Untold Dylan

By Tony Attwood

If you are a regular reader of Untold Dylan, then first, thank you, I really do appreciate it.  And second, you will I am sure have noticed that while the contributions of those other writers who are kind enough to write various series of articles for the site are generally planned and organised before they hand over their material to me for publication, my pieces are far less well planned and as a result can meander somewhat.

And this is most certainly true of late as I have been puzzling over the issue of the way Dylan, in his early years of fame, set about writing the music (rather than the lyrics), of his songs.

Before I began this, I did do some searching around for books on Bob’s music (as opposed to lyrics) in the early days of his career.  But I found precious little that could help me tackle this subject.   And so, as indeed I am sure has been most apparent, I am writing a series of articles without actually knowing where it is going to take me.

Yet despite working in the dark, as it were, I remain deeply fascinated by the way Dylan has constantly written and re-written his music – something few other musicians working in the pop and rock field have done – or at least done so extensively.

And so the first question I set myself in pondering this point is why Dylan has done this.  The answer I have come up with is that he does it because this is what happened with the traditional music of England which so fascinated Dylan once he discovered it in the 1960s.  I believe (with no direct evidence from Bob of course) that this interest led to the notion that music changing across the years, decades and centuries, could be carried on today by contemporary musicians – and indeed could be undertaken by himself  And so this is what he has done.  When we go to Bob’s latest concert it is not just to see him again, but to see if he has transformed any more of his songs into something utterly different.

What fascinates me further is that not only has any other musician gone as far as Bob has with such an endeavour, few writers have tackled this issue of Bob’s regular re-writing of his music.   And this was why my recent series, sometimes called “Bob Dylan the composer” has been looking into the origins of the music of some of Bob’s early songs, most notably those from 1963.  In case you are interested I’ve put a list of the recent articles from this series at the end.

However today I decided enough writing had been done for the moment on individual songs, and it was time to try and pull this notion together, if for no other reason that to allow me to see where I had got to.  In short, I started wondering why Bob, in 1963 primarily, was utilising other people’s music to fit his lyrical ideas.

To begin with, to look at this one needs of course a list of Dylan’s songs from that year, and fortunately we published just such a list for each and every year of Bob’s composing.    The page covering the 1960s with links to our early reviews of each song is here.  I don’t know if anyone else ever finds it useful, but I’m so glad the effort was put in, as I’m endlessly going back to see when songs were written, rather than when they were recorded.

And in looking back at the list, and considering Bob’s musical input, what became clear to me was that although by 1963 Bob already had a very clear vision of what made a great lyric, and indeed a very profound ability to write excellent song lyrics, he appears to have been far less certain as to his own ability to write original music.   For while sometimes he does create songs that are seemingly new, in the musical sense, he often dips back into using someone else’s music – at least as a starting point.

So what I have now done (and this may of course just turn out to be for my own benefit but you never know…) is taken the list of songs composed in 1963 and tried to summarise the origin of the music (and I stress, just the music, not the lyrics) in a few words

1. Masters of War based on Nottamun Town
2. Girl from the North Country based on Scarborough Fair
3. Boots of Spanish Leather based on Girl from the North Country
4. Bob Dylan’s Dream based on Lord Franklin
5. Farewell based on Leaving of Liverpool
6. Talkin Devil  unfinished song, origin unknown
7. All over you Title taken from James Bond film “Goldfinger”.  Song unfinished
8. Going back to Rome 12 bar blues
9. Only a Hobo based on “Man in the Street” and on “Poor Miner’s Lament”
10. Ramblin Down Thru the World based in part on Woody Guthrie’s “Ramblin Round”
11. Who killed Davey Moore?  Based on Who Killed Cock Robin
12. As I rode out one morning  Based on  W. H. Auden poem As I Walked Out One Evening
13. Dusty Old Fairgrounds A fast prelude to “Times they are a Changin”
14. Walls of Red Wing Based on “The road and the miles to Dundee”
15. New Orleans Rag Based on the format of ragtime music
16. You’ve been hiding too long. Based on “Ballad for a Friend” and “Oxford Town”
17. Seven Curses  Based on “Come all ye bold Highwaymen”
18. With God on our Side Based on “The Patriot Game”
19. Talking World War III Blues Based on Woody Guthrie style of talking blues
20. Only a pawn in their game
21. Eternal Circle Based on “Come all ye bold highwaymen”
22. North Country Blues
23. Gypsy Lou
24. Troubled and I Don’t Know Why Based on “I’m Troubled” and “What Would the Deep Sea Say”
25. When the ship comes in Influenced by “Pirate Jenny” from Brecht and Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera”
26. The Times they are a-Changing
27. Percy’s Song  Paul Clayton song called “The Wind and the Rain” 
28. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll Music based on folk song “Mary Hamilton”
29. Lay Down your Weary Tune.  Dylan himself said he was trying to capture to essence of Scottish folk music.  No exact song has been identified but some have suggested “The Water Is Wide”, “O Waly, Waly” and “I Wish, I Wish”
30. One too many mornings A variation on “Times they are a changing”
31. Restless Farewell  Based on “The Parting Glass”

Now this is a very crude set of links, that I know.  Many versions of older folk songs exist, and you may well find one that sounds nothing like the song that I have linked it too – and on this basis my list needs refining.  But my fundamental point here – which I am exploring as I write it (as I have noted several times) – is that while Bob at this early juncture in his career as a composer, was able to create interesting and often powerful lyrics, seemingly with some ease, and often with enormous success, his compositional skills were behind the lyrical skills.

However the notion of taking earlier songs as a basis for his work was well founded, I think, because we can see between these reuses of older songs, new songs emerge.  Indeed if you have had a look at my list above you might have noted that no antecedent is given for several songs in the latter part of the list.   Songs such as “Only a Pawn in their Game,” “North Country Blues,” “Gypsy Lou,” and most notably “The Times they are a-Changin”.

It is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that Bob edged his way to writing his own music with some caution, but it was the success of these original songs which showed him that yes indeed, not only was he brilliant at writing lyrics, he could also write good original music as well.

Of course there is no evidence from Bob himself on this point, but if I may, I would also cite my article from yesterday on Tell ol Bill    We do have (and in that article I have referred to) a recording of the Tell ol Bill session in which various approaches were tried out, and that gives us some insight into Bob’s way of writing the music, once the words are already there.

In my very humble view, I think Bob got it very wrong in that case, for as I have so often said on this site, I think he wrote a brilliant composition and found the perfect arrangement of it, but then he felt it was not up to the standard he wanted.

