator.   Me and Bobby McGee with Kris Kristofferson, and Turn, Turn, Turn with Roger McGuinn.

The story is that she went to Dylan and suggested a duet of Blowin’ In The Wind, for this project but Dylan declined.   Parton later said, apparently,  “I was going to do a whole album of his (songs) and I was going to call it Dolly Does Dylan. Now I’m having second thoughts.”

So was Bob miffed, or did the incident set up an idea in which he decided to look at the original song from another angle?  I can’t answer the former definitively , but the latter really doesn’t seem right.

And there is another much more likely explanation: the song Rolene by Mink DeVille.

Doc Pomus (Jerome Solon Felder) said about the band, “Mink DeVille knows the truth of a city street and the courage in a ghetto love song. And the harsh reality in his voice and phrasing is yesterday, today, and tomorrow — timeless in the same way that loneliness, no money, and troubles find each other and never quit for a minute.”

And just in case you are not fully up on your rock n roll history Doc Pomus knows what’s what, having written “Save the Last Dance for Me”, “This Magic Moment”, “Sweets for My Sweet”, “Viva Las Vegas”, “Little Sister”, “Surrender”, “Can’t Get Used to Losing You”, “Suspicion”, “Turn Me Loose” and “A Mess of Blues”.

Second verse of “Jolene”:

Well it’s a long old highway, don’t ever end
I’ve got a Saturday night special, I’m back again
I’ll sleep by your door, lay my life on the line
You probably don’t know, but I’m gonna make you mine

Mink DeVille recorded “Steady Drivin’ Man” which includes lines such as “You know that long old highway” and “She’s got a Saturday night special.”  (The saturday night special is a handgun – it is not a phrase that is used in the UK – at least not among the people I know.)

The band’s song, “Just Your Friends“ includes lines like, “You know that all of the time I’ve laid my heart on the line” and “I don’t know why I want more but I will sleep by your door for the truth.”

So it goes on.  Jolene it seems takes phrase after phrase from the band that recorded Rolene.

In “Jolene” we have

I keep my hands in my pocket, I’m movin’ along
People think they know, but they’re all wrong
You’re something nice, I’m gonna grab my dice
I can’t say I haven’t paid the price

In Mink deVille’s Desperate Days:  “Put your hands in your pockets, you keep moving around.”  In “Cadillac Walk,” “Ain’t she something nice/Bones rattle my dice.”

There’s no need to go further – but if you want you can trace the links through by listening to the band.

I am not sure if it is that Mink DeVille’s music isn’t to most commentators’ taste, or they just don’t care about historic links, but most writers ignore the connection between Dylan and Mink DeVille, and instead just dive straight into knocking Dylan.   Sean Wilentz Bob Dylan in America says of Dylan’s Jolene, it is

a toss-off steady rocker with a nice guitar hook, Jolene’s eyes are brown and Dylan sings as the king to her queen, while he packs a Saturday night special—a plain enough sex song, but lurking in the lyrics and the music are also hints of Robert Johnson’s “32-20 Blues…”

Which is where I stopped, because just about everything is Dylan has been seen by someone to be related to 32-20 blues – which is about a gun.  I’d suggest if you have not heard 32-20 you find it on the internet and play it, then you will be able to judge.  Or buy a complete set of Robert Johnson.

And besides that guitar hook is related back not to anything like 32-20 but to a guitar part in a Mink DeVille song.

Clinton Heylin is at his particularly negative worst on this song…

For a ditty that could as easily have been called “Baby I Am The King” to invite comparison with Dolly Parton’s consummate song of the same name suggests a certain chutzpah on the singer’s part.  [Chutzpah = Yiddish from the Hebrew word ḥutspâ (חֻצְפָּה), meaning “insolence”, “cheek” or “audacity”.]

In the past, one would have expected such bravado to generally have been warranted. But this is truly desperate stuff. Line after line of missing links, it is tuneless, hopeless, almost worthless too.

And yet I don’t find it so, but that is perhaps because I have been listening to Mink Deville as I write this, which I doubt that Heylin would ever do.

Indeed before I came across Dylan’s album I didn’t know Mink DeVille – I don’t think they ever made an impact in England – but I’m glad to have been introduced through Dylan to them.

But this is not just the copying of lines, for there’s a minor variation of musical interest too, because normally in songs of this construction the singer sings without accompaniment in the verse on the tonic chord, but here Dylan has an acoustic guitar in the background alternating chords I and IV (tonic to sub-dominant) which fits perfectly, and is not something I have heard before.  I suspect this evolved out of the performances prior to recording.

And here’s one more bit of fun.

I keep my hands in my pocket, I’m movin’ along
People think they know, but they’re all wrong
You’re something nice, I’m gonna grab my dice
I can’t say I haven’t paid the price
Jolene, Jolene
Baby I am the king and you’re the queen

“People think they know, but they’re all wrong,” is actually not a line from Mink DeVille.  A nice internal joke, and perhaps mostly a knock at turnips like Clinton Heylin.  His comment For a ditty that could as easily have been called “Baby I Am The King” to invite comparison with Dolly Parton’s consummate song of the same name suggests a certain chutzpah on the singer’s part reveals a complete lack of research and background knowledge.  As soon as you know that there is a band playing the type of music Dylan is known to like, who had a song called Rolene, you just have to start listening.

The “Line after line of missing links” (Heylin) are in fact links to Mink Deville.  This is Dylan poking fun at Heylin, and I think it works rather well.

In an interview that must have been available to Heylin, Paul James, who was for a while part of Mink Deville, talked about meeting Dylan in August of 2008:   “When I was taken to see Bob, the first thing he says to me is, ‘Hey, I saw that video where you played with Mink DeVille. Willy [DeVille] is something else.’  We talked about Mink DeVille and then Dylan said, ‘You think you could play guitar for me?’ I said, ‘Yea!’”

The September 27, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone Dylan talked about the walking blues and states, “I’ve been raised on that. The walking blues. ‘Walking to New Orleans,’ ‘Cadillac Walk,’ ‘Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane.’ It’s the only way I know. It comes natural.”    Cadillac Walk live by Mink DeVille is on You Tube here.   Most of the Mink DeVillealbums are available still in the UK.  I imagine they are available in much of the rest of the world.

If you have a moment, follow this link to their Berlin concert, or go and buy some of their music.  In the UK there is Cadillac Walk: The Mink Deville Collection.  Amazon has it for £5.99.  And then as you listen, just remember…

Well you’re comin’ down High Street, walkin’ in the sun
You make the dead man rise, and holler she’s the one

and perhaps spare a moment to think about how easy it is for a commentator to get so carried away in denouncing the work of a great artist he really can’t be arsed to look for the clues.

I keep my hands in my pocket, I’m movin’ along
People think they know, but they’re all wrong

Oh yes.

All the songs reviewed on the site

By Tony Attwood

“My Wife’s Home Town” is a variation on Willie Dixon’s song, “I just want to make love to you”; Dylan writing with Robert Hunter, the non-performing member of Grateful Dead with whom Dylan wrote bits of Down in the Groove, much of Together Through Life, and the wonderful “Duquesne Whistle.”   He also acknowledges Willie Dixon in the credits.

Willie Dixon’s 1954 song actually started life as “Just make love to me” and just about everyone and his dog involved in R&B has played it since – mostly in its second manifestation.  Hell, I even played it in a rhythm and blues band when we were a warm up act to the Animals – and that’s going back a bit.

What’s strange, interesting, bizarre, or whatever you want, is just how different the lyrics between the two songs are

The Willie Dixon original

I don’t want you to be no slave
I don’t want you to work all day
I don’t want you to be true
I just want to make love to you

Dylan

Well I didn’t come here to deal with a doggone thing
I just came here to hear the drummer’s cymbal ring
There ain’t no way you can put me down
I just want to say that Hell’s my wife’s home town

The original

I don’t want you to wash my clothes
I don’t want you to keep my home
I don’t want your money too
I just want to make love to you

Dylan

Well there’s reasons for that and reasons for this
I can’t think of any just now, but I know they exist
I’m sitting in the sun ’til my skin turns brown
I just want to say that Hell’s my wife’s home town

Middle 8 – original

Well I can see by the way that you switch and walk
And I can tell by the way that you baby talk
And I know by the way that you treat your man
I wanna love you baby, it’s a cryin’ shame

Middle 8 – Dylan

She can make you steal, make you rob
Give you the hives, make you lose your job
Make things bad, she can make things worse
She got stuff more potent than a gypsy curse

Final verse – original

I don’t want you to bake my bread
I don’t want you to make my bed
I don’t want you cause I’m sad and blue
I just want to make love to you

3rd verse Dylan

One of these days, I’ll end up on the run
I’m pretty sure, she’ll make me kill someone
I’m going inside, roll the shutters down
I just want to say that Hell’s my wife’s home town

https://youtu.be/hrgXpz7e-Uw

Willie Dixon, using the classic blues format, ends there, but Dylan then continues with a second run at the middle 8 and an extra verse

Well there’s plenty to remember, plenty to forget
I still can remember the day we met
I lost my reason long ago
My love for her is all I know

State gone broke, the county’s dry
Don’t be looking at me, with that evil eye
Keep on walking don’t be hanging around
I’m telling you again that Hell’s my wife’s home town
Home town, home town

—-

So what do we make of it all?  She’s a hell of a woman and its a hell of a rotten place to come from, maybe.  The world is falling apart; you don’t want to be here.

And of course it is a bit of fun turning a classic plodding ponderous love blues with one of the most famous blues riffs (A G E) being played over and over, into seemingly a hate blues, or is it a blues of despair?

It is the sort of game that musicians play, creating a reverse song, messing around with lyrics, turning songs upside down – the semi-pro bands I played in did it when we were supposed to be rehearsing, and from what I know from my friends who actually made it in the business, the professional outfits do it as well.

As for the lyrics, there are quite a few comments around to the extent that Dylan used lines from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but of course only in modern translation.  (The original series of stories was written at the end of the 14th century in Middle English so is fairly hard going).

Here’s a spot of the original…

“And if that any neighebor of myne
Wol nat in chirche to my wyf enclyne,
Or be so hardy to hire to trespace,
Whan she comth hoom she rampeth in my face,
And crieth, `False coward, wrek thy wyf!
By corpus bones, I wol have thy knyf,

which in one of the modern translations turns up as

“I’m pretty sure she’ll make me kill someone
One of these days – I’ll end up on the run
For I’m a dangerous fellow with a knife
Even if I daren’t stand up to my wife” 

Not quite the same, but it tries to give the drift.  So the common consensus is that Dylan has often picked up a contemporary translation of the epic poem and plucked the odd line from here and there.  Some people seem to think it matters, others not.

