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

By Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1975/81. Stuffed graveyards and false gods.

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

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

XVII     Hits and misses

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

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

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

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

(Filip Łobodziński, Untold, 17 May 2021)

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

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

Dylan.pl – Jak błądzący łach: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

————————–

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

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

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously in this series…

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

• What was the public to do – part 2

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

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

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

Previously in this series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is the Leaving of Liverpool

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

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

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

Farewell to you, my own true love;

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

So fare thee well, my own true love,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was also another version…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 16

by Jochen Markhorst

XVI      Beauty in Sound

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

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

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

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

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

Wolfgang Ambros – Allan wia a Stan:

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

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

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

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

– Love is the motivator,

– Faithfulness is the stumbling block.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously in this series

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

By Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

… as the music for “Only a hobo”.

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

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

And this “Only a Hobo” was born.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

In this little series of articles about songs Bob Dylan put onto an album, but then didn’t play in concert, we have reached the songs from Biograph, although this is a bit of a  misleading place to be because the Biograph songs are songs which seemingly were recorded by Bob but then abandoned and only resurfaced as a way of filling the Biograph album.

However, there are two songs from the list which I would argue most certainly could have been used and developed live on stage.  First we have Abandoned Love.

Maybe Bob has an aversion to singing in harmony, maybe he couldn’t find an arrangement that didn’t involve a viola.    But had he suddenly introduced the piece into a concert I think the audience, recognising an absolute rarity would have gone wild.  Well, at least I would.

It is four and a half minutes long and eight verses without any repeats – which should be no problem for Bob with his prodigious memory for lyrics, and really, although it exists in the most simplest of musical terms, it works at every level.

I can hear the turning of the key
I’ve been deceived by the clown inside of me
I thought that he was righteous but he’s vain
Oh, something’s a-telling me I wear the ball and chain

Maybe Bob doesn’t like the admission of his failures, or the fact that he is trapped – but then surely we long, long ago stopped seeing Bob songs as autobiographical.   But maybe it was that somewhat odd, almost spooky verse…

I’ve given up the game, I’ve got to leave
The pot of gold is only make-believe
The treasure can’t be found by men who search
Whose gods are dead and whose queens are in the church

“Whose gods are dead and whose queens are in the church,” indeed.  If I was running a Bob Dylan quiz one of the questions I would pose would be a quote of that line, and the question, “Which song is this from?”  And then if some clever-dick knows the answer, I’d ask, “and what does it mean?”

But maybe it was the Everly Brothers who did it for Bob – perhaps he just didn’t want to do a song the boys had done – although they didn’t offer up their cover until 1985 – ten years after Bob wrote it.   (By the way, what is the lead instrument in the break at around 3’30”?)

And now moving on to my second “never played in public song, here’s “Up to me”

Dupree came in pimpin' tonight to the Thunderbird cafe
Crystal wanted to talk to him, I had to look the other way
Now, I just can't rest without your love, I need your company
But you ain't a-gonna cross the line
I guess it must be up to me

There's a note left in the bottle, you can give it to Estelle
She's the one you been wond'rin' about, but there's really nothin' much to tell
We both heard voices for a while, now the rest is history
Somebody's got to cry some tears
I guess it must be up to me

So go on, boys, and play your hands, life is a pantomime
The ringleaders from the county seat say you don't have all that much time
And the girl with me behind the shades, she ain't my property
One of us has got to hit the road
I guess it must be up to me

If we never meet again, baby, remember me
How my lone guitar played sweet for you that old-time melody
And the harmonica around my neck, I blew it for you free
No one else could play that tune, you know it was up to me

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 15

by Jochen Markhorst

XV       “I had no idea what the hell he was singing about”

Our Japanese friends do not have a bad reputation when it comes to Dylan translations. Written publications are usually loving, very literal translations with a wealth of explanatory annotations and alternatives. Jingle-jangle = 金属の音が鳴る様子、ジャラジャラ = The sound of metal clanging, jingling, for example. “The lyrics are about a fantastical experience of moving between reality and hallucination, and the fictional Tambourine Man, a being in between the two,” the translator explains. To which they sometimes afford edits that more often than not add an enriching, deepening dimension:

そして救急車が行った後、残されているのものは
シンデレラが廃墟の街を掃いている音だけ

And after the ambulance has gone, all that is left is
Is the sound of Cinderella sweeping the ruined city.

… “Desolation Row” is called ‘廃墟の街’ in Japanese, haikyo no machi, Ruined City – which, in the language of a people who had to endure Hiroshima and Nagasaki, does indeed add an extra, oppressive dimension.

Mr. Tambourine Man – Bob Dylan (Japanese Cover):

Japanese artists, especially those from the premier league, sometimes dare to take a much freer approach to source texts. And even then, the quality of the lyrics usually doesn’t get any worse. As we have seen with Japanese great Haruomi Hosono, the electronic legend who has been forcing Dylan on his countrymen since the 1960s.

On Heavenly Music (2013), for instance, the album on which he honours his Western favourites. There, he surprises Dylan followers with a brilliant cover and exquisite translation of “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. Well, with a retranslation, actually. Hosono sobers Dylan’s slightly-hysterical lyrics, turning them into a naturalistic, tranquil and introspective account. No lions in the Coliseum, but a statue of a lion; no young girls pulling muscles, but a maid eating mussels, not Botticelli’s niece in the hotel room, but a kawaii, cute Greek girl… Dylan’s source lyrics are just a hat rack.

