Untold Dylan

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

“Everything is broken” is a most unusual song.  It consists of 28 lines of lyrics of which 12 begin with the word “Broken” – which is not really what one might expect from the man often considered to be a great genius of songwriting.

What carries the music through against this repetition howeer is the multiple textures of the music which are introduced one by one at the very start.  We start with the guitar with a repeated riff, then the bongos are added, with the vibrato guitar coming in – and we haven’t even got ten seconds into the song yet.  Then there is a second guitar riff on top and with this whole array of intertwined musical accompaniment Bob starts singing on ten seconds with the opening salvo of repeated “Broken” lines.

What holds all this together is the fact that this is a standard 12 bar blues format, with the three prime chords.   That means we have a feel of where this is going and so can enjoy the ride in terms of lyrics and accompaniment.

After three verses we get an instrumental break led by the harmonica – but this retains the repeated element – it is just one note played in a counter rhythm to the band.

So what holds our interest when the whole essence of the song is, both musically and vocally, so repetitive?   One point to note is that it is a short song in Dylan terms, just three and a quarter minutes on the album.   Another is that the 12-bar blues format of chords is one that everyone will feel at ease with.  Even if you have not musical background at all, the movement between the chords I, IV and V, sounds very familiar and established.

Which in turn puts all the emphasis back onto the lyrics – and here the repetition of the message with the word “Broken” appearing so often we get a very clear feeling.

Yes everything is broken, but we can still live it and enjoy it.   Nothing works, but that’s ok is the message which is conveyed as much by the energy of the music as by the lyrics.

And this really is quite an amazing achievement, because if one were to look at the lyrics alone without any knowledge of the music, one would never imagine this as a jolly bouncy song….

Broken bottles, broken plates
Broken switches, broken gates
Broken dishes, broken parts
Streets are filled with broken hearts

This is far from being the only way to see the world, but it is one way to perceive the civilisation in which we live.   And yet the music tells us that this is ok – in fact we should celebrate the fact that everything is broken.

Even at the conclusion, there is no release from the brokenness of this civilisation

Broken hands on broken ploughs
Broken treaties, broken vows
Broken pipes, broken tools
People bending broken rules
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking
Everything is broken

The message from the lyrics alone would be: this is an appalling disaster, a civilisation on its knees, or if you prefer, in its final days before it descends into anarchy.  But the music tells us that if that is how it is, go out and embrace it and have fun as society and civilisation collapse.   Collapse doesn’t have to be awful – we can embrace that too.

Bob played the song 284 times on the Tour, and if anything he upped the tempo, demanding that we all join in the celebration of brokenness with extra bounce.   The message throughout is simple: it’s the end of civilisation as we know it.  So let’s dance!

This recording from the Never Ending Tour series compiled by Mike Johnson comes from 1999 Inside the Museum.    The instrumental break that starts at 2’40” and runs through to the end really is worth focussing on, as it shows there is even more to be got from this simple 12 bar blues than we might ever have imagined.   It really is a celebration of brokenness – and one can’t say that of many songs.  I do hope you have a moment to listen.

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
• 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
• 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.
• 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
• Mississippi
• Not Dark Yet
• Shelter from the Storm
• Sign on the window
• Tangled up in blue
•  Yonder Comes Sin

by Jochen Markhorst

• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 1: She’s delicate and seems like a Vermeer
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 2: Oh, the streets of SoHo
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 3. Blake did come up with some bold lines
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 4: I love the sound of words, yeah
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 5: A man alone at his desk
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 6: Pete, money is coming in
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 7:  I had a little refrigerator

“Crimson and Clover still hits me”

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

Douglas Brinkley has noticed it too, the renaissance, or rather upgrade of “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. He asks about it in his interview for the New York Times in 2020, and then gets a remarkable answer from Dylan:

“I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable. That’s what the song tries to say, and you’d have to put it in that context.”

Remarkable for a variety of reasons. Confusing is the position taken by Dylan, after all the creator and restorer of the 50-year-old song; “I think this song has something to do with the classical world” – as if the song is a self-governing entity over which the creator has limited influence, and is as mysterious to himself as it is to the audience. In line, incidentally, with what Dylan says a little earlier in the same Brinkley interview about the creation of the Rough And Rowdy Ways songs: “The songs seem to know themselves and they know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically. They kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them.”

And the second noteworthiness is the depth Dylan seems to suspect in “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. And just as confusing. The more often you reread Dylan’s analysis, the more opaque it becomes – it’s almost Kafka’s paradoxical circle, the Kafkaesque quirk we know from ultra-short stories like Die Bäume (The Trees) and Der Aufbruch (The Departure), in which each subsequent sentence further obscures the understanding of the previous one. As it is with these five sentences. At least, “Coca-Cola”, “Brussels”, a plane ride and candy-eating journalists, to name just a few other song ingredients, do not, with the best will in the world, unleash “something with the classical world”. The subordinate clause something that’s out of reach suggests a contiguous connection, that the “something” from the Classical World is out of your reach – though Dylan doesn’t use a conjunction between the two phrases, so it’s a bit of a guess what the connection between the phrases is meant to be.

The following three sentences seem to be intended as an accumulatio, as a listing of equivalents for something like “creating a surprising masterpiece” – “surprising” as the talent apparently is deemed to be insufficient to create something of this exceptional quality. It is successively “beyond your experience”, “supreme and first rate” and an “unthinkable” achievement. The qualifications are a bit intense, and the metaphor you could never come back down from the mountain is perhaps a bit overly dramatic, but the thrust seems clear: the song is about, as we already have thought for about 50 years, creating a once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece.

After which Dylan’s closing words unscrew the newly-created notion again: this now is the “context” in which to put it. Weird. This is not “context”, this is saying-the-same-with-other-words. That “When I Paint My Masterpiece” is “something about the classical world” and features a narrator who dreams aloud of creating an exceptional masterpiece, we have known for 50 years. No, it seems as if Dylan is gradually removing contextually alien elements for the song’s renovation, to make the lyrics more one-dimensional, coherent. Which would at least explain the elimination of Botticelli’s niece and the pretty girl from Greece, as well as the deletion of “wasting my time and dodging lions in the Coliseum”, and it “contextualises” the evolution of the bridge as well.

It’s a jerky evolution. The very first recording, with Leon Russel, the one we know from Greatest Hits Vol. II, does not yet have a bridge. The demo version Dylan recorded on his own at the piano in those same March days in 1971 has an initial bridge:

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
Sure wish I hadn’t sold my old Victrola
Ain’t nothing like to that good old rock-n-rolla!

… the bridge that will never be sung again and according to Robbie Robertson, thanks to an inspirational Coke bottle from his mini-fridge before the song’s first release, the Band’s version on Cahoots, is changed into

Sailing 'round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola

… the words that also appear in the official publication on the site and in Lyrics. It is the bridge version to which Dylan, apart from minor deviations, remains faithful until deep into the 1990s. I’d be so happy to be back in the land of Coca-Cola, Dylan sometimes sings abroad. Or when in the US: Oh, to be back in the town of Coca-Cola (in 1997 both in Durham and Los Angeles, for instance). And playful variations thereon. Oh, to be back in the land where I could have just one more rum and Coca Cola! he sings 1999 in Oxford, winking at the Andrew Sisters in a brilliant, lingering rendition with prominent steel guitar and impassioned vocals, by the way. And the most frenzied version gets the Brussels audience in 2002, already won over anyway because Dylan serves them with “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and the name-check “Brussels”:

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
I gotta fill it with root beer, 7-Up and even Coca Cola!

Bob Dylan – When I Paint My Masterpiece, Brussels 2002:

In yet another exceptionally successful performance, acoustic and driven, this time starring Larry Campbell’s mandolin, and stretched to over six minutes – in which Dylan plays the bridge twice (the second without root beer and 7-Up, but with “just another Coca-Cola”), and twice the last verse, so to the delight of the audience also twice “Brussels”, which Dylan milks very untypically and very showmanlike as well:

I left Rome, I pulled into Brussels [audience cheering again]
On a plane ride so bumpy… Brussels! Where they all go… [
                                   audience cheering even louder]

Sometime in the second decade of the 21st century, that drivel about gondolas and Coca-Cola then starts to bother Dylan, and he feels a need to tighten the lyrics further, make them more coherent, put them in context. So that silly bridge has to go. We’ll hear the revised version from 27 July 2018, the start of the Far East & Down Under Tour in Seoul:

Sailin’ round the world full of crimson and clover
Oh, sometimes I feel like my cup is running over!

… plus the musical novelty of playing the last bars of the bridge from “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” under my cup is running over.

Now, admittedly, the lyrics do indeed fit the “concept”. Sailin’ round the world full of crimson and clover, with the reference to Tommy James & The Shondells’ immortal world hit, does express something like “searching for an original masterpiece”. With as an amusing by-catch the backstory, which could just as easily have been a Dylan story: in a radio interview Tommy James was persuaded to play the rough mix of the song he was working on at the time (November 1968).

Unbeknownst to him, it is recorded and then sold as a single to listeners who ask for it. Demand soars, and Tommy’s record company denies the protesting Tommy James to finish the song, to mix it the way he thinks it should be. Comparable to Dylan’s objections to the release of unrelenting masterpieces like “Blind Willie McTell” or “Red River Shore”, recordings he feels are “not finished”. And comparably incorrect: the phenomenal success of the raw mix proves record company Roulette Records right. “Crimson and Clover still hits me,” as Keith Richards writes forty years later in his autobiography Life.

Also fitting with the “concept”, lastly, is Dylan’s new closing line of the bridge: Oh, sometimes I feel like my cup is running over, which can be understood perfectly as a heartfelt cry of the frustrated artist seeking inspiration for his Masterpiece. Perhaps a nod to another immortal 1968 masterpiece, to James Brown’s “I Guess I’ll Have To Cry Cry Cry”, but my cup is running over is, of course, in itself too generic to be promoted to reference.

It’s a fairly stable replacement since Seoul 2018 – Dylan varies at most on the introductory words. “Oh, lots of time I feel just like,” for example (Waterbury 2018), or even closer to the desperate gospel classic “Motherless Child”: “Oh Lord sometime I feel like…” (New York 2018), but these are only minute deviations from the more-or-less final version that will gain semi-official status with the release of Shadow Kingdom in 2023.

