Untold Dylan

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.

By Tony Attwood

Dylan’s audience is predominantly male, and one suspects, a fair number of these men who listen to Dylan will have been crossed in love, having lost a woman who has either just walked away or gone off with another.  Or they might have fallen out over an argument.  It is after all one of the three standard formats of rock and roll (love, lost love, dance).

Most of the time is of course a lost love song.   But also I makes me think back to earlier masterpieces of atmosphere – such as the all time classic beginning, “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet.”

Although Most of the Time is much clearer than Visions of Johanna (in that the fog in Most of the Time is of the singer’s making, while in Visions the fog covers the whole world), in both songs the issue of self-delusion is at the forefront.    As Visions says,

“We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it”

What Dylan does in Most of the Time is so magical and so powerful and indeed one might say so all encompassing that he catches the sort of breathlessness that comes when the emotions are totally ruling the body where one can’t see the truth, the reality, the real world

So while there is more mist surrounding Visions, and more self-delusion on Time, the essence is the same.

The feeling in both is out-of-body, uncertain, unreal.  In Most of the Time this is in contradiction to the lyrics which assert throughout that the singer knows exactly what is going on and can handle it.  The music suggests totally he can’t and we know the music is right and the lyrics are wrong.  He’s fooling himself from the opening chord.  (In musical terms it is the sub-dominant – which fools us – even if we know no music – into thinking we are somewhere else, before the singing starts).

This is why the version on Oh Mercy is so wonderfully powerful, while the knock about version on Tell Tale Signs gets us nowhere.  The Oh Mercy version allows the music to tell us that the singer is saying (as so many men have said so many times), “Yes of course I am all right about it all, she’s gone but it was over anyway” and you know just by looking in his eyes, he’s having you on just as he is having himself on.

There is also the build up to the line, “If I was ever with her” which then results is an echoing pause in which the singer has declared his all-rightness so powerfully he now has to turn and wipe a tear from his eye.  He calms down a bit then, but it builds up again – just listen to the fade out and what the guitars are doing.  He’s lost in the mists as much as Louise, Joanna and Little Boy Lost.

In fact, in every imaginable way, this is Little Boy Lost’s song.  He takes himself so seriously.   Just look at these lines from the start of the third verse of Visions…

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall

In Most of the Time, the meaning of the lyrics is amplified by the rocking between C major and F major chords – like the singer is rocking back and forth on his heels, arms wrapped around his body, telling you what he and you know is quite untrue.

We also have a wonderful penultimate line to each verse which utterly contradicts the follow up title line.  Just listen to the song and notice the end of verse one…

I don’t even notice she’s gone
Most of the time

And verse two

And I don’t even think about her
Most of the time

If any of this were true he wouldn’t be saying it.  And just in case you have any doubt about that, in verse three we have…

Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine
Most of the time

Until the middle 8 – after the third verse.  Up to that point we have chords backing up the song which cause us no surprise – C, F, G, Am.  It is exactly what you might find in a song from Freewheelin or Another Side.  These are the chords upon which all classic folk music is built.

But then the singer is getting carried away

Most of the time
She ain’t even in my mind
I wouldn’t know her if I saw her
She’s that far behind
Most of the time
I can’t even be sure
If she was ever with me
Or if I was with her

Even if you have no musical background I’m guessing that you can hear something different happens after this with Most of the time I can’t even be sure.  The unexpected E major chord is what throws the music out of kilter, and that pause at the end of the line after “or if I was ever with her” adds to the unreality.   He knows utterly that he was with her, but his denial is so overwhelming he doesn’t know it at all.  He’s muttering small talk at the wall.

And so we build up to the climax of denial by taking the assertions to ludicrous proportions.

I don’t cheat on myself, I don’t run and hide
Hide from the feelings that are buried inside
I don’t compromise and I don’t pretend
I don’t even care if I ever see her again
Most of the time

When listening to this on Oh Mercy, it is even more powerful given the fact that the next song starts, “What good am I?”

There is a review of this song on Wikipedia which says “the narrator in “Most of the Time” sings of an estranged lover whom the narrator can’t quite shake from his memories.”

Not for the first time do I disagree with Wiki’s choice of comment.  “Can’t quite” is utterly wrong.  Both the music and the lyric show that the singer is totally and completely enraptured by the woman.  He is so deeply in denial we know that he is fooling himself from that open ethereal chord to the fade out.

An index to all the Dylan songs reviewed thus far

By Tony attwood

Part of the enormous power of Chimes of Freedom is that even 50 years after first hearing it some of the lines can still hit me right in the heart and take me back to my school days when I had was trying (very unsuccessfully) to start my career in the arts – unsure whether I was a great poet, a great songwriter, a great playwright, a great rock n roll pianist, a great novelist or something else. But whatever it was going to be I was going to be great.

And when you are 16 and living in a rural county which still thinks it is 1935, attending a very academic all-boys school and not doing very well academically, lines like

And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe

can really have an impact.  He might be someone I’d never get near, living in another continent, sometimes using Americanisms I didn’t understand and singing lyrics that I couldn’t always quite get, but Bob understood.  He was talking to me.

So I’ve lived my life with the song, but still it has this incredible power.  Indeed I feel it is one of the most powerful of all the Dylan songs, perhaps it is the most powerful of them all.

It was written in 1964 and was released on Another Side, and is said to be influenced by Dylan’s interest symbolism or (for Heylin and one or two others), the assassination of Kennedy.

Now Heylin plays a trick quite regularly in his books of acknowledging Dylan’s rejection of a viewpoint, and then telling us that Dylan is wrong and he (Heylin) knows best.

Chimes of Freedom is a typical piece of this nature – as Heylin examines every scrap of paper to produce his point which reaches its climax with the Dylan comment “The whole thing about my reactions to the assassination is overplayed,” before Heylin dismisses this with the line “Pages and pages of poems on the subject in the Margolis and Moss manuscripts belie this assertion.”

The problem is that Heylin, as he reveals repeatedly through his work, knows nothing of music per se, nor anything about the expressive process.  His works are primarily reportage, pulling together facts and detail, not expressing in depth in miniatures (which is what songs in essence are).

Of course I don’t know how Dylan works, beyond what I’ve read, but as a person who has written some 70 odd books and maybe a couple of thousand texts of adverts (the two arenas where my desire for greatness led me in the end), and as a person who has inevitably met and chatted with other minor writers, I know that most of us play with words, change things around and around, start writing about x and end up writing about y.  That’s how it goes.

As the artist sketches his drawings so the writer and composer sketches phrases, endlessly playing with words and ideas.  Indeed this little review has a whole section chopped because it seemed to go round in a circle as I tried to deal with Dylan, Rimbaud, symbolism, Bohemianism and a feeling for the underdog.

But Heylin sees himself as Sherlock Holmes I think, able to look at the evidence and unravel the truth no matter how complex the reality might be.  Unfortunately Holmes was a fiction – no one can really see what another person is thinking and what their motivations were or are, and very very few people who have not earned their living from a specific creative process.   (Conan Doyle was careful to keep Sherlock Holmes well away from highly creative artists most of the time).

Certainly the central element of the song is symbolism representing via the images the raising of the humble and the ordinary to a height above the idealised world of beauty and great thinking.  Everyone can potentially see the beauty of the universe in a grain of sand – we just need to be lifted up and shown how.

Dylan speaks out for the ordinary, the regular people doing regular things and being down-trodden as a reward for not being rich and powerful.   Whether it is true that Dylan was also looking to follow the world of the wild 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud and the other poets of the symbolist era, who can say.  Certainly his life was taking off in all directions, and in the music that followed Dylan’s move into rock there is a strong sense of surrealism (just think of where he had got to by the time of singing, “The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse.”)

So symbolism is dominant in the song, speaking about the ordinary world, and here not a life moving into the wildness of that of Rimbaud and thought patterns moving into the world of surrealism… that was to come later.

The image of the Chimes of Freedom is powerful enough, the fact they are flashing gives us an extra dimension which when combined with the certainty of some of the other lines that we have hope that yes, things can change.  We are, most of us, just ordinary regular folk, but we can aspire to a glimpse of heaven in the flashes of the chimes.  Indeed when seen in that light the symbolism is almost Taoist in nature.

So Dylan stands in the doorway, waiting for the storm to pass.  The symbolism makes him almost a poet of the Norsemen feeling that Thor, the god of thunder, is expressing his feeling for the oppressed.  (As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds is very Thor like, although I don’t think Thor actually cared too much about the weak.)

In a sense Chimes of Freedom is a bridge between the vision of the future in the song The Times They Are A Changing, and the visions of the present that pervade much of the rest of that album as it considers lives in which times are very much not a-changing.  In Chimes of Freedom Dylan offers hope to Hollis Brown and his fellows that times might be able to change.  That things can change.

Thus a significant part of the masterpiece of this work is the combination of sympathy and hope for the oppressed, and for those struggling to express themselves – to make their voices heard amid the tyranny of contemporary life, as with “the countless confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse.”

To say that everyday life is intolerable and impossible for some individuals had been a Dylan theme from the start.  But now he is saying it is intolerable and impossible for one hell of a load of people.   He’s saying this is a problem of our society – this is (as he would much later say) a world gone wrong.  We’ve given control of the world to the wrong people.

And worse, in the midst of this impossible society these people with power are now endlessly wanting to tell us what to do and what to think.   They are the “guardians and protectors of the mind.”  The Big Brother of 1984.  While Rimbaud might scream “my mind does not need a guardian” (he didn’t say it but it is easy to imagine him so doing), Dylan leaves the image hanging in the air.  He might almost have been talking to Heylin!

(Incidentally and in passing I should add that the “protectors of the mind” line is musically the one that Dylan took from “Chimes of Trinity” – the melody is identical at that point.)

As for the music – two things stand out.  One is that the song is in triple time with each strong pulse divided into three – very unusual in contemporary popular and folk music.  I think if writing the piece out in conventional notation it would have to be in 12/8 (meaning four groups of three quavers in each bar.)

