Untold Dylan

In this review of Dylan’s music, song by song, I am finally going to tackle Dylan’s comments about the “mathematical thing”.

Dylan has mentioned the mathematics of music as something he learned from Lonnie Johnson in 1965.  I may have missed it but I can’t find what song Dylan is referring to, but if you want to get an idea, try Another Night to Cry.

And meanwhile I’ll try and explain what I think this is all about.

The link between music, maths and physics is a fundamental of the way music is produced, and the way in the west we like to hear music.  It is a combination of science and preference.

Dylan, when speaking of maths and music, seems mostly to be talking about rhythm in music, and is not interested in the physics (which relates to pitch – that is how high or low the note sounds).

So, to focus on this issue, to make most music work you need a pulse, a regular beat.  You can create this by clapping your hands together with the same amount of time between each clap.

But that is boring in the end, so to make it interesting you might clap at twice the speed, or three times the speed, or four times the speed.  Or you might clap the first of every two notes slightly louder, as in

One two one two one two

Or maybe the first of every three

One two three one two three one two three

Or the first of every four, first of every five, or whatever you want.  If you have never done this, try it and see.  You are now making music.

In Western music we tend to count our music in four much of the time simply because we can halve that (count in two) and quarter it (emphasise each and every beat) without getting into half beats.  If we started in threes and tried to halve the beats we are emphasising every one and a half beats.

So music is mathematical – do you choose to work in twos, threes, fours or anything else.  Listen to Like a Rolling Stone and you hear the beats

ONCE upon a time you dressed so fine THREW the bums a dime in their prime DIDN’T you.

The words in CAPITALs are the start of each bar of four beats, the words in bold are the beats of each bar – four beats to a bar.

Four beats to a bar is the mathematical norm, but there is nothing wrong with counting in threes, or anything else, or indeed in messing with the number system and having extra beats here and there.

You can also have someone playing in fours, and then someone else putting three beats within each one of the fours – and this is what Lonnie Johnson does.  He plays groups of three among the four beats in a bar.  It’s good music, but not revolutionary.

From here you can make melodic lines out of the fours or the threes, and that has been done too.

And you can play with the chords.  A chord is three or more notes played at once, and certain chords are very, very common in pop music, others quite rare.  So you can take the chord of three notes (for example C, E and G to make the chord of C major) and change it to C, E flat and G.  That simple change makes all the difference.  If you can get to a piano and get someone to show you and play you those chords, you’ll hear at once that one tiny change makes a huge impact on what we hear.

Dylan also cites Link Wray’s Rumble which has multiple uses of three notes per beat in a song with four beats in a bar.  In classical music it is called “triplets”.

Dylan said on one occasion, “Link’s song had no lyrics, but he had played with the same numerical system. It would never have occurred to me where the song’s power had come from because I had been hypnotized by the tone of the piece.”

Dylan also said, “I don’t know why the number three is more metaphysically powerful than the number two, but it is.”  I’m not sure about the metaphysics, but the simple fact is different numbers do different things.  Three is a prime number, you can’t divide it up more.

I’m not sure Dylan is really serious about taking any of this further other than with playing with rhythms in his songs.  But he knows his Bible – or at least bits of it, and he’ll probably know The Wisdom of Solomon 11:21 “You have ordered all things in number, measure, and weight” which when (as a music student I was obliged to do) I took a look at medieval writing on music.   They got quite hung up on this notion.

The idea is profound – if you understand how numbers work, and how they influence whether music sounds harmonic (ie good) or discordant (bad) we can know how to affect the spirit and take a peek at the Almighty.   From this comes the notion of some numbers being good and some being evil.

And, rather worryingly, I think Dylan got himself a bit hooked on the mumbo-jumbo that comes out of this.

Chronicles for example is really, well, odd.

The system works in a cyclical way. Because you’re thinking in odd numbers instead of even numbers, you’re playing with a different value system. Popular music is usually based on the number 2 and then filled with fabrics, colors, effects and technical wizardry to make a point. But the total effect is usually depressing and oppressive and a dead end which at the most can only last in a nostalgic way. If you’re using an odd numerical system, things that strengthen a performance automatically begin to happen and make it memorable for the ages. You don’t have to plan or think ahead.

Err….

But I think something else was going on when Bob Dylan mentioned his mathematical notion.  My guess, listening to lots of Dylan and trying to analyse it, I think that in the early days the melodies and the chord sequences just came to him.  He was bursting with creativity, discovering new music all the time, and just writing.  It just came pouring out of him.

However he then hit the various periods of writer’s block that virtually everyone who is involved in the creative arts gets.  And slowly he moved over to thinking about chords, melodies and the like, and looking at the way they were formed.  Instead of just letting the music emerge, he sat at the piano and started looking at what happened when one used this note and that, together or apart.  What happened when patterns repeated, or moved together and apart.

Composing in short became more structured, more experimental, more thought about.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  It is a way of finding new patterns – exactly what every other artist ever has done.  Sit at the piano and play three notes over and over, and a song starts to emerge.  Take a set of words from a movie or a book you’ve read, and a song begins to emerge.  Take the notion of playing three notes inside each beat in a piece with four beats in a bar, and a song begins to emerge.

Above all it stops you getting stuck in the same system.

Cold Iron Bound starts with sounds, with a bass riff, with a long-short rhythm (in music we call it a dotted rhythm) as the vocal line is more regular.  The drums against this are playing

1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2

in each bar – ie eight beats in a bar of four beats but broken up into a mix of two groups of three and a group of two at the end.  So drums and bass are playing different rhythms, and the melody is working in more straightforward four beats in a bar.

It is the mathematical system.

The chords are unusual for Dylan too.  The song is in B flat, with the band playing the chord of B flat major and Dylan often using the notes of B flat minor in the vocal.  The chorus line changes, and for once I am flummoxed.  Maybe my ears are decline (well, yes I know they are) and maybe I am just getting old, but those last three chords I can only express as D flat major, E flat ?????, B flat major.

I turned to Dylanchords.info – usually helpful in such matters, but there the song is transposed to another key, and quite honestly I can’t make their version of the chorus chords work at all when I play the piano along with the piece. Eyolf Østrem on the site admits though his chords are “only a faint approximation to the wealth of notes sounding at this point (and never twice the same, it seems)”.

Maybe it is that mathematical thing!

Index to all the songs on this site

By Tony Attwood

One of the problems with Marching to the City is that it is a song that was obviously discarded from the album it was considered for, and instead elements from the song were picked up and used again elsewhere.

This suggests Dylan saw it as an early sketch then abandoned.  But that is not to say it was an early version of Til I fell in love with you – which is suggested in some quarters.  There really isn’t too much connection between Marchin to the City and Til I fell, apart from a couple of re-used lines and that they are both 12 bar blues.  And yes they are about life falling apart.

But there are thousands of 12 bar blues everywhere.  Millions.  Tens of millions, and millions of world-gone-wrong songs.  Marchin and Til and Fell don’t sound of feel anything like each other.

Besides there are also lines from Not Dark Yet in Marchin, and Marcin certainly isn’t a prototype of Not Dark Yet.

What we have then is an early version of a song, of which bits were then re-used elsewhere – something that all artists in every art form are prone to do.  We don’t know what Dylan would have done with Marchin later had he kept it, and indeed we don’t know he would have done anything.  But given the way he changes and changes his music during the recording process and thereafter, there is every chance he might well have done something quite different.

However as it stands, I don’t see this as a preliminary to either of the songs that it supplied lines for.  Rather it is a 12 bar blues, which probably started with Wade in the Water which is cited in the lines

The enemy’s great, but my Captain’s strong
I’m marching to the city and the road ain’t long

The start of the song as recorded is certainly enigmatic, and the idea is undoubtedly to create a song which although in the rigid 12 bar blues format evolves and develops.  Just listen to the first verse as each instrument gets going.  You get the idea of where we are, but not at all where we are going.

Listen now to the interlude between the first and second verse.  It is spacious.  The second verse seems to indicate that this is where we are.  Lines like “Nothing can heal me now” fit perfectly with the instrumentation at this point.  But still all is uncertain and unclear.

But then it grows some more – this was obviously Dylan’s instruction to the musicians.  We start hearing the organ playing the chords as triplets – by which I mean that for each beat of the bar we hear the organ chord played three times.

It is an interesting effect, but it is just an effect.  To work it has to move on, and that’s where this recorded rendition of the song goes wrong, in my view.

My guess, and of course nothing more than that, is that Dylan realised that in writing this piece he had come up with some fascinating concepts, and some great lines, which each demanded far more than this knock about blues gave.

Of course there was more Dylan could have taken from this song – those opening two lines are certainly ones that could have been kept.

Well, I’m sitting in church in an old wooden chair
I knew nobody would look for me there

But what this song did give us was other lines that are thoroughly arresting, as this song is the origin of “I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes” and the bit about London and Gay Paree, and following the river til it gets to the sea (all used in Not Dark Yet).

It is in fact, the musician’s equivalent of a notebook.  Of great interest as a record of the creative process, but the result is not especially important of itself – except for the fact that so many great lines cup in this one piece.

Consider the first verse…

Well, I’m sitting in church in an old wooden chair
I knew nobody would look for me there
Sorrow and pity rule the earth and the skies
Looking for nothing anyone’s eyes

Quite amazing.  But now consider the chorus:

Once I had pretty girl, did me wrong
Now I’m marching to the city and the road ain’t long

And for me (and of course this is always just my view) this doesn’t have the same quality as “Looking for nothing anyone’s eyes”.  It is in fact just the ordinary “girl done me wrong and I am leaving” blues.

Some of the lines show great promise such as

Loneliness got a mind of its own
The more people around the more you feel alone

which really resonate because we are still in the laid back verse two, but each time we are dragged down by the chorus.

For me, by the time we get to

Well, the weak get weaker and the strong stay strong
The train keeps rolling all night long

and the band are really hyping it up, it really isn’t working at all.  Who am I to tell Dylan how to write? No one of course, but since I am here and writing, I’d say that if he had abandoned the notion of the song building and building and building, and reworked the chorus, then we would have been on the edge of a great song.  Although Not Dark Yet, would have lost some of its best lines.

But as it turns out some of the lines that make up the rest of the piece really sound forced…

She looked at me with an irresistible glance
With a smile that could make all the planets dance

I want to say, “yes Bob I can see where you are going, but give it another week, and do some re-writes.”

For me, the validity of my point is made by the music at the end.  Dylan uses the absolute classic blues ending, the clunkety clunkety clunk resolution that a million blues songs have had before.

The best lines in this song deserve far, far more than that.  And eventually they got it, I’m delighted to say.

Index to all the songs reviewed on this site.

By Tony Attwood

This song, which pairs with Watching the River Flow, in terms of its consideration of artistic process, comes from 1971, and gives us a problem, in that it has changed quite a few times.  Rather like the masterpiece painting where x ray examination can reveal the changes that the genius painter made as he went along – not always (from our viewpoint) for the better, so here we can see the songwriter playing with his work, seeing where it might go.

However the notion of changing a work, even after it is finished for the first time, is one that many commentators find difficult.  In our society we are used to a final finished piece. Surely, they seem to argue, the work should be the work, finished off in some complete form, like a TV show, a movie, a car or a table lamp. You design it, you make it, it is.

But in works of art that is never right, and Dylan is the absolute supreme re-worker of his own material, as the live shows endlessly show.

So should we worry that on one occasion the streets of Rome are full of trouble, and another they are full of rubble?  Probably not, although there are one or two changes that are interesting to say the least, and one that is utterly fascinating.

The fact is that Dylan’s images can relate to real things he’s seeing and hearing, and other things that just pop into his mind at the moment.  Indeed part of the mark of a genius is what he observes, and part is this odd stuff that pops into the mind.  Part is the ability to re-work and find ever more interesting bits.

If we take the two opening lines – “filled with rubble” and “filled with trouble” both work.  The rubble of the fallen monuments of the Republic and the Empire, the trouble from the uprisings of greedy and self-centred men who would put themselves before the extraordinary achievements of the Republic, to the collapse of the Empire as the Goths came knocking on the door.

Both words (rubble and trouble) can lead onto the ancient footprints being everywhere.

So we have in the first verse a masterpiece of reference and change…

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

The Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti (Spanish Steps, Dylan calls the “stairs”) take you (if you have the energy) up the steep hill from the Paizza di Spagna to Trinità dei Monti.  135 steps, not really a climb to do on a cold dark night unless you are chasing shadows and ghosts – which is fun in itself.  But most of the time there are not cold dark nights in Rome.