With which Dylan has finally put it into context, accomplished the unthinkable, reached the place beyond his experience, and built his supreme and first-rate bridge to the timeless portrait of the struggling artist. At least: if that’s what the song tries to say.

To be continued. Next up When I Paint My Masterpiece part 9: And then along came Man to burn the oak tree down

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)

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

———

Songs and recordings researched and suggested by Jürg Lehmann.  Opening commentary by Tony Attwood

Way back in November 2021 (well it seems like “way back” but in fact it actually wasn’t that long ago) I started a series called “A Dylan Cover a Day” in which each day I took a Dylan song and looked for some covers of that song which were on the internet, and then picked a few of them and wrote a bit about each one.

That series finished very recently with You gonna make me lonesome when you go – and at the end of that review there is a list of all the 177 songs previously covered in the series.

Now obviously that left a lot of Dylan songs not included, and of course even in the 177 articles, there were many excellent covers that were missed.

And so now the series is over, Jürg Lehmann has suggested we might go back and revisit a few songs, and perhaps include some of the songs that I missed first time around (which I often did simply because the song was not particularly one of my favourites) and add some more reviews.

So it is still me writing the commentary, but this time not me selecting the tracks.

Jürg’s first selection is 2×2 with which I started off the “Cover a Day” series.  And his comment is simply, “There’s a very good cover by Saturday Night Fish Fry”.

This comes from the album Dirt Road Blues, and I must say the band does a wonderful job with the song – the track is beautifully performed and produced and the arrangement really takes us in a new direction.  As it is not a song that I have particularly rated, I am amazed that the band spent so much time on the arrangement and recording – obviously not because I don’t think much of the original, but because I really couldn’t see where else it could be taken.

But I am so glad they could see what I couldn’t.  Of course me not rating a song is neither here nor there; the main point is that I’ve been reintroduced to a Dylan song that really had passed me by before.  I can only hope it does the same for you.

And… I do like to expand my musical education as I go along, and here I need some help.   Obviously one can look up most things on Google and the like, but “Saturday Nite Fish Fry” is not only the name of this band but it is also the name of a very famous song from the 1930s which I have the feeling my dad played on sax when he was in a dance band at the time.   And also the band’s first album was called Saturday Nite Fish Fry (although with the words “volume 1” added.)

Which makes it had to find other versions of the song (if there are others) on the internet.  But you can find the whole album by the band on line here if you want to take this further.

But what about what happens if you go searching for “Saturday Nite Fish Fry” on the internet?  Well, this is where you are quite likely to end up.

And I know this is several thousand miles away from what Jürg intended but I love this journey.  This recording comes from 1949, but the song goes back much further than that.  But sadly I can’t find any earlier recordings.

However I must come back to the version of 2×2 Jürg has come up with. It really does illuminate what Bob put into that song as a composition, but (in my view) didn’t manage to bring out in the performance.

And just in case you have forgotten it, here’s Bob’s version

What makes all the difference for me is the bass guitar part.  In Dylan’s original version here it is just pounding away on the bass note of each chord, and it just makes the whole piece rather tedious for me before we get to the “How many” line.

Go back to the Saturday Night version, and not only has the song been slowed down but that bass guitar line has been really improved.  The changes are not enormous in themselves but the impact of the change is to make me listen to the rest of the band, and not be put off by the bass.

So I’m really glad to hear this version that Jürg provided, as it gives me another Dylan song that I can listen to, even if I still find the original difficult to take in.  I’m so glad the band persevered with it.

If you were to go back to our 2021 article “220 selected cover versions” you would find that 1 by 1 is not on the list.    If we get round to doing that piece again, it would be.

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

Once or twice: A recently inaugurated review of songs that Bob has performed just once or twice on stage. Previously we looked at 

• The girl on the Greenbriar Shore,
• Only a hobo
• Caribbean Wind.
• Lay Down your weary tune
• Spanish Harlem Incident

By Tony Attwood

The song I wanted to cover next in this little series of songs Bob has only performed once or twice was Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts which was played at Salt Lake in 1976.

Officially the report is that this performance was not recorded although as ever there are stories circulating that it was recorded and a few collectors have a copy.  But that’s what is always said.  I certainly don’t have a copy and although there are people around who will always say, “it does exist I’ve heard it” (etc) the fact that it remains undercover suggests to me that it’s a fantasy.  I’ll change my mind when someone sends me a copy.

Thre was also an extract from the song of under two minutes that has reportedly been Dylan performing on that one occasion, but again others dispute that too.   It is also said that this extract is a rehearsal piece, not a concert performance.

So no go on “Lily” but since I have been searching around let’s have a live performance that is out there.   For just because I start looking for something it doesn’t mean I can’t share what I actually found along the way.   (Indeed I never understand researchers in any subject who say “but that’s not what I am looking for” – what one finds along the way is often more interesting than what one set out to find.).

This is a much more gentle version than Bob delivers although it occasionally builds up a little en route, but the (mostly very much in the background) piano accompaniment does a lot to keep it light.  It also sounds to me like there is a glockenspeil in there too, which I do think is a bit odd.  But every arranger does his/her own thing – and she’s the recording star.  And a lady with a great memory.

Actually it is worth playing this and listening to the occasional moments from each instrument – the performer on the electric piano seems to have been given completely free range to be, well, a bit odd from time to time.  Although when you have a strophic song that is over eight minutes long and everyone already knows the lyrics, something has to be done to hold attention.

But no, there’s nothing by Bob.  And so, because I thought, if Lily wasn’t available, what was next on the list of songs Bob played once or twice?   Here I came up with “Stage Fright” – and this one is equally oblique in that the performance does say as you can see below (featuring Bob Dylan) but it has Rick Danko on lead vocals.

The Stage Fright live performance is listed as 3 January , 1974 in Chicago and you can see the set list through the link.  As for this recording, it is horribly unbalanced, but you can get a feel of what it was all about.

As a keyboard player myself I always enjoy hearing an organist having a bit of fun.   And beyond that I wonder if Bob was having a bit of fun in suggesting he had spot of stage fright in not singing the song.  (OK that’s a bit oblique, but if there is one thing Bob knows how to do it is oblique).

But of course if there ever was a man without stage fright it was and is Bob.  No matter what happens and how, he seems just to be there, knowing (I guess) that his audience will wait.   After all he had the experience of being booed for playing with a band, quite early on in his career, and just kept on keeping on.

Incidentally you have my most fulsome permission to stop listening to the Band’s recording of Stage Fright at any time you wish.  I have to listen since I’m responsible for putting the recording up, but there’s no reason why you have to suffer too.

And maybe that performance was a reason why Bob never returned to the song.

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.

Pay in Blood was played 477 times between 2012 and 2019 and I must admit I come to this song now with even more interest, and indeed excitement, than before as in the last article I re-discovered the changes made to Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum by Dylan on tour.  If you missed that last piece I would urge you to go back  to the last recording, not because of anything that I have written, but because of the final performance of that piece in the last outing of the song.  It is still being played daily in my house.

But we move on to Pay in Blood.  And here Bob manages to make the song appear slightly softer and a trifle slower.  And such is the change of atmosphere it almost sounds as if he’s changed key, although in retrospect I don’t think so.  It is just that the whole sound and approach gives an extra level of menace in this performance which was somehow not there on the album recording.

So what I am now listening out for is that sort of subtle change, especially in the final year of the tour…  We start in 2013… which doesn’t particularly contain any surprises but is a very enjoyable outing for the song, even though it is a song about danger.

2013: The art of the Dramatic Monologue

The second recording I’ve chosen comes from the same year and it seems to me to have increased the sense of menace and danger that was always there, even more.   Partly this is due to the balance of the band, which of course can be down to the recording itself.   It’s not a major set of changes, but there is something different here.

2013: Softly softly golden oldies

And as we move forward there are more changes but they are still very subtle.  It is almost as if Bob knows there is something he can do with the song that is different, but what….?  In fact what we get is a softer version, especially as the song continues.  Consider how he is performing around the third and fourth minute of the song and listen to the very short instrumental section that ends the performance.

2015: Bring on the setlist

So was this going to be another song which in retrospect we find that Bob played what is after all a perfectly good and enjoyable version all the way through the tour without variation?  Or we will find a sudden change of direction as we found with Dee and Tweedle Dum – an unbelievable journey?

Certainly by 2018 there were hints of change…. although not as dramatic as we have often found with other pieces…

2018 Riding the Setlist Wave

But this did not prepare us in any way for what was going to happen

2019 – We can either play or we can pose

So again we have a song that was kept much the same as the recorded format but in his last year of performance on the Never Ending Tour, Bob decided to kick the piece a different treatment.

Hearing the similarity of performances across the years (before the final tilt at the song if one may call it that) it strikes me that in these last years of the tour Bob was generally changing songs far less – and that might be seen as a prelude to the Rough and Rowdy tour in which both the set list and the arrangements remain similar across many shows.

But what does come across to me here, and of course most particularly in the previous edition with the final version of Tweedle Dee, is that Bob has decided to give his old favourites a kick in a new direction.   One wonders what might have happened to these songs with their new variant performances if Covid had not come along and stopped the show.  What would he made of this song, and Tweedle Dee next time around?

Other articles in this series…

• 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
• High Water
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• 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
• Like a Rolling Stone 1988 to 2002
• Love sick from the very start to 2000
• Love minus zero / No limit 1988 – 1996
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• One too many mornings. 
• 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.

The lyrics and the music.   Looking at how Dylan’s music relates to his lyrics and vice versa.   By Tony Attwood

I’ve never checked in detail but it seems to me that the original release of Cold Irons Bound has one of the longest musical introductions of any Bob Dylan recording.   And indeed it is interesting that in the live performances, this notion of the longish and mysterious introduction is maintained – although the exact format changes.

Indeed on the originally released recording that we have on Time Out of Mind (above) the musical introduction lasts just a few seconds under a minute.   Now, I’ve not sat here measuring each song’s intro with a stop watch (even I am not that sad) but it does feel to me as if it is one of the longest introductions we have on an album track.

When the bass does come in with its repeated melody we are 20 seconds into the recording, but still half a minute away from Bob starting to sing.  And ultimately when we get there we find the whole verse up to the chorus lines, is one musical line repeated over and over, above that bass.

This then contrasts with a completely different much more laid-back chorus.

So in effect, the whole verse is on one chord except the last three lines which form a chorus (followed by an instrumental line of the same music) giving us the title line.

