Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

Dylan has never lost his affection for the classic 12 bar blues – the first line repeated and then the answering line.   Verse, verse, verse, and no middle 8.  The basic chord sequence which can be varied but in essence is as here (in what is the unusual key for Dylan of B major)

B E B; E B; F#, E, B; B;

The song even has a “lord have mercy mama” line in it to make it real traditional blues.

The song includes Bob Dylan on piano and Peter Drake on pedal steel guitar.  What is interesting however is that Dylan uses the blues format not to say “I got the blues”, nor even “my woman she left me” but rather to say “I love her and she loves me, and oh how happy we will be.”

Well, not quite, but you know what I mean.

From my time as a very ordinary rock n roll artist I can say that these 12 bar blues are a lot more fun to play than they necessarily are to listen to.  There’s something about the format that makes you think, no matter what sort of cock up you’ve made of the last verse, there’s another one along in a second and this time you are really going to tell it like it is.  Or something like that.

And Dylan certainly seems to be having fun on the piano.  In the first two verses he’s very much in the background on the piano, but by the third verse we’re getting more glimpses.

We can hear the piano more clearly in the instrumental verse, and then suddenly as that break reaches its climax there he is pounding away the F sharp chord in semiquavers (four hits of the chord to each beat, making 16 in all).  And then we fade out.   Was it all because he wanted to play the piano on a blues?

There’s nothing wrong with the song, but with such a fun and well crafted pop song after it (I’ll be your baby), and such masterpieces of surreal storytelling like Drifter’s Escape and All Along the Watchtower, it really seems to be there to remind us all of where Dylan, and all the music, comes from.

Of course not every song can end with two riders approaching or a bolt of lighting destroying the integrity of the court house, but this doesn’t really tell us much at all.

Down along the cove
I spied my true love comin’ my way

and then… to conclude…

Everybody watching us go by
Knows we’re in love, yes, and they understand

And I guess all we can say is, well yes, Bob, if that’s how you feel, fair enough.  You long before earned the right to do it any way you want.

Index to all the songs reviewed.

By Tony Attwood

Ask anyone who has performed a song on stage which has multiple repeated lines: it is much harder to pull off than a song with ever changing words.  You have to do something to those endless repeats in order to take the audience with you, but it is so easy to go over the top when you sing the same line for the sixth time or more.

If you want a perfect example of how to carry it off, then the 1963 Carnegie Hall recording of Percy’s Song is it.  You never get tired of the repeated lines, you are utterly spellbound by the story, and its journey.

I think Dylan’s personal journey to this song is, for me (if for no one else) directly connected to Ballad for a Friend.  The recordings of Percy’s Song comes from 1963.  Ballad for a Friend which deals with an actual motor crash was recorded the year before.  A song that is reportedly related to the accident of Bob’s friend Larry Kegan accident which left him in a wheelchair.

If this is so, consciously or sub-consciously, then it is a remarkable journey for Dylan, for in Ballad for a Friend he is saying goodbye to a dear friend seriously injured in a car crash, (in the song the character actually dies) while in Percy’s Song he is pleading against the disproportionate sentence of man-slaughter for a man whose driving has killed four.

The song itself comes from the English ballad of the 17th century “The Twa Sisters” in which a girl drowned by her sister – a song which quickly became transmuted into “The Wind and Rain” and many other versions – which is where Dylan’s phrase comes from.

But it is not the question of how original this song is as a Dylan song that fascinates me, but the beauty of the rendition in the Carnegie Hall version.

It is all so astoundingly simple

Bad news, bad news
Come to me where I sleep
Turn, turn, turn again
Sayin’ one of your friends
Is in trouble deep
Turn, turn to the rain
And the wind

and yet verse after verse Dylan pulls it off.

As I say, it is all so simple, so low key, and that is what makes it work so well, for what is resting on the story is the life of a man – a man who is imprisoned for 99 years.

Listening to the song again today I suddenly thought also of the Drifter’s Escape, perhaps for no reason than that too is a dead simple song and it has a judge in it.  But there the judge is sympathetic to the accused – it is the jury who gets it all wrong.  One way or another though, Dylan is never a fan of the legal system.

I am not saying Dylan thought of one song as he composed another, rather it is probably just Dylan working out themes over time in different ways.  But even so somehow I find this connection between these simple songs delivered with such power and assuredness, each in a different form, each with the legal incidents being seen from three different angles with three different outcomes, to be completely fascinating.

Percy’s song revolves around the life imprisonment, in the Drifter’s Escape there is the walking out of the courtroom following the lightening strike, and in Ballad of a Friend the death of the man hit by the truck.

And so Percy’s Song ends

And I played my guitar
Through the night to the day
Turn, turn, turn again
And the only tune
My guitar could play
Was, “Oh the Cruel Rain
And the Wind”

One interesting point about the music – at the end of each verse it doesn’t get back to the key chord, the tonic, around which the song is focussed, but ends on the dominant at the end of each verse, preparing us for another verse and another and another as the story continues.

Which I guess is in keeping with the outcome of the tale – the man in imprisoned for the rest of his life.

However…

what disturbs me with this song is that the essence of the singer’s plea is that “he didn’t mean it.”  Is this a valid defence or not?

When I learned to drive a car (and of course I learned in England, not in the US) I was taught that part of the essence of driving was that one had to expect the unexpected.  You have to drive with caution.

Now of course most of us don’t much of the time, but that is what the basic law of the road in the UK requires.  You don’t have to be ready to avoid a sheep suddenly walking into your lane on a motorway while you drive at 70mph, but in an urban area with a pavement and shops next to the road one has to drive with the awareness that a pedestrian might do something silly and step out into the road.

We don’t do 99 year sentences for manslaughter in England, but I don’t think we let people off on the grounds that they didn’t mean it, either.

And so at this point, somehow the transmutation of the song from its early origins into the modern day breaks down for me.  To enjoy the song I must forget the meaning and listen to the music and the voice (without a focus on the words) it is awe-inspiring and other worldly.  With the meaning, I feel uncomfortable in a way that I never am with Ballad of a Friend – and yet knowing that Dylan wrote Ballad of a Friend from point of the victim’s friend, and then Percy’s Song from the point of the guilty man’s friend, just one year apart is, well, strange.

But no one else ever seems to have mentioned it, so I guess it is just me.

The index of all the Dylan songs reviewed.

By Tony Attwood (updated slightly on 10 April 2015)

“Come on out the dark is beginning” (Can you please crawl out your window?)

Oh how many many years is it since Dylan observed, “ain’t it just like the night to play tricks…” and here we are all these years later being taken once again into Dylan’s dark night time world.

Dylan’s strange worlds – be they painted at night or day – are worlds where the normal laws of logic and reality don’t apply any more.  They are alternative places where weird people exist doing strange things in odd ways.  The lands where the “Sweet pretty things are in bed now.” Trying to understand them, trying to judge them, is pointless, because these are different lands, the land of night where the normal rules of logic, justice and the constitution break down.

For medieval man the dead were as much part of this world as the living – they simply came out at night while the living had the world in the day.  The fairies, the demons, the witches and the rest, the creatures of the night, the inhabitants of the woods were as real as the animals, plants and people who inhabited the day time world.

That’s what ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is all about, the other world where the rules of our world don’t hold sway any more.

Dylan has, through a myriad of songs, shared with us his image of exactly this sort of other world, inhabited by all these strange people.  For such people, and “There are many here among us” different rules and different realities apply.  Indeed quite a few of them “feel that life is but a joke.”

And here once again we have entered into this other world.

This time however it is misleading because the music doesn’t give us the clue we are looking for.  Dylan is playing a game.

But to be sure, it is soon after midnight, when all the creatures of the night come out.  This is not about the start of a new dawn, a new day, but a celebration of the night.  The fun of the night, the wildness of the night creatures, and the fear that they bring.

Seen in this way it is quite understandable that this song takes us into the dark side of things with a do-wop 1950s beat and the absolute goo of

I’m searching for phrases,
To sing your praises,

because Dylan is singing in praise of the night time and all that it brings forth, good and bad.  They are out there – and Dylan’s always told us this.  “Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl, Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.”  Remember?  Now…

They’re lying there dying in their blood,
Two-timing Slim
Who’s ever heard of him,
I’ll drag his corpse through the mud

This is Dylan showing us that nothing is what is seems, and the world we think we see simply ain’t the world that there is.  Open your eyes and you can see something very different.

In a sense this highlights the problem of the protected middle classes in their sheltered worlds, and the academics in their ivory towers who don’t see the other world that is out there, the parallel world running alongside our world.  They don’t see the world in which there are people selling postcards of the hanging.

This other world can be found in so many places.  From the attempted quietness of Johanna’s room, to the craziness  of the Buick 6 where  “I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead I need a dump truck mama to unload my head”.

The underworld, the other world, in this song as in so many Dylan songs, is real, and is out there, and if we half close our eyes or perhaps enter our dreams, or go to the bits of the city we wouldn’t normally go to, or venture out to the edge of town to see the forgotten mining families and poverty stricken farmers we can find it.  It is soon after midnight, when all the creatures of the night come out.

Thus this is not about the start of a new dawn, a new day, but a celebration of the night.  The fun of the night, the wildness of the night creatures, and the fear that they bring.

The moon is out – for in this sort of world we need the moon to be out so we can see a bit of what is going on, and then have the moon dramatically slip behind the clouds and all the mysteries start to happen.

One interesting parallel that goes on here is between the lines of Mississippi such as My heart is not weary, it is light and it is free, and here My heart is cheerful, it’s never fearful.   

There are a number of such parallels but I don’t think they should be taken as direct linkages between the two songs.  These are songs of a very very different hue – Mississippi about the way society has evolved, and what the state does in the name of liberty, and this song about the underworld, the world that justice and reason passes by.

So I feel that because this is about the mythical world of night creatures we should not be trying to take everything seriously and literally.  The phrase  “Down on the killing floor” for example could mean anything from a woman having control over a man (an old blues meaning of the phrase), to hell, to a shooter video game.

But the point is it doesn’t matter too much what it means.  This is a portrait of the world of the night; he’s singing the praise of the night time, and all associated with it.

A gal named Honey,
Took my money,
She was passing by,
It’s soon after midnight,
And the moon is in my eye

And of course in the world of the dark, the world of the fairies, nothing is as it seems  The beautiful woman is not as she seems; of course she isn’t, the world is lit by the moon not the sun.  This is the land of the creatures of the night.

But the singer can move there readily without fear because he’s seen far worse than this, he’s been “all boxed in nowhere to escape”.

I’m not afraid of your fury,
I’ve faced stronger walls than yours

So Charlotte and Mary are there in this midnight world, that is where he is, exploring, listening to the chirp and the chatter.   Maybe its Gotham

They chirp and they chatter,
What does it matter,
They’re lying there dying in their blood,
Two-timing Slim
Who’s ever heard of him,
I’ll drag his corpse through the mud

But in this strange frightening environment, he’s perfectly ok, and he’s come and found what he was looking for.

And I don’t want nobody but you

Musically the do-wop beat never varies and the contrast between the creatures of the night and the simple boppy music lulls us along.  The chord sequence is everything we might expect from what we hear in the opening chords, and indeed the first verse.   The three major chords and the subdominant minor – nothing surprises us here.

We hear the verse twice, this is the A section.  Then the B section, ending on the dominant chord, before we are back to the A section.  This is classic ternary form with classic chord sequences.  Everything is constructed to give us a feeling of normality – because the world Dylan describes here is perfectly normal for the creatures who inhabit it.

The world of day, the world of night.  Quite different but if we try we can move between one and the next, and in so doing, we can learn a lot as we travel.

Just one thing before you go however.  Play the song one more time and just listen to the very very end.   There’s the chord you expect and this extra twist just at the last second.  Just to remind us that for all the niceness of the music, we really are in this other world.

Index to all the songs reviewed on this site.

By Tony Attwood

Knocked out Loaded was doomed from the start by its bad reviews, and if you think that, as far as Dylan’s music is concerned it is indeed a waste of space, then there’s not much I can do to persuade you otherwise, I am sure.