Confusingly Dylan likes to start the song with a bit of guitar strumming in four beats in a bar, before moving into the singing.   We are told that when recording the classic version of the song Dylan had to take about half a dozen attempts to get it right.  Because Heylin is no musician, he doesn’t tell us what went wrong each time – but I suspect it was this shift from four beats in a bar to four groups of three beats in a bar.  It is hard to pull off.

But it is this pulsing in threes which gives a real emphasis to the words, and as there are so many images in the piece that this helps bring out specific words.  If we take the line about Dylan’s favourite character – the drifter who wanders from town to town

Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting

the power comes into this line by the emphasis provided by the triple beat.  This constitutes two bars – one of the four strong words, and one which ends the final word exists alone

Condemned to drift or else be kept from

drifting

The other musical point is the simplicity of the chord sequence.  This is

Far between sundown’s finish and midnight’s broken toll  (G D G C)
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing (G  C D G)
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds  (G D G C)
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing  (G C D G)
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight   (D G)
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight  (C  G Am D)
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night   (G D G C)
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing   (G C D G)

This structure allows for an enormous power to be placed in the penultimate line.  Mostly this line is sung on one note, almost like a shout, and it works so powerfully because the previous line has uniquely in the song ended on the chord of D – requiring a resolution back to G.  The line ending on D is paused on the edge of the cliff, we feel ready to jump.  Dylan makes the leap for us.

It is a simple ploy, but masterfully done, and it allows Dylan to make this one line from the end to be the powerhouse of each verse.

Just consider them:

• And for each and every underdog soldier in the night
• And the poet and the painter behind beyond his rightful time
• For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased and cheated by pursuit
• And for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
• And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe

In the end I can do no more than leave you with the ending:

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

50 years on and I am still utterly moved.

Index to the songs

By Tony Attwood

John Wesley Harding was released at a time when the world of pop and rock was overwhelmed with alternatives to the old regime.  Blonde on Blonde  in 1966.  Sgt. Pepper in 1967, and Zappa’s Absolutely Free the same year all broke utterly new ground.

Indeed we also had songs like Tim Hardin’s “How can we hang on to a dream” in 1966, which sounded like just another pop ballad but was in fact an utter cry of despair.  There had never been anything like it before.

All that music seemed to be taking us in yet another direction – a direction of being totally either utterly haunted by what is in one’s mind or able to coujure up new images at will, just for the hell of it   Each of those works utterly different; each in terms of popular music was totally revolutionary.

And on 27 December 1967 we got John Wesley Harding, seemingly going in exactly the opposite direction of everything else.  Nothing is haunted, nothing is freaked out, nothing is psychedelic… but everything inside is utterly surreal.

In a very real sense Dylan takes us to another land with this album – and the key, I believe, is in the title song.  To understand the title song, you have to understand the album.  To understand the album, you have to understand the title song.

The actual historic John Wesley Hardin (not spelled as the album) was a killer, pure and simple, not some kind of Robin Hood.  He was also a self-propagandist, who claimed to have shot many more men than actually seemed to be the case.   Like politicians, he manipulated his own image.

And what did Dylan do?  He changed the spelling of his name, and changed his life story and his life style and recited it all in a simple four chord arrangement in three verses with a very simple bass, guitar and harmonica accompaniment  (the reverse of Blonde on Blonde style in fact).

The song ends with “he was never known to make a foolish move” – exactly the opposite of the truth.  The music is simple, the storyline anything but.

Dylan has said that the title track of the album is the one song that doesn’t fit with the album.  Heylin rejects this suggesting that Dylan is deliberately sending us on the wrong track – but then Heylin always says that when he either doesn’t like what Dylan said, or can’t make any sense out of it.

But the song is different from much of the rest of the album in that it is generalised.  Mostly the album is about specific incidents, specific moments – rather than giving a resume of a person’s life.  Much of the album is in fact surreal – the Watchtower, the damsel in chains in As I went out, St Augustine, Frankie Lee, the Drifter… this is not the real world in the slightest.

What Dylan is doing is using a very simple musical structure, and simple accompaniment, (and in Drifter a very very simple melody), but against this is putting a complex surreal story.

John Wesley Harding does this in a most curious way, by misspelling the surname and miss-telling the whole story.

The point is Dylan had already broken the mould of pop rock with his surreal lyrics, his one-track-across-the-whole-side, his monotone melodies, a piece about the wives of TS Eliot…

He’d done it, so he now went back to American folk history and a very simple sound – exactly the opposite route from everyone else – and then took that into a totally new world.

What Dylan does, as far as I can see (and I am not going to fall into the Heylin trap by saying that in some magical way I know for sure what is in Dylan’s mind) he makes it look at the start as if he is just going to give us some old 19th century American folk tales, but starting with the clues (the name, the storyline) in the first song, he rapidly takes us far, far away from that world.  By the time of the Watchtower we are on another planet – and the opening of that song seems to tell us that we are indeed not on this planet any more.

Dylan did unusually give us a clue as to what he was up to, saying in 1968, “What I’m trying to do now is not use too many words… Each line has something.”

In Rolling Stone magazine in 1969 Dylan added, “I was gonna write a ballad on … like maybe one of those old cowboy … you know, a real long ballad. But in the middle of the second verse, I got tired. I had a tune, and I didn’t want to waste the tune, it was a nice little melody, so I just wrote a quick third verse, and I recorded that …

Certainly the song, with its simple melody and use of the normal four chords for such a song give us no sign of surrealism.  Nor do the lyrics at first, if we don’t know about the real John Wesley Hardin.

John Wesley Harding
Was a friend to the poor
He trav’led with a gun in ev’ry hand
All along this countryside
He opened many a door
But he was never known
To hurt an honest man

Except, hang on, he’s just a regular guy with guns.

But by the third verse he has become a national Robin Hood

All across the telegraph
His name it did resound
But no charge held against him
Could they prove
And there was no man around
Who could track or chain him down
He was never known
To make a foolish move

And that’s it.   If we really listen to the song we are left saying, “What?”  and “Who?”  And while we are still saying that, up on track two pops Tom Paine (propogandist of American independence from Britain – I’m sure totally known in the US, but only known to historians in the UK).  We’ve jumped back 100 years and are in stories that have more to do with Alice in Wonderland than a visit to American history.

So once more I disagree with Heylin who limits an understanding of the album in general and the title song in particular by saying it “is an album full of outlaws, drifters, immigrants, messengers and saints.”  No, no.  This is an album that like a dream, starts from something we half know from having read a book or seen it on TV, and then takes us into a world where everything is turned upside down, and nothing is real any more, before neatly returning us to the real world at the end.

The killer thug has become the saviour of the oppressed while the band plays on.  And that’s just the opening song.

Index to all the songs

By Tony Attwood

I Am A Lonesome Hobo” fits neatly alongside “Drifter’s Escape”, representing the other side of the coin of the outcast in American society.

The drifter is a drifter by choice or perhaps because he has no choice, he is honest where he can be, stealing only in desperation, not educated enough to be a trickster or charlatan, and indeed in Dylan’s song, completely unsure of what is going on around him.

But with the Hobo it is his past success and well-being financially that has corrupted him.

The hobo is a man who has had it all, been involved in bribery and corruption and totally fallen.   He can’t look forwards to the magical salvation of the Drifter, because he’s a nasty piece of work.

So while the Drifter can’t actually get away from what he is, and most certainly can’t offer any advice, the Hobo can create his own homespun philosophy which incorporates nothing being amiss, admits to all he has done wrong, and yet still tells people what to do.

And he is not exactly saying, “don’t do what I have done”.   He is thinking back to what brought him low, and tells the listener to “stay free from petty jealousies, live by no man’s code, and hold your judgement for yourself lest you wind up on this road”.

So, do your own thing, and don’t tell others what to do, which isn’t particularly profound except that it says, don’t follow leaders, don’t follow a religion, just do it your way.

This is a very non-Christian view of the world.  While at an extreme push the Drifter’s Escape might have been down to devise intervention, the hobo is standing alone, aside from any code laid down by Christianity, Judaism or any other faith.

So we have a hobo with his own philosophy that he can express well.  He’s not the wanderer who has one last drink with his friends (for he has none) before moving on.  He is not the Drifter, lacking knowledge of the forces that affect the world around him.  This guy knows what’s what and has his own view of how to make things work.   He’s lost one fortune, and he might be off to make another (although equally he might be saying he’s found something more philosophical.

The music too is very different from that of the Drifter.  We have the rotating pair of chords in Drifter, like the old man rocking backwards and forwards, unable to comprehend the world.

Here the Hobo stands firm on one call – a chord that runs all the way thorough six lines before suddenly giving us relief and resolution in the last two lines with G, D, C, G, C, D, G.

Then we are back to that single chord again.

The two songs were recorded just under three weeks apart, so there is a unity here – a clearly expressed contrast.  The drifter can do nothing but rock back and forth between those two chords.  The hobo can look you straight in the eye, and hold you there (the one chord) before suddenly moving with a whole string of chord changes.

I am a lonesome hobo
Without family or friends
Where another man’s life might begin
That’s exactly where mine ends
I have tried my hand at bribery
Blackmail and deceit
And I’ve served time for everything
‘Cept begging on the street.

The whole of that first verse is saying “I’ve seen everything” and “You don’t want to mess with me”.

Verse two gives us the context.

Well, once I was rather prosperous
There was nothing I did lack
I had fourteen-carat gold in my mouth
And silk upon my back
But I did not trust my brother
I carried him to blame
Which led me to my fatal doom
To wander off in shame.

Inevitably the mention of brother and blame leads some to express a religious context and the story of Cain and Abel.  It seems too tenuous a link to fit in with the rest of the context, but of course everyone can make up his/her own mind.

Kind ladies and kind gentlemen
Soon I will be gone
But let me just warn you all
Before I do pass on:
Stay free from petty jealousies
Live by no man’s code
And hold your judgement for yourself
Lest you wind up on his road.