The impact of this arrangement is quite strange.  The song on this original is bouncy, both in the melody and the instrumentation.    and even the instrumental verse then makes no concession – it is the music as before, but without the voice.  There is no new guitar solo.

This constancy of the music, the form and the arrangement gives us an exact reflection of the meaning behind the lyrics.  Life in the sense of this journey towards prison goes on – it is not passive with a person sitting alone reflecting, but rather life out in the wild, and the realisation that things are like this and will go on being like this.  Until they get worse.

Well the winds in Chicago have turned me to shreds
Reality has always had too many heads
Some things last longer than you think they will
Some kind of things you can never kill
It's you and you only I'm thinking about
But you can't see in, and it's hard looking out

I'm 20 miles out of town, Cold Irons bound

In this way we get the feeling through the music of being out of town just walking on, with the wind howling, and everything happening, but at the same time there is the remorseless walking on.  Not only does nothing change, nothing is expected to change.  Hence the entire song on one chord.

There is a bounce of course within the accompaniment, and indeed a vigour in the way Bob sings, because the character in the song is constantly “Cold Irons Bound”, but still nothing is changing, the journey continues on and on and there is no escape.

So we have the implication of movement (it is a bouncy lively beat with the lyrical lines alternating between high (Well the winds in Chicago) and low (have turned me to shreds).  And this movement is unchanging except for the final resigned line of each verse (“T’m 20 miles out of town…”).

Thus we have physical movement and mental decline – he’s given up on his life, but he is moving on and on physically, as he has to.

It is a remarkable concept to carry off within a song, without making it all to obvious, and in the seven plus minutes of the song it is extraordinary that such constancy can hold our attention.  And yet it does.  We are there with the singer making this long and painful journey which is most certainly not going to have a good ending.

A perfect match between the lyrics and the music.

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
• 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
• 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
• 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.
• 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
• Mississippi
• Not Dark Yet
• Shelter from the Storm
• Sign on the window
• Tangled up in blue
•  Yonder Comes Sin

• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 1: She’s delicate and seems like a Vermeer
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 2: Oh, the streets of SoHo
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 3. Blake did come up with some bold lines
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 4: I love the sound of words, yeah
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 5: A man alone at his desk
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 6: Pete, money is coming in

by Jochen Markhorst

VII        I had a little refrigerator

Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

 To promote the release of Cahoots 50th Anniversary Edition in 2021, Robbie Robertson has himself interviewed for a “The Making Of” series of clips to be posted on the official The Band website, on YouTube, Facebook and whatnot.

The approach is – obviously – not overly critical, but Robertson is realistic enough to hint between the lines that he himself agrees that The Band’s fourth album is not exactly a highlight of the legendary band’s oeuvre. “We were just messing around,” is the gist of his reminiscences, laced with half-excuses like “we weren’t really studio guys” and “I just wanted to get off that treadmill”.

Then he seems to remember that we are actually making a promotional film and quickly dashes off some half-hearted advertising talk: “I think this record is unique in The Band’s music, unique in this discovery process, and it really represents the music of a period, and the fact that is has no rules – I don’t know, I just rejoice in them,” stressing that they were experimenting, that they had complete freedom in manager Albert Grossman’s new studio in Woodstock (Bearsville Studios); “So this was like a new toy.”

Cahoots’ biggest flaw understandably does not come up: the songs are just not that strong. In his autobiography Testimony, which was in shops five years before these promotional clips, Robertson is a touch more frank: “We knew it wasn’t all our best work” (like Levon Helm in his memoirs: “The music on Cahoots didn’t prove that memorable”). It’s still The Band, of course, with even on an overproduced album those irresistible frayed edges that elevate the men to such an exceptional band, and there are enough glimmers to call it a good album – the opener “Life Is A Carnival”, Allen Toussaint’s horns, Danko’s drive and vocals plus the arrangement of “Volcano”, the heartbreaking melancholy of the closing track “The River Hymn” – but the off-category quality of the three previous records is no longer there. We only hear that particular quality flaring up briefly in the album’s Dylan song, at track 2, in “When I Paint My Masterpiece”.

Not in so many words, but Robertson, too, does recognise this. And then oddly, with poorly acted modesty, seems to want to pull some of the credits back to himself in those promotional clips in 2021:

“He said: You know, I got a song. I got the beginning of a song. I think it might be good for you guys. So he played me this song “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” He’s playing the song, and I’m thinking, he’s right, he’s right. You put The Band in front of this song, something’s gonna happen. And he was playing and he was playing it, he got to a point and said: Yeah, that’s as far as I got. I really need in between the second verse and… I really need a bridge in there.

I said to him, do you want something to drink? (I had a little refrigerator.) You want something to drink, you want a Coke or something? He said: Oh great, okay. So I went and got a Coca Cola, and he made up the bridge. It says Oh to be back in the land of Coca Cola. And… it’s just one of those… in music… a perfect accident, when something just… this fits with that. And then we went and recorded that in the studio. And I thought, okay, this is a sign, this is telling us we’re getting down to business here. And it feels good. Again, very unusual, but I feels good.”

… which is a slightly upgraded version of the story he had already penned in 2016’s Testimony:

“There’s a tune, might be good for you guys.” He picked up my guitar and sang what he had so far on “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”

What a song! What an idea! I thought. I asked him if he wanted a Coke from the small fridge I had in my studio, and he came up with a bridge, “Sailing around the world in a dirty gondola, oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola.” I wrote down the words and the guys and I recorded the song the next day.

So, in both versions Robertson testifies that Dylan had only written part of the song and that a bridge was missing still; in 2016 he states Dylan lets him hear what he has so far, and in 2021 he reveals it was no more than the beginning of a song. Which is demonstrably false. Thanks to The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), we know the demo version that Dylan recorded alone on the piano on Day 4, the last day of the Blue Rock sessions 19 March 1971. A version that is the same as the recording with Leon Russel and his men three days before, apart from a few minor textual interventions, and apart from:

Sailing around the world in a dirty gondola
Sure wish I hadn’t sold my old Victrola
Ain’t nothing like to that good old rock-n-rolla

… apart from a bridge, that is. A bridge Dylan already had for quite some time. The same chords and melody as the bridge with the familiar first line that we’ll hear shortly after on Cahoots. Only the second line has changed (and the third has been deleted). Granted, not too brilliant poetry, but on that front the alternative to which the contents of Robbie’s fridge inspire is not much shinier either;

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

… although this variant has plenty of fans. And not the least, by the way. The ever-enthusiastic Professor Rollason, for instance, sees in these lines “a crucial Old World/New World contrast” and finds the rhyming gondola/Coca-Cola “perhaps worthy of Byron” (Dylan, Europe and a wild goose chase, 1998). Or Los Lobos’ keyboardist and producer Steve Berlin. Stereogum publishes a list of eighty artists choosing their favourite Dylan song on Dylan’s 80th birthday, 24 May 2021. Steve Berlin chooses “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, praising these very words: “And then the line about the land of Coca-Cola brings it all back home.” Friendly, but if we’re honest it’s really not much more than some corny rhyming fun.

Nevertheless, these words in the bridge seem to suit Dylan quite well. He never sings the Victrola/rock and rolla variation again, to the Coca-Cola variation he remains faithful for decades. Longer in any case than to the preceding chorus line Everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody. Somewhere around 1990, Dylan apparently learns how lame this particular simile is; after all, a rhapsody is a piece of music that, while a unity, is defined precisely by its contrasting parts – and thus, by definition, is not supposed to be smooth. From the 1990s onwards, Dylan then usually sings there either everything is gonna be different or everything is gonna be beautiful. Very occasionally, the rhapsody still comes along (Poughkeepsie 1996, Akita 1997), but from the twenty-first century onwards, the oxymoron is permanently banned.

The evolution of the bridge, from Victrola to Coca-Cola to the presumably final Shadow Kingdom variant “world full of crimson and clover” is less choppy, but then again: much more drastic as well…

——-

To be continued. Next up When I Paint My Masterpiece part 8: “Crimson and Clover still hits me”

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)

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

The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour: Commentary by Tony Attwood, audio kindly provided by Mr Tambourine.

Love Sick

Lover Sick starts at 3.20.56

The opening staccato chords are enough to tell us what the song is going to be.  And the accent Bob puts on words such as “brain” tells us that this is going to be a re-run of the recorded version with what has by now become the variations limited to the vocals rather than within the music.

And just in case you feel that this is how it always is on Bob’s tours, and this tour is no different from all the others, may I refer you back a few articles to the exploration of the way Bob ultimately developed an earlier song: Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum – an unbelievable journey

But now back to this piece: everything here focuses on the title – Bob’s voice really does tell us he is sick of love.  If we didn’t believe him before, we do now.

Now at this point the recording kindly put together by Mr Tambourine continues with recordings of the songs we have already looked at in this series, and so my intention from the start of this little series has been to get to here and then leave you to enjoy those songs and the others that turn up subsequently.

For example, at 4.02.30 there is Simple Twist of Fate, and 4.10.51 we have I’ll be your baby tonight.  But I can’t let the series go without leaping forward to 4:30.07.  You will know the song at once from the opening two chords, but here we have a slow blues version of “It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry”.   It is not a radical rewrite but it is an arrangement that is utterly, utterly, full of feeling and does give new insights.

With a bit of luck the track might play immediately on the link below…

And really this performance makes a point that I have been increasingly aware of since starting this blog: that in trying to express thoughts about Bob’s work, any attempt I might make to hear the work afresh is always tempered by my personal relationship with the song which began of course from the first time I heard it and continue through my life.

For me, every Dylan song is not just a song to be heard once more, but a journey back through the years from the first listening on the album, through live performances and of late the videos we now have access to.

So for me this version of “Train,” as with so many other Dylan songs, is a personal experience utterly wound up with my life.  If I’d been there I’d have been cheering just like everyone at the show.

And thus I will leave you to enjoy the rest of the recordings, and once more express my eternal thanks to Mr Tambourine for providing this set of recordings to Untold Dylan and giving me the OL to use his compilation.  I am once more in your debt, sir.