But if you are willing to reconsider, try this…

The opening track is a reworking of a blues piece by Little Junior Parker, in which (in the original) the lyrics consist primarily of the singer saying to his lady, “I’ll do what I want – if I want to stay out all night, then that is exactly what I will do.”  The lyrics don’t leave much room for interpretation:

Verse 1: You know I came home this morning at half past three, My baby started talking sweet talking to me, I told my baby let me tell you something, I wanna ramble…

Verse 2: Well I ramble last night and the night before I want get some wine and ramble some more…

Now Dylan takes the original song (which had already undergone one complete metamorphosis by John Lee Hooker) keeps the essence of the music (which John Lee Hooker loses, putting his own musical feel into the piece completely) but now utterly reverses the lyrics.

Well I told my baby
I said “Baby, I know
where you been
Well, I know who you are
And what league you played in

So now instead of the Dylan saying, “I’m doing my thing you can’t tell me what to do” he seems to be laying down the other traditional blues line, “My baby treats me bad”.  In other words she’s having an affair.

But this isn’t what Dylan is up to at all – in fact he is telling us something quite different as we find out as he gives us the background of the arena this relationship is being played out in.

It is Gotham City, or something rather like it.

Well, the night is so empty
So quiet and still
For only fifteen
hundred dollars
You can have anybody killed

This is starting to sound like a totally different song, but Dylan has kept something very important from the original, to let us know that this is the original.  The Little Junior Parker version starts, very unusually, on the sub-dominant chord, by which I mean that if you were playing it in E, you’d open with the chord of A.

This is not unknown, but it is unusual, and where it is used normally you get a reference point of the tonic (E) at the very start, just to let us know where you are.

But no, we are straight into the sub-dominant, and that is what makes the start of the song very distinctive.  So the music remains the same in terms of its basics, but not in terms of the lyrics.

(I should add that quite naturally Dylan doesn’t do anything to try and copy the composer’s lyrical gymnastics, he doesn’t have that sort of voice, but he still gets the feel.)

In Dylan’s version, he now turns on the woman saying, you are the one who is going to suffer if you carry on like this, not me.  And the suffering of course is because this is really bad world out there, and I am telling you for your own safety, this ain’t a safe place to be.  But I can’t control you – you have to take the consequences of your own action.

Well, I told my baby
Further down the line
I said, “What happens tomorrow
Is on your head, not mine”

So what we have here is a very clever re-direction of an old blues piece from, “Don’t you tell me what to do” male chauvinism for which the blues was well known, into the contemporary, “this is not a safe city to live in, for goodness sake take care” late 20th century lyric.

In one sense this is quite remarkable because Dylan is showing us the modern rock blues, which can have the same music as the blues of 1955, now needs a completely different set of lyrics to reflect modern times.

Indeed the fact that this is not a throwaway piece on a throwaway album is shown surely by the quality of the production, the style of Dylan’s singing and the energy he gets from the piece.

Both the original version and the Dylan re-write are dark pieces of music played out to a boppy lively blues tune.  The original is dark through its appalling notion (quite acceptable at the time of course) that a man can do what he likes, and tell the woman to stay in her place, while the later is dark, dark, dark, like Gotham.

In short Dylan is showing us we have traded one vision of life for another, but not necessarily with any improvement or gain.  Hence the music stays pretty much the same.

It’s a worthy statement, and it’s a sad reflection on modern music criticism that even if other writers on the topic have not thought it a worthwhile comment to make in a song, they could at least have recognised it is there.

Personally I think some of them were so appalled that Dylan wasn’t writing his own original pieces on this song, that they didn’t even bother to listen.  If they had, they will have seen that this is exactly what he was doing.

Index to all the songs 

By Tony Attwood.

(There is an index of all the songs reviewed on the home page of this site)

There is  a fundamental question that we face with Long and Wasted Years and which it is helpful to answer is we are looking for a meaning within the song.

First, is it the telling of a unified story of a singular couple of people in a particular moment in their lives?   And if so, is this Dylan playing his old tricks of not telling the story in sequence.  A sort of desperate later life “Tangled up in blue”

Or second is it an abstract piece of music, akin to an abstract work of modern art in which one can see images within but where overall there is abstraction – it is not a picture of “a lady” or “a landscape” or “church” or whatever but merely suggestions, shapes and patterns.

Or third is it an allegory for something else?

So if we listen to Dylan saying

“I ain’t seen my family in twenty years
That ain’t easy to understand, they may be dead by now
I lost track of ’em after they lost their land

is this some part of the abstract world, a word painting adding to the sense of loss and wandering, a sort of reflection on Dylan’s Drifter once more but now much later in life.

Or is the talk of “land” symbolic of something – one might think of Israel for example.  Or is this part of the story he is telling, which if we could but disentangle it, is a real coherent story.

We might turn here to the music for enlightenment.  The piece is musically very unusual for Dylan – it is in 2/4 meaning two beats in the bar.  I can’t immediately think of another Dylan song that does this.  There are eight bars in each verse, but because the verses are spoken the number of syllables per line can vary enormously.

So if we look at the opening “It’s been such a long long time” that takes up two of the eight bars.  “Since we loved each other and our hearts were true” is another two bars.  Then the recitation slows down, and “One time, for one brief day” is the next two bar phrase, while “I was the man for you” takes up the remaining two.

(To be more precise there is a fair amount of pushing forward and holding back going on, so that is not exactly right, but I hope you get the idea).

The two beats in each bar gives the song that plodding feel – an old man walking along the road with solid slow steps.  His brain is still active, he can think all these thoughts, but he’s plodding, plodding, plodding.

To try and resolve this, let’s see what sort of meaning, if any we can get from each verse – and then see if it makes a coherent tale.  I’ve tried to summarise each verse as a numbered line.

1: We loved each other so deeply for a while a long time ago

2: But now its all over, you’ve got guilty secrets, watch out they might come back to haunt you.

3: Can we do anything about this broken relationship?  Can we get counselling?  Do you want to work it out?

4: I’ve also drifted away from my roots, and my family has been dispossessed too, but I’m trying…

In short, there’s far too much water under the bridge for anything to be sorted out any more, but that’s the past.  Stop the blame, let’s somehow work something out.

With this type of analysis I think we are looking an abstract painting style of musical poem in which we don’t know, and we can’t know.  All we get are hints and suggestions.  If you find a sense in it all, that’s fine, there probably isn’t one specific answer, and your sense is as good as mine.

But consider this: consider Dylan’s early references to the loss of place,  identity and friends in his early talk of the North Country.  This could well be a 50 years later reminiscence of that.  So the person to whom Dylan addresses himself isn’t a real person, but a symbol of all that loss.  That loss of a way of life, of the friends you’ll never see again.

Dylan has had a lifelong fascination with and horror of the disruption of old communities, and that line about losing the family just makes me think of the disruption talked about in so many songs.  From the North Country songs to the disdain of Fourth Street, to the bewilderment of the Drifter, the eternal feel is of loss.

So the Long and Wasted Years might be the pointlessness of one’s life, or the whole failure of our society.  Or the pointlessness of an empty marriage.  Or the old man coming to the end and thinking of his life, “what the fuck was that all about?”

Let me try a variation on this theme.  In the UK it is a common reflection among those who think on such matters that the notion of family life is hard to fit with 21st century post-industrial society.  Marriages somehow are held together for the sake of the children, the mortgage, and everything else, but when the children get up and leave to go to university, or move to find a job, or get their own apartment, the final glue that holds the marriage together dissipates and the relationship breaks up.  It’s probably a more common theme now than the theme that has the family staying together.

Now one can survive this if one stays happily in touch with the ex, or with past friends, or most importantly with the children.

But…

I recall meeting a guy maybe 20 years ago, who was retired and renting a room in a house.  He had four children, now of course all grown up, and he had no contact with them, his ex-wife, his old friends….  Why, I have no idea.  A series of rows, the breakup of the marriage, I don’t know, but he didn’t know anything about his friends and family now.  Not even a Christmas card.

I can’t imagine that guy’s world at all.  I really, really can’t.  But the relentless downward pounding of the opening of each verse of this song and the title line gives me a clue of the endless emptiness, (which must be as cold as the clay).

So much for tears  so much for these long and wasted years.

It’s a sad and depressing outlook.

Index to all the songs reviewed here.

By Tony Attwood

Ballad for a Friend was apparently originally called Reminiscence Blues; quite why Ballad for a friend is a better title I can’t say, and as to why this work of unadulterated brilliance was left and did not become a central part of the Dylan canon I can only guess.

Recorded in 1962 when Dylan was 21, it is an extraordinary achievement in both composition and performance.  It would be an extraordinary composition for a songwriter twice that age – for a man of 21 it is quite simply inspired.  Indeed on the only recording we seem to have Dylan speaks rapidly at the end, explaining why the penultimate verse is repeated (he got the words wrong first time round) and his voice is that of a nervous uncertain 15 year old.  Musically he is three times that age.

The singer in the song is a man who has pulled back from the real world, unable to deal with what it has thrown at him, and expressing it through the blues in the only way he knows how.  He just sings it, it happened, it is there, he’s flat.  He’s not raging against the world, he’s just accepting it.  Numb, desolate, far too distraught to cry, he just tells the story. There is no dressing up of the reality, no repeats, no chorus.  It just was.  It just is.  It ever will be in his mind.

This is such an overwhelming masterpiece you’ll have appreciated already that I am finding it difficult to know how to describe it or even where to begin.  If for some reason you have never heard it, all I can suggest you can do is go and buy the Whitmark Demos, and play it over, and over, and over.

OK, if your partner is not a Dylan fan this might lead to the end of what was otherwise a perfectly workable relationship, but it will have been worth it.  You will have gained Ballad for a Friend.

Indeed in the last couple of hours as I have got my thoughts together and considered how to review this song, that is what I have been doing – playing it over and over.  It’s just a couple of minutes long, so you can get through quite a few performances in a couple of hours.  Fortunately tonight there’s no one else in the house.

The lyrics, the accompaniment and the melody all require analysis, and as I sit here trying to pull it together, I am not sure I am capable of doing anything like justice to such a work of brilliance.

But I’m here try.  So…

What makes the melody work against the accompaniment is that the melody is based fairly and squarely around the notes of the chord of A major (A C-sharp E).  Not exclusively, but mostly.  This in itself is extremely rare for Dylan.  There must be other examples but none come to mind at the moment.

But against this melody the guitar is playing the alternating chords of A major and D major, and then when there is no melody, Dylan throws in the blues notes of C and G.  This whole arrangement ought to clash, but it doesn’t.  It blends.  It blends because the movement of the two chords is in perfect liaison with the melody and because the blues guitar only clocks in after the singing has stopped.  The signing reports the events, it is the blues guitar that gives us the musical commentary on the horror of what has happened.

In short, Dylan tells the tale based around the notes of the major chord.  The guitar then comes in a gives us the feeling and emotion in its blues orientated response.  Simple, but rarely achievable.

Thus the emotion is removed from the singing – because the singer is so flat and beaten down by what has happened.   The guitar, unencumbered by any need for words can express the horror of the experience in pure musical form.

Also, the melody has a shape – the first two lines end on a low tonic, the last verse rises up and ends an octave higher.   If that doesn’t make any sense to you, my apologies – but just listen to the song again and in particular note the shape of the melody.   By ending each verse at the top we are pushed forward onto the next verse, and on and on.  It is like the truck rolling down the hill, it comes on and on, and nothing is going to stop it.

And what makes this all the more remarkable is that Dylan of course is not known for his melodies, any more than he is known for three line verses; but here he delivers the song utterly perfectly.

So onto the verses which are eight bars – two bars for each sung line with a two bar break at the end – which constantly catches us by surprise – and which sometimes is followed by a musical pause.

Meanwhile his foot is tapping throughout, tapping out the unchanging rhythm of the truck rolling down the road.

And still there is no need for extra emotion in the singing of the lyrics – the arrangement achieves the expression of all the emotions that are circling around.  The subject matter is utterly sad – so sad there doesn’t need to be extra emotion expressed in the voice – it is already overwhelming.

This is Bob Dylan’s Dream but the loss is a loss of one friend through death – not the whole group drifting apart on the winds of fate.  In the Dream the friendship can’t be recovered because life isn’t like that.  Here his friendship is torn by something far more ultimate and real: he died in a road accident.

And back in the real world I understand from the few commentaries around that something along these lines happened to one of Dylan’s friend although I believe the young man was severely injured but didn’t die. Which is why there’s no pick up at the end, no jolly conclusion; this is the misery of the blues.

