Untold Dylan

by Jochen Markhorst

II          “It all just about got to be too much”

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you

With “The first two lines which rhymed “kiddin’ you” with “didn’t you” just about knocked me out,” the now over-familiar quote with which he atypically pats himself on the back, Dylan looks back in 1988 at No 2 on Rolling Stone’s The 100 Best Singles of The Last Twenty-Five Years (No 1 is “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”). Understandable; the lyrics of “Like A Rolling Stone” are an early highlight of Dylan’s songwriting in his mercurial years – lyrics that are a mountain range of exclusively eight-thousanders anyway.

Dylan’s pride is a testament to his preoccupation with sound, with the euphony of his lyrics. Insightfully articulated by Dylan himself in one of the very most fascinating interviews with him, in the Ron Rosenbaum interview in November 1977:

“It’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They— they— punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose.”

A love of sound that sometimes overshadows or even trumps the content, but in Nobel Prize-worthy cases the lyrics strike the Holy Trinity of rhyme, rhythm and reason. In the early years, we actually see this love of how things sound more in his weak-spot for alliteration, inner rhyme and assonance. Verse fragments like misty mountains, seven sad forests, a dozen dead oceans and none is the number (“Hard Rain”), for instance. Or verse lines like The breeze will cease to be breathin‘ (“When The Ship Comes In”) and It’s all just a dream, babe / A vacuum, a scheme, babe (“To Ramona”), word combinations that already sing even if you just read them off paper in your head.

But roughly from “Mr Tambourine Man” onwards (originated in early 1964), we see an increasing fondness for rhyme, for finding frenzied rhymes and more complex rhyme schemes. And especially for the tail rhyme (or chain rhyme), for aaab-cccb, the medieval rhyme form that is rather unusual in popular music. In “Mr Tambourine Man” six times in the four stanzas, where – as usual in official publications of Dylan’s lyrics – the formatting hides the form, in this case the tail rhyme . In Lyrics, we see on paper:

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming

… but of course we hear aaab-cccb:

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand
but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s
too dead for dreaming

Tighter still, he then squeezes the monumental “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” into one of those tail rhyme corsets, albeit with a slight deviation (aaaaab-ccccb, alternating with aaaaab-ccb, so with varying amounts of a’s and c’s).

Franz Nicolay – It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding):

And after Bringing It All Back Home, then, when he writes the songs for the follow-up Highway 61 Revisited, he is definitively hooked on the tail rhyme: up to and including the closing hurrah of the Quicksilver Trilogy, Blonde On Blonde, Dylan seeks and finds most ferocious rhymes to keep his lyrics in that straitjacket. With the culmination in that category being “I Want You”, in which he crafts furious, Cole Porter-like enjambments to stick to the tail rhyme aaab-cccb ;

The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I s-
-hould refuse you
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it’s not that way I wasn’t born
to lose you

Technically “clean” rhyme perfection Dylan then achieves with the lyric he writes after “Like A Rolling Stone”: “Tombstone Blues”. Twelve stanzas that are not only audibly but also graphically, on paper, unwaveringly cast in that scheme. Frenzies, pure and wild rhyming pleasure we see there mainly in the c’s. Nervous/commerce, boys-in/poison, sick-in/chicken, jungle/uncle, laughter/after… one rhyme finding more eccentric than the other. “Is rhyming fun for you?” Paul Zollo asks in the 1991 SongTalk interview.

“It’s more like, it’s mentally… mentally… it gives you a thrill. It gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.”

… and a moment later Dylan explains that he then indeed works ‘backwards’: “You get the rhymes first and work back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way.”

“Making sense” at least still works just fine in the first lines of “Like A Rolling Stone”, where it seems as if Dylan more or less accidentally ends up with an aaaab-ccccb tail rhyme while rhyming internally:

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

People’d call,
say, “Beware doll,
you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all
kiddin’ you

… more or less by accident, because in the rest of the lyrics he allows himself minor deviations – a preconceived intention to write lyrics in tail rhyme it does not seem to be. Apparently, Dylan finds it more important to insert more sense-making qualifiers like “Miss Lonely” and vile one-liners like They’re drinkin‘, thinkin’ that they got it made than to keep the rhyme scheme at all costs. But the temptation is there, and the rest of the quote from Paul Zollo’s 1991 interview suggests that Dylan succumbs to that temptation more often than not:

“… 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.”

Referring to couplets like

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

… from which the coherence, as we still have in the first verse, slowly evaporates in favour of the thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.

John Mayer – Like A Rolling Stone:

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 3: It was just a riff really

———————

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

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 appeared on “Knocked out Loaded” and was played three times between October 1989 and January 1990.   And I am going to admit here that when I saw the song listed as being performed three times I rather struggled to remember it.

This is of course not a Dylan composition but a gospel-type song that is thought to have been written in the 1920s by JBF Wright.   It was certainly recorded by him and was by far the the most popular of the songs he performed and recorded, by a very long way.  And indeed one of the best-known songs of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In fact it has proven to be very popular with hundreds of artists recording it over the years, from Johnny Cash to Gerry Rafferty of Stealers Wheel, a band I hold in particular affection.  Gerry was born in the same year as me and sadly passed away in 2011, which indeed does make me feel very old.

So there are indeed many different places from which Bob might have picked up the song.  Certainly, it would be known to everyone with an interest in the music of the early decades of the last century.

Here is Bob performing it on 13 October 1989 in New York.

Sadly I can’t find recordings of the other two performances, so the only alternative is the album version however has quite a different feel – and indeed looking at the cover of the album and hearing the song gives me quite an odd feeling of disassociation.

Indeed that cover and then looking at the lyrics of the song really does give me a sense that Bob was in a world of total dislocation between the different elements of life.  How could he record this song, and approve that cover?   It seems a total contradiction.  Sadly I don’t have his phone number so I can’t ask.

Here are the lyrics

Precious memories, unseen angels
Sent from somewhere to my soul
How they linger, ever near me
And the sacred past unfolds

Precious memories, how they linger
How they ever flood my soul
In the stillness, of the midnight
Precious sacred scenes unfold

Precious father, loving mother
Fly across the lonely years
And old home scenes, of my childhood
In fond memory appears

Precious memories, how they linger
How they ever flood my soul
In the stillness, of the midnight
Precious sacred scenes unfold

I remember, mother prayin'
Father too, on bended knee
The sun is sinkin', shadows fallin'
But their prayers still follow me

Precious memories, how they linger
How they ever flood my soul
In the stillness, of the midnight
Precious sacred scenes unfold
Precious memories fill my soul

By Jürg Lehmann

Part one of this series can be found here.

The 70s and 80s offered another endless parade of minor and major artists, without anyone standing out with a particularly captivating performance. Perhaps Etta James (1983) can be seen as a late successor to Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder, regarding the acceptance and fascination of Dylan’s song among black artists.

Towards the end of the 80s, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ saw a bit of a revival as a protest song with a political message. On 18 June 1988, SOS Racisme organised a concert in Paris to protest against apartheid in South Africa. Bruce Springsteen’s surprise appearance was greeted with thunderous applause and his Blowin’ in the Wind was sung by the audience of around 150,000 in unison. One month later Springsteen performed the biggest concert of his career – and the biggest concert ever to take place in the former German Democratic Republic GDR. 300,000 to 500,000 people, depending on the source, saw Springsteen performing Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom and they got the message.

For Neil Young Blowin’ in the Wind became a standard during the 1991 tour with Crazy Horse which he started as the Persian Gulf War began. Apparently, the band watched CNN every night before taking the stage. “It blew my head off during that tour” Young later said in an interview. “When we were playing that stuff, it was intense. It was real. I could see people dying in my mind. I could see bombs falling, buildings collapsing on families.”

The nasty images and violent news spurred Young to play some of his roughest including an angry version of Blowin’ in the Wind, accompanied by the sound of a blaring air raid siren and gunfire.

“Entertainment, all by itself, is great; it’s a great thing to do, he points out. But when something like [the war] is happening, certain songs just seem trite. Why bother doing ’em? It’s just natural that the songs reflect what was happening in the country. You’d see it in people’s faces as they came in and out of the concert – the slogans they had on the signs they were holding.”

Neil Young has sung ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ live on many occasions, but his performance at the 2013 Farm Aid Concert is particularly well known.

The remainder of the 1990s was a relatively slow period with few notable developments. Artists who made their mark on the song included.

Low (2000) with their typical minimalist approach, Mountain (2007) with their typical powerful attitude; sister-act Liz Callaway & Ann Hampton Callaway (2012) dive into the song with lots of soul and passion, British folksinger Seth Lakeman (2011) brings in a Celtic touch while Ziggy Marley (2012) puts a reggae twist to “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

If you lived in the German-speaking part of Europe in the 80s and 90s, Nena was your constant musical companion. Nena started her career at the beginning of the 80s, when the band’s second single, 99 Luftballons (99 Red Balloons), was released in January 1983. The song caught the attention of a DJ in Los Angeles and spread throughout the U.S. 99 Red Balloons was an international success, selling millions of copies. And Nena became one of the most famous pop singers in Germany for many years.

It comes as a surprise that she has a different artistic side too. The double album Cover Me (side 1 in German, side 2 in English) was released in 2007, she interprets national and international hits and personal favourite songs. The album reviews were mostly mixed or bad: Adding electronic beats to ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ and singing it with a distorted voice is song rape, a German critic wrote. I don’t agree, I think Nena brought something new to the covers of Blowin’ in the Wind that no one had imagined before.

The series continues….

By Tony Attwood

As you may have noticed we have been publishing recordings of a few of Bob’s concerts from across the years (a list of these is given below).

And now the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour which started in 2021 seems to be over, finishing with Every Grain of Sand at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 14th November 2024.   Which gets some of us wondering…

The band for this final performance with Bob was Tony Garnier on bass, Jim Keltner on percussion, Bob Britt and Doug Lancio on guitar.

Bob has of course spent a career in doing the utterly unexpected, and so just as some people (to a large degree including myself) suspect this might be the end of all the tours, you never know.

And because of that we’ve taken a peek at what the official Dylan site has to say on the matter, and there we find this:

Watch this page on bobdylan.com for updates. All information is subject to change.

That’s it.  There is nothing else.

But if you want to go back through a few memorable moments there are of course countless recordings on the internet.  The recordings we have selected as being of particular interest along the way, in this series, are

•  Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• Dylan and Petty, Australia 1986
• Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961
• January 1976: the rehearsals
• Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime
• Earls Court: 15 June 1978 in full.: the astonishing re-arrangements

However because for the moment at least, this seems to be the end of the last show, I thought it rather fitting to present just this final song of the final show, on its own, along with the lyrics.  And I do this particularly because it seems to me that reading these lyrics again, and hearing them through the recording above, if there is to be a planned final moment, then this is a perfect song to finish with.

But knowing Bob (at a distance of course, nothing more) and his music, I wouldn’t put it past him to watch the response to the last show, have a long rest, and then suddenly pop up again, doing something quite different…..

However I’ve no special insight on this, so all I can do is offer the last song of the last show (so far) with its lyrics of the last song….  For if there is a way to say goodbye, this is certainly as good as it can get.

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet floods every newborn seed
There's a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and the morals of despair

Don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake
Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break
In the fury of the moment I can see the master's hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand

Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer
The sun beams down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay

I gaze into the doorway of temptation's angry flame
And every time I pass that way I'll always hear my name
Then onward in my journey, I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand

I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer's dream, in the chill of a wintry light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

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

5. What was the public to do? – part 1

‘Is there anything in addition to your songs that you want 
to say to people?’
‘Good luck.’
‘You don’t say that in your songs.’
‘Oh yes they do, every song tails up with “good luck, 
I hope you make it”.’

