“If you see her, say hello” is one of those songs that has within it has a complete multiplicity of what Dylan is. And it is also one of those songs that some of the “experts” on Dylan seem to go off on their own journey and miss what is so obviously there for us.
The early version of the song that opens disk three of the Bootleg Series 1-3, reminds us that Dylan is, or was, a fine guitarist, a man who could pluck unusual chords from nowhere to give his songs unexpected twists and meanings within the music that reflects the lyrics.
If you really want to hear early Dylan seeking to express himself both musically and lyrically, this track is a beautiful example. Even the typical wailing harmonica in its standard place as the penultimate verse, has a point as the song becomes more and restless in the lyric and the music.
In this early recording however Dylan holds himself back much more than in the version on Blood on the Tracks, keeping us lyrical and poignant until we get to “and I never gotten used to it” and then the angst takes over.
The version that most of us know intimately however is the one from that masterpiece of an album “Blood on the Tracks” which simplifies the musical accompaniment considerably. Here, it comes after the wild craziness of “Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” and in total contrast to the previous track it is tentative beyond anything on the earlier version.
Indeed, it is an interesting experiment to play the end of “Lily” running as it does at hyper speed. It’s final line is “Most of all she was thinking about the Jack of Hearts…” Then there is the harmonica verse which seems to leave us with just the organ playing. The between track pause and then that oh so slight, so unsure, we get the rocking between A and G, which symbolises all uncertainty whenever it starts a pop, rock or folk song.
It is in fact a total and utter contrast to the previous track, and all the more powerful for that.
So what we start with is a hesitant lost love song, just as in the early version, and it feels like we have something of a rarity here. What we end with is a typical Dylan song of disdain. It is, “Once upon a time you looked so fine…” and “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend” all over again.
Half disdain half lost love. Now there’s a thing.
If you listen to the Blood on the tracks recording in perfect silence you can hear a slight upping of the ante as the second verse comes in. But still it is peaceful, as the singer describes his lost love. OK he’s heard she is in Tangier, and Tangier is not necessarily a nice place to be – or at least it certainly wasn’t around the time the song was written. I can attest to that out of personal experience. Marrakesh wasn’t as great as that song suggested etiher.
But they’ve had a falling out, but it is accepted. It happens. He was really hurt, but he’s not blaming her. If that’s what she needs to do ok.
OK except…
Three things happen in the song. First it speeds up quite alarmingly as it goes through – which is unusual. Dylan and his band a professionals and they know how to keep time. So it seems deliberate. As does the increasingly frantic singing. Just compare the way the song ends with that gentle lilting opening. What on earth has happened?
Or consider the way the singing of the opening verses starts with a rising scale on the bass. It sounds like an old time folk song. By the last verse the bassist can’t actually play the scale and has to drop a note, it is all getting so frantic.
the rising scale at the start is old time folk
In this version the chords reflect the changing message by being a combination of rock blues chords and classic folk song. It is in D major and the blues chord C major is heard suddenly quite unexpectedly at the end of the second line (which takes the sequence GDCA).
Then we’ve got the standard chords built around the key of D – Bm, G, D, G. But the “damage” is done with that single unexpected C major chord. Through it, the potential for all hell being let lose appears.
If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early Spring, is living there, I hear
That opening is interestingly light. “Spring” is even skittish, as Spring can be. A time to grow and move upwards, and that’s what she did. And he’s really just sending her his best, saying, “I still think of you.”
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so
Then with the opening of the next verse there is still no hint of what is on the horizon.
We had a falling-out, like lovers often will And to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill
The “chill” is there in the music – oh how it is there. If you’ve never listened to it in this way, go back and play this, because it is an amazing turn of the moment. We go from light to dark in one line. And there is no way back, for “separation” is almost shouted out…
And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart She still lives inside of me, we’ve never been apart
The next verse does the same trick. It starts without malice
If you get close to her, kiss her once for me
I always have respected her for busting out and getting free
But then, listen to what happens with “happy” it is called out, almost sarcastically. Sarcasm? This is not where we started at all. And then we have “the bitter taste still lingers”
So he is still blaming himself, but oh how bitter he is. This crops up again with “used to it”, and the edge is there in the voice – he’s in pain, and he’s moving back to those songs of disdain.
Now the rising scale is gone and the speed is really moving, and we find again in the last first that shouting out of “way”. He’s just become frantic in what started as a peaceful lost love song.
Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast If she’s passing back this way, I’m not that hard to find Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time
Updated April 2018 including a link to a live version.
———————-
From Haiku 61 Revisited
When you get this old,
You get less sentimental
About everything.
———————-
Dylan has endlessly been accused of taking other people’s lyrics and melodies, and it has never particularly worried him. With Floater he goes overboard on the borrowing, with music taken directly from “Snuggled On Your Shoulders” by Lombardo/Young and lyrics taken from Junichi Saga’s novel Confessions of a Yakuza (translated by John Bester).
Maybe the contrast between the two sources amused him.
If you want to hear the original song there are many versions on the internet, but here’s the most famous (although its not complete) by Bing Crosby.
Do listen, it is one hell of a song wonderfully sung.
Here’s a complete version
There is a complete analysis of the original words compared with the lyrics of a whole range of Dylan songs here – but to give a bit of a flavour just consider this.
Original…
…some kind of trouble that put him on bad terms with the younger men… it’s up to him whether a session comes alive or falls flat…even kicking him out wasn’t as easy as that… I decided to wait a while and see how it worked out… age doesn’t matter…Age by itself just doesn’t carry any weight. (155)
Floater…
Well, the old men ’round here sometimes they get on
bad terms with the younger men,
Old, young – age don’t carry weight
It doesn’t matter in the end
Things come alive or they fall flat.
Not always easy kicking someone out,
Got to wait awhile, it can be an unpleasant task.
Dylan obviously loved this book having found it, for it is also used as a source in “Honest with Me”, “Summer Days”, “Po’ Boy”, and “Lonesome Day Blues”. One gets the impression he didn’t have too much to say.
The author of the Dylan haiku quoted above also makes an interesting comment on the song as a whole…
The song contains 16 verses, none of which seem to relate to each other, other than a recurring reference to living like a contrarian when people try to get the singer to do one thing or another. The title comes from the last verse when Dylan observes that it’s not easy to kick someone out (of your home, I guess), and that it’s unpleasant task. Sometimes, he says, someone wants you to give something up, and even if they cry about it, “it’s too much to ask.”
I think that’s as good a summary as one can do.
So, is this plagiarism? The answer in most countries is no – or at least no in the sense of being a breach of the copyright acts of the country. I can only speak in detail for the UK but under the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988 it probably isn’t in terms of the lyrics, because not enough is quoted. In terms of the music however, that is awfully close, and I wouldn’t want to defend a case if the estate of Lombardo and Young decided to try it out in court.
What Dylan doesn’t do, and what could have precluded any worries at all, is acknowledge sources. Had he done so everyone might have been happier since it would have sent a lot of people off to buy the original.
It is fairly obvious from the intro to realise this is not really a Dylan song, since the chords used are totally non-Dylan. Just like we can tell from the opening second of Wheel’s on Fire that Dylan did not compose this on his own, because of the second chord in the verse, so we know the same is true here. Dylan doesn’t do augmented. Or at least not with such panache.
So what are we left with? A simple opening of happy summer days…
Down over the window Comes the dazzling sunlit rays Through the back alleys—through the blinds Another one of them endless days
Honey bees are buzzin’ Leaves begin to stir I’m in love with my second cousin I tell myself I could be happy forever with her
The interesting thing here is that this is so non-Dylan, just as the chords are. Remember this is the album with Mississippi on it – ok that was written some time before but even so, it is a masterpiece of Dylan. And this is just… well, not as good as Crosby and the original.
I keep listening for footsteps But I ain’t hearing any From the boat I fish for bullheads I catch a lot, sometimes too many
This is a village life idyll, with a bit of the sharp end…
The old men round here, sometimes they get On bad terms with the younger men But old, young, age don’t carry weight It doesn’t matter in the end
One of the boss’ hangers-on Comes to call at times you least expect Try to bully you—strong-arm you—inspire you with fear It has the opposite effect
And a spot of home spun philosophy
They say times are hard, if you don’t believe it You can just follow your nose It don’t bother me—times are hard everywhere We’ll just have to see how it goes
OK if it is true, it is rather nice at times, as with…
My old man, he’s like some feudal lord Got more lives than a cat Never seen him quarrel with my mother even once Things come alive or they fall flat
And then it just goes over the edge. Maybe Mark Knopfler was on the scene playing old Dire Straits songs…
Romeo, he said to Juliet, “You got a poor complexion It doesn’t give your appearance a very youthful touch!” Juliet said back to Romeo, “Why don’t you just shove off If it bothers you so much”
Or in Mr K’s version:
Juliet says hey it’s Romeo you nearly gimme a heart attack He’s underneath the window she’s singing hey la my boyfriend’s back You shouldn’t come around here singing up at people like that Anyway what you gonna do about it?
In the end we are left craving if not for Shakespeare (whose stories were of course often borrowed from Hollingshed) then at least for Dire Straits’ resolution…
When you can fall for chains of silver you can fall for chains of gold You can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they hold You promised me everything you yeah promised me thick and thin Now you just say oh Romeo yeah you know I used to have a scene with him
Doesn’t that make your heart ache? But here we get the fall beyond the edge which is then is fallen over…
If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again You do so at the peril of your own life I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound I’ve seen enough heartaches and strife
Dylan, who has just nicked another song, is threatening? Well, not really, it comes from the source book.
I had ’em once though, I suppose, to go along With all the ring-dancin’ Christmas carols on all of the Christmas eves I left all my dreams and hopes Buried under tobacco leaves
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas? Who knows
When told about Dylan’s use of his lines the original author of the text said he was honoured. I guess I would be too. Trouble is, I’ve never written anything good enough to be nicked by Dylan.
Bing Crosby recorded his version on January 21, 1932 and released it on Brunswick record number 6248.
Here’s Bob on stage, seemingly referring to the lyrics as he sings – very unusual for him.
1: 500+ reviews of Dylan songs. There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.
2: The Chronology. We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums. The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site. We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year. The index to the chronologies is here.
3: Bob Dylan’s themes. We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions. There is an index here.
4: The Discussion Group We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
5: Bob Dylan’s creativity. We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further. The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.
And please do note The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews
*Yes, I know he played it once live on 12 November 1980, but “never” makes a better headline.
This review revised and updated 13 April 2007.
Having reviewed Angelina it makes sense to move on to Caribbean Wind also an out-take from Shot of Love.
“I couldn’t quite grasp what [‘Caribbean Wind’] was about, after I finished it. Sometimes you write something to be very inspired, and you won’t quite finish it for one reason or another. Then you’ll go back and try and pick it up, and the inspiration is just gone. Either you get it all, and you can leave a few little pieces to fill in, or you’re trying always to finish it off. Then it’s a struggle. The inspiration’s gone and you can’t remember why you started it in the first place. Frustration sets in.”
– Bob Dylan (to Cameron Crowe)
But the question any reviewer of this song has to face is “Which Caribbean Wind?” for this is the most re-written of all the Dylan songs. Indeed the lyrics that appear on the official Dylan site have little to do with the first version that appears on “Shot of Love Sessions”. And it is this version that I am going to use for this review. It also appears on Biograph.
The “Shot of Love Sessions” collection of songs was recorded at Rundown and Clover Studios, March and May 1981 and if it is the detailed movement of the lyrics that you require then “Still on the Road, the songs of Bob Dylan volume 2” is the book you need, but the ten page history of the song can be summarised easily. For his own reasons Dylan wrote and re-wrote this song, taking out any references that might be tracked back to an individual, a situation or a theme, and gradually the song became less and coherent as each line started to lose any connection with the line before or after.
In the end the most likely explanation as to why Dylan abandoned the song is simply because the endless re-writes had delivered a stream of interesting lines but no coherence from one to the next. As a result we can ultimately see the song as a celebration of the disconnection of fandom thoughts and maybe this is what Dylan wanted, for the writing of this seems to have come at the moment he decided to move away from predominantly religious pieces.
It starts off with the rose of Sharon, Sharon being a Mediterranean coastal plain between Joppa and Caesarea. We then have Milton’s Paradise lost, and that’s the first line. Then in line two we are in Rome and in line three on tour with Bob.
What are we to make of any of this? No one really seems to know. Jesus is still there, but He now becomes a bit player in the endless flow of images.
She was the rose of Sharon from paradise lost From the city of seven hills near the place of the cross I was playing a show in Miami in the theater of divine comedy Told about Jesus, told about the rain She told me about the jungle where her brothers were slain By the man who had been dyin’, who disappeared so mysteriously
Is Bob talking about his religious doubts or something else? Everything is possible with such a varied collection of ever changing lines.
Was she a child or an angel, did we go too far? Were we sniper bait, did we follow a star? Through a hole in the wall to where the long arm of the law cannot not reach Could I have been used and played as a pawn? It certainly was possible as the gay night wore on Where men bathed in perfume and practiced the hoax of free speech
The notion of being confused about his religious commitment is an attractive explanation several times…
The cry of the peacock, flies buzz my head Ceiling fan broken, there’s a heat in my bed Street band playing “Nearer My God to Thee” We met at the station where the mission bells ring She said, “I know what you’re thinking, but there ain’t a thing You can do about it, so let us just agree to agree”
And sometimes we seem to be back with Bob’s favourite book of the New Testament – the Revelations of John…
Every new messenger brings evil report ‘Bout armies on the march and time that is short And famines and earthquakes and train wrecks and the tearin’ down of the wall
Or was that actually Jericho? It is hard to know. There are so many “end of days” lines that one keeps coming back to Revelations however
I see the screws breakin’ loose, see the devil pounding on tin I see a house in the country being torn apart from within I can hear my ancestors calling from the land far beyond
But there is something else: the music, which is not mentioned in most reviews. For the music as captured in the first track on Shot of Love Sessions, is something quite remarkable. It is that descending baseline that Dylan loves (for example Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands) with one hell of a bounce and beat, coupled with a chorus which is musically taken from Isis. And we always know, when Dylan hits that descending bass, we are like as not in for one hell of a treat.
Certainly that the descending bass isn’t quite true in the first line, it jumps around a bit, which is a nice touch, but the feeling, emphasised by the second line, is there all the way through.
