Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

This series looks as the way Bob Dylan evolved from being a man who would arrange older folk songs, and on occasion, take existing melodies and write his lyrics around them, into an extraordinarily effective composer of both lyrics and music.

Previously in this series I’ve looked at…

• Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
• Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
• Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
• Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
• Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
• Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
• Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
• Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
• North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music

Bob Dylan released two songs overtly about the North Country in 1963 (overtly in the sense that they each had “North Country” in the title): Girl from the North Country and North Country Blues). And the links in those two cases were traced to some degree in my original articles considering the songs).

In both of these cases, there have been suggestions that the music was derived in part at least from earlier traditional ballads – Scarborough Fair for “Girl from the North Country” and “Red Iron Ore” for North Country Blues.  Such links (and others noted in the articles) are indeed very possible, and we should also note Bob’s own testimony that he was (at least at this time) listening to multiple folk songs and might well not have been aware of any link between his song and any antecedent.

Or, and I think this is much more likely, Bob would know of the previous versions of the songs and merely see himself as a person carrying on an exciting and valuable tradition of taking older songs and updating them lyrically for the current audience or situation.

So, continuing with our series on Bob’s early songs, the next song Bob recorded was Gypsy Lou, a song which he first wrote (or perhaps adapted from another source) in around 1961 or 1962.  But the song was not recorded until 1963, and given the way Bob would manipulate his own songs it is quite likely that the version that we have from 1963 is not exactly that which he wrote a couple of years earlier.  After all, it was his song, and he could do what he wanted with it!

This is fundamentally a two-chord song (although a third chord does creep in occasionally), and the melody of the first two lines of each verse sounds (annoyingly) familiar but writing today I can’t place it.   If you know, please add a comment below or if you prefer write to me at Tony@schools.co.uk

And as I noted in my previous review of this song, Bob does play tricks with “the way the melody subtly changes between the first and second verse.”  The lyrics are light and silly, although the song does seemingly deal with a suicide.

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

As for the music, my mind seems to be out of phase today as I write this, because I do know this melody, but I can’t place that either.  However, the rhythm is infectious and has been used everywhere.   In what follows, the speed is different, but the rhythm of the lyrics is very similar….  The content of course is about as far away from Gypsy Lou as it can be and the, but still there is a similarity.

But even Wikipedia doesn’t want to get involved in debating the source of “Gypsy Lou” and their engagement with Gypsy Lou vis a vis “Bootleg Volume 9” goes no further than listing the title.  And maybe I am wrong – maybe it doesn’t come from anywhere else, but I still have that nagging feeling.  (If you know please put me out of my misery.)

After that song, Dylan wrote Troubled and I Don’t Know Why, a song on the theme of everything is wrong

Now this time the source of the song is much easier to trace, for the song is based on a well-established folk song, “What does the deep sea say”

And indeed, Woody Guthrie made a recording of the song which could well have been Bob’s source.

The point that links these songs is that they are lively sing-a-longs from years before.  Indeed, the first recording of this song goes right back to 1929 – I don’t have access to that recording, but in 1937 it sounded like this…

Now my point here is that Bob was probably very aware of these songs mutating over time – they were indeed part of his country’s musical heritage, and so for him, I suspect, all he was doing was continuing this mutation of songs in keeping with the issues of the day.  He wasn’t seeing himself as going out and taking other people’s songs, he was continuing a tradition.

For Bob, “Troubled and I don’t know why” was just another song from the past which he could play with.   And playing with it he was, for Joan clearly doesn’t know what Bob is doing with the verses – she is there doing her bit for the chorus.   I suspect (but can’t prove) that at least some of the verses are Bob’s originals.   Especially the verse about the TV, which the audience clearly appreciated.

The series continues.

By Tony Attwood

This series looks as the way Bob Dylan evolved from being a man who would take existing melodies and write his lyrics songs around them, to an extraordinarily effective composer of both lyrics and music.

Previously in this series I’ve looked at…

• Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
• Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
• Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
• Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
• Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
• Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
• Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
• Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle

Now, I’m moving on to what seems to me to be a pivotal moment in the work of Bob Dylan the composer: North Country Blues

Bob had a certain affection with the notion of the “North Country” in 1963, writing both “Girl from the North Country”, and “North Country Blues” that year, but there is a huge difference between the songs, as the second of these pieces is as bleak as it could possibly be, both in the lyrics and the music.

The theme of economic change and the destruction of communities and individuals by an uncaring economic system, is very a Dylan theme, and indeed a theme of a lot of folk music, giving as it does an artistic context to the bleakness of lives affected by economic change which was not of fault of those affected so deeply by it.

Of course such change is always rationalised away and what we generally don’t feel or get to hear is the perspective of those most deeply affected, and who lack the resources to escape from the hell into which they have been plunged by unchecked capitalist exploitation of the local resources.  In most cases the stories of those whose lives are destroyed by unbridled economic change are never heard.  But Bob did give us one – although of course imaginary, the music and the images in the lyrics bring home to the listener the destructive nature of the economic system that created the problem.

Of course there have been other such songs but many will have been lost, and of course we don’t have recordings of how the songs were originally sung.  But there are elements of Dylan’s composition in the traditional ballad “Red Iron Ore”

Of course many recordings have been made by professional singers who will want to show their own vocal skills – as indeed will the pianists who accompany them, but beneath it all, there are elements of an earlier, simpler song

But it is important to add that this is not to say that Dylan somehow stole an earlier song, for the similarities between Bob’s version and those before are far fewer than we find in many of the other songs Bob was writing at this time.  Yet of course Bob was, we might agree to say, “influenced” by the folk song genre, but it does seem to me that here he created not only a completely new set of lyrics to tell the tale, but also a new song.  If there is an antecedent, please do let me know.  I’m not trying to claim my knowledge of folk songs is absolute.

What Bob does here is take these earlier versions and make out of them something more desperate still, and indeed more plaintive.  And it is not as if Bob did not have a variety of versions of the song to be influenced by… the notion of the destruction of the old ways as modernity and industrialisation transformed the world, is one that has been portrayed in song since the industrial revolution began in the later 18th century.

Here are two such songs that emerged from the revolution

But although many writers took the essence of the changes wrought by the industrial revolution and the tragedies it brought to the individuals caught up in its changes, Dylan it seems to me went far further with this song both musically and lyrically.

So although there may be some borrowing from the various Red Iron Ore songs that came from the era, Bob is most certainly not simply re-running the folk song.  He has personalised the situation in a way that makes us believe the characters are real.

Through this approach Bob has emphasised the horror and poverty of the situation by changes to the melody within the constant rotation of just two chords, which seem to suggest that there is no escape, there is absolutely no way out, everything is just stuck where it is, society and the capitalist system, is utterly uncaring.

But there is more because Dylan has, seemingly without being influenced by anyone else, decided to write a song in which most of the lines don’t rhyme – reflecting, it seems to me, the fact that these people’s lives can’t in any way be said to be rhyming.

Come gather ’round friends
And I’ll tell you a tale
Of when the red iron pits ran plenty
But the cardboard filled windows
And old men on the benches
Tell you now that the whole town is empty

Compare this with the lyrics of Red Iron Ore where the traditional AA BB format is continued throughout in terms of rhyme.

In the month of September, the seventeenth day,
two dollars and a quarter was all they would pay.
And on Monday morning the Bridgeport did take
the E. C. Roberts out into the lake.

So I see this as a real moment of Bob moving into his own field of musical composition, for here even the rhyme scheme reflects the horror of the story.  Bob has not copied music or lyrics because generally the music and the lyrics do not reflect the horrors of the situation.  The desperate bleakness of the situation is maintained throughout by only using two chords, and that repeated rise and fall of the melody, rising to a shout of anger, falling into desperation.

The lyrics and melody become a backdrop to this bleakness as the song ends as the husband, now utterly confused and reduced by drink either leaves or kills himself…. there is not even any need to clarify which, so deep is the desperation.

I lived by the window
As he talked to himself
This silence of tongues it was building
Then one morning’s wake
The bed it was bare
And I’s left alone with three children

The summer is gone
The ground’s turning cold
The stores one by one they’re a-foldin’
My children will go
As soon as they grow
Well, there ain’t nothing here now to hold them

The absolute tragedy of the lyrics in which there is no way out, is profoundly reflected by the simplicity of the music, and if, as it does seem to me, that Bob did in fact create the music himself, he must have known just how powerful his own writing could become.

So for me, this really does seem to be a big turning point.  Dylan is now creating his own song, and with incredible poignancy, weaving a tale around his original music.  OK, the music is not radically different enough from all that has gone before to call it ground-breaking – it is after based on all just two chords, but the impact and effect achieved in this piece, surely does mark it out as one of the key moments in the work of Bob Dylan the composer.  Two rotating chords is right – that is all that happens in the lives of the people in the song.  There is nowhere else to go, there is nothing to provide alternatives, except the alcohol.  And that is of course, never a solution, although it can be an end.

But for Dylan this was, I believe, a major new step forward – a song in which the music AND the lyrics equally portray the situation.

By Tony Attwood

This is a series of articles about Bob Dylan and the songs that he wrote which (at this stage) used other people’s music as he gradually built up the confidence (or maybe simply decided) to write some more songs with both the music and the lyrics composed by him.

So I am setting out below the articles so far

• Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
• Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
• Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
• Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
• Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
• Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
• Seven Curses and With God on Our Side

Following this we had Talkin John Birch Blues (as Bob introduced it) which became Talkin World War Three Blues

Clearly there is nothing original musically here, but the lyrics gained a lot of publicity.  However then Bob did create a song which not only had the most powerful of lyrics but also an original musical composition to go with the lyrics.  Indeed, it still seems to me decades later that the music fits the lyrics, and vice versa, perfectly.

And it has often struck me that Bob surely must have realised that he had written a stunning, amazing piece of music here, alongside these equally extraordinary lyrics – a piece which contrasted dramatically with what had gone before.  Was this not, perhaps, the moment that it really came to him that yes he could be a composer as well as a lyricist?   What, he may have wondered, am I doing, missing out on being a composer as well?

And it is interesting that now we have some interesting cover versions of the song.  The essence of the music is still there, but it is extended – something that can happen and can work because by now we all know the music.  Here are two examples…

So we now ask, what did Bob write next, now that he must have known he can be a composer as well as a lyricist?  Well, it was Eternal Circle, and you are forgiven if you can’t recall it.  It is a a three chord song which has a repeating melody and none of the power of what had gone before.

But the lyrics were indeed memorable – and really demanded music of more power…

I sung the song slowly as she stood in the shadows
She stepped to the light as my silver strings spun
She called with her eyes to the tune I was a playin'
But the song it was long and I'd only begun

Through a bullet of light her face was reflectin'
The fast fading words that rolled from my tongue
With a long-distance look her eyes was on fire
But the song it was long and there was more to be sung

My eyes danced a circle across her clear outline
With her head tilted sideways she called me again
As the tune drifted out she breathed hard through the echo
But the song it was long and it was far to the end

I glanced at my guitar and played it pretendin'
That of all the eyes out there I could see none
As her thoughts pounded hard like the pierce of an arrow
But the song it was long and it had to get done

As the tune finally folded I laid down the guitar
And looked for the girl who'd stayed for so long
But her shadow was missin' for all of my searchin'
So I picked up my guitar and began the next song

Ah, the tragedy of the lonely folk singer playing the clubs.  Except once “Only a pawn” had hit the streets Dylan was most certainly not that any more, and in reality hadn’t been for quite a long time.

And we did eventually get a few cover versions of the song… although not for quite a few years.   But the issue that struck me when I first heard it through these cover versions was just how long it took people to realise that it was worthwhile taking a Dylan piece and trying it out with a new arrangement.  Ah well, these musicians can be a bit slow sometimes…

In fact what we did have in this song, as Dylan wrote it, was the essence of Restless Farewell, which was to follow just a short while later, so maybe we should just think of this as a sketch of the later song, which somehow escaped into the wild.

And that point is itself important, for it reflects on the fact that Dylan, although by now an experienced lyricist, was not an experienced songwriter.   He was at this point still feeling his way, and still singing other people’s songs, even if they were to his own lyrics.

The series continues….

Details of our current and recent series can be found on the home page 

——————

Highlands (1997) part 1:  Wild rose in the heather

by Jochen Markhorst

A boy saw a wild rose
growing in the heather;
it was so young, and as lovely as the morning.
He ran swiftly to look more closely,
looked on it with great joy.
Wild rose, wild rose, wild rose red,
wild rose in the heather.

(“Heidenröslein, Wild Rose”, poem by Goethe, set to music Schubert, transl. Richard Wigmore)

In the liner notes to the various records of Schubert songs, it is often and gladly repeated. Schubert, who was a great fan of Goethe’s lyricism, sent him his set of Lieder in 1816 and again in 1825 three songs that he had dedicated to Goethe. On one occasion, Goethe sent back the consignment, which contained such small masterpieces as “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, “Erlkönig” and “Heidenröslein” without comment; on the other, he did not reply at all.

The undertone in these liner notes when quoting this anecdote is usually: how is it possible that the Dichterfürst, the poet laureate, did not recognise Schubert’s genius, and how strange is it that the civilised, broad-minded Goethe bluntly ignored Schubert’s outstretched hand? And for two hundred years now, musicologists and literary scholars have been thinking they have an answer to this. “Schubert’s music was too strong a competitor for the musicality of his lyricism,” for instance, and “Schubert’s songs did in fact not set Goethe’s poems to music – at best, he was inspired by them.”

Marlene Dietrich – Heidenröslein:

It is a somewhat romantic notion, which assumes that Goethe actually studied Schubert’s arrangements of his lyricism and felt threatened by them. Which is rather speculative. Indeed, it is rather unlikely. Goethe himself, a meticulous chronicler of his own life, makes no mention of Schubert and his dispatches either in his diaries, letters or autobiography. Yes, a small marginal note in one of his diaries, 16 June 1825, a day summed up in 95 words. The last 33 of these are:

„Sendung des Grafen Sternberg. Nachricht von seiner vorhabenden Reise. Sendung von Felix von Berlin, Quartette. Sendung von Schubert aus Wien, von meinen Liedern Compositionen. In Dodwell und Stanhope Morea und die griechischen Angelegenheiten.

Dispatch of Count Sternberg. News of his intended journey. Consignment of Felix from Berlin, quartets. Consignment of Schubert from Vienna, compositions of my songs. In Dodwell and Stanhope Morea and the Greek affairs.”