(Press conference in San Francisco, 3 December 1965)

By the autumn of 1961, Dylan had already been offered a recording contract. In November he had recorded his first solo LP, Bob Dylan, which appeared in March 1962 and contained eleven songs from the folk canon plus two of his first original compositions: ‘Song to Woody’ and ‘Talking New York’. The album was favourably received.

His record company, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) introduced no exception to the rule that the music industry used 45s, or ‘singles’, to present, popularise and monetise artists as much as possible.   In December 1962, they therefore released Dylan’s single debut ‘Mixed-up Confusion’, barely two months after The Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’ was released in England.

It constitutes an oddity in Dylan’s early work, an attempt at something ‘rockish’ that had nothing to do with the debut LP that appeared nine months earlier, and which had established him intentionally and oh-so-carefully as a promising folk singer. By contrast, ‘Mixed-up confusion’ presents an up-and-coming rock ‘n’ roll star with a five-man support band made up of seasoned jazz musicians who used this studio gig to earn a little extra on the side. With an unrelenting beat, a pounding piano, wailing harmonica and anguished vocals, it lasts 148 seconds (2:28) – only six seconds longer than ‘Love me do’. Perfect for a single.

If you ask me, it would have made for an explosive debut by the Dylan whose high-school dream was to follow in the footsteps of Little Richard. And that speaks only of the music, which was… what genre even was this? Hillo-country-rockabilly-woogie? I am happy to go with ‘folk rock’, the designation that the experts seem to have agreed upon, but it surely cannot help that the term was not coined until three years afterward, for the songs with electric instrumentation introduced by Dylan at the time.

Now to the rock ‘n’ roller’s lyrics: could anyone derive any meaning from them? I present them here by way of comparison with ‘Love me do’, with some additional lines in brackets that featured in two rejected recordings that I believe are sufficiently illustrative of Dylan’s mental state at the time. They also offer an early example of Dylan’s habit, or shall we say, ‘endearing tendency’, to alter lyrics without warning:

Mixed Up Confusion

Mixed-up confusion

I got mixed up confusion
Man, it’s a-killin’ me
Well, there’s too many people
And they’re all too hard to please

Well, my hat’s in my hand
Babe, I’m walkin’ down the line
An’ I’m lookin’ for a woman
Whose head’s (mind’s) mixed up like mine

Well, my head’s full of questions
My temp’rature’s risin’ fast
Well, I’m lookin’ for some answers
But I don’t know who to ask

(Well I’m too old to lose
But I’m just too young to win
And I feel like a stranger / [Won’t somebody tell me]
In the world I’m living in) / [Which way the world begins]

But I’m walkin’ and wonderin’
And my poor feet don’t ever stop
Seein’ my reflection
I’m hung over, hung down, hung up!

Nothing like ‘Love me do’, and as autobiographical as you please. Dylan sketches an extremely insecure mindset: ‘There’s too many people, and they’re all too hard to please… I’m lookin’ for some answers, but I don’t know who to ask… I feel like a stranger in the world… I’m walkin’ and wonderin’ and my poor feet don’t ever stop… I’m hung over, hung down, hung up!’

As I said before: not exactly a ray of sunshine. Is this what teenagers were hankering for? Clearly they were, as in July 1965 ‘Like a rolling stone’ – which is equally devoid of sunshine – became Dylan’s first global hit. They just weren’t quite ready in 1962.

The curious thing is that as far as I am aware, not even Dylanologists have been able to ascertain who it was at CBS who made the final decision for Dylan to debut on a 45 with a song like this. There can be no other explanation – and it was nothing less than a first-class blunder – than when choosing this track, the commercial department of CBS was itself in ‘mixed-up confusion’ about which Dylan should be presented to the public. It should therefore come as no surprise that it was recalled from the shelves shortly after its release. My guess is that somebody realised not only that Dylan had already been presented as a bona fide folk singer, but that he also had over 25 pure folk songs to his name, including several fine examples such as ‘Blowing’ in the wind’, ‘A hard rain’s gonna fall’, and the stirring ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’. Nina Simone’s recording of the latter is worth listening to as one of the rare performances of a Dylan song that surpasses Dylan’s own.

Nina Simone – The Ballad of Hollis Brown:

If they had asked Dylan – and to my knowledge, nobody ever did – whether ‘Mixed-up confusion’ might indeed have been autobiographical, he would probably have concocted one of the evasive explanations that he grew accustomed to giving as his fame increased.

Thankfully we can all take solace in the all-encompassing quote ‘I am my words’, which captioned his portrait in Newsweek. On 4 November 1963. Based on this utterance, and whenever I feel there is good reason, for quite some time I have given myself permission to interpret the I-figure in Dylan’s songs as their progenitor. It will therefore come as no surprise that I am most intrigued by his I/you songs on the assumption that they reflect his own love morality, which would seem reasonable for a moralist. But unlike many admirers, the actual events in his life that may have precipitated autobiographical elements in his work are not of special interest to me.

Furthermore, we must all be cognisant of the fact that whoever says ‘I am my words’ is not necessarily talking about themselves to the exclusion of all others; one can also say so in jest, or to avoid thorny questions, or even attribute the statement to someone else.

These possibilities certainly applied to the young Dylan, who around that time had become enamoured of the work by France’s most famous poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), and was therefore undoubtedly familiar with perhaps his most famous claim ‘I is somebody else’ (Je est un autre), penned as a sixteen-year-old upstart in a letter to a now completely forgotten correspondent.

Rimbaud added: ‘I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it.’ In other words: he bears witness to the work that emerges from his hand, and denies any authority over it. Whoever is not prepared to accept the same level of distance to the part of Dylan’s creative process that is rich in symbolism, will be in hardly any state to appreciate it. So here we are now, you and I: where do we go from here?

On 13 August 1963, Dylan’s second single ‘Blowin’ in the wind’ was released, roughly contemporaneous with ‘She loves you’, but a full eleven weeks after it had already appeared as the opening song on his second studio LP The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, when the recording had already existed since July 1962… He had therefore written a ‘universal hit’ perfect for a single release, which CBS failed to realise, and so they promptly put it in storage.

Only when competitor Warner Bros released an arrangement of ‘Blowin’ in the wind’ by Peter, Paul and Mary a year later which sold almost a million copies within the month, did they wake up and release Dylan’s version on the seven-inch market. This strategy cannot be called ‘promotion’, it is more like capitalising on an opportunity, which nonetheless must have cost Dylan tens of thousands in income. CBS was still clearly playing catch-up, although it did appear that they had definitively decided to include 45s in Dylan’s promotional arsenal from then on.

continued: DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA: What was the public to do part 2 – 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 Jochen Markhorst

I           The Rumpelstilskin tantrum

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you

Since its first publication in Egypt in 1917, the Jewish Heine’s work has been rippling through the Arab world; in 2015, for instance, an umpteenth translation of his work is published in Kuwait. Japan is sold on Heine way earlier; the first translations appear there in 1854, and his greatest hit is still being sung today. The Lorelei Fountain (aka Heinrich Heine Memorial) has stood in The Bronx since 1899. With interruptions and relocations admittedly (it is New York’s “statue most affected by vandalism and destruction”), but still, it is a further demonstration of the global impact of Heinrich Heine’s own “Like A Rolling Stone”, the indestructible world hit “Lied von der Lorelei” (Song of the Lorelei, 1824), the ballad that tells the story of the fair nymph along the Rhine who lures boatmen onto the cliffs with her wondrous singing. Essentially a Germanic variation on the age-old story of Odysseus and the Sirens, then, but biographers prefer to think that with this ballad, Heine processes the so-called “Amalien-Erlebnis”, the “Amelie-Incident”, the rejection he suffered. The young Heinrich is immortally in love with his niece Amalie Friedländer and sings her his love in sweet poems. And she, she ruthlessly ridicules his poems, and his infatuation, for that matter.

Heino – Die Lorelei (Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten):

“On April 26 God Himself checked into the Savoy Hotel,” writes Marianne Faithfull in Faithfull; An Autobiography (1994), referring to Bob Dylan, who takes up residence there on 26 April 1965. The London hotel on the Thames will be Dylan’s base of operations for the next five weeks, the entire month of May that is, for the England tour that will conclude at the Royal Albert Hall, an hour’s walk from the hotel. We know the footage from the documentary Dont Look Back (1967), the chaotic, overcrowded hotel room, the alley behind the hotel where the music video avant-la-lettre “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is shot, Joan Baez, Donovan and all those others. Fascinating, revealing images – yet still somewhat clinical without the filleting knife, self-mockery and superior irony of Faithfull’s descriptions of that unreal circus. Or the casual cruelty, a quality Faithfull charmingly camouflages by portraying herself throughout as a silly wench. The flowery condescension with which she introduces Donovan, for example:

“This little curly head peeps in and then three or four others, beards and long hair and sheepskin jackets; Donovan’s entourage. A very earnest bunch. Donovan came in, glowing. He was just such a sweet little person, very elfin and jolly. Not a bit like Bob.”

… from Chapter 3, with the wonderfully chosen title What’s a Sweetheart Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

In that same chapter, the Dylan analyst finds a promising clue to locate the genesis of “Like A Rolling Stone”. Faithfull recounts how, paralysed by the fear of making a fool of herself, she spends her days at the hotel mostly curled up in a recliner in a corner of Dylan’s hotel room, but apparently still (or precisely because of it) manages to pique the interest of “the hippest person on earth”.

Which does not end well, if Marianne’s amusing reconstruction is to be believed. She inspires him, she is told;

“For days I had been told that Bob “was working on something.” I asked what (I was meant to ask). “It’s a poem. An epic! About you.” Why bless his heart, I thought, he’s hung up too! But you don’t ever quite know with Bob; he wears his heart very close to his vest. No one was ever such a seducer as Dylan.”

And then shortly after, the nightly session takes place in which La Faithfull and Dylan are finally alone together in a room. The neurotic, incomprehensible Dylan plays DJ, puts his own Bringing It All Back Home on the turntable, looks piercingly at Marianne, repeats verse lines with meaningful intonation and wants to know from poor Marianne Didja unnerstan what I was gettin’ at? Didja know what that was all about, to which, of course, she doesn’t know much to say. Above all, she is hugely intimidated and afraid of saying something wrong – and meanwhile apparently completely misses the advances made by “the gangling Rimbaud of rock”. At least according to her, Dylan is suddenly “cross and rejected”, accuses her of leading him on, and finally explodes when Marianne says in her defence that she is pregnant, and getting married soon:

“Without warning he turned into Rumpelstiltskin. He went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the wastepaper basket.”

That, Marianne suspects, was that mythical poem about her, the “epic”.

There were five hundred days between the first day of recording Bringing It All Back Home on 13 January 1965, and the performance at the Royal Albert Hall on 27 May 1966, the last performance before the legendary motorbike accident and subsequent withdrawal from public life. Five hundred pretty busy days:

– recordings Bringing It All Back Home (13, 14, 15 January ‘65);

– a dozen concerts until 26 April;

– from 26 April to 1 June tour of England;

– from 15 June to 4 August recordings Highway 61 Revisited;

– in between the glorious electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival, 25 July;

– from 28 August to 28 November tour of North America with The Hawks, 26 concerts, from New York to Austin, from Newark to Ontario, from Los Angeles to Washington D.C.;

– in between starting Blonde On Blonde already. Recording resumed on 30 November, followed by further touring from 3 December to 19 December, through California;

– until 10 March 1966 recordings for Blonde On Blonde, interrupted by five performances;

– from 26 March world tour: Canada, Australia, Europe, concluding on 27 May 1966 with the performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London;

… the five hundred mercurial days. By itself, the “Rumpelstilskin tantrum” is a rather silly, petty and insignificant interlude in that raging vortex that is Dylan’s life in these 500 mercurial days. But music-historical weight is given to the (supposedly) torn poem when we look at the timeline and listen to Dylan’s explanations about the origins of “Like A Rolling Stone”.

