Untold Dylan

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

• The Rough and Rowdy Way Tour: 2021.
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour: part 2 Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 3: I contain multitudes
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 4: False Prophet
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 5: When I paint my masterpiece.
• Part 6: Black Rider and let’s not get too excited 
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 7: “I’ll be your baby tonight”

The recording starts at around 35 minutes 40 seconds.

My own version of you is one of those Dylan songs which most of will know immediately from the first bar – those four descending notes appear throughout the song, over and over again, three times in every four lines.   Although to be fair we do get an extra accent at the start of each descending bass line later on as the performance does pick up a lot of extra energy.

It does have what I take to be one of the great latter-day in-jokes of popular music with the line “You can bring it to Jerome” line.

If you are of a certain vintage and musical background as yours truly, you’ll surely get the line: Jerome Green, occasional songwriter but mostly known as Bo Diddley’s maracas player on the tours when he was really becoming known as one of the fathers of R&B,  – the guy who really didn’t want to be hassled by carrying the drum kit around so persuaded Bo that all he needed was two maracas in each hand.

As such he had an easy life, although I think he was actually an accomplished percussionist.  But opting out was very much Jerome’s lifestyle.   He was a pal of Bob Diddley from the early days, being the man who went around with the hat when they played on the streets.   Then in 1955 the little band of street musicians suddenly had a number one hit, with Jerome acting as co-writer on some songs, and of course writing “Bring it to Jerome”.

Jerome played and recorded with Bo Diddley until late 1964, by which time he had something of a reputation as a very solid drinker.  He got married but died some time around 1973, lost to the world of music, and to his family.  He deserves to be remembered far more than he is, and Bob’s mention of him here is more than welcome in my house.

I actually interviewed Jerome when I saw Bo Diddley play on stage as a teenager when the band toured England and came to play in Bournemouth near where I live.  It was my first-ever interview of a famous musician.  I was shaking like a leaf.

But back to Bob.   Although the song sounds utterly repetitive it does have built-in variations, starting out with four lines the same line before the final two lines which vary the theme.  Then the verses get longer and the ending varies.

Yet despite the changes it is the atmosphere of the song that carries it through to the crescendo at the end of each verse.  But as for the “bring it to Jerome verse” does it give us a clue as to what is going on?

You can bring it to St. Peter
You can bring it to Jerome
You can bring it all the way over
Bring it all the way home
Bring it to the corner where the children play
You can bring it to me on a silver tray
I'll bring someone to life, spare no expense
Do it with decency and common sense

For thereafter we have the sudden accent at the start of each line for the extended final verse with his gory details and additional weight on the beat and then a strangely slowing down, down-beat ending.

Is it the descent of mankind?   Is it the ever slower plod of footsteps as one gets older?  I don’t know, but I do find the “Bring it to Jerome” line fascinating.  It is a direct quote, and this reference to how Jerome Green, a lively, fun, talented musician just suddenly withdrew from music and passe away so young.  Is that part of telling us “the history of the whole human race” as something that plods along step by step?

Indeed I move toward such thoughts as in moments of being downcast and worried about life, or myself I think I have often felt like shouting out

Is there light at the end of the tunnel?
Can you tell me, please?

And I am tempted to stay with the vision that this is the clue to it all, this life moving from a rhythm and blues man who died far too young to the “Trojan women and children were sold into slavery”

Reddit has a long detailed discussion following on from lines such as

Mr. Freud with his dreams, Mr. Marx with his ax
See the raw hide lash rip the skin from their backs

but upon reflection I think that as so often this misses the point: this is as much about the sound of the words as the individual disconnected images.  Yes it can be explained with convoluted thoughts such as ” the axe comes to refer to an obsolete technology that Marx rejected,” or as saying something about the sadness of Jerome Green’s early death, as I have suggested, but it can also just be a set of images over a rather spooky sounding repeated accompaniment suggesting the world plods along, and we are just ants scampering around on the surface.

And indeed that is what this performance shows me.  It is a set of random lines that spring to Bob’s mind as he surveys the world he has known.  There’s no significance in each line; it is the overall feeling of those constant downward steps in the accompaniment that is central to all this.

Forget the meaning and this is as moving and worrying as a walk along an empty dark corridor where just one light bulb is occasionally flashing off and on.  It is a reflection of a troubling world which we can’t fully understand because of itself it is not comprehensible.  Just keep taking the steps one after another, and try not to fall over.

I utterly adore this performance as it really does seem to me to be reflecting the world Dylan sees and portrays.  A world that just keeps on moving on, without us being any more signficant than a bunch of ants upon whom someone might stand at any moment.

Yes Jerome left music and passed away so young… and he could have done so much more.  Did he have a great life after leaving the band?  I fear probably not, and that’s the horror of it all.  This is, I fear, nothing other than the story of our discontent.

