Untold Dylan

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 6

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it hard when you discover that
He really wasn’t where it’s at
After he took from you everything he could steal

 As Joan Baez sings “Percy’s Song” behind Dylan’s back, with La Faithfull sitting shyly beside him and the cameraman walking around him, zooming in on Baez, swerving back to Dylan and looking over his shoulder, Dylan seems to be in his own tunnel, concentrating on his writing. We get a flash of the paper in the typewriter roll, but frustratingly, the lighting is too dim and the film too grainy; not a word can be discerned. We can see, however, that it is not a lyric: Dylan types the lines all the way through, we also hear the ping when the carriage gets to the end and then see Dylan pushing the carriage back with the lever. Occasionally he consults handwritten notes lying to the right of the typewriter, his upper body moves slightly back and forth and he seems to be mumbling; as if looking for the rhythm of the sentences.

An educated guess would be that Dylan is writing copy to fill his experimental, long prose poem Tarantula. More precisely, he is writing what will later be the final chapter, AI Aaraaf & the Forcing Committee (pp. 129-137). Sometime in the next few weeks (midsummer 1965), the first pirated version of Tarantula will be printed in San Francisco. Well, a fragment anyway – 50 beige A4 sheets containing the 64 words of Aretha Known In Gallup As Number 69, the “aretha portrait” we later find as an interlude on page 135, shortly before the end of the book.

Harry Belafonte – Day-O:

Clues to this assumption, to the idea that Dylan is writing that final chapter here, are the specific idioms we see used in “Tombstone Blues”, “Desolation Row”, “Ballad Of A Thin Man”, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Like A Rolling Stone”, in songs germinating in these same mercurial days in the late spring of 1965. Those same clues, incidentally, suggest that Dylan, here in this hotel room in May ‘65, floating around in his stream-of-consciousness, afterwards divided the fully-typed sheets in two and promoted one half to Chapter 1, Guns, the Falcon’s Mouthhook & Gashcat Unpunished, and the other half to the final chord AI Aaraaf & the Forcing Committee. Apart from the suspiciously compositional intervention of having the work end and begin with “aretha” (it is even the first word of the book), there are remarkably many cross-connections between the first chapter, the last chapter and the songs of Highway 61 Revisited. Similarities transcending the coincidence factor anyway:

– the word “lumberjacks” which Dylan writes, in his 60-plus years of writing, only in two works: four times in Tarantula (three times in the last chapter: “the lumberjacks are coming”) and one time in “Ballad Of A Thin Man” (You have many contacts / Among the lumberjacks);

– in both Thin Man and AI Aaraaf, public order is disrupted by somebody naked;

– the pied piper on page 134 is sent to prison in Tombstone;

– both Gypsy Davy and the pretty things move from Chapter 1 to “Tombstone Blues” as well, as does the striking word reincarnated;

– The Good Samaritan, the ambulance and Nero are all transferred from Chapter 1 to “Desolation Row”, prince hamlet‘s notable supporting role seems to explain Ophelia’s presence over there;

– the housing project, the light rain and the morgue in the first chapter echo in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”;

– and finally, apart from some less remarkable congruences, the reflections in “Like A Rolling Stone”. The one-liner you can make it if you have nothing (p. 136) seems to seep through to When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose, unusual words like jugglers, bums, rags, steeple, tramp, clowns, in your prime and alibis we encounter elsewhere in Tarantula, a diamond ring is also worn (in Chapter 7, Prelude to the Flatpick) and after “diplomat” in the first chapter, we can also put the checkmarks at “chrome” and “horse” in this last chapter… by now it should be clear that Dylan is reusing the catch from his wildly churning stream of consciousness, from his subconscious, for Highway 61 Revisited. Fitting too with Dylan’s own, somewhat detached comment on this part of the song (“It all just about got to be too much”), which hints at the same embarrassment as the words with which he dismisses his own Tarantula: “Things were running wild at that point.”

 Bizarrely, then, one of the more frenzied images seems to come not so much from his subconscious as rather from his long-term memory. On 6 May 1961, the then 19-year-old Dylan is in Hartford, Connecticut, playing three Woody Guthrie songs at the Indian Neck Folk Festival (“Talking Columbia”, “Hangknot, Slipknot” and “Talking Fish Blues”). It is the festival where he met his sidekick Bob Neuwirth and, judging by the photos, tried to find a place among folkies like Jim Kweskin, Mark Spoelstra and Bob Jones. The most eye-catching photo was taken by Joe Alper and shows a heart-breakingly young and cheerful Dylan, making music in a small circle with Jones, Kweskin and especially with Jack Parmley (mistakenly referred to as ‘Jim Parmaley’ in Eric Von Schmidt’s book Baby Let Me Follow You Down). Perhaps, with some tolerance, we can indeed compare Jack’s appearance and charisma to a “diplomat”, but attention is, of course, mainly drawn to his left shoulder – carrying a Siamese cat¹.

Bob Dylan – Talking Columbia (INFF 1961):

By the way, in Von Schmidt’s book Neuwirth is described – with apparent sympathy – with the words “he had the rare talent to simultaneously participate and observe.” Which is a talent that Neuwirth seems to share with Dylan – as we see Dylan participating, and a small, furry detail from his surroundings shall descend in one of his all-time greatest songs, five years later.

He has the rare talent to simultaneously participate and observe.

———–

¹ Thanks to Scott Warmuth for his help in tracing the source of the photo

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 7: She’s a real princess

———–

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

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

• 1: Far Away From Insight
• 2: “I looked into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change’. 
• 3:  If this is a bunch of noise, then it is noise that I love
• 4: Far away from the music
• 5: How to ignore important details
• 6: Making New Morning
• 7: How Bob Felt at the Time
• 8: Does Bob Dylan have a right to a private life
• 9: Where do you go when the creative spark stops?
• 10: How free is the artist to say what he wants?
• 11: I am not me

This is part 12 of the series “The Double Life”.  And may I say, even if you don’t feel inclined to read my thoughts below, I do hope you might spare a moment to listen to the recordings included.  And if you don’t have time for them, please do try the final audio within the article.  Unless of course you already know it.

By Tony Attwood

“Why Dylan felt the need to write another blues lyrics and apply it to the tune he already had for ‘Call Letter Blues’ is one more for his therapist.”

That comment from Heylin on page 220 of “Far Away From Myself” by Heylin pretty much sums up my argument about the way Heylin sees creativity.

The fact is that many creative people (and here I am not just thinking of Bob Dylan, or songwriters in general, but almost all the people who can be called genuinely creative, in that they create items or works which are considered by many others to be not just unique but also of considerable merit) find their creativity comes in bursts.   When it isn’t happening, it is hard, often impossible, to do something that will trigger another set of creative artistic outpouring.  When it is happening, the creative person accepts it, and gets on with the creativity, until the creative burst once more fades.  If it doesn’t and just stays there, then this is the absolute creative genius at work.  (As opposed to the person just being a run-of-the-mill creative genius.)

And this is part of the mystery of creativity.  Not only is it hard (if not most of the time, impossible) to get a non-creative person to start producing works, items, or come to that simply “things” that can be genuinely described as creative in the normal use of the word, it is also hard for the often creative person to come out of a downturn and start to create once again.

Of course, a  few highly creative people appear to be creative all the time.  In musical terms we might think of JS Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, my regular three examples of men who could create constantly at the highest level.  In writing, Shakespeare obviously comes to mind (although for the last four years of his life, he appears to have written nothing at all, and just simply stopped).  But these are the exceptions.  Mostly the creativity phases itself in and out.

So if we ask why Bob wrote another set of lyrics for “Call Letter Blues” – the answer is because he was on a creative high, and thus the lyrics, and indeed the music, just kept on pouring out.  Bob’s therapist wouldn’t have been able to help because what turns on and off the creative flow in highly creative people is generally considered to be something internal which even the individual experiencing the phenomena can’t really explain.

Of course, the results can be disconcerting.  As one of the assistant engineers in the studio is quoted as saying “We had no idea what he was going to do, so we had to be ready for anything.”

In a later comment about the process it is said, “He was totally and completely immersed in the creation of this album,” which again is a statement about a man who is living through a period of very high creativity.

In such a period, for a person not used to working with highly creative people who succumb to the creative process when it gets into full flow, the reaction of the creative individual can seem strange, as with the notion that Bob was “only interested in first impressions.”    This happens because for the creator, the artist’s work is there, it has emerged in one rush, and he/she understands it in that immediate moment of its formation.  To think that others might need to listen to or look at a new artwork several times in order to appreciate it fully is alien to such a creative artist.  He or she can appreciate it at once, both in its individual parts (for example individual lines of lyrics or melody or both), so why can’t everyone else?

Indeed the depth of Bob’s understanding of his own work is revealed through the comments that those working with Dylan made, and indeed which we have ourselves made on this site in passing; that Bob likes to explore some of his songs in different keys.

Now for most people, including quite a few experienced musicians, the song is still the same whether you play it in the key of E flat, E or F.  Yes the melody is fractionally higher as you move through those different keys, and on some musical instruments, the accompaniment is harder to play in one key than another, but still, for most people it is the same song.  For Dylan seemingly it is not.

Heylin doesn’t really explore this notion and simply seems to put it down as just another odd Dylan quirk, but changing the key really can alter the feel of a piece to someone who is completely “inside” the music.

But if there was a problem for Dylan in the creation of “Blood on the Tracks” it appears to be that he was so full of his own creative endeavour, he could not appreciate how everyone else might struggle to keep up with him.  Indeed the thought occurs that had Dylan not already had his almighty reputation as a songwriter and performer, others involved in the production of the record might not have put up with his approach, and might even have dismissed some of the songs that we now consider to be absolute gems.

For if we just look at the Dylan songs composed in 1974, for most songwriters this would be seen as the absolute highlights of their careers.  For Bob Dylan this set of songs came pouring forth in a very short space of time.  Lily, Rosemary… Tangle, Big Girl, Shelter, If you see her, Twist of Fate, Idiot Wind, Make me lonesome, Up to me, Buckets of Rain… these are not just excellent songs, they are among the monuments of the genre.   And they all were written one after the other, for an album.

It is also interesting (at least to me if no one else) that apparently when first having recorded the material for the album, Bob was interested specifically in people’s first impressions of each song – which of course was how he was judging each song because each song was coming to him as a virtually completed item, and “all he had to do” was to write the lyrics down.

Quite how each song came to him in such a way is of course part of the mystery of the creative process, but the reports of the sessions involving these songs most certainly do make it seem as if this is what happened.   Bob had the idea, wrote it out, recorded it.  The only reworking he wanted to do was on the recordings themselves – specifically it seems in terms of varying the accompaniment.

And it is here that we see part two of the creative experience.  The songs came to Bob in a great rush, as he wrote them down.  But after the rush there was a slower thought process (very common among highly creative people) as to what to do with the song.  Should it be as recorded in that first burst of excitement and novelty, or should it perhaps be reworked with a simpler accompaniment….

But this is not the same as a producer then listening to the recording and manipulating it, adding a string section, taking out the percussion, and throwing in a female chorus, all after the recording session is complete.   This is the composer constantly playing with his own work.  Not all composers do it, and whether they do does not depend on how much of a genius the composer is, it is a matter of disposition and temperament.

And what is interesting in this regard is that having laid down the tracks at hyper-speed Bob then invited one or two musicians to listen to the tapes and add an element of the accompaniment if each felt he could.

Only after all that did he then re-record the whole album, and according to Heylin, by this stage he needed “some reassurance,” asking people if the recording was good enough, and on occasion working the same song over and over again, despite apparently already having recordings that the others involved felt were really good and worthy of inclusion on the album.

Thus we see, although Heylin doesn’t really seem to grasp it, a creative process across a number of days.  The sudden burst at the start which leads to the creation of the songs, the high energy of getting each one recorded, and then the slow downturn as the creative burst is still there but begins to decline, and the uncertainty in each case as to whether the recording, or even the song, was indeed good enough.

Overall this is a really interesting set of commentaries that we get concerning the making of an album – right the way through to the fact that at the end of the sessions, Dylan is himself able to appreciate which of a range of takes of each song is actually the one that fits best within the album.

However it is also clear that the album was not conceived as an album as such, as final changes were made and at least one song had to go to keep within the absolute time limit that the technology of the day would allow.

And at this final stage, there is a further interesting point: not for the first time it took Dylan longer to decide on the running order than it did to record the song.  And even then it seems Bob was not sure.

Heylin is good at describing the come down after the intensity of the writing, recording and mixing sessions, but reading his account it seems that he feels that these are issues of as much import as the creation of the songs and the recordings.   True, in one very specific sense they are, because the tale of this sublime album, is a tale of the rising up of creativity in the writing of the songs, the sustenance of it through the recording, and then the decline of that extraordinary burst which led to uncertainty and the suggestion that the album needed “corrective surgery.”

It is a perfect tale of the way in which creativity works within the human mind.  Quite how and why, is a totally different question.  But over the recording of this album, Heylin does give us insights into Bob’s extraordinary work when his creativity is at its most potent and fulsome.

What we can take from Heylin’s account is that Bob suffered from the aftermath of an incredible creative high, which led to the creation of the songs and the first set of recordings and then their reworking into the version that we ordinary people got on the album.

The whole experience of making the album changed Bob Dylan.  But then buying and listening to that album over and over again, changed many of the people who experienced the album that way.  We didn’t know we hadn’t got the version of the album that the gang in the studio (except Bob) had loved, but we still had a treasure.   But what Bob had done was created and lived through an experience that for most of us is impossible to imagine.   If that album meant a lot to us, just think what it meant first to those who were involved in creating it, and second to the man who wrote it.

By Tony Attwood

According to the official site, this song, (which turned up on the the Bootleg Series volume 11), was played three times in concert between 1 May 1961 and 14 July 2019 – making this probably the biggest spread across time of any of the occasionally played songs in this series.  Three times in 58 years.

Interestingly, the official site hasn’t even managed to get a set of the lyrics.

But I should warn you that if you go looking for more all sorts of things will turn up, such as a Neil Young / Bob Dylan duo singing “Knocking on Heavern’s Door” which (at least when I looked at on on 27 December 2024), was labelled “Will the Circle”.   Pesky things these labels – but worth mentioning here, because as I looked for recordings I came up with all sorts of things that suggest they were this song, but were not.

Anyway here’s the Basement Tapes version.

The song dates back to a hymn at the start of the 20th century with the almost identical name “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” written by by Ada R. Habershon and with music by Charles H. Gabriel.