We owe an initial public statement to a Canadian journalist, in a radio interview, 20 February 1966 in Montreal, in which Dylan reveals the anomalous genesis. “I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took Like A Rolling Stone.” When Jules Siegel interviews him a month later in Los Angeles, he repeats it in much the same words:

“It was ten pages long. It wasn’t called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred, it was  telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky. Revenge, that’s a better word.”

… where the “vomited hatred” has already been reduced to ten pages. And when Robert Shelton asks about it, it has become even less:

“Like a Rolling Stone, man, was very vomitific in its structure. It seemed like twenty pages, but it was really six. You know how you get sometimes.”
(No Direction Home, Ch. 8)

Like a Rolling Stone (Takes 1-3, Rehearsal):

The “Rumpelstiltskin incident” was sometime in May 1965, and the first take of “Like A Rolling Stone” is recorded during the first Highway 61-session, 15 June 1965. That timeline, Faithfull’s recollections, Dylan’s outpourings, and Marianne’s striking similarities to the “Miss Lonely” who attended the “finest schools” and “dresses so fine”, and Dylan’s riled-up, somewhat unstable state of being in the whirlpool of the Five Hundred Days… it is a confluence that almost inevitably must lead to a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred, to an adolescent revenge fantasy about the downfall of a nymph who has so cruelly rejected him.

Which would make the genesis of Dylan’s very own “Lied von der Lorelei” identical to Heine’s – the Marianne-Erlebnis, so to speak.

Continuation: Like A Rolling Stone part 2 “It all just about got to be too much” – 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

By Tony Attwood

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

• Let it Be Me
• Dink’s Song
• When the Ship Comes In
• Fever

According to the official site, Bob played “Walls” three times between 12 April 1963 and 17 May 1964, and the song was issued on the Bootleg Series 1-3.

But as we are so often finding, everything is not quite as straightforward as we might wish because there is a 1962 recording of the song on the internet, but it is really so poor in quality I wouldn’t want to force it on you but if you really want to go there it is here.  But don’t blame me – particularly if you conclude it is actually not Walls of Red Wing.

But we do have this which is a good quality live performance from 1963 – and as I’ve now discovered in series such as this, Bob really does like to explore performing some of these songs in different keys.   I’d love to know why he does that – is it a deliberate policy, or just something that happened?  (Obviously, in more recent times it has to happen by arrangement since the band need to know (although even then I wouldn’t put it past Bob to change keys without telling the band, just to keep them on there toes – but with these solo performances it is of course just up to Bob).

and this is the studio outtake

And because it is a Bob song, and because the original aim of this site was to contain a piece about every song Bob wrote (which we have done) I wrote a little piece about the song about seven years ago.

But I think I missed out the point that Bob attempted this song for two separate albums – “Freewheelin'” and “Times”, and I think the lyrics and deliberately repetitive approach of the accompaniment shows that although Bob really felt it was an important song, it just isn’t commercially viable.

Indeed as a song it is unusual – have many people written songs about a reform school?

Perhaps the problem is that the song needs the highly repetitive formulaic accompaniment to emphasise the message of the lyrics – but that doesn’t really make for entertaining music.  It’s a hard balance to get with songs about such topics.

The music itslef comes from the late 19th century / early 20th century song, “The Road and the Miles to Dundee”.

What strikes me is that Bob loses quite a lot of the essence of the song in his transformation of the song – and again maybe that was why in the end it didn’t make the album and only got three outings on stage.

As quite often happens there is not just a Scottish version of these 19th / 20th century songs but also an Irish version, and it is hard to know (at least for a non-specialist like me) just which one proceeds the other.  Here is the Irish version: Sweet Carnlough Bay.

Bob’s song was covered by Ramblin Jack Elliott who also has the problem of keeping the message of monotony within the lyrics balanced against the need to make the song something we want to listen to.

But this set of links does gives me a chance to put up this video.   Jack, another of the folk singers who was influenced by Woodie Guthrie is, I think, still with us, aged 93.   In earlier times Jack Elliott often sang Bob Dylan songs, and quite often referred to Bob as “my son Bob Dylan”.

So there we are – another song that Bob performed three times, and then let go.

By Tony Attwood

As you may know, if you drop into this site regularly, I have been plodding my way through Heylin’s two-volume critique of Bob Dylan (previous articles from volume 2 are listed below)   And although I’ve only reached page 163 I’ve also reached the stage in volume two where I am just about ready to give up.

But I’m not for one reason – Heylin keeps reminding me of brilliant, brilliant, brilliant Dylan songs I have not played in years.  Not that Heylin actually mentions these songs, and certainly not because he praises them, but rather because I find his commentaries so naff, that I am forced to go back to the songs from the period he is writing about, just to see if maybe he is right, and my memory is playing tricks.

And what has brought me to this “time to give up” point today is Heylin’s assertions (around page 160 of volume two) that Dylan had, between 1971 and eearly 1973, become paranoid and could get angry.

Now as it happens I did study psychology, (although I stress not psychiatry) and I read enough in my student days and while working on my research degree, to have learned something of paranoia.  And in this position, I have found the throw-away use of the concept of paranoia, (as when Heylin speaks of Dylan’s “paranoid visions” in a flippant throwaway manner), distasteful, frustrating and wrong.  And indeed I fear Heylin’s commentary in relation to Dylan’s view of the world in general, is a vision that has significantly damaged some people’s view of Dylan.

And what gave me pause today, in contemplating the next part of Heylin’s book, was the notion of how I would react if I found people prowling around my house and garden, rummaging through my dustbins (trash cans, I think in America), and then writing a lot about me in the media on the basis of what they found.

Of course I don’t know how I would react, because the reviews of my books and articles, when they have happened at all, have generally been moderate and modest.  A few utterly negative, a few full of praise, but mostly middle-of-the-road.  But still, two things strike me here.

The sort of interference in his private life that Dylan was subjected to in the early 1970s is totally beyond all bounds of reasonableness, in my view, and I suspect it would be enough to send almost anyone over the edge into paranoia (and I am not saying that all that Heylin suggests did happen to Bob, but even if it did it, Bob was not becoming paranoid, but simply getting very fed up with the intrusions into his private life.)

Now for myself, I like to be social, and I love going out, much as I enjoy my time alone at home, writing articles such as this, writing songs that only a handful of people will ever hear, and undertaking the commercial work that I do.  But I wonder, as I sit here writing, and gazing onto my garden and the fields beyond, how would I react if I suddenly looked up from the computer monitor and saw some people I didn’t know prowling around my garden, climbing the trees, taking photos, going through my dustbins and maybe trying to enter my house?

I guess I might go out and politely say to the intruder, “Can I help you?” but on the other hand, if the prowler looked as if he/she might have a tendency to violence, or perhaps looked as if she/he had consumed various behaviour-changing substances along the way, I might just call the police.  But then again, given that I read last week that we are currently 20,000 police officers short in England, while the number of crimes rose by 10% last year with the number of violent offences rose by 20% last year (figures from the Crime Survey of England and Wales), maybe I would be more circumspect, lock doors and windows, turn off the lights and hide.

And all this is in a small English hamlet mentioned in the Domesday Book, and where I don’t think we’ve had a crime in the 20 years I have lived here.

So what does Bob feel about this intrusion in his private life?  Heylin’s suggestion seems to be that by getting angry about people going through his trash, he is revealing his paranoia.  Personally I think he’s being very restrained.

Heylin also appears highly critical of Bob’s experimentation – as for example when he gets Ginsberg and others into the studio to produce a spontaneous set of songs.  OK it’s an idea, and it apparently didn’t work, but full praise (from me at least) to Dylan for trying.  The problem for Bob is that such failures are noted and remembered.  The problem for Heylin is that he doesn’t realise that virtually every artist in every form of art has disasters.  It’s just that most artists manage to destroy them before the world gets hold of them (or in my case as one publisher pointed out far more kindly than I deserved, “I’m not sure this book is quite what the market is ready for.”)

Is Dylan being annoyed about the intrusions, Dylan being unreasonable, ungrateful, eccentric, or anything else?  Or is it just an artist privately exploring where his art might take him next?

As a result of my writing of Untold Dylan (and indeed my other daily blog on issues surrounding the football (soccer) club that I support) I never see people prowling around my house, any more than I suspect you do.  But how would I react if I did?   Come to that how would Heylin react?   Of course, I have no idea in the latter case but I guess I would call the police.  (I’m not sure they’d turn up, but I would call them anyway.)

According to Heylin, in 1972 and 1973 Bob’s response to these unwanted intrusions into his private life were on occasion, neither calm nor measured, and although we may regret that, it is understandable, especially as this was the period in which Bob was finding it very hard to do his work as a songwriter.

We know that Bob wrote 15 songs in 1970, five in 1971, two in 1972 and 14 in 1973 (a full list of these songs and those of the rest of the decade are here).  We’ll all have different views on each song, but out of those 36 songs maybe half a dozen are of the type many of us would consider “classic” Dylan songs.

Now in comparison, Dylan wrote 36 songs in 1962 alone, a single year in which the compositions included, among all these others, at the very least, eight brilliant songs such as

• Ballad for a friend
• Blowing in the wind 
• Corrina Corrina
• Tomorrow is a long time 
• Hard Rain’s a gonna fall
• Ballad of Hollis Brown
• Don’t think twice
• Oxford Town

… and indeed playing “Tomorrow” (above) as I write this, still moves me deeply after all these years.

Dylan of course didn’t forget his past, and he surely must have realised that he was now struggling to write so readily, so easily and quite so wonderfully, while at the same time, he had at least one moron rummaging through whatever he chose to throw away.  And yet Heylin spends his time suggesting Dylan was losing his ability to compose songs that we would remember forever.  To which the most polite reply I can make is, “He was not then, and is not now, a machine.”

And if you doubt the validity of what I am saying, go out and find anyone who is involved in any of the creative arts at whatever level, and ask that person if she/he has emotional ups and downs, finds it hard to explain why some days / weeks / months it just doesn’t happen, and knows how difficult it can be to relate to those around who have no engagement in the creative arts, when the creativity simply dries up.

Of course Heylin, with his multiple books, might claim he is engaged in the creative arts, but reading volume two I reach the conclusion that he actually is just spouting opinion, which is rather different.

But there is something worse about Heylin’s writing even beyond this, for he has a habit of taking a single issue, or a single moment, and generalising out of it.  For example, he quotes a situation in which a family friend, Bob Finkbine, was having a coffee with Bob and Sara, and Finkbine asks Dylan if he ever had a time when he had difficulty in writing.  Sara is reported to have jumped in and said, “Try the last two years.”

Now first let us remember that these are three long-term friends having a chat in the kitchen about this, that and everything.  It’s the sort of thing many people do – I have a pal who comes round to my house most Friday afternoons for a coffee and cake.  We have no idea what we are going to chat about, but we usually chat for two or two and half hours and for each of us there is real pleasure in escaping our work (mine as a writer and my pal’s as a researcher and data analyst).  These are relaxed conversations where all sorts might be said, and I guess each of us could recall the other, over the years, saying something that would fit any worldview that was being developed.

But so what?  Is something I said on Friday afternoon to my pal in the course of a two and a half hour chat going to be seen as fully representative of my world and my worldview?  Maybe it might reflect my feelings that day, that week, that month, that quarter, but probably not more than that, simply because in conversations with really good friends most of us relax and explore some inner feelings.  What is said often doesn’t really mean anything.

And besides, across the period 1971 to 1973 Bob wrote 23 songs that we know about, and looking back at that list of compositions, I’d pick out 11 songs that I would and do still happily listen to

1. When I paint my masterpiece
2. Watching the river flow
3. Forever Young
4. Wagon Wheel (Rock me mama)
5. Knocking on heaven’s door
6. Never say goodbye
7. You Angel You
8. On a night like this
9. Tough Mama
10. Dirge 
11. Wedding Song

Yes of course some of these are now largely forgotten other than by people who really admire or love Dylan’s compositions.   Indeed the final one in the list “Wedding Song” from Planet Waves- it was played nine times in a two month period in 1974 and then left.  And maybe you haven’t gone back to it, but if you have five minutes to spare, do try it again.

