Untold Dylan

(Editor’s note, we’ve had to replace one video on this page, and the version added is set by the originator to play immediately this page is open.  To stop the soundtrack please scroll down to Liverpool 1965 and click on it.)

1964 – 74 – From the fool’s gold mouthpiece

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 first article on the third track, ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series at the end of this article.

In these previous articles in this series, and in my Never Ending Tour series, I have argued that there is a greater continuity in Dylan’s early work, up to 1966 anyway, than is suggested by the narrative that Dylan abandoned ‘protest songs’ in favour of ‘surreal songs’ when he switched from an acoustic to an electric sound. This narrative is too simplistic. To my mind, the spirit of protest, while it might have changed in focus, was just as strong in the later work.

Dylan’s songs may have become deeper and more wide-ranging (although even that is arguable) but were driven by the same moral outrage from ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ in 1963 to ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’ in 1966. Indeed, we could argue that the whole of Dylan’s oeuvre has been driven by that moral outrage. It has just taken different forms in different periods. Try ‘Foot of Pride’ (1984), an angry protest song if ever I heard one.

‘I am the enemy of the unlived, meaningless life,’ he sings in ‘False Prophet,’ written in 2020. If we want to know what he means by that, we can’t do better than return to ‘It’s All Right Ma’,  written in 1964, which is, I maintained in my NET series, a sweeping denunciation of all things false and phoney, and may well be the greatest of Dylan’s protest songs. The song is about the ‘unlived, meaningless life.’

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phoney

When ‘all is phoney’ the search becomes for the real and the true – ‘what else can you show me?’ Unfortunately the real and true don’t exist this side of the gates of Eden.

It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

This tour-de-force of a song dominates not just the second side of Bringing It All Back Home, but the whole album, possibly Dylan’s whole output up to that date. Only ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall’ and ‘Chimes of Freedom’ come close to it in depth and breadth and sheer length. ‘It’s All Right, Ma’ is one of Dylan’s long songs. ‘Hard Rain’ is framed as a narrative, highly traditional in structure, while ‘Chimes’ is also a narrative that uses the device of a storm, lightning and thunder, to present the real and the true as revelation. ‘It’s All Right, Ma’ eschews such devices and comes straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, Dylan in full Jeremiah mode. I don’t evoke this prophet lightly. It’s worth recalling that Jeremiah railed against idolatry, social injustices, and moral decay, which is precisely the territory of ‘It’s All Right, Ma.’ He doesn’t need a narrator.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

If you want to see the song in terms of the standard narrative, which would see Bringing It All Back Home as a transitional album, catching Dylan as he pivots away from protest, then it might be taken as a final broadside, a final burst of invective against the godless materialism that rules the modern world, the protest song to end all protest songs, with all the previous protest songs building up to this one. Going out with a bang. Tempting as this picture is, it’s not quite true. There will be further broadsides and bursts of invective, and godless materialism will never be too far from Dylan’s sights.

Dylan is apparently aware of the importance of the song. He stuck with it until 2013, performing it, to date, 722 times, seeking a variety of musical expressions for it, but never tinkering with the lyrics, the way he has done with other songs.

As with ‘Gates of Eden,’ the best place to start is with that seminal concert on Oct 31^st, 1964 at the Philharmonic Hall, New York City (The Bootleg Series Vol 6). Note the tempo, which is medium, not as fast as he will do it in 1965, and the hypnotic bending of his voice at the end of each line, drawing our attention to the rhyme. We can hear the master rhymester at work. A beautifully clear recording.

1964 Philharmonic

I found this next one undated in my archives. It sounds to me like 1964 but could be 1965. A reader might be able to identify this from the opening comments by what sounds like a folk club intro. I notice that Dylan gives the title as ‘It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Sighing)’ and that he’s accompanied at least by one other guitar. This sounds to me like a very early experiment with ‘going electric.’ The tempo has picked up a little from the Philharmonic performance.

For the album version, Dylan picked up the pace again. Now he was rapping out the lyrics at a mind-bending speed. It’s difficult now to convey the stunning effect of this song when it first appeared. I remember as an eighteen year old, with friends, clustered around a crappy old portable record player on full volume, staring at each other in astonishment – what the hell was this? There were no lyric sheets. We just had to figure it out, if we could keep up. We played it again and again. It was incomprehensible and hypnotic.

In retrospect, we can see Dylan as the grandfather of rap, or hip-hop. It’s most obvious in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ but it’s here in this stunning 1965 performance. This could be as good as it gets, folks, it depends on how you view later manifestations of the song. And how fortunate that we have this video, shot in stark black and white, as a record of that performance. (May 1, 1965 Liverpool)

1965 Liverpool

It is the effect created by the flat, almost inflectionless vocal delivery and the driving rhythm that drives the song. Tempo is all important here, and we could argue that in 1965 Dylan got the mix just right, and that the slower, more deliberate rock versions we later find in the NET lose the momentum of the song.

But I get ahead of myself, let’s stay in 1965 for one more of the six wonderful performances of the song in that year. This one’s from Sheffield, April 30^th, or at least that’s the date on the  Live 1962-1966 – Rare Performances From The Copyright Collections (2018) collection. One of the YouTube comments however claims that the recording is really from Newcastle, May 6^th.

1965 Sheffield

Dylan did not perform it in 1966, and it would be 1974 before he brought it back to the stage again, the song now ten years old.

For many of us, Dylan’s howling 1974 delivery brought the song back into focus after the ten-year break. We’d never heard it like this before. Gone was the flat, rapid-fire vocal delivery of 1965. He kept the fast tempo, in fact he increased the tempo to a manic rush, knocking nearly a minute off the performance time, but rather than the suppressed emotion of the earlier versions, we get an amped-up emotional delivery, a caterwaul of outrage and anger. Deciding which of these two approaches you prefer to listen to might depend on your mood. The sharp, restrained intensity of 1964 versus the unrestrained roller-coaster ride of 1974. ‘I have to stop listening, I feel sick,’ one YouTuber comments. I can understand that. The performance takes us to the vertiginous edge, listening to it a giddying experience. Not everybody likes what they see as Dylan’s ‘shouting’ 1974 performances.

This first is the performance from Before the Flood, at Los Angeles, February 14^th.

1974 Los Angeles

That wasn’t the only stand-out performance of that year, but none of them surpass the Los Angeles version. We’ll move on 1975, the first year of the Rolling Thunder tour, in the next article.

In the meantime, don’t let them get you down.

Kia Ora

Covers of Boots of Spanish Leather

by Jürg Lehmann

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

There is a vast number of covers of this song, many of them are beautifully presented and exquisitely executed. Most of the arrangements are characterised by their simplicity and restraint. Which is the best and most beautiful therefore depends very much on personal taste.

Shortly after the release, several of the usual suspects jumped on the bandwagon. Linda Mason in 1964, The Silkie and Dorinda Duncan in 1965, Richie Havens and Joan Baez in 1968, Dan McCafferty in 1975.

 In the 90s the song had finally crossed that lonesome ocean. Valerio Billeri, singer-songwriter from Rome, with more than 10 albums to his credit, is passionate about folk, rock and blues music, his repertoire ranges from ballads à la Fabrizio De André to Nick Cave. His compositions mix different influences, ranging from Mediterranean folk sounds to American folk music, including delta blues, while also absorbing suggestions from northern Europe. Today, Billeri specialises in demanding productions, including soundtracks with texts by Italian poets. Boots of Spanish Leather from 1991 was one of his first recordings.

From the gentle Mediterranean sounds of Valerio Billeri to the Irish Dubliners, the leap could hardly be greater. The Dubliners formed in 1962, and they soon were regulars on the folk scenes in both Dublin and London in the early ‘60s. The line-up saw many changes in personnel over their fifty-year career, but the group’s success was centred on lead singers Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew. The Dubliners became well known, not just in Ireland, but also as pioneers for Irish folk in Europe and (though less successful) in the United States. They influenced many generations of Irish bands and their legacy can to this day be heard in the music of artists such as The Pogues. They also gained popularity amongst famous musicians such as Dylan, Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, who were all self-proclaimed Dubliners fans. Boots of Spanish Leather is from the 1992 double album 30 Years A-Greying.

Nanci Griffith performed Boots of Spanish Leather with Carolyn Hester at Dylan’s star-studded 30th Anniversary Concert in 1992. He liked it enough to add his own harmonica to Griffith’s studio version, released the next year on her signature covers record Other Voices, Other Rooms. Griffith plays ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ completely straight, laying bare the song’s heartbreak and agony by letting the song speak for itself, praises the Rolling Stone magazine.

 Ida is an American indie rock band from New York City. They are known for their sparse, minimal, often quiet arrangements, but there are also avant-garde and experimental aspects to their sound. The band began in 1991, and their second album, 1996’s I Know About You, received much critical acclaim from the independent music press. Ida’s touring earned them a devoted following of listeners, and the attention of both the press and major labels. In 1998 they contributed their Boots of Spanish Leather cover to the Sister Ruby tribute album The Times They Are a-Changin’. Ida have released around a dozen albums before they unofficially went on hiatus in 2010, having never played live since, but reformed in 2023 for a show in Los Angeles.

Renowned Australian folksingers Ruth Hazleton&Kate Burke came up with one the first duets of Boots of Spanish Leather in 2000, what actually seems appropriate for this song. Unfortunately, the two female voices are almost indistinguishable from each other, which detracts considerably from the effect.

During his long career, English guitarist and folk singer Martin Simpson has repeatedly recorded Dylan songs. Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather was released in 2001 on A Nod to Bob: An Artists’ Tribute to Bob Dylan on His 60th Birthday, an album with an array of great covers. Simpson talked about his Spanish Boots version in an interview with Tradfolk magazine for his 70th birthday:

That’s one of my favourite arrangements I ever did in my entire life. I learned that song when I was 15, probably, and I sang it and played it like Dylan. The way Dylan used the guitar on that was old-fashioned, kind of thumb and fingers kind of picking – beautifully done, lovely chordal harmonisation and stuff – but when I arranged this I was going through a period during which I refused to play that style. I’d just go miles out of my way to avoid playing regular American fingerpicking. My arrangement is a very odd piece of guitar playing, actually. It’s got a break in it, which is almost classical in construction, in a way. It took me months of working to get that arrangement to the point where I could play and sing it. And it’s another one where I can pull time forever.

 Coming from an eclectic family of classic New York personalities working as taxi drivers, SoHo artists, musicians and even a jailbird or two, Julia emerged from it all a sensitive badass who rides vintage Triumph motorcycles and sings with smouldering expressivity. 

From Julia Haltigan’s self-description on her website, you wouldn’t necessarily expect her to be keen on covering a sad, romantic song like Spanish Boots. Haltigan has written and released several records under her name, many of her songs pay tribute to the street-tough poetics and gritty rock n’ roll of Big Apple icons like Television, Blondie, Suicide and Lou Reed. Nevertheless, she took on Spanish Boots for the 2002 tribute album Listen to Bob Dylan. And she did radically, but not by transforming it into gritty rock ‘n’ roll, as one might expect. Rather, she recites the song, slowing it down to the limit of possibility. Stretching Dylan’s original from 4 and a half to over 7 minutes sounds like a rather strange experiment – but you can trust Julia Haltigan.

Born in Santa Barbara, Julie Felix gained her love of music and connection to the land from her parents, who both had Native American blood. Her mother, an American with Welsh heritage, often sang the ballads of Burl Ives, while her father Lorenzo was a Mexican mariachi ensemble musician, who played guitar and accordion. In 1962 she travelled with the guitar her father had given her and a friend across to Europe. On the bohemian Greek island of Hydra she met Canadian Leonard Cohen, where he was living with his muse, Marianne. They became friends, he would borrow her guitar, and she helped him turn his poems into songs. She spent two years hitchhiking across Europe, hanging out with musicians, and playing in bars. When she eventually arrived in the UK, Julie was ‘discovered’ by David Frost. After featuring on Frost’s satirical show (she sang That’s No Way To Say Goodbye with Cohen, who made his TV debut), she got her own primetime show on BBC ‘Once More With Felix’, the first broadcast in colour on TV.

In 1964, even the British record label ‘Decca Records’ didn’t know whether to place her debut album in the classical folk category or take the risk in marketing her music as ‘pop’ and mainstream. It was eventually decided she was a pop singer. Felix quickly became a household name, TV star and Top Twenty recording artist. Despite her Californian accent, and even though she sang the songs of Americans Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon, she was claimed as ‘Britain’s answer to Joan Baez’. In 2002, Felix recorded a double album of Bob Dylan’s songs, Starry Eyed and Laughing, including her version of Boots of Spanish Leather. Julie Felix passed away in 2020; she is also remembered for her endeavours as a humanitarian and activist, dating back to her involvement in the peace movement singing protest songs.

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

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 11

by Jochen Markhorst

XI         I was transformed

The Guinness Book of World Records states that Bing Crosby’s 1942 “White Christmas” is the best-selling single of all time with an estimated 50 million units. The disclaimer “estimated” already indicates that the figures – or records and charts at all – are not too exact. The sales numbers of Bing’s world hit are based on the National List of Best-Selling Retail Records Chart, a precursor to the Billboard Hot 100, and in those years, lists were based on surveys, samples and reports from radio DJs; not very reliable and not at all comprehensive, all things considered.

