Standing in the doorway: a work of solemn genius from Bob Dylan

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Tony Attwood

Review by Tony Attwood.  Updated May 2018 with addition of this extraordinary live version of the song, and the opening verse at the end.

“Time out of mind” starts just about as low as you can imagine – “Love Sick” tells us the singer has had enough – enough not just of love, but of life.  It is the ultimate farewell song. 

Except it is not, for although it is hard to imagine the album could get any lower in emotional terms Dylan does just that.  And we are asking just how sick of life has Dylan got?

“Dirt Road Blues” seems to offer some chance of respite, but then we have “Standing in the Doorway”, and amazingly we are even deeper in the emotional mire than “Love Sick”.

It is an extraordinary achievement, not just because of the lyrics, not just because of the melody, nor even the chord sequence (which unusually modulates from E major to A major) but also for the production.  Dylan’s songs, as we all know, are often rushed through, recorded with errors from the accompanying musicians allowed to stand.  (Think of the bass player on Johanna if you want one example).

But not here – this is perfection; the perfection of darkness.

Yet in contrast Dylan’s voice is soft and gentle, as if he is resigned to his fate – and indeed that is where he ultimately takes us with Not Dark Yet. 

But that is three tracks away.   We start off here with very Dylan-esque commentary (“Yesterday everything was going too fast, Today, it’s moving too slow”) but then almost immediately we are shocked…

“Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you
It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow.” 

What?

Not only are the lyrics shocking, but the melody just strolls along, with the descending bass (and thank goodness for a bass player who has learned his part) and the slide guitar.  Even the drummer knows how to be laid back.

There’s no doubt that the subject matter has not changed from “Love Sick” – his lover has left…

“The ghost of our old love has not gone away
Don’t look like it will anytime soon”

And we remember that this is the man who just a few years back gave us that most amazing lovers’ line ever, “I’m going to look at you til my eyes go blind”.

 We also wonder, did he kill her?

“Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t” suggests that this is more of a horror than we ever imagined.  Or is going to kill himself…

“I know the mercy of God must be near, I’ve been riding the midnight train”

And…

 “I can hear the church bells ringing in the yard I wonder who they’re ringing for”

He is trying to live on (“Last night I danced with a stranger, But she just reminded me you were the one”) but he is going nowhere.  Anyway, he’s sick of love, as we already know.

So life stops, he stops, and he prepares us for the journey towards death that Not Dark Yet foretells.   He has nothing to do, and nowhere to go – reliant on others now, not himself.  This is the end, “I see nothing to be gained by any explanation”.

And that’s it.

“You left me standing in the doorway crying
Blues wrapped around my head”

 But it would be a mistake to think this is just about the lyrics.   “Standing in the doorway” is an extraordinary piece of music, brilliantly played.  What Dylan song has given us such lyricism, such gentleness, and all played against such a dreadful storyline?   Nowhere has lost love been portrayed so exquisitely.  

On its own this song is an utter masterpiece.   In the context of Time Out of Mind it is also a work of genius.   For this is the song, along with Not Dark Yet, that gives us the meaning of the album’s title.

If Dylan had written nothing else, he would be worthy of a place in the hall of fame.

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
You left me standing in the doorway, crying
I got nothing to go back to now

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.

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

 

Posted in The Songs, Time out of mind | 7 Comments

“When the ship comes in.” Bob Dylan as a prophet of vengeance and a better life to come.

Posted on December 24, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

This review updated July 2018, with the addition of one of Dylan’s rare outings for the song, and two totally different renditions linked at the end.

Amidst all the moral relativism of Dylan, all the references to the fact that “you are right on your side, and I’m all right on mine”, all the comments about not following leaders, and the commentary that says that everyone is just a pawn in everyone else’s game, suddenly like a beacon of certainty there is When the Ship Comes In.

Never has Dylan been more certain than here that there is an answer, that you are wrong and these guys (whoever they are) are right.   There is a truth, and I am part of it, he tells us.

The image of the ship itself takes us back to earlier days – to the time when the British explored the new world.  Wealthy men paid for the ships to sail to the Americas, and if one ever returned then even greater wealth and fortune was yours.  Your ship came in, and you really were made for ever more.

Dylan retains the nautical imagery through the opening verse and a half, and its all a jolly caper of exploration, until we suddenly have

And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken.

The song is now so familiar to us after all these years it is hard to remember what a jolt those lines brought on first hearing.  Words getting the ship confused?   What is all this about?   Every reference until then has been to the nautical adventure.  So we really are in a metaphor?  Yes of course we are.

But then he is back to talking about the ship literally, until  it is the final verse where Dylan suddenly develops this alternative theme, and takes us into a solid statement that the ship is a metaphor for change.  We are the new army.  We are the revolution.  Stand aside, for we are the future.  Times they are a changing.  We are David, you are Goliath.

The trouble is we have no idea who or what we are – at least not from this song.  Are we the Jews entering the promised land?  Or the young throwing aside the President of the United States?  Are we overthrowing capitalism, or are we saying no to war and bringing in the world of peace and love?  All we can say now, all these years on, was it didn’t happen, did it?

We don’t know.  In the end it is the sheer vigour and vitality of the song and the guitar playing that carries us through so that after a couple of listens we really don’t care.   It is enough to know that somewhere there is an answer.  Bob being what, at this time, and many other times, he didn’t want to be: Bob The Prophet.

The classical structure of the song (every chord is one taken from the major scale – no flattened sevenths or thirds here), emphasises the straightness of the song – this is the positive side of folk singing (a total contrast to North Country Blues.)

We can join in the celebration – and indeed we should.  Because the whole wide world is watching.  Who cares if we don’t know why.  Let’s just enjoy it while we can.

Dylan has stated that in writing this piece he was influenced by Pirate Jenny which has the lines

There’s a ship
The Black Freighter
With a skull on its masthead
Will be coming in.

Joan Baez has a totally different story about the origins of the song saying that she and Dylan were driving together to a gig of hers – she was driving so on arriving at what she thought was the right place, and asked Bob to nip inside to check.  He went to the reception and said, “Does Joan Baez have room here,” and they said no.  She went in and they welcomed her, but wouldn’t acknowledge Bob.  So he wrote “When the ship comes in” during the course of the evening.

There is a link with Pirate Jenny – it is about people not be accepted or recognised as people.  When the black freighter sails in Jenny is allowed to decide on the fate of those she had served in the town and she orders their destruction.

So maybe the Baez incident or maybe listening to Pirate Jenny or maybe both.

The keynote performance of course came when Bob shared the stage with Martin Luther King Junior at the Washington Civil Rights march, and he later spoke about modern day Goliaths who needed to be brought low, when introducing the song.

In total though it has only been performed live three times.  Here is the last ever live performance.

And here’s a totally different version from the Pgoues.  You want energy?  This has it all

And if that was just too much energy, here is the Clancy Brothers

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 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.

..

 

 

Posted in Bootleg Series volume 3, No Direction Home, The Songs, Times they are a changing | 10 Comments

Spanish Harlem Incident: The meanings behind Bob Dylan’s extraordinary song

Posted on December 22, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

This is one of Dylan’s unsung masterpieces – an extraordinary piece of music to the accompaniment of lyrics about a visit to a fortune teller / possible lover.   (She’s one or the other, or both, possibly at the same time). 