… and that throws some light on Goethe’s alleged disinterest. An identical picture emerges from the other, thousands of diary entries: Goethe’s house at Frauenplan in Weimar is inundated week in week out, for years on end, with letters, parcels and shipments from all over Europe. Goethe made the conscious decision to be very selective fairly early on in his life. “If I could not tell someone something special and appropriate, as the particular issue demanded, I preferred not to write at all,” he tells his secretary Eckermann in the last years of his life (Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, “Conversations with Goethe”, 1836). And:

“Thus it came to be that I could not answer many an honest man whom I would have liked to have written. You can see for yourself what is going on at my place and what kind of shipments arrive every day from every corner of the world. And you must admit that it would need more than one human lifetime if one wanted to respond to everything just briefly.”

It is much more likely, in short, that Schubert’s correspondence simply went down in the tsunami of mail. Well, it did not, thank God, discourage Schubert.

The custom of setting literary poems to music took off in the nineteenth century. Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Richard Strauss – in fact, all the great composers – loved to be inspired by the works of Schiller, Goethe, Eichendorff, Heine and all the others. And some poets owe their eternal fame to the musical setting of their actually mediocre poetry. Wilhelm Müller’s work, for example, we know mainly because Schubert composed his immortal Winterreise on it.

In the twentieth century, when poets place less and less value on the musicality of their poems, and thus make it more difficult for musicians to write music to their non-rhyming, arrhythmic and unstructured poems, the nineteenth-century duality of poets and song composers fades. The most successful examples generally fall back on solid, classical poetry. The Waterboys set poems by Yeats to music (An Appointment With Mr. Yeats, 2011), Leonard Cohen adapts Federico García Lorca’s poem “Pequeño vals vienés” (“Take This Waltz”, 1988), Edgar Allan Poe is picked up by Alan Parsons and Lou Reed, among others, and William Blake does reasonably well too (in The Verve’s “History” from 1995, for instance).

The Verve – History:

Dylan, then, has his own approach. He does not set other people’s poems to music, but he likes to borrow a line here and a word combination there. Even to this day, as is well known; “I Contain Multitudes” from 2020 is a line from Walt Whitman, for instance. William Blake echoes have been in Dylan’s oeuvre for half a century. In “Roll On, John” and in “Every Grain Of Sand”, to name just two, and here on Time Out Of Mind in “Cold Irons Bound” and in the outtake “Marchin’ To The City”. We hear T.S. Eliot in “Visions Of Johanna”, and dozens of verses and word combinations from – especially – Civil War era poems that can be found in the songs on Dylan’s aptly titled album “Love And Theft” (2001) and in the monumental song “’Cross The Green Mountain”.

“Highlands” is another variation on this practice. The core of Robert Burns’ chorus is set to music, and then largely, as in the “normal” folk tradition, reworked;

Robert Burns (1789)
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go.

Bob Dylan (1997)
Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart’s in the Highland
I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go

Dylan sings five variants of this refrain in his song, all of which in substance boil down to the same thing as Burns’ refrain; nature’s idyll and longing. And routinely picks the botanical additions thereto from songs that are somewhere at the front of the canon; “Wildwood Flower”, “Honeysuckle Rose”, “The Twelfth Of Never” (I’ll love you till the bluebells forget to bloom), and in the chorus variants comparable bluegrass clichés like “over the hills and far away”, and comparable rural scenery like “horses and hounds” in the fourth chorus and “buckeyed trees” in the second chorus.

Wildwood Flower – Johnny Cash:

The local botanist would object, by the way; it is buckeye trees. A detail, but it does grate a bit nevertheless, because apparently a spelling correction already has been made. The misspelling bluebelles on the official site and in Lyrics 1962-2001 has been corrected to bluebells in Lyrics 1961-2012, and buckeyed has also been considered: it has been changed to buck-eyed – with a hyphen, but is still wrong.

It would not have happened to Goethe. The uomo universalis from Weimar was not only a statesman, poet, scientist and philosopher, but also a naturalist; his botanical work, such as Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums (1817), is considered to be a precursor for Darwin, also according to Darwin himself. In the historical introduction that Charles Darwin includes in the third edition of On the Origin of Species, he acknowledges Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as “an extreme partisan” of the transmutation view. Goethe was, in short, botanically as well as linguistically versed enough to know how to spell buckeye and bluebells.

But he could not write beautiful songs.

To be continued. Next up Highlands part 2: You can hear the air around it

 ——————-

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

By Tony Attwood

Previously in this series

• Dylan, 1963 from copying of other people’s music to the launch of the original composer
• Why does a simple, hardly known Dylan song, get recorded over and over again?
• How the most subtle of musical changes gave “Bob Dylan’s Dream” a totally different meaning
• How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second: “Masters of War”
• When copying other people’s music was Bob’s prime way of working
•  Who killed Davey Moore?: A different type of borrowing

When we look at Dylan the songwriter in 1963 we get a curious set of contradictions, most particularly, we see a man who could write original music which is highly interesting, entertaining and worthy of listening to repeatedly, but who would also copy the music from other songs and use them these songs as a way of communicating his lyrics, generally without acknowledgement.   Indeed as we have seen Bob was quite capable of copying his own melodies if that is what he perceived the new lyrics needed.

In the last discussion on this topic we got to “You’ve been hiding too long” and I concluded with the thought that “What we are in fact seeing is the evolution of Dylan the composer of music, who can work alongside Dylan the composer of lyrics.”

After that song, Bob composed Seven Curses a song concerned with the absolute betrayal of justice, and what a father will do to protect his daughter.  Here, we are back to Dylan using an existing song and idea (in this case the “Maid Freed From the Gallows”.)  There are multiple versions of the song around as it moved through the folk tradition across Europe – seemingly from Hungary.  Below is one, translated into English, which takes the interpretation of the song in a different direction

And this is where Bob really does let his own arrangement of the music overtake the original 

Now I am not really into trying to get you to jump around this site and read something else I have written, but I think I was getting fairly near the mark when some ten years ago I wrote my review of Dylan singing the song – a review that others have been kind enough to quote off and on love the years.  So I will include a couple of sentences in which I point out that Dylan “took elements from the old songs, and devised his own new words and variations on the old. It is the natural ability of the artist that tells him which words work in which context, and here Dylan gets it right throughout.”

What makes this re-writing by Dylan, and indeed this recording, so important in the history of Dylan’s compositional ability, is that here has taken a traditional piece of music, kept the simplicity of the song, and indeed given it an accompaniment which is also simple, and yet gives us a morality tale which is utterly profound.  The music and the lyrics are utterly as one, in the sense that the world just keeps on going, while these appalling events unfold before us – and somehow we simply have to continue, somehow pretending that everything is ok, and there is nothing utterly wrong with our species and the cultures we create.

In short, this is for me a moment in the history of Dylan’s creativity which is as important – indeed as monumental – as his recording of Ballad for a Friend, a song for which I still cannot trace the antecedents. In essence, this is the taking of a traditional piece in such a new direction, and with such a perfect accompaniment that one is moving from the notion of “arranged by Bob Dylan” into “written by Bob Dylan”.  It is the same music as existed before, but somehow, it isn’t.

And I think this is important to note, because it highlights the fact that there was a process going on – a process which involved the coalessing of the performing of traditional songs with the writing of new songs.  Dylan had no worry about performing the piece as it was in earlier times – his interest was in making new music irrespective of the sources of his inspiration.  His interest was in fact, in his own creativity in relation to the musical monuments that had come before.

Now to me, this is a prime issue that is generally ignored in most writings about Bob Dylan.  Indeed if you had the patience to read through some of my ramblings in relation to Heylin’s monumental work “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” you might have noticed that across thousands of words I was making the point that Heylin’s reportage was fundamentally meaningless because he refused utterly to take into account the creativity of Bob Dylan, both in terms of the resultant music which he created, and in terms of how being such a creative genius affected Dylan’s personality and behaviour.

And if you want an example of Dylan’s creative genius in relation to taking other works, and then out of such works finding something utterly new, and utterly worth listening to, this song is that example.  For Dylan merges the ancient traditions of music with the modern in a way that results in an utterly engaging and incredibly powerful composition and performance.

One thing we can conclude, however, is that it is very likely that Bob didn’t quite know what he had done at this point or how incredibly brilliant the result was.  For as I have mentioned before “Seven Curses” was only performed twice, in the spring and autumn of 1963.   Although fortunately, we do have that recording above from one of those performances.

And as I have written before, quite how Bob could have created such a brilliant, wonderful composition, and then just left it at two performances, I don’t know.   Maybe someone in the record company was making suggestions as to what was worth playing and what was not.   If so, we really ought to have a legal sentence of extended public humiliation for whoever it was.

What we do know for sure, however, was that this song emerged just after “New Orleans Rag” and “You’ve been hiding too long” – a song which I summarised as putting forward the view that “Our leaders have betrayed the ideals of our country”.  I am tempted to print a few verses of the song here, but having done so in a draft version of this little piece, I find they fail to portray the depths of the emotion that Bob got into that song.  You’ll have to listen to it above.

But the fact that this song is a monument of sheer genius in terms of lyrics, music and, above all, the arrangement through the way Bob plays the guitar, is not the full story.  For what Bob achieved with this now often forgotten song, is the delivery of the most powerful of messages and most overwhelming set of emotions, in a most simple song.  The only question there could have been for anyone following his work at the time had to be, “What on earth could he do next?”

And yet, despite this brilliance, what Bob did not do was to write a piece of music of his own.  Instea,d he took the music of “The Patriot Game” to create “With God on our Side”.

The music of the Patriot Game has the simplicity that Bob found worked so brilliantly in Seven Curses, both in terms of the music which formed the basis of “With God” but the music now became less sorrowful that Seven Curses, and one might say “more accursed.”

But there is a profound desperation in “With God” – both musically throughout and of course with that famous last couplet

"The words fill my head, and they fall to the floor
That if God's on our side, he'll stop the next war"

Thus, in two consecutive songs, written in a year in which Bob wrote 31 songs (an utterly astonishing number second only to the previous year in which he composed 36 songs), we have astounding genius.  And in the composition of these two songs, Bob took on the very fundamentals of mankind’s inhumanity and wickedness.   For in “Seven Curses” the legal system and its representative is betrayed and destroyed by the powerful.  In “With God on our Side” the world teeters on the edge of ruin through our own collective stupidity and idiocy.

If we ever need an example of Dylan brilliantly telling humankind how pathetic and stupid it is, in consecutive songs, this is the moment.  And it was done with two songs that used borrowed melodies.   And I doubt anyone who realised that the music was borrowed from earlier compositions minded at all.  Why should anyone?   Surely the results were so complete, so absolute, so overpowering, any suggestion that the music had existed before would be utterly churlish.

These two songs – one of which became known across the western world, one of which was perhaps only known to those dedicated to the study of Bob’s music, told us something that perhaps many of us knew but had not always wanted to acknowledge.  This is an appalling world that our ancestors have created and we have allowed to continue.  And Bob was pointing out how pathetically stupid we had become in allowing it to happen.

In short, so powerful was the message that I doubt that anyone at the time was the slightest bit worried about the notion that the music was copied from elsewhere.  Most wouldn’tt have known, and even if they did, surely that fact made not the slightest difference to the power and importance of the message contained therein.

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 19 (final)

by Jochen Markhorst

XIX       The generous ghost

The turnaround is radical, though not unexpected; it has been announced. After two albums with which he establishes his name as a protest singer, very much against his will by the way, Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964) is a first “betrayal” by the then 23-year-old icon. A deliberate attempt to sabotage his status as the spokesman of the protest generation, betrayal of the folk scene, tasteless – critics do not shy away from the Big Words.

Half a century later, the bellowing is a bit difficult to follow. The album really is not that different. The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) also includes songs like “Boots Of Spanish Leather” and “One Too Many Mornings”; from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) a-political songs like “The Girl From The North Country” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” have become classics. Dylan himself doesn’t fully understand the commotion either, and 50 years later he will still – quite credibly – claim: “The last thing I thought about was who cared what songs I wrote. I just wrote them. I didn’t feel like I was suddenly doing anything else.”

The successor Bringing It All Back Home (1965) then goes one step further still. Not only is it yet another album without politically engaged or sociocritical lyrics at all, but, to add insult to the injury, it has a whole album side full of songs played on electrically amplified instruments. On that electric side are sharp, shrill rockers like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Outlaw Blues”, on the acoustic side folk-rockers with kaleidoscopic, psychedelic lyrics (“Mr. Tambourine Man”, “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”).

A volcano of creativity Dylan is in these months. Between August 8, 1964 and August 30, 1965, he produces three LPs.  In between he performs 43 times, writes one classic after another and records thirty songs. Eight of the nine Highway 61 Revisited songs are recorded in four days at the end of July, beginning of August. The ninth, the opening song, he recorded six weeks earlier, on June 15 and 16, 1965: “Like A Rolling Stone”.

At the first five attempts, June 15, he is still searching for the beat, among other things. The next day it is found, at the fourth attempt. After that eleven more attempts follow, but that fourth one eventually ends up on single. And in August on the LP.

That single still has to deal with some headwind at first. To start with, record company Columbia Records doesn’t see a single in it at all; the marketing guys are bothered because the song is far too long – over six minutes – and the sound is too unpolished, far too rough. The one employee who does see a hit in it, smuggles out a test press and hands it over to a friend: a disc jockey. That has some effect. Soon the calls start pouring in and Columbia releases a single version after all, with “Like A Rolling Stone” on the A-side and “Gates Of Eden” on the flip side. Bizarrely, a promo single for radio DJs is also released on which the song is cut in two; if a DJ wants to play the whole song, they have to flip the record over, halfway through.

It shall become Dylan’s biggest hit so far. Others have scored well in recent years with songs by his hand (Peter, Paul and Mary with “Blowin’ In The Wind”, The Byrds with “Mr. Tambourine Man”, Manfred Mann with “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”), but this time the master himself is in the highest regions of the charts. In America, he reaches number 2, behind “Help!” by The Beatles.

