Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden – Bob Dylan kicks open the door
By Jochen Markhorst
Five years ago, I wanted to write an article on “Desolation Row” for Untold Dylan. After 1,500 words, I had still not got past the title, and began to suspect I would need more than one article.
It ended up being a book (Desolation Row – Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965, published in March 2020). Meaning, I could throw out the ambition of someday writing the definitive Highway 61 Revisited book: such a book would become utterly unwieldy, running as it would to over 800 pages. At least.
So a new plan emerged: do it in parts.
Volume 2 became Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot– Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse (2021), and now, coincidentally given the recent success of the film A Complete Unknown, volume 3 in the “Highway 61 series” is coming out: Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden – Bob Dylan kicks open the door.
“Gates Of Eden” was, of course, on Bringing It All Back Home, but it happened to be the B-side of the single “that kicked open the door to your mind” (Springsteen), the single which I suppose did transform most of us. And I like the idea of honouring that earthquake with a book that has the same tracklist.
Even more coincidental is the conjunction of the publication date with the death of the enchanting, unforgettable Marianne Faithfull – the first chapter (and more) happens to be dedicated to her, to her significance in the creation of “Like A Rolling Stone”. A significance that has strangely always been somewhat underplayed. Strange, because surely Marianne’s presence in and around the genesis and in the song itself is not that very cryptic or hidden….
I will try and squeeze the rest of Highway 61 Revisited into one, concluding Volume 4. A challenge.
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. The new book is called Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden – Bob Dylan kicks open the door.
Publisher’s footnote:We don’t normally do much in the way of advertising within the articles of Untold Dylan, but for Jochen I will always make an exception. Without his articles, this site would not be a fraction of what it has become, and our readership would be much, much, smaller.
Jochen wrote to me asking if he could publicise his books as above, and my view immediately was that it was the very least I could do. I do hope you find the way to buying one of the versions noted above, read it and then give it pride of place on your bookshelf.
One tip, however: when you have bought it and read it, don’t lend it to a friend. The chances are, you’ll never get it back.
Phillip Gardener emailed me with his comments on the film “A Complete Unknown” having read recently, after reading my review, and I thought his comments were worth sharing. Phillip has kindly given me permission to reprint his email text here. The picture and video has been added by the publisher…
After having watched A Complete Unknown……
I was a 16-year-old Dylan fan and had queued all night in the pouring rain for a ticket to see him play at ABCRitz in Belfast on Friday 6th May 1966.
I played in a group back then called The Set, our manager informed us three days after I bought my ticket that he had secured us a ‘gig’ on Friday 6th May !!!! Can you imagine my horror, I wouldn’t be able to see the great man!
What our manager omitted to tell us when he announced our ‘gig’ was that it was as the introduction band for The Who (an up-and-coming band at the time!) who were playing at a place called The Top Hat in Lisburn.
The Who, Rodger Daltry, Pete Townsend, Keith Moon and John Entwistle were staying at the International Hotel which was directly behind Belfast City Hall. Dylan was booked into the old Grand Central hotel which was on the site that Castle Court is now on.
After our ‘gig’ we went back to the International with The Who , I won’t go into what we had to drink or smoke as I was under age!
Just after twelve, Bob Dylan and his manager walked in to join us for the rest of what was left of the evening!! He was told that the Who would be at the International and he wanted to meet them.
After having wanted to strangle our group manager for arranging a ‘gig’ on the same night that Dylan was playing …. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met and played with Bob Dylan!
Memories!
Phillip Gardner
PS From the publisher. I too was a Who fan, and indeed saw them at this time too – I think it was at the University of Sussex, but I might be mistaken as to the venue. The memories are hazy. There is a video of the Who from this era here.
I’m always delighted to receive reminiscences and thoughts on anything Dylan related for publication here. You can get in touch with me via Tony@schools.co.uk
XIII The songs find their way to me one way or another
“I never use the word “cover”. No one ever thinks that Ella Fitzgerald “covered” Berlin or Porter. She sang their songs. The songs were re-arranged and she sang them. I sing the songs of Bob Dylan and in this case, Leonard Cohen, because the songs came to me and demanded to be sung. That’s always the way it happens. I keep my ears and being open and wait. The songs find their way to me one way or another. My joy in Dylan’s work knows no bounds. He is Shakespearean to me.”
– Barb Jungr, interview with David Falconer for Female First, 2014
In the fictional Best Dylan Cover Competition, the ladies more often than not finish on top. The Roches‘ unsurpassed “Clothes Line Saga”, Emmylou Harris’ magical “Every Grain Of Sand”, Severa Gjurin’s breathtaking “Not Dark Yet”, Sinead O’Connor’s otherworldly “I Believe In You”, the Dixie Chicks with their irresistible “Mississippi” (okay, ex aequo with Rab Noakes), and we could go on and on. “Tangled Up In Blue” by the Indigo Girls, not to forget.
But in the “Like A Rolling Stone” subdivision, no lady even makes it to the Top 5, strangely enough. Brave attempts enough. The first is Cher, in 1966. The Goddess Of Pop is something like Dylan’s ambassador in the pop world, much the way Baez and Odetta are in the folk world. Cher’s successful debut album All I Really Want To Do already features three Dylan songs (apart from the title track, Cher’s first hit, also “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice”) and the success inspires husband Sonny Bono to repeat the same trick. And again and again; within a year, Sonny has his wife chirping two more complete albums (The Sonny Side of Chér and Chér, both released in 1966), With Love, Chér follows in 1967, and the fifth and last record the couple records is Backstage – five records in two and a half years, in other words, and four Sonny & Cher albums in between.