But the main point with the recording of the Tell Ol Bill session is that we can hear Bob trying out all sorts of different approaches.   With the lyrics, he seems to know from the start, how they should work.  But with the music, he is not always able to make the absolute judgements that he can with the lyrics.

Of course, that’s just my view, and although I’ve had a lifetime largely involving creative activities, I am as aware of ever that I might well be wrong, but I do see a link between Bob’s very tenuous steps toward being a composer of original music, and his subsequent interest in looking at ways to re-write the music, or at the very least the musical arrangement of his songs.

For as you will hear if you play the recording of the Tell Ol Bill sessions, those lyrics don’t change, but the music moves through a variety of different styles and approaches.

• All directions at once: Tell Ol Bill
• Dylan’s “Tell Ol Bill”: roots in a blues ballad, rhymes from the Romantic poets
• Tell Ol’ Bill: Dylan digs deep into the song’s origins to create a brilliant film song
  

Previously in this series, which is becoming known (to me at least) as Dylan, the composer,  I’ve looked at…

1. Blowing in the Wind and No More Auction Block
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
3. Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
4. Girl from the North Country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
5. Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
6. Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
7. Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
8. Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to Eternal Circle
9. North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
10. Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”
11. When the Ship Comes in: from Pirate Jenny onward.
12. When Bob said Times they are changing it is quite likely he didn’t fully realise how.
13. Dylan the composer: “Percy’s Song” and “One Too Many Mornings”

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
• Concluding thoughts and knocked out examples 

By Tony Attwood

When an article appears with the title “Concluding thoughts” then it is a fair bet that it is the last article in the series.  And so I intended the last article in the list above to be, but I remained disappointed that I couldn’t find anything new to say in relation to one of my own utter favourite Dylan songs in the written but not released catagory: “Tell Ol Bill”.  And so I left it.

There is a passing relationship with a traditional American song in this composition – but really it doesn’t go much beyond the title…. but I dealt with that and everything else I could think of in the earlier article “All Directions At Once 66: Tell Ol’ Bill”

And I didn’t return to Tell Ol’ Bill, much as I love the song, for the recent little series “The Songs that Bob Wrote and then Ignored” because indeed, I had written so much (or as one colleague said to me “raved so much”) about the song that there seemed nothing more to say.

But now we have the Tell Ol Bill Sessions on the internet and we can hear just how much work Bob was willing to go through to try and get a version that he felt was valid for an album.   And even if you are not particularly attracted to the song, I would recommend just popping into this series of recordings, in order to get an insight into the way Bob works, and the level of work put into finding the right version – even though in this case he did not think of it as worth releasing, or indeed playing.

Take for example the version that begins just after the 11-minute marker.   If this was the only version we ever heard, I’d be there saying “I can see why he abandoned it.”

But then suddenly after what I personally find a rather plodding version, just after 18 minutes we get a version that clearly is en route to the final destination of the song.    That version stops after a while, but it does show the jump Dylan can make in terms of arrangements.  A radical change to the percussion and we are off in a new direction.

We can’t hear all the discussions, but it is clear that Bob is hearing possibilities in the song that no one else is.   So on 21’30” minutes we are getting a little closer – and it is interesting that after so many tries already Bob can still find it in himself to deliver the song in a new way.

At 24 minutes we are off again – and just listen to Bob’s singing – he has been singing this over and over (and he must have sung it many times before bringing it to the studio for this attempt to get a version that he wants to release) and yet he can still find new life in the piece.

Of course, I don’t think each idea works – like the sudden break in the 24 minute version, but then what do I know?  What I would say is this recording is remarkable because it does give us insights into ideas that are tried right through but then abandoned never to be heard again – until the release of this collection.

What I would also add is that around the 30-minute mark however, we are getting remarkably close to that final “take nine” edition of the song.   But I really don’t like the piano part with its repeated note.  Was that Bob playing?  If so, what on earth is he trying to do?

But what is interesting is that around 33 minutes Bob seems to be taking the song in a totally new direction, and although that doesn’t lead to the final version, it does have some elements within it that make it to the end.  And this is at the moment when the comment is made “Maybe we should change it all… everything”.   Thankfully that did not prevail.

However on 35 minutes we are starting to hear a different version again… Bob starts it up and the band follow – although we are now getting minor chords where previously we were getting majors.   The effect is (for me at least) unnerving, for minor chords give such a totally different feel from that achieved using the major chords of most of the other versions.  But as we know, Bob is always willing to try something else…

And in this minor key approach, there is something that fits with the lyrics – although the recording of the minor key version breaks down, it leaves a feeling… a sense … of something extra that could be brought into the song; it is out there and just needs to be caught….

But then, yet again on 38 minutes, we are back to a more bouncy version.

Now I know this is a long listen, and really most of us don’t want to spend such much time on failed versions of a song, but what we can do is hear this extraordinary song emerge.  For around the 39 minute mark we really are hearing the song where it could get to and then suddenly at 39 minutes 30 seconds, we have it.

What the “it” is, is a combination of a solid beat, but with Bob still singing in the soft way that he adopted through the earlier recordings.  It is a real contrast, which it seems ought not to work, and yet, somehow, it does.

But just in case you really don’t want to hear how Bob works and re-works the song, you can of course skip to the final version – the one over which I rave and rave, and which Bob thought was not worthy of inclusion anywhere, or even worthy of playing on stage.

As I have said so often before, why this song was not released and not played in concert is quite beyond me.  My view is that for any other artist this could be seen as the high point of his musical achievement.  But for Bob it was just another song that was written, worked on over and over, and then thrown away, never to be played in public.

As I once said, this is Visions of Johanna with a beat.

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

The tempest struggles in the air
And to myself alone I sing
It could sink me then and there
I can hear those echoes ring

I tried to find one smiling face
To drive the shadows from my head
I'm stranded in this nameless place
Lying restless in a heavy bed

Tell me straight out if you will
Why must you torture me within?
Why must you come down off of your hill?
And throw my fate to the clouds and wind

Far away in a silent land
Secret thoughts are hard to bear
Remember me, you'll understand
Emotions we can never share

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

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

Beneath the thunder blasted trees
The words are ringing off your tongue
The ground is hard at times like these
The stars are cold, the night is young

The rocks are bleak, the trees are bare
Iron clouds are floating by
Snowflakes falling in my hair
Beneath the grey and stormy sky

The evening sun is sinking low
The woods are dark, the town isn't new
They'll drag you down, they'll run the show
They will see you black and blue

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

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

Highlands (1997) part 4 (final)

by Jochen Markhorst

• Part 1: Wild rose in the heather
• Part 2: You can hear the air around it
• Part 3: That long rambling talking thing

IV         She studied the lines on my face     

I’m in Boston town, in some restaurant
I got no idea what I want
Well, maybe I do but I’m just really not sure
Waitress comes over
Nobody in the place but me and her

 We owe to the esteemed Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas a special, fascinating plot interpretation of that alienating intermezzo halfway through the song, those seven stanzas forming a kind of one-act play for two in an empty restaurant in Boston. In his wonderful Dylan study Why Dylan Matters (2017), Professor Thomas points to the return of the image of the waitress. A return from that other monumental song in Dylan’s catalogue, from “Tangled Up In Blue” (Blood On The Tracks, 1975).