Water’s gonna overflow

“Maybe you noticed that most of my songs are traditionally rooted. I don’t do that on purpose. Charley Patton’s 30’s blues has made a deep impression on me and High Water (for Charley Patton) is, in my opinion, the best song of this record,” says Dylan at the Rome press conference, July 2001.

I do agree. Well, ex aequo with “Mississippi”, anyway. Both songs open the floodgates (no pun intended), and “High Water” belongs in the same outer category as “Desolation Row”, “Mississippi” and “I Contain Multitudes”; extremely rich, poetic, Nobel Prize-worthy musical gems. Lovely, lovely song.

Published: Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton) (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Markhorst, Jochen: 9798883642653: Amazon.com: Books

High Water (for Charley Patton) (2001) part 20

by Jochen Markhorst

XX        Odds and ends

 A fascinating dilemma for Duluth’s peace officers and law keepers if today or tomorrow a complaint comes in about the city’s most famous son. It’s plain as day though; Dylan does indeed sing the n-word. “The Negro’s name is used” in “Only A Pawn In Their Game” (The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964) and eleven years later even a degree stronger in “Hurricane”: To the black folks he was just a crazy nigger. Unthinkable it is not, such a complaint. In 2019, Duluth school district administrators decide to remove Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird and Mark Twain’s Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn from the curriculum “to protect the dignity of our students” and not require them to read books that marginalise them. Duluth is not alone herein; in the twenty-first century alone, the tally stands at over 20 school districts where Harper Lee’s pièce de résistance is being removed from reading lists plus dozens of attempts to do so. And usually complainants then invoke the perceived offensive use of the n-word. Like in Biloxi, Mississippi, where a concerned mother complains that her son feels “uncomfortable” with its use in Mockingbird – which, ironically, seems to be precisely the intention of Lee’s 1960 novel, the 1962 film version starring Gregory Peck and Aaron Sorkin’s 2018 stage adaptation.

Morrissey – Only a Pawn in Their Game:

The ongoing controversy gets a new boost in 2015, when publishers HarperCollins (US) and Heinemann (UK) release Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, initially touted as “the sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird”. Excitement about this soon gives way to sobering; Go Set a Watchman turns out to be not so much a sequel as rather a kind of preliminary study – Harper Lee wrote the work before To Kill A Mockingbird. After constructive criticism from an apparently knowledgeable editor, Therese von Hohoff Torrey, Lee lifted out the flashback passages centered around young Scout, and rewrote them into what is now the classic. “Draft manuscript” is thus a more correct classification for Go Set a Watchman than “novel” or “sequel”.

It is perfectly common for fragments and passages from rejected manuscripts to be saved for reuse in a subsequent attempt or, indeed, for reuse in a subsequent, different work of art. Bach disregarded the eternal value of his vibrant Brandenburg Concertos and unconcernedly cut and copied from it for later cantatas and even an entire harpsichord concerto (BWV 1057). Haydn’s Schöpfungsmesse (Creation Mass, 1801) contains scraps originally intended for Die Schöpfung, Beethoven’s Eroica is recycled ballet music, and there are hundreds more examples.

From literati, novelists and poets, even from giants like T.S. Eliot and Kafka, we can observe how deleted fragments from first drafts are later recycled in subsequent works. Which gives admirers fascinating insights into the creation of works of art, and critics ammunition: after all, interchangeability and reuse do undermine the idea that those admired symphonies, poems, novels and song lyrics are self-enclosed, autonomous works of art.

We know plenty of examples in Dylan’s oeuvre as well. Thanks to the Bootleg Series, we discover how outtakes like “Marchin’ To The City” and “Dreamin’ Of You” are plundered to contribute half couplets and complete verse lines to “‘Til I Fell In Love With You” and “Not Dark Yet”, among others. And in 2022, we see that artifice when we get to peruse draft versions and loose notes via the archive in Tulsa. For instance, we decipher Got to believe that you’re alive, at least that’s what to tell yourself in the “James Joyce stanza”, a verse line that moves paraphrased to No 5 of Side A, to “Lonesome Day Blues”: I’m telling myself I’m still alive. And we see the mechanism on a micro level as well: the migration of word combinations and even single words to later songs.

Saturday Nite Fish Fry – Lonesome Day Blues:

The draft versions of “High Water”, both the published copies and the rejected verses published by authors like Clinton Heylin after visiting the archive, provide quite a few aha moments in this area. In The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2: 1966-2021 (2023), Heylin quotes three more distichs that struck him. The first one looks familiar:

James Joyce left in the roaring rain
Rode to Rosedale but they wouldn’t let him off the train

The second line we initially know as Got pulled in Vicksburg but they wouldn’t let him off the train (something like that, anyway) from the other draft version, but in the definitive version only “Vicksburg” survives. Rosedale, though mentioned in Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere”, we won’t see again in Dylan’s oeuvre, nor the claustrophobic train experience.

