Untold Dylan

 I don’t know what it means either is an index to the current series appearing on this website.   Older series from this site can be found here.    Previously in this series on Bob Dylan in 1971 we have

• Wallflower Part 1
• Wallflower Part 2
• Wallflower Part 3
• Wallflower Part 4

Details of the book “Bob Dylan’s 1971” which is available in English, Dutch and German, and how it can be ordered are given at the end of the article.

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1971 is the fourth year of Dylan’s Seven Lean Years, the dry spell that Dylan himself places between John Wesley Harding (late 1967) and Blood On The Tracks (late 1974). These are the years when Dylan sits on the waterfront, watching the river flow, waiting for the inspiration to paint a masterpiece.

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

Apparently, they mean something to Dylan…

• NL: Bob Dylans 1971 : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.nl: Boeken
• UK: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Amazon.co.uk: Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Books
• US: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Amazon.com: Books
• DE: Bob Dylans 1971 (Die Songs von Bob Dylan) : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.de: Boeken

Wallflower (1971) part 5

by Jochen Markhorst

V          I’m your density

 The research by director Robert Zemickis and writer Bob Gale is good. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is more or less accidentally transported in the DeLorean to 1955, meets George, the boy who will become his father, and George is quite a dork. Doesn’t know how to approach his crush, Marty’s future mother. Marty gives his “father” a crash course.

Marty: Alright, okay. Alright, there she is, George. Just go in there and invite her.
George: Okay, but I don’t know what to say.
Marty: Just say anything, George, say whatever’s natural, the first thing that comes to your mind.
George: Nothing’s coming to my mind.
Marty: Jesus, George, it’s a wonder I was ever born.
George: What, what?
Marty: Nothing, nothing, nothing. Look, tell her destiny has brought you together, tell her that she’s the most beautiful you have ever seen. Girls like that stuff. What, what are you doing George?
George: I’m writing this down, this is good stuff.
[walks over to the table Lorraine’s sitting at with her girlfriends]
George: Lorraine, my density has bought me to you.
Lorraine: What?
George: Ah, what I meant to say was-
Lorraine: Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?
George: Yes, yes, I’m George, George McFly, and I’m your density. I mean, I’m your destiny.
Lorraine: Oh.
(Robert Zemickis and Bob Gale, Back To The Future, 1985)

Poor George mangles it, but still manages to articulate the same conviction as Dylan’s wallflower: “And I know that you’re gonna be mine one of these days.” We are in the local diner where the youth hang out and the jukebox plays. And when George has gathered his courage and steps up to Lorraine, the jukebox is indeed playing one of the biggest jukebox hits of 1955: Etta James’ “The Wallflower”. Chosen well not only for its correct year, but also for its content: the whole song consists of urgent appeals to a shy boy to step towards the girl. Only the shy boy, the wallflower, is not called George (it’s “Roll with me, Henry”), but you can’t have everything.

It is one of the first, and oddly enough one of the rare times that the word “wallflower” permeates a pop song. And then only indirectly; the word “wallflower” does not appear in the lyrics of “The Wallflower”. Strange, because wallflowers are definitely an archetype in pop culture. Even before 1955 and Etta James, countless songs have been written about lonely yearning girls, awkwardly shy boys and pitiful suckers meekly watching their secret crush dance with someone else – wallflowers, in short.

It eventually takes until 1966 before a trendsetter makes the word salonfähig, acceptable, and that trendsetter is, of course, the trendsetter of the mid-1960s:

But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze

… Dylan himself, in – obviously – “Visions Of Johanna”. With which the somewhat naive term became poetically acceptable, just as Dylan had already legitimised the word “clown” by its mere use in a song (Lennon: “I objected to the word clown, because that was always artsy-fartsy, but Dylan had used it so I thought it was all right”).

And so “wallflower” now is admitted as well. Greenwich Village-mate Phil Ochs is the first to follow, on his peculiar but fascinating baroque record Pleasures Of The Harbor (1967), in “The Party”: The Wallflower is waiting, she hides behind composition / She’d love to dance and prays that no one asks her. Ellie Greenwich (of the legendary songwriting duo Barry/Greenwich) tries her hand solo in 1968, singing No one can say that you’re a wallflower / Cause you’ve always got something groovy to say in “Beautiful People”. Doesn’t have the same impact as her “Da Doo Ron Ron” or “Then He Kissed Me” or “Do-Wah-Diddy” or any of Ellie’s many other immortal world hits, but at least her song demonstrates that the spell on “wallflower” has been broken.

The word may have surfaced, but Dylan’s song “Wallflower” remains under the surface for a long time. The first release, Doug Sahm’s, goes unnoticed – the first and only covers are made in Doug’s immediate circle, by David Bromberg that is. We have to wait until 1991, until the trendsetter himself throws the song out into the world, and then it slowly comes off. Very slowly, but then steadily.

The Holmes Brothers – Wallflower:

The first noteworthy cover is eight years away: The Holmes Brothers’ 1999 contribution to Tangled Up in Blues: Songs of Bob Dylan. Noteworthy mainly because it is such a peculiar cover; the intro is played on a lone piano that suggests we will first listen to Schubert’s improvisation on Happy Birthday To You. The piano sounds out, a classic blues lick in slow motion on guitar introduces the song itself, which is then suddenly tucked into a surprisingly corny schlager arrangement. A blues it is certainly not. Mandolin, fiddle, steel guitar… everything is present to at least turn it into an attractive bluegrass cover then, but The Holmes Brothers apparently set their sights on a schlager. Weird. Fortunately, two years later they revenge with an unparalleled cover of Dylan’s “Man Of Peace”, with which the men then demonstrate that they can indeed do something great with a Dylan song.

The Holmes Brothers

Buddy Miller and his wife Julie have been paying attention. Their intense 2001 “Wallflower” is expertly stripped of all triteness, and from second 1 splashes with zest for life and joy of playing; scruffy country rock, heavenly Nashville harmonies and an irresistible drive on their Album of the Year Buddy & Julie Miller. Thanks also to insiders; Dylan’s sideman Larry Campbell plays the fiddle, and by the sound of it, guest vocalist Emmylou Harris has given two or three tutoring lessons to Julie Miller (as, by the way, the whole record sounds like a revival of Emmylou Harris with Gram Parsons – like a Return of the Grievous Angel, as it were).

Buddy & Julie Miller 

In the twenty-first century, the song is becoming increasingly popular, especially in old-timey and bluegrass circles. The charming all-women’s group Uncle Earl, for example (2007, produced by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, remarkably), with a straightforward fiddle-about-and-singalong rendition; The Bottlerockets in 2013 (who, incidentally, had “Wallflower” on their setlist as early as 1993) acoustic with banjo and featuring Jeff Tweedy; alt-country lady and multi-instrumentalist Anna Elizabeth Laube on Tree in 2017, chillingly singing her own second voice, a trick she repeats a few years later with a rather perfect “Buckets Of Rain” on Wild Outside, 2023 – and those are just the finest Wallflowers.

Anna Elizabeth Laube – Buckets Of Rain: 

Country, bluegrass, rock and blues, the surprisingly intimate pop ballad that Nana Mouskouri makes of it… still, the most beautiful remains the jazzy Diana Krall, the interpretation taking us back to the Wee Small Hours, to Oscar Peterson’s In A Romantic Mood and Chet Baker’s Sings And Plays – taking us back to 1955, Back To The Past, effectively.

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

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

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

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Mr Tambourine Man – A History in Performance, Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.

By Mike Johnson

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

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In the last article we saw the birth of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and its early performances in 1964 and 1965, a bold declaration of a desire to escape this world of ‘crazy sorrow’ into a world of ecstatic freedom, a desire to get stoned and disappear ‘through the smoke rings of my mind’ to a wild, untamed place – the ‘windy beach’ with its ‘diamond sky.’ That very desire itself, I suggested, was a form of protest against what he would later call ‘the unlived meaningless life.’ (‘False Prophet’)

When we get to the 1966 performances however, the mood of the song has radically changed. Its defiance has given way to a darker, crazier mood, its yearning underpinned by the sombre sense that following the pied piper might just lead us to a land of shadows rather than joyful freedom. Dylan achieves this switch of mood through vocal intonation and timing, a touch of syncopation in the guitar playing and a madcap, lonely, swooping harmonica.

‘Mr T Man’ was not the only song to be radically reimagined in 1966. That frail little acoustic ballad ‘One Too Many Mornings’ turns into a slow-paced anguished rocker and ‘I Don’t Believe You’ loses something of the humour of the acoustic version in an angry rock outburst.

It is the voice Dylan adopted in 1966, the voice he used for Blonde on Blonde, undulating, full of innuendo and implication, that brings about the darkening of these earlier songs. That voice, once unflatteringly described by Canadian novelist Robertson Davies as Dylan’s ‘moo-cow’ voice, brings everything it touches into question. Nothing can be taken at face value. Forthrightness gives way to leering insinuations. It is a bitchy, sneering, petulant, hurt voice that remains always vulnerable and open to self-questioning. It’s a voice that undercuts its own assertions with ‘bitterness and doubt’ (‘False Prophet’).

When that voice takes on ‘Mr T Man,’ the idealism of that song, its jauntiness, gives way to the darker undertones inherent in the lyrics. There’s a darker side to getting stoned that Dylan will explore in ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,’ but, in performance, Dylan almost manages to turn ‘Mr T Man’ into a Blonde on Blonde song.

Dylan’s vocal timing plays a huge role here. The line ‘let me forget about today until tomorrow,’ becomes

let me forget about today
until
to
morr
ow

The dragging out of the word ‘tomorrow’ makes us wonder if tomorrow is going to be any fun, maybe not, maybe ‘to-morr-ow’ the reckoning will come, and the awakening from the drug-dream may not be so pleasant.

That voice calls other things into question too. Consider these lines:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

What are these ‘waves’ that can bury ‘memory and fate’? Remember the ‘roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,’ from ‘It’s A Hard Rain Gonna Fall’? Could those ‘waves’ be billows of drugged oblivion? I mean, where would you be without your memory and your fate? Might not these ‘waves’ drown your identity, plunge you into a forgetfulness and obliteration no sane person would court? The tambourine man becomes a master of illusion who will lead you to a land of smoke and mirrors, your wonderful freedom delusional, the ‘dancing spell’ not a celebration but a curse.

I put all this in the form of questions, for these are the uncertainties that arise from Dylan’s 1966 performances. Nothing taken at face value; everything called into question. Getting stoned is a double-edged sword. We can kind of read backwards from ‘Visions of Johanna’ to see in ‘Mr T Man’ a prefiguring of that later song.

There is a direct line of descent from the happily expectant night of ‘Mr T Man’ to the unquiet night in the opening scenes of ‘Visions of Johanna.’ From the brightly swirling ‘Mr T Man’ to the darkly swirling ‘Visions.’ I’m suggesting that we can view ‘Mr T Man’ as a prequel to ‘Visions’. Take the last lines of that later song:

and Madonna, she still has not showed
we see this empty cage now corrode
where her cape of the stage once had flowed
the fiddler, he now steps to the road
he writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
on the back of the fish truck that loads
while my conscience explodes

If we ask, how did we get here, to this godforsaken place, we can answer that it all began when, gripped by the desire to escape, we volunteered to follow the pied piper – ‘take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship.’ You can’t be sure that that ship is not going to take you to a night that plays ‘tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet.’ Get stoned enough and this is where you’ll end up. Not a good place to be, and one step away from paranoia.

Before playing the first recording from Sheffield, the most famous of the 1966 performances, we have to say something about Dylan’s harmonica playing. In my first article for the Master Harpist series I attempted to describe Dylan’s harp work on these 1966 performances, describing them as ‘fey sounds.’ That’s one way to put it. Against the repetitive thrumming of the guitar, the harp rages in a jagged, scissor like dance, as if in a desperate attempt to escape the confines of the melody. It is the dance of freedom and restraint. You can hear the entrapped spirit beating up against the walls of the world during the verses, then, at the end of the verse, a long slow, despairing blues note swooping us into the next verse. It’s giddy, exultant and more than a little demented – a dance of madness.

The performance at Sheffield on May 16^th is generally considered to be the finest of the 1966 tour, and I have to agree, if just for the final harp solo that keeps pushing higher and higher as if it could go higher than the notes can take us; higher, stoneder, crazier; both gentle and frail yet piercingly insistent. I hear the beating of luminous wings in the darkness. The term tour-de-force might have been invented for this very performance.

Note Dylan’s sly attack on the anti-electric crowd with his opening crack about his electric guitar never needing to be tuned onstage. He sounds very zonked.

1966 Sheffield

This more darkly driven mood reminds me, not just of ‘Visions’ but another night-time walking song, ‘Love Sick’ (1997). Like ‘Mr T Man,’ it begins with a description of physical and mental exhaustion:

I'm walking
Through streets that are dead
Walking
Walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

And with ‘Mr T Man’ we find:

My weariness amazes me
I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming

And:

My senses have been stripped
My hands can't feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wandering

The mood of the two songs is very different, but both are night songs, walking-the-dead-street songs, both chronicle the physical sensation of alienation, alienation from the street and its inhabitants, and both songs threaten to leave us ‘hanging on to a shadow,’ (‘Love Sick’) while the ‘ragged clown’ of ‘Mr T Man’ is chasing ‘a shadow.’

There’s nothing comfortable about the numbness described in these two songs, and others. The same sensations are approached in ‘Not Dark Yet’ (1997):

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from

And getting away from it all is what ‘Mr T Man’ is all about. There is a hopefulness about that in ‘Mr T Man’ (remember LSD guru Timothy Leary’s ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’) that is not sustained in the later songs. The inherent hopefulness of the song, however, is compromised by the 1966 performances which seem driven by a desperate madness.

Dylan clearly understood the importance of the song, placing it in his acoustic set along with behemoths like ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Visions of Johanna,’ as well as ‘She Belongs to Me’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’

There’s no point in needlessly visiting further performances from 1966 except for the Sydney concert of April 13^th. To my ear, the Sydney performances have a bleakness to them unmatched by other performances of the tour (If you haven’t already, try the Sydney ‘Visions of Johanna.’). The ‘spooky’ sound from some of the venues is absent here. Here Dylan saves ‘Mr T Man’ for last song in the acoustic set.

1966 Sydney

Arguably these are the finest renditions of the song in Dylan’s career, but we can’t make that judgement just yet. Changes are coming, Dylan will abandon his 1966 undulating voice for a different kind of ambience, and the song will reflect a more upbeat mood from the trippy 1966 performances. After 1966 Dylan will seek a new voice for his songs, the voice which, to the consternation of his 1966 fans, he will use for ‘Nashville Skyline’ and ‘Self Portrait,’ and in Dylan’s collaboration with Johnny Cash. Nashville Bob is waiting in the wings.

