Untold Dylan

Watching The River Flow (1971) part 4

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         Cocker Meadow

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

 At least once, Dylan is following in Joe Cocker’s footsteps, rather than the other way around. Dylan celebrates his 59th birthday with a memorable concert in Dresden. He treats himself and the audience to an upbeat opening with “Roving Gambler”, a nostalgic “Song To Woody”, beautiful and loving performances of audience favourites like “Mama You Been On My Mind” and “To Ramona”, cake is served too with “Country Pie”, which so surprisingly appeared on Dylan’s setlist in 2000, and when, after an hour, Dylan wants to resume the concert with “Ballad Of A Thin Man” after a short break, the audience spontaneously sings Happy Birthday To You. “Why, thank you,” beams the happily surprised birthday boy. And again at the end of the show: “Thank you! I will remember this birthday for a while!”

The closing words of a very successful performance in the Junge Garde, the small amphitheatre in the Großer Garten, Dresden’s city park. As Dylan looks up one more time, he sees the, “Cocker Meadow” on the other side, since 2016 the official name of the grassy area that for centuries was called Blüherwiese. Colloquially the stretch of park has been called Cockerwiese since Cocker’s legendary performance 2 June 1988, when the GDR still exists and the Party, in an attempt to ward off changing times and the imminent fall of the Wall, suddenly allowed West artists to perform. It is a close encounter of the third kind, as if a spaceship is descending, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. There are an estimated 125 thousand visitors at this first concert by a Westerner in Dresden, and in the collective consciousness of former GDR citizens the event still occupies a shining place. As Joe Cocker himself, in an interview shortly before his death in 2014, reflects on it with emotion:

“I would say that the Dresden show was one of those things in life that will always endure. In a collage of outstanding events in my life, the Dresden concert would definitely be one of them.”

In the concert the Sheffield steelworker, as so often, again exuberantly honours his hero Dylan. The opening song is “Dear Landlord”, halfway through is “Seven Days”, and if Dylan listens very carefully on that birthday night in May 2000, he might still be able to hear the reverberations of the last chords of Joe Cocker’s last song in 1988: the encore closes with “Watching The River Flow”, the song that seems to have been tailor-made for Cocker anyway.

Dylan fan Cocker continued to cover Dylan songs throughout his career. His first record already features two (“Just Like a Woman” and “I Shall Be Released”on With a Little Help from My Friends, 1969), the next LP opens with “Dear Landlord”, and in the decades that follow, Joe keeps on embellishing his records and his concerts with his idol’s songs. Dylan appreciates it, and, as a token of his appreciation, grants Joe a scoop in 1976:

“I was a bit nervous about even approaching him. I just asked him for something he hadn’t recorded and he said, “Tell you what, I’ve got this old blues I wrote about Catfish” — and he gave me a demo.”
(J.P. Bean, Joe Cocker : the authorised biography, 2003)

Joe Cocker – Catfish:

… and thus the rather insignificant blues rocker “Catfish”, a throwaway song by Dylan and Jacques Levy from the Desire sessions, ends up on Joe’s 1976 LP Stingray. The subsequent LP, the strong 1978 album Luxury You Can Afford, then features the song with which Cocker will bid farewell to Dresden ten years later, “Watching The River Flow”.

It is a steamy, cram-packed interpretation, expertly arranged by the grandmaster Allen Toussaint, who also sets the dreamy accents with his Fender Rhodes. We hear five horns, a backing chorus featuring Clydie King and Mona Lisa Young, the ladies who will soon chirp with Dylan himself, three guitars and master drummer Steve Gadd – Joe has apparently been given a nice budget by Asylum Records for the only album he will make for that record company. Commercially perhaps not too wise (the LP scores moderately), but artistically a hit. Allen Toussaint knows he is working with Joe Cocker, and understands what that means for his work.

Joe Cocker – Watching The River Flow:

Joe Cocker, for his part, is in his element. “Watching The River Flow” is a co-production of Leon Russell and Bob Dylan – the song is on the crossroads of his heart and soul, here his blood brother Russell and his hero Dylan come together. And, being a true fan and a true gentleman, he polishes off the weird, ugly mistakes in the lyrics.

In writing, in Lyrics and on the site, it looks like Dylan was in a particularly ungrammatical mood that March day in 1971. It already went wrong in the opening of the second stanza, and here in this bridge-like third verse, it goes wrong again:

People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah
Makes you stop and all wonder why

On second glance it is not that bad, though. These limp opening lines we may really attribute to the transcriber on duty. Dylan sings something like People disagreeing on oh, just about everything, and in the next line Makes you stop and a-wonder why. However, Joe won’t allow even a shadow of a language error, grabs his cleaning rag and sings:

People disagreeing on everything, 
Makes you stop and wonder why
Why, only yesterday I met somebody 
Who couldn’t help but cry
Oh, this ol’ world keeps rollin’ slowly on, though
So I’m gonna sit here on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow

A discreet and elegant correction. A bit drastic, perhaps. But not quite as drastic as Dylan himself, who, fifty years later, on the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2024 and on Shadow Kingdom, intervenes heavily in the lyrics. Rewriting this third verse to:

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

The operation coincides with the song’s promotion to concert opener. Major promotion, even: in almost all 202 shows of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, “Watching The River Flow” is the opening chord. Just like on 3 July 2012, by the way, when Dylan is back at the Freilichtbühne Junge Garde in the park in Dresden, opposite Cocker Meadow, and can make the opening chords of his show converge with the last distant echo of Joe Cocker’s closing chords from 1988.

To be continued. Next up Watching The River Flow part 5: The rest is just the same, isn’t it?

————-

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

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

Please note in keeping wity my recent run of mistakes on the site, the wrong article was published yesterday.  Here is the correct one.  The person in charge of putting up articles (me) has been suitably admonished by the person running the site (which is also me).

Really sorry everyone.   Tony.

———

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
• 1. Who this book is (not) for – part 2
• 2. Anything but idolatry – part 1
• 2. 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 

After browsing through the Cashbox Archives, it should come as no surprise that the cracks began to appear in The Great American Songbook’s once-foolproof formula for success. All that was necessary was for the sands of the Pax Americana to shift, which they ultimately did of their own accord. Long-term economic prosperity – which many had viewed as ‘progress’ – was all it took.

It was against this backdrop that the first generation of rich teenagers grew up. Like every generation before them, they sought each other out in order to teach one another about and enjoy life. Their primary motivation was love and/or sex – we are primates, after all. And as we all know, for centuries dancing has proven to be both the best scenic route and prelude to sex (self-gratification aside). The music industry may have provided the dance music, but it took some time before people noticed that the youth were ‘discontented’. Teenagers too ill-equipped to entertain themselves, but who noticed that they still had oceans of free time even after all their dancing and flirting, started feeling bored. In the mid-1950s, the adults then noticed that the combination of puberty/adolescence and boredom resulted in a strong tendency to exhibit deviant behaviour.

Emblematic of such behaviour was the character of Jim Stark in the aptly-titled 1955 movie ‘Rebel without a cause’, which made a cult figure of actor James Dean (1931-1955), whose untimely death sadly occurred in that same year. The film’s concurrent release with the definitive breakthrough of rock ‘n’ roll was no coincidence. An adult society that allowed young people to remain children for longer, but which also demanded that their behaviour remain ‘above board’, was not especially rich in adventure and so did nothing to cure the generation’s boredom. True adventure could only be found by throwing caution to the wind and travelling haphazardly across the country, a pastime reserved exclusively for true adventurers, of which there are always only relatively few. Dreaming of adventure did become a literary possibility in 1957 with the release of On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), but then again, most young people at that age were not readers either. Some, however, did retrace the journeys through the United States described in the book with exact precision. And before we lose sight of him: Bob Dylan – who in 1964 trundled from the east to the west coast in a station wagon with some friends during what must have been his last carefree holiday before being launched into world-stardom – declared that On the Road had been a powerful source of inspiration to him.

All very well and good. But it was rock ‘n’ roll that channelled all of the young people’s pocket money, free time and ennui. It was the inestimable legacy of Dylan’s two black forefathers, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, the latter of whom once said in an interview:

What we did: we took boogie woogie that black people was playin’ all the time and we put the blues and the boogie woogie together: rock ’n roll! You see, rock ’n roll is nothing but rhythm and blues up-tempo. And rhythm and blues up-tempo is boogie woogie.

Their new style brought about a pivotal change in American society, as it penetrated to the very marrow of both the bourgeois norms of decency and the strict racial segregation in their country. Their first television appearances show only white, smartly-dressed and well-groomed middle-class youths, daintily bopping along while seated in their chairs. But in the concert halls where they played, the young people – who had been segregated at the door based on skin colour – began dancing together as a mixed group. To quote Little Richard again:

Rock music broke down racial barriers. I would play places, and they would have white spectators. The white people would sit upstairs, the black people would be downstairs, because I was a black man. And the white people would leap over the balcony, come down and the audience would start integrating, because music has no racial boundary.

Some time later, rocking-and-rolling was permitted in the television studios, though black people were rarely included, if ever. Richard was more explosive but also more one-sided than Berry. All things considered, his songs were only about ‘good-looking girls’ – and he was a closeted homosexual to boot! Berry’s lyrics were more effective at capturing the essence of young people’s lives, and they occasionally even offered social criticism.

Though the recording industry was once again churning out reams of semi-talents, Elvis Presley was essentially the only one worthy to join the ranks of the forefathers. But Presley fans, prepare yourselves for some unpleasant news. Whereas Berry and Richard composed and released their own hits one after the other, the white ‘king’ –dubbed so in part because he was white – did not write his own material, and so sang songs by others. When that came to no avail, he successfully diverted attention away from his limited musical talent with fearsome pelvic movements and a provocative tough-guy expression. He was admittedly very sexy and had a voice, true, and as such he was certainly a seductive crooner who won the hearts of many a teenager. Each to their own. But ‘king’? No, that title was for Richard and Berry. Unlike the many who claim that rock ‘n’ roll began with Bill Haley’s ‘Rock around the clock’ and/or ‘Bye bye love’ by the Everly Brothers (ruddy or swarthy since they were not white, but one could be forgiven for saying so) I am a proponent of Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ (August 1955) and Richard’s ‘Tutti frutti’ (January 1956).

Chuck Berry – Maybellene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75RiHJGfyUE

Chuck Berry – Tutti frutti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F13JNjpNW6c

My reasons are musical ones: Bill Haley’s sound and that of the brothers Everly is nothing more than the serviceable workmanship of the music industry, whereas the rock by Berry and Richard is raw and real. And Presley’s greatest contribution, as a ‘randy and fair-skinned’ young man was that he made rock ‘n’ roll acceptable to the randy and fair-skinned youth of the middle classes. More than that really cannot be said. I understand that some will interpret this view as unfair (or anti-fair), but that is nonsense. Since when and why is the entire world population required to adulate Elvis Presley?

The musical and social revolution brought about by rock ‘n’ roll took flight with the advent of the portable transistor radio in 1954. The ‘pocketable’ Sony TR-63, that appeared three years later, became a coveted item among teenagers as it enabled them to listen to their favourite music anywhere, as it was broadcast by hundreds of commercial stations throughout the country. Here, the principal definition of ‘anywhere’ was: far from mom and dad, and not only inside the house, but outdoors as well. The global surge in youth music would not have been possible, or would at least have been significantly delayed, without television shows and the sale of millions of transistor radios.

The law of the handicap of a head start was consummated in the transition from singers who sang other people’s songs accompanied by string orchestras and brass bands, to young people who wrote their own lyrics and melodies which they performed themselves. This was the context in which Bob Dylan, then still known as Robert Allen Zimmermann, grew up.

In the early 1960s, when rock ‘n’ roll had died down somewhat, The Beatles made their entrance, representing the final fruits of the head-start handicap in the American entertainment industry. They are mentioned here because they strongly influenced Dylan, and vice versa.

As pleasantly virile and upbeat as their sound was, and however openly they sang about love, The Beatles’ early lyrics demonstrate that American songwriters were not the only ones struggling with mushy sentimentality. On the other hand, they did single-handedly (albeit in the wake of several innovative English pop groups such as the Kinks) shape young people’s music into the worldwide variant within Western folk music that was dubbed pop music. They had already been working hard at this process for two years when in August 1964, halfway through their first United States tour, Dylan called on them at their hotel in New York. At that time, he himself was little more than a folk singer who, while famous in his own country, was completely unknown beyond its borders and had released a failed debut single which, while not folk, was not identifiable as anything else. We will return to that later.

In any case: Dylan did not visit the Beatles as a victim of the Beatlemania that had spread like wildfire from the spring of that year, but simply because he understood how magnificent their music was. His most recent reason to believe as much was the appearance of The Beatles’ Second Album in April of that year, which opened with their cover of ‘Roll over Beethoven’ as an homage to Chuck Berry, and concluded with the show-stopping ‘She loves you’. From their sound, he had drawn the conclusion that the rock ‘n’ roll that had evolved during all of their teenage years had suddenly become ‘classic’, and also that the folk music of which he was a major exponent at the time was limiting his opportunities. His fourth album, Another side of Bob Dylan, that had appeared that same August would therefore be his last solo ‘folk’ album containing his own material. On it, he had announced his farewell to the folk world – but not the folk genre – with the purely autobiographical but cryptic number ‘My back pages’ and its chorus lyrics:

Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.