And indeed it’s still not much more reliable; since 1958 we have used the Billboard Hot 100 as a measure of record sales, and to this day that list is compiled from a combination of radio airplay, audience impressions as measured by Nielsen BDS, sales data compiled by Nielsen Soundscan (both retail and digital) and streaming activity as provided by online music sources. It has to make do. We simply do not have something like a Central Record Sales Administration; we do not have some registration point to comprehensively track sales figures from around the world.

The same goes for establishing what the world’s most covered songs are. Guinness World Records hails “Yesterday”, claiming more than 1,600 cover versions of it have been recorded, but secondhandsongs.com has only found 1304 so far. Stacker counts only 512 and puts “Yesterday” at position 2 – Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” is at 1 with 516 covers. At secondhandsongs.com, “Silent Night” is at one (4046 covers), the Washington Post agrees, but according to UK’s Independent, “Eleanor Rigby” is at 1, and we could go on and on. Little consensus, all in all – only in the case of “most covered artist” is Dylan somewhere at the top of almost all lists (not at secondhand songs, by the way – that’s where Lennon tops, followed by McCartney and Rodgers; Dylan is only fifteenth. Though if you filter by solo artists, Dylan is third, after Irving Berlin and Antônio Carlos Jobim).

Of “Like A Rolling Stone” a surprising number of covers can be found. At the end of 2024, the – unreliable – tally stands at 212, and that will presumably increase exponentially after the success of the film A Complete Unknown. Surprisingly many covers, as you would be inclined to think it is a song in the same category as “Strawberry Fields Forever” or, say, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, as songs whose final version already exists, to which there is nothing to add, where any deviation would be a deterioration, and which can be covered at most as a tribute or parody. Or, in an exceptional case, gains ironic value as when the Rolling Stones play “Like A Rolling Stone” (and even score a hit with it, 1995).

That untouchability has been expressed countless times, by half a generation of Baby Boomers, journalists, music historians and professors, up to and including the Olympus, by Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney, and Bruce Springsteen with his famous reverence at Bob Dylan’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame in 1988: “The first time that I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother, and we were listening to, I think, WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind … the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.” Remarkably similar, by the way, to the declaration of love and childhood memory shared with us by John Hiatt in Stereogum in May 2021, on the occasion of Dylan’s 80th birthday:

“My mother and I drove into a small town, we were up in a little fishing cabin my grandpa built. She had to go to the drugstore, and she went in and “Like A Rolling Stone” came on the radio. I was certain when she came back out, she wouldn’t recognize me. I felt like the song had changed me that much, just by hearing it. I was 13 or so. I was transformed. I had never heard lyrics like that. I had never heard a thing put together like that.”

Zappa, McCartney, Costello and Hiatt remain at a respectable distance from “Like A Rolling Stone” in their careers, but there are still plenty of daredevils to be found in the echelons below. At least 212.

The single “Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden” is released on Tuesday 20 July 1965, and within a month the first cover has been crafted: the Brooklyn garage band The Soup Dragons cover Dylan’s new single for the B-side of their flopped single “That’s Too Bad”. Although, cover… the three men (organ, drums and guitar) limit themselves to the chorus without much variation and without much sophistication, and those few words of it they also mix and change at will. So it’s more of a pleasantly disrespectful pastiche than a cover, but still: they’re the first ones (the actual release date can’t be traced, but in the UK the single was released September 17 – so in New York it must have been in shops sometime in late August).

A nose length behind them then come California sunshine nepo babies Dino, Desi & Billy in September with their superfluous cover. Toe-curling vocals, but expert musical support from the legendary Wrecking Crew, and as sons of Dean Martin, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, they actually get quite a bit of understandable but not very deserved airplay. And well alright, the same debut album features the hit song “I’m A Fool”, Lee Hazlewood’s “The Rebel Kind” and especially “Not The Lovin’ Kind”, and these still have some nice, antiquarian charm. However, the Dylan covers (including “It Ain’t Me Babe”, “Chimes Of Freedom” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”) are rather atrocious. Not to mention the insane idea of having “Satisfaction” sung by three beardless adolescents with clean nails and washed and combed hair.

In the wake of those two early birds, a cover was then recorded somewhere every month for a few years. Cher, The Turtles, The Four Seasons, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs with a somewhat bizarre bluegrass-pop-country crossover thing (one of the last drops for poor Lester, who really, intrinsically disliked all that horrible hippie music Earl absolutely wanted on the setlist), … however, the only one who matches the excitement of the original is the otherworldly Jimi Hendrix.

Jimi unfortunately never records the song at Electric Lady Studios, but does play “Like A Rolling Stone” on stage 36 times. The first time in December ‘66 in England, the last time with historical awareness at Newport ’69, and perhaps the most beautiful, intense and loving one is the one from Winterland, 11 October 1968 in San Francisco. A tender, drawn-out intro of more than two minutes, “Here’s a song written by a cat named Dylan,” slowly building on with, for the time being, all focus on melody, and only just before the chorus a first hint of one of those ferocious, irresistible Hendrixian derailments. Almost 12 minutes, but twice that length would have been fine too.

And around it then, a whole string of lesser gods with mostly embarrassing or failed covers. It takes until 1975 before we can sit up straight again: the psychedelic, hypnotic, drawn-out interpretation of Spirit on their kind-of-comeback album Spirit Of ’76, the album that also opens with Dylan, with the dreamy mash-up “America The Beautiful/The Times They Are A Changin’”. Over “Like A Rolling Stone”, Randy California (the album is actually more of a solo album by Randy with help from his stepfather Ed Cassidy than really a Spirit reunion) has laid the same misty, meditative veil, ticking off the two main cover criteria: he transforms the song and adds something to the original. Over a tapestry of three guitars, metered use of the phaser, vocals extremely tastefully varying from whisper to falsetto to tenor, from double-tracking to hollow bathroom reverb to bone-dry living room sound, and an ebb-and-flow orchestration similar to Jimi’s arrangement. Not coincidentally, in all likelihood; Randy did play in Jimi’s band Jimmy James and the Blue Flames in Greenwich Village at the time, and since then Hendrix has always been under Randy’s skin. In any case, the last three minutes (out of nine) are awfully close to what Jimi would have made of it had he been able to remain in Electric Ladyland a bit longer.

Spirit of ’76 is now considered a highlight in Spirit’s discography. But at the time, the album did not get beyond a paltry 147th place in the Billboard 200. Randy won’t make it to the Guinness Book posthumously either. He’s invisible now.

————

Continued: Like A Rolling Stone part 12. How Does It Feel?

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 Tony Attwood

As if putting a song on an album, and then never once, in a lifetime of touring and performing, actually play it, is not strange enough, it is surely even stranger to record a song, put it on an album, never play the song in public, and then name the album after the song.

But that is exactly what Bob did with Nashville Skyline (although there is the song called Nashville Skyline Rag) and again with John Wesley Harding.   Title tracks of albums, but never played.

And indeed you would be fully excused if you could not recall Nashville Skyline Rag, but it is indeed a real piece…. a jolly little song in two sections that follow the classic A B A format – meaning you get the first section, then the second then the first.

There is however one particular point about this song, in that the middle section modulates – and for the moment I can’t think of any other composition by Dylan that modulates. I think there are one or two but not that many.

Modulation is a simple musical technique in which the music changes key, and it generally happens in the middle of the song before moving back again.  In musical terms the piece changes key from the tonic (the basic key the piece is written in) to the dominant (the fifth note of the scale).   It stays there for a few bars and then comes back.

This is not to say that this is not a jolly little tune, but for me it has all the flavour of an afterthought, and indeed one can understand why there has been no inclination to play it on stage.  But that still raises the question, why name the album after this song?

The title track of John Wesley Harding suffers the same fate and again it is a very simple song, although it too has a hint of a modulation – although this time it is within the verse, and the music moves straight back to the tonic (the key it starts in).

And here I really am a bit puzzled – why name an album after a song which is in the same format as almost every other song on the album but not play that song?

I did a piece a few years back in the “cover a day” series on this song, and I must admit I didn’t find too much to excite me then, and there seems to be not much more to offer three or four years later.

The recording by Phil Cunneen is ok, but it still leaves me with the feeling of “why bother?”

But this takes us back to the question of why Bob named the album after this song – for surely he must have known at the time that he was unlikely ever to play the piece.

Of course, this contrasts with “All along the Watchtower” which was played over two thousand times in concert, generally as the end piece, and utilising the Jimi Hendrix reworking of the song, so of course at the time of making the album Bob would not have known what a universal appeal that song would have.

But when you come to think of it “All along the Watchtower” would have made a better title for the album.  For those of us who knew nothing of JWH and what he represented, “All along the Watchtower” is a much more atmospheric, and thus a much more inviting phrase.

And just in case you missed it, try this

Oh what memories these recordings bring back!

Obviously we were all going to buy the album anyway when it first came out, but a change of title might have broadened the appeal.

Indeed a similar argument could have been made over “I’ll be Your Baby Tonight” which was played over 600 times, and indeed by far my favourite song from the album, “Drifter’s Escape” which racked up 256 performances and remains forever in my list of absolute favourite songs.

Even Frankie Lee and Judas Priest got over 20 performances in public, but for the title track, and “Lonesome Hobo” no, not a performance.

And this got my rambling brain wondering about other songs that were album titles.   “Times they are a changing” is obviously one, “Highway 61 Revisited” each came before JWH and Nashville Skyline – the two albums with never performed title songs, and in both those earlier cases the title song did get a lot of performances.

This doesn’t mean that Dylan generally performed the title song of his albums a lot but they did tend to get a bit of a run out in most cases – although there never seems to have been a particular extra boost for a song just because it was the title of the album.

Which then led me to wonder, how did Bob choose the titles for his albums?  I can’t recall reading much about this, and I am sure in the early days the record company would have had an input, but after a while it would have been all down to Bob.

So, here’s my thought, if you know how Bob came to choose the titles of albums, would you like to write an article about it?  I can assure you it would have a readership of at least one (ie me), but I suspect others might be interested.  If you fancy taking this on please email Tony@schools.co.uk and give the email the title “How Bob Dylan chose his album titles”.  Or of course just write a comment below.

Incidentally, I am guessing but I suspect the album with the most non-performed tracks is Fallen Angels, which includes Young at Heart, Maybe you’ll be there, Polka Dots, All the Way, Skylark, Nevertheless, On a little street and It had to be you.

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 10

by Jochen Markhorst

X          Just jump on it

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024) does romanticise it a bit, of course, but by and large the film follows the actual, researched and confirmed historical events and fun facts surrounding the recording of “Like A Rolling Stone”. Before the final take, Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) says: “No more waltz time on this one. Ascending scale, La Bamba changes for the chorus. Come in on the downbeat of four. Just jump on it.” Which is all totally unlike Dylan, but content is correct. On the first day of recording, 15 June 1965, the song is indeed still in three-four time, waltz time; the next day, when the final Highway 61 take is realised, the song is in 4/4, which is to say, four beats to a bar with the accent on the first beat.  Here it is in 3/4 (three beats to a bar).

The funniest fun fact the film also tells it historically correctly: the witty way Al Kooper sneaks into the recording room and cheekily sits down at the organ – an instrument he does not know at all. Scriptwriters Mangold and Jay Cocks apparently read Al Kooper’s 1998 autobiography Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards: we hear near-literal quotes from the book. Kooper describes with superior irony and highly infectious self-mockery how he takes advantage of a moment of inattention from producer Tom Wilson to sneak into the recording room, his relief that the complex Hammond organ is still on (“If the organist (Paul Griffin) hadn’t left the damn thing turned on, my career as an organ player would have ended right then and there”), Tom Wilson’s giggly “What are you doing there” when he suddenly sees Al sitting in the recording room (“Wilson was a gentleman, however. He let it go”), his searching for the chords which explains the slight delay with which the organ runs after the chord changes (“like a little kid fumbling in the dark for the light switch”) and then the scene in the control room, when they all listen to the playback:

Thirty seconds into the second verse of the playback, Dylan motioned toward Tom Wilson. “Turn the organ up,” he ordered. “Hey, man,” Tom said, “that cat’s not an organ player.” Thanks, Tom. But Dylan wasn’t buying it: “Hey, now don’t tell me who’s an organ player and who’s not. Just turn the organ up.” He actually liked what he heard!

With which Kooper secures the dreamed ticket to Dylan’s inner sanctum. To his delighted surprise, Dylan invites him back the next day and asks Al for his phone number. “Which was like Claudia Schiffer asking for the key to your hotel room.” Very similar to how the filmmakers tell the control room scene:

102        INT. COLUMBIA STUDIO A — CONTROL BOOTH — LATER 102

Playback of the track. Bob listens intently, critically. Albert behind him, sensing   something major in the air, and Neuwirth is wedged against the back wall.

BOB: Let me hear more of that organ.

TOM WILSON: The cat’s not an organ player.

BOB: Sounds like one to me. Lift it, Roy.

Roy Halee brings the level up on the organ. The drums 
and the kick come up with it.

TOM: It’s tied to the drums.

BOB: Keep it there.

… so paraphrasing and near-quoting from Kooper’s book. “It’s tied to the drums” is again technically correct, by the way.

To understand fully what follows, it is important to remember that the word “track” here refers to the fact that these were “four track” recordings, meaning that one might have the voice as one track, the percussion on a second track, the guitars on a third, and so on.  This meant that after the recording was made each “track” could be manipulated independently of the others, so that the volume of the vocal track might be taken up without changing the accompaniment, while everything other than the vocal track might be cut at one point to make it sound as if the vocalist were singing unaccompanied.