How ‘Mr T Man’ will fare with Dylan’s change of direction will be the subject of my next article. Catch you then.

Until then, stay tuned

Kia Ora

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A full index to Mike Johnson’s 144 episode “Never Ending Tour” series – appears here.

The Double Life of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin is a big book. Over 500 pages in fact, and it is only the first part of Heylin’s latest offering on Dylan.   But despite Heylin’s eminence as a Dylan commentator, it’s a book that I think misses the point.

• Part 1: Let’s ignore creativity. 
• Part 2: On the road to creativity
• Part 3: Getting Noticed
• Part 4: Creativity is a multi-faceted gift
• Part 5: Raging against a masterpiece
• Part 6: Utterly missing the point

By Tony Attwood

There is a moment where Heylin comments on the morality he perceives in “Corrina Corrina” and in relation to it suggests that the lyrics suggest “a standard to which he [Dylan] was disinclined to hold himself.”

Now there can be some sort of justification in writing such a thing – for example if Heylin, in admonishing Dylan on page after page for being a womaniser, a liar, a stealer of other people’s music, a copyrighter of work he had no right to copyright, were to be found to be copying other people’s work in his “Double Life of Bob Dylan” without acknowledging the fact, then I guess some of us might want to point this out.

But Dylan is not an author, he is a song writer.   When a song writer writes lyric such as, “Baby I love you,” no one takes the lyrics as a serious representation of the lyricists frame of mind, since we all know what a song is.  To express it clearly, a songwriter is somewhat akin to a short story writer, except where there might be a plot there is instead music.

Although maybe no Heylin. While for most of us songs are fictional miniatures, fragments of life expressing one or at most two emotions usually (but by no means exclusively) in the space of three minutes.

Quite honestly it is beyond me how any adult might not get that. True, most of us who are Dylan fans like to think that when Bob wrote “Masters of War” he didn’t do it because protest songs were all the rage, but because he really felt it.  Just as (going back to my most recent article on this site) on the subject of Lenny Bruce, I take it that Bob admired Lenny Bruce, and didn’t write the song just because the record company said that a song about a contemporary artist’s death will boost sales.

But that does not mean that every song Bob has ever sung or indeed written, carries within it a message he believes in. It might be the case, but we don’t know because Bob doesn’t tell us.

The problem for Heylin, which I am fairly certain (given the way he writes) he has never realised, is that just as an actor who is totally sane can play Macbeth, so a songwriter living in perfect harmony with his wife and children can write lyrics along the lines of “My Baby Left Me” a) because they fit or b) because he can’t find any others or c) because the record company has been banging on about needing a new song and the composer still hasn’t come up with anything.

Writers are, after all, notorious for coming up against writer’s block, so why not songwriter’s block?   For as I have repeatedly said, although in my early days I did have hopes of becoming a commercial songwriter, it didn’t happen. However because I enjoyed the activity and because I thought some of my songs were quite good, I carried on songwriting. The results are only heard by myself and a very small very select group of family and friends, so there is no pressure on me at all. And yet despite this lack of pressure and the fact that I have written around 300 songs that I have felt good enough to keep (and occasionally play to others), I can go through weeks and weeks where I can create nothing, no matter how hard I try or how relaxed I am. And for me of course there is no pressure. If I don’t write any songs no one particularly notices. I write songs because I enjoy the process.

Oddly, Heylin does recognise this creative drive in reverse as he notes that, “Dylan was in a good space creatively.”  And this is a most telling phrase because it shows for once, Heylin recognising that being creative is different from most other aspects of human endeavour, given that for most creative people creativity is not something one can turn on or turn off at will.

Indeed Heylin describes in a little detail how Dylan wrote at this time, and it has nothing to do with the way most of us earn money. For Heylin describes Dylan sitting around until an idea struck and then typing it all out. And yet, through the book Heylin still demands that Dylan should act and behave like everyone else. Heylin even notes that Dylan was “oblivious to any hubbub around him,” which although hardly an in-depth analysis of what it means to be a creative person, is at least a start. Although Heylin can’t avoid suggesting that Dylan had no insight whatsoever into how good or otherwise any song might be. Playing the newly created “Hard Rain” to a passer-by he was apparently told he ought to record it. Dylan was unsure, replying, “think I should?”

If it happened (and by now one begins to wonder if anything in the book happened – but that’s probably just me getting frustrated) it is an interesting insight. But immediately we lose sight of this as Heylin with no justification or explanation describes the events of 26 October 1962 the “so-called missile crisis”.

And here I pause again, for “so-called” is a phrase that generally means that the writer or speaker thinks the name or term is inappropriate. If one writes “Bob Dylan, the so-called folk-singer” it generally suggests that one does not think that Bob is worthy of the title “folk-singer”.  So is Heylin saying that there wasn’t a crisis in Cuba? He also says the song, “Made its ‘official’ live debut at a multi-act show…”  The inverted commas around official suggest that here again the language isn’t being used properly.  So a couple of times in one page, Heylin is suggesting that most of us use language inappropriately, while he is by implication the arbiter of how one should write, speak, compose etc.  Which is odd enough, but when it is done without explanation or justification, it becomes downright weird.

What we actually have here is a writer who not only sees himself as the absolute source of information about Dylan, he is also the arbiter of everything from what is, and what is not a good Dylan song, to what is and what is not a nuclear missile crisis that could have destroyed half the world, while taking in the fact that “Bob never really accepted Hibbing as home” (page 152) in passing.

Apparently that latter point was because of the “pervasive sense of torpor and irremediable decline…”

And what is particularly interesting here is that Heylin gets this message from one paragraph of an early draft of “Tarantula” which Dylan calls a highly ambiguous work. But seemingly not at this point – although how Heylin knows that the ambiguity stopped just as Dylan decided to write about his home town I’ve not been able to fathom out.

But it is nevertheless fascinating as Heylin, having totally failed to recognise in the first 150 pages or so of his volume that the creative genius has a different sort of brain (at least in terms of the way it works) from most of us, just as the brilliant athlete has a set of muscles that work at a different level from those of most of us, so he seems to imagine that somehow Bob ought to have a moral code that was the same as everyone else’s.

And because of this it appears that “a lot of the time he [Dylan] didn’t necessarily  feel like letting even his family in,” which really feels is worthy of criticsm. For if Heylin had thought about it, the world that Dylan was exploring in his music was utterly different from anything his parents would have been able to understand.

The fact is of course that Dylan knew early on that he was different, just as the 14 year old who spends every evening writing songs, or painting portraits, or practising long-distance running, clearly realises he or she is somewhat different from the multitude around. These children are outsiders, and unless they are very lucky, will often find they have no one who can really get a grip of where they are and what they are doing.  After all, how does any parent know whether their 14 year old who has no interest in doing tonight’s homework but is instead ceaselessly listening to the blues, is  a) lazy, b) psychotic or c) a genius?

Heylin quotes Dylan as noting a series of songs, the sound of which “made me feel like I was somebody else and that I was maybe not even born to the right parents.”  It is not uncommon to hear creative teenagers express that – and in fact even more common if they find themselves in a school where obedience to the norm rather than creative expression is not just expected but utterly required. If you ever heard the phrase “You seem to think the rules don’t apply to you,” you’ll know what sort of institution I mean.

But Heylin himself will have no neutral ground from which he can take in various accounts and reach an argued judgment. When one of Bob’s fellow-performers speaks of the band’s ambition, Heylin jumps in saying that another band member “rightly disses his account”.   And we are left wondering, how does Heylin know that this dismissal is the correct and accurate view?  Indeed how does one ever really understand the ambition of another?  How does he know that the notion that “we really wanted to do stuff” should “rightly” be dismissed?

It is simply one person’s view against another on that most difficult thing to judge: creative brilliance. And throughout this book the one person who is allowed to judge is Heylin.  Could it be that Heylin has never in his life come across one of those young performers and writers who shine for a year or two, and then fade away, destroyed by their own creativity? (I’m at this moment thinking of Syd Barrett, you may well find another artist springing to mind).

In fact Heylin’s portrait of a young Dylan with ambitions but a fanciful mind. If something Bob is recorded as saying fits in with Heylin’s vision of Bob the fantasist then that gets quoted. If someone says the opposite, it is dismissed. There’s no evidence, except the fact that Heylin says so. And so we get the impression, if Heylin says, then it is.

Thus when Bob  Dylan sets up a three piece band (The Chords) it includes Bob himself, the “hottest guitarist in the school” and Lenny Hoikkla “who liked to hit things”.  It is from such sentences we learn more about the author than the subject of his book.

The series continues.

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

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.   You may also be interested in Mike’s new series: “Mr Tambourine Man: – A History in Performance, Part 1: A masterpiece is born“

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“Lenny Bruce” got 177 outings on the Tour between 1981 and 2019 having appeared in August 1981 on the Shot of Love album.   So it is interesting that it took Bob quite so long to perform it: our earliest recording in the Never Ending Tour series comes from 1994

1994: Dancing to the nightingale’s tune

This is a plaintive version indeed – just listen to how Bob sings “he was an outlaw”, and for me he really sings this version as he still means it – although Bob then insists on playing the same note over and over in the instrumental break – something he has often done on the harmonica, and which musically I never understand.  But that’s my problem not his.

This is a very unusual use of the voice by Bob in terms of the contrasts he puts into his own vocals – and the second instrumental break really does entangle the instrumental lines, once more in a way that is quite unusual on the Never Ending Tour.   Indeed the return to gentleness in the break after five minutes is also really is unusual for Bob.

Then we have a harmonica solo which is so plaintive and pleading it seems to take the entire performance to another level and provides a perfect postscript to a song that I still find a most wonderful piece of composing, even after so many listens.

2005: God knows you gotta weep

If you turned your volume up to hear the track above you might want to turn it down again before starting to listen to this version from 2005.   (You’ll understand we are just picking up the recordings that others have devoted hours and hours not just recording but also putting on the internet – so we joyfully take what is offered).

Bob is now, I feel, less concerned with the meaning of the lyrics and more with the sounds as he changes his articulation.   For me the added “chunkyness” of the accompaniment and the additional force of the lyrics remove a lot of the meaning, and indeed the sentiment, from the song.   So when Bob sings “Lenny Bruce is gone” with that extra accent on “gone” I’ve stopped believing he cares.

But the instrumental break around the four minute mark still works wonderfully, although then I find the spoken verse that follows isn’t really right.  The melody of the original is for me one of Bob’s great, simple melodies, and I don’t really want this old emotional friend changed in this way.

2019: We can either play or we can pose

And now if you want a surprise you are going to get one, with the way this version starts.  Indeed you might want to sit down if you are standing.  Or if you are sitting, just hold onto something.

The first 20 seconds give us a slight clue, but then as Bob starts to sing that opening line, well, I must admit I had forgotten what happened, but I should not have done.  For this is one of my utter highlights from the series – it would be on my CD of “The Never Ending Tour – the 20 greatest moments”.

Bob’s voice is faltering of course – he was 78 when he performed this and had had a life time of belting out vocals in huge stadia.   And now he can still take me apart by performing this wonderful song in this way.

The performance lasts getting on for six minutes and as you can hear Bob holds the audience totally in his spell.  And when he says “he was the brother that you never had,” I know exactly what he means.  (Or rather I know what he means – because since I first heard this recording, the actual real-life brother I never knew I had, found me, and transformed my life.  But that’s another story…)

Mike then kindly gave us a second version of the song – and as I am sure you will long ago have realised if you read any of the series, Mike was always totally the controller of the Never Ending Tour series, choosing exactly which performances he wanted to illustrate each part of the tour.

So all I can do is say a double set of extra thank yous that in his coverage of the 2019 tour (the final year of the tour in fact) he chose to give us this recording.

As by now you must have realised, although I’m the publisher of this site I don’t have any insights in what those who dedicate their time to providing the articles are going to say – they go their own way and what they send me is what is published.   But when I realised we had this version of this song in the review of this final collection from the tour, I just couldn’t believe it.

Mike did in fact give us one more episode after “We can either play…”  Virgil’s farewell: It’s not dark yet  which is a most wonderful postscript to the 144 episode series.  But more than that, it is a truly wonderful epilogue to this performance.  If you missed it when we first published it, it is of course still there.  I’d recommend trying it – but not before you have played “Lenny Bruce” at least once more.

And as a postscript (which I can do because there’s no one to tell me not to), here’s one more.   It is not from the tour, but if you love this song, then I suspect you’ll enjoy this.  It’s Bob with Tom Petty in 1986.  It’s not as extraordinary as that 2019 performance, but then, hardly anything is.

• A Hard Rain’s a-gonna fall 1988 – 1999
• Absolutely Sweet Marie
• Blind Willie McTell. 1997-2006
• Blowing in the Wind. 1991-2001
• Cold Irons Bound 1997-2002
• Desolation Row: beyond imagination: 1992-2017
• Don’t think twice it’s alright 1993-1997
• Duquesne Whistle 2013-2018
• Early Roman Kings
• Forever Young 1987 to 2011
• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• Gates of Eden
• Goodbye Jimmy Reed
• High Water
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• I and I
• I don’t believe you – 1994 – 2013
• I shall be released 1975-2008 
• I’ll be your baby tonight 2003-2015
• It Ain’t me Babe from 1994-1998.
• It’s all over now baby blue
• It’s all right ma – at least it was by 2001
• Lay Lady Lay 1993-2010
• Like a Rolling Stone 1988 to 2002
• Long and Wasted Years
• Love Sick from the very start to 2000
• Love minus zero / No limit 1988 – 1996
• Maggies Farm – with a wonderful ending
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• Not dark yet
• One too many mornings. 
• Pay in Blood
• Positively 4th Street, 1994-2006.
• Rainy day women, from push to stroke
• She Belongs to Me: 1988 to 1995
• Shelter from the Storm 1989-96
• Silvio
• Simple Twist of Fate 1989-2003
• Spirit on the Water
• Summer Days
• Tambourine Man 1964-1995
• Tangled up in Blue 1988 to 1993
• The Times They are a Changing: 1987-1995
• Thunder on the Mountain 2006-2014
• The Drifters’ Escape. 1996-2005.
• The Hard Rain of 1988, 2003 and 2015
• Things have changed 2000-2007
• To Ramona. 1989 to 2000
• Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum – an unbelievable journey
• Visions of Johanna
• Watching the River Flow

 I don’t know what it means either is an index to the current series appearing on this website.   Older series from this site can be found here.    Previously in this series on Bob Dylan in 1971 we have

• Wallflower Part 1
• Wallflower Part 2
• Wallflower part 3

Details of the book “Bob Dylan’s 1971” which is available in English, Dutch and German, and how it can be ordered are given at the end of the article.