That, I would argue, like the other ten songs above, is an extraordinary piece of music.  And indeed although I know quoting oneself is a really naff thing to do, I am going to repeat something I have said before about this song.  “Image falls onto image as thought pushes thought out of the way, but there is that unrelenting vision that he is not the Leader, he is not here to change everything, certainly not here to tell us what to do.  He is just a guy.”

So why dismiss it – indeed why is Heylin dismissing the whole list of compositions?   Sadly he never tells us, for as so often happens, he doesn’t justify his opinions but instead states them as facts.  Which they are not.

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

Previously in this series…

• 1: Your enemy’s corpse will soon float by
• 2: The situation comes first
• 3: If I had wings like Nora’s dove
• 4: Cocker Meadow
• 5: The rest is just the same isn’t it

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         “Life is so transient”

 “If I’m here at eighty, I’ll be doing the same thing. This is all I want to do — it’s all I can do,” Dylan says in May 1986, in the month he turns 45.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is rather silly, a bit insulting even, but Dylan has been asked since the 1970s how long he plans to go on – suggesting that he is now getting too old for rock music. “I’ll just be doing this until the fire’s burnt out. Muddy Waters is still playing, he’s 65-66. If those people can do it, I don’t see why I can’t,” he says in April 1978 in Australia – he then is 36.

It’s true, as we now know. Dylan will start the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2024 November 2021 when he is 80, in April 2024 interrupting the tour for 27 shows with Willie Nelson and the Outlaw Music Festival Tour, June to September 2024, and returning for the last leg of the R&RW Tour, October and November ’24 in Europe, as an 84-year old.

The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour is a special tour. The addition “2021-2024” in the announcement is already unique – we haven’t seen that in 60 years of Dylan tours. Equally remarkable is the setlist, which is more or less fixed for all 230 concerts, all nine legs of the four-year tour.

We remember the times when setlists changed night by night, depending on the mood of the day. Even on days when Dylan does two shows, he usually radically flips the playlist. March 2000 in Anaheim, for example: the late show has nine different songs from the early show. A week later in Reno, he takes only four songs from the afternoon to the evening, replacing 11 songs. And we know plenty of stories of band members telling how Dylan decides on the spot, on stage and without consultation, which song will be played. “We did work off a set list, but they were more suggestions than locked in. Instead of the Ten Commandments, it was the Ten Suggestions,” as Gary Burke says of the Rolling Thunder Revue (in Ray Padgett’s unsurpassed Pledging My Time, 2023).

Deeper into the twenty-first century, however, the setlists become more static. Roughly until Tempest (2012), Dylan runs the shows with about 30 songs in his suitcase, from which about 17 to 18 songs are taken each night. Around the “Sinatra records” (Shadows in the Night 2015, Fallen Angels 2016 and Triplicate 2017), the evenings become longer (usually more than 20 songs), and even more static. A tour’s setlist is fairly fixed, Dylan and his band working through virtually identical playlists over two months during concert series like the 2016 US Fall Tour or the 2017 Europe Spring Tour. The indispensable Olof Björner neatly keeps track of everything, providing statistics as well – including data like “2 new songs (9%) compared to previous concert. 1 new song for this tour”. Data showing, among other things, that as Dylan’s age and the twenty-first century progress, the percentages of “new songs compared to previous concert” become lower and lower.

Of flexibility, then, there will be virtually nothing left in 2021-2024. Roughly 90% of the songs are fixed, an average setlist usually looks like:

1              “Watching the River Flow” (performed 226 times, mostly as the opening)
2              “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” (200)
3              “I Contain Multitudes” (230)
4              “False Prophet” (230)
5              “When I Paint My Masterpiece” (229)
6              “Black Rider” (230)
7              “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (200)
8              “My Own Version of You” (230)
9              “To Be Alone with You” (229)
10           “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” (230)
11           “Gotta Serve Somebody” (198)
12           “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” (230)
13           “Melancholy Mood” (74) or “That Old Black Magic” (81)
14           “Mother of Muses” (230)
15           “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” (209)
16           “Every Grain of Sand” (224)

… plus in between two varying songs – almost every night has 18 songs on the programme. “Early Roman Kings” comes along 21 times, for example, and “Simple Twist of Fate” one single time, for the last leg “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “All Along the Watchtower” are unexpectedly reanimated (all 28 nights), and otherwise mostly covers.

A total of 29 different covers, of which Johnny Cash’ “Big River” is the winner with 21 performances, and Grateful Dead is the number one supplier (five songs, played a total of 27 times – their signature song “Truckin’” with the classic line “What a long strange trip it’s been” is Dylan’s favourite with seven renditions).

Bob Dylan – Truckin’, Indianapolis 2023:

Striking about the cover selection is not only the relative unfamiliarity of some of the choices (the Bob Weir/Josh Ritter song “Only a River”, Merle Haggard’s “Footlights”, Dwight Yoakam’s “South of Cincinnati”), but especially the ones that show a side of Dylan we don’t expect: Bob Dylan the Audience Pleaser. More than once, he adapts the setlist to his audience. On 6 and 7 October 2023, he opens in Chicago with “Born in Chicago” of his old friends from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the week before he opened in Kansas City with “Kansas City”.  In Chuck Berry’s St. Louis “Johnny B. Goode”, in New York he plays a snippet of Billy Joel’s “New York State Of Mind”, and in John Mellencamp’s native Indiana Mellencamp’s “Longest Days”.

Apart from those varying surprises, about 90% of the setlist is pretty much fixed for four years. And it has every appearance that Dylan is weaving some kind of sub-theme into it. Main theme is – of course – the latest album Rough And Rowdy Ways, of which he plays all the songs (except “Murder Most Foul”, for obvious reasons). However, the songs around it seem to have been chosen with a particular intention. Theme: the Loneliness at the End of Life, or the Volatility of Existence; something like that. Put a bit more poetically:

“The long strange trip of the naked ape. Not to be light on it, but everybody’s life is so transient. Every human being, no matter how strong or mighty, is frail when it comes to death. I think about it in general terms, not in a personal way.”
(Douglas Brinkley interview New York Times, June 2020)

Indicated, this underlying idea, not only by the choice of songs, but by the changes in lyrics as well. After all, at first glance it is remarkable that from his vast repertoire, the Old Master chooses precisely these songs to shine in that Rough And Rowdy Ways setting. Nothing wrong, of course, with older songs like “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” or “Gotta Serve Somebody”, but they shine a bit less than, say, “Visions Of Johanna” or “Not Dark Yet”.

At second glance, however, the songs seem to have been selected on the tenor of the lyrics, which should fit such a sub-theme like “The long strange trip of the naked ape”. At least: the protagonists of songs such as “Watching The River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece” are lonely and reflective, and the lyrics even seem adjusted accordingly; in Masterpiece, for the first time in 50 years, the narrator is no longer in a hotel room with Botticelli’s niece or with a “pretty little girl Greece”, but rather all alone. Intentionally; “Gonna lock the doors and turn my back on the world for awhile”. Just as the narrator in “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” locks out the world (“Shut the light, shut the door, shut the shade”), and in “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine”, as the title suggests, goes his own way.

The most radical lyric change also seems to have been inspired by the choice of that sub-theme. “To Be Alone With You” was back then, in 1969 on Nashville Skyline, a cloudless country anthem, but has undergone a complete transformation and is now a brooding, gothic thriller with gory undertones and a dark protagonist alone “in a castle high in an ivory tower”.

And concluding the portrait of the reflective old man is Dylan’s 80s masterpiece “Every Grain Of Sand”, the philosophical sister of “Watching The River Flow”, the dramatic monologue of the jaded man at the end of his life, realising that his journey is over, that bitter dance of loneliness, discerning forgotten faces in the broken mirror, concluding resignedly with it’s only me – the insight that we are all alone in the end, the proclamation of impermanence and existential loneliness from “To Be Alone With You”, “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine”, “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, and from the motto that will be on every concert poster from 2021: “Things aren’t what they were…”, right above the allegorical depiction of the ultimate memento: Death.

The recognition, in short, that everything passes, the nostalgic lament from “Truckin’” (“What a long strange trip it’s been”) – the motif that drives Dylan to open almost every concert with

This ol’ river keep a-rollin’, though
Where it stop and where the wind might blow
I sit right here
And watch the river flow.

Bob Dylan – Watching The River Flow, Lyon 2023: 

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
• 1: Who the book is (not) for – part 1
• Who this book is (not) for – part 2
• 2: Anything but idolatry – part 1
• Anything but idolatry – part 2
• 3: Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1
• 3: Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2
• 3: Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 3
• 3: Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 4
• 4: The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 1

4. The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 2

I/you songs only become truly excruciating when they degenerate into swooning, moans of heartache, or worse – begging not to be left alone. Would it surprise you to learn that these variants are also extremely popular? As though people in the western world enjoy nothing more than wallowing in self-pity and helplessness. I will treat you to several more choice examples later. But no, rage or revenge is always preferable where heartache is concerned, such as in ‘Cry me a river’ by Julie London,

Julie London :

or tranquillity, such as ‘You don’t know what love is’ by Dinah Washington (both thankfully from 1955 as well).

Dinah Washington:

For record producers, therefore, songs of longing (either joyful or lugubrious) were commercially the most interesting, particularly when issued in the form of a seven-inch record or ‘45’. The single was the ideal vehicle for measuring, promoting, and especially capitalising on artists’ popularity, given that the price put them within reach of the less affluent teenagers, who were the majority.

In this sense, Parlophone – the record company that contracted The Beatles after they had been dropped by the somewhat larger Decca – could not have been happier. Their first seven singles, one per quarter, were all love songs of the desirous variety. With one exception: ‘She loves you’, which appeared in August 1963, is a glorious example of how innovative newcomers can breathe new life into a tired old ‘product’, with a subtle variation on the banal music-industry love morality of which I presented some ‘tasteful’ examples above. Although it seems unlikely that The Beatles were aware of their innovation, they cannot but have realised that both the music and lyrics of ‘She loves you’ had struck a chord. It had a cheerful tune with a few unexpected chord changes, an up-tempo rhythm, and hit an absolute home run by placing the declamatory chorus at the beginning of the song, instead of leading up to it somewhere in the middle. That, already, was innovative. But the lyrics themselves are also special: simple as always, but that is where the comparison ends. ‘She loves you’ is an ingenious moral commentary that draws from a completely different, far more female-friendly source than anything that had been dished up before. Here, a young man (I) speaks to his friend (you) who has hurt his girlfriend (she) and now fears that he has lost her. But the singer saw her only yesterday, and assures his friend that she still loves him and fully understands that he harbours no malicious designs. And with a girl like that, what he ought to do is count his blessings. The moral of the story lies in the last of the three four-line verses, when the singer – being cruel to be kind – says to his friend that although it is his choice, pride can also take its toll, and so he should apologise. Because… She loves you! Yeah, Yeah, Yeah! The final ‘yeah’ is declaimed as a magnificent three-part chord, and the whole thing is over in a mere 138 seconds (2:18).

She loves you:

To summarise: a man who has mistreated his beloved should swallow his pride and make amends. Compared to the moral quagmire of the 1950s discussed above, this message was revolutionary. What kind of reform was lacking in the United States, but already seemed to be brewing in Europe?

We can probably no longer pinpoint whether this is the reason why ‘She loves you’ was responsible for The Beatles’ European breakthrough, and became their record best-selling single in England. America was undoubtedly also ready for it, but the assassination of President Kennedy in that same year delayed The Beatles’ breakthrough to the United States for many months.

Their seventh single, ‘A hard days’ night’ appeared in July 1964, shortly before Bob Dylan came to visit them in their New York hotel. Their eighth, ‘I feel fine’, featuring ‘She’s a woman’ on the B-side, was released on 27 November and was the first to include two I/she songs instead of I/you.