At the time, the unbeatable The Bootleg Series 12 – The Cutting Edge 1965-66 (2015) surprised, besides featuring all 20 takes of “Like A Rolling Stone” including the rehearsals, false starts and breakdowns, with the “stems”, the four individual tracks of the final recording. And indeed, Track 4 (“track as in the sense described in the previous paragraph) was attributed to “drums and organ.”   Only solo guitarist Mike Bloomfield was assigned his own track: Track 1.

Thanks to that same Bootleg Series 12, we also get quite a bit of studio talk in between recordings, and from that it’s easy to see that the authoritative, directing words with which Mangold’s Dylan instructs his session musicians have a high fantasy quality. In real life, we hear Dylan saying such plain banalities as “Let’s do just one verse man”, and “No, we just gotta work that part out – I finish at one, don’t you see?” and “Okay let’s cut it… it’s six minutes long man”; it doesn’t get much more technical than that.

Just as kind-of-true is the embedding of the other time “Like A Rolling Stone” comes along. As in the book that provided the template for the film, Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! from 2015, we hear the song for the second time at the end of the film, at the legendary edition of the Newport Folk Festival, where the folk world is shocked to learn that Dylan is electric now. Director Mangold seizes that earth-shattering moment to throw a few more Dylan fun facts into the mix, and why not indeed?

Timothée Chalamet – Like a Rolling Stone:

So the infamous Judas! shout is transferred from Manchester to Newport, but is now shouted by a lady, and an incredulous Dylan merely responds with “Come on man” (i.e. not with you’re a liar and not with play it fucking loud either); the mythical and probably untrue action of an axe-wielding Pete Seeger gets a nod; the film Dylan, like the real Dylan at the time, returns with an acoustic guitar after his disappointingly short set of only three electric songs at the insistence of the backstage and plays “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” – but in the film Dylan borrows the guitar from Johnny Cash and not from the historically correct Peter Yarrow; the setlist is entirely correct though – first “Maggie’s Farm”, then “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” and concluding indeed as in Manchester following the Judas!-incident “Like A Rolling Stone”; the shouted words from audience that we are able to discern (“Sellout!”, “Scumbag!”, “We love you Bob!”, “Phony!”) seem borrowed from the hubbub that erupted a month later in New York, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium concert, 28 August 1965… and like this, there are some more small, affectionate references and adaptations of anecdotal details from Dylan’s life that are given an antedated and relocated place here – which only adds to the entertainment value. And: rewriting of history is also, fittingly enough, of course extremely Dylanesque.

“Like A Rolling Stone” is not really the alpha and omega of the film, which it is in the book; while the book does describe Dylan’s life and career from the years 1961 to August 1965, on page 1, in the Introduction, Elijah Wald begins with a flash-forward to the last chapter before Aftermath, to Chapter 10, which is called “Like A Rolling Stone”, going into more detail about those eventful July days in Newport.

The film, on the other hand, is chronologically, beginning in 1961 and ending in Newport 1965 (allright, to round out the story and make the script cyclical we still get, somewhat forcibly, a brief Woody Guthrie coda), but then again: the film is called A Complete Unknown – “Like A Rolling Stone” is alpha, omega, and all the letters in between. As it should be.

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 11 – I was transformed

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

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

DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA

by Wouter van Oorschot; Translated by Brent Annable

A list of the previous articles in this series is given at the end.

 What you really don’t want – part 1

But it’s not to stand naked under unknowin’ eyes
It’s for myself and my friends my stories are sung.
(‘Restless farewell’ – 1963)

Turn the tables.

Perhaps you have been in a situation before where you were approached with clear romantic intentions by somebody who was in love with you. You were certainly taken with this person, though you felt like you needed time to determine whether you in fact returned their sentiments. Such universal doubts and insecurities are nothing unusual, after all.

At the same time, you were also a single person with certain needs, and so when love came along on a silver platter, and presented by someone who seemed appealing at first glance, you perhaps decided to get to know them better after all. I will skip over whether the ensuing romance was enjoyable for you both – it was your romance, after all – or whether it maybe did not ensue at all. But whatever the case, at a certain point you decided it would be better to call off the proceedings before the initial attempt at intimacy, or perhaps after several attempts – here, too, I will refrain from comment, as I cannot know when your misery began.

What it all came down to was the fact that the other party’s love for you expressed itself as stifling possessiveness. You were expected to turn a blind eye to all of their faults, for example, to promise time and time again that you would never leave them, that you would always show strength and never weakness, that you would take your lover’s side even when they were demonstrably wrong, to help them up after every stumble, close off your heart to all others but always bring your sweetheart flowers, come running whenever you were called, and heck, even die for them – or more if that were possible. In other words, you were to be a lover for life and nothing else. This, wholly or in part, is what they demanded from you.

The above scenario may seem familiar to many. Let us cautiously posit that these expectations have been (and in some cases, still are) cherished in conformity with a centuries-old, heterosexual set of love morals by quite a number of women with respect to men. To offer the benefit of the doubt, we might also add that for thousands of years, women have been subjected to conditioning by predominantly male religious leaders in the form of mores, values, legislation, religious treatises, and also in the arts (see Dusty Springfield below). In other words, a moral framework that resulted in ‘the weaker sex’ having very little say in such patriarchal societies, leaving them no option but to submit in resignation. At the same time, women quickly realised that their only recourse was to appropriate this moral code in extremis, and to demand domestic security from men, lasting from marriage to the grave. That is roughly how things went, and is reflected in the summary above.

Western society did change slightly in the 1960s due to the second wave of women’s liberation. The concept of ‘the battle of the sexes’ gained ground, and in the English-speaking world the pithy term ‘politics of sex’ became popular. While unfortunately neither attained the status of ‘winged words’, one consequence was the fact that, however slowly, it increasingly dawned on heterosexual men that a woman’s dedication at the very least presupposes some form of reciprocity. Or in other words: that mutual love and authority must be earned, not demanded. An equally important artistic consequence for the love song was that, compared to the dominance of the macho texts from the previous decades – several tasteless examples of which we examined in the previous chapters, selected from a pool of thousands – male artists were now also learning how to portray themselves as the weaker party.

To baby boomers such as myself, who were not yet ripe for love but were rapidly heading that way, this phenomenon undoubtedly began with the first Rolling Stones hit written by iMick Jagger and Keith Richards, released almost simultaneously with The Beatles’ ‘A hard day’s night’ in the late spring of 1964, when Dylan wrote ‘All I really want to do’. ‘Tell me’ is clumsy and dull, the message is little more than ‘tell me you’re coming back’. But as a Stones fan from day one, I grant clemency in this case because – mainly thanks to the final verse – it is a blues, a genre to which separate criteria apply, as you know:

I want you back again
I want your love again
I know you find it hard to reason with me
But this time it's different, darling you'll see

Refrain:

You gotta tell me you're coming back to me
You gotta tell me you're coming back to me
You gotta tell me you're coming back to me
You gotta tell me you're coming back to me

You said we're through before
You walked out on me before
I tried to tell you, but you didn't want to know
This time you're different and determined to go

Refrain.

I wait as the days go by
I long for the nights to go by
I hear the knock on my door that never comes
I hear the telephone that hasn't rung

Refrain.

But I digress: this was evidently the new direction for heterosexual men, and it did not take long for things to degenerate into extreme sentimentality, such as the first worldwide hit by The Four Tops from May 1965, a full ten years after their formation: ‘I can’t help myself’. Here, a fellow wails at his ‘sugar pie honey bunch’, claiming that he is ‘weaker than a man should be’, and ‘tied to her apron strings’:

Sugar pie, honey bunch
You know that I love you
I can’t help myself
I love you and nobody else

In and out my life (In and out my life)
You come and you go (You come and you go)
Leaving just your picture behind (Ooo)
And I’ve kissed it a thousand times (Ooo)

When you snap your finger or wink your eye
I come a-running to you
I’m tied to your apron strings (Can’t help myself)
And there’s nothing that I can do, ooh

Can’t help myself (Ooh)
No, I can’t help myself (Ooh)
‘Cause, sugar pie, honey bunch (Sugar pie, honey bunch)
I’m weaker than a man should be
I can’t help myself
I’m a fool in love, you see

Wanna tell you I don’t love you
Tell you that we’re through
And I’ve tried
But every time I see your face (I can’t help myself)
I get all choked up inside

When I call your name
Girl, it starts the flame
(Burning in my heart, tearing it all apart)
No matter how I try, my love I cannot hide

‘Cause sugar pie, honey bunch (Sugar pie, honey bunch)
You know that I’m weak for you (Weak for you)
Can’t help myself
I love you and nobody else (Ooh)
Sugar pie, honey bunch (Sugar pie, honey bunch)
Do anything you ask me to (Ask me to)
Can’t help myself
I want you and nobody else (Ooh)
Sugar pie, honey bunch (Sugar pie, honey bunch)
You know that I love you (Love you)
Can’t help myself
No, I can’t help myself (Ooh)
Sugar pie, honey bunch (Sugar pie, honey bunch)
You know that I love you

Oh, what a poor, powerless, hen-pecked chap. When the authoritative music magazine Rolling Stone published a revised, second list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time seventeen years after the first, they had the nerve to move this sob-story from position 422 to 483. On the positive side, this is thankfully only 18 places away from complete oblivion.

Besides, the reader will also be fully aware that lyrics of this kind do nothing to attack the essence of male-imposed love morals: most have regarded women as their property for so long already, have they not? And how recently did men still deny women even their own bank account – a trivial example compared to all the physical violence unleashed on women by men over the ages. It is therefore not difficult for a ‘healthy’ man to present himself as the weakest hankering, pleading, simpering party of the two.

I’ll give ten-to-one odds that when push comes to shove – to use a fitting expression – he will maintain that a woman should still bend to his will more than he to hers. And at least 99 out of 100 are still too self-absorbed to even give their loved one adequate satisfaction in the bedroom, where they climax too quickly, collapse in exhaustion and then usually fall asleep. Women have been counting their blessings in this regard for centuries.

Nevertheless: in our 21^st century, I wish I had a dollar for all the members of both sexes who perpetuate this possessive form of love. One could become a millionaire a hundred times over – although that depends on how deep your pockets already are, I suppose. In any case, friends, by now we have realised just how slow genuine progress is, have we not? Is there anything to be done?

continued: Dylan & Us, Beyond America: What you really don’t want – part 2

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

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

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

We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks

By Tony Attwood

As a not particularly successful musician, but still nonetheless a musician through my early working life, I lived and worked with the firm belief that music itself carried a meaning.  Not always a meaning that could be expressed in words – and indeed if it could be expressed in words, why would we bother to express the idea in music?   But still a meaning – and when it comes down to it, mostly a meaning that is tangled up in emotions.

Indeed almost all us respond to something in a minor key as being very sad, while songs in a major key with few or no minor chords are thought (by most people brought up in “the west” at least) to be happy.

If you want an example of a Dylan song in a minor key try Senor

and if you want more, try Love Sick

But of course music would be very dull if all we had were happy songs and sad songs; there is of course every nuance that you can imagine in between.

So if we take a song like “All I really want to do” it is in a major key and it is happy (in that there is something he really wants to do and it sounds quite possible) but with a touch of uncertainty (with the implication that she wants more than just friendship and he’s having to deal with that).

Quite often this meaning could be emotional.

And as we can hear, the original performance of the song is also somewhat plaintive, as befits a song that contains a lot of what he doesn’t want to do and the suggestion that she wants a lot more.

The song has been performed over 100 times by Dylan, but in performance, it has a problem, in that all we really have are two lines of music, which are repeated, and then the repeated two lines of the chorus.  And given there are six verses, that means that we hear the two musical lines of the verse 12 times, and of course the chorus six times.  That’s a lot of repetition, especially as the message is so simple and clear.

Which tends to make it a song that can be really interesting first time through, but after a number of listens, musically and I suspect lyrically, it begins to fade.   Indeed given that the verses all begin “I ain’t looking to” or “I don’t want to” it does mean we have pretty much got the hang of the song on the first hearing.

That’s not to say it isn’t fun, or that it wasn’t interesting at first, it is just that after hearing it quite a few times, there can be a problem.    And yet Bob gave “All I really want to do” over 100 appearances live on stage.  This is 1965 – the one with the cough…

Now the problem is that the structure of the song is so clear and specific, it doesn’t readily allow itself to have small or gentle changes.  So what Bob did was to turn the piece from a plaintive piece about not wanting to be involved, into a jolly, bouncey celebration that could be shared between friends who know they are together tonight but that doesn’t mean anything beyond tonight.   This ain’t the start of a love affair – this is just fun here and now.

Here is Los Angeles 1978

Suddenly we have a totally different song.   This is a song of two friends going out dancing and singing and just having a totally great time.  The worst thing that could happen to this couple is that they end up in bed together.

The jolly approach is emphasised by the piano and the bounce and that repeated five note intro to each line of the chorus.

One other interesting thing with this new approach is that the friendship becomes much more meaningful – at least for me!  This time I really do believe he wants to be friends, whereas in the initial version, I always took the song to be a put-off; he’s saying friends but has no intention of seeing her again.

At the Budokan in the same year we have the same arrangement but the tempo is slower and the key lower.  He starts “I ain’t looking to make you cry” – which is a bit different from before.

I have noted before how Bob loves to change the key he is performing in, and he does it again in London in 1978, as well as losing some of the melody in order to declaim rather than sing.  This is probably about as fast it could get.

For me this is one of the most enjoyable set of transformations Bob has ever made to one of his own works, exploring a whole range of meanings out of a very simple set of lyrics.  There’s nothing much of the original left by the time we get to this last version – and not for the first time I am left wondering if anyone else has ever re-arranged his/her own work as much as Dylan.