So what we get in chordal terms is
G, D, Bm, Em, C
G, D, Em, D, C
So yes, it is the classic descending bass that arrives in the second line (G, F sharp, E, D, C) which announces this is Dylan in classic mode and which run with different chords in the first line. (Actually the bass player doesn’t make the most of the descending bass possibility in the first line, where he could play G, F-sharp, E, D as a passing note, C but doesn’t. But hell, that’s a detail.)
And just then when we have had that classic sequence four times what do we get? Isis!
F C C G
F C G
OK, it is Isis with an extra bar added (that second C in the first line) but the reference is unmistakable.
So we have now a second really strong musical clue as to what Dylan is talking about. The lyrics have elements from the end of time as reported in the Bible, and the melody takes us back to a woman who knows everyone, a woman who has suffered through a relationship in the past going wrong through the misdemeanours of the man. A woman who holds the power.
And these two themes do eventually come together
She was well rehearsed, fair, brown and blonde
She had friends who was busboys and friends in the Pentagon
Playing a show in Miami, in the theatre of divine comedy.
Talked in the shadows, where they talked in the rain
I could tell she was still feeling the pain
Pain of rejection, pain of infidelity.
This woman is everything, she could be both. Dylan just falls for her – or at least for her presence, but then the outsider steps up… The rattlesnake – the ex-lover or ex-husband who feels the needs to deal with the newcomer “trampling over his flowers”. (I only wish I had found the song much earlier. There are some guys I would have loved to have called a rattlesnake in this context!)
Was she a child or a woman? I can’t say which.
One to another she could easily switch
Couples were dancing and I lost track of the hours
He was well prepared, I knew he was
Paying attention like a rattlesnake does
When he’s hearing footsteps trampling over his flowers.
And then suddenly we get this amazing chorus – amazing no matter which version of the song you listen to. Everything can change everything can be anything. Nothing is set forever. The wind is the metaphor for change.
And that Caribbean wind still blows from Nassau to Mexico,
From the circle of ice to the furnace of desire.
And them distant ships of liberty on them iron waves so bold and free,
Bringing everything that’s near to me nearer to the fire.
Meanwhile the woman looks at Dylan closely and announces her ex is outside, doing the usual “its only your best interest that I am trying to protect”. He clearly loves her, even though he’s slipping back on the alimony.
And hearing this Isis chord sequence, we are wondering – are we going to build up to that famous conclusion:
She said, “You gonna stay”, I said, “If you want me to, yes”
We don’t quite get there, but the hint, the thought is always there…
She looked into my soul through the clothes that I wore
She said “we got a mutual friend standing at the door
Yeah, you know he’s got our best interest in mind”
He was well connected, but her heart was a snare
And she had left him to die in there,
Eighty payments due and he was a little behind.
“She had left him to die in there” – a real Isis line.
So to slip away from the unwanted attention of the ex they meet secretly. The woman says, just leave it – we can’t do anything about him – he’s just there. Forget it. And in this revised interpretation “Nearer My God to Thee” is not a central point but a passing bit of scene setting.
Well, I slip in a hotel where flies buzz my head
Ceiling fan was broken, there was heat in my bed
Street band playing “Nearer My God To Thee”
We met in secret where we drank from a spring
She said “I know what you’re thinking, but there ain’t a thing
We can do about it, so we might as well let it be”
Two years on, the world is falling apart, and the relationship is over. The way in which Dylan re-writes the melody around line three is incredible.
Atlantic City, two years to the day,
I hear a voice crying “Daddy” and I look that way,
But it’s only the silence in the buttermilk hills that call,
Every new messenger bringing evil reports
‘Bout rioting armies and time that is short,
And earthquakes and train wrecks and the heat was scribbled on the walls.
Should he have tried to keep close to her? Maybe, but he just has to keep moving, keep moving.
Would I have married her? I don’t know I suppose,
She had bells in her braids and they hung to her toes.
But I heard my name and heard destiny say to be movin’ on
And I felt it come over me, some kind of glow,
For the sake of “Come on with me girl, I got plenty of room”
But I knew I’d be lying, and besides she had already gone.
With Isis yes he says yes. Here he is ambiguous, and the Caribbean wind still blows.
The tragedy of this song is that this version has only one thing wrong with it, the attempt to make something special and different out of the last line. Musically it doesn’t need it, and the experiment is abandoned in the rougher recording that concludes the “Sessions” album.
I much prefer these lyrics to the seemingly much more forced lyrics that appear on the official site. That version starts with “She was the rose of Sharon from paradise lost”. OK if you know your horticulture you can think about it as a plant. It is mentioned in the Song of Solomon too. And having ploughed through Paradise Lost at university I can say there ain’t no rose of Sharon therein. But then, is it really a nothing way to start a song – far too forced – or is it one hell of a way to start a song and really keep me guessing.
In the end I enjoy all the versions. They all work for me, because in none of them do I really know what Bob is talking about. But he does it with such energy, such boldness, and such desire.
What is on the site
1: Over 360 reviews of Dylan songs. There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.
2: The Chronology. We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums. The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site. We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year. The index to the chronologies is here.
3: Bob Dylan’s themes. We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions. There is an index here.
4: The Discussion Group We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
5: Bob Dylan’s creativity. We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further. The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.
And please do note The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.
Updated 27 Sep 2020 with the Levy recording added at the end.
The last review I wrote in this series was “Angelina” in which I suggested that the reason Dylan didn’t include that song on the album for which it was recorded, was that the rhymes were so false.
So it seems logical to move to a song which also has extraordinary rhymes which absolutely do work. Consider this
The Greek is quickly heading for the second floor She passes him on the spiral staircase Thinking he’s the Soviet Ambassador
The Soviet Ambassador has nothing to do with anything, and is there to rhyme with “floor” but within the context of the storyline about the volcanic eruption on the island – and the collection of characters reacting to the events, the presence of the Ambassador in and around the casino (which is the focus of part of the story) is perfectly reasonable.
But before getting further into this I’d like to write about Jacques Levy who co-wrote the song. He is probably the only clinical psychologist to co-write with Dylan, and was a most extraordinary man.
He obtained a doctorate in psychology and trained as a psychoanalyst subsequently and then worked as a clinical psychologist. But that’s only part of the story for Levy was also a director, most famously directing Oh! Calcutta!
His earliest musical compositions were collaborations with Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, and it was McGuinn who introduced Dylan and Levy to each other. Levy being a director also took control of Rolling Thunder Review and he wrote lyrics for the songs of Joe Cocker and Carly Simon. He also directed Doonesbury: A Musical Comedy, and wrote the lyrics for the musical Fame, the 1994 version of Marat/Sade, Bus Stop and Brecht on Brecht. He sadly died of cancer in 2004.
Such was the power and drive of Levy in terms of lyrics, that Dylan and Levy wrote all the songs that appear on “Desire” within four weeks.
The lively music is unusual for Dylan in that it starts with a minor chord (Em) before resolving to C and G.Indeed Dylan seems liberated by the lyrics, writing a melody and chord sequence that takes him into swift chord changes (such as the CDC change) with additional complexity from the descending bass.
There is no Black Diamond Bay as such, but the notion of a volcano hitting a small but inhabited island resonates with thoughts of the Caribbean which has volcanoes across region including Montserrat, Dominica, Guadeloupe…
The album was released in January 1976 – so anything before that date could be the volcanic eruption that was being thought of in the writing of the song – starting with 1902, when Martinique’s Mt Pelée erupted – the deadliest volcanic eruption of the 20th century. A pyroclastic flow from the eruption destroyed the town of St Pierre and its 28,000 inhabitants. Records suggest that only one person, a prisoner, survived.
Also in 1902, the Soufriere volcano in St Vincent erupted starting 6th May and ending 30th March, 1903. 1,565 people were killed and extensive damage was done to agriculture in the areas around the volcano. Around the time of the recording of Black Diamond Bay the Soufriere volcano was showing the earliest signs of becoming active once again and did indeed explode again in 1979.
So this might well be the context of the song, as we look at the people on the island, going about their work, while those called upon to comment on the volcano just describe it as foreign news, unaffected (as their job requires them to be) by the news itself.
It is said that Joseph Conrad’s novel “Victory” is an influence here, but personally I don’t see this. Victory is (it is true) set on an island and there’s a volcano and a casino, but that’s true of so many other novels. True in Victory the perspective changes, and true in Black Diamond Bay we do see the story from different viewpoints at the very end, but “Victory” is a sort of melodrama, and has a strong feel of the early 20th century when it was written, which is utterly unreflected in “Black Diamond Bay”. Maybe the composers saw one of the film adaptations which wandered from the original, but it is all rather tenuous. An influence perhaps, a “major influence” no.
So in the story we get straight down to the scene setting, both the people and the location..
Up on the white veranda She wears a necktie and a Panama hat Her passport shows a face From another time and place She looks nothing like that
Then we’ve got the casino…
She walks across the marble floor Where a voice from the gambling room is calling her to come on in She smiles, walks the other way
Enigma abounds as characters fade in and out without introduction…
As the morning light breaks open, the Greek comes down And he asks for a rope and a pen that will write
The implication is of suicide and the suicide note – but here the scene is set in other ways.
And as the yellow fog is lifting The Greek is quickly heading for the second floor She passes him on the spiral staircase Thinking he’s the Soviet Ambassador She starts to speak, but he walks away As the storm clouds rise and the palm branches sway On Black Diamond Bay
So now we have the opening hint of the natural disaster, but also a seemingly curious reference to TS Eliot. It is so fleeting a reference that I hesitate over it, but Dylan quotes Eliot elsewhere, so it is worth considering…
“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains”
This is from The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock. Prufrock knows that his life has been wasted in indecisiveness, trivia, cheap restaurants, pointless chit-chat…
“I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.”
Prufrock is a failure in a world of failures, he could easily have washed up on Black Diamond Bay and would not be out of place beside the woman, the gambler, the Greek, the desk clerk… These are the characters that populate Dylan songs (remember Louise and Johanna, with Little Boy Lost in “Visions of Johanna” – drifting and lost). These are the people Dylan observes.
So life goes on its pointless, second rate way, “As the storm clouds rise and the palm branches sway”. Everywhere there is the trivia of life…
A soldier sits beneath the fan Doing business with a tiny man who sells him a ring
The lights go out but there is an attempt to go on…
While a loser in the gambling room lights up a candle Says, “Open up another deck” But the dealer says, “Attendez-vous, s’il vous plait”
Interestingly, amusingly, even the French is wrong at this point. It should “Attendez s’il vous plait”. Maybe that’s just a slip, maybe it is another sign of just how second rate everything is. The casino card dealer can’t even get the French right.
So the woman knows it’s time to go – there is after all a volcano exploding, and in a moment of trivia needs to get past the Greek to get to the emergency escape, and in a Titanic like moment, the band plays on.
Then she ran upstairs to pack her bags While a horse-drawn taxi waited at the curb She passed the door that the Greek had locked Where a handwritten sign read, “Do Not Disturb” She knocked upon it anyway As the sun went down and the music did play On Black Diamond Bay
And it’s all over, everyone is trapped. The gambler finally breaks the bank, but since there is now no way out, he’ll never get the cash. The trivial nonsense flows all around… The island is sinking, the lady is told how much she is loved, she prays, and all hell breaks lose.
Then the change of perspective – the change that is supposed to link us to the Conrad novel (in which changing perspectives are central to the whole volume).
Walter Cronkite is doing the CBS news show, and even amidst the carnage and horror, because the story doesn’t happen in the US, but in some foreign place, they can’t even get the detail right…
It seems there was an earthquake that Left nothin’ but a Panama hat And a pair of old Greek shoes
The TV viewer picks up on the non-American context – if it isn’t in the US it doesn’t matter…
Didn’t seem like much was happening, So I turned it off and went to grab another beer Seems like every time you turn around There’s another hard-luck story that you’re going to hear
And so we get the final twist – all these lives are there, all being destroyed, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not a place we know or care about.
Now here’s the Levy recording. He chats at the start, and then there is a full recording…
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Please note that this review was written before I heard the Ashley Hutchings version of the song, at which point I changed my mind quite dramatically. But that often happens! If you want a more informed and in-depth review Jochen has (of course) provided that.
A (confused) commentary by Tony Attwood
Angelina was intended to be on Shot of Love – the third and final religious album from Bob Dylan – the one where the Doubts start. It was recorded in 1981 and not released until 1991 when it appeared on The Bootleg Series volumes 1-3.
When I first heard it (and this of course is just my personal reaction) my feeling was that I could see at once why the song was cut. The reason is simple: the rhymes are so horribly convoluted to fit the prescribed pattern AAA; B; CCC; B that I was almost curling up waiting for the next horror.
To take this rhyming sequence in verse one we have
A: chances, advances, dances
B: concertina
C: shore, door, before
B: Angelina
Now there is nothing wrong with any of this at all – and the A’s and C’s are always fine, but the struggle to find words that rhyme with “Angelina” results in some truly awful rhymes:
conertina
hyena
subpoena
Argentina
arena
And even here there is nothing wrong with these words or the rhymes. It goes wrong if you start to feel that a word is only there to make the rhyme rather than add to the meaning or evoke a feeling.
It’s like rhyming “you took me to the sea side” with “and we went on a fairground ride”. We yes, maybe you did, but it just sounds so horribly forced.
The “concertina” works because we are close to the start and don’t quite know where this is going. “Concertina” is certainly possible – it feels ok, its an unusual word, and yes the monkey jumping off the itinerant’s shoulder could dance to the concertina he is playing. But when hyena, subpoena and Argentina roll in with no explanation other than a forced previous line to try and make them fit into the song, then it just feels so, so, wrong.
The song itself is packed with religious – particularly Biblical – references. So when Dylan says, “Tell me, tall men, where would you like to be overthrown, In Jerusalem or Argentina?” one is left thinking, “Why Argentina?” But even that is beaten by the judge with his subpoena. All we are left thinking is what???
And it is a valid question, because this is a superb song, with many great lines, a good melody and a really good arrangement. So why put these strange lines in the seem to jerk out of the song like shards of glass where the surface should be smooth?
Why, when the whole song is packed with its Biblical references. This is a song where the references are deliberately obscure, where meaning is hidden for the very good reason that there is no meaning beyond the total uncertainty of what on earth is going on. Those rhymes just are not needed.
There’s another oddity here – the song is performed in D flat major. Nothing wrong with that except hardly anyone records anything in the pop/rock genre in this key. Simply because there’s no benefit and its just unusual. Unusual for no purpose in fact. One is almost tempted to postulate that it was recorded on analogue technology in D and slowed down, or C and speeded up. But that still doesn’t explain why.
