Untold Dylan

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

Previously 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

False Prophet (2020) part 8: They call me the Gris-Gris man

by Jochen Markhorst

I’m first among equals - second to none
I’m last of the best - you can bury the rest
Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold
Put ‘em six feet under and then pray for their souls

It has the same light-hearted function, intentionally probably, as the surreptitious, unobtrusive little self-portraits of Steen, Rembrandt and Van Eyk in their paintings; Dylan inserts a little wink into a text that might otherwise collapse under its own heaviness – similar also to the semi-serious references hidden behind “Miss Pearl”, “Mary Lou” and “only the lonely”.

After all, we are confronted with the heavy image of a dark prophet led up from the underworld to show us the way to the light. And who apparently has the stature to command us what to do with the corpses of his predecessors: we must bury them without clothing with their gold and silver, six feet underground. With which the Prophet again, like Dylan, seems to be picking left and right from canon, jukebox and mythology.

The second chest-beating of this verse, “I am second to none”, is familiar from plenty of songs, but is usually a compliment to the sung. “You’re second to none,” Curtis Mayfield and his Impressions sing in “Minstrel And Queen”, on their debut album in 1963 (incidentally, words Curtis does repeat in 1970 on his first solo album Curtis, in “The Makings Of You”). Billy J. Kramer devotes an entire song to it (“Second To None”, a 1964 B-side). Aretha in “School Days”, Joan Armatrading in “Join The Boys”, Boz Scaggs in “Simone”, and even James Bond’s dreaded, scary adversary Francisco Scaramanga gets that distinctive qualification: “An assassin that’s second to none / The man with the golden gun”.

And they are likewise the words Dylan himself chooses, though in this case not in a song, but to congratulate and compliment a valued comrade in arms. When Sam Lay, the drummer on “Highway 61 Revisited”, is awarded the Legends and Heroes Award in 2001, Dylan sends a telegram:

“It’s good you are being recognized. It’s so well-deserved. Walter, Wolf and Muddy, they must have known it too – that you’re second to none – your flawless musicianship and unsurpassed timing, maestro with the sticks and brushes.”

A cliché qualification all in all, which has some poetic lustre here in this song only through the literary motif of first-second-none. “Bury ‘em naked”, on the other hand, is an unusual word combination in song art, but then again we recognise it from religious works. Like from Legends of the Jews (1909), Louis Ginzberg’s compilation cum rewriting of hundreds of Biblical legends from Talmud and the Midrash, and the Old Testament from Genesis to Esther. In Ginzberg’s description of the doomed city of Sodom, we read:

“Once he was dead, the residents of the city came and took back the marked gold and silver which they had given him, and they would quarrel about the distribution of his clothes, for they would bury him naked.”
(Legends of the Jews 1:5:150)

… given the thrust that reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead appears to have not too far-fetched, in any case.

Much less far-fetched is the source for “I’m the last of the best” – borrowed from Dr John, no doubt. “A guy I know from New Orleans. I call him Mac, but you can call him Dr John,” as DJ Dylan says when announcing “Such A Night” in Episode 78 of his Theme Time Hour, “he headed to Los Angeles, and ended up being the Gris-Gris Ambassador”. Dylan gets to know him personally in New York, as a colleague on the recording sessions for Doug Sahm and Band in October ‘72, the upbeat, vibrant record on which Dylan seems to be little more than a session musician and Dr John plays organ on the Dylan song “Wallflower”, among others.

Apparently, Dylan has put Dr John’s indestructible 1968 debut album Dr John The Night Tripper – Gris-Gris on the turntable more than once, the record with the evergreens “Jump Sturdy” and especially “I Walk on Guilded Splinters”, but today Dylan echoes the opening song of that monument;

They call me, Dr. John, known as The Night Tripper
Got my satchel of Gris-Gris in my hand
They be trippin' up, back down the Bayou
I'm the last of the best, they call me the Gris-Gris man

… the irresistible “Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya Ya”, basically a blueprint for everything Dr John will make next (as Tom Waits occasionally seems to consult this blueprint as well); the sound Dylan seeks and finds on Rough And Rowdy Ways, the sound where you can feel the space around it, the “air being moved around the room,” as he calls it; the slightly-ominous New Orleans-voodoo vibe; the hollow backing vocals; the unusual arrangements and, above all, Dr. John’s singing voice – the voice Dylan chooses as a reference point when he wittily and ironically defends himself against criticism of his own singing style, in that wonderful MusiCares speech in 2015;

“No vocal range? When’s the last time you’ve read that about Dr. John? You’ve never read that about Dr John. Why don’t they say that about him? Slur my words, got no diction…”

And “Gris-Gris man”, by the way, despite all the vagueness, actually seems a fitting name for Dylan’s boastful, nameless prophet who is second to none.

“Six feet under”, the destination for the predecessors of the non-false prophet, is much more common and actually as much of a cliché as second to none, so we encounter it in many places in the canon and in Dylan’s jukebox. In Dylan’s stream of consciousness, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee’s “Trouble In Mind” (Lord, they put you six feet under / Shovellin’ mud directly in your face), Mississippi John Hurt’s “Louis Collins” (The angels laid him away, / They laid him six feet under the clay) and especially Dave Dudley’s version of “John Henry” are bobbing around, probably even on the surface;

Well they bury John Henry in the graveyard 
They laid him six feet under the sand
Everytime a freight train go a rollin' on by
They say yonder lies a steel drivin' man 
Lord Lord well yonder lies a steel drivin' man

“John Henry” has, after all, been under Dylan’s skin for sixty years. And since the summer of 2024, since Dave Dudley’s “Six Days On The Road” has appeared on the set list during the Outlaw Music Festival Tour, we know that DJ Dylan’s enthusiasm for Dudley at the time, during Episode 61 (“Second Countdown”, 12 December 2007) was not acted: “This song could not be denied. It even showed up in the pop charts.”

Charming, loving borrowings and references all of them – this prophet does indeed have a speaking style that copies the modus operandi of his spiritual father Dylan. But he remains an awesome, powerful prophet of course , this incomparable primus inter pares – you can bury the rest and pray for their souls.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 9: Just a closer walk with Thee

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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

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

The Double Life of Bob Dylan

Apologies, the numbering of the articles went awry last time – we are now properly organised numerically speaking.

• Part 1: Let’s ignore creativity. 
• Part 2: On the road to creativity
• Part 3: Getting Noticed
• Part 4: Creativity is a multi-faceted gift
• Part 5: Raging against a masterpiece
• Part 6: Utterly missing the point
• Part 7: The Moral Delinquent
• Part 8: Getting the basic facts wrong
• Part 9: Bringing folk music back home
• Part 10: It’s just a song
• Part 11: How to write a masterpiece
• Part 12: Respecting the artistic process
• Part 13: Beware the amateur psychologist

Heylin’s book “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” tells us about the songs Dylan wrote and performed, and his life as a young man and then as a professional musician and highly original creative songwriter.

What marks out the book is that these different strands to his life seem to have no connection in Heylin’s portrait.  From time to time, it is suggested that Dylan behaves in a way that some of us might think of as shameful, or perhaps regrettable, or perhaps even unacceptable.  From time to time Dylan composes utter masterpieces within the genres of folk, blues and rock music.   Each is noted, and yet there is no connection made.  Dylan’s behaviour is (for the most part) highly criticised.  His songs are sometimes praised, sometimes dismissed, but mostly left unmentioned.  In short, if you want to get an insight into the songs,  or how Dylan comes to write them, this is probably not a good place to start.

It is as if Dylan could, if he had wished it, have lived a life in a nice country residence with a wife and family, while popping into his personal studio every evening to knock out a couple more world-shattering songs, the likes of which no one had ever heard before.  But he chose instead to flit around, being uncomplimentary to people, changing lovers, taking drugs.

I suppose that it is possible that this was Dylan’s life in the 60s, but if we were to look at the life story of other geniuses we would surely soon realise, this is not how it works.   And indeed not how it works, for two reasons.

One is that the rock music industry is a world of its own, in which (mostly) young men find themselves suddenly thrust into the limelight without anyone around them able and willing to guide them, in a selfless way.  Instead these are young men who have a particular musical talent, surrounded by older men anxious to exploit it as much as they can, get a financial cut one way or another, and then when the public interest fades, move on to the next “fad” (as they see it) which they can once more manipulate to their benefit.

Given that virtually all people who are born with a talent that we might call genius don’t know why or how they have have attribute, or how to handle both it and its side effects, and given that in the rock music industry, there is virtually no one around who will act selflessly to help the genius, (everyone in short wants their cut), chaos ensues.

With Bob Dylan the chaos was made worse by the fact that he was able to compose songs of genius (or at least interest) at an extraordinary speed in the early years (29 songs that we know about composed in 1965 alone, from Farewell Angelina to Visions of Johanna – see part one of the Songs in Chronological order).  Thus everyone was clambering over each other to get hold of a part of the action – and Bob was left trying to deal with it.

But at the heart of all this – the one thing that made everything else happen – was Dylan’s genius as a songwriter.   And yet the songs, in the sense of how they were written, why they were written, how they were constructed, how they evolved – do not get a mention in the book.  As we move through the “Meet the Beat” chapter and thereafter there is a lot about the drugs being taken, but yet again nothing about the creative process.

Now it might be argued that this is a book about Dylan, not about creativity.  But if it were not for that extraordinary creativity there would be no book about Dylan, because he would have been just another guy who wrote some nice songs but nothing special.

As a result of this lack of insight or serious investigation (or I suspect both) Heylin makes comments such as “You could tell the audience was puzzled but they didn’t want to be thought uncool…” (page 273).   Which raises the question, “How could you [whoever you is] tell”?

Although it is not relevant to Heylin’s writing, that is certainly not how I remember the period.  As each album came out the debate on the merits and demerits of each song between myself and my pals was intense – and we discussed “why”.  We wanted to understand what Dylan was doing, how he was doing it, and why he was doing it.  (The debate around “Ballad in Plain D” for example was intense – was it a tale that needed telling in the full, in order for it to make sense, or was it padded out to help fill the album?)

Likewise I remember seeing performances by Jimi Hendrix Experience, and by Pink Floyd (including Syd Barrett) and debating in detail with my student pals the merits of each, where they were taking music, how much of what they were doing was a contribution to a general movement and how much was unique to themselves and would thus be a blind alley in terms of future music.   We listened, we thought, we debated, and some of us wrote and performed as well.   And maybe we were the odd ones out; but to Heylin the audience just sits or stands there and soaks it all up.  Without him to explain we wouldn’t understand a thing.

Thus for Heylin it all comes down to “You could tell the audience was puzzled.”  There were of course the denunciations of what Dylan was doing which Heylin seems to revel in mentioning, but only an occasional recognition of what was actually going on, and no recognition that many of us were not denouncing, we were discussing.  Heylin tellingly says, of the critics (from whom he of course disassociates himself, although I am not at all sure that separation is justified) “what these worthy critics had yet to realize was that he was no longer ‘theirs’; that their words were increasingly mere background hum against the swelling tide of Dylanmania.”

Which for me is a telling statement.   Heylin sets himself apart from the critics (by and large people who got and retained their jobs by being able to write or speak negatively and quickly after a show) and from the everyday fans (who had to queue and pay for their tickets and who actually enjoyed the shows).  Somehow we’ve got to the state where there are three audiences: critics, fans, and Heylin, and only the latter really knows.

And put simply, I think he is wrong; many people in the audience were much, much more knowledgable than Heylin gives us credit for, and some of us knew a lot more about songs, song writing, song lyrics, literature and poetry than Heylin could even imagine.

Thus as with Heylin’s retelling of the meeting of Dylan and the Beatles, much of the time all we get is a retelling of a well-known tale.  There are no insights, musical or poetic, but we do get a lot of mention of the drugs, as well as a lot of other tittle-tattle.  We are told Richard Farina was “terribly envious of Dylan”.   Maybe, maybe not, but does it make any difference to his music?

What we also get here is a constant suggestion of Dyolan as a control freak – which again ignores the genius of Dylan.  He knows what he is creating, and he knows other people cannot create anything like this, so of course he wants to control his own output.  Those of us who have worked as authors and put our work in the hands of publishers know this too!

So Heylin drifts into discussions about what Dylan wears (blue jeans on stage, a common suit afterwards exercises Heylin considerably – he can’t seem to work that out).  And all the time I am left screaming, “This doesn’t matter; it’s the music, not what he wears, not what he does in his spare time…”

The fact is that all people who spend a lot of time in the public eye, find they have a public image to maintain.  And this can be very different from their real identity.   Heylin does hint at this, but as with most things, quickly skates over the point without actually realising it is an interesting topic.  How Bob copes with this life is a topic of passing interest (Heylin suggests Bob was brutal in his criticism of other composers, although the only example he can conjure up was when Phil Ochs, David Blue and Dylan were together playing each other their compositions, and at one point Dylan (allegedly) says “Well have you heard this?”  As evidence goes for suggesting a long-term state of mind, it’s not much.)

What Heylin does however is not just write the whole two-volume report from his own perspective of how a genius should behave, he writes it as the ultimate arbiter of what happened.   The line “this was not the case  – not now or any time soon,” crops up on page 285, but you could put it anywhere.   Everyone else’s reportage is wrong, only he, Heylin is right.   And why and how is he so right?  Well, he just is.

As Dylan himself once wrote (and Heuylin actually quotes without irony), “Do not create anything, it will only be misinterpreted”.

Joan Baez is quoted a couple of pages later as saying, “He seemed to function from the centre of his own thoughts… and like a madman he was swallowed up by them.”  And yes that is pretty much a description of the life of many a creative genius.  But it is also a pretty good description of a writer who seriously believes that he knows the subject of his biography better than the subject knows himself.    A madman swallowed up by his own thoughts… indeed.

By Mike Johnson

• Part 1: A masterpiece is born
• Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.
• Part 3: Chasing Shadows
• Part 4: 1978-1986. Far From the Twisted Reach

[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 fifth article about the first track, ‘Mr Tambourine Man.’]

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”I wanna dedicate this song to all the people with the courage to have faith in something that never falters and never fails ” (Dylan introducing the song on stage in Vancouver, 01July ’86)

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I finished the last article with the promise to proceed to 1987, however a 1986 performance from Tacoma, July 31^st was accidentally missed, so I’ll start with it here. During the years 1978-1981 Dylan perfected the art of what we can call stadium rock, big band sounds for big stadium audiences, a far cry from his beginnings as a solo singer in small folk clubs. While he eschewed the big band sound for the 1984 tour, he returned to it with Tom Petty whose Southern rock or Heartland rock style could be pretty heavy and thumpy. That made these solo acoustic performances of ‘Mr T Man’ during the True Confession tours all the more interesting, throwbacks to that early folk club sound, a reassertion of the original Dylan.