Broadly speaking, each of Cher’s solo records follows the pattern of the debut album: a couple of covers, one or two songs written by Sonny Bono, and always at least one Dylan cover. And all recorded in the same studio (Gold Star Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood) with the same producer Sonny Bono and largely the same session musicians – there are not too many differences between the five LPs. Cher’s “Like A Rolling Stone” is on the second one, on The Sonny Side of Chér and so it does indeed sound like “I Got You Babe” or “Little Man” or any of those many other Sonny & Cher songs, with or without Sonny: like Phil Spector on a diet. The cover is pretty redundant, Cher’s vocal qualities, which are not too dizzying anyway, really fall short, and the only lasting value are the unleashed drums and their sound – so really only a nostalgic, dated quality.
Cher remains loyal to Dylan for a little while longer. The first record she makes without Sonny, the underrated 1969 gem 3614 Jackson Highway under the direction of Jerry Wexler at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, features no less than three Dylan covers. And again, Cher is quick off the mark; she is the first to cover “I Threw It All Away”, and the shared first to record “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” (at about the same time as Esther Phillips, both in April 1969, i.e. the same month Nashville Skyline is released). It’s true love, as we can distil from her autobiography The Memoir, Part One (2024):
“I was a huge Dylan fan and loved his writing, as did Sonny, although he never thought much of his voice, which was a bit rich coming from him.”
… but nevertheless, after 3614 Jackson Highway, that love is only consumed platonically; Cher has not recorded a single Dylan song since 1969.
The next lady up is Maxine Weldon in 1971, who has the great good fortune to be dealt The Jazz Crusaders as session musicians, making two wonderful soul albums. “Like A Rolling Stone” is on the second, Right On, the record that opens with a surprisingly successful soul interpretation of “It Ain’t Me, Babe”. Equally catchy are her versions of Creedence’s “Lodi” and especially Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright”, but on “Like A Rolling Stone” it chafes: not being able to choose between rock and soul really only works out well if you’re Blood, Sweat & Tears. Magisterial organ, though. And, of course, The Jazz Crusaders always sound great.
And that’s how it is, for more than fifty years hereafter. “Like A Rolling Stone” seems immune to the je-ne-sais-quoi that female artists often manage to inject into a Dylan song. Judy Collins, Sara K. (still a brave, intimate, acoustic, jazzy attempt), Nancy Sinatra… none of the ladies are Top 5 candidates re this particular Dylan song. Not even La Jungr.
Veteran and Dylan expert Barb Jungr can be regarded as the Dylan interpreter of the 21st century and can tick off dozens of highly successful Dylan covers, but every now and then she misses the mark – like unfortunately (or maybe: precisely) with the monument “Like A Rolling Stone”. Her tribute album Every Grain Of Sand (2002) with fifteen mostly wonderful Dylan covers was rightly acclaimed at the time, catapulting her name into the thin heights where Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone dwell. Understandably, it gave her the courage to continue building on her Dylan catalogue, culminating in a second tribute album in 2011 with 13 covers: Man In The Long Black Coat. Fairly consistently, the English lady keeps embellishing the albums in between and after with yet another Dylan cover, as she does on Waterloo Sunset in 2003. Track 2 is a particularly idiosyncratic, dramatic, very European jazz interpretation of Dylan’s twenty-first-century masterpiece “High Water”, carried by a compelling lick on the double bass, expressionistic keys from the piano and soundtrack-like guitar commentary. Comparably quirky is Track 8, her approach to “Like A Rolling Stone”.
This approach seems to have been: Chet Baker Sings. “My Funny Valentine”, “How Long Has This Been Going On?”, those regions. The upright bass as the driving force, the piano for accents, the vocals in the centre. It works well enough in the bridge and pre-chorus, and chorus is alright, but strangely it does not work in the verses – Barb “cannot keep up,” as it were, seems to have to sprint after the syllables. Strange; usually, Jungr is actually as much a master of phrasing as Dylan is. Anyway, it’s her choice. Although… the choice, if we are to believe her, is more or less forced on Jungr:
I never go into arranging thinking, “What I want this song to do is…” I go into an arrangement thinking, “What could happen with this song if we listen to it differently?” We ask questions. We try things and we ask questions of the song. We sit the song down at the piano and we go [to the song], “How do you feel if we do this? How do you feel if we moved that section about?” And the song is very clear. The song will go, “Yeah, I like that,” or, “What are you thinking? Don’t be an idiot.”
(Don Gibson interviews Jungr for Write On Music, March 2014)
An intelligent professional woman, La Jungr talks about Dylan’s songs and her methods with appealing poetry and philosophical depth. In which she shows herself to be a kindred spirit of Dylan, by the way – Dylan can communicate with the same mystical poetry that he is just a guiding vessel, that songs “come to him”, and that “the song knows what it wants.” As Jungr says: “It’s always about what the song asks for. What does the song want? What questions do the lyrics pose that the arrangements can help answer?” (PopMatters inteview with Alex Ramon, 2014). To what extent Barb has found that answer in the case of “Like A Rolling Stone” is debatable. In any case, the men of the wonderful podcast Is It Rolling Bob? do enthuse and ask Jungr about it, October 2018. “It took my breath away,” confesses host Lucas Hare, and then classifies Jungr’s interpretation as “a sort of psycho-drama. A quiet, understated psycho-drama up to a point.” “I know some people hated it,” says Jungr dryly.