As for the music, its just a rotation around the major chords of I, IV and V (D flat, G flat major and A flat major). Very effective, no problem, no comment.
So if we look at the lyrics that float above these major chords we have…
Well, it’s always been my nature to take chances My right hand drawing back while my left hand advances Where the current is strong and the monkey dances To the tune of a concertina
And we have to think yes, yes, yes this is going to be great. Taking us into strange worlds that no one has ever painted in a song before. The man taking chances, this sounds really good…
Blood dryin’ in my yellow hair as I go from shore to shore I know what it is that has drawn me to your door But whatever could it be, makes me think you’ve seen me before Angelina
The mystery deepens; we don’t know what’s going on, or if it will be untangled, but we want to go on…
His eyes were two slits that would make any snake proud With a face that any painter would paint as he walked through the crowd Worshipping a god with the body of a woman well endowed And the head of a hyena
This is a particularly interesting verse, since there is no god that fits this description – another reason to think it is a forced rhyme. (Seth, god of the dead, has the body of man and the head of a hyena). And yet we have the hyena, and begin to think, “oh hell, he’s put that in to rhyme with Angelina.” And I say “Oh hell” because Dylan doesn’t normally fall into this trap – that’s one of the many things that makes him great.
But the good lines continue
Do I need your permission to turn the other cheek?
That’s interesting since it seems to suggest that someone is trying to take control of Jesus’ command – giving permission to do as Jesus says. Is this an attack on the priesthood?
If you can read my mind, why must I speak? No, I have heard nothing about the man that you seek
Oh the mystery – we’ll forgive the Seth cock-up and go with this… But then,…
In the valley of the giants where the stars and stripes explode
What are we to do with this? The valley of the giants is one of the borders of Judah, so that’s important. And it is a novel by Peter B Kyne in which we have the story of evil big business trying to push the honest local guy around. So yes, Kyne did indeed bring the valley of the giants into the USA. But, so what, for either meaning. It is almost like Dylan is trying to be clever and show us that he knows these references. But Dylan? Surely not.
But surely yes…
The peaches they were sweet and the milk and honey flowed I was only following instructions when the judge sent me down the road With your subpoena
Now I am utterly lost. We are in the Promised Land, and then… well, then? And yes we then have these terrific lines as if from any one of a hundred Dylan lost-love songs
When you cease to exist, then who will you blame I’ve tried my best to love you but I cannot play this game Your best friend and my worst enemy is one and the same Angelina
There is a whole of explanations for this, but in this case I don’t think the average listener who came to this without noticing the forced rhymes would worry. It is simple, it is effective, it just feels right even if the meaning is obscure.
But then I get lost – for there is no sense in the Argentina reference that follows. Surely Dylan isn’t talking about the allegation that Nazis headed off the Argentina after the second world war. That is just so disconnected with everything else, and it doesn’t really tells us much about the “tall men” either.
She was stolen from her mother when she was three days old Now her vengeance has been satisfied and her possessions have been sold He’s surrounded by God’s angels and she’s wearing a blindfold But so are you, Angelina
Blind justice? I don’t know – I’m guessing – and I don’t want to be. Not because I want to know what it is about, but because I don’t want to know – I just want to flow in the imagery. Yet those wretched rhymes force me back away from the mixing words and dissolving worlds.
I see pieces of men marching; trying to take heaven by force I can see the unknown rider, I can see the pale white horse In God’s truth tell me what you want and you’ll have it of course Just step into the arena
This is all about the Book of Revelation and the Second Coming – I think. I like the idea that after all that has gone before you can step up to the podium and declare yourself for Christ, and have it all. However, I’m not a Christian so I am always open to correction, but I don’t think it is supposed to work like this.
Beat a path of retreat up them spiral staircases Pass the tree of smoke, pass the angel with four faces Begging God for mercy and weeping in unholy places Angelina Oh, Angelina. Oh, Angelina
There is one commentary that I have to say I rather like. I didn’t actually understand much of it but it ends with “the deceivers are also the deceived”. With lyrics as convoluted as this, they probably are.
In the end I come back to a point that I made much earlier (or so it seems, for this is a long and meandering review, I do admit), the one where the Doubts start. Take this as a song about a Christian having Doubts and slowly it makes sense. It makes sense because it is so confused – and quite often that is what having doubts is about. He could almost say, “Oh my God I’m so bloody confused.”
Think there’s something missing or wrong with this review?
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Much of the commentary over the years has focussed on ..mocked my God, humiliated my friends – a line that relates to the torment of Christ as reflected in Matthew 10:34 and to which I shall return later in this piece.
But there is another place to start – perversely the last verse:
What makes the wind want to blow tonight? Don’t even feel like crossing the street and my car ain’t acting right Called home, everybody seemed to have moved away My conscience is beginning to bother me today
Taking this verse on its own doesn’t necessarily lead us in the right direction, but stay with me a moment on this. It is the theme of loss and isolation – the traveller has returned home from his journeys and finds the world has changed. The world continues – the wind blows – but (the singer says) I don’t want to be part of this world. Everyone has gone, my old world has past me by. And now I start to get worried about all that I have done and experienced in the past? How do I cope with all this change?
So we have commentators that see verse two as reflecting 1 John 4:18, while Verse 3 relates to 1 Corinthians 13:2. Verses 4 and 5 related to Matthew 5:43-44. And there’s me saying, no, that is all a step too far.
I admit at once I am far from the best person to comment on this. I am not a Christian although out of my interest for the way in which Christian beliefs are propagated I have of my own volition studied the Bible somewhat more than some people who follow the faith do. So I do have a spot of knowledge.
Starting from my sceptical viewpoint I take the line
Tattooed my babies with a poison pen
and I ask what on earth does this mean? My babies? His songs? His children?
Maybe, but then the uncertainty is what you get from being allegorical. If Dylan told it really as it is, he would be about 1% of the writer he has been through his life. Compare anything we are considering on this web site with Woody Guthery’s “No Church Tonight”
Preacher Bill come to our house, One Sunday bright and fine, To fill his belly with sweet potatoes, Biscuits, chicken and wine. He took our Nelly back up the barn, And carried on a sight, I heard him whisper in her ear, “There ‘ll be no church tonight.”
Guthery tells us a tale and the understanding is simple: priests can do things they shouldn’t. But Dylan is way, way beyond this simplicity and that is why his works are so much more worthy of analysis than Guthery. He takes us somewhere quite different.
Wikipedia suggests that this Dylan line perhaps refers to the “hostility Dylan’s songs had met among the media and in concerts”. Really? Is he still thinking back to the “Judas” concert where he played in front of an electric band to the dismay of purists? After all this time?
Try another approach: this album includes the utterly haunting “Lenny Bruce is Dead” which Dylan claimed he didn’t know why he wrote. Fair enough – the only people who really understand their consciousness are the Swami’s of the order founded by Adi Shankara, and Dylan’s not in that league. But all of us have the ability to track back into our inner worlds and pull out a whole range of unconnected issues even if we can’t make sense of the whole thing.
So my point is, if Dylan did this with “Lenny Bruce”, why not with “Shot of Love”?
Some of the links between “Shove of Love” and the New Testament go beyond probability for me (although I reiterate I am not a Christian and therefore approach this from an outsider’s point of view). Quite how “Mocked my God, Humiliated my friends.” directly relates to 1 Peter 4:8 I can’t tell you. I leave that to others.
“To those who care where Bob Dylan is at, they should listen to “Shot of Love”. It’s my most perfect song. It defines where I am spiritually, musically, romantically and whatever else. It shows where my sympathies lie. It’s all there in that one song.” So said Bob Dylan as I quoted in the review of Dead Man Dead Man. So this song perhaps more than any other deserves further and further inspection.
But still, what do we find?
Mostly the song is on one chord. Only the line “Shot of Love” has a chord change. Thus it is a melodic song – all the interest comes from the way the melody takes on the word, but the melody itself is not that original or unusual. It is full of “blues” notes (the flattened third and 7th) and although great fun, is not a triumph of itself. It is in fact that arrangement that carries us through. The song in fact is saved by the arrangement.
Let’s look at the words further…
Don’t need a shot of heroin to kill my disease Don’t need a shot of turpentine, only bring me to my knees Don’t need a shot of codeine to help me to repent Don’t need a shot of whiskey, help me be president
I need a shot of love, I need a shot of love
To me it is simple. If we didn’t have all this talk about Dylan and religion, we’d be back with “All you need is love” – I need love to make me feel better. And don’t we all?
Doctor, can you hear me? I need some Medicaid I seen the kingdoms of the world and it’s making me feel afraid What I got ain’t painful, it’s just bound to kill me dead Like the men that followed Jesus when they put a price upon His head
OK, Jesus gets a mention, but put the whole song together and it is much more “Hard Rain” than anything else. Everything is going wrong, and it is hurting me, because there is nothing I can do about it. Hard Rain is gonna fall.
Following this approach, what we find is that the next verse quite simply says, “I don’t need to explain why I am what I am. I need to be loved, just like we all do.”
I don’t need no alibi when I’m spending time with you I’ve heard all of them rumours and you have heard ’em too Don’t show me no picture show or give me no book to read It don’t satisfy the hurt inside nor the habit that it feeds
Now let me pause and make another point. When I was taught literary criticism, and subsequently physics, I found in one place the two subjects were cojoined. What I was taught in both subjects is that whenever there are several possible answers to a conundrum and you can’t choose between them, you choose the simplest, until other evidence comes along. So we believe that men did indeed set foot on the Moon rather than it being set up as a giant hoax in a studio, because it fits with man’s exploration first of the earth and then of the solar system. The conspiracy of the TV stations is a much more complex affair which among other things requires a huge amount of people to keep very quiet about the conspiracy.
So with Dylan. Understanding this request for love as a request for love is much simpler than trying to link it with a series of verses from the New Testament.
Of course there are significant problems with interpreting Dylan here. As we have seen so often in his songs he is not logical about time, nor consistent in terms of the point of view. So it is again here.
Why would I want to take your life? You’ve only murdered my father, raped his wife Tattooed my babies with a poison pen Mocked my God, humiliated my friends
Notice that the mocking of God is placed on an equal footing with the humiliation of friends, yet no Christian writing as a Christian would ever say that. God and Jesus above all other things. And still we don’t know what or who those babies are.
But here is a different explanation…
“And they shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he shall rise again” (Matthew 10:34).
“Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for him? Will ye accept his person? will ye contend for God? Is it good that he should search you out? or as one man mocketh another, do ye so mock him?” Job 13:7-9,
Of course we each choose. Mine is with the simpler more secular answer, but if you want to follow the Biblical answer, obviously you can.
Next we have the verse that sets us totally among every day life, the feeling that we all get at some time that we just can’t settle, can’t find where we want to be, who we are…
Don’t want to be with nobody tonight Veronica not around nowhere, Mavis just ain’t right There’s a man that hates me and he’s swift, smooth and near Am I supposed to set back and wait until he’s here?
The man who hates him… the critic, the type of maniac that killed John Lennon…
And so we reach that last verse, which is where I started…
What makes the wind want to blow tonight? Don’t even feel like crossing the street and my car ain’t acting right Called home, everybody seemed to have moved away My conscience is beginning to bother me today
As Dylan says, “I need a shot of love,” to which I would reply…
Has Dylan ever constructed another song which ends with a fade repetition of one line? Writing this I can’t remember any, but now I’ve thought to look I’m sure to find many.
Dead Man fades out with, “Ooh I can’t stand it I can’t stand it” and in the end that is the part that influences me most of all, as I try to unravel this song – a song that at first listening seems like it should unveil its secrets easily, and yet which turns out to be an extraordinarily tough nut to crack.
The three religious albums from Dylan (of which this the last) have produced a significant amount of debate as to the meanings and direction – and we also know that Dylan took a lot of time getting the album to sound as he wanted. But there is little comment to suggest that Dylan re-wrote the songs. The songs were there – he just took time to get them to sound right. So, we know we’re dealing with a finished composition which at least makes life easier.
It is argued in some places that the song is sung to Christians who are adjusting Christian teaching to fit their own lives. The argument is that these Christians are living in a hypothetical world which I must say I rather like as a phrase, although I’m not to sure what it means.
But I do agree with the thesis – it is about the profession of Christian beliefs, while behaving in a way that is utterly contradictory to Christian forgiveness. And, through a most circuitous route (as I’ll reveal in this article) I’ve ended up thinking about Pearl Harbour, and the American response to that, which was ultimately the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
OK that’s a long journey. I’ll try and explain…
It is widely argued that the song is part of Dylan’s move from Christianity, the last of the three albums dealing with the theme. OK, so we know the overall context. But is this a case of an evangelist telling the world to turn to Jesus and reject the Devil? Or a comment on the way America, the American people, and US government have turned Christianity upside down in following rampant capitalism?
Or something a lot more bizarre? Here’s a thought: take the reggae style, think of Haiti and the voodoo religion. Then think, “Dead Man, Dead Man, When will you arise?”
That thought just occurred to me when writing this. Of course there is no context beyond the fact that it is in the musical style of the region – it doesn’t fit what we know of Dylan at the time, and the other music he was producing, but I include the point just to show how hard it can be to get to the bottom of all this. Putting forward a case to say this song is about Haiti is possible – although let me stress, I am not going to do that here!
But the choice of reggae is interesting. The only other reggae based song I can think of is “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” from “Slow Train Coming”. Dylan knows how to do it, but doesn’t seem that interested. If there are other reggae arrangements sung by Dylan do let me know – I find it an interesting theme.
Uttering idle words from a reprobate mind Clinging to strange promises, dying on the vine Never being able to separate the good from the bad Ooh, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it It’s making me feel so sad
Dead man, dead man When will you arise? Cobwebs in your mind Dust upon your eyes
I would find it very hard to say that the “Dead man” in the chorus is Jesus, for a devout believer would surely not suggest that Jesus had “Cobwebs in your mind.” It just doesn’t work for me. But if not that, what? Is it that the first two lines are asking when the Second Coming as depicted in the Book of Revelations will occur, while the last two lines of the chorus are about the government? It’s a bit obscure, but it works.
This album was released in August 1981. In an interview in 1983 with New Musical Express (the UK based weekly rock music magazine) Dylan said, “To those who care where Bob Dylan is at, they should listen to “Shot of Love”. It’s my most perfect song. It defines where I am spiritually, musically, romantically and whatever else. It shows where my sympathies lie. It’s all there in that one song.”