Baby's good to me, you know
She's happy as can be, you know
She said so

I'm in love with her and I feel fine

Baby says she's mine, you know
She tells me all the time, you know
She said so

I'm in love with her and I feel fine

I'm so glad that she's my little girl
She's so glad, she's telling all the world


That her baby buys her things, you know
He buys her diamond rings, you know
She said s

She's in love with me and I feel fine, mmm

I feel fine Video:

We can ascertain that in the two years since ‘Love me do’, only minimal textual development had taken place, with everything remaining at a safe teenage level. It is also not so that Lennon and McCartney were trying to write poetry – they were first and foremost musicians who, with George Martin’s help, developed into fully-fledged songwriters. Nevertheless, after ‘I feel fine’ the I/she songs increased palpably in number. Whether this may have been the result of becoming acquainted with mind-altering substances is up to the reader to decide. What is certain is that the line ‘Turn me on when I get lonely’ from ‘She’s a woman’ introduced a turn of phrase that in 1964 was only known to those who had encountered the substance at an early stage, or who were ‘turned on’, which was only a small circle. Lennon later explained that he was the one who suggested the line to the somewhat conservative McCartney.

So much for The Beatles who, while they certainly gave an enormous impulse to the music of young people, cannot be suspected of having changed the world with earth-shattering love poetry.

continuation: What was the public to do? – part 1

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

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

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

The Gates of Eden – A History in Performance, Part 1: 1964 Ancestral voices prophesying war

By Mike Johnson

[I read somewhere once that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the second article on the second track, ‘Gates of Eden.’ You can find the first one here: https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/29258]

After performing ‘Gates of Eden’ live in 1965, there was a nine year gap, taking us through to 1974, before Dylan again picked up the song, now already ten years old. The song became a feature of the 1974 tour, being performed some twenty-five times. 1974 saw Dylan’s last tour with The Band, and many fine rock performances came from that tour, but Dylan delivered an acoustic, solo, stripped down performance of ‘Gates,’ singing all nine verses at a faster tempo than we heard in 1964/65. The following performance is at Madison Square Garden, New York City, January 31^st (evening).

Madison Square Garden, New York City, NY – January 31, 1974 (Evening)

Good as it is, and a beautifully clear recording, I can’t help feeling that something has been lost – the eerie spookiness of the song, perhaps, the ambience or atmosphere of the song. This is very much a matter of personal taste. While I admire the performance, it doesn’t move me, lift the hairs on the back of my neck the way the 1960’s performances do. The performance is professional rather than inspired.

There’s not a lot of variation in the 1974 performances, although this one, from Ann Arbor on February 2^nd, although not as well recorded, has more the feeling of a poem being recited, especially the first, unaccompanied verse. I get more of the atmosphere of the song from this one, although it still feels a bit rushed to me.

 Ann Arbor

This is not available in all countries – so sorry if you can’t see/hear this one.

As an admirer of the song, I’m disappointed that Dylan did not perform it during the two years of the Rolling Thunder tour (1975/76). He did perform it once in 1976, at Salt Lake City in May, but there is no known recording of that concert. Given the marvellous performances of Rolling Thunder, we can only regret he didn’t include it.

We have to jump to the 1978 tour to pick up the song again, although he only performed it half a dozen times. Again, on this tour marked by some radical new arrangements with a nine-piece band, Dylan’s approach to the song is little changed from 1974 – solo acoustic with a brisk tempo. I was at the Blackbush concert and remember the crowd’s enthusiastic response to Dylan appearing without the band for this one. It was a moment’s nostalgia for the acoustic, pre electric Dylan.

Once more, there’s not a lot of variation in the 1978 performances. I have chosen this one from Paris (July 6^th). Dylan drops the second to last verse (‘The foreign sun it squints upon…’) in favour of a much-welcomed harp break, very much in the style of this 1960’s harp sound.

1978 Paris

These 1978 performances sound better to me than 1974. There is a trembling vulnerability in Dylan’s vocals which marks these recordings out. There’s an edginess to these performances that gives it that feel of a protest song, a protest at our surreal, violent and twisted world, which is just as surreal, violent and twisted now as it was in 1964 when it was written. This strange, nightmarish song has not lost its relevance. Its protest arises from the spiritual anguish that drives it. Let’s look a little more closely at verse 4 to get a feel for that anguish:

With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden

The ‘time rusted’ (‘rusting’) compass cannot show us the way in this fallen world any more than the fairy tale of Aladdin and his lamp. Alas, Aladdin’s magic lamp is a fantasy, just as the ‘promises of paradise’ made by ‘Utopian hermit monks’ is a fantasy.

When Moses came down from the mountain bearing the stone tablet on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed, he found his people had strayed from God’s path and were worshipping the Golden Calf, in other words, money, worldly riches. The hermit monks can be seen to represent the spiritual materialism that Dylan has consistently railed against throughout his career. I take their sitting ‘sidesaddle’ to indicate effete privilege. Their ‘promises of paradise’ are empty and hollow since they are founded on the love of gold rather than the love of God, and are mocked by the real and transcendent spiritual forces that lie inside or behind the gates of Eden.

Dylan did not pick up the song during his gospel years (1979 – 81) and we have to jump another ten years, to 1988, the first year of the Never Ending Tour, before we encounter it again – this time much transformed.

What strikes us about the history of this song up to 1988 is how little it changes. Except for some increases in tempo, it remains the solo acoustic song it was in 1964. In 1988 Dylan tore into his songs like there was no tomorrow, angrily ripping them out of his throat, and ‘Gates’ got caught up in that hurricane, for the first time as a rocker with a plunging electric guitar from GE Smith. The inherent grandeur of those chords make for a great rock song. We discover that ‘Gates’ can be delivered as an angry rocker with its roots deep in protest. Listening to this soundboard recording from Jones Beach (June 30^th), we realize that the song is not just eerie and spooky, but a rage filled cry of despair:

The kingdoms of Experience
in the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
each one wishing for what the other has got
and the princess and the prince
discuss what’s real and what is not
It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden

What a grim vision this is. Our experience is no help to us, and while there’s no escaping envy and greed and meaningless materialism, there are no consolations of philosophy either. Discussing ‘what’s real and what is not’ is as meaningless as greedily exchanging possessions. This is a protest, not against any particular this or that, but the human condition itself, and how well anger suits it! That tone is vengeful. Listening to this we wonder why we hadn’t noticed it before, the righteous fury and desolation driving the song. ‘All in all it can only fall…’

Jones Beach 1988

Dylan captures the same vocal power, even when delivered acoustically. At the New York concert (Oct 19^th) we get, not quite a solo acoustic, for GE Smith is playing a second acoustic guitar, but a reassertion of the acoustic roots of the song. The fact that he played it both with electric backing and without in 1988 suggest he was still experimenting, looking for the right backing for its new vocal spirit. The acoustic setting, however, leads to a more restrained delivery than Jones Beach.

New York 1988

Both of these are magnificent performances and will remain unequalled for some years. Interestingly, despite the success of the electric version, he stuck to the acoustic version in the following few years.

In 1989 Dylan’s approach to the song has not changed, it’s just sloppier. We are now entering difficult years for the NET, the era of ‘The Untouchables,’ which would last through to 1992, when Dylan’s voice became patchy and concerts became scrappy. You can hear it in this Atlanta performance (August 16^th), as he tries to recapture the spirit of the 1988 performances. It’s pretty good, but I noticed that he blurs the lyrics a couple of times, as if he’s forgotten them, his diction is not as clear and messiness seeps in. It sounds strained – to my ear at least.

Atlanta 1989

Atlanta is one of the better performances. There’s little point in adding more of the same, but this one from St Paul (Aug 3^rd) caught me up, despite the annoying, chattering audience. This voice is starting to get that scratchy quality, that vocal fry I charted in my NET series (he started to pull out of it in 1993) yet nevertheless the passion of the song comes across.

St Paul 1989

Moving on to 1990 the acoustic approach remains the same, and things don’t improve much. The song gets shortened down to just over four minutes by dropping verses out. Despite all that, the performance quivers with passion; the spirit of the song shines through.

New York 1990

In 1991, however, at the end of the year, we hit upon an unexpected gem. For the first time since 1988, the conception of the song changes again, not the angry rock version of that year, but, with the addition of some gentle drumming and a lilting tempo, something more wistful and whimsical. The protest is still here, but the emotional framing of the past three years has softened; the world of the song may be grim and frightening, but it is also magical and strange. There’s powerful guitar work here, too, keeping the rhythm out of the dumpty-dum by syncopation and a surging back and forth, just as Dylan’s voice does.

And, at least for this performance, Dylan’s voice has clarified as he puts some drama into those vocals. We get a foretaste of how he’s going to sound, those clear soaring notes, in 1994/95.

Detroit Dec 11^th,  1991

Again there is little point in needless repetition, but this Dublin performance (Feb 5^th) caught my ear for its warmth and compelling guitar work.

Dublin 1991 Feb 5th

I have belatedly discovered, however, that some of these You Tube recordings I have been using are inferior to the mp3s taken directly from the concerts. The Dublin 1991 recording is an excellent case in point. Here is the mp3 of that same concert (just click on the title immediately below)

1991 Dublin

That’s it for this time round. Next time we begin in 1992, the year Dylan added a steel guitar/dobro to his line-up, changing his sound forever.

Let’s catch him then.

Until that time

Kia Ora

A crazy phase of our war torn world.

By Tony Attwood

Having looked at the songs Bob has sung once or twice I’ve now turned to the songs Bob has performed just three times.  As I noted last time there are only about 15 such songs, so this is not going to be a very long series, and here we are already onto number four, of which there is just one video I can see – but there may well be others lurking around.

Bob first performed the song “Fever” on 22 November 1980 in San Francisco, then it was performed on 30 November 1980 in Seattle and finally oin 12 June  1981 in Clarkston.   So this is the middle version of the three – all perfectly rehearsed and executed as you can hear.

An index to the current series running on this site, and many of the past series is given on the home page: I don’t know what it means either, but it sounds good.

The series looking at volume 1 of Clinton Heylin’s epic review of Bob Dylan concluded here, and at the end of that piece, you will find an index to all the articles that were part of that series.  This is part five of the review of Volume 2 of Heylin’s opus., “Far Away from Myself.”  Again an index to previous episodes is at the end.

By Tony Attwood

Part 7: How Bob Felt at the Time

“While Dylan’s own contemporary work made almost no impression, his influence on contemporaries had never been greater.”

That statement relating to 1971/2 is made on page 142 of the second volume of Heylin’s magnum opus, the Double Life of Bob Dylan, and to me it is one of the most important comments the author makes.   For apart from being informative it raises all sorts of interesting questions about how Bob felt at the time.

Imagine, if you can (and it is hard, I know) that you have been one of the most idolised and lionised songwriters the world has ever known, and then you find you can’t do it any more.   You simply can’t write songs that satisfy your own criteria or reach the standards  your past work achieved.   What on earth do you do?  Do you release it anyway, or just pass the time, watching (as it were) the river flow?

It is of course not an issue that most of us get anywhere near facing, most obviously because we never get to the point of having worldwide fame for being a creative genius. Or indeed thinking that our own artistic endeavours are of particular merit. Besides, to have had all the fame and adulation that the average rock star gets, and then fade away is one thing.   But to have been hailed as the greatest songwriter of them all, and then find you can’t write songs that satisfy you, yourself, any more…. What then?

What Bob seems to have done, quite reasonably it seems to me, is to find a club which had live performers he liked, and where people wouldn’t make a fuss about Bob turning up, to watch and listen.  And it was in this hinterland, far removed from the mega-crowds at concerts, that “When I paint my masterpiece” emerged.