Subjective, of course. And still: Jungr often enough makes the Top 5 of the fictional Best Dylan Cover Competition. The No. 1 position even – with “Is Your Love In Vain?” anyway. With “I Want You” perhaps, and her eerie “Man In The Long Black Coat” also comes very close. Songs that have found their way to Barb, one way or another.
To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 14: What was I to say? Hurry up, asshole?
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:
Details of a few articles that explore a similar theme are listed at the end
By Tony Attwood
“Things Have Changed” was performed just over 1000 times by Bob and his band between March 2000 and September 2024. And what is interesting here is that although Bob made some changes to the song itself over that time, he retained the essence of the piece throughout all those performances.
The central theme that, “I used to care but things have changed” is always there, and there is no attempt to turn it into a new concept. Indeed such a change may not even be possible although Bob has done this before with a number of songs (and I am not resisting the temptation yet again to put in my favourite example of this ability, at the end of this piece).
Now of course I have not gone back and listened to all 1000+ performances of “Things”, and even if I had recordings of them all (which I don’t and I am not sure anyone does) I am certain that after 83 hours of “Things have changed” spread over however many days it would take me to focus on them all, I would be left even more bemused than when I started.
So I’ve chosen a few examples to suggest that perhaps perversely in a song which carries the word “changed” in the title, the number of changes made by Bob over the years is not nearly as great as that which we find in many other songs. And then, of course, I added my example of what is to me the greatest song change of the entire Never Ending Tour and all that came before and since.
But this issue raises questions, such as “Why has he not changed the song even more?” and leading on from that, is this a deliberate artistic policy on Bob’s part, or is there something inherent in some songs that stops them being changed?
Here is the original “Things have changed” from 2000, which of course you’ll know, but having started this journey, I found I wanted to hear where everything started from….
Today, I’m taken by certain lines, and struck by odd issues; many I am sure being totally irrelevant to everything, but still they strike me. Such as the rhyme of “champagne” with “train”. Did anyone ever do that before? And the oddity of “sapphire tinted skies”?
Here I am indebted to Larry Ffye who wrote the article “Shattering the glass of mirrors” on this site for pointing out therein that the phrase comes from “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. His rhyme incidentally is “skies” and “rise”. Dylan went with “skies” and “eyes”. (That’s not important, but I just noticed it).
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies;
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
Dylan, as you will recall, gave us
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes I'm looking up into the sapphire tinted skies I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train
Now, I have to say I find a trip back a quarter of a century to 2000 is quite a shock. Not because the song is not immediately recognisable, but because the feel of that slight lilt to the music, is so different from the way I think of the song now.
But then even within the same year, Dylan himself could change the melody and hence the entire feel of the song. And what I find so fascinating in the video below (from a gig I was actually at, so it has a special meaning for me) is the way Dylan himself looks and stands. He is singing about the fact that at any minute everything is going to break loose, but he is just standing there.
Now let us move on to 2012 – (and you’ll probably have to adjust the volume on your computer as these recordings all come from different sources of course). And by 2012, as we might expect, the key is different – but then so is everything else. The accompaniment, the singing, the emphasis on individual words, the instrumental break – just listen to that short passage at the opening, and between the verses.
Plus that strange (or at least to me strange) emphasis on the last word of each line, for no apparent reason.
Yet somehow it works. To me this sounds like fun, a twisting, tangling re-thinking of the lyrics. Even the little three chord interlude between the verses is unexpected and fun…
And beyond everything, I’m drawn to the line, “I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can.” Somehow with this version; this seems to me to be the absolute key to the song. I am totally drawn to the thought that Dylan is indeed walking away from himself far more at this point than he even contemplated when he wrote and first recorded the song. Although, maybe I am reading far too much into one performance.
But certainly this crazy character in the song tells us he can
"Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet Putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street"
And then if you are listening to the recording of this version you cannot but be amazed by the harmonica solo before, “I hurt easy, I just don’t show it” and the use of the instrument thereafter. Especially the harmonica playing that proceeds, “I’m not that eager to make a mistake” And then of course, that fabulous coda.
To me that harmonica, especially in that extended coda is portraying that “hurt easy” line. And indeed at this point in my life, having read so much about Bob, having been lucky enough to see quite a few concerts, I am drawn back to that. For Bob has indeed experimented so much with his music, and has repeatedly been shot down seemingly for the great crime of being a brilliant artist who experiments, rather than be satisfied with what he has already done.
I move on to 2009, and again I am taken by the fact that these changes made to this song (and I suspect every other song) are not changes for the sake of it. For as often as he moves a song somewhere else Bob can also take us back to its origins. This is 2009…
There is a sense of marching along, emphasising the beats, rather than the usual approach of coming in half a beat before the bar, and letting the vocals and the instruments sway against each other.
Just listen to the instrumental that starts at 2’22”. There is almost a feel of marching along; there is no swing in that lead guitar either; it just knocks out the beats. And he keeps doing it. Listen to the vocals around 3’10” with “hot to touch” and the lines that follow.
Yes Bob diverts slightly with the falling in love and wheelbarrow lines. But around 3’40” he’s back to the marching approach. And I am thinking, “Bob Dylan” and “marching” Of all the contrasting concepts there could be those two are surely among the most extreme.
But this is not happening by chance. Listen to the accompaniment throughout that performance and you’ll find those solid beats are there. Indeed by 5’15” Bob is still there emphasising the one-word-per-beat approach that gives the feel of the march.