But I also feel that this re-arranging work has never really has as much positive attention as it might have done.  I did try it a bit myself with the Never Ending Tour Revisited series on this site, but the focus then was on the tour.   But this way of changing one song really does show me just how much insight Bob has into the possibilities of his work.  For him the recorded version was never the end.

I’ve taken the plunge and suggested this article might be the first of a series of songs transformed, but I am not sure where I go next.  If you have idea please do write in.  You can leave a comment often a (now much reduced) set of ads at the end of the article.  Or indeed if you have an idea for an article of your own, or a whole series you can drop me a line at Tony@schools.co.uk

All the songs Bob has never sung

• The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles
• Motopsycho Nightmare

“On the road again” is a 12 bar blues, and it is possible that Bob doesn’t play that many 12 bar blues on the Never Ending Tour – I have never counted, but maybe he keeps the number down.   (That’s a task for the future: how many 12 bar blues per show?)

But on the other hand, Bob doesn’t mind putting 12 bar blues (which basically means that the song follows a standard pattern of chords with the chords being the three major chords that can be built from a major scale – so in C major the chords are C, F and G) on an album occasionally.

I have had the thought that these songs are just fillers, on the album to make up the number, or included perhaps because it is felt by Bob or the production team that one needs an upbeat 12 bar song because “that’s what the audience wants”.  Either way, I’m not very happy with the explanation.

But then if that is so, why include a 12 bar blues on a 12 song album but not in a 25 song live show?   I don’t know.

The idea put about is that this song, along with a number of others from this era, focuses on the artist against society and “previews the comic grotesques that will become more prominent on songs in later albums.”

Well maybe that’s so when we look at

Well, I wake up in the morning, there frogs inside my socks
Your mama, she's hidin' inside the icebox
Your daddy comes in wearin' a Napoleon Bonaparte mask
And you ask why I don't live here
Honey, how come you have to ask?

Well, I go to pet your monkey, I get a face full of claws
I said, "Who's in the fireplace, " and you tell me Santa Claus
The milkman comes in, he's wearing a derby hat
And you ask why I don't live here
Honey, how come you have to ask me that?

But then that still doesn’t explain why, if it is good enough and/or important enough to be on the album, it is not going to get a showing on stage.  After all, 12 bar blues can be easily re-written in order to maximise the musical entertainment while still putting across the message within the structure of the song.

And so, if “The song reflects a paranoid version of dread of dealing with in-laws” (these and other quotes here coming from the Wikipedia review of the song), the music doesn’t really relate to such a concept.   If we accept the Wiki view that, “The narrator wakes up in the morning and has to face a surreal world where his mother-in-law hides in the refrigerator, his father-in-law wears a mask of Napoleon and the grandfather-in-law’s cane turns into a sword, the grandmother-in-law prays to pictures and an uncle-in-law steals from the narrator’s pockets…” why is all this portrayed in a 12 bar blues, put on the album and then not played in concert?

I guess I can see the argument about 12 bar blues, and not having more than one per show, but with all these lyrics written, maybe Bob could have given us a jolt by using them again to a new tune, new rhythm, new melody… 

There probably is no logical explanation, and it was just a case of feeling the need for something upbeat on the album at that point and so dropping it in.

It has been suggested the song is a response to the song “On the Road”, a traditional blues performed by the Memphis Jug Band with more serious lyrical content concerning an unfaithful woman.

One of the original versions of On the Road Again was recorded by the Memphis Jug Band.   As with a lot of performances of this type there is a long instrumental section at the start, but the lyrics do come in…

But many of those who have decided to record the song, have tended to stick to Bob’s original version, rather than trying to change the music in any way.

Pat Guadagno and Tired Horses had a go but that lack of any sort of original melody means we know exactly where we are going as soon as the piece starts.

Ben Sidran does at least try and find a unique sound behind what is basically a recitation of the lyrics.

Julie Doiron abandoned any real attempt at a melody and has a voice that really takes us to somewhere so utterly different that I am not sure where I am anymore.

So maybe Bob just felt that his 12 bar belter was about all that could be done with the song so having put it on the album there was nothing more to do. But then again, maybe after the album came out the fact that Willie Nelson produced a different song with the same title, made Bob shy away from the track.  (The Willie Nelson song got into the Billboard charts and later won a Grammy.  But that was later – years after Bob had written his song and put it on the album.)

But back to Bob – he wrote the song, recorded it, put it on the album, and then left it alone.  For myself, it is not on my “Dylan’s 100 greatest songs” list – far from it in fact.  And I don’t mean any criticism of Bob for writing it – great artists in every genre create works that are created, as it were, “along the way”, as they are edging toward something far more important, complete, interesting, etc etc.

So no worries about why Bob wrote it.  It is just that having written it, he put it on the album and then left it alone.

And maybe today we can say “none of this is important” because on the internet we can access every song Dylan has created.  But at the time we couldn’t, and for me, even if no one else, every song on an album was important, and this one didn’t really seem to take me anywhere, or tell me anything.  And if that was why Bob didn’t play it on tour – why then take up one precious track with it.  Why not something else?

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 9

by Jochen Markhorst

IX         I’m a bit of a textualist

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

The lyrics conclude with what will become the most quoted one-liner. Up to the highest level even – Dylan is the first and, as yet, only songwriter to be quoted in US Supreme Court rulings. In 2010, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an opinion, “The-times-they-are-a-changin’ is a feeble excuse for disregard of duty,” and two years before that, in 2008, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted – entirely correct or not quite entirely – “Like A Rolling Stone”: When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. Dylan actually sings “When you ain’t got nothing”, and the Chief Justice gets some critical questions about that, eight years later during a visit to a law school in Boston. In front of an audience of students and staff, he first discusses the use of the Dylan quote in his judicial opinion, and the interviewing Dean John F. O’Brien of New England Law drills deeper, inquiring about the ins and outs of that missing word ain’t.

O’B: Chief Justice Roberts, in reading your opinions you seem committed to clarity but also to keeping it interesting for the reader. For instance in a case described by the New York Times as “an achingly boring dispute between telephone companies” you livened up your dissent by suggesting a lack of standing, quoting Bob Dylan, one of my favorites, by pointing out “when you got nothing you got nothing to lose”. [audience laughter] What was your objective in quoting Bob Dylan?

CJR: […] Bob Dylan captured the whole notion behind standing and what was an issue there when he said “if you don’t have anything you’ve got nothing to lose”. And in that case the party didn’t have any stake in the case and had nothing to lose, and the case should have been thrown out on that basis. I know Bob Dylan would have agreed with that. [audience laughter]

O’B: But you did clean up his language. Because the original language was the double negative well when you ain’t got nothing you got nothing to lose

CJR: Well actually I did get into a little bit of discussion about that with somebody. That is as performed. The liner notes show that it doesn’t have the ain’t, so… I’m a bit of a textualist [audience laughter] so I went with the liner notes.

Ironically, the “textualist” is then mistaken about the source. The published lyrics on the site and in Lyrics confirm the Judge’s retort – so without ain’t indeed – but there are no liner notes on Highway 61 Revisted’s cover. Unimportant and forgivable of course; it’s a spontaneous response to an unexpected question, we’ll give Chief Justice Roberts some leeway. If only because he single-handedly elevates Dylan to the stratosphere, laying one of the steps on the way to the Nobel Prize.

Moby Grape – Murder In My Heart For The Judge:

It is a particular power that many one-liners from Dylan lyrics seem to have; “to capture the whole notion,” as the Chief Justice says. In 2012, Professor Alex B. Long of the University of Tennessee wrote his study “The Freewheelin’ Judiciary: A Bob Dylan Anthology” (published in Fordham Urban Law Journal) because he had noticed that Dylan quotes do pop up so very often in court judgments, lawyers’ pleadings and in the courtroom at all. The times they are a-changin’ scores well, but the Greatest Hit is you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, often used to dismiss expert witnesses who only come to kick in open doors anyway. The particular strength of Dylan’s lyrics in particular, says Professor Long: they are highly memorable and have the ability to communicate the point that judges want to make.

Harry Nilsson – Subterranean Homesick Blues:

The professor does not explicitly name it, but a third quality is undoubtedly their vagueness or, put slightly more kindly, the multi-functionality – as the nothing to lose example illustrates. Chief Justice Roberts and, in an entirely different case, Judge Stephen F. Williams use the quote to clarify that the party has no interest, no standing in the case, and so the claim should be dismissed, or be declared “inadmissible”, as a jurist would say. Which is not how Dylan uses or means it. Most likely, Dylan means it as a sneer – although that view is not watertight either, but he certainly does not use it as a condition of admissibility, he does not try to express that our Miss Lonely would have no interest in a claim.

The linguist might argue that the deductive derivation When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose is a statement closed in itself, a rather open door without any argumentative power, with a high duh content. Yep. And if you close your eyes, you can’t see a thing, and only if you do have something, you are capable of losing something. But that – obviously – is not what the one-liner communicates.

However, what the oneliner does communicate within the context of the song is not entirely clear either. Taken by itself it is, after all, a kind sentence, a consolation. You have nothing to lose is an encouragement. “It can only get better from now on,” “cheer up, the only way is up,” or something like that. Which does not fit within the context at all, within this verbal reckoning with the haughty girl who has ended up in the gutter, where she belongs anyway, according to the narrator. Or does something of compassion actually flicker at the end of his tirade? After all, she did end up being cheated and swindled by the diplomat who robbed her of everything he could steal, which is perhaps a bit harsh, despite all her flaws and her blameworthy behaviour in the past. Well – how does that feel?

Presumably, the Chief Justice would answer: like injustice. And then ask the Public Prosecutor to consider filing charges against the diplomat.

Continued: Like a Rolling Stone part 10: Just jump on it

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

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

Previously:

• All the songs Bob has never sung
• The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles

A list of our current and some past series can be found on the home page.

By Tony Attwood

I did quite a long review of this song on this site ten years ago, and also did actually find a couple of cover versions to put into the “Dylan Cover a Day” series.  So yes we’ve done our duty to this song, apart from what is probably going to be the last reason for coming to it: Dylan has never performed it.  Thus it fits into this series looking at some of the songs in that category – which is in fact the largest category of Dylan’s songs listed by the number of performances.  I estimate that over half of Bob’s compositions have never been performed by him on stage.

But what can one say about this song which was good enough to go on an album, but not good enough for Bob to perform.   Indeed not many others have covered it, although I did find another cover – and this one is a live performance

It is well recognised that the song relates lyrically to some degree to Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and is less often commented on as being a talking blues (which it isn’t quite).  And of course musically it can be noted that it is a standard, but very fast 12 bar blues.

Commentators have noted that the song points to the fact that all political statements are protected by the First Amendment to the American Constitution (which came into force in 1791 – at the time of the French Revolution) and which I’ll spell out in case you are like me a non-American citizen.  It protects the freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.  (And of course, as a UK citizen I am fascinated by constitutions since in the UK we don’t have one).

The freedom of religion was a particularly hot issue at the time, given that the French Revolution started in 1789, and although Maximilien Robespierre was himself not an athiest (he tended to quote Voltaire to the effect that, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”, during the revolution, the state religion was replaced for a while by the Cult of Reason.

But anyway, back to Dylan.   Motopsycho then turned up again as Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream which was in fact played on six consecutive shows between 13 October and 19 October 1988, 24 years after Dylan first recorded Motocycle, although I have not been able to find a recording of any of these performances.

So although in a sense the creation of “115th Dream” excuses the non-performance of the preceding song, although it too died an early death on stage.

The non-performance of the song gives me a bit of a problem at this point as this article was seemingly going to be rather short, but I was then rescued by the song in French.

Hugues Aufray recorded this in 1965 – and I have just found, he was born on August 18, 1929, and as far as I know he is still with us, meaning he is not far short of his hundredth birthday.

So I went looking and found a more recent picture… still going strong in 2009 – that’s him on the left, unless you are reading this on a phone in which case he might be above or below.

Digging further I found the statement that “as of March 2023, with the death of Marcel Amont, he becomes the oldest active male artist in French song.”

And then, encouraged to go further, I discovered this is not the only version in French but there is also a version by Sarclo which doesn’t seem to be on the internet but is on Amazon if you have an account.

But we can’t leave it at that because there is also

And (you might be thankful to read) that is about as far I as can go.  A song recorded by Dylan for an album, not played by Dylan, and by and large not played by many others, which raises the question, why did Bob want to put that on “Another Side”?   Was Bob trying to show his versatility, or was it just a filler?

Ten years ago in my little piece on the song I made the point that it was a song, without which, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,”  might not have happened.  That doesn’t really explain why Bob particularly wanted this song on the album, and then never played it in public.  But maybe it just seemed like a good idea at the time.

But there we are. It is there, on the album, and I guess some of us still play it, if at no other time than when we play the whole album from start to finish.

Ah well.   Such is life.

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

A list of the previous articles in this series is given at the end.

8. What you really want

I ain’t lookin’ for you to feel like me
See like me or be like me
(‘All I really want to do’ – 1964)

Perhaps you have been in a situation before where you were in love, but your feelings were not immediately returned. The object of your affection may have been insecure or needed more time to ascertain whether she or he felt the same way. You will have needed to exercise patience, though nobody can wait forever. But at a certain point, if you were not able (or willing) to wait any longer, would you have attempted to win the other person’s favour by writing out an interminable summary of all the horrible things that two human beings can do to one another, concluding with the sentiment ‘All I really wanna do is, baby, be friends with you’?