Certainly taking lines from other works has long been a fundamental of English literature and song writing, and it is only in the latter part of the 20th century that anyone really seemed to mind too much.  Dylan’s done it all the time – indeed the recent review here of “God on our side” highlighted one such controversy.

Let me try, if I may, to give a sense of the problem with this sort of debate.  I earn my living as a writer, and work in fiction, non-fiction and advertising.  Last week I was watching an Italian series on TV called “1992” in which a character comes up with an idea of making a list of 10 people you love.   I’ve lifted that idea and am contemplating using it in a novel.  I’m not copying the script or the theme of the TV series – just the idea, and giving it to one of my characters.  Is that wrong?   Would it be better if the character said, “I was watching this Italian series – 1992 – and the guy there said….”

By which I mean to ask, where is the line to be drawn?  When does someone’s idea become open to all of us?  I’m not going to try and answer, but really just outline the sort of debate that happens around this type of situation.

What is not true is that Dylan borrowed the line “I’m pretty sure she’ll make me kill someone,” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.   No, Dylan borrowed it from one of many contemporary translations.   It comes from the prologue to The Monk’s Tale and is said by the Host – Harry Bailey.

The Host is a central player in the The Canterbury Tales, the man who proposes that that the pilgrims should tell each other stories as they travel along.  And in effect he becomes the glue that holds each episode of story telling together.

The Host wants to have a good time on the trip, rather than for it to be a sombre pilgrimage, and he doesn’t like the stories about tragedy and death, but loves the comedies, the rough and tumble, the wife who wants her man to be more manly – and of course the outrageously crude tales too.

But Harry also becomes very involved in the stories themselves.  He is indeed worried about his wife, for when Harry beats his servants (seemingly an every day occurrence in 14th century England, his wife brings along the clubs and encourages him to hit them harder.  If any of Harry’s friends fail to bow to his wife in church in acknowledgement of her, she screams at him, and accuses him of being browbeaten by his friends.

In fact Harry believes that one day his wife will demand that he kills their difficult neighbour.

So here we can see the origins of Dylan’s idea – instead of the woman who he “just wants to make love to” we have the woman from Hell.  Dylan in fact has taken a couple of lines from a modern translation, and the notion of the story – exactly as writers have done through the centuries.

There is also an element of Proverbs (21:9) lurking in the song, as in It is better to live on a corner of the housetop than in a house in company with a quarrelsome wife.

Or maybe it was Ephesians 5 that he started from with its requirement that, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as also Christ is the head of the church – he himself being the savior of the body. But as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

But mostly I think it is two old chums having a laugh by taking a song that every old rock n roller would know, and turning it upside down.

All the songs reviewed on this site.

By Tony Attwood

In one very real sense “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” is just a nice country song of reassurance, of the singer holding the lady’s hand and saying, “of course I am not a drifter on the road any more – at least for tonight.”

It bubbles and bounces in a country sort of way, and that would be that – a country Nashville song with a country Nashville lyrics, except, except…

The music is decidedly odd.  So odd in fact that its oddness must have been deliberate.  Indeed for any musician who knows his popular music it is quite a tricky piece to play – at least without a couple of very solid rehearsals.  And in fact on the official recorded version at least one of the musicians forgets himself for a moment and plays the music as you would expect it – but quickly corrects himself.

Indeed you wouldn’t really know there was a mistake, unless you know what you were listening for.

To understand what is happening, one must remember that popular music generally works like children’s nursery rhymes – in four bars, with an emphasis on the first or second word of each bar, and a sense of completion at the end.

Take the nursery rhyme….  You can probably count the four beats in each line

1Mary 2had a 3little 4lamb

It’s 1fleece was 2white as 3snow [paused for the 4th beat]

And everywhere that Mary went

The lamb was sure to go. [again pause for the 4th beat]

So as you can see you can count those four beats in each line and you will know that you’ve actually waited after “snow” and held back for an extra beat.  That gives the rhythm of the nursery rhyme a clear shape.  The same is true after the fourth line, we have an extra beat and that gives us shape.   Four bars of four beats, with the last beat of the second and fourth bar having no lyrics, to give us shape.

So 16 beats, the sort of number music likes.  A number that can be divided in half over and over.

In this song Dylan messes with this totally, which makes it very hard to play.  It feels all wrong and as a musician you have to learn where the extra pauses are.

The intro sounds ok, except that when it gets to the point where we expect the voice to come in, there are an extra couple of bars.  It gives the piece an edge of expectation even before Dylan starts singing…

Then after four bars of the song, by which time Dylan has sung the first two lines, the is an unexpected extra bar.  It goes like this

Throw my ticket out the window
Throw my suitcase out there too – the unexpected instrumental bar
Throw my troubles out the door
I don’t need them any more
‘Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you.

What we have is an 11 bar phrase – which is very very unusual.

The middle 8 takes us the same sort of odd journey for it too has extra bars we don’t expect which makes it nine bars long – a very odd length for a popular song.

Is it really any wonder
The love that a stranger might receive
You cast your spell and I went under
I find it so difficult to leave.

There is nothing in the lyrics that I can really discern that gives a reason for this.  We know the song was written towards the end of the collection that made up Nashville Skyline, and when one writes the lyrics out there is nothing that makes one feel that extra bars are needed.

And really if you look at lyrics like this

I can hear that whistle blowin’
I see that stationmaster, too
If there’s a poor boy on the street
Then let him have my seat
‘Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you.

you really wouldn’t expect anything odd at all.

Did they perhaps come by chance, because Dylan simply held on to the opening chord for one bar more than normal, and then liked the effect?  That is perfectly possible because at the start the musicians would just be playing around that one chord.

Or did Dylan think that the extra bar emphasised that he was staying, and not taking up his normal drifter pose, moving on down the highway and leaving the lady behind?  Like a move towards the door but sitting down again.

We know that the song took 11 takes to get right – and as I say the take we have on the album contains the hint of a slip by (I think) the pianist, (but it is hard to tell, for whoever makes the mistake covers himself well).  So one might ask, did all those takes occur because of these strange extra bars occurring at odd times?

Or maybe Dylan knew that it was another simple song like Down along the cove, and I’ll be your baby tonight, and he just wanted to throw in another kick to make it a bit less everyday.  The fact that he later played with the words (see below) makes me think this is so.

But most of the time this is another of Dylan’s travel songs with the usual train images tucked in there as he so often does.

You “can hear that whistle blowin'” as he he wants to “throw [his] ticket out the window”.

I do wonder if Dylan added those extra instrumental bars because he wasn’t very satisfied with the song – and that is also why he didn’t play it live until the Rolling Thunder versions.  It is on Bootleg vol 5.

Other than the extra bars, the interest musically is in the middle 8 where the chord sequence is unexpected and unusual for Dylan.  He performs in G but suddenly takes us to the unrelated chord of Cm for “Is it really any wonder” and then the even more unexpected A flat  for “You cast your spell and I went under” before bringing us back to G.  It is the sort of modulation that is very uncommon in Dylan.

Indeed when listening to that move from G to C minor I am immediately reminded of “Idiot Wind” which starts on the minor IVth and travels back to the major.  The same musical idea used in two very different songs.

By the time of Rolling Thunder the middle 8 had become

Is it really any wonder
The changes we put on each other’s heads
You came down on me like rolling thunder
I left my dreams on the riverbed. 

I think he’s mucking around.  But then there’s nothing in the rulebook to say that genius musicians can’t muck around if they feel like it.

Index to all the songs on the site.

By Dearbhla Egan

Reading Dylan as Poetry – It’s Not Dark Yet 1997

How does one go about reviewing one of Dylan’s songs if you come from a standpoint of having a long term love for the singer and the songs but only a cursory knowledge of the life of the man himself?

For as well as all those really devoted fans who crave not just the music but a knowledge of the life story of the writer, equally, there are devoted fans who are happy simply to listen to the music without needing to know the meaning behind every lyric.

There is a strong argument to suggest that Dylan was not concerned who or why anyone listened to his music although it was certainly important to him that somebody was listening.  As a writer, he has moved between poet, storyteller, evangelist and prophet (which is often where things get complex), and celebrity (a title which he would claim to hate but has courted in times of need). Depending on which of these hats he is wearing he brings us a version of his particular truth as he is experiencing it at that time through his music.

I would like to discuss where I notice Dylan writing as ‘poet’. I am very fond of poetry.  Some years ago during my teacher training I was taught how to make sense, if you will, of poetry by learning how to read it and how to speak it correctly.

It helps sometimes to know a little bit about the background of the poet but quite often, it is possible to analyse a poem simply based on the words and the structure.  A good poem is rarely difficult to understand.  Being Irish, I have a fondness for the Irish Poets in particular.  I suppose the language used is more familiar to me.  Our most celebrated poet in Ireland, Seamus Heaney, Poet Laureate, wrote the following short poem about his mother.

From Clearances 3  By Seamus Heaney

                When all the others were away at Mass

                I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

                They broke the silence, let fall one by one

                Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

                Cold comforts set between us, things to share

                Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

                And again let fall. little pleasant splashes

                From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

                So while the parish priest at her bedside

                Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

                And some were responding and some crying

                I remembered her head bent towards my head,

                Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives–

                Never closer the whole rest of our lives.                

I chose this poem as an example because I wanted to illustrate that sometimes a moment of perfection can be achieved in just a few lines that are skilfully observed and written. I am deeply moved by this short poem, having loved and lost a wonderful mother but even if you have not had that experience, this poem is still a gem that so effortlessly offers us the opportunity to enter into a moment of exquisite imagery without having to stretch the corners of the mind.  It does what it is meant to do flawlessly.

It has often surprised me to find, when I have had reason to research something of the life of a poet whose work I am studying, that many of these people who write the most tender and poignant poetry, have reputations as being cranky, irritable and insular people to deal with face-to-face.  These poets have written poems expressing love or loss or joy with such tenderness and insight, yet they come across as being anti-social and difficult to deal with in person. We tend to be greedy where love is concerned and want the pretty picture to be complete in all aspects. We have always asked this of Dylan too.

Bob Dylan was always a thinker, not a talker.  This has often been perceived as some kind of character flaw, affectation or arrogance on his part and has driven his fans to distraction over the years.  As I said already, love is greedy, and his fans who have loved him in their way, have had an expectation that a man who can so eloquently express himself in song should equally be able to do so in speech.

Fans of a musician so often feel that they are owed something in exchange for their loyalty but why should this be the case? I believe it is both unfair and limiting to judge Dylan in such a way and I think he has understandably felt frustrated and angry by the demands of his fans.  Some might say it is important to find a way to satisfy all the needs of your fans because without them you are nothing and there is an element of truth in this.

However, Dylan’s response to this concept might be that the re-pay is the album after album after album and if that is not enough, if they have to know what he eats for breakfast or who he has fallen out of love with or in love with then they can get lost. Not a great marketing strategy but marketing was never his strong point.  Nevertheless, he did take an interest in how his albums were received and in the responses he got which were not always what he had expected or hoped for from his ‘adoring’ fans.  Dylan fans tend to be discerning.  It is a nasty little habit that he could do without.