When I Paint My Masterpiece – Haruomi Hosono:

Hosono has not yet dared to touch “Like A Rolling Stone”, though. Neither has his friend Kenji Endo, that other titan in Japanese rock history (“Curry Rice”) – although Kenji recounts in every interview how his passion for music awoke during his college days when he first heard Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”. As again just before his death, in an interview with the New York Times:

When the Japanese singer-songwriter Kenji Endo first heard Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” as a young student in Tokyo in the 1960s, he was perplexed — offended, even. Aren’t pop vocals supposed to be pretty? But by the third listen, Mr. Endo remembered that he was in awe: “This guy is creating something that has never been created before.” He had found his calling.

And what about Mr. Dylan’s lyrics? “I had no idea what the hell he was singing about,” Mr. Endo said in a recent Skype interview.

Mr Endo would have been helped by the translations that the webmaster who calls himself Yoshiaki Masharu publishes on his wonderful site Lyriclist; hundreds of translations of English-language pop and rock songs, about 20 of them Dylan songs. Yoshi is careful not to translate “boldly”, as he calls it, because “misinterpretation or perversion of the facts is not acceptable”, but still does aim for ‘’translations that make sense, that reflect my own interpretation.” And succeeds excellently with “Like A Rolling Stone”:

皆言ってただろ「気を付けなお嬢さん、今に痛い目みるぞ」って
そんなのは奴らがからかってるだけだと思ってただろ

They used to say, ‘Watch out, missy, you’re about to get yourself hurt.’
You thought they were just messing with you

… for example, and

I hear you graduated from a good school, Miss Lonely.
But you know what, you’ve been coaxed.
No one taught you how to live on the streets.
You have to get used to it now.

His translation is preceded by a clarifying introduction for his compatriots. What is meant by a “rolling stone”, that the text largely describes the fall of a woman from an upper-class background, and that “the lyrics seem to contain Bob Dylan’s caustic message to the bourgeoisie, but they also make us think about what it means to rise and fall in life”.

Tone and content are excellently struck. And where a culture clash threatens, the footnotes provide insight. “Mystery Tramp” can be interpreted in a broader sense, including the subsequent “deal”, which some take to refer to “prostitution,” At most, Yoshi makes concessions in terms of rhythm, as evidenced by his footnote to the third-couplet:

“Diplomat interpreted here as ‘a man who is good at socialising’. Chrome horse was interpreted here as ‘chrome-plated vehicle’. It would be more faithful to translate it as ‘motorbike’ (=horse), but ‘car’ fits the flow of the story better, so we have done so.”

Some well-intentioned amateurs can be found on YouTube with loving but unfortunately unappealing attempts to cover the song in Japanese. Hindered, apart from poor talent, by poor knowledge of English, leading to alienating verses like Who knows where we’re going? Even God doesn’t know and It’s a world where you can’t even get out of college (?).

Like A Rolling Stone – Mabo Saito (Japanese): https://youtu.be/58veePEmFcI

So the wait is on for Japanese music talent to pick up Yoshiaki’s lyrics. The perfect translation is there. Although, perfect… phrasing will be a challenge. The Japanese verse lines have significantly more syllables than the source text. “Like a rolling stone”, for example, becomes korogaruishi mitai ni natte (転がる石みたいになって) – twice as many syllables as Dylan needs to say the same thing. A core line like You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely is 12 syllables in the source – a translation without “misinterpretation or perversion of the facts,” as Yoshiaki Masharu demands of himself, becomes Mina ittetadaro `ki o tsukena ojōsan, imani itai me miru zo’tte: 25 syllables, more than double the number.

A sensei like Bob Dylan might be able to handle it – but everyone else is bound to fall. And may have to content himself with the fact that, like Napoleon in rags, he amused the audience with the language he used. On the other hand: Napoleon, as Mashura helpfully explains in the footnote to the last verse, Napoleon is the man who said “Impossible, n’est pas français.”

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 16: Beauty in Sound

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Wherever you look when there is an article about Bob Dylan, it is for the most part about Dylan himself, his private life, his performances, and his lyrics.   Rarely is there much said about the music.   And so today I wondered what would happen if I took a fairly simple (in terms of musical construction and lyrical content) Dylan song, and really focussed on the music.  As the source for my experiment, I took “Blowin’ in the Wind”.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” is, according to Bob Dylan, and as is repeated endlessly by commentators, based on “No More Auction Block”.  Indeed, if you concentrate, you can hear the melody of “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind” in the instrumental introduction to No More, and again within the song most particularly in the last line of each verse.

Thus once you have that connection in mind to the effect that, “Blowing in the Wind” relates to “No more Auction Block,” it is possible to hear the musical influence of the latter on the former, and this comes across in Odetta’s version.

But I think this whole thing about “Blowin in the Wind” actually being based on “No more auction block” is rather a simplification.  Of course we accept it because Dylan is quoted as saying “‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ has always been a spiritual. I took it off a song called ‘No More Auction Block’—that’s a spiritual and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ follows the same feeling.”   But that is a key point – I am not at all sure how many people would trace Blowing in the Wind back to No Moire Auction Block without being told.

In short, Bob may have started with “No More Auction Block” but that is not the same as the two songs being inexorably linked.

The lyrics are of course completely different…

No more auction block for me
No more, no more
No more auction block for me
Many thousands gone

No more driver's lash for me
No more, no more
No more driver's lash for me
Many thousands gone

No more whip lash for me
No more, no more
No more pint of salt for me
Many thousands gone

No more auction block for me
No more, no more
No more auction block for me
Many thousands gone

… but then so is the music, and I wonder just how true that link that we are regularly told about actually is.  For really just as there is little more than one musical line in Dylan’s version of the song that relates “No more auction block” to “Blowin in the wind” and there is not much in the lyrics at all to suggest that “Blowin’ in the wind” is related to “No more auction block.”