Yet this is precisely the strategy of the I-figure in Dylan’s song, behaviour with which you are expected to identify. And for some reason, you also found it necessary to communicate all of this to the other party, in order to give clearer expression to your heart’s desire:

I ain’t lookin’ to compete with you
Beat or cheat or mistreat you
Simplify you, classify you
Deny, defy or crucify you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you

No, and I ain’t lookin’ to fight with you
Frighten you or uptighten you
Drag you down or drain you down
Chain you down or bring you down
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you

I ain’t lookin’ to block you up
Shock or knock or lock you up
Analyze you, categorize you
Finalize you or advertise you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you

I don’t want to straight-face you
Race or chase you, track or trace you
Or disgrace you or displace you
Or define you or confine you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you

I don’t want to meet your kin
Make you spin or do you in
Or select you or dissect you
Or inspect you or reject you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you
 
I don’t want to fake you out
Take or shake or forsake you out
I ain’t lookin’ for you to feel like me
See like me or be like me
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you

Surely we can agree on this point: that it is unimaginable for somebody in the midst of love to try to approach the object of their affections in this way. It is therefore difficult to identify with this song. But since we have it anyway, what are we to do with it? When I first started looking into it in late 1965 at the age of thirteen, a few things were already clear. Despite not yet having had my first boyfriend or girlfriend, all of these atrocities – or at least, the ones I understood – so obviously had nothing at all to do with that process that I paid them no heed whatsoever (in other words, I made no effort to look up the list of unfamiliar, unpleasant-looking verbs in my dictionary). The longing in the refrain was enough for me, although it did not help me to fully comprehend the song’s complexities. It was not aimed at thirteen-year-olds, after all.

‘All I really want to do’ is a love song in the minor. The I-figure speaking is not in love – or in the best-case scenario, not any more – and wishes to keep somebody at arm’s length who wants more than to be ‘just friends’. But who on earth resorts to such a long string of inhumanities merely to say so? Are they desperate to exaggerate for fear of being misunderstood? This interpretation therefore raises doubts. And why choose this particular song to open his fourth LP, Another side of Bob Dylan?

‘All I really want to do’ may take the I/you form and seem like a love song, but in reality, it is the deliberate overture to an album full of songs in which a barely 23-year-old man tries to liberate himself from the adoring masses who had won his heart but demanded his soul, and who erect a barbed-wire fence in response to deter anyone who wishes to pin him down based on any of his previous work. All the song’s misery is therefore a summary of that one feeling: you are standing in my way, so I am willing to be friends, but no more than that. It isn’t even a love song; it merely has the trappings of one.

Irwin Silber (1925-2010), activist and then extremely authoritative co-founder of the folk-music magazine Sing Out! (1950-2014), had it all wrong. He was there when Dylan premiered ‘All I want to do’ along with three other songs from Another side during the Newport Folk Festival on 26 July 1964. These included ‘It ain’t me, babe’, which concludes the album, effectively bookending the other nine songs and jointly constituting Dylan’s declaration of independence. Four months later – when Silber ought to have had plenty of time to listen to the entire album and collect his thoughts – he wrote an ‘Open Letter to Bob Dylan’, which included the following remark: ‘‘…your new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self-conscious […] I saw at Newport how you had somehow lost contact with people… some of the paraphernalia of fame were getting in your way.’

Despite the potential accuracy of these observations – the ‘other side’ shown by Dylan did indeed provide a glimpse into a self-assured inner existence, and at a time when barely anybody else on the mid-1964 American music scene had been saddled with any comparable expectations – Silber nonetheless had his wires crossed, and many others along with him. They could not imagine that Dylan’s intellectual existence had more to offer than mere social engagement and I/you songs that reinforced orthodox love values, as thousands had done before him. It would take Silber another four years to retract his criticisms, which he did in 1968 in the weekly journal The National Guardian (1948-1992): ‘Many of us who did not fully understand the dynamics of the political changes… felt deserted by a poet’ and ‘Dylan is our poet – not our leader… Dylan… is communicating where it counts.’

In Chronicles Volume One (2004), Dylan himself said the following:

“I liked Irwin, but I couldn’t relate to it. Miles Davis would be accused of something similar when he made the album Bitches Brew… what I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new images and attitudes into them.”

In contrast to the claims of many of Dylan’s early admirers, Another Side of Bob Dylan is, as a whole, not even a break with his earlier work. It can, so soon after the assassination of President Kennedy and partly thanks to his introduction to ‘mind-altering substances’ in the spring of 1964, even be considered an ‘expansion’ thereof. We only need realise that all the compounded suffering that constitutes the opening declaration in ‘All I really want to do,’ also symbolises the holy trinity of patriotism, piety and ultra-capitalism that gave rise to a society in Dylan’s country of birth where citizens can abuse their power to morally stifle, impoverish, humiliate, dishonour or even murder others (presidents, for example).

This song is therefore also about keeping the kind of people at bay who want to be more than just friends – such as those who are undesirably in love with you, or a group wanting to hitch you to their political wagon – as well as fending off a morality that impacts well-being and individual freedom under the guise of wanting to be ‘friends’.

Dylan objected strenuously to all such practices, and it is hard to find fault with him. This time, however, he packaged his protestations in the form of a nuanced song of desire, of a kind that had never been written before.

———–

Researchers have ascertained that Dylan has given 102 live performances of ‘All I really want to do’ – relatively few, given 3761 documented concert appearances between 1960 and 2019 (the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic). I have personally determined that he performed the acoustic version as it appears on the album only ten times in public during the initial year after its completion. There is some nice video footage of these performances: one is a 30-second fragment of only the first verse, that is nonetheless of interest since it is of the American premiere given on 26 July 1964.

Several complete recordings exist from his brief tour of England in April and May of 1965, however, that give a good impression of Dylan’s image as a ‘coming young man’, such as that from Liverpool in May 1965.

At the final performance, which was again in Newport but this time on 24 July 1965, he was introduced by a female voice in a manner that clearly reveals the extent to which the folk movement regarded Dylan as its own communal property: ‘I don’t have to tell you… you know him… he’s all yours: Bob Dylan.’

Two days later, there on the hallowed folk grounds of Newport, Dylan showed them just how wrong they were when he appeared as a rocker for the first time since his secondary-school days, astonishing the mainstream folk crowd with, among other things, the premiere of ‘Like a rolling stone’, which had appeared barely one week before as the new single that would make him world-famous. To put it briefly, he was already busy working on material completely different to that other ‘folk song’ that was already a year old. The practical reason why he stopped after ten renditions was probably the fact that by smoking so regularly, he had quickly become unable to perform the challenging octave leap on the word ‘do’ in the chorus. On 28 August 1965 he had also started a 42-concert tour through Canada and the United States with a rock band, where the song would have been extremely out of place.

He did not perform ‘All I really want to do’ again for another thirteen years. Then out of nowhere, in 1978, he once again gave 92 performances during a world tour, as a big-showtime oom-pah version with bells, whistles and backing vocals. The double LP Bob Dylan at Budokan illustrates just how horrendously tacky the oom-pah version is, and can therefore be safely left by the wayside.

After 1978, he never again presented ‘All I really want to do’ on stage. I am personally not aggrieved, as it is virtually impossible to improve on the simplicity of the acoustic version with the octave leap. I believe, moreover, that musicians incapable of pulling off the octave should not even be permitted to hazard an attempt at this beautiful, bittersweet song.

Publisher’s footnote: in relation to the final musical example above, please see the publisher’s note in the “comments” section below, which follows after the six lines of advertisements.

continued: DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA: What you really don’t want – part 1

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

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

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

We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks

The Gates of Eden – A History in Performance 

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

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 third and final article on the second track, ‘Gates of Eden.’ You can find the second article here: https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/29447]

I finished the previous post, ‘Gates of Eden Part 2’ with a You Tube clip from Dublin 1991 Feb 5^th, and I was ready to move on to 1992. I have belatedly discovered, however, that some of these You Tube recordings I have been using are inferior to the mp3s taken directly from the concerts. The Dublin 1991 recording is an excellent case in point.   It is now included within the second article (see link above).

To compare, I suggest you return to the previous article and listen to that last recording, then listen to the additional one added. They are so different I had to double check to make sure they were the same performance. This problem doesn’t apply to all You Tube clips, but enough of them to complicate my job. This has forced me to re-evaluate my use of You Tube clips, and to go back to the drawing board for this and future articles, making sure I have the best recordings available.

In 1992 Dylan expanded from a four to a five-piece band, bringing in Bucky Baxter to play steel guitar/dobro, enriching and softening Dylan’s sound. The effects are not immediately obvious, however, in performances of ‘Gates of Eden’ which remain acoustic. The song was performed some 20 times in 1992 but the performances are much of a muchness and not terribly exciting. Dylan was struggling with his voice in the early 90s, and the strain is evident in this recording. It’s great, however, to have a video of his performance although no date is provided for it.

New York 1992

Good as it is to see Dylan in action, that may not be the best performance of the year. Although Dylan’s voice is as rough as it gets, this Ottawa performance (22 08 1992) is full of power and passion, Maybe the best of the 1992 crop. The full band is backing him here, but subtly adding musical texture.

1992 Ottawa

1993 was the year of epic performances, with extended guitar breaks and long endings. Twelve-minute performances of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ and this ten-minute version of ‘Gates,’ the longest version that I’m aware of. (Toulouse, 30^th June) I wrote about this performance in my NET series (1993 Part 4 https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/17246). It’s not just the guitar work, but the way Dylan builds up the vocal, stretching his voice, which is beginning to recover its power.

1993 Toulouse 

Dylan did not perform the song as often as in 1992, and the following years would see a further decline in the number of performances. Not all 1993 performances were so epic. This seven-minute version from Seattle, August 21^st, is worth checking out for the video, although I’m not sure that the performance matches Toulouse.

1993

1994 saw a further reduction in the number of performances, but Dylan’s revived voice and more confident backing gives us some outstanding shows. I wish he’d included the song in the MTV Unplugged concert of that year. If he had, it might have sounded a bit like this:

1994

You can hear Dylan stretching his voice in one from Burlington of the same year (11 November).

By this time Dylan has fully integrated the band with the acoustic feel of the song. The effect is tasteful compared to the previous three years, gentle, with the beauty of the chord structure fully in evidence. This is a song for dreaming, and Baxter’s echoey slide guitar helps lend it the eerie effect that works so well with its ancient feel. The song is losing the stridency of the original 1964, and 1988 performances that made it sound more like a protest song than it does by 1994. Dreamlike alienation is the ruling spirit here, as it would be for ‘Lovesick’ that within a couple of years, Dylan would be writing, although, as I have been arguing in this series, the acoustic songs off side 2 of Bringing It All Back Home retain an edge, maybe the aura, of protest. It is the human condition as Dylan finds it that is being protested.

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel a glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means

Behind these lines lie the idea that our subconscious minds, the source of dreams, is like a dirty ditch hiding all kinds of nightmares and sins, maybe the very kind that inhabit the song itself, beauty and terror all mixed up together. This song does not stand in contrast to his later Christian conversion, as has been suggested, but may underpin it by locating the true source of spiritual power beyond human chaos and confusion as a brooding presence within the gates of Eden. No false paradise there. In 1979, with his conversion, Dylan finally storms the gates of Eden.

1995 was a peak year for Dylan, the year of those remarkable concerts in Prague I covered extensively in my NET series, and once again I can only regret that Dylan didn’t perform the song during his three-day epic stint in that city. However, he does fourteen other performances of the song, although these are not as inspired as some other of his 1995 performances. At this point it feels as if the song has nowhere new to grow.

For my NET series I used this one from Manchester

1995  Manchester

There’s not a lot to distinguish these 1995 performances from 1994, but I do like this one from Berkeley. Dylan’s voice has a wonderful luminous quality that marked the best performances of that year. You can certainly add this one to your 1995 playlist. It sits well with the Prague performances.

1995 Berkeley mp3

At this point, when the song has never sounded better, there is an abrupt drop in the number of performances, with only three in 1996 before the song disappears altogether for three years. It surfaces again in 2000 for a few outstanding performances, followed by two in 2001, before being dropped for good. I speculate that the new tranche of songs that arrived with Time Out of Mind in 1997 pushed ‘Gates’ off the setlists for those three years, and Dylan never attempted to adapt the song after his shift from guitar to the keyboards in 2002. Thus, this wonderful visionary song was lost to history.

The three 1996 performances were unremarkable. The audience talks its way through this Albuquerque performance (23^rd Oct) which is solid but not inspired.

1996 Albuquerque

The song’s brief return in 2000 is however, a different story. The performances of that year represent the pinnacle of achievement for this song. Unlike ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ which spluttered on until 2010, ‘Gates’ finishes at a high point.

I wrote about the Köln performance (May 11^th) in my Master Harpist series (Master harpist 2,), quoted myself from that article for my NET series (https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/20825), describing the performance as ‘exquisitely spooky,’ and I won’t go over that ground a third time. All I can say now is that this performance has remained at the top of my ‘best ever’ list and as one of Dylan’s finest performances ever in my opinion. The song is revealed in its full grandeur. It feels ancient, and the wailing harp makes me think of lonely bagpipes over a stricken battlefield. Protest? You bet – of war and peace the truth just twists… And something more that comes bursting out of our collective unconscious. The song is shown to have the scope and solemnity of a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch, all that beauty and terror I mentioned given musical focus. Make sure you have a clear eight minutes  when you play this one. Be prepared to fall under its powerful, magical spell. This performance is on You Tube, but the Mp3 is of far better quality.