The Carter Family 1935 used the updated version which has a very curious musical twist in that the rhythm moves from the expected four beats in a bar but cutting the beats short.  Yet when they play an instrumental verse that doesn’t happen.   Most disconcerting!   The lyrics get right down to basics ….

Undertaker, undertaker, undertaker
Won't you please drive slow
For that lady you are haulin'
Lord, I hate to see her go.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band gave it their traditional bounce and the notion of the cold and cloudy day quickly vanishes and they keep the rhythm the same throughout, which I suspect is much more to modern audience tastes – as is the notion of celebration of a life rather than a mourning of a death as the original song creates.

Bob and Neil Young slow the piece down and give it a feel much closer to their normal sound.

The birthplace website add the comment that “The circle is unbroken because the music is handed down from generation to generation,” which I guess is true in itself although I am not certain that was the original meaning.  But then I am not really qualified to comment on such things.

But I do have to add one other version

This is the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Johnny Cash and Ricky Skaggs.  Somehow this seems somewhat more appropriate as a delivery of a departing soul to heaven.

But it is a song that can have an enormous effect on people.  If you want to see how, take a look at the commentary under the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band performance.  When I looked there were over 300 comments.  I couldn’t take them all in by any means, but I must say I was extremely moved just from the first few.

Previously in this series…

• The mystery of “Eternal Circle”
• Let it Be Me
• Dink’s Song
• When the Ship Comes In
• Fever
• Walls of Red Wing
• Precious Memories
• Rocks and Gravel

DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

• Amuse bouche
• Who the book is (not) for – part 1
• Who this book is (not) for – part 2
• Anything but idolatry – part 1
• Anything but idolatry – part 2
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 3
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 4
• The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 1
• The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 2
• What was the public to do? – part 1
• What was the public to do – part 2
• 1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides 
• 1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides – part 2

Note: this article was originally published out of sequence, and was then withdrawn, with the correct article being published.  It is now republished in its correct place

1965: Teenager finds a hero – part 1

Knowing a singer’s life doesn’t particularly help your
understanding of a song. [...] It’s what a song makes
you feel about your own life that’s important.
(In: The philosophy of modern song – 2022)

In early March 1965, I leapt with surprise when I received a portable gramophone as a birthday gift – as ‘the’ only child, it fitted within the budget – along with some money to buy my first singles. These were ‘The last time’ (Stones), ‘Bring it on home to me’ (Animals) and ‘For your love’ (Yardbirds).

On 8 March, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was released in the United States. It was only Dylan’s second 45 in just over eighteen months, after take-two of his single debut in August 1963. Imagine if Parlophone had tried to pull a similar stunt on The Beatles, or Decca on The Rolling Stones!

In April, Dylan’s ‘blues’ would air for the first time on European radio. With a voice like a cheese grater and accompanied by a high-octane combo of two electric guitars, bass guitar, drums and piano, with scorching flares of harmonica between the verses, it was all over in 142 seconds.

In musical terms, it was the logical successor to ‘Mixed-up confusion’ from December 1962. And even on my first hearing, I knew straight away: this song was about me. The Netherlands was already sufficiently overpopulated for me to realise that what this man had made was urban-jungle music which, while originating in the United States, was equally relevant to the rest of the urbanised world, of which I myself was a part. I make no claim that I could have phrased it as such at the dawn of my fourteenth year, but that the song was about me, that much was clear. Nationally I must have been one of the first buyers, and was proud to say so when it entered the Dutch top-40 on 22 May, at number 39.

After all poets who preceded Dylan, many – and most in vain – have wondered what on earth they were to do with this rap avant-la-lettre. Although I could decipher most of the lyrics with my English-Dutch dictionary once they had appeared in print, I, too, had not the foggiest notion of what it all meant. But it didn’t matter, and you are welcome to explain to me how such a thing was possible: I lived in a minuscule country, without even an underground metro system, and yet I could hear and feel that it was about me. Granted, the recurring line ‘look out kid’ meant that I at least felt like I was being spoken to. I played that record to shreds. Around that time, during Dylan’s first English tour, cineast D.A. Pennebaker (1925-2019) shot the original video clip in an alleyway behind the London Savoy Hotel, masterfully documenting Dylan’s Chaplinesque freshness in all its simplicity:

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off

Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap
By the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin’ that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone’s tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D.A.

Look out kid
Don’t matter what you did
Walk on your tiptoes
Don’t try ‘No-Doz’
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows

Get sick, get well
Hang around an ink well
Ring bell, hard to tell
If anything is goin’ to sell
Try hard, get barred
Get back, write braille
Get jailed, jump bail
Join the army, if you fail

Look out kid
You’re gonna get hit
But users, cheaters
Six-time users
Hang around the theatres
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin’ for a new fool
Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’ meters

Ah get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don’t steal, don’t lift
Twenty years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift

Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don’t wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don’t wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don’t work
’Cause the vandals took the handles

Scholars have established that when writing the above, Dylan took inspiration from the novel The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac, as well as from the ‘beat poets’ in general and the initiator of the genre in particular, Allen Ginsberg, who was a friend of Dylan. I was oblivious to all of this, and I know for certain that the same applied to everyone else – a limited group of United States intellectuals aside – who approached the song simply as a piece of music.

It has also been established that it was Dylan’s way of electrifying the ‘folksy’ genre of the ‘talking blues’. I was oblivious to all of this, and know for certain… you get the idea. And by presenting himself once more as a rocker after his ‘flopped’ single debut ‘Mixed-up confusion’, Dylan this time broke free of the artistic chains with which his initial admirers wished to keep him bound as a folk singer (you can read that story in chapters 18 to 25, if you like): all true, I’m sure, but… no idea.

To me, the question therefore seems justified as to whether all this Dylanological erudition makes a shred of difference when reading the lyrics. Does this primordial form of rap become any better or worse in light of the fact that it was written over ten years before rap and hip-hop culture emerged in New York? And what do you think the lyrics mean exactly, or is such textual precision irrelevant in these cases? Is our intuition enough? You know, it could very well be that for newer generations, the above-mentioned iconic music video will remain the best introduction to the hero of former generations for centuries to come.

When asked years later, Dylan himself said he had been inspired by Chuck Berry’s ‘Too much monkey business’ (1956) and elements of the nonsensical ‘scat-singing’ from the 1940s and 50s (using the voice as an instrument: doobie doo-wop bapaloobop boo-wop babely-boom, etc.). As regards Berry’s text, compare for yourself:

Runnin' to-and-fro, hard workin' at the mill
Never fail in the mail, yeah, come a rotten bill
Too much monkey business, too much monkey business
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in

Salesman talkin' to me, tryin' to run me up a creek
Says you can buy it, go on try it, you can pay me next week, ahh
Too much monkey business, too much monkey business
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in

Blonde haired good lookin', tryin' to get me hooked
Want me to marry, get a home, settle down, write a book
Too much monkey business, too much monkey business
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in

Same thing every day, gettin' up, goin' to school
No need for me to complain, my objection's overruled, ahh
Too much monkey business, too much monkey business
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in

Pay phone, something wrong, dime gone, will mail
Order suit, hoppered up for telling me a tale, ahh
Too much monkey business, too much monkey business
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in

Been to Yokohama, been fightin' in the war
Army bunk, army chow, army clothes, army car, aah
Too much monkey business, too much monkey business
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in

Workin' in the fillin' station, too many tasks
Wipe the windows, check the tires, check the oil, dollar gas
Too much monkey business, too much monkey business
Don't want your botheration, get away, leave me

Too much monkey business for me

continued: Teenager finds a hero – part 2

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

Think of Dylan in the early days of his work and surely for most of us our minds will be drawn to “Don’t think twice, it’s all right” and “Blowin’ in the wind”.

It is widely commented that both songs have a certain amount of borrowed material within them.  Using Wikipedia as a source we find the comment that “Blowin'” is based on the 19th century African American spiritual “No more auction blow for me”.  This has appeared in many different forms, including a version by Bob himself.

“Don’t think twice” has an original tune but it is suggested in Wikipedia that the theme may have been taken from a passage in Woody Gutherie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, “in which Guthrie compared his political sensibility to newspapers blowing in the winds of New York City streets and alleys.”

Now these two points can give rise to questions about Dylan’s originality in his work.  Is he in fact often borrowing from the work of others?  And if he is, does it matter?

The question of Bob and creativity is one that we have considered many, many times on this site – but I am back with the subject today because of my continuing attempts to understand the essence of Heylin’s work “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” and his seeming reluctance to deal with the notion of creativity.  Indeed the index alone to volume two of “The Double Life” runs to over 40 pages and contains something like 3,400 entries – but no entry at all for “creativity” or “creative” or any word related to that subject.

Personally, I can’t see how one could consider Dylan’s work without considering the notion of creativity, and where his ideas and songs come from.  And I would have thought that is an especially interesting point in Heylin’s case because he spends so much time discussing Dylan’s life outside the world of creating and performing songs.  One might assume he would spend a bit of time thinking how Dylan’s life experiences affect his creative works, and how his creative mind works, in the sense of how the songs come to Dylan.  Indeed it would be interesting to know how Dylan’s approach to songwriting might vary from the approaches of other songwriters specifically, and other creative people in general.

Tucked away within this issue is the question of the use by Dylan of other people’s materials in his songs that I noted above.   Does that matter?  Does it reduce the value of Dylan’s work?  Should it be mentioned in the credits?  These again seem to me to be topics of far more interest, than many of those issues that are contained in the book.

But it is still interesting to pause for a moment and ask if Bob’s use of traditional songs in the formation of some of his compositions, should affect our judgement of his work.  Put another way, does it matter if Bob has lifted a melody or a set of lyrics from traditional songs?

Legally the answer is no: traditional songs are not in copyright and so can be used as one wishes.  In the UK the copyright on a song runs through the songwriter’s life and for 70 years after that.  Traditional songs of which the authorship is of course unknown are not covered by copyright.

In the United States works published before 1929 are deemed in the public domain.  But for works published between 1929 and 1977 the length of copyright control is varies and this is all a bit more complex for me, as a non-American and non-lawyer.  For work first published prior to 1978, the term will vary depending on several factors but my reading is that in terms of Dylan’s work, virtually all if not all of his compositions will remain his copyright for either 120 years from its creation or 95 years from first publication – so really in practice I don’t think Bob has much to worry about.  But my grandchildren, should they wish to, will be able to record at least the earlier songs without paying any royalties.

But for now, if you want to perform or record a Dylan song, legally you have to pay him, although I don’t think his lawyers are likely to come after you just for singing “Don’t think twice” in a folk club.

But this is really just a side-issue compared to the main question of creativity – which is a word that can cause difficulties when people try to define it.  We can mostly agree that it has to do with doing or thinking of something that has not been thought of or done before, and in this regard we might say that the idea of taking “No More Auction Block” and turning it into a modern song is itself a creative act.   But this again raises issue, is taking someone else’s work or idea and using it in a new way, truly creative?  Or should the words like “creative” and “creativity” be reserved for something that is completely new?

And this in itself raises a further problem because we are, all of us, influenced daily by the world around us: how can we ever say we have had an original thought or idea when we can’t possibly recall each thing that we have seen or heard in the past?

Of course, we might argue that deliberately sitting down and listening to someone else’s composition and then manipulating it somewhat to create a new (but related) work, is not an example of either originality or creativity.  But since we have many of us heard thousands of songs, perhaps tens of thousands of songs, if we subconsciously recall a song or part of a song and start using that in a composition, does that mean our new work is not creative in the fullest sense?

It all seems a bit of a tangle, and certainly in the UK where I reside, there have been a number of legal cases in which a composer of a song has accused another composer of writing a new song which is so similar to the earlier work that it constitutes breach of copyright.  If you want one famous example you might think of the case of “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison which was very similar to “He’s So Fine,” written by Ronnie Mack, and which had been a hit for the Chiffons back in 1963.

The case went to court in 1976 and George Harrison was found guilty of “subconscious plagiarism” and had to pay around £1.25m or $1.6m to the publisher of “He’s so Fine”.   Harrison is quoted later as having said that the case was about “bitching between copyright people and their greed and jealousy.”  Perhaps not his best line ever.

Dylan and his publishers have also been sued over copyright infringement in the case of “Dignity” in which James Damiano claimed that Dylan had copied various elements of Damiano’s works and pasted them together to generate “Dignity.”

Now I am not a lawyer and I may have got some of this wrong, so if that is the case please do excuse me and indeed correct me if you have further information, but basically I think in this case the plaintiff lost his case and appeal that “Dignity” contained snippets of Damino’s work.  More than that the court then ordered that by making details of the case known the plaintiff had breached a court order which were deemed confidential by the court and not to be revealed beyond the court.  The plaintiff was found guilty of contempt.

As for me, coming back to “Dignity” after several years of not listening it, I still love the song.

If you are interested in the sort of issues raised here you might also like to take a peek at articles such as…

• Why does Bob Dylan write songs?
• ‘If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important… I don’t have to know what a song means.” Dylan reveals his approach to composition.  
• Does it matter if Bob Dylan copies other people’s words and melodies?
• On the criticism that Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture was in part lifted from elsewhere
• Why can’t Bob Dylan appreciate which are his best compositions?

And in related arenas, especially if you have some spare time over the forthcoming holiday period we can also offer

• How Bob Dylan writes songs: 1 – The types of song
• How Bob Dylan writes songs: 2 – The origins of Dylan’s approach and style
• How Dylan writes songs: 3: “”I didn’t think I was doing anything different.”
• A classification of Dylan’s songs

by Jochen Markhorst

You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin’ out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal

Although we are graphically (on the site and in Lyrics) still in the first verse, we have actually already had two quatrains, together one octave, in the tail rhyme aaab-cccb. And with You used to laugh about , we enter the bridge to the chorus.

Well, “bridge” may be a somewhat too austere designation for this part of the landmark – “three-lock flight” perhaps does more justice to this thrilling, goosebump-inducing transition to the chorus. [See Editor’s Note 1 below]. The first stage of the lock is deceptively simple. Twice the IV and the V (the F and the G) of the chorus – every listener feels the climax, the liberating C (the I) coming:

F          G
You used to laugh about
F                 G
Everybody that was hangin' out

… but that liberating climax does not come (yet). Instead, Dylan leads us to the second stage of the lock, to the pre-chorus:

F             C/e**   Dm7   C
Now you don’t talk so loud

F                 C/e**    Dm7        C
Now you don’t seem so proud

(** See Editor’s note 2 below)

… a stage with once again a neat step by step progression: f – e – d – c. Descending steps this time, thus mirroring the ascending steps with which the song begins, without the fifth step though – our foot lingers in the air for a while, searching for the liberating G/b. Which only comes at the end of the third step of our three-lock flight:

Dm                                          F                G
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

Spirit – Like A Rolling Stone: 

… not only musically a compelling, smooth transition to the chorus’s upcoming C-F-G, but Dylan the Song Poet throws a wonderful enter hook to how does it feel lyrically as well: rhymingly, too, the pre-chorus flows into the chorus. Which seems a simple, obvious artifice, but it is not that conventional at all. “Imagine” (Imagine all the people/Living life in peace), Billy Eilish’s “Copycat”, Steve Winwood’s “Valerie”, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Hello, hello, hello, how low)… famous pre-choruses that do what they are designed for: they bridge the distance between verse and chorus musically and often enough content-wise as well, with lyrics announcing the chorus.