Now we also recognise the male protagonist from “Tangled Up In Blue”. Now, in “Highlands”, he is in the “wrong time”, you picked the wrong time to come, says the waitress, who by her looks and her behaviour has thrown him back in time, back to 1974. Just like her predecessor, she observes the restaurant guest intently (She studied the lines on my face vs. She studies me closely), we are again in an otherwise empty catering facility, and when she insists on drawing her portrait, he has to draw it, strangely, from memory, although she is standing right in front of him. It doesn’t look a thing like me, she says a little later, a bit indignantly. On the contrary, the satisfied artist contradicts her, it most certainly does – after all, he has fabricated a fine portrait of the memory of that waitress in the topless place at the time. The last stanza definitively illustrates that the narrator is in a different time zone when the waitress asks which female authors he has read: “Erica Jong,” he replies triumphantly. Erica Jong’s controversial Fear Of Flying is from 1973.

She goes away for a minute
And I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street but nobody’s going anywhere

Bob Dylan – Highlands:

It is the second time in Dylan’s oeuvre that an assertive bar lady is given a supporting role. So the first is that lady in a topless bar taking the protagonist home and making such a smashing impression with the work of a thirteenth-century Italian poet.

Twenty-two years later, her colleague in some Boston restaurant gets the spotlight, with word choice and plot suggesting that the protagonist is thinking of the same lady as in “Tangled Up In Blue”.

And four years after this we seem to encounter her a third time. In the sixth verse of “High Water” on “Love And Theft” the lady in the restaurant scene is then given a name, “Fat Nancy”, and there is again a suspicion of déjà vu. The tone, this time;

I asked Fat Nancy for something to eat, she said, “Take it off the shelf—
As great as you are, man,
You’ll never be greater than yourself.”
I told her I didn’t really care

Each time, the protagonist has a laborious, jolting dialogue with the lady present. In Tangled, the first-person can only mumble unintelligibly at a direct, simple question like “Don’t I know your name?” and remain awkwardly silent at an inviting opening like “I thought you’d never say hello”. In Boston, like a Kafka story, the conversation stumbles from denial to misunderstanding to rebuttals and back again (“got any soft boiled eggs?” “we’re out of them”, “draw a picture of me” “I don’t have my drawing book”, etc.): the same pattern as the brief interlude in “High Water”.

It’s not the only striking thing that seems to hint at Dylan doing some retrospection in “Highlands”. It is a sub-motive at the very least, or so it seems. Time Out Of Mind is a double album released thirty-one years after Dylan’s first double album Blonde On Blonde, and again the last record side, side 4, is reserved for one single song. Back then “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, in which a young, lovesick narrator sings a lady from the Lowlands. Now “Highlands”, in which an old, disillusioned narrator longs for the loneliness of the Highlands. Unattainable they both are, by the way; “Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes” as the narrator sang thirty years ago, willing to wait, though. Worn out, but nevertheless more optimistic, the narrator is thirty years later:

Well, my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind
And that’s good enough for now 

… a beautiful, peaceful, thoroughly melancholic ending to a wonderful song. And if Dylan keeps up this rhythm, we will hear what happened to this protagonist on side 4 of the next double album, sometime around 2028.

——-

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, which is becoming known (to me at least) as Dylan, the composer,  I’ve looked at…

1. Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
3. Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
4. Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
5. Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
6. Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
7. Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
8. Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
9. North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
10. Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”
11. When the Ship Comes in: from Pirate Jenny onward.
12. When Bob said Times they are a changing it is quite likely he didn’t fully realise how.

In the last article I included a recording of Times they are a changin’ performed 32 years after its composition, by which time Bob had performed it perhaps 500 or more times in concert.  The 12/8 time is still there, recognisable through the slow pulsing beat, and the lyrics are the same, but the melody has changed considerably, as has the tempo.  It would be too much to say it had become a new song, but the level of change between the original recording and that performance is reminiscent of what happened to folk songs prior to the days of recording technology.   Only with folk songs different performers changed them; here Dylan was doing his own transformations.

And it is worth contemplating for a moment just how radical this notion of re-writing one’s own hits was, for in the years leading up to Dylan’s emergence, the recorded version of a popular song was considered to be the definitive version of the song.  When people went to a pop or rock concert they expected to hear and see the band perform as they knew the song from the record.   This in turn, often led performers on TV to mime their hit songs while the released recording was played.  Indeed, there often was little attempt to hide the fact of the miming, since quite clearly there were no cables running from the guitars to amps.

However I don’t recall ever reading that Dylan mimed one of his own songs for the sake of a broadcast, and indeed I think that would be completely against his whole concept of what music is about: it is about the performance.   Besides, he has changed the arrangements of his songs so often that miming would surely be against the whole concept of song creation that Dylan has propagated, although if you have come across a clear instance of Dylan miming, please do let me know.   Even better if there is a video of such an event; I’d love to see it.

Of course, one of the great benefits of the regular revision of the songs has been that Bob could keep performing them across the years without either he or us getting totally bored with the pieces.  Indeed, when we note that three songs have been performed in concert over 2000 times live, and another seven have been performed over 1000 times live, this surely becomes a necessity for the mental well-being of both Bob and the band.  The regular gigs could not have existed without the changes.

But it is easy to forget just how unusual this notion of re-arranging was when Bob started doing it.  Indeed in Chronicles Bob does explore his idea that live performances should revise existing arrangements and performances all the time, suggesting clearly that he realised others didn’t appreciate why he was doing what he was doing.  And I would argue that this is unusual.  I am sure other artists and bands have since taken up this idea – and if you’d care to give me a few examples, I’d be grateful, but I do think Bob was one of the first, if not the first, to go out of his way to return to the folk music tradition of re-inventing the songs as one travelled around the country giving performances.

My key point here is that Bob did this musically.   Although some verses were missed out, and some mistakes were made, I think (just relying on my memory here) that Bob by and large left the lyrics alone – although I do recall “Rolling Stone” and “Blowin in the Wind” getting some changes lyrically.