The guitar playing takes us into unknown structures – we can resolve what Dylan plays in the original into recognizable chords, but that’s not what Dylan plays.  The melody likewise flows in a most unDylan-like manner.  The way the second half of the melody in each of the three verses changes so dramatically from the first half is unexpected – almost shocking, certainly surprising – especially because he is so demonstrative.  There is no uncertainty here.

This is the hobo out on the streets, saying “here I am babe looking for direction” in terms of the fortune teller’s palm reading.  It’s hardly unusual in terms of the history of songwriting but there are such unexpected lines that we are forced to sit up and take notice.  Where else is Dylan saying things such as

“I am homeless, come and take me to the reach of your rattling drums.”

Or

“The night is pitch black, come an’ make my pale face fit into place, oh, please!”

Or

“You have slayed me, you have made me, I got to laugh halfways off my heels.
I got to know, babe, will you surround me?  So I can tell if I’m really real.”

What is so remarkable is the context – for this comes from the album that starts with “All I really want to do,” and ends with “It Ain’t Me Babe” – two songs that define Dylan’s obsession with not being trapped by a woman who wants to wrap him up and define his being.   It is an obsession which starts on Freewheeling and continues way into the rock era – and yet here in Spanish Harlem he is proclaiming that this woman can take him and make him into a person – through her he can discover who is really is.

It is this utter reversal of a constant Dylan theme – the laughter and sneering at those around who are defined by others rather than who define themselves, and yet here he is asking the fortune telling lover to do exactly that: to define him, make him, create him.

The fact that the defining words come in the second half of each verse, where the music itself comes alive in such an extraordinary lyrical and chordal fashion shouts out that this is a unique moment in Dylan’s songwriting.  It is a moment to cherish.

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 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.

 

 

Posted in Another Side | 6 Comments

Bob Dylan’s “Highlands”; its origins in Burns poetry, and a beautiful rare reworking in concert

Posted on December 21, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

This review updated 26 June 2018, with addition of this live version – I really would recommend a listen to these, particularly this one below

Also now included are references back to the origins of the song in Scottish poetry and folk music with a link to a version of the original “My Hearts in the Highlands”

Dylan only played the song nine times in concert in all, so these recordings are to be cherished.  The version remained pretty much unchanged through these nine performances – this one has the best quality in my view…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt-N_irbG90

For me, to understand of Highlands, there needs to be a view of “Time out of mind”.  While many Dylan songs can stand apart from the albums on which they make the first appearance, most of Time out of Mind is fixed within the original album.

And indeed not just fixed within the album – but within a position within the album.   “Love Sick”, the opening track, sounds as if it is the end of everything – as if the singer can go no lower than where he is now.  And yet Dylan takes us down and down until the ultimate depths of “Not Dark Yet” – the song about dying.

After which there is no way but on and on, until we enter a misty no-mans-land, a vision of what is after death.  This is not heaven or hell, nor the currently popular vision of all-encompassing darkness out of which comes something appallingly awful.  This is white mist, memories, flashbacks, strange characters, and confusion of what actually happened in the past, and what you might think happened, but which might well simply be an invention.

The title comes from a Burns poem, “My Heart’s in the Highlands” which in turn comes from an earlier piece known as “Bonny Portmore” sometimes called “The Strong Walls of Derry”.  It’s a 12 bar blues – much extended but still a 12 bar blues with meandering guitars which help us meander to the various places.  And as Bob said in an interview with Rolling Stone, he had been writing down couplets and verses and keeping them for when he needed them in a song – which he did here.

Here is Burns song.

And here are the lyrics….

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.

Chorus.-My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.

Farewell to the mountains, high-cover’d with snow,
Farewell to the straths and green vallies below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods,
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.
My heart’s in the Highlands…

With Dylan, from the very start we are transported from place to place, verse by verse.  The opening verse is not one of those classics that begins “I dreamed that…” and carries on with dreaming I was back in the good times, that you were still alive, or whatever.

In the first verse the emotions of the singer are in the beautiful land and in the second he’s back in the daily grind.  So which one is true – as the third verse shows, he has no idea, and he’s really not trying to sort it out.

Verse four is back to the vision, the emotional home, and the singer knows he can make it there, but only slowly, gradually, and the methodology of transport is not yet clear.  What a transformation this is from track seven on the album where the only way forward is to enter the darkness.   He has moved on, to a world that is beyond the death of Not Dark Yet.

Verse five, and he uses the methodology that everyone who is seriously into music will use – music as a method of transportation to another world.  In this case he tries Neil Young – it doesn’t take him to the Highlands but it takes him a little along the road – although not to anywhere he recognises.

By verse six it is all getting too much, everything is breaking up, nothing is connecting, nothing is wanted, no possessions, just a search for a mental liberty, until in verse seven there is that flash of revelation just at the moment of waking – that moment where there is a beautiful insight, but as consciousness comes pouring in, it is lost, and in verse eight he’s moved on again, this time to Boston – just another image, another past moment – real or imagined.

By now the images are becoming almost dream-like – as in those dreams where nothing is quite as it should be, and you have know it is a dream, but you don’t know it enough to get out.   The conversation in the restaurant becomes surreal, all touch is being lost with the Highlands, we are getting bogged down in dream-like detail.

The next transformation back is a sudden jump – one second in the street, next back in the Highlands, but with each of these jumps there is a further disconnection from the current world and an ever stronger link with the new imagined Highland world – and he is lost.  He can’t join in the fun and games of those around him any more, because there have been too many jumps.

He recognizes the problem in the penultimate verse:

“I got new eyes, Everything looks far away”

While the end gives us the solution

There’s a way to get there, and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind, And that’s good enough for now

 

Posted in The Songs, Time out of mind | 9 Comments

Lay Lady Lay: Three Bob Dylan transformations of his song & a look at the meanings.

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

In returning to this song I didn’t really feel I wanted to change any of the original commentary, but I did want to add a couple of live recordings as they show the power of Dylan’s reinvention.

Here’s the second

And one more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fVNapIBjSs

They are really something, in my view.

Now here’s the original review…

Here’s a simple thought: “What is Lay Lady Lay” about? There’s an oft-repeated story that when the Everly Brothers heard it they mistook it for a song about lesbians, and turned it down. That was based on a mishearing. With the lyrics printed on hundreds of Dylan web sites we can see it isn’t so… but where does the song take us?

“Whatever colors you have in your mind  I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine”

Is almost Donovan Leitch like – I am the magician I can make you see whatever you want to see.

But then who is the man whose “clothes are dirty but his hands are clean?” There’s memories of Rolling Stone here – (You used to be so amused At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used)

But no, in this case…you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen

Of course this is a softer kinder world – the harshness of Rolling Stone is not here. “Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile” is said with warmth and affection.

Contrary to all the warnings on Rolling Stone

“You can have your cake and eat it too”

Only the ending is unequivocally clear – I want to wake up next to you.    So what makes it such a wonderful song?

Certainly, if we take the warmth of the words, then it is clear that the music fits perfectly too, for it is warm and kind. But there’s more, because the chord sequence is utterly unexpected – indeed I have seen experienced hardened rock musicians who can tell you a chord sequence as they hear a song for the first time, stumble over what happens here.

A, C sharp minor, G, D

Where did that G come from? How do you get a melody to go from C sharp minor (where the top note is G sharp) to G major? Personally, I can’t think of another song that uses such a sequence.