———–

1971 is the fourth year of Dylan’s Seven Lean Years, the dry spell that Dylan himself places between John Wesley Harding (late 1967) and Blood On The Tracks (late 1974). These are the years when Dylan sits on the waterfront, watching the river flow, waiting for the inspiration to paint a masterpiece.

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

Apparently, they mean something to Dylan…

Wallflower (1971) part 4

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         “He has ’em play as stupid as they possibly can.”

It is a famous comment, the one Dylan makes when interviewer Scott Cohen triggers him with “Heart Of Gold” in 1985. I was living in Phoenix Arizona at the time, in 1972, Dylan says, and it was a big hit. “I used to hate it when it came on the radio. I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me every time I listened to Heart of Gold. I think it was up at number one for a long time, and I’d say, shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.”

Dylan experiencing déjà vu, or rather déjà entendu, is conceivable. But probably not so much because he hears “me”. “Heart Of Gold” reaches number one on 8 April 1972. That’s six months after Dylan recorded “Wallflower” in New York. An austere recording, with exactly the same arrangement as Neil Young’s classic: acoustic guitar, plaintive harmonica, steel guitar, basic bass and simple drums. And that’s not all…

Ben Keith dies 26 July 2010 at Broken Arrow Ranch, Neil Young’s then ranch in California, where Ben lived the last years of his life. The famed steel guitarist’s obituary reads like the register of a rock encyclopaedia; Ringo Starr, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Patsy Cline, J.J. Cale, Willie Nelson, The Band, and many more, but surely his main claim to fame is his role in the band of his bosom friend and dear landlord Neil Young, whose musical support and companion he was for more than 40 years.

The first introduction to Neil is February 1971 in Nashville, when Tim Drummond arranges musicians for Young to record the first songs for Harvest – Drummond knows a steel guitarist whose playing is like the fingers of fog that creep in over San Francisco Bay. And indeed: Ben Keith immediately captures Neil’s heart with his majestic, goose bumps inducing contributions to such highlights as “Out On The Weekend”, “Heart Of Gold”, “Are You Ready For The Country?” and especially the simple, unearthy, brilliant swiping on “Old Man”…

“Ben and I developed the style during those sessions. When we did “Old Man” and talked about what he could play, I said, ‘Try to play those single notes and make it sound doubled. Just ride those babies all the way through there, that’s a great sound.”
(interview with Neil Young, The Tennessean,2005)

This is 6 February 1971, and from then on Neil and Ben are inseparable until Ben’s death. But the first cut is the deepest; when an interviewer in Amsterdam in 2009 asks the humble, somewhat shy Ben about it, he still calls Harvest, almost forty years and dozens of albums after the fact, his favourite album – “I don’t know. That was the first time we worked together, and it just came off so good… it just kinda stuck with me.”

After those immortal parts in February in Nashville and the completion of the Harvest recordings in September at Neil’s Broken Arrow Ranch, Ben Keith (or Bennett Keith Schaeufele, as his real name is) happens to be in New York. Harvest drummer Kenny Buttrey, who has been drumming for Dylan since Blonde On Blonde in 1966 (and on every record up to and including Self Portrait thereafter), takes him along, Thursday November 4, to New York’s Columbia Studio for the “George Jackson” and “Wallflower” recording session.

Ben impresses. From the second verse of “George Jackson” we hear him draw some tasteful, demure lines, and we also immediately recognise the hand of Neil Young: more is less. Ben knows when to fold his arms, and that will be the second big plus with Dylan. Only in the – far too long – finale does he loosen up briefly, and even then interrupts himself lightning fast when Dylan starts blowing a few notes on his harmonica again. So he gets to stay put for “Wallflower”, in which he is allowed to take the spotlight right away. Ben gets the intro, and from the first second draws his mood- and colour-defining lines – even under Dylan’s harmonica playing, this time. It’s done in one take.

Now Dylan actually seems to get a taste for the throwaway. Bassist Leon Russel and drummer Kenny Buttrey are dismissed and may go get a coffee, Dylan wants to try one more take, this time with Ben Keith on steel guitar as the sole accompanist: the “bare” take we don’t learn about until 2013, on The Bootleg Series 10 – Another Self Portrait.

Bob Dylan – Wallflower (alternate version):

It’s a wonderful take, and a strong demonstration of the correctness of Neil Young’s more-is-less adage from the early 1970s. Which some of his peers sometimes laugh about a bit, like drummer Kenny Buttrey in Jim McDonough’s Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (2002):

“Neil tells everybody what to play, note for note. If you play somethin’ he doesn’t like, boy, he’ll put a look on you you’ll never forget. Neil hires some of the best musicians in the world and has ’em play as stupid as they possibly can. It’s just ultra-, ultra-simple, a laidback kinda thing nobody but Neil does, and if you’re right with him it sounds great, and it sounds awful if you’re not.”

“Neil thought my hi-hat playing was too busy,” Buttrey recounts as an example, to which he sullenly said: “Fine. I’ll sit on my right hand,” and then indeed stays seated on his right hand throughout “Out On The Weekend”. We also hear that simplicity, that back-to-the-basics approach on the first take of “Wallflower”, in which Kenny restricts himself to boom-tshak-tshak from start to finish – incomparable to his phenomenal drumming on Blonde On Blonde, to “Absolutely Sweet Marie”, for instance, in which an unleashed Buttrey downgrades even Keith Moon to a toddler with a frying pan.

On Take 2 of “Wallflower”, Kenny may then stay seated on both hands. The fireworks has to come from Ben Keith, that other Neil Young disciple. In which Ben succeeds, thus contributing to a remarkable change of colour; in Take 1, with band, a somewhat tired longing dominates, mainly due to the classic way Dylan deploys: flat, with gradually dosed passion in his vocals, by way of small, Hank Williams-like sobs and hiccups in the longer outings. Which sets the tone – after all, this band (the supergroup consisting of Kenny Buttrey, Leon Russell and Ben Keith) is classically conditioned and naturally shifts into “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” mode.

The protagonist of Take 2, on the other hand, is much more confident. Won’t you dance with me is no longer a meek request, but rather a compelling invitation. Ben Keith leaves the basics with Dylan, and hangs the garlands: he lays it on thick, plays counter melodies and apparently, unlike with Neil Young, feels completely free – he even boldly plays his solo over and right through Dylan’s attempt at a harmonica solo.

Which, with the wisdom of hindsight, makes it unfortunate that Neil Young only got to know him after After The Goldrush – it’s a sweet torment to fantasise what Ben Keith could have added to “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”, to “Birds” and especially to “Oh, Lonesome Me” (on the live performances, Keith then usually takes charge of the organ – also beautiful). But thankfully, he is in time for “Old Man” and all those other beauties. And for “Heart Of Gold” of course, the song of which Dylan says, “That’s me.”

Well… yes and no. Dylan hears Kenny Buttrey. And Ben Keith. And a harmonica and a bass and an acoustic guitar. The same men and the same instruments, in short, with whom and with which he did record “Wallflower” a few months before, but still eight months after those same men had recorded “Heart Of Gold” with those same instruments. So all in all, not at all inconceivable how Neil ‘Shakey’ Young, upon hearing “Wallflower” on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 in 1991, turns it off and annoyed says: “Shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.”

To be continued. Next up Wallflower part 5: I’m your density

NL: Bob Dylans 1971 : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.nl: Boeken

UK: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Amazon.co.uk: Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Books

US: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Amazon.com: Books

DE: Bob Dylans 1971 (Die Songs von Bob Dylan) : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.de: Boeken

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

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

The Double Life of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin is a big book. Over 500 pages in fact, and it is only the first part of Heylin’s latest offering on Dylan.   But despite Heylin’s eminence as a Dylan commentator, it’s a book that I think misses the point.

• Part 1: Let’s ignore creativity. 
• Part 2: On the road to creativity
• Part 3: Getting Noticed
• Part 4: Creativity is a multi-faceted gift
• Part 5: Raging against a masterpiece

There is, in Heylin’s work some positive mentions of the fact that from early on Bob Dylan is noted as “a distinctive, highly personal stylist.”  This of course was and is true; Dylan transformed both pop and rock music, and our appreciation and understanding of folk music.  But at the same time, Heylin remorselessly criticises Dylan for not living up to the standards that Heylin himself proclaims as normal and basically “right”.  And as with so many moralists who criticise others, he sees no contradiction in this.

At the same time, although he packs his work with personal opinion, he criticises anyone who dares say something without back-up evidence.  So when John Hammond is quoted as saying “We nearly didn’t release the first album at all,” Heylin dismisses this because, “not a shred of evidence” exists for this, and accuses the speaker of “self-aggrandizement”.

The fact is that in fast-moving and highly competitive industries such as the music businesses, talking oneself up is part of the business.  In my experience everyone does it.  The quiet mouse not only doesn’t make a record, his songs are not recorded, he’s not a producer or arranger or anything.  It is an industry where to survive, one has to have a story, and indeed push that story forward.   Otherwise, even when creating wonderful music, you won’t get anywhere.  (It’s not the only industry like this – writing is the same, and indeed so are all the other creative arts that I know about).

Thus being pure, open and honest is not a recipe for success in the world of music, nor as far as I know, has it ever been.  Thus when Heylin writes about a “traditional blues Dylan was looking to claim as his own,” that makes Dylan sound like an out-and-out cheat; a man of no morality at all.  But the fact is everyone was doing that at the time; the old blues tunes had been considered common property for decades, and it was the arranger who claimed the ownership of his own version.

And indeed there was a validity in this, because it was often a new arrangement of an old blues song that could suddenly make the song popular.   However arrangements were hard to copyright, so copyrighting the song was what people did.

What Heylin does do however is admit that in these early years around the time of the first two albums, Dylan was “prepared to listen to anything” and this is an important comment (page 129) because that was clearly a fundamental in allowing Dylan to explore so many styles across the years.   Dylan, we are also told would also “play with anyone” and seemingly anywhere, and this too must have had a major impact on his work.  He rejected the idea of being put into a box – although yet again Heylin cannot let this obvious truth go (obvious in the sense that one only has to listen to a small number of Dylan compositions to realise just how varied his work has been from the start).

So Dylan is quoted as saying, “They were trying to build me up as a topical songwriter.  I was never a topical songwriter.”  To which Heylin instantly replies, “Sounds like semantics to me”.   And I am left thinking, “What is the point of this?”   Indeed is this a book about Dylan, or a book about Heylin’s view of the world, what is morally correct, how music is to be defined etc?  Increasingly I think, the latter.  That Dylan did not want to be a topical songwriter is an important point, and one to consider in reference to his compositions of the early 1960s – compositions which certainly reveal the truth of this point.

And this gives us a problem.  Dylan is quoted as saying that “Blowin’ in the wind” was just one song in the production line that was his song writing.  And then of course Heylin disbelieves him, suggesting Dylan “must have thought that there was something about the song because untypically he kept tinkering with it.”   And yet that “tinkering” (a put-down word if ever there was one) is what Dylan does and has always done.  That’s how the songs have been endlessly re-written and re-arranged on the tour.  You only have to see him in concert once to know this.

The fact is Bob Dylan had, and most likely still has, an incredibly active musical brain that was able to produce songs at the drop of a hat, and the more he wrote, the better they got.  But what we find in Heylin is that as he moves on, he recognises masterpieces like “Boots of Spanish Leather” and describes in interesting detail what the song relates to, but he seemingly cannot understand that to get to that sort of level of creativity, one needs to write hundreds of songs, perform hundreds of other songs, have thousands of experiences, and indeed makeup hundreds of stories.  Nothing is created out of nothing, and indeed if the tales told in songs then get used in everyday conversation, is that such a crime?

What Heylin does properly recognise is that Dylan was, in these early days, leading up to the second album, writing at an extraordinary rate.  Indeed if you look at our file of  Dylan’s compositions of the 1950s and 1960s you’ll see a vast number of compositions – and we have only listed those of which we could find a decent recording.   And that is the core element of Bob Dylan and his work.  There was a lot of it, especially in these early years.

And maybe this is just me and my prejudice, but when Heylin simply skips over this incredible achievement as a songwriter and instead tells us without any real evidence that “The legendary thousand dollar pay off to buy Dylan’s already expired contract with Leeds Music – mentioned in Scaduto’s 1971 biography and reiterated, almost verbatim, by Dylan in Chronicles, never happened,”  I am once more saying “I don’t care.”  Yes mention this in passing, but only if you are also going to mention in a lot more detail what Dylan was really doing as a composer at this time.

Thus overall I come from the position that people who are utterly outstanding in their field of endeavour are often accompanied by personality and behavioural traits that, like their work, are not everyday.  Suggesting as Heylin does (page 139) that Bob’s “later autobiographical song, “Simple Twist of Fate” shows a similar lack of moral compass,” is maybe of interest as a passing note, but is not the dominant issue of this moment.  The dominant point is what Dylan was creating, and how he came to create.  And on this Heylin is silent.

Put another way, does anyone care if JS Bach, Mozart and Beethoven each had a moral compass that is in keeping with Heylin or anyone else?  No of course not.  It is irrelevant because what is relevant is the music they created.

Which raises the question, why does Heylin write like this?  The only answer (at least the only answer I have found by page 139 of the first volume) is that Heylin has no serious understanding of creativity per se, isn’t a musician, and is more interested in what he can find which casts Dylan in a poor light (in his mind) than how the songs came to be, how the songs break new musical ground, what the lyrics are about, how the lyrics use new phraseologies and how those lyrics and the music accompanying them, work in different ways.   For all the use this approach is, Heylin might as well also tell us about whether Dylan mowed the lawn at his or his parents or his girlfriend’s house, how often he went to the toilet, and where he put the change from a dollar bill when he bought a new biro to write with.

The series continues …

An index to the current series appearing on this website appears on the home page.    A list of the previous articles in this series appears at the end.

“The Lyrics and the Music” (or sometimes “the music and the lyrics”) is a series by Tony Attwood which tries to find out what happens when one reviews a Dylan song not primarily as a set of lyrics, but as a piece of music which includes lyrics.

————–

The musical accompaniment for The Wicked Messenger is either unique in terms of Dylan’s work, or at the very least extremely unusual.   For as Dylan sings there is no chordal accompaniment at all, but a musical counter-theme picked out on what I take to be double bass and guitar.