Now I have to admit that over the years of writing articles for Untold Dylan, I have come to be a little suspicious about things Bob says.  Indeed, Jochen wrote on this site in January 2021 about Dylan’s speech in 2015 in which Dylan said,

“When you go down to Deep Ellum keep your money in your socks / Women on Deep Ellum put you on the rocks.” Sing that song for a while and you just might come up with, “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter time too / And your gravity’s down and negativity don’t pull you through.”

Now that I am sure is right – but equally I don’t think that is a prime influence.   That is the way the brain works, churning and turning words and indeed if you are musically inclined, musical phrases, over and over, and coming up with something new.  Besides if Bob really knew where his ideas come from, he wouldn’t have had the long spells when he composed nothing.  He would surely just have turned the creative spark on again, knowing as he did, how it worked.

Indeed as Jochen goes on to point out, Dylan went on to say, “These songs didn’t come out of thin air,” before listing seven examples of classics that have given him the format. “If you’d sung “John Henry” as many times as I have, you’d get to “Blowin’ In The Wind” too, Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key To The Highway” automatically leads to “Highway 61 Revisited”, “Sail Away Ladies” to “Boots Of Spanish Leather”.”

And then Jochen adds the explosive comment, “Charming and modest. And, as is often the case with Dylan, not entirely enlightening.”   Well, yes, up to a point, but maybe for once I will slightly disagree.  Not entirely enlightening, true, but a bit enlightening nonetheless.

Indeed as Jochen did point out when Dylan talks about the writing of his songs, he doesn’t cite events, movements, beliefs etc (with the exception of his short period of writing only overtly Christian songs) he cites the musical antecedents.

So now we need to ask, just how accurate a measure is this?  Is there really any link between the MUSIC of “No More Auction Block”, and the MUSIC of “Blowing in the Wind”?

Now I know (because I have just checked) that if you go onto Google’s AI Overview it will tell you that “The melody of Bob Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind” comes from the 19-th century African-American spiritual “No More Auction Block For Me” and so I am disagreeing with AI, because quite simply I am saying “No it doesn’t”.

Of course you can hear half a phrase of music in the title line to “Auction Block” as equivalent to “How many roads must a man walk down,”, but then that latter line only contains four notes, and yes it if you play it in the right key they are the same four notes as “How many roads,” although at a different speed, and with a different rhythmic lilt.  But this is true for hundreds of thousands of songs.

This is not to say that Bob or anyone else is lying when making the comment the first line of “Blowing” is taken from the first line of “No More”.   It is not even like saying that this sentence I am writing here, which begins “It is rather like saying” is based on a certain other sentence.  And yes in fact on Google (I have just checked) there are 145 web pages which have the phrase “It is rather like saying” on them.

But the key point is that we only have 12 notes available to us in music, while in the alphabet we have 26 letters.  It might not sound too big a difference, but I can’t find a website that tells me how many combinations of letters there can be if we allow repetition – which of course musically we are allowed to do.

In short in every song there are almost certainly elements of other songs.   The musical opening to “No More Auction Block” is made up of just four notes.  The musical opening of “Blowing in the Wind” is made up of the same four notes in the same order BUT the rhythm, speed and indeed feel of those notes is completely different.  To say one comes from the other is rather like saying that everyone who ever said “I don’t love you” said it with the same meaning.  Those words can be said in anger or in sorrow or in deesperation or with a throwaway carelessness or even to emphasise something even more powerful than love.

In short, there is some link between “Auction Block” and “Blowing in the Wind,” but it is the same sort of link that can be found between characters in two different novels saying “I love you.”  The words are the same but most likely the situation, the feeling, the emotions, the reaction, the volume, the speed – in short everything – is different.

We might also in passing note that “Blowin’ in the Wind” didn’t actually become famous because of Dylan’s version but because of the version of Peter Paul and Mary and I would argue that their version which emphasises tenderness and love, makes this a different song from Dylan’s own album version which to me at least, emphasises despair.

So where does “Blowing in the Wind” come from?  No, for me, not from “No More Auction Block” but somewhere completely different entirely.  I think Bob laid us a false trail.  He might have been listening to “Auction Block” but I think the amount of impact that song had on “Blowin'” is minute.

• The utterly brilliant Angelina, plus Maybe Someday, Under you spell
• The album title songs Dylan wrote and ignored: JWH, Nashville Skyline.
• The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles
• No time, time passes and Dirge

By Tony Attwood

Four songs from “World Gone Wrong” have never been performed by Dylan (according to the official site): Love Henry, Stack a Lee and Broke Down Engine.

The reason is probably because of the simplicity and repetitiveness of the song.  It consists of seven musical identical verses, in which the first two lines are varied and then the last three lines are repeated from verse to verse, as in…

Strange things have happened, like never before.
My baby told me I would have to go.
I can't be good no more, once like I did before.
I can't be good, baby,
Honey, because the world's gone wrong.

But what makes the song so worth hearing is the guitar part, which shows Bob at his finest as an acoustic guitarist.  It’s worth a listen just for that.

However as we know, audiences at Bob concerts are no longer respectfully quiet as they were in the early days, so the song’s chance has long since passed.  Which is a shame because Bob’s guitar accompaniment really is something to hear.

And there is another point here, that is who wrote the song (the increasingly bonkers AI Overview has no doubt telling us “Bob Dylan is the composer of the song “World Gone Wrong”.   And to be fair, There is an implication in some places that Bob wrote this but in fact it dates back to the 1930s.

BB King recorded it too, but there is no doubt the Sheikhs got there first.