OK that takes us in one direction, but between April and May of that year Dylan recorded Infidels which takes us somewhere else. His statement suddenly seems less definitive than he appears to make it seem in that interview.
By 1997, things were different. In an interview with Newsweek Dylan said, “Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else…I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity.”
So can we divine anything from all this? That Dylan learns from his own creative process? Almost certainly yes, just as virtually every highly creative person does. If he ever communicates with a higher plane he does it through composition. I can believe that.
But we must also note that Shot of Love opens side one of the album of the same name, Dead Man side two. So although Dead Man is not as important as Shot of Love, it is important.
Musically Dead Man is simple. Basically two chords (I and V), in both chorus and verse. Bass and drums give us the reggae feel, the bass being particularly well played, never over done, often giving us just a taste of what’s there – sparse to the point of disappearing and yet returning to define the underpinning of the song. It is a superb performance with superb production.
But still, hearing it afresh now, that opening verse comes across as an attack on the most powerful and overtly Christian country, and its handling of its affairs. So there we have a meaning, but immediately that meaning doesn’t seem to work so well in verse two, the opening line of which is particularly difficult.
Satan got you by the heel, there’s a bird’s nest in your hair Do you have any faith at all? Do you have any love to share? The way that you hold your head, cursing God with every move Ooh, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it What are you trying to prove?
Certainly on the reverse of the album cover Dylan could be said to have a bird’s nest in his hair. Is it that? Or… a bird’s nests are built usually in trees and the are organic growing things serving the purpose of continuing the species. Who or what is he talking about here? People in general who say, “For God’s sake!” The man with cobwebs in his mind? It is an issue that is hard to resolve for the moment.
Verse three adds to the thought that the song is about contemporary American politics, but it can also be about the whole country.
The glamour and the bright lights and the politics of sin The ghetto that you build for me is the one you’re living in The race of the engine that overrules your heart Ooh, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it Pretending that you’re so smart
This also now seems to be about everyone preaching everything as the way forward to solving all the problems of the world. “I am right – don’t listen to everyone else.” Suddenly the thought is there – is he talking about contemporary evangelical preachers who collect vast sums of money from their followers, and live the high life on it?
What are you trying to overpower me with, the doctrine or the gun? My back is already to the wall, where can I run? The tuxedo that you’re wearing, the flower in your lapel Ooh, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it You want to take me down to hell
This takes us back to politics. I’m left with the line “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” the phrase, and eventually the song, which came out of Pearl Harbour. The peace and the machine gun. Only as I try to balance the two contradictions of the love expressed in the New Testament and the need to fight on occasion for all you believe in, does this song start to make sense. In a way we are all living the contradiction, wanting a peaceful, honourable, decent, honest society to live in, and instead forced to live in a world of corruption and greed.
No one knows the answer, which is why we have the line “Pretending you’re so smart”. No one really can do this balancing act of how the Christian full of brotherly love behaves when faced by Pearl Harbour or the Nazis.
With this in mind, I looked forwards to what happened next.
This song was recorded two years ahead of “Blind Willie McTell” but who knows (without Dylan telling us) when he first started to sketch that masterpiece with the lines:
“Well, God is in His heaven
And we all want what’s His
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is”
So I finally struggle to the conclusion. Dead Man Dead Man (1981) was a stepping stone along the way to Blind Willie McTell’s “power and greed” statement in 1983. To me that is the only interpretation that works. It is an expression of dislike of a supposedly Christian government, and all that it does to defend its power.
I appreciate you may disagree – I just put this forward as the hypothesis that seems to work most for.
Updated 13 Nov 2017 with links to other versions of the song – I really hope you try them if you have not heard them before – they offer a completely different set of insights into the song. Reading my commentary first is optional.
By Tony Attwood
The song is upbeat, and the organist makes mistakes (playing I-IV at the end of the harmonica solo in the intro before Dylan starts singing instead of holding the tonic, forgetting to play during the “Staring at the butterfly” line)… Yet he has the simplest of parts to play – so why wasn’t it re-recorded or over dubbed? Ah – because Bob doesn’t do that!
And thinking of that, and the fact that the song is about gambling, made me think Bob himself likes to gamble with the outcome. (Incidentally if you do, do take a look at UK casinos).
But back to the song, certainly Dylan’s voice is absolutely spot on for the song. The chords are primarily I, IV, and V, there’s a nice descending bass line at the end, and the bass player is perfection – ok it is not a complex bass line but it requires tenacity and determination to keep going through this length of song, and he delivers.
So, what to make of it all?
The story almost makes sense but no, it doesn’t. Every time you try to make it mean something it slips through your hands and means something else.
And yet actually it is not that difficult as some of the reviews have suggested. The notion of interwoven characters who act in ways that we can’t quite understand, as if they are flitting in and out of each other’s lives sometimes touching our lives without our ever quite knowing what they do, why they do it, and who they are, is a theme of Dylan’s.
What Dylan has done here is stripped away the disdain (the bouncy melody makes the characters actually seem quite nice even though one of them is a hanging judge, one is a bank robber…) and given us multiple comic book characters rather than the one central person of Rolling Stone, 4th Street etc.
But this is not new. The song that developed this theme first time around was Visions of Johanna in which the essence of Johanna, Louise and Little Boy Lost is never resolved. Indeed it is a noticeable parallel between “Visions” and Lily, Rosemary etc that not only are there three characters, but also two of the three have names while the third is known by a title (Jack of Hearts / Little Boy Lost).
In both cases the existence of some sort of story line tempts us to assume that there is a sense that moves naturally through time, but it never works. There is a sequence, but…
No, as a total song you have to stretch the imagination to make it make sense, and in fact that is the brilliance of the song; it is a song that gives hints which send the mind spinning without actually giving us explanations.
But we also need to consider the context of the album on which it appears. Remember also the lack of logical sequence in Tangled up in blue which starts the album, and the sudden confusion between “he” and “I” in Simple Twist of Fate Or the sudden use of a very non-blues lyric in “Meet me in the Morning” after a totally blues approach up to that point.
Indeed the whole album reeks of confusion disguised as straightforwardness. We think we are getting the hang of things, and then Dylan throws in something that knocks us off balance.
The Jack of Hearts is a bank robber recently come into town, Lily and Rosemary have parts to play in the unfolding drama, and unlike Johanna we get some other characters, Big Jim owning a diamond mine etc.
But that brings up another issue. Let us pause for a moment to consider diamond mines. I’ve always placed the song in the Wild West – the whole lawlessness of the story makes me feel this is so. But where are the diamond mines in the wild west – or come to that anywhere else in the US?
In fact there have only ever been two diamond mines in the US. A small mine that operated between 1996 and 2002 (Kelsey Lake Diamond Mine near Fort Collins, Colorado) and Crater of Diamonds near Murfreesboro, Arkansas which was worked at the start of the 20th century but is now a tourist attraction where you can pay a fee to dig and see what you can find.
Dylan would not have known of Kelsey Lake mine but might have known about the Arkansas mine. Duluth, Minnesota where Dylan was born, is 1000 miles away, so it is not a local reference. The chances are it is not a reference to any diamond mine in real life – just a story line.
Indeed this reference to the non-existent mine should tell us all that the story does not make sense in terms of the real world – for if the mine is not there, then why should the characters or the story be considered in a real-world form either?
What we get in the first verse tells us that this is a shimmering half representation of life, just like Visions.
The festival was over, the boys were all planning for a fall The cabaret was quiet except for the drilling in the wall The curfew had been lifted and the gambling wheel shut down Anyone with any sense had already left town He was standing in the doorway looking like the Jack of Hearts
Just consider, “Anyone with any sense had already left town” – put another way “you are not going to find any sense here.”
So there is no point in trying to understand what, “Then he moved into the corner, face down like the Jack of Hearts” means in reality. It is not reality, it is just an image. Playing cards and life reflecting each other, somehow, although we can’t quite get how, it is a shimmering film.
Indeed in this non-world, when we come to the third verse, it is interesting that Big Jim owned not just the USA’s only diamond mine, he “owned the town’s only diamond mine”. As if there might be two!
But in saying that we cannot take sense from the story, we should not ignore the character of the Jack of Hearts – the sort of mythological man who can see off everyone. A Harlequin, a joker, a man who moves from the playing cards into real life and back, so that even Jim can’t handle him. The central character moves off the cards and into the room and out again. It doesn’t make sense, it is not meant to make sense.
The existence of the line, “But she’d never met anyone quite like the Jack of Hearts” reinforces the fact – he’s not real, he’s just an image, a wandering man, the drifter, the Mysterious Stranger – a commonplace device in contemporary literature and media. And so it has always been, for in mediaeval literature, we had the Wandering Jew. The point is not to answer the question, “who is this man?”; the point is to ask the question.
It is an approach that is reinforced by the fact that the Jack of Hearts ambiguously turns up at the end of lines…
No, nothing ever would except maybe the Jack of Hearts
She was gazing to the future, riding on the Jack of Hearts
Down the hallway footsteps were coming for the Jack of Hearts
There was no actor anywhere better than the Jack of Hearts
And from the missing verse (missing from Blood on the Tracks that is)
Just another night in the life of the Jack of Hearts
and as we approach the end…
The only person on the scene missing was the Jack of Hearts
In many senses the issue of confused identities, confused time, and the stranger who comes in and out of our lives is the theme of Blood on the Tracks. Tangled up in Blues and Simple Twist of Fate both echo this totally. Just think how close in terms of being outside of the touchable world, the woman is in Twist of Fate:
A saxophone some place far off played As she was walking by the arcade As the light burst through a beat-up shade where he was waking up, She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate And forgot about a simple twist of fate
And then again consider Tangled up in Blue. If you want a contemporary Drifter who comes in and out of our lives and who is endlessly enigmatic consider:
Then she opened up a book of poems And handed it to me Written by an Italian poet From the thirteenth century
In the real, real world who does that?
Thus we see Dylan’s techniques for giving us half-images of the world which he uses on Blood on the Tracks. He confuses people, he mixes up the story, characters come and go, and the sequence of events through time is not adhered to. In short it is a picture drawn in words and music, but always, always, we have the mysterious outsider who comes into our life and turns the whole thing upside down.
That’s just how it goes.
https://vimeo.com/81862481
It has only ever been played once live on stage – in 1976.
1: Over 450 reviews of Dylan songs. There is an index to these in alphabetical order at the foot of the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.
2: The Chronology. We’ve taken all the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums. The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site. We have also recently started to produce overviews of Dylan’s work year by year. The index to the chronologies is here.
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“Meet Me in the Morning” is Dylan producing the most perfect traditional blues song. It appears as the opening of side two of Blood on the Tracks (1975), and it is not only the only 12 bar blues on the album, is in total contrast to everything else on the LP.
We also have a second version avaialable:
On the album version makes his voice sound like that of one of the old time blues singers who uses the traditional format of the blues but adds a perfect melody about the three chord arrangement.
Even the lyrics are traditional blues. Take for example the verse
Little rooster crowin’, there must be something on his mind Well, I feel just like that rooster Honey, ya treat me so unkind
That is a real “My baby done gone” type of blues – the woman just walks out, it ain’t my fault – women are like that.
And yet the accompaniment itself does not really take us into blues territory – the way the guitars are played is almost skittish, a sort of country and western feel added to a blues format. It doesn’t start out like this in the instrumental introduction, but just listen to the instrumental break, which perversely is at the end of the recording, rather than being the penultimate verse. It is all far from the traditional blues in its performance.
It is also interesting to note that it is the only 12 bar blues on the album. But it has an important position at the start of side 2.
Wiki tells us that the song is also featured in the 2009 movie “Away We Go” and on September 19, 2007, “Dylan played this song live in concert for the first time ever during a show in Nashville. He was joined onstage for the performance by Jack White.”
Jack White certainly knows more about the blues than most contemporary performers, and the event in Nashville must have been quite something. C&W meets the blues – the definitive statement.
As for the opening http://www.co.wabasha.mn.us/ gives a fair insight into Wabasha, Minnesota, and we know Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota (except when I mistakenly say Mississippi by mistake). The distance between Wabasha and Duluth is, by car, about 165 miles. There is also the fact there is a Wabasha Street in St. Paul through which Highway 61 runs. But no one has found a 56th street intersecting with Wabasha.
So we get to verse 1, which seems to be a dead end in terms of strict meaning…
Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha Honey, we could be in Kansas By time the snow begins to thaw
Verse 2 plays an interesting trick, starting with a line that is really not at all interesting, and not really very “blues” since it is a line of hope. But then Dylan adds a remarkable twist.
They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn But you wouldn’t know it by me Every day’s been darkness since you been gone
By verse four Dylan really is taking off with the lyrics, for here we get a set of lyrics that no one would ever expect to find on a blues song. The matches are a trivial point, but significant enough if you want to light a cigarette or burn the place down. The birds flying low presumably indicate something symbolic, although I don’t know what low flying birds symbolise (although there is a band around called Low Flying Birds!)
The birds are flyin’ low babe, honey I feel so exposed Well, the birds are flyin’ low babe, honey I feel so exposed Well now, I ain’t got any matches And the station doors are closed
But the point with the low flying birds is that the image feels like a symbol of doom. Maybe just because it is in a blues song, he feels exposed, and the line comes twice. You just know this is not good.
The next verse really tells you that this is true – this is not a good place to have come from, but the singer went through everything to get the woman – and now she’s gone.
Well, I struggled through barbed wire, felt the hail fall from above Well, I struggled through barbed wire, felt the hail fall from above Well, you know I even outran the hound dogs Honey, you know I’ve earned your love
And then what an image to end with.
Look at the sun sinkin’ like a ship Look at the sun sinkin’ like a ship Ain’t that just like my heart, babe When you kissed my lips?
Maybe there is no consistent meaning, maybe it is just an abstract of words in blues form. But it is none the less a masterpiece of the blues for all that.
What else is on the site
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Simple Twist of Fate” is the second song on Blood on the Tracks released in 1975.
Its position continues the long established tradition of having an upbeat opening track and then a slow or sombre second track. Just listen to the end of Tangled up in blue and the opening of this track – the contrast is overwhelming.
But Simple Twist of Fate is not just the obligatory slow number slotted in as track two, for this is a song of magnificence – an incredibly complex revelation contained in six musically identical verses. As such it is a true masterpiece of songwriting.