We have seldom left this man alone despite it being clear that he does not respond well to public interest in his private life.  In a way this is why I have chosen to look at one of his songs as a poem.  In so doing so we can, in part, remove him from the picture as singer and musician and just look at the words as pure poetry without a relentless need to know about the poet. It is my way of celebrating the mind of a great poet and wordsmith and really feeling empathy with him as we read through the words of the song I have chosen.

The song is one of his later offerings called ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’  (From the Album ‘Time out of Mind…1997) and while the amazing music and the timbre of Dylan’s voice in this song certainly add to the overall effect, it could equally stand-alone without music as a very worthy poem. I think one of the reasons for this is  the striking aspect to the lyrics because of the stark honesty of Dylan, stripped away of arrogance, of certainty about his faith and his fate, a sadness about where he now finds himself after all has been said, done and sang.

I would invite you now to read carefully and slowly through the lyrics of the song.  There are no puzzles to be solved here so all that is required is an ability to empathise with the poet.  If you are familiar with the music, try to put it out of your head.  It really helps, if you are in a quiet space where you will be undisturbed, to read the words aloud.

The poet is not playing games with us here by using complex metaphors or similes. This allows the reading to flow freely from start to conclusion without interruption.  You should notice this particularly when you speak the poem aloud.  It is important to observe that in speaking aloud there is a slightly different rhythm and meter to the poem compared to the rhythm we observe in the sung version.  This difference can impact on the sense we draw from the poem.

In all probability, you will conclude that the meaning of this poem comes across as the same meaning you would draw from the song.  What I think that may be different however is the depth of your emotional response to what the man is saying and your level of understanding about where he is emotionally placed because of what he is telling us.  Let us read now and come back to this later.

It’s Not Dark Yet

Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain
She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing what was in her mind
I just don’t see why I should even care
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Well, I’ve been to London and I’ve been to gay Paree
I’ve followed the river and I got to the sea
I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

                                 Bob Dylan

Well, I don’t know about you, but my experience of reading this piece as poetry is very moving and also quite humbling in a way.  It is a sad poem where the poet is looking closely at the impending end to his life yet there is a flicker of hope still evident in the repeating of the line ‘It’s not dark yet’.  He is looking back at things but is more focused on where he currently stands which is a bleak and powerful picture of desolation and loss.  He who had it all, who’s belief in a higher power was once unshakeable, waits now for the darkness to finally envelop him while thinking:

Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal

And:

Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain

And:

I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes

Here the man is telling us that he feels disconnected from the people – friends, family, cohorts, fans, collaborators, characters and lovers that occupied his life.  He speaks of the emptiness and pain that is associated with this loss and how he has given up on looking for sincerity any more. He feels as if he has been duped and used by these people and he has had enough.

But surely the final denouement in the fourth and last verse has to be the most revealing and sincere but also the most despairing when we hear the words:

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

I have to be honest at this point and say that it is impossible for me to read those last two lines simply as poetry, disconnected from Dylan as poet.  It is painful to hear or read because he appears to be so lost and this is an unusual position for him.

When we consider a man who devoted so much of his life to religion and the search for meaning in all of it, now finding himself at the end without ‘the murmur of a prayer’ is actually distressing to me.  Of course, the main source of solace here for the listener comes from the fact that Dylan was only in his early fifties when he recorded this song.  As such therefore, it is more likely to have been a reflective piece, perhaps anticipating things to come but it is unlikely that the words were describing such conclusive emotions, observations and disillusionment at a relatively young age.    Hope continues to surface throughout however because ‘It’s not dark yet’.

In the end, none of us who care for Dylan want to find out that he feels this way.  It is painful because this wonderful artist whose music has filled our lives is telling us that he is getting old and taking stock but of course, as it is with all those we love, we just want him to go on for ever. It is almost as if he is finally reaching out to us for help and this is something he has seldom if ever asked of us before.

It does not get more generous than that by any poet, or song-writer or story-teller or however you want to view Dylan at any particular time.  In this scenario, I chose to view him as poet.

I think this song deserves the deeper analysis that is often afforded to poetry and the deeper understanding we reach by reading and speaking the words as poetry. All that being said, ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’ was conceived and produced as a song, not a poem. It is sung in a beautifully haunting way with the timbre of Dylan’s older voice working so well here and with the music laid down so perfectly. There is no doubt that it is best listened to just as it is, as a gem of a song.  For what it’s worth, I regard it as his Pièce de Résistance.

Dearbhla Egan

An index to all the songs reviewed on Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

Call Letter Blues is a song that is said to have come from the lost Bell Tower Blues and the backing track of which became Meet Me in the Morning (which is performed in a much slower style – it is much more wistful and reflective against the bounce and aggression of Call Letter Blues.)

But before we had all of this is Robert Johnson singing 32-20 which could well be seen as part of the origin of the whole process.  As could 20-20 Blues by Skip James.

They are all standard 12 bar blues and the historic recordings are worth a listen but as we listen to Dylan’s Call Letter Blues we don’t really instantly see a link.  A link with the blues yes, a link with the feeling most certainly, but not a musical or lyrical link specifically to those songs.  True, it would be hard to write Call Letter Blues without hearing Skip James and Robert Johnson but it could certainly be possible.

What I love about this blues from Dylan is the vibrancy of the backing band, the sheer energy and belief in what they are doing.  In fact what I love is the way Dylan has taken this old, old theme and updated it into a contemporary style.

From the start there is no debating where we are…

Well, I walked all night long
Hearing them church bells tone
Yes, I walked all night long
Listenin’ to them church bells tone
Either someone needing mercy
Or maybe something I’ve done wrong

The woman has left him, and walked out on the family and in that sense there is a link with the earlier blues

If I send for my baby, man and she don’t come
If I send for my baby, man and she don’t come
All the doctors in West Memphis sure can’t help her none

But Call Letter is a real Dylan song, a song with some real Dylan phrases in it, such as, “Way out in the distance” – you hear that you just know this is a Dylan song.

Way out in the distance
I know you’re with some other man
Way out in the distance
I know you’re with some other man
But that’s all right, baby
You know I always understand

And although much of the lyric doesn’t relate to the gun themed songs on James and Johnson, there is a linkage back to that original era of the blues…

Call girls in the doorway
All giving me the eye
Call girls in the doorway
All giving me the eye
But my heart’s just not in it
I might as well pass right on by

And a most bizarre twist at the end…

My ears are ringing
Ringing like empty shells
My ears are ringing
Ringing like empty shells
Well, it can’t be no guitar player
It must be convent bells

The bullets of 32-20 have turned into convent bells.  Quite a transformation.

According to those who study such things it was written at some time between Shelter from the Storm and Simple Twist of Fate, which places it around September 1974.

Michael Gray called it “a tense and multi-layered struggle between the lashing out and a stepping back,” which doesn’t really leave too much else to say.   It is a fight to carry on in a world where everything but everything is wrong.  A fight that sent the early blues singers reaching for the gun.  But Dylan is in a later age where gun crime has had a rather bad press.

So what we have is the walking and searching scenario after the woman has left – a variation on Dylan’s favourite Drifter motif.   A blues vision of “Simple twist of Fate”.

I gaze at passing strangers
In case I might see you

In the blues, looking at passing strangers, in the other meandering around the docks.

And there are blues historians who see the key link from this song back to the recording of 32-20 by  Major “Big Maceo” Merriweather the blues pianist of whom Don Palmer wrote, he had a “left hand so powerful it could seemingly summon up the dead.”   Some of the songs in this genre feature a train taking the woman away (another theme Dylan has used) which then morphed into the gun, as the cheated man goes out to shoot the woman (they didn’t mess about in these old blues songs).

My own view for what it is worth is that Dylan is influenced by this whole collection of blues artists and blues songs – he doesn’t take one and rework it, but instead has accumulated a knowledge of the songs across the years and his own blues – usually one per album – come from this.   But I can’t imagine Dylan venturing back into blues songs such as

Lord, I’ve got a 32-20, shoots like a .45.
Lord, I got a 32-20, shoot just like a .45.
Lord, if I happen to go at my woman, I’m gonna bring her dead or alive.

any more than Tampa Red’s “Down In Spirit Blues” (1931):

Now, if I find her, I’m gonna beat her, gonna kick and bite her too.
Gonna take my German Luger, goin’ to shoot her through and through

or the same artist with “Georgia Hound Blues”

So if I find her, I’m gonna kill her, and then I’m going to hang myself.
If I find her, I’m gonna kill her, and then I’m going to hang myself.
And if she don’t have me, she sure won’t have nobody else.

That also was 1931; he was getting into quite a psychotic state by then.

Above all what we have here are a collection of images and concepts accumulated from various blues artists being entwined into one song – not artificially, maybe not even knowingly, just entwined to create an atmosphere, an atmosphere which stays that way.  You can’t get a story here, just the feeling.

Well, I walked all night long
Listenin’ to them church bells tone
Yes, I walked all night long
Listenin’ to them church bells tone
Either someone needing mercy
Or maybe something I’ve done wrong

That is pure atmosphere.

Index to all the Dylan songs reviewed on the site.

By Tony Attwood

All music evokes an emotional response, which of course means it evokes a personal response, and I am always suspicious of people who try to remove their personal views from commentaries on music, writing as if their view was some sort of universal revelation about the music.

Nowhere is this more true for me than “With God on our Side” which has a melody and structure which appeared in the song The Patriot Game.  This song itself had two origins – one being the most famous phrases of Dr Johnson, and the other being the traditional song The Merry Month of May.  So by the time With God on our Side came along we had a borrowing of a borrowing of a borrowing of….

The problem we have here is that the linkage between Dylan’s song and the Patriot Game is not just the music, but also within the detail of the lyrics, for the second verse of the Patriot Game runs…

My name is O’Hanlon, and I’ve just turned sixteen.
My home is in Monaghan, where I was weaned.
I learned all my life cruel England to blame,
So now I am part of the patriot game.

Which was why Dominic Behan, who wrote Patriot Game, got so annoyed with Dylan’s God on our Side and called Dylan’s song a parody.  It wasn’t so much that Dylan took the song, because Dominic Behan did that too, it was the similarity of the lyrics transmuting the Irish struggle into… what?  Certainly not an American struggle because there is no struggle going on here – America just defeats everyone who gets in the way.

So let’s backtrack a bit to get some perspective.

Samuel Johnson was one of the great literary figures of 18th century England, who wrote A Dictionary of the English Language, the first modern styled English dictionary.  His sayings are spread throughout our language (at least in England) including perhaps most famously, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” (1775).  Dylan obviously knew this (but then everyone who is interested in English literature far and wide knows it I think) for he used it in Sweetheart like you:

They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you king

It is that verse, so close to the original that makes it difficult for me to see this as the serious commentary demanding wholesale analysis, that others see.