So in effect what we have are two melodic lines- one the (mostly) descending notes of the two instruments, and the other Bob singing a perfectly decent vocal line..

There is a recording of Dylan playing this with the Dead, and although there is a little more accompaniment the basic is retained.  And a recording from 1997 in which the descending counter melody is virtually removed, just making the occasional appearance.

And in between each verse we have a wailing harmonica interlude that has nothing to do with the verses, but which seems to symbolise the messenger’s distress – or maybe his wickedness.

At which point what we are left with is a simple two chord rock song, which seems to me to have lost much of its point…. although the instrumental break does return to the descending line that is the heart of the original.

As ever on tour, Bob played with the song, jettisoning the original musical approach for something quite different, and which really didn’t seem to have anything to do with the lyrics…

However by 2003 in London the counter melody is back, but there is so much also going on in the accompaniment the impact of that stark original is lost.   And indeed the change of the rhythm also further distracts from the starkness of the original.

https://youtu.be/Sg1ObPcd6Fk

Thus by the time of that performance above the essence of the music has been lost, and for me that then means that the whole essence of the song has gone.  Although of course by then everyone in the audience would know what the song was originally, and so can appreciate the extension.  But then, I think we lose any thought of who and what the messenger was.

In my imagination the messenger from Eli is a man travelling alone for hour upon hour, ruminating on the messages he is carrying and preparing to flatter the recipients of the messages in the hope of a fulsome reward – or at least food and water.

And yes, the sparseness of the original does take me back to that earlier time when messages were indeed carried by a single person along worn tracks rather than paved roads.  But there is a bizarre curiosity in the song as we move from the messages he carries to the messenger himself, who we find complaining about the effect of his work on his body, and the response at the end of those who received the messages he carried.

The simplicity of the piece, using the three verse format so common in the JWH album is reflected by the simplicity of the musical accompaniment, and it is the descending nature of the accompaniment that helps emphasise the world wearyness and tiredness a messenger must feel.   For the messages merely result in him being given another message to take back, and so on, without end.

Plus of course the fact that many confront him but few have anything to say, apart from the total rejection of his work, comes at the end:  “If ye cannot bring good news, then don’t bring any.”

Thus that descending bass in the original reflects the messenger making his weary way from one place to another without reward.  It keeps up a decent speed because those who give him the messages want them delivered quickly, but for him it is just repeat, repeat, repeat.

For all these reasons, the original therefore works – the music and the lyrics both reflecting the endless repetition of the tedious job, without making the music itself tedious.  But this is lost in the live performances where the need to put on a show dominates the meaning of the lyrics.  Meanwhile the wailing discordant harmonica which has nothing to do with the melody symbolises the tedium and the pain of the messenger’s endless, and largely unrewarded, work

The songs reviewed from the music plus lyrics viewpoint…

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

By Tony Attwood

According to the official Bob Dylan site North Country Blues was only performed live by Bob Dylan on 26 July and 26 October 1963.

But there is a recording of “An Evening for Salvador Allende” concert from May 1974 which says Bob is on it performing.  I’ve listened to it, and found the track which is at the 1 hour 10 minute mark or thereabouts, and there is a performance of the song, but I really don’t think that is Bob Dylan – not in the slightest.  In fact I would not even suggest you go looking for it.  It is someone performing a Dylan song, and not very well, in my view.

But we do have the 1963 Norfolk Folk Festival recording

And also the Carnegie Hall performance.  It is interesting that within this year Dylan is making one or two tiny changes to the performance to make it even more haunting.

Where the sad, silent song made the hour twice as long

What an utterly extraordinary line that is.  Poignant beyond belief, it defines the entire song of desperation – in just one line

North Country Blues came from a year in which Bob composed 31 songs that he kept, and came from a period in that year in which he wrote With God On Our Side, Only a Pawn, When the Ship comes in, Times they are a changing, Hattie Carroll, Lay down your weary tune, One too many mornings and Restless Farewell… they just came pouring out one after the other.

For most songwriters such a list would be the highlights of a lifetime.  For Bob they are the highlights of just one year.

Perhaps that explains why he only performed the song twice, with so many other new songs to offer.  Which just makes the fact even more profound: what an utter masterpiece to write and then put away.

Joan Baez also recorded it …

Here are the other articles from this series

• A satisfied mind
• Caribbean Wind
• The girl on the Greenbriar Shore
• Highway 61 revisited
• Lay Down your weary tune
• Lily, Rosemary and Stage Fright
• Meet me in the morning and From a Buick 6
• Only a hobo
• Restless Farewell
• Roll on John
• Sally Sue Brown
• Spanish Harlem Incident
• Stage Fright
• Talking New York
• You Angel You

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

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.

———————-

by Jürg Lehmann.

Ballad Of a Thin Man / The Covers

If you systematically go through Dylan cover songs, you inevitably discover that the well-known and frequently covered original songs in particular have a very different impact: some – such as Blowin’ In the Wind – provoke a flood of musically highly questionable, boring campfire kitsch, others inspire cover musicians to highly varied, interesting and colourful experiments. Ballad of a Thin Man belongs rather to the latter type.

The history of Ballad covers begins just a few weeks after the first release on Highway 61 Revisited  with a correct, but not very exciting contribution by The Grass Roots  (in 2000 the band released a more interesting live version.)

Then there is a break until 1981, when The Sports take on the song. In the years that followed several musicians tried their hand at Ballad: Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs (1987), Grateful Dead (April 1988, released in 2002), The Whitlams (1996), Robyn Hitchcock (2002), Big Brass Bed (2003).

Two respectable contributions come from the Dutch band Golden Earring (1995) (perhaps you remember their hit Radar Love) and from James Solberg (1998) on Tangled Up In Blues, a fine collection of Dylan covers by various artists (depending on the source, the musician on the album is not James Solberg but John Hammond).

From the turn of the century, the covers are a more risk-taking and try to find out what the song has to offer. The result is some very fine covers:

Kula Shaker (2002)

Ben Weaver (2005)

Willard Grant Conspiracy (2005)

The Dylan Project (2005)

Andy Santana (2007)

Arlen Roth (2008, instrumental)  

“There oughtta be a law against you coming around,” Dylan snarls in its final verse. Something is happening in the room that the thin man of the song’s title has just walked into. But he doesn’t know what it is: “Do you, Mr Jones?” While speculations remain rampant as to who “Mr. Jones” is and what exactly this song is supposed to mean, there is no definitive answer at this time. Todd Haynes’ 2007 surrealist Dylan biopic I’m Not There includes a music video which paints an image of what Mr. Jones may be like. Actor Bruce Greenwood plays “Keenan Jones“, a journalist who doesn’t understand the meaning behind the songwriting of Jude Quinn alias Bob Dylan. In the film, Jones is sent through a hallucinatory nightmare sequence while Stephen Malkmus’ cover of “Ballad of a Thin Man” plays in the background.

Stephen Malkmus, best known as the lead singer of the influential 90’s alternative band Pavement, was hired to record three songs for the soundtrack of Todd Haynes’ Dylan biopic. On an instrumental front, the stars of the soundtrack are The Million Dollar Bashers, a supergroup comprised of guitarists Tom Verlaine (Television), Nels Cline (Wilco) and Smokey Hormel, Dylan band bassist Tony Garnier, keyboardist John Medeski and Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth.

On 21 September 2011, an extraordinary concert took place in Ljubliana, the capital of Slovenia. To commemorate Dylan’s 70th birthday the U.S. Embassy invited several well-known Slovenian musicians to each cover a different Dylan song. Among the artists was Severa Gjurin who performed one of the best cover versions of Not Dark Yet, and also the band Laibach, who did an interpretation of Ballad Of a Thin Man (you can watch a compilation of song excerpts from the CD here).

Laibach is a Slovenian respectively Yugoslav avant-garde music group formed in the mining town of Trbovlje in 1980. From the early days, the band was subject to controversies and bans due to their use of iconography with parodies and pastiches of elements from totalitarism, nationalism and militarism. Censored and banned in Socialist Yugoslavia and receiving a dissident status and a cult following in their home country, the band embarked on international tours and gradually acquired international fame. After Slovenia became independent in 1991, Laibach’s status in the country has turned from rejection by a part of the public to promotion into a national cultural icon.

Early Laibach albums were pure industrial, with heavy rhythms and roaring vocals. Later in the mid-1980s, the sound became more richly layered, featuring samples from pop and classical music. The band’s lyrics, variously written in Slovene, German and English, are usually delivered by the deep bass vocals of the singer Milan Fras. Initially the lyrics handled war and military themes; later, the focus turned to any highly charged political issue of the moment, sending intentionally ambiguous messages. The band has seen numerous line-up changes. During their career, Laibach have also recorded film and theatre music and produced works of visual arts, while the band members have embarked on a number of side projects.

Laibach’s version of Ballad can be quite disturbing. You hear SS trademark vocals and firing squad drums, and the treatment turns the song inside out. “Dylan’s version mocks the uncool outsider Mr. Jones,” writes Tom Bolton in his review, “who just isn’t hip enough to get ‘it’: Laibach turn the mockery into threats, sarcastically growling “You don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr Jones”, and make it very clear how easily victimisation emerges from group ideals of what’s cool and what’s not. It’s a concise and persuasive comment on the 60s, once heard hard to forget.

If you search the internet for Laibach and Ballad, you will almost certainly come across a site with a comic strip.

This is not an official production of Laibach, the video was created by a youtuber by the name of Tadej Oslovnik, who in turn used a short animated movie called Skhizien (directed by Jérémy Clapin) as a template. It’s worth watching the video either way…

Over the last decade, numerous other Ballad covers have come out, none have reinvented the song or opened up new insights: Sfuzzi East/West (2010), Colossus (2013), Theo Hakola (2014), Red Rabbit (2016), Last Fair Deal (2018), Vanguart (2019), Hollin Kings (2021), Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band (2022), B.B.M. (2022), Mike Hagan & The Distant Conspirators (2023), Cat Power (2023).

Two songs that stand out are the contributions of Claus Hempler (2010)

and Karina Deniké (2012)

Deniké’s cover is from the album UnderCover Presents a Tribute to

Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, an album on which there are other songs worth listening to, such as Tombstone Blues by Beth Lisick or Queen Jane Approximately by Carletta Sue Kay. Claus Hempler was part of the performance “Teaterkoncert” in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2010 (to find out more about Teaterkoncert check the article about All Along the Watchtower).

But in saying that many artists have only recycled the familiar, then this does not apply to the jazz musicians (with jazz understood in a broad sense). The song is an invitation to musical experiments, there is a lot of artistic freedom that jazz musicians in particular can explore. As a result there are several outstanding covers, for example by Ben Sidran, who did two pioneering albums with Dylan covers.

Or Jef Lee Johnson’s free jazz inspired version of Ballad Of a Thin Man. He passed away in 2013 from complications following a bout of pneumonia at the age of 54. AllAboutJazz honous him as a “true American original and a true American gift to the musical world. Guys like Jef are the embodiment of every reason to use the phrase, “He’s got more talent in his pinkie than so and so has in his entire body!” Jef Lee has played since he was a young boy growing up and playing up in the church his grandfather built in Germantown, Philadelphia, PA. He plays everything- including guitar, bass, keyboards, sax, drums and drum machines, and is a potent vocalist of broad and powerful range as well. But it’s on guitar that he burns most incandescent, conjuring jawdroppingly brilliant, careening stylistic collisions of legato-laden fusion, angular outness, and state-of-the-art acid-funk. Jef’s concept, while wholly and truly original, justly deserves mention alongside such profound, formidable masters as Hendrix and Holdsworth.”

Or Dawn, who in 2009 covered Ballad of a Thin Man in association with Grand Panda on Béatrice Ardisson’s compilation, “Dylan Mania”. Besides a short video, Aurore Imbert, Dawn’s real name, has left virtually no trace on the Internet and it is not clear whether she is still active today.

All the covers listed below are excellent, you should listen to all of them.

• Jamie Saft (2006)
• Zoltán Oláh (2007)
• Ben Sidran (2009)
• Grand Panda feat. Dawn (2009)
• Jef Lee Johnson (2009)
• Ouellette, Lefebvre and Page (2019)
• Tacht (2023)

No wonder Ballad Of a Thin Man was used for the finale of the crime drama Peaky Blinders. It perfectly encapsulates the schadenfreude of watching an arrogant egotist having the rug pulled from under them, as happens to protagonist Tommy Shelby in the show’s last episode.

The musician behind the cover version on Peaky Blinders is English singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer Richard Hawley (2019)

“Possibly the definitive Dylan cover,” writes Ewan Gleadow in his review: The tempo of this cover, a fundamental understanding of the flow and beat of Dylan’s lyrics, “is a credit to Hawley as an artist…Hawley’s range of quality comes through in the playing style, the adaptation to the lyrics of Dylan and the pace he is more than capable of creating throughout this single. It holds within it the same scope, but a different style, the same lyrics, but a different tone. It “is sincerely one of the greatest covers put to tape, not just of Dylan, but in general.” This is perhaps a little exaggerated, because there are numerous extraordinary covers, as I hope I have shown in this series. But if you want to get a – very special – introduction to Richard Hawley, watch the video where Richard and Shez Sheridan perform an acoustic show at The Grapes in Sheffield with tracks taken from the Best Of collection Now Then.

Previously in the “Covers we missed” series…

•  2×2; Saturday Night Fry
• Abandoned Love
• Ain’t Talkin
• All along the Watchtower
• All I really want to do
• All the Tired Horses
• As I went out one morning
• Baby Stop Crying

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

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.   You may also be interested in Mike’s new series: “Mr Tambourine Man: – A History in Performance, Part 1: A masterpiece is born“

—–

As I look at the list of Dylan’s performances sometimes I am struck by the real oddity of Bob’s choices.  Of course he is the master and I am just the observer, so I am sure that there is a good reason behind the occasional “oddity” as I perceive it, but that feeling is there nonetheless.  For example the masterpiece that is “Desolation Row” has been played 581 times while “Silvio” which without considering matters in any depth I would say is a great rocker but overall a much lesser piece, has been played 594 times, between 1988 and 2004.

Of course a concert can’t be made up totally of Dylan masterpieces but it still strikes me as slightly strange.   And I guess it must have struck Mike who selected the recordings that should be used in the show, as a bit odd too, because he only selected two recordings of the song during the whole 144 episode series.