An important part of the song’s drive comes from organist Al Kooper creating the energetic, hectic urgency that makes the song all the more exciting, securing Kooper’s entrance ticket to Dylan’s inner circle. A month later, he sits behind the organ at the legendary Newport Folk Festival performance, in which Dylan plays electric to the audible horror of part of the audience. Afterwards, Kooper participates in the recordings of the other songs for Highway 61 Revisited and subsequently again for Blonde On Blonde, and even co-produces the kind-of-comeback album New Morning (1970). In later decades Dylan calls on him every now and then; at concerts in 1981 and 1996, for example.

There is a remarkable consensus about the meaning of the song, the meaning of the words. Many of Dylan’s lyrics are vague and ambiguous enough, and keep fans, moods, exegetes and devout disciples busy for decades. About who is meant by the visionary Johanna, whether or not “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is a hallucinatory account of a drug experience, how autobiographical “Tangled Up In Blue” is … every month a new book is published with Dylan interpretations, the discussions on the internet forums are raging daily. About “Like A Rolling Stone” even a complete book has been written. Renowned essayist/journalist and Dylan-exegete Greil Marcus devotes 300 pages to the song and its place in cultural history in his 2005 work of the same name, subtitled Bob Dylan At The Crossroads, and calls it “an explosion of vision and humour that has changed pop music forever”.

But Marcus does not look for hidden meanings and symbolism either, and joins the most popular, and also the simplest interpretation: it says what it says. A cynical sharpshooter snaps at, and ruthlessly deals with a spoiled girl who has apparently fallen off her high horse.

The tone and content of the lyrics fit into a long line of put-down songs by Dylan, songs in which he skilfully demolishes someone, usually an ex-lover. Before “Like A Rolling Stone” there are songs like the derogatory “It Ain’t Me Babe” or the acetic, hurtful ballad “Ballad In Plain D” and later Dylan still lets himself go often enough, like in “Positively 4th Street”, “Just Like A Woman” and the bitter “Idiot Wind”. The only one on this planet who doesn’t acknowledge this is Dylan himself. “Why does everybody always say that?” he asks Robert Shelton in 1965. “I’ve never put anybody down in a song, man.” There is one big difference from all those other put-down songs though: the origins of the lyrics, that mythical long piece of vomit from which Dylan claims the lyrics were extracted.

Much later, in 1985, he reluctantly admits that he might have been mean once, and says about “Ballad In Plain D”: “It was a mistake to record it and I regret it.” Striking still, is how he not so much regrets writing the song, those vicious words, but rather that he recorded it. A little later, in an interview with Bill Flanagan, he is less reserved: “I must have been a real schmuck to write that.”

Many artists have tried to articulate the song’s earth-shattering impact on their development, from Frank Zappa to Paul McCartney to Elvis Costello, but one of the many “new Dylans” the man who, because of “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City” alone may indeed have some claim to that honourably intended, somewhat disrespectful New Dylan categorisation, Bruce Springsteen, does it best, with that famous, memorable “the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind” quote.

Springsteen’s own “Born To Run” (1975) is his conscious attempt to match that kick against the door – but for that monumental song, he had to spend six months in the studio searching for the sound of “Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan, produced by Phil Spector”.

“Like A Rolling Stone” is at the top of the 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time list of the authoritative music magazine Rolling Stone and for Dylan himself the song remains special. Apart from the last few years, it’s almost always on the playlist of his performances and thus it’s in the top 3 of his most performed songs: he’s played it more than 2000 times since 1965. In 2003 he mentions “Like A Rolling Stone” as an example:

“It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.”
(Robert Hilburn interview in Amsterdam, 10 November 2003)

Amen to that.

———————–

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

By Tony Attwood

Previously in this series

• Why does a simple, hardly known Dylan song, get recorded over and over again?
• How the most subtle of musical changes gave “Bob Dylan’s Dream” a totally different meaning
• How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second: “Masters of War”
• When copying other people’s music was Bob’s prime way of working
•  Who killed Davey Moore?: A different type of borrowing

When we come to Dusty Old Fairgrounds however we have something different from all that had gone immediately before – a song that seems musically to be a Dylan original – and in fact what we have been noting so far as Dylan using other people’s music without publically recognising the fact, in this case he seems to have created a new piece of music which he himself then reused within his later composition “Times they are a changing.”

Now this is not to say that the song is itself copied from somewhere else – rather that I haven’t been able to identify an earlier version of the song.  If you can spot an antecedent, please do write in and say.

After that Dylan wrote Walls of Red Wing

The song is pretty much based on “Only a hobo” and the Scottish ballad “The road and the miles to Dundee”.  So what we do have is a case of Bob writing a melody of his own with “Dusty old fairgrounds” (although it must be said, hardly a revolutionary melody, but at least something original) and yet then going back to the idea of taking a melody from elsewhere.

Following this in terms of Dylan compositions, we had New Orleans Rag.   This is a song that could be described as having music of its own, but the musical content is fairly minimal – it is a two chord affair with the same two lines of melody repeated over and over.  The song is really all about the lyrics, in the same way that a talking blues is.

And although Bob was still using and re-using older material, I think this is the moment when he really did start thinking about the fact that in a few of his songs he had indeed created original music as well as the lyrics, and maybe he should be focussing on this a bit more.  Thus, instead of taking an existing melody, what we have here is a melody that Bob himself was going to re-use to some extent in the song (yet to be written at this point) Oxford Town.

The song is a cross between the lyrics of “With God on our side” and the melody of “Ballad for a Friend”. Indeed, the melody was also used in part later in 1962 in “Oxford Town”,  although obviously at a very different speed and to different effect, and then used again in 1963 in “With God on our Side.”

To me this re-use of his own material does indicate that Dylan had a very free and easy approach to melodies, rather than having a deliberate attempt to copy existing melodies.  When he found a melody he liked he re-used it irrespective of where it came from.  So one might conclude that during this era what Bob sought was the right musical and lyrical balance, without having a worry as to where the music and lyrics came from.

And there is a further point here, for what we have also noticed is that Bob has an extraordinary memory for lyrics, as witnessed through his generally faultless performance of his songs through his multiple tours.  It seems more than likely that he has a very good memory of melodies too, and so a melody once heard in, for example, a folk song, can then be re-used when the need arises – and because of Bob’s musical ability can be transformed.

And it is because Dylan was and is so deeply engrossed in the musical genres that fascinate him that he could undertake these reuses of songs and still produce music that is itself of interest rather than music that can be readily dismissed as a copy.

That reuse of melodies in totally different ways, of course, is exactly the sort of thing Dylan can do, but if anyone else had written this, it might well have been one of the songwriter’s crowning glories.  It says its message and its eats right into your heart and soul, and leaves you standing there wondering what on earth to do next.  Or at least, that is what happened to me.

And if you are coming to this song for the first time in the Donald Trump era, I suspect it might actually ring a few more very shrill bells in your head.  Now of course, I am not an American citizen, so I have no say in the matter, and so comment as an outsider who might well have a warped vision of what is going on, but from where I live it seems that what Dylan was worrying about back in 1963, still needs protesting against with as much vigour as he created for this song and its extraordinary final line.

It is also a remarkable cross-over song when it comes to form and format. While “With God on our side” is straight folk and “Ballad for a Friend” is straight blues, this is somehow both, and that is quite a remarkable achievement.  All the more remarkable in that it is in 12/8 – a time signature very rarely used in popular or folk music, but it is the time signature of Times they are a changing.  Put another way its in triple time, and the 1,2,3   1,2,3   1,2,3  1,2,3.   The  pulse rings out through the whole piece, and yet still gives it that feeling of being the blues.

What’s even more interesting is the way the guitar is played, which seems to have chord and note clashes throughout, the explanation for which I only understood when I turned  to Eyolf Østrem’s work which helped me out via his dylanchords.info site.  If you want the musical explanation of what makes this song sounds so spooky and extraordinary here it is.  I am quoting from Dylan Chords…

“Both in the guitar and in the singing, the tone Bb is prominent, which of course clashes with the B in the G major chord of the guitar — which of course is how it’s intended. In the guitar this is accomplished either with the high Bb (as in the second measure of the intro) or the low Bb on the fifth string (I’ve indicated this in the tab by using “bb” for the high and “Bb” for the low Bb), which is frequently hammered-on from the open string, as in the third verse.”

What we are in fact seeing is the evolution of Dylan the composer of music, who can work alongside Dylan the composer of lyrics.

This composition does, I believe, mark the start of the work of Bob Dylan the truly original composer.

The songs Bob wrote and then ignored. 

• Ballad for a Friend and the issue of originality
• Dirt Road Blues and Too Much of Nothing
• The utterly brilliant Angelina, plus Maybe Someday, Under you spell
• The album title songs Dylan wrote and ignored: JWH, Nashville Skyline.
• The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles
• No time, time passes and Dirge
• World Gone Wrong, She’s your lover, Foot of Pride
• Abandoned Love and Up to Me

By Tony Attwood

There is of course nothing wrong with a songwriter composing a song, making a recording (perhaps so he might come back to it later) and then leaving it alone.    I suspect all song writers do it – just as many novelists confess that they have stashed away somewhere the openings of half a dozen novels that they just couldn’t get right, and so abandoned, thinking maybe they would come back to them one day (but often never do.)

But even so, I still do have a great fascination with songs that Dylan composed and thought enough of to put on an album, but then never performed at all.  Of course some I feel about in the opposite way – I mean why record the 45 four-line verses of Tempest, all unvarying in their musical approach, just three chords, and a solid steady beat, and lines such as

Lights down in the hallway
Flickering dim and dull
Dead bodies already floating
In the double bottomed hull

Certainly if I were to have been asked at the time (which of course I was not) I would have said, “Bob, come on, you must have something more entertaining than that – and if not in your current output, then I can point you to the hundreds of songs from the past that you have left unplaced on an album.  Choose one of them.”

But of course Bob is Bob and he can do what he likes and the fact that there are hardly any covers around a fair number of Dylan songs suggests that the artists who look for covers can on occasion be as shortsighted as me.

But the issue remains – if Bob really rated this piece, why did he not deliver it in a concert?  Or if he didn’t rate it, why put it on the album?

Moving on however, a different sort of song all together that got the “no plays” treatment was “You Wanna Ramble.”   And one of the oddities about this song is that the Bob Dylan Project, who know a thing or three about Dylan’s songs, say of this it was “Composed by: Herman Parker Jr. (composer, lyricist), Bob Dylan (lyricist)”

It is a 12 bar blues with variations, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  It is a good lively piece in a recognisable tradition.  And here once again we have that contradiction.  Bob thought enough of it to put it on the album (which probably means recording it quite a number of times) but then nothing more….

But then again, maybe at some stage the inheritors of Little Junior Parker’s estate suggested that perhaps they were owed some royalties.  Junior Parker died in 1971 – and not being a US citizen my knowledge of copyright for the USA is limited, but I do know that for music first published prior to 1978, the term of the copyright will vary.  Maybe the copyright owners demanded more than Bob’s agents wanted to pay, if he went out and played it, and rather that fight the legal case, or pay up, Bob dropped it.

From the same album, but utterly different in every way was another song never played live: “They killed him”.

This song was written by Kris Kristofferson who according to reports was knocked out by Bob putting the song on an album – but then again, if it was good enough to put on the album, why didn’t Bob perform it?  It is after all, a very attractive and interesting song.

Of course, sometimes the issue is a little more readily understandable as we can see if we switch the album, Before the Flood.   This album contained a series of songs written by Robbie Robertson which Bob didn’t record such as The Shape I’m In, Up on Cripple Creek, When you Awake and Endless Highway.

There are of course other specific albums that Bob didn’t take on tour such as “Christmas in the Heart” and “Fallen Angels” and there are other songs Bob didn’t write which turn up on albums but didn’t make any playlist.

Many of these we can understand readily enough as they relate to specific places and specific times, but even so, I feel a sadness that we didn’t get to hear some of these on stage.  What could Bob have made of this for example….

And yes maybe Bob didn’t feel he could sing Alberta live for some reason – perhaps fearing it might not be heard properly above the noise of a raucous audience but even so, it would have been so good to hear it just once, live.

by Jochen Markhorst

XVIII    They wanted to check if the spirit of the lyrics was preserved

Anton Voyl has the nagging, unpleasant feeling that something is missing from his life. “Il y avait un manquant. Il y avait un oubli, un blanc, un trou qu’aucun n’avait vu, n’avait su, n’avait pu, n’avait voulu voir – There was something missing. There was an omission, a blank, a hole that no one had seen, had known, had been able to see, had wanted to see.” But he does not know what.

“Beneath the mass of illusions that his imagination was constantly dictating to him, he thought he could see a nodal point, an unknown core that he could touch with his finger but which he would always miss the moment he was about to reach it.”

Or, as Gilbert Adair translates entirely in style:

“Vowl, who, a victim of optical illusions, of sly tricks that his imagination is playing on him, starts to fancy that a focal point is at long last within his grasp, though just as it’s about to solidify it sinks again into a void.”

The reader gets to know Anton and his struggles for four chapters, and from Chapter 5 (!) he has disappeared. And the people looking for him from the fifth chapter onwards die when they get too close to the truth.

The best-known and most feared challenge for translators is Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition (“The Disappearance”, 1969), a 300-page novel from which the letter e has disappeared. “E-lipogrammatic,” as the language professors then call it. Only the most skilled, most creative translators manage to convert a readable version of La Disparition with the same restriction into their own language. Which has only succeeded in seven languages since 1969: English (A Void), Swedish (Försvinna), Turkish (Kayboluş), German (Anton Voyls Fortgang), Dutch (‘t Manco), Italian (La scomparsa), and the most ambitious, Spanish (El secuestro, 1997). The Spanish translators feel they must impose the same constraint on themselves as Perec, and therefore choose the most common letter in Spanish, the letter a. “To attempt to rewrite La Disparition without the letter a is to recognise the importance of the constraint in the original and accept the consequences,” explains one of the four translators, Hermes Salceda y Regina Vega.

It takes any translator years to translate La Disparition. It is a monstrous job. But it could be worse: Perec appeases his hunger for the forbidden e with his next novel Les Revenentes (1972) in which the e is the only vowel, which thus seems completely untranslatable. “J’erre près des berges de l’Elster. Elles sentent le genêt et les evergreens.” Try translating this with an e as the only vowel: “I’m wandering along the banks of the Elster. They smell of broom and evergreens.” In 1996, Ian Monk succeeded in English (The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Seks: “Fecklessness led me hence between the Elster’s scented evergreens, the fennel, the feverfew”), and exactly half a century after Perec, Dutchman Guido van der Wiel managed to do it (De Wedergekeerden, 2022).

