Untold Dylan

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.

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.

———–

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…

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.   An updated list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.

Back in August 2016 Jochen, commenting on “Simple Twist of Fate” noted that, ‘Just like her big sister, “Tangled Up In Blue”, Simple Twist is not only ambiguous, but constantly on the move, too. The words change per performance, Dylan swaps personal pronouns, sometimes pushes the text in one direction (and then suggests that the lady’s love is paid for: She raised her weary head and couldn’t help but hate / Cashing in on a simple twist of fate).’

“Ambiguity and movement” – I think that sums the song up perfectly.   Just look at the opening verse….

They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark
She looked at him and he felt a spark
Tingle to his bones
'Twas then he felt alone
And wished that he'd gone straight
And watched out for a simple twist of fate

What the music gives us here, is the picture of a the couple sitting together in a relaxed way – it is the bass that provides the accompaniment to the strummed acoustic guitar, which is very unusual indeed.  Indeed it is the bass that gives us a sense of both stability and gentle movement, which fits exactly with the walk along by the old canal.

In fact for much of the time the bass is descending suggesting not so much that the life of the person portrayed in the song is in decline but rather that it is just progressing along in its own path.   It is an approach that works beautifully – consider when he woke up in the bare room feeling emptiness inside – that bass gives us that feeling of time passing and things moving along.

But now listen again to the verse beginning around 3 minutes 20 wherein he still believes she was my kin, but we still have the feeling that it is inevitably over, because of the descending bass.

And yet this is not just a simple descent into sadness, because throughout the singer recognises that the loss of the lady was inevitable.

People tell me it's a sin
To know and feel too much within
I still believe she was my twin but I lost the ring
She was born in spring
But I was born too late
Blame it on a simple twist of fate

So yes there is both inevitability but also culpability on his part, and that descending bass line over and over tells us this – but also tells us that each time the bass gets to the bottom of the run, it will pick up and start at the top going down once again.

What I really wonder, listening to this original album version again, is who it was who came up with the notion of the rhythm guitar and the bass working together behind the melody, for that really was an inspired idea.   It is that combination of the two instruments that allows Dylan suddenly to take us by surprise at the end of each verse with his dramatic rise of the voice.

It is in each verse the one line of protest both in the lyrics and in the singing; a line that stands out from every other line….

And wished that he'd gone straight

Hit him like a freight train

Another blind man at the gate

To which he just could not relate

How long must he wait?

But I was born too late

These are arresting lines in terms of  the lyrics, and in terms of the music, and that brings a problem, because this penultimate line in each verse is out of context with the rest.  That is expressed by the way the melody rises, but it does leave the problem: how then can the music come back down.

If each verse ended on that high point it would have left us expecting the song to move on, but the point is, the lyrics don’t move on.  The singer is as bemused at the end of the piece as he is at the start.

This is only made possible by that penultimate line – almost a shout of protest in each case – which is then followed by the final line that itself always ends with the title.

The essence of the song is thus that she came along, they were together, she left, that final event being recorded in the wonderful fines

He told himself he didn't care
Pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside

And here more than anywhere the music helps us understand.  The descending bass reveals his utter despondency, but we know at the end of the verse he is going to break down because he simply cannot understand why she has gone (“To which he just could not relate).

A lesser composer would have kept the music of that penultimate line in the same mood and style as the rest of the song, but no, Dylan will have none of that.   Those penultimate lines express his grief both musically and lyrically.

And wished that he'd gone straight
Hit him like a freight train
Another blind man at the gate
To which he just could not relate
How long must he wait?
But I was born too late

These are the lines of pain – most especially in the final when the character stops being “he” and becomes “I” with that final cry on the top note, as all the while the bass plods along its predestined road.

A remarkable piece of music as well as a remarkable set of lyrics.

However because we now know the song so well, it is possible to perform it with far less emphasis on the penultimate line, and in that way the song still works, because in our memories we will always have Bob’s original version, although much of the drama is then lost.

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
• 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.

You Angel You was written in 1973, and performed twice by Dylan, on 14 January 1990 and 8 February the same year.  I am not sure why he left it so long and why it suddenly came back, and Mike Johnson in the Never Ending Tour series doesn’t offer a reason either.  It just happened, as these things do.

The 8 February recording was captured as part of the Never Ending Tour series in the episode Songs of love, songs of betrayal

The version that is on the internet is I think the same one, but with a less clear recording…and is identified as the 8 February recording.

So why did Bob just give us this song twice having thought enough of it to put on the album?

First, it is a short performance – most Never Ending Tour pieces last several minutes longer, so I guess Bob did not have a way of extending the piece either through new lyrics or indeed through an extended instrumental break or two.   And he also didn’t feel like adding any significant variations.

Also the lyrics are fairly short – making for a much shorter song than Bob often indulges in – and I am not sure they have too much to say…

You angel, you
Your essence got me under your wing
The way you walk and the way you talk
I feel I could almost sing

You angel, you
You're as fine as anything's fine
I just walk and watch you talk
With you memory of my mind

You know I can't sleep at night for trying
Yes I never did feel this way before
Never did get up and walk the floor
If this is love then gimme more
And more and more and more and more

And that’s it with the repeats removed.  Not really a Dylan-esque song.  And so I guess he either suddenly thought of  it one day, or maybe a friend asked for it, or perhaps the person about whom it was written, suddenly turned up, or sadly passed away, or something….

But there was more to be done with it, as Manfred Mann showed us a couple of years later (this was recorded in 1983).

But there is still more to this song, and Aaron and I did one of our joint reviews of it, including some rather interesting cover versions. in the Beautiful Obscurity series.   I do hope you have a moment to go back and have a look.  As you will know if you are a regular reader Aaron past away recently, and this is a good a way as any to remember his contribution.

Previously in this series we have looked at 

• 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
• Talking New York
• You Angel You

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 1

by Jochen Markhorst

I           There’s so much beauty and truth in it

In 2020, she repeats the formula, albeit this time Diana Krall stays closer to her roots: This Dream Of You is the second album she names after the Dylan cover on it. The rest of the album is mostly filled with jazz classics from the American Songbook. “How Deep Is the Ocean”, “Autumn in New York”, “But Beautiful”, and the like. Actually Diana’s core business, the repertoire and genre that secured her a place among the greatest jazz musicians of the 21st century, but strangely enough, in particular the one Dylan song stands out. Perhaps partly because this is one of the three songs on which Dylan’s bassist Tony Garnier assists her, or maybe just because “This Dream of You” is not yet a hackneyed song that has been played to death, but compared to this one rendition, the other songs suddenly sound a bit, well, stale and listless.