1996: Busy being born. With Al Kooper in Liverpool

But as I say it comes across as a good rocker, with a rare opportunity to have a spot of unaccompanied singing with Bob backed up by the band.  And the lyrics by Robert Hunter really are worth a second look…

Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast
Ain't complaining 'bout what I got
Seen better times, but who has not?

And who exactly was Hunter talking to at the end

I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain
You give something up for everything you gain
Since every pleasure's got an edge of pain
Pay for your ticket and don't complain

Which other performer has stood on stage and sung “Pay for your ticket and don’t complain”?

1998: One who sings with his tongue on fire.

I do hope you have time to listen to this performance all the way through – the concluding instrumental at the end really is superb.   Elsewhere Bob has changed his approach to the vocals but the notion of the chorus stays the same as before, and once again it is great rocker.

Robert Hunter died in 2019, and this note from Wikipedia perhaps reminds us that being a rock n roll start and a great writer is not protection from the ways of the world.   “In 2013, he was compelled to go on a solo tour as a result of medical bills, after surviving a spinal cord abscess in the previous year. Hunter died at his home in San Rafael, California on September 23, 2019. He had recent surgery before his death.”

And since we are on the subject here are the two men together…

Other articles in this series…

• A Hard Rain’s a-gonna fall 1988 – 1999
• Absolutely Sweet Marie
• Blind Willie McTell. 1997-2006
• Blowing in the Wind. 1991-2001
• Cold Irons Bound 1997-2002
• Desolation Row: beyond imagination: 1992-2017
• Don’t think twice it’s alright 1993-1997
• Duquesne Whistle 2013-2018
• Early Roman Kings
• Forever Young 1987 to 2011
• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• Gates of Eden
• Goodbye Jimmy Reed
• High Water
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• I and I
• I don’t believe you – 1994 – 2013
• I shall be released 1975-2008 
• I’ll be your baby tonight 2003-2015
• It Ain’t me Babe from 1994-1998.
• It’s all over now baby blue
• It’s all right ma – at least it was by 2001
• Lay Lady Lay 1993-2010
• Like a Rolling Stone 1988 to 2002
• Long and Wasted Years
• Love Sick from the very start to 2000
• Love minus zero / No limit 1988 – 1996
• Maggies Farm – with a wonderful ending
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• Not dark yet
• One too many mornings. 
• Pay in Blood
• Positively 4th Street, 1994-2006.
• Rainy day women, from push to stroke
• She Belongs to Me: 1988 to 1995
• Shelter from the Storm 1989-96
• Simple Twist of Fate 1989-2003
• Spirit on the Water
• Summer Days
• Tambourine Man 1964-1995
• Tangled up in Blue 1988 to 1993
• The Times They are a Changing: 1987-1995
• Thunder on the Mountain 2006-2014
• The Drifters’ Escape. 1996-2005.
• The Hard Rain of 1988, 2003 and 2015
• Things have changed 2000-2007
• To Ramona. 1989 to 2000
• Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum – an unbelievable journey
• Visions of Johanna
• Watching the River Flow

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

• Wallflower Part 1 is here.
• Wallflower Part 2 is here

Details of the book “Bob Dylan’s 1971” which is available in English, Dutch and German, and how it can be ordered are given at the end of the article.

1971 is the fourth year of Dylan’s Seven Lean Years, the dry spell that Dylan himself places between John Wesley Harding (late 1967) and Blood On The Tracks (late 1974). These are the years when Dylan sits on the waterfront, watching the river flow, waiting for the inspiration to paint a masterpiece.

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

Apparently, they mean something to Dylan…

 —————-

Wallflower (1971) part 3: Really it’s just a sad song

by Jochen Markhorst

 We don’t get to hear the original, Dylan’s own version, until 1991. “Wallflower”, like “George Jackson”, is still passed over for the precursor to the Bootleg Series, the successful 1985 compilation box Biograph. Insulting actually; 53 tracks, 18 of which were previously unreleased (plus three only available on single), but not even for this eclectic collection “Wallflower” does qualify. The premiere, finally then, is 26 March 1991, the release date of The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991. Not very glamorous at that; the song is tucked away at the end of the second CD, track number 16, and is effectively nothing more than a wallflower. In March 1991 radio interviewer Eliot Mintz wants to know if there might still be something to report on the song, in a three-part broadcast on Westwood One Radio Station devoted entirely to the release of the box-set:

EM: Any thoughts about the song Wallflower?
BD: No. Really it’s just a sad song, sad experience, one of those pathetic situations in life, that can be so overwhelming at times.

It is plausible that only the first syllable of that answer is entirely true; “no”. And that the rest is improvised because Dylan can’t quite remember that insignificant ditty offhand. The addition that it’s just a sad song is already a bit weird. “Wallflower” is in a major key, waltzes to a very danceable three-four time and the thin story the lyrics tell is in fact not too sad: a lonely boy falls in love with a lonely girl, asks her to dance, expresses the conviction that she is the woman of his life, and finally asks if he can take her home. It really does require some harsh cynicism to see a “sad experience” and an “overwhelmingly pathetic situation”.

No, it is more likely that in this radio interview Dylan is a bit caught off guard by the question. He did sing “Wallflower” once with Doug Sahm about 20 years ago (and that was only the third time he sang it anyway), and never played or even heard it again after that. Apart from the title, he only half remembers the second line (“I’m sad and lonely too”), and then constructs the memory that this half-forgotten throwaway was probably a lament about loneliness or something like that.

Dylan’s – presumed – forgetfulness is understandable and forgivable. After all, the lyrics don’t offer memorable one-liners like Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial or even just She was workin’ in a topless place and I stopped in for a beer, “Wallflower” isn’t blood-curdling storytelling like “Hollis Brown” or “Hurricane”, nor monumental poetry like “Changing Of The Guards” or “Not Dark Yet”. Dylan filled the rejected B-side at the time, 20 years before this interview, with uninspired clichés like

Wallflower, wallflower
Won’t you dance with me?
The night will soon be gone

… and similar lines of verse. Which indeed will not have left a lasting impression.

Fitting it is, though, as a conclusion to that barren year 1971, in which Dylan also thematises “searching for inspiration” in the songs he painstakingly manages to squeeze out. In September 1978, in the radio interview with Matt Damsker, Dylan reflects on the period when he struggled so much to write songs. He places the dry period between John Wesley Harding and Blood On The Tracks, roughly between late 1967 and late 1974 – the seven lean years, as it were:

“It’s like I had amnesia. […] I couldn’t remember how to do it. I tried to force-learn it, and I couldn’t learn what I had been able to do naturally like Highway 61 Revisited. I mean, you can’t sit down and write that consciously.”

And when Dylan explains this in more detail, he is quite consistent: “Blood On The Tracks did consciously what I used to do unconsciously,” which again he repeats literally so in the interview for Rolling Stone with Jonathan Cott two days later, including that dramatic image with amnesia: “I more or less had amnesia.” With which, retrospectively and with some exaggeration, we could classify the receding years ‘67-’74 as one big writer’s block. Slightly exaggerated, as Dylan still wrote some 50 songs in these seven years, including songs like, say, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, “Lay, Lady, Lay”, “Going Going Gone” and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” – so this writer’s block was not a total blank.

On the other hand: the vast majority of those fifty songs are definitely among the most mediocre in Dylan’s oeuvre. As he himself seems to think as well; most of the songs from this period, almost 70%, evaporate quietly, drifting away on the Waters of Oblivion. They are not played live, do not appear on compilation albums, and, for that matter, are covered remarkably little. “On A Night Like This”, “Tough Mama”, “Three Angels”, “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”, “Living The Blues”… and we could go on – it’s a long list. Plus: remarkably many of the few songs Dylan still does allow into his setlists are rewritten. “To Be Alone With You” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, to name just two examples, and with others, such as “Going, Going, Gone” and even crowd favourites like “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “Lay, Lady,Lay”, the words vary almost per performance, demonstrating Dylan’s own dissatisfaction with the original lyrics.

No, “writer’s block” is, on balance, a defensible qualification. Indeed, Dylan’s own utterances about these years fit the definition of that annoying phenomenon as articulated by Stephen King. Creative writing, King explains, is waiting for the visit of the musa, a “scruffy little fleabag” smelling of “whatever nasty mess it’s been rolling in”, living in the “the thickets of each writer’s imagination”. As an inspiration-seeking writer, there is not much more you can do than sit in a clearing in your mind, and then wait for the musa to come:

“Some writers in the throes of writer’s block think their muses have died, but I don’t think that happens often; I think what happens is that the writers themselves sow the edges of their clearing with poison bait to keep their muses away, often without knowing they are doing it.”
(“The Writing Life”, Washington Post 1 October 2006)

“One doesn’t call it,” King warns, “that doesn’t work.” Which Dylan learns by trial and error. “I tried to force-learn it,” and then spends seven years trying to lure the musa with poisonous bait. She occasionally comes frustratingly close. “It usually comes, drawn by the entrancing odor of hopeful ideas. Some days it only comes as far as the edge of the clearing, relieves itself and disappears again”:

I have seen you standing in the smoky haze
And I know that you’re gonna be mine one of these days
Mine alone.

To be continued. Next up Wallflower part 4: “He has ’em play as stupid as they possibly can.”

NL: Bob Dylans 1971 : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.nl: Boeken

UK: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Amazon.co.uk: Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Books

US: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Amazon.com: Books

DE: Bob Dylans 1971 (Die Songs von Bob Dylan) : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.de: Boeken

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

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

An index to the current series appearing on this website appears on the home page.    A list of the previous articles in this series appears at the end.

Mike Johnson is the author of the definitive review of the Never Ending Tour and of the series Bob Dylan master harpist

————

By Mike Johnson

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

It’s hard to imagine compiling a list of top ten Dylan songs that did not include Mr T Man.  I read somewhere that it was Dylan’s first original melody, the first song he wrote not based on some previous melodic line. If that is true, it was a stunning debut and a great leap forward in terms of Dylan’s songwriting.

It was first publicly performed on May 17^th, 1964 and last performed on June 28^th 2010, with 902 known performances between. I’m going to be traversing those years watching the song change, trying to chart its fate, its ups and downs and Dylan’s experiments with it. As well as its final, to date, resting place.

I think we shouldn’t be shy in admitting that the song reeks of cannabis (you can smell it a mile away), not just for some give-away lyrics,

take me disappearing down the smoke rings of my mind
the foggy ruins of time
far past the frozen leaves
the haunted frightened trees…

but for its overall mood and tone, that ‘beam me up, Scottie’ desire it captures. The reason we might not want to be upfront about the druggie echo in Dylan’s songs is because we don’t want them to be labelled as ‘drug songs,’ and written off as if that’s all they were. Dylan’s songs, particularly this one, don’t lend themselves to that kind of reductionist exercise. The scent of weed is just one thread of a rich tapestry. Mr T Man is so much more than ‘a drug song’, and is ultimately about our desire to escape our humdrum existence, to escape these ‘streets too dead for dreaming’ and enter a transcendent world, an eternal present where we can ‘forget about today until tomorrow.’ At the heart of it is a yearning for the divine.

It also expresses a different vision of freedom from Dylan’s previous, more political songs. Fast forward to Rough and Rowdy Ways and you hear Dylan sing,

I feel the holy spirit inside
See the light that freedom gives
I believe it's in the reach of
Every man who lives

We can get some inkling of the freedom he’s talking about there in ‘Crossing the Rubicon’  if we relate it to the experience he’s craving in that magnificent last verse of Mr T man:

yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
with one hand waving free
silhouetted by the sea
circled by the circus sands
with all memory and fate
driven deep beneath the waves
let me forget about today until tomorrow

Freedom is experienced as an ecstatic state, not just the right to vote or freedom from oppression, but as an upwelling of the spirit. Or, more precisely, the song expresses the desire for that upwelling of the spirit.

Because of the political context in which the song was born, it was seen to express a hedonistic turn, an aspect of Dylan’s turning away from ‘protest’ songs to more surreal, interior, drug-lit songs. Yet seen in another light, ‘the light that freedom gives,’ it is as much a protest song as any other, and its ‘escaping on the run’ can be seen as a rebellion against the ‘unlived meaningless life’ Dylan is still railing against in Rough and Rowdy Ways almost sixty years later. There is an underlying defiance in the song which brands it with the spirit of protest. The desire to escape on the drug’s ‘magic swirlin’ ship’ has its parallel in the spirit’s desire to transcend the flesh. The song’s hedonism gives way to something deeper.

According to the uploader of this, the song was written in the first months of 1964 and completed in April. Recorded at folksinger Eric von Schmidt’s home in Sarasota, FL, in early May. The words are still settling into place, and, most noticeable to me, the song has not yet found its tempo. Dylan was to play around a lot with tempos, and this song would see a variety of them. There’s no subtlety in this early recording; inflectionless strumming, a dumpty-dum, with no swing or driving syncopation. That would come later. But the song is there; we are close to the moment of its birth. I don’t know who’s playing the harmonica, probably Eric von Schmidt.

A week or so after that, Dylan was in Britain and we catch this performance from the Royal Albert Hall, May 17. The song is no more than a month old. The pace is slow and the delivery reflective, world weary; the harmonica wavering, almost uncertain, hovers around the melody. I think it’s fair to say that at this stage the song, magical as it is, has not yet lifted off, not the way it does at Newport a couple of months later. Here’s Royal Albert Hall:

The version that stole my heart, however, is this outdoor performance from the 1964 Newport Folk Festival in late July. In terms of tempo, the song has found its feet and Dylan’s windswept performance is captivating. The up-tempo, head-on approach makes us think of protest songs even if this is not protest in the more conventional sense. He shouts it out. The mood might be described as celebratory rather than world-weary. We’re already on that ‘swirlin’ ship’ and the ‘dancing spells’ are doing their work.

The basics of Dylan’s performance skills are evident here. He does not act out the songs or over dramatize them with facial expressions (think Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull), but stands in front of the mic and lets his voice and the words do the work. He’s not interpreting the words for us in terms of stage action but lets them work their own magic, lets them fall where they may. A welcome addition here is the harmonica, light and squeaky, capturing the dancelike spirit of the song.

By 1965, bold and declarative. Almost combative. Here defiance and world-weariness mix in a weave. It suggests weary defiance, mid-tempo, almost marching. You think this isn’t protest?

The first recording is from the famous July 25^th, 1965 Newport, great ‘electric controversy’ concert.

Strangely, this next 1965 Liverpool performance is not listed on Dylan’s official website as featuring Mr T Man. It strikes me that while the song represents a yearning, and although ‘it’s not aimed at anyone,’ and is just ‘escaping on the run,’ there is a confrontational side to it in the very forthright directness of these ‘stoned’ images, a kind of brutal honesty about wanting to get high and follow the pied piper.