It is a song that is at the start reliant on the descending bass line with variations. The chord sequence, while not unusual in pop and rock is unusual in Dylan – I can’t think where else this approach is used in Dylan’s songs. And it contains a twist.
The recording is in F major, and the moment that sticks in the memory throughout is the move from B flat to B flat minor in the fourth line (for example “’Twas then he felt alone”). It is not a Dylan invention, but it portrays musically all the pathos and depth of feeling that the lyrics contain.
The accompaniment is simple: the acoustic guitar strumming, bass guitar and harmonica when there is no vocal. Indeed the complexity of the meaning combined with the simplicity of the music has made it a song that many like to sing – Joan Baez included it on Diamonds and Rust, and Brian Ferry on Dylanesque, plus many others.
The simplicity of the music seems to be apparent in the lyrics from the start – the lovers meet but the man feels this isn’t going to work for some reason…
They sat together in the park As the evening sky grew dark She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones ’Twas then he felt alone and wished that he’d gone straight And watched out for a simple twist of fate
So we know there is a history, and wait to find out what. But then two things happen to the song which turn everything upside down. On occasion the “He” becomes “I” while the woman turns out to be a prostitute working the docks and the singer is an old man harking after the charms of a young woman. The he/I dichotomy gives us a difficult feeling, while the tale of an old man and a hooker seems out of place with the gentle melody and chord sequence.
In fact, if ever there is a Dylan song that gives you a knife in the heart after fooling you at the start this is it. You need a strong heart to take this…
They walked along by the old canal A little confused, I remember well And stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burning bright He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train Moving with a simple twist of fate
What are we to make of this “I remember well”. It seems in fact that the story teller is looking back to his past and is so removed from that past that he now confuses his personal memories with those which, because of the pain of the memory, he has had to place outside himself.
If you have ever experienced that pain, and had to take to that final recourse of separation from yourself to deal with it – or should I say if you are old enough to have to do that – then you will know the level of the anguish of what might have been, but now can never be.
So now we think we have this juxtaposition sorted, we understand the pain, but then Dylan hits us again.
A saxophone some place far off played As she was walking by the arcade As the light burst through a beat-up shade where he was waking up, She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate And forgot about a simple twist of fate
He can’t forget her and his casual encounter. But she is up and on with her work, although showing a feeling for those worse off than her that might take us by surprise.
Now Dylan either does one of his time-mix tricks where we find the story is not told in sequence or he wakes the next day, and finds she is not there when he has perhaps been dreaming of her, tries to deal with it, but can’t. I prefer the latter interpretation.
He woke up, the room was bare He didn’t see her anywhere He told himself he didn’t care, pushed the window open wide Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate Brought on by a simple twist of fate
The “he could not relate” line is the key to the “I” / “he” dichotomy – the “he” and “I” are the same person, because as this line says, the man cannot relate to these feelings. He is truly lost.
Then time passes, he searches her out, desperately hoping to find her again, but nothing is in his control. She has the power and he is lost.
He hears the ticking of the clocks And walks along with a parrot that talks Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in Maybe she’ll pick him out again, how long must he wait Once more for a simple twist of fate
And then we move on to this wonderful final, final verse. It hardly feels as if Dylan has been singing a straight strophic song with no variations – that B flat to B flat minor pulls the heart every time and keeps us focussed. He draws his conclusion – and for anyone who lives in a world of emotion and feeling – anyone who understands what it means to feel the pain of “if only” knows what he is saying with the opening two lines.
People tell me it’s a sin To know and feel too much within I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring She was born in spring, but I was born too late Blame it on a simple twist of fate
And now the “I” comes back, the eternal wishing for and thinking about a woman whom he met but could never get to know, could never love, but who is forever in his mind. The beautiful woman symbolising everything hopeful – she was born in spring. He is in the autumn of his life, and thus they are forever separated.
So strong is the emotion that the ability to separate himself into the “other man” who had these feelings, and the actual man living in the real world, now breaks down. He is that man, and all the pretending in the world cannot remove that reality.
This song is so utterly amazing, so un-Dylan, yet so Dylan – undoubtedly because of the input of Rick Danko. As I understand it from reports of what Danko has said, Dylan wrote the lyrics, and both men wrote the chorus together. Although Danko has not said (at least as far as I know) it seems both from this report and from simply listening to this song and comparing it with Dylan written pieces, he wrote the chords and melody for the verse.
When I started this series of reviews, I wanted to put this right at the top of the list, the first song, but two things got in the way. First I couldn’t find the words to express what I wanted to say about this and second it is so untypical that it seemed the wrong place to start. So, some 85 reviews on I have the feeling maybe I can write something meaningful now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I37Utt01j7U
The version I am referring to throughout is the Basement Tapes version recorded in 1967 and appearing in 1975. But by the time it came out what we knew (or at least those of us from the UK) was Julie Driscoll singing it with Brian Auger and The Trinity. It was not only a hit, it was a cultural classic of 1968. Indeed in many ways for some people it was 1968. There is also the later re-recorded version with of all people Ade Edmondson, the actor and husband of the wonderful Jennifer Saunders (although Ade Edmondson is wonderful too), which became the theme tune of Absolutely Fabulous – a stupendous hit of a TV show in the UK, largely because of the stunning script writing of Jennifer Saunders, perhaps the most talented comedy writer of the era.
But back to the music.
Two things shock and knock you out on hearing this original version. One is the sheer absolute power of that opening line “If your memory serves you well” – so powerful in fact that some people refer to the song by that line and mistake that for the song’s name.
And then there is that extraordinary chord change: Am to B diminished. Nowhere else in Dylan do you find this. In fact I can’t think where he uses a diminished chord at all other than here. The chord is removed in other versions, which is one reason why it is vital to return to this version of the song to hear it as created.
Indeed the chordal sequence is utterly unlike anything else in Dylan, alternating between A minor and C major. As for the delivery – ok the timing wanders a bit, but this was never meant to be a definitive recording. But who cares about timing, this track is utter perfection in terms of its expression of Dylan at his prime and pomp. For once every word is vital, important, all-powerful, demanding attention. No one can say “If your memory serves you well” in that way without grabbing you by the throat.
This is the height of the Songs of Disdain theme which in popular terms is highlighted by “Like a Rolling Stone”. Except, in this one case, Dylan is saying, “No you don’t, we are staying together, you don’t get away from me that easy”. This is Dylan knowing who he is, where he is, what he wants, and getting it all into one song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmJzgbwKIks
If your memory serves you well we were going to meet again and wait So I’m going to unpack all my things and sit before it gets too late No man alive will come to you with another tale to tell But you know that we shall meet again if your mem’ry serves you well
Now that you’ve met me there is no escape. OK you might not have waited, but that’s not a problem at all because you and I are bound totally in eternity to each other.
This wheel’s on fire Rolling down the road Best notify my next of kin This wheel shall explode.
What imagery is this! What incredible feelings it brings forth. Dylan, the man who had walked away so often, whether it was on One Too Many Mornings, or It Ain’t Me Babe, is not walking this time, because this time the two lovers cannot be broken apart.
If your memory serves you well I was going to confiscate your lace And wrap it up in a sailor’s knot And hide it in your case If I knew for sure that it was yours But it was oh so hard to tell But you knew that we would meet again If your memory serves you well
It is the power in that line repeated first and last that makes this so astoundingly overwhelming. The lace is the woman’s way of making herself appear more alluring, and here for a second we are almost back into the territory of Elvis Presley, Little Richard rock n roll songs where the woman is never trusted because she will go off with the next man who comes along with a faster car, smarter jacket…
Compare and contrast Wheels on Fire with something like “My Baby Left Me” to see the difference.
And that is the theme that takes us into the next verse. The singer says that the woman asked for the situation to be sorted, because she had failed to sort it herself.
But there is more – just listen to the singing, the way the words are pushed out so that no a single word or meaning is lost. Just listen to the opening of this verse – power pours out from it.
If your memory serves you well You’ll remember you’re the one
OK could she forget? But now he’s spelling it out.
That called on me to call on them To get you your favours done And after every plan had failed And there was nothing more to tell You knew that we would meet again If your memory served you well
He’s pulling her back in, and reminding her – I’ve done this for you, there’s no backing out now.
The wheel itself could be anything – himself (the singer), or his soul, his essence, his being…. all sorts of things. Everything. I think Robert Palmer hit it perfectly when he said, “Some have seen it as a piece of rock and roll burn-out bravura, others as a more spiritual declaration. Whatever, its power and immediacy render literal interpretations irrelevant.”
What we know from Danko’s testimony is that Dylan wrote the lyrics, and that the duo wrote the chorus together. Although Danko has not said (at least as far as I know) he wrote the chords and melody for the verse.
In the reviews one thing that comes up over and over again – the lyrics are chilling. And how this is true. If you had to struggle to understand each line that chillingness would be lost. But you don’t. They are clearer than anything since Freewheelin’.
In the end the song just goes around and around – you can hit repeat and apart from the slight change of tempo it is a perfect circle. Each verse could be placed anywhere. Probably the only thing you can compare this with is “All Along the Watchtower” which achieves the same effect although in a very different way but both have that continuity of expression which make them work.
“Watchtower” does it through repeating the chord sequence over and over, this song does it through the excellence of the production and the clarity of the voice. It is a deliberate rhythm which makes me feel that this is the voice that will take me through the burning when anyone who cares or cared turns up after my death to see me off.
But the key point here is that “All Along the Watchtower” and “Wheels of Fire” both speak of something that is not yet concluded – these are songs that are like pictures, capturing one moment in the drama. This is where the song is so different from (for example) “One too many mornings” or “Sooner or later one of us must know” which speak about it all being over. Here, it is far from over – indeed it has probably only just begun.
Unusually for Dylan, Dirt Road Blues demands to be seen not as a stand alone song but in the context of Time out of Mind, the album on which it appears. Dirt Road Blues is revealed as track two sandwiched between two masterpieces: Love Sick and Standing in the Doorway.
So the question is not so much what this second track is about so much as what is Dylan doing with Dirt Road Blues by placing it between what he must have known were two utter masterpieces.
Dirt Road Blue is a straight fast 12 bar blues in A major; first line played against A major, second line a repeat of the first starting on D resolving back to A, and then the final line on E7 before taking us back to A major. There are a billion other such songs in the genre.
We might also note that as a 12 bar blue it is short, at least short compared to the way Dylan used the genre in his later albums.
So let’s try and get a bit of context: “Love sick” ends…
I’m sick of love, I wish I’d never met you I’m sick of love, I’m trying to forget you.
Just don’t know what to do I’d give anything to be with you
Then comes Dirt Road Blues
Gon’ walk down that dirt road, ’til someone lets me ride Gon’ walk down that dirt road, ’til someone lets me ride If I can’t find my baby, I’m gonna run away and hide
I been pacing around the room hoping maybe she’d come back Pacing ’round the room hoping maybe she’d come back Well, I been praying for salvation laying ’round in a one-room country shack
The subject matter is exactly the same – it is just the upbeat 12 bars that hides it for a moment. He’s trying to hide it. He is on the edge of vanishing. He’s lost, he’s desperate.
Gon’ walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed Gon’ walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed ’Til there’s nothing left to see, ’til the chains have been shattered and I’ve been freed
We immediately think of “Gonna look at you til my eyes go blind.” That was a song of utter devotion of love, “blind” and “bleed” – so totally different. But he’s determined just for a moment to find something that save him.
Rolling through the rain and hail, looking for the sunny side of love
This is getting seriously desperate. And finally we know there is no way out. His love was all consuming and now it has gone and so to all intents and purposes has the singer.
I’m gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone
Gon’ walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed ’Til there’s nothing left to see, ’til the chains have been shattered and I’ve been freed
And then we quickly move on to Standing in the doorway.
I’m walking through the summer nights Jukebox playing low Yesterday everything was going too fast Today, it’s moving too slow I got no place left to turn I got nothing left to burn Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow.
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Thus the three songs fit – but musically it feels as if they don’t.
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Somehow Dirt Road Blues feels wrong, and yet it is the final attempt of walking down the road away from all the problems, as in “One too many mornings” where he has chosen to walk away. Remember all the songs of disdain where he has expressed his anger at the people he saw – “Rolling Stone,” “Fourth Street”, “Please Crawl out your window”.
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Now everything is reversed. To me Dirt Road Blues is a step out of reality, an attempt to prove to oneself that all is ok, an attempt to do the old “Don’t Think Twice” routine and walk away, another “Sooner or Late.”
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But this time, this time, it just won’t work. You can still play the old 12 bar blues you can still think “its me that is walking away” but it all collapses back in on itself because it is not true. In a total reversal of all of Dylan’s earlier songs of disdain it is the woman who has power and control. “It ain’t me babe” has been stolen by the woman and she’s using it to hit the singer with over and over and over again.
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It is a tradition in pop and rock that the track order on an album goes Fast – Slow – Fast – Slow… such simplicities are what record producers like. Dylan has utterly reversed this process by going Slow, Fast, Slow… and we begin to see the connectedness of each song to the next.
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As such the arrangement and placement of the song are masterly decisions. The lyrics of Dirt Road Blue belie the musical arrangement. You can try and sing like you are happy, but you ain’t fooling no one – and you certainly can’t fool yourself.
This review updated 23 Feb 2018, correcting a mistaken historical reference and adding a link to the song on Spotify. There is also a clarification about the war of 1812, and much more in relation to this song in Larry Fyf’fe’s article “The Not So Narrow Road That Leads To Dylan’s Door”
If this song had been on Highway 61 Revisited it would be known world-wide as a Dylan masterpiece. As it is, coming so much later in his career it is seen by some as just another Dylan blues. There’s also been a lot of comment on the Biblical references throughout – but I would argue that neither the “another Dylan blues” nor the Biblical approach give us a full understanding of this song.
A blues yes, but not just another blues. After all how many blues do you know that are 15 bars long? You have to go back to the early days of the blues and to people like Robert Johnson to find such things. Today it is 16 or 12, but not 15. No way. And as for the Bible – there may Biblical references, but if we take them as pointing us in a certain direction, what does it all mean?
However as we get going on “Narrow Way” we must note that not everyone is convinced. The endless conundrums posed in the words are too much for some. The LA Times for example is reported as having said, it “rolls like ‘Maggie’s Farm’ with a flat tire.”
The music is the fast blues which sets the scene for a song about life and the difficulties of life – and indeed the inequalities of life. And it starts out just as a blues should. (The lyrics here are taken from various web sites and my own listening – BobDylan.com curiously has refused to put the lyrics up so their page on the song remains profoundly empty).