• The Rough and Rowdy Way Tour: 2021.
• Part 2 Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine
• Part 3: I contain multitudes
• Part 4: False Prophet
• Part 5: When I paint my masterpiece.
• Part 6: Black Rider and let’s not get too excited 
• Part 7: “I’ll be your baby tonight”
• Part 8: My Own Version of You
• Part 9: Early Roman Kings
• Part 10 – To be alone with you
• Part 11: Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
• Part 12: : Got to Serve Somebody
• Part 13: I made up my mind to give myself to you
• Part 14: Melancholy Mood: Bob’s extraordinarily successful total reworking of a classic
• Part 15: Mother of Muses
• Part 16: Goodbye Jimmy Reed
• Part 17: Every grain of sand
• Part 18: Watching the River Flow

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

Once or twice:A recently inaugurated review of songs that Bob has performed just once or twice on stage. Previously we looked at 

• The girl on the Greenbriar Shore,
• Only a hobo
• Caribbean Wind.
• Lay Down your weary tune

Today it is “Spanish Harlem Incident”, and how one band took a single rather bland live performance, and transformed the song into a really memorable piece.

By Tony Attwood

For me it is the attempt to make this a solid fast-moving piece through the unchanging guitar part that makes this live performance unattractive.  I suspect the response to this one performance persuaded Bob not to continue with the song.

For this is an occasion in which a varied accompaniment is essential to the holding of our interest, not least because in the first part of each verse there is not much dynamism in the song itself.

When we combine this with the fact that the melody in the verse is often non-existent but combines with lyrics which themselves don’t really grab attention, then we can see why the song in this form is lacking something when it comes to a live performance.

Take for example…

I've been wonderin' all about me
Ever since I seen you there
On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I'm riding
I know I'm 'round you but I don't know where

… that third line is actually really interesting – anyone who pauses over the lines will surely be asking “what are these wildcat charms?” and “how is he riding them?” (salacious thoughts spring to mind).   Not to mention how the cliffs actually fit in with the whole concept of the piece.

But musically all we get is one note.  Now that can work if the guitar rhythm is doing something interesting, or the melody is engaging us elsewhere, or perhaps there is a moving accompaniment.  But here Dylan is doing neither of the first two and has no accompaniment beyond the guitar to help him out.

I feel it was at this stage that Bob was learning that in a live performance, the lyrics are not enough – for indeed if all we have is the lyrics then is probably better to leave the piece as a poem.

And so after this one performance, Spanish Harlem Incident was left – at least by Dylan, and by most cover artists.   But do spare a moment if you can to listen to Dion’s version from 1978, which tackles every single one of these issues, and shows us what the potential of the song really was.

So yes, good reasons for Bob not to go forward with the song in its original form, but a lesson can be learned here by all cover artists – just because Bob drops the song doesn’t mean that the song is not worthy of further investigation.

In fact well over half of the songs listed on the official Dylan site have been performed by Bob either never at all, or only once.   There is a treasure trove there for bands who want something different and potentially exciting and written by Dylan, if only they would bother to look.

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.

And may I add that if you think (as I did at the start) that Tweedle Dum is hardly one of the highlights of Bob’s musical career, please stay with this, or at least skip to the very last performance at the end of this article.  If you don’t know what happened to this song, you might well be as surprised, and indeed as delighted, as I was.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum was performed an amazing 491 times between 5 October 2001 and 23 June 2023.    And I say “an amazing 491 times” because I have to admit that until I came to write this, and listen to the recordings across the years, I have always seen it as a trivial song, a bit of a throwaway.   I do recall hearing it at concerts of course, but it never struck me until today that Bob played it quite so often.  Or why he played it.  Now I know.

It is, if my counting is correct, the 37th most played song by Dylan on the Tour.  Our earlier recording from the tour comes from 2001 – the start of Bob’s use of the piece.

2001: More power, wealth, knowledge and salvation

Listening to this recording of the song now for the first time in several years I actually wonder if I have been too hard on the piece (in my own thoughts).  It’s a jolly rocker with a really lively backing, and that rather hard-to-play guitar solo after each line in the latter part of the song.

This is also a perfect example of Bob not wanting to put anything into the instrumental version by the way of extensive virtuoso solos.  What we get is the music without the voice, not much more.

I have to admit that seeing just how often Bob has played the song I wondered if maybe I had totally missed the point of the piece, and that everyone else was seeing it as a major part of his output, I did a bit of looking, but no, most people see it as of moderate interest.  But no, I don’t think any of us could have imagined where this was going to end up.

2003: No flash in the pan

The main change I notice at once is Bob using that falsetto note at the end of the line which he has so often employed.  But although the pace and orchestration is still the same, the way Bob sings the opening verses gives an even more frantic feel about the piece.  (And if you don’t like frantic, I beg you, stay with this, because there is an utter gem to come).

This time, when we get to the instrumental break there is even more excitement and a real contrast then when Bob returns with a softer feel all round.   It is still the same song, but there are a few extra nuances, especially in the instrumental break which starts around 3 minutes 50 seconds.   It is as if Bob has said to the band “let’s show them there is more here than they thought”.  And as if he knows that there is somewhere else he can go with this, but hasn’t yet found it.

Then the much softer section that follows that frantic instrumental break gives a real contrast… but I am now confused… I suppose I can best express this as “Why?”   I don’t have an answer – or rather when I first wrote this I didn’t.  Having got to the end of these extracts, I realised.

2006: Walking through the Cities of the plague

Now this is a surprise.  Same song, same key, same speed, but much more laid back.  It is a reflection on what we have seen and heard before.   Even if you have had enough Tweedles by now, I would suggest listening to this piece in contrast with the 2003 version above.  It is such a simple song, but Bob and the band really have done something new with it, without actually losing or changing or developing any of the piece.

Whether it is worth it I am not sure.  The very soft verse just after the three minute marker seems just to be there as a contrast, without any other meaning or implication, but still, it’s fun I guess.   As for the much softer verse that takes us through the last minute or so of the piece… another surprise.

2010: Centre Stage, a change coming on

Now we get the feeling that Bob really is going to keep on with this strange little song until he gets every last drop out it.  We know what it is from the lyrics and the accompaniment, but Bob is singing it differently.  He’s being reflective, more inward-looking, more resigned maybe.   I get the feeling something else is going to happen, but it is such a simple song, how can there be anything more.   Well, that comment shows why Bob is the genius and I’m the guy just reflecting on what he manages to do.  (But don’t let this comment put you off listening to this version all the way through.  This really is a fascinating development).

2014: The survivors

And now, if you don’t know what is here, you are going to be shocked, stunned, surprised, and well, I don’t know.   OK I have rushed forward to 2014, and that is perhaps not fair, but it makes the point.

I love this.  If only this had been the original version, I would never have dismissed this as a passing fancy.  This is really fun, interesting and entertaining and dare I add, insightful.  This is indeed one of my favourite moments from the Never Ending Tour.  Not just because I love the performance but because of the journey that Bob took us through.

Who, honestly, on hearing the original live versions could ever have imagined the song could be like this?  How did he clear his mind of everything the song has been before, to get to this?

I certainly could never imagine the song had enough within it to take such a simple accompaniment.   I really do think this is one of Bob’s greatest Tour achievements – to take this simple song, and keep the essence of it and turn it into this utterly gorgeous arrangement.

I play this, I keep playing this, and I am so, so grateful to Mike for having selected it from the thousands and thousands of extracts he listened to.

As to why I like it so much… well, there is enough of the original there for me to recall where the song has come from.  Plus it has a relaxed feel that suits my everyday life at my age.  Plus I love the way the verses change – try the verse after the four minute marker.  And that distinctive guitar solo that recurs throughout.

Oh Bob, I love you for this.  No one else could ever have done it.

Other articles in this series…

• 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
• High Water
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• 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
• Like a Rolling Stone 1988 to 2002
• Love sick from the very start to 2000
• Love minus zero / No limit 1988 – 1996
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• One too many mornings. 
• 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
• Visions of Johanna
• Watching the River Flow

• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 1: She’s delicate and seems like a Vermeer
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 2: Oh, the streets of SoHo
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 3. Blake did come up with some bold lines
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 4: I love the sound of words, yeah
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 5: A man alone at his desk

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         Pete, money is coming in

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wastin’ time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see ’em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb
Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece

According to The Guinness World Records, Bing Crosby’s 1942 “White Christmas” is the best-selling single of all time with an estimated 50 million units. Which probably is about right, but overly reliable such numbers, or record lists at all, are not. We have had hit lists only since the 1950s, and even from those you can only approximate how much a single or an album actually sells. After all, we do not have something like a Central Record Sales Office, where sales figures from all over the world are registered.

By extension, what the most covered songs in the world are is equally impossible to determine. Guinness World Records hoists “Yesterday” on the shield, claiming that more than 1,600 cover versions of it have been recorded, but Stacker can only find 512 and puts “Yesterday” at position 2 – Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” is at 1 with 516 covers.

But then again, according to Far Out, “Satisfaction” is #2, according to UK’s Independent, “Eleanor Rigby” is #1, the Washington Post seems to know that “Silent Night” is the most covered song of all time, and we could go on and on. Little consensus, all in all – we only agree at “most covered artist”: Dylan tops almost all lists.

The unreliability is demonstrated, among other omissions, by the absence of “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)”, which does not make the Top 50 anywhere, despite the fact that we are all pretty sure it has to be one of the biggest hits of the 20th century. Written and recorded in 1939 by Solomon Linda and his Evening Birds in Johannesburg in Zulu language as “Mbube”, the song first rocketed across the African continent.

The South African record boss of Gallo Records puts the single in a box of records he sends to Decca Records in New York, where it is noticed by Alan Lomax. Lomax brings the song to Pete Seeger’s attention, who transcribes it by ear and releases it with his Weavers as “Wimoweh” – and scores a big hit with it. The English lyrics then are written in 1961 by lyricist George David Weiss, The Tokens record their version with these English lyrics, becoming the world hit we all know and love. And of which there are hundreds of covers – from Glen Campbell and Arlo Guthrie to Jimmie Rodgers and Roger Whittaker, from James Last to Bert Kaempfert, from Ladysmith Black Mambazo to Mory Kanté, and from R.E.M. to Brian Eno; “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” can be found in every corner of the record shop, and in 2000, journalist Rian Malan calculates in Rolling Stone that the song’s use in Disney’s The Lion King alone should be good for some $15 million.