Bob Dylan – Return To Me:

Many degrees less gruesome, but still pretty cruel, is the one time when the licensee of Dylan’s lyrics imposes a restrictive condition: on the (as far as we know) first licensed translation, the German Bob Dylan Songtexte 1962-1985 by German translators Carl Weissner and Walter Hartmann. At least, that is how the gentlemen justify their sometimes clumsy solutions on the very first page:

“In the license agreement for this German edition, Bob Dylan demands that the rhyme of the original be preserved as much as possible. Operations like these are always problematic. In many cases it is inevitable to deviate from the content of the original. It is clear that the extent to which one may go there is quite debatable. We have tried to keep it within reasonable limits, without doing things by half.”

It is a bizarre, unreasonable requirement to “keep the rhyme of the original,” and it tells two things:

1) Dylan finds the form more important than the content

2) Dylan has no knowledge of foreign languages

Or he thinks, let’s drive those Germans crazy, that’s possible too of course. In any case, Carl and Walter go to great lengths to adhere to Dylans rhyme schemes – with implications for the content. Bring that bottle over here has to become Bring diese Flasche hier rüber ins Licht (“Bring this bottle here into the light”), When the rivers freeze and summer ends can only be translated with Wo die Flüsse zufrieren und der Sommer stirbt (“Where the rivers freeze over and summer dies”) and Daddy’s in the alley, he’s looking for the fuse is now Daddy kriecht durch die Gosse, wo die Zundschnür rußt (“Daddy crawls through the gutter where the tinder soots”).

Dylan’s delight in inner rhyme and assonance the gentlemen – understandably – prefer to ignore altogether, otherwise it would really be a mission impossible. So the slyly concealed rhyme finds of “I Want You” just evaporate, nothing remains of the irresistible euphoniousness of Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet with Immer ist es die Nacht, die dir Streiche spielt, wenn du schlafen willst (“It’s always the night that plays tricks on you when you want to sleep”).

Weissner and Hartmann, by the way, are skilful and creative translators, who often enough hit the mark despite that odd limitation. The opening couplet of “One Too Many Mornings” is as beautiful and gentle in German as it is in the source text;

Am Ende der Straße bellen Hunde,
Es ist Abend, die Nacht kommt schnell.
Und während die Nacht sich niedersenkt,
Verstummt auch das Hundegebell

(Dogs are barking at the end of the street,
It's evening, night is coming soon.
And as the night descends,
The dogs stop barking)

Ernst Schulz – Viel zu spät und meilenweit zurück:

But against the ferocious power and sparkling language pleasure of “Like A Rolling Stone”, the constricted gentlemen don’t stand a chance, at least: not within that cruel and short-sighted restriction imposed;

Es gab mal ne Zeit, da warst du schick gekleidet
Hast den Bettlern einen Groschen hingeworfen, stimmts?
Und wenn man dich anrief und sagte „Paß auf, du liegst schief“
Hast du gedacht, daß man dich auf den Arm nimmt

There was a time when you were dressed stylishly
You threw a penny to the beggars, right?
And when they called you and said ‘Watch out, you're wrong
You thought you were being taken for a ride

Gone is the inner rhyme time-fine-dime-prime, gone is the surprising rhyme find didn’t you-kiddin’ you, and of the triplet call-doll-fall, Carl & Walter have barely managed to save two thirds (anrief-schief). And with the following 37 verses, that doesn’t get any better either – which we can’t really blame our gagged friends for, of course.

Perhaps the enforced scorching of Dylan’s best poetry eventually made its way to New York. In any case, these kinds of cruel translation demands are no longer made, and the policy since the 1990s seems to be: let’s just trust that professional translators know what they are doing – and at least have a better grasp of song lyric translations than legally trained copyright guardians. Though that policy is not yet fully crystallised, as a rather bizarre anecdote from Polish translator Filip Łobodziński demonstrates:

“In 2015, I had almost all my first anthology ready AND two thirds of the double-CD album I wanted to release, where me and my band dylan.pl played my translations of Dylan songs. In 2016, I already had a label that wanted to get it released, the only thing was to obtain permission from Sony. All Sony wanted was to send them the Polish lyrics AND their literal translations into English. Three weeks later I had an OK. They told us they wanted to check if the spirit of the lyrics was preserved. Not the rhymes, not the exact words.”

Asking for a literal translation to check whether “the spirit of the lyrics was preserved”? That’s like asking for a black-and-white photo to check whether the colours have been reproduced correctly. “That’s not how this works,” to quote Betty from the legendary Esurance commercial, “that’s not how any of this works.”

Filip was fortunately allowed to roll on. Like a rock ‘n’ rolling stone.

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 19: The generous ghost

————-

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

Publisher’s note: “It’s alright ma” is the third song to be considered in the “History in Performance” series.  A full index of the articles relating to “Mr Tambourine Man” and “Gates of Eden” appears at the end of the article.  Previously in relation to “It’s alright ma” we have published

• It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – A History in Performance, Part 1
• It’s All Right Ma: A History in Performance, Part 2: 1975/81. Stuffed graveyards and false gods.

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – A History in Performance, Part 3: 1984 –  One who sings with his tongue on fire.

By Mike Johnson

[I read somewhere once that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date).]

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) 

I was going to begin this article by commenting that unlike some of Dylan’s longer songs, such as ‘Tangled Up In Blue,’ ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ did not suffer from having verses cut in performances of the song as the years rolled by. But that’s not quite true. Quite a chunk of the song was removed and never heard again after the 1960s. These are the two verses that were dropped:

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him

 I think I can understand why Dylan dropped the second of these verses. The ‘one who sings with his tongue on fire’ could be seen as referring to Dylan himself, with the verse implying that listening to such a singer will only make you depressed. Who wants to be ‘down in the hole that he’s in’? Dylan might have rightly felt that listening to his songs does not create that effect, or provoke that response. Rather, in its anger and defiance, the song is uplifting, or at least I would argue so. (And the fault/vault rhyme seems clumsy to me). We could argue that this verse, with its personal focus, is not fully in harmony with the thrust of the song, which is an attack on bad-faith cultural attitudes.

The verse ‘for them that must obey authority’ however does seem to fit with the rest of the song, and it is harder to see why it was dropped. I don’t know about ‘cultivating their flowers to be’ as he doesn’t sing these words on the album or in the 1960s performances, where it comes out as

Speak jealously of them that are free
Do what they do just to be
Nothing more than something they invest in

I like the pithiness of this, and regret that Dylan dropped it. Maybe it just didn’t quite work for him.

Nevertheless, this cutting does not affect the overall balance of the song the way some of the cuts to ‘Tangled’ do. There’s so much here that the verses are hardly missed.

In the last article I traced the journey of the song to the scintillating 1981 performances, which I can only urge the reader of this article to go back and catch. Dylan didn’t perform between 1981 and 1984, so it’s to that year we now turn.

In the 1984 tour of Europe, Dylan abandoned the female chorus, the organ and the big sounds of the gospel years for a stripped down band. This is often billed as the Dylan/Santana tour, although there is some doubt about how often Santana played on this tour. Only rarely do you hear Santana’s distinctive guitar sound.

‘It’s Alright, Ma,’ now twenty years old, was played over twenty-five times during that tour and remained the acoustic centrepiece of the concerts along with a new version of ‘Tangled.’ At this stage, Dylan was still doing solo acoustic performances of these two songs. They were these blasts from the past, with ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ representing Dylan’s solo acoustic early ‘protest’ period, being the mother of all protest songs. Dylan keeps the tempo fast and spits out the words as of old, even if his voice sounds a bit thinner than before. This first recording’s from Hamburg, May 31^st.

1984 Hamburg

That does the job, but at Wembley (July) he cranks the vocal up, stretches his voice, to give us an exciting performance. Great to see the vid of him belting it out. Notice the audience responding to that famous line,

But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Audiences have often cheered at this line. (I wonder what the response would be if he performed it now).

1984 Wembley

In 1986 Dylan teamed up with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in a collaboration that remained in place until 1987. He did the first two concerts of that tour here in New Zealand/Aotearoa, and audiences here felt that Dylan was using these opening concerts for rehearsals. I was at the second, Auckland concert, and it was not Dylan’s finest hour – nor did it reflect well on our noisy, fractious audience. At one point Dylan had to tell the crowd not to throw bottles. There were dissatisfied Tom Petty fans who wanted to hear more of him, and showed their ire, and the setlist was quite bitsy, with no real arc.

I thought twice about including ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ from that Auckland concert (Feb 7th). You may know that I like to choose the best recordings of the best performances, and this one is neither. I am including it, not so much out of an ‘I was there’ nostalgia, but as a reminder that Dylan is not always on top of his game delivering scintillating performances. In Chronicles, Dylan wrote movingly about losing his connection to many of his old songs, how he could only relate to a few of them, and I think you can hear that in this recording. He seems hesitant, uncertain even, there are odd pauses and guitar fill-ins – but despite that it was the highlight of the concert for me.

What it will show is how much better the tour, and this song, sounded by the time they arrived in Australia a few days later. Here’s the Auckland performance:

1986 Auckland

Now to Australia. Unfortunately the YouTuber hasn’t provided the date, but I suspect it is from one of the four Sydney concerts that ran from Feb 10^th to 13^th. Now we’re talking! Dylan is right on top of the song and rips through it in fine Jeremiah style. All the excitement is back.

If you’ve seen the movie of that 1986 tour, Hard to Handle, you’ll be familiar with this performance, somewhat confusingly dated as both on the 24^th and 25^th of Feb, when Dylan returned to Sydney for two further concerts. I prefer the earlier performance, as in this one Dylan’s vocal kind of surges predictably, but hell, who’s complaining. All the old fire and brimstone is there.

1986 Hard to Handle

Dylan did not perform the song in 1987, so we have to move to the first year of the NET, 1988, to catch it again. That’s where I’ll be starting in the next article.

See you then

Kia Ora

Previously in this series

Mr Tambourine Man

• Part 1: A masterpiece is born
• Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.
• Part 3: Chasing Shadows
• Part 4: 1978-1986. Far From the Twisted Reach
• Part 5: 1986-1993: Evening’s Empire
• Part 6: 1994 – 99: My weariness amazes me
• Part 7: 2000 – 2010: the jingle jangle.

The Gates of Eden

• Part 1: 1964 Ancestral voices prophesying war
• Part 2: 1974 – 1991 A crashing but meaningless blow

By Tony Attwood

Previously in this series

• Why does a simple, hardly known Dylan song, get recorded over and over again?
• How the most subtle of musical changes gave “Bob Dylan’s Dream” a totally different meaning
• How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second: “Masters of War”
• When copying other people’s music was Bob’s prime way of working

In this series I’ve gone back to look at Dylan’s songs of 1963 and in particular noted how although Bob was writing original lyrics he was using other people’s melodies as part of his compositions.  Not just once or twice but as a regular event.   In recent articles I’ve picked out such recordings as “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” “Only a Hobo” and “Masters of War”  “Girl from the North Country” (the music for which was used a second time in the next song that Bob wrote, “Boots of Spanish Leather”),   “Farewell”  “All over you”, and “House of the Rising Sun.”

Of course, I am certainly not the first person by any means to raise this issue, although I am hoping to try and understand how a man who could write so many songs that are clearly not “borrowed” from others, felt the need to use existing songs in some of his work.

There is inevitably a website that digs into this issue with clear intent: Bob Dylan Plagarisms and this site quotes a 2004 interview with Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, in which Bob is noted as saying “… you have to understand that I’m not a melodist. My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form. What happens is, I’ll take a song and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate.

“I wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in 10 minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That’s the folk music tradition – you use what has been handed down. ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ is probably from an old Scottish folk Song….

“I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly — while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”.

This of course has been investigated before and many have commented upon it.  Joni Mitchell raised the point in 2010 in an interview with the LA Times as part of a joint interview with performance artist John Kelly.  During this Mitchell said, “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”

The interview involved Mitchell talking negatively about numerous other artists she didn’t like for various reasons, such as Grace Slick, Janis Joplin and Madonna although she is particularly positive about Jimi Hendrix.

The issue also appeared in the book Common as Air by Lewis Hyde, which won some literary prizes in 2010 when it was published.  Here the author defends what he calls the  “cultural commons” – meaning the ideas of the past that are now embedded in today.

In musical terms this could be translated to the fact that no one claims the copyright on the music of a 12 bar blues.  If you want to know more about the 12 bar blues and how it works there is a video (linked below) going into it in some details…  this takes “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley as an early example.  If you don’t want the whole story of the 12 bar blues go to 2’58” and you will hear the song.

In essence, the structure is something you will know perfectly, and it is used in hundreds of thousands of songs

• 1st line on the tonic chord – that is the chord of the key the song is in
• 2nd line – same lyrics but on the chord of the fourth note of the scale, going back to the tonic chord
• 3rd line – new lyrics going through the fifth and maybe fourth chord, back to the opening chord – with the line rhyming with the first two lines.

Now this highlights our problem with authorship and copyright.  Using the “12 bar blues” progression can’t be a copyright issue because hundreds of thousands of songs exist in that format.   But the lyrics can be copyrighted, and possibly the melody (although lots of 12 bar blues songs use very similar melodies).

But Joni Mitchell took her criticism of Bob Dylan as a composer further claiming, “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”

The question of plagiarism, made public by Joni Mitchell in 2010, is also discussed in Lewis Hyde’s Common As Air. The Bob Dylan Plagiarism site states that “Dylan’s first 70 recorded songs allegedly had clear predecessors and two-thirds of the melodies were directly lifted may be (as Dylan said) common to the “folk process.” But Yaffe also notes Dylan in his autobiography expressing feelings by using unacknowledged lines from Proust.

The issue thus has had wide coverage, and it is of course a matter for both the owners of copyright that might have been infringed and those who take a view on what songwriters should and should not do, to make their point as they wish.  There can be no doubt that Dylan used music that had been composed by others previously, without acknowledging this, but whether this should be a central issue of debate or just accepted as the way things are, is of course up to the individual.