We can of course see this as a warning against his whole life style, or just against his methodology.  Just as the Drifter’s escape isn’t clear in its causation nor is this warning of the hobo.  Most of us don’t want to be without family or friends, so I guess it is a warning.  But that enigma of the recommendations as to how to behave and not behave is an enigma that makes the song even more attractive.

Index to all the songs reviewed on this site

By Tony Attwood

Updated September 2018 with the addition of Thea Gilmore version at the end – if you are here, do listen.  And April 2019 to replace broken link, plus 4 March 2020 to include the Woody Guthrie reference

When John Wesley Harding was released I must admit I was disappointed with it.  A lot of the songs sounded, well (dare I say it?) unexciting.

But three songs stood out: “I’ll be your baby tonight,” “All along the watchtower,” and above all, “Drifter’s Escape,” recorded on October 17, 1967

And “Drifter’s Escape” totally bemused me.  I loved it, played it and played it, but I kept on wondered why.  What makes this song so special, so important, so amazing?

Here it is

The music of Drifter’s Escape is so simple.  Just two rotating chords and two short lines of melody, alternating.  How simple can you get?

But it works and works and works.  So again I ask why?  And how?  In a real sense the answer is explored in the Thea Gilmore version that I have added at the end – you might want to set that a-playing while you read on.  I find it helps.

First, the central theme – the drifter – is one that is central to Dylan’s muse. Dylan loves the hobo, the wanderer, and sees him as central to the traditions of American society.  Just think back to Restless Farewell, and to go further, go back to its source.

But the bottles are done And we’ve killed every one And the table’s full and overflowed And the corner sign Says it’s closing time So I’ll bid farewell and be down the road…

But now in this song the drifter is caught – trapped up somehow in a legal process he doesn’t understand and can’t comprehend.   The world is just going round and round and round – and that is the triumph of the music, that never varying pair of lines and rotating bass.  The music rotates as the drifter’s world rotates.

“Oh, help me in my weakness”
I heard the drifter say
As they carried him from the courtroom
And were taking him away
“My trip hasn’t been a pleasant one
And my time it isn’t long
And I still do not know
What it was that I’ve done wrong”

Incidentally that last part comes from Woody Guthrie’s “Buffalo Skinner”:

Our trip it was a pleasant one
As we hit the Westward Row
Until we struck ol’ Boggy Creek
In old New Mexico

There is a stunning poetic beauty here, because we can picture the scene, AND comprehend what the man is feeling – the complete lack of control of his life, lack of understanding of what has happened to him.   How could it come to this?  There is no way out, the music goes around and around.

But curiously the Drifter has a friend in the courtroom – the judge.   The jury, representing the crowd outside are baying for blood.  The man is clearly set up as a fall guy.

Why is he disliked?  Because he is dirty, a traveller, ignorant, illiterate, uneducated, the wrong colour, the wrong race, with the wrong accent?  Any or all of those.  Just another dirty hobo.

But the judge knows there is a miscarriage of justice going on here.

Well, the judge, he cast his robe aside
A tear came to his eye
“You fail to understand,” he said
“Why must you even try?”

But the judge is powerless in the face of court process and the law.  And when even the judge can’t help against an obvious miscarriage of justice you know we are all in trouble.  And the mob is demanding blood.   We are back in the territory of, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging.”

Outside, the crowd was stirring
You could hear it from the door
Inside, the judge was stepping down
While the jury cried for more

But even here in these last desperate moments, there are still a few good people around, people who care about civil rights, about dignity, about humanity, and above all perhaps, about our right to be different.

“Oh, stop that cursed jury,”
Cried the attendant and the nurse
“The trial was bad enough
But this is ten times worse”

And then Dylan has his fun.  God, or chance, or fate, or something of the kind, steps down, and intervenes.

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

In a sense it is funny, a throw away, and (yes I admit it Heylin got it right) a 300 page novel told in 24 lines and two chords.  It is the nightmare of Kafka, surreal, inescapable, the evil power overtaking us and we just can’t get out, except by chance.  The horror dream where the world is out of control.

Maybe that is why I have loved the song from the off – it helps me come to terms with a world ruled by crazy chance.  It is not a conspiracy, it is, by and large, just one set of mistakes after another.  And why all these decades later I can come back and love it again with the Thea Gilmore re-interpretation.

And those two simple musical lines add to the horror – I am trapped, nothing changes, there is no way out, oh, actually here it is… except that the music doesn’t change.  I’m out, but still in the same world… the nightmare is eternal.

It is of course possible to see a parallel here between Dylan’s own image of himself as a drifter in personal and musical terms, and the way the world treated him.  Dylan’s drifting has none of the pejorative terms that we associate with drifting, not at all.  It is drifting as in a choice – a chosen way of moving along.  “Gotta keep moving, blues falling down like hail.”

Of course many in our society prefer the fixed and known.  As when the folk fans didn’t like it when he turned to rock n roll, and now, what were the fans of Blonde on Blonde going to make of this album?  Shock, horror, Dylan’s gone Old Testament.

But change is always an option especially for the artist.  It is part of what makes us what we are.  Dylan drifts, but out of positive choice.

For me, as I got to grips with my love of the song on the release of the album and coming back to it again now, there is a duality here that I love.  Dylan has no faith in the mob – I can’t think of any moment in any song in which he does feel the crowd is right.
At the same time he has this deep feeling for the individual – the right of the individual to do his thing – while endlessly thinking of the way the social, political and economic system can and will always let people down.

This is in fact Hollis Brown finding his way out.  Hollis Brown found no escape except through murder and suicide.  But the drifter finds that chance forced him (probably) into poverty, and onto the road, but now chance gets him out of poverty and into a new escape.

Famously, Dylan never played “Drifter’s Escape” at a concert – and as I said in the original review of  this song “most likely because it would be impossible to do anything with the song other than sing it straight as on the album – without losing the context of what it was about.”  But that was before I heard Thea Gilmore take it on with such aplomb.

But when Dylan did perform it in 1992, after the Rodney King trial, he was ready to change the meaning to make it fit the new judicial political situation.  Indeed, I suspect some people who have come to the song since 1992 and not known about its origins may well have thought that Dylan was writing about Rodney King.  (May I add before I go on, what I am writing below is a very brief summary, and I am sure that it is far from an accurate precis.  It is here just to give an immediate context – you can of course look up the full details on any one of a thousand web sites).

Rodney King, I should explain, particularly if you are not an American citizen (the story inevitably made less impact in the UK, where I live) was a construction worker who having been involved in a car chase with the police was beaten by police officers upon his arrest.  The beating was filmed.

The trial of the police officers took place amid very heightened tensions in Los Angeles and the outcome of finding the officers not guilty created further intense problems and rioting.  In later trials two of the four officers were found guilty and two were again found not guilty.

Interestingly, despite its musical simplicity, some other artists have taken up the song and performed it, and for a while Dylan himself even played it as an opening song on tour.

You might also like the Patti Smith version on You Tube (Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International) which I find very attractive.

Then there is Hendrix

but that link is here, just in case it helps.  It is not a recommendation.  Neither is the Joan Baez version on Baez sings Dylan.  I really can’t imagine what she, or her musical director, was thinking about.  Of all the alternative versions Patti Smith remained the only one that really gets to the heart of the matter in my view until Jochen pointed out the version below.

And here is the one just has just knocked me out.  Very many thanks to Jochen Markhorst  for mentioning it in his review of John Wesley Harding

What else is on the site

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Restless Farewell is a singularly brilliant song of confession and moving on, a song saying this is me, I’ve done my best, and that’s all I can do for that’s how I am.  It is about the singer being “On the road again” as Dylan commented elsewhere.

But it is a song with a tailpiece – the anger at the “false clock”.

Indeed the story is that the song was written and recorded quickly with Dylan seething with anger in response to an interview which Dylan curtailed, and which when it appeared contained a number of what to him were hurtful untruths (although what today we might just consider run of the mill journalist commentary).  I’ll come back to this element within the song in a moment.

It was the last song written for “Times they are a changing” and appears last on the album.  In many ways it strengthens the curious feelings I have about the album, as I expressed in the review of Hollis Brown, for its emotions have nothing at all to do with the title track.  As Hollis Brown is a song about people with a traditional lifestyle seeking desperately to hold it together, so this is a song of constancy and continuation, not of change.   The traveller keeps travelling, he never stops, no matter what happiness and good companionship he is forced to leave behind when he moves on.  It is about the constancy of one’s chosen life, not of social and political change.

Interestingly this theme of constancy and travel is as strong a theme of traditional folk music as it is of the blues – particularly folk music in the Irish tradition (or so it seems to me – but I am not an expert), and it is one that Dylan has picked up on readily throughout his career.  It is “Times they are a changing” that stands apart from the tradition of folk and blues music that Dylan’s work comes from, and songs like Restless Farewell that pay tribute to the tradition.

Restless Farewell is based on the Irish ballad “The Parting Glass” and a comparison of the opening verses of the Dylan’s song and the original shows us just how strong an influence The Parting Glass was on Restless Farewell.

The original (which of course exists in many versions) starts…

Of all the money that e’er I had
I spent it in good company
And all the harm I’ve ever done
Alas it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit
To mem’ry now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be to you all
So fill to me the parting glass
And drink a health whate’er befalls
And gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all

And Dylan gives us

Oh all the money that in my whole life I did spend
Be it mine right or wrongfully
I let it slip gladly past the hands of my friends
To tie up the time most forcefully
But the bottles are done
And we’ve killed every one
And the table’s full and overflowed
And the corner sign
Says it’s closing time
So I’ll bid farewell and be down the road

The Parting Glass is a song of good memories but is also a song of desperate utter sadness – at least that is how it always gets me.  The traveller in the song is trapped, forever doomed to travel – rather like the traditional concept of the Wandering Jew of mediaeval literature (referred to for example in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale).  No matter what happiness he finds and gives, he has to move on.