And Dylan does so too, quite beautifully in fact, but also makes a lyrical connection by having the closing line of the pre-chorus rhyme with the opening line of the chorus;

About having to be scrounging for your next meal
How does it feel

Not some happy coincidence either; the poet applies the artifice consistently. After this meal/feel again in both other leads to the chorus (steal/feel and conceal/feel).

Content-wise, the songwriter still stays entirely on the track laid by that mythical “long piece of vomit”; for now, it’s still a coherent put-down, a spiteful revenge fantasy about a lady’s decline from riches to rags. And after this first chorus, Dylan keeps on track for a little while longer:

You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it

… although we do see the first hint of playfulness here, as the language artist is taking pleasure in the rhyme and rhythm game with used to get / juiced in it / used to it, at the expense of reason if necessary. We are thus approaching the turn Dylan is probably referring to when he analyses years later, “… and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much.” At least, the continuation not only has a different tone but undeniably cares less about reason, in favour of rhymes like realize-alibis, the euphoniousness of an exotic identity description like mystery tramp and the poetic beauty of a sentence like As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes:

You said you’d never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?

… with the veiled suggestion that Miss Lonely is offering sexual services in exchange for some necessity of life, so indeed has ended up in the gutter – but the original coherence is starting to fade. After all, it is unlikely that Miss Lonely would ever have said something like “Oh dear, I’d never compromise with the mystery tramp” during her heyday, just as not selling alibis is a bit alienating in this context. Which is no weakening; it opens the floodgates to what Dylan calls a little too self-critically too much: the colourful side characters who soon after the song’s release became something like Dylanesque archetypes (Napoleon in rags, the jugglers and the clowns, the diplomat with the Siamese cat), the snapshots of a wonderfully chaotic scene and the granite one-liners (one of which even is quoted in a Supreme Court ruling: when you got nothing, you got nothing lose, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., 2008).

At the latest from the third verse, it then seems clear that Dylan has abandoned his notes, the long piece of vomit, and dips a first toe into his mercurial stream of consciousness:

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you

The driving force now seems to be the ambition to stay within that aaab – cccb tail rhyme. Reason is slowly starting to fade away. “You get the rhymes first and work back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way,” as Dylan explained in 1991. And alright, some sense can still be made of it, of course. Indeed, with some indulgence, we can even grant Dylan spider-sense here, as he seems to detect a danger before it happens: Marianne Faithfull, again.

Just as the Ophelia -couplet of “Desolation Row” not only offers a portrayal of La Faithfull, but even has a prophetic quality (the bizarre coincidence that on 29 December 1968, “on her twenty-second birthday” Marianne does indeed play Ophelia in Tony Richardson’s staging), here in “Like A Rolling Stone” we see not only a portrayal but also a remarkably accurate prediction of the future:

“I was also getting involved in a long affair with Tony Sanchez, dealer by appointment to the Stones. I can’t believe I did that! I didn’t get enough pocket money from Mick and I didn’t have any money of my own, so how else would I have been able to get my own drugs? That was the level of my thinking. Not a pretty picture. I had charge accounts at every shop, but I never had any cash. I now realize that if you do want drugs, then you have to make your own money and buy them! To live outside the law you must be honest, but I didn’t understand that yet. For years I simply charmed and seduced people to get what I wanted.”
(Faithfull; An Autobiography, 1994)

The Lumineers – Ophelia:

It is quite literal. You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you. It took Faithfull long years before she understood that it ain’t no good. And while we’re building castles in the air: it’s really not that hard to see a mystery tramp in the dubious Tony Sanchez, with whom Marianne compromises.

As the prophecy foretold.

* Editor’s footnote 1: As one who lives close to the seven-lock flight on the Grand Union Canal (built at Stoke Bruerne, Northamptonshire England, opened in the 1790s), but I thought I would add for clarity that the “3 lock flight” phrase refers to locks on a canal.

** Editor’s footnote 2: It has become common for those writing the chord sequence of the “Now you don’t talk so loud” line to write “C/e” for the chord that occurs on the word “don’t”, although this is somewhat confusing.  The chord played is C major, so “C” is correct, but during this sequence, the bass guitar is playing a classic descending bass line and has reached the note E at this point.  In classical terminology, to be precise the chord is therefore “C (first inversion)” and is written “C(b)”.*   In more recent times writing C/E has come to mean the chord of C with E as the bass note, and of late this seems to have mutated in C/e.

Confusing Editor’s Footnote to the Footnote (which it is not necessary to read) continued:

*As to why it is C(b), in classical notation, just writing C suggests the chord of C in the root position, which means for the chord of C, C is the bass note with E and G above it.  To be exact one would write C(a) but because most chords are in root position, the (a) is omitted in classical notation.   If the middle note of the chord (E in this case) is at the bottom (as it is in this song at this point) one would write C(b) and if the top note of the three note chord is in the base position one would write C(c).   Writing C/e seems to be a recent development, perhaps specifically to help bass guitarists who have not had the benefit (or perhaps confusion) of a theory of music education.

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 6: Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

———

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

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

DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

Previously in this series…

• Amuse bouche
• Who the book is (not) for – part 1
• Who this book is (not) for – part 2
• Anything but idolatry – part 1
• Anything but idolatry – part 2
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 3
• Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 4
• The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 1
• The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 2
• What was the public to do? – part 1
• What was the public to do – part 2
• 1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides – part 1

6. 1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides – part 2

You might imagine that, thanks to my early introduction to serious art music and my own modest musical talents, that I had already developed a passable ear by the time pop music penetrated my adolescent brain. And as a strapping young lad, I quickly cultivated a strong aversion to the soppy, whiny love songs that proved to exist even outside the pages of The Great American Songbook, and to an extent beyond the ability of any reasonably sane person to tolerate. For your benefit, I have sampled the sentimental, gender-normative slurry that infected the western hit parades between Dylan’s debut single in 1962 and his American premiere of ‘All I really want to do’ on 26 July 1964 at the Newport Folk Festival. To limit my own revulsion, from the mountains of available material I shall present only one example per year. The titles of these songs often reveal enough: ‘Don’t break the heart that loves you’ (1962) is indicative of the kind of drivel one can expect from semi-talent Conny Francis:

Connie Francis – Don’t Break The Heart That Loves You:

Don't break the heart that loves you
Handle it with care
Don't break the heart that needs you
Darling, please be fair

Why do you flirt, and constantly hurt me?
Why do you treat our love so carelessly?

You know I'm jealous of you
And yet you seem to try
To go out of your way to be unkind

Sweetheart, I'm begging of you
Don't break this heart that loves you
Don't break this heart of mine

Darling, please don't hurt me
Please, don't make me cry
I don't know what I'd do if you'd ever say goodbye
Remember, I love you so much
And love is life's greatest joy
Please don't break my heart like a child breaks a little toy

The year 1963 saw various songs that led to a curious preoccupation with teenage marriage in Christian conservative moralism. B-grade artists Darlene Love, Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans extol the practice rather cheerfully (with choreography, at least) in ‘Not too young to get married’. But what are we to make of the monstrous ballad ‘Give us your blessing’, in which dilettante Ray Peterson ascribes the demise of teen couple ‘Jimmy and Sue’ to a bout of weeping in the car, after having been denied the blessing of their family?

Ray Peterson – Give Us Your Blessings:

Ray Patterson LYRICS:

Jimmy and Sue
Were both very young
But they were as much in love
As two people could be
And all they wanted was to be together
And share that love
Eternally

They went to their folks and told them
That someday soon they'd be wed
Their folks just laughed
And called them kids

So Jimmy said
"Give us your blessing
Please don't make us run away
Give us your blessing
Say you'll be there on our wedding day"

They wouldn't have laughed at Jimmy
If they could've seen through the door
They'd have seen Sue in the car
While he begged them just once more

"Give us your blessing
Please don't make us run away
Give us your blessing
Say you'll be there on our wedding day"

Well as they drove off
They were crying
And nobody knows for sure
Is that is why they didn't see
The sign that read detour

The next day when they found them
Jimmy and Sue were dead
And as their folks knelt beside them they couldn't help but hear
The last words Jimmy had said

As an exercise, try to deduce from this sad outcome precisely what kind of marital values might have been at play, out there in the remarkable United States.

Lastly, in ‘Beg me’ (1964), semi-talent Chuck Jackson makes it clear to his ex-partner that she should be on her knees from early in the morning until late at night, pleading for him to ‘take’ her back. We can discern, however, that it is not the relationship itself but the begging that concerns him, and is what gives him his kicks:

Baby you walked out on me-ee-ee
Leaving me in misery
Now you want me back aga - -in
But Ive got news for you my friend

I wanna know do you want me (yeah)
Do you love me (yeah?)
Do you need me (yeah)
Real bad (yeah) real bad (yeah)
the -e en Beg me (beg) (Please)
Beg me (beg) (Please)
Beg me (beg) (Please)
In the morning (beg) (Please)
beg me (beg) (Please)
In the evening (beg) (Please)
Beg me (beg) (Please)
Now get down on your knees (beg) (Please)
And let me hear you say please (beg) (Please)
I want you to beg me (beg) (Please)

But here’s an idea: if the ladies of the #MeToo movement wish to know how it all came about, they might take a good look at all the love songs produced by their own Western culture, paying special attention to the voluntary contributions made by their fellow women to the love-and-marriage morality and culture to which they so vehemently object. It would also seem justified to me to cease all objection to actions that are the product of moralities dating from before the #MeToo age, and to grant an annulment to all cases in which no physical injury was sustained since claims of mental anguish are legally indemonstrable and therefore hold, so many years after the fact, no water whatsoever. There are, incidentally, plenty of women who appear to be financially no worse off after all their sexual to-do, and respectable sex work would seem to exist, at least that is what people say – a situation which of course also applies to men, we must not forget.

In 1958, the other (rightfully famous) Chuck made it clear in ‘Sweet little sixteen’ just how vague age limits especially can be, particularly when eroticism is on the cards:

Chuck Berry – Sweet Little Sixteen: https://youtu.be/ZLV4NGpoy_E

They're really rockin' in Boston
In Pittsburgh, P.A.
Deep in the heart of Texas
And 'round the Frisco Bay
All over St. Louis
And down in New Orleans
All the cats are gonna dance with
Sweet Little Sixteen

Sweet Little Sixteen
She's just got to have
About half a million
Framed autographs
Her wallet's filled with pictures
She gets 'em one by one
Become so excited
Watch her look at her run, boy

Oh, mommy, mommy
Please, may I go?
It's such a sight to see
Somebody steal the show
Oh, daddy, daddy
I beg of you
Whisper to mommy
It's all right with you

'Cause they'll be rockin' on Bandstand
In Philadelphia, P.A.
Deep in the heart of Texas
And 'round the Frisco Bay
All over St. Louis
Way down in New Orleans
All the cats wanna dance with
Sweet Little Sixteen

'Cause they'll be rockin' on Bandstand
In Philadelphia, P.A.
Deep in the heart of Texas
And 'round the Frisco Bay
All over St. Louis
Way down in New Orleans
All the cats wanna dance with, oo!
Sweet Little Sixteen

Sweet Little Sixteen
She's got the grown-up blues
Tight dresses and lipstick
She sportin' high heeled shoes
Oh, but tomorrow morning
She'll have to change her trend
And be sweet sixteen
And back in class again

But they'll be rockin' in Boston
In Pittsburgh, P.A.
Deep in the heart of Texas
And 'round the Frisco Bay
Way out in St. Louis
Way down in New Orleans
All the cats wanna dance with
Sweet Little Sixteen

And Berry was not the only one to have trouble with such uncertainty. Nor should we ignore the fact that many young ladies themselves did, in fact, enjoy letting their hair down, and that all that freedom could be very confusing when they all had to get back in line and go to school the next day. In any case, there are countless love songs sung by males to considerably younger females, and the number that explicitly mention ‘little girl’ are legion. The converse, ‘little boy’, never occurs, unless we count the worldwide hit ‘My boy lollipop’ released by teenager Millie Small in the spring of 1964. But here,

 too, the original version from the 1950s was also written by men, and was titled ‘My girl lollipop’. Some readers will surely call me inappropriate for daring to point out here that, if we are to believe that it is nothing more than sugar candy in a ‘boy lollipop’ that makes Millie Small’s teenage heart go ‘giddy-up’, as she so coquettishly sings, then we might also imagine that the boy in question at least has reasonable hopes of some oral satisfaction of his own once their love progresses physically. Lollipops make good practice, after all.

I cited Chuck Jackson above deliberately, as his ‘Beg me’ scored well in the hit parade just as Bob Dylan gave the world premiere of ‘All I really want to do’ in July 1964 which, compared to the feculence cited above, presents an altogether different notion of how people prefer to spend their time together, as I will outline in due course. I already stated that for me, it would all begin in December of that year with precisely that song – though I had all but forgotten about the visit to my cousin until I discovered Dylan independently in April 1965, over a month after my thirteenth birthday. My discovery was also accompanied by several paradoxes: that Dylan left me in utter confusion, the resolution of which lay in the work itself; that he became my guiding star without guiding me, my new older brother without being a brother, and a new friend without ever knowing it himself. I therefore cannot skip over these beginnings, although there will be some Americana involved. But I promise: this will be only one of three instances, so please forgive my indulgence.

(continued: Teenager finds a hero – part 1 – Untold Dylan)

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

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

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

Previously….

• 1: Far Away From Insight
• 2: “I looked into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change’. 
• 3:  If this is a bunch of noise, then it is noise that I love
• 4: Far away from the music
• 5: How to ignore important details
• 6: Making New Morning
• 7: How Bob Felt at the Time
• 8: Does Bob Dylan have a right to a private life
• 9: Where do you go when the creative spark stops?
• 10: How free is the artist to say what he wants?

One of the criticisms that is often made of critics – and quite rightly made of critics –  is that they use whatever they are writing a commentary upon, as an excuse for expressing their own personal views on a topic, rather than really investigating the book or film or music or whatever it is.