Outstanding too is the audience response. They’re loving every moment of it.

2000

The song sounds almost as good without the harmonica but with strong guitar work, the same lilting, mesmerizing beauty. (Stockholm, May 18)

2000

Can this really be the end? Yes, except for two more performances in 2001, sans harp, but as powerful as the 2000 versions. Catch the complex acoustic guitar playing at the end of this one (Osaka March 7^th)

2001

And, although it doesn’t add much, here for the sake of it is the last ever performance (Ballina March 31^st)

2001 Final performance

So it ends, beautifully performed, as mysterious and evocative as ever. Jung once commented to the effect that the unconscious communicates with us through the language of dreams. We can feel the effect of the communication when we listen to this song even if we can’t quite pin down those lyrics. They weren’t meant to be pinned down or reduced to rational explanation but, carried by those epic chords, to speak directly to our imagination in the language it knows best, the language of imagery.

That leaves our world, and our psyches, on the very edge:

All in all it can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow

Those lines seem to apply today as never before.

That’s it for ‘Gates of Eden.’ I’ll be back soon to look at the next song on side B of Bringing It All Back Home – ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’

Until then

Kia Ora

by Jochen Markhorst

VIII       Just like some tragic beat Napoleon

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

 Steely Dan’s lyrics, perhaps even more so than Bob Dylan’s, have acquired a reputation for being impenetrable. While retaining poetic power though, so as with Dylan and as with, say, Jethro Tull and King Crimson, they are particularly attractive to masses of fans to discuss at fan forums and symposia. Not coincidentally all songwriters who are outspoken Dylan fans, by the way.

The most explicit and consistent, then, is Donald Fagen, who has over the decades repeatedly expressed his admiration, both in word and deed. “No one in the pop medium had ever used that breadth of subject matter or surrealistic and dream language,” he says in the Wall Street Journal (“Rock’s Reluctant Front Man”, July 8, 2011).

He borrows the title of Steely Dan’s debut album (1972) from Dylan – Can’t Buy A Thrill is the second line of Dylan’s own blues classic “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”. In 1981, at the beginning of the long Steely Dan hiatus, he applied to join Dylan’s backing band as a pianist. And when, in an unguarded moment, he says unkind things about his hero to reporter Andy Greene (“I’ve been to Bob Dylan shows where I essentially walked out in the middle. I just didn’t like it,” referring to what he sees as an abundance of “minor-key drone tunes with three chords”), he rectifies his comment via a long rebuttal in the Rolling Stone (July 2013):

“Greene brought up Bob Dylan. Because I could tell that Greene loved Dylan as much as I did, I let down my guard, and we started in with the classic fan talk, picking apart his recent work and mourning the fact that his erstwhile astonishing voice has now been reduced to a croak.”

The comments about the quality of recent songs were “jokes”, he says, and suggests it was a “big mistake” that he allowed himself to be critical of Dylan’s “damaged voice”, and tries to repair the damage with a nostalgic anecdote:

For Dylan idolaters, Bob analysis is a real party. We try to mimic his many eccentric vocal styles – folky Bob, psychedelic Bob, post-motorcycle accident Bob, Jesus-freak Bob – it’s fun. In college, we played a Dylan lyrics game:

“Name two items that hung from the head of the mule”.
“Oh c’mon, that’s easy. Jewels and binoculars, of course.”

Fagen is, in short, a real fan. Which then, apart from these fun facts, statements and the admission, “we try to mimic his many eccentric vocal styles”, may also be evident from the lyrics. Subtle and veiled, of course, but still… As in the title track of the superb, (by Steely Dan standards poppy) album Pretzel Logic (1974), the song with Dylanesque lines and references like He said, you must be joking son / Where did you get those shoes? and They say the times are changing but I just don’t know / These things are gone forever. And, more subtly, the third verse:

I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time, yes I do

Steely Dan – Pretzel Logic:

A Napoleon complex is putting it a bit too strongly, but “Napoleon” is indeed a sort of a motif in Dylan’s early 60s work, as Fagen keenly observes. When the famous Napoleon in rags turns up in “Like A Rolling Stone”, it’s already the third time in three years that we encounter the French emperor: after You need a different kind of man, babe / You need Napoleon Bonaparte in “Hero Blues” (1963) and after Your daddy walks in wearin’ / A Napoleon Bonaparte mask in “On the Road Again”, which Dylan presumably writes in 1964 – so Napoleon comes around once every year.

It triggers debate. There is in any case a considerable faction of eager cryptanalysts among Dylan fans, a usually somewhat overly enthusiastic column of puzzlers with the unfounded belief that Dylan hides existing persons and events behind symbolic masks and cryptic clues. And unsurprisingly, for that faction “Like A Rolling Stone” is a goldmine. Who is Miss Lonely, who are the diplomat and the princess on the steeple, what does Dylan mean by the chrome horse and who is the mystery tramp? The speculations bounce in all directions, from micro (“Edie Sedgwick”), to macro (“the audience”) to metaphysical (“the blues”), polluting the poetic gloss en passant, but oh well, no real harm done and it keeps a man off the streets.

All too likely, however, the scenario is not. Dylan is not a diarist who records his private worries and observations encoded in rhymes – moreover, it denies the essence of artistry in general and Dylan’s exceptional talent in particular. More likely, and also more respectful, is the observation that he is an artist doing what artists do: sketch You a picture of what goes on around here sometimes, tho I don’t understand too well myself what’s really happening, as he puts it himself in the liner notes of Bringing It All Back Home (1965, about three months before he writes “Like A Rolling Stone”). The credo of an impressionist, then, of an artist striving for a subjective representation of reality, and in doing so offering beauty, poignancy, comfort and elucidation.

On a stylistic level alone, Dylan’s self-analysis is quite apt. Neologisms, the use of synesthesias and sensitivity to sound, the baroque profusion of adjectives and adverbs: the Dylan of the mercurial years is a textbook example of a late-nineteenth-century impressionist. And in terms of content, the song offers us a condition humaine, and thus the comforting recognition that a revenge fantasy is an admittedly unattractive but no less universal human deficit.

Napoleon is eminently an appealing image for this particular revenge fantasy. After all, Napoleon Bonaparte’s life story is a fall from grace, the classic rise-and-fall story in extremis – from rising to emperor to ending up as an exiled outcast on a lonely island far away. A Miss Lonely writ large, in other words. Apart from that, the other symbolic connotation of the name Napoleon is right up Dylan’s alley: the Little General is by now located on the borderland of fact and fiction, of identity and illusion, of history and mythology – the favourite habitat of the writer who fills three-quarters of his own autobiography with fiction, of the songwriter who single-handedly filled the biographies of historical figures like John Wesley Hardin, Blind Willie McTell, William Zanzinger and Jimmy Reed with mythology, and who is fascinated by icons like Julius Caesar and Hemingway, Nero and Shakespeare, Jesus and Kennedy, by the inhabitants of that no-man’s-land between fact and fiction.

And just as the third allegorical value of the name Napoleon is a motif in “Like A Rolling Stone” and in Dylan’s oeuvre: dislocation, the perception that you are somewhere else than you are supposed to be. Which, in turn, Fagen’s mate Walter Becker uses quite dylanesquely on his first post-Steely Dan solo record 11 Tracks of Whack (1994), in “My Waterloo”:

I tried my best to hold my ground
I swore I'd never let it be this way
But now I broke my sword, dropped my gun
Just like some tragic beat Napoleon

Walter Becker – My Waterloo:

… a Napoleon sighing that he came a long long way from home, only regretfully to note that now I gotta walk that road again, now I gotta walk that lonely – miserably acknowledging that he has become Miss Lonely.

————-

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 9: I’m a bit of a textualist

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 Tony Attwood

In my rambling piece “All the songs that Bob’s never sung (or at least not very often)” I reached the conclusion that sometimes why he has not performed a song live is obvious – the song just isn’t right for a live show.  In particular the long, slow, repetitive songs which are hard to re-write and re-arrange (such as “Sad Eyed Lady”) would probably leave an audience restless.

I might add to this that “Freight Train Blues” and songs of that ilk would be fine for an intimate folk club – a brief bit of lightheartedness, a break perhaps from more intensive songs, but beyond that they really are not too relevant to today.  Unless the show is about “the old days”.   The same applies to the talking blues such as “I shall be free (Number 10)”.

Bob Marley of course could get away with performing “Talking Blues” because that song of his wasn’t a talking blues at all.  It’s here if you want to hear it.

But no, over time these songs fade in their original form and need to be brought up to date somehow.   So leaving that mode of performance aside and moving in a different direction, I am still left with the thought that just because Bob has simply ignored a song, it doesn’t mean no one else can.   Take “Temporary Like Achilles” – no use of the song from Bob – but as Wiki says, “The song has received acclaim from critics for its lyrics and musicianship.”   Maybe Bob just didn’t like it.

Still there is always the Old Crow Medicine Show, whose version I have considered before, and for whom the song could have been written in the first place.  They take it as a bit of fun, and really do enjoy themselves and I think it really works.

Indeed it is an interesting song in that its reception by critics ranges from “entirely successful, uniquely and unmistakably Dylanish, a gentle and moving love song” to “One of the worst tracks on the set.”  But then, what do critics know?

But like most of the very best songs, it can stand a reworking as Deborah Coleman showed…

The Don Olson Gang also had a good idea (it seems to me) with a reinvention of the song back into a 1930s slow jazz version.  I’ve put this on the site before, and two things remain the same.  I don’t know anything worth repeating about the band, and I still love this recording.

A long time ago Jochen pointed out, this is the only Blonde song not even to be rehearsed for a possible run-through, and hardly anyone has ever bothered to record it. Yet “on an album by any other artist, this song would be the prom queen.”

I guess by now Bob has simply forgotten about what seems to be an unloved composition, but it does have life in it as these recordings show, and there is no reason why it might not be used by other bands.  It is fun, it is lively, and it is open to all sorts of re-interpretation.  And best of all for such bands, Bob has simply left it alone.

PS The number of adverts appearing at the foot of each article has been reduced, and there is as ever a place at the end if you feel you’d like to make a comment.  Or indeed if you want to make it a bigger comment, you could write an article.  If so just email me: Tony@schools.co.uk

DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA  by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

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

 1965: Teenager finds a hero –part 3 (continued)

One final musing on my discovery. While Dylan’s switch from acoustic folksongs to a rock band was indeed a shocking development, outside the United States – and excepting a handful of English fans – we saw nothing but a completely unknown folksinger materialise as a pop star out of nowhere on the firmament. To us, Dylan the folk singer had simply not existed, let alone Dylan the ‘protest singer’ (except to precious few). We were suddenly introduced to an astonishing, unprecedented underground sound that would shortly thereafter be dubbed folk rock. And though times do change, they do not do so due to the proclamation thereof on the B-side of a single in a few European countries. As a side note: that acoustic-guitar business of his was, at least to Europeans such as myself, nothing new. We had had minstrels and troubadours aplenty for centuries, including some of the very best, such as Georges Brassens in France.

What Americans need to learn and understand, is that the Dylan whom many of them considered a turncoat when he abandoned the noble folk movement and ‘went electric’, only then became visible to the rest of the world, and as a folk rocker besides, appealing to a whole new set of teenage sensibilities right out of the gate. To tens of millions of ‘foreigners’, this folk rocker had virtually nothing to do with Americana, the very concept of which had not even come into existence yet. Their first notions of ‘what that Dylan guy is all about’ therefore deviated markedly from what his compatriots had trumped up about ‘their’ folk singer by that time.

The fact that many Americans have unfortunately never looked into this principal distinction and that they are therefore unable to imagine that a ‘foreign’ perspective might contribute meaningfully to the understanding of ‘their’ artist, can be attributed to their two-pronged exceptionalist misconception that a) the USA is the centre of the world, and b) that the core of Dylan’s art is ‘typically American’, and deserving of the Nobel Prize for that reason alone. But I maintain that the Americana in Dylan’s oeuvre is of minor importance to the appreciation thereof, a point that I will illustrate using several examples.

Dylan’s international breakthrough meant that his four folk albums also quickly became available outside the United States in the autumn of 1965. Then, too, ‘Blowin’ in the wind’ and ‘Times they are a-changin’’ were – however unjustly – embraced as the key numbers from this earlier work. Journalists who until then were just ‘doing their jobs’ were suddenly jolted awake and, free from their initial superficiality, promptly praised him as the ‘voice of a generation’.

But for Bob Dylan himself this epithet, bestowed upon him by spectral unknowns, came one-and-a-half years too late. In the autumn of 1963, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC) had given him the Tom Paine Award, named after one of the founders of the United States, because he had repeatedly spoken out and taken action in favour of those civil liberties and against the lamentable fate of America’s black population (see Chapter 21). Although he accepted the award, how could we foreigners have known that the handover ceremony on 14 December of that year was the direct catalyst for his decision never to align himself with any social movements ever again? In an interview in the autumn of 1964, he had already said:

“I agree with everything that’s happening, but I’m not part of no movement. If I was, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else but be in ‘the movement’. I just can’t have people sit around and make rules for me. I do a lot of things no movement would allow. It’s like politics, I just can’t make it with any organisation. I fell into a trap once – last December – when I agreed to accept the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.”