Feel free to interpret these lines, if you can. Perhaps a slick, twenty-first-century spoken-word translator would render them as ‘Man, what a boomer I was back then, now thankfully I’m woke’. We might safely disregard that interpretation for now. But in any case: Dylan had determined for himself that the young people’s music was moving in a different direction, and that it was also his direction. Reason enough to approach The Beatles, who had been responsible for it, to exchange ideas. The ‘Fab Four’, for their part, were already familiar with some of Dylan’s work which they greatly admired, and so they were happy to see him. Not until years later was it revealed that Dylan had also offered them a joint in their hotel room, and that ‘a good time’ was had by all. Dylan had already been familiar with marijuana (to say the least) for some time, and his initiation into its use had already left traces in his own work. With The Beatles it would be no different. ‘She’s a woman’ by Paul McCartney, the B-side of their single ‘I feel fine’, and ‘I’m a loser’ by John Lennon, on their new LP Beatles for Sale that appeared in late November/early December of 1964, were the first unmistakeable signs thereof.

Although at the time, as a nearly-thirteen-year-old, I was ‘more into the Rolling Stones than The Beatles’, I could not deny it any longer: ‘I feel fine’ and ‘She’s a woman’ were sublime. They were the product of a far more varied musical DNA than that of the Rolling Stones – though my thirteen-year-old self could never have formulated it that way.

But as I have already mentioned, it was in that same December of 1964 that Dylan and I encountered one another with ‘All I really want to do’, and it was this ‘encounter’ that would profoundly influence my outlook on life. Many millions have never experienced such a thing; to me, it was a boon.

At the time, I knew nothing of what Dylan’s life had been like prior to our encounter. And of course, I quickly realised that he knew nothing of our meeting, and that he never would. But I didn’t care. To me, it was real.

The next chapter looks at characteristics of the traditional love song, after which we will take a deep dive and I will demonstrate how my intellectual life and Dylan’s work became intertwined, as I have promised.

(to be continued)

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

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

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

By Tony Attwood

One of the attractions of looking for songs that Bob only performed three times live, at least according to the official site, was the fact that on the list is “When the Ship comes In” which has long been one of my favourite songs from the early songs.

I have always taken it to be a promise of the Second Coming, which as a non-believer doesn’t attract me, but as a song of hope and promise, I really do enjoy its energy.

Leaving aside the album version I guess the version most of us know is the one that turned up on “No Direction Home”.  It is noted as being played at Carnegie Hall, New York, in  October 1963.

This second recording is curious.  Dylan starts a 2’20”

And then we have the August 1963 version

But there is more, for this is Bob with Richards and Wood.   The notes say

“Sourced from the BBC broadcast. NOT INCLUDED ON THE 2004 DVD RELEASE.   The accreditation is BBC Live Aid 13 Juy 1985.”

And while I am at it, I also found a Clancy Brothers version and they turn it straight into a Clancy Brothers song, as if it has been one of their songs from the very start.   It’s not as easy to do that as you might think.

And since I have meandered off the topic of Bob’s version of his songs that he has only performed three times I’m going to add a cover version.

I love this because it has such a gorgeous energy including in particular some brilliant violin work, and a chord variation from Bob’s version which adds an extra edge.   These guys look and sound as if they really are enjoying the song – as indeed it is a song that should be enjoyed.  If not, why are you performing it?

The Farewell Drifters are (or maybe were, I’m writing to them to get more details) a band made for fun.  As far as  I know they only made three albums, which is pretty much a criminal offence for such a wonderful band.   But at least we do have this recording.

And yes I know I have travelled a long old way from the idea of Bob having performed the song three times – I guess he couldn’t see where else it could go.  I can only hope that Bob somehow got a chance to hear this version, just to let him know.  Of course his version is exquisite – but so is this.

So yes, I do think fun and joy in performances is a wonderful quality… and of course if you are only interested in Dylan you probably have gone away from this page already but just in case… do share with me the sheer joy and enthusiasm of this video.  It’s the Farewell Drifters again.  Oh, how I wish I’d had the chance to play in a band with this kind of vivacity.

Three times and out: Songs that Dylan performed just three times: Dink’s Song

By Tony Attwood

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

Previously….

• 1: Far Away From Insight
• 2: “I looked into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change’. 
• 3:  If this is a bunch of noise, then it is noise that I love
• 4: Far away from the music

This article was updated on 11 November 2024 (after I published a draft version, rather than the finished version – apologies for that!)

There is a quote from Sara Dylan at the start of Section 3.4 of Heylin’s book in which she complains about the “crazies” (as Heylin calls them) coming up to the family home.  She complains in part that “we get a Christ every six months coming up to our house… We even got John The Baptist last year.”

In a way, that sounds rather amusing., although for myself, that feeling only lasted about one second as I quickly recalled some of the people who turn up at my house (in a small village in Northamptonshire, England, with beautiful countryside views).  Indeed for one religious sect, I had to point out what my profession was and then threaten to write an article about their harassment of me when they kept on turning up, even after I had told their various representatives and their head office that I absolutely did not want to see them, and found them a menace to society.

But I am sure that was as nothing to what the Dylans got, and probably still get, and it must be really distressing – especially when some of these unwelcome guests actually enter the house without one knowing.

Heylin records a few such matters, but … and this is one of the key things that really does frustrate me about his mega-biography of Dylan… he doesn’t take any of this into account in his subsequent review of either Dylan’s behaviour or his work.

Certainly, the religious fanatics (as I perceived them) repeatedly turning up at my home frustrated me – and it was only happening two or three times a year.  What must it have been like for the Dylans and their children?

But Heylin takes no note of this as he goes on to describe Dylan’s behaviour which he suggests generally is unfeeling toward others, and in his estimation it seems, decidedly odd.

Now I complained earlier that among other things, Heylin takes no note of the effect of being a genius generally has on one.  The artistic genius, I noted, often doesn’t know where his/her genius comes from, and what turns it on and off, and so doesn’t know how to proceed when the perceived quality of work declines.   There are, after all, many mentors around who can help people through all sorts of crises, but I doubt there are many, if any, who really know how to help a creative genius when the buzz goes away.

This problem of uncertainty must have been even more exaggerated for Bob Dylan when having struggled (as Heylin describes it) to find his direction, he produced albums such as “John Westley Harding” and “Nashville Skyline” which not only went in different directions (particularly when compared with those that preceded JWH) but which were each a commercial success.

What was happening here is, I think, an incredibly interesting issue.  For it raises the point, is there some abstract way in which we can measure the musical effectiveness, brilliance, beauty or anything else of music, or are we just to consider that those that sell the most are the best?

Such questions sadly are far beyond Heylin’s ability to consider, and instead we get sentences such as “Absurd as it sounds “losing his audience’ had a certain perverse appeal to the befuddled amnesiac”.    And later, “Could career suicide really have been at the back of his mind?  If so, he was going about it the right way.”

These could be interesting topics to debate it’s true, except that when Henylin gets near such issues he cites one unnamed person who “stormed out of the room” on hearing “Blue Moon”.  What’s the point of adding this to the text?  We are not told.

So we get the feeling via Heylin that Bob Dylan was withdrawing into himself.  And we get reports about how Dylan treated some journalists’ questions if he thought they were too silly to answer.  There are also bits of amateur psychology, and in the end, Heylin concludes that in most things “Dylan was incapable of making a definitive decision.”    I truly doubt that, but of course I can’t prove my point.  But it does seem to take us back to the key issue: where does creativity come from?

But once again because we have no background information on Dylan’s creative ability, how it works, why sometimes it doesn’t work, and what he did in order to try and get his creative juices flowing again, these situations described by Heylin look like the tantrums of a spoiled child.

And yet I would argue, if one studies the work of most highly creative people, they go through such phases and can find these times incredibly difficult to handle.  After all, how would you feel if, having become the supreme musical megastar of all time, you then discover that you didn’t really know what to do next or how to do it?   While at the same time having record company executives pointing out that there were contractual obligations to fulfil.    And all the while having Heylin writing stuff about how you’d lost it (whatever “it” was)?

So this is really my main complaint about Heylin’s work.    Heylin makes no attempt to understand the music either in a structural way or from an aesthetic point of view.  He makes no concession to Dylan’s background or the way his image has been treated by the media and the record companies.  And likewise he shows no understanding of the pressure that Bob Dylan must have been under all the time to produce more music of the quality that we had all admired in earlier years.  In short, Heylin ignores all the important issues and instead gives us tittle-tattle.

It is true that he does quote some of those who came into contact with Dylan at this time, and one issue that was a problem (“He’s the center of attraction, and he hates it”) but there’s no attempt to dig further into this.  It is as if we have to accept that this is all Bob’s fault for simply not settling down and writing another “Visions” and another “Desolation Row”.

Of course one can take the view that one shouldn’t go into the music business if one can’t cope with stardom – but how could one tell in advance?  And come to that, how can one know what it will be like when the creative tap is turned off, but the media and fans are all still knocking at your door?

Heylin in fact goes down his own route – he takes one issue (for example buying a house) and then having sketched that out, he generalises to suggest that he (Heylin) has a complete understanding of Bob’s mental health issues at this time.  And to be clear, using the phrase “mental health issues” is not meant to imply Bob was mentally unsound, rather that he was suffering from a very high level of stress, and did not seem to have anyone at hand who was able to help him.

This is quite clear from a response Dylan is said to have made to a comment by Paul Simon.  Simon said words to the effect that Dylan had of late lost his cutting edge as a composer.  In fact Bob need not have made any ripost, but the fact that he apparently chose to say something perhaps reveals something of Bob’s fragile state at that moment.

And what disturbs me about Heylin’s book at this point is that Heylin is constantly there in the background suggesting that all he is doing is recording the events, whereas in fact he is being highly selective about what he reports, and the comments he makes.   Thus he leaves aside the issue of whether he, Heylin, has the necessary background and understanding to write in depth about the mental health pressures that can arise when a highly acclaimed creative artist feels unsure about his work, and what he might produce next.

The fact is that Bob had a recording contract that he had to adhere to; a contract which like all contemporary music contracts took no notice of the artist’s ability to be as successfully creative today as he was yesterday.  Apparently, Dylan wanted some privacy, and of course one can say, “Well you can’t have both anonymity and all the earnings from those songs.”  But the contract says nothing of such matters.  It just assumes that Bob can go on creating musical recordings that the audience will love – and that these recordings will be something unique to modern times.

Yet Bob was quite likely simply going through a period when he wanted to be obscure.  That might be the cause of what Heylin calls his “insidious nostalgia”.

Yet is that a reasonable description?  Most of us get nostalgic at some time, and often do so without a completely realistic view of the past.  Indeed it seems that Bob was uncertain about how realistic his thoughts were and how good his music and performances could be, as witnessed by his surprise appearance at a concert by The Band.  It was not just his amazement that he could still instantly wow the audience, but also his delight at then being back home away from it all afterwards.

What comes across to me is that Bob didn’t, during this time, seem to have a set of friends that stayed constant – friends who would be there and would always treat him as a pal – people who would understand and make time for being called when the friend was in need of support, no matter what time or day it was.  Or if he did, Bob found it hard to stay constant with these friends – which is not unknown in circumstances of the type described here.

Now of course that might be right –  but (and this is another huge problem with Heylin’s work) it is constantly unclear where Heylin is getting his insights from, and there can be little doubt that if Bob did have a few very close friends and confidants at this time, they would be extremely unlikely to talk to someone like Heylin who presents himself as the great unquestionable authority on all things Dylan.

Which really does bring us to the major problem with this book.  Heylin appears to be working as a private detective trailing through the detritus of Bob’s life long after the event.  Would those who really knew Bob actually talk to someone like Heylin?  I have my doubts.

Now add this notion to the fact that Heylin is constantly critical about Bob and his lifestyle, and indeed quite a lot of the time (when he bothers to mention them at all) Bob’s compositions and performances, and what we have is a book of negative tittle-tattle mostly supplied by outsiders mixed with a set of suppositions from an author who seems to have no musical ability or knowledge, and particularly importantly in this part of the book, no knowledge of creativity and how creativity affects the creative person.

It is almost as if the book needs a co-writer, who does know at last a little bit about those two rather vital subjects.

• Part 1 Your enemy’s corpse will soon float by
• Part 2: The situation comes first

by Jochen Markhorst

III         If I had wings like Nora’s dove

Wish I was back in the city
Instead of this old bank of sand
With the sun beating down over the chimney tops 
And the one I love so close at hand 
If I had wings and I could fly
I know where I would go
But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly
And watch the river flow

 Alas, the second stanza that Dylan may or may not have shaken out of his sleeve on the spot soon makes clear that the promise will not be fulfilled: not epic it shall be, but rather lyric. The song poet will not tell a story, but express emotions. It becomes obvious, anyway, that we are not to understand the where and when, the exposition in stanza 1, as an actual setting. After all, the suggestion was that we were in a city (night café, slow-moving trucks) at the crack of dawn. But this stanza opens with the desire to be “back in the city” and it is early afternoon (sun beating down).

Even more illustrative of the improvised genesis of the lyrics, moreover, is the strange, undylanesque linguistic error with which this second stanza opens; Wish I was back in the city instead of this old bank of sand contains a rather simple dangling modifier (I am this old bank of sand?). A language error that could have simply been polished away by adding a preposition (instead of on this bank of sand, for example, or away from this bank of sand), and forgivable in light of the impulsiveness to which Dylan has voluntarily subjected himself today, but the non-running sentence is written down uncritically in the first official song lyric collection Writings And Drawings, and in all Lyrics editions thereafter – to this day, it’s still on the site that way too. And in live performances he continues to sing it comme ça for decades.

The spiritual stepfather Leon Russell is incapable of saying it, though. In his steamy, smoking contribution to the 1999 tribute album Tangled Up in Blues: Songs of Bob Dylan, he changes it on his own authority into: Wish I was back in the city, instead out here on this sand. Which apparently escapes Dylan – in 2000 in Cardiff, he still untroubledly sings the anacoluthon. But it does bother him eventually, as we hear half a century after the day of its birth. When “Watching The River Flow” is promoted to the set opening of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2024, we notice:

Wish I was back in the city
In my true love’s arms
She likes older men
They can’t resist her charms

… a text change that will gain semi-official status with the release of Shadow Kingdom in 2023 (although the lyrics on bobdylan.com remain unchanged).