But neither is it expressed in the old 12 bar style of the repeated first line and so on – here the song drives us along.  The melody doesn’t get deflected by the gently alternating A and D chords.  The music tells us the pain is eternal, life just does this to you.

The guitar is tuned to open A; the territory is the North Country, of course, the language is the desperation of the blues, but with life continuing.  This is just what happens.  Just watch it unfold.

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

Years ago we hung around,
Watchin’ trains roll through the town.
Now that train is a-graveyard bound.

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

Something happened to him that day,
I thought I heard a stranger say,
I hung my head and stole away.

A diesel truck was rollin’ slow,
Pullin’ down a heavy load.
It left him on a Utah road.

They carried him back to his home town,
His mother cried, his sister moaned,
Listin’ to them church bells toll.

Why did Dylan never work it into his performances?  Why is it not recorded for any of the albums?   Perhaps because it was too close to home.  Maybe as he grew he really didn’t want to sing about an old friend to an adoring audience.

So what we have is six simple verses of three lines.  One singer one guitar two chords and a song unlike anything else I have ever heard.  And if it is a copy of some blues singer’s earlier work, just don’t tell me I don’t want to know.

This is just brilliant.  There is no other song like this that I know.  Nothing.  Indeed I need nothing else.  Not tonight, not tomorrow.  Not for a long while.

Not for a long while.

Index to all the reviews on this site

By Tony Attwood

Dylan’s interest in and involvement with the Beat Generation is well documented, and his experimentation with different forms of writing comes in many parts from those early influences.  Dylan’s use of the blues, folk, pop, and rock formats to take us to all sorts of new destinations combining new style, illicit drugs, the examination and re-examination of all types of religion, attacks on materialism, and an eternal concern with people… it is all the Beat Generation.

And in among this all is that desire for bohemianism and spontaneity as ways of discovering new art forms.  Ginsberg did it was Howl, Burroughs with the Naked Lunch, Kerouac with On the Road, and Dylan with…

Ah that’s the problem.  Dylan, in the early stages, was not a Beat Poet, nor a Beat Musician.  He was nowhere near as radical as Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac.  He was in fact re-working the models of folk music and the blues.  We find the occasional little experiment, like Motorpsycho Nightmare but the real leap comes with Subterranean Homesick Blues – Dylan’s first real Beat Poet piece.

So what we have is Dylan interested in, perhaps fascinated by the Beat movement, friends with the leaders, but not artistically not really able to find his way in.  .

Dylan made little mention of the dilemma at the start – at least until Gypsy Lou – which is, in the fashion of his reportage songs, the abbreviated story of Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb who together in New Orleans were at the heart of the local Beat community.

It was written around 1961/2 (so just before “Bob Dylan” was recorded) and recorded in August 1963 (around the time of Freewheelin).  My point is that it emerged before Dylan had any idea how to balance his interest in the Beat Generation and its poetry, with his own music, which was dominated by old English and American folk songs, and the blues of the 1920s.

Gypsy Lou, the subject of Dylan’s 1961/2 song was the magazine’s typesetter, (and creator and retailer of hand-tinted French Quarter cityscapes and small paintings to tourists on Royal Street).

The French Quarter of New Orleans was very much an artist, beat, creative, free spirit environment where social outcasts existed side by side with the genuinely talent artists – exactly the sort of place Dylan found exciting and intriguing in his early writing career.  Gypsy Lou sold her original works of art on the street, as Jon worked as a freelance writer and editor while together they ran the Loujon Press and its magazine (The Outsider) for what they called “Bohemian fugitives”.  Exactly something we can imagine Dylan being attracted to – after all he was already writing and singing songs about exactly such people – and continued to do so for many years.

Gregory Corso and William Burroughs contributed to the magazine which did two things (apart from having incredibly influential content).  It ran 3000 copies of each edition (unheard of at the time) and the publishers sent free copies to university libraries – which spread the word, even if it didn’t get too many subscriptions.

Jon and Gypsy Lou’s also moved into book publishing and had a hit with Charles Bukowski’s poetry: “It Catches My Heart in Its Hands” which made their name.  They also published two books by Henry Miller, all typeset by Gypsy Lou and printed by Jon, in their own home.

It was at this time that Gypsy Lou gained her reputation.  “Fiery” “flamboyant” and “jagged” were words used, but it was Jon (not Gypsy Lou as Dylan suggests in the song) who bungled the robbery of a jewellery shop and served three years in prison – an experience which he turned into a novel.  That’s the sort of life they lived.  At one stage they sold all their furniture and were living on the edge of survival.  Somehow it seemed to fit the model.

So here we have the bohemians, the eccentrics, the outsiders, the sort of people that Dylan came to write about later.  If you want a source for

The ghost of Belle Starr she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits
At the head of the chamber of commerce

Mama’s in the fact’ry
She ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley
He’s lookin’ for the fuse
I’m in the kitchen
With the tombstone blues

then quite simply it was this setting.  It was Gypsy Lou and her husband and the gang, only it took Dylan a few years to find a way to express it.  At first, it seems (at least from this song) it was all too much to take.

Jon and Gypsy Lou left the town in 1965 (by which time Subterranean Homesick Blues, Tombstone Blues and of course Desolation Row were written and recorded).   Dylan was moving on musically, Jon and Gypsy Lou were moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, probably to escape debts.  Examples of their work is now housed in museums that celebrate the Beat era.  Jon died in 1971, but Gypsy Lou lived on – at least until her late 90s.

Gypsy Lou probably never heard Dylan’s song about her, and if she had, I guess she would just have shrugged.  But what we have to remember is that it is a sketch written out of frustration – frustration that Dylan has not yet found a way out of his dominant influences to become what he wanted to become (and of course ultimately did become) the first man to take the Beat Generation into its own unique form of music.

Tragically the only review of the song I have sound is derisory in the extreme, dismissing it as a work of no importance, saying it “does little to retain its grip on the listener’s attention.  One doubts the song detained its author long.”

Maybe that final point is right – it was after all a sketch – but enough of a sketch for Dylan to record it.  Gypsy Lou was clearly on his mind and thank goodness the Whitmark recordings exist because they do give us this insight into what Dylan was going through trying to sort out how he felt about the Beat Generation.

Of course in one way Gypsy Lou from volume 2 of the Whitmark albums is a simplistic three chord piece with a three line chorus that tells us nothing.  But listen more closely and Dylan is playing little tricks.  The way the melody subtly changes between the first and second verse, the long unexpected held “hey” and the use of “round the bend”.  Does that mean “crazy” or does it mean (as it would to the Beat Poets) exploring the unexplored, visiting new territory….

If you getcha one girl, better get two
Case you run into Gypsy Lou
She’s a ramblin’ woman with a ramblin’ mind
Always leavin’ somebody behind
Hey, ’round the bend
Gypsy Lou’s gone again
Gypsy Lou’s gone again

Thus Gypsy Lou represents the whole Beat movement in the song – he follows the movement around, until it drives him crazy, rather that specifically following the woman herself.

Well, I seen the whole country through
Just to find Gypsy Lou
Seen it up, seen it down
Followin’ Gypsy Lou around
Hey, ’round the bend
Gypsy Lou’s gone again
Gypsy Lou’s gone again

And isn’t that like the Beat Movement – always on the move.  Which is how Dylan caught up with it when he wrote Subterranean Homesick Blues – that blues that isn’t a blues, symbolising the world that many of the beat poets lived in.  Indeed Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans about the Beat Generation, is clearly a reference point.

Certainly the world of the Beat Poets was one of late night drinking, fighting, sexual liberation, and from time to time writing stuff, much of which is best ignored, but some of which is occasionally brilliant.

But Dylan is not tied down with facts in his Gypsy Lou song.  There is no suggestion in the records that Jon committed suicide (he died in Nashville in 1971). But Bukowski later wrote a poem about the morning after Jon’s death “the dead are dead, there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s go to bed…”   Gypsy Lou was reportedly not amused.

After Jon died Gypsy Lou moved back to New Orleans and developed her role as respected eccentric and bohemian

So she was not the character Dylan painted, and this was not the life Dylan painted – although the stories about her abounded, such as the one that said she wore he dead husband’s ashes in a container around her neck.  The story that she ingested some of these over the years is also certainly untrue – but was the sort of story she encouraged.

She continued to work through later life, including being the narrator in the movie, The Outsiders of New Orelans in 2007.

Gypsy Lou Webb with Noel Rockmore, right, and a friend.

This in a real sense Gypsy Lou is a trial run for Tombstone Blues and similar unfathomable stories.  We can see who Gypsy Lou is but we shouldn’t take it seriously.

Well, seen her up in old Cheyenne
Turned my head and away she ran
From Denver Town to Wichita
Last I heard she’s in Arkansas
Hey, ’round the bend
Gypsy Lou’s gone again
Gypsy Lou’s gone again

This is not literal travel – not at all.  Dylan is seeing Gypsy Lou as an artist always exploring new territory – an avant garde artist so dedicated to change that you’ll be hard pushed to catch up.

Well, I tell you what if you want to do
Tell you what, you’ll wear out your shoes
If you want to wear out your shoes
Try and follow Gypsy Lou
Hey, gone again
Gypsy Lou’s ’round the bend
Gypsy Lou’s ’round the bend

The reference to the calaboose (a jail, I should explain, and I had to look it up myself.  It’s not a word we have in English English), and the suicide is as I have said, unrelated to anything in the real Gypsy Lou story.

Well, the last I heard of Gypsy Lou
She’s in a Memphis calaboose
She left one too many a boy behind
He committed suicide
Hey, you can’t win
Gypsy Lou’s gone again
Gypsy Lou’s gone again

So let me come back to my main point.  This is a sketch – playing with an idea.  Dylan is influenced by the Beat Generation, but doesn’t know how to translate this into music and lyrics.  Listen to the rest of the album  and you’ll see that he’s not yet making the break forward.  He’s only a year or two away, and this is a vital document on the road to that break through.  It is fun, but fun that arises out of frustration.

Untold Dylan – an index to all the songs

By Tony Attwood

When I first discovered Dylan – when Freewheelin came out – it was this song that I homed in on.  I think that it was the first song I performed in public as a teenager, and most certainly it resonated with the sort of romantic image I had of a young man who had lots of friends but had the nerve to leave them all and walk off to another world and then look back wistfully.

It is in fact the perfect template for Dylan’s stroll down the highway, the explorer of the world, forever walking on.   The antithesis of 4th Street and Rolling Stone – this is the ultimate fond farewell.

I can’t explain why these words still ring through me – for since then I have lived a life, been married twice, had three children, seven grandchildren, the good times and the bad, worked in the theatre, been a university lecturer, been a musician, danced and had loads of books published and yet still these totally American lines resonate through my completely English soul.

Still these words and the simple tune resonate so deeply that listening to the song as I write this sends shivers down my spine.  The words no longer cut home because no, I don’t look back at the early and wish to see those friends again.  Well, one or two maybe and indeed I’m still in touch with a couple from my student days, but no, I wouldn’t give ten thousand dollars to go back to that time.

And of course nor would Dylan.  It’s an image, a story, an idealised version of life.  And besides, I’m lucky.  The best bit of my life is now.

While riding on a train goin’ west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had

So there was me as a teenager, still at school in fact, studying English, history and music to get the grades to go to University; and this song’s lyrics had nothing at all to do with my life, living in the rural countryside on the south coast of England with my parents who were wondering what on earth had got into their son.

Yes sometimes we stayed out late, but really this “Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn” was the romantic vision.  Some fairly wild parties, the dancing, and playing in the folk clubs.  And yes we did the sitting together in the rooms laughing and singing, but until I’ve come back to this song I’ve never really thought of that as romantic or special.  We just did it.

So what really strikes me returning to this song for the first time in, what? 40 years? is how remote it was from me, and yet how much I felt I was there when I first heard it.  It is Dylan the master story-teller, creating the scene.   And of course because the song is based on an old English folk song, and because I was already learning about the history of folk music in my own country, there was an extra resonance.

But overall, for me, By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung  was as evocative in my school days as “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks” was evocative in my student days.  As a school kid you don’t have to worry about life at all – and that is the world I heard Dylan sing about.   Of the two thoughts of the origins of the song, I think he really was thinking about life at home before he went on the road.  By the time you become a student you are into rooms where the heat pipes do indeed cough.