In short, he had already mentally rejected the notion long before that he would ever raise his voice on behalf of anyone, other than himself – for exactly how and why that came about, the reader is referred to the ‘biographical’ section at the end of this book. It was not because he had abandoned the social engagement that so characterised his earlier work, but because at the core of his engagement lay the notion that nobody should ever be made to surrender their soul to another.

His decision to ‘go electric’ was the logical outcome of his self-liberation, and ‘Subterranean homesick blues’ was his way of celebrating. It was a bull’s-eye. As such, ‘Don’t follow leaders’ can be interpreted as a politically-charged slogan, but one that is left up-in-the-air by the following rhyme: ‘Watch the parking meters’. One could admittedly – though strangely – argue that leaders should not be followed due to some mysterious consequence involving parking meters, but anyone capable of making sense of such an argument, though doubtless a gifted rhetorician, would most likely only open themselves up to ridicule. Clearly Dylan felt the need to include that one line, which in itself showed some engagement, though principally to fend off the idolatry that had risen up around him. He himself had been so idolatrous of his childhood hero, folk singer Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), that he had even become Woody’s epigone. After realising as much, he therefore knew what he was talking about and said the following to journalist Nat Hentoff in The New Yorker on 24 October 1964:

“Everybody has to find his own way to be free. There isn’t anybody who can help you in that sense. Nobody was able to help me. Like seeing Woody Guthrie was one of the main reasons I came East. He was an idol to me. A couple of years ago, after I’d gotten to know him, I was going through some very bad changes, and I went to see Woody, like I’d go to somebody to confess to. But I couldn’t confess to him. It was silly. I did go and talk with him – as much as he could talk – and the talking helped. But basically he wasn’t able to help me at all. I finally realised that. So Woody was my last idol.”

I cannot remember how long it took me to acquire Dylan’s first four LPs, but I do know that I did endless odd jobs in the summer of 1965 so that I could buy them as quickly as possible once they became available. I cannot have succeeded until the autumn of that year, however, since the new songs of course took precedence, and although their release was delayed in the Netherlands, it was still a sizeable outlay for a teenage budget: three singles and two LPs. But less than a year after I had first heard it, I can state with certainty that I had obtained ‘All I really want to do’ for my very own. The song that started everything for me opened Another side of Bob Dylan.

continued: Dylan and us: beyond America. 8: What you really want – Untold Dylan

————

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

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

We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks

By Tony Attwood

If you have been extraordinarily patient or perhaps you have a particular interest in creativity as a subject, or maybe you just don’t like the work of Heylin, you might be pleased to note that I have decided at least for the moment, or perhaps permanently, to stop reviewing Heylin’s mega work “The Double Life of Bob Dylan volume 2 – Far Away from Myself”.

The reason is I seem constantly to be drawn back to the same problem over and over, a problem that I perceive in the text, time and time again, which put simply is that Heylin doesn’t understand that being a mega creative person who lives or dies in terms of his work, via the strength and variety of his creativity, makes the individual very different from the most if not all people who don’t live their lives through creative activity.

Heylin does attempt to describe Dylan at work in some of his hyper-creative periods but even with that doesn’t quite seem to get the impact that this has or relate to the experience of creative activity in terms of Dylan or anyone else.   To summarise my previous episode of this series, Dylan was creating what many people would consider one of his greatest albums – indeed some might say one of the greatest albums of all time in the genre of popular music – and was producing recordings that many of us would have been utterly delighted to hear on the album, but was then still continuing to re-record some of the songs, changing lyrics, adjusting the melody and so on.

This is the utter opposite of a person who is asked to cut down a tree or oversee the operation of a machine that makes mobile phones.   In such circumstances there is a right and wrong way to do things.   There is no right or wrong way to write a song.

But beyond that there is something else.  Because your view, my view and Heylin’s view there is no absolutely right view.  There might be general agreement that Bob Dylan is a master at writing songs but even within that there will be disagreements about which version of a particular song is the best.  And indeed, judging by Bob’s decisions as to which songs to put on an album, and which to play in public, his view is not always the same as everyone else’s.

What would be interesting would be to use the enormous amount of information that Heylin has at his disposal to see how those decisions are made – and I felt this, particularly in reading the “Into Dealing with Slaves” chapter.   I felt Heylin was probably more excited by calling a chapter just that, rather than thinking about the music and the lyrics.

But anyway, Heylin and I disagree fundamentally.  His view is that it is possible to understand what Bob is up to a) with very little reference to the music and b) without considering at all the notion of creativity.

For creativity is not just about making something new – we generally don’t consider a child’s scribbles in a book to be “creative” much more than we consider most sandcastles creative, nor singing a Christmas Carol in an unusual accent to be “creative”.

For being creative is far more than being different – it is being different in a way that gives us new understandings, new feelings, new insights etc, in a positive manner.   And the “positive manner” part is important – it doesn’t have to make us feel good but it has to make us interested.

“Blowing the Wind” is, to my mind, a highly creative work, because it used the basic elements of folk music (a simple melody and the four basic chords of much folk music, with a repeated line at the end to emphasise the message) in a way that was different from anything I had heard before.   The message itself in the lyrics is tantalising, suggesting as it does that “the answer” is out there, but is hard to grasp.

That message – that things might be unknown and difficult to understand – was quite different from the message of most popular and folk music of the time, and yet it was put across with a gentle lilting melody which is normally associated with certainty rather than uncertainty.

Yes of course Dylan does suggest in that song that there is an answer out there, but through the phrase “The answer is blowing in the wind” he is telling us it is hard to grasp.  Compare that message with the message given in the lyrics of most popular and folk songs wherein the message is one of clarity.

This however gives the composer a problem – because if the lyrics are going to be about uncertainty, how is the music to reflect that?   The composer might be tempted to answer that by making the music more chaotic, more uncertain, but Dylan does the opposite.

Moving on we might also consider another song of total uncertainty – “Visions of Johanna”.  From the opening line (“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks….” we have that uncertainty message.  But again Dylan does not reflect this in the music, which is built around three chords once again.    Yet the uncertainty of “Blowing in the Wind” where everything seems to be up for grabs and anything is available and out there if you look for it hard enough, is quite different from the uncertainty of “Visions of Johanna” where instead of the world offering all possibilities, the world is now playing tricks on us.

Put another way, with “Blowing in the Wind” everything is out there if we want to reach out and explore it.  With Johanna, nothing is available because we are stranded, and unable to reach out.

This message of uncertainty is obviously not the only issue that Dylan deals with, it is one among many, and part of the fascination with his work is that he does indeed deal with so many different issues.   I think Professor Timothy Hampton who described “Tangled up in Blue” as a set of sonnets gave us an insight into the structure and helps us see the way in which the lyrics keep changing their starting point, from for example “Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’,” through to “And I was standin’ on the side of the road, Rain fallin’ on my shoes” all in one verse.

Yet again Bob redefined how popular music could work with concepts and ideas far more complex than was the norm in the early days of either the blues or rock ‘n’ roll, both of which are very simple in their structures and lyrics.

Now for me, given an artist who is dealing with such matters in so many varied ways, this whole notion of Bob leaving his wife to go and watch a boxing match while ignoring the issues he deals with in his compositions, just seems bonkers.

There are many artists, in all the areas of art, whose work I have greatly admired through my life, but whose personal lives I might find less than acceptable models for how one should behave.  I choose to let that go, because it is the art, not the artist’s behaviour that interests me.

And maybe that is my problem.  I find the issue of Bob and his neighbours, or Bob suddenly changing his mind, or Bob letting people down, irrelevant.  Just as I don’t go to see him in concert to hear him discuss his private life, that doesn’t concern me when I listen to recordings of his work.

Now of course that does raise another matter.  Supposing we have a genius artist, whose work offers extraordinary new insights into humanity, the human condition, human interactions etc etc, but whose personal behaviour is (to us, to me, to some people…) utterly deplorable.  Supposing their political views are utterly abhorrent to me – do I reject their art, as a result?

For me that is not an abstract question since I have faced it with Salvador Dali, whose work I do admire, and which has influenced my own thinking.  His politics are not something I am drawn to, but that doesn’t affect my view of his work.  I don’t really know about Bob’s politics, but that doesn’t worry me.  Nor am I bothered whether he believes in the messages to be found within some this work or not.

Thus I wasn’t bothered when he started writing what I might call Christian music, even though I am an atheist who believes that religions should be treated like any other institution or society in my country.  But if Bob chooses to write and sing songs about Christian values  that is up to him.  I can still enjoy them as pieces of music.

I know about Bob Dylan and write about him, because of his music, and I can value his songs irrespective of the words, or through the words and music, as I choose to do.  It makes no difference to Bob of course, nor any difference to anyone else.  I see him as an extraordinarily brilliant creative force in 20th and 21st century songwriting.

Heylin goes a different way and seems to think that Bob’s actions in his personal life are valid areas for commentary alongside reviews of his artistic endeavour.   I think that’s codswallop.  I don’t care about the personal life of Salvador Dali, JS Bach, Beethoven, Roy Harper etc, any more than I care about the personal life of William Shakespeare or William Blake.   I appreciate and enjoy their work.   The fact that Shakespeare suddenly packed up, went back to Stratford and stopped writing is a point to be noted with interest, but it doesn’t change my enjoyment of his work.

So Heylin and I are on such different tracks I see no point in continuing with his massive tome.   I am sure many people will have loved it, but I find the list of accolades on the back cover singularly depressing.  If Andrew Motion seriously meant it when he wrote in the Spectator “Clinton Heylin is the eminence grise of Bob Dylan scholars” I can only say Andrew Motion, and I, are not only on different planets, but in different galaxies.

• 1: Far Away From Insight
• 2: “I looked into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change’. 
• 3:  If this is a bunch of noise, then it is noise that I love
• 4: Far away from the music
• 5: How to ignore important details
• 6: Making New Morning
• 7: How Bob Felt at the Time
• 8: Does Bob Dylan have a right to a private life
• 9: Where do you go when the creative spark stops?
• 10: How free is the artist to say what he wants?
• 11: I am not me
• 12: Blood on the Tracks, a lesson of creativity in process
• 13: Conclusion: there is no double life (this article).

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 7

by Jochen Markhorst

• 1: The Rumpelstilskin tantrum
• 2: It’s all just about got to be too much
• 3: It was just a riff really
• 4: You’ll curse the day you started going down that lost highway
• 5: To live outside the law you must be honest
• 6: Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

VII        She’s a real princess

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They’re drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe

In Chapter 36 of Tarantula, invitingly titled “Sacred Cracked Voice & the Jingle Jangle Morning”, Dylan presents a whole string of loaded names: Lord Randall, Sir James, Fanny Blair, Matty Groves, Edward, Willie Moore and Barbara Allen… all protagonists from age-old ballads, murder ballads at that. With alienating stage directions, though. So Edward, the fratricidal murderer with the bloody knife, now “cuts hedges for his wages”, has become a professional gardener in Tarantula; Lord Randall doesn’t die a miserable poisoning death but has a nice beer; the vindictive Barbara Allen smuggles Moroccan cinders into Brooklyn, whatever that may be; and only the devilish child Fanny Blair remains somewhat close to her roots. After all, Fanny is originally the 11-year-old “perjuring little whore” whose false testimony puts innocent young Henry Higgins to the gallows. During the trial, she lies glibly, to which the judge Squire Vernon says admiringly, “You’ve told it so well.” With Dylan, she remains fairly in character: “Fanny Blair [is] dragging a judge.”

One way or another we do see reflections of all those legendary figures and blood-soaked songs invading Dylan’s sixty-years oeuvre, some more subtly than others. Like from this chapter an unusual choice of setting: “Matty Groves, who secretly at midnight tries to chop down the church steeple.” And even more remarkably, on the next page: “Houdini & the rest of the ordinary people taking down puckered Jesus posters out there on 61 highway – Midas putting them back up”… there we have it, the glorious Highway 61, a few months before Dylan will name his glorious album after it.

“Princess on the steeple”, the opening salvo of this last verse, is a somewhat quirky paraphrase of the usual “princess in the tower”, but at first you suspect it was chosen for its rhyme with “all the pretty people”. More interesting than that technical solution is the source. Fairy tales have been a growing purveyor of sidekicks, sets, props and one-liners since the last album Bringing It All Back Home. And this Tarantula chapter more or less officially does acknowledge that. In the opening line:

the jugglers who call you by the wrong name & title you wounded kitten 
- it is that easy for they know no fairy tales

… in which the naming of jugglers, who will also reappear in “Like A Rolling Stone”, is of course notable as well, but from which we can mostly infer that not knowing fairy tales apparently is considered a sign of being uncultured.

Dylan is well-educated though, and knows his classics. On the previous album we saw Aladdin drop by (in “Gates Of Eden”) and a wishing well (“Motorpsycho Nitemare”), and here on Highway 61 Revisited they are all over the place. Cinderella, pied pipers, Tom Thumb, lumberjacks, mermaids and dwarfs… and of course the tone is already set with the very first words of the album, the opening line of “Like A Rolling Stone”: once upon a time. Hereafter fairy tales will no longer be so lavishly honoured on Dylan’s albums, but they won’t disappear completely either. Blood On The Tracks is a Cinderella quote, in “Soon After Midnight’ a fairy queen swirls by, from the stage Dylan reveals that Shane MacGowan’s “Fairy Tale of New York” is one of his favourite songs, and “Key West” is the enchanted land, and there are more half references and whole homages.