1965 Liverpool:

At this point we can pause again and consider some of the beauties of this song. For one thing it’s a masterpiece of rhyme. These ‘skipping reels of rhyme’ are deft, light on their feet and tossed off with apparent ease. Consider this self-portrait, the poet as ‘ragged clown.’

Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’

swingin’ madly across the sun
It’s not aimed at anyone

it’s just escapin’ on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin’
And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time

it’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing

Look at how the final word, chasing, throws us back to the multiple ‘ing’ rhymes of the opening lines, and feel that lovely accumulative intensity of: rhyme/time/behind/mind. These are jingle-jangle rhymes, they gather us up as they go and swirl us along. Once we have joined the dance of the pied piper, there’s no turning back.

The last verse is a sustained lyrical movement worthy of a Samuel Taylor Coleridge or John Keats. Again, it builds, it has rising action, held together by the lone rhyme of sorrow and tomorrow, and driven by couplets,  buoyed by half rhymes and assonance until we are finally ‘driven deep beneath the waves’

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees
out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
driven deep beneath the waves
let me forget about today until tomorrow

I’m particularly struck by the ambiguity of the experience. It leans into ecstasy. And yet it cannot escape a lingering darkness, those ‘haunted frightened trees’ and ‘twisted reach’ and when we do get to dance beneath that ‘diamond sky’ it is with only ‘one hand waving free’ – what about the other hand? Perhaps it is tied behind his back. Perhaps this is just all shadow play. The shadows ‘that he’s chasing.’

Dylan would fully exploit this ambiguity in the more darkly-driven performances of 1966, and we’ll turn out attention to them in the next article, part 2 of Mr T Man in Performance.

Until then

Kia Ora

by Tony Attwood

The Double Life of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin is a big book. Over 500 pages in fact, and it is only the first part of Heylin’s latest offering on Dylan.   But despite Heylin’s eminence as a Dylan commentator, it’s a book that I think misses the point.

•  Part 1: Let’s ignore creativity. 
• Part 2: On the road to creativity
• Part 3: Getting Noticed
• Part 4: Creativity is a multi-faceted gift

A key point in my argument in these articles is that if one is going to look into the life of a creative person, then recognition has to be made of the effect that a very high level of creativity can have on the individual’s personality, behaviour, energy, opinions etc etc.

Very high levels of creativity inevitable affect the way an individual sees and relates to the world beyond.   It is something the individual naturally has from birth, and the individual has to come to terms with the fact that other people don’t see the world in the same way and don’t respond in the same way.

What this in turn means, is that the creative genius often has difficulty in knowing who to turn to for advice and guidance.   Heylin, in “The Double Life of Bob Dylan” is very good at pointing out how in the early parts of Dylan’s career there were all sorts of people trying to rip him off in terms of royalties and the like, but there is very little about Bob getting solid, unbiased guidance from people who really understood what he was going through, but without an invested interest in his career.

This set of circumstances obviously has an effect.   The creative genius of of course knows and feels that he is different from the rest.  Then on top of that, he has to put up with those around him trying to rip him off, trying to push him towards this or that type of work and so on.

In this regard, Heylin’s criticism of Dylan for attempting to copyright what Heylin considers are mere “arrangements” rather than actual compositions of Dylan’s, is fair enough in an abstract world – but we don’t live in such a world.  In his early working life Dylan was being hyper-active as a songwriter, and the concept of copyright was nowhere near as well defined as it has become since, largely through a series of (won and lost) court cases.  To ignore this fact, is frankly ludicrous.

Furthermore, calling Dylan a “song-snatcher” is insulting as well as misleading – because in the early days of pop, rock and commercial folk music songs were built on each other.  Indeed one only has to consider the 12 bar blues to see how this works.   The format is incredibly simple, and used by hundreds of thousands of composers to create millions of songs, each one “borrowing” the same production line of the blues from all those who had gone before (just listen to the chorus of Rock Around The Clock, to get the idea).  Everyone used the format and no one worried about copyright because… everyone used the format.

What Helyin does however, is make himself the arbiter of what is a good song, as well as the arbiter of how the legalities of songwriting should be seen – ignoring how copyright was viewed when Dylan started writing. and indeed ignoring how it still is seen when it comes to such standard concepts as the 12 bar blues.

Worse Heylin then throws into the mix his own value judgements – suggesting that Dylan’s early work is simply a load of blues clichés.  But what is and what isn’t a cliché is again a personal opinion.  Consider Heylin on “Ballad for a Friend.”

This is a remarkable song and a remarkable performance. Far from being a standard blues, each line of lyrics starts on the second beat of the bar, while the verse starting “Where we go up in that north country” changes the time signature completely to great effect for the “better friend than me” line.

Although Dylan ends the recording by saying he messed up the vocal, what he doesn’t say is that he is changing the rhythm slightly within the verses, which gives that sense of unease throughout, which in turn is perfect for delivering the meaning of desperation and sadness for the events that happened in a world where everything simply moves on as if nothing happened.   And yet all Heylin can do is note that Dylan jumps from his actual roots (the north country) “before wrapping it in a bubblewrap of blues clichés”.

To me, that is a totally ludicrous thing to say.   The whole point of the blues – like rock n roll that came after it – is that it has clichés within it, which allow us to understand where we are without everything having to be spelled out.  These songs last two and a half minutes, and if they don’t have clichés to express where and what they are, we’ll never get to understand the whole concept.

It is as if for all his supposed erudition Heylin has never come across the roots of all this music in the English folk song tradition of the Middle Ages and before. (The first English folk song of which we have a fairly accurate understanding of how it sounded came from the 13th century, (Sumer Is Icumen In) and there as with the blues, the music was simple so that everyone and anyone could sing it.  That’s the point!

And it is not just Bob who comes in for this treatment.  “Robert Johnson was as brazen a songsnatcher…” we are told, which is gibberish.  All the blues were handed down from one singer to another and any notice of copyright was as much intended for the particular arrangement as a whole, nothing more.

What this extraordinary view of early American blues music leads to is that Dylan is said (by Heylin) to be “worryingly proud” of Standing on the Highway.  And why should he not be proud?   One might equally say that Heylin appears to be worryingly proud of “the Double Life” despite its total misunderstanding of the way the blues worked in terms of copyright.   If Heylin genuinely felt that Ballad for A Friend is a “bubblewrap of blues clichés” then perhaps we should feel sorry for him and for all those people onto whom he has insisted on forcing this view onto the rest of us.

One might also add that Heylin has seemingly never come across a creative person who might ask either in discussion or through his/her art “Why tell the truth?”   Popular songs, traditional songs, blues songs… they might have some truth within them, but mostly we can’t be sure, and generally people don’t see the singer as trying to express his own life through a song.  After all, if Elvis Presley sings “My baby left me” – we don’t take that to be true.  Nor do I take it as a personal insult that Elivs sang “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog”.

But Heylin goes even further as on page 119 he says, “As for the highly opinionated François Villon…” which could lead me to be writing “As for the highly opinionated Clinto Heyliin…” but I don’t (except by way of this example) because I take it for granted that much analysis of music is opinion.  Yes we can discover the origins of songs and treat that research as fact, but when it comes to evaluating music, rather as when it comes to evaluating personal behaviour, that is a matter of opinion.  Certainly if a lot of people reach the same opinion, then that becomes the accepted view, but in the end it is still a view.  There are not immutable scientific laws such as we find when discussing gravity or the speed of light.  When it comes to discussing works of art we are into opinion.  But good discussions of works of art also have some facts to back these opinions up.

But Heylin doesn’t agree and is unrelenting in his assault on Dylan.  Take this gem from page 120.  “Dylan also gets a number of material facts wrong; not because he didn’t do enough homework, but because he did none.”

Now if Bob was writing a text book on biology I might agree that criticism could be valid if that were the case – but Bob is a creative genius whose gift to the rest of us is his catalogue of 600+ compositions.  What on earth does homework have to do with it?  If someone tells me that ten years before “Like a Rolling Stone” a composer wrote “Once upon a time you dressed so fine”, then so what?   That is an interesting fact, but if composer followed that up with “before you offered me a lemonade and lime, but I said no baby I don’t have the time” I’d think, well, maybe that doesn’t really say much to me.

In short, ideas are everywhere, and as it was explained to me by my first publisher, you have to write the book (or the song) as “there is no copyright in ideas”.  I’m writing a review of Heylin’s work by saying that throughout he is missing the point.  You could do the same thing and publish it, and I’d have no claim against you.  Not unless you started copying my actual text.

Thus my complaint is not that Heylin attacks Dylan’s work although I must admit I don’t like some of it either.  It is Heylin’s view that he can dismiss a song (as for example in the line on page 121 “The song was even less worthy, but still gratefully received by Broadside,”) and expect and demand that we agree with him, even though he gives no evidence to back up his opinion.

OK maybe I have now started ranting, and that’s not so good, so I’ll stop for the moment, but really, “The Double Life” is an annoying work of opinion by a man who has little understanding of creativity, only a modest understanding of foik and popular music, and yet sees no good reason to justify anything he writes.

An index to the current series appearing on this website appears on the home page.    A list of the previous articles in this series appears at the end.

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“The Lyrics and the Music” (or sometimes “the music and the lyrics) is a series by Tony Attwood which tries to find out what happens when one reviews a Dylan song not primarily as a set of lyrics, but as a piece of music which includes lyrics.

Love Sick from “Time out of Mind” has been played by Bob some 926 times across a 27 year period and indeed is still on the current set-list.  And unless you have done this before I would suggest you might listen to this official audio from the very start in a totally quiet environment, focussing on what is happening in the background.  And maybe turn the volume up a bit.

Of course you knew this all along, but before Bob starts sings, “I’m walking through streets that are dead”, there is background music – a sort of rumbling suggesting that there is a background sound of life.   Other musical sounds come in, there is a rhythm, and Bob tells us he was destroyed like a child while he was sleeping.  (Which relates to a line that I quote at the end of this little piece, but which was dropped from the album version).

And then at that moment, after over a minute and a half of quiet background music, the desperate lyrics and the pulse of the beat, we get those two explosive chords, with “Sick of Love”.   Those two chords come twice, and then we are on to the second verse, plaintive, quite, pleading.

Background musical counter-melodies come and go, gradually increasing until we get to the “Sick of Love” moment again.

The instrumental break then is led by the organ at first with the lead guitar coming in with a counter melody before giving way to the organ again – but (and this is the really clever bit) the instrumental break doesn’t include that two chord explosive interruption.   We have to wait until “I think of you and I wonder” before that comes back.

The official Dylan site writes out the lyrics in the conventional way

I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

But if one just types into Google (at least where am in the world) “Love Sick lyrics” the format of the first entry (which is just credited to Google and nothing else) reads

I'm walking
Through streets that are dead
Walking
Walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

And that is interesting because writing the lyrics in that way really does reflect the music more than the official site version.  The “walking” is, the music tells us, not a brisk walk along the street or through the park, but a slow drag along the streets, and splitting those first two lines from the official version into four lines, really gives us, via the layout of the words, what the music is actually doing.  It’s a very slow walk to nowhere.

Or put another way, it is the slow plod of the man along the dead streets, is captured not just in the music, but in the way the lyrics are written out.  And we should remember that making the song of interest and keeping our desire to hear it through to the bitter end, is very difficult when the whole topic is one of negativity.   After all, “My feet are so tired my brain is so wired and the clouds are weeping,” really is incredibly depressing.

Yet via this unique musical arrangement, Bob manages to do this all the way through, even though there is no relief at all.  The music does not change, beyond the two crashing chords,  and the hopelessness of the lyrics gets deeper and deeper until ultimately it is lost.

Sometimes the silence can be like the thunder
Sometimes I feel like I’m being plowed under
Could you ever be true? I think of you
And I wonder

And thus at the end of the song we are utterly lost, both via the lyrics and the music.  He can’t say that it is over and he’s walking away, merely that it doesn’t know if she ever could be true.

Thus that contradiction in the music between the slow soft pulse that carries the song through, and the sudden explosive two chords at “I’m sick of love” gives us the contradiction held within the lyrics, between his love for her, and her behaviour toward him.

Everything about her is wrong – which makes his love for her seem ludicrous – as expressed by the lines that appear on the BobDylan.com version in verse two.  Is there ever something that could be less an expression of love?

You thrilled me to my heart, then you ripped it all apart
You went through my pockets when I was sleeping

But whatever version of the lyrics we look at, the conclusion with these two lines in the last two couplets, speaks of nothing but desperation – which is exactly what the contrast between the plodding verses and the sudden crash of the two chords in the chorus, expresses totally…

I’m sick of love…I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love…I’m trying to forget you

Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you

In short, it is, both in lyrics and in music, the expression of an utter contradiction and utter desperation is complete.

The songs reviewed from the music plus lyrics viewpoint…

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

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

Obviously a fair number of the songs which Bob only performed once or twice live do not have recording of that performance – of have a recording which is of such poor quality I wouldn’t want to inflict it upon you.

One of these poor quality recordings that I will inflict however is of “Meet me in the Morning” performed with Jack White.  If you really want to hear it here it is, but sadly what should have been a great moment of the two men together, isn’t.

We have more luck with the one and only performance of From A Buick 6 in 1965.  It is a straight 12 bar blues and in reality Bob doesn’t find that much to do with the song when playing it.  Perhaps that is because Wiki describes it as a raucous blues song.  And with such songs, it either is or it isn’t.

The studio recording was released as the B side of Positively 4th Street and is noted by several writers as being based on “Milk Cow Blues” by Sleepy John Estes.   There are fractional elements in Bob’s song that are similar to Milk Cow Blues, but then that is pretty much true for every 12 bar blues, so I am not really convinced.  Here’s the Sleepy John original…

Here are the other articles from this series

• A satisfied mind
• Caribbean Wind
• The girl on the Greenbriar Shore
• Highway 61 revisited
• Lay Down your weary tune
• Lily, Rosemary and Stage Fright
• Only a hobo
• Restless Farewell
• Roll on John
• Sally Sue Brown
• Spanish Harlem Incident
• Stage Fright
• Talking New York
• You Angel You

Bob is of course always touring, and I thought it might be interesting to have a look at what he has recently been playing.  So I have chosen the show on 7 July 2024 in Hershy Pennsylvania, for no particular reason other than the set list was available along with a full recording of the concert.

You can see the whole show here

The set starts with Highway 61 Revisited, a fairly standard approach to the song which is a fair way to get the band going and make sure everything is working ok.  It just has the slowdown ending which is a surprise if you’ve not taken it in before.

Then by contrast we have Shooting Star which is half sung half spoken, held together by a very solid drum beat.  It is now up to 136 live performances.  There’s a harmonica solo, but the start of it seems to have difficulty with the microphone.

Love Sick which follows is getting on for 1000 performances and it continues the downbeat approach, and once again we have a lot of the song declaimed rather than sung.  When I watch the video an advert pops up which is annoying, but if you want a complete concert there may be another copy around on the internet that will deliver the show without ads.

Bob then seemingly wishes Ringo Starr happy birthday, before bouncing along with Little Queenie – the Chuck Berry song.  Here’s the original if you want a diversion

Next up it is Mr. Blue. It’s not a song I’m familiar with but the internet tells me “”Mr. Blue” is a popular song written by DeWayne Blackwell that was a hit for The Fleetwoods, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1959″

So then after this break away from Dylan compositions, we have Early Roman Kings another song with over 500 live performances by Bob, and once more with a lot of declaiming in the vocal line.

Can’t Wait which follows is another tour favourite with over 200 performances, and this is one song that we have here that is performed in an utterly different way from that which we heard on the original album.  And just in case you can’t immediately bring the original to mind, here it is by way of contrast.

For me the sung version is more interesting.

And it is noticeable that the declaiming approach continues with “Under the Red Sky”  It’s an interesting song to choose with this treatment.  After all the lyrics are not ones that many people would put at the top of the list of their Dylan favourites…

There was a little boy and there was a little girl
And they lived in an alley under the red sky
There was a little boy and there was a little girl
And they lived in an alley under the red sky

There was an old man and he lived in the moon
One summer's day he came passing by
There was an old man and he lived in the moon
And one day he came passing by

But then we come back to Bob’s songs with “Soon after Midnight” which has now knocked up well over 400 performances in the last dozen years.

After this we jump way back in time to Ballad of a Thin Man which began life in 1965 and is now, according to the official site at 1263 performances, making it the sixth most performed song by Dylan.  The only songs performed more often are Watchtower (of course), Like a Rolling Stone, Highway 61, Tangled up in Blue and Blowing in the Wind.

“Thin Man” brings with it a real intensity, and it is a song that is clearly suited to the sort of declaiming approach that Bob is now using instead of singing the melodies, and it seems somehow very appropriate as we’re getting close to the end now.

Next is Simple Twist of Fate – a real contrast to Mr Jones – and here I must admit to a disappointment that we get the recited slow version, as I really do love the song in its original glory.  The harmonica solo is however really worth listening to,… but it is not played by Bob.   Indeed when have we ever heard him play like this.   But the various harmonica solos in this performance really are among the highlights of the show…

So what will Bob end up with?  It’s I’ll be your baby tonight – at a very slow speed.  It does then become a rocker of sorts working its way through the chord sequence until that suddenly stops and we get the coda.

I am not sure this version really matches the lyrics “Kick your shoes off – do not fear, Bring that bottle over here, I’ll be your baby tonight” but I think again maybe in a sense it does.

The fact is that we don’t get melodies any more, but we get Bob on stage, and that is still something worth appreciating.

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

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.

———————-

by Jürg Lehmann.

Baby, Stop Crying

“It sounded like something that Aretha Franklin should have recorded”, writes Elvis Costello in his autobiography ‘Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink’.

He is talking about “Baby, Stop Crying”, the song that Dylan recorded just two weeks before. Costello is not the only one who is touched. It is the third time that Dylan plays the song and it is, like that other new song from Street Legal (“Señor”), warmly welcomed. The master then seems reasonably pleased with the song. It is among the first songs on the playlist (as number three) and it stays there during the European tour. And it is a big hit on the old continent. Number thirteen in England, in other countries even higher.

Jochen Markhorst is one of the few who can take something positive from Baby, Stop Crying. It is one of the songs on Street Legal that Greil Marcus said was “simply impossible to pay attention to for more than a couple of minutes at a time.”

For Jochen however this disregard is incomprehensible: “Just like most of the songs from that album, the beautiful “Baby, Stop Crying” is forgotten, covered up in dust, has been kicked into the long grass, dumped into the wells of oblivion, shares the fate of the Norwegian Blue, but we can blame it partly on the troubadour himself: he never plays the song and even does not select it for Greatest Hits Vol. 3 (1994)… although it really is one of his very few, real, actual hits.”

As far as covers is concerned, however, even Jochen he states briefly and concisely: “Noteworthy covers there are not. And it is too late now. Aretha Franklin has passed away in…2018.”

Jochen is right, there is no cover that one could recommend with a clear conscience. It remains a mystery why nobody – who is capable of doing it properly – has any desire to cover the song since Baby, Stop Crying is a very coverable song with catchy tune qualities.

As one critic noted, “the lyrics are pretty direct here, as the narrator implores a girl in a world of hurt to quit her tears. What really sells this song is the thoughtfulness of the arrangement and the songcraft, how it builds from Dylan’s low drone in the verses to the impassioned singing of the chorus. Little things like that can carry a song a long way, especially when you’re operating in the more contemporary idiom Bob chose for Street Legal.”

So where does that leave us? Should we wait for a reborn Aretha Franklin or just forget about the song? For my part, I have the feeling that something can be done with this song. Although no cover is really convincing, some interesting ideas and approaches do appear. Maybe someday someone will pick up these ideas and bring them to a convincing result.

The history of Baby, Stop Crying covers begins the same year Dylan released the song (1978) with a proper, correct cover, a smooth pop version which stays close to the original. Jennifer Kemp, whose real name is Helga Schütz, was a German singer in the band Juwel at the time. After her departure, she released her first solo single in English, “Baby, Stop Crying”, followed a year later by an LP with the same title. After that, she was never heard from again.

After that the song was quiet for more than 30 years. It can’t be ruled out that it was played live from time to time, but as far as we know there are no audio recordings of it. It wasn’t until 2011 that the song resurfaced in a jazz cafe in Copenhagen, performed by the Aske Jacoby Trio.

In 2018 Californian Dave Tilton covered the entire Street Legal album (“Street Legal Revisited”).

Coming next are Muddy What (2019), a Munich-based blues band. Winner of the German Blues Challenge 2021, they are obviously an established part of the blues community and among the busiest touring musicians in Germany. As a matter of fact the band is not lacking in talent, the way they interpret the song is creative and gives new insights, especially the lead guitarist Ina Spang does a great job with her dreamlike mandoline play. Unfortunately, the singer ruins what could have been a nice cover with his unmotivated shouting.

Robbie Fulks might be familiar to you. The Chicago resident has released 15 albums over a career spanning more than 30 years. His 2016 record Upland Stories was nominated for a Grammy for Best Folk Album. His live performance of Baby, Stop Crying in 2019 is professional, although rather conventional and not very surprising.

Bocephus King is an Indie artist from Vancouver, Canada. His discography includes 6 albums released between 2000 and 2020. Bocephus King is a pseudonym of Jamie Perry, who is described “as an eccentric Americana troubadour who carved out a bit of a cult following in the first decades of the 21st century. Bocephus King dabbled in a great variety of sounds over the course of his career” (Stephen Thomas Erlewine on allmusic.com).

The scenery in the music video appears to be in Italy – in fact, Perry has covered a number of Italian songs on his 2020 album The Infinite & The Autogrill,  which he has translated into English. He has also won several awards at the prestigious Premio Tenco. In his latest musical incarnation, Bocephus King combines the influences and traditions of Sufi music, Berber, Mali, Rajasthan and flamenco with North American folk, rock and roll and analogue electronic music. You should therefore not be surprised when you hear tablas in Perry’s cover. To get an unbiased impression of the music, you can simply ignore the rather wacky video.

Trifle is an Adelaide trio of musicians who play original contemporary jazz and work with singers and other musicians to create new versions of classic songs as you can find out on their website. For this cover (2021) they meet Australian singer-songwriter Jessica Luxx.

There are a dozen other covers on the internet (for example Bob Dylan Experience or Dante Mazzetti), all of which still have a lot of room for improvement. And no, there’s no new Aretha Franklin around. But yes: it’s still worth a listen.

Previously in the “Covers we missed” series…

•  2×2; Saturday Night Fry
• Abandoned Love
• Ain’t Talkin
• All along the Watchtower
• All I really want to do
• All the Tired Horses
• As I went out one morning

 I don’t know what it means either is an index to the current series appearing on this website.   Wallflower Part 1 is here.

Details of the book “Bob Dylan’s 1971” which is available in English, Dutch and German, and how it can be ordered are given at the end of the article.

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1971 is the fourth year of Dylan’s Seven Lean Years, the dry spell that Dylan himself places between John Wesley Harding (late 1967) and Blood On The Tracks (late 1974). These are the years when Dylan sits on the waterfront, watching the river flow, waiting for the inspiration to paint a masterpiece.

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

Apparently, they mean something to Dylan…

————

Wallflower (1971) part 2

by Jochen Markhorst

II          “He once played with Hank Williams!”

“That was the Sir Douglas Quintet, the greatest little English group from San Antonio Texas, lead by Doug Sahm, featuring Augie Meyers on the Vox organ. Doug was a child prodigy. He turned down a spot on the Grand Ole Opry in order to finish Junior High School. As a youth he performed on stage with Hank Williams. Over the course of his career, he combined country, blues, R&B, Mexican conjunto, norteño and cajun music, along with British Invasion rock ‘n’ roll, garage rock and even a little bit of psychedelic into music which could only be called pure Doug Sahm.”

(Dylan in Theme Time Radio Hour Episode 6, “Jail”, aired on June 7, 2006)

DJ Dylan is a fan, in his Theme Time Radio Hour. In the three seasons of the radio show he plays a Doug Sahm record five times (twice Doug Sahm solo, three times Sir Douglas Quintet), each time with resounding words for the Texan. He calls him the great Doug Sahm, twice the DJ recalls that Doug was a child prodigy who stood on stage with the greats already as a little schoolboy, and likewise twice the impressed DJ reports, “As a matter of fact he once played with Hank Williams!” And Augie Meyers being a member of the band is also worth a mention every time – including a brief biography, in which the DJ tells the amusing anecdote of how Augie became such a great keyboardist:

“He was raised by his grandparents, and they didn’t want him to wander off. So they tied a six-foot rope to him, and tied the other end to the family piano. Augie realized he couldn’t go anywhere other than the piano – and learned how to play it. And we’re glad he did.”

Not empty words. The musician Dylan is an outspoken fan of Augie as well, has him playing mood defining parts on Time Out Of Mind and “Love And Theft”, calls him “the shining example of a musician, Vox player or otherwise, who can break the code,” and seeking his advice in the studio;

“When he did Time Out Of Mind, he says Augie, if you and Doug did this thing, what would you do? I said now we wouldn’t have two different drummers, we wouldn’t have two very different guitar players. I said you write this on the piano or on the guitar? He said I wrote it on the piano. So well you play piano and I’ll play organ, just this here organ in the back. And that’s the way we did it. And he would ask me questions like that. Which was nice.”
(Augie Meyers interview on The Paul Leslie Hour, 2020)

Dylan’s first studio experience with Augie was a quarter of a century before those Time Out Of Mind sessions in 1997: at Atlantic Recording Studios in New York, 1972. On Monday 9 October, Dylan reported there for the first of four sessions (9-12 October) to record Doug Sahm’s first solo record Doug Sahm and Band under the direction of Arif Mardin and Jerry Wexler.

It is a remarkable, unusual footnote in Dylan’s rich career. It almost seems as if Sahm asked him to join the band, and Dylan accepted the invitation. In the liner notes he unobtrusively ranks sixth in the list of musicians, after Doug Sahm, after violinist Ken Kosek, drummer George Rains, bassist Jack Barber and Augie Meyers. With no particular distinction, either: “Bob Dylan – vocal, harmony, guitar, harp, Hammond organ & Vox organ”, and then the list simply continues with Dr John, David Bromberg and 11 more musicians. With names we will encounter again later in Dylan’s career, by the way.

Jerry Wexler, of course, who will produce Slow Train Coming so beautifully in 1979. David Bromberg Dylan already knew from Self Portrait and New Morning, and in June 1992, the two men will record a whole slew of covers – recordings, a few of which are circulating in bootleg circles and contain wonderful gems (Jimmie Rodgers‘ “Sloppy Drunk”, for example), and two of which will eventually be added to The Bootleg Series, Volume 8: Tell Tale Signs (“Duncan And Brady” and “Miss The Mississippi And You”), but most of which are still waiting for an official release.

And furthermore, men like Flaco Jimenez, the admired accordion prodigy, Augie Meyers of course (who is persistently, three times, referred to as “Augie Meyer” on the sleeve), the legendary Dr John, the brilliant saxophonist David ‘Fathead’ Newman… it’s definitely a band in which you can imagine Dylan would feel perfectly happy. With Bromberg and Sahm alone, he would have two walking jukeboxes alongside him who are just as music-encyclopaedically versed as himself.

For each of the 12 songs, Doug Sahm lists some additional information on the cover, where it is not entirely clear why he mentions some musicians and not others. For example, under the title of the opening track “(Is Anybody Going To) San Antone” we read: “Charlie Owens, steel; Doug Sahm & Bob Dylan, vocals; Doug Sahm & Ken Kosek, twin fiddles.” Dylan is listed separately on three more songs. “Bob Dylan, lead guitar”, “Bob Dylan, guitar solo” and “Bob Dylan, harp”. On which songs Dylan then plays “Hammond organ” and “Vox organ”, and what he contributed to the other eight songs at all, is not clear.

What is mentioned though – of course – is a songwriter’s credit. As a valued band member, Dylan gets to contribute one song, much like Harrison with The Beatles – perhaps if the band had existed longer and made more records, Dylan, like George, would have been allowed to write more songs over the years. Anyway, at least now he gets to contribute one. And so this is the album with the official world premiere of the Dylan song “Wallflower”. Side A, track 5:

5. Wallflower
   (By Bob Dylan; ram’s horn music, ascap. Time: 2:35)
   Bob Dylan, lead guitar; Dave Bromberg, dobro; Dr. John organ; Bob &
   Doug, vocals.

Doug Sahm and Band – Wallflower

It is an enjoyable introduction. Loose, upbeat and pleasantly messy. The start is hesitant, Dylan’s and Sahm’s harmony vocals are unpolished and mixed rather far back, they are not 100% text-proof, Flaco Jimenez’s accordion is leading, the drums sound as if one of the coffee ladies has taken a seat behind the kit for a moment, and the overall association is: “The Band in a spring mood.” Dr John’s organ does have a Garth Hudson vibe, Robbie Robertson could not have bettered Bromberg’s dobro.