But that’s only the start of the fun, because then we had originally a pretty little girl from Greece who became Botticelli’s niece.  Just a phrase that popped into his head?  Maybe, maybe. But (and you are going to have to stay with me for a moment if you want to get to grips with this idea) here is another explanation.

I doubt that Dylan just looked at the Coliseum, and the Spanish Stairs and said, “hey that’s nice” and walked on.  I don’t mean I think he stayed with a guide book, but this is a guy who knows and enjoys his history and his literature, I suspect he knows a lot about art too.

And so I suspect the real origins of Botticelli’s niece come from his painting The Birth of Venus, which was commissioned by the Medici family.   As the guidebooks and histories point out Pliny the Elder (the great writer, scientist and philosopher who died while recording his scientific observations on the eruption of Vesuvius) suggested Alexander the Great offered his mistress as the model for the nude Venus to be painted by Apelles.  But then noting that Apelles had fallen in love with the girl, gave her to the artist.

Botticelli, in painting his version of the Birth of Venus, was seen as recreating the earlier lost masterpiece and in 1488 Ugolino Verino wrote a poem describing Botticelli as a born-again Apelles.

The actual model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus was not his niece but Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, who it seems had a “relationship” with two of the Medicis.  Linking  Birth of Venus with the great days of the Republic makes the model in the picture a symbol of the continuity of the Republic, the Empire and the Eternal City.

It’s a famous tale for anyone interested in the art of the Republic and the Empire and I think turning Botticelli’s Venus into Botticelli’s niece is a nice piece of fun for Dylan, which gives him a handy rhyme.  And why not?

We are very much in the world of Dylan the Tourist.  He won’t have seen Birth of Venus in a trip to Rome, but Dylan had Italian connections all the back from his time with Suze Rotolo and his trip to Italy looking for her.  Indeed the stories around Freewheelin are full of Italy.  And besides “Masterpiece” does have the line Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wastin’ time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see ’em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb

I’ve always wondered with that line of the long hard climb, if we are not back to the Spanish Steps!  Surely we are.

But then so much of this song is looking back

Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece

The geese story is, I think, not quite understood in every review of this song.  The story is that when the Republic of Rome was under attack from the Gauls in 390BC (which is to say in the fabled origins of the Republic, long before the days of the Empire) Rome seemed about to fall and the Romans were besieged.  Despite low food supplies during the siege the Romans kept their sacred geese fed, and this turned out to be a shrewd idea, because as the Gauls attacked, the geese honked as they do, woke up the guards, who then resolutely defeated the attackers.

The Gauls gave up their attack and withdrew, Rome was rebuilt, and the sacred geese were remembered forever with an annual parade in which a golden goose is the heart of the celebration.

Dylan then is remembering the story, which of course is a central part of Roman mythology.  You can’t read a guide book without finding it somewhere.

But then strangely he seems to dismiss it all…

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

Suddenly we are out of Rome – there are (just to be clear about this) no gondolas on the Tiber, that’s Venice.  Indeed going for a sail along the Tiber is just plain dull and really not worth the effort.  And besides, certainly for me, each time I’ve been to Venice there are not dirty gondolas; the competition to get the tourists into gondolas is very strong, and brightness and colour is part of the deal.  (The water buses are cheaper though, and just as much fun).

So what is this about?  Leaving the history, the romance, the beauty, the total story of the Republic and Empire, for sugar, colour, flavouring and water plus a mistake about where the canals are???

I think there is a good reason why the recording on Greatest Hits removes those lines – they have no real connection with the song.   They are just Dylan having a laugh.  And it is a real downer on Botticelli etc etc.  My own view, for what it is worth, is that it was an attempt at irony, and as such it is a good couplet, but open to misinterpretation.  So the version without it was used on the album.

And then he leaves and carries on with the tour of Europe.  The final verse seems to be a reflection on the art of Italy.  He has seen it, he knows he can create masterpieces in his chosen art form.  Brussels, the newspapermen and the fans are just a distraction.  And the women are nothing like the Venus he has been contemplating…

Clergymen in uniform and young girls pullin’ muscles
Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside

There is one other couplet that I really have always enjoyed…

Newspapermen eating candy
Had to be held down by big police

Dylan is having fun, but also saying he knows it doesn’t have to be like this

Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent
When I paint my masterpiece

There was however a line that appears to have been cut from this ending, With a picture of a tall oak tree by my side – the reference to the Zen tradition of using one aspect of nature alone to understand everything.  Cutting the pretty little girl from Greece was, to my mind (and of course all this ruminating is just my reaction to the song) was a good move (not that in any seriousness could I tell Dylan what was better or worse in his writing) but losing the oak tree was not so good, at least in my world.  It is an image of a way of contemplating the world – the only thing that is wrong with it is that it is from a totally different culture.  Not from Italy or Belgium, but from China.

And there is another cross reference that I had completely failed to see, until reminded of it through an excellent review  on Expecting Rain, which if you are seriously interested in this song you really ought to read.

In ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’  written in 1818 by Lord Byron, the poet (and here I quote from the Expecting Rain review)  contemplates the ruins of ancient Rome and finds nothing but chaos – broken dreams and relics of ancient cruelty….

Byron perceives the city as a whole as a space strewn with fragments and debris, visible signs of decayed power testifying to the vanity of human aspirations

The Expecting Rain review, written by Christopher Rollason (whose blog is always worth a read) sees the song as coming from a narrator who “has come to Europe and Rome in search of artistic fulfilment, hoping that with ancient scenes around him he will achieve the vision that will enable him finally to ‘paint his masterpiece’.”

That’s a very interesting vision.  I have approached the song seeing this as Dylan himself contemplating Rome and Italy, and the “paint my masterpiece” not being literally “paint” but a metaphor for his ultimate work of art – most likely of course his ultimate song or ultimate album as conveyed in the lines “Some day everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody When I paint my masterpiece”.

You can see it either way, just as you can see She promised that she’d be right there with me When I paint my masterpiece as a sexual phrase or as a phrase relating to the person who most artists or all genres have by their sides who support, put up with, and are a sounding board for their ideas.

So, a complex piece, with its own fun and some historical references too.  Difficult to transcribe into music.

But Dylan does it, but in so doing uses a technique that I think is unique within the Dylan repetoire.  He totally changes key between the second and third verse to reflect the change from Rome to Brussels.

We are clearly in A with A and E being the chords that the song for the first two verses, and then we slip backwards to the completely unrelated B flat.  It’s a different world.

It is not a very subtle technique, but it makes the point of the change of emphasis.  And the plane trip to Brussels wasn’t subtle.

As a final point….  This song was written in 1971.  In the summer of 1974 Dylan wrote Idiot Wind.  Maybe there was just something at the back of his mind that he knew was just a few years away from making its breakthrough.

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“Watching the River Flow” is a classic rhythm and blues song from 1971.  A song of beautiful simplicity for which the lyrics work perfectly.  And yet it is a song that critics and analysts have laboured over, instead of taking the easy route.

Everyone knows that the main theory is that Dylan is singing about his desire to withdraw from the music industry, and just sit back and watch, rather than engage, rather than be up at the pointy end.  Being in the audience instead of up on the stage.

In one sense we can see it as Dylan’s own commentary of the rural idyll of New Morning, where he worships the countryside and the whole concept of doing not very much at all.

But here he has a real old time rock bounce which is utterly unlike anything in the albums of the era.  Different producers, different musicians, different sound, different style.  Back to R&B.  He’s not sitting back doing nothing.  Not with that music.

But let’s take this further.  “Dylan as a passive observer” or “Dylan as the political activist”, is the debate that followed the song, but surely it is patently obvious in any study of any artist that is essentially a false argument.  The artist has to be an observer as well as an artist, just as the activist has to be an observer at times, otherwise his actions are reactive and instinctive, lashing out at whatever gets in the way, unrelated to any theory or vision, and usually of little merit.

Dylan’s multiple viewpoints – the value of life, the need to express the validity of basic human rights no matter who you are, the abhorrence of war, the delight in old folk songs, the love of blues, the invention of a beat generation form of music (with Subterranean Homesick Blues), the creation of songs where time does not run true, these all need reflection to be drawn into the debate.

And for me this is the essence of the failure of most reviews and critiques of Dylan.  They take a song, and analyse that, without taking overall context of Dylan’s progression, and Dylan the artist.

Yet it is not so difficult.  In my own very minor way I’m an artist, earning my living by writing, and I know what it’s like.  There are millions of people like me – we look, we explore, we reflect, we develop it in our artistic forms.

The artist is the observer and the interpreter, for how else does he/she create the art?  The artist watches,  interpets, creates the art.  What was Dylan doing when he created “Desolation Row” but observing the events around him, and then drawing out the key points and commenting upon them?  Where did Visions of Johanna come from, apart from watching people sitting in isolation, failing to make proper contact with each, lacking the glue that holds society together.

The movement from passive observer to active artist comes at the moment of artistic creation.  The moment the band begins to play the rhythm and blues and Dylan scribbles on his notepad

What’s the matter with me
I don’t have much to say

He is once more active, interpreting his role, re-analysing the world, recognising that you don’t write “Like a Rolling Stone” every day of the week, but there again you don’t have to.

Of course sitting here watching the river flow could be a case of doing nothing but sitting back in the gentleness that is painted in New Morning, but in reality few can ever do nothing.  One might meditate of course, but otherwise one is interpreting the world beyond, and eventually you have to engage once more.

And what is that whole first verse but a verse of restlessness.

Daylight sneakin’ through the window
And I’m still in this all-night café
Walkin’ to and fro beneath the moon
Out to where the trucks are rollin’ slow
To sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow

What am I, Tony Attwood, doing here, writing this review?  I am listening to the music flowing by, and it creates thoughts in my head which make me consider this, that and the other.  I write my review, seeking to throw new light (for anyone who wants to read) on this piece of music.

Only if you take Dylan absolutely literally do you get a sense of disengagement.  And when, pray, has it been a good idea to take Dylan absolutely literally?

But even if it is literally talking about watching without doing, thinking or anything to say, there is also the point that most artists need periods of disengagement from public life and from their art in order to think and re-think.  These down times are not what make the artist famous – Picasso isn’t famous for sitting on a beach looking at the sea, he is famous for painting Guernica, but he couldn’t paint Guernica without some down time looking at the waves.

Besides, when you listen to the song, it is anything but “lazing on a sunny afternoon”.  This is nothing like the sitting in the log cabin and going out to catch a fish for the evening meal that you get in New Morning.  This is the river of life that is so incredibly energetic that you certainly do need to sit back sometimes, just to draw breath from everything moving past you at ten thousand miles an hour.

Indeed it is quite possible to argue that Dylan is having a bit of fun here.  “Hey,” he is saying, “so you liked the rural charm of New Morning?  Ok, I’m going  to just sit back in my little log cabin up in the mountains and watch the world go by….  Like hell I am.”

In this approach this is the rock n roll musician’s retirement, not the retreat to the woods retirement.  This is the music of the 70 year old who is still bopping away at the dance clubs.  That is really the point.  I might be sitting in looking at the river, by inside me that old rock n roll is still playing.

Besides, he in the all-night cafe, he’s not going to bed as the sun goes down and getting up in the morning at sun rise.  He is in the country in the style of New Morning, but unlike New Morning he very much does not want the peaceful idyll.  He wants to be in the city.  Maybe today he doesn’t want to be in the middle of the action, but I bet that even Che Guevara had the occasional day off.

The overriding fact is that phrase “I don’t have too much to say” has multiple meanings.

One is, I ain’t anyone special, rather like “Don’t follow leaders” – as in “do your own thing, not what I say”.  I’m just this guy, you know.

One is that I am a quiet man, a man in retreat.

Another is that, just at this moment I am contemplative, considering, building up information.  I have no idea where my next masterpiece is coming from, but it’s in there, or out there, somewhere.  Just give it time, and before you know it “Tangled up in blue” will emerge.

Another is that the answer to the question is so simple I can say it in a few lines.  As in, “It’s not that complicated.  Just be kind, forgiving, loving and giving.  What else do I need to say?”

So my point is that “I’m fresh out of ideas” is just one of the many interpretations of the song.  It is the one most people have jumped on, but it is by no means the only one and I don’t think it is the right one.  Dylan is always far more complex than that.

So let’s go right, right back to the start.  Remember this

Sad I’m sittin’ on the railroad track,
Watchin’ that old smokestack.
Train is a-leavin’ but it won’t be back.