I heard a lot of the traditional Irish and English songs in my childhood, coming as I did from a working class musical background, and they always stayed with me.  Indeed in the late 1970s I wrote a series of adaptations of pop and folk songs for use in schools, which Oxford University Press published across three volumes.  It was my big breakthrough as a writer/musician – and interestingly (for me at least) it contained three Dylan songs (I negotiated the rights myself, and Dylan’s negotiators were incredibly reasonable in their fee request).

The Patriot Game and God on our Side, were of course far too political to be included in a book of songs that could be used in school, but I knew The Patriot Game and was saddened when I heard God on our Side for the first time.  I admired the lyrical dexterity of the song, but still kept thinking – surely someone as talented as Dylan doesn’t need an old song and adapted lyrics transposed into a simplistic commentary on patriotism.  Has he really run out of ideas?

Appreciating as I do that this site is read in Ireland and the USA as much as in my native England, there is no way I am going to try and explain the Border Campaign of the IRA in the 1950s, which is the heart of Patriot Game because if I try I am going to fail horribly.  But if I may I would say that the understanding of what happened then, and throughout “The Troubles” is utterly different in each country.  That does not mean that I suggest the standard English position is right – it’s just it would take me 20,000 words to cover the basic outline and I’d still get it all horribly wrong.

But if you have never heard The Patriot Game, I would urge you to listen, at least just once, to understand what Dylan heard and where he took the piece.

Here’s two very different versions on the internet at the time of writing

• Liam Clancy The Patriot Game
• The Wolfetones: The Patriot Game

Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.

And the core of the message that comes a little later…

It’s nearly two years since I wandered away,
With the local battalion of the bold IRA,
I’ve read of our heroes, and I wanted the same,
To play out my part in the patriot game.

I think the problem is that this was just about the most famous song from the Troubles (at least as far as I was concerned living in England).  Even Judy Collins recorded it, which surprised me when I heard it.

So how does one review a song when it is so tangled up with another song and a famous phrase that one has heard with other associations?

Of course one of the big problems from an English point of view is that Dylan tells history from an American point of view.  I know what the “Midwest” is, but I didn’t really grasp its full implication back then any more than the average American teenager probably understands the nuances behind the phrase “Home Counties” or “Black Country”.  Besides my knowledge of cavalries and Indians comes from black and white western films on TV.  Hardly a good source of instructive history.

Dylan did however do the true folk song thing of updating the song as he went along, later adding…

In the nineteen-sixties came the Vietnam War
Can somebody tell me what we’re fightin’ for?
So many young men died
So many mothers cried
Now I ask the question
Was God on our side?

However, as many have said, God on our Side confronts the US with its own past of violence and aggression and laughs at it being God’s Chosen nation.  And that is good, as would be any song that hit out at English pretentiousness in the same regard.   Once you believe in your absolute right, then your are doomed.

Indeed there is a relevance now in England as the government the year dictated that teachers have to teach “British Values”.  The problem is not just the notion that we should need to teach “British Values” but rather the notion that a government elected by a minority can define what these values are.  A few weeks ago I wrote an article outlining my concern with the government’s “British Values” and saying we should add to their list such things as adventurousness, creativity, exploration and a willingness to stand up to and question authority and pretension.  I got more emails supporting that point than I’ve ever had on any piece about schooling I’ve ever written.

The problem is that if you put a lot of people together who consider being law abiding as what all decent people should be, they start to get nationalistic, and the right of individuals to live their own idiosyncratic life drifts away.  The Drifter becomes not just a wandering outsider but a man to be arrested, put on trial, and convicted by a jury more concerned with its own world vision than anything the Drifter has ever done.

But this is not to say that I don’t admire the song.  Lines like Oh the country was young, with God on its side as an excuse for genocide is well founded, not least because of Psalm 25:7: “Remember not the sins of my youth, or my transgressions”.

You see I absolutely 100% cannot go along with that.  There are many things you can excuse because of one’s youth, but many that you can’t.

But just as I can’t go along with the simplicity of the Psalms, nor can I with the simplicity of Dylan in the lines

Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side

There are uncles that I never knew because they were lost in the second world war, and my father served on the front line in France and was one of those men who would never ever speak of the war thereafter when I asked.  But still I would have fought Nazism had I been called.  And until recently the guy I sat next to at football matches in London is a German and we both stood side by side on Remembrance Sunday before a game to pay respect to the fallen.  These are too complex a set of issues to be reduced to simple lines.

In the sense that Dylan is saying that history is far too complex to be simplified into school one-liners I am with him, but somehow the way he is saying it seems still too simple for the complexity of the subject matter.

So when I read that “With God on Our Side is one of Bob Dylan’s most devastating songs of social protest I have to defer.  The song is copied, the starting point of the lyrics come from another song, and it deals in a simplistic way with horrifically complex issues.  The concept that a nation has God on its side is patently laughable and so even from the off the song fails.

The fact that the 1995 version Dylan got rid of the Russians verse also shows me something within the underlying meaning is wrong.   Maybe the whole issue of God’s pre-cognition is just too complex for folk song structures. Or maybe it is so utterly obvious to me that God is not on our side because there is no God, I just cant value this song.

I suppose it is far more likely that I just don’t get “God on our side” in the same way that I don’t get”God Bless America” or “God Save the Queen” given the context of what I perceive the USA as having done to the Indians, or the British having done to the native Australians or the horror we managed to create in South Africa, which we then abandoned in 1910 to its fate.

At least the Irish national anthem, as I understand it, doesn’t give us God on the side of the Irish.

We’ll sing a song, a soldier’s song,
With cheering rousing chorus,
As round our blazing fires we throng,
The starry heavens o’er us;
Impatient for the coming fight,
And as we wait the morning’s light,
Here in the silence of the night,
We’ll chant a soldier’s song.

At least that seems to reflect the founding of the modern nation.

On September 25th, 2001, Dylan did an interview for Rolling Stone Love And Theft, and said

You hear a lot about God these days: God the beneficent; God, the all-great; God the Almighty; God the most powerful; God the giver of life; God the creator of death. I mean, we’re hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.

Is that at last a clue?  If God is arbitrary then life is chance.  Now that I can cope with.

And suddenly I can recast the whole song.  It is not With God on our Side but rather When the dice rolls in our favour.

Here, finally, it all makes sense.  Life as chance.  Yep, I can go with that.  Dylan was making fun of Dominic Behan by re-using the song he had used and some of his lines, and he’s also pointing out that God’s pre-cognition makes no sense at all in a world that has had such madness as the 3rd Reich, South African apartheid…

And with that thought I offer three versions….

Famous Tonight version (from a classic BBC TV early evening news and review programme of the 1960s – although it is only a partial version).

Vimeo version – with ever changing guitar rhythms

Live version – much later interesting re-working with much of the melody gone.

All the reviews on Untold Dylan

CHANGING OF THE GUARDS AND THE TAROT

by Dearbhla Egan

I would like to preface this review by stating that I have no expertise on the music of Bob Dylan or on the life of Dylan himself and neither have I anything more than a cursory knowledge of the meanings associated with the images on Tarot cards. So, now that I have blown the possibility of any credibility I might have used to my advantage I will go ahead with this review and ask you to read it with an open mind as, in the end, it amounts to no more than a hunch or opinion that I have.  I simply think I may be on to something and thought I would share it with you.

I listen to music almost all day, every day.  I find it helps me focus on my work. For some time now I have been listening to Dylan in a very concentrated way as I tend to re-play the same CD over and over, sometimes for weeks at a time, before I can muster up the enthusiasm to change it.  I know, as an artist (painter), that Dylan’s work is overflowing with imagery.  Dylan, as an artist, (poet, storyteller, songwriter, and musician) has always had a strong sense of the visible picture, the visual symbols, even if he often makes it difficult for us to make out what these images are about.

But, when he sings those songs that he writes in a narrative style, for me, it is as if there is a film reel running in my head.  Listening to ‘Tangled up in Blue’ or ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or ‘Not Dark Yet’ or ‘Hurricane’ and so many others, it is like watching a short film unfolding in my mind.  I am not just hearing but also mentally envisaging these stories with their colourful characters and moving stories.  It is all very visual stuff and there are a lot of his songs that fall into this category.  Many poets rely on visual imagery to convey an idea.

I can remember thinking, a long time ago when I first heard ‘Changing of the Guards’, that certain specific references made me think that the song was about the practice of witch-hunting which fitted into the Medieval setting along with a lot of the language he used, implying that the female object of his affection was being tried as a witch, perhaps most specifically in the third verse:

They shaved her head
She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo
A messenger arrived with a black nightingale
I seen her on the stairs and I couldn’t help but follow
Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil

But this theory, like many others one might have about individual verses of this song is knocked on the head when the supposedly captive witch is free to do her bidding by the seventh verse where:

She wakes him up
Forty-eight hours later, the sun is breaking
Near broken chains, mountain laurel and rolling rocks

(I will refer again to the ‘broken chains’ in a different context later)

And it begins to feel almost as if Dylan has been strolling through a Medieval film set, picking up on a new idea as he rounds each corner and is greeted by another vista.  He notes the previous view, puts it behind him and writes about what he next sees and so on.

I now believe that this perception is something very like what actually happened except that instead of a film set for inspiration he used the Tarot deck. I don’t think that he either knew enough or was interested enough in the historical values/meanings attributed to the cards to choose the images on the basis of that but he was merely taken by the captivating images and so he chose some based on their visual impact and cast others aside.

Ultimately, I believe, the first seven verses of this nine verse song are simply an attention-catching vehicle to keep us perplexed until the last two verses which are the real agenda here.  He was cautious enough to know that he couldn’t just write a song expressing the sentiment of those last two verses without getting a backlash although he had braved up enough one year later in 1979 with ‘You Gotta to Serve Somebody’ leaving us in no uncertainty about our spiritual doom, debts and duties.

He had become embroiled, perhaps trapped to some extent, in an unwavering belief system and in the certainty that through his music he had a duty to tell all of us that we needed to pick a side, what side that should be and what would happen if we failed to choose correctly.   That was not for Dylan or anyone to say and I think it was a failing on his part at that time to use his kudos as a popular musician to pontificate about religion.

However, I digress, and this rhetoric is not hugely relevant to what I really wish to discuss although I do feel strongly about it having now spent a good deal of time studying this song in detail.

So, at last, I am going to attempt in a some way to point out the references I have found in this song that relate directly to images from a pack of Tarot cards.  I am not going to go into long explanations around the meaning of the cards as I am fairly sure Dylan was not looking at them from that perspective and also because, as I stated at the outset of this review, I do not hold any particular expertise in this area and would merely end up quoting from books.