But we can compare a couple of versions of “One Too Many Mornings” first from 1965 with its utterly plaintive message…

… with a performance one year later where the instrumental opening before Dylan sings (at around 17 seconds) seems to owe more to “Like a Rolling Stone” than it does to the BBC Studios version one year earlier (above).

I am not sure (or perhaps better said, I haven’t seen this expressed) why Bob has regularly done this.  Is it because he has a new vision for what the song means, or just because it can be done (as in, “hey lets see what happens if we give it a beat”).  But it is something as we can hear above, that he has done from the very early stages of his career.

Now of course, we know that folk songs and the early blues all changed over time, simply because they were songs handed across from one performer to another.  Some of the changes would have been made deliberately to “improve” the song, some made deliberately to accommodate the vocalist’s range, some because of which instruments were available, and some happened because the travelling musician/s couldn’t remember how the song used to go.   Bob, however, as we can hear from the example above, took this on as a core idea in his work from the early days of touring.  The songs were not static: they were living, breathing creations, which like their creator, could develop and evolve over time.

But at the same time, we have to recognise that Bob was also writing new songs, and exploring different approaches as he did.   And as a little bit of fun while I was writing this, I asked a couple of knowledgeable Dylan pals what song Bob wrote straight after “Times they are a changin’.”

Now of course there can always be some arguments about what came when, but in reality I was the only one who knew, and that was because I’d just looked it up.  And indeed I have to admit I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t looked it up, even though I’ve written the chronology in the past.   Here is what I think is the right answer.

Now the point I would make is that this song has nothing in common with “Times They Are A-changin’,” which came immediately before.   It is also true that Bob credited Paul Clayton with the melody and that credit suggests that yes, Bob wrote the lyrics but was still unsure about his ability to find melodies to accompany what he could do lyrically, despite what he had achieved with “Times they are a changin'”

In fact it is often reported that the music Dylan created to the lyrics was taken from the Scottish ballad  “The Twa Sisters” but really, I think this is stretching things a bit….

Although I think I can hear a closer resemblance from this next version, and that makes me think there perhaps was another version (there are indeed many, many versions) that Bob heard, but I am suspecting at this moment that this is one of those tales where someone says, “Bob’s music comes from x” and everyone else keeps saying that.  But please do correct me if you have found a source that sounds a little bit like Bob’s version.

The song relates the story of a fatal car crash and a subsequent manslaughter conviction and 99-year sentence in Joliet Prison that is handed down to the driver (a friend of the first-person narrator). The narrator goes to ask the sentencing judge to commute his friend’s sentence, which he considers too harsh, but the sentence stands. The story of the hard-hearted judge is reminiscent of the Child ballad “Geordie”.

The song has 16 verses but only two new lines in each verse (the other two being “Turn, turn, turn again” and “Turn, turn to the rain and the wind” and takes up the theme, common in the folk music of previous sentences, in which a friend of the singer is sent to prison for 99 years.  The singer locates the judge and says that it can’t be possible for his friend to have committed such a crime, but the judge will have none of it, and the singer is sent away.

It is in fact a classic tale of either blatant injustice or justice having no heart – and the fear among the less educated that the world has no understanding of them and their lives.   They were at the mercy of the rich, the powerful, and events.

The song has of course, mutated many, many times, and I am not at all sure which version Bob heard but I rather think (without any direct evidence) it might have been one of the versions that went like this….

So what we have, not for the first time, is Bob being confident in his lyrical writing, but less confident in his composition of music – although this we might remember, was immediately after composing “Times they are a changing”.

Perhaps what is the most interesting and informative element in this moment of Bob’s writing career was that following this sad tale of the 99 year prison sentence, Bob’s next song was another song of injustice, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.

And it does strike me that there is a point to be made here, and that is that on occasion, knowing the sequence in which Bob wrote the songs, we can see connections between them.  This is not always the case, but it appears that “Times they are a-changin'” did not lead Bob to write more songs about a bright and positive future created by the young, whose parents did not understand their own offspring, but instead led him to write not about a bright future, but about the injustices in the past and present.  Why Bob’s writing did take this turn, I’m really not too sure, but maybe you can help explain it or maybe it will come to me in due course.

What is true is that the success of “Times” which appears to be a completely original Bob Dylan song in terms of the music, did not lead him immediately to create more songs with his own music, for there again part of the song came from the folk tradition – in this case “Mary Hamilton”.  Somehow Bob didn’t seem to believe in himself as a composer, even after writing “Times”.

The series continues.

• Part 1: Wild rose in the heather
• Part 2: You can hear the air around it

by Jochen Markhorst

III         That long rambling talking thing

It is, of course, not that surprising, Henry Rollins being so moved by Time Out Of Mind and by “Love And Theft”; after all, he is hearing himself. Or rather: his own words. Some of Rollins’ verses seem to inspire whole songs (“Million Miles”), in the masterpiece “Mississippi”, at least four fragments seem to have been borrowed from him, both in the outtakes and in eight of the eleven Time Out Of Mind songs, Scott Warmuth finds Rollins quotations, and again in “Highlands”, pretty obvious. The fragment “All the young men with their young women looking so good / Well, I’d trade places with any of them / In a minute, if I could” as well as “I think what I need might be a full-length leather coat / Somebody just asked me / If I registered to vote” are lovingly stolen. And diluted, more fragments qualify for the Rollins label. A terrifying line like Insanity is smashing up against my soul, for instance, does smell an awful lot like the work in the poetry collection See A Grown Man Cry, like a ferocious six-liner as

Alone looking for the quickest way to get to pain
I am my soul smasher love call death trip
I slashed the wrists of Destiny and took total control
I watch the night strangle the sun
Hail night
Darkness, my brother

… “a few bad turns” Dylan also reads in Now Watch Him Die, as well as “I have new eyes” (“I got new eyes” in the last verse of “Highlands”), and there are more whole and half borrowings like that.

“Highlands” is particularly peculiarly structured. Twenty quatrains, which for some reason on paper are all represented as quintains;

I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone’s always yelling turn it down
Feel like I’m drifting
Drifting from scene to scene
I’m wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?

… for example, which is of course just a simple four-liner, both in recitation and in rhyme;

I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone’s always yelling turn it down
Feel like I’m drifting, drifting from scene to scene
I’m wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?

A “restructuring” that can be done for all twenty verses plus choruses. After all, all twenty stanzas are modelled on the template, on Robert Burns’ “My Heart’s in the Highlands”: four-liners in the simplest rhyme scheme aabb.