No one who has heard Ballad for a Friend has ever said that at this point he was losing it because he just sitting, without too much to say. He’s contemplative because his friend was in an automobile accident.  That is a worthwhile state of mind to be in, to cope with the sudden catastrophe.

By Tony Attwood

It is a strange connundrum: Dylan puts at least one 12 bar blues song onto every album, which suggests this is the key to his roots, this is the music he loves.  And yet it is the 12 bar blues that are so often ignored by reviewers looking for the very essence of Dylan’s music.

So when we come to Time Out of Mind we think of Love Sick and Not Dark Yet maybe, but not of Til I fell in love with you the classic 12 bar blues.   And it is the same through all the albums.

Time Out of Mind is an album of being weary with the world and life – you don’t even have to listen to the words to get the picture.  Just play the opening of Standing in the Doorway; it oozes disengagement with the world.

I got no place left to turn
I got nothing left to burn
Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you
It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow

By the time we descend to Til I fell in love with you this is more than disengagement, this is falling apart; and the cause this time is not the reminiscence of things past but rather the total lack of self, following the start of the love affair.  He loves her so much, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.  Did I mention that it hurts?

Indeed so desperate is the situation that Dylan is waiting if not for divine intervention, at least divine protection.  Divine protection from love, now there’s a thing.

The attitude to women is however not the sort of rural idealisation of the New Morning songs, or the warmth of I want you nor even the relaxed enjoyment of I’ll be your baby tonight.

This is the old blues of perfidious womanhood betraying honest hardworking men.

But there is also the old blues concept of life going on, you just have to suffer it, that is how it is.  Life does this to us, and we can’t do anything about it, except of course in the traditional blues manner have faith in the Lord.

Or maybe in music.  For the piece moves on to the thought that  “If I’m still among the living, then I’ll be Dixie bound.”   Down the Road to the Southern States, the home of the blues, Highway 61, New Orleans.  At least there people will understand.  Or anyway, I’ll have the music.

The jagged chord at the very start, played over and over punches at our nerves from the first second.  During the first verse, it overpowers us as the first sound we hear and then slowly fades into the background – but always there.  Our nerves are on edge.

And as if that were not enough, as an opening

Well, my nerves are exploding and my body’s tense

is about as hard as a blues song, or come to that any song, can get.  You want a punch in the face?  Here it comes.

I’ve been hit too hard, I’ve seen too much

Incidentally, that line and the following line (Nothing can heal me now, but your touch) both turn up on “Marchin’ To The City” which was recorded in the same sessions but dropped from the album.  It is on Tell Tale Signs, and I’ll come back to it in the near future.

So, we kick off with desperation, and then we find the resolution is no resolution.

Nothing can heal me now, but your touch
I don’t know what I’m gonna do

She’s got the power, he’s sucked in, and has no idea how to escape.  Oh this really is the blues.

This song, with its continuing images of the world falling apart (it won’t even rain, damn it, when he needs it to), is part of the descent from desperation to utter total despair and then a complete sense of giving up, that marks out the first seven songs on Time Out of Mind.

Most albums start with something fairly upbeat, but this album starts with something jolly and positive, but this album, remember begins

I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

Now by the sixth song even the clouds won’t do what they are supposed to.  And, remember, we’ve still got one more bit of descending to do to finally hear that “It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there.”

Yes it is the world gone utterly totally wrong.

Well, my house is on fire, burning to the sky
I thought it would rain but the clouds passed by
Now I feel like I’m coming to the end of my way
But I know God is my shield and he won’t lead me astray
Still I don’t know what I’m gonna do
I was all right ’til I fell in love with you

That’s a lovely contradiction of the religious message.  God won’t lead me astray, but even so, I still don’t know what to do.

This being the blues, there is no relief for the middle 8, no change of key, no variation in the chord sequence, it is just verse after verse pounding after verse of desperation.

When I’m gone you will remember my name
I’m gonna win my way to wealth and fame
I don’t know what I’m gonna do

That old terrifying fear that no one will come to the funeral, no one will miss us or even remember us when we are dead, so little is the mark we have left on this world.  You never see it more profoundly expressed than here.  And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse…

Junk is piling up, taking up space
My eyes feel like they’re falling off my face
Sweat falling down, I’m staring at the floor

This has turned into a horror movie.  This is Edgar Allen Poe.  And so he has had enough.  He resolves what to do, immediately after saying he doesn’t know what he’s going to do…

Tomorrow night before the sun goes down
If I’m still among the living, I’ll be Dixie bound
I just don’t know what I’m gonna do

Because it will be all right if I can just get to the home of the blues.  The singer has just had enough of this world, and the South seems like a paradise, away from it all where somehow imaginary friends will see me all right.

But you know that any moment now he’s still going to say

Well, my nerves are exploding and my body’s tense
I feel like the whole world got me pinned up against the fence

and it will all go around again.

The great thing about this song on the album is that it leads so perfectly into Not Dark Yet that the opening of the next song (“Shadows are falling…”) seems like a blessed relief.  That is quite a musical achievement.

Musically, as I’ve said, it is a blues.  But there is a twist.  If you listen to each line you’ll hear at the end of the line after Dylan has sung his words the electric piano does a chord change like a little comment on what the singer has sung.

So the first line is in E (the classic key of the blues) but at the end of the line that electric piano gives us a quick A/E.  It is one of those little things in music that you maybe never notice, but it gives an extra feel.  Here that feel is of unfinished business.  Nothing is static – it is a musical answer to the line Dylan has sung but not a solution, not a resolution.  A clever twist.

Finally, on the issue of the production, it is said that Dylan didn’t like the Daniel Lanois production of Time out of mind.  I was surprised the first time I heard this, because for me the atmosphere Lanois gets throughout all these songs is a total reflection of where the songs take us.

It appears that Dylan thought the song could go further in other directions.  Maybe so, but history of full of artists who are not always fully able to grasp quite what they have done in one particular work.  That’s not to suggest I know more than Dylan, of course not, but rather it is to say, it is still worth probing issues and challenging everything.

But then, on the other hand, what do I know?

All the songs reviewed on Untold Dylan

by Tony Attwood

Father of Night represents one of Dylan’s most adventurous pieces musically, in that it is written in two separate keys, flowing neatly from one to the other but without the conventional simple techniques of modulation being employed.

This suddenly divergent musical approach may have come about by chance or it might have to do with the Archibald  MacLeish commission in which it was suggested that Dylan should contribute to MacLeish’s latest dramatic project.

MacLeish in the 1920s associated with the likes of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker…   An amazing group.

He took in every artistic influence going, and clearly it had an impact.  American Libraries much later called MacLeish “one of the hundred most influential figures in librarianship during the 20th century” in the United States.  And in 1959 his play J.B. won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  You don’t get much more elevated than that.

Around 1969 he met Bob Dylan, and there is a mention of this in Chronicles.

What MacLeish and Dylan thought of each other we don’t really know, but MacLeish admired T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and his work shows their influence. Whether we can say that Dylan admired the poets I am also not at all sure, but Dylan has certainly been influenced by Eliot, although I’ve always felt “Too much of nothing” was a direct assault on Eliot.

Also Eliot’s notion that a poet should write with “a feeling that the whole of the literature from Europe from Homer” seems to ring true.  And both Eliot and Dylan quote extensively from other sources.

Anyway the MacLeish project was said to be based on “The Devil and Daniel Webster” a short story by Stephen Vincent Benét which itself is based on “The Devil and Tom Walker”, written by Washington Irving.

In the Benét telling, a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the Devil and is defended by the lawyer Daniel Webster.

But the collaboration came to nothing, and we are left with wonderings about what thoughts for Dylan came out of the project.  Reports suggest that “New Morning”, “Father of Night” and “Time Passes Slowly” were sketches for the collaboration.

Certainly Father of Night would be a fine piece of musical theatre – one of those stage songs that could be grown and developed with that distinctive piano introduction turning up in all places.

But the words?

In essence they go nowhere.  It is a song that has a beginning like the end, and nothing has happened.  It starts…

Father of night, Father of day
Father, who taketh the darkness away

and it ends

Father of minutes, Father of days
Father of whom we most solemnly praise

and we have gone nowhere.

Several writers have commented that the lyrics are based on the Jewish prayer Amidah.   My knowledge of such matters is limited, so I might have this wrong but I think there are rules about how the prayer is recited (one should be standing in a particular way, facing Jerusalem etc) and the prayer offers praise for God’s “power and might” for his “bestowal of rain” and asks for God to grant “wisdom and understanding” and forgive all sins.

There is some sort of link with TS Eliot here, as Eliot ends The Waste Land with  Shantih  shantih  shantih – taken from the ending of an Upanishad – not really “the peace passing all understanding,” but something along those lines.

So I guess Bob is remembering his roots and trying to summarise the rural tranquility and homeliness that is sprinkled in the album with this 90 second ending, just as Eliot did in a much more intellectual (but for me often far more incomprehensible) end to Death by Water in the Waste Land.

There is only one alternative version of “Father of Night”, that I know and it was the 1973 cover by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band for the album “Solar Fire”.  I am not sure it adds much to our understanding, but it is there if you want it.

So back to the music.

It is another “black notes” piece on the piano (obviously) and it starts with what a musician would at once recognise as the chords based on the descending C melodic minor scale.

C minor – B flat – A flat – G minor

E flat – C minor

Thus we are clearly now in C minor, but then as we get to “Builder of rainbows up in the sky” we find the piano playing,

A flat – E flat – B flat.

Which gives us a clear feeling we are now in the key of B flat.   It is done so artlessly there is no feeling of any jerkiness which a bad change of keys can give – it is just there.  A smooth transition.

But then with “Father of loneliness and pain”  we have the start of a prolonged transition back to the minor key we started in

A flat – G minor – E flat – C minor.

The minor chord reflecting the word “pain” is just right – but and we are in C minor (not the C major we started in).

Then the final line just uses the chord of B flat – so we have ended the song in a different key from that which we started in.   We open in C but using the chords based on C melodic minor, we move to B flat, seem to move to C minor, but no in the final line we are in B flat.

This ending the verse in a different key from which it starts is not hard to do – it is a mechanical thing – but it is very difficult indeed to do without making the whole song construction disintegrate.  I can’t think where else Dylan tries it.  I just wonder who or what he was listening to.

In the end I am always left with the feeling that this is not so much a hymn of praise but rather a song about eternity.  The “Father” could be “God” but equally nature, the universe, life, the sun, everything.

Everything is there.  It goes on.  Just like the song, going round.

Father of grain, Father of wheat
Father of cold and Father of heat
Father of air and Father of trees
Who dwells in our hearts and our memories
Father of minutes, Father of days
Father of whom we most solemnly praise

A real Dylan oddity.  A unique piece.

All the songs reviewed on Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

I suspect it is quite easy to misunderstand One More Weekend as a throw away, and I’m particularly moved to say that, having added the phrase from Dylan’s interview with Rolling Stone on the home page of this site, I think he might be playing with us here.

There, in that interview, he talks of journalists seeing him as a folk singer, a protest singer etc, and always misunderstanding him, whereas if you consider his music surely it is clear that he is a blues musician with an interest in exploring where the blues can be taken.

Even in his earliest songs there are blues masterpieces, so naturally Dylan would continue to explore the blues in its classic 12 bar form and see where it can go – and that is what he has done through all this work as a musician.  Try Ballad for a friend if you don’t believe me.

So to see such songs as merely Dylan’s regular tribute to the blues is to miss the point.  Dylan never stands still, and One More Weekend is a perfect example of his exploration of the blues as a form, within the context of what he is doing elsewhere.

In New Morning Dylan has prepared us for where he was going singing lines like “This must be the day when all of my dreams come true” and “So happy just to be alive underneath the sky of blue”.

And a moment later telling us that having a wife, living in a cabin in Utah, having children, is “what it’s all about.”

Now on One More Weekend we find

We’ll fly the night away
Hang up the whole next day
Things will be okay
You wait and see
We’ll go to some place unknown
Leave all the children home
Honey, why not go alone
Just you and me.

This is meant to be fun.  It starts with “slipping and sliding” which comes from the 1956 B side to Long Tall Sally which has within it the lines

I’ve been told, Baby you’ve been bold, I won’t be your fool no more.

But does this mean the song is about betrayal?  You could argue that, and bring in the fact that the opening has a mention of a weasel, not normally a word associated with being straightforward.  You could argue that there are elements of put-down also, because the song has the same bounce as songs like “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat.”