Dylan pulls it off, and the melody glides lyrically along. Quite probably no one can ever use such a sequence again, for it is utterly Lay Lady Lay. Who cares about the lyrics this time around – it is the melody over that extraordinary chord sequence that makes it happen.

Posted in At Boudakan, Essential Bob Dylan, Greatest Hits Volume 2, Nashville Skyline, The Songs | 14 Comments

See that my grave is kept clean

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Tony Attwood

It is strange to think that all those years ago, my feeling about the very first Dylan album (“Bob Dylan”) was that the producer of the album had made a very odd choice as to the order of the songs. Surely one puts the strongest songs first, I thought. Get off to a flying start.

It took quite a few years to realise that this was just a Dylan thing. The whole album is wonderful, and still deserves playing. But some of the later songs from side B are particularly good and should have got a higher listing than “She’s no good” which starts the album. It’s fun and ok, but musically little more than a quick rush through a Jesse Fuller lark around.

There’s also the interesting realisation (which came much later) that there’s hardly a reference to the 12 bar blues here – the 12 bar format that formed the basis of so many of Dylan’s later songs. Ah well, so it goes.

“See that my grave is kept clean” is a stand-out song – and that at least is properly placed as the last song on the album. It is a stunning piece simply because the guitar playing is perfectly clean and understated, and the voice is remarkable. On first hearing in the 60s it gave the feeling that here was a remarkable blues singer who could take a conventional song about dying and give it something more than even Lemon Jefferson (of all people) could do himself.

In fact it sounds as if Dylan wrote it for himself to sing. We forget his age at the time – it sounds as if he knows what the blues mean – which is much harder to achieve than you might imagine. White man sings the blues? Whatever next.

Just listen to the “two white horses” verse and how he sings it. The mix of tension, anger and subtlety. The different way the word “following” is used in each repeated line…

And what is amazing is that this all comes from a man who has always said that the lyrics are what counts. “You can write a song on one note,” he once said – and yet here he uses the voice to express everything with a song that only has two lines per verse. There is plaintiveness, sadness, anger, tension… What more do you need?

There’s one last favour I’ll ask of you

See that my gave is kept clean.

Posted in Bob Dylan | 2 Comments

Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm. 3 very different versions; but why play it so often?

Posted on December 14, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood (revised March 2013 and again June 2018)

Between 1965 and 2009 Bob Dylan performed Maggie’s Farm 1051 times on stage – often as an opening song; an interesting outcome for a song that was a last minute addition to  “Bringing it all back home.”  The story goes it nearly didn’t make the cut.

Now having an opening piece that you feel comfortable with just to get the band going is a very common ploy for rock musicians; you can do it with eyes closed, and it gives the engineers a chance to play with the balance, while the audience is still getting used to the overall sound.

That’s understandable, but still, over 1000 times for what sounds to me like a rather ordinary song?

Here’s an early version in which the song is reduced to two chords but brightened by a really powerful lead guitar

Compare and contrast with what had happened by the time he got to this version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luj4azrlkdE

The quality of this final version is not quite spot on, but it illustrates the point of just how much Bob has got out of this song over the years

Now, here’s the original review, with a few modifications added in 2013.

What is it that makes Dylan stay with Maggie’s Farm? 

Hardly a tour goes by without it being wheeled out, it has been on over half a dozen albums and it was part of the notorious Newport Festival programme where the sound system produced a noise that excluded Dylan’s voice.  Plus the generally ignored fact that it is actually not a very interesting piece of music.  So why do we still get given it?

Musically it’s a variant 12 bar blues with very little by way of chordal change – just one chord change from the tonic to the dominant in most versions – and even that cut out on the live version on No Direction Home.

Most commentators see this as a protest against the folk-protest movement.  While folk-protest protested against the stylized thought and life styles of straight culture, so, it is argued, Maggie’s Farm protests against the stylized thought and life style of protest culture.  Dylan is saying “I’m not going to be part of this, any more than I am going to be part of mainstream culture.”

On such an analysis the electric music makes sense in that it is essentially dull and repetitious – which the man forced to follow the views of others (or indeed working manually on the farm) might well feel.  The farm incidentally is supposedly a pun on Silas McGee’s Farm, where Dylan had performed in 1963.

So far, so good, but the problem with an uninspiring piece of music which makes the point about the fixed attitudes of both sides of the argument, is that it remains an uninspiring piece of music, no matter how many times you play it.  The singer might well have a “headful of ideas, That are drivin’ me insane” but that still doesn’t mean either that the music has to be so uninteresting, or the piece performed so often for the message to get across.

The clue as to Dylan’s attitude comes perhaps with the fact that although it is not necessarily the first song in a performance, it is an early song – a statement about what this is all about.  In that case it is a statement saying, “no ideas are fixed, we break them all down.”

Whether, “Then he fines you every time you slam the door,” actually is a note about a folk club where people are as constrained in their behaviour as in any other form of life, we’ll probably never know – but in the end that’s still not the main point.

What we actually have is a contribution to a much more interesting debate.  Pre-Electric-Dylan the “rule” was that black blues musicians played the electric guitar, but white protest musicians played the acoustic.  That was one of the strangest conventions there ever was, with strong racist as well as musical undertones.  For pointing out the absurdity of this situation, Dylan deserves all the accolades.   But maybe there could have been a better vehicle for this than Maggie’s Farm.

Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

In this vision of the song, Dylan is comparing the musician who is trapped into a particular mode of expressing himself (white folk protest must be acoustic, black protest and blues can be electric) – and is slavery of a kind.  The use of the word “slavery” is telling here because obviously many black singers playing electric blues are descended from actual slaves.  (Sorry for being so obvious here, but somehow in an earlier version of this article that concept didn’t come across). 

So, I ain’t going to work on Maggie’s Farm no more, means, I am not going to be part of the conventions of music any more, because to be so is just boring.

This explanation, although obviously a supposition, at least makes sense in terms of the song, the fact that it is played with electric guitars, and the fact that it has been used so often by Dylan as an opening to concerts.  Here is an explanation as to why – because this song is the introduction to all the other songs that follow.  So of course it is the introduction.

 This review of Maggie’s Farm was updated in March 2013.

————

The site is developing its own theoretical approach to the music of Bob Dylan.  You can read about that approach as it evolves here.  There are details of the author, and the context of these reviews here.     The index of all the songs reviewed is here.

 

Posted in At Boudakan, Bringing it all Back Home, Essential Bob Dylan, Greatest Hits Volume 2, Hard Rain, No Direction Home, The Songs | 11 Comments

Don’t think twice by Bob Dylan. Looking back to 1962 and a beautiful live version

Posted on December 13, 2008 by Tony Attwood

This article was updated in May 2018.

This song is based on the folk song “Who’s gonna buy you ribbons” which has both music and some lyrics that closely resemble Bob’s song. This version recorded in 1960 was made by a friend of Bob’s.

Bob has played this over 1000 times in concert, here’s one picked at random which turned out to be utterly beautiful to my ears, after a rather haphazard start.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3niBKLN238

Sometimes it is a little too easy to forget just how perfect some of the early Dylan works are, and that is why the demo version of Don’t think twice is so welcome on the “No Direction Home” album. Beautifully understated, lovingly caressed, it seems the most perfect version of the song ever.

There are thousands of cover versions.  This is one of the best, but that of course is just my opinion.