Maybe Bob just didn’t feel it could carry off such a repetitive piece on stage, or maybe someone with a bit of copyright knowledge suggested that playing it regularly on stage might just alert someone that some copyright acknowledgement might be due, or indeed some payment.  And it is not as if America was not alert to copyright by the time the song was first recorded.  The first Copyright Act in the US was passed in 1831.

But whatever the reason Bob didn’t go further with the song.  Having recorded it and given the song’s name to the album itself, that was that.

But lest we think all of Bob’s decisions about not performing his own songs are just weird, or petulant or crazy, I want to divert into a song from the Bootleg 1-3 that Bob didn’t play live, and in my view quite rightfully so.

It is She’s Your Lover Now, and it would be good to say that this was an early version of “Like a Rolling Stone” but this was recorded and I think written, after “Like a Rolling Stone.”   It sounds to me very much like an attempt to copy “Rolling Stone” and have another piece with all the merit of “Rolling Stone” – and failing.

Maybe you like that, but I really can’t find anything good in it.

That was on Bootleg 1-3, as was my final unperformed Dylan song for today, which I find an absolute and utter masterpiece “Foot of Pride”.  It turned up on Bootleg Series 1-3, and it’s a good piece there, but I never marked it out for special admiration until I heard this.

And watching it is even more remarkable as Lou appears to me to be reading the lyrics off the monitor.

I don’t know about other covers of this, but then I haven’t really looked, but the main point for this little series is that Bob wrote (in my view) an utter masterpiece, and simply never performed it.  Maybe when he made the recording that turned up on the volume 1-3 Bootleg, he knew there was far more to come from this song.

But fortunately, Lou was out there and performed it, and who cares if he was reading the lyrics on the monitor?  It’s a brilliant way of representing the tedium and repetitiveness of life, and everyone trying to fight their way through, without ever going anywhere, without boring us senseless.

By Tony Attwood

Bob Dylan is of course one of those people who works in multiple fields of the arts. Here, we primarily know him as a composer and writer of lyrics. And I guess those of who have a tendency to focus on his work in songwriting can easily forget just how masterful he is with visual art.

Yet with a quick look at Dylan’s work in the Halcyon Gallery, you cannot but be impressed by both the quality and the beauty of his work. And of course, Bob’s artwork as with his lyrics and music can bring forth a feeling of “if only I could do that….”

This is a thought that has occupied me for much of my working life in the creative arts. Obviously not at anything remotely like Bob’s level, but still doing my best and earning some money along the way.

But I have been left with that constant feeling concerning visual art that if only I had the ability with paint that artists have, I might find I had something to say, visually. And so it has been for all my life, until now. But I’ve just found that there are tools like the ai art generator which are designed to help artists and marketers create stunning visuals with ease. Which is exactly what I need.

For the simple fact is that when you need an image that’s hard to find, such as anything from a watercolour floral background to a vibrant poster there is a way of getting it.

Of course you might well know the answer already, and maybe I’ve been rather slow in finding the solution, but the solution is simple. For now, I can type in a prompt describing the sort of artwork I want, and the Generate image tool does it for me.

The solution is the Adobe Express AI art generator. You just type a prompt describing the artwork you envision and the Generate image tool does it. If you want to see Bob’s work first of course you can – take a look at his art website.

And after that you can type new images into existence with the AI art generator.

Indeed if you do follow this route, and create something Dylan-related which you feel you would like to have reach a wider audience, by all means make send me a digital copy, and I’ll try and fit it into Untold Dylan. With an acknowledgement to you, of course.

By Tony Attwood

One of the great advantages that we have as a result of Mike Johnson’s astonishing work both on the Never Ending Tour and on Dylan the harmonica player (there’s an index to those articles at the end of the final article), is that we have available on this site a huge range of recordings, and it is but a matter of moments to find the earliest, “Tangled Up in Blue” live performance, and then the last.

But then when I decided to put these two recordings together I didn’t really know what I would find.   Indeed I heard from the 1984 recording didn’t really surprise me too much….  Its a good bit of modern rock ‘n’ roll.

But it made me want to remind myself of how all this started, so I want to remind you of the original version – not least because for me, playing multiple versions of this song, I can lose track of where we are….  And it is still a very beautiful recording, and even before noteworthy because since the song was released in 1975, according to the official site, it has sine been played 1685 times in public by Bob and the band.

1975

In 1975 it was being performed as a solo song: Dylan with an acoustic guitar.  He is in a lower key (one tone lower I think on just listening to these, rather than sitting down and playing along) but the speed has significantly changed.

1976

By 1976 we had an electric version, and this is not just a little bit of extra instrumentation – this is a new version with new implications: just listen to what happens at the end of the verse around 2’20”.

Now this is such a huge transformation from the original I am wondering what Bob was doing.  Was this a case of finding a new meaning in the song that demanded a hard rock version, or was this more a case of “OK guys let’s try it as a belter.”

And is there a particular reason for the “One day the axe just fell” verse being slowed right down?   Maybe the line about “The past was close behind” was on his mind.  Or was it just a case of saying “Let’s play it as fast as possible and see what happens,” but feeling a break was needed somewhere?

In short, does the change of tempo signify or symbolise anything?   Is it a piece of utterly inspired artistic insight?   Or really just a case of “let’s see what happens if we do it this way.”

The constant change of tempo and style suggests the lady in question is just flitting from one lifestyle to another, and the singer is trailing behind her.  Does the slow beat really suit, “Then he started into dealing with slaves And something inside of him died.”?  Maybe; I’m not sure.

Indeed does the change of tempo then signify that no matter what she does, he is still tangled?  I’m sorry I don’t have any answers, but just the suspicion that Bob said, “Let’s try this” and so they did.  (He is after all the boss).   And maybe he then decided, actually no, that’s just an effect for effect’s sake, which is the view I’ve got.  But maybe not.

1984

Certainly in the next decade, the song became much more recognisable for those of us who have played the album over and over.  The length is back down to five minutes, a little shorter than the original.

And that rather trivial thought about length then took me back to the origins, and I found that although I played the LP version just about an hour ago as I started to put this article together and listen to the various versions of Tangled that I have, going back to the original at this point really was a bit of a shock.

But it was time to move on to the latter stages of the 1,685 performances which finished in August 2018.  First the penultimate year… which is the last recording we have of the song from Mike’s amazing collection of the Never Ending Tour series.   This comes from the NET article, 2017 part 1. Songs on the rebound.   And even though I read and indeed published the whole series, coming back to this, was still a bit of a shock…

   2017

2018

But Bob did continue with the song and this recording does come from the final year.  The 2017 approach is continued, but Bob has changed his vocal part further.    Howver this was a far as he could go it seems, for in August 2018, “Tangled” was wrapped up for the last time.

But really what a journey.   And if you still have a moment and the inclination, you might try this little experiment, having played this final live version just pop back to the top of the article and play the album version again.   I can say I couldn’t possibly imagine where this song might go when I first heard it.  But to be fair, I doubt that Bob had any inclination that he would still be performing the song live on stage 43 years later.

But if this is not enough for you, please do visit “Tangled up in Harmonicas, Part 2” where you will hear what Mike describes as “the greatest ever version” of this extraordinary and brilliant song.

And who am I to disagree?

Elsewhere in Bob’s Transformations…

• Things have changed – or is he just having a laugh?
• Dylan’s complete transformation of “All I really want to do”
• Once or Twice: The Transformation of “Blood in My Eyes”
• Lay Lady Lay: Three Bob Dylan transformations of his song & a look at the meanings.

To find us on Facebook just type into your search engine “Facebook Untold Dylan

For an index of our latest series, and some of the older ones click here.

by Jochen Markhorst

XIV      What was I to say? Hurry up, asshole?

“Che soddisfazione essere scelti da Bob Dylan, How satisfying it is to be chosen by Bob Dylan,” is the headline above a short news item in La Stampa, 24 July 2003. The article then reports that “Come una pietra scalciata” by Italian hip-hoppers Articolo 31, their reworking of “Like A Rolling Stone” on the 1998 album Nessuno, “è stata scelta dallo stesso musicista di Duluth, has been chosen by the Duluth musician himself” for inclusion on the soundtrack of Dylan’s movie Masked And Anonymous.

Remarkable enough to ask further questions, which is what La Stampa does to frontman J-Ax. Not too deep, but Alessandro “J-Ax” Aleotti’s answer is intriguing. I had just written a lyric about the decline of a spoiled brat, he tells (la storia di una ragazza-cigno che torna ad essere brutto anatroccolo perché vive senza valori, as Alessandro poetically summarises it, “the story of a girl-swan who turns into an ugly duckling because she lives without values”), when our manager came to tell us that we had the chance to cover “Like A Rolling Stone”. The story of that song is practically the same as the lyrics J-Ax had just written, so that opportunity – after a few minor tweaks – was quickly seized.

Articolo 31 – Come una pietra scalciata:

It made little impression at the time, in 1998, apart from the predictable outrage among rabid Italian Dylan fans. But then out of the blue, two days before Christmas 1999, comes a phone call from Dylan’s management: whether they could use Articolo’s cover in a film. “We thought it was for a documentary and immediately gave permission,” he says.

In his autobiography (Imperfetta forma, 2016), the matter comes up again, of course, and here J-Ax tells it a little differently and with more detail. The very first step is particularly noteworthy:

“We got a call from Bob Dylan’s record company. They said all his songs were available to be sampled at will. We chose “Like a rolling stone “, his most famous song, mainly because it was the only (or almost the only) song we knew.”

So the initiative really seems to come from New York. Yet things still almost go wrong: before Articolo 31 can release the cover, they still need the Master’s approval. Which just doesn’t come. The release date is getting closer, and discouraged, the men are already adjusting the tracklist of the upcoming album Nessuno and moving “Come una pietra scalciata” to the bin. “Ma che gli vuoi dire a uno dei più grandi poeti del Novecento? Sbrigati, stronzo? – What was I to say to one of the greatest poets of the 20th century? Hurry up, asshole?” No, you wait and then say thank you for allowing me to wait. Patience is rewarded: one day before the album is due to be pressed, permission arrives from New York.

Why Dylan and/or his management made that sample offer, we don’t know. Articolo 31 was Italy’s best-known hip-hop group at the time – their 1996 album Così com’è was a huge hit, and to this day it is the best-selling hip-hop album in Italy – perhaps the investment firm General Dylan Dynamics Inc. felt they were not selling enough records in Italy and were looking for a key to open up that market.

Indeed, like France, Italy has the reputation of being a difficult market for English-language artists. By comparison, Dylan’s then recent album, the late masterpiece Time Out Of Mind, sells about 60,000 copies in both France and Italy. In the UK, with even slightly less population than both countries, the album sells three times more copies. While Germany has more inhabitants (about 80 million versus about 60 million in France and 60 million in Italy), it sells relatively much more than its neighbours on the other side of the Alps: 150,000 units, 150% more for a 33% bigger market. So manager Jeff Rosen may have made a marketing-driven assessment and then made his phone call to Italy’s most popular hip-hop group.

Strictly speaking, it is not a cover. The band samples a few fragments and leaves the chorus intact; we hear Dylan singing how does it feel, embellished with an Italian female chorus. The lyrics do indeed have the same plot and a similar protagonist, but nothing more: “Eri la più carina, un’eterna Miss Liceo, You were the prettiest, an eternal Miss High School,” J-Ax opens, then paints the arrogant socialite, the cruel and unapproachable Queen Bee who has nothing to offer but exterior and outward appearance, and judges only thereon at that.

As with Dylan’s Miss Lonely, things go wrong. Miss Liceo marries the handsomest douche bag in June, in September she makes her first acquaintance with his fists. Her father goes bankrupt, and then things move rapidly towards the gutter. By the end, there is nothing left of her haughtiness and she shares Miss Lonely’s fate:

Ora che sei una parte del mondo che ignoravi
Sei diventata una di quelle pietre che scalciavi

Now you yourself are part of the world you ignored back then
You yourself have become one of those rolling stones

The real Italian cover is more than 30 years older. In 1966, Gianni Pettenati scored his first hit with The Juniors: “Come una pietra che rotola”, the version that for most Italians is the first introduction to “Like A Rolling Stone”. It is a stripped-down, simplified translation of Dylan’s masterpiece. The revenge fantasy is retained, so is the object, but all colour (Miss Lonely, the Siamese cat, the diplomat, the jugglers and so on) has been erased – what remains are four fairly similar couplets. Such as:

E come guardavi tu
chi viveva un po’ più giù.
D’ora in poi, tu guarderai, tu guarderai dal fondo in sù
Ora stendi la mano, chiedi pietà.

And how you looked down at
Those who lived a little lower.
From now on, you will look, you will look from the bottom up
Now stretch out your hand, beg for mercy.

Gianni Pettenati & The Juniors – Come una pietra che rotola:

Nor can performance and The Juniors’ musical support stand in the shadow of the original. Legendary beat band The Wretched does it better. The men from Vittorio Veneto take the translation used by Pettenati and record, also in 1966, a very nice cover for the B-side of their flopped single “La mia preghiera”. It made no waves at the time, but over the years it has been used in documentaries, appeared on compilation albums and received increasing airplay – thanks to the magical powers of nostalgia, the B-side is now considered a classic. And thanks to that organ, of course. And because how does it feel simply sounds better in Italian:

Come si stà, ma come si stà
a far la pietra che
sta rotolando giù,
come stai facendo tu

The Wretched – Come Una Pietra Che Rotola:

… as everything sounds better in Italian. We are still waiting for one of the true grandmasters though. For Francesco De Gregori or for a posthumous discovery of a Fabrizio De André recording. Unlikely. But one can dream.

———

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 15: “I had no idea what the hell he was singing about”

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

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

By Mike Johnson

[I read somewhere once that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the second article on the third track, ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance in the link at the end of this article.  But in case you missed the first part of It’s All Right Ma is here…

We’ve already covered tracks one and two in some depth, and links to all those articles are at the end of this piece.  Meanwhile this is second episode of It’s all right ma, and you can read part one of this section here…

It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – A History in Performance, Part 1

———-

‘All in all it can only fall
with a crushing but meaningless blow’

You can find these lines, of course, in ‘Gates of Eden,’ the song that precedes ‘It’s All Right, Ma’ on the album but they could easily have occurred in that song as the sense of impending doom hangs over both songs. However, to my mind, the true precursor to ‘It’s All Right, Ma’ can be found in ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,’ a poem that Dylan, in a rare moment, read aloud to a lucky audience in April 1963.

As with the song, images flash by in a bewildering hurdy-gurdy. No sacred cow is safe from Dylan’s slashing wit, no crime against the spirit escapes his condemnation. Rank materialism comes under a bombardment of images. The poem is about encountering those ‘stuffed graveyards and false gods’ the song confronts.

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

And, as with the song, the fight for personal autonomy is forefront:

You need something to open up a new door
To show you something you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more
You need something to open your eyes
You need something to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that yer standing, that space that you're sitting
That the world ain't got you beat

Both poem and song celebrate a hard-won resilience and a fierce sense of personal autonomy. They signal resistance, a very live and active bullshit detector, a refusal to be a part of any group-think. It helps us chart our way through the chaos of opinions, those places for lost minds we nowadays call rabbit holes. You may lose yourself, but you have to reappear. That’s the trick of it:

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, ensure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to

You won’t find a more forceful declaration of personal autonomy than that.

In the previous article we noted that tempo is all-important with this song. Dylan often delivers it at breakneck speed and that seems to suit the song. No time for pause or reflection. The song is like a shower of shooting stars and, in the 1974 performances, it comes across as a howl of pain, but still at breakneck speed.

After being performed regularly in 1974, some forty times, it almost disappears in the first year of the Rolling Thunder tour in 1975, when it was performed only once. I suspect that it was pushed aside by all the new songs from Blood On The Tracks and the even newer songs that would shortly appear on Desire.

That single 1975 performance is, however, a beauty, delivered with the quivering intensity that marks Dylan’s performances in that year, arguably one of his best ever performance years. Interestingly, he slows it down, doesn’t howl it out as in 1974, but finds a new balance between restraint and forthrightness. (Providence, Nov 4^th)

1975

The song was only performed four times in 1976, a year marked generally by a harder edged sound than 1975. We have a great soundboard recording from Mobile, April 29^th, (evening performance) the last for that year. Again, the tempo is slower, and we note a melodic variation in the vocal as Dylan seeks new ways to deliver the song.

1976 Evening

By the time we get to the 1978 big band tour, the song has fully reestablished itself in the setlist and is regularly performed. For the first time we find a major revamping of the song as it moves from a solo acoustic performance to a big, big band production, Dylan’s first, and successful attempt to turn it into a rock song. In the following years Dylan would return to the acoustic roots of the song, and not everybody likes the bombastic feel of the 1978 version, but I like it because it swings. You can get up and dance to it. And the lyrics have lost none of their sting. Here it is from the famous Budokan concert at the beginning of the tour in February.