And of course listening now to

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold
We never thought we could ever get old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one

is utterly poignant today now that I know where my life took me.   Dylan of course had no idea what it would sound years later, but it is a mark of his genius that it worked on a teenager and it works on that teenager now in much later life.  Like I said, shivers down the spine.

And likewise the poignancy of the end

Now many a year has passed and gone
And many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again

Why should a young man want such sadness?  Of course I didn’t really want to be sad – I wanted to be able to look back on an eventful past while in effect I imagined I was stifled.  (It wasn’t, of course, I just thought it was).

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

I used to sing this over and over again and honed my folk guitar skills on this song.  And it is a perfect song to work on – there are no difficult surprises in the chords, and it is simple strophic in G.

G, Am, C D

C G C G, D C G.

The cleverness of the music comes in the third line.  Everything is slow at first, but in that third line there is a musical contrast.  The lyrics don’t always reflect it, but they do sometimes and that is enough.  But you get the long held word at the start of the third line as the C resolves down to G.

In fact it is that Am near the start that builds up the expectation which gets to a climax with the long held note (Where……. we longed for nothing) and is then resolved perfectly.  There is no improvement to be made anywhere.  Not even after 40 years.

So what we have here is a song celebrating the innocence of youth, and as such it is perfect.  Whether you listen to the version on the album or the demo version on the Whitmark double CD.  A lifetime encapsulated in one simple song.

The song itself is taken from Lady Franklin’s Lament and the whole  “dreamed a dream” theme and the ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat, is a direct copy , but that is not to reflect anything less on Dylan.  He turned it into a modern folk song that utterly affected me as a teenager, and after years of not hearing it, affects me as strongly now.  No one else could do that.

And just in case you are interested in dream interpretation you might be interested in the Ultimate Guide to Dream Interpretation.

Index to all the songs. 

by Tony Attwood

Corrina Corrina starts the journey that takes in a whole variety of songs including She Belongs to me, It takes a lot to laugh, and Alberta

Each has an issue of control, an issue of love and a worry.  And each takes the old relaxed 12 bar blues and does something nice with it.  Alberta goes off piste the most over the music, but it still retains that gentle lilt – and as we’ll see in a moment, Alberta has another connection to Corrina too.

Corrina herself has been away, he’s worried, because without her life means nothing, he’s thinking of her so much he is crying.

Just compare

Alberta what’s on your mind
Alberta what’s on your mind
You keep me worried and bothered
All of the time
Alberta what’s on your mind

Corrina, Corrina
Gal, you’re on my mind
I’m a-thinkin’ ’bout you, baby
I just can’t keep from crying.

There is no doubt that Corrina, just like Alberta, is in control.  The singer sure ain’t.  As with “she” in She Belongs to Me

You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees

And it “It takes a lot to laugh” Dylan actually says that he don’t want the power and control

Don’t my gal look fine
When she’s comin’ after me?

Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across
Well, I wanna be your lover, baby
I don’t wanna be your boss

But still he’s not really communicating, for he ends up here saying “just don’t blame me” which isn’t really the best line ever said to a lady.

Bob as the hopeless lover waiting for his woman – the woman who has all the power.  It doesn’t really seem that likely any more but the histories tell us it once was.

Corrine Corrine exists in many styles, formats and versions across the years, different chords, different melodies, different lyrics, but the gentle swaying 12 bar style is there throughout.

Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s was certainly not the originator but his version is well known and quite why Dylan or Dylan’s company tried to claim copyright I’ve no idea.  It’s a bit silly really, not least because there is a 1932 copyright by Armenter “Bo Carter” Chatmon, which starts

• Corrine, Corrina, where you been so long?
• Corrine, Corrina, where you been so long?
• I ain’t had no lovin’, since you’ve been gone.

But there is more.  Because Dylan’s version on Freewheelin owes an awful lot to the Highway 61 man, Robert Johnson and his song “Stones in my passway” which has the standard chord sequence and the lines

I have a bird to whistle
I have a bird to sing
Have a bird to whistle
and I have a bird to sing
I have a woman that I’m lovin
boy, but she don’t mean a thing

Incidentally the out take version by Dylan linked to below has a real nod to Robert Johnson.

Moving on the Alberta connection arrived in 1930 when the Jackson Blue Boys recorded Sweet Alberta with the same melody and the lyrics as Dylan uses

Sweet Alberta
Gal, where you been so long?
Sweet Alberta
Gal, where you been so long?

And there are traditional songs from the early days of the century that have the line “Has anybody seen my Corrine” again to the 12 bar setting.

By the 1930s it was also turning up as “Where have you been so long Corrinne,” as the mutations continued.  In short it became a standard of the “my life means nothing without you” style of blues.

And one thing I found while researching this little piece is that the recording of the song on 28 September 1935 by Roy Newman and his boys has Jim Boyd playing the electric guitar.  Historians of the subject generally agree this was the first recording ever of an electrically amplified guitar.  From Roy Newman and his boys, to Bob Dylan and his band, Corrina all the way.

And so everyone has recorded it.  Hell, even Bill Haley recorded it in 1958.

Try this if you haven’t heard it.  I am, I must admit, smitten by this version especially the Robert Johnson style reference to the devil.

Such a sweet simple song, such a history.

Index to the songs reviewed here.

By Tony Attwood

Dylan is strong on the decline of communities and traditional economics – as can be readily seen from two totally different pieces of music.

There’s Union Sundown

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

And North Country Blues

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

The theme of economic change and the destruction of communities and individuals by an uncaring economic system is very a Dylan theme.   Hollis Brown is another obvious example.

But he’s not so good on solutions.  Indeed when does Dylan do solutions to problems?  We might be living in a material world, just like they might be selling postcards of the hanging, but Bob’s not going to make a recommendation, other than “You gotta serve somebody” – at least some of the time.

It is not something I have considered before and I am sure you can immediately tell me some solutions other than the religious one, but when I start thinking about problems I get problems in the economic system, as above, and problems in personal relationships, problems with TV, the problems of self-doubt (“What good am I) and personal relations (“You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend”).

Indeed he even kindly summed it all up once for us

Trouble
Trouble, trouble, trouble
Nothin’ but trouble

And the solution is… to walk off down the road, One too many mornings style.  The drifter, wandering from town to town, is the model solution.  Or else there is no solution, and the past and the future merge, as with Tangled up in blue.  Or, God comes along and determines what we should do.  There’s no solution that is man made and that works.

True, Times they are a changing (the song not the album) offered a solution, but as I noted before, the album’s title song is quite out of line with the rest of the album, which offers no hope.

So this song is a forerunner of this bleak desolate outlook, modelled on his childhood home – a theme that runs and runs on to one particular high point when Dylan said,

Mercury rules you and destiny fools you
Like the plague, with a dangerous wink
And there’s no time to think

You rush around forever trying to put things right, but you really don’t have time to work any of it out.   We are what the world makes us (except for the time Bob thinks we are what God makes us).

Musically the chord sequence is as sad and simple as it could be: A minor and G major alternating.   That rocking slowly backwards and forwards, not of the old timer on the porch enjoying the later years of life, but the desperate sad starving woman trying to hold herself together.

Above it the bleak lines echo.

• Line 1/2 ends on a down note
• Line 3 answers and rises high and energetic but…
• Lines 4/5 repeat lines 1/2
• Line 6 gives up the battle and goes down into misery.

Even the sixth line of the third verse, “To marry John Thomas, a miner.” which ought to be upbeat – she is getting maried after all – isn’t upbeat at all, because it echoes with the knowledge that nothing ever changes until the mine goes bust.  Capitalism always wins.

The song was composed in 1963 and has huge elements of the Woody Guthrie and (separately) the blues influence in it – that representation in black and white of the old communities broken up and swept aside.

The actual town is considered by those who study such things to be the Mesabi Range on the Iron Range in Minnesota where open pit mining took place, near Dylan’s home of Hibbing.

So we have desolation row – not the desolation row of the mind or of a total and utter collapse of a society’s way of thinking, but of a twon now empty, a mother who dies young, a brother and father killed in mining accidents, he husband put partially out of work, the failure of the government to act over cheap imports, the husband who walks out but unlike Hollis Brown seemingly kills only himself, and now there is nothing left here.

To me one of the prime accomplishments of the song is its ability to move between settings as one verse follows another.  Consider this..

And what of the widow of John Thomas?  Her children will go, and she?  What of her in this desolate wasteland?

For her there is nothing.  Not now, not in the future.  Nothing.

I’ve not thought about Tales of Bleakness before as a way of considering Dylan, but now I come to it, it seems to encompass so much of his writing.  Times they are a changing was never the real Dylan.  Mostly it is decay, decline and dissolution.

Except when he found God.

Index to all the reviews.

By Tony Attwood

Consider…

We sit here stranded, though we’re all doing our best to deny it

Yet ev’ry distance is not near

There must be someway out of here

Three phrases from very different sounding songs but with a linked meaning.  We are trapped inside something or other, sometimes we deny it, sometimes we are just crying our defiance, sometimes we are getting angry and ready to push on, out of it, sometimes we ain’t got a clue as to what is going on.

In Johanna you get the feeling that the prison is metaphorical, we are stranded because of his thought patterns and anyway we deny it….   I could get up out of this cold damp room, if I wanted to, it is just….

In “I shall be released” there is the belief or a desperate plea that someone else will come along and release him.  If the release is from prison then it is of course the prison authorities .  If it is mental it is perhaps the Almighty who will do it.  If the character in the song is old and dying then it is death.  But always it is someone or something else.  In Johanna the emphasis is on the fact that you could do it yourself.  It’s just your thoughts playing tricks.  In “Released” it is waiting for help.   As for the Watchtower – well that is the ultimate wasteland.  Two riders were approaching… who knows what happens next.

Certainly musically all of these songs about being trapped or caught up in a situation are quite different but represent a recurrent theme.  Johanna is ethereal, the music reflected off the mists and fog surrounding the setting.     I shall be released (at least in the original version on the Bootleg 1-3 compilation, it is painful and slow (later versions have been very different), waiting for release to come, shouting in defiance but doing nothing.  In Watchtower, something damn well is happening, but we have no idea what it is.  (Not in the same way as Mr Jones – he believed he knew what was going on – in Watchtower the singer really has no idea what is happening.)

And so the pain of waiting is reflected in the plodding chord sequence of sadness in Released.

G Am Bm Am G – you can’t get more sorrowful than that.  The preponderance of the minor chords and the fact that the whole sequence goes nowhere.  It is like taking a few very painful steps up the stairs and then giving up on the third stair and coming back down.  But still the singer asserts “I shall be released.”   But really in this version musically it is hard to believe him.

And even that chorus is painful, hanging onto the bars of the prison and crying out, “you haven’t destroyed my spirit”.

In chordal terms the chorus runs

G Am Bm D G (repeated)

Here even the D major chord which should give us a sense of achievement and dominance over the music fails because of the level of minor chords.   This is tragedy and desperation, note after note, chord after chord.

And when we come to the lyrics it is hard for me to escape the view that “I shall be released” is probably mostly about a mix of a physical prison and a confession.  “Forgive me father for I have sinned” answered by “How long since your last confession?”  (or the Jewish equivalent – and here I ask your forgiveness because I am very ignorant of the details of the practice of the Jewish faith.)    But asking for forgiveness is certainly part of the whole show – the singer can believe he will be released  through confession, or through the unexpected appeal, but it is always by an outside agency.

Dylan of course spoke elsewhere about release – I particularly liked the release from the court room in Drifter’s Escape as either divine intervention or pure chance blows the courtroom up.  A release there from prejudice and prison from without.

Physical release is in many ways a much simpler concept than the release that Louise, Johanna and Little Boy Lost are denying that they even need, and so it is in keeping with the thoughts expressed in the song that I shall be released is much simpler musically.  No extended verses, no changes of musical direction – its a slow blues, pop and gospel compilation.

And the simplicity and sheer power of the whole concept has made the song highly desirable as something worth recording.   Everyone it seems has had a go. Apparently even Elvis Presley.

The music although painful also achieves a sing-along quality that makes everyone want to join in, which is why Amnesty International and other organisations use it.  It is almost as if by singing the song everyone imprisoned unjustly can get free.  Or if not, at least believe that thy can get free.