And of course this is Dylan – this is what he does – he throws in references here, there and everywhere and plays with us.  Just as he plays with the timing of events in such songs as Tangled up in blue where nothing seems to be fixed in a sequence, so he can play with our emotional responses too – and as I will come to in a moment he does a time sequence change in this song too.

So, the album is primarily about the simple life, the country life, everything New York life is not.  Yes, Dylan is perfectly capable of throwing that lot out the window and saying, “hey baby, let’s go to the country cottage for a spot of rumpy-pumpy” (don’t know it that last phrase translates into American, but I think you’ll get the idea).

Yes it is possible, but why do that part-way through this album?  Why do that after “Winterlude” and “Sign”?  He might have done it, but I don’t think it is quite his style.

This is by and large an album about the classic family values and classic morality and duty and honour that have no part in the Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 and Blonde times.

And besides, although it is a blues, this isn’t a classic blues.  Yes it sounds like it at the start, and line line, I’m looking good to see you, yeah, we could have some fun certainly seems like that, but…

But… that central “B” section (this is a classic A B A song) does things with the chord sequence that no blues song would ever do.

The song is in A major, and in this middle section Dylan completes a perfect modulation – that is to say a complete change into E major.  Thus this is not the blues, for no blues piece ever does that.

And he’s playing with chords again – just listen to what happens

(D) We’ll fly the night away,
(C) Hang out the whole next day,
(B) Things will be okay, You wait and (E) see.

You can feel the descent down through those chords and then the sudden release as we jump from B to E – a feeling of “ah, ok, that is where we were going.”

I think there is a huge amount of throwing away of lines going on here, either (one might argue) because Dylan couldn’t care less about the song, or because he could and he enjoys playing games.

Come on down to my ship, honey, ride on deck
We’ll fly over the ocean, just like you suspect

What does that second line mean?  Suspect what?  And so what’s all this about riding on deck.  (It might be some sexual allusion, but not one that I know.  I think I must have lived a very sheltered life).

If there is an overall meaning the fact that we have

We’ll go to some place unknown
Leave all the children home
Honey, why not go alone
Just you and me.

which suggests a couple just having a break from the everyday life.  And in the end that’s all it is.  Lines like

Coming and going like a rabbit in the wood
I’m happy just to see you, yeah, looking so good

don’t really illuminate the human condition or take the story forwards.  It is just where we are.  Always busy, always tied up with work and life and family, but hey, you are still the shining light of my world, so yes, let’s take that break.

Of course Dylan then throws me off track totally with

Like a needle in a haystack I’m gonna find you yet
You’re the sweetest girl mama that this boy is ever gonna get

So, he’s not in a happy relationship after all – he’s talking about the future.

Oh.

But then, maybe it’s just another of those future-present-past reversals that he so likes.  If you can tell the story forwards, you can always tell it backwards.

And I’ll say this for Bob Dylan.  He always makes me think.

All the songs reviewed on Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

One of the great problems with writing about Dylan, as opposed to, say, TS Eliot or Brahms, is that while I grew up with all three, Dylan was a choice – something that I opted to make central to my vision of the world from my later teenage years onwards.  The others I had to study as I took my A Levels at school and went on to train as a classical musician.

That makes the Dylan songs part of my consciousness, my world view in a way that Eliot and Brahms are not, and as I return to some of these songs from the earlier days I am instantly taken back to the entanglement of life from when I first heard each song.

Take “Sign on the window”.  It has that line “Brighton girls are like the moon”.  Which for a British guy who has just spent three years at the University of Brighton in Sussex (England), is a trifle confusing.

I still don’t know which Brighton he’s talking about and why.  Is that New Brighton in California, which has a sandy beach (Brighton in Sussex has a famous stone beach), or Michigan, or Colarado, or Monroe County New York or… well, I don’t know.  I’ve been to the States a number of times, New York, Florida, New Hampshire, Virginia… but never bumped into a Brighton, USA.   But hey, its a big place.

Anyway, there I was, I’d finished being a student, and was back in Dorset, teaching, thinking about what went right and what went wrong in my Brighton years, wondering what I was going to do with life now that it involved all this rather annoying “work” stuff, and why wasn’t everyone offering me fortunes to write music or books, or put in a turn or two as a dancer?  And meanwhile here’s Dylan singing about Brighton.   And now centuries (well years) later, I can’t get these thoughts out of my head, for I have to admit it, there were a couple of ladies from those days who I still remember, even now.

Brighton girls are like the moon.  Oh yes indeed.  Whatever happened to them?

And it’s not just me.  Lots of people say that they associate moments in their lives with songs of the moment.  Its commonplace – and it sure as hell gets in the way of writing a decent review.

But such is my task, so here goes…

The first thing is the key.  It is in the key of F sharp.   Look at a keyboard (or if you can’t, look at a picture of a keyboard) and you will see the black notes arranged in groups of three and two.   Some keys use lots of those black notes, some don’t.  The key of C major uses none at all – it just has the white notes.   F sharp major uses all the black notes plus two white notes.  (Every major and minor key uses seven notes – its in the rule book which was written sometime in the 17th century).

Irving Berlin (who wrote God Bless America, Cheek to Cheek, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Blue Skies, Easter Parade, I got sun in the morning and the moon at night – I was brought up on all these, my dad used to play these on the piano), wrote almost totally on the black notes, mostly in F sharp.

He was a self-taught musician, and quite a few self-taught musicians do this.   As Irving Berlin said, in 1962, “The black keys are right there, under your fingers. The key of C is for people who study music.”

Dylan it seems has the same idea.  Certainly his instrumental performance on this recording is one of his best – although as any trained musician will tell you, that repeating of certain chords over and over at the end of some phrases really isn’t right at all.  But still, he’s Dylan, and I’m not, and only one of us wrote all these songs, so what do I know?

Ron Cornelius who played guitar said, “His piano playing’s weird…because his hands start at opposite ends of the keyboard and then sorta collide in the middle—he does that all the time—but the way he plays just knocks me out.”

The only problem with this sort of composition is (as the always informative Dylan Chords web site puts it) “F# major, possibly the worst conceivable guitar key.”  But there are capos which overcome the problem.

So what have we got?  A piece written in the piano as the greatest of all the American songwriters wrote – on the black notes.  And he’s contemplating the past and how the world works, and what’s right for him right now.  It is real Irving Berlin country.

Just compare Berlin’s “Sun the morning” with the last verse of “Sign on the window”

Got no diamond, got no pearl
Still I think I’m a lucky girl
I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night

Got no mansion, got no yacht
Still I’m happy with what I’ve got
I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night

If you have never done this sort of wishing a bit (not desperately but a bit) that you could change your life, take a different stance, undo some mistakes, take a new turn, go back and find the girl (or boy) you walked away from then maybe you can’t understand.

I know a lot of people who say they haven’t done it, and don’t understand me when I talk about it.  Indeed I seem to have spent my entire life doing stuff, and then wishing I’d picked up other opportunities and done other stuff and then…

What I am trying to say is that all that thinking affects the way you see the world.

So I think Dylan is saying, all this has happened, I’ve been through good times and bad times, and I’m doing a bit of re-thinking here, and actually it is a bit odd because I am coming back to the sort of thing that I used to think was old-fashioned, and nothing to do with us any more.

In such a context we tend to remember the end of the song.  But the opening verse is easily forgotten in the overall piece, but just pause, if you will, and take a look and a listen again.  Don’t go on, don’t sing the whole song in your head.  Don’t play the music.  Just read these words.

Sign on the window says “Lonely”
Sign on the door said “No Company Allowed”
Sign on the street says “Y’ Don’t Own Me”
Sign on the porch says “Three’s A Crowd”
Sign on the porch says “Three’s A Crowd”

Where are you now?  Lost?  Alone in a crowded bar?  Sitting there on your own?  Wishing for old times.

(As an aside: a while back I wrote a song called “Old Times” which has the lines,

It was just like old times
But we never had any old times

through which I try to represent this wistfulness we get from thinking of the past.)

Of course we know the context of the rest of the song, but still, I would say that is a stunning and remarkable opening to a piece of music.  A unique opening to a piece of music.  I don’t know another piece that starts like this.

Then the verse that I took with me through life…

Her and her boyfriend went to California
Her and her boyfriend done changed their tune
My best friend said, “Now didn’ I warn ya
Brighton girls are like the moon
Brighton girls are like the moon”

However, at this point Mr Dylan and I part company.  For here everyone, musician and non-musician alike, will recognise that something changes in the music.

All the chords up to this point have been pretty much what we might expect.  They are all the chords that fit within a classical analysis of what is allowable in such a piece, plus one blues chord – the flattened seventh.  It is all coherent – by which I mean it all sounds like it is part of the same piece.

And then…

Suddenly we change key from F sharp into D (which is a bit like moving from speaking Esperanto into Swahili – the two are utterly unrelated and incoherently different), and before you know it we are in B, which is related to the world of F sharp and we are back in our original key.   The lyrics are

Looks like a-nothing but rain . . .
Sure gonna be wet tonight on Main Street . . .
Hope that it don’t sleet

Crash, bang, clunk – imagine a manual gearbox on a car with the clutch gone.

In a sense it works, the world has gone wrong, the woman has left, and as his mate said, “these Brighton girls just change, change and change again.”

Phase in, phase out, and then we are retreating from the world and in the idealised pastoral future.  Forget the horrors of Hollis Brown’s rural world, forget that they are selling postcards of the hanging.

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
That must be what it’s all about
That must be what it’s all about

It isn’t what it is all about of course.  But it is one way of living.

And yet…

Years later I sit writing this in my study, looking across to the tall trees in my garden swaying gently in the breeze.  Beyond, hidden now by the trees but visible in winter, the village church, some 500 years old.  The bells still chime on the hour (but always two minutes early).  I can go for a stroll to the river.  No trout, but its a fast flowing stream with a little bridge and weeping willows.

I have three daughters, who don’t call me “Pa” because that’s not too common in England, but they call me “dad” and my seven grandchildren call me “Granddad”, and hell, after all these years of trying to make something of myself, I have to admit it.  There’s a lot in what he says.

I wanted to change the world, and I really tried.  I mean I really, really tried.  But ultimately the meaning in life comes from sitting in this room, hearing the birds singing in the trees, thinking about my children, and doing what I enjoy doing – writing about Bob Dylan.

So it goes.

Index to all the songs reviewed.

By Tony Attwood

It is often suggested that the underlying meaning of New Morning is “Hello, here I am again”.  Possibly that is what it came to signify, but I suspect it started out as just a phrase, and the song that came out of those two words.

As I have said many times, as I try to illustrate the process of composing, I don’t in any way remotely say I know the way Dylan works as a composer, but I know that I, and a few song composers I know, can start with something simple like a chord change, or a few notes of melody, or a simple phrase.  “New Morning” sounds to me like one such phrase.

You have “New Morning” in your head, and without any conscious thought along comes “On this new morning” and a second later, “On this new morning with you.”  Gradually all emerges from this simply concept.

In such a process there is thus no conscious action of writing a song about a New Morning – the phrase just leads you on.  (Of course I can’t prove it, and Bob will never tell, but I’m just saying how it happens with me, and a few others I know).

Over the years I have written about (and indeed taught university music students about) the creative process, and along with every other writer on the topic I’ve read, I am certain that all of us can become more and more creative simply by practicing and by focussing on a desire to be more creative.

You want to be a good golfer, you practice golf on the golf course, but you also work on your swing, and all the other background stuff that is part of that.  You want to be a good painter, then you paint, but you also sketch, and scribble, and work out ideas on backs of envelopes.  You do it all the time.  It becomes your life.

So you want to be a songwriter, then you practice finding phrases of music and lyric, while you also develop your creativity in general as you search for ideas.  It is not hard to do.   And you should try it – it is fun, life-affirming and can be a good conversation piece!   It’s not difficult, nor is it complex.  It’s just in our society it isn’t really encouraged (and we tend to think of creative people as weird, freaky, spooky, downright odd and disruptive in the schoolroom).

So I think Dylan was stretching his creative muscles (as it were) and hit on the phrase, and it went from there and quite possibly meant, “this is the start of a new series of Dylan works”.  Or not as the case may be.  But as Rolling Stone said, “Calling his latest outing New Morning may very well be his way of saying, ‘I’m back’,” and that certainly seems possible.

Moving on to the music…

New Morning is laid back, in a similar way to John Wesley Harding, but with a bit of rock and roll.

Dylan never seems to have lost his sense of the rural, and while he can tell us the horrors of the rural world (Hollis Brown at once springs to mind, as does the first line of Desolation Row) he can tell us of the positive relaxed nature of village life too.