Which is not a peculiar thing, of course. Concealing the “real” form is something Dylan, or his editor, does with prodigious tenacity in every decade and every edition of Lyrics, God knows why. No, the peculiar thing is the function structuring, the chaotic formal tripartite structure:

• Choruses: 1, 4, 7, 15, 20
• Lyrical couplets: 2, 3, 5, 6, 16-19
• “Boston one-act play”: 8-14

Bob Dylan – Highlands:

So, during seven stanzas, the song seems to have a traditional verse-verse-refrain structure, then this framework is interrupted by an epic intermezzo of seven stanzas, not to return to the original structure afterwards. This seems to be mainly due to inattention, by the way: it seems that Dylan simply forgets a refrain – if he had added only one refrain, a refrain after stanza 17, the traditional verse-verse-refrain structure would have been maintained.

The eight lyrical couplets are interchangeable. They are, in any case, not connected by a plot, but they are eight separate tableaus, connected only by the voice of the narrator: by an elderly first-person narrator who eight times expresses uneasiness, fatigue and unfulfillable longing. Most tableaus seem to be triggered by a Rollins fragment, which is then developed into a quatrain by an associating, improvising Dylan. Rollins’ “shake the bars in front of my windows” (from Now Watch Him Die), for example, seems to trigger Dylan’s opening line “Windows were shakin’ all night in my dreams”, “feel like a prisoner” from the second verse can literally be found in See A Grown Man Cry, and like this, Rollins traces can be found in each of the eight lyrical stanzas. Dylan confirms the improvised character of the song by his explanations during a press conference in London, 1997:

Q: On your album, the song Highlands seems very improvised. How well prepared are you when you go into the studio?

BD: “Well, I think that long rambling talking thing… I think I’ve recorded things like that before, real early on. In that type of form, a person can say whatever they want because the form is simple. I wouldn’t say it was improvised, but a lot of different thoughts were connected in a lot of different ways that might necessarily not be what they seem to be on the paper when they were written. This is like thoughts, you know, that could be connected over a two-month period of time.”

Beautiful tableaux, visually strong and moving enough, but in itself not that special; “just dylanesque” as it were, comparable to language, tone and content of, say, “Cold Irons Bound” or “Standing In The Doorway”. No, the real attention grabber, the distinctive strength of the song is of course, that bizarre “Boston interlude”.

Bill Lamm – (I Hate To See) A Grown Man Cry:

To be continued. Next up Highlands part 4 (final): She studied the lines on my face

 ————

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

Jakob Brønnum and Eyolf Østrem have examined refrains in their substack series and  I am of course a long way behind them, but hoping eventually to catch up – although trying to examine Dylan’s music from slightly different directions.  And of course, as I am writing each one of these articles and then publishing it, I am not quite sure where I am going or if I will reach similar conclusions.  I’m probably as surprised as some of my readers at where we end up.

Anyway, previously in this series, which is becoming known (to me at least) as Dylan, the composer,  I’ve looked at…

1. Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
3. Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
4. Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
5. Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
6. Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
7. Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
8. Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
9. North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
10. Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”
11. When the Ship Comes in: from Pirate Jenny onward.

and we have noticed that Dylan used repeated chorus lines and phrases in songs occasionally in 1963, most obviously with “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind,” and with “With god on our side,” and very clearly indeed with “the hour that the ship comes in” from the song of almost the same name.

Now these were not the only two songs with such a key repeated line.  “Blowing in the Wind” the previous year had used it, and it is quite possible that Dylan picked up the thought from that composition, thinking it was a handy way to hold a complex song together.   So it was that With God on our Side and Only a pawn in their game both used the same technique a little earlier in the year, and what we can see is that Bob liked the idea of the emphasis that this repeated line gave.   Of course, this wasn’t his invention, for a variation of it can be found in “This land is your land” by Woodie Gutherie where the title line appears repeatedly, and there obviously are many other examples.  My point is thus not that Bob invented the notion of a repeated line, but that he grabbed it and used it in ways that others had not considered before.  In fact I’ll put an example of one of the most brilliant line re-uses ever at the very end, just in case you’ve not come across it before.

But back to the plot: obviously, I can’t tell if the use of this technique or re-using a line in Bob’s very next composition was a deliberate ploy, or it just happened because Bob found a line that he liked, but quite obviously we do have it again in “Times they are a changing” although this time at the end of each verse.  In the “Ship”, the repeated line turns up half was through the verse.  In “Times” it is very definitely the last line of each verse and all the more powerful for that.  It sums everything up.

But both songs have a meaning in the lyrics which links them just as strongly as the technique of the repeated title line.  “Times they are a changin'” is both the title and the message, and the repetition of the line makes it certain that we are not going to forget that message.  I did wonder at the time how many frustrated teens, stopped from doing what they wanted, simply said to one or other (or both) parents, “Times they are a changing” before marching out, despite being told not to.

What is also interesting musically is the reversion in “Times they are a changing” to the 12/8 time signature of “With God on Our Side”.  Although triple time (which means pieces of music that have a 3 beat pulse in them rather than the 4 beat pulse that is common to most contemporary popular music) has been used in popular music from time to time over the years (we might think for example of “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles) it is not that common.   And although 6/8 is not the same as 3/4 there is a certain linkage between the two, which makes some listeners feel that a piece in 6/8 is actually a fast 3/4.

In Times, however, there is a clear 12/8 rhythm, with the emphasis on 1, 4, 7, 10, with the biggest emphasis being on 1.

      1  2    3     4   5  
Come gather 'round people
  6 7 8   9    10, 
Wherever you roam
 11 12 1   2     3  4  5   
And admit that the waters
6   7   8   9    10
Around you have grown
11  12  1   2  3    4
And accept it that soon
5       6  7       8   9  10    
You'll be drenched to the bone
11  12   1,2  3  4  5   6    7  8, 9 10, 11    
If your time to you is worth savin'
12       1  2    3    4   5
And you better start swimmin'
6          7    8   9  10, 11
Or you'll sink like a stone
12      1,2,3  4    5  6 7,8,9 10, 11      
For the times they are a-changin'

12    1  2    2   4  5    6
Come writers and critics who....

Of course, this is a simplified approach – in that for example, the first syllable of “critics” at the end of the above example can be sung quickly on the fourth beat and held, but either way, the word “who” definitely comes on the sixth beat.

This is very unusual in popular music generally because 12/8 is tough to dance to without dancing as a waltz, but that didn’t matter here of course, because Bob was not writing a song to dance to and anyway, people don’t dance to protest songs.  But…

“Times they are a changin'” is not a protest song.   For in a protest song, the essence of the lyrics is not just that change is happening or about to happen, but rather that change is happening because of us.  We are changing the world from the old way in which those with money control everything to their own advantage, to a new just and fair society, or something along those lines.

