For more details on this new 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.
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By Jurg Lehmann
Billy 1? Billy 4? Billy 7? Most cover artists don’t care. They just mix the lyrics of the three versions, as did American singer and guitarist Billy Goodman, who was the first to tackle Billy in 1998 – 25 years after its release. Goodman started playing professionally at the age of 13, and along the way he has played with such rock legends as Jorma Kaukonen of Hot Tuna, Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and Dave Mason from Traffic. Goodman’s Billy is dutiful and correct, it’s his slide playing that makes the song a little bit special – and you may like the siren whistle in the distance, if you have a sense for the strange.
He stood out, said Bob Dylan. His voice and presentation ought to have gotten him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by now.
Willy DeVille’s fans included not just Dylan: Neil Young and Tom Petty and many others paid tribute to the one of the “very few who got it right; he understood what made a three-minute song great, and why it mattered—because it mattered to him, enthuses Thom Jurek and remarks self-critically: He lived and died with the audience in his shows, and he gave them something to remember when they left the theater, because he meant every single word of every song as he performed it. Europeans like that. In this jingoistic age of American pride, perhaps we can revisit our own true love of rock and roll by discovering Willy DeVille for the first time—or, at the very least, remember him for what he really was: an American original. The mythos and pathos in his songs, his voice, and his performances were born in these streets and cities and then given to the world who appreciated him much more than we did.”
Being inducted into the Hall of Fame was probably the least of deVille’s worries at the time he started performing Billy. At the turn of the century he was living in New Mexico and had just cured his two-decades-long addiction to heroin when his wife Lisa committed suicide by hanging. In his despair Willy caused a car accident, for the next five years, he walked with a cane and performed sitting on a barstool. DeVille’s stay in the Southwest awakened his interest in his Native American heritage. On his next album Crow Jane Alley he explored Spanish-Americana sounds and featured many prominent Los Angeles Latino musicians. It was in those years when he regularly performed Billy. We got several live recordings of concerts all over Europe, from 2000 until 2008, a few months before DeVille’s death. Here are the Stockhom concert from 2002 and the performance with Jan Akkerman in Harderwijk in 2008 – both make clear what a great performer Willy DeVille was.
These are all decent recordings, but they are not very exciting. Two stand out a bit: Suzie Ungerleider (2007), who at the beginning of her career had decided to perform under the name Oh Susanna, alluding to the classic American folk song “Oh! Susanna“, rather than her given name as a means of keeping her private and professional lives separate.
It took her 25 years to find out about the complicated racial history of the song “Oh! Susanna”, but then, in 2021, she announced that she was retiring the Oh Susanna stage name. Under whatever name, her Billy is a fine rendition, as is that by Gretchen Peter and Tom Russell (2009), the Man From God Knows Where.
Come up on stage Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (2009) and now things get really exciting. Their live duet of Billy is truly exquisite, with subtle vocal harmonies and Rawling’s masterful fingerpicking. Their sparse musical style, which combines elements of Appalachian music, bluegrass, country and Americana, is described by The New Yorker as at once innovative and reminiscent of past rural forms. Welch and Rawlings have collaborated on several critically acclaimed albums, their All the Good Times received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album in 2021. Over the years, they have covered numerous Dylan songs, Billy is definitely one of their best.
Can it get any better? Well, not for the next 10 years. Again, there’s no shortage of Billy covers, but none of them do I really need to listen to more than once or twice (perhaps with the exception of Les Shelleys):
Well away from any publicity in the English-speaking world, the album Bienvenido a los 90 was released in Spain in 2019. Bienvenidos a los 90 is a podcast by Spanish radio presenter Roberto Martinez that has been running for more than ten years and has become a sort of a cultural institution in Madrid. In 2019, a Dylan special was released as an album with a few really interesting songs. Among them a cover of To Fall in Love With You, which is probably the only version of this song that has ever been officially released on an album. The performer is Ricardo Lezón.
Dylan recorded To Fall in Love With You for the film Hearts Of Fire in London in August 1986. Dylan dropped the song, considered by many to be a potential masterpiece, for unknown reasons. Hearts of Fire performed poorly in cinemas and was shelved due to the negative reviews for the film. Dylan’s song is clearly unfinished – on the only recording that exists, you can’t even make out the exact lyrics. So it is not surprising that no recognised musician has dared to tackle the song to this day. Ricardo Lezón has probably not been noticed because his song is in Spanish. The only other covers I know of are a live performance at the Bath Festival in 2017 and a YouTube post by two young women from 2022.
Back to Billy. And Tucho and Sofia Buckingham. It is not that easy to find out anything significant about them, although they are not unknown in Spain. Sofia Buckingham was born in Madrid. As a kid she often spent her vacations in the U.S and she lived in England from the age of fourteen until she was sixteen. That’s when she started writing songs. In 2017, she released her first studio album ‘Mistakes at 2am’, which can be found on all the usual streaming platforms.
Singer/songwriter Toño Villar (‘Tucho’) is a musician from Salamanca who lives in Madrid since 2006. For several years he was the singer of the band Lex Makoto, until its dissolution in 2012. It was then that he began to listen to more folk and Americana. In 2017 and 2018 he did two solo tours in the US and then decided to lock himself away in Madrid’s Metropol Studios for his first album “Tucho”.
Tucho & Sofia Buckingham’s duet is a very fine Billy cover. The simplicity with which the two voices deliver and the harmonies between the male and female voice are impeccable, as is the accompaniment. I could do without Sofia’s voice leap at the end of the song, but let’s not quibble.
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.
Today it is the turn of the Ballad of Hollis Brown, which was performed 211 times between 1962 and 2012. This first recording is actually not from the Tour series (since it comes from before the Tour began), but it is in my files so here we go: five minutes of a singular message about the way our societies work, all based on one chord.
1974
So let us now leap forward and see what Bob had done with the song 15 years later on the Tour itself… and what we we find is that the very familiar chord backing is there, except after about half a minute we have a backing that is nothing like we have ever heard before. Indeed I am sure that if you just heard that backing without the vocals you might be hard-pressed to know what song this was.
Of course that can’t be it forever, and just before the two minute mark everything takes off – although it turns out only to be an intermission.
I must say I love this adaptation, even knowing every nuance of the lyrics as of course we all do, from the songs of this early period – and when the music does finally explode after the three minute mark it is like a glorious release of all that tension.
And yet Dylan still manages to take us down again.
It is not complicated stuff, but it is so easy to get this wrong just by taking a song up and down, but Dylan holds on to the tricks – for example not having the descending bass line come in until after the fourth minute. It’s a magical arrangement.
Moving on to 1996 the arrangement changes again as we would expect – although interestingly, although Dylan loves to change the key he performs other songs in, we seem always to be standing in the same key – presumably because of the open tuning of the guitar specifically for this piece.
The speed has gone down now but as ever, despite the fact there are no chord changes and that each verse has only two lines (with of course the first one repeated), it still holds my interest, I still want to hear more. This time we get Bob (it has to be Bob no one else plays that way) adding a guitar part to the instrumental sections.
Also, there is almost a bounce to the song, which I don’t think has ever been there before… and we are getting on for a seven-minute performance. I really must say I am awe of how Bob and the band holds this together – and for once I feel that guitar accompaniment really works.
And now jumping forward another eight years Bob has changed his voice considerably, seeking to reflect the lyrics more in the way he delivers the song in a new rhythm so that there is a counterpart between the rhythm of the lyrics and the rhythm of the guitars… plus the haunting sound effects that emerge from time to time.
Listening to this performance explains fully how Bob could keep this song which is so simple both musically and lyrically, in the repertoire, for so long.
In fact this was the model on which performances of the song were based from here on, as we enter the period in which Bob’s voice begins to creak somewhat. Over the years however there are still some more amendments and evolutions and I do think it is worth listening to the last outing that we have from the NET series – this being very close to the final airing that the song got.
The power of this utterly simple song, with its clear message concerning the way our societies work, is undiminished all these years later. I am, I have to confess, as much moved now as was way back when I first heard the piece.
IV Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many troubles
Hello Mary Lou - Hello Miss Pearl
My fleet-footed guides from the underworld
No stars in the sky shine brighter than you
You girls mean business and I do too
Tangible, identifiable influences of Homer on Dylan’s songs we have heard since the late 20th century, ever since Robert Fagles’ brilliant 1996 translation of The Odyssey. Initially in not too remarkable, undylanesque idioms where you can still think of coincidence (such as torn and tattered in “Can’t Wait” or true to life in “Red River Shore”), but at the latest since 2012, since Tempest, it’s irrefutable: Dylan copies entire sentences to his songs. They hauled your ship up on the shore and You been cooped up on an island far too long in “Roll On John”, for example, and I’ll lead you there myself at the break of day in “Duquesne Whistle”, up to even two consecutive lines as in “Early Roman Kings” (I’ll strip you of life, strip you of breath / Ship you down to the house of death).
And on Rough And Rowdy Ways in 2020 Homer, both the classic translations and Fagles’ retranslation, after nearly a quarter of a century of providing idiom and verse, seems to be slowly permeating Dylan’s style as well. Idioms we still see as well, of course. The painted wagon in “Crossing The Rubicon”, for instance, and the words with which Odysseus in Book XIX warns his old nurse Eurycleia not to betray him, “Or else, I warn you-and I mean business too”, we hear again in this second verse of “False Prophet”. But in a distich, as My fleet-footed guides from the underworld / No stars in the sky shine brighter than you now also sound Homeric stylistic features such as long comparisons and the peculiarity of naming characters with a compound adjective. Pallas Athena is almost always called “bright-eyed Athena”, or else “the bright-eyed goddess”, Hector is always “brazen-armed”, Menelaus “fair-haired” and Achilles, to return to Dylan, is nine times out of 10 referred to as “fleet-footed Achilles” (25 times in Lang’s translation, to be precise. And almost every time as “fleet-footed noble Achilles”).
It also seems to influence the choice of words in the setting description. We were already in the underworld thanks to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which apparently leads the flow of thought to the Greek underworld, to the fleet-footed god Hermes, the guide who leads the dead to, and Odysseus from the underworld;
“Why, he sent me down here once, to retrieve the hound that guards the dead—no harder task for me, he thought — but I dragged the great beast up from the underworld to earth and Hermes and gleaming-eyed Athena blazed the way!”
Even more remarkable than these stylistic quirks is the content. The narrator is led out of the underworld by two archetypal rock ‘n’ roll heroines – the suggestion being that he lived in a dark hell before 1956, and is then brought to the light by the fleet-footed, unearthly bright shining Mary Lou and Miss Pearl. Opening the gate to draw biographical lines from this narrator to Dylan:
“It was like I had been in the dark and someone had turned on the main switch of a lightning conductor.”
(Chronicles, Ch. 5, “River Of Ice”)
… an image Dylan uses more than once to describe the crushing impact music in general, and specific songs and/or artists have had on him:
“And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated.”
(Nobel Lecture, 2017)
In the first case, in Chronicles, about Woody Guthrie; in the Nobel Prize lecture about Leadbelly’s “Cottonfields”. And in 2022, in The Philosophy Of Modern Song, the image still has as much eloquence for Dylan when he wants to characterise the songs of Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong in Chapter 17, on The Temptations’ “Ball Of Confusion”:
“They look into the darkness and shine the light. And then they move on and shine the light into a different darkness. But it’s always darkness because you can’t shine a light into the light. They’re not preachers.”
Incidentally, with that last addition, They’re not preachers, we suddenly have a bridge to “False Prophet”. Not a tight, straight bridge, but still. Preachers, Dylan argues indirectly, bring light into the light. Great songwriters, on the other hand, bring light into darkness, drive out darkness in other words. In this second stanza of “False Prophet”, the listener may not yet know that we are listening to a first-person narrator who will hereafter declare three times that he is not a false prophet, but we already get a semi-religious hint; this narrator is someone who is led from the underworld to the light by luminous rock ‘n’ roll icons. And the closing line also insinuates that music is gospel: while the phrase “to mean business” seems to have come to Dylan the song poet via Fagles’ Odyssey, Dylan also uses it elsewhere to express something like “producing exceptional music”:
“With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business.”
… when the autobiographer Dylan tries to articulate Roy Orbison’s exceptionalism (Chronicles Chapter 1, “The Lost Land”), whom we, by chance or by design, shall encounter in the next verse. And in which that peculiar It was all about fat and blood seems like another Homer echo as well; we really only know the word combination “fat and blood” from The Odyssey, after all. With Fagles, the combination comes along three times, including in yet another of those long, Homeric comparisons:
“But he himself kept tossing, turning,
intent as a cook before some white-hot blazing fire
who rolls his sizzling sausage back and forth,
packed with fat and blood—keen to broil it quickly.”
(Book XX, "Portents Gather")
In short, the Muse who sang to Homer around 800 BC about the troubled man driven time and again off course after destroying the hallowed heights of Troy has found a new disciple 29 centuries later. Whose songs we are bound to keep singing too, for the next 29 centuries.
To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 5: Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken
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:
A list of previous articles in this series is at the foot of the page.
By Tony Attwood
“She Belongs to me” from “Bringing it all back home” was played live 491 times between 1965 and 2016. It is a song that many Dylan fans can immediately hear in their heads because it is, at least on the surface, so simple.
It is in fact a classic 12 bar blues, using just three chords and two lines of music per verse, with the first line repeated. Musically it is just the third line of each verse which is unexpected, introducing a minor chord.
But even so with the extra chord, the music itself is very simple, and the lyrics contain only two lines per verse. So what makes it such a superb piece of music?
The answer is that there is a beautiful set of contradictions in the song. Musically that final line of each verse is not what we expect, leading as it does with a minor chord. And lyrically, with that line Bob does something else unexpected. In verse one for example that minor chord accompanies
She can take the dark out of the nighttime And paint the daytime black
In the second verse the trick is repeated but with even more uncertainty in terms of what we are actually listening to…
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole Down upon your knees
The point is we all know the format of 12 bar blues songs, even if we don’t know anything about music – because we have heard millions of them. The first two lines of this song are exactly as we expect and they are full of “her” virtues…
She never stumbles, she's got no place to fall She never stumbles, she's got no place to fall
But that third line is always unexpected – both musically and lyrically.