For myself, if I found someone had taken a melody for a song I had written and which I have placed on my personal website, and used it in a song without citing my name, I’d be both pleased that someone thought some music of mine was good enough to take, and annoyed and would ask for some of the royalties.   If however it was pointed out to me that I had taken someone else’s melody and used it in one of my songs, I’d call it an honest mistake and apologise, remove the song from my website on which they are collected, and would argue that I hadn’t made any money out of the mistake (since the website is free to all – and is actually only there for the tiny number of people who have been kind enough to say that they like what I write).  It’s one of those issues that depends on where you stand.

When we come to Bob’s next song in 1963, Who killed Davey Moore?,  there is still some borrowing but it is of a different type, for the general consensus is that Bob took the idea for the song from the children’s song “Who killed Cock Robin”.   The lyrics for this song are based in part on a song published in 1744, although of course the music has mutated many times since then.

Davey Moore won the World Featherweight Title for four years before being beaten on a technical knockout by Sugar Ramos in March 1963. During the fight with Ramos in Dodgers Stadium.  After the match Davey Moor was taken ill, diagnosed with  brain damage and passed away four days later.  Phil Och’s song was issued in 1964 on the LP “The Original New Folk Volume 2.”  

Dylan’s song however came earlier and he performed it at Carnegie Hall on October 26, 1963.

For the next performance however Wikipedia notes that  during his October 31, 1964 show, before singing the song, Dylan said, “This a song about a boxer… It’s got nothing to do with boxing, it’s just a song about a boxer really… And, uh, it’s not even having to do with a boxer, really.  It’s got nothing to do with nothing.

“But I fit all these words together… that’s all…  It’s taken directly from the newspapers, Nothing’s been changed… Except for the words.”

What he didn’t mention was the tune itself, which was taken from the nursery rhyme Cock Robin.

Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the Sparrow, 
with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin.
Who saw him die? I, said the Fly, 
with my little teeny eye, I saw him die
Who caught his blood? I, said the Fish, 
With my little dish, I caught his blood.

• Dirt Road Blues and Too Much of Nothing
• The utterly brilliant Angelina, plus Maybe Someday, Under you spell
• The album title songs Dylan wrote and ignored: JWH, Nashville Skyline.
• The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles
• No time, time passes and Dirge
• World Gone Wrong, She’s your lover, Foot of Pride
• Abandoned Love and Up to Me

By Tony Attwood

I’ve raved over Ballad for a Friend so often on this site across the years it seems odd to write about the song again, but it does of course fit into this category of songs written but not performed.   However there is something else to add now…

But just in case you are not familiar with the song, or indeed if you fancy hearing it again, here it is.

It is a song that no one has suggested (at least as far as I have seen) was written by anyone other than Dylan.  However, here’s the conundrum.

Eyolf Østrem who knows everything anyone could ever know about the musical construction of Dylan songs in terms of chords and how they are played, notes the recording as being an open D tuning with the capo on the 7th fret.   As well as noting that  “The interlude figure also appears in Standing On The Highway, recorded on the same occasion.”

So from this we might take it that Bob had a tuning, and was making up a melody to go around it while he played the guitar in the restricted way that opening tuning allows and this happened early in 1962.  Of course that might not be how it all happened, but it is possible.

Now I think what often draws people like me who rave over this recording [at least I suppose there are others who also rave over this recording, although maybe I am more on my own that I imagine when it comes to commentaries on Bob’s recordings] are the lyrics which are extraordinary; simple and yet profound largely because at first we don’t know where this is going, and once we do, all we can do is go back to the start and hear it again.   The melody is plaintive – it is not complex, just three lines of music repeated six times, but once heard it stays in one’s mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 And yet as I am writing about Dylan’s compositions in the following year, I find I need to pose a question that I am not sure anyone else has previously asked.   If Bob was able to write this stunning original piece in 1962, or perhaps earlier, why then in 1963 was he copying the melodies and chord sequences of existing songs when writing the pieces that secured his legacy for the decades to come?  A list of the songs from early 1963 which were based on existing music appears in the article When copying other people’s music was Bob’s prime way of working

Of course one possible explanation is that “Ballad for a friend” was copied from someone else’s music, and Bob recorded it for the Whitmark Demos, just because he liked it and it demonstrated his talent.  After all there was no demand that we know of with the Whitmark Demo for Bob to record songs he had written.  And indeed as we can hear from the recording, it was not professionally recorded, as the tape is not running at the proper speed at the very start.

The notion that the music comes from elsewhere is originates from the thought that if Bob could write something this good in 1962, why in 1963 would he start taking existing music as the accompaniment for his lyrics?   Was “Ballad for a friend” not an original piece of Dylan music?  Did someone persuade Dylan he wasn’t a composer, and so should restrict himself to lyrics?  Or was Bob perhaps transfixed by the notion that in the old days when folk music flourished people did just take existing songs and write new lyrics?

Now it is of course quite possible that someone (or maybe a number of people) has/have answered that, and if so I would be really grateful if you could either put a note at the end of this little piece telling me about it, or indeed write to me at Tony@schools.co.uk – because I am puzzled.   How could he, and others, not recognise the power and elegance of the music of Ballad for a Friend, and then realise that if he could produce something as good as that musically, he had no need to take up other people’s (or indeed traditional) songs, but could in fact write music himself.

After all, writing music is not just something Bob does with difficulty.  One only has to listen to the extraordinary re-arrangements he has made of his own work in subsequent times to appreciate that.  Of course if you really want to go back over this topic you can read the series on the Never Ending Tour Revisited, but if you are short of time, or have had more than enough of my ramblings, I will once more refer you to Tweedle Dum, first as it appeared on the record

And compare it, as I have done before, to this live recording from 2014

Now this transformation shows an utterly astonishing musical and literary ability; for it is incredibly difficulty to set aside one’s original composition and re-invent it.  And let me add, that if you have never done such a thing yourself, it really, really is much harder than you might imagine – which is part of the reason why very few composers ever do it.  Writing a song embeds it in one’s mind.  Setting that aside totally and starting again as this rewrite does is an amazing achievement.  Dylan’s ability in this regard is rarely noted favourably, but it really ought to be.

Of course it might be argued that this ability to write and re-write songs in this way is a more recent development in Bob’s writing, but if that argument were to be put forward I would then counter by going back to this version of “It’s alright ma” from 1980 and was featured in Mike Johnson’s “History in Performance” series

1975/81. Stuffed graveyards and false gods.

This time the melodic line is roughly maintained, but the whole essence of the piece is changed by the installation of a totally new sort of urgency in the music both by the speed of the song and the way Dylan’s voice has modified the power of the message.   Just compare that with this 1964 live version:

So yes, I am puzzled by the way Bob turned to taking old folk songs and re-using the music for his songs in the early part of his career, when it seems his ability to write new music was as profound in the early days of his recordings, as it was in the years to come.

But the fact is that from the evidence we have it seems that this is what happened.  At first he wrote original music, and in 1963 he was using other people’s songs.   But the division is not simple – let us not forget that perhaps Bob’s most famous song of 1962 is “Don’t think twice it’s alright”, which is based musically on Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone”.

by Jochen Markhorst

XVII     Hits and misses

One of the most apocalyptic concerts Dylan has performed in his long career takes place on 17 July 1994 in Krakow. All of Europe is watching one of the dullest Football World Cup finals ever (Italy-Brazil in Pasadena, California; 0-0 after extra time; Brazil wins on penalties after Roberto Baggio aims for the stars and shoots his penalty way, way over the crossbar, creating the perhaps most infamous penalty kick of all time). Meanwhile, 4,000 Poles are unaware of the Italian tragedy, standing in the Stadion Cracovia, the stadium of one of the oldest Polish football clubs, waiting for Dylan’s first concert on Polish soil.

The weather forecast predicts misery, and from the second song onwards, “Just Like A Woman”, appears to have been still a tad too optimistic – song number three “All Along The Watchtower” almost goes down in the infernal driving rain and ferocious gusts of wind that will plague the rest of the shortened concert.”Rain coming in diagonally and horizontally,” as Victor Maymudes recalls (in Jacob Maymudes’ Another Side of Bob Dylan, 2014). After song number 9 “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, the weather gods have won and Dylan has to throw in the towel. According to Maymudes, the stage now holds “three inches of water”.

Among the 4,000 Poles is our Dylan friend Filip Łobodziński, who shares his memories 27 years later in a wonderful, nostalgic article on Untold Dylan (Memories of the first ever Polish concert Bob Dylan gave in 1994. – Untold Dylan). The wind and rain do not succeed in extinguishing his love of Dylan however. On the contrary, Filip cherishes the concert as a personal highlight, which, incidentally, he seems to share with Dylan himself…

Andrzej Marzec, the Polish concert promoter, told me later that Dylan had turned to him just after the gig and said: “I’ve just played my very best concert for the very best audience”. On other occasions, he apparently alluded to the event as a “metaphysical experience”.

(Filip Łobodziński, Untold, 17 May 2021)

Filip, a pivotal figure in the Polish world of art and culture for decades as well as a professional translator, does not profess his love only passively. With his tribute band dylan.pl he has been performing Dylan covers in his own, usually very successful arrangements and in his own translations since 2014. Translations that are officially published as well: Bob Dylan: Duszny kraj (“Soulful country”, 2017) and Przekraczam Rubikon (2021) compiling about 250 song lyrics, and, even more impressively, a translation of the untranslatable monster Tarantula.

Filip describes his struggles comprehensively and insightfully in three fascinating essays on Untold Dylan: Remarks of a happy Tarantula reader , “Like a Polish Wanderer: the work of translating Bob Dylan” and the third using “Like A Rolling Stone” as a case study: LIKE A POLISH STONE: the issues of translating Bob Dylan into a foreign language. In his Polish translation: “Jak błądzący łach – Like A Stray Bum”.

Dylan.pl – Jak błądzący łach: 

It is a gripping account. The song is “one of the most important songs in the whole music industry,” Filip writes, so that puts extra pressure on the translator. That, and Filip’s ambition “to be perfectly suited to the Polish mentality”. Which, to take just one example, moves him to translate “the pretty people” with “młodzi-prężni” meaning something like “the young and resilient”, and which makes the first verse almost unrecognisable when translated back:

Long long time ago you were straight from a catwalk
Alms to a poor man while you as, if from Eden
You had luck
They warned you, „It’ll turn out bad
You’ll find yourself on the bottom”, and you thought that
It was just a joke

… changes, derivations and adaptations, each of which he insightfully justifies. And then Filip takes us through the entire translation verse by verse, and almost word by word, to conclude with:

“I worked on it for about two weeks. It turned out to be coherent, convincing (in Polish) though I’m almost sure one can give it another try and do it better. But what I’m aware and proud of, it proved efficient on the record and live.”

Bold and quirky and successful, all in all – similar to what Romanian Alexandru Andrieș and what Japanese Haruomi Hosono dare to do with their translations of Dylan songs. And bolder than many of the official translations of Lyrics anyway. Though Filip, prompted in part by collegial sympathy no doubt, himself likes to point to a “regular”, i.e. English-language cover by his Polish compatriots Stanisław Soyka and Janusz “Yanina” Iwanski:

“The album NEOPOSITIVE, recorded with Janusz “Yanina” Iwański, a splendid jazz guitar player, was released in 1992. Unless I’m mistaken – the source for Sojka (Soyka, as he liked to be spelled at the time) was definitely the Budokan album (cf. the chord sequence).”

Like a Rolling Stone – Stanisław Soyka & Janusz “Yanina” Iwanski:

Official translations of Lyrics, i.e. those for which a local publisher has entered into a licensing agreement with the rights holder through Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department in New York, usually adhere much more strictly to the content, usually opt, in other words, for literal translations. Out of a professional principle, as the Portuguese translator explicitly explains. The bilingual edition of Canções is a titanic work on which the two translators Angelina Barbosa and Pedro Serrano worked for two and a half years, eventually being published in two volumes (Volume 1: 1962-1973 in September 2006 and Volume 2: 1974-2001; 27 letras de primeiras canções escritas entre 1961 e 1963 in June 2008). In the notes, Serrano describes the genesis and creation, and justifies the modus operandi:

“Our approach to translation would be harshly literal, that is, we would absolutely respect what was written and not allow ourselves to be tempted by what was perhaps the author’s intention, the meaning of the words, intuition or sensibility…”

“This choice caused us frequent aesthetic suffering,” adds the harried translator. But the duo succeeds wonderfully; if – for instance – we translate back the opening couplet of “Como Uma Pedra a Rolar”, we get:

Era uma vez tu vestias-te tão bem
Atiravas um cêntimo aos mendigos no teu apogeu, não era?
As pessoas avisavam-te, diziam: «Cuidado boneca, olha que vais cair»
Pensavas que te estavam todos a gozar
Costumavas rir de
Toda a gente que andava por ali
Agora não falas tão alto
Agora não pareces tão orgulhosa
Por ter de andar a cravar a próxima refeição.

Once upon a time you dressed so well
You threw a penny to the beggars in your heyday, didn't you?
People warned you, said: ‘Watch out doll, you're going to fall’
You thought everyone was making fun of you
You used to laugh at
Everyone who walked by
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
For having to cram for your next meal

… an almost literal rendering of the source text. Which suggests that the translators have done meticulous, down to the millimetre, customisation – which must have been a hell of a job. But: it is a voluntary and principled choice. “For neither of these two works were any restrictions pointed out to us by the editor Simon & Schuster,” Serrano reports on enquiry. Nor, Serrano knows, to the official translator of Spanish Bob Dylan : letras, 1962–2001, José Moreno. And that is a refrain among translators: no weird demands were made. To none of the translators around the world. With one single exception: to our poor German friends Carl Weissner and Walter Hartmann – who then obviously shoot over the crossbar. But, remarkably, only every now and then. And not even that far over…

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 18: They wanted to check if the spirit of the lyrics was preserved

————————–

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

A list of the previous articles in this series is given at the end.  The most recent article before this appears here.

(Publisher’s note: My sincere apologies for the delay in the appearance of this article following the rest of the series, for which there are links below.  I’d love to blame technical issues for it’s non-appearance but the reality is it was incompetence on the publisher’s part).

9. What you really don’t want – part 3

In short, three dreadful but universally acclaimed global hits by The Four Tops, Springfield and Wonder that represent a vast majority who stubbornly clung (and still cling) to the age-old fairy tale that human beings’ greatest happiness consists by definition in the act of discounting oneself completely in favour of another.