I still hold the belief to some extent that there was a theme of witch-hunting present in some of the lyrics and so there is a crossing over in parts between the two themes.

I see a theme of witch-hunting being set down in the first verse with the lines:

Desperate men, desperate women divided
Spreading their wings ’neath the falling leaves

Bearing in mind that it was common practice in Mediaeval times for a suspected witch to be hung by the neck this might explain the image of a desperate woman, spreading her wings (now angelic and winged in death) beneath the leaves on the tree on which she was hung.  Just an observation. 

On the first line of the second verse I think there is the first reference to the Tarot.

‘Fortune calls’

Well, typically, although technically incorrect, the Tarot has been considered a method of telling fortunes and that there is an element of divination attached to a Tarot reading.   Card number 10 of the Major Arcana is called ‘The Wheel of Fortune’.

He goes on to create a sort of theatrical set in this second verse ending with the lines:

She’s smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born
On midsummer’s eve, near the tower

Card number 16 of the Major Arcana is ‘The Tower’. The Tower shows a tall tower pitched atop a craggy mountain. Lightning strikes and flames burst from the building’s windows. People are seen to be leaping from the tower in desperation, wanting to flee such destruction and turmoil. The Tower signifies darkness and destruction on a physical scale, as opposed to a spiritual scale. Certainly the kind of imagery that would tie in with his words in the last two verses of the song.

Moving on to the first line of the third verse:

‘The cold-blooded moon’

This line seems to stand alone, somehow disconnected from the rest of the verse other than to set a scene.

On the fourth line of the third verse he sings:

‘Whose ebony face is beyond communication’

I have thought that perhaps it is possible that this may be an obscure reference to the illustrator of the commonly used ‘Rider Waite’ Tarot Deck, first published in 1910 in England.

The illustrator of these cards was a young artist of mixed race called Pamela Coleman Smith. She was born in London, the daughter of a wealthy English merchant and a Jamaican mother.  Her family moved home regularly between London, Brooklyn and Jamaica as a young woman but she finally settled in England. In 1911 at the age of 33 she converted to Catholicism and this may have interested Dylan.

Although she enjoyed some degree of recognition, she struggled all her life to make a living as an artist, writer and theatrical designer but ultimately died penniless in Cornwall in 1951 with all of her artwork and literature being sold off to satisfy her debts.  I suppose there is a tiny chance that this is the ‘ebony face’ he refers although I think I am clutching at straws here.  Nevertheless it is an interesting piece of history, isn’t it!

On the second line of the third verse he sings:

‘She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo’

Card number 1 of the Major Arcana is the ‘High Priestess’ who, in Greek Mythology, is regarded as the wife of Jupiter.  The sun god ‘Apollo’ is connected with any of the cards that depict a chariot as Apollo is seen in mythology to be riding his chariot across the sky so that the day might progress.  So, if Dylan was looking at a spread of cards one might assume that one of the cards was placed between the ‘High Priestess’ and ‘The Chariot’ thus being torn between Jupiter and Apollo.

In the fourth verse he sings:

 ‘I seen her on the stairs and I couldn’t help but follow’ 

I simply regard this line as a possible reference to how Dylan was looking at the spread of cards which has many possible formats but almost always takes the form of cards being stepped like ‘stairs’ and so his eye was following the layout of the spread.

Skip a few lines. On to verse five and the third line:

‘With the stitches still mending ‘neath a heart-shaped tattoo’

The ‘Three of Swords’ card depicts a large, red, heard that is pierced by three swords.

And the next lines on verse five:

Renegade priests and treacherous young witches
Were handing out the flowers that I’d given to you 

It is anyone’s guess what he is getting at here.  The obvious connection to the Tarot is with card number 5 of the Major Arcana, the ‘Hierophant’, known as the High Priest in some decks.  One suggested meaning says:

The Hierophant is very conventional and this Tarot card suggests that you have a desire to follow due process and to stay within the conventional bounds of what is typically an orthodox approach. Instead of being innovative, you will need to adapt to the existing set of beliefs and systems that are already in place. You will         need to do what is expected of you. The appearance of the Hierophant in a Tarot reading indicates that this is  certainly not a time to challenge the status quo!

Well, if Dylan understood this to be the meaning behind this card it certainly would not have sat well with his own dogma and agenda.  The Hierophant might easily have been degraded to the position of ‘Renegade priest’.

Perhaps the ‘treacherous young witches’  from the same line is just another throwback to that earlier reference I made suggesting that parts of the song referred to Mediaeval witch-hunting and, if so, this is more than just a mere suggestion that some of those alleged witches were the real thing!

Verse six is basically unfathomable to me other than that the language of it lends itself to the general historical context (insofar as there is one) of the song.  There are Tarot cards with images of dogs (for instance, if you look at the image of the ‘Sun’ card you will see dogs in the picture but not as guards or soldiers) so for this one he was doing his own thing.

Verse seven.  The unexplained miracle has occurred and she who was held captive is now up and about and:

She wakes him up
Forty-eight hours later, the sun is breaking
Near broken chains, mountain laurel and rolling rocks
She’s begging to know what measures he now will be taking
He’s pulling her down and she’s clutching on to his long golden locks

There are three cards that I associate with this verse. First is Card number 19 of the Major Arcana ‘The Sun’. The

Second is Card number 15 of the Major Arcana, ‘The Devil’ and the third is card number 7 of the Major Arcana, ‘Strength’.

The ‘sun’ is simply the sun.  The second card, The Devil, is significant in that the two lovers are chained together in front of the devil figure but the chain is breakable so that they can escape.  This would seem like a fairly logical reference to line three of this verse (near broken chains).

Then, with the ‘Strength’ card  I think he makes an error in the meaning he draws from the image…He’s pulling her down and she’s clutching on to his long golden locks except that in the many incarnations of the Tarot deck, this card always depicts a woman opening the mouth of a lion but it is not always clear that she is doing that at first glance.  It is often easy to mistake this image as being one of submissiveness on the part of the woman with the Lion depicting ‘strength’ as he draws the woman down who ‘clutches on to his long golden locks’.

After this seventh verse, Dylan loosens his grip on the Tarot as he goes on with great ardour to deliver his overly zealous warning urging people to choose their God wisely lest ‘cruel death’ befalls them. I have considered if perhaps the words ‘marked your cards’ in this verse are, apart from the obvious meaning of giving fair warning, an allusion to the cards that have accompanied him throughout the song and that perhaps it is a play on words. Maybe. Maybe not.

In the very end he makes a return to the Tarot using the image of the ‘Death’ card in its most misunderstood form, as a harbinger of doom and destruction which is not what this card is considered to mean (And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating).

Then, finally, ‘King of Swords’ and the ‘Queen of Swords’ which are two entirely different cards with different meanings thus suggesting that the last line is of no particular consequence unless they had a meaning for Dylan if he was looking at both placed with another card between them on a spread. I think this final line is as random and ultimately meaningless as much of the language used in the song.  It works because it just sort of fits.

Of course, it is not for me to say how or where Dylan should have looked to for inspiration to write his songs.  I just have a small problem with this one in trying to reconcile how it is possible that he drew on images from a deck of Tarot cards which have always been linked with the occult (rightly or wrongly) in order to go on to write a song where the slam-dunk at the end is a dose of the most high-minded, craw-thumping, Christian sermonising imaginable.

‘But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination

Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards’

There is certainly no ambiguity in those two lines. Tarot or no Tarot, I have to say that I am in full agreement with Tony Attwood’s final sentiments in his review about the ending of the song because it is so disappointing that Dylan spoke/sang to us in this way. In a way it leaves me wondering why I have bothered going to the trouble of delving into Dylan’s interest in Tarot cards.  Frankly, it has just been a sort of puzzle solving exercise for me with fairly underwhelming results although there is always something to be learned by such an exercise.  I still love Dylan’s work.  He has brought me and continues to bring me great joy but I don’t like what he is playing at in this song.

At the end of Tony Attwood’s review he says:  “brace yourself for elimination”  must be the Second Coming, which means the next line says you either are  for Him or against Him, and I really, truly dislike that sentiment.  If that is the God we have ruling over us, then I am still to be counted out.  Blind faith is not something I am willing or able to offer, and I am   so sorry that Dylan felt he could at this time.  Of course, my judgement is meaningless, who am I to say what’s right or not?  But then who is Dylan?  He can write the most staggering songs, but does that give him, or any Christian, Muslim or Jew the right to tell me that you are either part of the fold or an outcast?  No, for  me the answer is totally “no”.

The answer is definitely ‘NO’ for me also.

All the Untold Dylan songs reviewed

By Tony Attwood

The reports suggest that for some time Dylan was in the habit of announcing that “this was a song about the first girl I ever loved, but she left me for an older man and she’s in the audience tonight” – or words to that effect, which had all the people who think such things are important, rushing around trying to work out who it was all about.

It doesn’t really matter of course, and indeed the whole little tale might be untrue.  Dylan has always laid false trails; it seems to amuse him.

Indeed many, many songwriters write songs which take bits and pieces from their lives – but rarely do our lives make a complete story.  In fact that is the difference between fiction and life – in fiction there is some sort of sequence and we can make sense of it all.  Life isn’t like that – it is more often a muddle and set of confusions and coincidences.  We select out certain bits that fit into the theme of life we want to have, and then remember those moments.

So any song that pretends to be about a real life situation is often a chopped and changed version of reality, and the search for a real set of events in “Girl From The North Country” is probably fruitless as well as liable to take us away from the absolute beauty of this piece.  In fact such queries are unnecessary, because it is a beautiful piece of music in its own right, and doesn’t need such detective work.

As everyone points out it was written in 1963, and is very similar in a musical sense to “Boots of Spanish Leather.”  And in terms of the text both songs are about a lost love… but not the lost love that leaves the man crying in desperation anxious for the woman to return on any terms.   Rather these are songs of an acknowledged parting, a sadness but a moving on.  Indeed Red River Shore has much the same sadness – although in that case he goes back to try and find his lost love, while here it just sends a message without any real thought of whether it will arrive or not.

These lost love songs with the traveller moving on down the highway  offered a romantic vision of a past age, the sad traveller, the drifter, forced by his own inner drive to move on down the highway leaving events and people behind.  And already by the time Dylan was writing about it, that world (if it ever had existed like that) was passing away.  Such a world is as far from the one night stand as it is from love and marriage forever – for although it is temporary, it comes with a real depth of feeling.

It is the world of the wandering blues musician, the pedlar who wanders from town to town, the travelling minstrel and in English literature goes right the way back to mediaeval times with the Wandering Jew who turns up in Chaucer (as I’ve mentioned before).  Indeed I am reminded of the Parting Glass which I’ve dealt with in some depth elsewhere on this site.