“James Joyce”, to whom Dylan previously tried to give a place, between the lines of what was once a third verse, disappears too. In that third verse from the draft, of which not a trace remains as it is, James already had a hard time: “James Joyce just walked in the door like he’d been in a whirlwind”. Deleted, but not entirely evaporated. James Joyce then makes his “grande” entrance into Dylan’s oeuvre eight years later, on Together Through Life in “I Feel A Change Comin’ On”. Well, actually not really “grande” and much less spectacular at that (“I’m hearing Billy Joe Shaver / And I’m reading James Joyce”), but still. The spectacular setting, the whirlwind, lingers a little longer in Dylan’s working memory, but eventually finds a place too: in “Tempest” (2012).

For that marathon song from the album of the same name, Dylan has apparently been browsing his “High Water” draft versions quite a bit. At least, we hear a remarkable amount of noticeable idiom that we really only encounter once in sixty years of Dylan songs:

– High Water draft: River banks are swelling
– Tempest: the swelling tide

– High Water draft: James Joyce just walked in the door like he’d been in a whirlwind
– Tempest: He walked into the whirlwind

– High Water draft: Livin’ there in the underworld
– Tempest: Into the underworld

– High Water draft: I’m looking as far to the East as the eye can see
– Tempest: He saw the starlight shining streaming from the East
and much more similarly in – again – “I Feel a Change Comin’ On”:
– Looking far off into the East

– High Water draft: in the dreadful hours of dawn
– Tempest: In the long and dreadful hours

Taken by itself, each fragment is too unremarkable to be classified as re-use, but after the fifth notice, the coincidence factor can pretty much be ruled out. As also, with the benefit of hindsight, that Got pulled in Vicksburg but they wouldn’t let him off the train line does sound very much like an echo of a rejected line from the alternative “Dignity” version on Tell Tale Signs: “Pull into the platform, step off the train”. According to Dylans’s own origination report written in January 1988, recorded – and rejected – during the Oh Mercy sessions in 1989. So a 13-year-old echo of the song that kept him writing for a day and a night, as he writes in Chronicles:

“There were more verses with other individuals in different interplays. The Green Beret, The Sorceress, Virgin Mary, The Wrong Man, Big Ben, and The Cripple and The Honkey. The list could be endless. All kinds of identifiable characters that found their way into the song but somehow didn’t survive.”

Other individuals and identifiable characters such as James Joyce, Joe Turner, Dr Frankenstein and Huckleberry Finn, one would be inclined to think. Some of whom then turn out, years later, to have survived after all. You got to believe that you’re alive, at least that’s what to tell yourself.

————

To be continued. Next up High Water (For Charley Patton) part 21: Dat first rate ballad

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)

By Tony Attwood

I started writing this series (A Dylan Cover A Day) two and a half years ago, and for quite a while it was something I put up each day, but then the pandemic ended, other events happened, and it became a once every few days affair.   But I have really grown rather fond of it, not because I like my own writing or opinions (often the reverse) but because I have discovered so many new cover versions as I’ve done the basic research.

As with the two versions below.   Going back to the earlier days of this site I wrote quite a long review of the song which is still there if you want to take a look, but didn’t include any cover versions, probably because I couldn’t find any.

And they are indeed thin on the ground.  I won’t include the Girl from the North Country versions, as they always seem to me “show versions” rather than “cover versions” – show versions not really being intended to stand alone, but to be part of the complete theatrical performance from which they come.

Which leaves me with just two covers.   And how amazingly different they are.

Martha Scanlan’s version has a few seconds of guitar before the percussion comes in, which until that moment is a perfect musical accompaniment to the picture on the cover of the album (below).   But fortunately (as far as I am concerned) the prominence of the percussion is reduced (although I would have liked to have it reduced even further – and that is because the vocals here are exquisite.   In fact I would have taken the bass guitar down as well.

Actually, I am not sure I know another recorded version of any Dylan song where I would pay to lay my hands on the studio recording and produce a version in which those two instruments are taken further and further back.

The harmonies, the strings, the piano, and of course Martha’s voice, are just so wonderful for this song, I could cry at the way the rest of the instrumentation is added.  But still, it remains worth hearing and appreciating.  It turns what was for me another Dylan song from a not overwhelmingly inspired moment into something beautiful – but then has it removed by the arrangement.  Ah well, so it goes.

And now by way of absolute contradiction, Al Kooper, who basically takes the view that if you going to play rock n roll, then damn well play rock n roll and don’t mess about in any halfway house.

I’m not sure it works as a piece of music, but it really makes me smile – especially the female vocals.   It is not a version I come back to for the fun of it, but I have been known to torment a few Dylan purist friends with it too.

The middle 8 particularly is a scream.   I don’t really like this, but I’m pleased to have a copy.   Not least because then I can go back to Martha.

Bob has never played the song in public.  I wonder what he would have made of it?