The last time Krall let an album sail under the banner of a Dylan song was five years earlier; in 2015, she released the surprising Wallflower. The surprising thing being the tracklist: classics from the pop canon, mostly from the 1970s – “Desperado”, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word”, “I’m Not in Love”, that category. Jazzy arranged, carried by her signature hazy, sensual vocal style and her superior, hypersensitive piano playing. Good enough, but not as startling as the outlier on the tracklist, Dylan’s wallflower “Wallflower”. Strange at first, to see this lightweight ditty listed among such landmarks as “California Dreamin’” and “Alone Again (Naturally)”, but half a listen is enough to understand why Krall puts precisely this flag on her album: it’s a breathtaking performance, intimate and sexy, with a superb contribution from guest guitarist Blake Mills – the master who demonstrates here once again that a Dylan song brings out the best of his enviable talents.

Incidentally, Krall’s solo performances – i.e. just piano and vocals, no strings and no Blake Mills – are no less crushing. Actually, paradoxically, the dullest version happens to be the live performance together with her husband Elvis Costello.

However, her motivation for choosing the song, which she reveals in a radio interview with Scott Simon for NPR, definitely does not resonate in her interpretation:

“I heard it on a Bootleg Series. It was summertime and I was driving around British Columbia on a beautiful summer afternoon and I was listening to it with the children in the back, and I thought, ‘Well, this is a song we all should be singing together in the car.’ I loved it. There’s so much beauty and truth in it. Simple, but it speaks to a lot of people.”

… fortunately, Diana does not turn it into a merry sing-along.

Still, that’s what most colleagues do, turn it into a nice sing-along. The approach is usually upbeat country with leading roles for fiddle and banjo, the mood is usually: a sunny farmer’s wedding out in the country. Which seems largely due to the song’s first official release.

Which is not Dylan’s, by the way, that first official release. Dylan records the song during the “George Jackson” session, Thursday 4 November 1971. The session is his second and last creative outpouring in that desert year 1971, apart from the somewhat obscure contributions to Ginsberg’s sonic experiments, also in November (of which Dylan’s musical contribution to Ginsberg’s long, half-spoken poem “September On Jessore Road” is at the very least interesting). “Wallflower” seems originally intended only as a B-side for the single “George Jackson”, and given its somewhat throwaway, easy-going quality, probably even written especially for that. In any case, an opening couplet like

Wallflower, wallflower
Won’t you dance with me?
I’m sad and lonely too
Wallflower, wallflower
Won’t you dance with me?
I’m fallin’ in love with you

… does not give the impression that Dylan spent much time and love on it, nor that he felt any ambition other than “it’s just a B-side”. What Paul McCartney calls a “work song”, the songs that unlike the “hit songs” are casually dashed off to serve as B-sides or album filler, the song that may then be sung by George or Ringo, or sold by Brian Epstein to Peter & Gordon, or Billy J. Kramer, or The Fourmost, or whoever, who then often enough score big hits with them. In fact, one might even suspect that Dylan used one of those work songs as a template:

Little child, little child,
Little child, won't you dance with me?
I'm so sad and lonely,
Baby take a chance with me.

… “Little Child” from 1963’s With The Beatles. Initially written for Ringo as a matter of fact, and intended only as an album filler, but Ringo didn’t like it (and therefore got “I Wanna Be Your Man”), so Lennon then did it himself. Indeed not a real “hit song”, in Macca’s words. They weren’t too proud of it either; the song is never played again by the lads, not even by any of them in the solo years. Though even a weekday “work song” from The Beatles is still a Beatles song, of course. Nevertheless, “Little Child” is too unremarkable to merit a Dylan reference. Taken on their own, separately, the lyric fragments won’t you dance with me, I’m so sad and lonely and take a chance with me are obviously too stereotypical to be considered for the “Dylan source” label, but hearing all three of them, in the same order too, does rule out the coincidence factor. Somewhere in Dylan’s subconscious, “Little Child” is apparently floating around, and the angle “just popping out a B-side” is enough to bring up the words of Lennon/McCartney.

Just as Dylan’s aftercare is similar to the love the Fab Four gave “Little Child” afterwards. Disinterest, that is. Worse still, “Wallflower” does not even end up on a B-side in the end, is never played live by Dylan either, is indifferently passed over for the compilation box Biograph in 1985, and is not released until twenty years later, on the second CD of the start of the successful Bootleg Series, The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. Although – something of affection seems to be felt by Dylan after all, as we see a short year after that Thursday in November 1971. At least in October 1972, he hasn’t forgotten the song altogether…

To be continued. Next up Wallflower part 2: “He once played with Hank Williams!”

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.

Not Dark Yet began its live performances in 1997 and concluded in 2019 after 166 outings.

We pick it up in 1998; Friends and other strangers

The first thing I notice is the beat which is seems much more emphasised than I recall it from the album.  It’s faster and the key has changed.  The voice has become pleading but beyond everything that strange rhythmic approach of the original recording has gone.   Whereas before we had that unexpected beat before each line (as in Beat “Shadows are falling”) which gave such a sense of unease and uncertainty, that has gone.

That is not to say Bob is singing on the first beat of each bar but the unsettled feel of the recording has gone.  The edge is missing.  And listening to the instrumental section at the end, it feels (to me) that the instruments are falling over each other.

2000: Please heed these words that I speak

Now immediately we feel something gentler – something closer to the original recording.  The instrumentalists are not falling over each other – everything is more gentle as befits the lyrics.  “Still got the scars” now once more makes sense.

The whole point, it seems to me, is in that line that “It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there”, – that feeling of resignation, that it is all over – as explained in “She wrote me a letter”.

The deep resignation that is at the heart of the original is now once more the dominant force in Dylan’s vocals, and I can just sit here and take this in.   I’m not too sure about giving the bass the lead solo in the instrumental section – although the audience give some applause.

“Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer,” – yes I feel that.

2004:  The best singing audience

Now Bob decides to make his vocals the variations within the piece, and the rest of the band just follow along.  For me this doesn’t help; we know the melody and I am not sure these variations do anything to help.  But we now have the harmonica, played gently and with a deep sympathy for not just the music but also the lyrics, and beyond everything else the feeling of sadness that is at the heart of the piece.    He is after all so far gone he can’t even remember what he came here to get away from.

2009:  Contending forces: Courting Disaster

And now we are back to the thing I really didn’t like – that heavy beat from the percussion.   Bob performs in a true Dylan style of the era, with lots of emphasis on the last word or indeed the last syllable of each line

2019: It’s not dark yet 

Now if you followed Mike’s wonderful 144 episode Never Ending Tour series you will know that the final episode of the series dedicated itself  to this one song, with three amazing performances concluding this vast enterprise.  I won’t repeat all three here because you can simply go to that final 144th article and read and listen.  But I cannot, I absolutely cannot leave out this.

This is the master at work, the master at the top of his game, the master who knows exactly what he has created and what it is worth, and above all exactly how it should sound.

It is as if he is saying, “OK I’ve tried everything else, you’ve heard everything else, and this is really what it is all about.”

In many ways there is nothing else.   There is just “It’s not dark yet” and there is this staggering recording.  It is total.  It is everything.

“It brings tears to my eyes” is a totally overdone phrase.   Except here it is not.

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.
• 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

Clinton Heylin in his writing gets particularly spikey on the question or originality, particularly concerning the originality of certain songs, pondering whether Bob copied his music or lyrics unduly from someone else.   Heylin appears to see this not only as a point of reference (in the sense of “this song sounds very much like that song”) but also implies that Dylan was deliberately copying the music and then claiming it for his own.

In fact anyone who has deeply immersed themselves at a young age in a particular musical style will inevitably compose music that is imitative, and often not realise it.  Of course, as composers become more experienced they get deeper and deeper into their own “voice” and so the music becomes more recognisable as being in their own style – but this takes a while.

Indeed if you have never written a song that you feel might be good enough to be performed on stage, just imagine what it might feel like to have accomplished such a feat.  Then imagine what it is like if someone who has never written a song in his/her life tells you that “it sounds like you are copying Bob Dylan” (or anyone else).  It is a real downer.

Now these are important points, because when we read in Heylin (page 80) that Dylan claimed that an arrangement of, “He was a friend of mine” was his original work, and that this was unlikely to be so, it makes Dylan sound like an outright thief of creative works.  But in the early days of creativity, it is extremely hard for most artists (not matter what the art form) to distinguish between an arrangement that develops someone else’s ideas and something that is a direct copy.  Where is the borderline?

The fact is that songs can be transformed by the repeat of a verse, or the addition of a line or two, and through such a minor change can be moved from being “just another song” to being a really interesting piece of music.   But somehow Heylin will have none of this.  It is as if he has never realised that all 12 bar blues use the same chord structure, and a lot of them the same melody.

Of course I don’t know who “borrowed” what musical or lyrical phrase or arrangement from whom, but Heylin’s insistence that Dylan was deliberately copying and then hiding the fact rings untrue, given the way in which Bob developed his own songwriting subsequently.   But Heylin does quote an occasion in which Bob confessed that he couldn’t remember if he had written a piece or heard it (page 81) and takes from this to the notion that in essence Bob was free and easy with everyone’s copyright.

But the simple fact is that when one is writing constantly, one often can’t remember if a phrase or idea is an original or not.   I know school teachers and parents can, in annoyance say, “But you must know if you copied this or not,” because copying is seen as such a massive sin in schools, and most parents and teachers don’t write original work, but in my own experience this is not uncommon.  But most creative people don’t talk about “borrowing” ideas, phrases etc, simply because most non-creative people carry around with them the “it is a sin to copy” notion preached by parents and school teachers.   But in fact a lot of the time one simply doesn’t know.

I don’t know how many books I have read in my life, but I have written something like 70 books, and yes I have been told that I have copied someone else.   I can assert this is not overtly true in the sense of sitting with a book and retyping it, but I might well have retained something in my head – I’ll certainly admit that – especially as I am now in my 70s and my memory is seriously in retreat.

Indeed Heylin does go so far as to admit that, “Sometimes, it seems, Dylan genuinely did not know where a song he was playing had come from,” but the addition of that “it seems” shows how disbelieving of all this Heylin actually is.

It is my view that the complete lack of experience of Heylin as a songwriter and performer stops him from appreciating what was happening to Dylan in the early years.  As where he says that, “Incredible as this seems, the idea of putting together his own folio of songs actually predates that Columbia contract”.   And that use of “incredible” I think is telling.

Dylan was writing songs, and he felt this was his mission in life, and he felt he wanted to keep track of the songs he had written, even though none of them were as yet available on albums.  But why would he not keep such a collection of lyrics and chord structures?  Why is in “incredible”?  He is recording his own achievement.

The few songwriters I have known, have all kept copies of their songs both on paper and recordings.  And indeed yet again to bring myself, a person who writes songs as a way of relaxing after a day hammering away writing on the computer, I have a vast pile of paper containing the lyrics of numerous half written songs, plus on my computer recordings of around 250 songs I have written and actually managed to complete.  I guess maybe 10 people have heard a few of these but no more; writing them is my relaxation and fun.  Why on earth would a person with as much amazing talent as Bob Dylan not keep such a collection?

The fact is that Dylan’s songwriting became a sort of creative diary – not recording what happened to him, but a diary of where his creative thoughts were going.

But on one point Heylin does hit the nail on the head, as when he notes that these early days of listening and performing gave Bob Dylan a great level of self-belief – something which is essential to anyone who wants to make an art form the heart and soul of his/her life.   Of course not all great artists have this, but those who don’t, give themselves a real problem, given that at least at first others don’t recognise their ability.

However for Heylin this self-belief is suddenly noteworthy after the first 100 pages or so in which it is not mentioned at all.  But I think that to make sense of Bob’s development through his early performances and songwriting, we have to take this self-belief into account.   And indeed it is that self-belief that helps us understand his earlier somewhat self-centred behaviour.