Of this time, Jochen, on this site, has described the situation far more lucidly than Heylin could ever manage, saying,”1971 is the fourth year of Dylan’s Seven Lean Years, the dry spell that Dylan himself places between John Wesley Harding (late 1967) and Blood On The Tracks (late 1974). These are the years when Dylan sits on the waterfront, watching the river flow, waiting for the inspiration to paint a masterpiece.

“Then, in January ’71, a tape of Leon Russell floats by, inspiring a brief but long-legged revival: the songs Dylan recorded with Russell in March ’71 are on the setlist 50 years later, throughout the Rough & Rowdy Ways World Tour 2021-2024, night after night, some 200 times.”

Thus it was a composition that led, apparently, to a return to the ability to write songs there and then in the studio – a remarkable ability indeed, and one upon which many who witnessed it, looked on in total amazement.  Just as many of us are amazed by the music even before we learn that it took just ten minutes to write the piece.

Of course “When I paint” is a piece that sees Bob telling it as it is – the song does begin, after all, with the line, “What’s the matter with me I don’t have much to say”.  It is a song about the creative urge having gone, leaving behind it no trace.

And then, having created such a wonderful song, someone (presumably in the record company) decided to release it as a single.  It didn’t make the charts, but maybe it did remind a lot of people that Bob was still around.

At the same time there was another problem, apart from that of how (if at all) Bob might re-enter the music marketplace in a pre-eminent position.  And that problem was the way in which those who had known Bob personally in the past, through having performed or recorded with him, were now adding to their declining incomes by reminiscing about Bob and his move away from the sort of music that had made him famous in the first place.   It must have seemed to Bob that the chance to step back and reconsider himself, was being totally undermined by those who had known him in the past and were ready to accept a few bucks from a passing journalist to put forward their view on how sad was that Bob was no longer, well, to put it bluntly, “Bob.”

As Heylin notes, suggestions were even made to the effect that Bob had an obligation to both his public and the bands who had taken Bob’s songs and presented them to a wider audience.

And yet such a notion is surely nonsense because it ignores (as Heylin ignores) the two totally separate levels of reality in which successful songwriting occurs.

First there is the ability to write and complete a song which the songwriter is very happy with.  A song which makes the composer think, “Wow, I did that.”  If you are not a person working in a creative field you might find this hard to understand, but it is there for many artists, no matter what their field of work.  The visual artist, the actor, the singer, the author… each has feelings about his or her own work, and these feelings are utterly independent of what the world of critics, fans and friends say.

Then second there are the comments of others.  For a world-famous composer such as Bob Dylan there are of course millions of such comments, and he will undoubtedly only bother with a few, usually from people he respects.  But even here if a negative comment is made about one of his compositions that he really holds in high regard, it will be his feeling of the song that survives, not that of the friend-turned-critic.

Thus an artist of any kind often operates in some kind of “otherworld” when creating, and only when pausing or when the work is completed, (if at all,) does he/she consider what has been created.  And at that moment the artist can then reject all that has been written / painted / created / recorded in relation to the song, or accept it.  It is his/her decision, and it may not reflect the view that the public has.

My own feeling (and I’ve not done serious research to validate this beyond it being a feeling) is that in the “down” and “recovery” periods that most creative people go through, artists are more critical of their own work than they need to be, comparing their current efforts with the very best they have created in the past.   And this is related to the fact that as far as I can tell (from I admit knowing just a few creative people, and from trying to analyse my own modest book, article and to a lesser degree song writing) when one returns to creative work after a period away, one can be much, much more self-critical than before.  It is as if one can imagine one’s past work to have been at a much higher level than it actually was, and thus be attempting to reach a level one was never at before.

At the same time there is the issue of confidence – something we read about when at the very last minute, Dylan almost backs away from doing the concert for Bangladesh, seemingly losing his nerve about being on stage.   As we know of course, George Harrison calmed Bob down, and all went well.

Alongside all this, Heylin tells us, complex contractual negotiations were going on in relation to Bob’s future work.   And this really is something we need to pause and consider.  For here we have issues relating to huge amounts of future income (issues written of course in legal terminology which is often obscure to the non-legal mind), issues relating to appearing on stage in front of thousands on site and millions more who will see the video, and issues relating to being able to write new songs that are (in the minds of critics and fans and onself) as good as the old ones.

What does come over however is the fact that Bob was at this stage in his life – this period when in our lists of new compositions little seems to emerge – taking back control of his life AND of his art.  Control of what his recording contract said, control over when he played and what he played, and control over which songs that he had written were to be released.   And since what he wrote was utterly dependent on his emotional state, and since his emotional state influenced what he felt should be in the contract, what he played and when he played, pretty much everything went around in circles.

Heylin, who is much more a reporter than a creative writer, doesn’t really get this in my view, and the amount in his volumes about Dylan as a creative writer (let alone as a creative genius) is vanishingly small.   Which is a shame, because the reason we want to read these books is because of Dylan, the creative genius.

In short, I do get the feeling that Heylin doesn’t really understand the essence of creativity, even though creativity is the very heart and soul of the man who he spends so many pages writing about.  Bob however was utterly, totally aware that his creative levels had dropped, and like most creative people to whom that happens, he didn’t have any idea what to do about it.

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

Watching The River Flow (1971) part 5

by Jochen Markhorst

V          The rest is just the same, isn’t it?

People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah
Makes you stop and all wonder why
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
Who just couldn’t help but cry
Oh, this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though
No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow
And as long as it does I’ll just sit here
And watch the river flow

It is one of the many unforgettable scenes from the masterpiece Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984), and yet another of those for which Oscar-winning screenwriter Peter Shaffer barely had to adapt his own stage text. Mozart makes his appearance with the Emperor, who intends to surprise Mozart; seated at the forte piano he laboriously plays a welcome march Salieri composed especially for the occasion. With a pained grimace, the court composer Salieri endures the little mistakes made by the plodding Emperor, while Mozart is ushered in by the chamber servant. When the courtesies have been fulfilled and the nervous Mozart has made a few more faux pas but still has been given the Imperial commission to compose a German-language opera (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), the Emperor hands him the manuscript of Salieri’s welcome march as a parting gift.

MOZART: Keep it, Majesty, if you want. It is already here in my head.
JOSEPH: What? On one hearing only?
MOZART: I think so, Sire, yes.
Pause.
JOSEPH: Show us.
Mozart bows and hands the manuscript back to the Emperor. Then he goes to the forte-piano and seats himself. The others, except for Salieri, gather around the manuscript held by the Emperor. Mozart plays the first half of the march with deadly accuracy.
MOZART (to Salieri): The rest is just the same, isn’t it?
He plays the first half again but stops in the middle of a phrase, which he repeats dubiously.
MOZART: That doesn’t really work, does it?
All the courtiers look at Salieri.
MOZART: Did you try …? Shouldn’t it be a bit more… (he plays another phrase) Or this – yes, this! Better.

… and virtuoso improvising Salieri’s stiff, repetitive march transforms under Mozart’s hands into the brilliant march we will hear later in Le Nozze Di Figaro, in “Non Più Andrai”.

Mozart plays Salieri’s Welcome March (Amadeus):

The third stanza of “Watching The River Flow” offers musicologists a nice little treat. Musicologist and Dylan researcher Tony Attwood puts it this way:

Musically this is not the third stanza at all but the “middle 8”. And it is a treat because this musical technique is very rare in Dylan compositions.

The blues and folk music (in which Dylan is so well versed) is in a form known as “strophic” which basically goes “verse, verse, verse, verse” for as long as you wish. This is Dylan’s classic style of writing and the overwhelming majority of his songs are in this style.

But there is a variant approach which was very popular in the 1940s, and has carried on to today, in much pop music and within most ballads, in which there is a variant section of the music. It is often known as a “middle 8”, because it was traditionally 8 bars long and came between verse 2 and verse 3 – which is not quite the middle of the piece but as a description is good enough for pop and rock.

Bob Dylan, being a blues man, has primarily written in the standard blues approach of verse, verse, verse (the strophic approach). Listen to “TheTimes They Are A-Changin’” and you’ve got it.

But in this song he moves across to the form used by many composers of popular music in which you have a couple of verses, followed by the variation (the middle 8) and then goes back to the original verse.

However that’s not all, for in this case we have a fairly classic blues rocker in F, a deadpan blues chord scheme, lyrically the tried-and-tested couplet + refrain line structure – but then with the less conventional modulation from F to C (via the chord of G) – and that is our second variation from the norm for Dylan.

Modulations are rare in pop and rock music, and when composers in these genres want to change keys they simply bang us from one key to the next with a jolt. Indeed modulations in Dylan are extremely rare so it is worth pausing for a moment to see what he does.

In fact he uses a technique that was absolutely commonplace in 1930s and 1940s popular music to take us (just for a moment) from F major (the key the music is written in) to C major via the chord of G (which has no place in the key of F major). That G major tells us we are changing, and the C major chord tells us we have arrived. Here it is…

F
What's the matter with me,
       Bb
I don't have much to say,
G
Daylight sneakin' through the window
                                C
And I'm still in this all-night cafe.

Then we are back to the chord of F quickly followed by another B flat and that tells us we are firmly back in the key of F major (because the key of C doesn’t have a B flat in it). As a listener, we don’t really notice all this technicality but instead just hear it as a little variation. A musician however is likely to say “Did Bob write this? That is not like him at all!”

But that is not to say that Dylan is averse to playing around with musical form and structure. If you want an in-your-face example try “Too Much of Nothing” where instead of gently gliding us from one key to another (as here) he goes crashing through the keys without trying to make any of them connect at all.

My suspicion for what it is worth, is that someone in the band suggested it, or played it, and Dylan thought it was nice. If that didn’t happen, then I’d say he had been listening to some 1940s songs and thought he’d use the technique.”

With which musicologist Attwood indirectly confirms the story that Leon Russell had already recorded the musical accompaniment on his own before Dylan reported to the studio; he hears two “variations from the norm” that are unusual for Dylan and finds them so untypical that he suspects those norm deviations came from “someone in the band”.

Textually, the third stanza behaves like a bridge as well; the perspective shifts. For two stanzas we have listened to the narrator’s private concerns; now the gaze shifts from inside to outside, from the personal to the universal. Overly philosophical it is not, of course – People disagreeing on just about everything has little depth, and we know the observation approximately from earlier songs as well. From “Love Minus Zero”, for instance;

In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations

The same switch from personal to general, the same observation of “people”, and the same superficiality. Even “read books” Dylan will copy again today (fourth stanza: Makes you wanna stop and read a book), so it seems, indeed, that during the creative phase of “Watching The River Flow” Dylan’s own masterpiece “Love Minus Zero”, consciously or not, was reverberating somewhere in the back of his mind. And with the roughly same function, too; contrasting the narrator’s Zen-like, almost fatalistic state of mind with the restless, volatile rush all around him.

That tenor remains the same in the 21st century’s rewriting. On Shadow Kingdom and at all the concerts, we now hear Dylan singing:

People disappearin’ everywhere you look
Don’t know where to draw the line
Only yesterday I seen somebody
Who was really in a bind

… where the change from disagreeing to disappearing is striking, but certainly a well-chosen rephrasing to express existential loneliness; in the end, all the people around you are just passers-by, and you yourself are your only company from start to finish, something like that.