Indeed, in the ludicrous concept that somehow I was transported into being Bob Dylan, I think I would go through all the songs that I had never ever played on stage and introduce one of them into each concert.   Just for the fun of it.

Now wouldn’t that be something?

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

“The Lyrics and the Music” is a series by Tony Attwood which tries to find out what happens when one reviews a Dylan song not primarily as a set of lyrics, but as a piece of music which includes lyrics.   An updated list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.

——–

Highway 61 Revisited is one of just three songs that Dylan has performed live, 2000 times or more.  The other two are “Like a Rolling Stone” and “All along the watchtower”.

So journalists seeking a shortcut in terms of writing about the piece are likely to call it “iconic” – a symbol of Dylan’s compositions worthy of veneration; a symbol of the 628 songs Dylan has composed or co-composed.

And yes of course it holds a special place in our minds, the title song of the LP and (if you really have a good memory for irrelevant pieces of information) the B side to the single “Can you please crawl out your window”.

The opening line itself is iconic, “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’,” – no one surely has ever written an opening line like that.   You can’t be a Dylan fan without knowing it.

But what of the music?  And it is interesting, for although I am sure there must be some articles on the music of this song, I can’t immediately bring any to mind.   And indeed such is the historic and contemporary power of the song, I had to play it through in my head to check that my memory how the song is constructed was right.

And yes, the answer is dead simple: it is an extended 12 bar blues, based on the three standard chords of the blues and rock n roll.  What of course distinguishes it from every other 12 bar blues (the fundamental music of the blues and early rock n roll) is the lyrics.

For the lyrics, from the off, are so outrageous, that it is hard to take in what the music is actually doing.  It is there, supporting the lyrics.   I mean, how would you write music to the opening lines,

Abe said, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God said, "No", Abe said, "What?"

Build in complexity to the music and the sheer oddity of those lines in any context (let alone in a rock song, or a piece of popular music) would be lost.

And this is part of Bob’s unerring grasp of his art.  It may sound dead simple to say, but many a songwriter has failed to get it: if you want a piece of popular music that is going to be grasped at once, you can make the lyrics complex, or you can make the music complex, but not both.

Of course many songs do make both the lyrics and music complex at once – Bob did it with the wonderful “Angelina” for example, but then he is not aiming at writing a blockbuster that everyone will get the moment they hear it.  (You try singing the opening lines of “Angelina” from memory, or even after listening to it once through, and you’ll find it rather hard).   On the other hand with “Like a Rolling Stone” it is the melody that is simple but the lyrics which are complex.

So Bob wanted a blockbuster both in terms of the lyrics and in terms of the music.   That meant a solid beat with a bounce in it, a simple 12 bar blues construction using the classic three chords, and one hell of an opening line, which of course we got.

But then there is a problem, because we all know the 12 bar blues construction from classic blues songs with the repeated first line, but Bob wanted to make an enormous impact than that would allow, as of course he did with

God said, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
God said, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
Out on Highway 61

Georgia Sam, he had a bloody nose
Welfare Department wouldn't give him no clothes
He asked poor Howard, "Where can I go?"
Howard said, "There's only one place I know"

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 uses recordings selected by Mike Johnson in his inestimable masterpiece The Never Ending Tour, and looks at how those performances change as time goes by.   The selection of songs from the series, and the commentary, are by Tony Attwood.

—————–

Bob Dylan first performed “Forever Young” in 1974, four years before it was released on record, and went on to perform it 493 times, concluding in November 2011.

In the Never Ending Tour series we first picked up on the song in 1987, indeed in the very first of the 144 articles that Mike provided us within in his comprehensive review of the Tour.

This first performance that we have on record is indeed most curious.  There is one of the longest instrumental introductions I can remember to a song on tour, followed by Bob destroying the melody by calling out the lyrics in two word bursts with only a cursory relationship with the melody.   The chorus still retains the melody but otherwise… what on earth was he thinking about?   I have no idea, except that maybe people had been begging him to perform it, and he didn’t like the song, so decided to make it sound awful.

But of course maybe I just don’t like this rendition – and I’ll add a little personal context at the end to explain why that might be.  Or maybe I don’t realise that songs don’t need melodies – although I don’t think that’s right.  I do think that is a horrible treatment.

1987 – Farewell to all that

But whatever it was that was bugging him, Bob got it out of his system, and two years later was showing us that he realised that this was a complicated song: a love piece, and a song of devotion, plus a song of impossible wishes.

So here Bob goes out of his way to point out that it is not just the melody but also the chord structure which adds to the piece.  But he’s still being perverse: for half the song it is a guitar and vocal piece just like the early days, and then he brings in…. the percussion, with the guitar just constantly repeating the chords!!!   And all I can say is “what????”