But less we think that as the book continues Heylin stops suggesting that Dylan has made up his own history, this is not the case, for Heylin spends page after page following Dylan’s assertions that he met this or that record producer etc and then pointing out that he didn’t.     Although to be fair, when it comes to working with John Hammond Heylin admits that happened.

In essence, in one telling phrase, Heylin calls Dylan “a myth maker”.   It is a put-down phrase of course – you don’t call someone a “myth maker” if you are praising that person.  But even if the incident that leads to this accusation is true, then so what?    That is how most of the folk, pop, rock industry works.  Indeed it is how any industry in which there are more wanna-be people than there are vacancies actually works.  Try getting a job as an actor and saying that you have not worked before!  Indeed it is the way all the arts work, not just because the artists themselves talk themselves up, but because people who know the artists talk them up in order to get some of the reflected glory.

And this is the sort of point that Heylin always misses.   Dylan was in his early days trying to push his way into an over-crowded business, in which many people of talent are often ignored or lost.   So maybe he did become a mythmaker.   But so did many others, and if Bob had not have done that, maybe he would never have got his first recording contract, (and then this blog would never have existed).

Thus while Heylin criticises Bob’s way of forcing his way into the folk music world, I remain rather pleased that he did this.

The series will continue shortly….

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.   An updated list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.

“One too many mornings” had an on-stage life from 1966 to 2005 notching up 237 performances.  It is thus the 74th most played song to date.  (As you will know from this site we have Dylan down as writing 628 songs that we know about, but in fact only 378 of these have ever been performed by Bob in concert, at least according to the official Bob Dylan site).

It is a song that I, like I guess all of us who have been following Dylan from the early days, know by heart.  But actually playing it here for the first time in quite a few years I was amazed by how soft and gentle this original recording is, and how plaintive is the harmonica playing.  Bob’s voice is totally in tune with the emotions.  There is a desperate sadness here for times passing.

The melody is simple: “Down the street the dogs are barking” is all sung on one note and the whole of that first line has only three notes in it.   The melody rises, and the appropriately falls back with the second line “And the night comes in a falling.”   Of course if you’ve been playing the track regularly over the years you’ll know all this – it is just striking me because (for whatever reason) I’ve not listened to this original for a while.

The fact is that the picked guitar part is as gentle and as plaintive as the lyrics.  What’s more evening sounds simple (although if you have never done it you’d be amazed how long it can take to get guitar picking like that absolutely right, unless you are born to it).

The melody too is restrictive – it just ranges over the first five notes of the scale – so if you are playing this in C major (the key it is recorded in in the “Times” version the only notes you are singing are C, D, E, F, G.  It is a song built entirely on five notes – which of course adds to the simplicity of the meaning.

And to make it even more it is built around just two chords (C major and G major).

But then, as you will probably know Bob then changed the music, including giving it a new melody and a completely new power.

Through this change of the chord sequence and melody the entire song changes from sadness and tiredness to one of anger at a life where things went wrong and an anger over wasted time.  Now when he turns his head back to the room where his love and he has laid he is frustrated and angry and how it could all have gone so wrong.

Thus in the original Bob is simply resigned and the music is simple, in keeping with this message.  But by the time of this electric version, he has moved from a view that this is how life goes where we are all blown along by the wind, to a vision that he is a thousand miles behind because of the decisions that he has made (rather than a thousand miles behind because he just let it all simply drift by).

The lyrics are the same but the transformation of the meaning is as monumental as it is dramatic.  It is once more a reminder of just how important it is to consider not just Bob’s lyrics but also the musical arrangement.  The meaning changes through the way the music is presented.

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.
• 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.
• Idiot wind
• 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
• Shelter from the Storm
• Sign on the window
• Tangled up in blue
• Tombstone Blues
•  Yonder Comes Sin

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

——–

Once or twice: A review of some of the songs that Bob has performed just once or twice on stage, selecting those of which we have a genuine recording 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.

Previously in this series we have looked at 

• 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
• You Angel You

According to the official Dylan site Talkin New York was performed twice live, once on 16 April 1962 and once on 12 April 1963.   And of course it also appeared on the album “Bob Dylan”.  This version opens with a harmonica solo.

The 1961 New York live version has no harmonica introduction and has a slightly more relaxed feel, which somehow feels more appropriate given the lyrics.   And of course we have the one or two throwaway lines.

One of the great problems with putting a talking blues on an album, is that one of the key elements of the talking blues is that each performance can be slightly different, with new jokes, and slight variations in the music played between each line.  And indeed a line or two added that is relevant to the local audience.

So putting a talking blues on an album is a bit of a dodgy idea, but maybe it was felt helpful in showing Bob’s new audience the depth of his narrative, or maybe it was to accommodate people who bought the album because they had seen him play in one of those early performances.

Now I have put up the Loudon Waiwright III reply before on this site but I think it deserves a repeat just in case you missed it last time.

Likewise I have also put up Chris Bouchillo’s Talking Blues from 1926 before, but it is worth reminding ourselves perhaps where this form came from.

But having offered two repeats, here is something that I came across in my searching around for any other interesting background to Bob’s talking blues which is a talking blues by Pete Wylie of Wah! (and various other bands with the word Wah in their names).

For me it just shows that even the simplest of forms (for example the talking blues and the 12 bar blues) still have something to say, 100 years after its foundation.  And as I have so often suggested, if you can make it through to the end, it is worth it.

If you have an idea for a series on Untold Dylan, or maybe you would like to write a series, or indeed maybe you just have one article which you think could fit into this site, I’d be really happy to hear from you.    Please do drop me a line at Tony@schools.co.uk and write Untold Dylan article in the subject line, and then either describe the article or series, or attach the article as a word document.    Tony

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.

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

Recordings researched and suggested, and commentary by Jürg Lehmann.  An index to the songs covered in the original “Cover a Day” series is given at the end of the final article in the series.

———–

As I Went Out One Morning

The history of cover songs starts two years after Dylan’s release in 1969 with a rather psychedelic version by The Rainbow Press

The Rainbow Press released two albums in 1968 & 1969 then they disbanded. In 2018, the band was reunited after 50 years for fans of the Beatles, ELO, Utopia and Coldplay.

Only 16 years later Tribe After Tribe covered the song again with much energy and sheer force

Formed in Johannesburg and fronted by the uncompromising vision of guitarist Robbi Robb, Tribe After Tribe were one of the hardest-hitting rock bands of the mid to late 80’s. Formed in Johannesburg in 1984, they released their debut album ‘Power’ and the cover of ‘As I Went Out One Morning (Damsel)’ as a single in ‘85.

Tribe After Tribe reflects the members’ African background in a deft fusion of world music rhythms, chant vocals and guitar-driven alternative rock. Soon after the release TAT moved on to greater things in the U.S., releasing several critically acclaimed albums over the following 18 years.

Referring to Greil Marcus’ commentary on the song Jochen Markhorst comes up with the conclusion that “Dylan’s texts on John Wesley Harding are not encrypted philosophical tracts, encoded political pamphlets or veiled autobiographical confessions. They are neutral colouring pictures; the lines are drawn and everyone may colour it in as it pleases him. The right colour does not exist. Not “in fact” either. To a certain extent, this also applies to the music. Dylan’s original (of ‘As I Went Out One Morning’) is breathtaking in its simplicity and naked beauty. Simple melody, stripped-down chord progression and starkly arranged, like all songs on the album. Hence, a lot of room for the covers.”

You can’t say that the cover artists have really explored this space. Most of them have started tentatively into their expedition, decorating and expanding the original a bit without giving us any new insights. The results often sound nice, but it’s really nothing that would captivate you.

 Other covers

Stan Ridgway (1996)

Dr. Robert (1997)

Mira Billotte (2007)

Sfuzzi East/West (2008)

Dirty Projectors (2010)

Yoni Wolf (2014)

Jessica Rhaye and The Ramshackle Parade (2019)

Doing justice to the simplicity and beauty of the original without making a flat copy or a trashy knock-off is quite a challenge. Wovenhand (2009) has done it by reducing the austere original once again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e3vLaHt7yY

 By the way, there are also several YouTube contributions that have succeeded quite well in capturing the dreamy, impressionistic atmosphere of the song, for example

Why? (2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8xfp3aJ85g

Alec Martin (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS6aiJa7rx8

Jedan Tutuhatunewa (2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ogJiBdJ614

Thea Gilmore wakes us from our slumber with a rocking version on her superb tribute album John Wesley Harding (2011)  Gilmore fleshes the original and breathes fresh life into the song, as the BBC review puts it.

But if your claim to a cover song is “that you discover something new in the music, that it reveals to the willing listener an insight previously unrealised,” as Tony Attwood puts it in his review then you must not miss the contribution of Jef Lee Johnson (2009)

By Jochen Markhorst

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

And there shall arise after them seven years of famine

by Jochen Markhorst

The designation “Seven Lean Years” for the years 1968-1974 does evoke some resistance in Dylan circles. As in any fan community, there is quite a faction among Dylan fans parrying passionately, though not always coherently, both genuine criticism and perceived criticism of the idol. The tenor of the protest is obvious: Dylan really did make some very fine songs in those years. Okay, on a detailed level the displeased differ. In defence of Dylan’s honour one brave crusader boldly declares that New Morning (1970) is “massively underrated”, another sentinel limits himself to replying in reproachful capital letters with “NASHVILLE SKYLINE!”, a third Knight of the Locked Caps claims with straight face that Planet Waves is one of Dylan’s best records at all, and the dramatic climax comes from Canada from a hopefully ironic disciple arguing that “Winterlude” is “one of the best songs he ever wrote” – but the strategy of all the patrons is, of course, identical: citing Dylan recordings from the 1968-74s as proof of his mastery. And to refute the “Lean Years” classification, which is perceived as derogatory.

Charming and understandable, this defensive reflex, but sadly ill-founded. Joseph, the founder of the concept (Genesis 41, The dream of Pharaoh) explains it well enough: seven years of abundant harvests are followed by seven years of famine – in the seven lean years, the land produces little grain, compared to the quantities of grain in the seven fat years before.

Wednesday 29 November 1967 is the third and last day of recording for John Wesley Harding. Monday 16 September 1974 is the first recording day for Blood On The Tracks. The seven intervening years may, for quantitative reasons alone, be called the Seven Lean Years:

In the “Seven Fat Years” (1961 to 1967) Dylan wrote 222 songs.

(By comparison, in these seven years 1961-1967, John & Paul came to 108 Lennon/McCartney songs. The Jagger/Richards counter stood at 77 at the end of 1967.)

In the seven years between JWH and BOTT Dylan wrote 52 songs.

To put things in perspective, those 222 Dylan songs include dozens of one-day wonders, mayflies and passing fads from the Basement (“I’m Not There” and “Clothes Line Saga”, for instance), throwaway songs we know thanks to hotel room recordings and the like (“Definitively Van Gogh”), sketches and snippets of outtakes (“Jet Pilot”). But even without those stunted songs, the production on Dylan’s Seven Fat Years remains well above that of his peers, and well above the production quantities he manages to achieve himself in later years. All in all, the comparison of Joseph’s 14 Egyptian years on the one hand, and Dylan’s first 14 years on the other, seems pretty conclusive.

Bob Dylan – Definitively Van Gogh:

The comparison with the oeuvres of other artists, while impressive, is not too relevant in this regard, of course. After all, the metaphors from Pharaoh’s dream, the Seven Fat Cows/Seven Skinny Cows and the Seven Full Heads of Grain/Seven Thin Heads of Grain are closed in on themselves; meant only for comparison with themselves. Rightly, Joseph does not relate the harvests to, say, Sumeria, Elam or Libya, but rather compares Egyptian harvest years to Egyptian harvest years.

Anyway: so the “lean years” classification refers to quantity, not quality. “Quality” is – obviously – not objectively measurable, and discussions soon degenerate into the sometimes amusing but usually not very fruitful bickering about what is a good song, what is a mediocre song and what is an out-of-category song. Still, there is something sensible to say about that too – albeit with some restraint.