I’m gonna walk across the desert ’til I’m in my right mind. I won’t even think about what I left behind Nothing back there anyway that I can call my own Go back home, leave me alone It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way If I can’t work up to you, you’ll surely have to work down to me someday
So are we into Matthew 7:14 with “Straight is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” The origin presumably of straight and narrow as a common phrase. But then Dylan likes phrases like this, such as “Everybody’s moving if they ain’t already there” (Mississippi). They don’t have, and don’t all have to have, Biblical connotations.
Verse two however takes us somewhere else…
Ever since the British burned the White House down There’s a bleeding wound in the heart of town I saw you drinking from an empty cup I saw you buried and I saw you dug up
This certainly isn’t the Bible but relates I presume to the War of 1812. And this is where we have to start thinking, “this may use religious imagery but that does not make it a religious song. Take verse one and two together and you have a man saying, “I am not straight with the world, but that is because since the War of 1812 the country where I was brought up has not been right with itself – or the world. Old ideas are set aside (for example in the 1960s) and now they have been resurrected. (Either that or Dylan is suddenly talking about vampires, which seems extremely unlikely).
Yes the empty cup could be from the last supper, but that starts to stretch the connection with the British burning the White House down to breaking point.
Look down angel from the skies Help my weary soul to rise I kissed your cheek, I dragged your plough You broke my heart, I was your friend ’til now.
And this is where the pattern begins – Dylan could be talking throughout about his country or about his girlfriend. But given later lines about men and women, the country theme fits best.
I won’t continue with reference to the Bible – other writers have done it far more comprehensively than I could – but I would continue my argument that the theme of Biblical references as a theme of Dylan stating that the Bible is not right; the Second Coming is going to destroy most of you, really has to stretch a point with many of the lyrics. To me it makes much more sense to say that Dylan knows his Bible as many people of his up bringing and well publicised conversion do, but that does not mean he is using the references to talk about either the Second Coming or elements of the Old Testament in general.
What we have to remember is that Dylan has chosen a bouncy lively 15 bar blues that pays tribute to the music of the black musicians of the first half of the 20th century to deliver this song. Thus although the lines
You went and lost your lovely head For a drink of wine and a crust of bread
could have Last Supper connotations but they could also be a metaphor for the way in which the USA has utterly lost its way in both home policies and foreign policies (and we are talking here of a songwriter who has been given a medal by his President).
Thus when we bounce further along with
We looted and we plundered on distant shores Why is my share not equal to yours?
it is hard to know what this is about other than American imperialism (and I write this as a UK citizen whose country has done more than its fair share of plundering on distant shores).
Your father left you, your mother too Even death has washed it’s hands of you
then suggests that the founding fathers of the USA have been left far behind – so far behind that you now have nothing to hang on to. In which case
This is a hard country to stay alive in Blades are everywhere, and they’re breaking my skin I’m armed to the hilt and I’m struggling hard You won’t get out of here unscarred.
speaks for itself.
If we are following the theme of America past and present however we then have to see the Cake Walk as the old slave dance – symbolising the fact that even the slave era had occasional lighter moments which continued into black culture. Dylan is thus looking at the fact that America is now a union of black and white, with its first black president now in office.
Cake walking baby, you could do no wrong Put your arms around me where they belong I wanna take you on a roller coaster ride
I don’t mind admitting that as the song draws to a conclusion so the meanings increase in obscurity. Maybe many of the lines mean nothing – they are there because they sound good – just as the 15 bar approach sounds good. Without Bob Dylan telling us we don’t know, but that is no reason for not trying to find out.
Think there’s something missing or wrong with this review?
You are of course always welcome to write a comment below, but if you’d like to go further, you could write an alternative review – we’ve already published quite a few of these. We try to avoid publishing reviews and comments that are rude or just criticisms of what is written elsewhere – but if you have a positive take on this song or any other Dylan song, and would like it considered for publication, please do email Tony@schools.co.uk
What else is on the site
1: Almost 500 reviews of Dylan songs. There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.
2: The Chronology. We’ve taken the songs we can find recordings of and put them in the order they were written (as far as possible) not in the order they appeared on albums. The chronology is more or less complete and is now linked to all the reviews on the site. We have also produced overviews of Dylan’s work year by year. The index to the chronologies is here.
3: Bob Dylan’s themes. We publish a wide range of articles about Bob Dylan and his compositions. There is an index here.
4: The Discussion Group We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
5: Bob Dylan’s creativity. We’re fascinated in taking the study of Dylan’s creative approach further. The index is in Dylan’s Creativity.
And please do note The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews
In this review I’ve given a couple of live versions of the song plus the official original video, although sadly in many of the live versions available Bob’s singing is hard to hear. But there is a really superb (and quite amazing) collection of different versions of the song by Bob on the website “12 Live Versions”. I really do suggest you travel there if you want to hear some great renditions.
So, on with the show…
Heylin dismisses this as “another dozen verse dirge”. I don’t hear that at all. Nor do I find a special link between Dylan’s song and Johnson’s “Honeymoon Blues”
Indeed on reflecting on this I go to thinking, “when Heylin does his list of influences, is he just picking them out at random?”
Of course may well have a far deeper knowledge of the blues than I (although I like to think I am moderately well versed therein) but “Still on the road” is supposed to be (I think) a book for the Dylan fan, not a book which requires the reader to be deeply versed in the entire history of the blues.
Besides which, I’m not sure the Robert Johnson song above is one of his classics. But while I think Heylin is also completely off focus when he suggests “Thunder” is related to Leroy Carr’s “Getting all Wet” (there really is no musical link between the songs at all) at least “Getting all wet” is a great fun song and worthy of a listen.
The third of the songs Heylin throws at us as a source does indeed have a link because Dylan quotes a line from it (“Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down”), and yes this could link somewhat to Exodus 19:16-19
“On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast.Everyone in the camp trembled.17 Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain.18 Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain[a] trembled violently.19 As the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him.”
Here’s Mean Old Twister
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB8_KV_Zz14
But what have we learned from such a critique. Bob Dylan presents us with a three chord fast blues song which is either a surreal combination of odd images, or a song that says, “life is complex, don’t try to tie it down. We are made up of a thousand combinations of emotions, experiences and feelings. We are the inheritors of both our history and of the everyday around us. The song is a reflection of the chaotic world around us.”
Which is why ultimately, for me, Heylin’s review is nothing more than a “Look at me, aren’t I clever, I know the name of blues songs, and you are probably never going to look them up to see if they have any relevance to Dylan’s work” kind of review.
Yet we can all take on meanings and ideas as we see fit. We think that music and songs are special just as people are special. Some follow religion, some go out and try to make a difference. Some confront evil, some sing songs. Some still believe in man’s superiority to women, some still believe politicians and teachers. A thousand thoughts flow through our minds each second.
Indeed if we take that line from so many years ago, “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters,” I think we are getting close to this song. A hundred different concepts hit us at once. Who is to say what is important, what is trivial?
From which thought we might decide, how you see this song is up to you, the listener. You can see it as a post-modernist combination of images from the past and present, or as just a collection of random references. It is as much about anything as a Dali painting of bendy clocks is about anything, or it is about the history of the blues, or it is about September 11th, and who said a song had to be about one thing – or come to that anything?
There are in fact so many visions encapsulated in this song – maybe deliberately maybe by chance. Here’s just a few
Music is special
Religion is a force for good
Do something to make this bad world better
Man is the boss, woman is subservient
Heroes; we must have more heroes.
(Add your own suggestion)
In short this is a sudden look inside the music and images of the last 100 years, which is by and large what post-modernism does. It takes the past and reinvents it for today – but the re-invention often makes no sense, but each re-invention is equal.
Now it turns out that might not be such a clever idea since then fake news is equal to real news, which is a rather disturbing problem as I reconsider this review in 2018, but that’s not my problem to solve here.
So, we start in the world of the blues and jazz musician, and the world of the prophet. Maybe, when we come to think about it they are the same thing…
Thunder on the mountain, fires on the moon
There’s a ruckus in the alley and the sun will be here soon
Today’s the day, gonna grab my trombone and blow
Well, there’s hot stuff here and it’s everywhere I go
At least in this version we can hear Bob a little more clearly. Sometimes
Music could be a power to preserve the status quo, or a power for change. Dylan reflected the power for change through his early protest songs, but then moved elsewhere. The mantle has been taken up by others…
I was thinkin’ ’bout Alicia Keys, couldn’t keep from crying
When she was born in Hell’s Kitchen, I was living down the line
I’m wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be
I been looking for her even clear through Tennessee
And where does that take us? Well, it took me back to “Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedroll, tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole”.
The Alicia Keys commentary reflecting her role as co-founder and Global Ambassador of Keep a Child Alive, which provides medicine to families with HIV and AIDS in Africa, reminds us that Dylan has not supported too many causes since he moved away from the days of Blowing in the Wind, Times they are a changing, and Hard Rain. Does he regret that? Does he want to give Alicia Keys his support, or at least say, “Well done”. Probably.
In fact the further we progress the more we see that this is about the power of music to change the world
Feel like my soul is beginning to expand
Look into my heart and you will sort of understand
You brought me here, now you’re trying to run me away
The writing’s on the wall, come read it, come see what it say
You, the fans and the critics; for you I’ve tried to create music and images, and you’ve interrupted them and interpreted them forever. We all can create music. My heart is my history of music. When the music plays there is nothing else. Whether we are talking of the height of the classical romantic tradition or the simplicity of the blues it is all the same. “Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedroll, tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole”. Except today it is Alicia Keys and my trombone.
Thunder on the mountain, rolling like a drum
Gonna sleep over there, that’s where the music coming from
I don’t need any guide, I already know the way
Remember this, I’m your servant both night and day
I write the music that reflects the world you create. If it were not for the music we would have no way of understanding anything. If I could write a book about it I would. But I can’t so I create music.
The Alicia Keys’ reference keeps returning as the world degenerates:
The pistols are poppin’ and the power is down
I’d like to try somethin’ but I’m so far from town
The sun keeps shinin’ and the North Wind keeps picking up speed
Gonna forget about myself for a while, gonna go out and see what others need
And what do we need? Love, sustenance, absence of war… Maybe we have not progressed at all from the days of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis…
I’ve been sitting down studying the art of love
I think it will fit me like a glove
I want some real good woman to do just what I say
Everybody got to wonder what’s the matter with this cruel world today
Can I really understand the world by walking down the highway, by driving down Highway 61, or do I just wait until I die and go to heaven at the moment of Revelation?
Thunder on the mountain rolling to the ground
Gonna get up in the morning walk the hard road down
Some sweet day I’ll stand beside my king
I wouldn’t betray your love or any other thing
So, on to religion. St Herman, a Russian Orthodox monk and missionary to Alaska. Gentle, ascetic, simple. The patron saint of North America. Everything the modern America is not.
Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages
I been to St. Herman’s church and I’ve said my religious vows
I’ve sucked the milk out of a thousand cows
Let’s get back to Alicia:
I got the porkchops, she got the pie
She ain’t no angel and neither am I
But we are each, in our own ways trying to do something. Me with my outreach to the world through the lyrics, she with her outreach to rescue those beset by Aids.
And so where are we? At a world that through religion can bring us to 9/11
Thunder on the mountain heavy as can be
Mean old twister bearing down on me
All the ladies of Washington scrambling to get out of town
Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down
So that’s where we got to. Life is just like this. It’s a mess. I tried. I’ve said my prayers. I’ve told you all about life through my previous songs. I told you not to follow leaders. But did you listen?
Everybody’s going and I want to go too
Don’t wanna take a chance with somebody new
I did all I could and I did it right there and then
I’ve already confessed – no need to confess again
I will do all I can, that’s all I can do. Stop interpreting me, stop telling me who I am and what I mean. Stop it, I am me, and I do it my way. I’ve tried to tell you, but you just ain’t listening. You have neither music nor faith, and with neither you are nothing.
Gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up north
I’ll plant and I’ll harvest what the earth brings forth
The hammer’s on the table, the pitchfork’s on the shelf
For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself
“Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedroll, tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole”. We are just musicians. Don’t us expect to put the world to rights. Alicia does her bit, in my own way I do mine. What more do you want?
But at the very least, I took the blues somewhere that no one else has done before or since.
Here’s the official video
What else is on the site?
You’ll find an index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.
The index to the 500+ songs reviewed is now on a new page of its own. You will find it here. It contains reviews of every Dylan composition that we can find a recording of – if you know of anything we have missed please do write in.
We also now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
And please do note The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews
It has taken me a long old time to get here, but a very special thanks to our correspondent who pointed out that Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers had recorded “Each Day 1” – which is exactly the tune of “Duquesne Whistle”. You can hear it here, and believe me this is not a song that just sounds a bit like the Dylan song, but it is the Dylan song.
But back to Dylan, who has I think been a bit naughty here not recognising the source
The opening of “Duquesne Whistle” is not only deceptive in terms of setting up what comes after, it is also played fractionally slower than the main tune. It is a very odd way and unusual thing to do – and it is easy to miss if you don’t put the song on a loop and move straight back to the start at the end.
But it has a purpose, and it was this oddity that started me on the route to thinking that of all the varied interpretation of the lyrics of the song, there is one that seems to fit perfectly.
Late in the afternoon of Sunday, May 22, 2011 a huge multiple vortex tornado struck Joplin and Duquesne, Missouri. It was the third tornado to hit the area since May 1971. It killed 158 people, injured some 1,150 others, and was the deadliest tornado in the US up to that point since 1947 and was (at the time) the costliest single tornado in U.S. history.
There was extreme damage in the area of Duquesne Road in southeast Joplin with many houses and industrial buildings flattened in this area with the industrial park by the corner of 20th and Duquesne especially hard hit with nearly every building flattened.
Duquesne is considered an incorporated community within “Greater Joplin” – Duquesne simply blends into the metropolitan area. Duquesne itself is small – in 2010, there were 1,763 people in 781 households, which means that the devastation was huge in terms of the community.
As for the whistle tornados are associated with a whistle sound – which comes from the inflowing winds. Hence Duquesne Whistle – the opening track of an album called Tempest.
Musically Dylan uses the rocking IV-I chord change as the fundamental part of the song – there’s a link with “Thunder on the Mountain” and indeed to “Tell Ol Bill” which uses a similar technique, although with a different chord change. One can even say that the rocking chord change symbolises the tornado – although I am not sure we even need to go that far.