This is the start of the goodbye songs that occupied Dylan so much in the early years – “You just kind of wasted my precious time” – so much the precursor of It ain’t me babe and the other early songs of that genre.

From the instrumental introduction there is the feeling of oneness between Dylan, the song and the guitar. Through this early version you feel for him, and you even feel for the girl who is cast as the outsider – Dylan walks off with the guitar and the song, the girl has nothing save humiliation.

After all, “You’re the reason I’m travelling on” is one of the harshest lines anyone has ever sung to a woman.

It is such a perfectly simple song – the simple strophic verse-verse-verse, which makes the words become understated. Sometimes it seems that “I give her my heart but she wanted my soul” needs to be accompanied by a clash of drums, with possibly some lighting and thunder to help us along.

And this simplicity is why it can work. It is so beautifully understated. Even though “You just wasted my precious time” we have that simple chord structure and elegant melody. How could someone write such a beautiful farewell song?

Here’s the original

The general belief is that this is written in relation to Bob’s relationship and breakup with Suze Rotolo.  Ultimately the whole thing comes from “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone” although unfortunately I can’t find a version on line at the moment.  If you know one please add it.

There have been a number of arguments about whether Bob actually played the rather difficult guitar part on the recording – the official story is that the whole song was recorded in one take, which if that is the case requires a guitarist of enormous ability to get such a complicated part perfect in one go.

Certainly Dylan didn’t normally play it like this when it played it in live shows, although the early concerts did, so I guess it was just a perfect take.  And that idea is backed up by the version on the Witmark Demos (Bootleg vol 9) which is certainly worth listening to if you haven’t heard it for a while.  It is on Spotify if you don’t have the album.

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.

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.

 

Posted in Freewheelin, No Direction Home, The Songs | 7 Comments

What’s going on here?

Posted on December 10, 2008 by Tony Attwood

This web site aims to build up a commentary on the music and lyrics of Bob Dylan.

My belief is that most sites on Dylan faithfully record who performed on each record, what Dylan was doing at the time, and the state of his private life at that moment. Few however look at the meaning of the lyrics, and fewer style at how the lyrics link with the melodies, chord structure and form of the music.

That’s the type of analysis that is going on here. I’m trying to add several new commentaries a week. They are not appearing in any sort of logical order – each one comes up because I think of it, or someone mentions it to me.

If you’d like to contribute please send in a commentary and I’ll put it up with your details.

Tony Attwood

Posted in Editorial | Leave a comment

Lenny Bruce is Dead: Dylan’s eulogy to the man who man fun of religion

Posted on December 9, 2008 by Tony Attwood

by Tony Attwood

This article updated 22 June 2018, with the addition of two superb live versions at the end and some additional thoughts.

In his interviews Dylan says that he wrote the Lenny Bruce song in about five minutes.   Bruce died in 1966, and Dylan wrote the song around the time of the recording of Shot of Love in 1980.  Dylan never expressed any interest in Lenny Bruce before or since, and claims he has no idea why he wrote it.

What is really fascinating is that Lenny Bruce made fun of religion – it was one of the key targets of his work – and Dylan wrote this during his religious period.  An interesting contradiction and one that Bob has addressed in his comments about what Christianity is all about – although I am not sure I fully followed the answer.

It is also one of those songs that Heylin really can’t stand, complaining that Dylan wasted a great tune on lyrics like this.  Again I disagree – but then I am not a Christian so I guess I see things from another perspective.

But Dylan’s comments do give us a real insight into the meaning of Dylan songs, for here, virtually by his own admission, we have a stunningly elegant piece of writing in which the words have no deep meaning, but are part of a contextual whole, equal in many regards to the melody, chords, the piano and the voice.

It works so well because the music manages to be utterly haunting, and so matches the first line (which is the only line those who only just about remember the song actually know)

Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lives on and on

Indeed it can be argued, because of Dylan’s comments, that the words don’t matter too much – what matters here is the total sound.  And yet as you can here from the versions below, no matter which way it is performed the message is enhanced.

Each version does give us the feeling of an overall sound, even if you never once listen to the words – at least not until we get to the final line…

Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.

And that is about it.  An opening line and a closing line, a piano and a voice.  All making a simple song that is haunting and exquisite.  Sometimes things just work.  What is amazing is that as Dylan changed it, so it continued to work.

Between 1981 and 2008 Bob played this song 103 times, showing that (I think) he too had got the message that there was something very special in this song.  The lyrics, yes, the music, yes, and then the overall impact of the song sandwiched between that first and last line.

So of course the song didn’t end with that simple album version, because with Dylan songs are revisited and re-arranged.  Here are two.

I love this version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FcL5TGONAo

And here’s another knock out performance…

Maybe in the end the attraction between Bob and Lenny Bruce is to be found in one particular line

He just showed the wise men of his day to be nothing more than fools

Bob and Lenny both.

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 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

Posted in Shot of Love, The Songs | 9 Comments

It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry. Bob Dylan works out the Phantom Engineer

Posted on December 8, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

This is one of the songs that I reviewed twice.   Once in the version below which I wrote very early in the history of the site, and once much later 

I’m not trying to suggest this original review (or indeed any review here) is of earth shattering importance, but I found it interesting to look at the two contrasting thoughts.

In this case I have left the original review in blue and added some thoughts and extra ideas plus a couple of recordings of the song at the end in black.

“I want to be your lover baby, I don’t want to be your boss”

“I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul”

Dylan returns to the theme of being asked to give up too much of himself that he explored in “Don’t think twice” with “It take’s a lot to laugh”, known originally as Phantom Engineer. The relationship is over, the singer has shrugged, said his goodbyes and is travelling away.

The harshness of the goodbye in “It Ain’t me Babe” in which he tells the woman that she is looking for “a lover for your life”, is not here. He has simply got up, walked away, and hitched a ride on the overnight train.

He knows the woman is chasing him – these are the songs of Dylan rejecting women who want him in ways that he can’t oblige – but this time he doesn’t worry – because he admits from the off how good the girl looks when she’s by his side.

But then, in later reflection (musically separated from the rest of the song by the instrumental break) the final verse says that maybe, just maybe he is having regrets. The beautiful sunsets have given way to the winter’s cold and he comes out with those final lines…

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.

The train, jogging along, is the metaphor for these comings and goings of relationships. As for the music, that jogs along too. One chord suffices for the first two lines, followed by a descending bass (the exact contrary of the lead song of the album “Like a Rolling Stone” recorded on the same day as “It takes a lot to laugh”) ending up on the dominant, and then one chord again. It is a simple bounce along, with a rise in emotion every third line.  Thus despite all musical connections it is the contrast of Rolling Stone and Desolation Row.

Why then does it work so well? How come what appears to be a throw away little song with nothing much to say (when compared with Rolling Stone and Desolation Row) can shine out across the years?

First there is the fact that Dylan worked on it for days and days, hours and hours, changing individual lines, and eventually even the title.  It is also the simplicity of the music which contrasts with the complexity of the lyrics – we can see the singer getting onto the night train and just going and going, looking out of the window across the landscape in a semi-dream state as the music moves with the train. Every now and then (the third line) a frown passes his face and a contradicting image rises up, but then it goes.

“I want to be your lover baby I don’t want to be your boss”. Relationships reduced to the simplicity or complexity of a train ride. It can go either way – off to the country, or back home. It’s up to you.

And what now, all these years later, when I sit here with this song having been part of my life since about the age of 18?