But of all the fairy tales, Rapunzel still seems to impress him the most. Demonstrably twice, at least; He’s pulling her down and she’s clutching on to his long golden locks Dylan sings in 1978, in “Changing Of The Guards”, about a dame born on midsummer’s eve, near the tower; on that same album Street-Legal, Rapunzel returns again in the finale, in “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)”: She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair; and here in “Like A Rolling Stone” seemingly more explicitly – the princess on the steeple. However some doubt as to whether Dylan actually meant to refer to the fairy tale is justified. After all, it’s not too conclusive. Or Dylan is accidentally rehashing two fairy tales, which is at least as likely.

Character-wise, Rapunzel is not at all like Miss Lonely, of course. Rapunzel is naive and innocent, modest and submissive, living a lonely and unenviable life for eighteen years until her rescue, locked in the tower with no entrance and no stairs, in the service of that false, hypocritical witch Frau Gothel. No, Miss Lonely is much more like Hans Christian Andersen’s Princess On The Pea, the thoroughly spoilt princess who has gone from riches to rags, knocks on the door of a castle and has a sleepless night there because the queen wants to test whether she is rigtig, whether she is a real princess. The pea she places under the twenty mattresses of the guest bed then does, in fact, keep the brat from sleeping – yep, hun er en rigtig prinsesse, she is a real princess.

Paula Cole – Hard To Be Soft:

Dylan might then reject Princess on the Pea because of the somewhat unfortunate homophone pea/pee in English, which indeed does lead the associations to unintended side roads. In this scenario, the alternative princess on the steeple seems mainly motivated by the idea that it expresses something like living in an ivory tower. A blasé gal with a rich daddy who feels elevated above the riff-raff – the step to the metaphor “princess on a steeple” really is not too big or far-fetched. So he deliberately does not write “princess in the tower” precisely to avoid the link with Grimm’s Rapunzel. Which doesn’t quite succeed, in the end – the image is simply too firmly entrenched in our collective consciousness, and is refreshed fairly regularly, too; the princess-in-the-tower motif keeps reappearing in poems, novels and films. Since 1965 alone, since “Like A Rolling Stone”, there have been more than a dozen film adaptations and re-workings, Disney’s animation Tangled (2010) being the biggest commercial success.

Director Todd Hayes avoids that pitfall, the Grimm association. He eschews the fairy tale connection but still borrows this setting from the last verse of “Like A Rolling Stone” for the party scene in the Jude segment of I’m Not There (the part in which Cate Blanchett plays the jacked-up, vile 1965 Dylan so chillingly well). We are at a Warholesque Sixties party in a white, sterile environment among pretty people drinkin‘, thinkin’ that they got it made and the swaggering, neurotic Jude/Dylan has just heard from his manager “Norman” that he is now a millionaire. The airy-fairy princess “Coco Rivington” (Michelle Williams in an Edie Sedgwick-like role) makes a grande, inebriated entrance and is verbally torn to shreds by Jude. Enraged and humiliated, Coco leaves the tower room down the spiral staircase. Pityingly, Jude watches her from above. “I tell you, love and sex are two things that really hang people up. Why that is…I’Il… I’ll never fully understand.”

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 8: Just like some tragic beat Napoleon

———-

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

Meanderings on a very cold morning, by Tony Attwood

Looking at the list of songs Bob played in his last concert to date (that of 14 November 2024) it struck me that all the songs in that gig were songs that Bob had performed a couple of hundred times – or more.   And “or more” is rather an important addition because the concert also included “It Ain’t Me Babe” which he has performed over 1000 times and “Watchtower” which of course has been played over 2000 times.

Then it was with no particular aim in mind that I started flipping through the list of songs Bob has performed live, and found the last song which Bob performed and which one might call an “outlier” was Mr Blue which suddenly turned up between June and September last year (2024).

And at this point I began to start pondering how these songs came to turn up suddenly – for example “Cold Cold Heart” was performed for the one and only time on 21 June 2024.   Is it that someone Bob knows who is going to be in the audience that night asks for it?  Or is the band sitting around and Bob says, “What can we play that is different?”  Or….

I really would like to know, and if you have any thoughts on why a song suddenly has been performed on the tour, maybe just once, maybe a few times, and then vanished again, it would be interesting to know.   Please do add a comment here, or if you want to write a whole article about such songs by all means do – and send me either the idea or a full article to Tony@schools.co.uk

There must be a story behind performances of songs like “Will the Circle be unbroken” that was played three times, for the first time in 1961 and the final time in 2019.  The other performance was with Neil Young.

I mean it could just be a whim on Bob’s part, or it could be a member of the band or a fellow performer or friend suggesting it, or…. well I don’t know.

And thinking along these lines, there is also that vast list of songs Bob has never performed – indeed at a rough estimate I think something like half of the songs that Bob has either written or recorded have never been played by him in public.

Some of these I can understand – “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for example would be hard to re-arrange, and if played pretty much as on the album, would really take the life and soul out of a concert.   But then again John Wesley Harding has never been performed, and Bob chose to give the album that name.

In fact, as I look at the list of songs never performed by Bob there are so many I would love to have heard in concert.  Songs like “No Time to Think” – not just because I like the song but because I think another arrangement could have been really interesting.  But of course with that song, as with so many others, other artists have shown that yes indeed these songs can have a life beyond Bob’s version.

But there are also some that I would like to have heard live just because I love the songs so much – such as Angelina.  And no, I don’t know a lady named Angelina (although I am always open to new friendships), it is just such a wonderful song.  Of course I do recall I devoted a whole article to a cover of this song, but, well, maybe you weren’t reading Untold Dylan at the time, or maybe you have forgotten (it was a long time ago) so I have an excuse to include it again.

I am not quite sure where this meander of mine is going, but the fact that around half of the songs recorded by Bob have never been performed by Bob does give me pause for thought.  Maybe if I were a lot younger and still in a band I might suggest we do an album of Dylan’s lost songs.

But I’m not, so I won’t.  But I can still dream.

By Tony Attwood

Previously in this series…

• Dink’s Song
• Eternal Circle
• Fever
• Let it Be Me
• Precious Memories
• Rocks and Gravel
• Walls of Red Wing
• When the Ship Comes In
• Will the circle be unbroken

“It’s all good” appeared on “Together Through Life” and was performed three times in concert starting on 31 October 2009 at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago and ending just under three weeks later on 18 November 2009 at the United Palace Theatre in New York.    We have a recording of just one of these – the Chaciago 2009 performance.

And immediately it is possible to see why Bob didn’t take this any further, for the song is based on one chord throughout and the message if extremely clear from the start.   And this really isn’t Bob in terms of music, for more often than not we note the way Bob uses the chord sequence as a key part of the song.  With that removed, there’s just the bounce.

To be more precise, without those changing chords (even if there are just there of them as in a traditional blues format song) what we have is rhythm, melody and lyrics.   In “It’s all good” the rhythm is bouncy but unwavering, once we have heard the first couple of lines we’ve got it.

And unfortunately the melody itself doesn’t vary itself too much either, and the lyrics are OK but not the greatest.

Big politician telling lies
Restaurant kitchen all full of flies
Don't make a bit of difference, don't see why it should
But it's all right, 'cause it's all good
It's all good
It's all good

This is not to say it is not an enjoyable song – it’s bouncy and the lead guitar does some interesting things along the way, but after the opening verse above, we have the mesage.

Now there’s nothing wrong with that message – saying how awful the country is, is indeed a powerful and important message, but it is one that we know.   And so travelling through the song’s eight verses with endless highly generalised examples of how awful the world is, without any change of chord or melody means listening to the song is ok the once, but after, maybe not the best thing to be doing on a cold January morning, with Christmas and the New Year now all gone and done.  Although to be fair, the sky is a most beautiful blue, without a cloud to be seen.

Would I feel any better about the song if this were a warm day in June?  Actually no probably not.  It was, I think, and remains, I am sure, just a filler.  Three performances was enough.

I'm gonna pluck off your beard and blow it in your face
This time tomorrow I'll be rollin' in your place
I wouldn't change a thing even if I could
You know what they say?
They say it's all good
It's all good

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

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

1965: Teenager finds a hero – part 2    (continued)

But while I understood Berry’s ‘Too much monkey business’ without a problem, I can honestly say that to this very day, I still have no concrete notion of the meaning of Dylan’s text. And it still doesn’t matter: a lifetime later, on every hearing I still experience the same initial sensation, that this song is about me. Tell me, how can that be? In the old days – when second-rate secondary education and literary theory had not yet ruined our enjoyment of reading, and there were still teachers who could explain in simple terms what the ‘shock of recognition’ was – back then, you could have a discussion with a teacher like that about how such a thing were possible: to experience a shock of recognition without being able to explain precisely what one recognised.

With the help of such a teacher, one might then have discovered what it was… or perhaps was not, and have it explained to one that there was such a thing as symbolism, and poetry created via a ‘stream of consciousness’ or écriture automatique, that they were not to be taken literally per se, but could be probed intuitively to see whether anything resonated.

I must confess that I had one such English teacher, Bart Westerweel, praised be his name, who managed to make me receptive to even such unfathomable texts such as ‘my sweet old etcetera’ by e.e. cummings. Encouraged by his efforts, in the autumn of 1968 I would give a presentation on Dylan’s ‘Tombstone Blues’ from 1965, with the confidence that I had explored and understood everything based on my own intuition, and concluding that it was nothing short of a masterpiece. I had just started smoking cannabis, which I believed gave me the ability to better plumb the depths of Dylan’s art. Mr Westerweel received my account favourably, precisely because I had been so ‘nebulous’ in my analysis, whereupon he began – without embarrassing me in the slightest – to explain to the class how much more meaning the song contained than I had professed with my limited understanding of it. I might hope that you, dear reader, also had the good fortune of such fine teachers.

Meanwhile, the line ‘Don’t follow leaders’ – the only one that I understood effortlessly, thanks to my political background – immediately presented me with an existential dilemma at the age of thirteen. I was still susceptible to idols, and although I do tend to think that the same applies to all adolescents, I will only speak for myself. I had acquired a new idol just like that, who was fortunately also a soloist, eliminating the need for me to divide my attentions among a group. And a good-looking one too, if the cover was any indication. Hmm. And not unimportantly, this was the same fellow who had sung ‘All I really wanna do is, baby, be friends with you’. Yes please! But are we to be convinced that idolatry and leadership should not be confused with one another? I did confuse them, however subconsciously. And yet here was an idol who urged me in the imperative not to follow leaders. If I did what he said, then I was following his own orders, which he had just explicitly instructed me not to do. What hidden meaning did this contradiction conceal, or was it merely a paradox?

My thirteen-year-old brain was set to pondering. And how was I to interpret the fourfold warning ‘Look out, kid’ because ‘it’s something you did’ (what exactly?), ‘no matter what you did’ (how come?) ‘you’re gonna get hit’ (by whom?) and ‘they keep it all hid’ (who keeps what hid?) The fact that Dylan was (or, more precisely, could have been) referring to himself as ‘kid’, and that the song was an internal monologue in the imperative mood, did not occur to me. Not because I did not know what an internal monologue was, but because the song was about me. He had struck a chord within me, he was my new hero and I was already doing many of the things he had presented to me in the imperative (keep a clean nose, learn to dance, get dressed, try to be a success, please her, please him, buy gifts, don’t steal, don’t lift, don’t wear sandals, try to avoid scandals, don’t wanna be a bum you better chew gum), so deferring to his leadership was no longer up for discussion. But what does a thirteen-year-old do with a command to do the opposite?

I will skip ahead and reveal here that one year later, in February 1966, I decided to simply forget about this contradiction or paradox, whatever it was. Once the moment has arrived, you will understand why. I say this in hindsight, of course, but I am certain that I can pinpoint the moment when it happened: the moment when I no longer cared whether Dylan’s new works were better or worse than those I already knew. After that time, my attitude to Dylan was no different than to any other artist: once fascinated, my interest is difficult to shake off. I blame my upbringing. Pick an author for yourself whose work you admire. Whenever they release a new book, you will probably read it regardless, without expecting it to be any better or worse than the previous – it is not the quality, but the development of the oeuvre that is important. This attitude is also what prevents us from issuing harsh judgements prematurely, But first, let us look at what led up to February 1966.

We have already witnessed CBS’s inept management of Dylan as an artist. But ‘Subterranean homesick blues’ also appeared as the first song on Dylan’s fifth LP Bringing it all back home in late March, two weeks after the single. When the single entered the Cashbox Top-100 on 3 April at no. 94, it seemed as though CBS’s commercial policy, after around three years, was now finally working in Dylan’s favour. On his ‘home turf’, at least – everywhere else it was still a shambles. In the global release, the B-side of the single was filled with a similarly recent love song ‘She belongs to me’, except in France, Italy, the Netherlands and what was then West Germany, where the eighteen-month-old ‘Times they are a-changin’’ graced the reverse side. For this reason, some have referred to these releases as a ‘double A-side’, but in reality it was simply a public-relations move to show his versatility.

The European branch of CBS, who oddly enough had already released records in France containing ‘recent’ songs in June and November of 1964, may have thought that with the strong left-wing movements in those countries, the public was perhaps more receptive to a positive folksong about changing times than to a love song. Seen in this light, the deliberate use of the hymn that had more or less given him the status of a secular priest in the United States was a smart move. It is also true, however, that for three whole years, nobody had seen fit to point out beyond the United States that Dylan was already a successful folk singer with four albums to his name – LPs that had not even been released in France until ‘Subterranean homesick blues’ became a worldwide hit. In any case, in the United States, they finally decided to strike while the iron was hot.

(to be continued)

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

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

 We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks