Untold Dylan

Previously….

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

By Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so from Rocks and Gravel we end up with…

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

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

Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 3

by Jochen Markhorst

Previously in this series

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

III         It was just a riff really

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jürg Lehmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________________________________________

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

DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

Previously in this series…

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

 What was the public to do? – part 2

(continued)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please Please Me

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

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

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

[Chorus]

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

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

[Chorus]

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

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

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

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

he at least might have written:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

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

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

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

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

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

———————-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously….

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

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