Solomon Linda, as it then goes, barely sees a penny of that. Much to the chagrin of the autobiographer Pete Seeger:

“I distinctly remember being told, “Pete, money is coming in for ‘Wimoweh.’ Where should we send it? Gallo says send it to them.”
“Oh, don’t send it to them,” says I. “Solomon Linda will never get a penny of it.”
“Well, get his address. We’ll send it directly to him.” I didn’t bother to ask exactly what “it” was. Foolish me. A year later I’d located Linda and a check for about $1,000 was presented to him at a grand banquet in Johannesburg. I assumed this was the first of many such payments, and that a standard songwriter’s contract had been signed with Linda. Again, foolish me.”
(Pete Seeger – In His Own Words, 2012)

The Weavers – Wimoweh

The boatload of money ends up going to lyricist Weiss, Seeger recounts regretfully, because a judge in 1991 ruled that that was simply copyright law: “If you adapt and arrange an old song in the public domain, you get to keep all the royalties,” with the judge deciding that the original song is in the public domain – presumably because South Africa is not a signatory to U.S. copyright law.

Weiss apparently knew the approximate meaning of the original lyrics. Mbube means “lion”, and the chant that Pete Seeger heard as “wimoweh” is actually uyimbube – “you are a lion” in Zulu. Enough to inspire Weiss to

In the jungle, the mighty jungle
The lion sleeps tonight

… which in turn will echo ten years later, in 1971, in Dylan’s impromptu in Manhattan’s Blue Rock Studio: Dodging lions and wastin’ time / Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle. Rather poignantly, that line from “Wimoweh” to these words in “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, as we hear Dylan copying Weiss’s zoological fake news – after all, lions don’t live in the jungle. The mighty king of the jungle, of course, is Tarzan, who never encounters a lion there. Should Tarzan swing on all the way to Asia, he’d encounter tigers at most, as Elvis communicates zoologically correctly;

I am the king of the jungle
They call me Tiger Man
I am the king of the jungle
They call me Tiger Man
If you cross my path
You take your own life in your hands

(Editor’s note: Jochen’s link for this song https://youtu.be/0pV_Q_eyfnQ is not working in the UK, so an alternative is provided below).

Dylan’s first introduction to the song will have been Pete Seeger and The Weavers’ phonetic version, on 1957’s The Weavers at Carnegie Hall, the live album including “Rock Island Line” and “Woody’s Rag/900 Miles” and “Goodnight, Irene” and all those other songs that will somehow trickle down into a Dylan song in the sixty years that follow. Still, The Tokens’ English-language world hit is inescapable, of course. As inescapable as The King’s ’68 come-back special, in which he performs his driven version of “Tiger Man”. Which makes Dylan’s train of thought on this winter day in New York all traceable with a high degree of probability: Italian impressions on the walk to the studio – “Going Back To Rome” – Colosseum – wild-animal fighting – “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” – king of the jungle.

Slightly less reducible but still imaginable are the next stops on the train of thought. Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory could just be an autobiographical interlude – perhaps even a memory of his Rome visit in January ’63 and getting on the train there to visit girlfriend Suze in Perugia, two train hours away (who, however, is already back in New York by then). And the line When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese then might be triggered by Titus Livius’ old legend, about the geese of the Capitol, of the old citadel. The geese who, on the night of 2 August 387 B.C., warned of the invading Gauls with their snapping, waking up Marcus Manlius and thus saving Rome just in time.

Granted, not entirely conclusive, the latter; they were not wild geese, and the Capitol, while perched high on Capitoline Hill, is not really what you imagine a hilltop to be – but still within the bounds of artistic license that an on-call creating Dylan may allow himself, this Tuesday afternoon in March 1971.

Six weeks later, on 28 April 1971, he secures the copyrights. Under the title “Masterpiece”, the song is entirely in his name alone.

To be continued. Next up When I Paint My Masterpiece part 7: I had a little refrigerator

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)

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

A list of the previous  articles in the “Dylan cover a day” series is printed at the end.

by Tony Attwood

If by any chance you have been following this series you might be expecting “You angel you” as the next song that we might cover, but in fact Aaron and I did this previously for the “Beautiful Obscurity” series – and although looking at songs for a second time has never been a problem on Untold Dylan, in this case, Aaron’s legwork was so extensive, he managed to find so much on the song, there’s not much more to put into another article.  So I refer you back to the earlier article, “Beautiful Obscurity: You Angel You”

Which brings us to “You gonna make me lonesome when you go.  Except that when Jochen did his piece on that song he gave us five covers .   I’m going to add just three more of which one, by Isballea Lundgren, is a piece that I find utterly remarkable.

First Ryan Adams, not because I am knocked out by the overall effect, but because he does do something which is often overlooked by cover artist – adding a completely new rhythm.

It does give the basis for a version of the song that keeps the melody, chords and lyrics can remain the same, but offers a different sort of accompaniment.  It’s a technique that could be used more by cover artists.

This idea goes even further, and with even greater musical effect in a remarkable cover by Isballea Lundgren, the remarkable Swedish jazz vocalist.    She has the voice to carry this through, but she also has an arranger who has achieved absolute wonders with the song.  Even though I know the song completely because of Dylan’s versions, and of course the covers that Jochen chose, this gives me something quite new.   The short instrumental breaks are worthy of a mention on their own – put together with the whole three and three quarter minutes seem like a perfect dream.   I play it over and over.

In fact this is just one of those songs that can performed in a myriad of ways – I won’t copy in the bosa nova version simply because I think its a bit cheesy but it is out there if you want to find it.  But I will add this country version just to show how much can be done with the song.  Here is it a totally different piece of music with a different set of meanings….

In fact in that version above the way the title line is sung makes it sound as if this was the original version – it sounds so natural!

This could go on and on forever, but as we have already had Jochen’s choice, if you like this song and have a mind to discover different approachees, you’ve got enough versions here to drive your partner, your parents or your neighbours completely mad by playing them all.

But my serious point remains: quite often Bob Dylan has that remarkable ability to create a song that can be re-created to infinity.  This is Jimmy LaFave.

Previously in the series

1. The song with numbers in the title.
2. Ain’t Talkin
3. All I really want to do
4.  Angelina
5.  Apple Suckling and Are you Ready.
6. As I went out one morning
7.  Ballad for a Friend
8. Ballad in Plain D
9. Ballad of a thin man
10.  Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
11. The ballad of Hollis Brown
12. Beyond here lies nothing
13. Blind Willie McTell
14.  Black Crow Blues (more fun than you might recall)
15. An unexpected cover of “Black Diamond Bay”
16. Blowin in the wind as never before
17. Bob Dylan’s Dream
18. BoB Dylan’s 115th Dream revisited
19. Boots of Spanish leather
20. Born in Time
21. Buckets of Rain
22. Can you please crawl out your window
23. Can’t wait
24. Changing of the Guard
25. Chimes of Freedom
26. Country Pie
27.  Crash on the Levee
28. Dark Eyes
29. Dear Landlord
30. Desolation Row as never ever before (twice)
31. Dignity.
32. Dirge
33. Don’t fall apart on me tonight.
34. Don’t think twice
35.  Down along the cove
36. Drifter’s Escape
37. Duquesne Whistle
38. Farewell Angelina
39. Foot of Pride and Forever Young
40. Fourth Time Around
41. From a Buick 6
42. Gates of Eden
43. Gotta Serve Somebody
44. Hard Rain’s a-gonna Fall.
45. Heart of Mine
46. High Water
47. Highway 61
48. Hurricane
49. I am a lonesome hobo
50. I believe in you
51. I contain multitudes
52. I don’t believe you.
53. I love you too much
54. I pity the poor immigrant. 
55. I shall be released
56. I threw it all away
57. I want you
58. I was young when I left home
59. I’ll remember you
60. Idiot Wind and  More idiot wind
61. If not for you, and a rant against prosody
62. If you Gotta Go, please go and do something different
63. If you see her say hello
64. Dylan cover a day: I’ll be your baby tonight
65. I’m not there.
66. In the Summertime, Is your love and an amazing Isis
67. It ain’t me babe
68. It takes a lot to laugh
69. It’s all over now Baby Blue
70. It’s all right ma
71. Just Like a Woman
72. Knocking on Heaven’s Door
73. Lay down your weary tune
74. Lay Lady Lay
75. Lenny Bruce
76. That brand new leopard skin pill box hat
77. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts
78. License to kill
79. Like a Rolling Stone
80. Love is just a four letter word
81. Love Sick
82. Maggies Farm!
83. Make you feel my love; a performance that made me cry.
84. Mama you’ve been on my mind
85. Man in a long black coat.
86. Masters of War
87. Meet me in the morning
88. Million Miles. Listen, and marvel.
89. Mississippi. Listen, and marvel (again)
90. Most likely you go your way
91. Most of the time and a rhythmic thing
92. Motorpsycho Nitemare
93. Mozambique
94. Mr Tambourine Man
95. My back pages, with a real treat at the end
96. New Morning
97. New Pony. Listen where and when appropriate
98. Nobody Cept You
99. North Country Blues
100. No time to think
101. Obviously Five Believers
102. Oh Sister
103. On the road again
104. One more cup of coffee
105. (Sooner or later) one of us must know
106. One too many mornings
107. Only a hobo
108. Only a pawn in their game
109. Outlaw Blues – prepare to be amazed
110. Oxford Town
111. Peggy Day and Pledging my time
112. Please Mrs Henry
113. Political world
114. Positively 4th Street
115. Precious Angel
116. Property of Jesus
117. Queen Jane Approximately
118. Quinn the Eskimo as it should be performed.
119. Quit your lowdown ways
120. Rainy Day Women as never before
121. Restless Farewell. Exquisite arrangements, unbelievable power
122. Ring them bells in many different ways
123. Romance in Durango, covered and re-written
124. Sad Eyed Lady of Lowlands, like you won’t believe
125. Sara
126. Senor
127. A series of Dreams; no one gets it (except Dylan)
128. Seven Days
129. She Belongs to Me
130. Shelter from the Storm
131. Sign on the window
132. Silvio
133. Simple twist of fate
134. Slow Train
135. Someday Baby
136. Spanish Harlem Incident
137. Standing in the Doorway
138. Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
139. Subterranean Homesick Blues
140. Sweetheart Like You
141. Tangled up in Blue
142. Tears of Rage
143.  Temporary Like Achilles. Left in the cold, but there’s still something…
144. The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar
145. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
146. The Man in Me
147. Times they are a-changin’
148. The Wicked Messenger
149. Things have changed
150. This Wheel’s on Fire
151. Thunder on the mountain
152. Till I fell in love with you in the north of Norway
153. Time Passes Slowly – just sit down and close your eyes
154. To be alone with you
155. To Ramona: unexpectedly yes!
156. Tombstone Blues
157. Tonight I’ll be Staying Here With You
158. Too much of nothing
159. Trouble as you have never been troubled before
160. Tryin’ to get to Heaven
161.  Unbelievable
162. “Up to Me” and a return to earlier days
163. Visions of Johanna
164. Walking down the line
165. Whatcha gonna do
166. Well Well Well
167. Went to see the Gypsy.
168. What good am I?
169. What was it you wanted
170. When I paint my masterpiece
171. When the night comes falling from the sky
172. When the ship comes in
173. When He Returns
174. When the deal goes down
175. Where are you tonight?
176. With God on our side

Commentary by Tony Attwood, audio kindly provided by Mr Tambourine.

Watching the River Flow

“Watching the River Flow” is another laid back half-sung half-recited song in which I get the impression Bob has really worked on the notion of being the outside observer looking at the rest of the world go by.  That feeling came across in the original 1971 recording and is still very much at the heart of this performance.

There is a constant four note descending effect that runs through most of the piece, emphasising the continuity of the “flow”,  although it stops for the middle 8 (until the last bar).   And, indeed, this seems to me to fit in with the overall concept of the the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour – it is Bob looking back on his own work, rather than commenting on his work by writing new arrangements of the songs.

In the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour we do have changes to the arrangements of these classic songs, and indeed sometimes to the vocals, but it is to a much lesser degree than within the Never Ending Tour.  The impression I get is of Bob looking at the rest of us looking at him.   He’s looking back at his life, but without the desire to re-write the past which was at the heart of the NET.

Now  I haven’t asked Mike Johnson (who created the 144 article, “Never Ending Tour” series on this site) for his view (Mike lives on the other side of the world from me, and I’ve only just thought of this) but considered this way, this Rough and Rowdy tour is the mirror image of the Never Ending Tour, in the sense of the musical arrangements, as well as the song selection night by night.

In short the Never Ending Tour was a continuous challenge to all of us to reconsider the past, and from there to rethink our future.   The Rough and Rowdy tour is a celebration of the past, and an invitation, it suddenly occurs to me, to sit back and watch the river flow.

“River” was written in 1971 in a year of what seems to have been an artistic struggle for Dylan, and suggests that the essence of life is that life just moves on, rather than life being an opportunity to change the world and leave a mark upon the world.  It was a return to the “Blowing in the Wind” vision of accepting reality as we are told it is, rather than “Masters of War” or “Tangled up in blue” each of which in a variety of ways, challenges our view of reality.

Each of these songs seem to suggest that the world happens to us, rather than any of us having an influence on the world.  Thus they are songs of the artist observing the world rather than the artist trying to change the world for the better.    And it is a thought that resonates with the fact that the shows also include “Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine” and others with a similar vision.  

In short, we are invited to travel our own road, rather than make the world a better place.  And perhaps that comes about with age.  After all, sitting and watching is something that most of us tend to do as we get older, rather than continue the fight for something better.

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

Once or twice: A recently inaugurated review of songs that Bob has performed just once or twice on stage. Previously we looked at The girl on the Greenbriar Shore, Only a hobo. and Caribbean Wind.  So rather obviously, this is number four in the series.

Recorded in 1963 this was released 22 years later, possibly because there is a blip in the recording (although that might not be on the original, sorry you’ll have to check your own own copy of “Biograph”.  The copies I have found on line have that blip, and my albums are not in an order that makes retrieving one particular LP an easy task.)

Meanwhile here is the public performance

The generally accepted view is that this was recorded for the “Times they are…” album. and the story circulates that Dylan was wanting to capture the feeling of a Scottish ballad, such as perhaps “The Water is Wide”.

Dylan performed it once on stage in 1963 but then with Dylan having dropped the song from the album the Byrds then took it up.

I love the harmonies that the Byrds create, but this was the period where every recording they made had to have the Byrds “jingle jangle” sound, and for me that is just not right.  Indeed “not right at all”.  I am left screaming with dismay.

Various music critics attempted to categorise the song in various ways (“a message from the universe” being one of the more outlandish) but there seems to me to be no need to find a message – the song is in the spirit of what Dylan is said to have identified as the source: Scottish ballads.

There is also the notion from Paul Williams that, “we hear Dylan struggling to put into words the melody that haunts him” but again I don’t hear that.  I hear music that is clearly constructed, and to which the lyrics fit perfectly.

It is only around 250 words long (including the repeated chorus) but for me these lyrics contain a set of clear, unpretentious images sung to a simple, memorable and above all enjoyable melody.  In essence it relates to the way in which one can use music to relieve the tensions of the world, and express one’s thoughts of the world in a way that conversation and prose cannot.

It suggests that the sounds of life are all we need; songs are not required.  The wind , the ocean, the rain, the rustling leaves, the flowing river… these are the only sounds we need to understand the world and be at peace with the world.

Of course there is the eternal irony that a song is constructed to express that thought, but such is the way of the arts, we accept the conceit of the lyrics to allow us to enjoy the beauty both of the conception of the song, and its execution through lyrics and melody.

The Amnesty International 2012 compilation of Bob Dylan covers, Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan includes a version of “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” by Billy Bragg. “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” by Storyhill is bearable.

Tom O’Brien’s version from “Red on Blue” is also bearable but only seems to be on Spotify.   And maybe this is why the song is not as widely heard as it should be.   It seems to be so utterly difficult for anyone else to make a decent version of it.  Probably best to flip back to the top of this piece and play Bob’s version, and ponder why he never gave us more.

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

The lyrics and the music.   Looking at how Dylan’s music relates to his lyrics and vice versa.   By Tony Attwood

Creating a song that lasts nine and a half minutes implies doing one of two things: having a lot of musical variety, or having a song that creates either a story or plays with a set of endlessly rotating images around a theme.

Dylan, as we know, is often no that not much of a coherent storyteller – which is not a criticism, it is just not a format that he chooses to follow.   And so with long songs he tends to select a wider than normal range of images.  Although of course being Dylan, that’s not quite an explanation to cover all the long songs, but it is a starting point.

And Dylan is something of an expert at unusually long songs.   Indeed at nine and a half minutes “Key West” only clocks in at number eight on his personal list of long compositions – although I might have missed something along the way.  I’m thinking that…

• Murder Most Foul
• Highlands
• Tempest
• Sad Eyed Lady
• Desolation Row
• Joey
• Brownsville Girl
• Tin Angel

… are all longer.

But here’s my problem.   Looking at the list, what strikes me is that apart from “Desolation Row”, none of these I choose to play when I am just looking for a song to listen to.

And part of the problem, I think, is that in a number of cases Bob has created a really long song without too much thought of melody or rhythm – they are recitations in which the words utterly dominate.  The music is pure accompaniment.  Not always of course, and Desolation Row stands out in this regard, but in a number of cases the music takes very much a background seat.

Now if we look at the issue of poetry and music without the context of Dylan, there is no reason why this format of half-sung half recited pieces with a minimal musical background should not exist.  It is another form, which because we know Dylan as a SONGwriter, we choose to label as a song.   And indeed Bob has performed this piece over 200 times on stage amidst the songs.  So for him it is a song, not a recitation.

And this is in contrast to Murder Most Foul, Highlands, Tempest. Sad Eyed Lady,  by way of example, none of which are shown on the official Dylan has ever being performed live.

So, we may conclude perhaps that Dylan likes the notion of the recitation of lyrics to a simple musical background as an art form, but thinks that probably it is not something the audience that attends his shows wants to know too much about.  Or rather he thought that until now.

For this time Bob seems to have taken the notion of a recitation to an accompaniment to an extreme – and has reversed his general policy – this piece has been performed over 200 times on stage.

So let us consider the opening lines…

Wherever I travel, wherever I roam
I'm not that far before I come back home
I do what I think is right, what I think is best
History Street off of Mallory Square
Truman had his White House there
East bound, West bound, way down in Key West
Twelve years old, they put me in a suit
Forced me to marry a prostitute

And what I personally find so curious is that there is no coherence here.   But I stress, I find this “curious” as in the sense of unusual and unexpected, not in any way in the sense of “poor art” — indeed exactly the opposite.   Take out the musical background and I don’t think this works too well at all.  Add the music and the images come pouring out from the recording straight into my heart and mind.

I have lived most of my life in England, the country where I was born, although I have lived abroad and have travelled the world (United States, Australia where one of my daughters lives, China, Sweden, Algiers where I lived for a year…) but I don’t have any relationship with Key West.

So the question for me is what do I get one from this song about a place of which I know absolutely nothing?   And the answer is “atmosphere”.  Not of the place itself, but of the situation portrayed via this vast array of images and the gentle lilting background music that so contrast: the gentle background and the endlessly changing overlay of images.

And that is really the key here.   The music is unchanging suggesting to me that no matter how much life’s events change and take us in different directions, it is still our individual journey through our life, from which we can pick out incidents and places, and maybe say “that’s the place I like to be.”  Our memories may be incomplete and inaccurate but they are what we build our vision of ourselves upon.

So I think of Sydney, Australia, where I have been six or seven times to visit my family, and the Great Wall of China on which I have walked once, and the Twin Towers in New York one of which I ascended just a few weeks before the atrocity of 9/11… these are the memories of totally different occasions and situations.   And they are bound together as parts of my life journey, parts of the memories that slowly fade…

And this is how I feel the song.   The unchanging background music of one’s life, which is always one’s life no matter how much things change.  I can’t remember the names of my different companions on many of these adventures, but they are still part of my history.  But do I pick out one place now where I want to be?   I guess so: it is my house, where I now sit and write this, a house in a village so ancient it is listed in the Domesday Book.

And it is having made this meandering journey in my head that today I think I appreciate Key West as a song (not a recitation) more than I have ever done before.   So now I think about my journey in life (I am six years younger than Bob, and have no fame, but still have had quite a journey) and now I can make sense at last of Key West, and perhaps a bit more sense of my own meandering life.

Not that not making sense of the song worried me in the past, but now I get it, I like the song more.  As Bob says in the second line, “That’s my story, but not where it ends.”  Snap shots of life, knowing that nothing from the past can be changed.   Suddenly realising that yes, that was my life, how on earth did I manage to a) do so much, b) make so many mistakes, c) still have a good time, d) still be doing ok.  And what such thoughts need is a ceaseless gentle lilting musical accompaniment.  Nothing else.  And that’s what we get.