Now I can appreciate the work the Dylan put in to each and every line that he so carefully crafted, and all those different versions that were played through until Dylan got that absolute final version that he wanted.

The Cutting Edge CD has a really interesting alternative version – oh, I do love the piano part in this.  Much more honky tonk – and oh, doesn’t Bob sound so certain and secure about the whole thing?

And we also have a live version which I also love; here Dylan has revisited an old friend, he has not desire to change the song, just to give a more reflective version just a few years later.

Between 1965 and 2005 Bob performed the song 160 times (according to the official site) although Wikipedia would have us believe “Dylan played the album version of the song live for the first time as part of his set in the August 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.”

Either way I think it deserved more.

DYLAN AND IT TAKES A LOT TO LAUGH: the series

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 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

 

Posted in Highway 61 Revisited | Leave a comment

Love Sick. Bob Dylan’s unexpected brilliant masterpiece of decline that surpasses all lost love songs before or since

Posted on December 6, 2008 by Tony Attwood

Revised 14 May 2018.

by Tony Attwood

You want a masterpiece from the old boy – here it is. Unexpected, it seems to have come out of nowhere after seven years. The opening seconds present a growl of uncertainty, before the guitar clicks in, and we have no idea what is going on. And yet within seconds of the start of that opening verse, we know exactly where we are…

I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

… we are at the end. The very end. After this there is nothing. The understated vocal, the perfect backing, the accurate singing, this is the farewell performance.

“I’m sick of love but I’m in the thick of it”

It is perhaps the strangest way ever to start an album – starting with what appears to be the end. And this 1997 desolation row is far more personal than Desolation Row itself. There is no one else to blame, no Eliot and Pound fighting in the captain’s tower, because everyone else is leading an ordinary life, everyone else has a life, while the singer is just hanging on to a shadow.

So the chords of E minor and D rock back and forth, and the verse ends with a descent of E minor, D major, B minor, A major – and the descent is a descent in every respect.

It feels like the end, with the utter perfection of the accompaniment having its own understated say in the instrumental verse.

It continues, and when you think it can’t get any more painful it hits those final heart wrenching closing lines that everyone has felt. You only have to listen to Dylan’s voice on those last few notes to know the sorrow and pain.

Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to
Be with you

You only have to listen to the accompaniment that unexpectedly breaks up over the final B minor A major chord, before falling into the E minor to know this is the end of the end.

And yet amazingly this is not as low as it goes, because this album keeps taking us down, down and down, track after track until finally we hit Not Dark Yet, and the return journey begins into the fantasy world which ends up in Highlands. For once the track order makes a total kind of sense.

This is the Vision of Johanna not of the youngsters with a life before them to be used or thrown away, but of the old man watching the shadows. At least in the original Visions there is the feeling that there are friends out there, and the young man singing will ultimately “get over it”. Here, there is no chance. It is not downhill all the way, because there is no more downhill.  We have reached the lowest point – until the album continues to go ever further below in a way that we cannot believe is possible.

Now if you have been reading my reviews here you will know I disagree with Heylin on a multiplicity of things, but never more so than on this song where Heylin places the song on a par with “Wiggle Wiggle”.  So what can be said to counter such a view?  I must admit I find it hard to know where to begin.

Certainly the fact that Dylan has, according to his web site in 2018, played it live 835 times gives us a clue to what Dylan thinks he achieved here.  I’ll try and explain

Trying thinking of that pulsating beat and the reverberating guitar gives us the plod of the lyrics walking, but the sudden quick guitar change at the end of each verse jerks us out of the descent.

I’m walking through streets that are dead

The point is that it is the streets that are dead.  Not Bob, not his relationship, but the entire world around him.  He is walking through nothingness.  He has no thoughts…

my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

He gave her everything, he trusted her totally

I spoke like a child; you destroyed me with a smile
While I was sleeping

And what he captures here is that pain of seeing everyone else happy and together – the lovers in the meadow.   And he can’t even take solace from looking out.  In Johanna he knows that there is life in the opposite loft but here he cannot even bear to look…

I see, I see lovers in the meadow
I see, I see silhouettes in the window
I watch them ’til they’re gone and they leave me hanging on
To a shadow

and so we get to that ultimately all consuming all conquering horror of knowing he is trapped for ever.

Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you

This is the ultimate, absolute, total, complete lost love song.  An utter masterpiece that has deserved every one of its public performances.  Quite simply I have got no idea what Heylin is talking about.

Facebook has a copy of the version of this song played at the Grammy Awards which if you have not heard it really is worthy of a listen.

https://www.facebook.com/dylanfans/videos/10150138049620540/

This song came right at the end of the compositions related to “Time out of mind” – maybe “Make you feel my love” came later.  And then nothing until suddenly we found, two years later that he used to care, but things have changed.

This was not a passing fancy.  Things really had changed and that film song just confirmed it.

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.

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.

 

Posted in The Songs, Time out of mind | 6 Comments

Desolation Row by Bob Dylan. It doesn’t get more frightening than this.

Posted on December 5, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood with help from Pat Sludden.

This review was one of the first ones I wrote in 2008 not long after conceiving of the idea of this web site, and while I was still trying to work out how best to approach songs which had been reviewed a million times before I decided to write my own comments.

In 2018 two new articles were added to the site which you might also enjoy in relation to this song.

Here’s the original review…

Returning to the original version of Desolation Row after years of hearing it in live performances, is quite a shock. I recall a performance at Wembley where suddenly it became a dance number – and none the worse for that, because once again it woke us all up to the terrors portrayed in the song.

In the original there is something so gentle and clean about the opening bars with the sweet continuing melodic guitar in the background, and then across it comes that line: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging…” and you know that in and around Dylan’s home town they were still doing that when he was a kid.  The album is  named after the  highway that passes near his home town – this is Dylan talking about home but not quite home – it is that mix of real and unreal that Dylan was developing at this time.

Unhappy men, living in attics and also listening to Visions of Johanna have used lines from the end of the song to explain their feelings and emotions over the breakup of a relationship (especially the last verse), but “I received your letter yesterday” is more about the isolation of the singer from a world gone very wrong indeed, rather than anything else. It is the ultimate reflection on the decline of American idealism into an anti-intellectual fascism that protects those with against those without.

It is the most powerful attack Dylan made on his society – but it not as many claim, a surreal song. Rather it is a science fiction story of the Philip Dick genre – a total dystopia. To have added jagged guitar and pulsating drum would have been too obvious – this is peaceful music for a world that has collapsed. It doesn’t have to rain to show you the world is a miserable place.

Likewise the chord sequence is kept simple, like the accompaniment, which makes the horror of the lyrics all the more real.

There are lines here for everyone – you choose the verse and it gives you the horror show. It is The Waste Land for those who don’t read Eliot.

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do

It doesn’t get more frightening than that, does it?

What else is on the site

1: Over 470 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.

6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines and our articles on various writers’ lists of Dylan’s ten greatest songs.

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

Posted in Highway 61 Revisited, The Songs | 25 Comments

Subterranean Homesick Blues: the meaning of the music and the lyrics

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

Revised 13 October 2017

This was Dylan’s first successful attempt to integrate the emotions of the Beat Generation which he had understood from Alan Ginsberg and others combining the thoughts of the moment with three minutes of everything that was happening in the world of the mid 1960s.