There is a difference of course – God has forced the Wandering Jew to wander (as it is in some versions of the tale) to do penance for the sins of his religion.  Thus fate has him trapped.  In the ballads of the folk tradition there is no origin for the cause of the wandering – it is just there.

“But since it fell unto my lot, that I should rise and you should not”, as the folk ballad says, and this is a perfect example of “Song of My Leaving,” in my still far from unfinished classification of Dylan’s songs (I really must get that part of this site together).

The link with the Parting Glass of course is clear in the opening verse  as Dylan sings, “the bottles are done, and we’ve killed every one and the table’s full and overflowed, and the corner sign says it’s closing time” – it is the perfect simple expression of the end of a reflective evening drinking with friends before the traveller gets up and goes on his way, even though his friends and maybe lover are saying “Oh, come on, stay the night…”)  But the traveller cannot.  He is forced onwards, ever onwards.

The Parting Glass concludes

Of all the comrades that e’er I had
They’re sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e’er I had
They’d wish me one more day to stay
But since it fell unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all

Fill to me the parting glass
And drink a health whate’er befalls
And gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all

Indeed if one didn’t know Restless Farewell’s lyrics particularly well one could read the first eight lines above and hear them as part of Dylan’s song.

Dylan’s musical structure is a straightforward use of the chords of the folk tradition – the major chords with the minor sixth added as a passing chord.  This is exactly the folk tradition, there is no variation, no movement into the blues, anywhere in sight.  We are in the world of the traditional travelling man.

So on this basis this is a beautiful song and one worthy of a strong positive mention when discussing Dylan. But what gives it an extra strength and interest is that it was re-recorded in 1995 as part of the celebration of Frank Sinatra’s 80^th birthday, and I would strongly recommend you take a look and listen to this recording.

Which brings us back now to the other factor that we must note is the ending; the attack on the journalist.

The article that upset Dylan, we are told by Heylin and others, was one that appeared in Newsweek, on 4 November  1963.   The article suggested Dylan was not in touch with his parents, when (Heylin and others say) there was no split, and they were in fact in New York to see him play at Carnegie Hall.

Also in the article is the “revelation” that Dylan had paid a school student $1000 for the rights to “Blowin in the Wind.”   This story circulated for a long time, although many sources now say that the student admitted later he had made the story up.  He had heard the folk music original “No More Auction Block” just as Dylan had.

The fact is that as in Restless Farewell, Dylan has often extensively borrowed from the folk and blues traditions of the past, and claimed the songs as his own when he has recorded his variant versions.  That is a fact that we may have our own views on, but this particular article seems to have annoyed Dylan greatly even though several commentators have subsequently pointed out it that is was not especially nasty.  If you are in the public eye, you can expect stuff like this.  (Indeed even this very modest web site gets abusive comments sent in about my commentaries and I just have to ignore them and delete them.  If a correspondent wants to argue a point that’s great but writing in to say that I’m an idiot, that the site is useless and that reading a specific review was an appalling waste of time, seems to me pointless.  If you don’t like it, don’t read it).

So, Newsweek caught Dylan on a bad day or hit a particular nerve (perhaps in relation to his parents) and he reacted to it.

Thus at the end the restlessness of the traveller goes, the apology to the women he’s hurt passes by, and it is his lifestyle that is justified by the claim that this is just the way he is.

But to stay as friends
And make amends
You got to have the time and stay behind
And since my feet are fast
And point from the past
I’ll bid farewell and be down the line

So the song continues until this final verse – a verse that has nothing much to do with the rest of the song, and nothing at all to do with the original folk ballad that Dylan has used as his source.  It is seemingly all about one journalist writing one article in one magazine.

Well a false clock tries to tick out my time

is a fairly strong and dramatic start to this final verse, and Dylan starts putting the pins into the picture stuck on the wall…

To disgrace, distract, and bother me
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face
And the dust of rumours covers me
But if the arrow is straight
And the point is slick
It can pierce through dust no matter how thick
So I’ll make my stand
And remain as I am
And bid farewell and not give a damn

In short he moves from saying, “well this is just how I am – “just gotta keep moving” as Robert Johnson classically said to hitting back at the journalist.

But there is a problem, if one is going to be pedantic (and I say this just to cover all angles academically – I have never really felt there to be a problem when I listen to the song).

Not giving a damn is not what the song is about, either in its original form, or here.  The traveller says, “that is how I am” but he does give a damn.  He is sorry, but acknowledges he can’t change.  Not giving a damn is all about not caring who you hurt and not caring about what others say about you.   Not giving a damn is what Dylan does in many of his Songs of My Leaving.

Dylan was indeed entering the “not give a damn” world, has he continued to go his own way, recording what he wanted to record, not listening to the demands of critics, commentators or fans as he moved in the electric rock, country music, “Self Portrait”, becoming a Christian, moving on from there, and everything else he ventured into.

He wanted to be, and indeed became, the artist with the sketchbook, sketching everything and anything, take it or leave it, not caring about the results.

There is of course one link with all that has gone before… and this comes from the fact that in his “not give a damn” phase he is standing alone, just as the Irish traveller does.  The break in the link is that there is no sadness or regret in Dylan’s last verse.  The link is the fact that he has travelled the musical scenes and explored his own world, meeting his fans at the concerts, and moving on.

It is even possible to see here the announcement of the never ending tour.

So I’ll make my stand
And remain as I am
And bid farewell and not give a damn

Each concert done his way, as the traveller moves on, always restless.

Or

I’m just on the road, heading for another joint…  as he said in Tangled up in Blue.

Anyway, you will of course make up your own mind, but in doing so, take a moment to listen to a totally different version of this song.  The accompaniment runs at double speed while the melody is the same.  Even after hearing it twenty times I struggle to understand both why and how he did it.

Back to the index of songs

By Tony Attwood

Suddenly coming back to Tomorrow is a long time after many years without listening to it, is quite honestly, a shock.

A shock because sometimes (for me at least, and I am sure this is just a failing on my part) it is hard to remember how delicate and gentle Dylan could be – as with the live recording from 12 April 1963 that we have.  It is an astonishingly moving performance of an astonishing piece.

But equally listening to the various versions of the song reminded me that Dylan has had a habit of pushing some of his songs to the limit, and  then beyond – and the “Rundown Rehearsal” version is an example of this.

The original is a simple piece based around the three standard chords with a picked accompaniment.  By the time we get to the Rundown version extra minor chords are added and there are attempts to give the production sudden gravitas through this.  But, in my humble opinion, this beautiful, delicate piece is utterly betrayed by this re-working.

For me, the original is complete. You don’t need any more – and you certainly don’t need minor chords.  It is a sad delicate piece – like a painting in which a sad man looks into the distance on a beautiful day.  You don’t need to paint in the rain to show us he is sad.  Dylan doesn’t need to throw in a minor chord – he got it right the first time round.

If you have not heard the song before, or have not heard it in a long old time, start with this version original version (the links are below), make sure the room is quiet, turn off the phones, the children are asleep, your partner is reading a book, put on the headphones and close your eyes and listen.

This recording is so perfect it can’t go any further.  Everything else is a reworking going nowhere.

Which is not to say I dismiss the Elvis Presley 1966 recording of the song.   As most sites report, Dylan said that Presley’s cover of the song was “the one recording I treasure the most.”  Actually some places transmute this into a quote that seems to say that this is the version of this song that Dylan liked best, but I don’t think this is so.  Dylan said, as I understand it, that Presley recording one of his songs gave him a recording he treasured the most.

I suppose what makes the song work so utterly, and the reason why the live acoustic version is so perfect, is that the simplicity of the singing and accompaniment provides a perfect contrast with the imagery of the lyrics.   Just the opening line “If today was not an endless highway” speaks to anyone who has ever been lonely and sad through the absence of a lover.  This is the empty room where the heat pipes just cough.

And if that opening were not powerful enough that opening verse would still be considered a remarkable piece of writing with the way it conveys the inability of the lonely even to find release in sleep.  Time simply doesn’t pass.

If today was not an endless highway
If tonight was not a crooked trail
If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all
Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin’
Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin’
Only if she was lyin’ by me
Then I’d lie in my bed once again

Indeed it is possible to argue that the most informative piece of reporting that Heylin gives us in over 1000 pages of text on Dylan is the letter Dylan wrote to his lover…

“It’s just that I’m hating time – I’m trying to … bend it and twist it with gritting teeth and burning eyes…”

It is also interesting that here Dylan abandons rhyme.  It returns in the second verse, but the sheer jagged nature of loneliness stops the rhyme in verse one.

But we are forced to move on…

I can’t see my reflection in the waters
I can’t speak the sounds that show no pain
I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps
Or can’t remember the sound of my own name

Dylan also commented on the song itself, saying that he didn’t like the third verse, and that he didn’t feel it was a statement of what he felt.   That of course might well be true, but for a song of this nature, the tradition is to reflect more broadly at the end, to give a wider overview, to look beyond the specific and head out into the more generalised feeling so that all of us who are the audience, and not the singer, can take part in the emotion.

To my mind (and I know, who am I to say what is right and what is not, when considering such a beautiful work?) the last verse does work, because it is generalised.  It is not about today, it is not about the echo of the singer’s footsteps, it is about the world at large – and that is a valuable conclusion to the piece.

There’s beauty in the silver, singin’ river…

The Elvis Presley version is here.

and finally, the version I don’t care for, with its forced extra chords and added emotion: The rundown rehearsal

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

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

If ever there is a Dylan song in which, to understand it, you need to listen to the music not just the lyrics, this is it.

If we go back to the version on Bootleg Series volumes 1 to 3 (disk 2 track 4, recorded 6 September 1964) what we find is a plaintive song with endless unexpected chord changes (sometimes catching us out by coming half a beat to early or late).  But it is none of this that causes us to stop and think “what?”

It is the musical structure which gives us two four bar phrases in standard 4/4, but with a bar (in the first verse) in 3/4  time.  Even if we are ready, the next verse throws us out again, because that interrupting half-way house bar is reduced to a beat.  By the third verse it has become a complete 4/4 bar.