The composition is performed in E Flat with a fun variant on the standard blues format of three major chord. We get D flat minor to A flat, and a modulation to the dominant (B flat), while all the time the double bass player has a wow of a time bouncing along with a counter melody of his own, and the occasional slip early on which no one really seems too bothered about.
There’s a catch in the music too, for between each verse in this strophic song, we automatically feel that four more rocking A flat / E flat changes. Between the instrumental introduction and verse one we do indeed get three A flat / E flat changes, and then a final B flat to E flat, and that sets the scene for what we expect.
But between verse one and two we only get two rotations of A flat and E flat however. It catches us out. It feels that the song has moved on too quickly. But then between two and three we get four rotations, with the final one changed to B flat to E flat again. The composers are having a bit of fun. And why not, for it is a bouncy song. In between three and four we are back to two rotations. OK we’ve got it now.
So can we get any further with the lyrics and the tornado
‘Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing Blowing like it’s gonna sweep my world away I’m gonna stop at Carbondale, keep on going
Carbondale in the south of Illinois also had a tornado (February 29 2012 was the last one)
If you want to see through the train connection in the piece, this Carbondale does have a train station on the “City of New Orleans” train line.
There is another possible whistle at the Duquesne Works steel mill, where you can find the “Dorothy Six”, the large blast furnace. And there are many other explanations, some of which struggle with the spelling of the track title, where the trains run, and just about everything else. Trains, train whistles, train lines, closing steel furnaces – take your choice, but for me the evidence of the tornado explanation is overwhelming. At least it explains why the oak tree is probably not there any more.
The opening, as I have mentioned is fractionally slower than the rest of the song, and is deceptively everyday, until…
There is, of course, nothing to say that each line of a song needs to be connected, or actually mean anything. But if it is meanings we want, then the red light is a warning, and the chamber door reference is the feeling of the whole house being shaken by the incoming wind rush. Suddenly there are memories, memories that are never going to be repeated after this devastation.
You smiling through the fence at me
Just like you always smiled before
Because
Can’t you hear that Duquesne whistle blowing?
Blowing like the sky’s gonna blow apart
He’s saying, hell I have had some hard times, and “You’re the only thing alive that keeps me going” even when you have called me all sorts of names. And yet this is all about to fall apart. We are all going to die in this horror and terror. So inevitably…
I can hear a sweet voice steadily calling
Must be the mother of our Lord
The final verse gives some more clues…
Can’t you hear that Duquesne whistle blowing?
Blowing through another no good town
The lights of my native land are glowing
I wonder if they’ll know me next time ’round
I wonder if that old oak tree’s still standing
That old oak tree, the one we used to climb
This was the second review I wrote of “It takes a lot to laugh”. Indeed over time the song has had quite a few reviews and mentions here: there is an index at the end.
Returning to “It Takes a Lot to Laugh” some 47 years after it was recorded, it is extraordinary just how much power it packs, how much it moves me, how important it can still seem in my life, even though I haven’t played it for years.
And perhaps more than any other Dylan song, I am left with a sense of utter relief that it was this version that was put on Highway 61 and not an alternative version. This is the recording of this song that I need.
Of course that is a personal reflection, but for me these feelings are important as I try to unravel what makes this such an extraordinarily successful piece of music.
Perhaps the first point to make is that it comes straight after “Tombstone Blues” which is frantic to the point of falling over itself – (which is a good enough reason on its own to have this version, rather than the alternative on the album. Another more frantic piece at this point on Highway 61 would have had the album falling over itself in its own fury).
From the start of the version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh” that we were given, everything is relaxed. The line speaks of having been up all night – we feel half tired already.
I guess this relaxation is part of what makes this so much more approachable than some other Dylan songs of the era. Also it is neither surrealist in its lyrical approach, nor is it a song of disdain. It is a song of lilting joined up happiness. Here there is no “useless and pointless knowledge”, no search for food, just the traveller on the train (or as I argue below, just a man looking out of his window, and thinking about the night train).
The opening of the piece, before Dylan starts to sing, is a trick Dylan used a number of times but is no less remarkable for all that. Only a couple of bars, but the use of a favourite devise is still something that enthrals us.
It is such a simple idea. The instruments coming in one after the other, acoustic guitar, drums, piano, electric guitar, each going in turn before we are off. It is almost like the train pulling out of the station, and the journey begins.
Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby, can’t buy a thrill Well, I’ve been up all night, baby, leaning on the windowsill Well, if I die on top of the hill And if I don’t make it, you know my baby will
Those who have commented on the song’s meaning have generally focussed on the sexual imagery, taking the point that “if it die” is a sexual reference, as per Shakespeare. Maybe it is – but it all seems a bit obscure to me. One Shakespearean reference out of the blue, and nothing else? Why? And quite how does it all fit together with the other lines?
Besides which the meaning isn’t that clear. The actual sexual use comes from the French, La petite mort, (the little death), which is the euphemism for orgasm and the post-orgasmic state. But it can also mean spiritual release – the release from seeing a great work of art, or experiencing the beauty of nature. It doesn’t have to be all about sex.
Thus it is just as easy to say that the singer is riding the mailtrain, wherein there is no bar, no service of coffee, no hookers, no nothing. Through the whole journey the singer can’t sleep, and is just looking out of the window. He thinks, looking at the endless landscape, if I were to die on this train, and there is no more of me, even so, my lover would still continue and make something of her life.
Meanwhile we should remember (and contrary to many commentaries) is not a blues. It has neither the pounding rhythm, nor the sadness, nor the fundamental chord structure of the blues. The descending bass line in “if I die on top of the hill” (G, F, E, D, making the chords G, G7, C, D) is pop, jazz and dance music, not blues.
Thus we can have a sexual song, or we can have an romantic taking his romance from staying awake on the mail train all night, and seeing the sun rise.
But there is a third alternative approach, which I rather like. This takes the song to be primarily urban not rural. After all one can more readily lean on a windowsill in one’s New York apartment than on a train. The train image serves to contrast all night looking out of one’s window and all night looking out from the night train.
If we look at verse two…
Don’t the moon look good, mama, shining through the trees? Don’t the brakeman look good, mama, flagging down the “Double E?” Don’t the sun look good, goin’ down over the sea?
…we could get an interesting combination of rural and urban. But Double E is a really interesting vision… (and I pick the word “vision” here most carefully)…
Double E locomotives were apparently the largest trains on American railways. And “Double E” was occasionally used as a reference to something very large, in early American popular song. But equally in New York I believe the trains were named with letters and numbers – as opposed to the London Underground where we have had names for lines (Victoria, Piccadilly, Northern, and so on). I believe EE trains were local trains, and also known as “the Double E.” Now there is a reason to think this might be the allusion here, since in “Visions of Johanna” we get the reference to the D Train.
In which case “the moon looks good through the trees,” becomes an urban picture which can apply equally to the rural setting. Urban and rural combine. Both have their trains, both show us unlikely and unexpected beauty.
I’d also like to give a mention to the line, “Don’t my gal look fine when she’s coming after me?” It can be a very macho-centric line – the man leads the lady follows. But it need not be. It could be the buzz everyone can get when the person he/she loves does something wonderful out of the blue. That could be asking for a dance, helping pick up the pieces, or running to catch up.
I go for the New York mixed with rural scenes explanation for all this, because if you just listen to the piano playing throughout this recording, it is not fundamentally rural, it is town based. It is the saloon, or the club.
And the last verse?
Now the wintertime is coming, the windows are filled with frost I went to tell everybody but I could not get across Well, I wanna be your lover, baby, I don’t wanna be your boss Don’t say I never warned you, when your train gets lost
It’s winter, I can’t explain myself, I want to be equal with you in life, and… none of us can ever fully explain what we want to say. I have images of the city, images of the countryside.
The train is the metaphor for a journey through life. And certainly the piano after the last verse tells us that the meaning is continuing – this is not a disconnect. It doesn’t matter if it is a rural or urban ride, you can see beauty, you can get tired, you can be with your lover anywhere.
But if you want a wonderful new insight, just try this…
You’ll find an index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.
The index to the 500+ songs reviewed is now on a new page of its own. You will find it here. It contains links to reviews of every Dylan composition that we can find a recording of – if you know of anything we have missed please do write in.
We also now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
And please do note The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews
We know a fair amount the day of the Locusts from David Crosby’s commentary about how he, Sara and Bob Dylan attended the honorary doctorate award at Princeton University – an occasion Bob Dylan did not wish to attend but which Sara and Crosby tried to persuade him to go to.
The story that Crosby tells does not reflect well on Dylan, and paints a portrait of a paranoid Dylan¸ rather than a man who is against accepting an award on a matter of principal, (as for example Woody Allen reveals in the way he eschews awards).
During the event Dylan refused to wear a mortar board and academic gown, but again was eventually persuaded so to do so that the ceremony could go ahead.
At the same time as the degree ceremony there was a cicada infestation at Princeton. Cicadas (which don’t normally harm humans) live underground for most of their lives then dig themselves out of their nest. Most cicadas have a two to five year life cycle but in North America some go through a 17 year life cycle and this is what happened at the time of the ceremony – they emerged after 17 years underground.
Musically the chordal basis of the song of I, IV, II, is not particularly exciting, but it is the melody that makes the music interest, combined with the drive of the lyrics which tell a story of the occasion in which Dylan uses the locusts as a backdrop to his own unpleasant feelings. So in the verse we have the story…
Oh, the benches were stained with tears and perspiration
The birdies were flying from tree to tree
There was little to say, there was no conversation
As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree
…and then the references to the infestation in the chorus
And the locusts sang off in the distance
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody
Oh, the locusts sang off in the distance
Yeah, the locusts sang and they were singing for me
It is in fact, an infestation in an investiture, but Dylan didn’t use what is perhaps too obvious a word game.
In short the sound of the locusts, which is normally considered a rather annoying background sound, turns into a sweet melody simply because Dylan contrasts it with what was for him the unpleasantness of the graduation.
The events take on an increasingly surreal turn in Dylan’s vision of events…
The man standing next to me, his head was exploding
And at the first chance he goes:
I put down my robe, picked up my diploma
Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive
Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota
Sure was glad to get out of there alive
What is interesting was that the award came just before the release of Self-Portrait, which is widely disliked by critics and fans alike. We don’t really know if Dylan was nervous because of the occasion, or because he knew just what sort of reaction he would get from Self-Portrait. Surely someone must have told him it really wasn’t that good.
In Chronicles Dylan is very plain in his dislike of the speech which introduced him at Princeton and which included a phrase about him being, “The disturbed conscience of Young America!”
Perhaps the best story of the day however comes not from Dylan but from Dave Crosby who when asked what he was doing with Dylan said, ‘I was standing by the New Jersey Turnpike, looking for America, and Bob saw a freak and stopped to pick me up.’”
Chronicles does however give a further insight: “I was glad to get the degree, though. I could use it. The very look and touch and scent of it spelled respectability and had something of the spirit of the universe in it. After whispering and mumbling my way through the ceremony, I was handed the scroll. We piled back into the big Buick and drove away.
And clearly those comments were close to the mark because on June 23, 2004 Dylan accepted another honorary Doctorate, this for “outstanding contribution to musical and literary culture,” from the University of St. Andrews. This time there was a more interesting speech indeed, delivered by Neil Corcoran. “It seems appropriate, that his second such degree should come from Scotland’s oldest university, since Scottish border ballads and folk songs have been the inspiration for some of his melodies, and his great song ‘Highlands’ is an elaborate riff, or descant, on Robert Burns.”
Or of course you could see it as a tongue in cheek reference to all this “useless and pointless knowledge.” Who knows.
Dylan has also been award a Medal of Freedom, and a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. Also he won an Academy Award for “Things have Changed” and a Golden Globe Award for the same song. Interestingly Dylan has since then had the Oscar on stage with him when performing.
Although there is little musical connection between “Honest with Me” from “Love and “Theft”, and Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, there is a connection via the lyrics.
Consider the opening of Honest with Me:
Well, I’m stranded in the city that never sleeps Some of these women they just give me the creeps I’m avoiding the Southside the best I can These memories I got, they can strangle a man
and Tom Thumb
When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s Eastertime too And your gravity fails, and negativity don’t pull you through Don’t put on any airs, when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue They got some hungry women there, And they really make a mess out of you.
Both songs appear to be songs of total disaffection and disorientation. But while Tom Thumb stays in the horrors of the Juarez city, Honest with Me goes elsewhere – and turns out to be a lost love song. Although not a particular favourite with Dylan fans this really is one of the most remarkable lost love songs of all time.
And indeed the video I’ve selected at the top of the page brings this out as powerfully as any version I’ve heard.
One other introductory point: the slide guitar effects on the original LP version remind us of the song Highway 61 Revisited. The remake obvious takes a different route, but still, this is blues territory, and no mistake.
Now consider this next section:
Well I came ashore in the dead of the night Lot of things can get in the way when you’re trying to do what’s right You don’t understand it—my feelings for you You’d be honest with me if only you knew
What we have here is a situation (a situation which runs through the whole song) in which the singer has lost his lover, and it is eating his heart out. He hangs on to her memory, he wants to be with her, but she just doesn’t understand him – in fact she doesn’t get it at all. He is trying to get away and do the right thing, but everything is against him.
So despite the fact that it is all over he just cannot ever let go. In fact so entrenched is he in his love he just can’t let go.
To put this message across Dylan uses the most extended 12 bar blues he has ever devised. There is a singular four bar introduction which takes us through all of the blues chords. Recorded in F major it takes us through F, E flat, C, B flat, A flat, F. Hearing that, even if you don’t know anything about musical construction, you know you are in the blues.
The opening is 16 bars – one wonders if Dylan is ever going to change chords at all. But then we get the confirmation that this is the blues, for in comes the sub-dominant section for four bars, back to the tonic for another four, and the structure completes with four bars of the dominant and back to the tonic and the descending blues chords.
And just as we have got a full grasp of the music we have this – the heart of the lyric:
I’m not sorry for nothing I’ve done I’m glad I fought—I only wish we’d won
This text comes from a US Civil War song “I’m a Good Old Rebel” in which the Southern soldier knows he has fought for the losing cause, but he stands there utterly unrepentant.