How utterly utterly different from Little Boy Lost who  brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously.

Many have reproduced Allen Ginsberg’s recollection of Dylan’s comment around this time that he was writing shorter lines, with no wasted language and no wasted breath and we can see that here, but it’s not quite as simple as that, because Dylan’s theme here fits perfectly with the requirement and notion of the short line.  The complexity of the entrapment of Johanna, Louise and Little Boy Lost demands longer lines and more complex imagery.

But returning to the song in question, at this time there is something else to notice.  Everyone knows the chorus – so for a moment let us forget that, and just read the verses.

It is only when we do this that we realise that there is a profound disconnect in this song.  The three verses don’t seem to link up.   The first seems to be about the fact nothing is changing so hold on to the memories.

They say ev’rything can be replaced
Yet ev’ry distance is not near
So I remember ev’ry face
Of ev’ry man who put me here

Second time around, we get the notion that we all need something to worship, except the singer who sees his reflection above himself.  He is able to release himself – because he gets to know himself, or perhaps gets to know God.

They say ev’ry man needs protection
They say ev’ry man must fall
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Some place so high above this wall

But still everyone is alone, no one takes responsibility.

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Crying out that he was framed

This can make sense if we see the chorus linking all the verses – my life is trapped but I shall ultimately be released from the stresses and strains of my entrapment.  Where ever I am whatever I am I shall be released from this cage.  I won’t do it, but something will happen from without.

Which is what belief in fate, in God or in the cavalry coming over the hill is all about.  You can wait for it and believe it will come and help out, or you can be like Johanna and the others and tie yourself up in knots trying to solve the problem you don’t acknowledge exists.

Either way, it seems, no one actually does get released.  Which is a bit odd.

By the time of the Greatest Hits 2 version, the song has changed its feel, and if you want a view of where it got to later try the Dylan and Norah Jones version   This is wistful, and was recorded at the time that Dylan was throwing a falsetto note into the end of almost every line in every song.

Here the feeling is of reflection and hope rather than desperation.  This has turned hanging onto the prison bars into a slow dance number with your girlfriend.  Just look at how Norah Jones is moving; all the pain of the song removed and the lap steel guitar playing in the instrumental break adds enormously to the new interpretation we have of the song.

It thus can be a man in isolation in prison on his own, or a celebration of the fact that we can all find a way out of here.

Which then takes us finally away from the prison of the original version, onto a resolution.  Not the resolution of Johanna nor the resolution of

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
Can’t get no relief

But still a resolution.

Poor Johanna is still stuck.  On the moor the wind is still howling.  But the imprisoned man it seems has found his way out.  Just by waiting.

Index to all the songs on the site.

By Dan Haggerty

I was always sure that others must have drawn the same conclusion- “Shooting Star” is about Jimi Hendrix. But it doesn’t even seem to be an unpopular theory amongst Dylanologists. It seems to be just my own theory, shared by no one. I think I can change that.

On the surface it is a simple song about someone who is lost to you. Beneath the surface it is a song about someone who is lost to you, someone who’s name is Jimi.

Many people associate this song with a lost loved one.   Others have their interpretation thrown off by the seemingly religious lyrics in the bridge.

No religion here, despite the mention of the Sermon on the Mount. Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

The key to the song lies in the bridge. The bridge that gets rightly and properly ignored by the folks who associate the song with a lost loved one. After all, how many people’s recollections of their dearly departed loved ones involve “The Last Fire Truck from Hell”? It’d make for some interesting Thanksgiving conversation “Remember the time Grandma was riding on the last Fire Truck from Hell?”…. “ Um… No, I can’t say I recall that…How much have you had to drink?”

The first verse  – quick and easy, (explanation in parenthesis.).

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you (Jimi)
You were trying to break into another world (musically and psychedelically)
A world I (Bob Dylan) never knew
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through (Here’s to hoping, after all – there must be some kinda way outta here said the joker to the thief)
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you

The 2^nd verse requires a bit more explanation-

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or overstep the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me

Jimi was a big fan of Bob Dylan and yet also became a peer, Bob still plays All Along the Watchtower more like Jimi’s version than his own. In this verse Bob is hypothetically asking the younger man, Jimi, a fan, and a peer, who wasn’t alive to answer, if he, Bob, had stayed the course? Had he gotten wiser and better? Or just older and tired?

Jimi gets to be immortally young, by virtue of a youthful death, Limitless potential. Bob gets to mortally age and record Knocked Out Loaded “Was I still the same, had I ever became what you wanted me to be?” You, Jimi, a Fan, a Peer, I’m asking you this, “Did I miss the mark or overstep the line that only you could see? I saw a shooting star tonight and I thought of me.”

Now we get to the key that truly pins down who these relatively vague verses are really about, that odd bridge with it’s out of place apocalyptic religious imagery. What is a Fire Truck from Hell doing in this bitter sweet remembrance?

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire/dump truck from hell (Live he sings Dump Truck)
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

“As the last Fire truck/Dump truck from Hell goes rolling by”, listen to the ending of “Third Stone from the Sun” that is where that specific sound resides. Dylan is speaking of a very specific sound and he perfectly poetically sums it up with just a few words. I am not leaving the Dump Truck out of this. I think that to be the true lyric and that is why it is what Bob chooses to sing in the years since.

At this point, I would ask that you listen to “Third Stone from the Sun” with these lyrics in mind.

You have to invert the stanzas to hear it properly.
It’s the last temptation, (Listen to that exotic belly dance of a main theme)

The last account (Your Majestic silver seas, your mysterious mountains , that I wish to view closely….Your superior cackling hen)

The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount (Didn’t Jimi just land his thinking machine on the Mount? “you are a people I do not understand, so to you I will put an end”)

The last radio is playing (You will Never hear Surf Music again) and there’s the siren of the fire truck just as Jimi says that. I guess Bob didn’t just have a choice about which vehicle to assign the sounds to. He actually had his choices of 2 municipal vehicles from hell present in the song! And he has sung about both of them!

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell (as Jimi fires up his planet destroying machine)
As the last dump truck from hell (it pulls up at 6:18 into the song)
Goes rolling by (It is the last thing you hear as it rolls away)
All good people are praying

I saw a shooting star tonight, slip away,

Tomorrow will be another day

Because as vivid of a soundscape as Third Stone is – it is the song that ended in an apocalypse, not the world.

Sadly. While the world goes on, Jimi does not.

Jimi pretty much shares the same fate that the Earth meets in Third Stone. All you have to do is substitute fame and hangers-on for that pesky alien. Bob knew what the crowd around Jimi was like, He’s sung about them. He calls them parasites. Everyone wants a piece of you and none of them along the line know what any of it is worth. Had he had the chance to speak to Jimi about it this, his remarks might have began with, “I used to be amongst the crowd you’re in with.”. I think this explains why Bob chose to devote the bridge to Third Stone.

I think Bob takes this aspect of it very personally. Thus thinking of YOU (Jimi) when he sees the shooting star in the first verse, and himself in the second – There, but for the grace of God, goes I.

That said, it is not surprising to me that Jimi’s hero would have liked to have said something to him about insulating himself from all of that. Who’s been more vigilant about insulating himself from all that than Bob Dylan?

Guess it’s too late to say to you (Jimi)

The things you needed to hear me (Bob) say

I saw a shooting star tonight slip away.

The end, or better yet, some famous last words- Two riders were approaching, And the Wind Begins to Howl….

——————————

This is the first review of a Dylan song on this site by a guest writer – and I would love there to be more.  If you would like to review a Dylan song – either one that has not already been covered here, or one that has, but which you would like to interpret in another way – please do write it up and send it to Tony.Attwood@aisa.org  Ideally please write it as a word document or if not, write it within the body of the email and I’ll extract it from there.

——————————–

Untold Dylan – an index of all the songs reviewed thus far.

By Tony Attwood

I have agreed in the correspondence columns of this site to pull back from endlessly mentioning Heylin, but I fear I need him here.  Not to be critical of him, but really to say, I just don’t understand.

Heylin, calls this an “unalloyed masterpiece” and sees it as “Every bit the equal to This Wheels on Fire”.  There is talk of “The indivisible link between singing and salvation.”

But Dylan obviously didn’t think enough of the song to rescue it.  Which leads us to the question of how much we trust Dylan’s judgement over his own music.

He has been strongly questioned over such tracks as Series of Dreams, Blind Willie McTell and Dignity being omitted from albums, but I think I can see in each case where he was coming from, as I have tried to explain in the reviews.  They were masterpieces, but unfinished, each with its own issues unresolved, and I can see how he wanted to finish them and take care of the final points of difficulty, but in each case he didn’t.

So when Dylan never returns to a piece, my suspicion is to think that he knows what he was doing in setting it to one side for all time.  And here I have to say that I have no idea what Heylin and other commentators who really love this piece are talking about.

My problem comes from several directions.  First, and most important, the claim of Heylin and others that this is a masterpiece are not backed up by anything in their commentaries.  They don’t edge me towards the lyrics, the melody, the meaning, the chord structure… As a result I don’t know where they are seeing the brilliance at all.

Second I have no idea what this song means.  Quite simply, what is “the sign on the cross”?  Of course I recognise it could be the inscription referred to in Matthew “This is the king of the Jews”, but I don’t see how that makes any sense all the way through.  Each time you tie the meaning down, it vanishes again.   So why does that sign worry Dylan?   How can he say,

Well, it’s that old sign on the cross
Like you used to be

What does that mean?

Now if you have read a few of these reviews you’ll know that I am not looking for literal meanings throughout in Dylan, for quite often he plays with words and engages in surrealism to put concepts across. I don’t take each line as having a meaning, but this is the song title, repeated and repeated in the song and I feel the need to find a meaning, or find a symbolism, or a surrealistic intent – which doesn’t seem to be there at all.

So when Dylan says

Yes, but I know in my head
That we’re all so misled
And it’s that ol’ sign on the cross
That worries me

I get worried.  That reference to us all being misled suggests Dylan is starting to refer to us all being sinners, misled by the Devil, but then how is the sign on the cross worrying from such a Christian perspective?

One thought I have had as a way around this is that Dylan is writing from a Jewish perspective, and that he is having doubts about the faith he was born into and considering the Christian faith.  That works at this point, but I am not sure it always does.   Take for example

Well, it’s that old sign on the cross
Well, it’s that old key to the kingdom
Well, it’s that old sign on the cross
Like you used to be

I can find other interpretations but not one that fits exactly with the idea of this being a song from a Jewish man reconsidering his faith vis a vis Christianity.

And then we come to the spoken section.   My first reaction was that Dylan was simply messing about.  The voice is so strange, like he is deliberately poking fun at the preacher speaking these words.

It is possible to disentangle these words to make it a serious bit of preaching but then if we do that we are back to seeing the title of the song from a Christian perspective not a Jewish perspective, and the sense vanishes again.

Take this section…

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.

OK we can all make meanings out of that, with a few moments to think about it, but what is the point of such a ramble?  Why express it in this way?  What is the relationship between the music and the lyrics – a relationship that Dylan normally has so exactly sorted (which of course is the essence of this web site – the music AND the lyrics need to be considered).   Here Dylan has abandoned the melody, but the rather everyday chord sequence plods along as he speaks.

I am not saying that this is nonsense, just because I can’t grasp what is going on – after all I’m just a regular guy trying to look at Dylan’s work – but I am saying I don’t understand this at all.  I don’t understand the lyrics, the drop into the preacher talking mode, the references to the Sign on the Cross, the way the band plods along, the reason for the wavering voice, especially early on… any of it.  It doesn’t seem to link together to me.

I’ve looked through all the reviews of this song I could find, in an attempt to locate something that will give me an insight into what is going on here, and likewise to find any reason to suggest that Dylan is mistaken in setting this recording aside and leaving it sinking into the ground.

But the one review that I have found that made sense to me was in the Guardian, a left leaning intellectual English daily newspaper.  They said. of the Basement Tapes recordings generally, and with a mention at this point of Sign on the Cross…

“These guys are flying low over the mountains, pilled to the gills, low as Hamlet, high as kites. Take one listen to Teenage Prayer, which puts the I in innuendo. Or Please Mrs Henry, as scatalogical as a Carry On film. Or Sign on the Cross, in which the keys to the kingdom come wrapped in silver foil. These songs have Mystery written all over them, but beware of licking the label lest a white rabbit appear.”