Thus none of this enjoyment and insight would have worked for me if this piece had been a song in the conventional sense, rather than primarily a musical recitation.  It is the provision of the music and the half-sung approach that stops me just hearing a song, and starts me thinking of the journey of my life as well as enjoying the song.

That’s quite a breakthrough.  I’m glad I’m writing this series.  I’m glad I wrote this piece today.  Having listened to this song more carefully today than ever before, I am more of a person than I was yesterday.  It wouldn’t have worked as a poem.  It works as a recitation.

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
• 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
• 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
• 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.
• 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
• Mississippi
• Not Dark Yet
• Shelter from the Storm
• Sign on the window
• Tangled up in blue
•  Yonder Comes Sin

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.

Between 2012 and 2021 Early Roman Kings was played 519 times by Bob Dylan on stage.

The song was from the first – and indeed always thereafter – performed in a way that was immediately identifiable with the original, with that unmistakeable three-chord phrase repeated over and over and again, and Bob singing much of the song on one note.   All that was added was a jumble of sounds at the start which really (to me, as ever, it’s just my opinion) doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the piece of music.  It’s more like a call to the band to be ready to play than anything to do with the song in my view.

This version comes from 2012 The Ivory Revolution Begins.   In essence, once we have the first couple of lines, we have the song – it is all on one chord apart from a very brief move to a second chord just before the end of the verse.  As such it is totally a song of atmosphere – and that atmosphere is one of menace.

By 2015 however a certain softness has entered the atmosphere., as can be heard from this performance from It doesn’t get any better than this.  I must say I hadn’t realised that is how it changed.  It came as a pleasant surprise.

So the menace has gone, and now we have a reflection on what is happening.   The song is the same, the lyrics are the same, the instruments are the same but the atmosphere is completely different.

In 2018, we still have that collection of sounds as the opening, but that extra softness has been extended so that in the review Hell bent for leather contrary to the implication of that title (which applies to other songs) we have a song that has none of the menace of the 2012 recording above.    Bob is getting softer and softer, more and more gentle with a song that started with absolute menace and power.   It is still the same song, but the whole concept of of what he is singing about has changed.

2019: the final recording of this song that we have in the final year of the Never Ending Tour: The liberated republic

Now Bob has gone back – some way at least – to his earlier thoughts on the song.  There is a little bit more force here , a little bit more of the 2012 edition, what I suppose we might call a bit more “umph”.

This is interesting because we don’t often find Bob going back to earlier thoughts on the song – mostly I get the impression of a journey going on and on until it stops because all options have been explored.  By the end the menace is overwhelming – as if to say enough of these early gentle versions, this is what it is really about.  And, as it turns out, that’s it.

Other articles in this series…

• 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
• Forever Young 1987 to 2011
• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• High Water
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• 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
• Like a Rolling Stone 1988 to 2002
• Love sick from the very start to 2000
• Love minus zero / No limit 1988 – 1996
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• One too many mornings. 
• 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
• 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.

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.

In this article we’re looking at I shall be Released which first appeared on the tour on 30 October 1975 and was retired (at least so far) on 7 June 2008 after 491 live performances.  I’ve also included the recording of Dylan singing with Norah Jones, which is not strictly a NET recording, but interesting nonetheless.

Our earliest recording from the tour comes from 1988 The 60s revisited

Hearing this again today was a real shock.  I guess when publishing Mike’s articles I was just focussed on the music from the tours, not thinking back to the original recordings.  But today playing the original, I am absolutely knocked back off the chair.

I have no doubt (for myself and course it is just me) the original is a billion times better. that the live version above.  The message is one of hope not of desperation.

So the question arises what would Bob do after that?  Well we actually have a recording from 1989 – one year on from the piece at the start of the article.   It hasn’t actually got back to the lightness of the album version, but it is not so depressed as the year before.  A fire in the sun…   Maybe Bob thought he had gone too far the year before.  Certainly the bass and lead guitars are given the freedom to have a lot of fun.

Now we jump forward to 1995:  Beyond Prague, London Calling.  Sorry about the volume change here, obviously I just run the recordings as we have them, without any adjustments.   The song starts after about 55 seconds.  And just in case one is tempted to say that Bob is edging further back to the original, do go back and have a listen to the album version above.  It’s still a long way away from where we have got to in 1995.

There is still that desperate wearyness in the singing, but we do have vocal harmonies which means either Bob went back to his original recording or else has a perfect memory for what he did in the studio.

2000: Back to Bedrock II

This next is from 2000 and yes we are now moving back to the original in the instrumental break.

2003: No flash in the pan

Now we have one of Bob’s favourite techniques wherein he has the freedom to play with the music while singers in the band keep the elements of the song in place, just so we know where we are.

And certainly, we have travelled a very long way from 1988.

We do have one other recording of Bob playing and singing “I shall be released” with Norah Jones – and it looks like she wasn’t really sure what they were going do.   But she played the part like a real trouper.  This appears to be from the Amazon.com 10th Anniversary Concert at Bennaroya Hall in Seattle

Other articles in this series…

• 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
• Forever Young 1987 to 2011
• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• High Water
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• I don’t believe you – 1994 – 2013
• 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
• Like a Rolling Stone 1988 to 2002
• Love sick from the very start to 2000
• Love minus zero / No limit 1988 – 1996
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• One too many mornings. 
• 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
• 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.

A list of the previous  articles in the “Dylan cover a day” series is printed at the end.

by Tony Attwood

The twist here of course is that “With God on our side” is itself a cover – in this case of The Patriot Game.

I have to admit the opening of this recording still sends shivers down my spine – and most of the rest of me too.  If you have time do listen to it all – not for the lyrics (I do not use this site to convince you of one interpretation of history against another), but rather for the way the music changes.  The music is quite extraordinary: mind you so are the lyrics.

The first recording of Bob’s version was not by Bob himself but by Joan Baez

Surprisingly (at least for me today in 2024, but maybe it is just because I have forgotten), Manfred Mann made a version.  It is of course Paul Jones singing.

There is a major question, as time has passed and people have come to know the song well: what to do with the accompaniment?  Ramblin Jack Elliot changed the lyrics to “God on Her Side” at least and makes it into a waltz, which seems at the same time inappropriate and quite telling… I can’t make up my mind.   I have images of generals in full regalia dancing on the graves of the fallen.

My late mother’s brother died in the second world war, so obviously I never knew him, but it makes this all that bit closer.   And I am really not sure about how the song builds.   “I’m feeling kinda tired” isn’t really right for me – in fact it is not right at all.

Judy Collins brings me back to how I think the song should be performed.  This is haunting, even though I have (by the moment of hearing this) heard quite a few versions, which I have chosen not to include here..  The harmonies, with a lesser artist, could be horribly inappropriate but no, it works.

This next version is Kelsey Walen from 2020, and whoever thought of just bringing in the double bass in verse two deserves a medal.

I’m leaving the Heron version until last, for reasons that I think you will immediately appreciate once you start playing it.   And if you are tempted to think, “no, not for me” because of what they do to the piece, I would urge you to continue if you possibly can.  It is an extraordinary re-thinking of a song that most us know so well.

To re-write such a well known song, itself based on a previous song, and come up with this approach shows a remarkable musical ability.  And please don’t stop listening when it appears to be all over.  The harmonica finale is as remarkable as the first part.

As ever, of course, I leave it with you, but I can tell you, I am moved as I have rarely been in writing this series.

Previously in the series

1. The song with numbers in the title.
2. Ain’t Talkin
3. All I really want to do
4.  Angelina
5.  Apple Suckling and Are you Ready.
6. As I went out one morning
7.  Ballad for a Friend
8. Ballad in Plain D
9. Ballad of a thin man
10.  Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
11. The ballad of Hollis Brown
12. Beyond here lies nothing
13. Blind Willie McTell
14.  Black Crow Blues (more fun than you might recall)
15. An unexpected cover of “Black Diamond Bay”
16. Blowin in the wind as never before
17. Bob Dylan’s Dream
18. BoB Dylan’s 115th Dream revisited
19. Boots of Spanish leather
20. Born in Time
21. Buckets of Rain
22. Can you please crawl out your window
23. Can’t wait
24. Changing of the Guard
25. Chimes of Freedom
26. Country Pie
27.  Crash on the Levee
28. Dark Eyes
29. Dear Landlord
30. Desolation Row as never ever before (twice)
31. Dignity.
32. Dirge
33. Don’t fall apart on me tonight.
34. Don’t think twice
35.  Down along the cove
36. Drifter’s Escape
37. Duquesne Whistle
38. Farewell Angelina
39. Foot of Pride and Forever Young
40. Fourth Time Around
41. From a Buick 6
42. Gates of Eden
43. Gotta Serve Somebody
44. Hard Rain’s a-gonna Fall.
45. Heart of Mine
46. High Water
47. Highway 61
48. Hurricane
49. I am a lonesome hobo
50. I believe in you
51. I contain multitudes
52. I don’t believe you.
53. I love you too much
54. I pity the poor immigrant. 
55. I shall be released
56. I threw it all away
57. I want you
58. I was young when I left home
59. I’ll remember you
60. Idiot Wind and  More idiot wind
61. If not for you, and a rant against prosody
62. If you Gotta Go, please go and do something different
63. If you see her say hello
64. Dylan cover a day: I’ll be your baby tonight
65. I’m not there.
66. In the Summertime, Is your love and an amazing Isis
67. It ain’t me babe
68. It takes a lot to laugh
69. It’s all over now Baby Blue
70. It’s all right ma
71. Just Like a Woman
72. Knocking on Heaven’s Door
73. Lay down your weary tune
74. Lay Lady Lay
75. Lenny Bruce
76. That brand new leopard skin pill box hat
77. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts
78. License to kill
79. Like a Rolling Stone
80. Love is just a four letter word
81. Love Sick
82. Maggies Farm!
83. Make you feel my love; a performance that made me cry.
84. Mama you’ve been on my mind
85. Man in a long black coat.
86. Masters of War
87. Meet me in the morning
88. Million Miles. Listen, and marvel.
89. Mississippi. Listen, and marvel (again)
90. Most likely you go your way
91. Most of the time and a rhythmic thing
92. Motorpsycho Nitemare
93. Mozambique
94. Mr Tambourine Man
95. My back pages, with a real treat at the end
96. New Morning
97. New Pony. Listen where and when appropriate
98. Nobody Cept You
99. North Country Blues
100. No time to think
101. Obviously Five Believers
102. Oh Sister
103. On the road again
104. One more cup of coffee
105. (Sooner or later) one of us must know
106. One too many mornings
107. Only a hobo
108. Only a pawn in their game
109. Outlaw Blues – prepare to be amazed
110. Oxford Town
111. Peggy Day and Pledging my time
112. Please Mrs Henry
113. Political world
114. Positively 4th Street
115. Precious Angel
116. Property of Jesus
117. Queen Jane Approximately
118. Quinn the Eskimo as it should be performed.
119. Quit your lowdown ways
120. Rainy Day Women as never before
121. Restless Farewell. Exquisite arrangements, unbelievable power
122. Ring them bells in many different ways
123. Romance in Durango, covered and re-written
124. Sad Eyed Lady of Lowlands, like you won’t believe
125. Sara
126. Senor
127. A series of Dreams; no one gets it (except Dylan)
128. Seven Days
129. She Belongs to Me
130. Shelter from the Storm
131. Sign on the window
132. Silvio
133. Simple twist of fate
134. Slow Train
135. Someday Baby
136. Spanish Harlem Incident
137. Standing in the Doorway
138. Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
139. Subterranean Homesick Blues
140. Sweetheart Like You
141. Tangled up in Blue
142. Tears of Rage
143.  Temporary Like Achilles. Left in the cold, but there’s still something…
144. The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar
145. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
146. The Man in Me
147. Times they are a-changin’
148. The Wicked Messenger
149. Things have changed
150. This Wheel’s on Fire
151. Thunder on the mountain
152. Till I fell in love with you in the north of Norway
153. Time Passes Slowly – just sit down and close your eyes
154. To be alone with you
155. To Ramona: unexpectedly yes!
156. Tombstone Blues
157. Tonight I’ll be Staying Here With You
158. Too much of nothing
159. Trouble as you have never been troubled before
160. Tryin’ to get to Heaven
161.  Unbelievable
162. “Up to Me” and a return to earlier days
163. Visions of Johanna
164. Walking down the line
165. Whatcha gonna do
166. Well Well Well
167. Went to see the Gypsy.
168. What good am I?
169. What was it you wanted
170. When I paint my masterpiece
171. When the night comes falling from the sky
172. When the ship comes in
173. When He Returns
174. When the deal goes down
175. Where are you tonight?