So it goes on with the timing of the piece becoming ever vaguer and more and more unexpected.

What aids these curious rhythmic changes is the fact that the lines of the verses over run, cut short, change… there is in fact no rhythmic constancy.  Conventionally the lyrics are written (depending of course on the version you are listening to) as

Perhaps it’s the colour of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

But equally we could have

Perhaps it’s the colour of the sun cut flat An’ cov’rin’
the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

Or in the second verse

I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind

could actually be

I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ 
or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind 

However we play with them, the words express the mixed up feelings that we can all get at the end of a love affair, where the narrow thoughts are eating us up, but we are trying to deny it is happening.   We desperately want to get out of conventional angst (that was very much the thinking of the 1960s – we don’t have to think like our forefathers) – but he knows that this is not really true – he’s just “pretending not that I don’t know”.

And the ending is so powerful that it takes us several hearings of the song to get this right…

I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind

Can you see yourself as clearly as I can see you?  Now, there’s a thought and a half.  Utterly simple, utterly complex.

What we have here is a piece in which the music follows the words, but the words endlessly tumble over an the music is trying to catch up, until by the end the words follow the music.  Words can get extended in different versions as in the final verse in the second line suddenly the “I” in “I won’t be near” is curiously given an extra beat and a half in some versions – but not others.

Of course this works in the early recordings because it is Dylan on his own – you can’t so easily do this with a rock band, or even if singing a duet.  And so as time has gone by the song has become fixed into set rhythms, although Dylan’s own performance with John Baez retains some of the rhythmic oddities, but in the end it loses all the subtleties.  If you want this song as it was intended you have to have a solo version.

And maybe it is because the song can exist in so many different versions that we never had a version of it on the early albums.  Certainly the song was intended to perhaps for Times They Are a Changing or Another Side of Bob Dylan but came out on neither, and we had to wait for the live versions, and the Bootleg series.

So this is a song whose rhythm we can’t hold down, and indeed nor can we with the chords – version after version of the song has been recorded with different chords, and of course different feelings.

And maybe this is the mark of a great, great song – because it can be reinvented so many, many times. If you want to explore the depth of it try this utterly magnificent version by Jeff Buckley  Somehow he keeps the hint of the rhythmic uncertainty through the different length of the lines – no where else can I find a way of expressing the pain of the singer to the songwriter.  When I hear this I feel I am in the empty room with him.  And the room is still empty.

And if you think less of the Buckley version than I do, please stay with it, until that last verse.      For me, it is the definitive verse of the definitive version.

Contrast this (if you dare) with Rod Stewart’s version on the “Reason to Believe” album, which works in a Rod Stewart sort of way, but utterly, utterly fails with the twiddly instrumental cover for the pauses that some idiot somewhere decided to put in.  They mean nothing, have no relation to the song, and destroy what could have been an entertaining version of the piece.

But the fact that you can have so many different versions shows what a song this is.

So magnificent is this song that you don’t need to know the origins of the lyrics, but for completeness, let’s record the fact that it is the breakup with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (or at least that is what the commentators say) that led to the song.

According to Heylin the song goes with Ballad in Plain D and Ramona – and maybe it does.  But the notion of Oliver Trager which suggests this is a “straightforward love song of separation and yearning” is to miss the point.  That is the start, but not the end.  For this verse…

I am not askin’ you to say words like “yes” or “no”
Please understand me, I got no place for you t’ go
I’m just breathin’ to myself, pretendin’ not that I don’t know
Mama, you been on my mind

really takes us somewhere else.  The lyrics and the music are equally confused, and that is what makes this so wonderful, and why the song loses its flavour when sung as a duet where it is harder to get the time changes together for both musicians.

The chord and rhythmic changes verse by verse are the musical representation of “Pretendin’ not that I don’t know”.   That is why it all works so perfectly in the earliest versions.

“Pretendin’ not that I don’t know”.  You work it out.

Index to all the songs

By Tony Attwood

Dylan, the man known for his lyrics, presents us on Self-Portrait, with two instrumentals.  Why?

I think to find out we have to look at the overall vision of the album, and most particularly the title.  Self Portrait to me means, “this is what I really am, this is what I do, this is my life.”  And that is what he delivers.

The implication of this is that not every song is a masterpiece, not every song is a gem, not every rendition works.

At the time of the release we were five years away from hearing the Basement Tapes, but of course Dylan knew all about those sessions, and his striving to find ways to create a new type of music.  He had also decided not to follow the political era, the assassinations, the city rioting, Vietnam…, but instead to record totally different type of songs.   Occasional comments by Dylan about everyone wanting a piece of him, and telling him what sort of music to write and perform, show that he was annoyed and frustrated by others telling him what to do.  He wanted his own artistic integrity.

So Blonde on Blonde and the Greatest Hits marked the end, the Basement Tapes, the un-released (as yet) interregnum, while John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline marked out Dylan as his own man (again) travelling in his own direction.

Then if Harding and Nashville are details of Dylan’s new directions, so Self Portrait is an overview of the man and his life.  He’s giving us little pictures of him, including the grotty bits.

The recording of Rolling Stone on the album is deliberately a recording of a live show where he gets things very wrong.  Alberta, turning up twice, is a tribute to a song that hundreds of thousands of musicians have enjoyed playing and singing – a beautiful song that both the genius of Dylan, and those of us of modest talent, can share.  A song that marks the start of the album as a tentative uncertain beginning, and a solid well-rounded and full-of-hope ending.

In the midst there is Woogie Boogie.  Woogie Boogie is what those of us who play in bands do – and quite probably what Dylan and his musicians have done as a warm up before every session.  A straight instrumental 12 bar blues.  (The title of course comes from the piano style of the 1920s, the bopping bouncy dance style, which eventually became the contrast to the slower sadder blues).   Everyone knows how to do it, and you just do it to get the feel, to allow the engineer to get an idea of what you might be up to. and to get your fingers moving.  The drummer might adjust his stool, the guitarist might change the plectrum, someone might check that their instrument is in tune, the organist might change the settings, the pianist wonders who spilt a pint of beer into the inner workings…

It is in short the equivalent of the athlete’s warm up before the race.

Normally you never hear such songs, but Dylan is showing us his world; all the bits we never see.

Now consider the end of the album.  She Belongs to Me is actually an interesting recording of the song that is certainly worth having.  Dylan’s voice is in fine fettle, the lead guitarist knows where he is going, the version takes the song we know and develops it – the very essence of Dylan – and the piano adds a lovely mix of “Rainy Day” style and backup chords.

Then we have an experimental ending which doesn’t quite work – but its still a much better attempt at a reworking of an old favourite, and it makes much more of the portrayal of the artist as one who you will do anything for, before you end up so obsessive about her that you can’t escape.

And so to Wigwam.  It is a really lovely song – a song that you really want to have Dylan lyrics to – and yet he torments us by just singing the melody.

Now I don’t know any writer that has postulated a link between the way the lady artist in “She Belongs to Me” torments those who follow her, and the way Dylan is tormenting (or if you prefer, telling to fuck off) those who are demanding he does more songs like Blonde and Highway 61.  To me, he is saying, this could be about anything to do with our troubled times, contrasting our worries with our lighter moments – but I am not giving you that, because that makes life too easy for you.  I am going my way.

I don’t have to give you the lyrics you want, Dylan says.  I don’t have to give you the perfect renditions of my classic songs.  I don’t have to give you anything at all.  If I want, I can take time out and just sing melodies.

The ending to Wigwam is unexpected, but then so is the start.  Listen to it again, and hear the growl bass after the guitars come in.  It comes and goes and comes and goes.

I suspect 99% of people who have listened to this piece have never even noticed this – but play it again and listen.  There is something odd, something lurking beneath.  This is not just a pretty tune.  This is the historic portrait – a life drifting by.

One of the big clues is that there are no repeating verses and choruses as in pop and rock normally.  This is strophic – through composed from start to end.  Each of the three sections is different.  It is worth hearing again just to appreciate that.

And then as the album draws to a close we return to Alberta, that beautiful poignant song of want, hope and desire for the future  Whereas in the first version it was poignant now it is one of life being ok.   We’ve made the journey, and yes, I can live with this.

Through one very plausible interpretation of Self Portrait, Wigwam is the statement of moving on.   We’ve done the warm up, we’ve looked back, we’ve considered the highs and lows, we’ve  done ok, and pondered something utterly different from ever before, in terms of Wigwam.   So the pensive for Alberta gives way, and we move forwards to a lively upbeat new future.

Perhaps the disappointment is that Dylan does not seem to have wanted to develop Wigwam further. It remains a one off.   But he’s now the tormenting (not a tormented) artist, turning you this way and that while feeling satisfied with life around him – he’s doing fine, and he’s not giving you any real insight into what he is going to do next.

Index to all the reviews.

By Tony Attwood

As I listened to Hollis Brown for the first time in many a long year, following a request from a reader of the site for me to do a review, I thought: can I say anything that has not been said before?  Surely everything that could be said, has been said.

And by and large that is true, but then as I turned the basics over in my head I did remember that it was originally recorded as a track for Freewheelin’ but dropped from that album, only to return on Times they are a Changin, in the context of which it seems to make a sort of reverse comment.

For the whole essence of the title song of Times is what it says in the title – the old world order has gone and you’d better keep up if you want to be part of the new world..   The essence of Hollis Brown is that nothing ever changes.  The appalling inequality of the human race and the desperation which drove Hollis Brown to kill his family and himself, followed by seven more people being born, suggests nothing but nothing ever changes.

But then I guess it doesn’t matter.  No one has ever claimed Times to be a concept album – Times they are a changin is just the most immediately approachable and most iconic song on the album, so it is natural that the album bears that song’s title.   Hollis Brown is about the opposite view.

Fittingly Hollis Brown is a very simple blues based around one chord with one line repeated and then an answering line.  It is based completely on “Pretty Polly” an English folk song that also turned up in the Appalachian tradition, and of which there a multiple versions recorded through history.