Can’t you hear that rooster crowin’?
Rabbit runnin’ down across the road
Underneath the bridge
Where the water flowed through
So happy just to see you smile
Underneath the sky of blue

And of course, it is a love song too – the rural world is perfect because he sees her smile.  It is a “new morning with you.”

But nothing much happens in paradise (as David Byrne so clearly pointed out) which is what makes the next verse rather trivial.

Can’t you hear that motor turnin’?
Automobile comin’ into style
Comin’ down the road
For a country mile or two
So happy just to see you smile
Underneath the sky of blue

Nothing happens.  Not even when they go to bed…

The night passed away so quickly
It always does when you’re with me

And then we are back in country heaven where, basically, nothing happens.

Now a song about nothing happening could be a disaster although you could argue it is about some sub-text that I know one or two writers have indicated, but which I can’t really come to believe in.

No, what Dylan does is salvage what could be nothingness with a remarkable orchestration and underlying chordal progression that is by and large so un-Dylan.

First off, the chords.  The song is in A and so a rotating A / D chord change as the band starts up is all we might expect.  Very relaxed, very straightforward.

But then, as the organ begins to have a bit more prominence we are off.  In the second line C sharp minor appears and is followed by A7, F sharp minor, D, B minor, C sharp minor, D, E…

OK I appreciate if you are not schooled in the finer points of chord sequences that is gibberish, but believe me this is unusual.  Not odd.  Not wrong, just unusual, especially for Dylan.

But whether you get the chords or not, just listen to the track and how the organ comes in, during “Rabbit running down…” to give a totally different feeling from the opening.

And then by the time we get to the chorus, we’re rocking away – quite different from where we started – and where we go back to with verse two.

If nothing else, listen just to the organ in the chorus – that playing is talking about fun and laughter and enjoyment.

But then the middle 8 – again with a very unusual sequence (G, F sharp minor, G,E).

And the organ is holding a chord as if this is in the village chapel on a sunday.

By the time we get to the last verse we really know what is going on.

Can’t you feel that sun a-shinin’?
Ground hog runnin’ by the country stream
This must be the day
That all of my dreams come true
So happy just to be alive
Underneath the sky of blue

When we have “this must be the day”, everything is so simple, step by step he’s got there.  Life is reborn.  He is reborn.

The song was recorded in three takes on one day and it is quite an achievement to get and keep the simplicity of the lyrics.  After all this is the man who wrote Rolling Stone and Visions of Johanna.  But he’s a clever guy this Bob Dylan.  He can also do simplicity too.  And sometimes that is a lot harder than complexity.

It’s a lovely piece, it really works, and it deserves to be heard on its own.  Just this time, don’t play the album, just play this track.

What else is on the site

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

The index to all the 594 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

• WINTERLUDE is a Finnish Dylan Forum. ..

• Michael Gray, an expert on Bob Dylan and contributor to Telegraph Travel, is planning a series of “Winterlude Weekends” at his home in south-west France next February and March.

• The song was featured in The Comic Strip‘s 1998 special “Four Men In A Car”.

• Winterlude is a song on New Morning.

Yep, I found all of those on the internet when researching this song.   And I can tell you there is no agreement anywhere on what Winterlude (the song) is, although the one thing it most certainly is (a waltz, one of only a few in the Dylan canon) is only mentioned in two of three places.

One thing is for sure though, the people who comment all over the place saying this is a Dylan made up word (you know who you are) are wrong.  It is the winter festival held in Canada’s National Capital Region.   Come celebrate winter in the Capital during three fun-filled weekends in February. Grab your skates or rent some here and glide along…   you get the idea.

Is Dylan singing his waltz to a woman, or to a celebration in February?  The latter seems odd but I wouldn’t put anything past Dylan.

Winterlude, Winterlude, oh darlin’
Winterlude by the road tonight
Tonight there will be no quarrelin’
Ev’rything is gonna be all right
Oh, I see by the angel beside me
That love has a reason to shine
You’re the one I adore, come over here and give me more
Then Winterlude, this dude thinks you’re fine

In one sense the song sounds a bit like Ramona, almost as if someone had heard Ramano and was messing about with it, trying to make fun of what Dylan is and what he does.  Which when you think about it, is thoroughly odd.  But as we know Dylan could write waltzes, such as Sara, so why do this?  Or at least why, having done it, preserve it on an album?

Unless, unless, Sara is the key.  A nickname for her?  Certainly it is a very comfortable easy going piece of music that hardly stretches us.  A song between a couple who have become very comfortable with each other?

Certainly this is a turn away from the world, a cozy up by the fire.  In fact it is like You Angel You – its a nice little love song, either about a place, or a time of year or about a woman.  It’s a stroll along the roadside with all sorts of odd rhymes thrown in for good measure.

Winterlude, Winterlude, oh darlin’
Winterlude by the road tonight
Tonight there will be no quarrelin’
Ev’rything is gonna be all right
Oh, I see by the angel beside me
That love has a reason to shine
You’re the one I adore, come over here and give me more
Then Winterlude, this dude thinks you’re fine

It is three chords simple pop.  It is a song about the simple life, and why not.  Whoever said everything should be intellectual a deep in meaning?

Whoever said that every line should have a meaning?  I mean, what does

The snow is so cold, but our love can be bold
Winterlude, don’t be rude, please be mine

actually imply?

I really have no idea.

All the songs reviewed on this site

By Tony Attwood

I bought New Morning upon its release, and thought of this song, “What an interesting piece; I wonder what it is about?”   And I suspect I’d never have really thought it was about Elvis had it not been for the fact that years later I read that Ron Cornelius, the guitarist on the album, reported that he asked Bob Dylan what ‘Went to See the Gypsy’ was about and Dylan replied that it was about going to see Elvis in Las Vegas.

But, of course it is never as simple as that.  For on 14 May 2009 the article Bob Dylan’s Late-Era, Old-Style American Individualism appeared in Rolling Stone which contradicts this whole idea.

I’m going to deal with the notion that it is about Elvis first, and then come back to the Rolling Stone article.

The big problem for me with the Elvis is a gypsy idea, is that I’d never heard of Elvis being called The Gypsy.   Now of course it is possible that the notion that Elvis was a gypsy or was called “gypsy” has circulated in the US, but never made it to the UK where I live until 2008 when a magazine in the UK that was published to promote an understanding of, and respect for, gypsy communities claimed that Elvis Presley was descended from German gypsies who emigrated to the U.S. in the early 18th century.

The problem with the argument is that a major part of such evidence as there is, is that Elvis’ mother’s side of the family contained the name Smith – which the magazine says was a common surname used by British Romanies.    Unfortunately Smith is the single most common surname in Britain today – and tracing it back to Romanies is impossible.  The blacksmiths, from which the name comes, were revered by the Vikings who ruled much of northern and eastern England in the Dark Ages (after the departure of the Roman Empire and before the Anglo Saxons fully established themselves).  The Smiths were considered the highest of the non-nobles because of their seemingly magical ability to make swords (remembering that one only passes to Valhalla if one dies with a sword in one’s hand).  Swords were vested with extraordinary power, and indeed if a man were injured by a serious sword strike, his only chance of healing (it was believed) was to get the sword that struck the blow, and destroy it.

That’s all by the way, but it explains in part why Smith is such a common name in my country.  Not from Romany origins, but from a deep veneration of the work of the blacksmiths whose secrets were handed down from father to son.

Anyway, most mainstream publications debunked the “Elvis was a gypsy” story at the time, and several cited David Altheer, a writer and researcher on gypsy culture saying, “The fact someone had gypsy in their family 300 years ago is frankly irrelevant – it does not mean you are a gypsy.”

There is one other point about tracing people as of gypsy origin in the UK, which has nothing to do with the song, but which I will throw in to complete the summary.  In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 says you must not be discriminated against because of your race – and race includes “ethnic origins”.   The courts in the UK have said that Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers are protected against race discrimination because they’re ethnic groups under the Equality Act.

So, as one of the pubs that I have frequented in London found to its cost, put up the sign “No travellers” on the door, and you’ll get prosecuted.

Anyway, that’s an aside.  Now, version two – from Rolling Stone.

The first thing to take from the article is how much back stage chit chat with the elite Bob gets up to.  The President of France (Dylan asked him about how the G20 negotiations were going), Charles Aznavour (“a bit of banter”)….  And Dylan talks about who he admires in rock – mostly Chuck Berry.

And then onto Elvis…

For Dylan, the very fact that Elvis had recorded versions of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” remains mind-boggling. Dutifully, as if returning a favor, Dylan recorded Elvis’ hit “(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such As I” during both the Basement Tapes and Self-Portrait sessions.

But that was about as close as they ever got. “I never met Elvis,” Dylan says. “I never met Elvis, because I didn’t want to meet Elvis. Elvis was in his Sixties movie period, and he was just crankin’ ’em out and knockin’ ’em off, one after another. And Elvis had kind of fallen out of favor in the Sixties. He didn’t really come back until, whatever was it, ’68? I know the Beatles went to see him, and he just played with their heads. ‘Cause George [Harrison] told me about the scene. And Derek [Taylor], one of the guys who used to work for him. Elvis was truly some sort of American king. His face is even on the Statue of Liberty. And, well, like I said, I wouldn’t quite say he was ridiculed, but close.

You see, the music scene had gone past him, and nobody bought his records. Nobody young wanted to listen to him or be like him. Nobody went to see his movies, as far as I know. He just wasn’t in anybody’s mind. Two or three times we were up in Hollywood, and he had sent some of the Memphis Mafia down to where we were to bring us up to see Elvis. But none of us went. Because it seemed like a sorry thing to do. I don’t know if I would have wanted to see Elvis like that. I wanted to see the powerful, mystical Elvis that had crash-landed from a burning star onto American soil. The Elvis that was bursting with life. That’s the Elvis that inspired us to all the possibilities of life. And that Elvis was gone, had left the building.”

So there we are.  He told the guitarist, he told the journalist.  How do we reconcile the two?

Simple – the story in the song is about an imaginary meeting – about what it might have been like to go and see Elvis or some similar pop idol from the old days who is still churning the songs out but no longer relevant.  Which explains the invention of Elvis as the gypsy.  It is an imagination of Elvis, as per the description in the Rolling Stone article.  The traveller who moves on, but is now no longer relevant.

This explains the music too for what hits one about the music is not any sign of typical gypsy rhythms, but the fact that this is rock music, nothing else.  There are no tempo changes, no modulations of key, no booming double bass, no two string harmonies, no accordion… I could go on but you get the idea.  This is rock music, not gypsy music.

But still Dylan gives us something different and unexpected.  The song has, at one level, a standard structure known in the trade as ternary  – which basically means having an opening section, a middle section and the opening section again.   In a lot of music, especially pop, the opening section (usually called A) is repeated so what we get is this.

• Section A
• Section A
• Section B
• Section A

What makes us sit up and take notice here however is that the second verse has two extra lines in it that the first and last verse don’t have.  Listening to the piece you may not even notice this, but it just feels as if “something” happened.  What that “something” is, is not clear, but it is there.  It is unexpected, and odd.

This is by no means the first time Dylan uses such a device – the last verse of Visions of Johanna does the same thing (and if you listen carefully you can hear the bass player forgets about the extra two lines and makes a mistake, playing it as if it is a standard verse).

Added together, the extra lines and the ABA structure gives us a feeling that the song seems to keep changing – but the change is marginal.  It is a clever musical trick.

And here’s a thought.  If you start from the premise that Dylan quite often uses words just because they come to him and seem to fit (rather than because they have a deeper meaning or significance, or refer to anything), then “gypsy” could be just that.  Dylan just called the Elvis character the gypsy.  And who knows, maybe the writers of that strange 2008 British publication read that “Went to see the gypsy” was about Elvis, and so made up a weird theory about Elvis’ racial identity.

Writers eh!  Who’d trust them?

As for the story in the song, the backstage chat with “Elvis” doesn’t actually go very far…

Went to see the gypsy
Stayin’ in a big hotel
He smiled when he saw me coming
And he said, “Well, well, well”
His room was dark and crowded
Lights were low and dim
“How are you?” he said to me
I said it back to him

In terms of profundity, this ain’t much.   I remember, in my early days as a journalist, reviewing a series of books called “In his own words” for a magazine, and really feeling rather sad when I got to the Elvis Presley In His Own Words volume, because in honesty the guy didn’t seem to say much at all, and certainly not much that was at all insightful.