Dylan – Watching the River Flow (Shadow Kingdom):

For now, however, on this Wednesday afternoon in March 1971 the freestyling song poet has to fill the second verse. It seems he is again delving into his inner jukebox. He has placed his protagonist on a bank of sand, decides on “longing” as the motif for the lyric, and then opts for the rhyme “a love close at hand” – unusual, but in Dusty Springfield’s 1966 world hit it could be done (You don’t have to say you love me / Just be close at hand), and the song is on Elvis’ most recent album (That’s The Way It Is, the single “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” becoming his 42nd Top20 hit later in 1970), so a love close at hand does hang in the air.

The interline With the sun beating down over the chimney tops is again confusing in terms of content (does the narrator wish to be on a rooftop terrace with his beloved in the city, or is he sitting here on a bank while the sun reflects on the rooftops?), and seems to have been rather haphazardly snatched from that inner grab bag. In fact, the “chimney tops” can only be an echo from “Over The Rainbow”;

Someday I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops,
High above the chimney tops,
That's where you'll find me.

… in the canon, at least, there are no other chimney tops to be found. Like the word combination sun beating down might bubble up because of the proximity of water and thus the proximity of “Under The Boardwalk” (Oh when the sun beats down and burns the tar up on the roof), but it is more appealing to think that Leon Russell triggers those words.

Russell has just cemented his place in the rock pantheon as bandleader, song supplier and sideman of Joe Cocker’s monumental Mad Dogs & Englishmen, the live album that features nothing but rock highlights, including the Russell/Cocker duet “Girl From The North Country”, the hits “The Letter” and Russell’s “Delta Lady”, and the definitive versions of “Feelin’ Alright” and “Cry Me A River” – to single out just a few titles. All of them songs capable of setting Dylan’s associative flow in motion as he is searching for inspiration while listening to Leon’s soundtrack for what will become “Watching The River Flow”, but we can be fairly sure that Dylan is enamoured with the album’s title contributor, “Mad Dogs & Englishmen”;

In a jungle town where the Sun beats down to the rage of man and beast
The English garb of the English Sahib merely gets a bit more creased
In Bangkok at twelve o'clock they foam at the mouth and run
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun

… Noël Coward’s immortal 1931 cabaret song (featuring the classic oneliner “But Englishmen detest a siesta”). And Dylan’s impressions are still fairly fresh. After all, he was there, at the live recording of Mad Dogs & Englishmen in March 1970 at New York’s Fillmore East, as we know from Leon’s announcement of “Girl From The North Country”:

“There’s a guy in the house tonight that I know that you all have watched for a long time. Me and Joe have watched him for a long time. We love him. We’re gonna do one of his songs cuz we love him, that’s why.”

Less puzzling is the source for the over-familiar If I had wings and I could fly. Although Heylin traces the words to “The Water Is Wide”, and is recognised as an authority by Wikipedia, that seems very unlikely. True, the opening of this ancient folk song is The water is wide, I cannot get over / Neither have I wings to fly (in virtually every variation since the eighteenth century, from Scotland to Canada and from the United States to Australia), but that’s really too thin to be promoted to “source”. Much further up front in Dylan’s working memory, and much closer to “Watching The River Flow” is:

If I had wings like Noah's dove
I'd fly the river to the one I love
Fare thee well, oh honey, fare thee well

… “Dink’s Song”, that is, the song that was in Dylan’s repertoire as early as 1961, the song he paraphrases in 2020’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”, the old folk song he duets with Joan Baez at the Rolling Thunder Revue in ’76, and the song with which he crushes his first great love in New York:

“He started slow, building the rhythm on his guitar. Something about him caught my full attention. He pushed out the lyrics as he hit the strings with a steady, accelerating drumlike beat. The audience slowed their chattering; he stilled the room. It was as though I had never heard the song before. He stilled my room, for sure.”
(Suze Rotolo – A Freewheelin’ Time, 2008)

… where Rotolo also quotes exactly these very lines (misquoting though, as she understands “Nora’s dove”, adding a pleasantly absurd touch to the famous opening line).

The ad-libbing creator is almost at the stanza’s conclusion, at the recurring refrain line, and then posts his third and final miss of this verse: “I’ll just sit here so contentedly.” Misplaced, as he has just assured us that the narrator wishes he was somewhere else and that he misses his beloved so much – the six verse lines before this are opaque enough, but at least one thing was clear: he does not sit there “so contentedly”.

Like the error in the first line, the performer holds on to this awkward paradox for a long time, only to finally correct it in 2021. Since then, he simply omits both But and so contentedly;

If I had wings and I could fly
I know where I would go
Right now I’ll just sit here
And watch the river flow

Too late, probably. We must fear Aristotle has already refused “Watching The River Flow” for his Poetics, passing the text on to Didactics.

To be continued. Next up Watching The River Flow part 3: Cocker Meadow

——–

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)

Dylan on Tour: concert recordings selected by Tony Attwood

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

Sometimes the quality varies, although with today’s piece I think you are going to be amazed both by the performances and the quality of recording – unless of course you know this recording already.

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

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

And now an absolute stunner – quite rightly called “Flawless Soundboard”.  But it is more than that  – the performances are utterly, utterly exquisite.  Even Watchtower at the end seems to me to add something to all the many times we’ve heard it before.

So this is one of those shows that in my house gets played and played.

But just in case you don’t have two hours 21 minutes spare may I just invite you to play the very first track and enjoy the positivity and quality of the opening song “I am the man Thomas”.     Bob only ever played it 59 times and this either was the very last performance or one of the very last ones.  (I’m not quite sure on that point – you know please do comment).   And it is so worth hearing for that reason if nothing else.

(Incidentally, if you want to know a little more about that opening track I did an article on why Dylan likes this song so much.   I wouldn’t call it essential reading, but it’s on this site if you would like to take a look).

Anyway, for me this is one of the great recordings.  If you enjoy this concert 10% as much as I do, you are in for a really good time.   A list of the songs appears at the foot of the page and if you hover your mouse pointer at the foot of the screen you can move through from song to song, if you don’t have time for all of it.  But you really should try.  This is a dream.

Atlanta 2002.  A list of all the songs performed is printed below the video.

• I am the man Thomas
• My Back Pages
• It’s all right ma
• Searching for a soldiers grave
• Lonesome Day Blues
• Lay Lady Lay
• Floater
• High Water
• It Ain’t Me Babe
• Masters of War
• Tangled up in Blue
• Summer Days
• Sugar Baby
• Drifter’s Escape
• Rainy Day Women
• Things have changed
• Like a Rolling Stone
• Forever Young
• Honest with Me
• Blowing in the Wind
• All along with watchtower

By Jürg Lehmann

Blowin’ in the Wind is one of the Bob Dylan songs that was first released by another artist. The circumstances surrounding the first recordings and releases are somewhat confusing, involving several people appearing as protagonists.

The first artist to cover ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ was Bobby Darin, who recorded his version of the track weeks after Dylan created the original in Columbia Recording Studios. Remarkably, Dylan’s recording of the track wasn’t officially released for almost a year after he got it down on tape, and it’s unknown how it ended up in the hands of Darin. Although, Darin also didn’t share the track until 1963, when the singer included it on his album, Golden Folk Hits.

The first musicians to release a version of the song was the Chad Mitchell Trio, who released it on their album, Chad Mitchell Trio in Action, which came out in early 1963 (Bob Dylan himself released it second, in May 1963 on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.)

Mitchell’s record company didn’t dare to release it on single, being hesitant about the use of the word death in the song. Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman took advantage of that misjudgement. His troupe of artists also included the successful Peter, Paul and Mary and that trio released their cover just three weeks after Dylan. It became a huge hit that landed at number two in the Billboard Chart. Dylan, though, at least performed the song on TV before anyone else, in March of 1963.

So there you go, Bobby Darin was the earliest to record the song, the Chad Mitchell Trio released the first cover and Peter, Paul and Mary released the first single and made it a hit. The trio then continued to perform Blowin’ in the Wind for decades, with one of the last recordings dating from 2017. 

 No track by Bob Dylan has been covered more often than ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’, it has been recorded by hundreds of artists since its original release and that’s without calling out on-stage covers. The song has been translated into more than 20 languages and there are cover versions in practically every genre, including performances by opera stars.

Unfortunately, the sheer number of covers doesn’t mean there are lots of great new versions out there. Listening to all these covers can be pretty painful. Many of them are basically the same, and they lack imagination, emotion and depth and even worse, some stage kitschy pathos. But we’ll have to deal with this, Dylan’s song is part of the cultural common property.

As Jochen Markhorst puts it: “Blowin’ In The Wind’ is what the Mona Lisa is to Da Vinci, Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’) to Shakespeare, the Symphony No. 9 in D minor to Beethoven and The Thinker to Rodin – not necessarily the best work of a genius artist, but the best known, the work that immortalises the artist. ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ is an art transcending masterpiece that elevates and connects people, which is quoted by judges, popes and presidents and will still be sung by our great-grandchildren.”

The obvious quality of the song, the acclaim from Peter, Paul and Mary and the promotion by Joan Baez launched the career of young Dylan. A few months later, he was already the undisputed crown prince of the folk community. At the Newport Festival in July 1963, Dylan was joined on stage by Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez. Together they sang Blowin’ in the Wind.

Meanwhile, Blowin’ in the Wind attracted many other colleagues. In 1963 alone, the song was covered 24 times. In 1963 alone, the song was covered 20 times. In 1964, 22 times, in 1965, 23 times, and in 1966, 25 times. The list of performers reads like a who’s who of the most famous artists of the time including, to name just a few:

The Staple Singers (1963), Odetta (1963), The Kingston Trio (1963), Jackie De Shannon (1963), The Bee Gees (1963), Linda Mason (who released the first ever album exclusively with Dylan covers in 1964.)

I don’t think any of these contributions really developed Dylan’s song further, let alone reinvented it. The inflation of covers was relentless. Cher (1965) jumped on and Bobby Bare (1965), Marlene Dietrich (1965) recorded a German version of the song (titled “Die Antwort weiss ganz allein der Wind”), Johnny Mathis soon joined (1965), Chuck Jackson (1966), and even Elvis Presley was tempted to cover the song, he did a recording in 1966 at his home in Hollywood wherein he played the piano (released in 1997), but then decided against it – for whatever reason.

‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ was raging around the world by then and had already left a crater in the United States, Jochen Markhorst writes in an interesting article. The black community also picks up the song, probably in part due to the gospel undertones of the melody. It contributes to the unifying, universal power of the song – apart from the non-specific, poetic vagueness of the lyrics, the chosen music also has a race- and culture-transcending quality…Black artists, and not the leasts, put the song on the repertoire. It motivates one of the greatest names, Sam Cooke, to write that other hymn of the civil rights movement, ‘A Chance Is Gonna Come’, the song that shortly after Cooke’s premature death in December ’64 will reach mythical significance. In his biography Peter Guralnick reconstructs the influence of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ on Sam Cooke: ‘When he first heard that song Sam was so carried away with the message, and the fact that a white boy had written it, that . . . he was almost ashamed not to have written something like that himself.”

Cooke introduced ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ to his live set upon hearing it and he put his own easy-swinging spin on the song.

The amazement that a white boy can write something like this, Sam Cooke shares with Stevie Wonder. During the ’60s, young Stevie Wonder was strongly engaged with political and social issues. His mentor and assigned producer Clarence Paul sung him “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Stevie began performing the song in concert. One time Wonder couldn’t remember the second verse and Paul appeared on stage coaching him. Stevie decided that Paul would duet with him every time he sang the song. After performing it for two years, the audience demand grew to the point that Wonder had to record his cover. As a Stevie Wonder/Clarence Paul duet, “Blowin’ in the Wind” went to number one in R&B charts in the summer of 1966. Though, according to Stevie, the real achievement was that a white folk protest song could penetrate deep into the black neighbourhoods of a big city. On the occasion of the 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration at the Madison Square Garden in 1992, Stevie made another memorable appearance with Blowin’ in the Wind.

The Covers of Blowing in the Wind will continue in the next episode.

Previously in the “Covers we missed” series…

•  2×2; Saturday Night Fry
• Abandoned Love
• Ain’t Talkin
• All along the Watchtower
• All I really want to do
• All the Tired Horses
• As I went out one morning
• Baby Stop Crying
• Ballad of a Thin Man
• Beyond here lies nothing
• Blind Willie McTell – Part 1
• Blind Willie McTell Part 2
• Blind Willie McTell Part 3
• Black crow blues
• Beyond the horizon
• Hollis Brown

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

A topic rarely ever addressed is the equally objectionable mediocre quality of the lyrics to be found in this musical morass. Nearly all of the texts served up to these semi-talents reinforced the aforementioned Christian conservative notions of love and marriage. Is it any surprise, therefore, that these songs contain numerous love songs that put women in their place? Do not think for a moment that I am making this up: from the ‘innumerable millions’ of songs in the unsung Cash Box Archives, named after the music-industry magazine that appeared weekly from 1942 to 1996, I have selected some particularly egregious examples from the years 1955-56, when The Great American Songbook was already so clogged up with muck that it was no longer salvageable.

A woman can find out what she is good for – and what she is certainly not good for – from the trio Don, Dick & Jimmy in ‘That’s what I like’. She must kiss, hold, hug and pet him, and above all, keep her mouth shut:

Don, Dick & Jimmy 

THAT'S WHAT I LIKE 

People worry about the pursuit of happiness,
It's amazing the amount of time and energy they spend,
When there's really only one approach
To the present psychological trend.

Hold me, hug me, pet me baby,
That's what I like!

Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me baby,
That's what I like!
Hold me, hug me, pet me baby,
That's what I like!

You don't have to give me clever conversation,
I just want affection, not an education!
Kiss me, hold me, hug me baby,
That's what I'd like you to do,
And love me, love me, love me baby too!

Ooh that's what I like!
Oh that's what I like!

You don't have to give me clever conversation,
I just want affection, not an education!
Kiss me, hold me, hug me pet me baby,
That's what I'd like you to do,
And love me, love me, love me baby too.
That's right baby!

Amid the blossoming of romance, the Rover Boys already see their life’s journey spread out before them. ‘From a school ring to a wedding ring’ traces a straight line from the first stolen kiss in the schoolyard to the first kiss at the altar, as the wedding bells chime:

The Rover Boys – From a School Ring to a Wedding Ring: 

From a school ring
To a wedding ring
Is the story of our romance
From those bashful looks
Over classroom books
To a stolen kiss whenever we had the chance

From a school ring
To a wedding ring
Are those wonderful youthful times
From a teenage date
By the schoolhouse gate
To the ringing of the churchhouse chimes

I remember how we danced
At the junior ball
While the band played our favorite song
Every time we hugged and squeezed
I remember we we′re teased
By the fellas who we're standin′ around the hall

From a school ring
To a wedding ring
How those years in between rush through
From a school ring
To a wedding ring
To a lifetime of love with you

Once the knot is tied, four white men calling themselves The Four Aces will also show a woman her place in ‘It’s a woman’s world’. She gives herself unconditionally, and just ask any man: it’s a woman’s world, but only because it’s his!

The Four Aces – It’s A Woman’s World

Woman's world, 
It's a woman's world when she's in love
It's a woman's world when she's in love
It's a woman's world, his kiss can make her glow
And that's what makes it so (it's a woman's world)

It's a woman's world, stars dance above
It's a lovely world, his footstep at the door
Just proves it more and more
His hopes, his dreams and his ambitions
All the ups and downs she'll gladly share
She'll give her all without conditions
When he looks around, she'll be there.

It's a woman's world, ask any man
It's a woman's world, and he's so glad it is
For when it's hers it's his!
It's a woman's world, but only because it's his
(It's a woman's world, ask any man
It's a woman's world, and he's so glad that it is)
For when it's hers it's his!

Quite some nerve. It must be admitted, however, that some women do bring it upon themselves. Like semi-talent Teresa Brewer, who damns members of her own sex who dare to show their men the door. In ‘Silver Dollar’, a man without a woman is worthless as a grain of sand, but a woman only realises the worth of her man after sending him packing:

Teresa Brewer – Silver Dollar:

A-rolling, a-rolling
A-rolling, just a-rolling

You can throw a silver dollar down upon on the ground
And it'll roll because it was round
A woman doesn't know what a good man she's lost
Until she throws him down

So listen, listen, listen to me, I'll make you understand
How a dollar always travels from hand to hand
But a woman goes from man to man
How goes from man to man

Oh, man without a woman is like a ship without a sail
A boat without a rudder or a fish without a tail
Oh, a man without a woman isn't worth a little grain of sand
But there's one thing worse in this universe and that's
A woman without a man
A woman without a man

Yes, a woman never knows what a good man she's got
Until she turns him down
And a dollar always travels from hand to hand
But a woman goes from man to man
How goes from man to man

Life's a woman, a woman, yes, a woman
You throw a silver dollar down upon on the ground
And it'll roll because it's round

‘Keep me in mind’ is the kind of plea in which the somewhat more astute and animated Patti Page tells the man of her dreams that she is prepared to give herself to him utterly, provided that marriage is on the cards:

Patti Page – Keep Me In Mind:

If you need someone to lower the light
And then you want someone to hold you real tight
Someone who'll hold you and do it up right –
Keep me in mind!

If you feel lonely and long for a kiss
And then you want someone who'll bring you some bliss
Someone who'll kiss you and never resist –
Keep me in mind!

Give me a call
Knock on my door
Send me a telegram!
Yell down the hall
Beat on the floor
I'll come runnin' wherever I am!

If you need someone to whom you can cling
An' then you want someone who'll mean ev'rything
Someone who'll love you, if you'll buy the ring –
Keep me in mind!

Keep me in mind!

The ineradicable nature of this theme should be apparent from the worst of the worst, the ultimate cowboy tear-jerker from 1968 which, for inexplicable reasons, also somehow achieved popularity outside the United States: ‘Stand by your man’, by the accidental and beehive-haired superstar Tammy Wynette. ‘Love him, be proud of him, after all, he’s just a man’. Indeed:

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman
Givin' all your love to just one man
You'll have bad times, and he'll have good times
Doin' things that you don't understand
But if you love him, you'll forgive him
Even though he's hard to understand
And if you love him, oh, be proud of him
Because, after all, he's just a man

Stand by your man
Give him two arms to cling to
And somethin' warm to come to
When nights are cold and lonely
Stand by your man
And show the world you love him
Keep givin' all the love you can
Stand by your man

I must stop here. And if these are not the worst examples to be found: there is a mer á boire out there. If you do not believe that these songs were not only a dime-a-dozen but a dime-a-thousand, go and browse the Cashbox Archives for yourselves: it is truly nauseating. And these were just the average artists. Big names also appeared who, while they sang a little better – Tony Bennet, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Andy Williams – nevertheless produced a sound that was essentially no different: equal parts saccharine and brash, and just as nauseating. And because monkey-see, monkey-do, the rest of the world proceeded to generate similar musical sludge in other languages, with their own semi-talents. One must be on guard against common anti-Americanism, no?

Pre-eminent black solo artists such as Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington had also mastered this style, and unfortunately needed to conform to it in order to reach a wide enough audience. They had so much talent, however, that in their best work they succeeded in escaping the pedestrian humdrum of the languishing music industry, and rose up above themselves. This ‘best work’ was therefore left unspoiled by string and brass orchestras, but can be found in their collaboration with smaller-scale jazz combos (which, incidentally, did greater justice to the black culture from which they grew as icons, and that ultimately enriched the Western folk music tradition). The most dramatic example comes from Nat King Cole, who debuted with a trio in 1942 and from ‘That ain’t right’ onwards, released a series of nuanced numbers until finally falling prey to the entertainment industry’s orchestral molasses in 1948, with ‘Don’t blame me’. How telling a title!

Another striking example is the enormous quality disparity in the oeuvre of Dinah Washington: her orchestrally-tainted songs are utterly eclipsed by those recorded with a jazz combo. See her masterpiece, For those in love (1955).

continued: DYLAN & US: BEYOND AMERICA: 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 4

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

“I don’t know what it means either” lists the current series on the Untold Dylan site.

———-

By Tony Attwood

If you have been around Untold Dylan for a while you might remember a series called “Once or Twice” in which I took a look at some of the songs Bob performed just the once or twice, and for which there was a recording of the live event that we could use.

That series came to an end simply because we ran out of songs for which semi-decent recordings were available, (it ended with   Series farewell: When the Ship Comes In and there is an index to the whole series in that article) but having had a break from the series for a few weeks I thought I would take a look and see if anything interesting turned up when looking at songs that Bob has performed three times, and then dropped.

I don’t know how many of these with interesting recordings that we will find but as a starter I have Dink’s Song which is also known as “Fare Thee Well”.  Pete Seeger and many others has performed it across the years.

Of course the lyrics vary across multiple versions but the opening lines still resonate and certainly in the UK where I live, many people will immediately recognize the opening…

If I had wings like Norah's dove,
I'd fly up the river to the man I love.
Fare thee well, O Honey, fare thee well.

The name of the song comes from the fact that John Lomax noted the song being sung by a lady called Dink as she washed clothes on the banks of the Brazos River in Texas.   The song then became part of the American Ballads and Folk Songs volume published by John and Alan Lomax in 1934.

This is a quite stunning version by Marcus Mumford and Oscar Isaac.

There is a version that one might call somewhat eccentric by Jeff Buckley, which has a long section at the start which is hard to hear and also to some degree unclear as to where it is going, and indeed perhaps why it is going there.  But the version is so unexpected (if you don’t know it already) it is worth noting I think and of course you can always miss out the opening stuff and arrive a bit later – maybe around 1’50”.  But if you don’t know this version and treasure early versions, you might find this hard to take.   So first here is a more staid reworking of the song…

And now…. Buckley

Bob’s best known version came from No Direction Home – and some copies of this recording end with Bob saying a few words, but I am not sure this is actually a live recording in the sense of being in front of an audience.  But it is credited to 22 December 1961 and that is so specific, maybe it is right.

And we do have a recording of Bob and Joni Mitchell which certainly is live…

Joni Mitchell also recorded it….

So there we are – looking at a song Bob performed three times, I am not sure we have a real live solo recording in front of an audience, but still an interesting song and the version with Joan Baez is certainly worth a listen.

There are about 15 songs listed that Bob performed three times, so it is possible that we might find one or two more with some interesting recordings.   And if not, well, at least this one was an interesting journey (for me if no one else).

By Tony Attwood

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 four of the review of Volume 2 of Heylin’s opus., “Far Away from Myself.”

Previously….

• 1: Far Away From Insight
• 2: “I looked into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change’. 
• 3:  If this is a bunch of noise, then it is noise that I love

If you would like to know about the essence of Heylin’s vision of Dylan, you could do worse than turn to volume two of the Double Life of Bob Dylan, “Far Away from Myself,” and without having to plough through the 700 odd pages of the book you could take a look at page 84 where Heylin reports that in one interview Dylan says that he songs on the John Wesley Harding album gave real insights into himself.  Heylin’s response is that the songs reflected nothing of Dylan’s “inner me”.

In short – we are told we can ignore anything and and quite possibly everything that Dylan has said, for the only person who can really judge where the truth lies is …. Heylin.  He presents no evidence for his claim, but he can claim it because he is Heylin.

Now of course it is quite possible that Heylin is right in the sense that this was one of Dylan’s misleading comments.  But it is also possible that Bob was totally tied up with the creative flow of what he was writing.

However either way, there is something that utterly stands out in the JWH album and that is that we have a classic type of pop album of the type we used to get, in which there are  12 straight songs of a similar type.  Exactly as pop stars used to present to their fans.  And in fact Dylan goes further and creates 12 songs most of which each of three verses, with the only variation major variations being with the last song, “I’ll be your baby tonight” which again has three verses but also has a “middle 8” (a verse with a different melody and chord structure which traditionally appears between verse two and three).  Put another way, in musical terms we have an album of 11 strophic songs (ie verse, verse, verse) and one ternary song (which songs A B A, with the first A section repeated).

Heylin reports the explanation for this sudden drop into conventional songwriting (the A A B A format has been a classic of popular music from the earliest days) was that Dylan was finding it hard to write new songs at all.   And yet the style and approach of the songs on the album is very varied.

Even when the subject matter appears to be similar (as for example with “Drifters’s Escape” – which according to Heylin was the first song recorded, and with “I am a lonesome hobo”) the instrumentation is the same.   And yet it is a mark of Dylan’s ability that either through careful planning or because it just happened, the two songs are utterly different, and indeed the songs are written from completely different perspectives.

What makes this such an extraordinary song is that it is an appeal from the disenfranchised, who wish to fight against a state but have nothing to fight with or brain with.   The and its systems that the disenfranchised don’t understand.   But this is not a song about pity, it is a song in which each side is completely unable to understand any aspect of the other.

The drifter finds himself in a world that he doesn’t know and can’t understand.  The judge appears to find the drifter as being a person without merit, suggesting it is pointless him even trying to grasp what is going on.   Meanwhile the jury in the trial seem to have got the taste of power and either want to hear another case or want the drifter to be subjected to an even worse punishment.

But then either by chance or through divine intervention the drifter gets away.

And not only is this simple tale told in three straight verses, it is told with just one line of music used four times in each verse…

Oh, help me in my weakness I heard the drifter say
As they carried him from the courtroom and were taking him away
"My trip hasn't been a pleasant one and my time, it isn't long
And I still do not know what it was that I've done wrong"

There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Business men, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None will level on the line
Nobody offered his word

Dylan on Tour: concert recordings selected by Tony Attwood

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

The recordings we have had along the way 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
• The Harmonica Shows 8 October 2024

And I really want to emphasise the point that this is not something exclusive to Untold Dylan, so really this series shouldn’t be here (not being “untold” as it were).  But I’ve had a few emails saying that this is an interesting extra collection for Untold to have, so it seems to me to be a worthwhile gathering together of a few interesting recordings all in one place.

I would particularly recommend Desolation Row at just after the 52 minute mark.

• 01. All Along the Watchtower 0:00:22
• 02. It Ain’t Me, Babe 0:03:53
• 03. I Contain Multitudes 0:08:30
• 04. False Prophet 0:14:27
• 05. When I Paint My Masterpiece 0:20:55
• 06. Black Rider 0:25:40
• 07. My Own Version of You 0:31:10
• 08. To Be Alone with You 0:39:40
• 09. Crossing the Rubicon 0:44:16
• 10. Desolation Row 0:52:20
• 11. Key West (Philosopher Pirate) 0:58:58
• 12. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue 1:09:30
• 13. I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You 1:15:17
• 14. Watching the River Flow 1:21:42
• 15. Mother of Muses 1:26:26
• 16. Goodbye Jimmy Reed 1:32:05
• 17. Every Grain of Sand 1:39:00

by Jochen Markhorst

• Watching The River Flow (1971) part 1

II          The situation comes first

What’s the matter with me
I don’t have much to say
Daylight sneakin’ through the window
And I’m still in this all-night café
Walkin’ to and fro beneath the moon
Out to where the trucks are rollin’ slow
To sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow

Whether the song was a little pre-cooked, as Jim Keltner suspects, or indeed dashed off in a single outburst on the spot, as Leon Russell says, does not matter much for the genesis; in either case, we see the struggles of a song poet in a dry spell.

The approach to unlock the creative part of the brain, to spark the stream of consciousness, seems: a story.

At least, we see a fairly common opening, almost identical to, say, Heinrich Heine’s top hit Die Lorelei (1824);

I don't know why I am feeling
                So sorrowful at heart.
An old myth through my thoughts is reeling,
                 And from them will not depart.
The cool evening air makes me shiver
                As I watch the Rhine's gentle flow.
The peak towering over the river
                Gleams bright in the sun's setting glow.
                                            (transl. Peter Shor, 2016)

Remarkably identical even; first the author’s unusual personal outpouring (Heine’s I don’t know why I am feeling so sorrowful at heart versus Dylan’s What’s the matter with me, I don’t have much to say), and then the classic opening of a novella, setting the scene – who, where and when. Also, in both cases, an ‘I’ as the who, a waterfront as the where and the day/night transition as the when (only difference: with Dylan the end of the night, with Heine the beginning of the night). And in Heine’s case, the what, how and why then indeed follow, as it should be when writing a ballad.

It has every appearance that Dylan is also trying to force something like this. He sets the scene – a hapless first-person chronicler leaving a night café at the crack of dawn and having nothing better to do than sit by the waterfront – thus suggesting that now the profound event will follow, the development of a catastrophe or the run-up to a catharsis. At least, this is how we are all conditioned, and this is how master storyteller Stephen King prescribes it, in his unsurpassed, masterful memoir c.q. writer’s manual On Writing from 2000;

“I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety—those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot—but to watch what happens and then write it down.”

“The situation comes first,” King teaches. As for what happens next… the writer has limited influence on that. Sometimes I do have an idea about it, but in most cases, “it’s something I never expected.” A plot, King means, can help, but usually the protagonist takes on a life of his own and deviates from what the writer intended. And that’s a great thing, thinks the master – “if I’m not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, […] I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety.”

A technique the song poet Dylan seems instinctively keen to employ this March day in 1971: he places his protagonist in a situation, in some sort of predicament, as King says, and then just waits to see what will happen. The choice of setting is already promising: it is a cinematic setting, word choice suggests a troubled protagonist at a low point. The I leaves a night café at the break of dawn, in the wee small hours of the morning that is. Not an unfamiliar setting in songwriting, and it always signals: unhappiness. In Dylan’s jukebox is undoubtedly Stonewall Jackson’s “Sadness In A Song” (1962), for instance;

While a lonesome city sleeps to pass away the time
By myself I walk the streets with a troubled mind
Up ahead the neon sign it says All night Cafe

… or else Ralph McTell’s immortal “Streets Of London” from 1968, a song with an identical colour:

In the all night café at a quarter past eleven
Same old man sitting there on his own
Looking at the world over the rim of his teacup
Each tea lasts an hour and he wanders home alone

Lonely, unhappy protagonists, on their way from nothing to nowhere. Dylan thickens the misery even more than Stonewall Jackson and Ralph McTell by choosing the wee small hours of the morning, the loneliest of all hours, “the time you miss her most of all,” as Sinatra knew in 1955. And reaffirmed in dozens of other songs. “The Song Is Ended”, “Kansas City”, “When Your Lover Has Gone”, Dylan’s own “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, “Ray’s Blues” by Ray Charles, “I Can’t Keep From Crying”, Johnny Rivers’ “Tunesmith”, and we could go on and on; all songs in which the dramatic low point is at the break of day, or at the break of dawn, or at daybreak, in any case at the time of day Dylan also deliberately chooses here, worded somewhat more poetically: Daylight sneakin’ through the window.

Much the same is true of the slightly archaic to-and-fro – whenever we hear that at all in a song, the narrator is more often than not unhappy, haunted by a sense of lostness after – usually – the departure of a loved one. In all likelihood, Dylan can sing along to Pete Seegers’ “The Foggy Dew”;

And my heart with grief was sore.
For I parted then with valiant men
Whom I never shall see n'more.
But to and fro in my dreams I go

… or, who knows, today Dylan was walking from his home on MacDougal Street with a slight diversion to the Blue Rock Studio on Greene Street; via Mott Street and Delancey Street, strolling through his beloved Manhattan and humming along in his head to Lorenz & Hart’s classic, ironic declaration of love to this – then dilapidated  – part of New York from the Great American Songbook, “We’ll Have Manhattan” (1925):

It's very fancy
On old Delancey Street, you know
The subway charms us so
When balmy breezes blow
To and fro

Dylan himself no doubt has a soft spot for Dinah Washington’s nostalgic version of the song, but in these days, The Supremes’ smashing interpretation is probably still in the air.

Anyway: night café, dawn, walkin’ to and fro… by now, we have an impression of the state of mind of the lone narrator, who will soon sit pondering on the riverbank. And then let’s see what will happen. Perhaps a mythical fable creature like the Lorelei will show up, luring boaters onto the cliffs with her enchanting song. Or a fog will rise, bringing gruesome antediluvian monsters to shore….

To be continued. Next up Watching The River Flow part 3: If I had wings like Nora’s dove

————-

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 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

 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2

(continued)

Rock ‘n’ roll and pop owed their ability to establish themselves as the newest offshoots of Western popular music within a span of less than ten years (1955-1964) to the industrial magnates, who quickly realised that there was a small fortune to be made with the commercial exploitation thereof. The target audience at the time was the first generation of predominantly white, middle-class youth born after the Second World War, who had access to two resources hitherto unheard of for teenagers: a small disposable income, and more free time than any preceding generation in history. And so, it was for the first time that young teenagers and adolescents were ‘identified’ by capitalist entrepreneurs as a discrete consumer group. I, at least, am unaware of any period from the preceding centuries when they were similarly ‘exploited’ even as a distinct segment by commercial businesses.

It seems fitting that this new definition of the word ‘youth’ – no longer merely as a developmental stage, but now also denoting a separate demographic within a human population – came out of the United States. The country had emerged from the Second World War relatively unscathed (aside from around 400,000 casualties ‘on foreign soil’ and countless wounded), while Europe and Japan had been blasted to ruins – inasmuch as they had not already done so themselves – in order to neutralise Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire. The war and other industries had been running at full throttle: Russia’s Red Army had been armed by the United States in order to aid Hitler’s defeat in Eastern Europe. Economic growth continued after that, not least to aid the very same Europe and Japan in their ‘rebuilding’ and restoration efforts and/or the implantation of democratic foundations based on Western models. Consequently, with the exception of a single year, unemployment in the United States remained stable between 3.5% and 6% until far beyond the 1940s, which was deemed acceptable. And that was where the first younger generation grew up where there was money to be earned by creating a demand for products that spoke to the themes that moved them most: love, dancing, sex, and heartache. The chief supplier? The music industry.

The end of the war was welcomed by a rise in the mass-production of cheap consumer electronics. The number of television sets exploded from tens of thousands to many millions within only a few years, and even cheap gramophones were soon within ‘everybody’s’ reach. Because these devices are useless without anything to play on them, the music industry flourished in tandem with that of consumer electronics: money can only be earned by creating artificial demand where it does not occur naturally.

The only thing that did not follow the same trajectory was the American love song. From around 1920, light music had developed to support the mass-production of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films. The ‘best’ songs that came out of this process were entered into The Great American Songbook, several entries deservedly earning worldwide fame.

This trend stalled in the 1950s, however, and constitutes a prime example of the law of the handicap of a head start, as formulated in 1935 by the world-famous-in-the-Netherlands historian, Jan Romein (1893-1962) in his essay The Dialectics of Progress. Put simply, his law states that a head start in a certain field often results in a lack of any stimulus to seek out further improvement or progress in that field, so that sooner or later, one is overtaken. Romein focused primarily on the technology sector: companies that manufacture and commercialise highly innovative products fall into the trap of living off the immediate income and neglecting to invest in further innovation.

Competitors are then able to copy the invention and continue to improve it without the burden of the initial development phase, enabling them to rapidly earn a large market share. An early example of the law of the handicap of a head start is the decline of English industry in the nineteenth century, in favour of that on the European continent.

Romein’s law can be applied directly to the entertainment industry that produced The Great American Songbook. Its boundless growth began in the wake of the economic boom that followed the First World War in the ‘roaring twenties’, as evidenced by the export of jazz to Europe (among other things). The global turbulence resulting from the economic depression in the 1930s and the ensuing Second World War had no noteworthy adverse impact on the development of the songbook, as the producers continued to supply the type of carefree diversion that the predominantly traditional, Christian, heterosexual masses needed in such uncertain times.

Only once the United States had emerged as the clear winner from the Second World War did the era known as the Pax Americana truly set in. The aura of victory made the rest of the world particularly susceptible to The Great American Songbook, and all that it stood for. The global social, political and cultural origins of the country and its people were clearly evident, and the music industry spread its wings.

But while it reached record heights due to its ‘head start’, the light music of the 1950s fell into a rut of stale predictability, and its quality had run to seed. The greatest culprit in this sense was the saccharine love-and-marriage morality infused into Walt Disney’s animated movies that was taken for granted by the conservative Christian white majority, because it was simply right and therefore did not need to change. Boy meets girl, they marry ‘til death do us part’, have children, dad is the breadwinner, mum stands beside her husband as the happy-homemaker-and-all, they regularly swear fealty to the American flag and that ‘for which it stands’, and live happily ever after, eternally barbecuing beside their oh-so-lovely neighbours.

Although there was no more substance whatsoever to this hetero-Christian consumptive morality, it nonetheless penetrated the finest capillaries of society, where all original artistry became stifled and nonconformists of any kind essentially became enemies of the state. In short, the entertainment industry had no reason whatsoever to wonder whether The Great American Songbook was in need of innovation, even to a small degree. The theatres and drive-ins needed filling, and the ratings determined the success or failure of commercial television stations, which were interested in nothing more than dime-a-dozen entertainment shows that drew the most viewers.

It was in this bed that the industry had made for itself that hordes of mediocre singers were churned out in rapid succession to satisfy the mediocre tastes of the masses, and if they did not, they were replaced – Pat Boone, Don Cornell, Vic Damone, Doris Day, Connie Francis, Sunny Gale, Georgia Gibbs, Julius La Rosa, Russ Morgan, Patti Page, Joan Weber, and many, many more – along with cavalcades of mediocre vocal trios and quartets – the Andrews Sisters, Beverley Sisters, Bonnie Sisters, Fontane Sisters, Four Aces, Four Coins, Four Esquires, The Four Voices, The Five Satins, and again, many, many more.

They may not have written the superficial lyrics themselves, but they could have refused to sing them and because they did not, is it their names that are listed here and not those of the lyricists. They were accompanied without exception by show-business orchestras, the timbre of which was dominated alternately by saccharine strings and bold brass: that striking, typically American fusion of the classical European string orchestra and the traditional big bands made up of brass instruments and a rhythm section, that proliferated as soon as jazz had gained a foothold in the northern cities.

This resulted in an entertainment overstretch sound, scripted meticulously and predominantly by white producers, with an offensive tendency toward ostentatiousness that they nonetheless considered subtle. They even believed that the vast majority of the global population enjoyed it just as much as they did – which sadly even proved to be the case, as this insipid mediocrity became the dominant style. To meet the insatiable demand from hundreds of millions of bourgeois citizens, many tens of thousands of love songs were rolled off the production lines at breathtaking speed. Here, the law of the handicap of a head start was in full swing – pun intended.

continued: Dylan and Us: Beyond America – 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, part 3

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

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

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

The 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 three of the review of Volume 2 of Heylin’s opus., “Far Away from Myself.”

Previously….

• 1: Far Away From Insight
• 2: “I looked into the bleak woods and said, ‘Something’s gotta change’. 

In my early days of trying to establish myself as a writer, I was told by a colleague who showed me far more patience than my work at that time deserved, that every paragraph should say something which if not important, was at least interesting or entertaining or frightening, or arousing or informative or tantalising, or if nothing else, at least enjoyable.

It’s a message that, in my view, has never been received by Clinton Heylin, whose prose suggests to me that the only reflecting he does once a piece is written is to say “how can I make this longer?”

Of course, I have no real knowledge about how he writes but I am endlessly caught by the thought that this is what happens: he wants to make it longer.   Take for example the statement relating to 1967 when “Dylan was doing a whole lot of nothing and seemed content doing so.” (page 41).  Of this time Robbie Robertson is reported as saying, “The other guys would go into town and pick up chicks and come back and party all night long.”

Quite why we then have either another 30 pages of Dylan doing nothing, or indeed why this statement about doing nothing is relevant and needs mentioning by Heylin I am not at all sure, for if it has anything to do with Dylan’s music or his mode of creating music, then it might be helpful if he could explain how.   But Heylin does not explain.  Instead, he meanders into pointless detail such as, “If the guitarist meant Woodstock, calling it a town in 1967 was a stretch.  It was little more than a hamlet…”   And given this is supposedly a volume about Dylan and his work, I find myself repeatedly wondering, does that matter?  And yet this trivia is seemingly a central, in fact dominant, element in the book.

So I ask, what difference does any of this make to anything apart from pandering to the most prurient reader (who perhaps would be better advised to listen to some music)?  Likewise, the “fact” (if it is such) that “Dylan drove his wife mad, leaving ‘movie’ camera equipment all over the place…” is not really vital to the situation.  Dylan needed to get back to writing songs, because of the contractual arrangements reached with the two record companies fighting over his work, and he was going about it by living a fairly unstructured life, with other musicians around.  That’s it.  Sometimes great writing emerges from structured living, sometimes it arises from unstructured chaos.  For most people it doesn’t arise at all.  Ever.

[Just by way of example, and I am certainly not proclaiming my writing to be artistically significant, I have a structure to my writing day: I write my first article of the day (usually about football – [soccer]), have breakfast, bring the coffee back to my desk, read and answer the overnight emails, start work on this site, make a second coffee, speak to my work partner on the phone about what commissions, requests, threats of legal action, and interesting information has come in since yesterday, and then do some more writing and then I stop, play the piano for a bit, make myself a meal and in the evening go dancing.  Not everyone’s cup of tea but it works for me, and earns me enough to get by].

That paragraph above in brackets is irrelevant to the issue of Dylan, but I include it because Heylin’s diversion into irrelevance seems to reach near hysterical levels (if such a thing is possible, and I never thought it was before reading this book), by noting that  “… on February 5th 1967, two days after the eighth anniversary of Buddy Holly’s unnecessary plane crash, he [Dylan] and Robbie Robertson flew all the way to Houston to watch Muhammad Ali fight Ernie Terrell in a private plane, in apparently atrocious weather.”

And for some reason, that seems to me to be pure Bob….

Now there is one point here, in that Mrs Bob was heavily pregnant at the time and many people (myself included) would expect that the husband might have abandoned the trip in case his wife went into labour.  Indeed I recall my wife being pregnant with our first child and the football team I support playing a match 90 miles away – a match for which I had a ticket.  I chose not to go because if my wife went into labour someone was going to have to drive her to the hospital quickly, and I wanted that to be me.  Bob obviously had other priorities and quite possibly a resident doctor.   But would they not fly because Buddy Holly had died?  That seems unlikely.

So, OK, its a story, but not really that central.  Besides we have a lot of other interesting insights, which are much more informative.  All husbands and partners face the issue of how to arrange their lives when a child is due.  But few are recording songs by the dozen, and in these circumstances, Dylan’s desire to get his songs recorded in as few takes as possible, rather than using the burgeoning techniques available in the studios, is of more specific interest here.  After all many of us are fathers, but there’s only one composer of “Johanna”.  And the few takes notion is interesting because that’s how it always is with Dylan, as for example in his decision to use the version of  Visions of Johanna on the album in which the bass player makes a horrible error in the final verse, forgetting that it has extra lines in it.  (As far as I recall Heylin didn’t even notice).  Dylan obviously just didn’t want to do another take.

There is also something very odd about the way Heylin sees the world.  For example, would anyone else call Buddy Holly’s plane crash “unnecessary”?  Aren’t all crashes unnecessary?  Would anyone else keep citing all these quirks in Dylan’s behaviour, and not draw them together into a personality profile which surely must relate at least in part, to his genius as a composer?

In this curious background approach to the world of highly regarded artists of the day that Tiny Tim (Herbert Butros Khaury who died in 1996) shines through as a really nice guy.  But most other people in the story… well, they are not necessarily people you’d want to get to know unless you had to.

And maybe that is right.  Maybe these musicians and hangers’ on were not nice, polite, concerned, gentle people.  But then surely that is an issue in itself to be discussed.  Why did Bob, and the people around him, not behave more decently to each other, if that is what happened?  Why were they so self-centred?  (And to be clear I am not saying they were, but rather pointing out that this is how Heylin views them, without ever asking, “why was Bob and those around him, not able to behave as we might expect decent people to behave?”

I’d then answer by saying, maybe it was because they were highly creative musicians.  If so, let’s explore that a bit…

But instead we have Heylin’s vision of himself as a judge both of what is good music and what isn’t, (and what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t), as with comments such as, “At which point the tape mercifully runs out.”   OK maybe it was an awful piece, but then if so, the question arises, why were the guys doing this?  What did it lead to?  Do all rock musicians who are searching for the songs for the next album behave in this way?  (Answer, certainly not the few I worked with).  Or is it just that Heylin sees himself as the ultimate arbiter of what is, and what is not, a good song, well performed?  Sadly I think that’s the case.

The point is, once again the issue of creativity and purpose passes Heylin by.  For Heylin refuses to see Dylan as a staggeringly creative person with an utterly extraordinary memory for music and lyrics, whose creativity and memory is the core of his being.  Instead, he is constantly harping on about Dylan’s behaviour, as if one might imagine that a man with all this talent can just switch it on and off.  A man, in fact, who can switch on his creative genius, create something amazing, and then be a perfect middle-class gentleman, looking after his family, doing all the right things….

And maybe that is an ideal – but in my experience at least, it doesn’t work like that.  Life is not scripted and we all have behaviour patterns some of which are not so good.   For some, those behaviour patterns are predictable to the point of being boring.  For some (and highly creative people often seem to fall into this category) the behaviour can be erratic, self-centred, and less caring for others than we might wish.  And that’s not good – but it seems to go with the territory.   You can’t be an amazing creative genius but actually fit into everyday life like an accountant or lawyer or teacher or….  At least that is not how I have found life.

Meanwhile, for Dylan, projects come and go – they seem like a good idea, and then get lost.  And yes that goes with the territory (it happens to writers as well as musicians) and is not an indication of a person who never finishes anything, because clearly Bob does finish things, such as albums.   So he changes his mind, goes this way and that, as he searches for the next unexpected development in his career.   But the notion that Heylin then puts forward that Bob “began to suspect he simply didn’t have it in him” to produce two albums a year [“product” as Heylin calls them] for the next five years., is yet another suggestion provided with no evidence or background.

Certainly what we do see, amidst what Heylin portrays as a chaotic life, is artistic integrity.  Bob, it becomes clear, was certainly not going to let a record company put out something that he didn’t think was good enough or original enough or indeed novel enough – so in this period it seems he was “writing ten new songs a week, rehearsing them in his living room….”

That is an amazing output, although again Heylin cannot stop himself from denigrating the work of his subject, describing one piece as “a song of self-analysis, designed to save money on a therapist.”  So what?  That doesn’t mean it is going to fail as a piece of entertainment.

What in fact was happening, as Heylin does finally recognise (page 49) was that “a new Dylan [was] emerging”, through what was clearly a time-consuming, difficult and perhaps sometimes painful process.   And yes, that is how original creative artistry often seems to go.  The artist doesn’t know how to make it happen, and so casts around via a multiplicity of ideas, wondering what it was that made everything work so perfectly in the past.

And herein lies the problem.   “Visions of Johanna” was a stunning masterpiece.  But it can’t be created again – what is wanted is whatever it was that was happening in the composer’s mind that allowed Visions to come into existence, but which this time will lead to the creation of something different.   But the artist doesn’t know if that is possible, and even if it is, how it can be made to happen.  Imagine, you invent the hammer.   It’s a brilliant idea, and everyone loves it.  Then your boss says, “OK what’s the next invention…”

What Bob seemed to find, just as many totally creative people do, was if he tries less and enjoys himself more, then the gates to creative nirvana might just open.  As Blake says in the Proverbs of Heaven and Hell  “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”, and it seems from Heylin’s description Bob tried some of that approach (although as far as I have read, Heylin doesn’t use that quote).  So Bob appears (at least in the way Heylin writes it) to be improvising both in his lifestyle and in every basic musical idea he can find, in order to seek a way, if not to the palace of wisdom, then at least to the next album.

Part of this exploratory process then involved creating characters like “Tiny Montgomery” and this is indeed where the story gets interesting…. except Heylin then diverts into a rather tedious debate as to whether Bob used a typewriter or not.   Which debate leads to the bizarre comment, that “so scant was Dylan’s regard for the lyrics, he was now producing like ticker tape….”  Yes lyrics were then abandoned, as Heylin notes, but he seems to be utterly oblivious to the fact that for most artists, no matter what their field, no matter how great or poor they are creatively, probably around 90% of the output is rejected in order to keep the 10% the audience gets to read or hear.

I truly can’t see any real evidence that Dylan had scant regard for his lyrics at any time, as Heylin suggests.  I suspect he was going through a process which is equivalent to the visual artist making sketches which are then jettisoned, or a playwright having a couple of actor friends take on character roles and improvise conversations, to help the author get the feel of his creations.  Or indeed a songwriter improvising at the piano…

Improvisation worked at this time because now Dylan was getting back into the swing of things.  For as Heylin says, Dylan “cut eleven original songs, one after the other, in no more than two takes….”  The creative genius was back as becomes apparent as one realises that these songs included “You ain’t going nowhere”, “I shall be released,” “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Million Dollar Bash” – all in September 1967.   Also in the list is “I’m not there” which Heylin dismisses as “semi-coherent”, a throwaway phrase that leaves me so fuming that even now I have to stop writing to recover.

Still at least he has the decency to quote Bob’s comment, a decade later: “At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe,  and we were singing these homespun ballads.”  And yes, there we have the clue to where this is going.

Finished off and rehearsed, this could turn out to be a fantastic song – but even without that, unfinished it is one of those songs that from the first time I heard it, has forever been part of my view of the world out there.

Yes she's gone like the rainbow
The shining yesterday
But now she's warm beside me and
I'd like her here to stay
She's an unforsaken beauty
And don't trust anyone
And I wish I was beside her
But I'm not there, I'm gone

And then around this time, Bob had the idea of a song that begins, “Help me in my weakness…”  Maybe there is no connection, but maybe one experiment clears the way for something amazing….

The series continues.

I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current series appearing on this website.

————–

Watching the River Flow part 1, by Jochen Markhorst

I           Your enemy’s corpse will soon float by

The Western World’s Most Erudite Man, Umberto Eco, muddies the already murky waters in the Postscript to The Name Of The Rose (1980): “But there is an Indian proverb that goes, Sit on the bank of a river and wait: your enemy’s corpse will soon float by.” Confusing, as barely five years earlier, in James Clavell’s 1975 bestseller Shōgun, we were told that it is a “Japanese wisdom”.

Sean Connery does not listen to Eco. He believes James Clavell. When he plays former police captain John Connor in the successful crime thriller Rising Sun in 1993, where he is portrayed as an “expert on Japanese affairs”, Connor-san sprinkles ancient Japanese wisdom throughout the film, and towards the end of the film there is a fitting moment to throw in the passing corpse aphorism. Which in turn inspires Blizzard Entertainment’s game designers; in Overwatch, one of their most successful multiplayer first-person shooter games, we hear it again, spoken by the Japanese fighting hero Hanzo: “If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy floating by.”

Just as often it is attributed – of course – to Sun Tzu, to The Art Of War, or quoted as a “Chinese proverb”, which is at least closer to the actual source of the saying. The original Chinese – i.e. not Japanese – wisdom is a completely failed translation of Confucius is; “The time is passing like a river running day and night,” is the approximate best translation. The Chinese characters for passing time can be understood as passed away, deceased, and from there a well-meaning but slightly too creative translator went wrong. There is no mention of corpses floating by with Confucius, in any case.

It is apparently a multi-purpose metaphor, watching-the-river-flowing-by. Indeed, the narrator in Dylan’s “Watching The River Flow” does the opposite of Connor-san – not death, but life flows by. Completely zen, however, he is not:

What’s the matter with me
I don’t have much to say

… are the opening lines. Words of a man tormented by a blank mind, a lack of ideas, and not understanding why. So it seems that, as with that other song today “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, Dylan stays close to himself. After all, we are in the seven lean years, the years when we are scraping the bottom of the well that once seemed inexhaustible, the years when Dylan fills songs with empty talk like Winterlude, this dude thinks you’re grand and uninspired theft like They say that nighttime is the right time / To be with the one you love (‘To Be Alone With You’), the years when his protagonists admit out loud that they have no words, like By golly, what more can I say (“Peggy Day”) and You’re beautiful beyond words (“Never Say Goodbye”).

Which song came first is not entirely clear. The recollections differ. Drummer Jim Keltner recalls that Masterpiece was done pretty quickly, and that they did “several takes, but not many” on Watching next. Tireless archive sleuth Michael Krosgaard has been unable to find any studio logs and has only been able to listen to one of the three tapes – on which there are first 11 takes of Masterpiece, and at the end one full take of “Watching The River Flow” – the final one, the one from Greatest Hits. Leon Russel, on the other hand, is pretty sure Watching was the first one:

“So, I took Jim Keltner and Carl Radle and Eddie [Jesse Ed] Davis up to New York. And I gave them some changes to a song, and we cut this track. And Bob listened to it, and he walked around with his [note] pad in the studio and allowed me to walk around and look over his shoulder, and he wrote ‘Watching the River Flow,’ was the first one. And the second one was ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece.’ I constructed the changes in this track, and then he listened to the track and wrote those songs. And he allowed me to watch him do that, which is what I wanted to do. It was great.”
(Bill Janovitz – Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History, 2023)

… and Leon Russell is – obviously – a reliable source. Also the fact that Dylan apparently found Masterpiece unfinished (as evidenced by the re-recording on Day 4, with lyrics changed and bridge added), as well as the content of the opening lines of Watching, are arguments for Leon Russell’s recollection; first “Watching The River Flow”, then “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. The one tape Krosgaard managed to find in the Columbia archives is then presumably the third and last tape from those days at Blue Rock Studio, on which the engineer added a copy of the best Watching take for convenience.

Eventually, studio owner Eddie Korvin’s notes and recollections, which are now at the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, make it official: on Day 1 a practice session with a few covers (“Spanish Harlem”, “That Lucky Old Sun”, Hank Snow’s “I’m A Ladies Man”, Josh White’s “Blood Red River” and “I’m Alabama Bound”), on Day 2 “Watching The River Flow”, Day 3 “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and on Day 4 mixing.