1986 Tacoma 31^st July

Dylan only performed the song once in 1987, in Anaheim, (CA), July 26^th, playing with The Grateful Dead, and oh what a disaster it was! Dylan’s performances with the Dead are notoriously patchy, but this wooden, dumpty-dum performance does no justice to the song, to Dylan or the Dead. They struggle through a lifeless rendition. I would rather have ignored it, but my duty to provide an accurate history of the song in performance won out. Here it is. Don’t feel obliged to listen to all of it.

1987 Anaheim

‘Mr T Man’ was performed about a dozen times in 1988, the first year of the Never Ending Tour, performances which were pretty indifferent. We only have mediocre recordings of mediocre performances. Once more Dylan’s interest in the song seems to have ebbed. Nothing like the dynamic performances of ‘Gates of Eden’ in that year. This one’s from Santa Barbara, August 7^th.

1988 Santa Barbara mp3

In 1989, after two years in which the song languished, we find reinvigorated performances, played regularly and featuring the very squeaky harmonica sound Dylan explored in that year with a new slow, bluesy ending. This acoustic performance (two guitars I believe) was rapturously received by a Boston audience (Oct 24^th) and features some peppy guitar work from Dylan. My only complaint is that, with this speedy tempo, it sounds a little too rushed. I prefer it a little slower and with a bit of swing, but here it is. A great video too.

1989 Boston

In 1990 we have a performance with the Byrds (McGuinn, Hillman and Crosby), with Dylan once more happy to sing along with the Byrds’ pop version of the song. This is not a regular NET gig, but a Byrds’ performance featuring Dylan as a guest at the Roy Orbison tribute concert, Los Angeles Nov 24^th, which aired on the Showtime network. A vigorous engaging performance and fun to watch.

1990 With Byrds

That was not however the best performance of the year for ‘Mr T Man.’ That distinction may well lie with this London performance on Feb 8^th, the last of a four night residency at the Hammersmith Odeon, but with forty-eight performances of the song in 1990, I might well have missed a better one. The harp break is brief but cogent and, as with 1989, there’s a slow finish with a high, piercing harp.

1990 London, Hammersmith Odeon.

1991/92 were difficult years for the NET, the era of the Untouchables, as the band became known, a time when Dylan’s voice became scratchy with a loss of vocal timbre, while the performances had a ragged, amateurish feel to them. Interestingly, some Bobcats like this period, finding in the stripped-down, rough-edged, ‘garage band’ feel to the music a kind of authenticity that takes us back to pre-famous Dylan of the early acoustic years. What could be seen as a lack of professionalism could also be seen as the genuine article, the unadorned punky Dylan. The real thing. I’m not so sure. In the first verse Dylan, in this Milan (June 8^th) performance, loses his way among the lyrics, blurring them over to cover up for forgetting them, and it all feels rushed to me.

But it is certainly a raw performance, with Dylan enjoying his acoustic guitar playing and a probing, gentle harp break, rather than wild and swinging.

‘You can sing all my songs for me. Wait till you hear the next,’ Dylan says to the enthusiastic audience before launching into the song.

1991 Milan

Readers who have followed my NET series will recall that a decisive shift took place in Dylan’s sound in 1992 when he expanded the band to include a steel guitar/dobro. Bucky Baxter was the first to take up this position. This allowed for softer, more orchestral sounds and signalled a shift away from the raw ‘garage band’ sound of 1990/91. Dylan was laying the foundation for the upswing in his performances I have called the rising curve which will take us to a peak in 1994/95.

Dylan performed ‘Mr T Man’ thirty times in 1992, firmly aligning the song with his new sound. With the full band in attendance, it no longer sounds like a solo performance but, with Tony Garnier on a double bass rather than electric bass, and the guitars all acoustic, the acoustic feel of the song is retained. This acoustic sound will be brought to perfection in 1994 with the MTV Unplugged concert.

I think it’s fair comment to say that Dylan seems more interested in his guitar and harp playing than in the lyrics of the song. He only sings two of the four verses but with an extended guitar break and long instrumental ending, which switches to a slow march. Add to that a peppy, still squeaky harp. It’s a reminder that this is the year Dylan will begin his switch to lead guitar in earnest, and that will take him right through to 2002 when he will turn to the keyboards.

Again, it feels a little too fast to me, he seems to be rushing through the song, the incomparable lyrics lost in the haste, but that’s certainly some deft guitar work. His voice is still pretty scratchy, but he makes up for it with the drive and verve of the performance. (Hamilton, August 21^st)

1992: Hamilton

I think this recording from Meadville (PA), August 20^th, in the same year is better than Hamilton, with the vocal more to the fore. It’s not just the recording that’s better but Dylan’s vocal performance is more enthusiastic. He’s pushing his voice and the song which is still a bit too fast for my ear. We barely get time to register those lyrics.

1992 Meadville 

By 1993 you can feel Dylan pulling the band together and exploring some solid electric guitar work. Many of the performances of that year, such as ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ and ‘I and I’ are designed, it seems, to showcase both Dylan and his other lead guitarist, John Jackson. ‘Mr T Man,’ however, remains acoustic.

Dylan’s vocal is understated, to say the least, he hardly projects the song vocally at all, and his interest, as in 1992, seems to be in his guitar work, with an extended guitar break once more. Unlike 1992, however, he pushes that somewhat strained voice to lift the last verse to a climax. At the end of the song he repeats the chorus and does a slow wind up. This London, June 12^th performance is pretty typical of the year, although there is no harp break at the end of the song.

He also modifies the breakneck pace of the 1992 performances, allowing a little more time for the lyrics to register and the more dreamy steel guitar to make its presence felt – a harbinger of things to come.

1993 London

The best performance from 1993, however, may well be this one from Wiesbaden (February 20^th). Dylan is stretching his voice here, and the recording, despite the audience noise (a rowdy but enthusiastic audience), is better than London’s. We get a foretaste of how Dylan’s voice is going to develop in 1994/95, and how he will overcome the scratchiness of the previous three years. We also get another vigorous harp break.

1993 Wiesbaden

In the next article we will focus on those ace years of 1994/95 and find out what happens to the song.

Until then, stay with it.

Kia Ora

Dylan’s influence on everything from  music to culture and even politics is undeniable. As one of the greatest songwriters of all time, he’s been a poet, a voice for social change and an artist embracing the power of reinvention for six decades.

What’s more remarkable of all, though, is just how relevant his music remains today…With each passing generation, new listeners discover Dylan’s work and are now doing so through channels that simply didn’t exist during his early career. Here in the digital age, Bob Dylan’s musical legacy is reaching more people than ever before, thanks in no small part to a vast and expanding digital footprint.

Join us as we explore how digital innovation is helping new generations of listeners connect with the timeless power of his songs.

The Shift from Vinyl to Streaming

For two thirds of his artistic career, Bob Dylan’s music was confined to tangible mediums – vinyl records, cassette tapes and then CDs. Fans across the globe would be united in the ritual of buying albums in a store (or later, ordering online), listening to them in their entirety and carefully reading the liner notes to understand the various stories behind each song.

This method of music consumption was deeply personal, but also limited by physical distribution. Despite the proliferation of his music, it was still only available to those who could make in-person or online purchases. The advent of advanced digital tech, however, has transformed how the world listens to music, and Dylan’s catalogue hasn’t been left behind.

Streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube have made Dylan’s entire discography available at the tap of a screen. This accessibility has introduced his music to a previously untapped demographic who might never have picked up a vinyl record or CD. Today, people can explore his incredible career at their own pace, jumping from Blonde on Blonde to Rough and Rowdy Ways as they see fit.

Meanwhile, curated playlists and recommendation algorithms also help to introduce Dylan’s music to those unfamiliar with his work (if such people actually exist!). Most of the leading streaming platforms have ample playlists dedicated to the man, offering a comprehensive introduction by mixing his iconic hits with lesser-known gems.

Expansion into Digital Entertainment

As a seminal singer-songwriter, Dylan has been immortalised in modern digital entertainment, either through direct homage or the use of his work in gaming and film.

The modern-day digital entertainment landscape is a hugely influential and significant cultural industry. The gaming industry alone is worth over $180 billion and encompasses everything from mobile gaming to iGaming sectors like the online casino genre. Speaking of casinos, Dylan’s been known to reference games and gamers in his songs before so it’s not too difficult to imagine that if they’d be written now, he’d be singing about digital only verticals and titles like online slots and Live Roulette! Or perhaps that’s a bit too far-fetched.

What’s not far-fetched, though, is that his songs have cropped up in video games a fair few times. There are even Dylan references in games as diverse as Mortal Kombat, Lara Croft and Cyberpunk 2077. Of course, his music is a frequent staple in simulation games, with Tangled Up In Blue a staple track on Rock Band 2 and his original All Along The Watchtower being showcased in Guitar Hero 5.

Gaming isn’t the only sector driving the growth of digital entertainment, thanks to streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon Prime barely any of us watch terrestrial TV anymore. Bob Dylan’s life and legacy are the centrepiece of No Direction Home, Rolling Thunder Revue and I’m Not There, to name just three, and, while they weren’t all created specifically for the digital medium, they’re widely available for streaming and repeat viewing. And, by being so accessible to Gen Z listeners thanks to their digital format, such films and shows are further introducing him to new audiences.

Social Media and Dylan’s Continuing Relevance

Social media completes the triumvirate of Big Tech entertainment industries and the likes of Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are also playing a role in keeping Dylan’s music alive in the public consciousness. Memes and viral videos across social media apps often feature snippets of his music. Notably clips of his iconic performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival or his Nobel Prize acceptance speech have racked up considerable views.

Then, there’s the influencer factor to take into consideration. When the current crop of musical artists like Lana Del Rey and The Weekend publicly cite Dylan as an influence on their work, this encourages their hoards of fans to go and discover his back catalogue. These shout-outs bridge the gap between generations, ensuring Bob Dylan remains as relevant to fans of contemporary music now as he has been in the six decades prior.

By Tony Attwood

The essence of the Workingmen’s blues comes with the chorus

Meet me at the bottom, don't lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman's blues

It is a song of a man at the end who is saying that no matter what you do,  there is nothing you can achieve.  You are what you are; the world is simply what it is.

Sometimes nobody wants what you got
Sometimes you can’t give it away

(It is also, incidentally, a song for which the lyrics published on the official site are probably further away from the original recording than with any other song).

But more to the point here there is not much of a melody – try singing this unaccompanied and there is not too much there – so many notes of the melody are repeated.

One might also note that it is also nothing like a blues, musically.  Certainly, the man’s life described in the lyrics is a life full of blues, going on going nowhere – as exemplified by the fade out of the song at the end.  It just goes on and on.

And yet it is a very successful song despite this.  So what has Bob done musically to create a song that portrays the repetitive and indeed hopeless nature of the lyrics, without on the one hand becoming tedious and boring and without on the other hand making us feel so desperate about the life described in the lyrics, that it becomes hard to listen to.

Certainly what he doesn’t do is give us an inventive and varied melody – as obviously that would destroy the essence of the down-trodden nature of the life described.   True the music plods along through the repeated chord sequence and there is not much variation in the melody, but still we want to listen.

And perhaps we should also note in passing that it is also nothing like the original “Workings Man’s Blues” by Merle Haggard which is a bouncy 12 bar blues

For Dylan, I think the clue to the way the music has been composed is that there needs to be a sense of reflection, of looking back, of considering – at the same time as reflecting and thinking that this life is going nowhere unless the “you” to whom the song is sung will turn up and “lead me off in a cheerful dance”.

But if one considers the first four lines there is no way that one could put in anything other than a slow plodding set of chord changes while delivering the message (which the song does) which says this is how it is – that’s it, that’s all you get.   (Lyrics are taken from Genius which to me appears to reflect how Bob sang the song on the album)

There's an evening' haze settlin' over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down
Money's gettin' shallow and weak

The fact is that even before the one element of hope with the brand new suit and brand new wife, everything still is pretty awful and there is seemingly no guarantee that the “you” who is expected will indeed lead the singer off in a cheerful dance.

Now I'm down on my luck and I'm black and blue
Gonna give you another chance
I'm all alone and I'm expecting you
To lead me off in a cheerful dance
Got a brand new suit and a brand new wife
I can live on rice and beans
Some people never worked a day in their life
Don't know what work even means

Thus we have it; a sad reflection on how life is, without a thought that we can make it better if this is the life we are trapped in, and the slow descending lines of the chord sequences, with only a minimal level of melody is exactly what we get.

In this regard, the music absolutely reflects this; the music is the message, slow, steady, and indeed graceful in its acceptance of what life is all about.   It is in fact that the exact opposite of the original Working Man’s Blues both in terms of the lyrics and in terms of the music.

In short, the plodding, step by step nature of the bass line, and the minimal variations in the melody reflect the sad decline of the working man trapped in the conditions that the lyrics describe.   The hopes described in the final verse are thus desperately sad; the music tells us they are likely to be achieved, but one can always go on hoping.

The music indeed is an absolute perfect fit for the lyrics.

Here’s a list of the other songs included in this series….

• A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall. 
• Abandoned Love
• All along the watchtower
• Angelina
• Ballad for a Friend
• Beyond here lies nothing
• Blind Willie McTell
• Black Diamond Bay
• Can you please crawl out your window
• Caribbean Wind – Dylan’s musical exploration of evolving uncertainty
• Chimes of Freedom
• Cold Irons Bound
• Cover Down Pray Through
• Dark Eyes
• Desolation Row
• Drifter’s Escape
• Don’t think twice it’s all right.
• Early Roman Kings
• Every grain of sand
• Everything is broken
• False Prophet
• Foot of pride
• Gates of Eden
• Girl from the north country / Boots of Spanish leather
• Goodbye Jimmy Reed, and the 13 bar blues
• High Water, a rise, a fall, a bounce, a flood
• Highway 61 Revisited
• I believe in you
• “I Want You”. It was never meant to be like this.
• Idiot wind
• If not for you
• It takes a lot to laugh
• It’s all over now baby blue
• It’s all right ma: life really is ok despite everything.
• Isis
• It ain’t me babe
• Jokerman
• Just like a woman
• Key West
• Lenny Bruce is Dead
• Love Sick
• Man in the Long Black Coat
• Masters of War
• Mississippi
• Not Dark Yet
• One too many mornings
• She Belongs to Me
• Shelter from the Storm
• Simple Twist of Fate
• Sign on the window
• Tangled up in blue
• Tombstone Blues
• The Wicked Messenger
•  Yonder Comes Sin

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

Once or twice: A review of some of the songs that Bob has performed just once or twice on stage, selecting those of which we have a genuine recording (and “genuine” is important here since I have found a few sites that seem to suggest they are a recording of a live version, but I have my doubts.)  Text and video selection by Tony Attwood.

I was thinking about “All over you” for inclusion in this series, but then remembered I had said pretty much all I could say, and included the video of the live performance as well.  That piece is still on the site here.

So we can move on to “He Was a Friend of Mine” which according to the official listing was played twice once in 1961 and once in 1962.

This is a traditional song, first collected in the late 1930s and recorded by being sung by an inmate at Clemens State Farm in Texas in 1939 was performed by Smith Casey with the title Shorty George.

Rolf Cahn recorded it using the current title in 1961 and it is reported that Dylan used the Cahn recording as a basis, recording the song for the “Bob Dylan” album in 1961 but of course it was omitted from the album.

This second version says it is live, and it certainly has a smattering of applause at the end…

So I guess we have recordings of both the performances Dylan gave of the song.

And although this is not by Dylan, I have to add this, just to give a feel of what else can be done with the song.

Also in this series…

• A satisfied mind
• Blood in my eyes
• Caribbean Wind
• Corina Corina
• The Girl on the Greenbriar Shore
• Highway 51 revisited
• Lay Down your weary tune
• Lily, Rosemary and Stage Fright
• Meet me in the morning and From a Buick 6
• North Country Blues
• Only a hobo
• Oxford Town
• Restless Farewell
• Roll on John
• Sally Sue Brown
• Spanish Harlem Incident
• Stage Fright
• Talking New York
• You Angel You

Part two of a synopsis of “Dylan and us: beyond America”  by Wouter van Oorschot: 

Part One appeared here.

For now, Wouter’s book is only available in Dutch:

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

Previously, we published two chapters:

What you really don’t want: reconsidering “It ain’t me babe” – Untold Dylan (bob-dylan.org.uk)

and

All I really want to do: What you really want – Untold Dylan (bob-dylan.org.uk)

We plan to publish a few more chapters in English on Untold Dylan in the near future

16. What you really want

‘All I really want to do’ as the first of two brackets between which Mr. Dylan, with his almum Another side…, showed his self-liberation as an artist both mentally (matters of love) and socially (matters of politics).

17. What you do not want at any cost

‘It’ain’t me, babe’ as the second bracket in which Mr, Dylan presented the first dense example of a completely new, one might add revolutionary type of lovesong to world literature, thus expressing a mentality that would eventually become his artistic trademark: his resolute rejection of ‘love-possessiveness’ –, all this set off against examples such as ‘Tell me’ (Rolling Stones), ‘I can’t help myself’ (Four Tops), ‘You dont have to say you love me’(Springfield) and even ‘You are the sunshine of my life’ (Wonder).

The chapter is closed off by showing the fourth stanza of this song (‘You’re talking turns me off, babe’…) that Mr. Dylan decided to drop, thus showing his great artistic instinct for quality as it would have weakened the song as a whole enormously.

18. The interchangeable I and You

The argument here is that ‘It ain’t me, babe’ (and quite some lyrics that would soon follow) stripped the century-old lovesong of its ‘only natural’ heterosexual character, thus enabling teenagers of whatever sex or gender to freely interpret them and/or identify themselves as desired, with either the ‘you’ and/or ‘I’ in the lyrics.

One of the main reasons why Mr. Dylan’s work appeals to so many women and non-heterosexuals all over the world is exactly this: not only there was no talk of just ‘he’ or ‘she’ anymore, but all the more of an ‘I’ who explained to his or her lover why their relationship must and shall end. This could be anyone. Basically, during the roaring sixties Mr. Dylan’s ‘you’ and ‘I’ – lyrics became genderless for many people.

19. Attack!

Two songs that explore the theme of telling the ‘you’-person to leave, follow shortly after the harsh ‘It aint’me, babe’: a more friendly suggestion in ‘If you gotta go, go now’ and an even harsher ‘It’s all over now, baby blue’ in which there’s only talk of a ‘you’.

This trio forms the upbeat to what I call later on the ‘Battle of Newport’ – with a wink to the Battle at Nieuwpoort along the coast of Dutch-Flanders on July 2nd 1600 during the 80-year war between Spain and the The Netherlands, which ended with the independence of the Dutch Republic.

20. What remains is only You

This one deals with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and the impact it had on me, barely thirteen years old, during the summer of 1965. For me it was Mr. Dylan’s third song that I had ever heard after ‘All  I really want to do’  (that I had already almost forgotten) and ‘Subterranean homesick blues’ which is why I could not perceive him other than as ‘a rockstar from the start’.

The very fact that ‘Miss Lonely’ (and her counterpart ‘Little Boy Lost’ just a little later on) became archetypical figures for people all over the world, implies that Mr. Dylan managed to unleash his art from the boundaries of his home country. By doing so, unforseen he found himself in the eye of the hurricane of the revolutionary period that humanity faced at the time. Important as well – and maybe difficult for Americans to imagine what this meant – was that only thanks to its worldwide ‘tophit’ status Mr. Dylan’s previous five longplay records were finally released in most other parts of the world after the release of number six Highway 61 revisited, which is why for non-Americans his folky period came too late in the day, so to speak.

21. So what: chronology?

I share the view of Tony Attwood and Olof Björner (website ‘Expecting rain’) that with respect to content and style ‘Can YOU please crawl out your window?’, called ‘Look at Barry run’ at first, originated after ‘Like a rolling stone’ but surely before ‘Positively 4th street’.

The fact however that these two follow-up singles were released in the opposite order, raises questions about Mr. Dylan’s artistic development in reaction to the start of the Battle of Newport on July 25th. One of those is the motivation for why he left them off the Highway 61 revisited-lp which had enough space left to include them.

It is my strong belief that nobody else but Mr. Dylan decided and insisted upon it.  That ‘Positively 4th street’ was to be the follow-up single for ‘Like a rolling stone’ and therefore he saw to it that is was left off the LP, whereas he considered ‘Look at Barry run’ as a leftover, not good enouigh for the album, but which finally, in another setting,  became ‘Can YOU please crawl out your window?’ and was released in The Hawks-version because at the time of that recording ‘I wanna be your lover’ did not fit and there was no other song with ‘hit’-potential available.

22. Unravel the magnificent flop just like that

As I personally consider ‘Can YOU please crawl out your window? as the key to my understanding of Mr. Dylan’s art, this chapter is at the heart of my essay. Quite some words are spent on the last stanza that can be heard on the single but has always been omitted both on www.BobDylan.com and in the four consecutive Simon & Schuster editions of Lyrics. I also examine why the single flopped.

One of the reasons may have been that it was a forced attempt to create an even better follow-up for ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ than ‘Positively 4th street’ had proven to be, but that it’s June/July content, in spite of The Hawks memorable facelift of the music on November 30, did no longer fit to Mr. Dylan’s actual state of mind, as he had already moved on to create lyrics that would be included in Blonde on Blonde.

23. From failed single to good single but next flop

A follow-up single for the flopped previous one could have been ‘She’s your lover now’. The way in which Mr. Dylan performed this song entirely on his own on January 21st 1966, behind the studio A piano after a long day and almost 20 unsatisfactory attempts with The Hawks, is magnificent.

But that he dropped the song and never returned to it is another splendid example of his artistic integrity. He must have felt that he had met the frontier of his extraordinary talent and that he should come up with something more simple, which he did a few days later when he recorded ‘One of us must know (sooner or later)’ and which of course he decided to be his new single. The fact that this one flopped even more than ‘Can YOU please crawl out your window?’ is a an extraordinary fact that must have been quite disappointing for him.

24. Burned out at the zenith

This chapter deals with the release of Blonde on blonde and the World Tour 1966 (for which I use a fragment of the opening song of the electric set ‘Tell me, Momma’ to show what happened there musically).

The first two of the three quoted songs, ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’ and ‘Pledging my time’, show that Mr. Dylan had determinedly stopped trying to explain to his fans and followers whatever he had been trying to (‘How can I explain, it’s so hard to get on.’). They are witty songs of deliberate resignation so to speak.

The third quoted song however, ‘Most likely you go your way (and I’ll go mine)’ is Mr. Dylan at his most powerful and sarcastic best, in which for the very last time he floors his entire public at large with just one punch: it is an absolute highlight in his oeuvre until then (and would remain that in later years). He was at the very first peak of his career, even surpassing The Beatles as ‘front page news’. Transcribed bits of my own making of interviews during the Tour and fragments taken from Mr. Scorcese’s documentary ‘No direction home’, show Mr. Dylan witty and sharp as ever but exhausted at the same time, speaking the prophetic words before his last concert in London: ‘Man I’m gonna get me a new Bob Dylan next week; give me a new Bob Dylan and use him, use him… Use the new Bob Dylan and we’ll see how long he lasts…’ He had lost part one of the Battle of Newport but returned home with a head held high as he had given all he possibly could.

Dessert

While reckoning that many lyrics from 1967 onwards share the Nobel Prize quality of the ones of the revolutionary years 1964-1966 that I discussed, having made my point I decided to summarize the rich harvest of later years in order to avoid an exhaustive enumeration of the oeuvre that would discourage the common reader.

25. Boy becomes ‘recording artist’

This final chapter’s title indicates that for Mr. Dylan after the necessary 1966 break, nothing was ever the same. From his ambition ‘to join Little Richard’ until his temporary disappearance after the 1966 World Tour, his artistic development had followed a straight upward line.

Whatever purpose he may have had by returning to the public arena with such an amazing record as John Wesly Harding on the break of New Years Eve 1967, whose sound and content baffled everybody who had been left by the ‘boy’ that made Blonde on Blonde, it soon turned out to be the starting point of a ‘recording artist’ who deliberately saw to it that people could never ever pin him down to an image they believed he should have and stick to.

I chose ‘Dear Landlord’ as the most impressive song on that record because of the last two lines of the three stanzas, culminating in the promise of not underestimating on the sole condition that it must be mutual.

‘Battle of Newport’  being just a metaphor for Mr. Dylan’s fight for artistic freedom, with his return, he simply started a ‘second round’ for which ‘change’ was the keyword for the years to come. In my opinion, this has led to varying results between 1969 and 1990, the most astonishing of them being the religious period between 1979 and 1981. Being an atheist myself, this wasn’t for me, except for what I consider to be a faraway echo of ‘All I really want to do’, the really witty song ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ and this, as so many times, again due to the last stanza.

I pay some attention as well to what others have imprudently called the ‘Never Ending Tour’ and I would not be surprised if Mr. Dylan’s motivation for his hard work during so many years would thrive on his final acceptance of the fact that for tens of thousands of people throughout the world he had indeed become the leader that he never had wanted to be. Of course, this is nothing but speculation.

My closing statement is that not too long before Mr. Dylan started touring the world each year, in 1989 something must have happened that made him decide to once more, and for the very last time, punch the possessive people who had never stopped annoying him emotionally and socially. He then wrote his masterpiece ‘What was it you wanted?’ which I present as a Final Chord of the battle to which in later years he would only seldom refer in veiled words.

Apéritif

Here I pay tribute to the man who during his whole career approached the poet that others named him with humour and irony, such as his self-mockery in ‘I shall be free no. 10’ (1964) and how he was basically right when he described himself as ‘song and dance man’ during the well-known December 1965 press conference. Nevertheless: even if most of Mr. Dylan’s 600 or so song lyrics may be considered being just that, I firmly support these two beautiful lines of the Dutch poet Jacques Bloem (1887–1966):

Is this enough: a bunch of poems

for the justification of a life

and yes, I think it is in Mr. Dylan’s case. For sure

Epilogue

During my life, Mr. Dylan has become a ‘persona’ that does not overlap with the man that I do not, and do not wish to, know personally. One can befriend an artist without him being aware of that through is art. Therefore: what I pretend in my essay is nothing about who Mr. Dylan is as a person because I have not the faintest idea about that. All I have done is present to the obliging reader what his art and persona mean to me. And yes I have befriended him through that. To this I can only add that I feel a kind of compassion for the homeless and directionless tragedy of his art, which seems to be the price that Mr. Dylan had to pay. And if I am to outlive him I shall mourn the death of an artist whose work has been a lifelong companion and source of inspiration for me. For that at least I owe many thank to Mr. Dylan himself, not his persona.

Previously 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

by Jochen Markhorst

False Prophet (2020) part 7: A minstrel collecting words

I’m first among equals - second to none
I’m last of the best - you can bury the rest
Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold
Put ‘em six feet under and then pray for their souls

 Coincidentally or not, the exact same words Tom Paxton chose to describe Dylan in an interview with Richie Unterberger more than 20 years before “False Prophet”. Unterberger, who is collecting material for his two successful books on the history of folk rock (Turn! Turn! Turn! The ‘60s Folk-Rock Revolution, 2002, and Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock’s Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, 2003), asks Paxton what it was like back then, in the 1960s in Greenwich Village on MacDougal Street, when the songwriters sat together after closing time at a table in the Kettle of Fish, the bar above The Gaslight Cafe. The image, says Unterberger, is that Dylan held that as a kind of king’s court, and men like you, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, David Blue and others were waiting their turn to be graciously admitted to the inner circle.

Unterberger: “I’m interested in your memory of the situation, since one of the things my book will be emphasizing is that Dylan was just a part of this mammoth musical movement, albeit a very important one.”
Paxton: “I think that’s astute of you. I think that it really was a question of, as they say in ancient Rome, first among equals.”

Paxton is a great artist who is also highly regarded by Dylan. He records Paxton’s “Annie’s Going To Sing Her Song”, for example (during the Self Portrait sessions in 1970, eventually released on Another Self Portrait in 2013); he uses “Bottle Of Wine” as a template for “Buckets Of Rain”; in Chronicles, the autobiographer recalls how, as a fledgling folk artist, he admired that Paxton wrote his own topical songs (“even though his most famous song, “Last Thing on My Mind,” was a yearning romantic ballad”); and most poetically, Dylan expresses his admiration in the peculiar, under the transparent pseudonym “R. Zimmerman” published poem “An Observation, Revisited” (1976):

I'm making scribblings.
I'm always making scribblings.
A minstrel collecting words
for an eventual song.
In my mind I keep humming Tom Paxton's
"Peace Will Come"

A peculiar, long (904 words) and actually quite undylanesque poem, in which the narrator is remarkably similar to Bob Dylan. “An Observation, Revisited” is set up like a Dinggedicht, like a thing poem by Rilke – in this case, the “thing” is a photo exhibition, or more precisely, some of the photographs from that exhibition, which was indeed on view at the Susan Caldwell Gallery in SoHo in those days. At the time, the gallery exhibited 20 photographs of a terminally ill woman, some of which are unmistakably described in “Zimmerman’s” poem. Unlike Rilke, however, this Zimmerman allows himself to stray away from the things to be described, losing himself in biographical, poetic reflections that fit wonderfully well on the person Bob Dylan. As in this example: a minstrel collecting words for an eventual song – Tom Paxton’s words “peace will come” will indeed descend into a Dylan song a year later;

Peace will come
With tranquillity and splendor on the wheels of fire
But will bring us no reward when her false idols fall
And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating
Between the King and the Queen of Swords

… the prophetic words of the last verse of “Changing Of The Guards”.

Tom Paxton, in short, is an artist whose work and words Dylan appreciates and takes seriously, and who, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, analyses with informed hindsight that Dylan was the first among equals. With substantiation too:

“The thing is that songwriters love good songs. Songwriters love to hear good songs. So it was never hard to get us to like something if it was good. And it really had the effect of spurring us to keep trying to improve our writing, to hear good songs. And it just happened that a lot of the good songs we heard were from Bob.”

As the same reflex to rank, in the famous anecdote Leonard Cohen tells to David Remnick of The New Yorker in 2016, underpins the idea that Dylan in “False Prophet” larded his lyrics with autobiographical glitter. They are in the car together in Los Angeles, Cohen recalls. Dylan is driving.

“One of his songs came on the radio,” Cohen recalled. “I think it was ‘Just Like a Woman’ or something like that. It came to the bridge of the song, and he said, ‘A lot of eighteen-wheelers crossed that bridge.’ Meaning it was a powerful bridge.”

Dylan went on driving. After a while, he told Cohen that a famous songwriter of the day had told him, “O.K., Bob, you’re Number 1, but I’m Number 2.”

Cohen smiled. “Then Dylan says to me, ‘As far as I’m concerned, Leonard, you’re Number 1. I’m Number Zero.’ Meaning, as I understood it at the time—and I was not ready to dispute it—that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.”

Paxton and Cohen, two exceptional songwriters from Dylan’s inner circle who, through word choice and word content, paint the same portrait as Dylan does in the opening line of this fourth verse of “False Prophet”: I’m first among equals – second to none… that Dylan is here adding self-reflections, ironically or otherwise, to his portrait of the Prophet now seems clear.

Which does not make it a self-portrait, of course. This narrator is loud and haughty, has a boastful, manly kind of manner, as Willie Dixon said of Muddy Waters, and that does not at all fit the Dylan we know from public presentations, written outpourings and interviews. It’s more like something like the glimpse of Rembrandt we see behind the backs of the Night Watch (1642), Van Eyk’s distorted reflection behind the backs of the Arnolfini couple (“Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife”, 1434), and like Jan Steen (1626-79), whom we almost always see popping up somewhere among the merry companions in his works. Added by the painter out of a kind of modest pride (Van Eyk even writes a Kilroy-was-here avant la lettre over that tiny self-portrait; “Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434 – Johannes Van Eyk was here 1434”). For the viewer an amusing detail, but for the expressiveness and power of the snapshot of the night militia, of the portrait for Mr and Mrs Arnolfini, of Steen’s ensemble pieces it makes no further difference.

Dylan’s “self-portraits” in this song are then even more subtle than those Dutch masters – after all, these are portraits made by others, which Dylan then incorporates collage-style into his portrait of the Prophet. But it is unpretentious embellishment, it is unrelated to the message this Revelator one wants to proclaim. “I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else,” says the Prophet. “Songs like Let Me Rest On A Peaceful Mountain or I Saw The Light – that’s my religion.” (Newsweek interview with David Gates, September 1997).

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 8: They call me the Gris-Gris man

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

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

The Double Life of Bob Dylan

• Part 1: Let’s ignore creativity. 
• Part 2: On the road to creativity
• Part 3: Getting Noticed
• Part 4: Creativity is a multi-faceted gift
• Part 5: Raging against a masterpiece
• Part 6: Utterly missing the point
• Part 7: The Moral Delinquent
• Part 8: Getting the basic facts wrong
• Part 9: Bringing folk music back home
• Part 10: It’s just a song
• Part 11: How to write a masterpiece
• Part 12: Respecting the artistic process

By Tony Attwood

Although Heylin doesn’t actually pose the question directly, in a very clear way the whole contents of “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” does indeed raise one fundamental issue: “Does Bob Dylan’s life away from writing, performance and recording actually affect his writing and his performances?”

If it does, then of course it will be of interest to anyone who seeks to understand Bob Dylan’s music, beyond the issue of listening to the recordings and/or going to concerts and thinking “I like that.”

And in that case, the question arises, how does Bob Dylan’s life affect his music (and vice versa)?   This is a very different question from the reverse: does Bob Dylan’s music affect his life?  If the former (Dylan’s life affects his music) is true then we might study Dylan’s life in order to understand his music better.   But if the latter is true (how his success as a songwriter affects his life) we are into very different territory.  This is not a topic Heylin seems to want to confront.

Now I have argued before in this little series that people who are brilliantly creative are different from the rest of us in several ways, not least in that one gets the impression from reading about most of them that they don’t know where their unique insight into the world comes from, or how to switch it on and off.  It just is there – except when it isn’t (and that can be very frustrating for a creative artist who enters a period when the creativity simply stops happening).

This in turn can, and does, lead to times of difficulty (when the creative ability seems to vanish and there is no way the artist can find to turn it back on again).  In Dylan’s case we know there have been periods when he has written (or at least written and kept) very little.   We know at times he has seemingly deliberately turned away from recording his own music, to record other people’s songs.

If you want to take a short-cut look at how this works you might care to take a look at the page on this site “Dylan songs of the 1950s and 60s”.  There the songs are placed in chronological order and we can see the staggering output in much of the decade until 1968 when suddenly it seemingly stopped.

Dylan did the same in 1972 and 1976 (Dylan’s songs of the 70s), and 1980…. and so on.  The output is not just uneven – the songwriting really has stopped dead at certain times.

Of course that is understandable, even the most amazing genius needs a rest every now and then and exploring what causes these non-creative periods (or at least periods of very low output in comparison) could well be interesting.   It might just be something that happens to the highly creative person (there is some evidence of that from other creative geniuses) or it might be something else.  It is a topic worthy of debate.

And yet this is not something that Heylin gets into – not because he ignores the ups and downs of Dylan’s writing, but rather because he gives us so much tittle-tattle from Dylan’s life that the writing of the songs almost becomes a minor issue, tucked away in between details of whose house he was staying in at the time.

What we get instead of any investigation into Dylan’s creative work, are comments about Bob, such as “He was rarely tender and seldom reached out to anticipate another’s needs, though occasionally he would exhibit a sudden concern for another outlaw, hitch-hiker or bum”.  That is a quote from Joan Baez and is indeed interesting, in that we might speculate that Bob was showing concern for the “outsider” – and one can argue that because of his rare songwriting genius, he was indeed linking their lives to his own, perhaps seeing himself as the outsider, as indeed they were seeing him.

Martin Carthy’s comment that, “Phoney artists bug him,” is another one of interest.   It suggests that Dylan was (of course) fully aware of the huge amount of work he was putting into his musical creations, and how (as we can see from his varied level of songwriting year by year) like so many artists he had periods where he found it hard to create new works of significance, sometimes that ability would leave him.

We also know from the musings of many other creative people who become famous for their artistic endeavours, that the attention of fans can sometimes become too much and needs to be escaped from.

All these issues relate to Bob Dylan and his creative work, and certainly for me, are interesting.  Indeed when Heylin touches on them. his work is of much interest in my view.  But when he describes Dylan and chums careering around the country doing nothing much, (which actually takes up an astonishingly large part of this book) it is far less interesting.

Yet something important does come out of all of this, and that is that Dylan has never had a prescribed approach to songwriting.  As far as we can tell, sometimes it happened, sometimes not.  For example, Heylin’s almost throw-away comment from May-Lou Paturel (the wife of the owner of Cafe Espresso) that Bob “later moved in with us and started writing.  He dedicated one of his albums to us,” is of interest.  It appears that the couple gave Bob somewhere he could work without being interrupted or challenged and he valued that enough to dedicate “Another Side” to them.

From this and from Heylin’s detailed review of Dylan’s escapades in driving around the country, we can get the feeling that Dylan (again like so many creative geniuses) could not control his creative activities.  They seem to be there, or not, and if not Dylan needed to do something else, such as go careering around with his friends.

I also get the strong impression that Dylan feels most people (especially critics) don’t understand the world as he does, in particular, his view that “things happen” and there’s nothing much we can do about it.

Heylin, however, has the clear view that most people are chancers – looking to use other people for their own benefit.  He certainly casts Johnny Cash in this light, speaking of Cash’s “ulterior motive” for befriending Dylan because “he needed songs”.  (One might in passing see Heylin in the same way – a chancer exploitinig the life of Bob Dylan to his own benefit).

In fact, Heylin is very strong on people’s ulterior motives (except his own).  One could argue that Heylin has an ulterior motive in pointing out all the darker elements in Bob Dylan’s personality, his lack of empathy with other people, his self-centredness, and so on because it allows him to create a book about Dylan without writing very much at all about the songs Dylan creates – something that Heylin seems to find very difficult to do.   And he does seem to have this dark vision of everyone’s motives except his own.  Virtually no one encountered does anything genuinely to help another person.  Rather, everything has an ulterior motive.

Thus when Heylin speaks of other recording artists recording Dylan’s compositions, including the ones that Dylan chose not to put on his albums, he doesn’t write, as perhaps most of us would, about “the songs that weren’t selected for the album” but rather says, “The race to record Dylan’s detritus was ramping up as the likes of Odetta and Judy Collins joined Baez and Cash in an almost unseemly rush for contemporary relevance.”

Yet I would often argue these songs were far from “detritus”.   Clearly some of Dylan’s selections for the albums were idiosyncratic which could leave absolute gems unreleased by Dylan (“Caribbean Wind,” anyone?) while others were included (“Black Crow Blues” springs to mind).

To me Heylin’s vision is a pretty negative way of seeing what was going on.   And to make the point I’m going to include here a Judy Collins recording, which I find deeply moving.   “Dark Eyes” is a song I find troubling in many ways.  Judy Collins, for me, takes it to a different plain, and I value it enormously. This recording (which of course I know came much later than the period we are covering here) suggests there is a deep artistry and understanding within Judy Collins work.  It has been there from the start – I just choose this recording, to get myself away from the cynical negativity that is the very heart of Heylin’s work.  I am finding there is a limit to how much of it I can take.

Of course it is not only fellow performers who get the negative approach from Heylin for he thinks little of the audience too, as he writes “You could tell the audience was puzzled, but they didn’t want to be thought uncool by anybody, so they applauded just as vigorously.”

“You could tell…”   Just consider that.  It suggests Heylin could tell, and you, since you are clearly a person of taste as you are reading his book, are of course going to agree.   Only the silly people who were at the gig (and by then had not had the benefit of reading Heylin) were fooled.  Indeed Heylin is trying here, as in other places, to get the reader to join in his (Heylin’s) superiority.   This is of course the curse of much journalism; the need for the journalist to suggest that he is in the know, and so able to interpret events for the audience – but with the associated need that the readership should accept the journalist’s view.

And really this is the heart of my problem with Heylin.  When it comes to the musical compositions of Dylan, (and the musical performances as well of course) Heylin really doesn’t have any idea how to write about them.  So he doesn’t.  Which is fair enough.

What is not fair enough, in my view is that he then fills the book with his amateur (and generally erroneous) psychology.  And basically he would have done better to have studied psychology for a few years before trying to interpret people’s behaviour in the way he does.

The Never Ending Tour Extended: This series primarily uses recordings selected by Mike Johnson in his inestimable masterpiece The Never Ending Tour, and looks at how those performances of individual songs change as time goes by.   The selection of songs from the series, and the commentary below, are by Tony Attwood.   A list of all the songs covered in the series is given at the end.

An index to all the current series on this site appears on the home page: I don’t know what it means either.    We’re also on Facebook – just type in Facebook Untold Dylan.

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Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ appeared on “Together through Life” and was performed 435 times between 2009 and 2024 by Bob Dylan.

Mike was so taken by what Bob was doing with the song (especially the harmonica work) that he included three separate recordings from different shows in his article “The blood of the land in my voice: Together Through Life” in which he reviewed the performances of 2009.

And indeed if you click on that link above you can take in all three of Mike’s selected versions.

But I am going to jump forward to 2011: Quick man, I gotta run to see if Bob had actually taken the piece any further forward.

Of course one of the problems we have is that each recording is made by a different recordist with different equipment, so sometimes the quality makes it harder to compare one version with another.

But I really rather like this version in that somehow the accompaniment holds itself back and allows Bob to deliver the verses in a stand-out way, that makes us aware of the construction of the song.

And that’s important because the song is, in effect, very simple – just four verses of six lines with one of those lines always being the title line.  Looked at on its own the ultimate verse, does nothing in particular without the music, but within the context of music these lyrics it really work in delivering a picture of life as a journey reaching its end…. and not least because of the guitar part.

My ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread
Listen to me pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin'
Nothin' done and nothin' said

The first of the 2014 articles was simply designated The Setlist, the first half, and now we start thinking Bob has stopped changing his song – but just wait a second, the accompaniment now turns into something else.

And combined with the way Dylan is singing we get a far more mysterious almost dystopian version of the song.   It is a soft interweaving of themes which still keeps the song as a 12 bar blues (with one extra chord added) but the mixture of sounds makes this very much more an “edge of the world song”.

This really makes me think of what Bob was looking for when he first wrote the track – the music here is much more in keeping with the lyrics in my view.  And his delivery is perfect.  As for the instrumental breaks, to my mind these have now taken us onto a different level.

This is a portrayal of the edge and the end, exactly as the lyrics suggests.

So let us jump on again to 2017: part 3.  You went through my pockets while I was sleeping

A strange beginning of confusion but there is no mistaking that rhythm, and now Bob has removed much of the mystery – it is as if he has taken the song as far as it can go and now he is giving it a rerun without too much enthusiasm.

The last look we can take at the song comes from 2019: We can either play or we can pose

What are we to make of this musical introduction?  A symbolic expression of chaos in keeping with the words “Beyond here lies nothing”?  Maybe so, but it doesn’t seem right for me.

In fact, by this point I find the words of this song playing over in my head

I'm movin' after midnight
Down boulevards of broken cars
Don't know what I'd do without it
Without this love that we call ours

Those words create an image that I don’t find is ever fully captured by the accompaniment of this song on the tour.  And this final version confirms that thought – each instrument seems to be doing its own thing, demanding to be heard no matter what.   That is an expression of the chaos “beyond here” but is for me, not in keeping with the song.

In fact, I’m left feeling critical…. with a feeling there is something better that could be done with this song – just listen to the final instrumental verse.   What does it tell us?   The planet is a mess?  Life is a mess?   Something like that…

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

————

Prelude by Tony Attwood: Being English, and living all but one year of my life in England, I’m acutely aware of how my Englishness has influenced my view of Bob Dylan.  Which is why among things I have always been keen to include articles on this site from writers of other nationalities, (and incidentally one reason among so many why I so valued the writing of the late Aaron Galbraith with his Scottish-American take on life).

And it is one reason why I invited Wouter van Oorschot to write an article about his book “Dylan and us: beyond America”.   I’m publishing his reply in two parts – here is part one.  I should add, in case some of the musical examples here are not ones Wouter would have chosen, they were added by me…

A synopsis of “Dylan and us: beyond America”

by Wouter van Oorschot: 

1. Not for whom 

Nederland, Amsterdam, 2023
Wouter van Oorschot,

Three groups will not be amused by my book.

First, evangelicals who only took an interest in Mr. Dylan during his openly religious period (1979-1981).

Second, those who will say that I drop a clanger by arguing that American idioms in Dylan’s work can obscure the global importance of it and therefore can be temporarily declared irrelevant, (notwithstanding that many lyrics containing Americana belong to the most Nobel prize-worthy ones).

Third, dylanologists who pretend that they understand Mr. Dylan’s work better than any other person and even better than he does himself, and for whom no one, like me can do any good by writing about Dylan.

2. All except idolatry

This chapter deals with the absurdity of Bobcats or Dylanheads who forgot to live their own life because for them Mr Dylan has become God himself.  It is followed by the prelude to the next two chapters in which I explore the status quo of Western popular music in 1962, when Mr. Dylan arrived on the scene, and the characteristics of the century-old lovesong.

3. Love, dance, sex, sorrow

Prior knowledge of the development of popular music in the USA is advisable in order to be able to estimate the true value of Mr. Dyan’s work.  This chapter offers a short history of the origins of rock-’n-roll, the decay of the Great American Songbook after WW 2 and its replacement by industrial mass-market music (illustrated with quotes of a cross-section of very popular and very appalling, mostly misogynistic songtexts, against the background of which rock-’n-roll emerged and the adolescent Dylan grew up, to end with the introduction of portable radio (around 1963) that enabled youngsters to flee their homes and listen to their music anywhere.

4. The invariable hetero lovesong

In which it is argued, concentrating on The Beatles’ singles ‘Love me do’ (December 1962) and ‘I feel fine’ (November 1964) that the century-old genre of the lovesong had always been exclusively cliché-ridden heterosexual.

5. Becoming who you are

A few words about Mr. Dylan’s background, ending with the high school year bookquote ‘To join Little Richard’.

6. From rocker Zimmerman to folksinger Dylan

The explanation of how this change came to be, with ‘Song to Woody’ as a source from which the oeuvre would rise.

7. What should they do with that

In which it is argued, concentrating on the singles ‘Mixed up Confusion’ (December 1962) and notably ‘Don’t Think Twice it’s All Right’ as the B-side of ‘Blowing in the wind’ (August 1963), that the traditional love song that had been known for centuries had come to an end.

8. Up against the cliffs

Pressure rises as Mr. Dylan, displaying his talents, is unwillingly welcomed by representatives of the Left as their secular protesting preacher.

9. Trapped

The triumphant October 26 concert at Carnegie Hall, the biased Newsweek-‘profile’ a few days later that made Mr. Dylan realise how fame can take its toll in very unpleasant and angering ways, and in reaction to this his song ‘Restless Farewell’ (last stanza chosen as fragment which, in retrospective, can be considered as the upbeat of his self-liberation as an artist) and the completion of the album The times they are a-changin’ on October 31.

10. Conflict in the making

How the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22nd thwarted Mr. Dylan’s acceptance of the Tom Paine Award a few months before, as well as his acceptance speech on December 14th a little later.

11. Dull but necessary chapter

The Kennedy assassination interrupted Mr. Dylan’s songwriting for almost three months. It demotivated him as well to wholeheartedly promote his new album The times they are a-changin’ during his spring 1964 concerts, as the title song in which he had invested all his craft a few months before and that he had chosen as the opening song for all his concerts, in his own words now seemed quite unreal to him. It means that he had already emotionally outgrown the album before it was even released.

12. Turning point

The only song that originated within almost three months of a writer’s block was ‘Guess I’m doin’ fine.’ In it there is the significant line ‘I been shot at just like you but as long this world keeps a-turnin’ I just keep a-turnin’ too.’ It shows that after these turbulent weeks and months Mr. Dylan was regaining his courage to continue his work. And: as he kept on touring the word ever since: he kept his word.

13. Poetic chimes

The release of The times they are a-changin’ on February 10 coincided with the passing of the Civil Rights Act by the US House of Representatives on that very same day. By that time, for several weeks Mr. Dylan and a few friends crisscrossed the USA in a large station wagon, halting here and there.

During this trip the source of his songwriting opened again. But not only time had changed. Emerged an astonishing new type of songs, the first three of which would have been ‘Chimes of Freedom’, ‘Mr. Tambourine man’ and ‘It ain’t me, babe’. Not only is it tempting to speculate that ‘Chimes of Freedom’ was at least in part inspired by the passing of the Civil Rights Bill, these songs were the first three in which Mr. Dylan displayed his self-liberation. From then on, he had become an artist, determined to reject any form of emotional and/or social possessiveness, both in his private and public life.

Entremets

In the belief that if one keeps oneself out of range while writing about Mr Dylan’s oeuvre one can only produce a dull book, in the next two chapters I speak of my personal background and how this influenced without any doubt my future interpretation of Mr. Dylan’s work.

14. 1962-1964: teenager takes sides

How I learned about the existence of pop music on the sole Dutch tv-channel in 1962 when I was ten years old, how four bereavements in October-November 1963, among with the suicide of my 8 years older brother and the assassination of President Kennedy, changed my view on life when I was 11 years old and how, at twelve, my entry on highschool in September 1964 changed my perspective.

15. 1965: Kid discovers a hero

No teenager in The Netherlands had ever heard of Bob Dylan until ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ entered the sole Dutch Top 40 on May 22nd 1965.

With only nine months of English lessons at school, except for one or two lines I did not understand at all what the song was about but this I knew for sure: it was about me. Hence, just turned 13, I discovered my first ‘hero’. I kindly ask my possible American readers to realize the difference in perception between themselves, who at the time had known Mr Dylan for several years as a highly esteemed singer of acoustic folksongs, and teenagers outside the USA for whom in 1965 he entered their minds as proto-rapper with an electric band.

Part two will appear shortly.

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

Mr Tambourine Man: – A History in Performance. 

1978-1986. Far From the Twisted Reach

By Mike Johnson

• Part 1: A masterpiece is born
• Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.
• Part 3 – Chasing Shadows

[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 fourth article about the first track, ‘Mr Tambourine Man.’

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In 1978 Dylan took to the stage with an eight piece band and three backup singers and, for the first time since its inception, the song gets a radical makeover, no longer delivered solo with guitar and harp, but with the full band, complete with Steve Douglass’ dancing flute, a wonderful, light swirling sound that expresses the wild, joyous nature of the ‘trip’ upon ‘that magic swirling ship.’ That brisk, upbeat backing takes us into fantasy land. Some don’t like the 1978 sound, but at its best it is both inventive and in touch with the spirit of the songs. In this case, the magic of the experience is captured.

Mr T Man sounds revitalized, refreshed, re-magicked. By not performing it solo, by bringing in the band with an imaginative arrangement, Dylan has taken some of the nostalgia out of the song. It’s almost like a new song.

So what’s the catch? Well… I’m going have to drop my obsession with missed verses, but I have to point out that Dylan only sings two verses, the first and the last, and wonderful as it may sound, we’re not getting the full experience.

Here it is, the re-mastered Tokyo performance known as the Budokan recordings:

That was early in the tour, Feb 28^th. If we fast-forward however to the end of the year, we find something radically different. In Seattle on Nov 15^th a hoarse Dylan delivers a dead slow ‘Mr T Man’ all the bounce and swirl gone. It’s a standout performance, a tour-de-force with the song’s yearning nakedly painful. Those breezy, stoned lyrics become something else. It sounds more like he’s talking to God than the local weed dealer. That yearning to escape the fetters of the world and to be where ‘there are no fences facing’ can become an agony, the urge for transcendence overwhelming. And the lyrics dig deep enough to carry that charge.

I don’t know Dylan’s personal history well enough to say, but I believe it was around this time, at the end of the ’78 tour, that Dylan converted to Christianity and started writing gospel songs. Maybe that had something to do with this passionate performance, ‘Mr T Man’ doing service as a vehicle for Dylan’s new, spiritual experiences. It becomes a Christian song (sort of), or at least is infused with that energy.

He makes the song great again.

It’s history now, how Dylan went on the road in 1979 playing nothing but new gospel songs, thus alienating the audience he’d built up through the mid 1970s with songs from Blood On the Tracks and Desire. He introduced a few old songs in 1980 with more coming in 1981. Dylan didn’t do ‘Mr T Man’ until 1981, except for one lone performance in 1980.

To understand what is going on with this one-off 1980 performance we have to back-track to 1965, and a cover of ‘Mr T Man’ by the Byrds, a cover which popularized the song. By putting Beatles’ chords to the song, they turn in it into a Beatles/Dylan song, a 2.30 minute pop song. They only sing one verse, the ‘swirling ship’ verse, because, I speculate, it is most dope-dreamy, stoner friendly of the verses, tailor-made for the sound they’re producing.

Those opening chords, pure Beatles! I’m not saying that to disparage it. I love pop songs, even ‘My Boy Lollipop’ has its charms, and Mr T Man can be lollipopped quite seductively, doing something very similar to what Peter Paul and Mary did with ‘Blowin in the Wind.’ By adding beautiful harmonies the song is sweetened, a bit too sweet for me I have to confess, too saccharine and gauzy for my liking. When you take the edge, the bite, out of Dylan this is what you get. I hope I’m not offending too many Byrds’ fans by saying this. Dylan had no such qualms and welcomed the Byrds’ lollipop – after all, they’d turned his song into a hit! A song to dance to. What could be more fitting for a song that casts its ‘dancing spell’ your way?

Here they are live in 1966. Note those Beatles haircuts! And the groovers are grooving. It all looks so…innocent…don’t it?

All that is background to what we hear in 1980, San Fran 22^nd Nov, that sole performance. It seems that the presence of Byrds’ member Roger McGuinn, who shares the vocals with Dylan onstage, had a lot to do with the song being performed. After all, they were in San Fran, California, home of the ‘California sound,’ the Byrds, the Eagles and the Beach Boys. Sweet harmonies. The summer of Love. The smoke rings of our minds.

It’s curious what happens to the lyrics here. The first verse is dropped and, after the chorus, McGuinn sings the second, ‘swirling ship’ verse as in the Bryds’ original. When Dylan sings the next verse, the third ‘escaping on the run’ verse, something strange happens. After the line ‘…there are no fences facing’ Dylan jumps back to the first, unsung verse, grabs the last lines (‘my weariness amazes me….too dead for dreaming’) and replaces the end of the third verse with them. Then drops the last verse altogether.

This doesn’t feel like a botch up to me. It seems deliberate, grafting those lines onto the end of that third verse and so jettisoning ‘the ragged clown’. I can’t even speculate why. We have to remember that for Dylan nothing is set in concrete. Lyrics are detachable, they can be dropped or moved around. Musical styles from pop to blues to country can be picked up and discarded or melded. The song is an ever-movable feast.

Musically, the performance is the tribute to the Byrd’s version, which, by 1980, had its own nostalgic appeal. We’re getting the Byrds with Dylan singing along.

San Fran 22^nd Nov.

In 1981, however, ‘Mr T Man’ returned in full force and was regularly performed, along with some other older songs that Gospel Bob rediscovered. Those readers with Trouble No More, the gospel collection, will find the song live, performed in London on June 28^th. This is it here:

However, that performance is eclipsed by the following night, the 29^th, when he amps up the vocal. 1981 was peak year for Dylan as a vocalist. His baritone, now edging into tenor, becomes, a powerful instrument in its own right. Dylan handles the phrasing like a jazz singer, able to pitch his voice wherever he wants it. An ace performance of the song. (And see, I’ve stopped talking about missing verses.)

1981 London 29^th June.

After the triumphant 1981 tour, which bought to and end four years of touring with back-up singers and big bands, Dylan quit the road until 1984, when he toured with a stripped back band featuring Mick Taylor (guitar), Ian McLagan (keyboards), Greg Sutton (bass), Colin Allen (drums).

It is wonderful to see Dylan returning to a solo, acoustic presentation of ‘Mr T Man’ as he also did with ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ that year. The song is now twenty years old, and Dylan’s performance recalls the early, glory days of the song in 1964/65. He sings it straight and heartfelt, with no embellishments, and the song shines all the better for it. We don’t get the feeling that Dylan is playing it for its nostalgia value, rather re-living the original lure of the song. We may not be young any more, but the desire to escape the ‘crazy sorrow’ of the world doesn’t fade.

This has to be one of my favourite performances.

Dylan did the song some seventeen times that year, but the best must remain the Barcelona performance (June 28^th). And the video is so good I assume it was professionally done for TV. Enjoy!

Dylan did not hit the road again until 1986 when he teamed up with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for the True Confessions tour, which, after a bit of a shaky start (I saw their second concert in Auckland and it hadn’t yet fully cohered), gathered energy and went on to deliver some of the greatest rock performances of all time. That’s another story. ‘Mr T Man’ was only performed six times in that year. I’ve chosen this one from New York, Madison Square Gardens, a performance full of passion and verve. A good recording too, except for a talker who’s too close to the recorder.

I’m not sure if there is a second acoustic guitar in behind Dylan here, but, as with 1984, it’s great to hear the song done acoustically, and with a little touch of madness in the harp break. He ups the tempo too, pushing it along, which adds drive and urgency to it.

You get a bonus with this one, as a beautiful acoustic version of ‘One too Many Mornings’ comes after ‘Mr T Man,’ another song returned to its roots.

1986, New York

Dylan all but abandoned the song in 1987, while touring with Petty’s band. There was a single performance in Arnhem, and it’s there we’ll start with the next in this series.

Until then, travel well,

Kia Ora

False Prophet (2020) part 6

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         The gospel of rock ‘n’ roll

I’m the enemy of treason - the enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life
I ain’t no false prophet - I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go

 “Can you play this, but change it a little bit here?”, the words with which Paul Simon turns General M.D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters’ song “Tekadzovo Undzi Bebula” into “I Know What I Know” will also have been, approximately, the words with which Dylan has his band play Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson’s 1954 “If Lovin’ Is Believin’”. The relatively unknown William Robert Emerson has been indirectly honoured by DJ Dylan on his radio show on one occasion;

“I could do this whole show and play nothing but Sun records, and here’s one of my favorites. It was originally recorded by an R&B singer named Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson.”

… announcing “Red Hot”, thus failing to mention that Emerson also wrote “Red Hot”. The DJ only plays a snippet of that original – to then give way to the childhood hero who won his place in the rock pantheon with “Red Hot”, Billy Lee Riley. And omitting to share fun facts like the noteworthy trivia that Emerson also wrote “When It Rains, It Really Pours”, the song Elvis recorded four times between 1955 and 1968. Or the irresistible “Every Woman I Know (Crazy ‘Bout Automobiles)”, which is on the setlist with Ry Cooder, among others.

“If Lovin’ Is Believin’” is the B-side of Billy Emerson’s first single “No Teasing Around” from 1954 (with Ike Turner as bandleader and guitarist). The differences from “False Prophet” are minimal, as acclaimed musicologist and Dylanologist Eyolf Østrem points out in his wonderful article “False Prophet” vs. “If Lovin’ is Believin’” – Greedy Plagiarism or Lovin’ Recycling?” on his great website Things Twice:

“The recurring riff is copied note for note almost without a change, but also with regards to the sound: the distorted guitar and the parallel melody line in different octaves. The tempo is exactly the same (78.5 bpm) and the swing ratio is indistinguishable (slightly less than 2:1; Emerson maybe closer to a straight 2:1, but it’s hard to tell)”

… Østrem analyses, with written-out musical notation of both songs in evidence. The changes, Østrem says, are limited to a shortening of the riff and of the verse (both two bars less), and at the end of the paragraph “Exhibit G: False Prophet but True Crime?” he is even more unrelenting:

“Dylan and his band copy everything: sound, rhythm, phrasing, key, tempo, swing, chord structure, adding nothing of substance, other than what Dylan always does when he sings.”

So in the end, the only real differences between the two songs are the vocal delivery and – obviously – the lyrics.

Which is not an insignificant difference, of course. But even for that feat we may shift some credit to Billy Emerson, since Dylan, like Paul Simon, seems to be guided by the music when looking for the words to sing. As the opening line of this third verse does illustrate. Content-wise it is empty. I’m the enemy of treason – the enemy of strife to describe a protagonist is as meaningless as, say, I like good things and I don’t like bad things. At least, apart perhaps from Loki, the Nordic god of chaos and lies, and Mars, the god of war, there are not too many “friends of treason” and/or “friends of strife”. Still, the line is a fourteener, as C.S. Lewis would note with satisfaction, of similar length and rhythm to Billy Emerson’s opening line You been so deceivin’, tell me when are you leavin’ or to Emerson’s closing line From there we’d start working on a brand new family tree

Just as empty in content, just as strong rhythmically, but more euphonious is verse line 3, I ain’t no false prophet – I just know what I know. An initial association of most listeners in 2020 is presumably Paul Simon’s “I Know What I Know”, but with the wisdom of hindsight Dylan seems to have been fed again by Awakening Osiris, the poetic translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where in Chapter 64, “The Family”, he puts a tick in the margin at:

“I am a great, yellow, stalking cat—mesmerizer, healer, companion—tender and fierce, a beast of fur that blinks. I know what I know in my body. I hold the rat in my golden gaze. I lick the dust from my kittens.”

Though it’s still more likely that neither one is a source. After all, the word combination is not too distinctive. And not too important for the tenor of the lyrics – which, of course, is determined by the first part of this third verse line, I ain’t no false prophet.

It is a sort of refrain line (it is the only word combination that is repeated, sung three times), as well as the song’s namesake, and for that reason alone the song’s key phrase. Linguistically a godsend for crypto-analysts and nitpickers. The ungrammatical double negation opens the gateway to analyse that the I-person indeed is a false prophet, as he is denying being not a false prophet. But that should be easy to refute; in the blues idiom a double negation has been an amplifier, an intensifier of negation for more than a century now, and has permeated English-language grammar as such anyway, and rock, folk and all other genres since Chaucer. “I ain’t no fortunate son,” for example. Or “ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone”. Motörhead’s Lemmy declares “I ain’t no nice guy,” “I can’t get no satisfaction,” sings some band from London, and thousands of other examples.

A second red line from the schoolmasters has thus also been refuted. After all, the negation, says the language purist, only says what the narrator is not, as opposed to telling what he, in fact, is. Well – yes and no. That same intensifying function does signal that the narrator emphatically states what he is. So Lemmy wishes to point out that he is a bad boy, John Fogerty communicates being an Average Joe, Jagger expresses his sense of alienation. And Dylan’s narrator, if we follow this line of argument, thus then emphatically makes himself known as a true prophet.

A prophet who, as we begin to suspect after Mary Lou, Miss Pearl and the closing line with its ostentatious reference to Roy “Lefty Wilbury” Orbison (“Only The Lonely”, 1960), preaches the gospel of rock ‘n’ roll.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 7: A minstrel collecting words

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

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

The Double Life of Bob Dylan

• Part 1: Let’s ignore creativity. 
• Part 2: On the road to creativity
• Part 3: Getting Noticed
• Part 4: Creativity is a multi-faceted gift
• Part 5: Raging against a masterpiece
• Part 6: Utterly missing the point
• Part 7: The Moral Delinquent
• Part 8: Getting the basic facts wrong
• Part 9: Bringing folk music back home
• Part 10: It’s just a song
• Part 11: How to write a masterpiece

By Tony Attwood

Getting on for half way through “The Double Life of Bob Dylan (page 227 to be exact) Heylin comments on a situation in which Dylan has been recording the “Times they are a changing” album and is told to stop playing another song on the piano because their studio time had run out and another band has booked the studio from that point on.

He comments “So much for Columbia respecting the artistic process”.

The “artistic process” in question is the artist getting a complete recording of each song in a way that he personally feels is satisfactory – and that of course is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  Indeed even more reasonable in 1963, when the cut-and-paste technology that exists now was impossible to imagine.

In those days, what Dylan performed in a single take was what was recorded, there was little else that could be done.  It is the situation that amateur songwriters like me live with even now – I sit at the piano with the music in front of me and generally take about a dozen attempts to record a song with only minimal mistakes.  And my standards are far lower than Dylan’s and those of the record company for recordings that millions of people would hear.  A handful of fluffed lines is about the best I can get, so I live with that.

But the order of the day was that you stayed in the studio for the time you had, and then left.  Yet Heylin protests about the artistic process without making any reference to the norms of the day. And although it may well be true that, “Dylan had just recorded an album that will fill Columbia coffers for the next have century…” as Heylin says, their booking was for a limited amount of time, and besides no one really knew at that moment that this album would be that popular.

However much more oddly than that throughout the volume Heylin specifically makes no allowances for the overlap of the artistic process – or better, I would actually say, in relation to that album and a lot of Dylan’s work, “the process of the artistic genius”

I find this an absolute contradiction.  Individuals in all the arts who have a talent way beyond that of the majority, tend to work each in his/her own way, and have personal traits that do not accord to the norm.  Yet Heylin goes out of his way to point out as many of these as he can find in relation to Dylan.

As I have already tried to explain, this is because most highly gifted artists do not, in my view, having studied a few of them, themselves understand how they are able to produce art which others cannot.  And in fact because of this when they hit a period of “artistic block” as most do, whatever the art form, they have no prescribed or pre-arranged way of getting out of the “block”.  It is not a case of working harder or longer – indeed it is often thought that this is the opposite of what is needed.  For many artists, it is a case of walking away and leaving it.

Indeed this is what Dylan has often done later in his career when he has been dissatisfied with a song.  For myself the way Bob gave up on Caribbean Wind was a tragedy, for it is to my mind a fantastic song – but something in it was not right for him at that moment, and he stopped.  He clearly could not find the way to resolve whatever it was that troubled him about the song.

It is something that is not uncommon with artists – whatever their art form – but although Heylin finds he is able to use a throwaway line such as “So much for Columbia respecting the artistic process!” Heylin mostly refuses to understand the impact the artistic process has on the artist.

Heylin, is annoyed that Dylan criticises a journalist for “just doing his job” but is equally determined to put up his own vision of how an artist should work.  He notes the comments of Newsweek reporter Adrea Svedberg who claimed that he had written “Blowin in the Wind” (which of course was nonsense) but then criticises Dylan for not giving credit to those whose work he has developed, saying “It was time Dylan came clean.”

But the reality with the artistic process is such that much of the time some copying is inevitable.  A writer of songs is surrounded by songs all the time, and unlike the writer of novels, is restricted by issues of length, and the fact that there only two musical scales to write in (major and minor), and a limited number of rhymes for each word.   Dylan broke the mould by writing about subjects (such as equality, oppression, the tricks the night plays, etc) which had not been part of popular music before, and wrote songs that billions of people could relate to, and in so doing would inevitably do what other songwriters had done since the start on songwriting, which is copy existing work to some degree.

That we remember all these songs, and some of us often play them, is because in his combination of music and lyrics, timing and rhythm, accompaniment and phraseology, something different emerged which gave us new insights.

Indeed as Heylin admits on the very next page, “Dylan was becoming a mesmeric performer” and adds that Suze later said , talking about watching from the side of the stage, “I watched and absorbed what was happening. We all sensed a sea change.”

Now of course Dylan was not the only person ever to undergo a sea-change as a performer, but the point here is that Dylan had no one tutoring or coaching in the ways of writing songs, refining them, searching for new ideas, performing on stage, putting a collection of songs together for an album or a stage performance… from all that we know these abilities emerged in him, as part of his creative genius.

And yet when we come to the issue of Dylan getting very upset about an article about himself which was snide and vengeful, Heylin suggests the reporter was “just doing his job” and implies Dylan should not have been angry.   And it is almost with relish that he says “The press wars had begun.”

To me this shows once more, Heylin’s total and absolute lack of understanding of and feeling for the creative artist.  And I want to conclude here by expressing that in another way.

If I were a carpenter, as the song goes, and I created a table which was not even but which had one short leg, my table would be a failure, because of that single factor.  No matter how wonderful the inlays and decorations as a table it would not pass muster.

But as a songwriter, if Dylan created a song that mesmerised a generation, that would be a success.

Now that is all fine, but there is a difference.  The table which stands properly on equal legs succeeds as a table because it fulfils its function.   But although I would argue “Mr Tambourine Man” fulfils its function, I have come across people who really don’t like it, calling it too long, laborious, unclear, meandering and so on.  In short, although I can give reasons why Tambourine Man works, others can argue against that because this song does not have an underlying function in the way a table does.  We might argue about the table’s beauty, but in terms of its function, it either is a table on which we can put things without them falling off, or it is not.

With many songs, and indeed multiple works of art in every artistic mode, there is no underlying concept of “does it work or not?”  For me it works as much now as it did in 1964, but for others it is tedious, repetitive, too long, boring, uninteresting, not something one can listen to etc.

Thus the concept that “The image of a genius is that they don’t copy,” is neither definitive, accurate or the slightest bit interesting.  It is an opinion, nothing more.  A genius in songwriting can copy, and if he can then make the final piece something that moves us far more than the originals from which he copied, then he is a success.

Or take an orchestra playing a Beethoven symphony.  To the naive listener, it may be hard to tell the performance under one conductor from that directed by another.  Yet there are subtle differences, subtle nuances that appear with each maestro’s work.

The person who knows little of classical music might not get the differences between one performance of a Chopin prelude and another, but those who truly listen will see what is going on.   Yet are we to say to each pianist who has laboured to express the genius of Chopin’s work that he can never be a genius performer because someone has already performed that prelude? No of course not.

Likewise, if a genius writer took the notion of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson and wrote a brilliant new story concerning the pair, would that never be called a work of genius, because a genius wouldn’t take two existing characters, but would write his own?

I think this is nonsense, and again shows Heylin not understanding the creative mind.  The creative genius can of course direct his/her mind, but much of the time it is the mind that is directing the genius to who knows where.  And if Dylan creates two songs with the same melody, as we discussed before, does that mean that by definition Dylan is not a genius?

Heylin ends the chapter with relish saying, “The press wars had begun,” and within one page of the start of the next chapter he notes Dylan saying in an interview, “Writing letters.  I just never do that,” and then spends time telling us that he most certainly did write letters as if this is in any way important beyond Heylin showing off.

The simple fact is, I find it very hard if not impossible to think of a genius whose pronouncements about his own working life are consistent.  And even if I could, would it matter that Dylan keeps meandering from the strictest accordance with what happened and what did not?  Or are we now to say that those gorgeous lines

The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off

are Dylan at his worst because they are contradictory, and a true artist never contradicts himself?

Really, I am left thinking, how bonkers do you want to be?

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

——————

In the last couple of months we have published links to recordings of a two complete Dylan concerts which can be found on the internet, just in case you have not found them in your browsing.

Both of these recordings received quite a lot of interest on the site (in terms of the number of visitors each got).   I’m hoping to pick up another concert from the current tour shortly, but in searching around I came across an earlier concert which I really enjoyed revisiting so I thought I would share that.

Certainly for myself I found going back to this complete concert a very interesting contrast with Dylan’s live shows in 2024.

So previously we’ve offered (and of course, they are still there) What Dylan played on 7 July 2024, and how it sounded.   And then after that The concert in full on 3 August 2024.

And thus, now by way of contrast, the “Dylan Down Under” Full Concert Audio Bob Dylan concert in Adelaide, Australia – March 21, 1992

Here is the recording, and below is the song listing…. and if by any chance your view of this is that you have heard it all before, may I direct your attention to 37 minutes 32 seconds: “Little Moses”.   The full track listing is below.