For this Fair Land of Freedom I don’t give a damn I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done
Back with Dylan we next have more characters that relate us back to Tom Thumb:
The Siamese twins are coming to town People can’t wait—they’re gathered around
At first this is utterly unexpected and indeed confusing. But confusion is the issue of the moment –
When I left my home the sky split open wide I never wanted to go back there—I’d rather have died
Thus the singer has experienced a nightmare so awful he has to leave, there really has been no choice. Everything is now falling apart, the nightmare continues… (for UK readers, “trunk” is obviously “car boot” in English English).
My woman got a face like a teddy bear She’s tossing a baseball bat in the air The meat is so tough you can’t cut it with a sword I’m crashing my car, trunk first into the boards
Such is the singer’s destruction by this set of experiences, self-degredation has taken over. He hates himself, everything is awful, he has nothing…
You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice Well, I’ll sell it to you at a reduced price
And then just in case we have any doubt of what is going on we find that it is not just self-degredation, it is also disbelief that a world could be like this:
Some things are too terrible to be true I won’t come here no more if it bothers you The Southern Pacific leaving at nine forty-five I’m having a hard time believing some people were ever alive
By now the singer is reduced to nothingness. He doesn’t even have clothing – he now stands here before us naked. He has lost everything. We are reminded of the “even the President of the United States sometimes has to stand naked”. Naked in the final reckoning, naked as in finally telling the truth, and not hiding behind lies.
I’m stark naked, but I don’t care I’m going off into the woods, I’m hunting bare
But no matter what, he can’t get rid of the feelings he has for the woman. She overwhelms his every thought, she is everything, no matter that he knows how badly she has treated him, and how she has moved on while he has not.
I’m here to create the new imperial empire I’m going to do whatever circumstances require I care so much for you—didn’t think that I could I can’t tell my heart that you’re no good
Everyone told him, everyone warned him, but the overwhelming feeling he has for the woman, in spite of everything she has done to hurt him, he can’t let go…
Well, my parents they warned me not to waste my years And I still got their advice oozing out of my ears You don’t understand it—my feelings for you Well, you’d be honest with me if only you knew
And we are left with the thought:
I’m not sorry for nothing I’ve done I’m glad I fought—I only wish we’d won
Utter brilliance. Thank you Bob. And for those few seconds of harmonica at the end. It was worth holding the harp mic all the way through.
Between October 2001 and July 2019 Bob performed the piece 725 times: a real favourite. I can sure see why.
What else is here?
An index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.
There is an alphabetic index to the 550+ Dylan compositions reviewed on the site which you will find it here. There are also 500+ other articles on different issues relating to Dylan. The other subject areas are also shown at the top under the picture.
We also have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook which mostly relates to Bob Dylan today. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
And please do note The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.
Dylan’s “High Water (For Charley Patton)” is based on three chords but in effect two of the three chords are just used in passing at the end of each verse to the line “High water everywhere”. As a result virtually all of what we hear is set around one chord, and thus a major emphasis is placed on the lyrics and melody. Indeed it is remarkable that Dylan does manage to keep the tension and interest running through this song – not least because of the sparse accompaniment that is used.
The song takes the title of Charley Patton’s song, but there is no real relation between the songs apart from their subject matter – and even there it is hard to see if Dylan is really focussed on what Patton was singing about.
Patton’s piece is a blues, but with variable length lines to accommodate an intermittent spoken commentary, while Dylan’s is slower and more regular and is as much a focus on racism as on the floods. The line “It’s tough out there; high water everywhere” thus seems to have a much broader context.
Fortunately you can readily hear the Patton song readily on You Tube
https://youtu.be/72oQy_M7h4Q
The lyrics of the original are published at the end of this review and I would recommend you might have them with you when listening to the Patton song – not because of any cleverness on my part but because it is not always easy to follow the lyrics in the original.
Dylan’s work is laced with references. The first is Big Joe Turner, the blues singer with the astounding voice, whose recording of Shake Rattle and Roll was just one of his many hits
The Reformation comment is puzzling – is that really a reference to the religious transformation of Martin Luther etc. The “you dance with whom they tell you to or you don’t dance at all” line makes sense in this context, as clearly the Reformation was about who had authority on Earth to interpret God’s word, but it just seems to pop out of nowhere, and I wonder what I have missed here. There is one possibility – I have seen a lyric set which says “Bertha Mason” rather than “Reformation”. Bertha Mason is the mad lady from Jayne Ayre. Sadly this still doesn’t get me any further.
Kansas City’s reference is easier: it is a line from the song of the same name, which Fats Domino, among many others, had hits with. It opens, “I’m going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come”.
And it gets odder for after that there is the pig without a wig verse. The only reference I have here is Thomas Hodd (The Wise Little Pig).
Where are you going, you little pig?
“I’m going to the barber’s to buy me a wig.”
A wig, little pig!
A pig in a wig!
Why, whoever before saw a pig in a wig?
What the song does have however (even if we can’t make sense of them) are these extraordinary images created out of everyday speech. I have mentioned above “you dance with whom they tell you to or you don’t dance at all”. Now we have “Don’t reach out for me, she said, can’t you see I’m drowning too”. They are symbolic representations of change – and goodness, to me at least (even if no one else) they have one hell of an impact.
But it is about this point I start to wonder if we are supposed to make sense of this song any more than we make sense of a Jackson Pollock painting. We have George Lewis – but which George Lewis and why? The composer? The clarinettist? Some other George Lewis that is central to the battle for equality in the southern US, but who I don’t know (I am English, and although I do try to take in US history and social development, I’m never going to know as much as an American citizen, so maybe I have missed something obvious).
And even when I do make some sense of all this, I am guessing. The Charles Darwin reference looks easy enough – a reference to fundamentalist Christians who take the Bible literally and therefore see Darwin’s work On the Origin of Species, as such an awful book (while most people find it a total revelation). But why Darwin on Highway 5? I have no idea. I’ve managed to make sense out of Highway 61, the Blues Highway, in the review of Highway 61 Revisited, but this reference is beyond me.
The cuckoo reference is from an old folk song (which in part may date from the work of John Clare – which I know because I live in Northamptonshire, in England, and John Clare is just about the only famous person in history associated with the county). Then there’s the Robert Johnson reference I’m getting’ up in the morning, I believe I’ll dust my broom which is thrown in – and Clarksdale Mississippi is at the intersection of Highway 61 (here we are again) and Highway 49 – the location of Johnson selling his soul to the devil. Since the line is followed by “everything a looking blue” we can be sure we are on the right trail at this point, if nowhere else.
So, some guesswork, and some bits where I am lost. Here’s the original. The lines in brackets and italics are spoken in a different voice.
Well, backwater done rose all around Sumner now,
drove me down the line
Backwater done rose at Sumner,
drove poor Charley down the line
Lord, I’ll tell the world the water,
done crept through this town
Lord, the whole round country,
Lord, river has overflowed
Lord, the whole round country,
man, is overflowed (You know I can’t stay here,
I’ll go where it’s high, boy)
I would go to the hilly country,
but, they got me barred
Now, look-a here now at Leland
river was risin’ high
Look-a here boys around Leland tell me,
river was raisin’ high (Boy, it’s risin’ over there, yeah)
I’m gonna move to Greenville
fore I leave, goodbye
Look-a here the water now, Lordy,
Levee broke, rose most everywhere
The water at Greenville and Leland,
Lord, it done rose everywhere (Boy, you can’t never stay here )
I would go down to Rosedale
but, they tell me there’s water there
Now, the water now, mama,
done took Charley’s town
Well, they tell me the water,
done took Charley’s town (Boy, I’m goin’ to Vicksburg)
Well, I’m goin’ to Vicksburg,
for that high of mine
I am goin’ up that water,
where lands don’t never flow
Well, I’m goin’ over the hill where,
water, oh don’t ever flow (Boy, hit Sharkey County and everything was down in Stovall )
But, that whole county was leavin’,
over that Tallahatchie shore (Boy,
went to Tallahatchie and got it over there)
Lord, the water done rushed all over,
down old Jackson road
Lord, the water done raised,
over the Jackson road (Boy, it starched my clothes)
I’m goin’ back to the hilly country,
won’t be worried no more
This review updated July 2018, with help from Larry Fyffe, and it now includes links to two live versions by Dylan, plus a version by Howard Markman and Glenn Workman with The Stone Hill All Stars.
I think it is fair to say that for most fans “Summer Days” is just considered “another Dylan R&B song”. Lively, jolly, very well performed on the album, with some excellent lead guitar work, no stumbles by any musician. It is a good fun track, where it is probably best not to listen to the words too closely. Here’s a live verson
The structure and organisation of the song is primarily that of the extended 12 bar blues, but it has much more to it than that, because of the variant verses, and the sheer length of the piece – 15 verses (although the final is a repeat of the first) – makes it quite an extraordinary composition. Perhaps we don’t always feel it as that because of the speed of performance.
The variant sections occur every fourth verse (ie 4, 8 and 12) in which Dylan sings over what was initially an instrumental break with the lead guitar doing a descending solo pattern. It is not something I have ever heard before or since in this type of song.
There is also the curiosity of verse 7 in which there are simply far too many words to fit the structure. It is a verse that demands special attention because the structure almost breaks down, but Dylan continues singing and somehow it all fits together in the end. As I try and show below, there is a reason for this.
And what does it all mean? Well, here goes.
First off, this is from “Love and Theft”, which is an album, according to some critics, which is a homage to America’s deep south. The Chicago Tribune ( September 11, 2001), said it was an album taking “the myths, mysteries and folklore of the South as a backdrop”. What I am going to argue here is that in this song in particular Dylan is not in the deep south at all, but in the frozen north of Canada. It is still Love and Theft, but the location changes.
The singer is marrying a lady from the Manto Sipi Cree Nation – a First Nation community. (The First Nations are the original inhabitants of Canada who are not Inuit or Métis).
This gives a bit of context for the opening verse – ” Summer days, summer nights are gone, I know a place where there’s still something going on.” Summer being over in the far north will mean far more than for most of the people of the planet, since it takes us towards eternal night. “Still something going on” has a significance in this interpretation.
Verse three (“Everybody get ready—lift your glasses and sing”) is presumably the toast at the wedding. I’m absolutely not an expert on The First Nations, but I am hoping that maybe a toast to the King is something one might find in the wedding services of the Manto Sipi Cree Nation. (If you are going to jump in here and say that I’ve got all this wrong, fine – I openly admit I am struggling to put a meaning together).
The Flats could be the area of Cleveland, or come to that a lot of places in Canada – and who is the businessman to be stopped. An oil developer? This is now just guesswork. I don’t know about Gods River – I can only hope I’m on the right track.
Certainly it is possible to tie in the issue about The Flats. Gods River flows into the Hayes River and the result is rapids, lakes, waterfalls, and as it nears Hudson Bay, tidal flats.
There is then a suggestion that the marriage in real trouble from the off, and then the very curious extended verse seven.
She’s looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand She’s looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.”
That is particularly interesting because the most common expression of the past is that you cannot go back and repeat the past. Suddenly the lines from Mississippi comes into my head
“Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay; You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way. Only one thing I did wrong was stayed in Mississippi a day too long”.
But this line: “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean,you can’t? Of course you can,” is from The Great Gatsby. Now Gatsby, in the novel, was indeed a very generous man – especially at his parties which might be relevant in relation to the Genius of Generosity below. But at least we know why Dylan expanded the structure to put this point in – it is a quote and he wanted to give it in full.
And the mystery continues in verse 8…
Where do you come from? Where do you go? Sorry that’s nothing you would need to know Well, my back has been to the wall for so long, it seems like it’s stuck Why don’t you break my heart one more time just for good luck
So we can take it that the marriage went wrong and the guy is off in his car, which is swish and fast, but running out of petrol. Goodness knows what’s going on in verse 10, but now he’s really challenging anyone and everyone in verse 11, and the politicians in verse 12.
You got something to say, speak or hold your peace Well, you got something to say, speak now or hold your peace If it’s information you want you can go get it from the police
Politician got on his jogging shoes He must be running for office, got no time to lose He been sucking the blood out of the genius of generosity You been rolling your eyes—you been teasing me
The “Genius of Generosity” is a book by Chip Ingram and a philosophy of a contemporary American church which relates to giving by the members of a church to help that church.
Standing by Gods river, my soul is beginning to shake Standing by Gods river, my soul is beginning to shake I’m counting on you love, to give me a break
Gods River (which is the clue that gives us the First Nations link) is a remote, (and I believe it is Gods River, not God’s River) settlement in Northern Manitoba, Canada and the location of the Manto Sipi Cree Nation.
And then back on the song, the singer is off.
Well, I’m leaving in the morning as soon as the dark clouds lift Yes, I’m leaving in the morning just as soon as the dark clouds lift Going to break the roof in—set fire to the place as a parting gift
Summer days, summer nights are gone Summer days, summer nights are gone I know a place where there’s still something going on
It is difficult to interpret – but perhaps it is best to say it is a wedding and a divorce, with tradition and the church not always playing a good part. The Gatsby quote is the key for me, because Dylan has gone out of his way to put it in, in full, and because of the apparent contradiction to his earlier comments on the subject.
The All Music site says, “Lyrically, this song is preoccupied with growing old (one of the song’s funniest lines being “The girls all say, ‘You’re a worn-out star'”), but the narrator is clearly wanting to enjoy the process, rather than dwell on it (unlike, say, the Dylan of Time Out of Mind). The song is a testament to Dylan’s genius of phrasing. It is easy to assume that only he could sing lines such as “She says, ‘You can’t repeat the past’/I say, ‘You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can'” and make them both funny and profound. A series of highly charged, tightly constructed verses highlight Dylan’s continued skill as a lyricist, but the success of this song is more to do with the way he sings it, rather than what he is saying.”
And finally I do like this third recording, not least because of the pianist. He really knows how to play this type of song. OK the quality of recording is naff, but hell, it’s fun. It’s by Howard Markman and Glenn Workman with The Stone Hill All Stars at The 4th Annual Night of 1000 Dylans. How about that!
Overall I love this song, and would love to be able to get more explanation out of it. But there again, maybe I am pushing too far, and there is none to be found ….except for a satire on my part.
You’ll find an index to our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture.
The index to the 500+ songs reviewed is now on a new page of its own. You will find it here. It contains links to reviews of every Dylan composition that we can find a recording of – if you know of anything we have missed please do write in.
We also now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link
And please do note The Bob Dylan Project, which lists every Dylan song in alphabetical order, and has links to licensed recordings and performances by Dylan and by other artists, is starting to link back to our reviews.