So what is this? Is it, “Hey guys we’ve never played this song as a march before,” or is there a message within? A message that says, “No matter what I say or do, people will stick with their same old-fashioned interpretations”? Or in fact, is he just having a laugh?
For me, no he is not. Because this is the man who by this stage we know could transform one of his own songs that really didn’t say too much to anyone, into one of the greatest moments of all from the tour. And yes I keep on saying this about this performance, and you are probably bored out of your mind with me repeating this (assuming of course that you have been reading my ramblings all the way through – and if that is the case, let me know when you are next in my part of the world and I’ll buy you a drink). But then again, if I don’t point this else, who else will?
Since I first heard this when Mike provided it in July 2023, it has been right up at the top of my selection for the best moment ever of the Never Ending Tour. Best not only because it was so unexpected, but best because of its lyrical and musical quality. I’m sorry if you are fed up with me promoting this moment from the Tour, but well, it’s one of the few privileges one gets from being not only the writer but also the publisher.
A rather beautiful song (to my mind if no one else’s) that falls into the “never played” category is “Alberta”, of which there are of course several versions. I wrote a little something about them here and as I said at the time the two versions are quite different, and both have significant musical merit, number 2 particularly. But neither have been offered to the adoring crowds.
In fact eight tracks at least from that album have not been played live by Bob – one more than have missed out from New Morning. Although we did get an alternative version in the bootleg series volume 10.
I think maybe I can see why Bob might not like this enough to take it on tour, and that is the “la la la” sections, which I can’t see the need for. But now listen to the version that was put on the album
And I still think there is more that could be done to develop this song and make it not only a song that could be played on tour, but one that could become a favourite of the live performance.
Yet just because Bob didn’t rate a song for a live performance that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done. And as proof of that, I’d take Caroline Doctorow’s version of “Time Passes Slowly” as one of my all-time favourite Dylan covers – it has everything that I could possibly want from a cover version – an understanding of the song itself, some beautiful harmonies, a gentle reverence for the original and an excellent performance.
Moving on there is perhaps more reason to understand why the Pat Garrett songs didn’t get played in concert, and I’m not really moved to examine them any further, so from there I move down the list on the official Dylan site of songs never performed by Dylan and get to “Dirge.”
My review eight years or so agolooked into the song, and didn’t bring in covers; but of more interest is the fact that it is one of only three songs on Planet Waves that was not performed by Dylan.
But there are some artists who have been brave enough to take this on. These performances are, for me if no one else, highly imaginative and very varied in their approach. One I really do like is from Erik Truffaz featuring Sophie Hunger – and please if you venture into this song don’t click away after a few seconds.
I wondered at first if Dylan’s decision not to present this was just down to an immediate decision, or maybe because he too felt that the way to go with this song, was to vary the approach within the song. Dylan doesn’t do that – and besides he often has an audience that bounces along when there is a bounce to bounce to – and with this one they wouldn’t know where they were.
It would of course be a major leap for Dylan to try anything like this, and I am not at all sure that the audience would really appreciate what was going on – so this time, not performing the song is understandable – but still a shame. I’d love to know what Dylan might have made of this in public.
Street Legal, had two non-performed songs: New Pony and No Time to Think. The absence of the Pony doesn’t worry me too much but “No Time to Think” not being performed by Bob is a severe loss, I feel.
I have raved over this cover over and over again – it is right up there in my top ten of Dylan covers, and I really do feel Bob have given us much more had he ever chosen to take the song on stage.
On the other hand, I’m not so keen on Dave Tilton’s version – it just shows that what feels like a good idea doesn’t always turn out that way.
But the song has travelled to languages beyond English... alothough the original Dylan approach is generally retained. So maybe that’s the clue – there really is no way to perform this song, other than with a very strong link to the original version.
An index to our series appears on the home page, and you are of course very welcome to leave comments below.
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 and further information.
Long a staple of the Bay Area music scene, Tim Hockenberry was exposed to wider audiences when he recorded and toured with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, known particularly for singing their cover of the Savatage power ballad Believe. At the beginning of his career, Hockenberry also played the trombone, his first album is a straight jazz record. His second album was Mostly Dylan (2005), which he did with producer Tom Corwin and Bonnie Raitt’s band. The album’s subtitle New perspectives on the songs of Bob Dylan is actually appropriate, Hockenberry and Corwin have created some excellent and unique covers including a slowed-down version of Spanish Boots. ‘
Boots Of Spanish Leather’ conjures up images of slow dancing under a starlit sky, with echoing guitars and drawn-out vocal lines, a critic wrote. It’s at times like this where Hockenberry’s in his element, working every drop of emotion out of Dylan’s lyrics and exploring a wide and diverse vocal range.
Later in his career, Hockenberry, who was a recognised musician at the time, made some surprising decisions. In 2012, he made a splash on the America’s Got Talent television talent show. I never thought about going on there, to be honest, he explained in a 2020 interview. I always felt I was too old for something like that. I was offered a VIP slot to audition for the show.
Hockenberry made it to the semi-finals, that was when he first read the contract that he had signed. The contract states that if you win, they own you for seven years. You are signed to work for them in Las Vegas, six nights a week, for $1000 a week. They own 75% of all of your publishing retroactively for ten years. I talked to my lawyer about it and he told me that I need to get off the show. At this point I certainly had the competitive spirit and wanted to win, but not at that cost. So for the next song, I chose John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. The first line is ‘Imagine there is no heaven’, which right there should kill most of the Midwest vote. Hockenberry was proved right.