I chose a gender-neutral formulation here, but just in case, I will insert another reminder that in practice it was, and still is, the doing of religious moral crusaders worldwide – heterosexual men who still have no inclination to change traditional marriage values once and for all for the benefit of women, while maintaining that they are ‘ordinary, healthy men’ who are perfectly fine with the status quo. Nowadays, more and more women rightfully have very different ideas on the subject, and so we find ourselves embroiled in the ‘politics of sex’ – the latest proof of which can be seen in the #MeToo movement.

What does all of this say about the societal facet of Dylan’s ‘inner-directed, inner-probing, self-conscious’ work that Irwin Silber refused to comprehend? Given the largely autobiographical character infusing Dylan’s entire oeuvre, it could very well be that all of his love songs from the early period – that predominantly address a lost love, or sometimes a farewell – draw on personal experiences with women, though for us readers and listeners, his personal life is irrelevant. What is relevant is that his rejection of possessiveness in relationships, the first sign of which was ‘Don’t think twice, it’s alright’ from November 1962, merged roughly one year later with his rejection of the possessiveness of the masses who wanted him to continue writing and singing ‘socially engaged’ songs such as ‘Blowin’ in the wind’, ‘Masters of war’ and ‘The times they are a-changin’’.

It is my opinion that the quasi-cheerful ‘All I really want to do’ and the simultaneously unapproachable and dolorous, ‘It ain’t me, babe,’ are the first fruits of this attitude in his work. As a dual declaration of independence, they are both contrasting and complementary to one another since the former, though in a rather negative fashion, sets out the conditions under which the I-figure is prepared to maintain friendship with you-figures, while the latter expostulates the equally negative reasons why there is not – or no longer – any possibility of love.

In ‘All I really want to do’, Dylan clearly delineates what society can expect from him, and in ‘It ain’t me, babe’ he specifies what a lover (or potential lover) should, at any rate, not expect from him. It is the crystal-clear position of a person protecting their independence from both a possessive society and a possessive lover.

So once again: far from abandoning the engagement present in his earlier work, as described by the Irwin Silbers of this world, he instead tackled both types of possessiveness in one fell swoop. After Another side of Bob Dylan, this confrontation led to a creative explosion lasting a mere eighteen months in which Dylan, in addition to other important works that unfortunately must be left aside here due to the scope of this book, combined both rejections into a series of under ten songs, treating his besiegers to a barrage of disdain. The eight others will be presented below one by one.

Did he thereby significantly contribute to the liberation of the individual from love and from the collective, both simultaneously and definitively? Did he confound traditional power dynamics for good with the two notions that love can only exist based on freedom, reciprocity and equality, and that the authority of parents, family, teachers, employers, religious forerunners, politicians and peacekeepers are not to be taken for granted, but must be earned? Looking at the world today, it would not seem so. But neither these questions nor the answers thereto were what prompted the jury to award him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 – which was well-deserved. It was enough that the extremely well-spoken Dylan had set an oeuvre to music that posed this question, an oeuvre that was unparalleled, incomparable, and therefore inimitable.

‘It ain’t me, babe’ has proved itself as one of Dylan’s most popular songs, or at least one of the most significant. This fact evidently also held true for himself. The use of statistics often conceals skullduggery, but with over 1070 live performances by the end of 2023 it was ranked eighth among his most frequently performed songs of all time, which cannot be a coincidence.

Of the nearly one hundred cover versions by others, the earliest – by Johnny Cash and Joan Baez – appeared only months after the original. Even Nancy Sinatra tried her hand. It has been recorded in seventeen languages and distributed by ‘local artists’. Nevertheless, I would advise you here, too, to stick with the original version, which is musically already problematic enough, not being what one would call a ‘catchy tune’. Incidentally, none of the anti-possessiveness songs lend themselves to arrangements, for the simple reason that they are all inimitable. Though the substance may be relatable, any version that does not supersede Dylan’s own will only expose the performer as a parroter of ideas, destroying any sense of credibility. Superseding Dylan is also no mean feat, and one that almost nobody can pull off successfully: the sound is simply too unique, without enough ‘general appeal’.

The fact that Dylan knew exactly what he was doing is illustrated by a fourth verse that was discovered later, and that he discarded with very good reason, as it would have diluted the whole significantly:

Your talking turns me off, babe
It seems you’re trying out of fear
Your terms are time behind, babe
And you’re looking too hard for what’s not here
You say you’re looking for someone
That’s been in your dreams, you say
To terrify your enemies
An’ scare your foes away
Someone to even up your scores
But it ain’t me babe

An audio recording of the London premiere on 17 May 1964 has survived. Though not the best quality, it does convey the charm of the initial try-out before a full auditorium: the tempo is low, and the vocals extremely concentrated. What struck me personally is that it was perhaps the only time when he was not completely certain of singing ‘No no no, it ain’t me, babe’, since he seems to have used ‘Lawd, Lawd, Lawd’ several times, a variant of ‘Lord’ that was not uncommon in both blues and folk circles.

Lastly, I am loathe to deny you the opinion of one particular scholar, who is convinced that Dylan’s ‘no, no, no’ is a response to The Beatles’ ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ in ‘She loves you’ from over nine months beforehand. A clever theory, and if you ask me: sure, I’m all for clever theories. I even have one or two of my own if need be. But my suggestion would be: let’s ask Dylan himself.

(Due to financial circumstances beyond the author’s control, here he must end Brent Annable’s exemplary translation of Dylan and us: beyond America. It is to be hoped for that with the publication of this one third of the book, foreign publishers will be found so that in due time the complete text will be accessible to non-Dutch readers as well. Foreign rights can be acquired through Prometheus Publishers, Amsterdam, except for English language rights, that are available directly through the author at e@hlp.nl.)

Previously in this series…

• Amuse bouche
• Who the book is (not) for – part 1
• Who this book is (not) for – part 2
• Anything but idolatry – part 1
• Anything but idolatry – part 2
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 3
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 4
• The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 1
• The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 2
• What was the public to do? – part 1

• What was the public to do – part 2

• 1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides part 1
• 1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides – part 2
• Teenager finds a hero – part 1
• Teenager finds a hero – part 2
• Teenager finds a hero – part 3
• What you really want
• What you really don’t want – part 1
• What you really don’t want – part 2

Wouter’s book is only available in Dutch for now:

Dylan en wij zonder Amerika, Wouter van Oorschot | 9789044655179 | Boeken | bol

Previously in this series

• Why does a simple, hardly known Dylan song, get recorded over and over again?
• How the most subtle of musical changes gave “Bob Dylan’s Dream” a totally different meaning
• How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second: “Masters of War”

As noted above I have been writing in the last few days about some of Bob’s early compositions, in articles such as “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” “Only a Hobo” and “Masters of War”  with a view to understanding how Bob was working as a songwriter in these early days of his career.  And the immediate conclusion is obvious – he was taking established traditional songs and using their melodies to which he added song lyrics of a totally different nature from the originals.

And so as the next song on the compositional list is “Girl from the North Country” the music for which was used a second time in the next song that Bob wrote, “Boots of Spanish Leather”.

We know from numerous accounts that at this time Bob Dylan met Martin Carthy who introduced Bob to a few of the vast number of English folk songs dating back to the 17th century if not much earlier – and it appears that until this moment Bob was not aware of the rich tradition of English and Scottish folk music which actually dates back to the 13th century, if not earlier.  Perhaps the earliest of all such songs is “Sumer is icumen in” still known in England today as “Summer is a-coming in”.

Among other songs Martin Carthy introduced Bob Dylan to was “Scarborough Fair”

It has been widely commented that Bob took the music and some of the lyrics of this song for his own song “Girl from the North Country,” including the line from the refrain “Remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love of mine”. The music was then used again with “Boots of Spanish Leather” and I wrote about these two songs in the “Music and the Lyrics series”

I won’t repeat myself as that article is still on the site, but I do want to make the point that during this period Bob was not writing music; he was writing lyrics and attaching the lyrics to an existing melody.

And this didn’t stop there for the next song Bob presented to the world was “Farewell” which took the music of “The Leaving of Liverpool” another English folk song.

And here is the Leaving of Liverpool

What is particularly interesting to me, as and Englishman brought up in a musical family, is that these are not obscure English folk songs, but ones that I heard and learned in the 1950s.  Indeed I suspect many English people will indeed still be familiar with this song and at least some of the other songs that Bob used.

Now of course these songs were new to Bob, and he knew that people in America who were interested in folk music would not have heard them.  For Bob I guess it must have been like finding a second Woody Guthrie!

And as I pointed out in an earlier article on this, it is not just the music that links Dylan’s “Farewell” back to “Leaving of Liverpool” it is also the lyrics.  The version everyone who has ever visited folk clubs where traditional folk songs are sung in my country will know is

Farewell to you, my own true love;

I am going far away.
I am bound for Californ-i-a,
And I know that I’ll return someday.

So fare thee well, my own true love,

And when I return, united we will be.
It’s not the leavin’ of Liverpool that grieves me,
But, my darling, when I think of thee.

Leaving aside all the similarities of the tune, the opening lyrics in Dylan’s song is so similar that it is getting awfully close to copying:

Oh it’s fare-thee-well, my darlin’ true,

I’m a-leavin’ in the first hour of the morn.
I’m bound off for the Bay of Mexico,
Or maybe the coast of Cal-i-forn.

So it’s fare-thee-well, my own true love,

We’ll meet an-other day, an-other time;
It’s not the leavin’ that’s a-grievin’ me,
But my darlin’ who’s bound to stay behind

Bob recorded the song as one of the Witmark demo recordings in March 1963 and as I have noted before there are several sources that say he had it marked down as a possible song for the “Times they are a changing” album.

So what we now have are the first five songs Dylan composed in 1963 all having had music borrowed from earlier folk songs: “Masters of War,” “Girl from the North Country,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, and “Farewell.”

Quite clearly then taking old folk songs and writing new lyrics was not a one-off, but in 1963 was a way of writing for Bob.  He was indeed at this time a poet who set his poems to other people’s music.

Here’s the sort of singing of “Leaving of Liverpool” that I heard repeatedly, in my youth (and which I might add rather annoyed me as a proud Londoner who saw the north as a run-down backward irrelevance).

Judy Collins, Anita and Helen Carter of the Carter Family, Tim Buckley and The Modern Folk Quartet all recorded Bob’s version.  As did Lonnie Donegan, Dion DiMucci of Dion and the Belmonts, and Liam Clancy (who would of course been fully aware of the source of the song).

What this indicates is that no one was particularly concerned about the rewriting of old English folk songs and having them designated on the record as being written by Bob Dylan.

And at ths point I want to take in one more of Dylan’s songs from this period (early 1963) for I think it shows the first sign of Bob breaking away from the notion of using traditional music to go with his lyrics, and that is the largely forgotten “All over you” which is a comedy alternative to the talking blues which was popular at the time.  It is however still based on something previous: in this case ragtime music.

My feeling is that Bob was very aware of this ragtime style and so rather than copying it directly (it really does take a lot of work to be able to play ragtime in the authentic style), he had the idea of taking a generic style and writing a piece in that, without actually copying directly.   We can hear Bob’s introduction making a reference to his own copying of other people’s work.

And that seems to me to be the start of the new direction, or not just copying a song, but actually recognising that he had been doing this, and maybe could go a step further thereafter.

Indeed this had been something Bob had been doing for a while – we might recall “Death of Emmett Till” which uses the House of the Rising Sun” as its musical base

So my point is simple: Dylan copying other people’s music was not an occasional one-off, but a prime way of working which he had been using for some time.

• The utterly brilliant Angelina, plus Maybe Someday, Under you spell
• The album title songs Dylan wrote and ignored: JWH, Nashville Skyline.
• The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles
• No time, time passes and Dirge
• World Gone Wrong, She’s your lover, Foot of Pride
• Abandoned Love and Up to Me

By Tony Attwood

In this series I’m looking at a few of the songs Bob Dylan put onto an album, but then didn’t play in concert and asking (although quite often not answering) the simple question, “Why go to all the trouble of getting a recording good enough for an album, and then never include the song in the rosta?”

With “Dirt Road Blues” I think we have more of an answer than we have had in some other cases for as I noted when I first reviewed the song, it has to be seen not as a stand alone song but in the context of Time out of Mind where it was the second track, between Love Sick and Standing in the Doorway.

To me that suggests that the song is a reminder to the audience that yes although the album is about lost love, which suggests slow, often depressing songs, it is possible to be a bit more upbeat about the subject.  And although we know that Bob has almost always had control over what goes on his albums as much as what songs he plays on stage, it might be possible here that someone said, “Bob you’ve got to lighten it up a bit near the start.”  So he did.

And having done that, Bob then felt that there was no reason to play it in concert.

In fact “Dirt Road Blues” is, as far as I can tell, the only song from Time Out of Mind that Bob has never performed live.   And yet it obviously occupied him for a while during the recording of the album, because we know of at least two other versions, beside the one that appeared on the album, and both are clearly highly arranged, complex versions that would have taken a fair bit of rehearsal.   Indeed although the version below says “Version 1” there must have been a lot of rehearsing  (and thus possibly recordings) before the band got to make this recording.

We can certainly say both recordings we now have are well rehearsed, rather just knocked out as a spot of relief between the very, very downbeat opening tracks.  Indeed just listen to the middle 8 in the version 1 recording above.

And irrespective of whether my view of why the song was not played in concert is right or wrong, I must say I love this first version; a version which I would have thought could have fitted well into any gig.  OK the lyrics are just the standard blues lyrics, but the overall effect of the recording really gives us a bit of uplift – the uplift Bob clearly decided in the end that he didn’t need given how the lyrics pan out…

Gon’ walk down that dirt road, ’til someone lets me ride
Gon’ walk down that dirt road, ’til someone lets me ride
If I can’t find my baby, I’m gonna run away and hide

And as we move on through the song nothing really changes….

Gon’ walk on down that dirt road ’til I’m right beside the sun
Gon’ walk on down until I’m right beside the sun
I’m gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone

There was also another version…

This version really does take us away from the essence of the album as a whole, although personally I think this has to be my favourite approach – it has a perfect swing to it which counteracts the fact that it still is that old 12 bar blues approach.

There is also a beautiful contrast between what the band does when Bob is singing and in those intermissions between each line.  I really would have loved to hear this in concert.