Indeed, apart from the quantitative argument for referring to the seven years from late 1967 to late 1974 as “Lean Years”, it is also striking: most of the songs (about 70%) from those years simply evaporate. They aren’t played live, don’t appear on compilation albums, are covered remarkably little, are underrepresented in the various “100 best Dylan songs” lists (songs like “Wigwam”, “On A Night Like This”, “Billy”, “Living The Blues”, “Three Angels”, “One More Weekend”… it’s a long list).

I myself – like all Dylan fans – find plenty of beauty in this period (Nashville Skyline, “The Man in Me”, the 1971 “Leon Russell songs”, “Never Say Goodbye”), but I don’t think it’s too absurd to classify the mercurial songs from ’65-’66 on the one hand or Blood On The Tracks on the other as artistically more valuable. Ditto for the folk songs, love songs and protest songs from ’62-’64; it does require some mental acrobatics and uncritical benevolence to equate the beauty of, say, “One Too Many Mornings” or “Seven Curses” or “Just Like A Woman” with, say, “Country Pie” or “Wedding Song” or “Went To See The Gypsy”.

Which is not to say anything against the 52 songs from the Lean Years – with any other artist, we would describe the years in which songs like “Forever Young”, “Lay, Lady, Lay” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” are written as the Golden Years. But Dylan, with “Visions Of Johanna”, “All Along The Watchtower”, “Hard Rain”, “It’s Alright, Ma” and all those other immortal masterpieces, has simply set the bar for himself somewhere in the stratosphere.

Bob Dylan – Seven Curses:

Dylan himself, by the way, is generally rather condescending about his work from those lean years. In interviews and in Chronicles, for example (“I just threw everything I could think of at the wall and whatever stuck, released it, and then went back and scooped up everything that didn’t stick and released that, too”); he repeatedly claims that in those years he didn’t know how to write songs anymore (“It was like amnesia” and “Never until I got to Blood On The Tracks did I finally get a hold of what I needed to get a hold of”); and Al Kooper’s account of his work with Dylan on New Morning (in Kooper’s autobiography Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards) is disconcerting.

For what it’s worth, of course; the value of Dylan’s take on his own work is not uncontroversial. But in this case I do go a long way with him, yes.

PS: Like Joseph and the Pharaoh, Dylan eventually survives the drought. The seven years following these lean years (BOTT through Shot Of Love, 1975-1981) are again astoundingly prolific, and almost at the mercurial level: 110 songs, including granite monuments like “Every Grain Of Sand”, “Isis”, “Where Are You Tonight?”, “When He Returns” and all those other immortal masterpieces.

After which the next dry spell is already upon us…

Footnote from Tony: A full list of Dylan’s compositions in the 1970s in chronological order is to be found here.

—————

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.

Bob Dylan has performed Gates of Eden 217 times on the tour between 1964 and 2001.  We pick it up in 1988 and the opening made me wonder if I had picked the wrong musical extract from the tour.  But no, this is Bob emphasising the horror side of the song.  Every aspect of the performance emphasises the decline and destruction of humankind – and there is no relief – it continues to the end in the manner in which it started, making it a very hard listen indeed – although of course that is the idea.

1988: Heroes and Villains

By the following year Bob had decided to take the song back under his own command.  This is one of those recordings that remind us that some people go to a Dylan concert in order to talk all the way through the gigs.   I know what I think of that; I wonder what he thinks of it.

But ignoring the chatter as much as I can this is a fine performance, which to me reclaims the song from the excesses of the full band version from the year before.   There is ever more emphasis put into lyrics without overdoing it – by this date the song was almost a quarter of a century old and everyone would of course know it by heart.

And please do stay with it to the end – it is a remarkable conclusion.

1989: A fire in the sun

Moving on a few more years we are now with the solo version with a slight second guitar accompaniment but the attempt to push out each word and phrase with a much higher energy and tempo level.

I must say I absolutely love this version (although if you stay with me through this piece you’ll see it is ulimately out done).  There is a reflective quality about Bob’s performance here.  We have lost the emphasis on the horrors and now just have reflection – which is managed particularly well given the tempo.  The fact that some of the lyrics are lost matters not, because we know them.   We are rushing headlong to the cliff, and know there’s virtually no chance of stopping.

1992: All the friends I ever had are gone

Jumping forward again we have a confusing introduction.  It sounds darker and deeper but there is something else in there in the introduction – and it turns up again just before the last line of each verse.

The contrast between the pounding beat from the guitar and the third line doesn’t exactly work for me – why is the third line of each verse so different?   It gets more understandable as the song progresses as the vocal part gets clearer, but I am still not sure.   However the instrumental verse after three minutes really is something, and the verse that follows seems to get the third line in a more meaningful setting.

Which really makes the point, each of these modifications is an experiment – as is the second instrumental break.  And this really is a performance that evolves in interesting ways as it continues.  What is happening after six minutes for example in the final  instrumental break which runs on to the end of the song is really unnerving and wonderful at the same time.

1995:  Acoustic wonderland

So we move on to the final performance from our archives and not for the first time I feel that Bob himself knew this was a farewell – or getting close to it.   This is the performance I was waiting for.  The reflection, which tells us it is all over, we’ve wrecked the world, the prophets of eternal salvation and the prophets of doom are just kicking each other down the street.  There is no salvation; just this eternity of our own stupidity.

This is not the only magical performance that is to be found on the Never Ending Tour of course, but if you are not convinced just listen to the instrumental verse after three minutes, and the way Bob takes the whole performance right down.

I can’t say that this is as astonishing as the farewell performance of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee from 2014 but like that performance, this one is there for me as one of the most extraordinary and amazing moments.  It goes onto my make-believe album of “The Never Ending Tour’s Greatest Hits.”   And if Aaron were still with us I’d be saying, “We must create an album of “The Never Ending Tour’s Greatest Moments”.  Perhaps I can do that on my own at some time in the future as a more lasting tribute to my dear friend’s memory.

2000:  Master Vocalist: Finding voice

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
• 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.
• 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

This is an extraordinary piece of writing.  Each verse is just three lines.  Only two chords are implied throughout yet Bob puts across the desolation at watching the train take the body of his best friend for burial.  There is form in the guitar accompaniment, but it is varied, and that gives us a sense of edge, of uncertainty, which a lesser performer would never be able to consider let alone execute.   Together this remarkable performance delivers  a suggestion that the singer has something to be deeply ashamed of in terms of the death

Something happened to him that day,
I thought I heard a stranger say,
I hung my head and stole away

In spite of all the danger
In spite of all that may be (Ah, ah, ah, ah)
I'll do anything for you
Anything you want me to
If you'll be true to me (Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah)

But with Heylin, by page 80 I felt I could have been reading about a guy who’d hang around garages because he loved cars and decided to open his own petrol [gas] station and eventually had one in every county.

Maybe it is true that by the time he was 15 Bob was telling everyone who would listen he was going to be a rock n roll star, and Heylin sees this as important because “At an age when many contemporaries were obsessing about girls, he was obsessing about music.”

And ok maybe it’s Bob (and me – and as I recall several of my school friends) being oddballs, for at 15 I recall I was obsessing about music, mostly the obscure music that never got played by the BBC – like Bob Dylan.  But it didn’t stop me obsessing about girls as well.   Or writing.  (I was writing my first novel at the time – thankfully long since lost).

The point here is that by mid-teens something of the future of our lives can be perceived in many of us.  That doesn’t mean that the teenager who steals a pen is going to be a thief, nor that the teenager who writes a song is going to be a genius composer, but such actions are hints of what might come later.  And the more and more the individual is focussed on this slightly unusual behaviour, the more likely that final outcome is.

So my point is that somehow, the young Bob Dylan was odd because he was so interested in music “at an age when many contemporaries were obsessing about girls”.  That doesn’t mean he was destined to be a genius songwriter (as witness the fact that six years later, I too had the desire to write songs).  But Dylan not only had the obsession, he clearly also had the talent, which drove him on.  The prime point is that he knew he had the talent and would let nothing get in the way of exploring that talent, and that is what gave him the development in his songwriting skills that produced Man on the Street and other songs…

… and just kept going.

The fact is that Bob appears to have adopted the blues songs as a way of life was because he found he had a direct link to the songs.  For whether he had lived the songs or not it sounded like he had lived them – or least he might have done.   And yes, as Heylin points out, he “only really seemed  to want to participate when he was the centre of attention and could play music” and that is the clue.  For he knew he had created interesting, original music and he knew that no one else in the room could do that.

I have a memory of playing a song that I had written in a folk club on the south coast of England, around the age of 17, and after my slot was finished one of my friends  told me that the people next to him, on hearing me announce it was a song I had written, said “I don’t believe he wrote that,” or words to that effect.  I didn’t know how to respond, except to go on writing more songs just to prove that I could.  Given how superior Bob’s songs were to mine, I suspect any sort of put down like that would have driven him on as well.  Only 100 times more so.

The series continues…

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

 —————–

 When I Paint My Masterpiece (1971) part 15 (final)

by Jochen Markhorst

XV       An absolutely personal interpretation

Located in southeastern Transylvania, in the centre of Romania at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, Brașov has an eventful history. Over the centuries, it was a Saxon, Hungarian, Transylvanian and Austro-Hungarian town before gaining its current Romanian nationality in 1920. Its naming reflects the jumpy history: Brașov used to be called Corona, Kronstadt and Brasso, and when one of its most famous sons, Alexandru Andrieș, was born there in 1956, it was called Orașul Stalin – “Stalin City”.

Andrieș is as multicoloured as his city’s history. Distinguished architect, graphic designer, celebrated poet, award-winning actor… but surely his main claim to fame is his music. His enormous body of work (“Awfully prolific. The collector’s nightmare,” according to his biographer Sergiu Mitrofan) includes more than 70 studio albums, live records, DVDs and more, he has performed thousands of times, probably more often even than his idol Dylan, and is still going strong.

His 1999 Dylan album Alb Negru (“White and Black”) is superb. Seventeen Dylan songs in Romanian, with lyrics he had already published separately in book form in 1991 on the occasion of Dylan’s 50th birthday (La mulți ani, Bob Dylan). For Dylan’s 60th birthday in 2001, another EP with Romanian versions of “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, “Shelter From The Storm” and “Motorpsycho Nightmare” – again very successful covers – was released as a bonus.

A highlight of Alb Negru is the intimate, casual performance of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” (Ma lasi prea singur dacă vei pleca), but the album’s closing track is certainly just as strong: Alexandru alone at the piano with his interpretation of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” – Cînd am să-mi pictez capodopera. In the album’s liner notes, Andrieș writes: “Acest album – o interpretare absolut personala, in cel mai poetic sens al cuvantului, a cantecelor lui Bob Dylan; This album – an absolutely personal interpretation, in the most poetic sense of the word, of the songs of Bob Dylan,” which is very well-put. Demonstrating this “absolutely personal” and “most poetic” with his translation of Masterpiece, for example.

The form is expertly maintained (rhyme scheme and almost identical metre), but with the melody, tempo and content of the lyrics Andrieș goes his own poetic way. This narrator also finds himself in a messy Rome, with “chunks of history” everywhere, but then takes his own, magically realistic turn: “S-a furat Coliseul, mai e doar un ciot – The Colosseum’s been stolen, there’s only a stump left…” Quickly back to the hotel, to call the police. At night, the narrator returns to the empty plain, sees a goddess wandering about, but “degeaba încerc să-i vorbesc, avem limbi diferite – no use trying to talk to her, we have different languages”. In the last stanza, in the taxi on the way to the airport, the fellow traveller asks what he thought of it, here in Rome. To that question, the narrator replies, you get your answer cînd am să-mi pictez capodopera – when I paint my masterpiece.

Magic realism like a Murakami story, a dreamlike interlude á la Petrushevskaya and a pinch of Kafka to conclude: for Alexandru, Dylan’s source text is a coat rack on which he hangs – very Dylanesque – the poetic fruits of his own associative mind. No pretty girl in the hotel room, no lions, Spanish Steps nor geese, munching journalists or muscle-sporting girls… so it is really not a translation of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” in the strict sense of the word. Alexandru Andrieș gives an absolutely personal interpretation, in the most poetic sense of the word.