While the first decades in the after-life of Spanish Boots were rather scant in terms of quantity of covers, interest increased considerably from around 2005 onwards. Renowned Australian (jazz-) singer Rebecca Barnard took on Dylan’s song on her 2006 album Fortified. Californian singer and actor Tyler Hilton released a haunting duet version with Alexa Dirks on his YouTube channel in 2008.
Dirk Darmstaedter (2010), a singer, songwriter, and producer born in Germany, raised in New Jersey, now living in Hamburg, released Spanish Boots on his tribute album in 2010 (Dirk Sings Dylan). Scottish folk musician and singer-songwriter Ewan McLennen recorded his first album Rags & Robes in 2010, which cemented his reputation on the UK folk circuit, and led to him winning the 2011 BBC Horizon Award. It was the same year that McLennen contributed a cover of Spanish Boots to the album Younger Than That Now. One of the most exciting new voices I’ve heard in years. He sings beautifully, with great sincerity, great empathy, praised Mike Harding on BBC Radio 2.
Born in Puerto Rico, Gabriel Ríos came to Belgium at the age of 17 to study painting in Ghent. Instead of painting and canvas, he chose the path of music. He found his way within the Belgian music scene and with friends he created a series of colourful albums: from the sultry Latin crooner-pop on Ghostboy to the reflective tones of This Marauder’s Midnight. With his sixth album, Playa Negra (2024), Ríos returns further to his roots and now sings exclusively in Spanish. In May 2011, Flemish public broadcaster ‘Radio 1’ invited artists to their studio to celebrate Dylan’s 70th birthday. Gabriel Ríos performed a superb Boots of Spanish Leather.
Boots of Spanish Leather has been translated into several languages, including Frisian (Reina Rodina, 2010)…
Two outstanding non-original language versions come from Mikael Wiehe & Ebba Forsberg on their 2007 album Dylan på svenska, that is the subject of other articles on this website, and the Dutchman Ernst Jansz.
Ernst Jansz is one of the founding members and frontmen of Doe Maar. Doe Maar is a Dutch 1980s ska/reggaeband, and is considered one of the most successful bands in Dutch pop history. He is a well-known celebrity in the Netherlands, besides his music, he has also written three semi-autobiographical books based on his Dutch-Indonesian identity.
Jansz recorded a Dylan album in 2010 (Dromen van Johanna) with 12 songs, that he translated into Dutch, including Boots of Spanish Leather.
In 2001, he released the live album Dromen van Johanna. More than ten years later, in 2023, Jansz has once again dealt intensively with Dylan; he toured the country with a theatre lecture Dylan according to Dylan. Jansz says his intention was to lift the mystical veil around the legend by showing images, playing the translated songs and talking about the connection between the songs and their creator. Jansz shows how he implements this using the example of Spanish Boots as follows: The night before her departure Dylan wrote ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’. A wonderful congratulations to his great love. She was gone and he was miserable. Because he missed her so much, he refused to stay in their apartment in New York because everything there reminded him of her. He slept with friends, wandered through Manhattan and wrote one incredible love song after another. After six months a letter arrived from Italy. The gist: ‘Pop, I’m staying here a little longer.’ Nowhere is it said that she hooked up with a nice Italian, but she dedicated her book ‘A Freewheelin’ Time’ to her husband, an Italian.
It’s a touching story, and probably well suited to a theatrical reading. It’s also essentially true, but unfortunately Jansz doesn’t disclose his sources, so we’ll never know for sure if Dylan really wrote the song the night before Suze’s departure.
This version from The Airborne Toxic Event wins my prize for the biggest surprise that I got in working through some of the many versions of ‘Spanish Boots’. The harmonies between the male and female voices are utterly unexpected as is the changing accompaniment and the glorious instrumental break. The simplicity with which the two voices deliver the last sung verse, followed by the instrumental coda is perfection for my ears. Like Tony Attwood, many critics are impressed by the cover which actually adds something never heard before to the song: The Airborne Toxic Event’s cover is a masterful interpretation of Dylan’s original, capturing the essence of the song’s themes and emotions, the universal human experience of yearning for a loved one who is far away. ‘The Airborne Toxic Event’ is a rock band from Los Angeles, formed in 2006. Named after a section in Don DeLillo‘s novel White Noise, the band is known for its blend of rock music and orchestral arrangements, having performed frequently with the ‘Calder Quartet’, a string quartet based in Los Angeles. The group has also played concerts with the ‘Louisville Orchestra’ and the ‘Colorado Symphony Orchestra’. Boots of Spanish Leather is their contribution to Amnesty’s Chimes of Freedom album from 2012. There is also a music video of the recording session.
A list of the previous articles in this series is given at the end
What you really don’t want – part 2 (continued)
In the final track from Another side…, which forms the complementary bookend to ‘All I really want to do’, Dylan did do something, by rejecting this kind of possessive behaviour outright. Though it is hard to argue against him, listen first and judge for yourself:
Go ’way from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed
I’m not the one you want, babe
I’m not the one you need
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Never weak but always strong
To protect you an’ defend you
Whether you are right or wrong
Someone to open each and every door
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe
Go lightly from the ledge, babe
Go lightly on the ground
I’m not the one you want, babe
I will only let you down
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart
Someone who will die for you an’ more
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe
Go melt back into the night, babe
Everything inside is made of stone
There’s nothing in here moving
An’ anyway I’m not alone
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Who’ll pick you up each time you fall
To gather flowers constantly
An’ to come each time you call
A lover for your life an’ nothing more
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe
By way of comparison: when Dylan wrote this song, The Beatles were still producing hit after hit, devoid of any substantive claims concerning traditional relationships. All well and good: their service to music was a different one, as was that of the Rolling Stones.
Dylan did make such claims, for although he would always deny being a moralist, he was one nonetheless, as evidenced by numerous songs that lack an I-figure and that therefore resemble sermons, or are replete with single-line admonitions. He would remain so his whole life.
I am certain that there will be experts by now who argue that he cannot possibly have realised at the outset that ‘It ain’t me babe’ was addressing possessiveness in relationships as a universal problem. Granted, at the time the material was perhaps too close to home for him to have been fully aware of it while writing. My counterproposal is that the idea is not so far-fetched after all, since his mind was already open to the idea of anti-possessiveness. The dimension he had already added to the centuries-old love song made it clear that a fine alternative was available: that it is good and proper to end a relationship – as tragic as it may seem – if another’s love comes at the cost of surrendering your soul and becoming a trophy which, of course, is not love at all.
But although he revolutionised the genre, his efforts unfortunately did not result in the prompt eradication of this brand of possessiveness from society. Even disregarding the overly adulated conservative horror Tammy Wynnette, both she, and Dylan’s much-adored contemporary Dusty Springfield (1939-1999), demonstrated as much in 1966, with her universally nauseating world hit ‘You don’t have to say you love me’, whose misogynistic sentiment trumps even ‘Stand by your man’:
When I said I needed you
You said you would always stay
It wasnt' me who changed but you
And now you've gone away
Don't you see
That now youve gone
And Im left here on my own
That I have to follow you
And beg you to come home?
You don't have to say you love me
Just be close at hand
You don't have to stay forever
I will understand
Believe me, believe me
I cant help but love you
But believe me
Ill never tie you down Left alone with just a memory
Life seems dead and so unreal
All thats left is loneliness
Theres nothing left to feel
You don't have to say you love me
Just be close at hand
You don't have to stay forever
I will understand
Believe me, believe me
This was two years after ‘It ain’t me, babe’. It is almost as though Springfield listened to Dylan and thought: I need a countermove, but what? Oh, I know: ‘Believe me, I’ll never tie you down’.
Notice the contrast with The Four Tops, who were actually begging to be tied to the ‘apron strings’. But here, too, appearances are deceiving, for although Springfield refuses to tether her man – who does not even need to say he loves her nor stay forever and is, therefore, no ‘lover for your life and nothing more’ – he does, however, need to ‘be close at hand’, like a pack of tissues ready to wipe up her blubbering.
If this is not enough to make you sick, I don’t know what is. The you-figure in her song therefore had every right to flee, though he applied Dylan’s ‘Go away from my window’ to himself. Or who knows: perhaps he clambered out of her window to make as quick a getaway as possible. None of this reflects personally on Dusty Springfield herself, of course – like Presley, she had a formidable voice. But she could simply have refused to sing it. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine had the nerve to include this originally Italian drivel (‘Io che non vivo senza te’ – I who cannot live without you) as number 491 in their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It no longer featured in the 2021 revised edition, so clearly finding a replacement was not that difficult after all.
There are lighter – and therefore more underhanded – variations on this possessive theme, such as ‘You are the sunshine of my life’ (1973) by Stevie Wonder. In the 2021 Greatest 500 list, Rolling Stone awarded it position no. 183. Quoting the full song is not even necessary to convey its suffocating qualities, the opening two lines are enough. Incidentally, I have rejected Sony Music’s risible demand that I pay €20 per 10,000 copies to quote those two lines in this narrative essay – they are freely available online.
But surely their import does not bear thinking about: somebody who will hover about you like an insect or orbit you like a planet for your whole life, on pain of combustion in the fire of your so-called love? This is clearly an example of love being taken, not shared.
The in itself rather generic question How does it feel has by now pretty much been hijacked by Dylan’s song – two, three generations can no longer hear the word combination without unleashing the reflex to be on your own. Just as the question What is love can no longer be asked without someone shouting Baby don’t hurt me, and just as every teacher in the Western world dreads the lesson in which he has to mention Galileo – one of the class jokers wíll shout Galileo Figaro magnifico in a high-pitched voice.
Still, every so often, some daredevil manages to escape the suction of “Like A Rolling Stone”, and the best example is Slade’s 1975 pièce de résistance. The single “How Does It Feel” is only moderately successful, presumably because the song and arrangement are so totally unlike Slade, but it is an exceptional song, with quite prominent proponents at that. The loudest fan is Oasis’ Noel Gallagher, who goes on record in 1999 with:
“People just think when they listen to Slade, they think of Cum On Feel The Noize and Mama Weer All Crazee Now, but: How Does It Feel is easily one of the best songs ever written. Ever. Such a brilliant song. Go on buy it if you’re watching this. It’s on the Greatest Hits. Track 13.”