But let’s move on.   Here’s a second “never released” song, and this one is very different in that the recordings we have of Bob performing the song clearly were not ready to be released.   So my point here is quite different – I think that with a bit more work this could have been a superb Dylan track.  But two things took the song in a wrong direction I believe – one is the falsetto voices in the chorus, the other is the step by step rise in the music for “When it’s all been done before”… the build up to that chorus.

Take two of the song shows (to me and of course as ever this is just my view) Bob struggles to know how to deliver these lyrics which are of themselves pretty apocalyptic.    In short, I think he got stuck – and that is not me suggesting that I would have found a way out of the dilemma; I don’t think that at all.

In fact I only think there is a way out of the problem because Peter Paul and Mary ripped up the whole concept of the music representing the lyrics, and instead gave the whole piece a bounce.

Yes if one takes the lyrics as the starting point, this song becomes impossible, but there is nothing in the book of musical rules that says it has to be this way.

The PPM version isn’t perfect by any means, and I think the ending is horrible, but the concept of this final verse with bounce and energy is interesting and fun.

Too much of nothin' can turn a man into a liar
It can cause some man to sleep on nails
Another man to eat fire
Everybody's doin' somethin', I heard it in a dream
But when it's too much of nothin', it just makes a fella mean

Say hello to Valerie, say hello to Marion
Send them all my salary on the waters of oblivion

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 16

by Jochen Markhorst

XVI      Beauty in Sound

Between the two extremes of our Japanese Dylan friends on the one hand and the Received Pronunciation of the very English Barb Jungr on the other, there are 9,559.36 kilometres (5,939.91 miles), 40 countries, some 31 official national languages and a multiple of that if you also start counting all the languages of minority groups (Catalan, Sámi, Kipchak… those languages). And translations of “Like A Rolling Stone” can be found in every language, and always more than one translation per language. If not in officially translated Lyrics, then by professional musicians with poetic talent, if not by well-meaning YouTube amateurs with acoustic guitar in the living room, then on enthusiastic fan blogs. The song, after all, hit like a a comet, was felt worldwide, and its magic continues to be picked up by each next generation.

So the usual favourite Italian has quite a bit of competition. Even from above the Alps; by nature, German is admittedly less melodious and sonorous than Italian, but – for example – in the lilting Austrian dialect, that natural disadvantage is fairly erased. As the legendary Austropop star Wolfgang Ambros demonstrated as early as 1978 on his tribute album Wie im Schlaf – Lieder von Bob Dylan with his version of “Like A Rolling Stone”, whose title alone is more eloquent than any international competitor: “Allan wia a Stan” (“Alone like a stone”).

However, the poetic multicolour has evaporated from Ambros’ translation. No Siamese cats, no princess on the steeple, no Miss Lonely… the Austrian rocker writes four interchangeable couplets in which four times the downfall of the little tart is sung:

Vor langer Zeit, warst so elegant
Und hast no glaubt, du bist was Besseres, is' net wahr
Und wann wer g'sagt hat, pass bitte auf
Dann hast nua g'locht, weil des für di so lustig war
Du hast di lustig g'mocht
Olle andern hast laut aus'glocht
Aber jetzt schau, wohin hat di des bracht
Jetzt lachst nimma, und i hob di im Verdacht
Dass'd dich aufreißen lasst auf da Straß'n
Für an Apfel und a Ei

A long time ago, you were so elegant
And you thought you were something better, ain’t it true
And when someone said, please be careful
Then you laughed because it was so funny to you
You mocked them,
Loudly laughing at all the others
But now look where it's got you
You're not laughing now and I suspect
That you let yourself get picked up from the street
For a penny

Wolfgang Ambros – Allan wia a Stan:

… an unequivocal, dramatic decline, in other words: from haughty socialite to cheap street hooker. Sonorous, yes, but without the mercurial poetry. Similar to that other kind-of-German translation, by Cologne superstar Wolfgang Niedecken, the former frontman of BAP, the biggest German rock band of the 1980s. Niedecken is a seasoned and practising Dylan fan, has written an entire book about his Dylan love (Wolfgang Niedecken über Bob Dylan, 2021), and, apart from many covers in his beloved dialect Kölsch, has also made two entire tribute records (Leopardefell, 1995, with 17 Dylan covers, and the triple CD Dylanreise in 2022, including 19 Dylan covers – all in Kölsch). But “Wie ’ne Stein” (Like a stone) was already on an LP by BAP in 1982 (the millionseller Vun drinne noh drusse) – in a translation similarly one-dimensional as Ambros’s, and 40 years later that still annoys Niedecken a bit:

Dylan’s lyrics are poetic and multi-layered. Isn’t it fundamentally difficult to translate them?

“I really enjoy it. The longer I do it, the more faithful I become to the work. Especially with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, I wasn’t particularly faithful back then. I wrote stuff in there… [laughs]. When I translate Dylan songs today, I really go into detail and try to stay as close as possible. I take my time with it.”
(Kölnische Rundschau, 25 March 2022)

Niedecken here addresses a mentality that is widely shared: Mir macht das einen Riesenspaß, “I really enjoy it,” and defines the approach of his working method here, which is less widely shared: ich versuche so nah dran zu bleiben, wie es nur irgend geht, “I try to stay as close as possible.” A journey around the world of all those diligent translators, from China to Finland and from Portugal to Mexico, reveals two Great Common Denominators:

– Love is the motivator,

– Faithfulness is the stumbling block.

All translators are driven by a love for Dylan’s songs. And all translators find themselves in the split: should it sound good or should I translate correctly? Chinese academics Ke Chen and Qiao Peng of Xi’an Shiyou University (A Study on the Chinese Translation of Lyrics from the Perspective of Translation Aesthetics -Taking Bob Dylan’s Lyrics as an Example, November 2024) know this too, of course, and state, “Poetry translation demands not just precise word-for-word conversion, but also the adept conveyance of intangible rhythmic nuances.” And when faced with dilemmas, prefer sound to precise translation.

Reluctantly, still. “Poetic poetry is the core part of Dylan’s songwriting, and his work contains an extraordinary poetic power,” our friends from the Far East acknowledge, finding then a basis for their challenge in the work of Lu Xun (1881-1936), the literary giant who also reflected contemplatively and essayistically on literature. As in the first article on Chinese literature, Outline of the Chinese Literature, 1925. Xun defines a kind of Holy Trinity for lyricism, which can be effortlessly transposed to the Holy Grail for any song translator: first, beauty in sense, second, beauty in sound, third, beauty in form. A similar formulation as the familiar mantra Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason, in other words. Our concern however, his followers argue in 2024, is songs. And songs must first and foremost sound good. So they shuffle the ranking of Lu Xun’s law a bit, swapping place 1 and place 2:

1. Beauty in Sound
2. Beauty in Sense
3. Beauty in Form

Next, Ke Chen and Qiao Peng demonstrate with academic seriousness what consequences this has for a translation of “Like A Rolling Stone”. “鲜” (xiān) and “钱” (qián) may not strictly speaking belong to the same rhyme category, they explain, but “bring a certain rhythmic sensation to readers or listeners”, and even more academically defend their translation of the second line of verse:

“Similarly, “现” (xiàn) and “吧” (ba) also have a certain phonetic connection in spoken language, especially when “吧” is used as a modal particle, it often ends lightly, forming a contrast with the preceding syllables and adding a rhythmic sense to the language.”

… not effortlessly understandable for Western readers, but it is still clear how much the men seek Beauty in Sound. The concessions to Beauty in Sense, by the way, are minimal. Translating back, the opening lines are something like:

There was a time when you were well-dressed
Throwing vigorously a few bucks at a hobo, ain’t that true?

With charming modesty, both gentlemen apologise throughout with minor disclaimers. “When English is transformed into Chinese, due to the differences in language habits, it is easy to show traces of stiffness and far-fetched,” for example. And in the Conclusion, after demonstrations of their struggles with among others “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”: “Their [Dylan’s lyrics] political nature and creative background are very different from Chinese poetry.”

Yet: despite all the love of sound and all the care for rhythmic sense – they can’t beat Italian, Kölsch and Austrian. Well, in Western ears, anyway.

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 17: Hits and misses

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door

Previously in this series

• Why does a simple, hardly known Dylan song, get recorded over and over again?
• How the most subtle of musical changes gave “Bob Dylan’s Dream” a totally different meaning

By Tony Attwood

As noted above I have been writing in the last few days about some of Bob’s early compositions, in articles such as “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Only a Hobo.”    Here I have been trying to understand how Bob was working as a songwriter in these early days of his career.

One of the key points is that with those early Dylan songs (they were both composed in 1963) we can see and hear that Dylan was taking existing songs, adding some modifications and writing a completely new set of words.  This in turn drew a completely new audience into the music of bygone eras.

I’ve not seen an analysis of how many Bob Dylan songs from this period were of this type, with the music “borrowed” from earlier times, and new lyrics added, but for the moment can say it was a fair number.  (If you have seen an article that works out how many songs from one of these early years had original music and how many used earlier compositions, please do add a note – it will save me working it out).

I am also not aware of other songwriters in the early 1960s doing the same thing – and so again I would be grateful if you could let me know of other examples of the process I describe here, that happened before Bob started releasing his own compositions.  In short I am trying to resolve whether Bob thought up the notion of taking traditional songs and adding lyrics strongly related to the early 1960s, or were others doing it.

Thus I’m following this a little further, hoping my meanderings might be of some interest.  And today I’ve moved on to “Masters of War”, and to give a context of the proximity of the compositions, here is the start of the list of Dylan compositions in chronological order.  There were 31 songs that Dylan composed in 1962, of which the first nine were…

• Masters of War (War protest)
• Girl from the North Country (Lost Love)
• Boots of Spanish Leather (Song of Leaving)
• Bob Dylan’s Dream (Lost love)
• Farewell (a song of leaving)
• Talkin Devil (talking blues, the Devil is real)
• All over you (comedy alternative to talking blues)
• Going back to Rome (there is something about Italy)
• Only a Hobo (moving on)

Now the very short description of the subject matter of the song is something I dreamed up some years back when I created a chronology of Dylan’s songs (the 1960s section is here if you want the full story), as I was trying for the first time to get a grip with the way Dylan’s creativity evolved.  And it is interesting, to me at least, that Bob was writing about so many different subjects.  There are two lost love songs, and two songs of leaving, along with a song about moving on, and so on, but no single subject matter dominates Bob’s writing here.   It really does look as if he was trying out every subject he could think of.

But only one of these is a song that in any way could be called a protest song, even though when Bob started to become famous, he very quickly became described by many commentators (who are always looking for a short cut to describe a complex situation) as a “protest singer”.  That of course is Masters of War.

And here again, as with “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Only a Hobo”  Bob took an existing song and used that as the musical base of his newly created lyrics.

As has been widely acknowledged, “Masters of War” takes its melody from “Nottamun Town.”   Dylan’s version appeared on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and between 1963 and 2016 Bob performed it on stage 884 times.  And of course it changed a lot over the years.

The exact origin of that song on which “Masters of War” is based is disputed, and although multiple people have put forward theories explaining “Nottamun” as a reference to Nottingham in what is now known as the English East Midlands (and as it happens that city is very much still there, which I can attest by pure chance as I was dancing in Nottingham last night, although that event has no connection with this article), but there is nothing in particular in the original song that does link it with Nottingham, or anywhere else or anyone else.

The simplest explanation is that it is a song celebrating nonsense, created in the days when everywhere beyond the confines of one’s own village or town, was considered to be strange, weird and by and large unsafe. A world that is in fact upside down (a thought that was commonly expressed in pamphlets of the time, as that is what seemed to many people to be happening in the English civil war (1642 to 1651) – as well as this being a fundamental concept of folk tales from the earliest of of times).

Thus the song has been reinvented to include many settings telling of strange lands where strange things happen.  But what Bob did was to take this melody and create new lyrics telling of a world where horrors were about to happen not because of the world’s weirdness but because of mankind’s stupidity.   The concept also is that the singer can see what’s going on – (and by extension so can the fans).   It is in fact a very appealing conceit: you might be fooling everyone else but you don’t fool me.  “I can see through your mask”.

The point about the song however is that the simplicity of its construction (it is all based on one implied chord, and everything is powered by the melody and the lyrics – although changes can be added as  the song progresses).   This video includes an interesting introduction to the song, as well as some contemporary musical variations.

Now what Bob did was to start with a simple variation on the traditional song in terms of the lyrics, while keeping the essence of the song as close to the original versions – at least as we can assume they were performed.

In Dylan’s original version, the genius is the simplicity of the accompaniment with a powerful melody reaching to the high notes twice in each verse before descending.  Add in the fact that so many of the lines are themselves memorable, and those of us hearing the song for the first time on Freewheelin could not but be moved.   The fact was, for most of us, we had never heard anything like this before.

Now my point here is that Bob’s recording of the song seemed to come out of nowhere.  I certainly had never heard “Nottamun Town” at the time and never heard such a strong public denunciation of war in a song before.  All I had known was the poetry of the war poets such as Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves etc.

So this was an extraordinarily powerful piece of writing, made all the more so because I was (as I think many others who listened to Freewheelin’ soon after it was released were) completely unaware of the source of the music.   Of course, it was the lyrics that we all remembered, but it was the power of the music that brought the song to mind – and of course which then allowed it to be performed in the folk club scene that was growing exponentially.

And this leads me to my point.   The songs of Bob Dylan at this time, which I and my contemporaries got to know, were, to some extent at least, songs for which Bob wrote the lyrics, but not the music.  Quite why he chose to work that way I don’t know – maybe he just hadn’t discovered how good a writer of music he could be.  Maybe he had been told that his songwriting was “not how we do it” (for there are always people who think they know about such things, but in reality just get a buzz out of criticising).  Maybe he just loved the folk songs that he found.

But for whatever reason, at this time Bob was often creating songs for which he did not write the music, but did write the lyrics.   I’m not saying that every song he composed at this time was one in which the music was lifted from elsewhere, but it is certain that in some important cases, this was what happened.

By Tony Attwood

Yesterday I wrote a piece on this site, How the most subtle of musical changes gave “Bob Dylan’s Dream” a totally different meaning; an article which looked at the way musical changes from the original song “Lady Franklin’s Lament,” took away some of the desperate sadness of that original.