David Bromberg seems particularly enamoured with the song. The first cover is to his name anyway, on 1974’s Wanted Dead Or Alive, as an appealing bluegrass ballad with an inspired inner dynamic – from joyfully carefree to poignantly desperate. The song remains on his setlist. On Live New York City 1982, “Wallflower” can be found again, again in a scintillating performance, and in 2023, the now 77-year-old Bromberg is still playing the song, still just as passionate, with “very special guest” Jeff Tweedy as guest vocalist. At New York’s Beacon Theatre on Broadway, half an hour’s walk from the Atlantic Recording Studios at 157 W 57th Street, where more than fifty years earlier he forged that first official recording of “Wallflower” with Dylan and Sahm.

David Bromberg & His Big Band ft. Jeff Tweedy – Wallflower:

To be continued. Next up Wallflower part 3: Really it’s just a sad song

NL: Bob Dylans 1971 : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.nl: Boeken

UK: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Amazon.co.uk: Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Books

US: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Amazon.com: Books

DE: Bob Dylans 1971 (Die Songs von Bob Dylan) : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.de: Boeken

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

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

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

The 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.

I’ll be your Baby Tonight was played 654 times between 1969 and 2024, although here we are looking at the performances that form part of the Never Ending Tour, not the most recent Rough and Rowdy tour.   As such it is the 23rd most performed song by Dylan across the years, and in terms of John Wesley Harding tracks, second only to the all-time most performed composition, “All along the Watchtower” which had 2268 performances, concluding in 2018.

1991 King of the unsteady

Our first sampling gives no real indication of what the song is going to be from the introduction – it’s a gentle rocker which includes just the hint of a melody from the lead guitar.  Then just past the minute mark we get the harmonica coming in, and finally Bob gives us vocals – which to me seem to be unsteady, or perhaps even on might say, uncertain.   Which is strange for a song chosen to be one of the most performed of all his compositions.

I’d also say that the instrumental breaks sound something of a mess to me – every instrument ploughing in with its own contribution without direction.   Indeed this is one of those performances which I feel, if I heard it without any knowledge of Dylan, I’d just dismiss it as one from an ok band which could do with a new vocalist, and some more rehearsals.   (In fact rather like the bands I used to play in).

Around the 5 minute 30 mark there is a harmonica solo which does little more than repeat one phrase.  And then it comes to an end.   Not Bob’s finest performance in my opinion, although the second or two of audience reaction we can hear before the cut off suggests they liked it.

2003 Pounding pianos and hectic harps

In 2003 the lively, bouncy approach to the song is maintained, but with a much shorter introduction.   Bob uses a sort of pleading voice with the lyrics coming out in bursts, in a vocal performance that still doesn’t seem to match the relaxed approach from the music.

Indeed I think that is the main point with this performance.  The music and the singing are out of touch with each other.  Just listen to the instrumental break around 2 minutes 20 seconds and onwards.  It is lighthearted, fun, jokey, relaxed… the second verse of that instrumental break also plays with the timing.

Then with the vocals coming back for the middle 8 it seems everything is working well with vocals and instruments, but as Bob returns to singing, we still have that pleading effect from his voice.   Also from this point on we can occasionally hear Bob on the piano – and he’s not really playing in keeping with the band.

But then, there is an instrumental break with the harmonica.  Unfortunately, the recordist picked up a conversation as well, which is off-putting, but if one can ignore that, the performance is saved by that final verse.

2015: Singing to you, not at you

Our final recording of the song still keeps that bounce, but Bob has returned to singing – and how he has returned.  It is now more experimental and varied and as a result very much more in keeping with the song.  I love the way he sings “Take your shoes off” and “Bring that bottle over here”.

The instrumental breaks too seem to be much more in keeping with the rest of the song  – carrying the same relaxed feel through the entire performance – which of course is what is needed to stay in touch with a song called “I’ll be your baby tonight”.

It is incidentally one of the few Dylan compositions in which the composer modulates (ie changes key).   The fact that we don’t particularly notice it now, is in part because we are used to those chord changes, but also in part because of the way the song swings long   Just listen to the last minute of the performance.

And that’s it.  We just have three recordings of this song from the tour selected in the Never Ending Tour series which suggests to me that Mike Johnson, in selecting the recordings to include in his articles, didn’t find much going on in terms of the evolution of the song, and so didn’t include more in his articles.

And because of the structure of the chord sequence and the importance of the melody that is quite true.  So Bob played with the rhythm, which is fair enough, although what could have taken the song further forward would be harmony singing, which of course Bob doesn’t do often.  But just to show where the song could go here’s another interpretation.  The melody and chords are the same.   It is the harmonies that do it.

Other articles in this series…

• A Hard Rain’s a-gonna fall 1988 – 1999
• Absolutely Sweet Marie
• Blind Willie McTell. 1997-2006
• Blowing in the Wind. 1991-2001
• Cold Irons Bound 1997-2002
• Desolation Row: beyond imagination: 1992-2017
• Don’t think twice it’s alright 1993-1997
• Duquesne Whistle 2013-2018
• Early Roman Kings
• Forever Young 1987 to 2011
• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• Gates of Eden
• Goodbye Jimmy Reed
• High Water
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• I and I
• I don’t believe you – 1994 – 2013
• I shall be released 1975-2008 
• It Ain’t me Babe from 1994-1998.
• It’s all over now baby blue
• It’s all right ma – at least it was by 2001
• Lay Lady Lay 1993-2010
• Like a Rolling Stone 1988 to 2002
• Long and Wasted Years
• Love Sick from the very start to 2000
• Love minus zero / No limit 1988 – 1996
• Maggies Farm – with a wonderful ending
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• Not dark yet
• One too many mornings. 
• Pay in Blood
• Positively 4th Street, 1994-2006.
• Rainy day women, from push to stroke
• She Belongs to Me: 1988 to 1995
• Shelter from the Storm 1989-96
• Simple Twist of Fate 1989-2003
• Spirit on the Water
• Summer Days
• Tambourine Man 1964-1995
• Tangled up in Blue 1988 to 1993
• The Times They are a Changing: 1987-1995
• Thunder on the Mountain 2006-2014
• The Drifters’ Escape. 1996-2005.
• The Hard Rain of 1988, 2003 and 2015
• Things have changed 2000-2007
• To Ramona. 1989 to 2000
• Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum – an unbelievable journey
• Visions of Johanna
• Watching the River Flow

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

by Tony Attwood

The Double Life of Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin is a big book. Over 500 pages in fact, and it is only the first part of Heylin’s latest offering on Dylan.   But despite Heylin’s eminence as a Dylan commentator, it’s a book that I think misses the point.

•  Part 1: Let’s ignore creativity. 
• Part 2: On the road to creativity
• Part 3: Getting Noticed

——————

My point in this series is that Bob Dylan is self-evidently not an ordinary guy – he is in fact a creative genius.  And so expecting him to have behaved as an ordinary guy throughout his life, (especially that bit of his past life when he was struggling to understand what he was and what he could do, while at the same time being pushed around by those in the record company who were naturally looking after their interests rather than Bob’s), is unreasonable.

Of course, Bob didn’t behave like everyone else, not did he adopt the morality of the 21st century, because he wasn’t like everyone else and this was the 1960s.  So although I am sure Mary Rotolo, mother of Suze, was undoubtedly speaking the truth when she said that Dylan “told me so many lies right away… they were stories that were … beyond belief to an older woman,” the reality was that Bob was effectively living in a different world from Mary, both in terms of his experiences and in terms of his thinking..

Few of us ever get the experience of creating something new, different and indeed earth-shattering, but we don’t have to have had that experience to imagine how mind-blowing, unsettling (in the sense of asking “is it really that brilliant, or am I just fooling myself?) and above all life-changing, such an event must be.

But Heylin revels instead, in what he sees as the nastier side of the young Bob Dylan and goes on and on and on quoting people with negative things to say about the young Dylan.   Although he does slip a few hints as to what was really going on as he cites Paul Nelson saying Dylan had “a strong streak of dishonesty and a strong streak of honesty… right together.”  In my experience in the music industry, it was ever thus.

For those trying to break into the music business, what mattered was breaking into the music business.  So the comment “I doubt that he has ever been sincere in his life” said by John Hammond Sr is probably true except for one thing: Bob wanted to make music.    Hammond admits that this perceived insincerity doesn’t detract from Dylan’s creativity, but then throws in another knock by adding “Bob always had fantasies about himself.”  Or as a more generous person might say, “Like so many of us, Bob had his dreams.”   The difference of course is that Bob made his happen.

So what the book offers us is report after report suggesting that when Dylan was charming those with any sense could see “through the layers of charm”.  But on the other hand, full marks to Bob for learning how to be charming.  I’m not sure I learned that until I was well into my 20s.

Thus it continued and we are over 100 pages into Heylin’s book before any serious comment about Dylan and his choice of music, where in passing Heylin notes that Dylan “resolutely refused to drop challenging material,” from his performances and recordings, suggesting that in this regard musically Bob could be quite “Perverse.”

It is an interesting insight, and one wonders why we are forced to read 100 pages about his alleged but mostly unproven mistreatment of his friends to get to this more important bit.   For let’s not forget, the important bit in terms of what happened later, is the music.  Bob will not be remembered for “borrowing” someone’s records, and in Heylin’s eyes remains suspect because he refused to criticize big money makers like Harry Belafonte, Kingston Trio etc.

And this takes us to Heyline’s problem.  He seems to have got hung up on the notion of the impoverished artist, refusing to take the commercial money but instead just sticking with his art.   Somehow he expects Dylan to be like Monet or Gaugin, or maybe William Blake.  I’m not sure if Heylin mentions William Shakespeare anywhere in his volume, but he really ought to reflect that there was a man, considered by many to be the greatest writer of them all, who not only borrowed unremittingly from everywhere and everyone else, but also made a decent enough living in doing so, retiring from writing and productions aged 49.

Mind you it is not just Dylan who comes in for criticism.  John Hammond gets dirt thrown over him for supposedly (there’s no proof) messing up the recording of “You’re no good”, and for commenting that Dylan was undisciplined in the studio.   Somehow Heylin confuses the very basic recording techniques of the 1960s with what is possible today and blames Hammond for not getting a perfect take every time.  Suddenly we find Dylan has been moved from being the kid who took and borrowed without giving, ihto God’s gift to music (which might well be true) in the space of a page or two.

I was (unsuccessfully) making demos a few years after Dylan – although in London, not in the States – and the technology was primitive, not least because the very expensive best gear was reserved for the singers and bands who were already established.   These were the days when anything and everything in a studio was mega expensive, and from a commercial point of view, Bob Dylan was still a risk.  Demos were circulated on 10 inch discs, and they cost money.

Hammond is criticised for making Dylan record “See that my grave is kept clean” three times when the first recording is excellent – but that is how it was those days.  You never quite knew how the original recording was going to translate onto a disc, so you had to have multiple recordings.

But perhaps worst of all, Heylin reserves for himself the ability to read what was in Dylan’s mind all those years ago.  He reports a discussion as to who wrote “Man of Constant Sorrow”, with Dylan deliberately misleading Hammond by referring him to Judy Collins recording of a different song (p107).  But it is Heylin who is wrong.  “Maid of Constant Sorrow” recorded by Judy Collins in 1961 is the same song as “Man of Constant Sorrow”.  Just the sex is changed.

And this is my point.  Only the arrangement changes.  And according to Wikipedia (not always correct I know, but seemingly right this time) it is a traditional song first published in 1913, on which no copyright is payable.

At the heart of all this is the suggestion made repeatedly by Heylin, that Dylan didn’t speak the truth but Heylin knows the truth.   But the fact is that in the 1960s everyone in the music industry who was contemplating releasing the first record by a new artist, wanted a spicy story.  “I went to school, studied classical music on the piano, passed all my exams, worked moderately hard, and at the weekends wrote a couple of songs in my bedroom” was not what was wanted.  They wanted a rambling man moving from town to town, meeting musicians by the roadside, or at the campfire, picking up the old traditions as they travelled on.  They wanted the Rambling Man.  So that is what Dylan gave Hammond – exactly what Hammond wanted to hear and could use in the publicity material.

And here’s a little sidenote that may help explain what Dylan was going through.  I was about to write at this point, “I did the same when trying (but ultimately failing) to get my own musical career on the road, and in fact I wrote a song about that whole idea of inventing a past: Captured by a life that I don’t know that well.”

At which point I paused and thought, “Did I actually write that?” and had to check to see it was one of mine.  And yes I suspect my memory is ok on this one.  But my point is that Heylin is using commentaries from people who were often delivering their memories years later.  And memories, as surely we all know, are not always reliable.

Now I am not trying to argue that Dylan did not make things up.  He was after all trying to break into the music industry where, assuming that the American music industry in the 1960s was like the English music industry, everyone made up stories about themselves all the time, not because they were inveterate liars, but because, well, that’s what everyone did.  My story that “I’m at grammar school in Dorset at the moment, and hoping to go to university in October” wasn’t what was wanted at all, as of course I soon realised.

Given all this, who knows if the story about Dylan being told by Van Ronk, that Van Ronk told Bob he didn’t want Bob to use the VR arrangement of House of the Rising Sun, is true or not.  Maybe it is, and Bob went and used it anyway – but that is how the music industry worked in the 1960s.  Nothing was sacred, nothing was reserved, and no one (at least in England) even thought it might be possible to go to court over such an issue as the copyright on an arrangement.  Everyone “borrowed” everyone else’s.

Dylan however is portrayed as a thief, a person of low moral standing, a man who in Heylin’s own words, “stretches the truth”.  Whereas Heylin is judging Dylan’s actions within the music industry in the 1960s by the legal and moral standards of today.  Certainly the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 clarified all such matters in the UK, but before 1988… well those were murkier times.

Maybe legally and perhaps morally Dylan was wrong, but as Dave Ray is quoted as saying, “If you showed him [Bob] how to do something… ten minutes later, he was doing it.”  Dylan had that ability to listen to music and then reproduce it, and he used it.  And Dylan was not unique in this.  A lot of musicians in the folk, pop and rock field did it then and do it now.  Indeed if people coulddn’t do this, and didn’t do it, how on earth does Heylin think folk music was passed from one village to another in mediaeval times?

As Heylin does himself admit, in these early years “the pace at which Dylan is moving creatively is frightening.”   It is just unfortunate that Heylin doesn’t recognise the inevitable knock-on effects that such creative developments coming at such a speed, will inevitably have.

The series continues…