It’s sources in Dylan’s own writing go back to Gypsy Lou – the song about the Beat Generation and his frustration with it (or with himself for not being able to write Beat Generation music), and its sources in lyrical terms come from Jack Kerouac who wrote a novel called The Subterraneans.

But Bob did have a musical source in Chuck Berry’s “Too much monkey business”   Just try some of these lines…

Salesman talking to me tryin’ to run me up a creek
Says you can buy it, go on try it, you can pay me next week

Blonde haired, good lookin’ tryin’ to get me hooked
Wants me to marry, get a home, settle down, write a book

Same thing every day, gettin’ up, goin’ to school
No need to be complainin’, my objections overruled

Pay phone, somethin’ wrong, dime gone, will mail
I ought to sue the operator for tellin’ me a tale

Dylan takes this idea and updates it a bit.  The fire hoses were used to break up demonstrations then, as much later – although if you get too close to the lyrics the fire hose bit could be taken to suggest that one should NOT get involved in civil rights protests – which given the context of so much of Dylan’s early writing, would seem odd. Or maybe he was just being post-modernistically ironic.

Some “insights” that commentators have found in the song are barely that – “I’m on the pavement thinking about the government” could be an allusion to anti-government protests in the streets, but if so is hardly mind shattering.  And really that is not the point.  The point is the scatological approach to poetry and life: this can be nothing more than a scatological experience as both Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan said.

Then there’s the Weathermen bit – “Don’t need the Weathermen to know which way the wind blows.” Some sources cite this as the origin of the name of the Weathermen, the radical and violent anti-governmental group. Others say that Dylan was citing an already existent organisation. Either way, given the simplicity of the “I’m on the pavement” bit, he could just be talking about the weather.  And again going back to Chuck Berry, it was the everyday that was the source of the story.

And in many ways this is what the Beat Generation poetry was all about – it was taking a scatological approach to lyrics and rhyme, rejecting all that had gone before, linking the future to the past and back again, finding new models, new expressions, new ideas, even if no one knew what they meant.

Maggie turns up as well, and “Maggie’s Farm” puts in its first appearance as track 3 on side one of the album. There’s more interaction with the law (“must bust in early May, orders from the DA”) and so it goes on. If anything it is perhaps a reflection of the turmoil of life (“twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift”).

Quite why it has been so popular and so highly revered is hard to say in any way other than the fact that it so dramatically broke so much new ground right at the start of the album.  It is hard to remember this far on but we really had never heard anything remotely like this before – except from Chuck Berry – and his music was pushed off into the backwater of rhythm and blues that appeared to white kids, along with Bo Diddley

Rolling Stone has the song it in the top 500 greatest songs of all time, everyone seems to have quoted it somehow, and yet if taken apart it is just a boppy little rock song with no melody and three chords. In the end its meaning, its important and its sheer memorableness can only be ascribed to the fact that almost every line is quotable somehow, somewhere, it does symbolically catch the moment, and it is the opening to a truly great album.  Dylan called it a subconscious poem, and it is certainly that.  It’s brilliance is that it taps into a whole community’s subconscious.

The borrowing from Berry doesn’t really matter.  It is the transformation that counts.

What else is on the site

You’ll find some notes about 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 all the 594 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 2000 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, please do drop me a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article.  Email Tony@schools.co.uk

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, links back to our reviews

 

 

Posted in Bringing it all Back Home, Essential Bob Dylan, The Songs | 11 Comments

Love minus Zero / No Limit. Bob Dylan takes a Zen approach to the perfect relationship

Posted on December 1, 2008 by Tony Attwood

 By Tony Attwood

This review revised May 2017

The second of the two love songs from the first side of “Bringing it all back home” is infinitely more complex than “She Belongs To Me”. While musically it seems to be straightforward, the lyrics (and indeed the very title, written originally as a fraction) suggest Dylan has most certainly travelled to another place.  

The music works around the three major chords, and the melody flows across 16 bars of 4/4 in every verse. All very conventional.

But the lyrics are not as ever heard before. There’s a Zen-like opening (My love she speaks like silence) which shows us this is another place entirely from the conventional love song, and then we realise, there are no rhymes.

It was an approach to writing that Dylan rarely used – indeed writing this I am struggling to think where else he did use this approach. It seems strange within such a conventional musical base to make such a departure, and yet that is the point. The convention of everyday is undermined by the attitude of the individual, for that is what the song is about. “She knows there’s no success like failure and that failure’s no success at all” – a radical way (but nonetheless valid for all that) of seeing the world.

It is a song about the inner attitudes and visions of the singer’s lover which allow her to co-exist with this world without compromising her visions. The visions that she and the singer share are snapshot visions – exactly as the visions within the Gates of Eden are – but these are of a Zen-like acceptance of the world which allows one to see everything far more fully than is possible most of the time. There is no battle, because the world and the singer can coexist.

“She knows too much to argue or to judge.” You can’t get more Zen like than that..

But it is also a song about the all-encompassing feeling of love that can (if we are lucky) envelop us all in, at times.  That period when one’s lover is everything – indeed more than everything.  Wherein one’s lover appears to be above and beyond reality, where everything one’s lover is, says, does, becomes is automatically of value in itself and does not require questioning.  When indeed nothing can be questioned.

This is a period which (at least in my experience) cannot last and that failure to continue with this sort of adoration eventually can destroy the relationship.  Only by reaching the same level of speaking like silence and knowing too much to argue or to judge can one reach out and be as one with the lover.

Dylan has performed the song many times and it turns up on various compilation albums, but if you are fully familiar with the original and the variations at the live shows, listen to the Newport 65 version (its on YouTube) – perhaps the fastest he has ever played it, and an amazing contrast to other approaches. But it still works, it is still true.

There is also a very alternative version from Jimmy LaFave here.

What else is on the site

You’ll find some notes about 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 all the 594 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 2000 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, please do drop me a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article.  Email Tony@schools.co.uk

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, links back to our reviews

 

 

Posted in Bringing it all Back Home, Essential Bob Dylan, The Songs | 12 Comments

Gates of Eden: two revised renditions & the meanings behind Bob Dylan’s masterpiece

Posted on November 30, 2008 by Tony Attwood

At times I think there are no words but these to tell what’s true.

If you have never heard this version above, do give it a listen – the differences between this version and the album version are subtle but they add something which after so many years of listening to the album version are quite a shock.

The problem with the CD version of “Bringing in all back home” is that if you have never owned the LP you don’t quite get the absolute division between sides 1 and 2. Side 1, all pop and bop and laughter, love songs, funny songs… OK that is over simplifying the situation, but it is the essence of the music.

And then Side 2, that almighty sandwich in which the bleak solitude of Gates of Eden, and the monument to individualism (It’s Alright Ma) exist between the lighter Tambourine Man and Baby Blue.

With such an extraordinary brilliance of writing existing at so many different levels, these four songs cannot be separated in terms of greatness, but “Gates of Eden” stands out in one regard because it is the definitive statement from Dylan in terms of what he was doing then, and as it turned out what he continued doing through his writing career.

The line, “At times I think there are no words but these to tell what’s true” refer to the girlfriend’s dream, and dreams were on Dylan’s mind then as now – the album contains the bizarre dream about Ahab and his ship and seemingly everything else that can be crammed in, Love Minus Zero has its own dream like imagery, and Subterranean Homesick Blues if not a dream exists part of the time as if from another world. Dylan never lost his interest in dreams – from Bob Dylan’s Dream on Freewheelin, through to Series of Dreams which turned up on the 3rd volume of the Bootleg series, and even on to the dream-like sequences of “Things have changed.”