1978 Nippon Budokan Hall, Tokyo

But that is not necessarily the best performance. For my money, some of the greatest 1978 concerts can be found at the end of year, the American leg of the tour. As a contrast to Budokan, try this one from Charlotte, Dec 10^th.

1978 Charlotte Dec 10 1978

The feel here is looser, more frenetic and ecstatic. The audience too seem to be in a state of high excitement. The whole atmosphere is a lot buzzier than Budokan.

The song was dropped in 1979, which was dedicated to the new crop of gospel songs, and only began to creep back at the end of 1980 with two performances, both in Portland in December. This one’s from Dec 3^rd and sounds like a solo acoustic performance, greeted ecstatically by the audience. Many Dylan fans had had their fill of preacher Bob with his tub-thumping Christian songs and joyfully greeted the reappearance of their old, protest Bob, perhaps not realizing how well the song fitted with the new Christian Dylan, its moral denunciation of the fallen world in which ‘not much is really sacred.’ Indeed, listening to the song in this setting makes us wonder if this upsurge of gospel songs wasn’t a throwback to the years of the apparent moral certainty of the old ‘protest’ Dylan, before the realisation that things are not so black and white, a realisation expressed in ‘My Back Pages’ in 1964. Maybe these Christian songs are another kind of protest song.

Whatever, Dylan too sounds happy to have rediscovered the song after a couple of years break, and it sounds fresh and vibrant. He’s picked up the pace again, the song races along, and Dylan is in wonderful voice. 1980/81 are peak years for Dylan’s vocals. Everybody’s in a state of high excitement. A wonderful performance.

1980 Portland

In 1981, the last year of the gospel concerts we find over twenty performances of the song, scintillating, rapid-fire performances that are hard to beat. There’s something of a hysterical edge to Dylan’s 1981 concerts which makes them outstanding. Although they’re pretty similar, I’ve chosen two recordings from 1981 (sorry, no dates for either of them), if only because it’s one of my favourite years for live Dylan. He’s never sounded better, and maybe will never sound as good again.

If anything, he pushes the song along even faster than in 1980, or indeed any previous performance. The images race by, but Dylan never loses control. He’s right on top of the song. And the guitars (I think there are two acoustic guitars going for it here) set a hectic pace. Wow! is all I can say. What a blast!

1981

And again in 1981

In the next article I’ll be jumping to 1984.

In the meantime, don’t fall for ‘pettiness which plays so rough’ and stay with it.

A: Tambourine Man

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

B: Gates of Eden

• Part 1: 1964 Ancestral voices prophesying war
• Part 2: 1974 – 1991 A crashing but meaningless blow
• Part 3: 1991 – 2001. Where Babies Wail: A Spooky Grandeur

C: It’s alright ma

• Part 1: It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – A History in Performance.

• The album title songs Dylan wrote and ignored: JWH, Nashville Skyline.
• The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles
• No time, time passes and Dirge

A consideration of “Maybe Someday”, “Under your spell,” “Farewell Angelina” and that most brilliant of Dylan compositions “Angelina”.

By Tony Attwood

“Maybe Someday” is listed as a Dylan composition, and it is one that has never been covered.  Some may argue that this is because it is, in itself, a weak song, although Bob considered it strong enough to put on the Knocked Out Loaded album.

But there has been at least one cover version although I must admit I don’t like it.  But I liked to keep things complete, and maybe you’ll find more in it than I can.

But a combination of only one cover and many people saying they don’t like the original probably gives us a clear indication of the problem with this song.

However there is yet another problem – the song by Dylan is based on a song by Sleepy John Estes.

And still you may ask (if you are still with me) “where is all this going?”   Well, as you still here, I will tell you.  A couple of months back “Far Out” magazine published an article “‘Angelina’: the darkest lyrics of Bob Dylan?” which opens with the lines, “Blending surrealism with religious imagery and Biblical references, ‘Angelina’ features some of Dylan’s most brooding lyrical ideas, as he seems overawed by a scent of impending doom. The identity of the song’s subject is much debated, with some arguing that Angelina could be a planet or a country, or indeed a woman. What feels clearer, though, is the cloud of darkness that hangs over the writer, an unusual characteristic among Dylan’s wider lyrical reflections.”

And yes of course these lines pepper the song – and maybe that is what puts performers off this magical compositon.   Perhaps the world is not ready for “I see pieces of men marching, trying to take Heaven by force,” although being an atheist myself,I love that line.  (Besides, people who believe have millions of songs, people who don’t believe are a bit starved of music that expresses their point of view, as I see it).

But the reviewer and I concur in the end, for after considering the darkness of the images the reviewer says, “One thing is for sure, though, ‘Angelina’ is a devilishly good song.”   And with that, I can agree.

————————

by Jürg Lehmann

A list of previous articles on other songs in the “Covers we Missed” series is given at the end.  The blue links in the article will also take you to recordings and further information.

• Boots of Spanish Leather (part 1)
• Boots of Spanish Leather (part 2)

If you have ever been a bit interested in Dylan covers, you may have come across Juliana Richer Daily’s memorable performance of Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. For Spanish Boots she teamed up with Trevor Willmott in 2013 to perform a duet in perfect harmony. Both Trevor and Juliana are very discreet persons; there is not much to be found about them on the internet. Juliana seems to reside in Nashville, where she works in an architecture firm. She has released an album (Slow Love) in 2014, which is available on bandcamp.