But “Times” doesn’t say this at all.  It says that

...the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'

We are not making it happen, there are no revolutionaries as such. It is just the old regime being supplanted by the new regime, which will be a lot better.

Now there is, of course, a hint that the change itself might not be peaceful as in “The battle outside ragin’ Will soon shake your windows And rattle your walls,” but that is just a hint. And it would have been hard to make it much more than a hint, given that the record companies were being run by people who would remember the attempt to surplant our way of life, by the government of Germany.   So there is no call to arms, and there is no sign of revolutionaries coming along and sweeping away everything that has gone before.   Rather, there is a statement that change is happening, it is happening naturally, and above all there ain’t nothing you can do about it.

Of course this appealed greatly to the younger generation of which I was a part at the time (and oh! the irony of writing this now in my 70s, and having the enormous joy and pleasure of my grandchildren exploring the world, fighting against what they see as the irrelevant old ways, ignoring any suggestion that a grandfather might be able to offer some advice etc etc).  But I think in the era when the song was written, many of us ignored what the lyrics actually said (that change happens no matter what).  And if we could ignore that in the lyrics, we most certainly could ignore any implication there might be in the fact that the time signature made it sound like a waltz.   A revolutionary waltz?  Whoever thought of such a thing!

What did both attract me, and worry me, at the time the song was first heard in the UK was  the ending

The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last

… for I thought yes, I want the old ways kicked out in favour of a new world in which creativity and inventiveness would be valued equally with the virtue of hard work and knowing one’s place, but really, the band I was in was certainly not going to play a waltz, and I certainly wasn’t going to be found listening to a waltz!

And this was not just because we felt a waltz was 1930s, not progressive 1960s, but also because none of us had the talent of Bryan Ferry and co to turn the song into a four beats in a bar rocker (ie 4/4 not 12/8).

What strikes me is that this wonderful Ferry version contains a subtle underlayer, but despite this, there is still there, the threat to the older generation which is absolutely not in the Dylan original.   When Mr Ferry sings, “the order is rapidly fading” this is revolutionary.  When Bob sings it, it is like suggesting that an old-timer stays on the pavement so as not to be run down by passing traffic.

Thus, despite all the solidity expressed within the song both musically and lyrically in relation to the concept of natural progression, musicians have taken the song and had great fun with it.  And if you are listening to my examples, please do give the one below enough time to get through the first verse and then into the second.

In short what Bob had created, although I suspect neither he nor anyone else at the time quite realised it, was a piece of music (in fact many pieces of music) that could have one meaning when expressed in one way, but a different meaning when performed with the same words, but with a completely new arrangement.

Now, I have heard it argued that every song can be rearranged into something different but I would also argue that there are two issues here.  One is that just because Bob chose to give the world “Times” or, indeed, any other song, in one arrangement, that does not mean it is the best arrangement for all time.  The other is that I am not sure Bob is always a very good judge of what the possibilities are for his music.  And, of course, in that regard I am not the first to make such a comment.

But the implications of this are profound.  There are millions of well-known popular songs that really are trapped in their original arrangement because they don’t have anything within them that allows radical re-interpretation.   But that is not the case with many Dylan songs, and “Times” was neither the first, nor the last, that could be utterly transformed – not just into a new arrangement, but also into a new meaning.

In Bob’s original, the implication of the 12/8 time and the performance on Bob’s album is that this is the reality: times change, but at a fairly sedate pace, although the old folk (especially those in power) inevitably like to hold on to the past.   In reworkings of the song we find that by changing the rhythm and style of the accompaniment, the meaning of those lyrics now change.

The Bryan Ferry version of the song itself says, by transforming the song from 12/8 time into a solid 4/4 beat, that we are marching onwards to a new world, but this time we are the driving force.  In Dylan’s original version, the driving force was some sort of ill-defined natural change that has happened throughout human history.

And such a thought opens up a really radical notion, that Bob didn’t really see the possibilities of this song he had created or, indeed, perhaps of any of his songs.

Of course, over time that changed, and Bob has become a master of re-writing his own music, and indeed I have repeatedly slipped in, under the smallest of pretences, my own utter, utter favourite bit of Bob rewriting Bob.   If you are kind enough to read my ramblings regularly, you’ll know what’s coming and won’t have to play it, although I hope you will.  But if you are unsure what’s coming just sit back and enjoy this.  Because Bob The Arranger is a central part of Bob Dylan’s work, and a part of his legacy that is often ignored and it is a concept I want to explore further in this series.

If you have been, thank you for reading.

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – A History in Performance, Part 4: 1988 –  The darkness at the break of noon

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 All Right 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). This is the fourth article on the third track, ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series here:

If you have been following this series you may have noticed that I like to begin each article with a comment on some aspect of the song before getting into the performances themselves. In this post I’d like to begin by considering the first line of the song: ‘The darkness at the break of noon.’

What is this darkness? I suggest it is not the same as the darkness in this line from ‘Love In Vain’ (1978) – ‘When I am in the darkness, why do you intrude?’

That darkness I take to mean that introspective space we can get into, our own personalised rabbit hole, dark night of the soul.

Nor is it quite the same as the darkness in this line from ‘Precious Angel’ (1979) when, with regard to his ‘so-called friends,’ he sings:

But can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high
When men will beg God to kill them
And they won’t be able to die

That I take to mean the cosmic, apocalyptic darkness that Christians believe will fall during the last days of the world.

‘The darkness at the break of noon’ which ‘shadows even the silver spoon’ to my mind refers to the shadow of hypocrisy and bad faith that serves to occlude the sacred. The sacred is nowhere to be found, no matter where you look in this world given over to materialist values. That is the message to be found in the lines I quoted from ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Gutherie’ in my second article on this song:

Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill
And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house

What is the ‘it’ you can’t find? The really sacred – the true and the real. And the innocent. The ‘flesh coloured Christs that glows in the dark,’ seems to refer to the commodification of religion. That’s a false glow. That line reminds me of ‘turning virgins into merchandise’ (Making A Liar out of Me –1979). Lost innocence. It’s amazing how consistent Dylan’s critique of society has been over the years.

The ‘silver spoon’ is a reference to inherited riches (born with a silver spoon in your mouth, as the saying goes). This spiritual darkness in ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ shadows the light of midday and all earthly riches. It is the veil of illusion and lies that separates us from reality.

This veil of darkness lies over the whole song. The condemnation of materialist values couldn’t be plainer – ‘money doesn’t talk, it swears’ – and sooner or later, we will have to shed that veil and ‘stand naked’ in sight of God, no matter who we are, even if we’re ‘president of the United States.’ You won’t be able to hide behind wealth and privilege or ‘fake morals.’