And because you might not know the song here are the lyrics – not exactly as sung by Dylan but there are of course many variations

Away by the waters so blue
The ladies were winding their way
While Pharaoh’s little daughter went down to the water
To bathe in the cool of the day
Before it was dark she opened the ark
And found the sweet babe that was there

And away by the waters so blue
The infant was lonely and sad
She took him in pity and thought him so pretty
And it made little Moses so glad
She called him her own, her beautiful son
And she sent for a nurse who was near

And away by the waters so blue
They carried that beautiful child
To his tender mother, to his sister and brothers
Little Moses looked happy and smiled
His mother so good did all that she could
To raise him and teach him with care

And away by the sea that was red
Little Moses the servant of God
While in him confided, the sea was divided
As upwards he lifted his rod
And the Jews safely crossed while Pharaoh’s host
Was drownded in the waters and lost

And away on a mountain so high
The last that he ever did see
With Israel victorious, his hopes were most glorious
That soon all the Jordan be free
When his spirit did cease, he departed in peace
And rested in the Heavens above

And if you go to the end of the concert you’ll hear information from the people who preserved this audio recording so that we can all enjoy it now.  Here’s the track listing…

• Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)
• 04:27: Most of the Time
• 08:55: All Along the Watchtower
• 12:54: Just Like a Woman
• 18:19: Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
• 25:06: I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
• 28:46: Maggie’s Farm
• 34:16: Love Minus Zero/No Limit
• 37:32: Little Moses
• 42:20: Female Rambling Sailor
• 46:33: Desolation Row
• 51:37: Cat’s in the Well
• 57:01: I’ll Remember You
• 01:01:47: The Times They Are A-Changin’
• 01:09:39: Highway 61 Revisited
• 01:16:24: Ballad of a Thin Man
• 01:22:43: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
• 01:27:42: Blowin’ in the Wind

You’ll notice a second traditional song “Female Rambling Sailor” which follows.  There are of course many versions of this and I can’t find a set of lyrics that match what Dylans sings and nor can I quite make out every line he sings – but if you can, or if you find a link to these actual lyrics please do post them in comments.

And you might like to contrast those two traditional songs with what Dylan does to “Desolation Row” after.

Anyway, I really enjoyed that concert.  Hope you did – I was particularly taken by the concluding performance of “Blowing in the Wind”.   It seemed a perfect way to end the concert.

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

For more details on this series on cover versions of Dylan songs that were not considered in the last series, please see the intro to the first article in this series.  An index to this series is at the end of the article.  A list of all the cover reviews from the previous series can be found at the end of the final article in that series.

Black Crow BLues

By Jürg Lehmann

It is hard to see quite what Dylan was doing here, other than finding another song to fill up the album that had to be recorded fairly quickly…This view that it is a fill-in song is supported by the view of the accompaniment which sounds honky-tonk, on a slightly out of tune piano, with some fairly messy (but as a result interesting) playing, but with some wrong notes and unexpected (but again interesting) variations on the classic blues approach using B instead of B flat on occasion for example.

Like Tony Attwood, Jochen Markhorst also considers Black Crow Blues to be a minor song in Dylan’s catalogue: Dylan did not put a lot of love into this anyway. Around those blues clichés he adds a few technical tricks – here a lazy internal rhyme…, there some alliteration, but compared to the poetic brio of a “To Ramona” or a “Spanish Harlem Incident” it is rather limited, if not trivial. The song has probably been dashed off and selected for Another Side Of for its exceptional nature, for its non-conformism – which seems to be a selection criterion for this multi-coloured album anyway.

Dylan recorded the song in two versions, one with guitar accompaniment, the other with piano (he plays piano for the first time on an official recording). He never plays the song again after those takes. Nor did anyone else for a very long time – except The Silkie, who rushed to cover the song for their album The Silkie Sing the Songs of Bob Dylan in 1965. Unlike the other tracks on the album, Black Crow Blues is not available today – which is a shame, because you’d love to hear The Silkie sing the blues.

In 1992 Peter Case finally recorded a cover for 2 Meter Sessie, an independent Dutch music platform that started in 1987 and recorded over 1,800 sessions for radio, television, Youtube and streaming platforms – including a few Dylan covers, such as a great version of Dignity by Low Anthem. Case released another almost identical Black Crow cover in 2011 and he still performs the song live today. The cult artist of Beatlesque power-pop of the ’90s who became a sort of a folk hero has covered several Dylan songs – Black Crow Blues is not his best, this medal goes to Long Time Gone and even more to This Wheel’s on Fire.

Danish guitarist Per Christian Frost is probably the most famous Danish guitar player. He has been on the field since 1968, best known as a member of the band Gnags, but he has also released 5 solo albums and participated in countless Danish productions. Frost’s last album entitled “The Calling” has received numerous excellent reviews.

Per Christian Frost is particularly known for his massive diversity of genres, he moves elegantly in the intersection between R’n’B, rock, funk, reggae, blues and jazz and The Calling also has an extremely wide musical range and is rich in unrivalled technique. Black Crow Blues is the album opener. Dylan’s original is bearly recognisable with Frost twisting the classic blues into a groovy slice of music with cool rolling rhythms. It is completely unexpected, but what a great surprise!

Per Christian Frost passed away in March 2023. He was 68 years old.

Editor’s footnote: The Silkie’s version does seem to be available on Amazon, but only if you are a subscriber.

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
• Beyond the horizon
• Hollis Brown

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

A list of previous articles in this series is at the foot of the page.

By Tony Attwood

Two songs together in one article in this “lyrics AND music” series – why is that?  Because the music of each song is almost identical.  What’s more, there is a real link to the traditional song “Scarborough Fair,” which Dylan drew upon for aspects of the melody and lyrics of “Girl from the North Country,” including the line from the refrain, “Remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love of mine”.  Ewan McColl first made the song better known to contemporary audiences in 1947.

As a result, Scarborough Fair is, for many English people (and I don’t know about other countries) one of the most famous of all the traditional songs.   And it gained an extra popularity once Simon and Garfunkle used it as the basis for their song “Canticle”.

Girl from the North Country was recorded in 1963, and it opens not on the key-chord of the song but on the chord normally written as VI which is a minor chord.  The recording below from the original album version is in Bb (B flat) and opens with G minor chord which resolves to F and then finally takes us to the key chord of Bb.

This is very unusual for Dylan, although it is a perfectly acceptable way of approaching a song, as it emphasises the sadness (because opening minor chords are generally associated with sadness by tradition, although not for any logical reason).

And of course that minor chord is what is needed to emphasise the sadness of the lyrics.   I mean, “She once was a true love of mine” … you can’t get sadder than that, can you?

Unfortunately, not all websites and printed transcriptions follow what Dylan is actually doing and insist of giving us a major chord at the start and that is not just a mistake, it changes the entire meaning of the music and hence the lyrics.   It suggests musically that everything is ok, when it certainly is not.

A common version of the song as sung in the 18th century reads

"O, where are you going?" "To Scarborough fair,"
    Savoury, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
"Remember me to a lass who lives there,
    For once she was a true love of mine

… and so we can see that Dylan took most of the lyrics as well as the melody.   Of course the original was simply sung, there were no accompanying instruments, so whether one emphasises the minor key or not is a personal choice today, but the melody certainly implies the minor key, from the earliest versions.

However, a number of artists have attempted to take us back to the original version but with a contemporary accompaniment.  This is one I particularly like

However for Bob once was not enough for he went back to the song for “Boots of Spanish Leather.”

Bob credited both Martin Carthy and Bob Davenport with helping him discover and understand the implications of these English folk songs.

And to jump to another issue currently occupying me, it is this sort of re-working of traditions that so annoys Heylin, who appears to find it a form of cheating.   If you are interested in that particular line of argument you might be interested in the evolving series “The Double Life of Bob Dylan”.   At the moment of writing this  article, I’m up to episode 11 but as long as the series keeps going it will be highlighted on the home page.

Here’s a list of the other songs included in this series….

• A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall. 
• Abandoned Love
• All along the watchtower
• Angelina
• Ballad for a Friend
• Beyond here lies nothing
• Blind Willie McTell
• Black Diamond Bay
• Can you please crawl out your window
• Caribbean Wind – Dylan’s musical exploration of evolving uncertainty
• Chimes of Freedom
• Cold Irons Bound
• Cover Down Pray Through
• Dark Eyes
• Desolation Row
• Drifter’s Escape
• Don’t think twice it’s all right.
• Early Roman Kings
• Every grain of sand
• Everything is broken
• False Prophet
• Foot of pride
• Gates of Eden
• Goodbye Jimmy Reed, and the 13 bar blues
• High Water, a rise, a fall, a bounce, a flood
• Highway 61 Revisited
• I believe in you
• “I Want You”. It was never meant to be like this.
• Idiot wind
• If not for you
• It takes a lot to laugh
• It’s all over now baby blue
• It’s all right ma: life really is ok despite everything.
• Isis
• It ain’t me babe
• Jokerman
• Just like a woman
• Key West
• Lenny Bruce is Dead
• Love Sick
• Man in the Long Black Coat
• Masters of War
• Mississippi
• Not Dark Yet
• One too many mornings
• She Belongs to Me
• Shelter from the Storm
• Simple Twist of Fate
• Sign on the window
• Tangled up in blue
• Tombstone Blues
• The Wicked Messenger
•  Yonder Comes Sin

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

Once or twice: A review of some of the songs that Bob has performed just once or twice on stage, selecting those of which we have a genuine recording (and “genuine” is important here since I have found a few sites that seem to suggest they are a recording of a live version, but I have my doubts.)  Text and video selection by Tony Attwood.

————–

The official Bob Dylan website has Dylan having recorded 705 songs – although of course not all were written by him.  About 46% of these have never been performed in public – or at least never performed in a way that is recognised on the official site.  77 have been performed once or twice, and we have been looking at a few of these (18 of these so far to be exact).

And (for me if no one else) they do make an interesting list, these once or twice songs.   Restless Farewell for example, from “Times they are a changin'” was played on 17 May 1964 and 21 May 1998.  It comes from one of his best-known albums and was the song requested specifically by Frank Sinatra when Bob played at his 1995 concert.  “Roll on John” is another magnificent work, but it was given just the two outings for very particular reasons, as you can read in the review.

So what about “Blood in my eyes”?  At  the moment I can only find one of the two performances (16 and 17 November 19, but in this case, given that the song was performed on consecutive days, I suspect the performance was similar on both days.  This is the second performance.

So why would Bob then drop this song?   Quite simply I have no idea.  I am not trying to argue that this is a fantastic performance – but it is very enjoyable and we all know how Bob has been able to take such a start and then go on and develop it further over time.

And after listening to that live performance it is interesting to go back to the album

This then leads me to the thought that maybe Bob felt that the extraordinary feeling he created in that solo version was completely lost in the live performances and, perhaps he valued the power and direction of the album version and didn’t want it tampered with.

Certainly the lyrics are utterly amazing – not in the normal way that we speak about Dylan’s incredible lyrics on songs like “Visions” but amazing in the simplicity of the lyrics.  There are five verses but in each case just two of the lines are original, with the remaining four lines are a repeated chorus.

The magic of the song comes from the fact that such limited lyrical material makes such a fantastic and fascinating track.  Leaving aside the chorus which includes the line “I got blood in my eyes for you,” three times, what we have is

Woke up this morning, feeling blue,
Seen a good-lookin' girl, can I make love with you?

I went back home, put on my tie,
Gonna get that girl that money that money will buy.

She looked at me, begin to smile,
Said, "Hey, hey, man, can't you wait a little while?"

No, no, ma'ma, I can't wait,
You got my money, now you're trying to break this date.

I tell you something, tell you the facts,
You don't want me, give my money back.

And maybe in the end Bob just thought that this was not enough for a song, or I think perhaps more to the point, that by putting the band and the bounce into the song, although the result is very enjoyable, maybe there is just not enough to carry the song through.

But even so, I am so glad we have got at least one live version of the song.  Yes I lose the message in the live version, but I just love the sound.

In the same series….

• A satisfied mind
• Caribbean Wind
• Corina Corina
• The Girl on the Greenbriar Shore
• Highway 51 revisited
• Lay Down your weary tune
• Lily, Rosemary and Stage Fright
• Meet me in the morning and From a Buick 6
• North Country Blues
• Only a hobo
• Oxford Town
• Restless Farewell
• Roll on John
• Sally Sue Brown
• Spanish Harlem Incident
• Stage Fright
• Talking New York
• You Angel You

False Prophet (2020) part 5

by Jochen Markhorst

V          Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken

I’m the enemy of treason - the enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life
I ain’t no false prophet - I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go

 On the poetic power of Paul Simon’s lyrics we can probably all agree. Like Dylan, he has a special talent for writing verses, couplets, entire lyrics even where he manages to hold the Holy Trinity of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason. He, like Dylan, masters the art of moving with narrative songs (“A Most Peculiar Man”), and he distinguishes himself with the quality of the Very Great: articulating the wordless. “Hello darkness my old friend.” “All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.” Pure, majestic lyricism, both eloquent and profound – and these are just three examples. Simon’s 60-year-old oeuvre offers hundreds of such hits.

Leading, as with Dylan, is the sound, but beyond that Rhymin’ Simon doesn’t know how it works either. When Paul Zollo asks about it in his American Songwriter series (2011, updated in 2023), Simon’s first reflex is: it’s a mystery. “I really can’t explain it.” Where the songs come from and what the lyrics mean is and remains a mystery to himself:

“I really don’t know. I really don’t know what exactly all the songs mean. Sometimes other people have meanings and when I hear them, I think, “That’s really a better meaning than I thought and perfectly valid given the words that exist.” So part of what makes a song really good is that people take in different meanings, and they apply them and they might be more powerful than the ones I’m thinking.”

Which is exactly the same reflex as Dylan has, almost identically worded even: “I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good.* And you want your songs to sound good” (Nobel Prize lecture, 2017). And like Dylan, Simon can brood for years on a good phrase, on a beautiful image or an exciting word combination before finding a place for it in a song. “I had the title very early,” he tells about So Beautiful or So What (2011). “Way before, years before I had that song. I had written down a sentence, Everything is either so beautiful or so what.” And the creation of one of his Great Masterpieces, the song “Graceland”, illustrates how Simon arrives step by step at that trinity of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason. Driving through Wasteland it was at first, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s 1922 pièce de résistance The Waste Land, one phrase out of many on the estimated 50 pages in his yellow legal pad filled with sentence fragments, images and word combinations that will eventually be forged into songs on the album Graceland (1986). Simon leafs through it, and…

“…all at once Paul hit upon the single sentence, or half a sentence, that pulled everything together. It was a simple but profound change. Not “driving through Wasteland.” Going to Graceland. That was it. Now he understood that the idea of a physical journey had been the right one to search for the roots of the music he loved best, but the spiritual direction was wrong. Not Africa. Memphis.”
(Marc Eliot, Paul Simon: A Life, 2010)

In the fascinating documentary Under African Skies (BBC, 2012), Simon tells it slightly differently, but the thrust remains: Simon thematises the same as Dylan in “False Prophet”: rock ‘n’ roll as a metaphor for the path to enlightenment, to the state of grace, and the prophets who show us that path are Elvis, Mary Lou, Miss Pearl and Roy Orbison.

In the documentary, Simon goes into detail about the creation of those songs on Graceland. Political, explicit criticism of racism and apartheid was explicitly not the intention, he says. “I thought about writing political songs about the situation,” he says, “but I’m not actually very good at it.” A conversation with the pioneer of Xitsonga music General Sherinda reassures him on that front. Simon asks what the song he wants to copy, sung in Zulu, is actually about. “Well, you know it’s about… remember the 60s when the girls wore really short skirts? Wasn’t that great?” replies Sherinda. Ah, Paul sighs in relief. They don’t make political music either. It’s pop music. Twenty-five years later, at the reunion in South Africa, he asks guitarist Ray Phiri what the second verse meant again. The first one was something with mini skirts. And the second? Something about a chicken, right?

Ray Phiri: “Oh, the other one, it says… it means slaughter an owl, because there’s no chicken, and you cut the head and throw it away. The body will look like a chicken, so don’t worry. We will eat that in the train [laughs].
Paul Simon: “We will eat that in the train. It’ll look like a chicken. Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken. And then, you know – nobody will know. We’ll eat it on the train [laughs]. That’s what it meant.”

The content, Simon implies, is not too important. More important is that it sounds good, he seeks words “that would sync to the tracks and tell a clever story in the process”;

“Lyrics like don’t I know you from the cinematographer’s party were written not just to tell a story, but to carefully scan with the rhythms.”

The example with the cinematographer’s party comes from the song that arises when Paul hears a song by General M.D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters. “I could point to their record and say, ‘can you play this, but change it a little bit here?’” He is talking about the third track on Side A, the song after “The Boy In The Bubble” and “Graceland”: the brilliant, bouncy pop gem “I Know What I Know”, with its catchy, zingy, meaningless chorus

I know what I know
I’ll sing what I said
We come and we go
That’s a thing that I keep
In the back of my head

Paul’s template seems to be the song “Tekadzovo Undzi Bebula”, although “He Mdjadji” is just as similar, both by Mkhatshani Daniel Shirinda, General Shirinda. With both songs, at least, it is quite traceable that Simon in South Africa said: “Can you play this, but change it a little bit here?” Back in New York, it took “an extraordinarily long time to write the lyrics,” in which case he followed the rhythm and number of syllables of the original lyrics, and approximated the sound. Which turned out to be quite a task. “He went out and tried desperately to put words to each one,” recalls producer Roy Halee in the same documentary, “and he did. And he slaved at it. And it was awfully hard. Because there’s so much going on in those tracks. You know, they are very busy tracks.” It took a while, Simon explains, before I understood that I had to follow the bass, and not the “different symmetry” of the guitar. “So I ended up writing abstract or ironic or… but in either case sort of sophisticated lyrics to what were sophisticated rhythms.”

An approach, anyway, that Dylan seems to be copying for Rough And Rowdy Ways in general, so also for “False Prophet”, and for this third verse in particular…

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*Editor’s note: As you may have seen, this is the phrase also chosen as our headline on the home page of this site.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 5: The gospel of rock ‘n’ roll

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

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

The Double Life of Bob Dylan

• Part 1: Let’s ignore creativity. 
• Part 2: On the road to creativity
• Part 3: Getting Noticed
• Part 4: Creativity is a multi-faceted gift
• Part 5: Raging against a masterpiece
• Part 6: Utterly missing the point
• Part 7: The Moral Delinquent
• Part 8: Getting the basic facts wrong
• Part 9: Bringing folk music back home
• Part 10: It’s just a song

By Tony Attwood

Heylin, in “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” has a chapter called “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy” – a quote of course from “The Life of Brian” movie (although I am not sure Heylin actually acknowledges that; he probably assumes his readers watch the same films as he does).

But that raises the question, how do we define naughtiness?   In most families, naughtiness is, in fact, defined by parents as they go along and basically incorporates the child doing things that the parents don’t want the child to do, either because they assume the child knows what is right and what is wrong, or have expressly told the child not to do a specific thing.

And, although it is true that certainly in my country (and I suspect many other western countries) many parents will often agree what is “naughty” and what is not, there is also an awareness that not everyone agrees what is naughty.   Thus some for example may value creative thinking while others focus on obeying rules without question.

Sadly, Heylin doesn’t face this issue, and so for him, taking the melody, or lyrics from an acient folk song and then reusing this in part or whole for a new tune is Dylan being a “very naughty boy”.   And yet it has been the essence of the folk tradition for centuries.

What’s more (and again Heylin doesn’t seem to get this) something like half of all pop and rock songs are based around the same chord structure, using chords I, IV and V from the major scale.  And more than that, using them in the same order, most notably in what we call the “12 bar blues” format.   So Heylin sees Dylan using the melody of the Patriot Game for “With God on our Side,” as some sort of crime, rather than being the essence of how folk music works.

Except that what Heylin either doesn’t know or at this moment conveniently forgets (and if I may say, if he doesn’t know, he really, really should not be writing a book about Dylan’s early career in which folk music played such a central part) is that “The Patriot Game” is (and here I will quote Wikipedia, which I am sure Heylin must have heard about) “an Irish ballad with lyrics by Dominic Behan and a melody from the traditional tune “One Morning in May”.    (Other more detailed reports of the origins of English folk songs are available on the internet).

The earliest versions of One Morning in May come from the late 1600s and it existed in many different parts of England at that point.  It was also often called “The Nightingale”.

Now if you are not well versed in English folk music from 400 years ago you might listen to this version below and think “that’s nothing like God on Our Side” but in fact although it is sung at a much faster speed the essence of the song’s construction is the same, and of course due to the lack of reliable tape machines in the 17th century no one actually knows what speed it was sung at.

Try this…

The chord sequence is somewhat different, but of course they didn’t have chord sequences in those days, because there were no instruments that could play chords – chords came into use with Baroque music in the late17th century through different melodies being played at the same time, but the only chordal instruments at first were the very primitive church organs.  Before then it was all just a vocal line and some rhythm.

So when Heylin says Bob “was obliged to admit he was using the same tune an earlier workshop performer, Jean Redpath, had employed for “The Patriot Game”, and this was possibly why “Dylan refrained from performing “Masters of War,” Heylin is as ever giving us a shorthand version of reality.  This was one of the oldest English folk songs, for which there was no chord sequence, but just a melody and lyrics.  Lots of composers had used it over the past 400 years.   It’s a shame Heylin missed that.

Interestingly Heylin on the same page also refers to Dylan as the “upstart crow” – another phrase that I suspect he throws in without actually understanding it’s meaning.  Indeed for if he did understand he would surely never use it, given the way he knocks Dylan for copying.  Allow me a moment to explain…

“An upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”, is a line from Robert Greene in his work “A Groats Worth of Wit”  written in the late 16th century, in which he criticises the work of William Shakespeare who was then an up and coming playwright and thus a rival of (and already in many people’s eyes a rival to) the established Robert Greene.

And how ironic it is that Heylin, probably inadvertently (although of course I can’t be sure how much he knows about the evolution of English literature even though it is a contemporary writer of English literature that he is contemplating in his 1000 or so page work) is using a phrase to criticise William Shakespeare when criticising Bob Dylan.  Ironic not just because both were exceptional writers of their day (and I am not trying to compare Shakespeare with Dylan here) but because both borrowed extensively from the work of others.

But to be clear on this point (because I suspect Heylin doesn’t really know too much about this sort of thing, and you might be interested) I am not saying Dylan is the new Shakespeare.  Shakespeare for example invented words and phrases in a way that I don’t think Dylan has ever done.  “All the world’s a stage” is one of the most famous inventions of Shakespeare, as is “Brave New World”.   And then so are words like “Bedazzled” and “Critic”.  Indeed in relation to Heylin I might at this point be tempted to say “Good riddance” which first turned up in Troilus and Cressida.

Indeed, quite possibly when looking at some of Dylan’s more convoluted lyrics Heylin might even be tempted to say, “It’s all Greek to me” (although of course I don’t know if that phrase is widely used outside of the UK, where I live, but most English people will know it).  That turns up for the first time in Julius Caesar.

Anyway, what we can gather is that Heylin doesn’t seem to know his Shakespeare, any more than he knows too much about the origins of folk music in the Western world.  But this never stops him from criticising any and every aspect of Dylan’s work and life – even down to the way he looked, “in tattered jeans and a black jacket three months on the far side of a haircut.”

And of course it is not just Dylan who gets Heylin’s ire.  Joan Baez gets put down for promoting Dylan’s songs.  And as for those songs, do not ever dare to think that they came out of Bob’s deep thinking and analytical view of the society into which he had been born.  “When the ship comes in” was written (seemingly, according to Heylin) following an argument “with a hotel clerk… over Dylan’s shabby attire.” (Although quite how Heylin knows that this was a cause and effect, we are not told).

But perhaps the biggest of all the problems we have within Heylin is that for him, everything has to have a meaning and an explanation.  So where Dylan has an interest in seeing somewhere he once worked, this isn’t just nostalgia, it is something that “continued to bother him”.

And this for me is where Heylin really does get the human psyche wrong – and if you will stay with me for a moment I’d like to give another simple example from my own life.

I lived in London until the age of 11 when the family moved 150 miles away to the country.  Many, many years later I found myself with time to spare and in the part of the city where I was brought up, and I parked my car and did the walk I did each day as a child to and from school.  Then I just stood at the gates of the school looking at the playground for the first time since I left the school, and found myself crying.  Not from sadness but from the overwhelming emotions that were roused by seeing this place, still a school, still looking much the same as it was as a child some 55 years later.  I had the complete flashback experience and it was overwhelming.

Now I don’t think there is anything wrong with my doing that, nor the emotions that suddenly overwhelmed me as I tried to put my life from the age of 11 onwards into context and perspective.  And I can fully appreciate Dylan going back to where he worked as a “nobody” and now was looking on as a famous singer-songwriter.   But, it seems, Heylin doesn’t get emotion – which must be partly why, of course, he doesn’t get Dylan.

To Heylin, everything seems to have a meaning – but that’s not right: some things are just emotional.  And emotions are absolutely not logical and thus don’t always have meaning.

The point is, we are the sum of our experiences, although some people do turn away from their past more than others and try to create life anew.  And this “sum of experiences” then gives us our approach to the world.   If Dylan were to have become a historian, he would have been interested in exactly what happened at various times.  But he didn’t, he became a singer-songwriter, and so he plays with reality, as all poets do, and we are entertained.

Yet Heylin says of Dylan. time and again, phrases such as “the facts of the case were yet again as chaff blowing in the wind”.  Quite possibly so, because Dylan is a songwriter, not a historian, and I find myself asking “How on earth could Heylin miss this fundamental point?”  (And why does he make the same point over and over again?)

So when Heylin considers the cane that Zantzinger was carrying, as he sings the song about Hattie Carroll, he (Heylin) gets very worked up about the fact that it was a hollow toy cane, not the cane Dylan describes.   And to my mind this is as irrelevant a fact as is the way Shakespeare portrayed Richard III as a hunchback.  We know the king was not, but do we ceaselessly drone on and on about Shakespeare getting it wrong?  No, at least not in the books that I have read.  (Although I suppose if Heylin were writing about Shakespeare, he probably would).

And to be clear I am not comparing Dylan to Shakespeare (and I do know a little about Shakespeare, not just from school, but because I happen to live about one hour’s drive from Stratford on Avon, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and have had much pleasure in watching productions there), but rather pointing out that our greatest playwright of all time, played with the facts just as much as Bob Dylan.   It is what playwrights and songwriters do, and it is quite amazing that Heylin hasn’t got that.  (It is of course possible that Heylin has watched some of Shakespeare’s historical plays and taken them to be truthful representations of the past – which would be really spooky).

So when Heylin writes, (and I quote exactly) “What he [Zantzinger] was to Dylan’s closed mind, was guilty”, it is Heylin who actually has to accept the guilt, for it is Heylin who is guilty of failing to understand the nature of poetic lyrics in a song.  Songs are not about truth, they are expressions of the world from an emotional point of view.  A song that was utterly factual would be horribly boring, and of no interest to anyone (although if Heylin wrote songs those would probably be the songs he would write).

Thus Heylin’s statement that “the facts of the case were yet again as chaff blowing in the wind” says far more about Heylin than about Bob Dylan.  In the end all one can say is “IT’S A SONG Mr HEYLIN, IT’S NOT BIOGRAPHY”.  Just as many novels use real-world situations in a fictional way.  I thought he might have got that.

Indeed to suggest, as he does, that Dylan had then or indeed any other time “a closed mind” is probably the most ludicrous statement I have ever read about Bob Dylan.

In fact, to understand Heylin fully we need really look no further than page 225 where he writes that Dylan “preferred jabbing listeners in the ribs with a near-lethal dose of moralizing”.   In reality, Dylan, like so many artists before him, was doing what artists generally do.  He was showing us the world from a different viewpoint.

I suppose in his own defence, Heylin could say he was doing the same, but he does so in a book that seems to proclaim itself as a truthful representation of the facts, whereas in reality, it is an interpretation of what happened; an interpretation that seems for much of the time to forget or ignore how creative people work, and what art actually is.

In fact Heylin sees the work of composing and recording songs as mechanical – a fact that can be gleaned from his statement that having recorded one set of songs, he went back to the studio the next day “convinced that he’d wasted almost a whole afternoon at Studio A.”

What Heylin seems to fail to get is that writing and re-writing in the studio was what Dylan did.  Indeed in the early days it was the producer that was getting Dylan to try songs over and over.  Now it was Dylan who was doing it.

Here’s the simple fact: in the early days of writing a song, and then learning how to perform it, no two versions are ever the same.  (Indeed the same is true of an orchestra rehearsing a Beethoven symphony in order to perform it or record it.   There is a lot of going forward and back to get it right.)

One can only assume that Heylin just writes his books and never goes back to re-think what he has said – and thus expects other people to do the same when creating artistic works.  And in fact, now I come to think of it, I suspect that might well be exactly how Heylin writes.  It would certainly explain a few things.

The series continues