There is no dispute that the music of Bob Dylan’s Dream, was not only lifted from the earlier song, and then itself was changed by Bob over time.   The sad edge that we hear in the early performances has gone by the time it was recorded – not because the lyrics were changed – they were not, but because of the way the music was subtly changed.

And this led me to think: this really is a defining element within Bob’s work.   Indeed we all know of course that Bob would regularly rewrite the music of his songs (although he has done this far less in recent years) while retaining the lyrics as before.  And I am sure we can all think of examples of songs that have turned up in concert sounding really quite different from the recorded version.

But what I have not done in the past (and I am sure this is just a failure of my own thinking) is to consider why he does this, and what the implications are of it.

With “Bob Dylan’s Dream” the changes that Bob introduced to the music in the recorded version, lightened the message somewhat, even though the lyrics stayed the same.  So having published that little piece yesterday I then started to ponder, “was this a common practice by Bob across the years of his constant touring?”   To take a song and change the music, not just because that’s what he did, but to develop or even change the message?

In his early years of composing Bob would, as we all know, take tunes that he liked and re-work them.   For example as has previously been pointed out on this site he used “Railroading on the great divide”…

… as the music for “Only a hobo”.

This borrowing of tunes and indeed extracts from lyrics for subsequent songs was how folk music was propagated.  Occasionally a new song might be found, and then quite possibly that too would be part of the collection of available melodies that could be used and re-used for new lyrics.  For there are always many more people who can write interesting lyrics, compared with people who can write interesting melodies.

So it is not too great a leap to suggest that Bob knew both “Railroading” and “Only a miner,” when he took up the musical theme…

And this “Only a Hobo” was born.

This reworking of old songs was of course the tradition of the folk music that evolved in the British Isles centuries before, with the songs then being taken to North America, and then with new melodies and themes being found as time went by.

So this evolution of songs was nothing new, and all Bob was doing was applying this approach to more modern music.   It also, incidentally, throws a new light on Bob’s fairly well-known objection to people recording his concerts.  That objection can be seen as being related to his desire to protect his copyright, and thus his income, but it perhaps should also be seen in relation to his desire for the music to be left to mutate into new forms, rather than be fixed.

The view that songs are or should be in a state of flux comes of course from the folk tradition.  And it seems to me that Bob’s valuing of the way in which songs can mutate and evolve should be seen as a central part of his approach to music, and his own desire to mutate his own songs – at least until a few years ago.  This in turn could be an explanation for Bob’s dislike of recordings of his shows being put on the internet – for the existence of those recordings could in some ways “fix” the approach to the song.   Bob instead (in this view) wanted to aid the mutation of the song to continue, (although of course this view is countered to some extent by the way in which Dylan didn’t do too much to vary the Hendrix version of Watchtower, once Bob had started playing the electric version).

This leads to an interesting thesis: that the performance of songs should not really be seen as the finishing point, as happens once they are released on record, but rather as a part of an ongoing journey.

Of course, the journies themselves can lead to one particular version of a song becoming seen as the definitive version, such as has happened to some degree for Rod Stewart’s “Only a Hobo”.

But even here this was far from being the only version.     The Johnson Mountain Boys took us back into the folk tradition of earlier eras with the addition of a banjo and violin and thus making the song much lighter.   The change in the musical arrangement gives us a totally different feeling from that of Dylan and Stewart.  For here there is now a deliberate total disconnect between the lyrics and the song, which add considerably to the poignancy of the song as a whole.

Now this desire to change the musical arrangement of Dylan’s song is something that does not happen to the works of most other recording artists, and even where it does happen it most certainly doesn’t happen so often as it does with the music of Bob Dylan.   Take this for example

Indeed as we go back to the cover versions, there seems to be something in what we might otherwise consider a fairly unexceptional Dylan song that makes musicians think of reworking the song.  Consider this by the Hobo String Band for example.   It is still the same song, but the message and feeling within the song is quite different.

We can go on finding more and more reworkings of this not especially well-known Dylan song each of which can give a slightly revised interpretation to the lyrics.  Some, for example feel sad, some ironic, but some also celebrate the life of the central character.   This is Jonathan Edwards & The Seldom Scene.

Now this raises a question that I have not seen posed in other articles or books (but if I have missed someone’s treatise on the subject please do tell me).   This question is, “why are Bob’s songs treated in this way?  Why are so many varied versions recorded?”

Is it that there is something within Bob’s original (even where he is using a reworking of a traditional theme) that makes them suitable for revision, or is it always because it is a Dylan song, and therefore because of that, people are more likely to pay attention?

Now my point here, and forgive me for emphasising it again, is not the lyrics.   For I am not sure there is too much in these lyrics that would make multiple performers want to record the song.  It’s a plaintive piece, it has a message, but really, it’s not that deep.  So I move on to ask, is it something in the original melody that induces this desire to rework the song?   Or is it something in the music and lyrics combined which makes other performers want to take on the idea of doing their own version?

I am not in any way trying to argue that each cover version of a Dylan song adds something spectacular to the song, nor am I trying to suggest that every Dylan song has something in the music that makes lots of artists want to record it.  But I do think it is possible to argue that Dylan’s music (rather than just the lyrics) can attract other musicians to have a go at further developing the song.

What’s more these new versions of the songs have kept coming over the decades.  This version below comes from 2010 – getting on for half a century after Bob Dylan wrote and recorded the song.

Now the question is, are all these people recording this song because it is a Dylan work, or because there is something particular about the lyrics or perhaps the music?  The version above is from Lötsjön and was recorded in 2013 – so we have now hit the half century.

What I also find interesting, is that what I have always thought of as a fairly ordinary Dylan song, has gone on being recorded, and indeed has moved into translations.  This version is in Hungarian (I think – please forgive me if I have got this wrong).

My last example today is Zwykły włóczęga which is the song in Polish performed by Martyna Jakubowicz, and in listening to this I come back to my main point.  Why have so many people wanted to work on this song?  It could be argued that it is just the lyrics, but I think there is more.  I think it is the simple melody that draws people in – in short it is the music of Bob Dylan that is attracting all these artists to the song.  For the fact is that no matter what the language, the melody is indeed always very memorable.

For there is something particular about the music of this piece.  As you may well know, most pop and rock songs come with a solid four beats in a bar, which if the band want to give the music some swing, also includes an emphasis on the second and fourth beat of the bar.)

But we get none of that here, for “Only a hobo” has a time signature of 6/8, which means that to count the beats one would recite:

So my question (mostly directed to myself at this stage) is WHY do some many bands want to record a Dylan song, even when it is, like this, a fairly obscure Dylan song?  Is it because

a) Dylan wrote it and the band can say “This is a Dylan song” or

b) There is something particular in the lyrics that makes it interesting or

c) There is something particular in the music that makes it interesting.

The classic answers would be a) or b) or both.   Being perverse I am starting to think that at least in part the answer is c), and that this is the case because the way Dylan writes the music makes the songs very adaptable.

Now in these cases, Dylan has given us a fairly straightforward recording, but each of the artists featured above has found something else to do with this song – which is often not the case with folk, rock, or pop songs.

So I seem to be starting a journey that says to me, it is Dylan’s music, so largely ignored by critics who seem to want to do nothing but crawl over the lyrics, that allows at least some of the songs he has composed to be varied and developed, both by himself and by other bands.  The fact that critics don’t seem to want to write about this, doesn’t worry me.   After all this is UNTOLD Dylan. And of course you don’t have to read if you don’t want to.

But I do think I might be onto something here.  So if you know of a book that already says all this, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk and tell me, and I’ll stop wasting your time, and mine.  Otherwise, I rather think I shall continue this theme.

By Tony Attwood

I was writing a couple of days ago, in the article Dylan the lyrics, the music and some false comparisons: Blowing in the Wind, about how I felt the link between Blowing in the Wind and its supposed antecedents had been overplayed.

That however (in my opinion) is not the case with “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, and its antecedent, “Lady Franklin’s Lament.”  The closeness of the songs cannot be denied – but the ways in which Bob Dylan performs his “Dream” is utterly different from Lady Franklin’s Lament.  And this I think is an important point if we wish to understand Dylan the composer, as opposed to just Dylan the lyric writer.

As you can hear below, the whole approach of the Lament is that it is (rather obviously) a lament: “a passionate expression of grief or sorrow” as Google helpfully tells me.   And indeed if you just look at (let alone listen to) the final verse you will see the full meaning of the “lament.”

And now my burden it gives me pain
For my long lost Franklin I'd cross the main
Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To say on earth that my Franklin do live

Now if you listen to Bob’s rewriting of the old song as we have it on Freewheellin’, the whole style and approach is much more upbeat, even though the lyrics tell us that the dream made him sad, as you would expect, what with it being about his friends who have long since died.

And indeed I would say that even if you remove your undoubted ability to recite the lyrics of the song by heart, there is still a certain buoyancy about the song.  Which when one ponders that point for a moment, is again rather odd.

Certainly what I remember, learning and performing this song as a young man, was singing the line about not getting old with a fair amount of gusto.  I had no thoughts of getting old of course; I had a life before me. And yes it was easy to tell wrong from right; I knew that.  I just wished the government did.

Such a view was helped by the fact that the sadness doesn’t really come in until the very end.

How many a year has passed and gone?
Many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a first friend
And each one I've never seen again

Now as it happens that rings incredibly true to me today, as just a few weeks ago I heard that a good friend of mine from my school days (some 50+ years ago) who was in fact one year younger than me, had died a couple of years back.   We had not been in touch for a long time, but I remember him fondly, and it was a great shock to hear the news.   I asked the one pal I have from those days who I am still in touch with what had caused my best friend’s death, but he didn’t know.

So of course this song suddenly came back to me, and its poignancy hit me stronger than ever.  I don’t quite feel the way Bob expressed it…

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

…but I am feeling sad about a lost friend, and the remoteness I now have from my own past.

And yet, and yet…. I never felt when I performed the song in folk clubs in my teens and 20s, and I still do not feel, “Bob Dylan’s Dream” as a sad song.  And of course it wasn’t sad then because I was young, and had a full life to look forward to, rather than a full life to look back upon.

So for me the question now arises: how could a song by Dylan which is about such a sad event and which ends with that note of desperation…

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

      G           Am
While riding on a train goin' west,
              C/g    D/f#
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
C /b G                    C/g     G
I    dreamed a dream that made me sad,
             D            C         /b        G
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had.

Now if we go back to the wonderful performance “Live at Town Hall New York April 1963” (Live 1962-1966 — Rare Performances From The Copyright Collections (2018), which is at least at this moment on the internet and in case that vanishes, also on Spotify if you have an account),   we do get a greater sense of sadness because of the way Dylan sings, and in particularly occasionally holds onto some of the lyrics, and takes the guitar further into the background.   Indeed by the penultimate “Many a year” verse, you have to be completely insensitive to the performance not to feel at least some of the emotion inherent in the song.

Which may leave us puzzling over why Bob took the emotion level down for the recording on Freewheelin’.  Why do we not get the full blast of the sadness there?

Of course it may have been because by the time of that recording Bob had played the song so many times, he longer felt easy putting all the emotion into the song.  It may have been habit, or it may have been the producer in the studio suggesting he might “lighten it up a bit”.

And it is that thought that brings me to my real point: what Bob has done is created a song, based on an old ballad, that with very minor amendments in performance, could be desperately sad, as the lyrics suggest, or could in fact be a piece that tells the same tale with exactly the same lyrics, but which via the music by-passes some of the desperation implied in the last verse.

Now these musical changes that Dylan introduces are indeed subtle, and of course I have no idea how they came about, but they do tell us a lot about Dylan’s music – and it is the music that is important here, because the lyrics stay the same.  Play the song one way, as on the album, and the sadness is there in the lyrics, but not reflected in the music.  Play it the other way, as in the 1963 New York Town Hall performance, and all the desperation is there in both lyrics and music.

And this for me is a perfect example of how Dylan is able to manipulate his compositions through very subtle changes in order to vary the way we react to a piece.  And indeed it is an example that gives an insight into why Bob has sought endlessly to re-invent his music on tour.

What we can conclude from this is that for Bob the music is absolutely as important as the lyrics, which is why we have multiple versions of the same song.  Indeed my view is that with this song, and with the most subtle of changes, Dylan shows just how much understanding he has of the impact of the way the music is performed on the message of the song.

And at this point I would also like to add Judy Collins version here.  What we have here is a very enjoyable performance of the song, and one that I have willingly listened to many times, but it has none of the desperation of Dylan’s early version.  Rather I can imagine I would have been applauding warmly if I had been fortunate enough to be in a Judy Collins concert and hearing her play that, but there would not be tears rolling down my cheeks as I suspect there might have been if I had heard a performance that delved into the meaning of the lyrics.

Here are the other songs in the series. There are details of our recent articles and series on the home page.

• A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall. 
• Abandoned Love
• Alberta
• All along the watchtower
• Angelina
• Ballad for a Friend
• Beyond here lies nothing
• Blind Willie McTell
• Blowing in the Wind
• Black Diamond Bay
• Can you please crawl out your window
• Caribbean Wind – Dylan’s musical exploration of evolving uncertainty
• Chimes of Freedom
• Cold Irons Bound
• Cover Down Pray Through
• Dark Eyes
• Desolation Row
• Drifter’s Escape
• Don’t think twice it’s all right.
• Early Roman Kings
• Every grain of sand
• Everything is broken
• False Prophet
• Foot of pride
• Gates of Eden
• Girl from the north country / Boots of Spanish leather
• Goodbye Jimmy Reed, and the 13 bar blues
• High Water, a rise, a fall, a bounce, a flood
• Highway 61 Revisited
• I believe in you
• “I Want You”. It was never meant to be like this.
• Idiot wind
• If not for you
• It takes a lot to laugh
• It’s all over now baby blue
• It’s all right ma: life really is ok despite everything.
• Isis
• It ain’t me babe
• Jokerman
• Just like a woman
• Key West
• Lenny Bruce is Dead
• Love Sick
• Man in the Long Black Coat
• Masters of War
• Mississippi
• Not Dark Yet
• One too many mornings
• She Belongs to Me
• Shelter from the Storm
• Simple Twist of Fate
• Sign on the window
• Tangled up in blue
• Tombstone Blues
• The Wicked Messenger
• Workingmen’s Blues # 2
• You’re a big girl now
•  Yonder Comes Sin