Then the brief non-chat is over and Dylan leaves.

I went down to the lobby
To make a small call out
A pretty dancing girl was there
And she began to shout
“Go on back to see the gypsy
He can move you from the rear
Drive you from your fear
Bring you through the mirror
He did it in Las Vegas
And he can do it here”

And that means?

One explanation is that Dylan has been reading Hesse’s Steppenwolf, the novel that looks at the personality split between humanity and aggression with a fair deal of homelessness thrown in as a side order.  I have to say I just don’t see that and I really don’t know where that takes us.  Yes, the Magic Theatre has a  giant mirror but…

So I’ll pass on the detail of the meaning and go to the “B” section – the middle part of ternary form.   Is Dylan expressing sadness for what Elvis (or who he symbolises here) was?

Outside the lights were shining
On the river of tears
I watched them from the distance
With music in my ears

Certainly the last verse sees the gypsy character as being ephemeral, moving on, with no permanent mark left, and that does accord with how Dylan talks about Elvis.  No one talked about him any more, but the old Sun records were still there, and people still jived to them.

So (and this is a bit of a wild punt) Dylan goes back to listen to Elvis one more time, to see if there is anything in his more recent recordings, but finds there isn’t.

I went back to see the gypsy
It was nearly early dawn
The gypsy’s door was open wide
But the gypsy was gone
And that pretty dancing girl
She could not be found
So I watched that sun come rising
From that little Minnesota town

I love that throw away at the end.  Dylan’s not going to see the fallen, irrelevant god of an Elvis-type figure.  Elvis had become pointless, past it, nothing, whereas the kid from Minnesota still has a lot to say.  (The kid who first heard all the early Elvis music that influenced his writing, in that little town).

The world that Elvis embodied in his prime has gone.  Elvis is a sad character that no one takes any notice of now.  Time to go home folks.

All the songs reviewed on this site.

By Tony Attwood

“Ring Them Bells” is considered by many as the best song on Oh Mercy – which given that many people think Oh Mercy was the best album since Desire, means it ought to be good.

It’s a ballad, a hymn, a religious treatise, an abstract painting, or an update on Times they are a Changing, you take your pick.  But whatever else it is, it is certainly a less heavily produced song than much of the rest of the album.  And a song with a unique cascading piano part which defines the music from the start.  A cascade that appears as Bob starts singing and gives us the impression of the bells, without being so naff as to have bells being played.  (That would have been awful!).

I might be wrong on this, but I am not sure Bob’s ability as a pianist would allow him to play or write that cascade.  It’s not that complex, but it is not the sort of thing I’ve not noticed him do anywhere else, and I wonder what came first, the cascade or the song.  Did Bob write a simplified version, and then hand it on?

But whatever way it happened that piano part at the opening of the first line defines the bells and the song.

The track is well sung on the album too – but it is open to reinterpretation.  If you don’t know it, try playing the album and then immediately follow it with (for example), the Supper Club live versions in 1993 which are considered by Heylin as the best moment from the Never Ending Tour.  (I don’t agree with this at all, for me it was the re-interpretation of Desolation Row as a dance piece, but he’s been to infinitely more gigs than I have, so I bow to him on this one).  But certainly if you choose to go to You Tube for one of the Supper Club concerts, you will get a treat  – especially if your knowledge of the song is limited to Oh Mercy and maybe the two disc version of Tell Tale Signs.  (The limited edition three disc version had another approach to Ring them bells on the final extra disc.)

There’s no doubt that as a piece of music it works beautifully – the melody just gives us the chords, the chords give us the melody – one of those beautiful songs where everything seems to fit so naturally together, rather than have any feeling that the composer was searching to find a way, any way, to end a line or make a rhyme.

There’s no hint of blues anywhere, where unusual chords are thrown in, as in the middle 8, they have nothing to do with the blues genre.  Rather they are stretching the song to see just how far it can go, and the answer is always… a very very long way.   This is a very unusual musical approach for Dylan.

Indeed given all the argument about the production that was put into Oh Mercy, and how much Daniel Lanois changed the essence of Dylan’s work during production,  Live At the Supper Club 1993  which has Dylan alongside Tony Garnier, Winston Watson, John Jackson and Bucky Baxter, does show another side to the piece.  But also it is still the same piece, with the same essence of meaning.

The song also has some of the lines that are oft-quoted by those who like to quote Dylan – the lines about the “blind and the deaf,” in verse two.  And of course it gives a mountain’s worth of support to those who believe that even after the religious orientated trilogy Dylan was still serving the Lord, still believed in the literal Revelation of St John, and was still waiting for the chosen ones to rule those who managed to make it through the apocalypse.

This religious feeling is enhanced by some excellently chosen references.   The Unesco world heritage site, The Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai, also known as St Catherine’s is a staggering place to visit, (although please don’t take that to mean that you should plan a trip there just now; personally I’d stay very much on my side of the Mediterranean just now).  After she was beheaded the angels took her remains to Mount Sinai where they were indeed discovered about 1300 years ago.

If you ever do see it I am sure you will see what I mean in terms of it being a fit into “the city that dreams/Ring them bells from the sanctuaries/Cross the valleys and streams”.

But I wonder… is this all really meant to tell us anything literally.  And then I wonder, is this really a religious song at all?

Consider for a moment St Catherine, St Peter and Sweet Martha.  If we are looking for literal meanings the issue must be “why those three?”   We can all find explanations for each, but all three in one song?   True, we also have a reference to The Chosen Few  – which could take us to the Saints who will judge the world at the end of time (I could show off and say Revelations 20:4, but that would just be showing off), but then again why those three people, in this context.

The problem is as fast as we try and track down one reason for a reference to be there, the others fall out of sync with it.   Which leads me to see these references as in fact half references; reflections placed throughout the song as much for the sound of the words as any symbolism or direct pointing in any direction.

Indeed when it comes to how religious the piece is, I keep coming back to the 1997 interview for The New York Times, just four years after the Supper Club recordings, where Dylan said, “This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like “Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain” or “I Saw the Light”—that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”

In reaching back to that comment I expect I have been influenced by the fact that I started writing this review on the 70th anniversary of VE Day – the day the second world war in Europe ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany.

One of the many, many points about this day – particularly for those of us whose ancestors were lost in the war – is that during the war church bells in Britain didn’t toll.   VE Day was the day on which every single church bell in the kingdom tolled – as they did again for the 70th anniversary.

Such events can be incredibly moving, and heighten an awareness of one’s country’s history, the sacrifices of one’s ancestors, and the deep and rich symbolism of church bells tolling.   And it is that which I take from this song.  Not detailed references to future events foretold in the Bible.

So I really can’t see that this is a song regretting the decline of religious belief, nor even a criticism of the leaders of Christianity who have a far lesser influence on the lives of everyday people than was so in previous centuries.   Indeed even the opening lines give us confusion…

Ring them bells, ye heathen
From the city that dreams
Ring them bells from the sanctuaries
’Cross the valleys and streams
For they’re deep and they’re wide
And the world’s on its side
And time is running backwards
And so is the bride

Of course it can be argued that Dylan has Joel 3:11 at the back of his mind

Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about.

But here’s another view.  I’ve always thought that “all ye heathen” line sounds quite a bit like

Come gather round people where ever you roam.

You see I think that manipulating lines from the King James Bible doesn’t actually mean that Dylan is making direct references to God that he wants us to acknowledge and obey.  After all, if Dylan wants to tell us to be good Christians, he does it directly and tells us to Serve Somebody.

To take a literal approach you need to explain why where and when the heathens should ring the church bells.  If you want to know, I can show you.  Just go to any of the bell ringing societies that we have all over the UK where the art of bell ringing, rather than the religious context of bell ringing, is practiced.

Dylan is using all his regular sources, and coming up with “the world’s on its side” in the track after telling us “everything is broken” and that really ought to be a fair old clue as to what is going on here.  The heathens are in the church ringing the bells, the world’s gone wrong, and while the film of the bride walking across the churchyard into the church for her wedding is running backwards in a final surreal twist.   The world is upside down.

Yes of course you can argue that we are again back with Revelation in that the bride is the bride of Christ, but again I make the point, when Dylan wants to tell us to become Christians, he doesn’t muck about with half images.   When he wants to paint an abstract painting on a religious theme, then he does it with half references, and accumulated but disconnected images, which he does here.

True, the second verse (Ring them bells St. Peter) sounds at first like it is a call to arms for the church, but everything depends on how you interpret the final two lines…

And the sun is going down
Upon the sacred cow

A sacred cow, I need hardly remind you, in most conversations these days is not about a perception of the animal in certain religions, but rather something that is unreasonably considered immune from question or criticism.  “The sun is going down on the sacred cow” actually means, we are all questioning everything, we hold no idea as sacrosanct any more.

If I really wanted to take a meaning out of this verse, I’d say, “Question Everything.”   The contrary view is that it tells Christians to abandon modernity and get back to the simple life, but it just doesn’t seem to work for me either here, or in the context of Dylan’s wider body of writing.

Besides if simplicity was what Dylan really wanted to convey, wouldn’t he do it, not on a highly produced album, but on his own accompanied by an acoustic guitar?

So the word play goes on, and whatever meaning you put into the song the images are striking, and I must say, fun.

And the mountains are filled
With lost sheep

Then as we move on this song does sound like a latter day version of Times they are a changing, and Chimes of Freedom.

Ring them bells for the blind and the deaf
Ring them bells for all of us who are left

True, we then go back to “the chosen few” – but then we have already had the bells for everyone who is left, so it seems a case of inclusivity.

But if you want the religious interpretation then “Sweet Martha,” who was witness to the resurrection. Except I think she is a Saint.

(Incidentally one wonderful interpretation I came across, researching this song was that this refers to Martha, the daughter of Bob Crachit in Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol, with the poor man’s son being Tiny Tim, and once we get to this point I have to say once again, when Dylan wants to give us a clear message he gives us a clear message, whether it is in the religious albums or on Times they are a changing.  When he wants to attack someone he attacks that person with no holds barred.  (“You’ve got a lot of nerve to say...”)   And when he wants to paint an abstract picture he paints an abstract picture (Tombstone Blues).

So this song is an accumulation of images – we can look at them like we can look at a Jackson Pollock, and we can detect meanings and overall insights, just as we can with a painting, but trying to turn an individual line into something that clearly means x or y, is, for me, quite pointless.

I think (and of course it is just me) this is a collection of images that relates to the cascading sound of church bells, which as I mentioned at the start, the piano delivers under Dylan’s voice.  We have lines which are provocative and interesting and challenging, but they are not meant to be put together as a set of meanings that say, “Repent for the end is nigh”

Oh the lines are long
And the fighting is strong
And they’re breaking down the distance
Between right and wrong

Compare and contrast with

The line it is drawn the curse it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last

Are we to say this is a direct call back to Matthew 20:16 (so the last will be first) or is it Dylan playing with images, exploring words, taking it all where it will go.

Poetry like this is as much about playing with words as it is about telling us to do this, not do that.  It expresses what non-poetic forms can’t express.   It is not always meant to be taken literally.

Perhaps the best way I can put this is carried on a t-shirt that I sometimes wear when I’m out dancing:

Poetry would be a lot harder if violets were orange

It can be deadly serious and insightful, it can be fun, it can make us sit up and take notice (Hollis Brown is a perfect example) and it can give us deeper insights into the human condition (Subterranean Homesick Blues does that I think).  But as often as not, it is not intended to be taken literally.

Ring them bells for me is an update on Times they are a changing and Chimes of Freedom.  Just like the bells in Britain on VE day, 1945 when the Nazis were finally stopped.

Don’t get misled by the saints and the quasi religious comments.  If Bob wanted to preach, he would preach, loud and clear.

Here’s he’s just giving us an update, and it is no worse a song for all that.

Index to all the songs reviewed on Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

There are two issues that, for me, dominate any attempt to understand and evaluate this song.

The first is the notion of the concept of “conceit” and the second is the fact that Dylan suggests that the downfall of the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart was the source of his inspiration for this song.

In my first attempt to write this review I started with the Jimmy Swaggart bit, but then got really tangled up and found I couldn’t without looking at the notion of conceit.  So here comes the second edition (the first firmly consigned to the ever growing electronic trash box).  And I will try and show why I think this is indeed where we have to start.

Plus at the very end, come up with a completely different interpretation of the meaning of the song.  Just for the hell of it.

In one sense starting with “conceit” is obvious – it’s in the title.  And it is not a disease.  So from the off Dylan challenges us, which is always a good thing for any writer to do.