Not too important, of course. But it better fits the obvious assumption, that Dylan is trying to overcome writer’s block by thematising that same writer’s block – and that the first words on that day of creation then are What’s the matter with me, I don’t have much to say. Although, as on Masterpiece, Dylan confidant Jim Keltner, the drummer, has his doubts whether “Watching The River Flow” was really created on the spot:

“Bob was standing right up against the wall as if to have the words bounce back into his ears, and he was singing, or at least his mouth is moving. He had a tablet, and he was writing. I have a feeling that he probably had those songs fleshed out, mostly, and just honed in on them when we got there.”
(in Ray Padgett’s “Jim Keltner Talks Thirty Years of Drumming for Bob Dylan,” Flagging Down the Double E’s, 2021)

Leon Russell may be the Big Man, the go-to guy of these recording sessions, but Jim Keltner is inner circle, drumming intermittently for Dylan for more than 30 years, and is a certified emotional, sensitive man of feelings, an utterly engaging man who sits sobbing behind the drum kit on occasion, overcome by the beauty or content of a Dylan song. This has been the case since his third Dylan session (after “Watching The River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece”), since “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” in 1973: “It was such a touching song. It was the first time I actually cried when I was playing.” Dylan is touched. He invites Keltner to the Slow Train Coming sessions in 1979, and at the first listening session a pack of Kleenex is waiting for Jim on the side table. Of which, indeed, Keltner has to make copious use again.

Anyway, when this sensitive Dylan expert with ample inside experience says, “I have a feeling that he probably had those songs fleshed out, mostly,” well, that’s worth something. Even if his gaze may have been clouded by tears.

To be continued. Next up Watching The River Flow part 2: The situation comes first

————-

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 Mike Johnson

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

And I try to harmonize with song
The lonesome sparrow sings

If we follow the chief spell-caster, the tambourine man himself, down those ‘foggy ruins of time’ we might find ourselves standing before the gates of Eden. There is no specific mention of any gates to the earthly paradise of Eden in Genesis, but gates often symbolize a boundary between the sacred and the profane, the unknown and the known. On this side of the gates we stand in the fallen, nightmarish world and face the ineffable, the mystery of mysteries, all that lies beyond our known world of pain and war, beyond the weary world of words. What lies behind the knowable?

Dylan is not the first poet to explore this encounter with the mysterious and the unrevealed. The song reminds me of one of humankind’s earliest poems, the Tao Te Ching by the shadowy Lao Tzu, especially the first poem which I think is worth quoting in full:

the way that can be told is not the eternal way
the name that can be named won’t last
the nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth
the named is the mother of ten thousand things
ever desireless, one can see the mystery
ever desiring, one can see the appearance
these two spring from the same source
but differ in name
this appears as darkness within darkness
the gate to all mystery

That is to say, ‘there are no words/but these to tell what’s true.’

However particular the imagery of the song is to the mid-twentieth century, it’s fascinating to think that some two thousand five hundred years ago another poet stood before the same gate(s), behind which lies the source of all truth, hidden and revealed: ‘there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.’

Of course much of the haunted feeling that we get from the song (the song itself is a kind of haunting) arises from its chord progression. I noticed its similarity to ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ by Gordon Lightfoot, written over ten years later, but more than that it seemed (hauntingly) familiar to me, like something ancient and only half-remembered. A melody line half submerged in history. So I contacted our super-knowledgeable editor, Tony Attwood, asking him about what I called a ‘Celtic feel’ to the chords, and if perhaps Dylan had based his composition on some much older song in the folk tradition. The answer was yes and no. It’s not based on any particular song but is written in the Dorian mode, rather than in a major or minor key.

‘The modes were the approach to writing songs up to around the 16th century, and the easiest way to understand them if you are not used to them is through the white notes of the piano. The Dorian mode runs from D to D, but only using white notes – whereas the key of D major, which runs from D to D, has F sharp instead of F and C sharp instead of C. We hear this as Celtic, as quite a few songs from Scotland and Ireland were preserved in their original form because of the isolation of the communities where they were sung.’ (Thank you Tony!)

There’s a grandeur in that chord progression that Dylan was to take full advantage of. When played slowly, with a lilt, there is a stateliness to it, a sense of unfolding majesty, and it is that, combined with Dylan’s nightmarish imagery, that gives rise to the powerful affect of the song, its emotional pull, its aura of deep time.

Before looking a little more closely at this imagery, let’s hear the second only performance of the song on the 31^st October, 1964, at the New York Philharmonic Hall, the song having been written mid-year, after ‘Mr T Man.’ While that song was performed over 900 times during its performance lifetime, ‘Gates of Eden’ was performed a mere 217 times. It never became a favourite in performance, despite Dylan recognising the importance of the song by placing it on side B of the ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ single in 1965. This comparative rarity makes the recordings we have all the more precious, and none more so than this one, sung in that high register Dylan’s young voice could handle so well.

(Live at Philharmonic Hall, New York, NY – October 1964)

Note the extra chord between verses that Dylan was later to drop.

If the musical mode is medieval, so is the imagery, the ‘motorcycle black Madonna’ notwithstanding. There is a kinship of spirit with the hellish visions of Hieronymus Bosch. While what happens behind the gates is an enigma, this side of the gates it’s a hell on earth Hieronymus Bosch style, with distorted creatures like the ‘grey flannel dwarf’ and ‘shoeless hunter’ and hell hounds baying at ‘ships with tattooed sails.’ The image below is ‘The Hell’ from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

I’m not suggesting that Dylan took imagery from Bosch, rather that both artists drew the same kind of surreal and distorted world to show what life is like on the wrong side of the gates of paradise. Wikipedia comments, ‘The abstract poetry inspires a nightmarish vision.[8] Each verse provides a separate description of a decaying society.[7] Although the song’s title seems to provide hope of paradise, there is no paradise in the place this song describes. Rather, the imagery evokes corruption and decay.’

As with Bosch there are biblical roots to some of this imagery. Take these lines:

Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die

This scary idea is echoed in the Book of Revelations (9:6), ‘During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.’

Much later, in ‘Precious Angel ‘(1979) Dylan will return to that Revelations verse:

My so called friends have fallen under a spell
They look me squarely in the eye and they say, "Well all is well'"
Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high
When men will beg God to kill them and they won't be able to die.

These ‘so called friends’ get a mention in ‘Gates’ too:

The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign

In my NET series, and my articles on ‘Mr T Man’ in this series, I argued that there is not such a sharp division between Dylan’s early, protest songs, and his mid-sixties surreal songs as has been assumed. I argued that ‘Mr T Man’ was another kind of protest song in its expressed desire to escape from the ‘crazy sorrow’ of this world. The strain of protest is perhaps even sharper in ‘Gates of Eden’:

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains

In ‘Gates’ we see the world through a distorted mirror, but it is recognisable as our violent and twisted world. The surreal imagery is not there for its own sake, or to just sound weird, but to expose a world where ‘not much is really sacred’ as he will sing in the next song on the album, ‘It’s All Right, Ma.’ Intense alienation is a natural response to being in this corrupt and profane world.

A foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine

While the Philharmonic Hall recording is clearly the best, this performance from San Jose, also 1964, although not as well recorded, is of interest because there is no supporting harmonica. The song sounds even bleaker and starker.

(Live San Jose 1964)

Dylan also dropped the harmonica for his 1965 performances, perhaps because it’s a long enough song as it is with nine verses. At this stage Dylan is singing all the verses. There were only ten performances of the song in that year. The one that stands out is this one from Manchester in May.

(Live at Free Trade Hall, Manchester, UK – May 1965)

After 1965, Dylan abandoned the song until 1974, when he hit the road again after an eight year break from touring. The song was not sung during the famous 1966 world tour.

Of interest, however, is this informal studio recording with George Harrison on May 1st 1970. It’s a fragment, but fascinating in the way Harrison’s electric guitar backs up Dylan’s acoustic. Beautiful guitar work by Harrison, the way he works around the Dorian mode chords. Perhaps that melody line haunted Dylan as it does me, for here he does a ‘la la la la’ for the opening verse. I think he’s enjoying the music quite aside from the lyrics. That hypnotic lilt!

I’ll leave it there for now and pick it up in 1974 in the next post.

Until then

Kia Ora

Notes:

• The Tao Te Ching is thought to have been written around 600 BC. This translation is based on that by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, 1973. I have tweaked it a little.
• My title comes from Coleridge’s ‘Kublai Khan,’ another poem that evokes the ineffable and mysterious with its ‘sunless sea’ and ‘ancestral voices prophesying war!’ There’s a kinship of feeling between this poem and ‘Gates of Eden.’

The Mr Tambourine Man series

• Part 1: A masterpiece is born
• Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.
• Part 3: Chasing Shadows
• Part 4: 1978-1986. Far From the Twisted Reach
• Part 5: 1986-1993: Evening’s Empire
• Part 6: 1994 – 99: My weariness amazes me
• Part 7: 2000-2010; the Jingle Jangle

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

Details of previous episodes from this series are given at  the end

 —————

3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1

Well, I’ve been lookin’ all over
For a gal like you
I can’t find nobody
So you’ll have to do
(‘Honey, just allow me one more chance’,

The freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)

Appreciating the value of Dylan’s work is facilitated by a prior knowledge of the development of Western folk music in America in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of its origins.

Non-western readers will perhaps forgive me my unfamiliarity with their popular music forms, necessitating me to limit my discussion here to Western folk music, which shall be defined as the music of European peoples and their dominant settlements in other continents.

Campfire and pub songs, ballads, chansons, operas, musicals, operettas, German Schlager, brass-band music, waltzes, marches, even the world-famous refined kitsch of André Rieu, all belong to Western folk music. The blues and all of the genres to which it gave birth also qualify, for while imbued with the African heritage of their creators, they nonetheless emerged against the oppression of the preeminent European settlers in the United States, becoming dominant musical movements.

Those wishing to further suppress their colour-blindness may choose to go one step further, stating that in the twentieth century, ‘black’ music even achieved the dominant position that until then had been reserved for ‘white’ forms. Personally, I am no fan of this recently imported identity-based thinking from the United States, as it serves more to divide people than to unite them. Music belongs to the human race. It should be clear, after all, that I did not learn to do the twist from my clog-dancing, carnival-revelling compatriots!

Rock ‘n’ roll and pop, therefore, are forms of Western folk music. For the preservation of our communal mental health, however, let us at least separate them from Schlagers, musicals, operettas, waltzes, marches, brass bands and most certainly ‘refined kitsch’. Like all forms of popular music, pop and rock ‘n’ roll are simple in structure. The two most common rhythmic frameworks used are duple/quadruple time  (i.e. the even time signatures, which have proven so effective for mating displays) and triple time (which seems only to serve as a prelude to the former).

Chord progressions are very straightforward, and melodies are nearly always crowd-pleasers (provided the lyrics are not all-that elaborate, so that everybody understands what they are about). The greatest distinction between rock ‘n’ roll/pop and all other popular forms is that they are first and foremost young people’s music. But like all of their relatives – and I would hazard the same assessment for non-Western folk music – they are also primarily about love, sex, and heartbreak.

It is therefore a simple fact that the role of pop music essentially boils down to accompanying teenagers and adolescents throughout their sexual maturity. (The fact that some never outgrow it in their later years is a form of nondiscretionary behaviour that points, if anywhere, only to rudimentary musical development – the perpetuation of which can also be a deliberate choice.) This blossoming sexuality is the reason why duple time is more dominant in rock and pop than triple time: mating is a skill, and must be learned.

It should be equally unsurprising that the lyrics are one-dimensional and rarely venture beyond requited love, dancing ‘til you drop, sex, and the sorrows of love, though not necessarily all at once. However, if the teenagers and adolescents feel the music intended for them has no ‘affinity with the zeitgeist’, then there will be simply no success for the artists in question. The three rock-‘n’-roll giants – Little Richard (*1932), Chuck Berry (*1926), and Elvis Presley (*1935) – had this affinity in the mid-1950s, with the three pop giants from the 1960s, Dylan (*1941), The Beatles (*1940-43), and The Rolling Stones (*1936-1943) in turn resonating with post-Second World War baby-boomers like myself.

The term ‘rocking and rolling’ goes back to the seventeenth century, when English sailors used it to describe the ship’s swaying movements from front-to-back and from side-to-side. The oldest documented song containing the term, ‘The camp meeting jubilee’, dates from around 1900 and contains the lines ‘We’ve been rockin’ an’ a-rolling in your arms/In the arms of Moses’. Rock ‘n’ roll’s musical roots, on the other hand, lie in the black population of the United States. ‘Rocking’ and ‘rocking and rolling’ turned up in secular black slang, as more or less veiled euphemisms for dancing, sex, or both. Trixie Smith makes no bones about it in the chorus of her blues number ‘My man rocks me’, recorded in 1922:

Trixie Smith – My Daddy Rocks Me: https://youtu.be/nzVCFiyCsoc

My man rocks me with one steady roll
There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold
I looked at the clock and the clock struck one
I said "Now Daddy, ain’t we got fun"
He kept rockin’ with one steady roll

My man rocks me with one steady roll
There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold
I looked at the clock and the clock struck three
I said "Now Daddy, you a-killin’ me!"
He kept rockin’ with one steady roll

My man rocks me with one steady roll
There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold
I looked at the clock and the clock struck six
I said "Now Daddy, you know a lot of tricks!"
He kept rockin’ with one steady roll

My man rocks me with one steady roll
There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold
I looked at the clock and the clock struck ten
I said "Glory! Amen!"
He kept rockin’ with one steady roll

The lovemaking for the lady in question was perhaps not so enjoyable after all: her ‘daddy’ took around ten hours for his ‘steady roll’, which to me would seem a little excessive, even for the most modern of androsexuals. But #MeToo movement or no, it is a blues, after all.