We get a spot of relief from the constant strumming when the percussion joins – but really; an arrangement of acoustic guitar, harmonica and thumping drum, for a song with the chorus line, “May you stay forever young”?????

And what of those last few seconds?   Mind you there is a guy shouting “Bravo bravo” over and over at the end, so he obviously gets it.  If I could find who that was, I’d love to have him review this performance rather than me.

1989 – Blown out on the trail

After hearing those early performances I really did begin to wonder if Bob hated the song.

But of course I am wrong, as I always am if I try to predict anything to do with Bob.   In 1993 he delivered of the song a version that finally did it absolute justice in my view.   It is a beautiful love song whether it is aimed at a child by a father or at an 18 year old by a lover of the same age.

Now we have a version that I can listen to.  There is a touch of that incessant repetition just for a few seconds in the instrumental break but that only sets me on edge because of listening to the earlier versions.   This time Bob doesn’t descend.  He stays in the ethereal.

And I wonder, was this his decision, or did someone point out to him that those earlier performances were destroying something of beauty?   We won’t know of course, but there is a lovely ending too.

1993: The Supper Club and beyond.

So the question then became, which of these approaches would Bob retain?  Would he go back to destroying a work of beauty (and of course this is just my opinion – and as ever it is perfectly reasonable to reply “what do you know?”).

Well, what Bob actually added was more beat, and gave the percussion a more prominent part generally, but much of the beauty of the song remained – although, although…. that highly repetitive nature of the instrumental break at 3 minutes worries me.     And indeed it comes again later.

Is Bob really thinking “Let’s emphasise the ‘forever’ nature of the piece by playing the same notes over and over and over again?”   He might be, although I’d love to think that’s not it.  There must be something else.

1998 Friends and other strangers

So where did it all end up?   Below is the last recording we have from the Never Ending Tour of this song, and now he almost sounds like a grandfather giving his love to a grandchild.   He loses some of the melody again and the temptation to have those double beats in the rhyme is still there, but the feeling of genuine concern comes across.

However, here’s the thing: all reviews like this are based on our own lives and world experiences.  And there’s a very strong element of that here, as one of my grand daughters now in her teenage years is revealing an extraordinary talent as an actor.  I watch her in amazement and see her taking on more and more complex parts, but most of all I want to say, “Of course I won’t be alive to watch all your career blossom, but whatever happens, ‘stay forever young’.”   Remember these early years wherever your talent takes you.

2011 I  lit the torch and looked to the east

Other articles in this series…

• Absolutely Sweet Marie
• Blind Willie McTell. 1997-2006
• Blowing in the Wind. 1991-2001
• Desolation Row beyond imagination: 1992-2017
• Don’t think twice it’s alright 1993-1997
• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• 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
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• One too many mornings. 
• Rainy day women, from push to stroke
• 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
• 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 Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour

• The Rough and Rowdy Way Tour: 2021.
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour: part 2 Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 3: I contain multitudes
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 4: False Prophet
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 5: When I paint my masterpiece.
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour: Part 6 Black Rider and “let’s not get too excited”

I’ll be your baby tonight

The song starts around the 31 minute mark.

Another Dylan long-term favourite on stage with over 600 performances, differentiated this time by the thumping accompaniment: it has become a straightforward rocker.  But generally straightforward rock songs have some sort of distinguishing feature for Bob, either in the unusual accompaniment or in the instrumental break, or the way in which Bob himself performs, but there is nothing really here to distinguish this version.

However there is an oddity, for suddenly, without any warning, the song goes down to half speed for the last run-through.

Now I really don’t get this at all; I can’t understand any of the decisions made in the arrangement.  So I thought it might be interesting to look at the last recording we have of this song from the Never Ending Tour series – this being in 2015

Now there is not too much that is different in terms of Bob’s approach which is partly declaimed and partly sung, but what made it work back in 2015 was the gentle and almost lilting nature of the accompaniment.

And indeed on hearing this once more, it really leaped out at me that the lyrics are “I’ll be your baby tonight” which is gentle loving phrase, linked to the romantic nature of the lyrics throughout.  Take the “middle 8” for example

Well, the mockingbird's gonna sail away
We're gonna forget it
Big old moon's gonna shine like a spoon
We're gonna let it - you won't regret it

Close your eyes - close the door
You don't have to worry any more
I'll be your baby tonight

Shut the light - shut the shade
You don't have to be afraid
I'll be your baby tonight

• The Rough and Rowdy Way Tour: 2021.
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour: part 2 Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 3: I contain multitudes
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 4: False Prophet
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 5: When I paint my masterpiece.
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 6: Black Rider

by Jochen Markhorst

XIX       Water’s gonna overflow

It does show a circled “3” at the top, but the draft version photographed by the Rolling Stone journalist when he visited the Bob Dylan Centre archives in 2017 does seem to be the very first version anyway – perhaps Dylan put the 3 above it because this was page 3 of a notebook. Or perhaps because he came up with three variants (two in black, the third in blue) on this draft alone. The opening couplet of this – supposed – primordial version can still be deciphered reasonably well:

High water risin’ – putting lime in my face
High water risin’ – it’s hard, leaving this place 
I’m looking as far to the East as the eye can see 
Trying to get a glimpse of what might be
Dreaming of an old love affair – high water’s everywhere

Presumably primal version, as Joe Turner is not yet mentioned. A name Dylan seems to want to have in there pretty soon after scribbling down this first draft; we see in brackets next to line 3: Joe Turner looking east and west from the dark room of his mind, the line that will eventually be chosen with the addition “Big”, and below three more variants with “Joe Turner”.