Alexandru Andries – Cînd am sa-mi pictez capodopera:

Different but just as poetic is the third and final successful translation, made on the other side of the world by Japanese legend Haruomi Hosono. In Dylan circles, we have come across the electronica giant (Hosono is the driving force behind the revolutionary band Yellow Magic Orchestra in the 1970s) before; in 1969, he and his band Apryl Fool recorded a striking, peculiar cover of Dylan’s “Pledging My Time”. East meets West doesn’t really work for that cover yet, but in 2013 we are 44 years older and correspondingly much craftsmanship richer.

On Heavenly Music, Hosono honours his musical heroes, the American songs he learned to appreciate during the American occupation and helped him through the misery of post-war Tokyo (Hosono was born in 1947). Influences we have been able to hear throughout his oeuvre, but on this album it is thematised. With an exquisite Japanese touch: stillness and introspection. As in his cover of Burt Bacharach’s “Close To You”, which begins like a soft rain shower in May, with thin chords on the piano steadily trickling down, dull beating on the roof by the drums and a bass half-mixed away – as if you’re faintly hearing the neighbour’s radio. “Tip Toe Thru The Tulips With Me” Hosono sings in Japanese, accompanied by an accordion that takes us to Place Pigalle, “Something Stupid” is a faithful copy of Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood’s classic, “My Bank Account Is Gone” by Jesse Ashlock from Hosono’s birth year 1947 sounds oddly even more authentic than the original… Heavenly Music surprises the listener with one gem after another.

The biggest surprise is the closing track. Hosono’s covers a monument from his German art brothers from Düsseldorf, the electronics concern Kraftwerk. Not only surprising because Hosono precisely chooses “Radio Activity” of all things, thus giving a place to the horrors of post-war Japan, but also because of the exceptional arrangement: the synthesiser classic is now carried by acoustic guitar and piano, the electronics relegated to atmospheric noise in the background á la Radiohead. In the short interlude halfway through, early 70s Brian Eno violence unleashes itself very briefly, but then the radio-active cloud descends, and hushed the album ends.

Shortly before that, at track 8, is Hosono’s tribute to Dylan: “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. Similar both in sound and instrumentation to Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom version (and thus also to The Band); accordion, upright bass, mandolin and acoustic guitar. But, like only the greatest artists, Hosono goes his own way with the lyrics – and survives. More than satisfactory, even.

Hosono’s “translation” is similar to Romanian Andrieș in approach: the source text is merely a coat rack. The elaboration, however, is diametrically opposite. Whereas Andrieș still extrapolates the fantasy elements and lifts the content of the text towards surrealism, Hosono opts for naturalism, for sobriety. Hosono’s narrator walks through Rome and is cold, quickly returns to his hotel room. No Botticelli, no Venus – here is the Greek girl again, and she is kawaii, cute. At the Colosseum, he wastes his time in mui, “idleness”, and Hosono eliminates something as unrealistic as lions supposedly roaming there. No, he only notices a shishi no zou, a statue of a lion. “Geese” for that matter also seem too exotic for unclear reasons – here the narrator recalls a hunt for ducks. Understandable, on the other hand, is how a Japanese might find clergymen in uniform too alienating, so that becomes – very Japanese – sou, monks. And thus, Hosono is also the only one in the world who finds young girls pulling muscles far too weird and unrealistic, and therefore makes grateful use of the homophones muscles/mussels: the young girls in Brussels open kai – “shellfish”.

Haruomi Hosono – When I Paint My Masterpiece:

Many translations, all in all, but only three of them doing what a cover should do: enrich the original. With which Dylan himself, despite that strange condition in the licence agreement with the German translators Carl Weissner and Walter Hartmann, surely would agree. And if he then had to choose between German Wolfgang Niedecken, Romanian Alexandru Andrieș and Japanese Haruomi Hosono, his heart would presumably incline towards the Japanese. Haruomi is the grandson of Masabumi Hosono, the only Japanese passenger and survivor of the Titanic – and well, then you do have an edge with Dylan. Plus: nobody sighs “Coca-Cola” as nostalgically, as full of lost akogare, longing as Haruomi.

When I Paint My Masterpiece part 14: Un appuntamento con la nipote di Botticelli

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)

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” 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.   An updated list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.

Masters of War

There is a pulsating relentless feel about the music of Masters of War which grabs the listener by throat and won’t let go.    The guitar part is unvarying, there is only one chord, only the last line offers any variation, and that only slight – and with a sense of desperation.   The music is in fact utterly relentless is delivering the message that is in the words.

And more, verse after verse continues: there is no inter-verse instrumental break, apart from an occasional extra bar, which Bob can be forgiven as the music pounds on without any chance of us (or him) pausing for breath.

The message is clear there is no escape: it is as relentless as the build up for war is relentless.  Even the end won’t give up – he is not just talking about defeating the Masters of War he doesn’t even trust them to stay dead once they are buried.

There is also the extra power put into the third line of each verse with its strong accent at the end

• You that build the death planes
• You play with my world
• A world war can be won
• Then you sit back and watch
• Fear to bring children
• You might say that I’m young
• Will it buy you forgiveness
• I’ll follow your casket

These are all challenging lines which Dylan punches out so we cannot miss them, or the importance of the words.

Not surprisingly for such a powerful forceful song that resonated so much with the times, Bob played the song in concerts no less than on 884 occasions across 53 years (at least according to the official site).

The last recording we have from the Never Ending Tour comes from 2010 and I found myself wanting to hear how on earth Bob could retain the menace all those years later but without playing the song exactly as he did when it was first recorded.

In fact he does it masterfully, primarily by adding one or two beats after each line.   It is a simple but incredibly effective musical device.  We all know the song so well, we all know what happens even if we are not recognizing the way the beats work, and here is something totally upsetting to that rhythmic pattern, but without in any way destroying the message.  In fact the message is enhanced.   As is the repeat of the last verse.

And of course the song is as utterly relevant today as it was which is why Bob kept that power right the way through to the final performances.

Indeed it could not be any other way.  It pounds into the heart just as it pounds into the brain.

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.
• 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.
• Idiot wind
• Isis
• It ain’t me babe
• Jokerman
• Just like a woman
• Key West
• Lenny Bruce is Dead
• Man in the Long Black Coat
• Mississippi
• Not Dark Yet
• Shelter from the Storm
• Sign on the window
• Tangled up in blue
• Tombstone Blues
•  Yonder Comes Sin