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

———–

by Jochen Markhorst

• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 1: She’s delicate and seems like a Vermeer
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 2: Oh, the streets of SoHo
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 3. Blake did come up with some bold lines
• When I Paint My Masterpiece part 4: I love the sound of words, yeah

When I Paint My Masterpiece (1971) part 5

by Jochen Markhorst

V          A man alone at his desk

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

It’s 1785 and eight-year-old Carl Friedrich Gauß baffles village school teacher Büttner with his arithmetic skills. Even the “most difficult textbook in the German language”, Höhere Arithmetik, little Carl completes in one afternoon. To master his emotions, the bewildered teacher habitually administers Carl the last spanking of his life, and then arranges a maths tutor to prepare little Gauß for an academic career.

“They worked together for a year. At the beginning Gauss looked forward to the afternoons, which at least interrupted the uniformity of the weeks, although he did not have much interest in mathematics, he would have preferred Latin lessons. Then it got boring. Bartels didn’t think quite as draggingly as the others, but tiring it was with him as well.”

German success author Daniel Kehlmann’s biggest hit is 2005’s Die Vermessung der Welt (“Measuring the World”), a kind of fictional double biography of top German scientists Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt and their very different ways of measuring the world. We see a fascinating submotif in the above excerpt: Bartels didn’t think quite as draggingly as the others, but tiring it was with him as well – the loneliness of the genius.

Belle & Sebastian – Lord Anthony (live at Barrowlands):

As a theme it does come up often enough in biographies of geniuses, fictional or otherwise, both artists and scientists: the frustrating insight that you yourself are the only one who can recognise the depth, truly appreciate the beauty, enjoy the elegance of your work – the loneliness of the genius creator of the genius masterpiece. And via a long-standing diversions, this motif now seems to creep into Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” as well.

The disappearance of female company from that hotel room in 2002 still seems to be something Dylan initially regrets, in the sparse performances thereafter. In the years up to the seemingly last performance in 2011 the first lines still remain unchanged, the narrator rushing across Rome’s streets and down the Spanish Steps back to his hotel room on that cold dark night, but then:

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ll paint all the walls, and paint them all with grease
She promised she’ll be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece.

… an unnamed “she” as a replacement for the Greek beauty and Botticelli’s niece, in other words. Not very striking, though; much more striking, of course, is that thing with fat, with “grease” – which will be further elaborated in the probably final version, the version we are graced with on the Shadow Kingdom release in 2021. The corona surprise marks the triumphant return of “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. The song opens both the 2021 set and the soundtrack released in 2023 of that online corona concert, and thereafter remains on the setlist in all concerts of The Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour (2021-2024), usually around the fifth spot.

We can follow in quite detail Dylan’s wrestling with that first verse from 2018 through to today’s version from 2021. So, after 2011 Masterpiece is put in the drawer for seven years, but then, when Dylan has rehabilitated the song and dusted it off in the summer of 2018 at the start of the Far East & Down Under Tour, we hear:

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room,
Gonna swap out all my clothes, scrape off all of the grease.
Gonna stay right there, gonna lock the doors on the world for a while
Gonna stay right there until I paint my masterpiece

The perhaps a bit too vulgar “swap out” is soon replaced by “wash out”, scraping off the grease is a keeper. Three weeks later and 8400 km (5200 miles) away, 26 August in Christchurch, New Zealand it is:

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room,
Gonna wash out my clothes, scrape off all the grease.
Gonna lock the doors, gonna turn my back on the world for a while
Gonna stay right there until I paint my masterpiece

Bob Dylan – When I Paint My Masterpiece Christchurch 2018:

… and then Dylan only still fiddles with those last lines. We hear different variants with and without locking the doors and with and without turning my back on the world, which makes no difference to the thrust whatsoever. Main point: ladies are no longer welcome. The elder Dylan definitely decides on a radical change of tone, gone is the oh-la-la couleur. From now on we listen to a solitary, tormented artist deliberately cutting himself off from the world and its carnal temptations.

Ah, Humboldt exclaimed, what is science then? Gauss sucked his pipe. A man alone at his desk. A sheet of paper in front of him, a telescope at best, the clear sky outside the window. If this man doesn’t give up until he understands. That might be science.
(Measuring the World – Daniel Kehlmann)

Fitting to this new scenario are also the lyrics adjustments in the opening of the second verse, the Coliseum couplet. In 2002, the first time the ladies were discarded, he is still dodging lions and wasting time, and keeps on doing so in the years that follow. Only in 2018, at the resuscitation of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” in the Far East, do we hear:

Well, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodgin’ lions with a mean and hungry look
Those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see ’em
I could see ‘em comin’, I could read their faces like a book

… which is given a much more transparent metaphorical quality by the plot shift to a lonely, tormented artist; Dylan has decided that the artist is no longer idly loitering, down there in the arena – wasting time is dropped once and for all. The Coliseum is now unmistakably the stage, the publicness in which the artist for so long has been offering panem et circenses, bread and games to the public. The lions are now mean and hungry – evoking the critics, the arrogant reviewers, the howlers, the disgruntled fans, the Judas-and-treason-shouting disappointed ones. Who confront the creative, misunderstood genius with the same depressing truth as the young Gauß experiences;

“Not being able to look away was sadness. Being awake was sadness. Recognising, poor Bartels, was despair.”

… I could hardly stand to see ’em, I could see ‘em comin’, I could read their faces like a book.

To be continued. Next up When I Paint My Masterpiece part 6: Pete, money is coming in

———–

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)

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

————

Commentary by Tony Attwood, audio kindly provided by Mr Tambourine.

The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour 17: Every grain of sand

Every grain of sand begins on the video at 3 hours 17 minutes 18 seconds (approx).

This is a 1981 song with a new melody – although really most of the time Bob is just reciting or declaiming the lyrics rather than singing them.  He first performed the piece live in 1981 and the most recent playing of it is shown on the official site as 6 April 2024, making it 382 performances all told by that date.

The style and approach – and indeed most of the arrangement – is similar to that which was used at the end of the Never Ending Tour.  Here for example is the recording from 2013.

Clearly, in terms of live performances, I have seriously diverged from Bob in terms of what works for I really didn’t like the ceaseless repetition of musical phrases, and indeed individual notes in the Tour version, and Bob has kept almost every element of this arrangement.

Of course this is my failing, for in a real sense, this arrangement is a reflection of the lines from the song

There's a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair

But does that need to have individual notes played over and over again, or indeed that same three-note descending pattern, likewise played repeatedly in order to express those lyrics in music?

Of course, Bob is the master, and I’m just a writer – worse I’m a songwriter whose songs never made much money – so I clearly have no right to criticise.  Which means I have to acknowledge that the failure to get any delight from the repeated notes and phrases, or indeed any insight, is entirely mine.

Yes of course there are moments here when the music and the lyrics are as one.  I think particularly of the lines that suggest there is no escape, which is something that I feel the music puts across totally…

I gaze into the doorway of temptation's angry flame
And every time I pass that way, I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey, I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand

In the bitter dance of loneliness, fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face

Sometimes of course with Dylan it is possible to ignore the music and just feel the lyrics – and indeed vice versa.  But here with that endless three note descending line and then the section where the same note is played over and over again, I find I can’t escape from those lines.  Not because I am lonely – fortunately for me that period of my life has long since gone.  It is just that the ceaseless repetition of three notes becomes irritating.

And I guess this is the point.  I love Dylan’s music and his lyrics, and I don’t think I have ever, since first hearing the Freewheelin’ album as a teenager, become irritated with an arrangement… until now.

Of course, it is just me, and I would love it if someone else were to write a review of this performance of this song on the tour, so I could learn from their appreciation of the song. But for now, no this is not for me.  I have however taken comfort in the original album version… and if you have time, do listen to the harmonica solo, just in case you have forgotten it from all those years ago.