All that is not sacred is false and phony, advertising and propaganda.

Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

Dylan performed the song only three times in 1988, the first year of the Never Ending Tour, and I was going to pass over it until I realised that there were a couple of interesting aspects to the Los Angeles performance. Except for 1978, when the song came roaring in with a big band backing, Dylan had stayed with an acoustic presentation, often just solo guitar.

The first thing to notice in this 1988 recording is the backing. An augmented acoustic? An early attempt to turn it into rock song, perhaps.

Around three minutes into the song, delivered with the same almost breathless energy that marks these 1988 performances, Dylan seems to lose track of the lyrics. He does a good job of blurring it over, but what’s interesting is that when he comes out of it, he’s singing the verse ‘One who sings with his tongue on fire…’ The first time we’ve heard it since the 1960s. I suspect it was not intentional, but with Dylan you can never tell. (Los Angeles, Aug 4^th)

Dylan brought the song back into prominence in 1989, when it was performed over twenty-five times. We’re back with a purely acoustic sound again. I’m uncertain as to the date of this recording but is, to my mind, better than what I could find on YouTube. It rattles along, and Dylan sounds fully committed to the song.

1989

1990 was a big year for the song, with over forty performances. This one from Berlin July 5^th is as good as any. Despite a subtle bass and the gentle pattering of drums, Dylan keeps it acoustic. The song becomes an acoustic centrepiece in concerts largely given over to rock songs and GE Smith’s twanging electric guitar.

1990

 In 1991 the song almost disappears again, being performed only once, in London (Feb 12^th). Again, I can’t know why Dylan didn’t perform it again that year except to speculate that because he did eight concerts in London, and likes to do at least some different songs each night, he could have pulled ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ out of the bag. By 1991 his voice is starting to crack, but he delivers a vibrant performance, marred only by flubbing the lyrics again towards the end of the song. Of special interest are the guitar breaks with two acoustic guitars going for it.

1991: London

1992 was the year of The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, held at Madison Square Garden, New York in October 1992,  an event that Neil Young described as ‘a Bobfest.’ A range of performers, including Stevie Wonder and Johnny Winter, came forward with their chosen Dylan song. The concert was professionally recorded and released on a double album. It is significant, I think, that Dylan, who was the last performer, chose ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ as the song to represent him and his thirty years of performing and recording. It is after all, arguably, his greatest protest song.

It’s an electrifying performance. A flat, nasal delivery, with Dylan sounding as if he was tearing the song out of his throat. If you haven’t already heard it, you have a treat in store. Undiluted Dylan.

1992

He performed it half a dozen times in 1992, but nothing quite lives up to that Anniversary Concert recording.

At this point something strange happens. While we have become used to Dylan seeming to blow hot and cold on the song, almost dropping it some years, and stacking the setlists with it other years, that doesn’t prepare us for him abandoning the song for seven long years. We thought we’d lost it. Then, in 1999, it comes back from the dead, but will be radically re-imagined musically. Why did Dylan drop the song? And why did he pick it up again after all that time? There’s no knowing.

But it’s to 1999 that we will turn in the next article. We might find the answer there.

In the meantime, watch for those who would ‘push fake morals, insult and stare.’

Kia Ora

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.  That is where he started out, but somewhere along the way Bob became a composer of music (as well as a lyricist) in his own right.

Previously in this series I’ve looked at…

1. Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
2. Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
3. Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
4. Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
5. Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
6. Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
7. Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
8. Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
9. North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
10. Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”

Next comes “When the ship comes in” which naturally has a lot of commentaries written about it.  However, none that I have seen suggest directly anything other than the notion that the music is a Bob Dylan original composition.

But there are hints and suggestions, perhaps because with Dylan there are always hints and suggestions, that ideas behind the song were drawn from elsewhere.   For example, Bob Dylan commentaries that there is a link drawn between “Pirate Jenny” from the “Threepenny Opera” and Dylan’s song.  In the video below, the music starts on the 30-second mark.

Of course this is not suggestive of an exact copy by Bob Dylan of music from elsewhere, but we could be talking about an influence, (and all composers are subjected to influence) as the rhythm of the song is much the same as that used by Dylan.  It could be the sort of situation where the rhythm of the melody of one tune is retained in the mind and gets mutated to fit the next set of lyrics.

And let’s be clear – there is nothing illegal or even generally considered “wrong” in a composer, or indeed a poet or novelist, being “influenced” by what has gone before.  To be utterly original is not only nigh on impossible, given how much has been written before, but also often pointless.  There is still much to be made out of taking what has gone before and seeing where else it can go.

Thus staying with the origins of Bob’s interest in “Pirate Jenny”, it has also been noted that Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo was the set director for an amateur production of the play, and indeed it has been often noted that Dylan attended the rehearsals. Here are the lyrics to the opening of Pirate Jenny.

You people can watch while I'm scrubbing these floors
And I'm scrubbin' the floors while you're gawking
Maybe once you tip me and it makes you feel swell
In this crummy Southern town

It is quite possible to sing those lines to the music of the opening four lines of “When the Ship Comes In.”   The melody of each song is quite different of course, but the pulse is the same, and for many song composers it is the pulse of the song that is the thing that is first set down, as a guide to how further verses will work.  Even if you have no musical background, you can perhaps sing “You people can watch while I’m scrubbing these floors” to the music of “Oh the time will come up when the winds will stop.”

Of course, that is not proof of where Bob got the rhythmic pulse of the song from, but it is a possibility and this allows us to postulate that this could be the origin.  But if we do say that then it is important to be clear that this is not at all “copying” to the extent we have noted in some other early Dylan compositions where virtually a whole melody is taken and re-used with new lyrics.  It is, in fact, what many songwriters do; they listen to a lot of music, to the rhythms, to the melodic passages, to the chord changes and so on, and some of this will stick in the mind, and get reused as a new idea or a new set of lyrics starts to emerge.   In short, if Bob were to have been influenced by “Pirate Jenny” then that was all it was – an influence, not a copying.

Indeed, as we pursue this line of thought, there are certainly lines in “Pirate Jenny” which maybe point again toward the “Ship” such as

Then one night there’s a scream in the night
And you’ll wonder who could that have been

which perhaps you can hear in your mind to the tune of the Ship instead of the lyrics

Then they'll raise their hands sayin' we'll meet all your demands
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered

Furthermore, “Pirate Jenny” as the title suggests, does have ship images in it as with

There’s a ship
The Black Freighter
with a skull on its masthead
will be coming in

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin’.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.

And in Revelations 7.1 we have

“And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.”