Not until the 1940s did journalist Maurie Orodenker (1908-1993) first employ phrases such as ‘rock-and-roll spiritual singing’, ‘…displays its rock and roll capacities when tackling the righteous rhythms’ (1942) and ‘tight rhythmic rock and roll music’ (1945) in Billboard, a weekly music and entertainment magazine.

One year later, ‘Good rockin’ tonight’ (1947) by blues singer Roy Brown (1925-1981) became perhaps the first interracial ‘hit’ in a wilder version by Wynonie Harris (1915-1969). The fact that the dancing lyrics were a thinly veiled reference to sex was no longer news to anyone, and those in the know were only increasing in number.

The new style of music and dance, with Brown as one of its founders, was emerging from a blend of rhythm and blues, jazz, ragtime, cowboy songs, country blues, and folk songs. Radio disk jockey Alan Freed (1921-1965) monitored the developments in the northern state of Ohio with his radio show, The Rock and Roll Party. He reached both a large and varied audience, and the term ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ slowly entered the vernacular.

continued: Dylan and Us, Beyond America: 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2

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

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

Previously, we published:

• What you really don’t want: reconsidering “It ain’t me babe”
• All I really want to do: What you really want.
• Dylan & Us: Beyond America. Amuse bouche
• Dylan & Us: Beyond America. 1. Hors d’oeuvre – part 1 
• Dylan & Us: Beyond America . 1. Hors d’oeuvre part.2
• Dylan & Us: Beyond America. 2. Anything but idolatry – part 1
• Dylan & Us: Beyond America. 2. Anything but idolatry – part 2

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

by Jochen Markhorst

Previous articles in this series…

• Part 1: “The beam that is in thine own eye”
• Part 2: The Dead are from a different world
• Part 3: Right up there in the stratosphere
• Part 4: Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many troubles
• Part 5: Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken
• Part 6: The gospel of rock ‘n’ roll
• Part 7:  A minstrel collecting words
• Part 8: They call me the Gris-Gris man
• Part 9: Just a closer walk with Thee
• Part 10: I found the sound that was my holy grail
• Part 11: Say my name
• Part 12: A manic depression is a frustrating mess
• Part 13: You have been rickrolled
• Part 14: I discern the fruit from the poison

XV       No, people never see me as a prophet

In August 1991, fifty-year-old Dylan spent a week in Brazil for five concerts. The last night is in Rio, before that he has played in Sao Paolo and in Bela Horizonte, and the opening of the Brazilian leg of the 1991 Tour of South America was in Porto Alegre. There, prior to the first concert, is also the only opportunity for the Brazilian press to ask a few questions; Dylan allows five minutes to two journalists each time. The ephemeral nature of this sparse set-up is reflected in the results; the various publications consist mainly of empty answers to clichéd questions. Dylan endures the “interviews” reluctantly, apparently:

Q: Are you going to be playing any songs from your last album, Under The Red Sky?
BD: Maybe.

Or:

Q: Taking a trip down memory lane, what are the most significant moments in your career?
BD: I don’t look back.

Hardly uplifting, all in all. With one exception: Dylan’s answer to the first question. Equally dismissive and sparse, but an eyebrow-raiser in terms of content:

Q: Do you think that your public see you as a kind of prophet, as a musician with messages?
BD: No, people never see me in that way.

This is 1991 and a blatant lie. For almost 30 years now, Dylan has been annoyed and pestered by people who see him as a prophet. Certainly from the mid-1960s you can’t find an article about Dylan without the word prophet – “protest prophet,” “prophet-haired poet of protest,” “Dylan the prophet of the Doomsday Poems,” “prophet in a motorcycle jacket,” “visionary prophet”, and these are just a few of many examples. Just as often, Dylan resists it: “I don’t think anybody’s a prophet” (Chicago Daily News, 27 November 1965), “I’m not a prophet” (Copenhagen press conference 1 May 1966), culminating in Chronicles, his 2004 autobiography:

Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite) — stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior — those are tough ones.

After which, in the promotional interviews surrounding the publication of Chronicles, Dylan underlines that very distaste for “prophet”:

EB: What was the toughest part for you personally?
BD: It was like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story. And you’re just not that person everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time. ‘You’re the prophet.’ ‘You’re the savior.’ I never wanted to be a prophet or savior. Elvis maybe. I could easily see myself becoming him. But prophet? No.
(Ed Bradley interview for CBS “60 Minutes” special, 19 November 2004)

None of it helps. Even the Pope helps to keep the fire burning. In the book Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, writes about the last guy, John Paul II (John Paul II, My Beloved Predecessor, 2007), he denounces the fact that his beloved predecessor invited artists like Dylan: “There was reason to be sceptical, — I was, and in a certain sense I still am, — to doubt if it was really right to let these types of prophets intervene.”

So, in short, autobiographical alarm bells do go off when Dylan in 2020 has a first-person in one of his new songs declare “I am not a false prophet”. And Dylan hears those bells too, of course. Being the bell ringer himself, after all.

On the other hand: just as persistent as Dylan’s opposition to being labelled a “prophet” is his aversion to autobiographical interpretation of his songs. He has been insisting, again since the mid-1960s, that je est un autre, that the first-person characters in his songs are not “me, Bob Dylan”, and admits still frustrated that he has let himself be known on one occasion – in “Ballad In Plain D” (1964), for which he expressed regret in 1985 (“Of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone”).

Which does not take away the somewhat banal fact that biographical facts, images and faces no doubt penetrate a Dylan song often enough – as with any artist. The fictional character simply cannot describe a sunset if his spiritual father has never seen a sunset, cannot articulate jealousy if the artist has never felt it, cannot sit in an underground car if the poet has never taken the subway – facts, images and faces from Dylan’s own life penetrate his art. “You can’t help it,” as McCartney says, “whatever’s important to you finds its way in” (Conversations with Paul du Noyer, 2015).

Still, that does not make it autobiographical. Recognisable set pieces or reducible feelings do not suddenly transform a work of art into an ego document, into a life story – they are only auxiliary pieces, accessories that give colour to the narrative or to the poetry of the – in Dylan’s case – lyrics. Something similar applies to anecdotal songs, those that are built on an event in the creator’s life. “Smoke On The Water”, “The Ballad Of John And Yoko”, “Day Of The Locusts”. Anecdotes do not make the lyrics autobiographical, “telling one’s own life” or “portraying one’s own personality” either. Very few songs are like that anyway. Neil Diamond’s “Brooklyn Roads”, Jimi’s “Castles Made of Sand” to a certain extent, Neil Young’s “Don’t Be Denied”… it is rather an exception when a song poet pours his own life story into lyrics.

However: as soon as the poet models the I-personality after his own reflection and curriculum, the lyrics, narrative or poetry do acquire autobiographical weight: it becomes confessional literature, it becomes a text in which the author clearly expresses his own feelings, experiences and opinions.

“I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song / I’m twenty-two now, but I won’t be for long,” Paul Simon sings a few months before his 23rd birthday (“Leaves That Are Green”, 1964), raising the expectation that we will hear a passage from his diary, that the song is confessional, that we will be allowed access into intimate private thoughts and innermost feelings of the poet himself. “I Am… I Said”, Bob Forrest’s touching, disconcerting “Cereal Song” (The Bicycle Thief, from the masterpiece You Come And Go Like A Pop Song, 1999)… songs in which the songwriter emphatically weaves biographical facts and thereby suggests that the described feelings, experiences and views of the first-person are autobiographical, we know plenty. Not so much from Dylan, though.

Which brings us to “False Prophet”. Dylan opts for a first-person who repeatedly (three times) declares “I ain’t no false prophet.” An identification so specific and unusual, and so remarkably close to the mirror image and curriculum of Dylan himself, that it sort of forces us to pick up the key: this is a confessional text. Having resisted the label “prophet” for more than half a century, Dylan now then confesses: well alright, I am a prophet. Not a false one, a real one. And let me show you the way to the Light: Ricky Nelson and Jimmy Wages, Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson and Roy Orbison, your guides from the underworld. Songs, songs of love and songs of betrayal are the Holy Grail, in the songs you will find Truth.

Granted, not very profound, but: honest. And no empty words either: the prophet Dylan practices what he preaches, has been tirelessly proclaiming his teachings for more than 60 years now, spreading his and others’ gospel across the planet, inspiring us again on this album in song after song to follow the light of Jimmy Reed, the Rolling Stones, Jacques Offenbach, Little Walter and Sinatra. Culminating in the closing sermon “Murder Most Foul”, in which our pastor has us opening his Book of Psalms and Hymns on no less than 74 pages. From Beethoven to Tom Jones, Cole Porter to The Who and Charlie Parker to Tom Dooley: Prophet Dylan rewrites the Egyptian Book of the Dead into the Book Of Life.

———————

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 on Tour: concert recordings selected by Tony Attwood

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

Now this time the quality suffers somewhat, as it is a rehearsal recording, but the fact that it is a rehearsal gives an extra level of interest.

The recordings we have had along the way 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

And I really want to emphasise the point that this is not something exclusive to Untold Dylan, so really this series shouldn’t be here (not being “untold” as it were).  But I’ve had a few emails saying that this is an interesting extra collection for Untold to have, so it seems to me to be a worthwhile gathering together of a few interesting recordings all in one place.

• 01. All Along the Watchtower 0:00:22
• 02. It Ain’t Me, Babe 0:03:53
• 03. I Contain Multitudes 0:08:30
• 04. False Prophet 0:14:27
• 05. When I Paint My Masterpiece 0:20:55
• 06. Black Rider 0:25:40
• 07. My Own Version of You 0:31:10
• 08. To Be Alone with You 0:39:40
• 09. Crossing the Rubicon 0:44:16 1
• 10. Desolation Row 0:52:20
• 11. Key West (Philosopher Pirate) 0:58:58
• 12. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue 1:09:30
• 13. I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You 1:15:17
• 14. Watching the River Flow 1:21:42
• 15. Mother of Muses 1:26:26
• 16. Goodbye Jimmy Reed 1:32:05
• 17. Every Grain of Sand 1:39:00

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

 2. Anything but idolatry – part 2 

(continued)

We will also certainly cover this religious period, but let us not get ahead of ourselves. First we must examine Dylan’s failed launch into pop-stardom in December 1962. That would be of little use, however, without first explaining how I believe American popular music was commercialised and poisoned by the entertainment industry in the 1950s. Since it was against this backdrop that Dylan went through puberty and developed his temporarily dormant ambition to make a success of his life, I shall attempt to paint it for you. But you will understand my temerity in doing so: bows in that country are cocked at any non-American with the audacity to commit such a foolish act (although some would seem to prefer an AR-15 [a lightweight semi-automatic rifle, in case you are not familiar with firearms]).

But even this would be premature. A clear understanding of Dylan’s art also necessitates some general observations regarding the traditional love song and its global appeal. Last of all, it is important to understand the state of affairs around 1962 in the United States when Dylan first garnered attention there as a musician. His first 45-RPM release (a single debut) fell almost concurrently with that of The Beatles, and so something was afoot. I will make rather short shrift of the first twenty-two years of Dylan’s life, however, for the benefit of those who would prefer me to get straight to the twenty-five songs that I believe illustrate the essence of his artistry – all seasoned, of course, with lashings of my personal background and clouded perspective. I will try to keep things friendly!

Dylan’s self-emancipation as an artist took place around his 23^rd birthday, and was marked by the song ‘All I really want to do’. He premiered it on 26 July 1964 during the annual Newport Folk Festival in the American state of Rhode Island, when he had already released three ‘folk’ LPs and had achieved a degree of stardom in the country of his birth.

Those who would prefer to gain an understanding of who Dylan was in the context of the age when his life began (the period from his birth in 1941 until the premiere of ‘All I really want to do’) should first read chapters 18 to 25 – then we will reconvene at chapter 3. This sequence will involve the repetition of some material which, while inevitable, is nonetheless surmountable. Those who are happy to take Dylan’s youth and formative years for granted for the present, can simply read on. The option is always available to refer to chapters 18–25 in the event of any questions about Dylan’s younger years. You may need to play a little hopscotch in that instance, but what of it? In 1963, author Julio Cortázar showed just how enjoyable that can be with his book of the same name. Again, the choice is yours!

As a preamble to the next chapter, I believe an extremely brief summary of Dylan’s childhood and younger years is in order. He was a respectable middle-class boy from the Midwest of the United States near the Canadian border, who moved to New York in the winter of 1961 at the age of nineteen to make his living as a folk singer. He did not rise to national fame until his earliest work had become imbued with political engagement, influenced by the family of his first great love. After that, his talent did the rest. These landmarks will become relevant later.

As for Dylan’s life itself: many premature biographies have already been written (that is to say, written before his death). Charitable and interested readers can readily leave these unread, especially those who, after reading this book, have not yet decided whether Dylan’s work as a whole is sufficiently captivating to warrant learning more about his life. It may also be advantageous to wait, for given Dylan’s age at the time of publishing – 83 – it would seem that new and updated posthumous biographies are not very far away. That is the nature of things. Beware, however, of the aggravating habit among some publishers of selling old wine in new casks, or furnishing revised editions with completely new titles. Incidentally, the information I am serving up here about Dylan’s life, though I do so out of sheer necessity, is also nothing more than a potpourri of what I have garnered from elsewhere. And so you see: we all ‘borrow’ from one another, the only difference is what I choose to present. Very well, let us begin!

(end of chapter 2)

continued: Dylan & Us: Beyond America: 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1

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

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

 Previously, we published:

• What you really don’t want: reconsidering “It ain’t me babe”
• All I really want to do: What you really want.
• Dylan & Us: Beyond America. Amuse bouche
• Dylan & Us: Beyond America. 1. Hors d’oeuvre – part 1
• Dylan & Us: Beyond America . 1. Hors d’oeuvre part.2
• Dylan & Us: Beyond America. 2. Anything but idolatry – part 1

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