Strength of the song, Noddy’s unique vocals and lyric content all gloriously resist the Dylan association. But in general, users bow their heads and refer implicitly or explicitly to “Like A Rolling Stone”. Like recently, English indie band London Grammar’s “How Does It Feel”, with the curtsy in the chorus; “How does it feel now you’re alone? / How does it, how does it feel to feel low?” (on Californian Soil, 2021), or 1970s rockers UFO in 1978‘s “Lookin” Out for No. 1” (“How does it feel to be right out on your own? / Just gotta keep looking out for No.1”), which incidentally seems very much inspired by a Lou Reed throwaway, Transformer‘s album filler “Wagon Wheel” (“Won’t you tell me, baby, how do you feel / Hey you gotta live your life as though you’re number one”). Or even more subtly, as with die-hard Dylan fan Graham Nash;
… in the message to Dylan disguised as a naive peacenik anthem “Be Yourself” from his still very charming solo debut Songs For Beginners (1971), the song opening with
How does it feel
When life doesn't seem real
And you're folating about on your own
Your life seems uncertain
So you draw the curtain
Pretending there's nobody home
… and then insinuating slightly less subtly in the third verse that we are talking about Dylan:
We once had a savior
But by our behavior
The one that was worth it is gone
Song birds are talking
And runners are walking
A prodigal son's coming home
With biblical ambiguity, as befits a Dylan tribute. Nash’s unbritish lack of irony and his verging on Disney-like weakness for pathos don’t really stand the test of time, but on the other hand: the album features granite songs like “Better Days” and “I Used To Be A King” – which fortunately far overshadow the embarrassing hippie naivety.
The other side is the slogan-like use of How does it feel. Dylan books, tribute records, bootlegs, articles and reviews… the catchiness of the slogan is eagerly and often used and reused. As for the record on which Nancy Sinatra sings her version of “Like A Rolling Stone”, 1999’s How Does It Feel.
It is a somewhat peculiar cover. Of course, roughly half of the more-than-200 covers struggle with the challenge of adding something to the original – perfection is hard to improve on, after all. So we have many covers that do qualify for the stamp “pastiche” or “parody” or “tribute” rather than “real” covers, than interpretations like Spirit’s of Hendrix’s, covers that manage to hold up the monument, but from a different angle. Nancy with the laughing face is somewhere in between.
How Does It Feel is an album assembled from scraps, just as the album cover appears to be a leftover from Nancy’s photo shoot for the May 1995 issue of Playboy. Twelve songs, six different producers, and a tracklist that ranges from Linsey De Paul’s “Sugar Me” to Hazlewood’s “Happy” to the highlight Brook Benton’s 1962 “Walk On The Wild Side”.
Anyway, the record is named after Nancy’s version of “Like A Rolling Stone”, one of two songs produced by Bones Howe. Which suggests that Howe was the instigator – Minnesotan Bones Howe began his impressive career (Elvis, Sinatra, Mamas & Papas, and especially Tom Waits) with Dylan; his breakthrough was the 1965 hit he produced for The Turtles, Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe”. In 1979, he enticed Jerry Lee Lewis to record the obscure Dylan throwaway “Rita May”, and sometime in between, December 1975, he produced three songs for Nancy (also the as yet unreleased “Uptown” and a song that eventually ended up on How Does It Feel as well, “Fancy Dan”).
Bones’ work is generally beyond dispute. In particular, his work with Tom Waits (the Asylum records) is rightly praised in only superlatives, as is his influence on that umpteenth comeback album by The Killer (Jerry Lee Lewis, 1979). But in December 1975, he is not really in form, or not really inspired (which seems rather inconceivable when you are in a studio with Nancy Sinatra).
In any case, the arrangement is very unfortunate. A far-forward mixed hi-hat doing exactly the same thing as on every KC & The Sunshine Band record of the 70s and rather obtrusively trying to insist that funk would be a good choice for “Like A Rolling Stone”, a horn section wavering between Herb Albert, Blood, Sweat & Tears and a 70s police series, and a hideous background chorus. The only golden edge comes from Nancy – always cool, calm & collected, although that promise of sultriness she usually achieves partly by singing just behind the beat is absent today. Nancy opts for ennui – which, of course, does fit this lyric in a way. However: after two verses, producer Howe allows her to sing the chorus one more time, and then we already enter the fade-out: seven (!) times a bored sounding “Like a rolling stone”, slowly fading away, the timer is at 3’29” and done. Bob’s your uncle.
The arrangement is bad enough, but boldly discarding half the lyrics borders on sacrilege. The recordings are presumably intended for a relaunch of Nancy’s career, after her last, not too successful 1972 record Woman – but someone is wise enough to decide that this is not the way to go, and lets the recordings disappear. It eventually takes until 1995 for Nancy’s next record to be released. That record, One More Time, the one for which she does the full monty in Playboy for promotion, does indeed pave the way for a rather successful relaunch, by the way. Or comeback, actually. Which apparently gave her the courage to put together the leftover record How Does It Feel in 1998. “Bones Howe kept our session tapes of “Like A Rolling Stone”, “Fancy Dan” and “Uptown”, thank heaven,” Nancy then declares. Hmm. One could have an opinion thereon. Maybe it would have been better if Bones had lost those tapes. When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose, after all. On the other hand: “I think Nancy is head and shoulders above most of these girl singers today. She’s so soulful also in a conversational way.” So says Dylan in the 2015 AARP interview, so nearly 50 years after he could review her version of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” (1966) and 16 years after he was able to hear her version of “Like A Rolling Stone”.
It’s quite a compliment. From the master himself. Now, how would that 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:
A friend and I went to see “A Complete Unknown” – the movie – last night at our local cinema and it was indeed a pleasant evening out – at least until the very end. The film, as you may well know, covers Dylan’s days from sitting at the bedside of Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey onto the first concert where he performed accompanied by an electric band, (and was roundly booed).
The audience in the cinema (at least for this film) was decidedly of the older variety – people like me who have been Dylan fans from the moment his music first became available in the UK in 1962/63. And looking around while overhearing the pre-film chatter, I wasn’t the only person there who was accompanied by a friend who wasn’t a committed Dylan fan, but was interested in seeing the film.