Curiously, the fourth stanza, the final couplet, escapes rigorous revision. Curious, as the rest is just the same, isn’t it, as Mozart would say. In the 1971 original, that undylanesque repetition was already striking. Not only musically repetitive – again that “bridge couplet” – but also lyrically:

Stanza 3 1971
People disagreeing on just about everything,
Makes you stop and wonder why
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
Who just couldn’t help but cry
Stanza 4 1971
People disagreeing everywhere you look
Makes you wanna stop and read a book
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
That was really shook

 … practically the same thing. With anyone other than Dylan, we might have raised some questions about that lazy rhyme look-book-shook and its substantive silliness. When Leon Russell records his cover in 1999, he simply omits that whole verse, thus reducing the lyrics to three stanzas. But Dylan doesn’t seem to be bothered by it. After he has had 50 years to think about it, it eventually becomes:

Stanza 3 2021
People disappearin’ everywhere you look
Don’t know where to draw the line
Only yesterday I seen somebody
Who was really in a bind
Stanza 4 2021
People disappearing everywhere you look
Ever stop and wonder why?
Only yesterday I seen somebody
Too sad to cry

Leon Russell – Watching the River Flow:

Still, there can be no question of laziness or fatigue; after all, Dylan elevates the song to the welcome march of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour and for four years, some two hundred concerts, he opens the show with this variation of “Watching The River Flow”, with people disappearing everywhere, people who won’t bother me again, non più andrai, notte e giorno d’intorno girando, turbando il riposo – no more will you go night and day walking to and fro, disturbing the rest, as Mozart would say.

To be continued. Next up Watching The River Flow part 6: “Life is so transient”

————

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

How to Create a Bob Dylan Fan Site from Scratch

Bob Dylan is arguably one of the most talented musicians of all time. Even those who were not born in the 1960s or 1970s can appreciate what his lyrics have to offer, and this timeless appeal continues to attract audiences from all walks of life.

If you are a die-hard fan of Bob Dylan, why not express your admiration through a standalone website? The good news is that you do not need to possess the skills of a coding expert to make the most out of what the online community has to offer. Let’s look at a handful of practical tips that will streamline the development process.

The Times They are A-Changin’

We are referring to the sheer number of website creation tools in this sense. For instance, why not employ a professional domain checker when deciding on an address for your site? Not only can this utility determine what titles are available within seconds, but you can also select from popular suffixes (such as .com, .co.uk, and .org). We need to remember that the domain of a website partially defines what visitors will experience upon entering, so it pays to put in a significant amount of thought.

All About the Content

Many followers believe that Bob Dylan led a double life; a trait that might have very well led to his creative nature. This notion can also be translated into the world of website development. Let’s remember that the length of time visitors choose to spend on a page is largely determined by what the page in question has to offer. Never be afraid to think outside the proverbial box, and to experiment with different elements. For example, many sites devoted to Bob Dylan will contain embedded media such as images or streaming video content.

Beyond Dylan Himself
Whether your Bob Dylan tribute page is meant to represent nothing more than a project of passion, or if you instead wish to use the site to generate additional income, exposure is critical. So, why not include other materials? It could be an excellent idea to upload songs written about Bob Dylan from other artists (Joan Baez is one of many examples). Not only will this provide visitors with even more material to enjoy, but it could very well attract a larger online audience.

Music Formats

Nearly every website touting the works of Bob Dylan will contain samples of his music, or even entire songs. This is why it is crucial to appreciate the file formats that are most common. The majority of experts recommend uploading files in MP3 or MP4 format, as these are compatible with most devices (including iOS and Android operating systems). It is also possible to compress these files into ZIP format if you happen to be offering them for download. Just be sure that there are no copyright issues!

Thanks to the power of the Internet, the magic of Bob Dylan can be enjoyed by an entirely new generation of listeners. Why not become a part of this ongoing movement?

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

4. The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – part 1

Well, I spied a girl and before she could leave
I said ‘Let’s go and play Adam and Eve.’
I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin’
When she said, ‘Hey man, you crazy or sumpin’
You see what happened last time they started.’
(‘Talking World-War-III blues’, The freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – 1963)

Now that we have bid farewell to the sludge of the entertainment industry, we would do well to study the characteristics of the age-old love song itself, which also feature in those of Dylan. Although we are all familiar with them, we in fact rarely take a close look at them. But we will do so now, so as to enable a sharper distinction between Dylan’s work and the aforementioned sludge.

Since time immemorial, love songs have fallen into one of at least three categories. Songs of the I/you variety are the most proliferous. Less commonly we encounter songs in which the singer sings of a loved one to a third person – the she/he songs. Both kinds appear in major and minor variants, and can therefore express joy at a love that is within reach, or sadness at love that is not (or is no longer). The joyful kinds consist merely of happy tidings, making them somewhat uninteresting. Sadness has a far broader palette, however, and can express itself through jealousy, rage, reproach, contempt, self-pity, or any one of the myriad remaining negative emotions. Lastly, there is the kind in which the love between (usually) two people is recounted by a third party. The ballad, which offers a suitable framework for such narratives, is now considerably rarer than it once was, and so can be discounted here. Which is a shame, since while they are only stories, there are some very beautiful ones among them.

For obvious reasons, the discussion of which would be a needless distraction here, love songs are unabashedly heterosexual in nature. The classic image of a yearning love song is that of a man accompanying himself on a plucked string instrument while serenading a woman from beneath her balcony or open window in an attempt to win her love. He sings to her with words such as: you are wonderful, so sweet and so beautiful, I love and long for you, will you be my dearest (there is no talk of marriage, not yet). This I/you construct allows listeners other than the “serenadee” to splice themselves directly into the action. This is more than likely the reason why they appeal to people the most, and consequently are the most common type. The she/he variety creates more distance with the audience.

The biological fact that most love songs are written by heterosexual males is a matter for scientists to address. Nature perhaps suggests that primate females require serenading by their male counterparts in order to increase the probability that they offer themselves ‘willingly’ for mating. Male birds and frogs that sing or croak more beautifully or loudly have the same goal, after all, and therefore a greater likelihood of mating. This may be the reason why songwriting females have been in the historical minority – a dreadful shame, if you ask me. Again, scientists must be the ones to rule on whether they have rapidly closed the gap in recent decades, due to the contraceptive pill. It is clear, however, that odes and serenades dedicated to men are far less numerous than the reverse: now why might that be?

The odes by men are sometimes cloyed by a half-hearted imperative plea, as though the lover in question cannot choose between a primitive ‘Come here!’ and the more civilised ‘Can I come over?’ One very well-known example of this type is The Beatles’ debut single ‘Love me do’, that appeared on 5 October in England in 1962. The song’s sophistication is roughly equivalent to that of a pre-pubescent brain in its final year of primary school, excepting perhaps the possessiveness of the title and the pendulant awkwardness of the song’s two final lines. Lennon and McCartney were aged 22 and 20 at the time, so perhaps the song’s substrate was a little firmer after all… although the words ‘somebody new’ seem to suggest that the girl in question was not their first love interest. They were simply two attractive, musically gifted young adult men whose modest first attempt (142 seconds long, or two minutes and twenty-two seconds) put them on the road to worldwide fame. The song’s undisputed heterosexual nature is evident, since ‘time immemorial’ was not yet over when they wrote and sang it: people knew, without exception, that by ‘you’ they meant a woman. ‘Love me do’ was a run-of-the-mill novelty, but thanks to that ‘somebody new’, every teenage girl could dream that the song was all about her. John and Paul knew what they were doing.

Is all this attention not perhaps more than such an inconsequential text deserves? There can be no doubt that the more mundane the lyrics, the more subordinate they are to the music. The vast majority of people will therefore claim that they never really pay attention to the words. That may be the case, but it is also true that we can all sing along to a song that we like after only a few hearings – in our native language at least – however vacuous the text may be. Many tens, hundreds, and for some even thousands of song lyrics (or fragments thereof) are therefore now lodged firmly in our brains, which means that worldwide there are hundreds of millions of brains walking around with the same song lyrics inside them (albeit fragmented, and mostly in English). Now, dear reader, feel free to convince me that because ‘nobody pays attention to the words’, they have not managed to somehow infiltrate our global morals and conduct. If that is what you truly believe, I would venture that you only deem the lyrics unimportant when they already align with your existing thoughts and behaviour. Words that profess anything different will stand out to you immediately – only then will you notice them, and face the decision to either approve or reject them. In summary: the lyrics might very well be subordinate to the music, but they penetrate and influence our ideas and conduct nonetheless. And that most certainly deserves attention.

The fact that anybody can identify immediately with I/you songs has won this variant universal appeal. Teenage girls, for example, who wanted literally nothing more than to be adored by one of the Fab Four, transplanted themselves into the position of the I-figure in their songs and imagined one (or all four) of the boys, standing on that balcony or in the open window, listening to their serenade, ready to be seduced. For the girls who had the good fortune to see or hear The Beatles from close by, this inner conversion resulted in utter delirium. The already-married Lennon learned quickly: his entreaty of ‘Please please me’ on The Beatles’ second single of the same name (January 1963) was markedly better than McCartney’s plea in ‘Love me do’. After the recording, producer George Martin congratulated the boys on what he thought would be their first number-one hit. And he was right: the girls had understood, and were willing.

continued: Dylan & us: beyond America. 4: The unchanging (heterosexual) love song – 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

Dylan on Tour: concert recordings selected by Tony Attwood

In this series, I’m searching the internet for complete, or near-complete, recordings of Dylan concerts or rehearsals.  In each case I’m not particularly concerned with the video – it is the music, and having a record of what it actually sounded like, rather than what commentators have said it sounded like or what it looked like, that interests me.

Sometimes the quality varies, but this time once more we are lucky.  The recording really does give us a clear recollection of what the concert was all about.

The recordings we have had along the way in this series are

•  Bob Dylan, Little Moses and the complete March 1992 concert
• What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   
• The concert in full on 3 August 2024.
• Dylan and Petty, Australia 1986
• Manchester 1966, the full concert.
• The Carnegie Chapter Hall concert in full: 4 November 1961
• January 1976: the rehearsals
• Erfurt 8th October 2024
• 9 February 2002: Atlanta. Sublime

The Earls Court concert on 15 June 1978 was an extraordinary affair – as you will be able to see just from the set list of no less than 28 songs.  But what comes across are the extraordinary arrangements – this is not a singer going through his “greatest hits” – this is a phenomenally complex re-writing of the catalogue as it existed at the time.

You may not like everything here; I personally don’t care for “I want you” as performed here, for example, as through the change of music the meaning is changed utterly.

Below is the set list – at least I think that’s it.  I wrote this while listening to the gig and then found that a different list of songs from this gig has been published on the internet.  So it is possible I got carried away listening and didn’t get this right – if so please tell me.  But if I listen to the whole show again I’ll miss my lunch date….

• Hard Rain
• Love her with a feeling
• Baby Stop Crying
• Mr Tambourine Man
• Shelter from the Storm
• Love minus zero
• Tangled up in Blue
• Ballad of a Think Man
• Maggie’s Farm
• I don’t believe you
• Like a Rolling Stone
• I shall be released
• Going, going, gone
• Rainy Day Women
• One of us Must Know
• You’re a big girl now
• One more cup of coffee
• Blowin in the Wind
• I want you
• Senor
• Masters of War
• Just like a woman
• Oh Sister
• All along the watchtower
• All I really want to do
• It’s all right ma
• Forever young
• Times they are a-changing.

If you were there, I suspect you are still living this night.  If not – here’s a word of warning.  This is two hours of utter, sublime brilliance, and it is hard to take it all in, in one playing (and that of course assumes you have two hours to spare).  But if not you might like to go to the 1 hour 29 minute marker and listen to “Oh Sister”.  Just to get a sense of what is to come.  At least even after sitting here listening to this, at the moment of hearing that, I was utterly knocked out.

Have fun.

Details of our current and recent series are given on the home page of this site.   I’m always interested in receiving new ideas for articles and series – if you would like to contribute please do email me: Tony@schools.co.uk – and write “Untold Dylan” in the subject line.

———–

By Tony Attwood

My first venture in this recently invented series was a review of performances of “When the Ship Comes In” – which then led me to post a recording of that song by the Farewell Drifters.   Since that post I’ve been delighted to have a spot of correspondence with a member of the band – and as I suspected they are no longer together, but still in touch with and on good terms with each other, which is good to hear.  And indeed a good reason to continue looking at Bob’s songs which according to the official website were performed just three times by Bob.