The song itself has mutated over time also being known in places as “The Gosport Tragedy” or “The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter”.  In this latter version the ship’s carpenter promises to marry Polly, but murders her when he finds she is pregnant.  Leaving the body he returns to his life on board, but is haunted by her ghost, and dies utterly insane.

Many commentators have also pointed out that versions of Pretty Polly and its related songs often have the man ready to kill the woman, and certainly not out of compassion and heart-felt sorrow and desperation as in Dylan’s version.

Indeed in one version he takes the girl out for a stroll in the woods, but then she sees

A new-dug grave with a spade standing by.

and then (and remember the words change from version to version so this is just one sampling of the song) he confesses

I dug on your grave six long hours of last night.

And why would he do such a thing?

Your past reputation’s been trouble to me.

In many versions, the song “Pretty Polly” constantly switches its point of view with the singer speaking as a witness at one moment and as a the killer in another, and then as Polly.  It takes some doing to bring it off.

Dylan alternates too but in a different way, starting and ending as a distant observer, but through the bulk of the song, talking directly to the character, and he seems to make no difference between the viewpoints in terms of the music.  It adds to the bleakness.

Dylan performs on his own on the album version, with most common variant tuning of a guitar – the top and bottom string both tuned down one tone, but with a capo on the first fret to help remove the brightness of open string tone, so he performs in E flat minor.

Dylan’s version consists of the standard Pretty Polly approach spread over 11 verses and is set in South Dakota.  There is no deception here, just the horror of a downtrodden man trying

The horrors come as early as verse two

Your children are so hungry, That they don’t know how to smile.

and a little later

If there’s anyone that knows, Is there anyone that cares ?

What is interesting, if we can pull ourselves back from the power of the emotion, is that this is an anti-religious song.  Brown prays to God, but there is no response, and Dylan makes no excuse for this.

And to add to that Dylan is talking directly to a murderer.  He’s not interceding or asking “why oh why did you do it?” he is just there as an observer, watching, unable to intercede.

You prayed to the Lord above  “Oh please send you a friend”

Your empty pocket tell you that you ain’t a-got no friend

That repeating of friend at the end of all three lines in that verse is very powerful.  Any attempting at rhyming would have been just another rhyme.  Here the line is so bleak that hammering home the same word pushes the message out much more strongly.

The murder of the family and the suicide are not taken lightly – the man is so deeply tormented he can hardly stand to commit the deed, and then we have that immortal last verse so matter of fact like an antiseptic police report of a murder

There’s seven people dead on a south Dakota farm

Somewhere in the distance there’s seven new people born.

What has actually happened here is the the singer, the man and his family who are at the heart of the story, and the listener have all melded together.  We feel the family pain, we hear the wind blowing, we are part of the despair, part of us is blown away each time we hear the song and appreciate its message.   Hollis Brown may have killed his family and shot himself, but that is not the end of it at all.  The tragedy of extreme rural poverty lives on and on, amidst all the affluence of the United States.

Index to all the songs

By Tony Attwood

Thin man ends the first side of Highway 61 LP, and when it was released in 1965 I really did wonder about it.   It certainly was a song of disdain – and that plodding descending bass is just so perfect for the contempt that is in the song, symbolising the disdain of the slow walk away.  But disdain of what?

While I should have been studying TS Eliot for my England A level I sat and puzzled and puzzled.

And I came up with some rather odd ideas of my own.

I thought, rather bizarrely I must admit, that maybe Dylan was a sci-fi fan for just before the album’s release, I’d read “The World that Jones Made” written by Philip K Dick nine years before Highway 61 was released.  I won’t bore you with all the details of that novel, for the meaning of the song doesn’t quite fit with the essence of the book, but it does have links to the song and I could imagine Dylan being interested – if sci-fi turned him on that is.  (I don’t think it does).

Dick, incidentally also wrote “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” the year after the release of Highway 61, which is the novel behind Blade Runner, and many other significant works.  He was an influential in sci-fi as Dylan in contemporary music, and delved into imagery as spooky as Dylan’s.  Consider…

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, “How does it feel
To be such a freak?”
And you say, “Impossible”
As he hands you a bone

That could be straight from Philip Dick.

But I had other thoughts.  I also pondered whether Mr Jones was your average middle class American, seemingly in control, running the company, keeping the family together, but with no idea of the revolution that is going on around him.  (That actually is the opposite of Jones in the novel, who ultimately very much knows exactly what is happening).  This was, after all, the mid-60s when there was a real feeling that the old political and social ways could be swept aside for ever, and I think many young people of the era had this feeling that those running the system (by which I mean government, the media, education and the like) were simply out of their depth.

I think we were calling it the counter-culture by then, and in England the counter culture most certainly portrayed the feeling that the largely state controlled media of the era was utterly out of touch with what we were thinking.  They also most certainly were not playing our music – at least until John Peel came along on the pirate station “Radio London”.  Indeed I do remember talking to John about this song as we were trying to get him established on the BBC at that time (something against which there was much resistance).  But I don’t recall John being a Dylan fan particularly so I am not sure we got very far.

Anyway, musically the song is interesting as one of the few songs by Dylan in a minor key, and with chords totally built around the harmonic minor – by which I mean there is no deviation into flattened 7ths or anything like that.

So from the start you walk into the room, and the bass is just descending under your feet, and everything has that sad bleak minor feel (“The World that Jones Made” is a dystopia novel, and fits this notion exactly, and certainly relates to the “who is that man?” line – so my early thoughts weren’t that whacky).

And I suppose it was that first line that gave me the feeling of Jones as Mr Middle Class, who has utterly lost touch with his children, to whom he has nothing to say when he gets home.  The more he tries to find out, the less any of it makes sense, the more freakish they appear.

But the alternative notion – the alternative to my thoughts of Philip Dick and Mr Middle Class who suddenly realises that the world has all changed while he wasn’t looking,  was that Dylan was writing about a real person.

Dylan was quoted in an August 1965 interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edminston, as saying, “He’s a real person. You know him, but not by that name… I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, ‘That’s Mr. Jones.’ Then I asked this cat, ‘Doesn’t he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?’ And he told me, ‘He puts his nose on the ground.’ It’s all there, it’s a true story.”

There is also a quote from March 1986, when Dylan said that he wrote Thin Man in response to everyone who kept asking him questions all the time.  “You just get tired of that every once in a while. You just don’t want to answer no more questions. I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right? So, every once in a while you got to do this kind of thing, you got to put somebody in their place… So this is my response to something that happened over in England. I think it was about ’63, ’64. Anyway the song still holds up. Seems to be people around still like that. So I still sing it.”

That quote is particularly interesting in relation to the reviews I’ve just been doing concerning Self Portrait, as before I started this review I was trying to think how to review the two instrumentals from Self Portrait.  I think that quote gives me the answer – I’ll come back to them shortly.  I’ll come back to the England bit in a moment.

Getting back to Thin Man as one single person…  In 1975, Jeffrey Owen Jones, a film director, and lecturer at Rochester Institute of Technology (who died in 2014) was suggested as the person concerned.  In most versions of the story the person involved was said to be a “reporter” – and indeed Jones was working at Time magazine at the time of Thin Man’s conception.

But this event had nothing to do with England, but rather New England, and the Newport Folk Festival, which would make the date recalled by Dylan fit.   In this version, Dylan and Jones talked before Dylan went on stage with his electric set, which caused dismay to some folk purists at the festival.

Jones’ claim to be “the” Jones of the Ballad was suggested in Rolling Stone, in which interview he wrote, “I was thrilled — in the tainted way I suppose a felon is thrilled to see his name in the newspaper.   I was awed too that Dylan had so accurately read my mind. I resented the caricature but had to admit that there was something happening there at Newport in the summer of 1965, and I didn’t know what it was.”

According to a local Rhode Island paper Jones then moved on to work in Uruguay and Spain as a film director, before returning to the US, becoming a lecturer in film, while working on educational films for CBS.

But less we get too carried away by such a revelation, in 1990 Dylan said, “There were a lot of Mister Joneses at that time,” and so everyone has been free to have his or her interpretation.

But of all of these, the journalist interpretation, especially in relation to the journalist who kicks the man when he’s down by writing about his misery and refusing to let him crawl away and redeem himself, seems to fit best.  Just listen again to the opening with that thought in mind…

You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard
But you don’t understand
Just what you’ll say
When you get home

But still I come back, crazy though it sounds, to “The World that Jones Made” because that is a story set in a world in which every idea is possible and accepted.  The only rule is that you are not allowed to preach your ideas to someone else.  Try verse 2 in that regard.

You raise up your head
And you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says
“It’s his”
And you say, “What’s mine?”
And somebody else says, “Where what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God
Am I here all alone?”

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Of course after this Dylan goes into the freak show people who were referenced so often in the songs of this era, from the geek in the third verse to the lumberjacks in the “middle 8” which in this song does work as a perfect relief from the slow plodding of the descending bass of the verses.  But if you really know Philip Dick the writer, you will also know that this is exactly his world.  Strange isn’t it, if Dylan never read that novel.

But the point is that these verses still work perfectly as the thought of the journalist trying to interpret this crazy world for a publisher who is still stuck in the 1950s.  And they work as an interpretation of Philip Dick’s writing.  And they work as a denunciation of the old culture, out of touch with the new.

It all works – that is what makes the song so powerful, and the music with those minor chords and plodding bass all fit as well.  Just as does the organ and piano together (a rarely used combination before this time).

The key point that pulls all these different theories together is that until the mid-60s culture was very much controlled – suddenly here the kids were breaking free and doing their own thing.  (In a certain way Dylan came back to this in Early Roman Kings – culture as a powerful force in its own right).

The journalist is watching the show and trying to interpret it for an audience as bemused as he is….

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, “How does it feel
To be such a freak?”
And you say, “Impossible”
As he hands you a bone

As we move to the middle 8 the notion seems solidified with the talk of “contacts” and the use of imagination as a way of interpretation – keeping the old world going by giving to charity.