I’ve seen reviews that suggest the film is “disappointingly unambitious” and I suppose that means “unambitious” in the sense that it primarily told the story that we all know of Dylan visiting Gutherie, making his initial albums, riding motorbikes without a helmet and then playing an electric set. And so for those of us who know all this, yes there is nothing new but it is still entertaining. But for those who come along with their committed companion, much of it will be new, and I think, enjoyable. That’s the sort of movie it is.
It is sympathetic, it’s a good story, and the performances by Timothée Chalamet and cast, is extremely well-played. The criticism is thus, for me, one of those typical film reviewer comments where the writer seems to assume that everyone knows everything and everyone wants to move on to something new. But no, sometimes I (and I think the rest o the audience) like to revisit the past. And why not?
Besides, some of us who have been following Dylan from the start, and while not quite as old as he is, are getting on a bit, do like to be reminded of the old days, in an entertaining and sympathetic way. In short, if you want some new insights into Dylan that have not been aired before, your best bet is probably still to read Untold Dylan. Not every article will please you, but you should get quite a bit of enjoyment along the way. But on the other hand if you want a decent evening out… yes this is a good way to get it.
The other point that struck me is that we have had a number of Dylan movies before, portraying Dylan in all sorts of ways, while playing with the enigmatic nature of Dylan and his work from time to time. So that has been done, and although perhaps another enigma built on enigma movie might find something new to say, surely there is nothing wrong with a film that turns its back on those approaches and instead gives us a reminder (although in double quick time) of the journey from “complete unknown” to the man who had enough confidence to take on the whole folk music world by playing an electric set.
Looking back once again it was an extraordinarily odd and bold thing to do, and I found myself wondering why those organising the concert at which Dylan “went electric” didn’t actually ask him what was going on, as all the paraphernalia of an electric gig (such as amplifiers) was set up on the stage. But no, seemingly (according to the film) no one noticed the cables and the amps. And presumably, there wasn’t a sound check either.
And I must admit, I’ve never thought of this before. Who laid all the power cables? Why didn’t anyone ask what they were doing?
OK maybe I’m being trivial and silly, and of course, with movies, we are required to suspend disbelief. What’s more, this film doesn’t set out to be anything but a piece of entertainment and reminiscence for those (and in some cases their carers) who want to reminisce.
Dylan said of the film, “Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.” And that’s a good way to put it. With this actor, you can really believe you are watching a young Dylan, and since most of the people opting to watch the film will know the history (even if their companions or possibly carers don’t) that is exactly what the film needs.
Indeed it is not too surprising to see the film being nominated for awards. I don’t go to the movies enough to know if it was in with a shout, but I certainly thought the performances of the leading actors were exactly what was needed. It is, after all, a story in which less talented actors and filmmakers could go totally over the top.
My own reading of Bob’s history, and listening over and again to the early recordings leads me to conclude that in these early days, Bob was uncertain about where he was and what he was. Bob in his later days has become an expert at being either a myth-creator or a myth-maker, I am never sure what. But it all seems to fit.
What we don’t have is any attempt to consider, let alone explain, the evolution of Bob’s composition on from the lost love tales of “Don’t think twice,” through to telling the older generation that their world has gone with “Times they are a-changing” and then onto the feeling of being completely outside of the world with “Like a rolling stone”. But that makes sense within the film because we are observing Bob from the outside, not considering the world as Bob sees it.
I have seen criticisms of the fact that the movie falls into the trap of the “worn-out tropes of a biopic,” but this I think is to ignore the creative conception of the film – just as many general commentators completely fail to understand the creative conception of Dylan’s music.
The fact is that most of the audience for such a movie will be people who have been Dylan fans for much of their lives. OK some will be their friends, family members or even (dare I say it) their carers, but the people taking the initiative to go to see the film will be people who have followed Dylan for much of his and their lives. They’ve heard the music and read the books. We know what really happened, and many of us will have been there at least in terms of time, if not physically in the same country.
In short the audience – or at least the prime part of the audience – knows the story because many of them were following it in real time in their teens or 20s. So trying to see the movie through the critical eyes of a disengaged (and probably younger) observer is pointless. We know what happened, we just like seeing it again in a partially fictionalised form.
Besides, there are some nice throw-aways in the film too, like Bob saying, “People make up their past,” which I think we have learned well enough, and not just in relation to Bob. Indeed it has always seemed to me that the only people who don’t realise that we all interpret our pasts in our own way, giving accent to some moments, and deleting others, emphasising and expanding in some ways, forgetting in others, are members of the legal profession and journalists looking to take a few cheap swipes.
The way Dylan has done some mythologising of his own has often been picked up on by journalists who have such limited knowledge of music they don’t know what else to write about. Besides which, the telling of tales is what folk music (where less we forget is where Bob started) is all about.
And also there are nice bits that from all that we know, are true, such as the unplanned introduction of the organ into “Like a Rolling Stone,” which I really enjoyed too.
In fact, for me, it was a thoroughly good evening out, at least until our return journey back to my village tragically reminded me of the world we are actually now in, as all the roads were shut around the nearby supermarket that I use several times a week, following a stabbing of a store worker by a shoplifter. Real life, and again a “complete unknown” as ever, is there ready to slap one in the face; the stabbing hasn’t even made the news. I fear for the worker who was attacked, but then quite separately I was really pleased to see the film. That I suppose is the dichotomy of life.
(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 31st, 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 30th, 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 6th.
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 14th.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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 21st 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?
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
“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?
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.
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:
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.
A list of the previous articles in this series is given at the end.
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.