My Oxford English Dictionary tells me conceit is an excessively favourable opinion of oneself.  (The original meaning, still sometimes in use in English English is that of a central idea, and conceit in its modern meaning was originally referred to then as “self-conceit”.  The old use still crops up, especially in literary discussions).

So this seems to be Dylan’s central theme.  Conceit seen as a disease, even though in real life it is not a disease.  (Hold that idea, because I will come back to it at the end).

It is a habit of mind, or perhaps a personality trait.  It is much despised in England, where instead modesty in terms of talking about oneself is highly valued and praised, just as modesty in dress is a traditional Christian concept (I seem to recall Paul having a few words to say on the issue).

So conceit is akin to boasting, although “boasting” tends to be more of a one-off.  Conceit is a long term version.

Now this little aside, before we get to the song, is important I feel (having spent a couple of days playing with these ideas) because of what happens when we relate the song to Jimmy Swaggart.  If you are fully familiar with Swaggart forgive me for a moment while I do a quick resume.  (His antics had little impact in the UK, where the tradition of his type of preaching has very little impact).

From the story as I read it, Swaggart is an evangelist, which is to say, a person who steps out to convert people to Christianity generally through public preaching (which could be in public, or on TV or on the internet).

So where does the conceit come in?  After all, lots of people are evangelists, be it for Christianity or any other religion.  Few people, I suspect, really suggest that calling oneself an evangelist is conceited in the modern sense.

What resolved this issue for me (for as I have mentioned, being in Europe I have little insight into what the whole evangelical movement of parts of the US is like) came when I went to have a look at Jimmy Swaggart’s web site, where there is the banner heading

The anointed teaching, preaching and music of Jimmy Swaggart

Now that is interesting, because “anointing” in this context means (again according to my Oxford English Dictionary) “ceremonially conferring divine or holy office”.

I’m not going to try and push this too far – I don’t really know how and where Swaggart thinks he was anointed by the Almighty, but here is the link to conceit.  Jimmy Swaggart seems to suggest through the use of the word “anointed” that he has had divine or holy office thrust upon him; he has been selected.

This makes all the difference to the reading of the song because this is where some people would consider Swaggart full of conceit.

I’ve taken up a fair amount of space on this because I think some may have thought that Dylan, in mentioning Swaggart, was speaking of his fall from grace through cavorting with prostitutes while making public the similar behaviour of other ministers of religion.  But reprehensible though all that may well be, that isn’t conceit.  Nor, in many parts of the world is paying for sex.  No, the conceit comes from the belief that one is anointed or chosen from on high to be the representative of the Superior Being, our Lord or whatever word you wish to use, on Earth.

I mean, I do sometimes let slip that I think I’ve a fairly decent writer (but then can go through long periods of doubt when I think most of my output is fairly feeble), but that is nothing compared with saying that one has been chosen from on high to be one of the people who should tell the rest of the world how to behave.

OK, that was a long ramble, but it aims to suggest that if the connection with the song is Swaggart, then it is Swaggart’s assertion that he is anointed that got Dylan moved, not Swaggart’s sexual indiscretions or his subsequent lies.

Swaggart, before his downfall, ran his own ministry, and spent a lot of time on television running courses and the like, and was, as far as I know, one of the biggest of the on-air preachers.  And one day he revealed that Marvin Gorman, who was also a minister in the Assemblies of God, had had several affairs. Gorman was subsequently removed from the church.

Gorman retaliated and got his son to watch a Travel Inn which Swaggart was known to use, and took pictures of Swaggart meeting with a prostitute.

It is then said that Swaggart promised to get Gorman reinstated into the church (which presumably Swaggart thought he could do, as he was the anointed representative on God on earth) if Gorman remained silent about what he had found Swaggart doing.

But, so the story goes, Swaggart didn’t deliver and in February 1988, Gorman exposed Swaggart where pictures were presented.  Swaggart was suspended from the church and did a live “I have sinned” speech on TV, confessing his sins.  He was defrocked, at first for two years and then permanently.  He then moved on to become an independent preacher.

Now for most of us that would probably be that.  We’ve been caught out and it is time to hide, and maybe beg forgiveness from one’s family.

But no, for in October 1991 Swaggart was found with another prostitute.  When challenged by his church he is reported to have said, “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business,” and he stepped down from the church.

Now that, for me, is something else.  A direct line from God.  Wow.

And so we get the issues of delusions of grandeur that merge with conceit, and which are central to the song, perhaps with a link back and forth to “The Man With The Black Coat,” “What good am I?” and “What was it you wanted?”   They are all looking at the interface between what people think and what they do.

Disease of conceit is written in C major, a key that is often used for grand musical statements, and Dylan is certainly very clear in this song, expressing his condemnation of the disease very clearly.  There’s no a hint of the blues chords here at all, no reference to the world of rock n roll, of problems with women; this is a grand statement of right and wrong on a global scale, and the way some people really think they are above everyone else and able to tell the rest of us what to do.

Which in turns gives an interesting interaction with “What good am I, if I’m like all the rest?”   What Dylan is saying, it seems to me, is that telling others how to behave is not what it is about at all.  Being a good person is about being there for people who matter to you.  When you are asked to do a favour for a person who needs your help, you do it.  That is what matters, not all this TV preaching stuff.

But it goes further, I think.  Remember…

Yes, just a little time is all you need, you might say, but I don’t know ’bout that any more, because later on you might want to enter it, but, of course, the door might be closed. But I just would like to tell you one time, if I don’t see you again, that the thing is, that the sign on the cross is the thing you might need the most. 

That is part of “Sign on the cross” which I’ve reviewed earlier at length.  In thinking of Dylan’s relationship with evangelical preachers it is worth taking a trip back to that song as well.

Overall I began, in considering this song, to reach the conclusion that Dylan really dislikes conceit in people – not just in terms of Swaggart or fallen evangelists, not just in terms of individuals, but in terms particularly of people in power who have a vision that they can put things right.

Politicians have often been portrayed in this way in Dylan, and having seen Dylan perform this song where he changed the way he was emphasising each line of this song, I got the impression he was not saying, “you are all conceited” to the audience, but rather “watch out – it is everywhere.”  Back to the days of “don’t follow leaders”.   That certainly makes sense of

There’s a whole lot of people suffering tonight
From the disease of conceit

But then I began to wonder what is going on.  “Dying?”  Consider what happens next

Comes right out of nowhere
And you’re down for the count

No it doesn’t.  Not at all.  People who are conceited are conceited all the time.  They become that way either because their personality tips them in that direction or because they have learned conceited behaviour from parents or teachers, or all of that.  You don’t get an ordinary regular person who is gentle and kind suddenly becoming conceited.

Then in the middle 8 Dylan tells us

Conceit is a disease
That the doctors got no cure
They’ve done a lot of research on it
But what it is, they’re still not sure

Now poetically the songwriter can always get away with a lot but this looks like a horrible throw-away four-liner, the sort of thing a very very very minor songwriter like me wouldn’t even bother to write in the notebook for changing later.

The point is that the notion of the disease is one that grabs our attention, yes.  That’s fine.  But then taking the notion of disease literally without giving any more insight or thought is just, well, nothing.   One might say, “our entire country is being brought down by the disease of conceit” and then go on to say it is central to the workings of the political class, but this gets us nowhere.

Unless…

Unless Dylan is saying that religion – the belief in a Superior Being who wants us to behave in a certain way – is conceited, because it takes mankind up to a level of importance which is nonsensical.  We are just evolved life forms with a propensity for hurting each other and mucking up the planet.  And yet we believe we are somehow special and being watched by God.

Yes that is conceit.

I wonder.  Was that what was on Dylan’s mind?  Hold that thought and try this

Whole lot of people seeing double tonight
From the disease of conceit
Give ya delusions of grandeur
And a evil eye
Give you the idea that
You’re too good to die
Then they bury you from your head to your feet
From the disease of conceit

It took me a long time to get there, but well, it fits.  We think we’re special but we’re not.  We’re just the generation that screwed up the whole planet with two world wars, climate change, and economic ruin.  And we still think we’re clever.  That’s the disease of conceit.  It is inside all of us.

If you’ve have been, thanks for reading.

An index of all the songs reviewed on this site.

By Tony Attwood

Go on the internet and it is hard to find any sort of commentary about Where Teardrops Fall.  Maybe because some of the other songs on Ph Mercy gained particular attention, or maybe because the song was seen as the standard Dylan blues or slow piece after the first upbeat track (something that is not just a Dylan approach but commonplace on rock albums – it seems to be the rule, although no one quite knows why).

Or maybe this song so clearly forms part of a trilogy along with “Shooting Star” and “Man in a Long Black Coat” and those other songs have gained the attention.

Or because it is as Heylin claims, “the least worthy” song of the group and the one that Dylan worried about.  For Heylin it is “a piece of fluff”, a comment which is not only insulting, but also says so very much more about Heylin than about the song itself.

Chronicles tells us the song was cut in a single take – although other commentators differ on this – and the musical oddities in the recording mean this is quite probably true: a single take with overdubbing added in subsequent days.

But if you really want to know about the recording listen to the end – no one is quite sure how it is supposed to end, so you get the little arpeggio and the sax note held til the last.  It is the sort of ending you hear on thousands of early runs through of songs while the band is getting the whole piece together.  Sorting out the end is often, well, the end of the recording.  Dylan just let it happen.

And in a sense that is rather good given the subject matter of the song and the way that it ends.

But let’s go back to the start and ask, what do we have here?

In terms of the chords, we have some unusual musical creations from Dylan to be sure.  The song is in G, and it uses the conventional chords of G, C and D most of the time.  But at the end of the first line (“Far away where the soft winds blow” and E flat is fitted in.  Most unusual, and most unexpected.  While in the middle 8  “You can show me a new place to start” suddenly has a C minor.

Both chords work, and they are not unique in Dylan’s writing, but they are unusual.  He was thinking and experimenting, not just knocking out a fill-in number – not handing over a “piece of fluff”.

What he is doing is creating a picture, somewhat akin to the classic Chinese drawings of the mountains and clouds, with the river below.  You get not so much the detail, but the whole impression.   Just consider the first verse…

Far away where the soft winds blow
Far away from it all
There is a place you go
Where teardrops fall

The sadness of the last line is amplified when you realise that this is lady is no longer in the place to escape from, but the place she has chosen to go to.  That is certainly odd in popular music – to advocate a place to which one might go to have a cry about the sadness of old times and life passing.

Far away in the stormy night
Far away and over the wall
You are there in the flickering light
Where teardrops fall

The “you” of the song has gone and left him and she’s in the land where teardrops fall.   But why?

They have been together, taken things at a gentle pace, got to know each other, stood at the edge of the world (in the shadows of moonlight) but it is her, the woman who is in the place where teardrops fall, who can show the singer “a new place to start.”

And he needs that re-start of his world, because he has lost himself…

I’ve torn my clothes and I’ve drained the cup
Strippin’ away at it all
Thinking of you when the sun comes up
Where teardrops fall

He is certainly lost, but she is not in paradise, nor in hell, but in a place where one cries gently over the passing of good times.  If they could only just get together again they could pull down all the barriers between them, all the deliberate not seeing of each others point of view, they could awaken to a new life and rise up phoenix like…

By rivers of blindness
In love and with kindness
We could hold up a toast if we meet
To the cuttin’ of fences
To sharpen the senses
That linger in the fireball heat

So he is ready to come back to her, in her lonely sad place, so that they can cry together about the wrongs done, the wounds created, the hurt and the pain.  And through crying together put it right.

Roses are red, violets are blue
And time is beginning to crawl
I just might have to come see you
Where teardrops fall

Heylin’s piece of fluff turns out to be not just a thoroughly listenable-to piece of popular music with a beautiful melody and interesting twists in the chords, but also a remarkable story.   There are 10 billion pop songs about him coming back to her, 10 billion “sorry baby” songs, but none other than this that take us on a journey from the “rivers of blindness” – the place where prejudice and stupidity get in the way of a relationship – to that isolated, quiet, clam, contemplative place “where teardrops fall” at the memory of it all.

I just imagine her sitting by the river, at the foot of that Chinese drawing, looking up at the mountain and the clouds, just watching, thinking of the past, as the occasional tear falls onto her cheek.

Of course it need not be a physical place, as I have imagined it, but rather the lady retreating into herself, crying over the wrong turn the relationship has taken… and that is part of  the brilliance of the piece.  It could be a physical or a mental place.  Either way it works.