But still the journalist theme continues, with

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known

But there is also a homosexual or bi-sexual interpretation.  I am not sure it works for all of the song but it certainly works with the sword swallower verse.

Maybe that is the point – it is all about confusion and even the confusion gets confusing.

Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word “NOW”
And you say, “For what reason?”
And he says, “How?”
And you say, “What does this mean?”
And he screams back, “You’re a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home”

In the end we are left with those recurrent lines…

By Tony Attwood

Living the Blues is one of those odd Dylan slightly flawed gems that turns up so unexpectedly – in this case on Self Portrait, an album not known for its Dylan originals.

And for once Clinton Heylin and I agree – although only on one point.  The origin of this song was undoubtedly “Singing the blues” written in 1954 by the wheelchair bound Melvin Endsley and recorded by just about everyone from Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Guy Mitchell (also covered by Tommy Steele in the UK) to Andy Williams, Paul McCartney, Stonewall Jackson, and Ricky Skaggs.    

The similarity between Dylan’s song and Endsley’s masterpiece just jump out if you are familiar with both, and I’d like to point out (to retain my own credibility here) I thought of this long before I read Heylin.  But interesting to see he makes this his main point.

“Living the blues” was the one giant hit that Endsley had, although Knee Deep in the Blues also found favour, and many of his other songs were minor hits, and Dylan would certainly have been fully aware of the song at the time of writing his version.  Interestingly, the melody is different from and indeed more melodic than “Singing the Blues” where the first three bars are sung on just two notes, but the lyrics have a very similar feel.  The “Without you” refrain is in both songs.

Dylan performed the song on the Johnny Cash show in June 1969 – although it looks very much like he was miming to a recording made a little time before in the studio.   This is a slightly different version from the Self Portrait album version. If you want to an alternative there is a not very good version by the tribute band Love Minus Zero & Friends also on line, but really, I wouldn’t bother.

So, for the song itself, it is in C and there is a jagged little intro that recurs in the song on the notes C, B flat, G, F, E flat C.  A standard blues descending scale, although the melody and lilt of the song itself have nothing to do with the blues – which is another link to “Singing the Blues”.  But that inclusion of B flat and E flat really does remind us that this is “the blues” – a nice touch.

Indeed if you do know “Singing the blues” you get to think about it as soon as Dylan gets going with…

Since you’ve been gone
I’ve been walking around
With my head bowed down to my shoes
I’ve been living the blues
Ev’ry night without you

Singing the blues itself opens with

Well, I never felt more like singin’ the blues
’cause I never thought that I’d ever lose
Your love dear, why’d you do me this way?
Well, I never felt more like cryin’ all night
’cause everythin’s wrong, and nothin’ ain’t right
Without you, you got me singin’ the blues.

Different song, and the Guy Mitchell version I have found on You Tube is more upbeat than I remember it, but even so, there are links.

Dylan continues with a real 1950s feel…

I don’t have to go far
To know where you are
Strangers all give me the news
I’ve been living the blues
Ev’ry night without you

And then, in keeping with the style of the 1950s Dylan gives us a “middle 8” – an intermediate section which was so popular in pop music of that era.   It is just what “Singing the blues” does.

He moves onto F major for the first two bars, and then back to C major, but then in a break from “Singing the blues” the fourth line “But I can’t deny” goes to D major, preparing to modulate to G major.   We do indeed get there, but then the last line of this section (“Carry for you deep down inside”) is very strange.  It starts on the chord of G major, making us feel we are very truly there, and then quickly goes through a set of chords that associate with C major – but not C major in blues music, but C major in classic folk.

All in all this final line which runs through the chords of G, F, Dm, Em Am F

I think that it’s best
I soon get some rest
And forget my pride
But I can’t deny
This feeling that I
Carry for you deep down inside

It is a most curious experiment, and not one that I have ever heard done in any other song.  Indeed I think one might also say that this isn’t tried elsewhere because it just doesn’t work.

The whole song is lilting.  Yes it has the lyrical theme of the blues – the woman has gone – but it is the blues 1950s pop and country style.  There’s not a single element of Dylan’s early folk roots in this at all either in the lyrics or the melody or the chords.   And then suddenly we get this strange set of chord changes.  It really seems to disrupt the whole piece for no reason.

For me it is an experiment that failed to work but which is left in, which is a shame because otherwise it is lovely piece of music.

Apparently it was intended as a single, but was then dropped for Lay Lady Lay.  But we have it preserved on Self Portrait.   But even there it is rather curious coming immediately before Like a Rolling Stone.

Maybe the clue is in the last verse.  Does “If you see me this way” mean “mixed up between my old song, my rock masterpieces when I can’t remember all the words (which he can’t in the Self Portrait version) and a bit of country?”

That might be pushing it all too far, but even so, that’s how it comes across.

If you see me this way
You’d come back and you’d stay
Oh, how could you refuse
I’ve been living the blues
Ev’ry night without you

It is a lovely song, but that last part of the middle 8 is, for me at least, a trifle annoying.

Index to all the songs reviewed.

By Tony Attwood

I mentioned in reviewing the “All the tired horses” track from Self Portrait that I had forgotten all about that song until a request was sent in to review it.

My LP Self Portrait has long since gone, but I suspect if it still lives somewhere in some second hand record shop and it were to be played there would be endless scratches at the start of the second track, because what I used to do was play Alberta over and over, by-passing the first track.  Not because I didn’t like “All the Tired Horses” but because I loved Alberta so much.

While the commentaries of the “What is this shit?” variety proliferated by commentators unable to see beyond the end of their typewriters, there were some of us who saw it differently.

Dylan had had one major change of direction from acoustic to “play it fucking loud”, and been roundly condemned.  Now he was at it again, doing his own thing, looking back to the songs that influenced all of us who played in bands at the time and who sought to explore where our music had come from and where it might go.

The point here was that everyone wanted to own Dylan, to control him to tell him what he was and what he was allowed to be.  In fact to make pompous critics and their reviews more important than the man they were reviewing.

It seems incredible these days that such thoughts exist, although in reviewing Dylan’s post-divorce activities with No Time to Think I noted that the promoter of the Japanese tour sent over a list of what songs he wanted to hear, and what he did not want.

This is what Dylan has fought against.  While visual artists, authors, playwrights, dancers – and in fact the whole community of artists can do their thing and have the freedom of time and space to explore their genre, genius rock musicians always find others trying to control their art.  Everyone’s an expert, everyone knows better than Bob.

Like hell they do.

Now I have said on this site many times that I don’t consider myself an artist of high esteem – clearly not – but I have earned my living as a musician and a writer, and in my own way I have my own artistic integrity.  Yes I have often written for other people to their requirements, but there are limits beyond which I don’t go.

So if I can make a few decisions about my own work. Dylan, being the supreme popular musical artist of a generation can certainly decide for himself.  Indeed we may ask, who the hell are these people who seek to tell him what to do?  Just how self-important does a person have to be to be to think he/she can suggest that Dylan is right to do this and wrong to do that.

The two Alberta tracks on Self Portrait are my absolute favourites – they were then and they are now.  They are sung with such care and devotion, arranged with such sympathy for the songs that they are, and they say, “I’m a singer, these songs mean something to me, listen if you wish, but don’t you dare tell me what to do, what to believe, what to say…”

Alberta 1 and 2 are different songs – number 1 is that slow poignant style that Dylan perfected for songs of sadness and goodbye, while number 2 has that characteristic bounce.  I have read that one of the two is in triple time – I can’t see that.  You can make an argument for No 2 being in 2/4 rather than 4/4 but that’s it.  Certainly No 1 is solid 4/4 – you can’t feel it any other way.

The song itself goes back to the 1930s if not earlier.  LeadBelly recorded “Alberta” several times in the 1930s and 40s and Mary Wheeler has it in her 1944 collection with the note that it was collected from Gabriel Hester with the lyrics that we know today.

It might well be a steam boat song – it might not – but either way it has always been incredibly popular – and as people started to value American folk music all over again, rather than discard it (often with the most awful racial overtones in their criticisms) as primitive, so this song as always been a favourite.

Dylan starts with a minor chord – unusual for him (Em) and resolves to D and then to the tonic chord of G.  It is a perfect chordal arrangements in both versions.

Alberta let your hair hang low
Alberta let your hair hang low
I’ll give you more gold
Than your apron can hold
If you’d only let your hair hang low

What Dylan is doing, I believe, is not just recording a song that he loves, and indeed a song that all of us who developed musically through the growth in awareness of where our popular music came from, he is also using the song to talk to his critics – the people who worry about him, while he is far from worrying about himself.  The fools who tell him what to think and what to do.

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

These people are getting at him, saying, “We want another Desolation Row, we want another 4th Street” but Dylan is saying, no, I’ve done that, I’ve made my protest, I’ve hit out at people I dislike, and that was just a phase.  I don’t want to criticise like I did in “Rolling Stone”, I don’t want to walk away like “One to many mornings”, I just want to reflect and think, and look at the world afresh.

Alberta don’t you treat me unkind
Alberta don’t you treat me unkind
Oh my heart is so sad
Cause I want you so bad
Alberta don’t you treat me unkind

There is a significance in both versions – just go back to the first version (the second track on the album) and listen to those rotating guitar chords at the very start, before the singing starts.  What does it say to you?

To me it says,

And I ride on a mail train, baby, can’t buy no thrill
Yes, I’ve been up all night, baby, leanin’ on the window sill
Yeah, but if I die on top of the hill
And if I don’t make it, you know my baby will

When everyone is getting at you, it takes a lot to laugh.  So Alberta don’t you treat me unkind.

Genius dismissed as shit.  Wasn’t it ever thus?

Index to all the songs

By Tony Attwood

The problems with popular music critics through the ages have been legion.  A lack of any sort of musical knowledge (Clinton Heylin is the prime culprit here), a lack of understanding of the creative process, a lack of comprehension of the artistic mind… Indeed everything is set aside so that a simple “does it work?” or “does it do something new?” question can be asked.  Most of the time they are not critics, they’re bullshitters.