Of course none of us is going to be pleased when another suggests that our favourite art work is the construction of a mind that had temporarily slipped over the edge and was desperately trying to claw its way back.  And I know what such an allegation sounds like.  I have a full size print of Jackson Pollock’s oil painting Convergence hanging in the entrance hall of my house, and many is the visitor who had thought it amusing to suggest that a child dabbing paint at random could have produced the work.  I disagree and speak of the emotions aroused in the picture via the light, texture and the various contrasting shapes. I also speak of the innovative style, and its relationship to the political situation in the US when it was painted, highlighting not just the need for free speech but the need to use it to challenge everyday convention and constraints within America itself.  It is politics without the gestures. Rebellion without being sure what you are rebelling against.

OK I recognise that by the time I have said all that my house guests have usually popped down the pub and left us to it, but my point is, I (and of course many others far more knowledgeable and talented than I) can express views on what we see in Pollock where other people find it a mess.

I find “Sign on the Cross” an unintelligible mess, but of course I am waiting for someone to give me an exposition of why it is more than just a drug fuelled bit of a kick around with a phrase Dylan happened to pick up.

Of course I am almost certainly wrong, but once more I find myself allied totally to Dylan and his decision to leave well alone and floundering with the commentary of Heylin.

It was ever thus.

Index to all the songs reviewed.

By Tony Attwood

I think I must have been about 15 when I first heard the “Times” album.  The next day I went out and bought my first guitar (cost £10.00 I think – maybe $13.00), plus a copy of Bert Weedon’s “Play in a Day” and I started to learn.

This wasn’t quite as big a shot in the dark as it might sound.  My grandfather was a piano maker in one of the many tiny piano making companies that existed through the big cities of the UK before the second world war, while my father was both a classical pianist and a saxophonist in a touring dance band.  I was being touted as a potential professional musician at the time, but ultimately my sight reading let me down.

So going out and buying a guitar in the belief I could teach myself to play was not quite as odd as it might seem, and by the time I was 16 I was making my first tentative steps into the folk local clubs playing, among many other things, “Spanish Leather”

Even at that tender age the combination of power and simplicity in the message and the music struck me.  Of course I had no idea about love and the devastation of lost love, but this song gave me insights.

Thus the plaintiveness of the lyrics combined with the simple chord sequence, poignantly plucked guitar and the searching voice was not only where I sought to take my music, but also a learning curve in terms of possible human emotions.  Suddenly I could understand that eternal sadness of the one left behind and the excitement of the person leaving.   Which is what I felt when my girlfriend, a year above me at school, left for university while I was still wearing the uniform and writing essays on the French Revolution and TS Eliot, while attempting to master Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.

But such worthy matters meant little to me compared with Spanish Leather.  I only heard the beautiful understated guitar playing.  I was there, in the Spanish mountains (which by purest chance I had visited with my parents the previous year).

Strangely it was around this time that I first heard Robert Johnson – another life transforming moment, and from the “King of the Delta Blues” album learned about the crossroads.   Which is what Spanish Leather is about – the crossroads: do the lovers stay together or take separate turns?   There is a moment of choice – there are moments of choice throughout our lives, and here Dylan taps into one such poignant moment.

I was really, really full of all this in my teens, and must have been an impossible teenager trying to make sense of it on my own, for most of the kids at school thought Dylan was just weird.  (This was Dorset, I should point out).

And just as I learned about blues falling down like hail from Robert Johnson, so I learned about songs that could be dialogues between a man and a woman – and of course this being folk it is the woman who leaves the man.  I desperately wanted to feel and take on board the sadness of “I don’t know when I’ll be coming back again.”  Goodness knows why – I got enough of it in the rest of my life – why did I want to start early?

The origins of the song are clearly (in part at least) in the traditional Black Jack Davey mould, which appears on Good as I Been to You – which I’ll come back to anon.  There is also a sensational version by the White Stripes: Backjack Davey

But there is a review of Dylan’s performance of Spanish Leather which says it made the review “weak in the knees”.  It certainly did that for me.

And when I came on to the many Dylan songs in which he identifies himself as the man leaving, the man moving on, how I wished I could be that too – if only I could find the courage to get up and go, confident that I’d be able to make a new life in the next town I tipped up in.   But I had to wait some years to do that – whereupon I ended up in Algiers for year.  Oh Bob – do you have any idea what you did to the lives of impressionable kids like me?

Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true love
I’m sailin’ away in the morning
Is there something I can send you from across the sea
From the place that I’ll be landing?

Why must she go?  What is so important that she has to leave behind her loved one?  Why does life have to be like this?

It is strange now, as a man looking back on my life, how much power some of these lines still have for me.  They are so simple, just as the melody is simple, and the accompaniment (once you’ve learned how to pick a guitar) is easy to do and the chords are the standard folk chords. But the power never diminishes.

The same thing I want from you today
I would want again tomorrow

One could build a whole song out of those two lines, and it would be worth hearing.

And so she goes.  And forever we are left with that poignant ending

And yes, there’s something you can send back to me
Spanish boots of Spanish leather

If you want to go exploring you can do worse than try this YouTube page which goes through several songs.  And for a version that is very different there’s the Forest Rangers version.  It doesn’t work for me, but I know some people feel it adds something.   Perhaps I have heard the power of simplicity in the original too often to go for all the extras.  I am happier with Dylan himself, live at Carnegie Hall.

 Untold Dylan – all the songs reviewed thus far

By Tony Attwood

Dylan seemed to be quite fascinated with the talking blues in the early years of his career – pretty much against the trend of the age.   “Talking world war III blues”, “I shall be free number 10”, “Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues” …  And then he came back to the form some years later with “TV Talking Song” on Under the Red Sky.

In 2013 the New Yorker ran a piece on the song which noted with much interest that “Dylan has been a towering figure of the television age, yet over the past half-century, he’s not had much to say about TV—at least not in the lyrics of his songs.”

Dylan has commented negatively about the influence of TV in interviews, noting that people used to go out and have a life, now they just watch TV instead.   But the New Yorker struggled to find much in the way of TV mentions elsewhere in his songs, and the article has to settle for (among a few others)

You may be the head of some big TV network
You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame
You may be living in another country under another name

which is hardly insightful, at least not insightful vis a vis TV.

But eventually Dylan did get back the theme with TV Talking Song.   The song seems to have gone through a lot of re-writing during and around the recording, and it seems some of the lines lost might have been worth keeping.

Heylin cites one such re-written verse which started out as

Tear the screen apart he said, and climb up on the knobs; You can have another life with all the time you’ve lost; Raises little puppets, spins your brain about; Sometimes you gotta do like Elvis did, and bow the damn thing out.

What Dylan does is what so many others have done: he starts by condeming not the technology but the use of the technology, but then in recognising just how invidious the whole thing has become, the song becomes a condemnation of the technology in total.

As the New Yorker says, “Mostly, though, it is another reminder of how stultifying and mentally exhausting contemporary television often is, no matter what the people on the screen are saying.”

And yet, and yet… I can’t speak for TV in other countries for although I’ve watched TV as I have travelled the world I haven’t really seen it in depth as I have in the UK.  But in the UK I’m of late encouraged by what some of the minority channels are showing these days.

We all need some pure light entertainment some of the time, as well as some of the deeper darker series coming out of Scandinavia and France.  But thinking of the latter and watching Braquo, for example, I found what I imagine life would have been like if Jean Luc Goddard had made TV series.  This is TV with phenomenal artistic merit.

But of course Dylan is talking about the mindless pap made for virtually nothing and which has no artistic merit at all and which covers so many cable and satellite stations.

So the man is in Speakers’ Corner.  And may I add if you are not English, yes it is a real place in Hyde Park, close by where the Tyburn Gallows stood until the end of the 18th century, and yes people get up and speak there on any lawful subject without disturbing the peace.  (Actually one can do this anywhere in the UK, as you can in most liberal democracies; it is just that this is the famous place where people gather).

He talks about the evil of TV…

There was someone on a platform talking to the folks
About the T.V. god and all the pain that it invokes

The situation is getting worse and worse and then we end with a spot of irony

The crowd began to riot and they grabbed hold of the man
There was pushing, there was shoving and everybody ran
The T.V. crew was there to film it, they jumped right over me
Later on that evening, I watched it on T.V.

What I have always wondered is why the crowd rioted.  Did they really not like being told that TV is rubbish?  Maybe, but it all seems a bit of a trite reason for having a riot.  Just an artistic device I guess.

But still I can easily imagine the TV crews filming it and showing it on the evening news.   Riots are newsworthy.

It’s not a great song, but it is enjoyable, and more and more could be done with it, if Dylan ever wanted to go back, which I am sure he doesn’t.  It doesn’t have the power and fun of Subterranean Homesick Blues – which is just over the border into a song rather than a talking blues – but it could have done with a bit more work.

Wouldn’t it have been great to know more about the speaker and his world, in the sense that we learn about the Drifter who escapes?  But of course in the Drifter’s Escape our concern is the man, here it is the idea.

TV films man protesting TV.  Somehow that just doesn’t seem surprising.

Final point: these little articles have the title “the meaning of the music and the lyrics”.  So what of the music?  It is all on one chord, and in a very real sense that is apposite.  The TV programmes go round and round and round, nothing changes, it is all dross… so what better music than music which stays constantly on one chord.

Details of all the songs reviewed on this site.

By Tony Attwood

Now I must admit that when the suggestion came in that I should review Wiggle Wiggle I wondered if this was a serious suggestion.  This song has the reputation of being Dylan’s worst recorded piece.  And also I think I have only played it a few times, following the conventional wisdom that Red Sky was not an album I really wanted to know much about.

But I have made the offer on the home page: tell me what you want reviewed and I’ll do it.  And so with a gulp I started.

https://youtu.be/wi0ZGj3rEn4

I should point out that my technique is to play the song over and over while writing about it, so that I can grasp the overall essence of the piece, and the fine detail.  (Sorry if that sounds horribly pretentious, but it’s what I do, whether I know the song very well, or hardly at all.)  Did I really want to play “Wiggle wiggle” twenty times in the next couple of hours?  Gulp again.

Looking back at it all, Red Sky was Dylan’s 27th studio album, which is three more than Elvis managed in his lifetime (although to be fair Mr Presley made a fair number of soundtrack albums).  So Dylan should have known what a studio album was all about by the time he reached this point.

And yes he’s made funny decisions on studio albums all through his life, like excluding Blind Willie McTell and Dignity, but listening to each of those you can see why.  Brilliant masterpieces though they are, each is slightly flawed, and one can imagine that Dylan wanted to perfect them before releasing them.  But Wiggle Wiggle?

It was released in 1990, after Oh Mercy which I have been reviewing of late and which contains some utter wonders.  And let’s not forget that in 1988 and 1990 Dylan recorded with the Travelling Wiburys – although that second Wilbury album came after Red Sky.

But the point is that volume 3 of the Wilburys includes the utterly consummate “Where were you last night?” and the dreadful “Wilbury Twist”.  Now of course “consummate” and “dreadful” are just my views, and I know that “Where were you” has been called a “formulaic pop song” but I heartily disagree.  I’ll go back to my review written a few years ago, and see if I can explain further.

However Wilbury Twist is shocking.  So was “Wiggle Wiggle” of the same ilk?  I certainly have thought so until now.  But…

As I listened again I wondered if I have been influenced as I guess many others have by the fact that “Red Sky” is dedicated to “Gabby Goo Goo”, (Dylan’s daughter).

Dylan has explained that he was working on the Wilburys at the same time – Heylin (who on this sort of issue is seemingly all-knowing) says no – Wilbury’s 3 came after Red Sky.  And was Dylan disillusioned with the recording industry, as it often quoted?  If yes, what was he doing making another Wilbury’s record?

Patrick Humphries, speaks of “sloppily written songs, lazily performed and unimaginatively produced.”  Of Wiggle Wiggle he says, “worse than anything Dylan has ever recorded? Maybe not that bad, but certainly up there, jostling for position in that particular part of hell, where the jukebox plays nothing but “Joey”.