She's nobody's child, the law can't touch her at all
All the confusion comes in that last line, and although having heard the song so many times we are not really confused any more there is still that little something. For example with the verse…
She wears an Egyptian ring, it sparkles before she speaks She wears an Egyptian ring, it sparkles before she speaks She's a hypnotist collector, you are a walking antique
the opening line (repeated) tells us that she looks good and sounds good. And yes, we have got this idea now. But then with the two slightly unexpected chords of the third line we get the challenge. And the song is making it clear that we might adore and even worship her, but really she is on another planet, and we are so far behind.
(And it is not necessary to understand the structure of the unexpected chord change – for most non-musicians it just feels slightly different, slightly edgy, slightly unexpected).
Dylan songs are almost all strophic (that is to say verse – verse – verse etc without variation). And we know that format so well, that we can quickly adjust to this slightly unexpected approach to the form, and not let it disturb the pleasure the music gives us, although that last line really can be a bit confusing.
But Dylan does not let it go at that. He gives us a real kick in the final verse with that last line: is he after all talking about a child rather than a lover? We are left unsure.
Bow down to her on Sunday, Salute her when her birthday comes Bow down to her on Sunday, Salute her when her birthday comes For Halloween, buy her a trumpet, And for Christmas, get her a drum
The lyrics can be read either that she is a child who wants childhood toys or that she is an activist, getting attention for her cause, and the trumpet and drum are not literal but metaphorical.
We don’t know – and what makes us even more confused (even if we know the song so well that we can just accept it and move on) if we come back and really think, the smoothness and repetitiveness of the song will catch us out. We have been lulled into the complacency of thinking that she is a very self-assured and competent child – and the gentle music encourages this. But suddenly that last verse says something different, but the music just carries on as before.
Is she a child or not? Is everything calm and simple, or is she a woman leaving lovers behind, while she pretends still to revel in childhood pleasures?
The music takes us one way, the lyrics another. It may sound a simple idea but believe me, it is very hard to pull off with success. But of course this is Bob, and he can not only pull it off on the recording, he can keep on doing it with further variations live on stage. Including pulling out the occasional extra trick with the instrumental break between the verses. This is 1993, Hammersmith (West London). And please do listen to the final instrumental section with its repeated last line. That really does confirm, this is not about childhood pleasures.
The songs reviewed from the music plus lyrics viewpoint…
For more details on this new 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.
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Covers of Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
By Jürg Lehmann
Beyond the horizon is Peter Parcek territory: no one has immersed himself in the song as intensely as the virtuoso Boston blues guitarist. Parcek discovered Dylan as a teenager in a small town in Connecticut when he caught one of Dylan’s concerts at the Bushnell Auditorium in Hartford in 1966, as the folk artist was becoming a rocker.
I’ll never forget that concert at the Bushnell,” says Parcek. People were booing him in that concert. I thought he was fantastic…I really felt a connection to this music, and I wanted to try something that hadn’t been done. Hopefully Bob won’t come after me, and really, I hope he’d like it. You have to be true to who you are, so I did not try and imitate his versions. I figured Dylan, of all people, proved it’s OK to personalize music, so my versions are very different from his. His songs all tell stories in very distinct ways, and I think his later work, the most recent stuff, definitely feels like it has some Chess Records, classic blues influences.
Parcek’s earliest version of Beyond Here Lies Nothin comes from his 2011 Pledging My Time. The EP also includes Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat, It Takes a Lot to Laugh and She Belongs to Me. The songs can be found at Parcek’s website www.peterparcekband.com or at bandcamp (in case you have a spotify subscription you can also find it there).
In 2013 Parcek (pronounce: Par:check) uploaded a live performance on youtube which prompted Tony Attwood to an enthusiastic review: Now if I were still in a band, I would urge my fellow geriatrics to introduce into our repertoire a version of “Beyond here lies nothing”, which I really think is an utterly gorgeous song. (For whatever reason) very few people have even tried to work with this song. But there is one standout cover version – and even if you listen to a bit of this and think, well, so what? – please stay with it to the guitar solo, and tell me, who else is playing like this, these days? This is the sort of cover I really adore… it shows a virtuoso performer at the top of his game, showing off in a way that makes absolute sense within the context of the music.
A live Peter Parcek experience is second to none, writes Judd Marcelloc in the liner notes to the 2011 EP. Having logged many live gigs, I was also very interested in hearing recorded music from Peter. I was always asking Peter if he was going to release an album. Each time I asked, “I’m not ready, yet” was Peter’s reply. In 2010 Peter finally released his national album debut, The Mathematics of Love, to much critical acclaim…It says a lot about the integrity of a musician – one that is already playing at a level most never reach – that after four-plus decades of live gigs and honing his self-taught style, he finally felt he was “ready” to make his statement.
Today Peter Parcek is no longer an insider tip, he is regularly being praised by critics for his exceptional guitar skills. Next time Dylan needs a guitar player for his Never Ending Tour band, he should give Parcek a call, one says. And he was honoured by Buddy Guy during a backstage visit, when Parcek grabbed a guitar lying around and started playing, with the sentence ‘You’re as bad as Eric Clapton, and I know Eric Clapton’.
In 2020 Parcek released his latest album Mississippi Suitcase, yet again with a cover of Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, this time with a moodier version compared to the one in 2011.
Luckily, Parcek has been working so intensively on Dylan, because apart from him, nobody else has tackled the song on a comparable level. The closest to him come Clas Yngström &Big Tex Three. Yngström is considered one of Sweden’s best blues guitarists and singers. In 2012 Yngström and his band recorded the album Mr. Bob’s Blue Devils. They have selected twelve songs from different periods in Dylan’s career. From the early Outlaw Blues (Bringin’ It All Back Home 1965) and Pledging My Time (Blonde on Blonde 1966) to Jolene (Together Through Life 2009). It’s worth listening to the entire album, but the definitive highlights are Meet Me in the Morning (one of the best covers of this song) and Beyond Here Lies Nothin’.
Norwegian jazz singer Gina Aspenes (2015) and the Honeyboys (2016), a band of older gentlemen based in New Brunswick, round off the “official” interpreters.
If Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ meets with little interest from established professionals, then this does not apply to the legions of semi-professionals or amateurs who stage themselves on youTube. You can easily find 20 to 30 performances, including several remarkable ones, for example….
Footnote from the editor. Jürg also included New Pony-The Dylan Sessions (2012) but I can’t get that link to work in the UK where I am based. You might have more luck.
A look into some of the songs Bob Dylan performed just once or twice but then set aside for ever more…
By Tony Attwood
It has often been noted that the song was a response to an open invite from Broadside for songs about contemporary events, and Dylan’s song was printed in the December 1962 Broadside magazine. But as many have pointed out the song doesn’t specifically mention the events. Dylan in a comment on the song highlighted the line, “Somebody better investigate soon,” perhaps suggesting that is the central meaning of the song, rather than it being specifically about events.
A version was released on Bootleg Series 9, but is not available on the internet – at least not as far as I can find in the UK. Dylan performed it once on October 25, 1990, when Dylan appeared in Oxford.
Now what does happen is that other recordings are put up as being live from the same event, but clearly they are not the same recording – being sung for example in a different key. For example…
So it certainly sounds as if the first one above is very much live, but not the second. And that is not just a case of there being no audience sound – rather it being in another key. That recording above has turned up on other sites too…
So what is this second recording? Is it the same show as the Bob Dylan live recording above but with the audience sound removed? Perhaps that is possible (remembering when the recording was made) – if you know please do write in. Or is it something different? Not for the first time I am confused.
Hello Mary Lou – Hello Miss Pearl
My fleet footed guides from the underworld
No stars in the sky shine brighter than you
You girls mean business and I do too
He certainly does show hints of some missionary drive. Around the “Sinatra albums” (Shadows In The Night, Fallen Angels and Triplicate, 2015-17), Dylan stresses that he considers the albums already successful when the names of men like Rodgers and Hart, Hammerstein, Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn enter a new generation, and prefers to direct attention to the songs. “What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them,” Dylan declares while discussing the first album, Shadows In The Night, “lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.”
The same sympathetic reflex we see on other fronts over the years. Dylan brings men like Ronnie Hawkins and his forgotten childhood hero Billy Lee Riley on stage; takes his hat off to Link Wray and Chuck Berry and dozens of others; as DJ of Theme Time Radio Hour he seems to make a sport of fishing obscure country and folk artists, blues heroes and song poets from the Waters of Oblivion; in his autobiography Chronicles he elaborates for pages on more and less obscure musicians and songs, and his thousands of setlists are littered with tributes to dusted songs and discarded colleagues. And the apotheosis, of course, is The Philosophy Of Modern Song, Dylan’s exuberant ode to dozens of songs, writers and composers in the form of 66 essays.
Chapter 4 of the essay collection is devoted to the song “Take Me From This Garden Of Evil” from the obscure, fascinating pioneer Jimmy Wages, a ferocious rockabilly song that has been gathering dust under cobwebs and moisture moulds for decades somewhere in the back of Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio archives. Jimmy Wages was an artist who offers everything that thrills a passionate archaeologist like Dylan; Jimmy was Elvis’ neighbourhood kid in Tupelo, went to school with him, and, like Elvis, undertakes the pilgrimage to Sam Phillips in Memphis. But where Elvis is subsequently led to the High Road, Jimmy remains stuck on the Narrow Way: the eight to ten songs that Wages records are not released, and Jimmy plays the club, pub and bar circuit until his death in 1999. He still lives in Tupelo then. Embittered he is not. “I’m just one who tried and didn’t make it,” he says in one of the few interviews conducted with him, “I got a lot of company.”
Dylan’s tribute in 2022, in The Philosophy Of Modern Song, is his most explicit, but not his first homage to Jimmy Wages. Two years before that, we hear a first subtle salute: Hello Mary Lou – Hello Miss Pearl, the opening line of the second verse of “False Prophet”, the second song of Rough And Rowdy Ways nods to Ricky Nelson’s big hit “Hello Mary Lou” and to Jimmy Wages’ “Miss Pearl”, one of those 8 to 10 recordings Jimmy made at the time that were only dusted off decades later to be released on Sun tribute records or compilation albums.
It is the second song from Rough And Rowdy Ways and the second time Dylan salutes old rockabilly heroes – in the same form, at that. In the opening track “I Contain Multitudes”, Dylan opened the fifth verse with Pink pedal pushers, red blue jeans, a similar fusion of two songs. Again an opening line, again from the late 1950s, again one from the Sun Studio, and again the combination of a monumental, immortal world hit with a dusty, forgotten staple. In this case Carl Perkins‘ 1958 flop “Pink Pedal Pushers” and Gene Vincent’s out-of-category milestone “Be Bop A Lula” (Well she’s the girl in the red blue jeans) from 1956, like “Miss Pearl”.
Revealing that Dylan places the source of the other reference, “Hello Mary Lou” and Ricky Nelson, in the same outer category as Gene Vincent. As Elvis even, essay writer Dylan argues in The Philosophy, in which he devotes Chapter 11 to Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool”:
“There’s an argument to be made that Ricky, even more than Elvis, was the true ambassador of rock and roll. Sure, when Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan, everybody stopped and took notice, but Ricky was in your house every week.”
Dylan is referring to one of the most successful sitcoms in US television history, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Ricky’s parents’ show in which, starting in 1957 (Fats Domino’s “I’m Walking”), Ricky is allowed to sing the songs that soon made him a teen idol. And made him a rock ‘n’ roll legend, as at least Dylan thinks, which he already argued way before 2022’s The Philosophy. As early as 2004, in Chronicles, the autobiographer Dylan hears Ricky on the radio in the first chapter: “Ricky Nelson was singing his new song, Travelin’ Man”. The flipside of the double A-side with “Hello Mary Lou”, by the way, and the song that gets another nod later on Rough And Rowdy Ways, in “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” on Side B (Take me out traveling, you’re a travelin’ man).
Anyway, the memory of that time he heard “Travelin’ Man” on the radio inspires the autobiographer to write a five-hundred-word tribute to Ricky Nelson. “I had been a big fan of Ricky’s and still liked him,” Dylan confesses, devoting especially many words to Ricky’s voice and singing style. “Ricky had a smooth touch,” for example, and “His voice was sort of mysterious and made you fall into a certain mood,” and noteworthy is the effort the fan Dylan takes to express his admiration in original terms: “the tonation of his voice” – Dylan is probably one of the first writers in the twenty-first century to dig up the archaic tonation in order to describe a vocal quality. But despite his trendsetting qualities he hasn’t gained too many followers since.
Ricky Nelson – Hello Mary Lou:
Most explicit then is Dylan’s admiration on his radio show, in which he plays a Ricky Nelson song three times. Apart from “Travelin’ Man” and “Hello Mary Lou”, he also plays “Waitin” In School”, which the DJ announces with:
“Here’s a man who brought rock ‘n’ roll into America’s living room, week after week. You got to remember, there was no MTV, there were no channels showing rock around the clock. You had to figure it out where you could find it. And sometimes it was only a three minutes a week, tucked away on some show like the Ed Sullivan Show. But Ricky Nelson changed all that. As one of the stars of his parents’ TV show Ozzie and Harriet he was given center stage to perform a song just about every week. Alongside Ricky was the magical guitarist James Burton. Ricky gets kind of a bad rap and isn’t considered as high as a rocker as people like Elvis, Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins. But for my money he is right up there, in the stratosphere.”
(DJ Dylan in Theme Time Radio Hour ep. 21: “School”, 20 September 2006)
… in a line-up featuring Elvis, Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins, with the men of “Be Bop A Lula” and “Pink Pedal Pushers” in other words. And since “False Prophet” Jimmy Wages may also join the queue, we may assume.
To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 4: Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many troubles
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:
One of the constant themes in “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” by Heylin is that Dylan meets groups of people, these different people do things, Dylan moves on. He is projected (by Heylin at least) as the outside observer looking in, never the participant, never committed to the cause.
To back this up Heylin cites a comment that Cesar Diaz, a guitar technician, made to him, wherein he states that Bob is just singing and playing his songs, rather than delivering a message he believes in. Moving on from this thought Heylin concludes (page 203) that “many people were taken in by topical songs masquerading as folk songs”. He cites “Who killed Davey Moore?” as an “almost tuneless anti-boxing sermon from a man who would later own a boxing gym.”
Now this is a most important point, although I think Heylin misunderstands it totally, and I want to try and explain this in a little detail.
Most people in Western society do not confuse the actor on stage or in a film, with the part he or she plays in the movie or on stage. True, some actors can get “type cast”, through always being offered parts portraying a similar type of character and actors can resent this, but generally the actor and her/his agent will ensure they get a variety of work.
Heylin suggests that Dylan the composer is rather like actors who are taking on roles, and this is a very interesting point of view for analyses of his songs. For it is, in my experience, (as nothing more than an amateur songwriter and previously folk club performer), that in general terms the audience often assumes that a songwriter and performer is generally “telling it as he/she sees it”, whereas a novelist is generally spinning a tale.
I don’t know why this is – maybe it is the shortness and intimacy of the song that makes the audience believe that the song is the performer and/or composer and vice versa. But I can most certainly tell you that from my perspective with over 300 songs written, and having spoken with fellow amateur songwriters, this is often not the reality. Most songwriters are, most of the time, short story writers or the portrayers of emotions, not people constantly re-writing their own biography.
But most people who get to talk to a songwriter – even an amateur songwriter – who has written a fair number of songs (say 50+) still tend to believe that the songs they write are true stories. And although this is only anecdotal, I can add that several times I have had a lady friend ask me to sing my latest song, have heard my follow-up statement that “it’s like a short story, it’s not real”, and then said “Well, if that’s what’s going on, I’m off,” leaving me saying to the open door, “it’s a little story, it’s not about me or you…”
Quite why people believe that novelists and short story writers are indeed writing fiction while songwriters are portraying how they feel, or what has just happened, I don’t know, but that’s how it seems to be.
And it is true that in the 1960s with the arrival of the “protest song” a lot of people in their late teens and 20s were looking for those who would speak up for them in calling out what the politicians were getting up to. Certainly in the UK across the media we did not have voices opining that the politicians and spokespeople of the age were totally out of touch with reality. And with Dylan’s songs we suddenly found we did have exactly that view expressed. So when Dylan told parents that their sons and daughter were beyond their command, that was considered to Dylan’s call for us to rise up and rebel against the old regime, be it political or at home.
Perhaps this was because of the intimacy that the modern folk song. One man playing a guitar and facing the audience, does indeed imply that the lyrics are real and heartfelt. And of course sometimes they might be. But not always. Just because Dylan said “your sons and your daughters are beyond your command,” that didn’t make it true – especially if the parents were paying the university fees.
But when he is on a subject, Heylin won’t let go, and so he leaps forward and criticises Dylan for writing, “Who Killed Davey Moore?” and then later owning a boxing gym. He just takes it that Bob thought boxing was wrong through writing that song, but there are multiple other explanations from the fact that Dylan is acting like a short story writer, to the fact that Dylan likes boxing but agrees it should be more strictly regulated. And in the end Bob just wrote a song, just as he wrote “I want you” but it didn’t actually mean you, or anyone. It was just a song.
In short Heylin is propagating the vision that the songwriter and the singer must believe in the song – and he is doing that because that is how he feels. Not because he has any evidence and not because it is true.
This approach of Heylin, which he has picked up from others, that the songwriter inevitably believes in the lyrics of his songs, is utter nonsense. Of course songwritrers don’t write about things they utterly don’t believe in (I am not going to glorify right wing politics in a song) but I most certainly can write and sing a song about losing the love of my life and finding her again years later and being welcomed back by her, and then assert without fear of contradiction, that this is utterly untrue. I wrote the melody, found an opening line, let the subsequent lines flow, and there, and lo and behold I am reporting that I have been wandering the world in a deep lost haze thinking of no one but her. Likewise fact and fiction can merge: my last novel set in 1910 has within it the events of 1910 in London, but the characters within the story are totally invented. That’s how it goes, and songs are no different.
But somehow people can accept fiction as fiction in novels even when it is based in the real or a historic world, but not in songs.
Within Heylin’s commentary is the allegation that Bob judges the people he meets to be weird, while he himself is the only sane one. Maybe so, maybe not, but really does it matter? Does it make “Times they are a changing” a less enjoyable song if we find that Bob didn’t actually believe things were changing? I can’t really see why that matters.
Indeed I find I don’t have to believe that the human race will expand across the galaxy, ban the creation of robots, set up an empire based on the planet Trantor, then turn in on itself only to be saved by a psychologist who has developed a way of seeing into the future, to post messages to generations to come on what they must do next, just because I have read and thoroughly enjoyed Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels. Reading the books has given me enjoyment, but I have never had the feeling Asimov could tell me the future.
So what we find is that fiction is seen as fictioin, be it in novels, movies, poems, short stories etc. But when it comes to songs, there is a view that the composer is telling us about something real that he/she believes in or has witnessed.
But it is from this weird belief that songs reflect a real world that Heylin often suggests that Bob is exaggerating, or not telling the truth. Somehow it seems Heylin can’t accept a song as fiction. So when Heylin acknowledges a lot of the time that Dylan doesn’t believe in what he is singing, he gets rather annoyed about the fact – whereas it is a fact of songwriting.
Indeed this picking and choosing of what is true and what is not in what Dylan says quickly gets utterly out of hand as the resultant debate of (for example) whether Dylan wrote “Masters of War” in London or not becomes overarchingly important, for Heylin, which in reality it isn’t. What is important is that Dylan wrote it, and most people agree it is a superb song.
Yet the endless debate on what is true and what is not then results in what Heylin believes is true being the most important thing in the book – which obviously it is not.
Now this is not to say Heylin is making it all up. The world of the arts in London in the 1960s was a place of turmoil – and with everything looking and sounding so different from what had gone before, critics and commentators had a real problem on deciding what was good or not.
But instead of acknowledging that fact and looking for the consequences, by the time we get to page 208 in “The double life of Bob Dhlan” Heylin is warming to his theme that Dylan would write about anything if it got him an audience when there is no evidence of this at all. What is much more likely is that Bob wrote about topics that he found of interest, and he keeps the songs that seem to him to work.
When the CBS censor tells Bob not to sing his “John Birch song” Bob takes it as an insult – simply because an artist should be able to choose which of his artworks he wants to put before his audience. But that’s not how Heylin sees it; to him the John Birch argument is an excuse because,”Bob had been spoiling for a fight with CBS”. There’s no evidence that this is so, but for Heylin, once Heylin has spoken, that’s how it is. Or was.
And that is what everything comes down to. Bob is driven by the desire for good publicity. There is no evidence for that, but that is Heylin’s idea so he finds “facts” to fit his thesis and pumps these at us through the book.
And of course, by pure chance sometimes Heylin must be right. But my point is that this situation turns up over and over again in this book – Heylin speaks without properly presented and examined evidence. They are situations which can be explained in different ways, and yet Heylin proposes his interpretation, and then takes that to be what really happened, no matter how fragile (or non-existent) the evidence, no matter what anyone else says. If it fits, it’s true.
Heylin in short comes up with a view, and then from that point on that view is treated as fact when in reality all he has done is postulated one explanation which was and remains a possibility, not more. For Heylin, when he has written something which is actually just one explanation among many, that then becomes the truth.
Thus one postulation piles upon another as truth, and from this evolves Heylin’s entire theory of who and what Dylan was and is. And yes of course Heylin might be right, but then so might any other hypothesis relating to which topics Dylan chose to write about at any particular time. And I can say for sure, if I’d used that technique in my research degree both my thesis and myself would have been out of the professor’s door, and indeed out of the university, within minutes.
And ok, Heylin is not writing an academic thesis, but nonetheless he, like all non-fiction writers, has a duty to look for the truth and provide evidence to back up the assertions.
So when on page 206 Heylin asks “who exactly was trying to impress whom?” he is making a multiplicity of errors. The various folk singers involved in a dispute about what should be performed were demanding artistic freedom, as most serious artists do. But Heylin sees this movement as nothing more than grandstanding – taking up a cause in order to get attention and be seen to be on the right side. As ever there is no evidence. He just says it.
And yes maybe some were doing just that: looking for a cause on which to build their popularity, but yet again there is no evidence that Dylan was doing this, as opposed to writing about what he fancied writing about. So when CBS tells Dylan not to sing the John Birch song and Dylan walks away from the show, Heylin instantly questions Bob’s motives (without serious evidence) postulating without evidence that “Dylan had been spoiling for a fight with CBS.” OK maybe so, but also maybe Dylan just believed in his right as an artist to write and perform what he wanted.
And this is the point: Heylin regularly puts together unrelated points, often with no evidence, and then draws unwarranted conclusions. What’s worse, Heylin constantly tells us that Dylan’s own pronouncements are often highly unreliable – except when they fit his narrative. But in fact it is Heylin’s pronouncements that are highly unreliable because they are made to fit his own existing views.
So Heylin packs his prose with suggestions such as “Dylan had been spoling for a fight with CBS.” Had he? I’ve no idea, but even if he had been, that doesn’t mean that the argument about what could be sung in a concert was not real. It might be alleged that I have been spoiling for a fight with Heylin (which isn’t true, but let’s imagine it is.) That “fact” would not affect the validity of any point I make in these essays. Indeed in this case of Dylan spoiling for a fight with CBS, the one and ONLY bit of evidence that Heylin can come up with is that Billy James recalled Dylan leaving the studio seemingly in a particular state of mind. As evidence goes, it isn’t much.
True, Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul and Mary suggested Dylan did write earth-shaking songs but was “laughing all the time” which again in terms of definitive evidence really isn’t too much. Yes it is interesting, because I guess Peter Yarrow knew Dylan quite well (although I am not sure) but it is also curious. “Laughing all the time”? It seems very unlikely.
Perhaps the really big problem is that Heylin knows x happened and y happened, so he links them together in a logical sequence. But creativity itself is not logical; and life is not logical. Emotions are not logical either. Songs come out of nowhere or don’t come at all. Suddenly an artwork inspired by x turns out to reflect y. That’s how it goes. Yet in such a world of creating turbulence Heylin demands Dylan should be logical and consistent, and most bizarrely of all, not to take disputes personally.
These issues surrounding Dylan’s time in England were personal; they were about his creations – his songs – and their “validity” (which I shall come back to at the very end of this piece), and indeed the right for them to have a hearing on TV. And there is the fact that art and creativity are not logical. That indeed (and this is just my opinion) is why so many inexperienced writers make a hash of their novels – they have their characters act in a logical and consistent manner. In real life emotions abound and get in the way of actions. And that happens as much in later life, as it happens in the teens and 20s.
There is also the fact (that Heylin deals with very slightly on page 208) that there is no one consistent view of what the artist should do. Many of the creative people I have ever met while working as a writer, working in the theatre, and being on the fringes of the world of music, have contradictory views on what an artist should do. That is not only contradictory in the sense of the purpose of their art, but also on the question of being different from each other, and of over time, changing their own views.
I certainly know, and often tell my friends, (and they point out to me) how much I crave praise for my work, no matter what level it is at, no matter whether it is in relation to my songs, or my dance choreography (neither of which people pay me for), the advertisements I have written, or the books I’ve written, (which people do pay for). That desire for praise may seem awful, and indeed it troubles me sometimes, but even now after a lifetime in the arts, the fact that a lady told me in a dance club last night that I was by far the best dancer in the club, lifts me. It’s trivial, there’s no money involved, we’re not in a relationship, and it means a lot.
That may sound utterly pathetic, but from my conversations with other people engaged in the arts as a central part of their lives, I think it is not uncommon. Probably because where the arts are concerned, criticism from people who are not daily engaged in the arts is far more common than words of praise or even words of thanks. After all, when it comes down to it, how can a person who has never written a piece of music in his life, criticise the music of a man who has published well over 500 songs?
I’m going to conclude with something that could well strike you as utterly odd. I’ve put it at the end so you can ignore it; it is not a central part of my argument but an illustration. Below is a recording of me performing one of the songs I have written. In no way is this included to suggest that I am a good songwriter, but rather because of one key point:
As the composer I know for sure, that this song is not about anyone.
I just made up the lyrics and the music. But many people who have heard me perform it want to know “Who is it about?” and when I say “no one” they don’t believe me.
It’s called “She Walks Through Midnight.” And I promise, it is not about anyone in particular. It’s just a song, and it’s my note to Heylin to say, “just because it is in a song, it doesn’t mean it’s true.” I wrote it because I enjoy writing songs, that’s all. I’m also setting out the lyrics below, because this is not a studio recording (it’s recorded in my sitting room) and the lyrics may not always be clear. Again I stress again, it is purely by way of illustration. People who have kindly listened, have said “but that must be about someone”. And they are wrong. And I suspect the same thing applies to many of Bob’s songs, just as it does to my little piece below.
She walks through midnightShe walks through rainbows floating byShe sees the afterglowShe sees each stillnessas clouds all pass her by.
And then I see her drift away, slip through my handI once imagined that somehow, she might understandMy thoughts about herAnd these whispers touched by this lasting soundThese patterns carved through older patterns Collapsing on the ground.
She walks through midnightShe walks through rainbows floating byDid she see me? No, she’s beyondAs I see her she starts to fly.There is a drifting evening rain which slows my spinning daysThere is the movement of the breeze
a passing sound that fades. I think about herAnd why my time’s no longer clearThese patterns carved in endless timesWhich are forever lost but for her are forever near.And there, as the stars riseI find I’m walking home alone.There’s no one here except for me It’s just for me the time has flown.She walks through midnightAnd as I drift she’s always hereI once imaginedBut not without her being nearThinking of her life away.The pattern clear along the roadI still wander far below
Why I still wander far away
I dream of walking side by sideInside the only land I have knownShe walks through midnight I see
And I am so alone.She walks through midnightSo far behind I’m so alone.
She walks through midnight
This time we have a recording of the whole show from…
Shoreline Amphitheatre – Mountain View, California; 3 August 2024
This is an audio recording of the show – there is no video – but I have chosen this because the quality of the recording really is rather good in comparison with many others we have used in the past.
I commented before that Dylan’s singing voice has declined quite a lot – as indeed is common with men in their 80s, and indeed the fact that he continued as long as it has meant that he has had to adjust how he is going to sing his songs.
Highway 61starts the show and here again we have that declamation of lyrics with some singing thrown in, plus Dylan on the piano playing a bit of background to the band. The main variation in the song is the constant descending line.
Shooting Starstarts at around 4’25”, and once more we have a half-sung half-declaimed run through of the lyrics.
There’s nothing much between the songs – Love Sick starts at around 8’20”. And again I’m finding that these are mostly the songs as we know them but with declamation rather than singing. And my comment is simply that this is not to my taste – I like the melodies, even if they are simply and repetitive as they were in the early days of rock n roll. I also like the variations that Bob has introduced over the years and which I’ve tried to pick up on in the “Never Ending Tour Extended” series of which the most recent edition is God Knows.
Thus for Love Sick, the really interesting instrumental moment around the lyrics “I’m sick of love” remains much as before.
13’15” brings us “Little Queenie” – the Chuck Berry song. Here’s a copy of the original.
Next up comes at 15’09” is Mr Blue which appeared on the Basement Tapes Complete. May 23, 2021 was an American songwriter active since the 1950s.[3] Dewayne Blackwell wrote the song and it was a hit in 1959 for the Fleetwoods. As time went by his songs were picked up by the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison and Bobby Vinton, all of whom you will remember if you are of a certain vintage.
At 18’23” we have Early Roman Kings with Elvin Bishop who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 2015 and here the solid blues feel is emphasised even more than on the recording. We really are into the solid 12 bar blues world now.
Can’t Waitcomes in with a Dylan solo recitation at 25’21” in a performance used to build an atmosphere.
29′.15″ then brings Under a Red Sky is perhaps a bit of a surprise and for me nothing much is added to the song that we know. According to the official statistics the only other time Bob has ever performed this was 12 November 2000. I would love to know the thinking of Bob, behind bringing this song in now. But of course he doesn’t normally tell us.
34′.35″ provides a complete contrast with “Things have changed” and hearing this contrast with Under a Red Sky makes me wonder not for the first time how Bob goes about choosing his songs for the shows. Is it just what comes to mind – in that he chooses one and thinks, “what next?” Or is he seeing the concert as a complete whole, giving a vision of life as he now sees it?
Stella Blue which starts at 40.02, as far as I know has not been performed prior to this tour. It was written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Here’s the original version
“Six Days of the Road”comes next and was written by Earl Green and Carl Montgomery and is being played regularly on this tour. It was a hit in 1963. It starts at 45’20”. Again here’s what the original hit sounded like…
50’03” takes us onto Soon After Midnightfrom Tempest recorded in 2012.
And then given all that has gone before it was a surprise (at least to me) to get to Ballad of a Thin Man at 54’29”. The introduction is unmistakable of course, and the recitation style is indeed suited to this song.
“Simple twist of fate” is performed on the one hour mark with a recitation start, which gave me the thought it might turn into an upbeat version of the song, but no we move on to a song in the style of the rest of the concert. We do however get a harmonica solo.
And so on the one hour mark we finish with “I’ll be your baby tonight” which starts with the same tempo (or perhaps lack of tempo) as the “Twist of Fate” – but then “I’ll be your baby” picks up into a gentle rock n roll song with Bob playing the same chord sequence (or the same note on occasion) over and over, before a slow end after nine minutes of this finale, and that’s it.
[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 third article about the first track, ‘Mr Tambourine Man.’ Find the second article here: ]
* * *
For those Bobcats who fell in love with the live performances of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in its early phases, 1964 – 66, Dylan’s dismal performance of the song at the Isle of Wight in 1969 must have come as a shock. This seven minute epic ode to escapism becomes, at the Isle of Wight, a three minute quick visit to a song that had apparently lost its charm for Dylan.
No wonder it was hard to find a recording of this. I had to dig deep into my archives. Perhaps Dylan fans prefer to sweep this one under the rug.
The song has four magnificent verses with the chorus repeated after every verse. Add an extra two verses for harp solos and you get the sustained poetic tour-de-force the song became in 1966. At the Isle of Wight Dylan only sings the first two verses, with minimal harp support, and then appears to abandon the song. Sings the chorus then wraps it up. What a let-down.
It starts well enough and Dylan, in his new avatar as Baritone Bob, sounds pretty good and the peppy tempo of the acoustic guitar feels just right. There is a tremble in his voice that augurs well in terms of emotional engagement with the song. Then all that promise goes to waste when he bails out half way through. Without the last verse the song can’t reach its climax. Could Dylan have lost interest in the song, now five years old? When, after 1966 with its deep dive into drugs and existential angst, Dylan set out to forge a new path, could it be that he would have to leave such songs behind? Perhaps the new, straight Dylan couldn’t relate to a song that evokes the siren call of cannabis. I would argue that Dylan doesn’t rediscover the song in almost its full glory until the first Rolling Thunder tour of 1975, but we’re not there yet.
Between 1966 and 1974 Dylan didn’t tour, but besides the Isle of Wight he did another one-off, the Bangladesh concert of 1971. This concert was much better received than the Isle of Wight, and in general the performances are a lot stronger. Despite the fact that the third verse (the ‘ragged clown behind’ verse) is missed out (and we fear it’s gone for good), Dylan delivers the song without frills yet with sincerity. It almost feels as if the song has returned to its roots, before the zonked out performances of 1966; there’s freshness in it.
For some Bobcats, this is their favourite performance of the song and I can see why. While the performance might return the song to its roots, Dylan’s voice is no longer young and full of youthful yearning, but matured with the richness of experience behind it. The edge is still there, the lure of the ‘magic swirling ship’ is still strong. The urge for transcendence doesn’t go away with the passing years.
And, last but not least, we have the guitar work by Dylan and George Harrison who go together beautifully. A lovely performance.
1971 Bangladesh concert
Perhaps what’s most appealing here is the lack of affectation. He’s not putting on any particular voice, it seems, neither the undulating tones of ‘66 or the Baritone Bob of Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait. The harp solo doesn’t reach the ecstatic heights and swooping lows of ’66, but it’s subtle and jazzy with an effective touch of whimsy.
We don’t get another performance of the song until 1974, when Dylan went back on the road with The Band. This was a stadium rock tour and Dylan’s performances have not been universally admired. ‘This was the year Dylan stopped singing and started shouting,’ one YouTube commentator says. I’m not so sure. That ‘shouting’ produced some powerhouse performances, particularly of ‘It’s All Right Ma,’ but there was some loss of intimacy. These were not small, intimate venues. However, Dylan pulls the song off in a vibrant performance, much to the appreciation of the audience.
‘Mr T Man’ is now ten years old, and there is already an air of nostalgia in the solo acoustic performance of it: the thin, frail harp break, the lonely trembling voice. Remember those good ol’ days of ‘64 and ’65 when we thought we could disappear ‘through the smoke rings’ of our minds, past all the bad trips, to ecstatic freedom? Now the song recalls those giddy days. It no longer operates as just a call to escape, but a call to remember that youthful desire to fade into our own parades. A desire that never quite goes away. The song still speaks to us, but it also speaks to our vanished youth.
This recording is not as good as I usually prefer. It’s a bit thin and tinny. There is maybe a better performance in the mass of material on ’74 recently released, but if so I haven’t caught up with it yet.
Philadelphia 1974 Evening
There is a sharp contrast between the 1974 concert tour and the Rolling Thunder tour that kicked off in 1975. The madcap bus tour across America, often playing to small-town venues, is justly famous as this is peak Dylan, and some of the performances, ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ and ‘Isis’ for example, being the finest Dylan ever did, ’66 notwithstanding. His voice has a richness, a power and a timbre he never had in ’66. This is Baritone Bob as we’ve never heard him, not the light, somewhat cheesy baritone of Nashville Skyline, but turbocharged with passion and a total commitment to the material.
Arguably that passion and commitment show most clearly in his recent songs, those from Blood on the Tracks and Desire, the Desire songs being forged on the road, but his earlier material doesn’t suffer.
The following clip is from the Martin Scorsese film, The Rolling Thunder Review. If you’re just focusing on the song and Dylan’s performance of it, you might find Scorsese’s images a bit distracting but they do give us a good feel for the ambience of the tour.
‘It happened so long ago I wasn’t even born,’ the older Dylan quips as he tries to pin down, without much success, what the tour was all about. Scorsese uses the song as background to images of cultural and political significance of the early 1970’s, including Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war. It was a cunning choice of song by Scorsese, who could have chosen a more obviously political song like ‘Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ to support his political commentary, but on reflection ‘Mr T Man,’ with its expressed desire to get away from it all, and a nostalgia for a more innocent age, provides a perfect somewhat melancholy backdrop to the turmoil of the 70’s.
I call Dylan’s guitar work here syncopated, but I’m not quite sure of the right word to use. The song becomes more rhythmic, more of a foot-tapper. It surges. It manages to avoid any rigid dumpty-dum.
1975, Scorsese
It’s better, however, to hear the full song through with no distractions, and what a moving, vibrant performance (Boston, Nov 1975) this is. Even without the third verse, which is indeed gone for good, the last verse lifts the song to its climax. The performance is more restrained than ’66, and energy held in check, an emotion barely contained, the harp not as hectic but also quivering and restrained. Suddenly the song lives again for us:
1975 Boston
The second year of the Rolling Thunder tour saw a shift in tone towards a harder edge, and they were back in big venues again. Despite turning many of his old acoustic songs into rock songs, notably the swirling ‘Hard Rain’ and ‘One Too Many Mornings,’ ‘Mr T Man’ remained as a solo acoustic performance, a throwback to the old Bob, a reminder of the pre-1965 Dylan, a nostalgic exercise. However, listening to this performance from Clearwater in 1976, we might wonder why he bothered. As with the Isle of Wight concert, he only sings two verses, in this case the first and the last, and while the magical movement of that last verse, from the ‘smoke rings of my mind’ to the ‘windy beach’ gives the song its climax, we’re still just getting the flavour of the song rather than the full song itself. A three and half minute reminder of what the song once was. A taste rather than the full course.
It’s all the more frustrating as Dylan is in great voice, in this case a soft, numinous voice reminiscent of ’66. This could have been an outstanding performance if Dylan had chosen to give the song its due. Again we’re left with the impression that Dylan’s only doing the song because he has to, because he knows its importance, and how his audiences love his solo performances of it, rather than his heart being in it. It’s almost a cruel reminder of the 60’s Dylan.
1976 Clearwater
Although it wasn’t clear at the time, 1976 was the last time we would hear the song as that solo acoustic survivor from the 1960’s. When Dylan hit the road again in 1978, it would be with a big, thirteen piece band and a radicalized conception of the song. We’ll be looking at that in the next post, coming up soon here on Untold Dylan.
Another day without end - another ship going out
Another day of anger - bitterness and doubt
I know how it happened - I saw it begin
I opened my heart to the world and the world came in
“HOLY SHIT, the Dung Beetle said. I will check it out. Thanks for the heads up.” Normandi Ellis responds enthusiastically and wittily to an email from a Dylan fan telling her that Dylan used her poetic translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Awakening Osiris, 1988) for his new song “False Prophet”. Half an hour later, she has checked, and Normandi sends a longer e-mail after, in which she cites, among other things, that Jerry Garcia had the entire “Becoming the Phoenix” passage read at his funeral service as he was lying in his coffin; wonders if Coleman Barks feels the same way every time someone uses his adaptations of Rumi’s poetry; and jokingly points out that she would happily accept $100 from Dylan as payment, being the amount that a concert ticket had cost her at the time.
At that point, the Dylan researchers on the fan forum expectingrain only celebrated the discovery I opened my heart to the world and the world came in, which comes straight from Chapter 8 of Ellis’ book, “Triumph over Darkness”:
“I’ve known the pleasures of the earth. I bathed myself in light on an afternoon of rejoicing—not a festival, but an ordinary afternoon where I opened my heart to the world and the world came in, where I brought water from the well with my daughter, where I chewed the grass, ate the figs and sat by the riverbank watching sunlight dazzle like the white pearls of my daughter’s smile.”
… but the intrigued fan who under the name “HatFullOfGasoline” bothers to read the whole chapter falls from one surprise into another aha-erlebnis. The day of anger, bitterness and doubt Dylan has picked up from the same chapter: “I know the names of the scorpions and they are these: anger, bitterness and doubt”, two pages after that we read “This is the day without end”, which Dylan will use for the opening line, for Another day without end, and with that we have already been able to reconstruct almost the entire first verse from Chapter 8 of Awakening Osiris.
Incidentally, the remaining phrases also seem at least inspired by this ancient collection of prayers, magic spells and incantations on assorted papyrus scrolls. Another ship going out breathes the same metaphorical charge as the dozens of boats that sail through the spells; “This white boat of spirit ferries the body through dark waters,” Ra sails in “the boat of the sun,” the soul of Osiris “sets sail in the boat of morning sun,” and to Ra is addressed the supplication “bless the boat of morning that carries us into light” – to quote just a few of the many examples. Only I know how it happened – I saw it begin has a somewhat Biblical tone, although even in Awakening Osiris the chief gods are referred to as “the masters who witnessed the creation.”
Apart from the words themselves, Dylan seems to have been touched by the style of writing as well. Repetitio is the favourite stylistic figure in the Egyptian Book of the Dead anyway, especially the “I + verb” opening variant, like this – rather randomly chosen – example from Chapter 40, “Becoming The Swallow”, in which almost every sentence and phrase begins with it;
“I have held my destiny in my two hands and I am the shape I made. I have suffered and loved. I have walked through fire and did not burn. I’ve been blown by wind and did not fall. I’ve walked the long road and kept to my journey though I met no other traveler. I have lost and found myself in every rock, field and tree. I know what I am and what I imagine. I know shadow and light, and I have never been satisfied with shelter and bread when the great was left unattained.”
… just as in Dylan’s “False Prophet” we also get an ‘I + verb’ opening 24 times in the ten stanzas. In addition, it is again striking how much Awakening Osiris has also permeated the other lyrics on Rough And Rowdy Ways. Side B opens with “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”, and in it we hear an echo from the above quote:
I travelled the long road of despair
I’ve met no other traveller there
… as the oft-repeated “building people” in the Book of the Dead (Someday I’ll imagine myself a different man, build bone and make flesh around him in Chapter 45, “Becoming the Child”, for example) seems to descend in the next song, in “My Own Version Of You”, and as we hear one borrowing after another again in “Black Rider” on Side B:
Awakening Osiris:
“Is it even the same road I travelled a moment ago?”
“Black Rider” 1st verse:
The road that you’re on, the same road that you know
Just not the same as it was a minute ago
Awakening Osiris:
“I have seen the great world and the small one.”
“Black Rider” 2nd verse: You’ve seen the great world, and you’ve seen the small
Awakening Osiris:
“Let me pass […] Then the doors open.”
“Black Rider” 4th verse:
Let me go through, open the door
All borrowed from Chapter 9, “Seven Houses in the Other World”, a chapter where Dylan will no doubt have nodded approvingly and muttered in agreement more than once. “I am I – an old man become strong, a tongue spitting light into darkness” he reads there for instance, and “Love and anger gave me words of truth, but I refined them.”
Anyway, after all those otherwise weightless references to Egyptian mythology we’ve heard in Dylan’s songs since the 1960s (the magical Egyptian ring in “She Belongs To Me”, “Isis”, the god with the obsidian eyes in “Romance In Durango”, and more), Jerry Garcia’s funeral in 1995 with “Becoming the Phoenix” as the eulogy seems to have triggered Dylan to dive deeper into it. We see the Eye of Horus appear on a large canvas as background scenery at concerts, in the Rolling Stone interview in 2012 Dylan places the Book of the Dead in a list of titles that contain “truth” and “provide images for the songs”; “There’s truth in all books. In some kind of way. Confucius, Sun Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, the Koran, the Torah, the New Testament, the Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and many thousands more,” and a culmination of that fascination we then seem to reach here on Rough And Rowdy Ways: passages from the Book of the Dead that not only “provide images” but inspire whole songs.
“The Dead,” as Dylan says of Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead in The Philosophy Of Modern Song, “are from a different world.”
Grateful Dead – Estimated Prophet:
To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 3: Right up there in the stratosphere
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:
I have suggested a number of times in my review of Heylin’s book “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” that Heylin merges the notion of research with his own personal prejudice and indeed on occasion, with a spot of sheer invention. Some examples of this are trivial, but they do add up. For example, Phillip Saville, the BBC director of the play that Dylan was booked to appear in, and the reason for Bob’s appearance in London, is noted as saying, “At about five in the morning the first night he stayed, I could hear the song, “How many roads…” To Heylin immediately replies “Rather unlikely,” suggesting that Dylan “If Dylan was working on anything” it was “Masters of War” at the time. No evidence is provided by Heylin as to why the commentator was wrong and he (Heylin) is right.
In fact, by this time (page 188) Heylin has spent so long dissing every single witness statement that doesn’t exactly fit his notion of what is what, and when, without providing any evidence to the contrary, I begin to get tired of being told everyone else is wrong. Maybe some people are wrong – but all of them???
In fact of course it doesn’t really matter which song Dylan was working on, on which particular day of the week. But that fact is lost because of the insistence that everyone else is getting every fact and date wrong, and only he, Heylin, the man who was not there at all at the time, (the man who we might recall from my outburst at the end of the last episode, doesn’t actually know much about England’s capital, but utterly asserts big-time that he does) really has THE KNOWLEDGE.
Part of the whole Heylin approach (and forgive me if I have rammed this home too many times already but it is the main thing that comes across in this book) is that Heylin seriously seems to believe that he knows, when in fact, he quite clearly doesn’t. And at this part of the story, as a Londoner born and bred myself, and one who not only lived in London but also worked in a theatre in the West End of London, and spent the days trampling many of the West End’s streets visiting publishers as I tried to develop my career as a writer, I can tell you that when Heylin says that the Cumberland Hotel is “still walking distance from the whole West End” this is just plain silly and written without thought. The Cumberland is on Oxford Street at the junction with Edgware Road, and if that isn’t part of the West End, I am not sure what is. So what does the word “still” mean in that sentence?
To me that looks like a bit of showing off – of saying, “Of course I know my way around London”, which maybe is or maybe isn’t untrue, but it is all part of the “look at me, I know all this, I’ve been there,” approach, through which he tries to get us to accept horrible statements such as (and this one really annoyed me) “Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, both insufferable folk snobs…”
So, if I may, let me offer you an alternative vision of Ewan MacColl, a man revered by many as playing a fundamental part in ensuring the continuity of the English folk music tradition which was in danger of being utterly lost. “Left school at 14, a political activist at 15, founded theatre troupe at 16, on MI5’s* files at 17, godfather of British folk revival at 35…” This is the man who wrote “Dirty Old Town” in 1949 and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in 1957, and if “Dirty Old Town” is too English for your taste I would urge you to listen to “The First Time,” even if you have heard it before. And then think, this was written by the man Heylin (who as I pointed out in the last episode knows nothing of the history of the capital of England) is seeking to put down.
This is one of the masterpieces of English songwriting, in my view, in terms of its melody, rhythms, and lyrics. Indeed I have had occasion to comment in my ramblings on this site how emotional I am in relation to music, and I have to confess this song can still move me to tears. In fact at this point in Heylin’s book, I had to stop myself from throwing it (the book) out the window (which since I write on the upper floor of my house, and it is raining at the moment, would have done quite a lot of damage to the book – aside from breaking the glass on its way out).
I don’t care what Ewan MacColl said or what else he wrote (although of course I admire much of it), the man who can write this deserves a monument at both ends of Oxford Street. And I can’t even bring myself to put a recording of “The Joy of Living” here – the song that Ewan wrote just before he died, on the site. I need to be able to write some more.
How dare, how dare, how dare Heylin, who (as far as I know) never written a song in his life, dismiss MacColl and Seeger in this way. But I must pull myself together for I am here to consider Heylin not indulge my own views on English music.
But this leads me to another point. Bob Dylan at this time, was not experienced with different cultures, different styles and different approaches to life. Music in England at this time was in total upheaval and not just from the development of a style of music on Merseyside which led to the early compositions of the Beatles, or the folk song revival of which MacColl and Seeger were part. We were still six years from the formation of the Scratch Orchestra(another venture in which I had a tiny part) but the seeds of that revolutionary approach to music were already being sown – which makes the point that by the time Dylan arrived in London the music scene was in uproar and chaos, and no one knew which direction any aspect of music was travelling in.
Dylan’s visit to London was in 1962. England did not have a single pop music station operating through the daytime until 1964 when the pirate station Radio Caroline was launched (although Radio Luxembourg did operate at night with a decidedly dodgy signal on medium wave). The first authorised pop music station (BBC Radio 1) was not launched until September 1967.
So the musical awareness of many people in England at the time was utterly different from that of people in America, and that was something Dylan would have had to get used to very suddenly, and probably without warning. Thus it is very likely that Bob was learning a lot from the live music he was hearing – such as arrangements of Scarborough Fair or Dominic Behan’s arrangement of “The Patriot Game”
This of course is the music that Bob used to composer “With God on our Side” but somehow to suggest that Bob lifted this and that there was something amiss with him so doing, is nonsense, for “The Patriot Game” is performed using the melody of “One morning in May”. But the song probably dates back at least to “The Souldier and His Knapsack”, which is noted as early as 1639, and undoubtedly had been around for decades if not centuries before that.
Thus these songs have a long history, which somehow Heylin doesn’t seem to be aware of, and so in taking such a melody and re-writing the lyrics while amending both melody and accompaniment, Dylan is not in any way stealing someone else’s work, but continuing a tradition of 400 years and probably much more.
Of course not everyone in England would necessarily want to hear an American accent taking a traditional English song and changing it, because this was a time of a lot of musical prejudice, and (as Heylin totally fails to understand, probably because he couldn’t be bothered to do the research) it was a time when the notion that the English nation had no musical heritage was only just beginning to be challenged. The reason for such a view was complex, but to a considerable degree based on the feeling that all the great music of western civilisation had come from such composers as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, while English composers of classical music were very much in the second or even third division.
Traditional folk music in the 1960s in England, was still very much seen as quaint, simplistic and quite often rather embarrassing (being sung by men with funny accents who would put their right hand over their right ear for reasons that were never fully explained).
This was the cultural world Dylan had meandered into, with no one to guide him, a world that was slowly starting to understand that England had an exciting musical tradition of its own. And so when Dylan performed “with his guitar in one key and his harmonica in another” as Heylin puts it (page 196) people were taken aback, but not because in England there was a staid tradition into which Dylan didn’t fit. Culturally at the time England was discovered that it did indeed have a musical tradition apart from Europe, and America had another tradition.
Meanwhile there was virtually no “popular music” on radio or TV in the UK, and when anything contemporary was played, the very powerful Musicians Union controlled how many records could be broadcast. Mostly, music had to be recorded especially for the show – a trade union demand that Heylin seems to be utterly unaware of, but which affected the English folk and popular music scene immeasurably.
Thus in many respects, Dylan, in creating and performing his own new songs and adaptations of older songs, was completely in touch with the contemporary musical situation in England when he visited London. There was only one radio station playing actual pop records, and that was broadcasting from Europe at night on medium wave with a very dodgy signal. Thus the English audience was desperate for new music, and particularly new music which had a link to their own past. It was into this restricted musical scene that Dylan had stumbled, seemingly without anyone around him who could properly guide him or help him understand what on earth was going on. Just three TV channels, three radio stations – and remember the pirate radio stations hadn’t arrived yet.
And it is the utter and complete lack of understanding of London in the early 1960s that leads Heylin to write (page 203) that “the locals were easily impressed by topical songs masquerading as folk songs.” Yes people would have been impressed I am sure – just as I was when Freewheelin’ turned up in my local record store. But not as topical songs masquerading as folk songs, for the simple reason that those of us interested in music beyond what was in the top 20, had been learning about the traditions of English folk music from the likes of Ewan Maccoll and Peggy Seeger.
Suddenly we had that music taken apart and sung in relation to the 1960s. I doubt that many people – even those who were really deeply into folk music – had ever heard “Constant Sorrow” before Dylan performed it, even though the song dates back to around 1913.
That song would have passed us all by. What we first got was Dylan’s version…
And this is what Heylin seems to be to miss completely when he writes about Bob’s visit to England to be part of the BBC recording. English people had never come across anything like this before – not just the singing, but the harmonica approach in which the harmonica could be held being a chord and that has nothing to do with the song, or indeed the key it is played in, as the opening to each instrumental break – as in the recording above.
It was earth-shattering, and it is such a shame that Heylin seems to have no musical knowledge and so is unable to appreciate let alone write about, what is actually going on.
Footnote: *MI5. A branch of the Military Intelligence division of the British government which is focussed on spying within the United Kingdom itself.
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.
This might come as a surprise: it seems to start out as a solo performance by Bob with some clever guitar work – but in fact there are at least two guitars – until around two minutes when everyone takes the song on, for a powerful instrumental improvisation, in which clearly there is no agreement as to who is in the lead.
When we get back to the “middle 8” things calm a little, and then (thankfully, from my perspective) we are back down quite a bit, but it builds up again with everyone fighting each other. I am not sure what they are fighting about, but I really do love the first couple of minutes, and the rest of the band are there in the background before the percussion gives the cue for everyone to make as much noise as they can.
God knows it’s terrifying
God sees it all unfold
There’s a million reasons for you to be crying
You been so bold and so cold
Incidentally, the song is notable for being one of the very few occasions in which Bob uses an augmented chord. Written G+ in musical notation it is made up of G, B and D#.
From the same year we have this version with the harmonica introduction – it is a good example of how Bob was working at this time, constantly exploring arrangements as the tour continued. The band is held back for a little longer and seems less intense on taking over the whole show. Maybe Bob had words with them. But certainly, there is a level of restraint here that we don’t have in the earlier part of the tour. Indeed even the instrumental break seems to have more organisation and control – and there is a much greater awareness that musically what marks this song out is that unique chord sequence.
By 4 minutes 30 we are starting to lose it a bit but the slow down around five minutes leads to a more reflective coda.
So moving on now to 1995 where will Bob have taken the song? We’ve certainly got a stronger acoustic guitar, and then as ever the percussion comes in to set the song off as a rock number. Even the bassist has found a riff of his own to play. The instrumental break is now however much more organised, with a nicely arranged mid-point. They certainly have been working on the arrangement – although without losing the thought of improvisation. Whether the harmonica solo above the whole band works or not I am not sure, but it is quite a jamboree. There’s also a very effective breakdown at the end.
In many ways this is a fairly simple song, and it is remarkable that Bob can get so many variations out of it without actually losing that trade mark chord sequence. By 2004 the percussionist has simplified his entry and the song has perhaps become a little bit too well-known to the band. But the long recitation of the lyrics on the same note makes it feel like there is a certain lack of ideas. There is however a very interesting harmonica part near the end, but you really have to listen out for it.
So we approach the end of the song on the Tour, in 2006. It has had a long life (188 performances – a lot for a track from the often derided “Under the Red Sky”. The introduction on the electric guitar with Dylan singing above is now much longer – the band is held back, and we are holding ourselves in wait for the percussion to enter.
But now even that entry is more restrained with a very strange seemingly almost out of tune repeated lead guitar single-note oddity, before the middle 8.
We are not quite back to where the song started, but the heights of sound and the blast of sound that we heard in earlier years have now gone. Indeed this is one of the oddest instrumental breaks I have ever heard from a Dylan band on tour.
But that break aside, I welcome this return to less of a blast, for the full on rock treatment has never seemed to me to fit to the lyrics. This solid beat, beat, beat, beat without a bass drum knocking out every beat of the bar and quite often with the lead guitar just playing a single note on every beat, is very unusual.
It is almost as if Bob is saying he has had enough of these God-given rules that must at all times be obeyed without question, or without reference to the surrounding circumstances. I’d very much go along with that!
God knows there’s a heaven
God knows it’s out of sight
God knows we can get all the way from here to there
Even if we’ve got to walk a million miles by candlelight
So maybe that is it. He’s now walking those million miles by candlelight. We can only wish him good luck.
This series on the lyrics and the music aims to look at both aspects of Dylan’s compositions, rather than focus entirely on the lyrics – just to see what conclusions we might reach. A list of previous articles is to be found at the end.
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By Tony Attwood
“…those few Dylanologists who bravely attempt to capture “Changing Of The Guards” in one conclusive interpretation, go down struggling.” That was the view of Jochen Markhorst in his superb review of the song in October 2019, “Chasing a meaning that might not be here”.
But of course others want to have us hear their own views of what the song is all about and those definitions surround us.
So can I add anything more? In terms of what the lyrics mean no, of course not. Jochen nailed it five years ago. But I can add a little I think (with my normal pomposity) that by combining a consideration of the music and the words in one review, and seeing what we get.
And in doing so I am struck by a sentence that Jochen wrote in that article, “The baroque exuberance of the text fascinates…” And I am once more struck by how true that is, but not just of the text but of the music too – for in Dylan terms this song is unique from a musical point of view (or because it is always possible I have forgotten an example from elsewhere, it is at the very least, extremely unusual).
In this regard, if you are used to listening to some of the live performances it is worth heading back to the original recording, for I do think this is how Dylan wanted it to sound after considerable experimentation – and it was only after this that he upped the tempo and the vigour of the song in the live performances.
First and most obviously we get a fade in – where else does that happen in Dylan? I am sure it must do somewhere else in Dylan since it is a simple technique to handle in a studio but I can’t think of an example at the moment. It gives the sense that the music has been there all along and now we are opening the door and entering the room where it eternally plays.
And then from a musical point of view something else hits us – the use of the minor chord.
Now even if you are not a musician, I am sure you will be able to hear the difference between a major and minor chord. If it is not immediately apparent and you don’t have a friendly musician with a guitar passing by, I will try and explain, using my recording studio (also known as my sitting room) which includes he piano which I still love to play every day.
In this first example, there are four chords and the sequence of four is repeated
The chords are C major, A minor, F major, G major.. To most people used to Western music, it sounds fairly happy and jolly. The second chord – the A minor, doesn’t bring a sudden sense of uncertainty or negativity or sadness… it is just a passing moment between the other three chords which are all major chords.
But now if we have a piece of music that is all minor chords, the feeling does indeed change.
Most popular music is written using major chords but quite a lot of songs use minor chords as a passing moment – and as in the first example above in this way they don’t affect the nature of the feeling within the song. In this second example the sound is however much more sombre.
However if one ends a phrase of major chords with a minor chord what we get is a feeling half way between those two examples above – a feeling of uncertainty.
and this is what Dylan does – there are two major chords but then there is a minor at the end. It is not intrusive, it doesn’t feel out of place, and most people who are not performers or not musically trained most certainly don’t notice it particularly, but that minor at the end gives a feeling of uncertainty. Not the uncertainty of being lost in an urban environment while driving, and cars and trucks all around, and having no idea where to go or what lane to be in. But still that edge of uncertainty – of not quite knowing where one is going.
So, the fact is that most pop and rock and folk music is based on major chords. And most of Dylan’s compositions are based on major chords too. Where minor chords are used they tend to be used either as the most important chord in the whole piece, setting the scene for of sadness for the music as a whole, or as a passing chord of no particular significance.
But here we have major chord, major chord and then the minor. And the minor can’t be heard as a passing chord because it is the end of the line. What we also have is a fade in, rather than a clean start. And then again we have a musical introduction with a tenor sax (not that common in Dylan once again). All of that is very, very unusual for pop, rock and Dylan.
And if you want one more variation we have a female chorus singing the opening lyrics of three lines of each verse followed by an “ohhhhh”. How unDylan do you want to get?
Plus with all that we have these lyrics
Sixteen years Sixteen banners united over the field Where the good shepherd grieves Desperate men, desperate women divided Spreading their wings 'neath the falling leaves
Fortune calls I stepped forth from the shadows to the marketplace Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down She's smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born On midsummer's eve, near the tower
What does all that mean? Well of course, as ever, a lot of people have ventured to tell us, as Jochen noted, adding quite rightly, that they “go down struggling”.
Which that leaves me hoping that I am not struggling, but rather pointing out that we have highly ambiguous lyrics, along with an accompaniment that is utterly un-Dylan-like, and challenging in a sort of gentle, “I bet you didn’t quite expect this” sort of way.
The fade in, the fade out, the use of the minor chords as a dominant part of the accompaniment, the use of the female vocalists, the use of the “ohhhhh” (or maybe “ahhhh” vocal accompaniment)… none of this is Dylan – or at least not Dylan that we know.
And yet despite these obvious variations, we have person after person telling us that this is Bob the Christian. Or that the message is …. well, you can make up what you want.
So… Jochen quite rightly says that most analysts of the song “go down struggling” and I utterly agree. Thus what I want to try and do (and I do it with a lot of trepidation) is to add one point: the musical arrangement is utterly un-Dylan. If the music says anything within the context of Dylan it says, “This is not me”.
But at the same time, the song is really rather jolly; just hearing the music without any knowledge of the lyrics (if you can imagine that) makes most people feel quite happy. It is not the music of suffering, or eternal damnation or repenting sins or salvation. It is a jolly piece of music with a very effective female chors repeating certain lines.
And we can’t even say that the repeated lyrics are particularly important. What the female chorus sings at the start are the lines
Sixteen years over the field Desperate men,
Spreading their wings
Fortune calls
There is no literary sense in those lines – it is just the lines that come at the point where the female chorus is asked to sing.
So let us go back to one of the first bits of philosophy I was taught as a young student: Occam’s razor. The idea is that when an event has two possible explanations, the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation.
Thus if we apply Occam’s razor to this song, the lyrics have no coherent meaning. Which then implies that the music has no deep meaning of its own, but is simply there to help the entertainment be, well, more entertaining.
So here is the meaning of the piece according to “The Law of Briefness” which is the alternative title of “Occam’s razor”. Dylan wanted to write an album that was different, but which was still a continuation of his work from the past. That meant opening with a song that could also be a single. So he writes a song which has no concrete or clear start, but just fades in. It also has no end, it fades out. It has lines which are clearly often not very significant – and they are repeated by the female chorus because… well, just because.
Lines like “Sixteen years” and “Fortune calls” and “The cold-blooded moon”.
Meanwhile, the band plays along with the saxophone having a particular impact, and the overall sound is rather good. In fact very good. I’ve played it hundreds of times.
But I never lose the feeling from the music and from the lyrics, that if you really want an explanation as to what it all means, then the biggest clue is that very unusually for Dylan the songs fades in at the start and fades out at the end.
There’s no musical reason for this – Dylan just decides to do it. Which if you want an explanation says, “Life goes on”. Of course, as it goes on it changes. Hence the title.
The songs reviewed from the music plus lyrics viewpoint…
For more details on this new 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.
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Covers of Beyond the Horizon
By Jürg Lehmann
What’s wrong with Dylan’s Beyond the Horizon? The classic Red Sails in the Sunset has – among many others – been covered by Bing Crosby, Fats Domino, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Van Morrison and even The Beatles– so why shouldn’t Dylan do it too?
Nobody can be surprised that he borrowed a melody, Dylan does this regularly, and you don’t have to do much research to find the source of inspiration, Red Sails is obvious.
So is it because of the lyrics that barely anyone deals with the song? There are only very few covers, but there is also little interest otherwise. In Still on the Road, Clinton Heylin gives Beyond the Horizon barely a page (…unfortunately, Dylan seems to have very little idea what to say next in this song though he is fully determined to run the full gamut of romantic stereotypes). Philippe Margotin&Jean-Michel Guesdon in Bob Dylan-All The Songs write not much more than that all the musicians are in tune with Dylan’s vocals.
As far as I can see, there are just three serious articles available on the internet, one tries to explain Dylan’s poetry in prose, the other two are by Tony Attwood and Chris Gregory:
“The singer begins by conjuring up an imaginary world ‘beyond the horizon’ situated somewhere …in the long hours of twilight… This is a song written, of course, by a man in his 60s, aware of his own imminent mortality. Yet while on Time Out Of Mind’s Not Dark Yet – his most profound meditation on mortality – he tell us that …Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear… now he seems to look into the face of death with a sly shrug and a playful wink.
“Few Dylan songs express delight in such a way… the wistful Tomorrow Is A Long Time (1963) perhaps, or the pleading Emotionally Yours (1985). But whereas such songs profess great sincerity, Beyond The Horizon is infused with an overwhelming sense of relief and sheer dizzy humility. He presents us with a vision of a kind of Paradise imagined as an ‘all singing, all dancing’ Hollywood musical. The singer has entirely come to terms with his mortality… he is already in Paradise, a place where …life has only begun… Beyond The Horizon is a song about transcending the fear of death. It seems to contain all those romantic, corny songs which tell us about a love which will ‘last forever’, and to stretch their sentiments to the logical extreme. It manipulates cliché to go beyond cliché.”
Tony Attwood, however, is not convinced by Gregory’s reasoning, he finds himself asking, “do I really want to see the next world, the promised land, the eternal paradise, through a bunch of phrases that could have been written into many other songs by modestly decent writers, without actually telling us anything? There are, for me, three problems. First, too many lines that just don’t quite work. Second, no overall message or idea that makes one think, “ah that’s interesting”. Third, the melody is so close to “Red Sails” (which surely everyone with an interest in popular song throughout the years knows inside out) that we’re endlessly reminded of the source….
‘When I first heard this song I wanted it to mean something particular, something special, not so much for itself, but because it was written by Bob, and as far as I can tell is what he wrote just before “Nettie Moore”, which is a completely different type of work. And it was of “Nettie Moore” that Dylan was speaking when he said it was “not just a bunch of random verses”.
‘In fact I think the use of that phrase does tell us about this song. I think it is just a bunch of random verses. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because as Bob has shown, it is possible to create intriguing images and thoughts out of just that. But here, no, it doesn’t work for me….
‘For myself I can’t find any power in this song’s lyrics, nor merit in reworking such a beautiful tune from 60+ years before.’
So here we got a possible answer why so few critics and artists are interested in the song. But then you come across the cover of Jette Torp & Jan Kaspersen and think: well, if you play it like that, then all the objections, criticisms and concerns don’t really matter. It’s just a song –a lovely one.
Torp’s live performance in 2016 is of an amazing simplicity and directness, it’s as if Dylan – contrary to Heylin’s objections – knew exactly what he wanted to say next (although Torp & Kaspersen skipped more than half of the lyrics and didn’t stick to the official version on the Dylan website. Perhaps this helps).
The ending line of the song is also a romantic stereotype, of course, but it’s still great: I’ve got more than a lifetime to live lovin’ you. You would like to hear this over and over again (ask my wife).
Michel Griffin also tackled Beyond the Horizon in 2017.
The symbolic power is actually recognised right away; in the first centuries of our era the Romans were already saying pelle sub agnina latitat mens saepe lupina, “under the skin of a lamb lurks the spirit of a wolf”. But oddly, it takes another 12 centuries or so before the dramatic power of the wolf-in-sheep’s clothing image from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is appreciated by the poets. The Greek Nikephoros Basilakis is usually cited as the first, thanks to a fable in his Progymnasmata in which a wolf wraps itself in a sheep’s fleece (and then is accidentally slaughtered by the shepherd who randomly plucks a sheep from the flock). In the following centuries the image continues to be used, mostly in fables, so that a wolf in sheep’s clothing soon gains proverbial status everywhere. However, for the most amusing adaptation we have to wait until the 20th century, until the genius Friz Freleng.
Sylvester The Cat, Porky Pig, Tweety, and let’s not forget Yosemite Sam… without Friz Freleng, the 20th century would have been a lot duller. Not only because of the huge number of cartoons he directed (more than 300, more than anyone else), and their quality (which earned him five Oscars and three Emmy Awards), but also thanks to the multitude of characters he conceived or co-developed. Apart from the aforementioned VIPs colourful heroes like the first Pink Panther and supporting roles like Tweety’s Granny. And equally influential are the shorts that in turn inspired other greats. Walt Disney transformed Freleng’s Oswald The Lucky Rabbit into Mickey Mouse, Chuck Jones gratefully used the Elmer Fudd that Friz created for Confederate Honey (1940) and the same Chuck Jones built the successful Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog series (“Mornin’ Sam”, “Mornin’ Ralph”) on Friz’s 1942 short The Sheepish Wolf – the funniest adaptation of the wolf-in-sheep’s clothing-motif.
But the spiritual father of all these proverbs, fables, stories and cartoons is, of course, Jesus, the source being the Sermon on the Mount as recorded by Matthew in Matt 7:15: “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.”
It is certainly not the first time Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount has seeped into a Dylan song. Here on Rough And Rowdy Ways, Dylan quotes the Lord’s Prayer in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” (second verse; “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory”), Jesus’ template for prayer that Dylan name-checks in “Foot Of Pride”; he sprinkles glitter from the Sermon throughout his gospel oeuvre (in “Do Right To Me Baby” and in “Precious Angel”, for example, and more); paraphrases Matt. 6:34, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself”, in “Mr. Tambourine Man” (Let me forget about today until tomorrow); variants of the town built on a hill and house built on a rock from Matt. 5:14 and 7:24 we hear in “Po’ Boy”, “Scarlet Town” and “Summer Days”… from I’ll reflect it from the mountain in 1962’s “Hard Rain” to The city of God is there on the hill further on in this 2020’s “False Prophet”, the Sermon on the Mount continues to echo in Dylan’s oeuvre. And explicitly Dylan refers to it in “Up To Me”, the 1974 Blood On The Tracks outtake:
We heard the Sermon on the Mount and I knew it was too complex,
It didn't amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects
In short, in every decade of 60 years of Dylan songs, we come across references, a name-check or quotes – the Sermon on the Mount really is a constant in the oeuvre.
That review in “Up To Me” is a bit mysterious, by the way. “The Sermon on the Mount was too complex, being too fragmentary.” The Sermon on the Mount “too complex”? On the contrary, really; Jesus’ sermon excels in its plain language and clear messages – unlike his usual style of speech, with all those laborious parables and counter-questions, the Sermon on the Mount is completely unambiguous, spoken mostly in short, simple sentences. Jesus begins with the eight Beatitudes (“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth,” and so on), followed by the salt-and-light metaphors (“You are the salt of the earth”), metaphors that he explains right after, then stresses the validity and the correctness of the Laws of Moses, declares the Lord’s Prayer, and further meanders on about the importance of humility and modesty, and the horrors of hypocrisy and whoredom and the likes, and does all of this mostly in the classic and very understandable thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure.
The second part of Dylan’s critique in “Up To Me”, it didn’t amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects, still makes sense then, but is most of all a chutzpah of course. Indeed, the content of the Sermon on the Mount does not have a comprehensive plot, it is not a continuous story – it consists of isolated statements, instructions and admonitions. With some good will, one can recognise a comprehensive chiasm structure, the x-structure with the Lord’s Prayer as the crossroads, as well as a comprehensive tone; mildness is indeed the overarching tenor of Jesus’ words (except his somewhat hysterical views on divorce and adultery – casting hell and damnation already if you only look at another woman with lust). Content-wise, though, it’s like what the broken glass reflects, that’s true. But from the pen of Dylan this is rather blatant, not to say a travesty – Dylan himself, after all, is the grand master who assembles disjointed, unrelated mosaic bricks into song lyrics. Song lyrics like “Up To Me” and like “False Prophet”, ironically enough.
Which seems to demonstrate that Dylan did not get to Matthew 7:3; “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 2: The Dead are from a different world
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:
From my perspective, the way Heylin describes the evolution of Bob’s early bands is pretty much what happens to a lot of young people when they form bands. The reason they are there is the music and their desire to show other people what they can do. What they have had no training or experience in is how to organise anything – in this case a group of a few teenagers who want to make music together and show others how good they are. Most schools are based on the notion that the teacher organises, and the pupils and students follow. If we are ever taught how to organise, that comes much later.
Indeed teenagers were not (and as far as I know still aren’t) helped to understand the concept of group dynamics any more than they are taught how to write successful songs in the contemporary or any other style. School curricula across the Western world still seem to be stuck in the teaching in facts and an understanding of the past, rather than how to research, and how to do stuff in the present.
Part of this problem is discovered by all young aspiring artists who genuinely do have a particularly high level of creative ability, whatever their art form of interest. For what they find is that most people are not only not travelling on the same bus as they are, they aren’t even travelling in the same direction (or even dimension). Thus part of the work of the young genius who wishes to have his art accepted is to find a way to link between what he/she feels and what other far less talented people will accept.
Bob was clearly learning this in his first attempts to play with a band, which in turn explains why Bob had difficulty finding himself a band that he would find acceptable and which would accept him. Combine this fact with the point that people of genius generally wish to push forward the ideas that so deeply affect them, and may have little time for other people and other ideas, and we can understand what happened to Bob with his early musical ventures far more clearly than through all the tiny points of detail that Heylin, having researched, feels utterly obliged to publish.
But Heylin loves the throwaway line which comes without explanation. Take for example the claim that the popular song “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens, “would later for the basis for Dylan’s own radical reinvention of rock, “Like a Rolling Stone”. (Page 168).
I have oft mentioned here and elsewhere that I started my working life as a musician, and that I still play and still write music, and from a musical point of view (which I feel qualified to offer) I think this is stretching things a bit far. Heylin gives no explanation for this comment and seems to have picked it up from the internet and just written it in order to knock.
There are a lot of versions of La Bamba…
…but the point is that La Bamba was a Mexican folk song from the 18th century, as far as I know, and there really is nothing culturally or musically to link Rolling Stone with La Bamba in any way at all. It’s an internet myth. Indeed one can hear this in five seconds.
So why does Heylin put this odd comment in, without any validation? One can only assume that he read elsewhere that La Bamba is the source of Rolling Stone, and without pausing to play the two pieces either on record or in his head (if he is capable of such a thing), he just wrote it down.
It really is nonsense – although one of those bits of nonsense that gets repeated and repeated and which today (in the UK at least) we call “fake news”. Or perhaps better said, nonsense, gibberish, tripe…. (and there is some more of that later, if you can stay with me).
But Heylin is most insistent that Dylan was part of the world of artists bastardising a folk song and then claiming it for their own. And it is true that this is what people did at that time and yes if we want to know the origin of some of Dylan’s songs that is a point worth following. But to decry this process and to make it seem that Dylan was a thief is just a form of “presentism” – judging the actions of those in the past by today’s standards and norms. We might feel ourselves superior, because in my country today, women have far more rights and equalities than they had 100 years ago, but if one only judges the past by reference to today’s norms we get only a fractional understanding of the past.
So maybe Paul Nelson is correct when he said that Dylan had told him that, “he had used topical songs as a vehicle to get to the top and always considered them as a means to an end.” But we should view this comment with the awareness that Nelson said this in 1965 and if we make a judgement, it should include being aware of the norms of the day – something that seems quite beyond Heylin.
The same applies to understanding the comments between musicians and producer that have been preserved from the Dylan recordings of the mid-60s. Put in black and white without any context, as Heylin does, they sound awful, but certainly when I was trying and failing to make a breakthrough in music in the early 70s that is how people spoke in the studio.
At the same time everyone copyrighted everything, even when it was copied from someone else. The idea was that if we didn’t copyright this arrangement, someone else would do so, and take our work. So we were not so much simply stealing other people’s works, we were trying to protect ourselves (usually unsuccessfully) from subsequent theft. In the UK, and I imagine the USA too, it took a few laborious legal cases and a new Copyright Act to get the mess finally sorted. That Act (the Design Copyright and Patent Act) became law in the UK in 1988 – before then all copyright was a minefield.
So this is my on-going complaint about Heylin: he judges the actions of Dylan in the 1960s by the mores of today, and that is a ludicrous approach. Of course, we might note that “you couldn’t get away with that today,” but history is about understanding not just what happened in the past, but the context of the past – and this is where Heylin is a non-starter.
I mean, I could spend my time commenting negatively on the fact that Heylin will use the split infinitive in his writing (as in “Columbia had failed to really follow through on the single.”) In formal English grammar that is certainly very poor writing, and although I try and avoid something like “to really follow” people do write that sort of thing, so it is accepted. In short, if we do note such things, we should also note that in the standards of English writing today, “to really follow” is considered ok. Otherwise, we would spend all day commenting on grammar and not getting anywhere.
And this brings us to a major failing of Heylin. He spends all day analysing the past, from the perspective of the present, and using this as a stick with which to beat Dylan.
That is foolish in my view, but that’s not all – for Heylin’s writing is awash with unjustified (and quite honestly I often find unjustifiable) personal comments. So commenting on a series of recordings that surely most of us would never have had the chance to hear, he says “The best of the bunch – Oxford Town excepted – was a “come all ye call to join the march of progress, “Paths of Victory.” And that comment really needs to be clarified
As I noted in my review of the piece on this site the song was a re-write, and Heylin admits this, but still throws us his remark that this was just about the best of the bunch without a justification. Heylin says, he seems to suggest, and so it is. To contradict the mighty Heylin, would be, well, foolish, it is implied.
However, in the real world, there was still a disconnect between what Dylan could do with a song and what he could do with a conversation – and this is an interesting point when we look towards Dylan’s career as he started to make records.
We get and insight into this from a meeting between Judy Collins and Bob Dylan in 1962. By then Collins was a great admirer of Dylan’s work, but after meeting him said, “This guy’s an idiot, he can’t make a coherent sentence.”
Heylin quotes that but then jumps into saying “Collins was still smart enough to co-opt Dylan’s better discards,” implying that in some ways Judy Collins herself was stupid to make the comment about Dylan’s speech. Whereas what Judy Collins was quite possibly noting was that like so many geniuses, Bob could express himself perfectly in one form (the song) but not in others (such as the interview, or the conversation).
It is a perfectly legitimate, and indeed given that it was so early in Dylan’s career, when he had hardly been called upon to do interviews, very valid comment, and should lead to some consideration of the nature of Dylan’s artistic genius. For although a few geniuses can or could work in multiple forms, many can’t, or won’t or don’t. Why this is, and what his observation leads us to think when, for example, considering Dylan’s poems and books, is another matter – but given the size of Heylin’s book, it most certainly could be considered therein. But at least for the moment, he is content to publish a put-down and leave it at that. How typical of the man!
In fact it is this sort of trivial throwaway that really does annoy me. I know these are points of detail, but if one is writing a two volume affair that runs to around 1000 pages surely there is a duty to get some easily checked facts right. For when Heylin makes grotesque errors of fact in his book when he is not talking about Dylan, it does suggest that Heylin, his editor, and his publisher really don’t care about facts, or details – and thus may well have got some of the bits about Dylan wrong as well.
And I say this knowing that I make mistakes quite often. But this is a blog written by me, and not checked (nor even proof read) by anyone else. Heylin’s two volumes is different – it is presented as important, and it is a book published by Vintage, part of one of the biggest publishing firms in the world. There should have been checkers of the historical facts.
And yet despite the status of the publisher, and indeed the status that Heylin likes to afford himself, he can say, and is allowed to get away with (by his editors and publishers) the statement that soon after his meeting withJudy Collins, Dylan “headed for London, capital of Albion since the Romans…”
Now Heylin doesn’t have to say that bit about Albion and the Romans; but I’m a Londoner and I know where my birth city is, and I suspect so does every reader of his book. And because I’m a moderately well educated Englishman I know it is nothing short of mindless gibberish, utter garbage and total tripe to write “London, capital of Albion since the Romans”.
Of course it’s a throwaway line from Heylin not checked either by himself, or (worse) by his editor, (or proofreader or publisher). But he gets this wrong. And if he gets that wrong, one thinks, how much more is wrong? (Well actually we have already found out, quite a lot, and I am only up to page 185 of volume one).
Now I don’t expect people to know about the history of my home town – I know it because I am proud to be from North London. And to come back to Heylin’s wild ravings with the Albion stuff, you only have to go as far as Wikipedia to get the facts. Or come to that any other book on London’s history.
For in essence the capital of England for centuries was Winchester but was moved to London in the 12th and 13th centuries and from that point was seen as the capital by convention, although not statute.
As for Rome, in the fifth century, Rome was sacked by the Vandals and shortly after the Western Empire ceased to exist.
Here’s Wikipedia on the topic – it is a shame that Heylin couldn’t get even that far in checking his facts….
“The capital of England was moved to London from Winchester as the Palace of Westminster developed in the 12th and 13th centuries to become the permanent location of the royal court, and thus the political capital of the nation.”
Thus London became the capital of England 750 years after the Romans left.
OK that’s not important when considering Bob Dylan, but I would make the point that if Heylin, his editors, his proofreader and his publisher can’t get that bit of detail right, it is perhaps not surprising that he gets so much else wrong. After all, with the issue of the capital of England, I think the details do appear in most history books concerning the country. And its on Wikipedia. One only has to look it up.
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.
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Wiggle Wiggle had 105 performances from Bob Dylan between 1990 and 1992, but then has not been touched since. And you might think, remembering the lyrics, that is a good idea…
Wiggle 'til you're high, wiggle 'til you're higher
Wiggle 'til you vomit fire
Wiggle 'til it whispers, wiggle 'til it hums
Wiggle 'til it answers, wiggle 'til it comes
Indeed these are not words that are normally quoted in articles about Dylan and yet playing the album track again, we have a danceable rock song in which the bass plays a running counter melody during the verses.
As for the lyrics we don’t get much from the song – any more than we do with the instrumental break in terms of innovation: it is in fact a bit of 1960s fun. And yet in the couple of years after the release of Under the Red Sky, Bob played it regularly on stage.
Here’s the original
Now as I have mentioned before, the tracks that were chased down and then selected by Mike Johnson were very much of his choosing, restricted only by what recordings had been made on the concerts and were now on line. He picked out Wiggle just twice during the series…
“Oh Lordy – well, here it is, rough as hell, with pretty much a completely new set of lyrics! The whole performance sounds pretty improvised to me, including the lyrics. Those incomparable lyrics and he doesn’t sing them! Sounds like he’s making it up as he goes along, and in some cases, just making Dylan-like noises that are not actually words…? (see what you can make of it).”
I’d respectfully disagree – the band know exactly what is going on, so I’m fairly sure Bob isn’t making it up as he goes along musically – and yes although the guitar solo is improvised, it is improvised around the chord sequence and everyone knows where this is going.
The length of the performance is also a clue as to what is going on – two and a half minutes is the classic length of the 78rpm and 45rpm rock song. I think Bob is having a bit of fun taking us back to the roots of rock n roll.
This is the only other performance of the song Mike selected, and of course you can read his full commentary through the link above, but I’d highlight this point he makes.
“Here it is, with the lyrics restored. There’s some pretty fancy guitar work here by John Jackson. This jazzy extension seems to be what interests the musicians. The audience seem to get it, and have a good time. ‘Wiggle you can raise the dead!’ Oh Lordy.”
Again, I really like this, although could do without the gentleman who likes to shout “Yeah” a lot. It takes Bob really into the rock n roll era, and perhaps reminds us that most rock n roll songs have lyrics that are utter nonsense.
For let us not forget that rock n roll moved along with songs that included lyrics such as
I chew my nails and then I twiddle my thumbs I'm real nervous, but it sure is fun Come on, baby, you drive me crazy Goodness gracious, great balls of fire
And again we might remember how much Bob appreciated the work of Jerry Lee Lewis et al. I was fortunate enough to be at the Bob Dylan gig on the day Jerry Lee died, and totally against his normal procedure Bob came back for an encore, announced that “we lost Jerry Lee today” and sang a Jerry Lee Lewis song in tribute.
I also recall Mike once commenting on how Bob “sure hammers those ivories Jerry Lee Lewis style.” And it really makes me think, just because the lyrics make fun of pop lyrics, and in a sense of all of us, that doesn’t make it a worthless song. As 105 performances tell us, Bob didn’t think it worthless; I think he was enjoying himself.
A look into some of the songs Bob Dylan performed just once or twice but then set aside for ever more…
By Tony Attwood
Bob Dylan performed Corrina Corrina just the once, on April 16 1962 in New York
Now it is alleged in some sources that Bob is not singing Corrina Corrina at all but in fact “Sones in My Passway” written by Robert Johnson.
I am not at all convinced by this argument, for although “Stones” has the lyrics…
I have a bird to whistle
And I have a bird to sing Have a bird to whistle And I have a bird to sing
… I am not sure there is too much else to connect the songs, aside from the fact that they are both 12 bar blues – and since there are millions of 12 bar blues around that in itself doesn’t seem enough of a link for me. But of course you can make up your own mind…
I’ll come back to “Stones” at the end with another recording, but for now let’s accept that the song dates back to 1928 with antecedents before that, although often not sounding remotely like the version Bob adopted. His version is a variant 12 bar blues, and that was a version which was not copyrighted until 1932 by the performer Bo Carter. Here’s the original Bo Carter version.
Bob made several studio recordings of the song…
Which of course ended up as the album version
I find it fascinating how, not just here but quite often, Bob changes which key he wants to perform individual songs in, and this is another example of this. Bob appears to have a different feel for each key – something that can be found in a few other performers, probably because the music played on the keyboard or guitar really does “feel” different in each key, even if it is still the same piece of music.
Listening to these recordings for the first time in a number of years I’m taken once more by the gentleness of the performance by Bob.
But of course when doing a little digging around in order to write a brief review like this one can often find something a little unexpected, and this time the unexpected was the song “Has anybody seen my Corinne” which is a different song, of course, but the name and the theme of Corinne needing to come back home is the same throughout. This dates from 1918.
There are even earlier songs about Corrina not being here, but the further back we go the further away they are from the song that Dylan picked up on, but if you really want to go searching there is a Blind Lemon Jefferson recording of Corrina Blues, but by that far back we really have no relationship with the song Dylan recorded.
HoweverI am going to finish by going back to the start because I do want to include this recording. It is Eric Clapton performing Stones in my Passway, the song from which most authorities agree, was the start of the journey that ended with Corrina. Now that is the blues…
For more details on this new 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.
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Covers of Hollis Brown
By Jürg Lehmann
It has now and then been stated that Hollis Brown is problematic for the cover artist in that it consists of just one chord and two lines a verse (one of which is repeated.)
Many cover artists are tempted, precisely because the song is so ‘monotonous’ and ‘simple’, to ‘get something out of it’ to make it more ‘interesting’. But this is like trying to improve a black cube by Malevich with a few colours. It certainly goes wrong, which happens to more than a few songs that are way over the top by unnecessarily overdramatising an already dramatic song.
So how do you get the intensity of the song with restraint? For example with a clever, creative arrangement, but also with the charisma of the artist – or with both.
Shortly after the release of the original song, Nina Simone showed how it can be done.
That she was recording my songs validated everything that I was about. Nina Simone was the kind of artist that I loved and admired, said Dylan.
Some artists are destined to be forever entwined, writes Jack Whatley. Usually, such entanglement can be traced back to a mutual kinship or a shared musical passage to greatness. Sometimes the way two artists become connected can be simple and, frankly, a little boring. But if there was ever a word that represented the antithesis of Bob Dylan and Nina Simone, boring would be a solid front-runner. These two giants of America’s surging 1960s represent the heart and mind of the counter-culture revolution.
… Bob Dylan represents one of the keenest lyrical minds the world has ever known…His songwriting skills have been used outside of his own remit by countless impressive artists. From Jimi Hendrix to David Bowie, the world of the freewheelin’ troubadour rarely hit the ear without evoking the mind’s eye. One such lover of Dylan’s work was Nina Simone.
Sincere advocates for the Civil Rights Movement, both artists can be seen as pivotal members of the arts division of the general push for racial equality. While Dylan would appear at the critical MLK March, Simone would devote much of her life in the limelight to sharing the spotlight with the myriad of issues she saw imposed on regular folks. It’s a kinship that would unite the two artists and see one another’s greatness…
Bob Dylan hasn’t offered many covers in his time, instead preferring to pen his own work for his audiences. Nina Simone, however, would have happily held her hands up to being much more a performer or singer than a songwriter and so used the work of others to express herself.
Dylan was one of her most favoured and covered songwriters. In 1966, her version of ‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ appeared on the album ‘Let It All Out’. Her album ‘To Love Somebody’ from 1969 contained her interpretations of ‘Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues’, ‘I Shall Be Released’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’. Two years later she recorded ‘Just Like a Woman’.
Since her death in 2003 Nina Simone’s catalogue has been revisited on several occasions, and each time a greater portion of her legacy has been restored. Released nearly in conjunction with To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story – the career-spanning overview – Jazz Icons: Live in ’65 and ’68 presented Nina Simone from two different European television performances: The Holland 1965 session and the England 1968 session.
On her album Let It All Out in 1966, Simone uses an acoustic guitar as the main instrument, her live performance the year before would be more piano heavy and much more forceful. With her energy and earthy vocals, Simone makes every song her own. This is particularly evident in her version of Hollis Brown. “A masterful performer, particularly in a live setting, Simone clearly knew how to reach her audience most effectively at any given point in time, writes John Metzger. With the two shows that are featured on Jazz Icons she demonstrated that there is more than one way to frame a message…This is how many remember her, and although it is, at times, a raw, edgy, and uncomfortable performance, it also is impossible to turn away from her mesmerizing presence. Simone had a knack for luring her followers into her tales of hardship and struggle, though she also had a habit of challenging them to keep pace with her point of view…(She played) Bob Dylan’sHollis Brown like a miniature symphony that was adorned with jazz instrumentation. The circular, rhythmic progressions she spun on piano did more than simply form a trance-like cadence that mirrored the cyclical nature of life and poverty depicted in the latter track; it also captured the manner in which the music consumed her, controlled her, and ultimately spilled forth with unstoppable force.”
Unfairly forgotten by many nowadays, Stone The Crows (featuring the brilliant vocals of Maggie Bell) were a highly respected Scottish blues-influenced rock band back in the early 1970s. “With musical talent to spare and Led Zeppelin’s manager behind them, Stone The Crows should have been a success story. Instead it’s one of tragic death and unfulfilled potential”, deplores Martin Kielty.
Stone The Crows came to a premature end following the tragic onstage death of guitarist Les Harvey, electrocuted by a live microphone. The band continued for a while, but some of the spirit was irreplaceably gone.
The band has had something of a reappraisal of late, not least thanks to the release of four remastered albums of the legendary BBC sessions.
If you’re a fan of Stone The Crows or indeed the criminally underappreciated Maggie Bell, you will wonder how your record collection has coped without this all your life (Steve Pilkington). The biggest revelation on these albums is the version of Bob Dylan’s Hollis Brown…Stone The Crows are extending the five-minute 1964 original to over 13 minutes, Bell inhabiting the words with deep anguish and suffering while an extended instrumental break has the band stretching out for a lengthy and powerful workout. It is hard to imagine this not having been heard by Nazareth before they recorded their own take of Hollis Brown 3 years later, yet in 2021 it is the first time the Stone The Crows take has ever appeared on an official release. It’s practically worth the price of admission by itself.
Yes, this is great music with a great singer, however, I tend to agree with Tony Attwood, who, while emphasising the qualities of the cover, also has a problem with the vocalist putting too much into the song as it builds up. It’s too easy to do that;the horrific silent scene of Hollis Brown committing suicide is lost. Dylan gets it by telling the tale in the same voice all the way through, so the deaths become matter-of-fact. Moreover the organist going on a little jaunt around the 5th minute took me totally away from the scene of five children, a man and a woman lying dead at an isolated house. This is the band having fun, each musician doing his or her stuff. Keeping this in mind you still should not miss the Stone The Crows cover version – or better still the whole album.
After putting themselves on the hard rock map with the album Razamanaz in 1973, Nazareth took their new, forceful style even further the next year on Loud & Proud. The album’s definitive moment of heaviness is the extended reworking of Hollis Brown and it is certainly one of the most unusual songs Nazareth has ever recorded. The Dylan original is hardly recognisable as such – which in itself does not mean anything wrong –, but the song escalates into a psychedelic ecstasy with roars and shoutings coming from the hell of desperation, but without gaining any intensity.
While some critics call it a nine minutes of electrocution of horrific distortion, Nazareth’s Hollis Brown is one of the fan’s favourites. It will certainly entertain anyone with a passion for 1970s hard rock.
Leon Russell, on his 1974 album Stop All That Jazz delivers a deep, uptempo, heavy bass and drum led funk version of Hollis Brown. The entire album is stylistically all over the place, Russell making use of the tech of the time. Some critics praise how far-reaching Leon Russel’s vision was – a combo of ominous sequenced sounding synth, stereo field effects, drummer/drum machine syncing, and gospel moans. It seems to prefigure Euro-disco and electro, but with organic elements. The repetitions, the formal monotony of the song are Russell’s undoing; in my opinion he does not succeed in making the monotony interesting, it simply remains – monotonous.
In 1989 and 1991, two other heavyweights took on Hollis Brown: The Neville Brothers (Yellow Moon,1989) and Stephen Stills (Stills Alone, 1991).
Aaron Neville and Stephen Stills are both great singers and performers, Stills also an excellent guitarist, and they turn in perfectly nice renditions without varying Dylan’s song too much from the original take. In fact the covers are more Dylan than Neville or Stills – but without the sense of menace and bitterness.
These are all very pleasant, interesting contributions by mostly excellent artists, but none of them is extraordinary. It’s the sort of music you would be happy to hear on a winter afternoon when you find yourself listening to an unexpectedly good cover band. It is definitely worth a listen, but there’s no reason to book the artists’s next concert.
One who stands out a bit is Rocco DeLuca (2009): his rendition has something more compelling, more haunting, perhaps because he doesn’t just sing, but actually tell the story.
I’m kind of a born-again Bob Dylan fan, I’ll be honest, says Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath.
I grew up in a punk rock/hardcore world where it wasn’t cool to listen to folk music, so I’m just now (2012) discovering a lot of amazing artists. Bob Dylan was one I passed on in the past, but now I’m digging into his catalogue and really appreciate his stuff…It’s kind of beginning to sink in. Especially as I’m really getting into the lyrics…This song, and his words, I felt this real affinity to and this sounds like something that if I was trying to tell a story, I would write it like this. It’s the first time I sang lyrics like the kind of the same way I sing my own.” Hollis Brown was Rise Against’s contribution to Chimes of Freedom: Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International. The US punk/hardcore band is known for its political commitment, it is therefore not surprising they decided on Hollis Brown. It’s a theme, McIlrath says, Rise Against can relate to.“I think that punk music has always kind of had an obligation to speak up for the underdog. Punk itself is people who feel like the black sheep of society. Rise Against’s cover is a forceful, insistent song that breaks out into an angry outcry when things get more urgent and desperate. The band also released a Making of Hollis Brown.
David Lynch, best known as the mastermind behind the series ‘Twin Peaks’ and as the director of films such as ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’, seems to be at home in all corners of the arts. After school, he studied painting, which led him to film. This in turn led him to music. He eventually built his own studio and released his first album ‘Crazy Clown Time’ at the age of 65. The follow-up album ‘The Big Dream’, with a Hollis Brown cover, was released two years later (2013).
Lynch is known for his disturbing and mind-bending visual work. Is the same true of his music? On his Hollis Brown David Lynch’s voice can only be heard in an alienated form. Noises waft in front of and behind it – sometimes produced by an electric guitar, sometimes by a source that is difficult to determine. Percussion or computer beats give the whole thing a few points of orientation, but the result of Lynch’s version sounds somewhat spooky.
The introduction of the vocal was a disappointment to me, but they do change the instrumentation as we progress and that works, writes Tony Attwood before continuing with an interesting general observation: It does strike me that many of these musicians and producers, talented as they are, are not considering one particular point: most of the people listening to their rendition are going to know this song off by heart. The really, really good re-interpreters of Dylan do consider this – they know we know the song by heart, and so they start from that point of familiarity and take us on a new journey, making a well-known road somehow different.
That is why Hendrix’ “Watchtower” worked – he just totally shocked us by taking the music to a new place, while still keeping it as a Dylan song.
This version by David Lynch does that in part, but still can’t deal with the fact that every verse is musically the same. Dylan didn’t have to worry because when he sang it, it was new to us. But now…
If you’ve never heard of Bill Sims Jr., you’re like me before I started my first research on Dylan covers some years ago. I came across Sims, who released an entire album of Dylan covers in 2016 (including the only existing cover of My Wife’s Hometown), pretty much by accident. There is little information about Sims on the internet (here are two articles: Remembering the Life of Bill Sims; Bill Sims: Composer Extraordinaire), he passed away in 2019 and it seems nearly impossible to find out who is looking after his legacy. His Dylan cover album Bill On Bob is currently available on iTunes, where you can pre-listen and download the song or the entire album, if you like it.
Bill Sims’ great contribution has everything you’d expect from a Hollis Brown cover: a simple, but clever arrangement that creates an intrusiveness from the outset, an intensity of performance that builds as the song progresses and the drama unfolds, a singer who pushes the boundaries vocally, but not beyond.
Over the last ten years, we once again come across a series of pleasing and skilful interpretations (which also include a remarkable contribution from a Polish artist): Hans Theessink (2013), Doolin’ (2016, Karen Casey (2018), Martyna Jacubowicz (2018, Polish), The Vengeful Cousins (2023).
If you’ve never heard of Bill Sims Jr., you’re like me before I started my first research on Dylan covers covers some years ago. I came across Sims, who released an entire album of Dylan covers in 2016 (including the only existing cover of My Wife’s Hometown), pretty much by accident. There is little information about Sims on the internet (here are two articles: Remembering the Life of Bill Sims; Bill Sims: Composer Extraordinaire), he passed away in 2019 and it seems nearly impossible to find out who is looking after his legacy. His Dylan cover album Bill On Bob is currently available on iTunes, where you can pre-listen and download the song or the entire album, if you like it.
Bill Sims’ great contribution has everything you’d expect from a Hollis Brown cover: a simple, but clever arrangement that creates an intrusiveness from the outset, an intensity of performance that builds as the song progresses and the drama unfolds, a singer who pushes the boundaries vocally, but not beyond.
Renowned US jazz singer Paula Coletackled Hollis Brown on her eighth studio album Ballads in 2017. Besides Hollis Brown the release also includes her take on Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, both tunes which she says she sings with reverence: I was really moved by Bob Dylan’s period in the ‘60s when he would sit at his typewriter and weave his social commentary into these beautiful poems and songs. Cole’s cover offers an interesting jazzy arrangement and a singer who is emotionally involved, but that doesn’t really carry over to me.
The latest cover version from 2023 comes from another prominent jazz vocalist: Emma Smith is recognised as one of the most exciting voices of her generation, spanning many genres, scenes and stages, she has performed from the O2 to the top jazz clubs of NYC. Being immersed in a musical environment from a young age she began her singing career at 14, and the year after joined NYJO as featured vocalist. She has also appeared with Sir John Dankworth’s band, the Jazz Vocal Project alongside Bobby McFerrin, and at the 2015 BBC Proms. Emma Smith’s rendition brings us back to the beginning of this article: the formal monotony of Hollis Brown tempts artists to artificially pump up the performance and confuse the drama and intensity of the song with loudness and vocal flamboyance. In my opinion, this also seems to have happened to Emma Smith – despite her undisputed talent and the excellent accompaniment by her quartet.