In the other so-called “draft manuscript”, the version printed on page 496 in Mixing Up The Medicine, the third line is “Joe Turner he got away (tried to)” and something with “Got to Kansas City / Got no place to play” – which seems to confirm that this draft version was written later than the version without “Joe Turner”. Also illustrating once again, incidentally, that “Big Joe Turner” is a last-minute addition, and that at the creation stage Dylan had the protagonist from the antique folk song “Joe Turner” in mind.

Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton Joe Turner’s Blues: 

More revealing than that relatively weightless Joe/Big Joe switch is the tenor of this primal couplet, suggesting an entirely different slant from what the cultural-historical mosaic “High Water” eventually became.

It seems that the opening words high water risin’ were the trigger, the catalyst, as Dylan will call it 2020 (New York Times interview, on the Walt Whitman quote I contain multitudes), and that the stream of consciousness initially leads him to lyricism like in 1967’s Basement gem “Down In The Flood (Crash On The Levee)”: metaphorical use of “high water”, “flood” and “levee crash”, to express the state of mind of a man who has had enough of his wife. Here we have a narrator who is “leaving this place”, looking for a new future (looking East, trying to get a glimpse of what might be), stone-faced (lime in my face), and who muses on a previous, presumably long-forgotten love interest; he is a man who is again “dreaming of an old love affair”.

The gentler version, all in all, of the narrator in “Down In The Flood”, who snarls at his wife “don’t you make a sound”, growls “pack up your suitcase”, a man who “refuses” her and tells her to take the train, and advises her to “find another best friend”. Meanwhile, the metaphors the narrator uses to express his displeasure are identical to “High Water”: high tide’s risin’, crash on the levee, water’s gonna overflow, go down in the flood.

The Derek Trucks Band – Down In The Flood:

It is quite likely that Dylan, with his documented aversion to repetition, would also see, no later than after about four of five lines into the conception stage, the similarity to his sneering song from over 30 years before. “Down In The Flood” is, after all, one of those few songs for which he still feels affection after the Basement months. Indeed, it is not unlikely that “Down In The Flood” (or “Crash On The Levee”; the titles are used interchangeably) was an initial trigger for “High Water” in the first place. After “Down In The Flood” is polished, it gets an honourable place on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II in 1971: the re-recorded version with Happy Traum is the bestseller’s finale. A few weeks after the release of the double album, Dylan steps on stage at The Band’s New Year’s Eve concert in New York (1 January 1972) to play four songs with his old compadres, and “Crash On The Levee (Down In The Flood)” is the opening track. After that, the song slowly gathers dust – Dylan doesn’t look back at it for over 20 years.

But then it’s 1995, and Dylan starts his spring tour in Prague on 11 March, opening the concert with the pleasant surprise “Crash On The Levee” in a considerably roughened version with stadium rock-like Rolling Stones quality. It does please; the song stays on the setlist and is used 88 times as a concert opener in 1995. Ditto in ’96 and ’97; dozens of times on the setlist, always as an opener. In the run-up to the recording days for “Love And Theft” (8-21 May 2001), Dylan plays the song less often, and “Crash On The Levee” is no longer the opener, but the song is still alive – two days before Dylan goes into the studio, 6 May 2001, he plays the song in Memphis, as number six on the setlist.

It is further notable that the last three performances of the song (4, 5 and 6 May) are each preceded by the cover of the time-honoured Roy Acuff song “This World Can’t Stand Long” (1947), the song Dylan has been performing with some regularity since 2000 – always respectful and quite authentical acoustic performances, usually with Larry Campbell on mandolin, Charlie Sexton and Dylan acoustic guitar,Tony Garnier on upright bass and modest drum accompaniment by David Kemper, ending with the chorus as a fine three-part a cappella. In an arrangement, in short, that is already suspiciously close to the studio recording of “High Water”. The substantive link with “Crash On The Levee” – and by extension with “High Water” – is of course obvious:

This world was destroyed before
Because it was so full of sin
And for that very reason now
It's gotta be destroyed again

… after all, Roy Acuff’s song recalls the greatest flood of all.