Not everyone saw it that way, but maybe I was influenced by the negativists through having daughters aged 12, 10 and 7.  These days they are my dearest, closest friends, but back then they seemed to move regularly between angels and monsters as I tried to earn enough from my writing to keep the family together.  They didn’t like Wiggle Wiggle as I recall despite Time saying that it sounded, “like the theme song to one of those tripped-out television shows beloved by toddlers and drug users.”  

Maybe my daughters were just too old.

So, it’s a kiddies song, for a four year old.  Wiggle means “to move or cause to move up and down or from side to side with small rapid movements.”  Like my youngest grandchild today would did if I played her this.

But … no!  The words don’t fit, and nor does the music.  Those 16 beats at the start aren’t on the tonic, they are on the dominant. We hear a G chord 16 times and then hit C, which the song is recorded in.  You don’t start a kiddies song with such menace.

Then there’s the dominant bass.  A damn sight better playing than on Vision of Johanna (which has that horrible error in it from the bass), this is interesting and inventive from all the musicians.  Where the bass could have been just playing C, it plays C, B flat, F twice and then a variation in the third line.  Visions may have all the lyrical dexterity, but this has the accompaniment.

And there’s nothing wrong with Dylan’s singing at all – of course not, because on Wilbury’s 3 he is on top form.

So what makes us think this is bad?  I guess it is the lyrics – or rather just the word “wiggle”.  It is a child’s word – or a word applied to children.  He can’t be serious.

But still I come back and say, no, this is not a child’s song – not at all.  Just look at the lyrics…

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a gypsy queen
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle all dressed in green
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle ’til the moon is blue
Wiggle ’til the moon sees you

And apart from the interesting reversal of the moon seeing you, tell me why that is so bad when “Tutti Frutti, aw rooty Tutti Frutti, aw rooty A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom” is so good.  And remember as you answer that Tutti Frutti is Italian for “all the fruit” and it took three people (Little Richard Penniman,  LaBostrie and Lubin) to write it.

I think it is hard to listen to Wiggle Wiggle now without the prejudice of “worst Dylan song” etc etc.  But in reality it’s not, not at all.  It is full of life and vigour, and take out the word “wiggle” and it is a rock song.

And then start to listen to where those so derided lyrics go.

I’ve quoted Wiggle ’til the moon sees you.  What does that mean?  The moon seeing you probably refers to the moon supposedly influencing people’s behaviour.  There werewolf is the perfect example.  Thus you “wiggle” and the moon comes out, that bright yellow light hits you, and you change into something else.

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a swarm of bees
Wiggle on your hands and knees

Wiggle ’til it opens, wiggle ’til it shuts
Wiggle ’til it bites, wiggle ’til it cuts

Hang on, this is no kiddies song, this is getting nasty.  Maybe werewolves and vampires is the territory.

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle—you can raise the dead

Now at this point we get an instrumental which is based on one chord – “raise the dead” when on chord all the way through until we get a repeat of the middle 8.  And then consider

Wiggle ’til you’re high, wiggle ’til you’re higher
Wiggle ’til you vomit fire
Wiggle ’til it whispers, wiggle ’til it hums
Wiggle ’til it answers, wiggle ’til it comes

So tell me what on earth is this if not a journey into some nightmare.  I am not sure what nightmare, and I am certainly not suggesting this is some great work of art but I am saying at this point I can’t make a judgement, because I am just bemused by the whole image.   I’ve got werewolves, vampires, and monsters vomiting fire.   Are we talking about the classic image of the Devil here?  Is this a song about temptation, or black magic?

Certainly if it is, I think it is a song that works.  The whole point of the notion of the Devil and temptation in Christian mythology is that the Devil is utterly devious.  He twists and turns trying to corrupt your soul.  He, one might say, wiggles.

Maybe, maybe not.  It’s a tenuous interpretation, but I would say this. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than the “song to his daughter” scenario.  If you had a young daughter would you sing her a song about vomiting fire?  I really don’t get that notion at all.

As for it being the worst Dylan song, no not for me.  It is a great bit of rock and roll music, the words are interesting and ultimately confusing (which is a Dylan trademark) and it has an excellent accompaniment throughout.  It is surprising, lively, and unexpected.

I can think of much that is far less interesting in the Dylan repertoire.  Indeed before the request for a review of this song came in I was about to have a bash at “Down along the cove” which to me is a very ordinary and rather dull 12 bar blues.

But then, each to his own.

Index to all the reviews on this site. 

By Tony Attwood

In essence “If Dogs Run Free” is a 12-bar blues played in a moderately free jazz style, with the piano and guitar free to extemporise around the standard three chords of the 12 bar format.  This sort of extemporisation is what we tend to get when musicians with a soft jazz inclination have a jam session.  Everyone knows the structure and is then free to play with it.  (I remember once sitting down with Soft Machine and playing a 12 bar variation for about 15 minutes; mind you I thought it all sounded great but they didn’t fancy having me in the band so that suggests my analysis might be somewhat faulty here) .

Here the scat singing of Maeretha Stewart weaves around what Al Kooper is doing on the piano.  Put another way there is a three way conversation going on between piano, scat singer and guitar in which each musician has to make his/her unique contribution while being totally cognisant of what the others are doing.

It’s an art – you have to be reticent and forward at the same time – controlling your urge to make your part be heard while never overstepping what a fellow musician does.  And you have to be totally at ease.

In one sense the opening verse says all this.  The title line expresses the freedom that many jazz forms have – a much greater freedom than pop-rock often allows.   So the opening

If dogs run free, then why not we
Across the swooping plain?

could well be saying, “why must our music be so restrictive and formulaic – let’s explore some other dimensions.”

Of course as an enormous admirer of Dylan (and why else would I be writing these reviews, but for that reason?), I am not for a moment suggesting that Dylan is formulaic but I am saying that sometimes to me, personally, it feels that he exists a little too firmly in the rigours of the old 12 bar tradition.

When he breaks free, as for example with Highway 61 Revisited (the song that is) he is remarkable both in lyrics and music, but sometimes (Down Along the Cove would be an example I would cite as one such) the formula of the 12 bar tradition seems to hold him back.

Following this logic, the interweaving of the instruments and two voices is like

a symphony
Of two mules, trains and rain

When improvising in this way, the musicians often keep going because they feel the music is going somewhere.  In a practice session and left to their own devices rock blues and jazz musicians can just keep playing for half an hour or more, feeding off each other…

The best is always yet to come
That’s what they explain to me
Just do your thing, you’ll be king
If dogs run free

Of course I’ve no straight connection to Bob’s world, so I don’t know for sure, but that explanation works for me.

My mind weaves a symphony
And tapestry of rhyme

And that to me is a perfect summary of his creative world.

Of course it could be any other aspect of the creative process.  Talk with people whose entire lives are built not around office work or the factory, or a service industry, but rather the creative process in arts, technology, design, scientific thinking, and you will find that their world is quite different on every level from that of people who work in what one might call the more mainstream areas of employment.

Quite often the “symphony” goes wrong, the sounds disintegrate, but the struggle is to bring them back into the desired form or style.  But the point is that “it’s all unknown.”

In a very small way, I’m engaging in a creative process here.  I know each song before I start, of course, but much of the time I’m not sure where the writing of the review will take me, and the published version is often very different from the first draft.

Oh, winds which rush my tale to thee
So it may flow and be
To each his own, it’s all unknown
If dogs run free

In short, the creative artist is following his/her own journey during the creative process, and the audience can do their own thing too, in response.

Of course the final verse of the song is about love and not the creative act and I’ve wondered if the whole piece isn’t about “true love”.  Maybe it is, but I just find the phraseology of the earlier verses quite compelling when considered from the point of view of what the musicians are doing on the recording.  Obviously, everyone can decide, and as quite often, that is the beauty of Dylan.  We are left to decide.

True love can make a blade of grass
Stand up straight and tall
In harmony with the cosmic sea
True love needs no company
It can cure the soul, it can make it whole
If dogs run free

If you’ve been lucky enough to be utterly, totally, deeply in love, then you’ll see exactly what this verse means from that point of view.  But many a musician, dancer and writer I have worked with has been as in love with his art as he ever has been with a woman.  One only has to spend time with an artist who simply cannot stop working on his/her creation, to know this is true.

The publication of the book of the same name illustrated by Scott Campbell  does, I think, add something to the notion that this is primarily about creativity, as it is surely about experimentation and exploration.

Countering all this I have read the comment on one Dylan site that “Experiments are fine, but at a certain point you have to stick the tunes in there… Kudos to Bob for trying, though.”

In the days when all I had was the albums, short of endlessly lifting the stylus off and playing my favourite tracks over and over (which I was not averse to doing) I had to listen to whatever Bob gave us on the album in order.  That made some of the experimental work harder to take, mostly because they were not the experiments I particularly wanted at that moment.

But now we can pick and choose what we hear and what order we hear it in, and that perhaps gives us time for an extra consideration of pieces like this.  It is certainly worth doing.

At the time of first hearing it I felt I was for once getting just a little peek inside Dylan’s creative universe.  Now returning to the piece all these years later it still seems the same to me.

I don’t have to hear it over and over to take the message, the meaning and in this case, the inspiration from the song.  When I feel I have no idea what to write next, songs like this help me along the road.

Index to all the songs reviewed.

By Tony Attwood

“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and the song that precedes it “Down along the cove” appear to have little to do with the rest of the John Wesley Harding LP, either musically or in terms of sentiment, style, storytelling and lyrics.

If we consider “Drifter’s Escape” with its multitude of layers and commentary about society, outsiders, laws, the judicial system and interventions from on high, and think of these two final tracks, it is hard to think how to compare them.  They are from different environments.

I’ll give Down Along the Cove its own article, so let’s leave that blues and focus for a moment on the straight pop song “I’ll be your baby tonight.”

As every review says, it was recorded in 1967 and has Peter Drake on guitar.  Dylan sang it at the Isle of Wight and loads of people have covered it since.  If you have never heard the Robert Palmer and UB40 version from 1990, do give it a go.    It is basically great fun, which is indeed how a song should be.

This was a quite rightly a hit all over Europe and Australasia – although I am not sure it made an impact in the USA.  I suspect Dylan was rather pleased, because he was, I think, still wanting to show us his immense versatility.   He could write Desolation Row and bubbly pop songs – and do both brilliantly.

What makes this piece so memorable is that it is a dead simple song consisting of just 80 words – and that is included the repeated title line.  But it is also a beautiful song that stays in the mind.  Of course it is not ground breaking, in the way that Desolation Row and Johanna were but it is still a classic in its own right.

Thus it is a pop song, a highly memorable pop song, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The song moves in a standard strophic form (A B A) with the typical move of chords in the “middle 8”.  And the harmonica and steel guitar sound perfect, as if the song was written around them.  Plus there’s that lovely melody over the top.

Close your eyes, close the door
You don’t have to worry any more
I’ll be your baby tonight

It’s all over in 18 words across 16 bars, and then we have it again.

Shut the light, shut the shade
You don’t have to be afraid
I’ll be your baby tonight

In classic pop form the bass takes up four notes of the scale to give us the middle 8.

Well, that mockingbird’s gonna sail away
We’re gonna forget it

Now we have the standard pop modulation up to the dominant…

That big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon
But we’re gonna let it
You won’t regret it

And we’re back.

But why I wondered, a mockingbird?   One source I’ve found said mockingbirds usually symbolise happiness, playfulness.  But when I checked with a few friends they confirmed my feeling that mockingbirds have a different connotation.  Perhaps it is different in the USA from what we think in the UK.

But anyway, what’s the bird doing sailing away?  I really don’t know but then bird life was never my strong suit.  Could it be that Dylan is having a laugh here, laughing at what turns up in popular songs?  After all in love songs “moon” is supposed to rhyme with “June” not “spoon.”  Whoever heard of the moon shining like a spoon?

In fact when you come to think about it, the whole middle 8 is nonsense, surreal.  Have the couple already had that drink he’s offering.  Or something stronger?

It is a very curious middle 8 because of those lines, and it has always puzzled me.  I am still left with the thought that there is something about mockingbirds that I don’t know.  I’ve even tried to link this in with Harper Lee’s novel, and the movement from innocence to maturity, but really that just seems to be stretching everything a bit too far.  Unless the singer is seducing a naive innocent virgin – the journey from innocence that is the heart of Harper Lee’s masterpiece. Now that would be spooky.