I think that is a valid criticism of critics generally – to my mind, they often spend far too much contemplating trivial details and far too little considering the artistic work overall.  And this I think is largely because they generally lack the vocabulary and knowledge to describe the artistic work in question – and so find it impossible to move on to the even more difficult concept of explaining why we might consider this artistic work to be a work of sublime genius, in contrast to that artistic work which ought to be consigned to the dustbin (trashcan).

At the same time we might note a few classical composers whose work was hardly known outside their own circle during their life times, Charles Ives, Schubert, Gustav Mahler, or indeed much of the larger scale work of JS Bach…   the fact is that the importance and value of composers’ work is reconsidered over time, and immediate judgements are often later set aside.

This makes criticism of a composer and/or performer’s work at the time of its composition and/or performance very difficult – it is hard for the commentator to get away from the immediate impact and the immediate issues surrounding the work.

But Heylin ignores this problem and instead his work is full of harsh criticisms of Dylan’s songwriting as made by others, perhaps in part because he is secure in the superlatives labelled upon his own work by reviewers (some of which are printed in the edition of The Double Life itself).

Indeed Heylin describes the writing of a critic such as Nick Kent at one point being “back to his offensive best”.  This is an interesting comment for it relates to an article Kent wrote which begins, “If Dylan really thinks this work is worth of superlatives, then both he and his ever-expectant audience better pack up their tent and forget about any future projects, because I can’t think of anything more tragic than Bob Dylan trying too hard to be Bob Dylan and consequently falling flat on his Jewish-caretaker’s mug every time out.”

It’s a clever twist because it allows the author to slip in his assertion that Dylan is trying too hard to be Dylan as a given, rather than leaving us to consider the quality of the songs as one issue, and the point about Dylan trying to be Dylan as another point of debate.  What I think we need to be doing in the light of that comment, is to ask how we would know if Dylan is trying to be Dylan, what that would mean, and would it be a bad thing?  How can we make a judgement?   We are not told nor are we helped in our understanding by the writer.  Instead, the criticism exists, and is allowed to exist, and all proper consideration of the issue comes to an abrupt halt.

Furthermore this comment implies that the critic who (in many cases) has never created any significant artistic work himself, can make a judgement that is absolute and correct.    Clearly this is not the case – the comment quoted above, like all critics’ comments, is a personal opinion, given without any detailed explanation, and absolutely no evidence to show why it might be true or how we could even know if it were true.

Even the occasional back-up comment such as “We spent more time than it took to record or mix just to sequence the record,” is based on the premise that the sequencing of the music is unimportant.  Also we don’t know if the allegation can be backed up, and no discussion as to why the sequence of tracks on an album might not be important.

Indeed why should one not consider the sequence in which the recordings appear on an album to be an issue of major concern to the artist?  I must admit that although I often do listen to Dylan’s songs individually, or on a playlist of my own creation, I do go back and consider the order of the songs as Dylan presented them.   Indeed, to jump forward, I recently wrote a little piece about the very last song in the very last concert that Dylan has performed thus far, considering – or perhaps better said, inviting readers to consider – the implication of that choice.  (The final song of the final show).  Choices can be important.

So why should Dylan as an artist not consider such matters at length?  Indeed take the vast number of novels and films that don’t tell their story in sequence, but perhaps give us a conclusion, and then take us back to the start so we find out slowly how that conclusion arose.  Or indeed the way films use flashbacks. In short, conclusions are reached without debate or discussion.

Or further consider the detective story which starts with the murder, and then works backwards to find the suspect.  Should we be invited to read the end first rather than the story as the author wrote it?

Quite possibly there is no absolute answer to the question of the order in which songs should appear on any particular album, but the creator of the songs surely has every right to decide what order he wants.  Especially Dylan, a creator who has his own views of his own work.   You only have to look at the list of songs that Dylan has played just once, twice or three times to see that.

My own little series on the songs Bob has performed just once or twice included what I consider absolute gems such as When the Ship Comes In, Caribbean Wind, Restless Farewell, Roll on John,  Lay Down your Weary Tune…  Bob obviously didn’t consider these worth playing again.  He’s the boss, and he certainly knows far more than I do about his music.

The most sensible conclusions to draw from all this are that first, artists often have a different view of the comparative merits of their work from the views of the critics.  Second, the views of critics are often overturned and ignored after a year or two.  Sometimes after a week or two.  And I would say, so they should be.

And this now leads to another point which relates not just to Heylin and his monumental “Double Life” duology.  (At least I presume it is a duology – he could go on and write a third volume course).  The artist’s work is produced and then fixed – be it a song that he records, a play, a painting or whatever.  The critic’s views appear for a moment and then are generally (quite rightly) forgotten as others come along later and reconsider the work.

This seems to me very important.  No one particularly worries what critics said about a particular Dylan work 30 years ago, for we tend to draw our own conclusions, and assuming we own recordings, play the recordings we like, irrespective of what a critic says.

Which then leads to the question: what is the point of the critic?  The fact that Dylan took a long time to write the sleeve notes for an album and kept changiing his mind about which songs were to be included and which order they might come in, is perhaps of passing interest, but really not that much.  It’s the music that counts – a fact which Heylin who seems to know nothing about music – seems absolutely unable to grasp.

Yes, it is interesting to know something about how Planet Waves, as an album, came about. And indeed Dylan’s uncertainty of how it should be presented, which meant that it was only released mid-tour rather than at the start of the tour in 1973, is also of some interest.  But surely what most of us are interested in is the music – which is the one subject upon which Heylin says NOT A WORD.

The fact that Dylan’s choice of which songs to put on any album and which songs to omit is not my choice doesn’t make Dylan’s choice wrong nor does it make my choice of any importance or significance.   Likewise, that the fact that it is not Heylin’s choice doesn’t make Heylin’s choice of importance or significance either, any more than it makes his criticisms of importance.

Nor is there any reason why we should take any note whatsoever of a comment such as “Within a week of the start [or the tour], the more interesting songs began to drop like grouse on the Glorious Twelfth.  The first to bite the dust was the opener in Chicago both nights.”  That was “Hero Blues”.

I think for me, it is the fact that Heylin constantly feels that his opinion is definitive that really does grate.  It is not that I never respect the work of experts, but on the issue of songs and songwriting, Heylin is clearly and utterly, not an expert.   If he is an expert on anything it is on digging up the minutia of Dylan’s life.

But even there he often seems lost.  Take for example, “The audience reaction certainly seemed out of all proportion to the merits of the shows.”

The audience’s reaction of which he writes was one of huge enthusiasm.  And the merit of the shows – how do we evaluate that?  Well, musically I gues.  But on music, as I have noted, Heylin says not a word.  So again, how do we evaluate?  He doesn’t say.   And by not telling us he invites us to assume that there is a measure of the merit of a show, rather as we can, should we wish, measure the exact temperature in our house at this moment.

But the fact is that I know what the temperature in my house is, because I am writing this in mid-winter and I need the heating on so I have set the temperature of the house heating system to remain at a steady 20 degrees centigrade.  The merit of my heating system is that it allows me to choose the temperature to be a comfortable temperature for me in which to write.

But what is the merit of a Bob Dylan show?  How are we going to measure that?   The critics would like us to believe that the merit of a show can be measured. they know how to measure it, and they are not going to tell us how they do it.  So why are their views important?  True, I might measure the merit of a show by whether I felt uplifted or disappointed – but that would be a wholly individual response, just as Heylin’s is.   So then I might ask, why is my judgement less valid than his?

Clearly, we are both people who write about Bob Dylan.  Heylin is famous, I am not, so does that make his judgement better than mine?   I’m not sure that fame is a valid approach to take here.

But what about enjoyment – the audience loved the show, does that not make it a great show?   Or do I judge it on the quality of the sound system?  Or the fact that Dylan did or did not play the songs I wanted to hear?  Or what about how the audience behaved?  Or come to that how the bouncers behaved?

The fact is that Heylin doesn’t define his measuring system but it does seem in part to be linked to which songs Dylan plays.  Heylin clearly has his favourites which he presents as being superior to others, although how he reaches these conclusions are often ill-defined, but he claims if Bob doesn’t play those songs the quality of the show declines.

Or is it that Heylin is influenced by what he feels is a sense of detachment in Dylan’s answers to journalists’ questions?  He certainly appears to be critical of the fact that journalists were instructed (by whom we are not told) that they should not ask questions on specific topics.  (They still did, and Dylan’s answers were as amusing as ever).

So overall there is a problem.  If you are going to critique music, or a show, or a concert, or a play or anything artistic, you need to have a basis of values upon which your critique is built.  Then the listener or viewer or reader will understand your value judgements.

But when the basis of the critiques is simply that you know, and your audience doesn’t, the whole thing becomes a bit of a shambles, because there is no consequent debate to be had.  Heylin knows, I am wrong if I think otherwise, that is all we can conclude if we take his work seriously.

I can tell you (as I have written here many times) that for me the greatest re-write Dylan has done in my opinion was to Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, a song which Heylin describes a being about “violent men ready to explode”.

By Tony Attwood

Three times and out: This series looks at songs that Dylan performed just three times and then left.  Previously we have looked at…

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

Eternal Circle appeared The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3 and was performed live on three occasions between 17 May 1963 and 17 May 1964.  The studio version appeared on the 50th anniversary collection album. 

One of the live versions turned up on “It could even be a myth” with a note saying “Royal Festival Hall, London, UK, 17th May 1964…possibly.”  That was according to Discogs.com

The whole “It could even be a myth” album appears on the internet here.

In a discussion on Reddit, it was noted that ‘both “Eternal Circle” and “Restless Farewell” are both based on the melody of the Scottish folksong “The Parting Glass.” Eternal Circle is in C and Restless Farewell a step up in D.

Here’s the Parting Glass

Here’s the studio recording of Eternal Circle…   The lyrics are set out below.

I sang the song slowly
As she stood in the shadows
She stepped to the light
As my silver strings spun
She called with her eyes
To the tune I’s a-playin’
But the song it was long
And I’d only begun

Through a bullet of light
Her face was reflectin’
The fast fading words
That rolled from my tongue
With a long-distance look
Her eyes was on fire
But the song it was long
And there was more to be sung

My eyes danced a circle
Across her clear outline
With her head tilted sideways
She called me again
As the tune drifted out
She breathed hard through the echo
But the song it was long
And it was far to the end

I glanced at my guitar
And played it pretendin’
That of all the eyes out there
I could see none
As her thoughts pounded hard
Like the pierce of an arrow
But the song it was long
And it had to get done

As the tune finally folded
I laid down the guitar
Then looked for the girl
Who’d stayed for so long
But her shadow was missin’
For all of my searchin’
So I picked up my guitar
And began the next song

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         You’ll curse the day you started goin’ down that lost highway

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

“Over with it,” commands Krazy Kat’s bully, the cruel mouse Ignatz, in one of George Herriman’s many masterful miniatures, in this case a 1910 episode. And when Kat has painstakingly pushed the rock over the obstacle, and the rock rolls down the steep slope, Ignatz orders, “Now follow it.” Herriman has tilted the panels 45 degrees; our eye follows the downward thundering boulder and the trail of destruction with the same speed and stress as Kat does.

“Well, I followed it, Ignatz,” reports Kat still panting after completing his task.
“Good,” the mouse says, “did it gather any moss?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought,” Ignatz replies paternalistically.
Impressed, Krazy Kat is left behind: “L’il fillossippa. Always seeks the truth, and always he finds it.”

In 1500, Erasmus of Rotterdam publishes the first edition of his Adagia, a collection of 818 classical quotations and proverbs. It becomes hugely popular, especially after cheap and bilingual editions of it are printed from 1521 onwards, and Erasmus continues to work on it until his death; when he dies in 1536, it has grown to a collection of 4151 adagia.

Its popularity also explains the striking similarity of sayings in the various European languages; crocodile tears; throwing oil on the fire; in the land of the blind, one-eyed man is king… hundreds of expressions from Erasmus’ hit have been adopted in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and all the less prominent European languages.

The collection would make an inspiring birthday present for Dylan.

• “A fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi, in front of us an abyss, behind us wolves,”
• “Tempus omnia revelat, Time reveals all,”
• “Dulce bellum inexpertis, war is pleasant to those who do not know it”

“Every line in it,” as Dylan says of his own “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, “is actually the start of a whole song.” And indeed: under 3.4.74 we find “Saxum volutum non obducitur musco; a rolling stone gathers no moss,” the proverb that drives Ignatz to his empirical research, and which, after many detours, leads to one of the greatest rock songs in our music history.

When the first issue of music magazine Rolling Stone appears on 9 November 1967, publisher Jann Wenner explains the connection right in the beginning, in “A Letter From The Editor”:

“The name of it is Rolling Stone, which comes from an old saying: A rolling stone gathers no moss. Muddy Waters used the name for a song he wrote; The Rolling Stones took their name from Muddy’s song, and “Like A Rolling Stone” was the title of Bob Dylan’s first rock and roll record.”

So an old saying it is indeed. Much older even than Erasmus’ 1500 publication, which after all compiles ancient sayings. Five hundred years before Erasmus we already find it at Egbert of Liège (around 1023; Assidue non saxa legunt volventia muscum – constantly rolling stones gather no moss), and presumably Egbert is paraphrasing a saying from Publilius Syrus’ collection of proverbs, the Sententiae. Publilius was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, so wrote this before our era, more than a thousand years before Egbert.

Jann Wenner’s five-step leap (old saying – Muddy Waters – Rolling Stones – Dylan – the magazine) thus suggests a connection between Muddy Waters’ hit and Dylan’s inspiration. Well, possibly. Muddy’s “Rolling Stone” was his first hit for Chess Records (1950), the single that gave him the courage to quit his day job. Actually an adaptation of Robert Petway’s version of the old blues traditional “Catfish Blues” (1941, from which Muddy also literally copies his opening lines Well I wish I was a catfish / Swimmin’ in an oh, deep blue sea ), but the Hoochie Coochie Man then turns it into the account of a womaniser, waiting for his prey’s spouse to leave the house. And sings in the third verse:

Well, my mother told my father
Just before I was born
“I got a boy child's comin', he's gonna be
He's gonna be a rollin' stone
Sure 'nough, he's a rollin' stone”

… with which rolling stone penetrates blues jargon and, by extension, the rock idiom.

Muddy Waters – Rolling Stone (Catfish Blues): https://youtu.be/bnsw4sySaxw

All true – yet it doesn’t seem to be Dylan’s trigger for the namesake and legendary chorus of “Like A Rolling Stone”. For that, we have a much more obvious candidate, one who is much deeper under Dylan’s skin: Hank Williams.

I was just a lad, nearly 22
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I'm lost, too late to pray
I started goin' down that lost highway

Now boys don't start to ramblin' round
On this road of sin, are you sorrow-bound?
And you’ll get lost till curse the day
You started goin’ down that lost highway

Neuwirth: O no, no, there’s another verse. With “I’m a rolling stone.” –
Dylan: Oh, yeah.

I'm a rollin' stone, all alone and lost
For a life of sin, I have paid the cost
Take my advice, you -- you'll curse the day
You started goin' down that lost highway

Dylan & Baez – Lost Highway (Don’t Look Back):

“Oh and what about ehm,” Dylan interrupts himself, only to then immediately after “Lost Highway” switch to that other Hank Williams signature song, to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. We’re at 32’58”, about a third of Dont Look Back (1967), Pennebaker’s documentary on Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, we find ourselves with Dylan and Joan Baez in the hotel room at the Savoy Hotel, and it’s May: these are the days when Marianne Faithfull sits curled up in a chair in the corner looking pretty, the days when “Like A Rolling Stone” germinates.

A second and even stronger argument that rolling stone enters the creative part of Dylan’s brain not via Muddy Waters but via Hank Williams is its semantic connotation. With Muddy, after all, a rolling stone is something like a free bird, a man who goes his own way, a womaniser, befitting Muddy’s image – a good-looking man, dresses well, attracting the audience in this boastful, manly kind of manner, in the words of Willie Dixon. Close to the original connotation assigned to it by Publilius (“one who is always on the move, without roots here or there, shunning responsibilities and cares”), and far from the meaning rolling stone has with Hank Williams.

Hank’s rolling stone is no enviable fortune-hunter. On the contrary, he is just another guy on the lost highway – alone and lost, some poor sod paying the price for a sinful life, with no hope of redemption. He is, in short, a complete unknown without a home, he is the rolling stone Dylan will lead into the greatest rock song of the 20th century a few weeks after he sings his lament in a London hotel room.

And whom he then leads from the Lost Highway to Desolation Row – but that is another story and shall be told another time.

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 5: To live outside the law you must be honest – Untold Dylan

—————

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

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

• Part one of this series can be found here.
• Part two: from the 70s onwards
• Part three: the interpretations

By Jürg Lehmann

 Of course, Blowin’ in the Wind was also embraced by the jazz community. Ray Bryant got off to a promising start in 1963, but most jazz covers in this early stage were dutifully reproducing the tune, such as Duke Ellington (1964) and Stan Getz (1964). King Curtis’s version of the song (1966) treats it as just another pop number – he does at least give it a cheerful swing that opens up some of the melody’s potential.

But the epitome of Dylan’s tunes being used by jazzers keen to tap into the pop market, writes Luke McKernan, is ‘Dylan Jazz’, by the Gene Norman Group, from 1965. This is an entire album of jazz covers performed in workmanlike fashion by a combo that included future country star Glen Campbell on guitar. It’s proficient stuff, great for playing in the background at your mid-60s swinging party, but chiefly notable for how the musicians have no sense of the song’s import, even if they are playing them as instrumentals. Their covers reproduce exactly what they saw on the music sheet, but bear no relation in feeling, or indeed tune, to what Dylan meant.

Shirley Scott, the ‘Queen of the Hammond Organ’ (1968), and Stanley Turrentine (1968) stand out by trying their own interpretation.

But it is only with Jan Johansson, who was somehow ahead of his time, things start to get truly interesting. Although he is little known outside Scandinavia, Johansson was among Sweden’s top jazz pianists of the 1950s and 60s. It was at that time that Johansson came to the attention of Stan Getz, who spent a lot of time in Scandinavia. Getz loved the melodic nature of Johansson’s playing and went on a six week tour with his quintet. Johansson also was an outstanding fusionist of Swedish folk music and jazz and known for his ability to combine complex harmonic structures with melodic clarity. His album Jazz på svenska (Jazz in Swedish) has sold over a quarter of a million copies and has been streamed more than 50 million times on Spotify. In November 1968 Jan Johansson died in a car crash on his way to a concert in a church in Jönköping, Sweden. Blowin’ in the Wind is a live recording made in the period between 1966 and 1968 and released posthumously in 2004 on the album Blues.

Arne Domnérus (1924-2008) was a contemporary of Jan Johansson, and together they recorded 10 albums. Born in Stockholm, Domnérus made his professional debut during the early ’40s, playing alto sax in popular dance bands. By 1942 he led his own group and made his recorded debut in 1945, honing an urbane, sophisticated style that nevertheless possessed an urgency often absent from the cool, remote tone associated with Swedish jazz.

American icons Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were both in attendance for Domnérus 1949 Paris festival gig, a performance which served notice that players of European descent could offer their own interpretations of music largely considered an African-American phenomenon. In his very Swedish, unassuming way, Domnérus said he developed his own style because he couldn’t hope to play like his idols, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges and, of course, Bird. Parker was so impressed that he signed Domnérus for the Scandinavian tour he mounted a year later. At the time, Scandinavia was considered a safe haven for American jazz musicians, with an open-minded audience and better performance opportunities than in the US. Above all, African Americans were safe from racial hostility here.

Domnérus’ Dylan cover is from the album Sketches of Standards with guitarist Rune Gustafsson and dates from 1991. Domnerus was capable of transcending the most unpromising material, enthuses Chris Mosey. One example featured on ‘Sketches of Standards’ is his total transformation of the old Bob Dylan folk revival anthem ‘Blowing in the Wind’ which, with the admirable Rune Gustafsson on guitar, is transformed into something of a mini masterpiece.” 

‘Last Radio Show’ is the last completed film by director Robert Altman. The comedy is inspired by one of the most popular radio shows in the US, ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ hosted by Garrison Keillor. ‘The Last Show’ is a love letter to a radio format that seems to have fallen out of time: the live show in front of a studio audience with sketches, music, commercials and the same main actors.

For 23 years (1993-2016), Richard Dworsky served as pianist and music director for Keillor’s. In 2006 he made his on-screen film debut as pianist/bandleader in the Robert Altman film and he was also the arranger and composer of the film. Dworsky’s Blowin’ in the Wind dates from the time before the Prarie radio show, it is from Back to the Garden (1992), an album with instrumental covers of songs from the 1960’s.

‘Last Radio Show’ is the last completed film by director Robert Altman. The comedy is inspired by one of the most popular radio shows in the US, ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ hosted by Garrison Keillor. ‘The Last Show’ is a love letter to a radio format that seems to have fallen out of time: the live show in front of a studio audience with sketches, music, commercials and the same main actors. For 23 years (1993-2016), Richard Dworsky served as pianist and music director for Keillor’s. In 2006 he made his on-screen film debut as pianist/bandleader in the Robert Altman film and he was also the arranger and composer of the film. Dworsky’s Blowin’ in the Wind dates from the time before the Prarie radio show, it is from Back to the Garden (1992), an album with instrumental covers of songs from the 1960’s.

Peter Saltzman is a pianist who has written music and produced a slew of records over the years, ranging from solo piano to symphonies, pop songs, choral and chamber music, and jazz. In the mid-to-late 90s, Saltzman led the Revolution Ensemble, a group that broke new ground with its adventurous mix of jazz, classical, Latin, and pop genres. He describes it as a highly personal, but accessible approach to playing the piano in a post-jazz style’. Since 2001, he has headed the Peter Saltzman Band as lead singer, pianist, songwriter/arranger. Things Better Left Said, released in 2003, is a vocal album comprising originals and standards, such as Blowin’ in the Wind.

Passionate improviser, composer and arranger, Belgian Pierre Van Dormael was a musician of many talents, and is considered by many a pioneer in various musical forms and experiments. His cover on the album Solos – Duos stands out for Tony Attwood, “because of the space it allows for us to appreciate the simple but highly effective representation of the chords without playing any.” The album was recorded between September 2007 and February 2008 and mastered in September 2008, the same month Pierre van Dormael passed away.

Italian saxophonist Stefano Cantini began his career in the 80’s, he has played with Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler, Michel Petrucciani, Chet Baker and many others. Cantini is described as an artist with a reserved life, appreciated by his fellow countrymen and musicians in the sector without ever having made it commercially. The characteristic of his music is that it transcends the boundaries of genre; clearly of jazz origin, especially for the sense of improvisation and cadences, it offers excursions into the pop, rock and classical fields. This year (2024) has seen the addition of another genre, when Cantini teamed up with Italian disco music and techno king Alexander Robotnick. The EP Robocok is the perfect sound for the dancefloor – and million miles away from the 2010 album Errante with Blowin’ in the Wind.

Details of our other current series are given on the home page.

By Tony Attwood

This isn’t part of the normal run of articles for this site but instead is just a note about a smile that came to my face this morning.

As you might imagine, running this site, I do get quite a few people emailing me, selling all types of goods and services which have no relevance either to myself or to the site.  My email address is out there – because I do want readers to be able to write to me if they have thoughts on the site, and perhaps are interested in writing an article, or want to let me know what they like and don’t like.   We’ve been going for 16 years and I still enjoy it.

Anyway, these adverts come to my in-box, I recognise them pretty quickly (since they are by and large written in a very similar style) and I hit delete.    It’s a bit frustrating when there are lots of them, but it it just part of running a site like this – which overall I do enjoy doing.

But today I really did have a laugh and I thought I’d pass it on, while also saying “Happy Christmas” in advance.

The email’s headline was “Discover High-Quality Gloves, Caps, and Scarves from a Trusted Supplier” and I took it to be just another company that had scooped up a million email addresses and emailed all of them in the hope of picking up one more outlet.

Yet as my finger headed for “delete” I noticed something else.

The subject line of the email read….

A Dylan cover a day 73: that brand new leopard skin pill box hat 

Seemingly the writer had found my article written some two and a half years ago, and some bit of software (or maybe even a person, but I suspect it was software) had taken that to mean that I trade in leopard skin products.  Or hats.  (Which I don’t).

OK, it’s not THAT funny, but on a morning when the clouds cover the sky, it’s not much above freezing outside, and I’ve got to go shopping, as well as fill in some complex forms to make sure I keep getting the money that comes in from books I wrote in the dim and distant past, it gave me a smile.

And I thought I’d share that with you.

And of course, in case you live in a part of the world that celebrates Christmas, and in case I don’t get around to doing it in the coming nine days, I hope you have a happy Christmas, and enjoy Untold Dylan.

Indeed if you feel that you have something to say on Dylan which is not said elsewhere, and would like to write an article for Untold Dylan, please do drop me an email.   It’s Tony@schools.co.uk     I’m in England, but our writers are spread out all across the world, so where you are is not an issue.  As long as it offers a new insight into Bob and his work, I’ll be pleased to have a look.

But no, I’m not in the market for leopard skin pill-box hats.

Tony Attwood

DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA

by Wouter van Oorschot; Translated by Brent Annable

Previously in this series…

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

1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides

What do most people want from you? They want your autograph.  Nobody knows me and I don’t know them. You know. They walk up and think they know me because I have written some song that happens to bother them in a certain way and they can’t get rid of,  you know in their mind. That ain’t got to do with me, they still don’t know me and I still don’t know them. So they woke up you know, as if eh… we’re long lost brothers or sisters or somethin’, what’s that have to do with me, none of that I can prove in any court.

(1986: Christopher Sykes – interview ‘Meet Bob Dylan’, part 3 of 4, 2:12–2:44)

Three pivotal months in my youth were March 1962, when I made my first acquaintance with pop music because we got our first television set; September-October 1963, when three people close to me passed away; and September 1964, when I started secondary school. These three jolts to my adolescent brain lay at the foundation of my embryonic grasp of Dylan’s art, which came about in February 1966. I gave forewarning of my historically-tainted perspective on Dylan’s work, and here I serve up these seismic events honestly and openly, for your delectation.

Until 1987, commercial television was prohibited in the Netherlands as it was regarded as a threat to democracy. Anybody who has witnessed the plebian Donald Trump – who was intent on the gradual destruction of democracy in his country not only during his presidency (2016-2020), but throughout his life – as he was supported by the far-right commercial television station Fox News, cannot deny the Dutch legislator its prophetic judgement. And in spite of the adage by German poet Heinrich Heine: ‘If the world ends, I shall go to the Netherlands – there everything always happens fifty years later’, only thirty years after the introduction of commercial television into the country, its pestilent influence on our political system was already noticeable. Caution is therefore advised, the more so for our friends in the United States now that Bob Dylan is not present to point the way…

When the television arrived in our home in March 1962, I was ten years old. At that time, our diminutive nation had only one channel, which was to be shared between public broadcasters of various ideological persuasions. I was taking piano lessons and already knew who the great composers were, but my introduction to young people’s music took place during the monthly (yes, monthly) television broadcast Top or Flop, a pop-music programme made by the only progressive broadcaster of the day. It believed that even teenagers deserved some representation at least once a month, during which time an ‘expert panel’ passed judgement on recently-released 45s. For a full half hour, if you please!

I experienced my first three deaths in 1963 within the space of four weeks, at the start of my final year of primary school. I was eleven-and-a-half. First the father of one of my classmates died; the fact that such a thing could just come out of the blue left a deep impression on me. Shortly thereafter, our schoolteacher was away from school for a whole week because her husband had died, which had an even deeper impact, since she ‘belonged’ to all of us.

Lastly my brother Guido, who was eight years my senior, committed suicide. There was lots going on with him, but let us leave the primary cause at a serious heartbreak. It was thus that on 7 October 1963 I became not ‘an’ only child, but ‘the’ only child, as our parents had made the wise decision to stop at two. It took some getting used to. An eight-year age gap, however, did mean that Guido and I had not spent an awful lot of time together. I still lived at home, and he had already moved out when he decided to end things. I had schoolfriends, he had a relationship (which had also ended), I listened to the music we had at home, while he bought jazz records and smoked.

Returning briefly to the international context: the murder of president Kennedy in the United States, which took place hardly a month later, was to me little more than a television event. I had never before realised that there was even such a thing as a president, and by the time I did, this one was already gone. My experience of it ended there, although I did notice that my parents were quite shaken by it all. So it did merit some thought. And when little John Kennedy junior saluted his father’s passing coffin, for a moment I was keenly aware that I had also lost my own brother. Not until later did I realise that Death, after my threefold personal encounter with Him, had crowned himself with yet another morbid accolade. Murder most foul it was, yes indeed, just like the movie that had been named after an Agatha Christie novel starring Margaret Rutherford as the original Miss Marple, which appeared shortly after Kennedy’s murder (March 1964) and may have been the inspiration for Dylan, who used the title for the final song on his 2020 album Rough and rowdy ways.

The third event that had a powerful impact on my young life was my entry into secondary school in September 1964. I was twelve-and-a-half, and had made my first modest forays into puberty. It was partly for this reason that my interest in pop music had grown rapidly, and I can say that A hard day’s night had me completely hooked: my mother accompanied me to the cinema to see the Beatles movie.

Shortly beforehand, at the primary-school farewell party, five of us boys had lip-synced some Beatles songs on stage (‘All my loving’ and ‘Twist and shout’, that’s how behind we were) without worrying too much about the words, which – despite the above demonstrations of their adolescent simplicity – we hardly understood anyway. At secondary school, however, I was now taking twelve subjects, including three hours of English per week, which rapidly improved my understanding of the countless pop songs that were flooding into the Netherlands, mostly from England.

I searched for and found pop stations on my transistor radio, and also purchased a weekly pop magazine with some regularity that included two entire pages of lyrics from the most popular songs at the time, but which we as non-English speakers could not dismiss as unimportant for any other reason than that we simply could not understand them. Whenever I heard a song on the radio that I liked, then those two pages were useful to me at least. And if I found the lyrics in question, I would mutter or sing along to them, and if I was able to purchase the single, I stuck the lyrics to the cover to be sure I would not lose them. In this manner, I learned English more effectively than from my textbooks, and thanks to a good auditory memory, I knew a great many songs by heart right up until my death (I consider that ‘knew’ to be a sublime form of anticipation).

But that is nothing compared to the knowledge that goes to our graves with us when we die. It represents an unparallelled loss of capital, so in that sense I do have some sympathy for the tech companies that are eager to document our every thought. Only it is prohibited because those are our thoughts and not theirs, and there you have it: how many times must the adage ‘Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam’* be repeated, do you suppose?

These three elements – pop music, an awareness of death, and English classes – constituted the substrate in which Bob Dylan’s work would germinate and take root in late December 1964. My parents took me to visit family in Amsterdam one day, and because I quickly grew bored in my uncle and aunt’s living room, I slipped away and requested an audience with my cousin, Yonty, in his bedroom. Yonty was seven years my senior, and had a friend to visit, but I was granted entry. The hour that I spent with them was, alas, marred by the single record they played ad nauseum with nothing but nasal bleating and tiresome guitar chords, to which I took an immediate and fervent dislike. I had no idea who it could have been and understood nothing of what was sung, except for one line that consisted entirely of words that I had already picked up in my English classes: ‘All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you.’

To me, a child in the throes of development, drawn equally to charming boys and to sweet girls, but above all ‘the’ only child, that line fit me like a glove. Though I was barely conscious of it at the time, there on the eve of my thirteenth birthday he had expressed my innermost romantic feelings: All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you. I was unaware of it, but that line carved itself firmly into my subconscious.

You may, of course, decide that these personal outpourings have nothing to do with you, and for as long as you and I are spared each other’s company, dear reader, you are absolutely right. Provided you harbour no delusion that you can read any other books about Bob Dylan that are not coloured by the personal backgrounds and histories of their authors, for they most certainly are, despite best efforts to maintain an air of objectivity. I, at least, am honest about it.

(continued: 1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides – part 2 – Untold Dylan)

*Editor’s translation, just in case you skipped a few classes during the discussion of Cato: “What’s more I consider Carthage needs to be destroyed”, perhaps more simply put, “We need to do this.”  But beware: editor’s translations are not always reliable.)

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

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

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

Previously….

• 1: Far Away From Insight
• 2: “I looked into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change’. 
• 3:  If this is a bunch of noise, then it is noise that I love
• 4: Far away from the music
• 5: How to ignore important details
• 6: Making New Morning
• 7: How Bob Felt at the Time
• 8: Does Bob Dylan have a right to a private life
• 9: Where do you go when the creative spark stops?

By Tony Attwood

Does it matter that Salvador Dali supported the Francoist regime?  Does it make his works less important and insightful artistically?  What about Goya?  What is the relationship between an artist and his/her political views?  If the artist has political views you don’t agree with does that make him less of an artist in your view?

Maybe not, but it can cause some to doubt the ability of the critic to fully grasped what the artist was up to, when critic and artist hold utterly opposing political views.

This writing a sentence which opens “Fittingly George Jackson was gunned down whilst trying to orchestrate a jail breakout,” before adding, “Fittingly Jackson was gunned down….” gives us a clear view of Heylin’s political agenda.   And indeed many will agree with him about the nature of George Jackson.  But that raises the issue, what are we to make of Dylan’s song “George Jackson”.

Is a song to be held in low regard because one does not agree with the message in the lyrics?  If so then the whole of Dylan’s work is to be viewed from a political point of view., and only to be valued when his lyrics agree with the listeners’ political standpoint?

Of course it can be said that in this case, Dylan was wrong; Jackson was “little more than a crook,” as Heylin quotes, clearly suggesting that he agrees.   But there really is a question here that does not appear to be recognised by Heylin, and that is, is Dylan’s creative art form subservient to the message?  In other words if we don’t agree with the political message, does that mean the creative art is of lesser, or indeed, even of no value?

Personally I’m very unhappy about this.   I think that for people interested in art, the art form and the political or religious or any other message within the art, is only one part of the story.  I for example love the work of Salvador Dali, but his politics were about as far from mine as I can imagine.

Heylin clearly believes that the facts of who Jackson was, overwhelm any attempt to value the artistic creation of the song.  More, he feels that within his books on Dylan, his own personal political view should become part of the story, as expressed in the line “Fittingly, Jackson was gunned down.”  One only needs a passing interest in the law and justice for all, no matter who or what they have done, to be concerned about the gunning down of a person being a “fitting punishment”.

Now of course we all have opinions, and we can see that this section (as indeed elsewhere in the books) Heylin is constantly viewing Dylan through his own political lens.  But this raises another point: Heylin doesn’t come out and confess this.  Rather he takes it that his own personal views of justice etc are universal.  He thus presents himself as the speaker for the whole of western society.  The one who knows.  The one who can tell us.

Yet we may ask, “Do we criticise Bram Stroker for developing the character of Dracula?”  Do we take it personally?  I don’t think so.

Heylin says, “Dylan has a long history of seeing criminals as victims,” yet Heylin persistently mixes the views expressed in songs with the view of the composer.  Writers, like actors, do not always write about they believe in.  Or does Heylin believe that a man who plays the part of Dracula, The Joker, or Voldemort really is that character?  (So bizarre has this book become by sections 3.7 and 3.8 that I begin to wonder.)

My point here is that irrespective of Dylan’s view of the people he writes songs about, there is an issue here, and a viewpoint, that leads the author to conflate the message and the art.  (He notes for example the “John Lennon turgid pro-IRA, pro-black power polemics for his latest platter…” and seems highly delighted that it was not a commercial success.  But is Heylin’s convolution of the lyrics and the overall musical effect valid?  Because Heylin feels a set of songs is turgid, does that make them turgid, or is it that Heylin just doesn’t agree with the politics?  I was thinking he was saying, “What I say is right.”  Now I start to feel he is also saying “My political view is right, and there is no other.”

For is the fact that some art is “commercially catastrophic” a measure of its artistic success?  Repeatedly in the book Heylin conflates the two issues – if there is something he doesn’t like or agree with and he can point to it being a commercial failure, he certainly does, endlessly suggesting that by choosing themes and approaches outside of Heylin’s self-selected norms the artist will fail and will deserve the failure, for failing to represent the norms of Heylin, (which are in fact, he suggests, the norms of society.)  And yet repeatedly in the creative world, artists have stepped beyond the norms of society, only to find society much later, catches up with them.

Indeed one could also point out the many love songs (of which Heylin seems to approve) are exceptionally trite, but Heylin never uses this put-down for love songs, he only does it for political songs with which he does not agree.  He also seems to feel that he is the appointed one, who is allowed to comment upon Dylan’s work and give the official verdict (which is probably why the press like his work so much: they hate uncertainty but thrive on certainty, and if it comes from one source, so much the better).   Thus someone who examines Dylan from his own point of view can be called by Heylin, a “self-styled Dylanologist”.   But if so, then what else is Heylin?

Dylan, I feel, has always written what he wants, and that is part of the strength of his music.  But Heylin sees Dylan as someone with severe problems (of the type which again by implication Heylin suggests he himself does not suffer from).  Thus when some improvised poetry of Ginsberg was found to be being recorded, and Dylan reportedly said, “Turn that damn thing off,” (meaning the tape machine), Heylin calls this part of Dylan’s “paranoid visions.”  But actually it could just as easily have been Dylan knowing that the resultant recording would have found its way into the wider world and be offered as an insight into Dylan’s creativity, when it fact it could be just a rough sketch.

But talk to any songwriter or performing musician, and the chances are that they will say, the last thing they want circulating are the early improvised run-throughs or written drafts, because they will be offered up as finished works of art, and not the early explorations they actually are.  I can most certainly say as a writer that early drafts of my work are absolutely not intended for any sort of publication, and certainly other writers I’ve discussed this with privately feel exactly the same.

In short, the early musings of creative people which lead ultimately to the completed artwork are often things that are not to be exposed to a wider audience, both because they are not finished, because the artist is not satisfied and because the audience at large is generally ignorant of just how many drafts a work of art might go through.   Yes sometimes the artist might agree to sketches being released, (as presumably Dylan has on occasion) but that is a matter for the artist.

This culture of demanding access to everything is clearly linked to rummaging through the rubbish jettisoned from the house.  There might be nothing of significance there, but there will certainly be something of which some significance can be imagined.  But it is the personal throw-aways of the individual, and surely we still have some willingness to preserve the rights to personal privacy among the living.

There is also the point that most of us can get upset or depressed or angry or any of the other emotions of which the human mind is capable of generating.  Because of my insignificance in the world no one reports on my artistic outbursts, which fortunately have reduced over the years, but Heylin reports every Dylan moment as if the musician is unstable, rather than a man under a level of pressure and observation that almost anyone would find intolerable.

Mixed in with this is Heylin’s view that Bob was somehow unreasonable in feeling that he needed to be in a certain place with certain people around or not around, to be able to create good music.   This is very similar to most of the artists I’ve come across, whatever their art.  However, most artists have the fortune not to be mega-famous and not to be pursued by Heylin or someone like him; thus they could eventually settle down and work without distraction.  Such a situation leads inevitably to disagreements with critics and the public about one’s work, which of course are hard to resolve since there is no arbiter who can decide what is good and what not.  The artist might have one view, the agent another, the commercial interests another, the audience yet another.  And quite often Heylin, another.

In this regard, Heylin presents a totally false view of the artistic world in which it is possible to make definitive opinions of whether the art is good or not.  That is not the case.  Sometimes there is a coming together of opinion over certain artwork such as in Dylan’s case, “Blowing in the Wind” and “Idiot Wind” and perhaps “Visions of Johanna” but other times no such consensus can be found.  Besides which, the artist has to exist in the real world which in Dylan’s case includes bootleggers dustbin raiders and critics.

Of course most of us never have something that we have done at work described as “Merely awful” as Rolling Stone did on one occasion of a Dylan composition, but for most of us, our work is just our work, not our heart and soul.  And here I can sympathise with Dylan, although of course working on an infinitely smaller scale than Dylan.  For many years I worked as a copywriter – meaning I wrote the text for advertisements – and had numerous occasions where insults were handed back to me by our client, once my work was established.  Fortunately, I was generally able to show that many of my advertisements were significant successes, but it can still be very frustrating to have someone who really doesn’t know anything about the creative work one is engaged in, dismissed.  Because I wrote for different clients all the time I was able to see the results of my work in different arenas, and thus show that the denigration was not appropriate.  But when Bob was infinitely braver than I, venturing as he did into new artistic fields, that outright rejection of a work of art by someone who had never written or sung a song in his life, must have hurt.

As for the fact that Bob seems to be mistrustful of many people around him, consider this sentence from Heylin (page 1777).   “Columbia had miscalculated his royalties for the period 1967 through 1972 to the tune of more than $300,000.”  CBS settled the debt and paid Dylan in full.

So yes you may think, “how good is that to get $300,000 extra in the bank.”  But if you were still working for recording companies, you might start distrusting the whole industry.  For perhaps even worse, (given that Bob wasn’t actually short of cash) was the fact that after he left the label, Columbia released the “Dylan” album claiming that most of the songs on the album were Dylan compositions, which they were not.

In short every part of Dylan’s professional life was engulfed in battles, and Heylin notes these.  But at the same time, while Heylin rarely notes the effect all this might have had on Dylan, Heylin insists on finding meaning in every line that Dylan writes – meanings which he then associates with Dylan personally.  The equivalent would be someone reading HG Wells “War of the Worlds” and then stating with certainty that Wells believed that Mars was inhabited and that it would in the near future launch an all-out assault on Earth.

But no, he didn’t; it was fiction.  So why does Heylin not accept that song lyrics can be, and indeed mostly are, fictional?  If Dylan writes, “I hate myself for loving you” that does not mean he does have the emotion.  He might, but we don’t know.  What we do know is that he’s writing a piece of music for us to enjoy.

Worse, Heylin suggests is that his own understanding of Dylan is paramount; his view is definitive.  He clearly is no musician himself, but he can criticise musicians for destroying an “otherwise exemplary rendition”, but of course he can’t really explain himself.  When a friend of Dylan says, “I think it’s one of the best songs you’ve ever written,” Heylin’s response is “which it wasn’t by a long chalk”.   And how do we know that Heylin is right?   We don’t.   He demands to be seen as the ultimate insider.  He simply demands we accept.  And indeed we can say that all the articles in this series are about what happens when we deny that acceptance and instead read Heylin’s work critically.

Beyond everything else, Heylin does not understand the creative artistic process (rather than the process of the critic), in which the artist of whatever type he/she is, keeps on playing around with the work even when others think it is done.   Even with “Dirge”(above) which Heylin admits is brilliant, he has to say “He had unwittingly tapped into his bloodiest track in years”.   Unwittingly?  I’m not sure, and Heylini offers no proof.

Yes this is Heylin, so even when praising a song, he has to suggest that the success of that work happened “unwittingly”.  It was ever thus.

By Tony Attwood

Three times and out: Songs that Dylan performed just three times and then left.  Previously we have looked at…

• Let it Be Me
• Dink’s Song
• When the Ship Comes In
• Fever
• Walls of Red Wing
• Precious Memories

Here we have a go at “Rocks and Gravel” which has a curious history – if you don’t know it I do hope you have a few moments to take in the whole article and the recordings because it really does take us somewhere unexpected (unless you already know the story, in which case don’t spoil it for anyone else).  I must admit I didn’t know where we were going until I listened to the song again today.  Something nudged me and I couldn’t quite place it until suddenly heard a line that I knew rather well.  But let me hold you in suspension if I may and take it from the start….