To give an overall perspective of this rather bizarre search for obscure songs, there are about 370 songs that are listed on the site which have turned up on officially recognised albums (including of course the Bootleg series) but which Dylan has (according to the site) never performed in public, plus around 55 that have been played just the once, and around 28 that have been performed twice.

But I am somewhat hesitant with these numbers since I am a) dependent on the info only on the official site, which does occasionally make a slip, and b) I am counting up the totals on the screen, which is not always easy.

However there are only 15 songs that Bob has (at least again according to the official site) performed three times which doesn’t give me many to look at.  Although it was the realisation that “When the ship comes in” (a song I rate very highly indeed) was in the list that made me want to look further – although you might recall I started out with Dink’s Song as the first item in what is, quite clearly, going to be a fairly short series.

But now, on with the next song – Let it Be Me.   This is from Colombes 1981

The song is based on “Je t’appartiens”, (roughly “I belong to you”) which was released as a single in France by Gilbert Bécaud in 1955.   And if you have never heard the original you might want to sit down first…

The song was written by the performer and his regular lyricist collaborator Pierre Delanoë.  The story is that Delanoë “wrote the lyrics for Bécaud as an apology for missing one of the singer’s performances.”   It was released on the old HMV label in 1955.

But the version most of us old-timers recall is the one by the Everly Brothers recorded in 1959 in New York with a band made up of Howard Collins, Barry Galbraith, and the ensemble of Mundell Lowe, Lloyd Trotman, Hank Rowland, and Jerry Allison. The song was released in 1960.

For me, it is one of those songs that has always stayed in my memory, and on seeing that Bob had performed it three times, the music immediately came into my head – although I’d not only not previously listened to Bob’s performance, but also not knowing heard it in many, many a long year.   I am not at all sure whose performance I knew, although I imagine it was the Everly Brothers version, as that was a hit in the UK.

And certainly, when I found their version on the internet it immediately rang a bell…

But returning to Bob we do have the last of the three live performances, this one with Clydie King

I can’t find a copy of the second live performance by Bob but you might also recall the Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell version from 1968.

I can see why Bob performed it (which is not always the case with other people’s songs) – it is a singularly beautiful, calm and relaxing piece.

It also rather curiously fits with what is happening outside my house as I write this.  I look out onto my garden at the end of which are a set of very tall trees, above which as I write was a vast array of maybe 100, circling birds.  And as the music finished they flew away.

I’m neither suggesting the birds could hear the recording, not that there is any significance, but I do like moments like this, reminding me of the randomness of life.  And it remains, to me at least, and I guess to Bob, a rather beautiful song.  It will, I am sure stay in my head throughout today – at least until I go dancing tonight, when of course new music will take over.

An index to the current series running on this site, and many of the past series is given on the home page: I don’t know what it means either, but it sounds good.

The series looking at volume 1 of Clinton Heylin’s epic review of Bob Dylan concluded here, and at the end of that piece, you will find an index to all the articles that were part of that series.  This is part five of the review of Volume 2 of Heylin’s opus., “Far Away from Myself.”  Again an index to previous episodes is at the end.

By Tony Attwood

Leading up to “New Morning” Heylin describes Dylan as an artist lost.  An artist who agrees to work with the Byrds, but then doesn’t tell them where or when, until the day of the recording, by which time, they’ve given up and “flown” away, with Bob seemingly not having anything new to record anyway.

Elsewhere, the story is told of the recording of “Self Portrait” in which according to Heylin, Bob gave everyone a half-hour’s notice, but still ends up recording 17 songs on the first day and 11 more on the next.

Of course, this way of working is utterly disrespectful of everyone else.  They are tales of a man who is focused only on himself and his art.  It is almost as if no one else is seen to have a life.  But then, one can also say, that’s often the way for brilliant creative artists.

Worse, even when the musicians got into the studio to record with Bob, it wasn’t as if Bob was prepared with a series of songs that he could teach them, and then they could record (although this in itself would have been unusual – normally there would be rehearsal time elsewhere so that everyone got into the studio knowing exactly what was to be done).  But no, Bob was found in the studio on day one, flipping through copies of “Sing Out” songbooks looking for songs he wanted to try.

Which brings us to a key point.  Yes, this appears utterly disorganised, and lacking in any sense of recognition that other people have their own lives and their own work to get on with.  Yes we might allow that artists can have bursts of inspiration and need to get the work completed as that inspiration hits, but Dylan’s approach seems to go much further and be infinitely more disrespectful.

Drawing once more on my own very modest time in the world of music, I recall once being with my partner in south Wales, and getting a phone call from a musician of quite considerable repute saying that he and his band were finishing their new album in a studio about 150 miles from where we were, and the producer had just decided that one particular track needed an organ part.   They didn’t have an organist in the band who could handle the part, but there was an organ in the studio, and would I mind driving over there, now, at that very moment, and help cut the final track.

Since I did like the guy who was phoning, and since my partner had never been in a studio before to see a band making an album, after a brief consultation I agreed and we did the journey, cut the track, and got back to her house in the small hours of the next morning.  I was thanked by the artist, but no more, and never heard from him again, (although we had previously been on very good terms, and had worked together several times on different projects).

Now I slip that bit in, not to boast “that’s me on that album” but because that’s how it can go in the music business, especially at my end of the music business where tiny budgets and lack of resources can lead to such circumstances.

Dylan of course, at the very opposite end, has never had such problems, but seemingly had, at least at this period of his life, that total self-centredness that many people who are not highly creative themselves can’t understand.   What people often seem to want is the creative genius to be both a creative genius and a really nice, ordinary guy.  It doesn’t always work like that.

Indeed I recall being a guest at a convention celebrating a particular TV series with which I was involved, and had to listen to a member of the audience telling everyone how awful my work was and what a pity it was that they hadn’t got a “proper writer” involved.  I at least had the consolation that the theme of my book then became a major series, but that’s how it goes.

Now I make that point because in most walks of life abuse from members of the public is rare (except perhaps in the case of the member of the public being drunk), and my novel referred to above sold well and led on to other work.  But as that episode shows, when working in the creative arts one necessarily builds up a certain level of resistance to what one might see as unwarranted criticism.  Lots of highly creative people can be pretty awful to work with.

And I mention this here, as Dylan at the time of Self-Portrait had suffered from a lot of heavy criticism – indeed Heylin cites a comment that his work at the time was that of an “amnesiac searching for his lost self.”

Now the approach adopted for Self-Portrait was a form of working that very few artists could get away with, because a) they didn’t have the wherewithal to hire the studio on spec, and b) they didn’t have the recognition of those around them that something good can come out of this.  Dylan had that respect and recognition and thus people who were willing to take time out to oblige the artist, most certainly did so.

But the whole point, and it is clearly one that Heylin doesn’t get, is that Dylan was wanting to capture the essence of older songs not just in terms of the lyrics and the melody, but the essence of how these songs were performed when first created.  Which meant not going back to correct mistakes, not using overdubs etc.  In fact just one song in the collection was is worked on (apparently it was first recorded for Dylan’s wife) while the rest all got one take and that was that.

And that, I can say from my own experience, takes some doing.  At home, I record the songs I write these days as a hobby, and each will normally take me six or eight attempts to get a version that has just one or two slips within the recording, slips which most non-musicians won’t notice.  But Bob was creating these songs in one or two takes for potential release on an album.  On the rare occasions he felt any further accompaniment was needed he apparently simply left a note – accompaniments were added later.

Heylin also makes much of the fact that “Self Portrait” is most decidedly not a self-portrait.  The songs are not written by Dylan, the photographs on the album were not taken at his home, the arrangements of the songs were often not Dylan’s…   In fact Heylin calls it “a gag” – noting that unlike other “gags” this one was not funny.   He also notes that Bob couldn’t decide on a cover for the resultant album, and then decides at the last minute to use one of his own paintings.  The album famously got a review in Rolling Stone that started. “What is this shit?”

It was in short an extraordinary artistic endeavour; one of the sort that no one who was not an extraordinarily well-known creative artist who had a contract that allowed him to do whatever he wanted, could get away with.

So what are we to make of this album, its form of creation, and the subsequent allegations that Heylin delves into (such as that at the time of the album and thereafter, that Bob was “fooling around.”)

As Heylin does seem to grasp, Self Portrait was a way of clearing a lot of other thoughts and issues from Bob’s mind, thus allowing space for the creation of songs like “If not for you”, “Time passes slowly” and “Sign on the Window” to emerge later.

But despite this, Heylin still doesn’t seem to get the key point: musicians of whatever type (save perhaps for the likes of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven) do need to do all sorts of preparation and exploration before the masterpieces pour forth.   And indeed it appears (both here and in other reports) that Bob was not planning it this way… it just happened.

This was in fact a very interesting time: Bob just could not get himself together, until suddenly out of the blue he books the studios, tells whoever he can reach to be there that day (or the next at the very latest) and without any preparation just records all these songs that he already knows… and then finds through that process he is liberated from whatever the bonds were that were holding him back.  He records then “Self Portrait” and as a result finds he can start writing again.

Heylin of course, as ever, goes into detail, and tells us of the various experiments, which is quite interesting in itself, but I am not sure that through this Heylin fully gets what is actually going on.  “Self Portrait” got Dylan working in a studio again, and cleared the decks as it were, but not for a series of already written Dylan compositions.  It was for a series of new songs: most of which in retrospect Dylan decided that he really didn’t want to play to anyone else.

What we know is that “Went to See the Gypsy”, “Time Passes Slowly”, and “If Not for You” overlap the two albums – clearly showing that the work on Self Portrait enabled Bob to overcome his songwriter’s block and start composing again.

But it does also appear (although not that clear via Heylin, one almost has to be making notes as one goes along to get the full picture) that “Three Angels”, “If Dogs Run Free”, “Winterlude”, and “The Man in Me” evolved subsequently in a fairly chaotic manner.  Indeed there was a plan to do a new album, but quite what it would include seems not to have been planned at all.   Nor was the overall feel of the album considered – or in fact anything else.  It just happened.   Indeed the impression delivered by Heylin was that music was being created and recorded just to make the album seem acceptable to all concerned.

Heylin’s comment about Bob and this album is, “He was treading water and he knew it,” which although probably true, seems hardly adequate as a full story.  True “If not for you” is more sentimental than we normally associate with Dylan, and “Day of the Locusts” is an interesting passing vision of what it is like to be given an honour you don’t want.  (And I feel that particularly, for around this time I introduced the lady who was going to become my wife to my parents, and we then all went together to the ceremony in London where I picked up my research degree.  Locusts no, utter pride and joy yes.  But then, I got my honour for making a contribution to human knowledge. Dylan got his for being Dylan.  Maybe that makes a difference.   I’ve still got mine up on the wall.

And maybe that’s why “Time Passes Slowly” follows the locusts – the award was an interruption to total tranquillity.   But then there’s “Went to see the Gypsy”, which Dylan completely denies is about meeting Elvis (whom he never met), and from then on, for me at least, it all seems to be downhill.  “Winterlude,” “If dogs run free”…, to me they sound as explorations…  Songs that were quickly created and recorded for an album to come out immediately8 after the last album, just to show people that he really could write new songs.

Maybe there are many Dylan fans who really love these songs, but I am not sure Dylan is among those who feel anything for “New Morning”  Over half the album is made up of songs that Dylan has never ever performed on stage (at least according to the official site) and of the remaining five, “Locusts” has only been out eight times, the title track 79, “If not for you” 89, “If dogs run free” 104 and top of the list “The man in me”: 155 times.

That I think tells us something about how Bob felt then as he quickly left the album behind and moved on, and subsequently.

———–

The series looking at volume 1 of Clinton Heylin’s epic review of Bob Dylan concluded here, and at the end of that piece, you will find an index to all the articles that were part of that series.  This is part five of the review of Volume 2 of Heylin’s opus., “Far Away from Myself.”

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