So on 4, 5 and 6 May, Dylan plays “This World Can’t Stand Long” plus “Crash On The Levee” sisterly side by side, and on Tuesday 8 May he enters the studio in New York for the recording of “Love And Theft”. The first two days are spent taping “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum”, “Summer Days” and “Honest With Me”, Thursday and Friday the band is off, Saturday 12 May is spent recording “Bye And Bye” and “Floater”, then three days off, and from Wednesday 16 May to Saturday 19 May the rest of the album is recorded (and on Monday 21 May another recording day is dedicated to the Time Out Of Mind-outtake “Mississippi”). Thursday 17 May is reserved for “High Water”. Two takes, the first being chosen for the album.

An educated guess is that Dylan wrote “High Water (for Charley Patton)” in the days leading up to its recording. We owe the clearest indication of this to engineer Chris Shaw’s testimony in Uncut, the revelation that “a lot of editing” took place, and that the editing included the verse order of “High Water” – apparently the song was not yet finished when recording began.

The most likely scenario for the creation process is then, all things considered:

– in the week before Dylan goes into the studio, he plays the combination “This World Can’t Stand Long” with “Crash On The Levee” three times; the word combination high water risin’ is now floating somewhere in the upper stream of his prefrontal cortex;

– high water risin’ floats almost naturally into an already deepened navigation channel, the channel dug à l’improviste in the Basement by “Crash On The Levee” 34 years ago;

– after a few lines Dylan notices this too, but thankfully the rhyme finding old love affair / everywhere opens new vistas – high water’s everywhere leads the flow of thought to Charley Patton.

At least, that apostrophe -s in high water’s everywhere seems to tell us that Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere” was not the catalyst, but suddenly comes out of the blue now. “None of those songs with designated names are intentionally written,” Dylan says in that same 2020 New York Times interview, “they just fall down from space. I’m just as bewildered as anybody else as to why I write them.”

To be continued. Next up High Water (For Charley Patton) part 20: Odds and Ends

Details of our other series can be found on the home page

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

By Tony Attwood

I have written before about how highly I rate “Well, well, well” and since then have discovered a few more covers which again I rate highly.  But I should add the caveat that there is at least one other song with the same title, so if you go a-searching you might come up with something that was not co-written by Bob at all.

This first one however does actually make it clear that this is the Dylan co-composition.   These guys get a fantastic sound out of the song – it is one of those cover versions which make me think, this must be the original, even though I know it isn’t.  It is the care with which the instrumental arrangements fit with the vocals that really knocks me out.

And remember it was co-written by Bob Dylan; how can this be not better known?

With Bonnie Raitt there is a 40 second introduction which isn’t really necessary to listen to in order to appreciate the music.  Another artist that appreciates just what a gem this song is.  It really deserves to be much better known.

There must be something in this song that makes people want to talk about it rather than sing it.  Danny O’Keefe gives us 90 seconds of talk first about how he came to write the song with Bob Dylan, which I can excuse – I mean if Bob ever asked me to help him out with a song, I’d still be talking about it six weeks later.  But if you want to know about the songs origins do listen, or otherwise skip forward.  As I said last time I featured this song, this is so worth hearing…

I’ll finish with Don Henley, not because I think it is the best of all but because one of the key issues with this song is that allows itself to be re-arranged into many different shapes and approaches and still come out shining.   If only artists and their producers were not so drawn to covering the same Dylan songs that everyone else had done, maybe we could have even more superb covers of this wonderful piece.

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

“The Lyrics and the Music” is a series by Tony Attwood which tries to find out what happens when one reviews a Dylan song not primarily as a set of lyrics, but as a piece of music which includes lyrics.   An updated list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.

In a 1963 radio interview Bob said, “No, it’s not atomic rain, it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen … In the last verse, when I say, “the pellets of poison are flooding the waters”, that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers.”

That comment I think gives us an insight into the lyrics, which is bolstered by listening to the rather obvious effect of the music.  Musically, it is, in its original form, a gentle, highly repetitive song.

But that doesn’t really tell us the whole story, because in western culture one of the most common forms of gentle, repetitive songs, is nursery rhymes like “Ba ba blacksheep.”  (You’ll have to forgive me here, I don’t know if that is a song known outside of the UK, but if not, take it from it, it is very gentle and simple and sung to children to help them go to sleep).

Musically “Hard Rain” is indeed highly repetitive.   The first two lines are very similar, the difference being that the second line ends on the dominant chord, which gives us a feeling that we’ve reached a turning point, and something different will happen.

We then get five lines beginning with “I” and then the two chorus lines containing the title.

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

It is a very gentle song; if one heard the music and did not know the lyrics (which of course is now impossible) it could almost be a nursery rhyme, and the places one has visited could have been places a child would know.

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

I've been to see Grandma and I've been to see Grandad...