This is not a unique interest. Dreams were the inspiration for art and poetry through the 20th century – as was the reinterpretation of reality in dream-like ways. If we think of the stark black and whiteness of “Gates of Eden” in these terms we think surely of Picasso’s Guernica that final masterful statement of what the world has come to.

But while Guernica was Picasso’s final statement of greatness before the long, long decline into being a servant of the Communist Party, with Dylan we are still at the start. The dreams are still fresh, although none the less frightening.

It’s a song in 6/8 – more commonly associated with Celtic folk than the torments of Dylan’s subject matter. And so extraordinary is the reach of the song that it is a shock to return to the words and be reminded that this is a strophic song with each verse of just four lines. (Although some versions in print split the lines in half, musically we have four phrases of four bars – the classic 16 bar song. It is a four line song.)

Here image after image hits us, even over 40 years after its creation. One could print the whole song as an example, but to take just one line, try this as an assassination of contemporary life: “friends and other strangers”

As chilling a group of four words as you can find – this is isolation supreme.

But more than anything else this tells us what Dylan is writing about now and in the future. Yes there are love songs, yes there are songs about his ex-wife, yes there are the political songs, but mostly these are the songs of the sub-conscious where images pile on top of images, leaving the individual acting in a world that makes no sense, isolated, alone, “leaving men wholly totally free to do anything they wish to do but die”.

From this inferno, there is no escape.

This extract from the 1988 version again gives me shivers – I can hear the original version from the album in my sleep, each change here send shivers through my entire body as if a long lost friend has returned more beautiful and more frightening, more fragile and more gentle than ever before.

Between October 1964 and March 2001 Dylan played the song 217 times on tour.  He has not played it since.

Original review 2008; updates 2018.

What else is on the site

You’ll find some notes about 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 all the 594 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 2000 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, please do drop me a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article.  Email Tony@schools.co.uk

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, links back to our reviews

Posted in Bringing it all Back Home, The Songs | 4 Comments

Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind”: the meaning of the music and the lyrics

Posted on November 29, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

There can be few opening chord sequences as distinctive as Dylan’s minor-4th, 5th, Tonic sequence which opens “Idiot Wind”. And there can be few opening lines to a song as distinctive as “Someone’s got it in for me, they’re printing stories in the press.”

Within those six bars – and that is another distinctive factor, for it is only six bars – we have the landscape set out. There is a coldness about that minor fourth, like a cliff face with the wind howling, which tells us this is not going to be an easy ride. There is a coldness about the words – the mere fact that it is “someone” not an identified person who is doing the mischief makes it even more chilling.

And now looking back on it, how well we know that this is not an easy rise, for this is “Like a rolling stone” part 2. Of course there are differences – here in Idiot Wind, the guilt is at least partially shared. In Like a Rolling Stone there is only blame and finger pointing. In Idiot Wind there is uncertainty which was never there in the earlier song – but maybe that’s what getting older brings.

Just compare the openings…

“Someone’s got it in for me, they’re printing stories in the press”

“Once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”

Equally bleak but in different ways.

And when we turn back to the musical structure we find more similarity, because both these great songs are in 2/4 (rather than the conventional 4/4) and both work in six bar phrases. It is rare in Dylan – indeed it is rare in the world of pop and rock – and he reserves it for masterpieces of anguish and annoyance.

Pete Hamill’s notes to the album veer (at least to my eye) between insight and portentous wordiness. He suggests Idiot Wind is personal – I can’t see it myself, but then obviously Mr Hamill has access to Dylan that I can only dream about. If the bit about the shooting and the inheritance is real, then so be it, but it seems more like part of the painting of an imagined landscape – the background like the windmill in the Dutch masterpiece – from where I sit. But where he does strike the mark, I feel, is with the comment that “The idiot wind trivializes lives into gossip.” This is a theme of the sleeve notes essay – for earlier he says, “And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism,” the plague being the descent of America from its high ideals into the politics of the 1970s.

 Perhaps that points us to the biggest difference between Rolling Stone and Idiot Wind. In the latter Dylan says, “you are talking nonsense,” in the former he says, “you are nonsense.”

Much of its history pop and rock has been about love, lost love and dance. The lost love sub-genre has generally been of sadness and wanting the lover back. Dylan singlehandedly invented a completely new sub-genre: despair, disgust and dismay. “Like a rolling stone” was the first high mark of this style of writing, “Idiot Wind” the second. It may be extremely uncomfortable, but it is the ultimate antithesis of relativism. Every approach to life is not equally valid, equally understandable and equally excusable. There are people of whom we must say, “You are utterly wrong.” And that’s what he says here, even where he says, “yes I got it wrong sometimes too.” The latter does not excuse the former.

You’ll find some notes about 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 all the 594 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 2000 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, please do drop me a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article.  Email Tony@schools.co.uk

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, links back to our reviews

 

 

Posted in Blood on the Tracks, Bootleg Series volume 3, The Songs | 11 Comments

Dylan’s “We better talk this over”: the last ever performance changes the feeling

Posted on November 26, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

“We better talk this over is hardly a great song, but it does have a way with words that is unusual even for Dylan.”

That comment above was made when I first wrote this review.   Over the years I have changed my mind and in March 2020, I added the above live version, which I really love, and which transforms the song – and I am so grateful to mr tambourine for finding and preserving this video.  Apparently it was the last live performance; it happened in 2000, and it totally transforms the song.

Here’s the original review…

The start does not auger well with the opening lines still jarring after all these years

I think we better talk this over
Maybe when we both get sober

I can still hear myself shouting, “Oh no,” as I heard that for the first time. It is just so naff. And worse the opening is followed by two throw away lines which make one think that the great lyricist has lost it 

You’ll understand I’m only a man
Doing the best that I can.

But then in the next verse we suddenly get a surprise… 

Let’s call it a day go our own different way
Before we decay.

Decay? Now that is odd. Love songs – lost love songs indeed – normally speak about “getting older” not decay. This is indeed something new.

Next verse…

I took a chance, got caught in the trance
Of a downhill dance.

Another surprise. Downhill dance. The previous lines of the verse are mundane, but suddenly there’s a jump into this different language.

and just to show this was no accident, it turns up again next time around – again with the 3rd and 4th line 

I’m lost in the haze of your delicate ways
With both eyes glazed.

So it goes on, the mundane clashing two lines later with the extraordinary. I don’t know if Dylan quotes the Zen stories elsewhere, but he brings in the most famous Zen image at this point…

Like the sound of one hand clapping

Followed by more unexpected imagery.

The vows that we kept are now broken and swept
Beneath the bed where we slept.

There is then a musical jump – an instrumental pause which goes nowhere at all, followed by a totally unexpected repeat of the “middle 8” (the B in a ternary analysis). Again I can’t think where else this happens in Dylan – if he is in ternary he stays in ternary, and ternary does not repeat the middle 8…

Why should we got on watching each other through a telescope ?
Eventually we’ll hang ourselves on all this tangled rope.

So is this a song in which Dylan deliberately mangled the mundane with the extraordinary? If so, why? Or is it that he just ran out of ideas, needed another song quickly to complete the album and put in a half finished version of what could have been a masterpiece?