But such a lack of knowledge of what the mockingbird and spoon stuff means doesn’t actually stop us enjoying the fun.  Everything else in the song is about relaxing, taking it easy, just let it all happen, have a drink, settle down in my arms spend the night here.  Perhaps the mockingbird has no meaning at all.

Kick your shoes off, do not fear
Bring that bottle over here
I’ll be your baby tonight

What we can say for sure is that it presages Tonight I’ll be Staying Here With You which closed the next album – Nashville Skyline.   That song is in the same form, and so obviously deals with the same situation, except that in the latter song the singer’s announcing his role in the affair rather than telling the woman what to do.  I’ll deal with that song later, but here’s the taster just to remind you…

Throw my ticket out the window
Throw my suitcase out there, too
Throw my troubles out the door
I don’t need them any more
’Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you

So John Wesley Harding, which starts with a complete re-write of the history of what John Wesley Hardin was actually like, and takes us through the very edges of society, ends right away from the drifters, hobos and outlaws, as it leaves behind the 19th century outlaw and plants us firmly in the 20th century.  Dylan moves on.

It is as if he is saying, “I’ll be your baby tonight, but I can’t tell you where I’ll be (musically, historically, emotionally or physically) by the time we reach tomorrow.”

With Dylan it was ever thus.

Index to all the songs reviewed on this site

By Tony Attwood

Romance or religion, or the collision of the two?  Or a collision of two worlds, metaphorical or actual.

Let me make it clear that my interpretation of this song is very different from what I have seen and heard other people say.  And maybe I’m way out here – but as always this is what seems to make sense to me.  If this is the first review of mine you’ve read, please don’t judge me just on this one – they are not as left field as this.

The problem is that at one level this appears to be a very simple song, but we have that troublesome B section, with all the fire engines and sermon on the mount business, that tells us it is far from that.  And that is what gives us the problem.

The singer thinks of a girl who was trying to find a new way in life, and he wonders did indeed find it.  And here for once the traveller moving on is the woman, while the man does the “you wanted me to be someone I couldn’t be” thing and is seemingly left behind.

If it were just this it would be unusual but otherwise just a nice little song.  But of course there is a lot more.  For in this song there has been a real connection between the man and woman.  Maybe not for long, but a connection.

And then suddenly all hell breaks lose half way through the song,  but still he is almost wistful.  It is as if fate has just blown the two of them together and then apart.  For a moment they occupy the same space but they are on different journeys.  They look at each other and think they are connected but their separate worlds but then BANG, and they move on.

So with this interpretation we have the image of worlds colliding, there’s an almighty explosion, it’s like the end of the world, but then the worlds slip apart and move away from each other, and normality is restored and each world carries on as before.  But it doesn’t have to be a science fiction story – two realities that come together and hit each other in a new Big Bang and off they go again.   It can just be the blow up before “you go your way and I’ll go mine” but without all the blame games.

Have we ever seen such a thing elsewhere in Dylan?  Well, actually I think so although from a different angle.  Apart from the aforementioned time will tell just who fell. And who’s been left behind how about…

We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view

Tangled up in Blue, that great mix of different times and different realities where the story is in the wrong order, the past is at the end and the start, the end is where it begins…  There worlds of the woman the singer collide and part over and over again, such that when the couple are together, they can’t quite get it together, if you see what I mean.

But Tangled up in Blue doesn’t have the apocalypse – everything just keeps moving in and out, in and out.  So where have we seen this great crashing explosion before?

Musically, just one place.  The chorus of “Too music of nothing” uses the same musical trick as “Shooting Star” except that the lines in the version of Too Much (“Say hello to Valerie”) on the original Bootleg album grind upwards through the chromatic scale.  Here they slide downwards.

Now as I have written elsewhere I find that chorus on the first Bootleg version Too Much to be a horrible clash and a huge mistake on the part of Dylan (if I may venture such an opinion).   But here, many years later, Dylan puts the process in reverse.  Which is curious when you consider what the lyrics are doing.

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

What Dylan does musically is move down the chromatic scale note by note and as I say this is, to the best of my knowledge ,only the second time in his whole writing career that he has used this chromatic scale.  (You can hear it by playing each note, black or white, that are next to each other on the piano.  Dylan does it starting on C sharp, going down to C, B, B flat, A.

(C sharp minor) Listen to the engine, (C) listen to the bell 
(B) As the last fire truck (B flat) from hell
(A) Goes rolling by
(B) All good people are (E) praying

The musical sequence is then revisited

It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

I do appreciate of course that many people have seen this as an overtly Christian statement, and obviously there are many overtly religious connotations here.   Some have also seen it as a final farewell to Dylan’s Christian era.

“Did I ever miss the mark or overstep the line that only you could see” is also seen by some as a reference to the lines of the 19th century Biblical scholar Joseph Addison Alexander, “There is a line by us unseen/That crosses every path/The hidden boundary between/God’s patience and His wrath.”

Maybe, but as we know Dylan has often quoted sources – poems, novels, lines from the movies, without actually saying that the movie or poem is important. It is just that he likes the line.  And the fact is that not even Revelations has a fire truck in it.  Nor a radio.

But if we compare Dylan’s use of the chromatic in “Too Much of Nothing” and here the lyrics make an interesting comparison#

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

and

Say hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivian
Send them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion

Valerie and Vivian are the wives of TS Eliot, one left in the wilderness of an atrociously awful north London lunatic asylum, the other kept waiting until the first ultimately dies before she is allowed to marry the poet.  Dylan has written a description of the chaos that Eliot caused the two women in his life and written of his distaste for Eliot

There is a total bleakness in the “Say hello” lines and of course oblivion.  The last radio playing is the same image – oblivion.  And that is what I think we have with

The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

Oblivion.  Desolation, Destruction.   Not entering God’s grace, but just another glimpse on another world on the very edge.  The next thing you know the stars are beginning to hide.  There are no more sermons because the worlds have clashed and parted and moved on.

I like the notion of the clash of two worlds – his and hers.  They have met and colloquially one might say, “all hell has broken loose”.  It is not literally the end of the world any more than it is literally the last radio playing, because this clearly isn’t the end of the world as we have another verse still to come.

But then despite all that,

Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away
Tomorrow will be
Another day
Guess it’s too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away

They have passed and gone and the past cannot be regained.  All we can know is that the past is always close behind.   But for now calmness is restored because actually there is not too much between the man and the woman.

We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue

And anyway, as Dylan said in that other attack on Eliot

The moon is almost hidden, the stars are beginning to hide .

And that is where I ended the first version of this review.  But reading it and thinking again there is another way of seeing this.   He thinks of her.  He thinks of himself.  He thinks of the almighty bust-up row that they had.   Life goes on.

Untold Dylan – the index to all the songs reviewed. 

By Tony Attwood

“Most of the time” which precedes “What good am I?” on “Oh Mercy” is a song of self-deception where the self-deceiver knows at the end of each verse that he’s not kidding anybody – certainly not himself.

And then we move on, on “Oh Mercy” to “What good am I?” where the self-deception ends and the singer begins to question himself, rather than assert.

And what questioning he is doing.  This is a real self-battering.

But before we get into it, there’s a nice musical link between the two songs too.  Both start not on the tonic chord (the chord that the song is built around) but with the instruments playing the sub-dominant.  What is happening in those first few seconds of each song is like a sigh – we drop down from the pretence and what is left of bravado and self-confidence.  We drop down to the basic level of self-doubt and concern.

What Dylan is saying in this simple piece is that in the end the only way out of the Little Boy Lost position is honesty.  Look at yourself in the mirror and see what’s really there.

For Dylan at this time the big question is, if I retreat from the world and don’t engage with the big issues – be they personal or social – then what is the point of it all?  It is like the phrase “the only reason for writing is to change the world”.  The only reason for being here is to do good to be thoughtful and kind. To treat people right.

Interestingly this is a rejection of the Zen approach of isolation of the individual and the contemplation of the world inside a grain of sand – at least if you have decided to engage with the world.  Maybe that retreat from reality is fine if that is the totality of what you do.  But engagement, sympathy, kindness, support, understanding, empathy… these are the qualities of the really human and humane person.

Musically the accompaniment is occasional, intermittent, totally in keeping with the ponderousness of the lyrics.   The chords are the basic ones of a standard folk or pop song – as becomes a piece considering such basic issues.   The alternating E major and A major emphasise the passing of time.  Two minor chords in the third line and then we’re back. to the rocking chords.  No suprises.

Also, as with “Most of the time” the song is in ternary form, meaning it has a repeated verse, a “middle 8” and then back musically to the original.  Musical theorists, when teaching music students, write this as ABA.  It is one of the most basic forms.

The “A” section is verses 1, 2 and 3.  B comes with verse 4, (you can’t mistake how different it sounds) and then we are back to A again. This stretches the form in an unconventional way – normally in pop we get two verses of A at the start.

But the level of uncertainty in the song is so overwhelming, the stretching of the form seems absolutely what should happen.

In the first verse Dylan is speaking of the trivial argument, the “you’re not going out like that!” comment of parent rejecting the new fashion conscious clothes the teenager has just brought in, the “that doesn’t suit you” of the lover out of sympathy with his companion.

Then the row breaks out and he walks out.  It is a scene repeated a billion times a day across the planet.  We’ve probably all done it, and if we have any humanity, we’ve probably all hated ourselves for doing it.

What good am I if I’m like all the rest
If I just turn away, when I see how you’re dressed
If I shut myself off so I can’t hear you cry
What good am I?

There are in fact some incredibly strong lines here; a man reprimanding himself for letting his love affair or his relationship with his son or daughter come to this.  The lover’s or child’s tears, the thundering sky… what a comparison, what an image!

What good am I if I know and don’t do
If I see and don’t say, if I look right through you
If I turn a deaf ear to the thundering sky
What good am I?

And so he’s caused pain, quite unnecessarily, quite pointlessly, and meanwhile the world is still there, life is still there.  And the singer just can’t get out of this.  This is the problem.  He just doesn’t know how to say, “It is entirely my fault.  I am so sorry.  The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt you.  I have no excuse.  Just forgive me.  Let me try again.”

What good am I while you softly weep
And I hear in my head what you say in your sleep
And I freeze in the moment like the rest who don’t try
What good am I?

And so we come to the “B” section – and it certainly is a different section.  Because here Dylan is asking who did this to him, but also why is he like this?  Why do I do this?  It is the moment of self-reflection that turns away from the main theme of the song and asks how he came to be like this.

What good am I then to others and me
If I’ve had every chance and yet still fail to see
If my hands are tied must I not wonder within
Who tied them and why and where must I have been?

And most likely we are listening and hoping for a resolution, for him to be able to say how sorry he is, how desperately sorry.  But he’s so tied up.  It turns out not to be “where must I have been” but “I am still here, and I am still hurting you.”

What good am I if I say foolish things
And I laugh in the face of what sorrow brings
And I just turn my back while you silently die
What good am I?

The song finishes with an instrumental verse – a rarity in Dylan, but it works well, leaving us contemplating.  Has he really answered the questions?  Was it all rhetorical?  Is he saying, “What good am I if you hurt you like this?  I’m nothing – so I have learned my lesson.”  Or is it “If I were to hurt you like that I’d be nothing, so now I am making amends.”

We, on the outside, want to know he’s answered the questions.  We want to see that he realises that if he turns from his friends when he is needed, he is nothing.  We want him to show us that he sees that we are all known by the way we treat those who care for us and for whom we care.  But we are left hanging.

Heylin is in his most nauseatingly sneering mode reviewing the album track saying, “Though there is something instantly enticing about the whole ‘sound’ of the thing, all that needless noodling is a constant distraction from the central performer’s concerns.”

The attitude of Heylin here seems to be that if only Dylan called on him personally to produce the album then we’d have masterpiece.  But in making this reference he shows that he really isn’t grasping what is going on here.  The singer is not alone – he is engaging with his own mind while outside the world keeps butting in.  If you don’t believe me, try the old “try not to think about it” concept.  If ever there is something we can’t do its “not think about” something we’ve been told not to think about.  The world is always there, always knocking into our self-conscious mind.  All that “noodling” is life Mr Heylin, although I guess you don’t get that.

If you are not sure what I mean, play the track and listen to the ending.  You are never quite sure where it is going to stop, because the jagged and soft bits of the world keep bumping in and won’t stop.  Not even when you sleep.

Index to all the songs reviewed.