So for me, the exact details of the trip to England in December 1962 the search for Suze Rotolo in Italy and the fact that she had just left to return to the US, is of passing interest and obviously relevant to Dylan’s interest in this type of lost love song, but the debate about whether he was talking about Echo Helstrom or Bonie Beecher or Suze Rotolo isn’t so important.

That’s not to deny that any of Dylan’s life is important.  That Suze Rotolo moved into Dylan’s rooms on Fourth Street is interesting, because of what Dylan later said about Fourth Street, but then you can go on finding links everywhere.  The key point to me is that this was a style of writing that Dylan had for a while – songs about the wanderer moving on.  At other times in his life he was concerned about seeing all the strange characters around him as a surreal freak show.

Hearing this as a youngster, at school, living with my parents, isolated from a world in which one could get up and go to Italy looking for a woman who had left you, was an ideal… I wanted that, I wanted those experiences.  It didn’t seem sad, it seemed an ideal to be able to have such a depth of experience rather than be in a village in Dorset, being told (as I was in a school report) that “what this boy does to the English language should be a criminal offence”.

And looking back I can see how all through my life that desire to go wandering on my own stayed with me – and I still do it today sometimes.  Something in me always reached out to that concept – although at times I have been quite often been very frightened by it too.

These days I still explore it by occasionally going to a dance in a venue where I’ve never been before, where I won’t know anyone, and so being forced to ask for dances (rather than relying on meeting up with people I already know).  (I’m cheating in a way because at jive venues in the UK the convention is that everyone dances with everyone else, but even so, not knowing anyone can be a little daunting).

I only mention my own reminiscence because it seems to me that for most of us Dylan’s songs work especially keenly when we can grasp what lies beneath his vision – we make an emotional link with where he is, and I certainly do with this type of song.

But perhaps the most interesting point about these trips to Europe is that Dylan met Martin Carthy (a man famous within the English folk tradition) with his phenomenal knowledge of and insight into English traditional folk music.

Many have suggested North Country is related musically to Martin Carthy’s version of Scarborough Fair, and although I think this is stretching the point a bit, I think the influence of meeting and listening to Carthy was profound.

Scarborough Fair is a song that goes back at least to the 17th century – although the lyrics (in which a man and woman give each other impossible tasks to complete) are quite different from the topic Dylan chose.

Scarborough, incidentally, is a real place – a coastal town in north east England, also famed for its close association with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn who established a theatre there.   The line “remember me to one who lives there” comes from Scarborough Fair.

The place that Dylan sings about could well be Scarborough – especially in winters past…

Well, if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline

But the “north country” is also commonly used in English folk music as a symbol of a place unharmed by the horrors of industrialisation, where people live still in a calm way at one with each other and nature, and Dylan may well have taken this idea as his central notion in the song, either consciously, or unconsciously.   There is certainly no hint of this being the “North Country” that turns up in North Country Blues.

What it is, however, related to is

Where we go up in that North Country,
Lakes and streams and mines so free,
I had no better friend than he.

The phenomenally moving Ballad for a Friend, (which if you have meandered around these commentaries you will know is one of my top ten all time best Dylan songs) expresses the same delicate sadness and regret at past times gone – although in Ballad, they have gone for a quite different reason.

What I think we have here (and what, in my humble opinion, has led most commentators astray) is one of those cases where someone says Girl from the North Country is taken from Scarborough Fair, and then everyone else just copies that notion without really thinking about it.

If you play the two songs one after the other, the linkage between them isn’t that great, nor is it that clear.  The melodies are different, Scarborough Fair is always sung in 6/8 (that lilting 123,123 time that is unmistakable whether you have studied music or not) whereas North Country is a straight four beats in a bar.  And the lyrics really don’t have much to do with each other at all.

In North Country Dylan expresses his love, not for the girl, but for the memory of her that he now carries around with him.  An idealised memory of a past when he was happy.

Please see for me if her hair hangs long,
If it rolls and flows all down her breast.
Please see for me if her hair hangs long,
That’s the way I remember her best.

It is idealised.  He hopes she is doing well, but his feelings are dominated by the notion that if she has forgotten him, he is somehow diminished.  He remembers her, and he desperately wants her to remember him.  The past was happy, and he needs that memory to be complete at all levels.

I’m a-wonderin’ if she remembers me at all
Many times I’ve often prayed
In the darkness of my night
In the brightness of my day

It is a common feeling – that we want the people who are important to us to feel the same about us.  The worst thing is to find someone you recall from the past with great fondness looks at you and says, “Yeah I think I remember you.  Were you the guy with the….”  Such a situation diminishes us greatly.

But as I say, this is an idealised world.  To me the notion of all this wandering around, always moving on, is a reflection by Dylan of part of the blues genre, not a tale of a real person on a real day.  The images he creates are as unreal as anything in Scarborough Fair itself, with the exchange of impossible tasks.

Dylan obviously was fond of the song for, as undoubtedly you know, it turned up not only in the classic version on Freewheelin’ but also on Nashville Skyline.  But to me, even though as with All I Really Want To Do I have heard it a million times, and although when I was about 16 and started to play in folk clubs it was one of the songs I loved to play and sing, (before I had the confidence to create and perform my own songs), the Freewheelin version is for me, still the best by far.  I’d not heard the outtake version that is on the internet before writing this review, but still that original album version is the one I want to hear.    Although I did quite enjoy this complete alternative version that I found!

For me, what makes this song work so beautifully now, as it did when I first heard it, upon its release on Freewheelin’, is the way a simple plucked guitar accompaniment and use of images from somewhere in the ill-defined idealised past, combine with a feeling of language from that same lost period.  The idealised “north country” of old English ballads is brought back to life because no one, either today, or in the 1960s would ever say “if you’re travelling in the north country fair.”  Simply by saying “north country fair” we are back in an older time.

And in speaking about a true love that has somehow been lost, we are in that older time before jealousy and delusion crept in to corrupt us all.  There’s no central heating, there are no cars, there is no TV, this is the natural world before it all went wrong, the world where nature and your inner most feelings are at one – and the language reflects that.

The image of the girl is classic as well – the notion of the long hair rolling and flowing gives us an image from a picture gallery, not a modern day woman.  She’s living in this romantic rural past, and the lyrics and the music reflect this utterly.   She’s an ideal, just like the girl in Love Minus Zero.

That is why the song works so completely perfectly: the combination of lyric, melody, rhythm, accompaniment all work as one, all give us the same sense of place and time.

And this is why, for me, Dylan used this as a starting point for the similar “Boots of Spanish Leather”.  The song works so wonderfully of course he wanted to explore it further, to take the notion of the traveller moving on, further.

I know, if I’d written something this good, I’d have used it one hundred times over.  But then I don’t have Dylan’s creativity.  So I didn’t.

An index to all the songs on this site

By Tony Attwood

I have to admit that there are some early Dylan songs which I bought upon release and played to death, and now haven’t listened to for years.  This is one of them.

So I came back with some trepidation to it – not least because it was never one of my absolute favourite Dylan songs, and I didn’t particularly care for the Byrds version of it either.

Thus you might imagine my complete surprise when, on responding to a request to review the song, I did my usual trawl to find unusual recordings of the song on line and found one that really knocked me out.

The link is below – and what really engages me in this is the enthusiasm and drive – it just pushes the song forward at a rare old pace, no hanging around extending certain syllables for no particular purpose.

It may well be that this version has appeared on one of the bootleg albums, and I just haven’t realised because I skipped the song, having heard it too often.  If so sorry about that, but all the pleasure is mine now, on finding this version today.

Anyway, the song was written and produced in 1964, and the above recording comes from maybe a year later, so Dylan had had time to play with the piece and find new ways to do it.

It’s incredibly simple in concept – I just want to be friends – and that simplicity is emphasised by the multiple rhymes within the song.   Besides, probably by the time people were hearing this version, they already knew what the Byrds were doing with it.

The playfulness is so perfect however, not just because I have not heard this before now, but because I always thought the song was of itself a bit of a parody with all those rhymes – a laugh at moon/June (or as one of my t-shirts says, “wouldn’t poetry be difficult if violets were orange”).

(Actually that doesn’t work if the doggerel “Roses are red violets are blue” isn’t famous where you live.  Everyone in the UK will know it I am sure).

But the overall point is that Dylan is pushing boundaries here.  Here’s done “Times they are a changing”, on an album in which virtually every song except the title song is about things NOT changing, but staying the same often with disastrous consequences.  Now he’s saying I just want to be your friend, and enjoying himself so much that I immediately got the idea that this was not all he wants to do.  (If you know what I mean – but hell, I was about 15 at the time, so my interpretation was warped by what was happening to me).

As for the Byrds version, I hardly played it at all (it was on the radio all the time, and I remember seeing them mime in badly on Top of the Pops) but I did like “I’ll probably feel a whole lot better” which I recall being on the B side.

Which shows what I know – in the UK the song was a great hit for the Byrds and for Cher, and for a 15 year old living in rural Dorset (a county on the south coast of England) where the number of girls who might actually understand what any of this was about (not that I did anyway) was limited, it gave an insight into a world of mystique.  A world where as a guy you actually might be able to turn down one girl and be sure there is another in waiting.  (Certainly not my experience aged 15).

So when Dylan sang “Deny, defy or crucify you” I just thought “wow – can you do that to a woman?”  Fortunately I never tried to find out.  I am, at heart, quite a nice guy really.

But looking at the lyrics now, what Dylan is saying he doesn’t want to do it fairly awful

No, and I ain’t lookin’ to fight with you
Frighten you or tighten you
Drag you down or drain you down
Chain you down or bring you down

I ain’t lookin’ to block you up
Shock or knock or lock you up
Analyze you, categorize you
Finalize you or advertise you

I don’t want to straight-face you
Race or chase you, track or trace you
Or disgrace you or displace you
Or define you or confine you

I suppose I wasn’t really au fait with the appalling way men can treat women – an only child, living in Dorset, trying to write his own songs, and desperately interested in dance (which like being in the theatre at that time had all the associations of being gay in a world where it was still actually illegal – while knowing I certainly wasn’t gay – I just never let on that I love dance, unless I was on the dance floor) – I was so removed from the real world.

But I was fascinated by the ending…

I ain’t lookin’ for you to feel like me
See like me or be like me

That gave me pause for thought.  I’m an individual, she’s an individual, let us do our own thing.  Revolutionary in a country where in church women still promised to honour and obey when they got married.

And all this before I have mentioned the music.  One outcome of my life at the time was that I might possibly become a classical musician, and so with that sort of training I knew at once that hey – this was a song in 12/8, which means four groups of three quavers in a bar.  You can beat in fours to the song, but when you do that you are beating the first quaver in the bar.  The whole song revolves around that lilting feeling of 123 123 123 123.