So as I have tried to note before, we must accept that most authors and composers generally draw on what are called “sources”; not always of course, and not in every book or song, but nevertheless it is common practice for writers in all formats to be influenced by what others in their field have done.  Almost every writer in every format is listening to and noting where others have gone, and we certainly know that Bob has always had an encyclopedic knowledge of music in multiple formats.

I have recently noted in an article on this site, that despite the obvious popularity of the song “When the ship comes in” Bob only performed it three times on stage and of course, as ever, we don’t really know why.  The simplest answers are that having recorded the song, he didn’t really fancy it anymore and that there is not too much you can do to re-arrange the song while still keeping it as the song that we all know (and indeed love).

But what I think we can also conclude is that this is, without much doubt at all, truly a Bob Dylan original song, with music (unlike many seen up to this point) totally by Bob Dylan.  There are influences, but every composer is influenced.

We do, however, on this occasion, have a comment from Dylan himself on the composition of the song, although it was made almost 20 years later, so it may not be that reliable. And as it turns out, is not particularly helpful!  For it is reported that “in 1985, he [Dylan] told the highly acclaimed film maker Cameron Crowe, “This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced, of course, by the Irish and Scottish ballads …’Come All Ye Bold Highway Men’, ‘Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens’.”

And this is where I have a problem, because although I can find references in the literature (presumably taken from this comment) to Bob having taken “Come all ye bold highway men” as a source for some of his own work, I can’t find any references to that song anywhere.   And this is despite having had quite an engagement with traditional folk music of the British Isles in my musical life.  It is simple not a song I know.

Now of course, that latter point is neither here nor there, I’m moderately knowledgeable about the folk traditions of the British Isles, but not an expert.   But beyond that it seems that the internet doesn’t seem to have much on that song either.

So if you can find a recording of someone singing “Come all ye bold highway men,” which is not an obvious contemporary piece, please do leave a link to it in the comments section, as I have drawn a blank.  And if we all draw a blank, I think we might begin to consider the notion that there was no Scottish or Irish ballad called “Come all ye bold highway men” which has survived the ravages of time, to be a valid one.

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

Highlands part 2: You can hear the air around it

by Jochen Markhorst

“Probably the last time I bought a record that was just brilliant all the way through was Nick Cave,” Henry Rollins tells in an interview with DVD Talk, in 2004. “I wrote him a letter after I played it and said you and Dylan are like the only guys writing songs right now. I think the last two Dylan records have just been incredible – Time out of Mind and Love and Theft. Those were just amazing.”

Further on in the same interview, he explains what touches him, apart from the songs, even more: the sound. Henry Rollins is a man of knowledge and moreover blessed with the gift of words, so he can perfectly articulate what touches him so, in terms of sound: “I miss the space, I miss the sound of a guitar in a room where you can hear the air around it. Who makes records like that still? Tom Waits does, Bob Dylan does.”

It demonstrates a kinship with Dylan, as evidenced by the words of session musician Jim Dickinson, the keyboardist on “Highlands”:

“One thing that really struck me during those sessions, Dylan, he was standing singing four feet from the microphone, with no earphones on. He was listening to the sound in the room.”

… almost the same words Rollins uses to describe his preferred sound, the sound he hears on Time Out Of Mind. Which is also confirmed by engineer Chris Shaw;

“And I’d say about 85 per cent of the sound of that record is the band spilling into Bob’s microphone, because he’d sing live in the room with the band. Most of the time without headphones. That’s why the record has this big, I think, almost kind of swampy sound to it, and he loves it, he really goes for that sound.”

… the sound that Dylan hears on those famous “reference records”. In an interview with Robert Hilburn, September 2001, Dylan leads the Dylanologists to Charley Patton;

“I had the guitar run off an old Charley Patton record for years and always wanted to do something with that. I was sitting around, maybe in the dark Delta or maybe in some unthinkable trench somewhere, with that sound in my mind and the dichotomy of the Highlands with that seemed to be a path worth pursuing.”

… but that seems to be a misdirection; a Patton recording with a similar riff cannot be found. It can be found at Slim Harpo, though. Who is also mentioned elsewhere by Dylan as an example of the “reference records” with which he tried to put producer Lanois on the right track. Similar riffs as in “Highlands”, which is a quite generic riff in itself, can be heard more than once on Slim Harpo’s records. “That’s Why I Love You” comes close, for instance, and “Tip On In” even more so, as well as in sound – in fact, all those old Excello recordings have the “air”, the “space” that Dylan and Rollins love so much. Reduce the tempo of “Tip On In” by 75%, and you’re pretty close to “Highlands”.

Slim Harpo – Tip On In:

It is not unlikely that Dylan is simply mistaken, with his Patton hint. Fans and followers often think that Dylan is putting up smokescreens on purpose or having fun fooling journalists, but we have seen for 60 years now that Dylan is not familiar with details of his own discography, mixes up facts about recordings, such as the names of session musicians, and only superficially remembers circumstances surrounding recording sessions. It simply doesn’t interest him enough. He rarely, if ever, listens back to his own records, as he has said repeatedly for the past sixty years. During interviews, he often makes mistakes in dates and tracklists, which occurs again when asked about Time Out Of Mind and “Highlands” in 2001, more than four years later. Only nine months after the recordings, in September 1997, he does not remember exactly anymore:

“I don’t think we had a full ensemble playing on that, as I remember. There can’t be more than four people playing. I can’t say that the musicians didn’t know the song or the lyrics. I don’t know…,”

… he says to Edna Gundersen. And in 2001, with Mikal Gilmore for Rolling Stone, he is half wrong when he says about “Highlands”:

“That particular song, we worked with a track that I had done at a sound check once in some hall. The assembled group of musicians we had down at the studio just couldn’t get it, so I said, “Just use that original track, and I’ll sing over it.” It was just some old blues song I always wanted to use, and I felt that once I was able to control it, I could’ve written about anything with it. But you’re right – I forgot that was on that record.”

That peculiarity, that exceptional technical fact, “a track that I had done at a sound check once in some hall” concerns the recording of “Dirt Road Blues”, as we know thanks to both Daniel Lanois and drummer Winston Watson. For “Highlands”, a pre-recorded loop is indeed also used, but it was fabricated by Lanois and Tony Mangurian, while playing along with a reference record, and further edited by Lanois and Dylan at the Teatro in Oxnard sometime in late 2016

Bob Dylan – Dirt Road Blues (Version 1)

In short, it is not too daring to question Dylan’s memories and statements about the recording process and song inspiration. Nor is it deliberate deception – recordings are simply not that important to Dylan. His head was in the Highlands, probably.

To be continued. Next up Highlands part 3: That long rambling talking thing

 ——————

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

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.