The music is not exceptional, and the story line of lost love is not just commonplace but also obviously what was on his mind at the time. So mundane music, mundane topic, mundane lyrics… but mixed with extraordinary imagery.

As always will don’t know and won’t know. It remains a curiosity, but with some moments to treasure.

What else is on this site?

You’ll find some notes about 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 all the 594 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 2000 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, please do drop me a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article.  Email Tony@schools.co.uk

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, links back to our reviews

 

Posted in Street Legal | 3 Comments

Dylan’s “Where are you tonight?” – the meaning of the music and the lyrics

Posted on November 25, 2008 by Tony Attwood

by Tony Attwood

There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain, tears on the letter I write.

There is a set of Dylan songs where each line is a song – you can take the line and it has an image so powerful that it doesn’t matter what the rest of the song is about.

Yes, you can read the history of “Where are you tonight?”, and think, ah yes, he is singing about Sara and her attempt to take the children away from Dylan – Hawaii was the place she chose at that moment. The court battles, the hatred, the horror of losing one’s children; everything that a woman who wants the kids and doesn’t want the man, can throw into the ring.

Much of the song could be said to be about this – but who knows with Dylan?  

“There’s a babe in the arms of woman enraged…” It all seems to fit, and yet, and yet…

Stand back for a moment and just look at the lines in splendid isolation, and there is even more life to be had here.

What adds to the feeling of line after line each being a song in its own right, is the length of the verse – no matter how many times you hear it, the fact is that the second four lines catch you out – it feels like we have had the bulk of the verse after four long lines, but then another four come tumbling in, all with the same melody and that same, incredibly simple I IV chord sequence. The pressure builds and builds, and only then do we finally hit the dominant chord and find a way out.

Then it’s back to that relentless I IV…

There’s a woman I long to touch and I miss her so much but she’s drifting like a satellite.

There’s a neon light ablaze in this green smoky haze, laughter down on
Elizabeth Street

So it goes on. You don’t need the songs, you only need the lines. Where Jokerman failed so totally in putting together a collection of images this song works – it works because the images are so much more powerful, and most of all it works because the music is so fitting.

And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone where she bathed in a stream of pure heat.

How else could you sing this but over a simple rocking chord change? How else could you make this long stream of images work other than in an endlessly repeating verse line.

It is in fact Hard Rain, years later and in the end it is the lines that tell us where we are, what sort of world we are in… 

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure, to live it you have to explode.

Or if that doesn’t get you, try this

She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair and discovered her invisible self.

And the last selection of I IV chords ends…

If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise, remind me to show you the scars. 

Was Dylan reminded of this years further on when he said, “I’ve still got the scars that the sun doesn’t heal?” Quite possibly – its hard now not to listen to Not Dark Yet and remain immune to the effect of this song.

What makes one ultimately have to put the stylus back one track, or flip back the button on the CD is the end

There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived.
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived.
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive,
But without you it just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, where are you tonight?

Has the situation of lost love ever been summarised so perfectly? The man who sang of his love in Isis is back, and he’s just had some more amazing experiences. If only Dylan had sang of his life forever, and never got sidetracked.

But that would be too much to ask.

What else is here?

You’ll find some notes about 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 all the 594 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 2000 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, please do drop me a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article.  Email Tony@schools.co.uk

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, links back to our reviews

Posted in Street Legal | 11 Comments

Jokerman: the meaning of the lyrics and the music

Posted on November 23, 2008 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

Numerous reference books suggest that Jokerman is one of Dylan’s masterpieces. A great poetic adventure that encapsulates everyone and everything from Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats (1884) to… well, anything you like. All mixed with a mature and detailed reflection on Judaism, and the books of laws in the Old Testament.

Such approaches tend to ignore the fact that Dylan himself doesn’t like the piece much (see http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/1991zollo.htm for one such interview), and the fact that when he has sung it live he has often chopped out verses seemingly at random and just thrown it in “cos the kids like it.”

Dylan’s view seems to be that it is a failed song, a song the lyrics of which he changed too often for it to work any more. As for the music, it is more complex than the old 12 bars tunes but not exactly the first movement of a string quartet.

And one thing is for sure (and is missed out in most commentaries) the music and the lyrics have nothing in common.

The music is simple, bouncy, fun, but not especially exciting or unusual but still a good tune that works, it serves as a basis for a stream of words, but not much more. For the song to work, the lyrics have to be both electrified and at one with the music, meaning they have to be bouncy and fun.

Consider for a moment the great work which apparently was recorded in time for Infidels but didn’t make the cut – “Blind Willie McTell”. Here the brooding melody and chord changes fit perfectly with the brooding lyrics, even if neither have anything to do with Blind Willie McTell. That’s fine because the man of the title has nothing to do with the song.

But in Jokerman we seem to have a bit of a muddle – a bouncy tune that has nothing to add to the feeling – except that the Jokerman is a Jokerman. Which would work if there was something jokey in the lyrics, but even from line two, “While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing” we have nothing funny. Are you going to make a joke out of “a snake in both of your fists”? I suspect not.

OK, comes the answer, he’s not that kind of Jokerman – he’s more the kind that plays a joke on the whole universe – a nasty twisted joke – a devil with an evil laugh.

Right – so where does that leave, “Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune, Bird fly high by the light of the moon”?

It is all so confusing, that we look for some sort of way out. This is not surrealism, or the musical version of a Jackson Pollock, it is something quite different.

But what/

When we hear, with that same bouncy 2/4 tune which mutates into 4/4 at the chorus, that suddenly Dylan is talking about Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the books of laws in the Old Testament, we think, maybe this is going to sort it out. Dylan is laughing at the old laws – that’s what the bouncy song is about.

And here there certainly needs to be comment and a half. Leviticus is the book of the Bible that tells us to stone to death married women who have sex with another man, who tell us not to approach the house of the Lord if wearing clothes made of two or more cloths, and not to approach if our eyesight is not sound (which cuts out anyone wearing glasses). There is a lot of stuff about killing goats too.

But there is nothing on this. Not even with the wildest imagination is there anything there that offers us any insight. I am not searching for meaning any more than I am searching for meaning in Jackson Pollock, to take the example that came into my head earlier. All I am doing is looking for an insight. A way of saying yes, this is why the melody is like it is, why we have a 2/4 verse and a 4/4 chorus. Why we have a Jokerman.

I think Dylan was right in that interview – there is nothing but nothing here apart from a set of lines along a vaguely messianic theme to inappropriate music.

And that is not to remove the one great track from the album, as some would have it. Rather it is to let us look elsewhere, where the issue is entirely Israel. Neighbourhood Bully, for example, is a song that I, with my political views, am extremely unhappy with, unless I twist the meaning so much I think I leave behind anything Dylan meant. But as a work of art, it is something far more than Jokerman ever became.

I really want to understand this song, so ultimately of course the failing is mine, not Dylan’s because I can’t get to grips with it at all.  I just so wish I could.

You’ll find some notes about 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 all the 594 Dylan compositions and co-compositions that we have found on the A to Z page.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with over 2000 active members.  (Try imagining a place where it is always safe and warm).  Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link 

If you are interested in Dylan’s work from a particular year or era, your best place to start is Bob Dylan year by year.

On the other hand if you would like to write for this website, please do drop me a line with details of your idea, or if you prefer, a whole article.  Email Tony@schools.co.uk

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, links back to our reviews

Posted in Infidels, The Songs | 92 Comments