For creativity in the arts isn’t like that, and thank goodness that although there are some fairly feeble theatre, art, classical music, dance and literary critics around we do have some who understand the explorations, the games, the trials of the artist.

Indeed I can imagine that if Heylin had declared himself a literary critic instead of pontificating on Dylan, he might well have applauded Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” for being short and to the point with some interesting characters, but sneered at Gravity’s Rainbow for being too long.   Or maybe he would have enjoyed the Pickwick Papers because they were funny, and dismissed Bleak House as too dull to hold the audience.

Nowhere is this point better made that with his review of “All the tired horses” and indeed much of Self Portrait (which he graciously informs us without any justification is not a self-portrait).

The notion of popular songs written around a handful of lines has been with us for a long old time – certainly since the early days of rock n roll, and indeed the 12 bar blues themselves have the approach of repeating the first line in each three line verse.

One only has to think of  the rhythm and blues classic “I Need Your Lovin” composed by Bobby Robinson and Don Gardner which has just one line – “I need your lovin everyday” and was a huge hit in 1962.  It lasts almost six minutes and manages to combine the gospel feeling with the insistant repeat of the line symbolising the power and passion of love in which all one can do is think of one’s lover, over and over and over.

Others have gone for three line songs – Little Richard’s “Keep on knocking” is a classic with

• You keep on knocking but you can’t come in
• Come back tomorrow night and try it again
• You said you love me but you can’t come in.

Or if you prefer there is “Hound Dog”

• You ain’t nothing but a hound dog crying all the time
• You ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine
• You said you were high class but that was just a lie.

What these songs do is use the power and drive of the music to allow the lines to be repeated over and over while “I need your loving” plays with the vocal part as two singers entwine.  What Dylan does, typically, is goes somewhere else, varying the accompaniment constantly while keeping the lyrical line stable.

It is a most interesting experiment, and coming back to it now (I have to admit I had forgotten about the song, until I received a request to write about it) I’m led to the conclusion that the people who come out of this album looking silly are not Dylan and the record company but the critics, like the Rolling Stone guy who wrote “What is this shit?”   “More than you could possibly know,” I think would be an appropriate answer.

All the tired horses in the sun
How am I supposed to get any riding done?

Dylan has spoken in some interviews about the Self Portrait album, and expressed his frustration at what the media seemed to be demanding of him, as if he would suddenly pop up at Woodstock, suddenly embrace this or that cause – it all represented a complete misunderstanding of Dylan as the musical and literary explorer, the great traveller taking in every genre, and each diversion, just to see where it went.

But instead of seeing it like that, most writers have followed the notion that “riding” is Dylan actually saying “writing”.  As a metaphor it is hardly very profound for such a lyricist is it?

I think that just as “I hear you knocking” can repeat and repeat because it is about the continual attempt by the Devil to re-enter Richard Penniman’s life,  “I need your loving” repeats and repeats to stress how love is bigger than everything, and “Hound Dog” is just “you’re nothing, you’re nothing, you’re nothing” (the reverse in fact of “I need your loving”) so “All the tired horses” is about the world around.

If everyone around you in the world is just run down and going over the same old ground, it is hard to pick yourself up.  So you look elsewhere – which on the album Dylan does perfectly soon after with his beautiful rendition of Alberta.

Although, as I say, I had lost track of this song, when I heard it again I was reminded of my first hearing of it, when I thought the singer sang, “All the wild horses” – which would change the meaning totally to one of “there’s a party going on, and I want to work.”  But no, this is the world, still a pretty world, still an interesting world, but a world, that is running down.  We need a new direction.  The band plays on in ever increasing twiddles and turns, but we don’t get anywhere at all.  We need that new route out.

As such, the album is perfect; a review of sources, an artist’s sketchbook, a poet’s collection of favourite lines.  Had it been me (and I’m not of course suggesting I have one billionth of the creative talent of Dylan) I would have tried  playing with Auden’s

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

and

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun

as my source, or maybe Eliot…

See the women come and go, talking of Michaelangelo 

We all have our favourite lines to express where we are, to remind us of what’s what, and to allow us to pick up, look around and start again.  On this album Dylan did just that.

Index of all the songs reviewed

By Tony Attwood

For this review I’ve been listening to the version of the song on Infidels

and a singularly different version on You Tube recorded at The Warfield 1992.  

I have to say I am not sure what Dylan was about with this live version – far from adding anything to the song it seems to me to distract.    There is also a version by David Albion which I found so horrible I could only listen to about 10 seconds before stopping it, so I am not providing a link.

Thus it is the album version for me.   A rollicking rock blues sung with the sort of echo chamber that I’ve rarely encountered beyond rock records of the late 1950s.  But it works really well – the great demagogue with his megaphone standing before the crowd telling them what’s what.

Well, my shoes, they come from Singapore
My flashlight’s from Taiwan
My tablecloth’s from Malaysia
My belt buckle’s from the Amazon
You know, this shirt I wear comes from the Philippines
And the car I drive is a Chevrolet
It was put together down in Argentina
By a guy makin’ thirty cents a day

Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
’Til greed got in the way

Well, this silk dress is from Hong Kong
And the pearls are from Japan
Well, the dog collar’s from India
And the flower pot’s from Pakistan
All the furniture, it says “Made in Brazil”
Where a woman, she slaved for sure
Bringin’ home thirty cents a day to a family of twelve
You know, that’s a lot of money to her

The music is a simple rotation of A and G chords through the verse, with that glorious guitar rock lick going on behind.  In the chorus we move across to rotating D to A chords with an E to A to round it off.

I think we’ve heard Dylan talking about the need to help the workers through protectionism before, although at this moment I can’t remember where.  But being English I come from a different tradition – although curiously we had our rampant protectionists too, the political party: the United Kingdom Independence Party, which became  the Brexit Party, which gave us the sort of self-focussed determinism that Bob seemed to like.

For me this is one of those songs where I love the music, even though, largely because of where I live and my upbringing, I can’t sympathise at all with protectionism.  For me, the fault is not that we buy from around the world – I want to do that, and I want the workers who create the shoes, clothes and computers I buy to be well paid and get ever higher standards of living.  Naive of course but that’s what I want.

But there’s an enormous kick at the end of the song.  I still can’t work out if there is additional meaning there, or it is just a few lines to make up the last verse.  I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Where the UK and perhaps the US has gone wrong (and as a UK citizen I do not want to start saying that I know what’s what in any other country) is through going for the global economy, but meanwhile not delivering a good enough education system at home, so that our citizens can take on the jobs not covered by poorer countries.  Like developing anti-gravity devices, providing energy without carbon emissions, giving everyone healthy food and plentiful water…

So I come from a different place from Dylan on this one, but that doesn’t spoil my enjoyment.  For once it is a political protest song that I mostly don’t agree with but so what.  Yes of course I am against greed, but greed and capitalism are one of a kind, for the most part.  For every Victorian philanthropist that we had, we had a dozen mine owners who paid their workforce the lowest possible wage and kept the guard dogs around them should anyone have the temerity to ask for an extra penny.  And with the mine owners and the like backed by the government – just look at Winston Churchill as Home Secretary taking on the miners and using the troops to put down the strikes in 1910.

In one sense, irrespective of his political views, Dylan is therefore being simplistic in the song.   In a free market capitalist economy companies will outsource production to provide cheaper goods and more profit and capitalist governments will support them.  By making their goods cheaper the firms get more sales, and consumers buy the cheaper goods and governments get voted back in.  If it didn’t, it wouldn’t have sustained itself.

Anyone who wants to by pass imported goods can certainly do that, although in the UK that is slightly more complicated, because (at least for now and I hope for a long time to come) the UK is part of the European Union, which means there are no import duties on anything traded within the Union.  So we export and import across Europe without trade barriers – and about half our trade is done this way.

Well, my shoes, they come from Singapore
My flashlight’s from Taiwan
My tablecloth’s from Malaysia
My belt buckle’s from the Amazon
You know, this shirt I wear comes from the Philippines
And the car I drive is a Chevrolet
It was put together down in Argentina
By a guy makin’ thirty cents a day

But where I fall out with Dylan here is in the area where he suggests that the problem is not just that of big corporations, but with ordinary people in supermarkets and on line who will buy what is best – often cheapest – for them.  We do have “fair trade” products but an awful lot of people go for the lowest price, no matter what.

So for myself the key is in the last line of that first verse.  The question is what do we do about the poverty created by this sort of global market – poverty within a country that we have no control over.  What do we do about this by-product of global capital?

Of course if you want to protect jobs in your own country you should buy products made in your own country – but the person living on less than a living wage says, “how can I?  I don’t have the money”.  So the cycle continues.

And so the simplicity of the verse

Well, you know, lots of people complainin’ that there is no work
I say, “Why you say that for
When nothin’ you got is U.S.–made?”
They don’t make nothin’ here no more

is the core of the song.   In the end therefore I guess my problem comes back over and over with that chorus

Sure was a good idea
’Til greed got in the way

No, I doubt capitalism was ever a good idea.  It was just the idea that made some people in the USA and the UK very rich.

But I do like the way Dylan has a bash at the trade unions.  Trade unions in the UK have developed in a very different way from the unions in the USA, as far as I know, and those that are left are still hanging on in the UK, are still doing a good job for their members protecting against employers who play the dirty tricks like trying to change contracts without agreement on both side, and then trying to avoid redundancy payments.

And so Dylan finally moves on …

Democracy don’t rule the world
You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid

This almost seems like part of another song, not really connected with the main thrust of the argument about global trade.  When I first listened I remember wanting Dylan to go further with this, but somehow he just didn’t want to.

Certainly all the years since would seem to boost this point in these four lines.  If only Bob had left these lines for another song, and then developed it fully what a song that might have been.   Masters of War: Looking back from the wreckage.

Index to all the songs reviewed.