“Rocks and Gravel” is in itself unusual, in that it was played by Dylan three times but never released on an album.  This recording came from the Finjan Club in Montreal, Canada, in June 1962 – (it’s in a different key from the version above, which is the clue to it being a different version).

There are several retunes and a false start but it is worth staying with the recording.

It is a 12 bar blues with its own variants as it works its way through the song.   Some of the lyrics were used again later as you might recognise…

The song reoccurred later as “Solid Road”.  In the recording below it appears in two versions, the second starting at 2’21”.  A 5’03” we then get the song “Wichita (Going to Louisiana)”.  This is noted as a Bob Dylan song by the official site, with one performance date on 16 February 1962.

Rocks and Gravel was recorded for inclusion in Freewheelin’ but obviously dropped.

According to the official site the song “Rocks and Gravel” and was performed live three times between 16 February and 15 October 1962, and certainly it is this last recording above which really shows where Bob was trying to take the song as the recording has as noted a second version within it.

The lyrics are on different sites set out in different ways, but when written out as below they reveal the classic 12 bar blues construction

Takes rocks and gravel, baby, make a solid road, (Make a solid road)
Takes rocks and gravel, baby, make a solid road, (Make a solid road)
Takes a good woman mama, to satisfy my weary soul.

Have you ever been down on that Mobil and K. C. line,
Have you ever been down on that Mobil and K. C. line?
Well I just wanna ask you, if you seen that gal of mine.

Don't the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea,
Don't the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea,
Don't my gal look good,when she's comin' after me?

The KC Line is a reference that occurs in many blues songs including “Mobile and KC Line” by Monkey Joe.  This is on Spotify but I can’t find it available for free on the internet.

The “Don’t the clouds look good” line then of course got used later….  (“Never let a good idea go to waste,” as the artists always say.)

And so from Rocks and Gravel we end up with…

And just to give myself a pat on the back, Wikipedia (at least today) doesn’t note the origin of this song as being “Rocks and Gravel”.  OK there have been a few mutations on the way, but that’s is the journey Bob and the song took.  (I’m not saying I’m the first to spot this, but quite a few commentators have missed the link, so I thought I’d give myself a pat on the back).

The index to Untold Dylan’s current series is on the home page 

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 3

by Jochen Markhorst

Previously in this series

• Part 1: The Rumpelstilskin tantrum
• Part 2: It all just about got to be too much

III         It was just a riff really

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

“Man, I steal, I steal.” A relaxed John Hiatt laughs and smiles brightly, when in the 1980s a Dutch interviewer asks him about his sources of inspiration. “Wait. I’ll show you,” Hiatt says. He grabs the guitar lying next to him on the couch, plays the chords of the over-familiar opening riff of “Smoke On The Water”, then looks at the interviewer with a leering grin as he continues to play the same chords and the same riff, but now with a swing – and suddenly we hear “I Don’t Even Try”, the opening of Hiatt’s recent album, his first masterpiece Riding With The King (1983).

Unintentionally, Hiatt draws an amusing parallel here with the record that started it all for him, Highway 61 Revisited. As a kid, he is initially only a fascinated radio listener. “You know, The Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin and The Monkees and 1910 Fruitgum Company,” but then, when little Johnny has just turned 13, the earthquake Highway 61 Revisited takes place.

He immediately wants to learn to play guitar, feels inspired to follow the trail back from H61 to antique folk and country blues and “I started piecing together songs from the moment I knew two chords.” Which he manages quite well, as we all know. John develops into an excellent songwriter of Olympic stature, enriching us with such gems as Bring The Family (1987), Slow Turning (1988) and Leftover Feelings (2021) and becoming a song supplier for the premier division (Bob Seger, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Joe Cocker) and even the division above that, the stratosphere; the gods play his songs too. Eric Clapton and B.B. King, for instance, and Willie Nelson. And Bob Dylan, of course (“The Usual”, 1986).

Great minds think alike, we then see when we juxtapose Hiatt’s amusing “Smoke On The Water” anecdote with an outpouring of Dylan in those same 1980s. On 17 June 1985, Dylan is a guest on Bob Coburn’s Hollywood radio programme, Rockline.

This is the first time in 20 years that Dylan has lent himself to such a chat show, a talk show where listeners can dial in and ask questions (the previous one was the Bob Fass Show in January 1966, on WBAI-FM – apparently Dylan prefers Bob’s). Overly spectacular this 1985 show is not, but entertaining enough. Coburn is a competent DJ, keeping the conversation lively and giving plenty of space: as many as 23 listeners get the chance to ask questions. For the majority of questions, however, Dylan is as he usually is: vague and evasive. Q: “Is Egyptian mythology behind the song Isis, since Isis is an Egyptian goddess?” A: “[Laughs] I guess so.” One of the exceptions is Caller 17, Tommy from Virginia:

C17: “I was just wondering what inspired you to write the song Like A Rolling Stone.”
Pause
Coburn: “Do you remember the inspiration for that?”
Dylan: “Well, it was just a riff really. It was like the, you know, the La Bamba riff. I just…”
Coburn: “You mean Richie Valens.”
Dylan: “Yeah. I was just fooling with that, I think.”

Alright, Dylan ignores the fact that the questioner is most likely far more curious about the lyrics than the accompanying music, and then limits his answer to the memory, to some sort of anecdote revealing from where only the chorus sprung. At any rate, the refrain does indeed have the same, bog-standard I-IV-V progression that we know from every traditional blues and have been playing since Bach (Das wohltemperierte Klavier, 2. Teil, Prelude in C-Dur, c. 1740), and Bach hadn’t come up with it himself either. In the centuries since, it has been the most popular structure; apart from the blues, there must be thousands of folk and pop songs alone in the guitar- and piano-friendly C-F-G variation of the I-IV-V progression. “Twist And Shout”, “Honky Tonk Women”, “The Joker”, “Every Grain Of Sand”, “Pretty Flamingo”… ad infinitum. Still, Dylan’s association with precisely Richie Valens’ “La Bamba”, of all songs, is understandable:

C             F G                                                                         C             F G
Para bailar la Bamba                                                       How does it feel

C                F   G                                                                    C             F G
Para bailar la Bamba se necesita,                              How does it feel

          C                   F G                                                                         C             F G
na poca de gracia                                                              To be without a home

C               F     G                                                                       C             F G
Una poca de gracia pa mi pa ti y,                               Like a complete unknown

C             F G                                                                        C             F G
arriba arriba                                                                       Like a rolling stone?

The structure in which the C is set like a hammer blow on the last word of the verse line, the F and the G to bridge the pauses between the words to the next verse line… indeed, it is conceivable that Dylan, like Hiatt with “Smoke On The Water”, is just fooling around with “La Bamba”, playfully pulling the groove of the over-familiar riff a little tighter, et voilà – Bob’s your uncle.

The musical foundation of the legendary chorus is, of course, not the epicentre of the earthquake. The magnitude of “Like A Rolling Stone” is first and foremost the sum of urbane poetry plus the mercurial sound plus the perfect evocation of viciousness generated by the symbiosis of music and lyrics in the verse.

The musical foundation of the verse is a lot more unusual than that of the chorus. Dylan has the brilliant inspiration to choose an ascending staircase for the words with which he kicks down in his revenge fantasy: G – Am – Bm – C – D, so neatly ascending stepwise, and even with mathematical precision the first five steps of the Ionic scale G major, as the music professor would add (I-ii-iii-IV-V). Very unusual. Sure, we do know some songs with the first four steps – “Here, There And Everywhere”, “Boys Don’t Cry”, “Uptown Girl” – but they all take a different turn after step four. Then again, the bridge in Dylan’s own “Mississippi” is an original variation where the bass climbs the entire scale step by step, all eight steps:

G                      /a        /b                                    /c
Got nothing for you, I had nothing before

/d                              /e                         F                 G
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore

But there is hardly any “Rolling Stone variation”, where the chords take the first five steps in a row. The bridge of The Doors’ underappreciated “Hyacinth House” (under I see the bathroom is clear) comes very close – there are not many more examples.

It is a beautiful find to use the five-step ascension to musically represent rage. The rise depicts something like bitterness – cynicism – contempt – anger – fury, ascending stages of ire. Dylan’s fellow Nobel Prize winner (1912) Gerhart Hauptmann had the same idea, 77 years earlier. The protagonist of Bahnwärter Thiel (1888) has lost his wife at the birth of their infant son. His second wife treats that child, her stepson, badly, especially after the birth of her own child. One day, Thiel accidentally witnesses how viciously his wife treats the little boy:

“Phew, phew, phew!” it sounded again; you could hear someone spitting out the three words with every sign of anger and contempt.
“You wretched, vile, backstabbing, sneaky, cowardly, mean-spirited lout!” The words followed each other with ascending emphasis and the voice uttering them turned into shrieking. “Hitting my little boy, eh? You have the nerve to slap that poor, helpless child on the mouth? – Eh? – Eh? – I just don’t want to get dirty, otherwise – …“
At that moment, Thiel opened the door to the living room, leaving the end of the sentence stuck in the startled woman’s throat. She was chalk-white with rage; her lips twitched diabolically; she had raised her right hand.

“Die Worte folgten einander in steigender Betonung, the words followed each other with ascending emphasis,” until her voice starts shrieking… if Dylan ever decides to turn Bahnwärter Thiel into an opera, we already know what kind of music he’ll put under this passage. He’ll play the Like A Rolling Stone riff, and then starts just fooling with that.

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 4: You’ll curse the day you started goin’ down that lost highway – Untold Dylan 

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

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

• Part one of this series can be found here.
• Part two: from the 70s onwards

By Jürg Lehmann

Claus Hempler and Eric Bibb&Habib Koité stand out in this period with two completely different interpretations. Hempler, a Danish singer/songwriter was part of the ground-breaking Dylan Teaterkoncert project, and he also performed as entertainment with a menagerie of Danish musicians at the Eurovision Song Contest 2014, but obviously did not succeed in hitting the ESC spirit. Hempler approaches things without undue reverence; his 2010 version of Blowin’ in the Wind  illustrates his love of experimentation, the ambivalence between seriousness and fun.

Two exceptional musicians from their respective genres meet as a duo – on the one hand, there is Eric Bibb, one of the stand-out musicians of American blues. And there is Habib Koité. Koité lives in Bamako, Mali, and has long been one of Africa’s most successful and influential musicians, Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt being among his biggest unsolicited fans. The ‘Brothers in Bamako’ project from 2012 combines two musical styles from blues, folk, reggae and West African ethnic music, which is very expressive despite its simplicity and minimalism; it leaves its mark on Blowin’ in the Wind. David Bowling is right when he notes that Bibb and Koité take the song to places it has rarely, if ever, travelled. Bibb’s vocal, Koite’s rhythms, and the blending of Olli Haavisto’s pedal steel into the mix creates an intriguing and memorable performance.

 Over the past 15 years, there has been a steady stream of renditions, some of them are very well done and definitely worth hearing.

Regina McCrary has a long history with Dylan, as a backing singer in his shows and on his records during the 1979 to 1981 period. In 1981, she actually co-wrote a song with Dylan called ‘Give Him My All’. Every now and then the four McCrary Sisters joined Dylan for his encore and supplied backing vocals for “Blowin’ in the Wind”. Tony Attwood describes their own version of the song (2012) as “refreshing and giving him new faith in musical arrangers.”

The most surprising thing about this cover is that the Swedish sleaze rock band Vains of Jenna even came up with Blowin’ in the Wind (2011). The song is miles away from their usual repertoire; if they’re going to do Dylan, you’d expect them to choose a different song. But here it is.

Hanne Boel sings like the love child of James Brown and Janis Joplin, a critic once stated. Boel is Denmark’s best-selling female artist of all time. For 30+ years she has been at the top of the Danish rock-pop scene, she has released 21 albums in 36 years. Besides Blowin‘ in the Wind (2013) her Dylan repertoire includes a completely rewritten I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight and two great covers of Emotionally Yours and Chimes of Freedom.

Scott Hoying is known as the baritone of the a cappella quintet Pentatonix and one-half of the music duo Superfruit. Pentatonix won three Grammy Awards as “the first a cappella group to achieve mainstream success in the modern market“. Superfruit’s YouTube channel has half a billion views. For a dramatic and passionate rendition of Dylan’s classic Hoying teamed up with Julia Harriman and powerhouse vocalist Mario Jose (2016).

Willie Nile included his cover on the superb tribute album Positively Bob (2017).

Japanese-American guitarist, singer and songwriter Kina Grannis is a great example of the self-made stars of the new internet generation. In 2007, Kina joined YouTube, made a music video and entered herself into a contest and came out on top. A few months later, her video for “Message From Your Heart” was aired during the Superbowl and its 97 million viewers and she walked away with a record deal. Since then, she has been touring around the world and continues to regularly release songs on her YouTube channel. In 2017, it was Blowin’ in the Wind.

The Mayries are Matilda Ekevik and Sofi Lindblom, a Stockholm-based duo, who in 2017 started releasing covers with their characteristic harmonies and sound. Their Blowin’ in the Wind is from the 2018 EP Songs of Dylan. The Mayries, states Tony Attwood, offer something so plaintive that I wonder how I could ever not have understood that this is how this song deserves to be played.

In 2019, Jessica Rhaye and the Ramshackle Parade released a tribute album (Just Like a Woman – Songs of Bob Dylan), video clips on YouTube followed shortly after. The homespun feel of the music and the videos call to mind Peter, Paul and Mary. And apparently people like it: Almost 16 million users have streamed Rhaye’s Blowin’ in the Wind on YouTube (2024).

Malian singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara is a multiple Grammy Award nominee, who strives for a symbiosis between synthetic sounds and traditional Malian rhythms. Her unconventional Blowin‘ in the Wind is from the Uncut Magazine album Dylan Revisited (2021). In May 2023 Diawara was invited by France Inter to present her new album ‘London Ko’. As part of her carte blanche, she covered ‘Blowing in the Wind’ a capella.