Thank you Bob.  This was a rare visit to another world.  Ignore Heylin.  Do it again sometime.

All the songs reviewed on this site.

By Tony Attwood

He is affection and future, the strength and love which we, erect in rage and boredom, see pass by in the sky of storms and the flags of ecstasy.

He is love, perfect and reinvented measure, miraculous, unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine loved for its qualities of fate. We have all known the terror of his concession and ours: delight in our health, power of our faculties, selfish affection and passion for him,—he who loves us because his life is infinity…  (Rimbaud: Genie)

I have listened to Mr Tambourine Man too many times, and at the same time tried to see what Dylan saw in Rimbaud’s poetry that made him want to divert his creative attention to the lad.  And now, all these years later I think, yes, ok.  OK.  But no more.  Just OK.

The swaying motion on the bank of the river falls,
The chasm at the sternpost,
The swiftness of the hand-rail,
The huge passing of the current
Conduct by unimaginable lights
(Rimbaud: Motion)

Unimaginable lights sounds like a forgotten verse from Tambourine Man and these two selections from Rimbaud are what I would guess Dylan had read in the run up to writing Tambourine Man.

Dylan was, by all reports, doing what many creative people do, at the time, experiencing the new in order to stimulate the creativity.  Enough people have written about Dylan’s world at this time without me trying to summarise it, but it seems Tambourine Man comes out of this experimentation and his fascination with this French teenager who wrote his own brand of poetry, and then aged 20, stopped, dedicating himself instead to being a libertine.

The Tambourine Man himself is the wanderer, based we are told on Bruce Langhorne (who played the lead guitar on the song), who actually did have a large tambourine, and it is based on walking the streets at night.  As Dylan is quoted once as saying, “You get a little spacey when you’ve been up all night.”  Eventually he used the line in “It takes a lot to laugh”, and much more successfully than the images are used in Tambourine Man, in my opinion.

I’m not trying to criticise this notion of staying up all night to get inspiration, for indeed I’ve regularly used novel experiences myself to stimulate my own modest creativity, in particular going alone to jive clubs that I don’t know, where indeed I don’t know anyone, in towns I don’t know, knowing it will force me to ask for dances, pushing myself in other people’s secure world stepping out from safety, being exposed as the outsider.  But these jive clubs are not like Mardi Gras which is where I gather Dylan was.  Maybe one gets a different notion there.

Not (as I always say at these moments) that I am trying to suggest I am an artist of merit, but rather that I have written enough and met and talked with enough other minor artists to know that is what a lot of us creative types do.  We look for novel experiences to stimulate the imagination.

But… but for me it doesn’t have any of the depth of Baby Blue, which ended the second side of Bringing it all back home.  I can still listen to Baby Blue and hear it with a freshness and interest, but not Tambourine Man.  Somehow it remains stuck in the time when it was written, whereas Baby Blue reaches out far beyond that moment into the present day.

So why?

Is it that I don’t like the Pied Piper?  Quite possibly so, because the whole concept is one of losing control.  I don’t want to hand over to the Tambourine Man and let him take me, but I often want to say, “If that’s how you feel, it’s over” (as in Baby Blue).

So I want the novelty of experience, but not by handing myself on to another and saying “take me”.  Not at all.

But whatever I say, let us not forget that “Gates of Eden,” “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” were recorded at the same time as Tambourine Man.  It would be ludicrous in the extreme not to recognise such an astonishing output, and what does it matter if so many, many years on I don’t want to listen to the Tambourine Man’s call any more? Not a jot.

As for the music, I can do no better than take what Professor Wilfred Mellers noted: that the song is in the key of D major, but sounds as if it is in the Lydian mode. (The modes were the precursers of our major and minor keys – you can hear the Lydian by going to a piano and starting on G, moving upwards, playing just the white notes).

And forgive me while I pause on Wilfred Mellers.  He was Professor of Music at the University of York in 1970 and was the first senior academic to show a serious interest in what I was trying to do as a young musician/writer/dancer.  It was his belief when no one else wanted to know that kept me going in my search for a place in the arts.

Professor Mellers wrote an astonishing array of books including the classic Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music which gives a lot of insights into some of the music Dylan heard early on, Twilight of the Gods: the Beatles in Retrospect (1973) (the first major academic book on the Beatles music), and A Darker Shade of Pale: a Backdrop to Bob Dylan (1984).

But back to the main point…

I don’t have any dispute with the standard interpretation that Dylan hasn’t slept all night and follows the Tambourine Man who may or may not be real.  The Tambourine Man is inspiration, we follow him because he can take us somewhere good.

I guess my question is, “does it still say something to us now?”  Which is also my issue with Rimbaud – does he say anything now?  The answer to the latter is no, not much, which is why he remains such a minor poet.

Tambourine Man in fact, for me has become a historic marker.  Whereas so many of the songs that I have gone back to and reconsidered still have an enormous driving power and force for me, irrespective of whether I have played the songs regularly over the years or no.  But for me the Tambourine Man’s days have gone, perhaps mostly because the chorus is just not very interesting.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

The image of the first verse is powerful, the empty streets alone, after a night time awake, was powerful indeed in 1965, but really only for its novelty and its appositeness to the time.  Maybe because I was just 18 when I heard it, maybe because as I left home and started out as a student I was free to stay up all night, without anyone giving me a frown.   And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming is indeed a powerful imagination of the streets one walked through on the way back from a party.  But only the first couple of times.

And of course because of my utter love of dancing even then cast your dancing spell my way was and remains a key line for me – but really that is my point.  I got the lines because I lived the lines.  And the really great music of Dylan does so much more than that.

Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day,  for example, is unbelievably powerful and moving to me, and I’ve never been there.  That is true poetic power.  Mostly Dylan can do it, but here…

Now looking back there are some lines in Tambourine Man that are indeed fascinating anew.   It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing is perplexing – a literal shadow of a man or woman passing by or a metaphorical shadow?  But as fast as I think of that we are back to the chorus, and quite simply I don’t want to hear the chorus again.

Maybe that is the problem – the chorus isn’t strong enough to be sung so many times.  All the interesting bits – even if they are faded now after so many hearings – are in the verses.

And when I say that I find “smoke rings of my mind” a hackneyed phrase, you are probably going to close Bob-Dylan.org.uk never to return.  I’m sorry, but hackneyed is what it seems now, and I fear it felt that way all those years ago.  It is just a set of words, illuminating nothing much.  So very flower-power.

Same with the foggy ruins of time, and the twisted reach of crazy sorrow… what is it saying?  Nothing much – or at least nothing much any more.

And here I think I see why I don’t choose to play this song these days.  Whereas I have never ever finished exploring Visions of Johanna because the images and the inter-relationship between the three characters in the scene are endlessly intriguing, I really don’t want to forget about today until tomorrow.

That’s just sleep, or a drug induced hallucination.  I want life.  I want more of life.  I didn’t want oblivion then, and I certainly don’t want it now that I am in the latter portion of my life.  Just compare that ending of Tambourine Man (Let me forget about today until tomorrow) with the ending of Johanna

The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

I can contemplate one forever, the other now seems too trivial to consider.

Sorry.

What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

2: The Chronology.  We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums.  The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site.  We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year.     The index to the chronologies is here.

3: Bob Dylan’s themes.  We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions.  There is an index here.

4:   The Discussion Group    We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

5:  Bob Dylan’s creativity.   We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further.  The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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

I didn’t start out to write about the various times that Dylan’s interactions with the legal process in which judges play a central, and mostly appalling part.  But somehow that’s where we have got to.

The mistrust of authority is a central theme in the tradition of folk music across most of Europe much of the time, and this song comes directly from that tradition, and versions of it have been collected time and time from England to Hungary.  They have also undoubtedly existed in many other countries (whose folk traditions we didn’t study when I was a music student).  Others can trace such origins far better than I.

What makes Seven Curses work as a song by Dylan, is that apart from being a haunting and moving story sung well to an exquisite tune, it has within the production two elements – two elements which make it seem quite extraordinary that this was not released as part of Freewheelin.

The first is the guitar performance with its open tuned guitar picked perfectly and never over-played.  Just listen to the track which forms the opening of disc two on the Bootleg Series 1-3, and listen particularly to the opening seconds where the guitar is heard before Dylan’s voice comes in.   It has the faint echo of openness and desolation, or wilderness and nothingness – which is what the song is about.  For if our legal system is corrupt in this way, we, as a civilisation, have nothing left at all.  (I should add that my re-listening to this track comes at a time when in Britain, the corruption of the entire legal process through politicians ordering the police and judicial system to lay off other politicians suspected of the my appalling crimes against children is making headline news.  It seems we haven’t moved on an inch).

And then secondly, in listening to the whole piece, listen to what Dylan does to the rhymes.

In verse one and two there are hints of half rhymes at the end of line two and four (“back” and “neck” obviously don’t rhyme, but end with the same sound.)

Old Reilly stole a stallion
But they caught him and they brought him back
And they laid him down on the jailhouse ground
With an iron chain around his neck

Verse two does the same thing but with the start of the final word of lines two and four (“hang” and “hand”)

Old Reilly’s daughter got a message
That her father was goin’ to hang
She rode by night and came by morning
With gold and silver in her hand

This break with the tradition of rhyming lines in songs adds to the sense of openness and bleakness, it gives a jagged quality to the lines plus a sense of incompleteness that amplifies the opening tuning of the guitar and the lack of any musical in-fill.

But then we move on.

In verse three, lines one and three have the half rhymes (“daughter” “father”) but lines two and four have the first proper rhymes (“head” and “instead”)

When the judge he saw Reilly’s daughter
His old eyes deepened in his head
Sayin’, “Gold will never free your father
The price, my dear, is you instead”

Now lest we think that this is just coincidence, the next verse builds again on this rhyming approach, and at the risk of being even more pedantic than usual, let me reiterate: we started with no rhyme, we then had half rhyme, we then that half rhyme and a true rhyme, and now we have an internal rhyme.

And my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all

Internal rhymes in songs are incredibly powerful because they are unexpected and rare – and actually for the songwriter very tough to do without sounding artificial.

And this internal rhyme comes with a verse that opens “I’m as good as dead”

“Oh I’m as good as dead,” cried Reilly
“It’s only you that he does crave
And my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all
Get on your horse and ride away”

Next verse we get even more rhymes with a rhyme at the end of the first two lines (“die” and “try”) and then another brilliant internal rhyme

And pay the price and not take your advice

That is once more the third line, and thus the song has moved onto a new pattern.  But the power of that internal line would have been lost if the song had used the approach from the start – but we didn’t get that.   We started without rhyme.

“Oh father you will surely die
If I don’t take the chance to try
And pay the price and not take your advice
For that reason I will have to stay”

And yet there is still more variation.  Just look at the sixth verse: we have “gallows shadows” in line one, we have line two rhyming with line four, we have the half  rhyme of “evening” and “groaning” and we have yet more power added to the song with three lines starting with the same words, “In the night”

The gallows shadows shook the evening
In the night a hound dog bayed
In the night the grounds were groanin’
In the night the price was paid

This repetition of opening words in this style, is another power-play – just as the internal rhymes work, so does the repeat, and that then sets up the next verse starting “The next morning”.  The night has gone on and on, although it only takes one verse to make the point.  The time span emphasised by the repeats.

The next mornin’ she had awoken
To know that the judge had never spoken
She saw that hangin’ branch a-bendin’
She saw her father’s body broken

As for the rhyme in that verse we have three lines now rhyming (one, two and four), and then we move into utter bleakness, with no rhyme at all.

These be seven curses on a judge so cruel:
That one doctor will not save him
That two healers will not heal him
That three eyes will not see him

That four ears will not hear him
That five walls will not hide him
That six diggers will not bury him
And that seven deaths shall never kill him

There is no bile and no vindictive feeling coming from the singer, for he is still singing the same song in the same way with the same accompaniment – the emptiness is endless, as will be said in another context.  But instead the repeating of “him” is like the hammer blow.

I doubt very much that Dylan planned all this.  He took elements from the old songs, and devised his own new words and variations on the old.  It is the natural ability of the artist that tells him which words work in which context, and here Dylan gets it right throughout.

Seven Curses fits perfectly with Dylan’s deep feeling for miscarriages of justice, as expressed also in Percy’s Song and Ballad for a Friend, and later in Drifter’s Escape and which of course which turn up time and again in his music.  These are incredibly powerful works from a young man exhibiting a remarkable natural uncontrived talent, and we should be grateful that all of these songs were kept, even though they never made the albums.

Index to all the Dylan songs reviewed