That adds to the fun and humour – although this 12 beats to a bar approach doesn’t have to be lilting.  Times they are a changing uses the same approach, except in Times each of the three beats is fairly equal.  Here it is different…

The beats work like this with each of these two lines being a complete bar of 12/8 and each of the three beats separated by a /

I ain’t / lookin’ for you to / feel like / me /
See like / me or / be like / me

Counting the numbers it goes

12     3

I     aint

Two quaver beats on the 1.

That’s all getting technical so I will stop – but take it from me, the fun comes from that lilting 1 2 3, and that was very unusual in a popular song.   (Not uncommon in Ireland, but certainly uncommon in the music I was hearing on the BBC).

All the songs on the site

By Tony Attwood

Sometime in the summer or autumn of 1961 Bob Dylan played harmonica on the title tune of Harry Belafonte’s new album, “Midnight Special”.  From the accounts available it appears that Belafonte’s producers were looking for a new, more contemporary sound, and felt that Dylan could contribute that with his harmonica playing.  They were all in New York, so Dylan was invited along.

According to Anthony Scadutto, Dylan was very excited by the opportunity, but “he returned dejected, annoyed, angry. Belafonte is a total professional, a musical perfectionist. He will work on a song, do it again and again… until he has it exactly the way he thinks his record should sound.”

Dylan it seems felt the endless reworking of a single song was too much, and said that he quit the recording session after the one song.  Presumably that implies that Dylan was going to be asked to play on several other tracks on the album – but didn’t.  You can hear the track here.

The song, which of course is a classic of the genre, contains the lines

If you ever go to Houston, boy, you better walk right,
And you better not squabble and you better not fight.
Benson Crocker will arrest you, Jimmy Boone will take you down.
You can bet your bottom dollar that you’re penitentiary bound.

And thus it was that Dylan returned to the song with “If you ever go to Houston” – track four on “Together through life”.   The arrival of the song on this album suggests a recollection of Dylan’s first ever harmonica recording.

If you ever go to Houston, Better walk right
Keep your hands in your pockets, And your gun-belt tight
You’ll be asking for trouble, If you’re lookin’ for a fight
If you ever go to Houston, Boy, you better walk right

The Houston Press did a bizarre review of the lyrics as the song first came out, which included comments like “he doesn’t mention whether or not you need a concealed-handgun license, which is a deplorable omission for someone who’s giving advice on such matters.”

Many people who have commented on the song call it a Texas Dancehall Jump, but no one pauses to indicate what a Texas Dancehall Jump is.  I’m sure everyone into dancing in the US knows, but even though I go dancing several nights a week, sitting here in middle England I don’t know (although I imagine it is a type of lilting song that couples can hold hands to in a ballroom grip and sway around the dance floor – but that is a guess).

But it might be another of those occasions where someone has put down the phrase, and everyone has seized onto it.  I wish someone would tell me.

However when we get to the street names, the Visit Houston web site tells me slightly more helpfully that, “The Heritage Society campus in Sam Houston Park, at the corner of Bagby and Lamar Streets, is a Museum Gallery dedicated to preserving Houston’s history.”

If you’re ever down there On Bagby and Lamar
You better watch out for The man with the shining star
Better know where you’re going Or stay where you are
If you’re ever down there On Bagby and Lamar

Indeed when it comes to all things American, of course, I am at a disadvantage, being English, and of course in English schools they don’t teach American history (by and large our history lessons teach wars that we won – with the exception of the invasion by the Norman French in 1066, which for some reason everyone knows).  I’ve visited the USA many times, but Houston, so I can do no more than scrape together my fragments of knowledge and hope someone will help me out.  Please don’t laugh too loudly at my errors.

The town of Houston was formed in 1837 and the Mexican War mentioned in the song was 1846-8.   There was also the Texas Archive War in 1842 event about which I knew nothing until I started writing this up, and which probably has nothing to do with any of this, but it was a really interesting read.

Anyway, Dylan says

I know these streets, I’ve been here before
I nearly got killed here, During the Mexican war
Something always, Keeps me coming back for more
I know these streets, I’ve been here before

Then we get the local interest element that Dylan always does well, drilling down from the broad issues to the personal detail.

If you ever go to Dallas, Say hello to Mary Anne
Say I’m still pullin’ on the trigger, Hangin’ on the best I can
If you see her sister Lucy, Say I’m sorry I’m not there
Tell her other sister Betsy, To pray the sinner’s prayer

Of course we don’t know who these sisters are, but they are past friends of the singer.  He’s positive and friendly about the first two, but for the third, he’s telling her to confess her sins.

There is no actual Sinner’s Prayer, but it is a phrase that is often heard within Christianity for the moment one asks for forgiveness and wishes to repent their sins.   But in an interview Dylan once said that he was actually talking about the confession in which the repentant will say to the priest something along the lines of, “Father forgive me for I have sinned, it has been six weeks since my last confession.” 

The theme of the confession – or rather the battle between the confession and the need to keep following one’s emotions seem to be tormenting him…

I got a restless fever, Burnin’ in my brain
Got to keep ridin’ forward, Can’t spoil the game
The same way I leave here, Will be the way that I came
Got a restless fever, Burnin’ in my brain

So he’s looking for her, searching for his woman.  And she’s doing ok, because the Magnolia Hotel is a fairly smart place to be.  Indeed it won an award for the “Best Boutique Hotel in Houston”

Mr. Policeman, Can you help me find my gal
Last time I saw her, Was at the Magnolia Hotel
If you help me find her, You can be my pal
Mr. Policeman, Can you help me find my gal

But it is not a fruitful search – he’s lost, he’s wandering, and we’re back to the old Dylan theme of the outsider, wandering, drifting.

If you ever go to Austin, Fort Worth or San Antone
Find the bar rooms I got lost in, And send my memories home
Put my tears in a bottle, Screw the top on tight
If you ever go to Houston, You better walk right

David Hildago, who played accordion on the album, is quoted in Uncut magazine as saying of this song that, “It started out like a Jimmy Reed tune and it ended up… Bob was playing organ, he started this riff, and it went from this completely other thing, to what it is now. It was fun to be in the room when it happened.”

So it is a song evolved in the studio, and none the worse for that.  My screwy attempt to make sense of the lyrics probably is just that.  Just trying to make sense of a song that really has no sense – it is just an atmosphere.

As for the music, it’s a lilting ballad based around the three main chords we hear in the 12 bar blues, but with the each chord having a secondary suspended chord associated with it – and it is this that gives it its lilt.

If the song was played straight in E it would run

(E) If you ever go to (A) Houston
Better walk right (E)
Keep your hands in your (B) pockets
And your gun-belt tight (E)

But what Dylan actually does is add the suspended chords so we get the effect …

(E) If you ever go to (D/A/D/A) Houston
Better walk right (A/E/A/E)
Keep your hands in your (E/B/E/B) pockets
And your gun-belt tight (A/E/A/E)

It’s a fascinating effect in a lovely relaxed song.

Index to all the songs

By Tony Attwood

If I had to cut everything down to one type of music and one concept that Dylan has spent his life being fascinated by I would not say “folk music” or “rock music” I’d say 100% the blues.  And I would not say love songs, or lost love, or civil rights or justice, but rather the Wanderer, the Exile, the Drifter the isolation of people from each other.  These are the characters who fascinate Dylan beyond all others – those who drift into one’s vision and then drift out again.

Indeed even when Dylan seems to be writing a love song (as in Beyond here lies nothing) he is in fact writing about the isolation of the two lovers from the rest of the world.

I was writing on this theme in the last review I did – “Red River Shore”  wherein I jumped back to earlier examples of the Wanderer, in Shelter from the Storm and Tell Ol Bill.

The Wanderer in Dylan can be himself walking off down the road and passing by (Shelter from the Storm, One too many mornings) or it can be an observed outsider like the Drifter in Drifter’s Escape, it can be the man who can’t find his love as in Red River or it can be two lovers so in love that there is no other world beyond themselves gazing at each other.

So hearing that “Beyond here lies nothin'” is based on a phrase from Ovid, makes sense, because Ovid suffered (or we think he suffered) from exile, and wrote about it (although these are not his famous poems, but something of an end-of-life afterthought).

Indeed every review you are ever likely to read about this song will start with the notion that the phrase comes from Ovid.

But….

The clue that something is wrong in an analysis comes when you find that all the reviews use the same phrase, none of the reviews (or I should say none of the reviews I have seen) actually tell us which Ovid book the quote comes from, let alone quote the exact text.   And I think there is an important point here (other than the way most reviewers copy all the other reviewers and can’t be arsed to look things up), because we need to know, in reviewing Dylan, if this is an exact quote from a text he had read, or just a line someone else told him about.   It helps us understand.

We can believe there is some Ovid in here somewhere, because in latter day albums like Modern Times, Dylan does seem to be a reader of Ovid.  But that doesn’t prove he’s quoting the great man at this point.

And the ever excellent Expecting Rain web site has this quote from Ovid as a quote from Tristia.  “Here is the ultimate torture for me, exposed amid foes. What banished person lives more remote from home? Beyond here lies nothing but chillness, hostility, frozen waves of an ice-hard sea.”

So maybe that is right, but tantalisingly the writer did not give us a source for the translation, and it doesn’t say that in my copy!  Perhaps it is just a case of different translators.

Ovid was the ultimate exile (if his own story is to be believed – some contemporary writers claim the whole thing was a fiction, and of course there is nothing wrong with writing fiction).  He was one of the three great, great, overwhelming writers of Latin literature along with Virgil and Horace (a bit like some scholars of English would rank Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens as the three ultimate giants of the language, or Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were the giants of the classical romantic tradition).

But aged 50, in 8CE (or 8AD as we used to write it), Ovid was exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea by Emperor Augustus.  While there he wrote Ibis, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto: the poems of exile.

He wrote about the awful conditions in Tomis, about how he was old and sick and just wished to see his family again, and expressing his deep sincere regard for the emperor and how whatever it was that caused his exile was all just a silly mistake – a misunderstanding.

Although the works are considered very much the lower end of Ovid’s legacy to us, there are lines which 2000 years later still ring with us, like

“writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.”

But there is no quote that I know (and please tell me exactly where it is if you know it cos it is driving me mad) that even approximates to Dylan’s phrase, Beyond Here Lies Nothing.

There are lines like

There’s nothing further than this, except frost and foes, and the sea closed by the binding cold.

And if I were wanting to take a line from these poems and express it as the core to a musical piece I’d use

there’s nothing sinful in my song

But not the title of the track.  I wonder then if there is an approximation translation which takes the essence of the poems and re-writes them into modern English.  I don’t know if there is – it is just a thought.  Tell me if you know.

In Beyond here lies nothin Dylan is with the woman he loves, the only woman he has truly loved, and is saying that there is nothing in the world beyond that love.  So “beyond here lies nothin'” is not a physical concept but a spiritual one. There is nothing except our love because without it I have nothing.  If Dylan is in exile, he’s in exile with his lover.

Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ we can call our own

But the wreck of a society that Ovid describes on the Black Sea is here too, although in contemporary terms.

I’m movin’ after midnight
Down boulevards of broken cars

The world is wrecked, but we have each other…

Don’t know what to do without it
Without this love that we call ours
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ but the moon and stars

All we have is our memories…

Beyond here lies nothin’
But the mountains of the past

There is a reference perhaps to Ovid on the Black Sea but it is a fleeting glimpse

My ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread

and we are reminded….

Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ done and nothin’ said

Dylan obviously liked the song as he made it the opening of Together Through Life, and both his lyrics in the song and the Exile poems have a connection with that title – although it is tenuous in regards to Ovid because he was isolated from his family, and the pleasures of Rome.

It was also used within the final episode of the second season of True Blood – as much for its atmosphere and the resonance of that single line “Beyond here lies nothing”.

A link in the music has been shown with Otis Rush’s “All Your Love (I Miss Loving)”… but that is what you get with 12 bar blues.  Look hard enough and you’ll find a connection.

As for the music, it is 12 bar blues without the repeating of the first two lines, and in a minor key, which is much more unusual that the major key.   If the song were in the major it would have accompanying chords of A, D and E.  Here these are replaced by A minor, D minor and E.

But the song bounces so much that one hardly notices the minors as one normally would do.  A clever touch in the music.

But damn it, I wish I could resolve that Ovid quote stuff.

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Red River Shore combines a series of themes that are as old as folk music, and uses lines that can turn up anywhere.  Even the title is akin to a Ledbelly song Red River Blues, although that is quite a different piece.

But Dylan more than likely had heard that song – and the title it is one of those that just stays in the mind.  There’s even a book called Red River Blues which describes the blues in south east USA.  (There are incidentally two Red River’s in the US – Red River of the North, Red River of the South.  I will leave it to a citizen of the USA to tell me if either is relevant here as the location for the girl’s home).

There is a copy of the song on line here.

This is a song that combines lots of traditional themes about wandering, walking away, regrets, loss etc.  In more detail…

• Lost love – as I have noted before this is, in the classic analysis, one of the three fundamental concepts within popular music (the other two are love and dance).
• The myth of mutual attraction – that just because I love you, you should love me.  “Why don’t you love me,” cries the man, “when I love you this much and I’d give you everything.”  But to no avail.  Reciprocated love is not that easy to find.
• Endless pining – I’ve waited for ever, my entire life has been the waiting for this girl.  Sorry old friend, that’s just how it goes.
• The notion that desiring possession of another is just plain wrong.  Now that is rare to find in a song – most of the folk and blues tradition treats the woman as an object that has no feeling.  But in this piece Dylan does reflect in passing that “possession” is not a good desire, although that gets twisted at the end.
• The sadness much later of not taking advice – the “if only” songs.  In this song she says, go away and live the quiet life, but he can’t and he doesn’t.  But if only he had, had much sweeter life might have been.
• The hopelessness: “I’ve had everything the world can offer but not the one thing I wanted more than anything.”
• The lack of reality.  The most important thing in my life is unknown to everyone else who was there.   The twist of memory – I remember, it is so real to me, how come they don’t.

And if all that were not enough, there’s even a thought of raising the dead from the grave at the end which is just plain spooky.

Such reviews as there are of this song, insist on saying there are 16 verses in the song – but that is not right at all.  There are eight verses.  It is a strophic song (ie verse, verse, verse, going on as long as you want).  Each verse has to be the same basic construction as each other verse, to be a Verse and make the song strophic.   But the first four lines of this song are not the same as the second four lines.  So the verse is all eight lines.  (In musical terms the first four end on the dominant chord, and the next four lines end on the tonic.  It is an eight line construction, not four.)

Dylan famously couldn’t get the song to sound right after several attempts in the studio, and abandoned the idea.  Which can happen to the best of songs.  The aim is not just to write nice words and a good tune, but also to get a good production with the instrumentation available.  Dylan didn’t manage it this time, but even the greatest songwriter of the age can hit a brick wall.

Besides he set himself one hell of a task.  Eight musically identical verses of eight lines are going to be hard to devise in a way that will keep everyone interested.  Yes the words might be plaintive and emotional, but normally there has to be more.

And the sudden changes of direction really cause us problems in a way that they don’t in such songs as “Tangled up in blue”.

But there is a huge amount here worthy of note of course.  The opening line “Some of us turn off the lights and we live” is everything you could want from an opening line.  Some of us would pay a month’s salary to write a line like that.

But the second line is a disappointment – we want the same level of mystic intensity but we don’t get it.   And the same happens to three and four.  Line three is unexpected and challenging line four a disappointment.

Some of us turn off the lights and we live
In the moonlight shooting by
Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark
To be where the angels fly

But we do need the intensity because as I say this chordal sequence comes up eight times in the song.  In such a restrictive structure we need a huge level of intensity in the lyrics – in my view (and of course that is all it is) we don’t get it.

Even bringing the instrumentation in very slightly in the second verse, and then with the full blown burst from verse three on doesn’t really sustain us as there are still five verses to go.

But Dylan looks to have tried everything in the song to make it happen.  For example he uses Pretty maids all in a row.  Now here I have to hesitate, because although every English person will know this as being from “Mary Mary” (an 18th century nursery rhyme) I am not sure if that is how it is understood in the US.  (It is also a Joe Walsh song on Hotel California and a 1971 murder mystery movie but surely that’s not relevant is it?)

Here I think it is just a phrase – and to me this is the problem, and the reason why Dylan did not proceed to release this on a mainstream album.  He has 64 lines of lyric, but only five lines of music.  Musically lines one, two and three each come up 16 times.   Line four and line eight each turn up eight times.  As I say, in a structure like this every line needs power.

So a verse such as

Pretty maids all in a row lined up
Outside my cabin door
I’ve never wanted any of them wanting me
‘cept the girl from the red river shore

really doesn’t carry it off.   Even the profound thought of the girl that he should go home and lead a quiet life seems to fall a bit flat – we are really wanting something a bit more powerful as a way of expressing this simple concept.

Well I sat by her side and for awhile I tried
To make that girl my wife
She gave me her best advice and she said
“Go home and lead a quiet life”

But these oft-repeated lines just keep getting repeated

Well I’ve been to the east and I’ve been to the west

Of course some of the writing is very fine – the cloak of misery verse works singularly well and is indeed memorable, but by then it is hard to know where we have got to in the story.  Dylan’s famous ability to tell a story back to front intrigues in some songs, but not here, because by the cloak of misery, it seems to be all over.

Well I’m wearing the cloak of misery
And I’ve tasted jilted love
And the frozen smile upon my face
Fits me like a glove

Dylan does deliver a hefty punch later on when he reports the more difficult concept of the fact that no one remembers her.

Well I went back to see about her once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to had seen us there
Said they didn’t know who I was talking about

It is a concept debated in psychology – not just that we remember things different from those who shared past events, but the events we select and give great meaning to, are often not recalled at all by others.

Indeed a while back I met, for the first time in many a decade, the guy who had been my best friend at primary school (age 5 to 11) in north London.  We were both taken with seeing each other again, but then each of us told the other our most profound memory of that time.  Neither of us could even remember the occasion, or the events around it, that the other chose.

It is quite a stunning experience to have a memory challenged like this.  I told my best pal from my childhood years of the incident I remember more powerfully than any other from those years, and he had no recollection of it, or the issues around it.  None at all.  He doubted it happened.  He then told me his memory, and I had no recollection of that.  That really challenges one’s sense of the past!

But back to the song.   If you live in the UK and watched the recent BBC TV adaptation of  Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell the ending of Dylan’s song will ring quite a bell.

Now I’ve heard about a guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife
That if someone around him died and was dead
He knew how to bring him on back to life

Well I don’t know what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing any more
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
‘Cept the girl from the red river shore

Those verses of contemplating reincarnation are, for me, just weird.  Too weird for the song.  This is not, “oh how I miss her,” this is black magic and the land of the Raven King.  To me, it doesn’t work alongside this melody, nor indeed the rest of the song. You just can’t do a plaintive melody over thoughts about raising the dead.

And maybe that is another part of the problem.  Those points I highlighted with the bullet points above – normally each one is enough on its own for a complete song.  Dylan gives us all of them – but with this unchanging pattern of music.

Now I know that many Dylan fans find this a beautiful, delicate song, and some debate the notion that the girl is just an imagination – the woman the singer would have loved to have met, but somehow because he kept on moving around, never did.

It’s an interesting interpretation, and certainly reminds us of the vast number of Dylan songs that sing of getting up and leaving – One to many mornings is always the one that comes first to my mind but there are so many, many more.

Some find it as a song of warning – no the grass is not greener.  Take what you have found and what you have got.  But for me such interpretations fall short of the mark, because the song is not particularly about endlessly looking for the perfect woman, but instead is about finding a woman whom he loves, but who won’t reciprocate that love.  The wandering woman, totally self-contained and content who just moves on.

So, in coming to review this song, my intention moved on to other songs of the same type.  Songs about the individual who seems removed from everyday concerns, who can just be there but not be shackled by the conventions and concerns of the everyday.

Try thinking of another long detailed song (this one with ten verses) Shelter from the Storm.   This is another regular theme as old as story telling – the mysterious passer by – again the sort of person who turns up in so many Dylan songs – the magical, mysterious stranger.

Or if you prefer, leave the CD running after Red River Shore, and see what you get – “Tell Ol’ Bill“.  It dates from about seven years later, but it is still playing the same theme, still using the four line sections.  Still  the wandering stranger – just from another perspective.

Here the role is reversed it is not the observed woman who is so mysterious and disappearing, but the singer who seems to fade in and out of reality.

Shelter from the storm shows that these long sequences of repeating verses can work if the central concept is unified.  Tell ol Bill shows us that the theme of the dislodged person can on occasion demand a much more complex set of musical patterns changing across each four line section.

In Tell Ol Bill the singer has experienced it all and dealt with it all.  He’s removed from our everyday, but he copes.  In Red River the singer is still pining away.    So Tell ol Bill says…

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

But he has also taken command

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

What connects the songs is the notion that “I’m livin’ in a foreign country but I’m bound to cross the line”.   The isolated wandering person looking for what has been, what was lost, what might have been.   The Outsider.  The theme that goes back to Chaucer in the 14th century, and undoubtedly long before.

And being an Outsider is always tough – you are walking a razor’s edge half the time, as Dylan so clearly pointed out.  You get trampled on as you pass.  And that is the problem with Red River – these strongly emotional challenging lyrics are missing.

And maybe the opening thought I had is the key.  There are so many themes here – all those bullet points – that really, in the end, there’s just too much trying to be crammed into one very simple musical structure.

All the songs reviewed on this site.