 Power-Haus is a German company specialising in custom music production, as stated on their website. Behind the company is Munich native Christian Reindl whose focus on trailer, movie and gaming composition has garnered a loyal fan base. Spotify lists 150 compositions, Blowin’ in the Wind (2022) has made it there and so has Masters of War. It’s not the kind of music I’d like to listen to every day, but the spherical computer arrangement of Reindl and singer Lloren add an unheard-of sound to the long line of covers.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” is a simple three-chord song that doesn’t have indefinite opportunities to excite in its musical construction. But with a clever, if simple, arrangement, you can still surprise. As does singer and Broadway actress Joanna Alexis Jones (2020) with the help of her Californian producer AG. The versions of Power-Haus and AG/Joanna Jones are both made for licensing purposes.

__________________________________________________

In part 4, we consider “Blowin’ in the wind” the jazz versions.

DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

Previously in this series…

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

 What was the public to do? – part 2

(continued)

Concerning Dylan’s own version of Blowing in the Wind, released after the success of Peter Paul and Mary’s almost-million seller (see What was the public to do? – part 1), it has been claimed that this ‘take-2’ of Dylan’s single debut was no great commercial success.  Although in fact, nobody seems to know how many copies of hís ‘Blowing in the wind’ were actually sold, which would allow a comparison with the over one million sold by Peter, Paul and Mary. We may insist on calling it an improved single debut, but only because of the far superior I/you minor-key love song on the B-side. I give the lyrics below as they appeared on the record itself:

Well it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don’t know by now
An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It’ll never do somehow
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on
But don’t think twice, it’s alright

It ain’t no use in a-turnin’ on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
But I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin’ anyway
But don’t think twice, it’s alright

It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
Like you never done before
It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
I can’t hear ya anymore
I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’ walkin’ way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I am told
I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don’t think twice, it’s alright

So long honey, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
Goodbye is too good a word, babe
So I just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s alright

Dylan recorded the song in mid-November 1962, twelve days before The Beatles recorded ‘Please please me’. Both I-figures address a girl or young woman (according to the listener’s discretion), and again: everything is of an openly heterosexual nature. I belabour the point because this aspect would no longer be taken for granted in the not-too-distant future. But as different as the two songs may be, both I-figures uphold virtually identical love values, which were also averred by average young Western men in 1962. For the essence of this argument, see the summary below.

Please Please Me

Last night, I said these words to my girl
"I know you never even try, girl"

[Chorus]
Come on (Come on), come on (Come on)
Come on (Come on), come on (Come on)
Please, please me, whoa, yeah, like I please you

You don't need me to show the way, love
Why do I always have to say, love

[Chorus]

I don't want to sound complaining
But you know there's always rain in my heart (In my heart)
I do all the pleasing with you, it's so hard to reason
With you, woah, yeah, why do you make me blue?

Last night, I said these words to my girl
"Why do I never even try, girl?" ("I know you never even try, girl")

[Chorus]

Lennon’s boy makes a veiled request to finally be permitted to have sex. At the time, western modesty demanded a fierce denial of any such intentions, but many girls who themselves could not wait, understood perfectly what was going on, as demonstrated by the rising Beatlemania. Dylan’s boy, on the other hand, bids farewell to his love by leaving a message that she will not find until he is already long gone. That the sex has already taken place here is but speculation, so there is no need for me to write about it. Nor is it of any material import exactly what may have transpired between the individuals in question. We never find out exactly what happened, there are myriad possibilities, but ‘You’re the reason I’m travelling on’ would seem self-explanatory: he is driving the dump-truck, plain and simple. And whatever happened, that much is clear, whether it occurred before their first lovemaking, between the various instances, or after the final occasion.

Both sets of lyrics are sung by a lover who feels hard done by. But the clarity of the desire felt by Lennon’s figure, who feels he must wait too long for what he desires, is matched only by the ambiguity of Dylan’s. The latter protagonist presents the contradiction of singing to his lover after he has already left, leading the listener to conclude that he either made a quick recording and left it for her to find, or sent it to her after he left. To adherents of this theory, the song is ripe with the undertone of a person trying to strengthen their resolve, having already made a decision but dreading the consequences. It suggests a form of heartbreak, but one that is rendered all but impossible by the extremely spiteful generalities ascribed to the woman in question by the I-figure. She is, after all, ‘the reason’ why he left, having said nothing that could have made him stay, and who also wasted his ‘precious time’. If somebody left me a note like that I would feel genuinely hurt, having been shown the door, and by a gutless runaway to boot! These days such behaviour is labelled ‘misogyny’, or if one is feeling particularly malicious, a ‘typical case of #MeToo’. There is only one moral justification for this type of sexist machismo, to be found when the ‘you’ figure is transformed into a far more distant ‘she’. Once well on his way, the man ruminates: ‘I once loved a woman, a child I am told / I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul’, and then, addressing himself for once, ‘But don’t think twice, it’s alright.’

Dylan was 21 when he wrote and recorded ‘Don’t think twice, it’s alright’. A young, attractive man who, with a passable effort using a borrowed melody lasting only 220 seconds (3:40), took his first steps along the road that would ultimately bring him global renown. One reason I say ‘passable’ is because instead of writing:

But I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay

he at least might have written:

I wish there was somethin’ you’d have done or said
To try and make me change my mind instead

in order to leave things in the past tense, and avoid any grammatical or logical disruption to the narrative.

On the cover to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, then famous journalist and music critic Nat Hentoff (1925-2017) wrote: ‘It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better… as if you were talking to yourself.’ Hentoff’s interpretation is interesting, as it would mean that the I-character never actually intended to leave his ‘farewell letter’ behind for the woman in question. If so, it would not be the only time that Dylan gave the impression of writing and singing entirely about himself, for himself. In such instances, we might wonder whether, in addition to the desire to express a veiled moral lesson, he had any other reason for sharing his self-reflections with his listeners. Whatever this reason may be: I have been unable to find it.

It is irrelevant, in any case, for the one line ‘I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul’ expresses, albeit in embryonic form, the germ of the revolution that Dylan would effectuate in the centuries-old genre of the love song. His position here – and this is only the beginning – is as follows: ‘I will give my heart to the person I love, but hands off my soul, or I’m outta here’. This position has nothing to do with misogyny, and everything to do with an attitude that takes an axe to the equally age-old and possessive morality of love which, to be fair, also permeates all early Beatles songs, or rather, permeates the love song in general. To summarise the current state of play: we have young men of an equal age, Bob, John and Paul, with similar rock ‘n’ roll backgrounds but who are nonetheless worlds apart, and not only because they come from different countries. And what was CBS’s solution? A B-side.

(to be continued: Dylan and us: Beyond America. 1962-1964: Teenager chooses sides – Untold Dylan)

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

This article is part of a series of articles started out as a review of Clinton Heylin’s tome “The Double Life of Bob Dylan.”  It’s a massive piece of writing that I find uninformative and uninspiring, but it does have the virtue (for me, if no one else) of raising some issues which I’ve not really thought through before.   Most particularly, as I get into volume two which covers 1966 to 2021, I note with something verying from dismay to utter horror, the lack of any insight at all on the issue of Bob’s phenomenal creativity.

That is to say, Heylin doesn’t consider how a massively creative individual such as Bob Dylan copes with, and eventually comes out of, a situation in which he suddenly finds the creative spark which was simply there, every day, is no longer present.  And worse, how does he deal with the fact that there seems to be no way to get that creative spark back, no matter what he does?  (Although to be fair I am not sure there is much written on Dylan and creativity although there is an interesting short piece on Dylan on Creativity available on line.

As I’ve noted in previous articles (listed at the end of this piece) I find Heylin’s volumes more a reflection of Heylin, his knowledge (and in parts his lack of knowledge – or at least understanding) of the way a creative artist creates, than a useful study of Dylan’s work.  And the more I read volume 2, the more it makes me realise just how few people have tackled the issues of creativity, life, events and Dylan, as a whole.  And it is the thought that a fundamental issue in relation to Dylan’s work is missing from Heylin’s account that leads me to keep reading what I find to be a rather turgid volume 2, (and then write my view of where Heylin has got it so wrong!)

So in a real sense I am very grateful to Heylin for he has, in writing what I think are two pretty awful volumes, highlighted the key issue that is missing from so much discussion on Dylan: the issue of creativity.   Hence I am continuing with this series, while at the same time contemplating writing a series here specifically on Bob Dylan’s creativity.  Perhaps more of that later.

A list of the previous rambling articles in this series is printed at the end of this piece.

———————-

The third verse of Dylan’s “One too many mornings” composed in 1963 contains the “restless hungry feeling” line, and it is worth considering that verse…

It’s a restless hungry feeling
That don’t mean no one no good
When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good.
You’re right from your side
I’m right from mine
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind

… it is interesting for it has within that verse a denial of the value of the ordinary and the everyday.    For the restless hungry feeling doesn’t offer help to anyone, especially when all that is being said by me can be said just as well by everyone else.   In such a world each person is right, and no one really is in touch with any reality other than her/his own.

Put another way, it is only when one uses art (in any of its many particular forms) either to express something important that has not been said before, or to offer a new insight into something that is well known or often expressed before, that art has any purpose.

At least that is what these lines of Bob say to me.  It is not that the restless hungry feeling that civilisation or society or politics or whatever has gone wrong that is unhelpful.  What is unhelpful is that we can all of us end up saying the same thing.   That situation means all of us are just going round and round in circles, never exploring new possibilities and options.  Everything, including life itself, drifts into becoming a cliché.

In a very real way this can be seen as a criticism of Bob’s own writing by Bob himself in 1973/4.  A feeling that the writing is irrelevant if it is doing nothing more than repeatedly saying the same thing in a slightly different way.  And according to Heylin this was the feeling that Bob very much had, to the extent that (in the words of Jerry Garcia to Rolling Stone) “he wants to get out of the music world.”

Now I have expressed my view a few times here that creative people are different from those who work in non-creative fields because the creative world lacks clear instruction manuals.  You can learn how to be a physicist or a house decorator, and your work can be measured against established yardsticks.  But being a creative artist is quite different – it is hard to establish how creativity can be taught or learned, and it is equally hard to establish rules by which creative endeavours can be measured.  (Indeed when researching the subject at Nottingham University I recall several of us ending up with the view that the only way one could help students to be more creative in their work was to tell them to be more creative.)

As we can see from the recordings and all that has been written, Bob, in the early 1970s was very conscious of his creativity.   If he had been an accountant or a bricklayer he could have been shown where he was making mistakes and could have been shown how to overcome the mistakes.  Had he failed to learn how to stop making mistakes he would have lost his job, and that would be that.

But there are no re-training courses for creative artists, who have lost their creative spark simply because none of us quite knows where creativity comes from or why many highly creative artists can suddenly lose it.  (We might think perhaps of the notoriously difficulties face by many talented musicians in terms of their second album: they threw all their creative ideas into the first album, and then, there’s not much more forthcoming).

As a result of this simple fact of life Bob was lost in the early 1970s, and as I’ve pointed out previously his creativity level dropped.  He couldn’t write much that he was satisfied with, he didn’t know how to recapture his earlier productivity, and he had no one to turn to, Iin order to find the answer.

Thus as Heylin points out, Bob felt the need during this low period in his creativity, to “get away”.   Now that is not an unusual feeling among highly creative people who find that their ability to create in a way that satisfies them, has gone walkabouts.  Some simply stop, some travel, some take to drink, some just go through the old routine hoping the old spark will be rekindled, some have marriage breakdowns, but very few highly creative people actually talk much about this – for the simple reason they don’t understand why the spark has gone, or indeed what the “spark” was in the first place.

To get this in perspective, take 1962 – the year in which Dylan wrote at least 36 songs including “Don’t think twice” and “Hard Rain”.   I am utterly certain that he, like other massively talented artists, didn’t have a plan as to what he was writing or how he was writing – it just happened.  And then take 1968, when it all stopped.  True the creativity picked up again, but then in 1971 it left him once moren – and because there was no one out there who could tell Bob how to get his creative spark going again, it stayed stopped.

In fact it wasn’t until 1973, that compositions like “Wedding Song”, “Dirge”, “Heaven’s Door” etc appeared (and I should add, I am talking about songs in regards to their originality of style and approach, not a case of whether one likes them or not).  And with these songs, we can see a return of originality and exploration.  In short, creativity.

And it seems that for Dylan, just like every other creative artist who hits a brick wall, he really had to wait for things to get moving again.  Now I know in my own very modest way as a writer of a fair number of books, I’ve had that too.  Not that I was in any way famous, but it’s how I earned my living, and so the occasional drop in the ability to find new things to write about in a way that people would find interesting just stopped, was if nothing else, financially painful.  It was also enormously frustrating, and I suspect I took out my discontent on those I loved most, which was pretty appalling.

Yet I needed to keep writing because I had to pay the mortgage and the school fees.  Bob however could afford to stop, but still, the sense that he used to be able to create brilliant new songs at the drop of a hat, seems to have gnawed at him.  Yet Heylin, seeming to miss the point completely, quotes Jerry Garcia as explaining the situation by saying, “He’s in a house now with five kids in it.  He has not time to write, no solitude.”   And maybe that was true, but mostly I think whether one is one of the greatest creative artists of all time, or a jobbing writer (as I have always seen myself) when “writer’s block” hits, it hits.  And you just have to wait, and meanwhile, try something new.

So Bob explored making a film.  And (because this is what happens during periods of writer’s block), he started to re-evaluate and in effect downgrade his previous work.  Heylin quotes Bob as saying of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, “Everybody loved it.  It was shit.  That was the end for me.”

Indeed with seemingly much merriment, Heylin goes to some lengths to tell us how Bob turned to writing the soundtrack for a movie, and how it was derided by the critics (page 175/6 of “Far Away from Myself” if you want the gory details).

But at the same time as this prolonged period of songwriter’s block there was an ongoing contractual battle happening between record companies, the discovery that past royalties had been seriously underpaid, the release of the rather poor retrospective “Dylan” album….   in short every part of Dylan’s professional life was a battleground.

Of course Siegfried Sassoon wrote poems of war, of the war he was very much a hero within, but it was not his war, it is was his nation’s war.  Dylan was fighting a war over publishing contracts, unwanted record releases, intrusion into his private life… and all the time wanting to find a new way to be creative once more.  Songs are started but abandoned.

And all of this comes back to one central issue.  Successful creativity is something that in almost every artist, comes and goes.  And to give the most famous example,  William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest around 1610, and then seems suddenly to have stopped.  He left London, went back to Stratford, wrote virtually nothing more and passed away on 23 April 1616.  It happens.

Previously….

• 1: Far Away From Insight
• 2: “I looked into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change’. 
• 3:  If this is a bunch of noise, then it is noise that I love
• 4: Far away from the music
• 5: How to ignore important details
• 6: Making New Morning
• 7: How Bob Felt at the Time
• 8: Does Bob Dylan have a right to a private life