The Lumineers are an American alternative folk band based in Denver, Colorado. The founding members are Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites. Schultz and Fraites began writing and performing together in New Jersey, in 2005. ‘The Lumineers’ struggled to find success in New York according to Schultz, who said, I was living in Brooklyn and working three jobs just to pay the rent, adding, it was really infuriating to move to a city that would help us grow musically, but then never have any time to work on music. So I decided to do something about it.

In 2009, Fraites and Schultz, in their ignorance and naïveté, moved to Denver, Colorado, and joined the open mic scene. ‘The Lumineers’ emerged as one of the most popular folk-rock/Americana, their popularity growing in the 2010s. They are known for their energetic live shows and several international hit singles, including Ho Hey, Stubborn Love and Cleopatra.

Wesley Schultz has been involved with Dylan throughout his entire career. With ‘The Lumineers’ he regularly performs Subterranean Homesick Blues. As a solo project, he covered Boots of Spanish Leather in 2016. Four years later, he returned to the song, this time as a duet with Diana DeMuth. Their cover was released on the album Vignettes (2020) and as a lyrical video.

More fine covers from the 2010s that are definitely worth a listen to are Amos Lee & The Forest Rangers (2015) soundtrack of the drama series Sons of Anarchy; Bill Janovitz (2019), Bluestain (2019), Ciaran Tourish (2019) and Sam Varlov (2019).

The North Carolina-based duo Mandolin Orange – now known as Watchhouse – approach Boots of Spanish Leather from the profound angle of it being a true duet, a kind of call-and-response, between two singers, a man and his woman, both with their own stories to tell, in their own distinct voices.

The young couple, Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz, play an understated guitar and fiddle, respectively, slowing the pace and lowering the pitch to bring forth the bittersweet tenor of the song. ‘Mandolin Orange’ has garnered rave reviews for their performance. Yes, they really are communicating, writes Tony Attwood. What’s more, they resist the temptation to bring the strings in too early.  But when it comes in, it is perfect, as is the final harmony. What could have been a simplistic idea of two instruments and two singers, becomes a rendition that makes me learn the song afresh. 

The praise for Mandolin’s excellent rendition is fully justified, but it is also true, that Marlin’s voice can be a potential turn-off for some. In the end it comes down to personal taste again. If you like to get more familiar with Mandolin Orange, you can treat yourself to a copy of their album  Blindfaller from 2016, or Tides of a Teardrop (2019).

Should you not have found your favourite cover yet with the ‘Mandolin Orang’e version, you can try it with Flagstaff couple Kyle and Gretta Miller. Under their band name Tow’rs, they released a single in 2021. Their Boots of Spanish Leather is also a classic duet with restrained vocals and instrumentations, thus emphasising the desperation and wistfulness that Dylan brought to the tale.

By the end of 2024 Montreal’s Half Moon Run put an atmospheric spin on Spanish Boots. Behind the seemingly simple presentation of the song is a rather refined arrangement including a discerning picking pattern. I’m never tire of hearing this song, says band member Conner Molander. It has that sense of wistful longing that characterizes many Half Moon Run songs – listening, our hearts open up, pondering some lost love beyond the horizon.

 In jazz Jewels&Binoculars took on Boots of Spanish Leather on the first of their three outstanding Dylan albums, The Music of Bob Dylan, 2003 (the song starts at around 4.20).

 Janet Planet covered it on her Bob Dylan Songbook in 2010, and as a big band version on Just Like a Woman in 2015.

Castell Collection is another secretive band that leaves no traces on the internet (the singer’s slight accent could hint at Germany, but the publisher is Sony / ATV Music Scandinavia). There’s no need for them to keep it under wraps, their album Yet Another Side from 2016 includes Boots of Spanish Leather  and some other very good Dylan covers, such as Sweetheart Like You.

Mark Murphy (not to be confused with the great American jazz singer of the same name, who died in 2015) included a re-imagined Boots on his debut album in 2016. Fans of smooth, intimate jazz with a Latin touch will get their money’s worth.

They will also like the version of Brooklyn-based saxophonist Noah Preminger. Preminger, born in 1985, has recorded some twenty critically acclaimed albums as a band-leader and is a two time winner of Downbeat Magazine’s ‘Rising Star Best Tenor Saxophonist’. His 2016 album Some Other Time ,which also includes Boots of Spanish Leather, successfully combines the best of improvisation with the romantic gestures that ground these compositions (Downbeat). And the New York Times is certain, that Mr. Preminger designs a different kind of sound for each note, an individual destiny and story.

Boots of Spanish Leather is very popular with YouTubers, many of whom, especially young ones, are attracted to the song and try to make it their own. Some of them do it really well, they would have deserved a large audience.

Kiersten Holine (2012), Brandon Wallace&Sean-Marie Hart (2012), Aubrey Wood (2015), Kelly Oliver (2016)

Kina Grannis (2017), Townsend (2017), Adelaide Spitz&Will Daughtridge (2019), Julianne Barredo (2021), Christina Eltrevoog (2021).

Elsewhere in the “Covers we missed” series…

• Abandoned Love
• Ain’t Talkin (Le feu Au Coeur)
• All along the Watchtower
• All I really want to do.
• All the Tired Horses
• As I Went Out One Morning
• Baby, Stop Crying
• Ballad of a Thin Man
• Ballad of Hollis Brown
• Beyond the Horizon
•  Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
• Billy and To Fall in Love With You
• Black Crow Blues (and a version you won’t believe)
• Blind Willie McTell – Part One
• Blind Willie McTell part 2
• Blind Willie McTell – Part 3
• Blowing in the Wind Part one
• Blowing in the Wind Part two: from the 70s onwards
• Blowing in the Wind Part three: The interpretations