OK that sounds really weird because we know the song, but if we did not, it is a song that could be invented as a calming process when the child is settled down at night and for fun the song changes each night to record what actually happened.   (And really I can’t believe I was the only dad who sang to his children as they settled down for night…. nor the only one who amused them by changing the lyrics and the songs sometimes…)

Anyway, it could have been a gentle lullaby, given the music, but in fact it is a warning about the end of the world, which gives us a staggering contrast between the gentle music and what the lyrics actually say; a contrast that makes the song all the more effective.

Now this is quite a hard trick to pull off.  A lesser composer would have given us sharp-edged chords and a jagged or monotonous melody.   And yes Dylan does repeat the music in the main body of the verse over and over: we get lines in the main body of the song anything between five and twelve times in a verse.  And it makes the point – we are being pushed down and down and down by what is happening around us.

That of course could be horribly dull, but it is rescued by various factors.  First through the contrast between the delicate nature of the music and the horrors portrayed in the lyrics.  Second because of the total abandonment of rhyming after the first two lines of each verse.  And third, as noted just now, because we get the same musical line over and over and over as if we are being driven down deeper and deeper into the ground by the terrible events that the song relates.

To my mind it really was here, in this song, that Bob Dylan realised just how far he could take popular music and folk music.   The length could be anything.  The subject matter could move as far away from the traditional “love, lost love and dance” themes of popular music.   Repetition of the music to a level never heard before could be used if the lyrics were interesting and varied enough.  And perhaps most extraordinary of all, for any musician listening, the verses could be of different lengths (nine lines in the first verse, 16 in the last verse).

This was in fact a song that tore up the rule book and threw it out the window.   But that could have resulted in something that was nothing more than a jumble, if Dylan had not constructed a new format that held the song together.  And for that he needed the repeating lyrics, as well as the repeating music.

It is, in fact, not just a work of lyrical and musical genius, it is a song that offered songwriters a chance to see just how far the song format could be taken.  It is hardly Bob’s fault that so few of them had the ability to take the hint and try it themselves.

The lyrics and the music: the series…

• Series intro: most analyses of Dylan’s songs mistake the essence of what the songs are
• 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
• Idiot wind
• It ain’t me babe
• 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: Comparing recordings of Dylan performing his own compositions across the years.

This series uses recordings selected by Mike Johnson in his inestimable masterpiece The Never Ending Tour, and looks at how those performances change as time goes by.   The selection of songs from the series, and the commentary, are by Tony Attwood.

———–

“Spirit on the Water” from Modern Times was played 547 times by Dylan and the band between 2006 and 2018, when it was finally put to bed.  In this piece I’m going to look at five snapshots: Dylan’s live performances from 2006 (when it all started) through to 2016, just three years before the Never Ending Tour actually ended.

2006 part 2:  Enter Modern Times

Bob and the band are actually performing this in a different key from on the album – one tone lower in fact.  I guess this was not because his voice was not happy reaching the high notes but rather to accommodate some of the small changes he has made in the melody.

And somehow, although this is indeed still a gentle song, some of that gentle reflectiveness of the album recording has gone, as Bob does his thing of emphasising some of the words in a half-spoken. half-sung way.

For me it is a performance that is ok, but has that element in it that I do find in some of the early stage versions of songs where Bob hasn’t yet found some new variations in the music and is playing around with the vocals a bit.  It is as if the stage shows are themselves rehearsals for what comes next, which is an interesting approach, although it can be a bit frustrating if it happens too often on one night.   But then, that’s Bob.

2008 part 1: Industry Standards and Dallas Delights

And if that was what happened, then now, two years on, there is that fraction of an extra bounce in the music that makes all the difference.  Bob’s singing is now responding to this and we are on our way.   For as a result the feel is more gentle, more sympathetic, more caring.  The band is still doing its thing, but somehow in a slightly more restrained way with some extra caresses from the guitar that are only there if you really are listening for them.

In short we still have the bounce, but it is not quite as dominant as before, meaning we can focus on Bob’s singing, although I suspect anyone who didn’t know the lyrics would have a lot of problems understanding them.

However, for me Bob loses the way in the middle 8 and can’t sustain the new approach lyrically throughout, and yet the performance is totally rescued by the gorgeous instrumental break at 3 minutes 45 seconds.   It doesn’t totally work, as is always the way with improvisations, but even so, it deserves more than the smattering of applause it gets.

And the second instrumental after the six minute marker really is fun – and that’s without knowing what it was that turned the audience on at that point.

2010 part 3: Jumping on the monkey’s back

Now the bounce is friskier – or if you prefer bouncier, and somehow Bob’s part sung part declaimed approach fits with this perfectly.   And what’s interesting is there is still a joy in Bob’s voice and no sign of repetition taking its effect.   The melody still gets some changes, but most of the developments are in the instrumentation, but only there if you listen carefully.   Overall, there is now a real feeling of this as an old friend that is to be caressed and nurtured, rather than just wheeled out, because everyone expects it.

Indeed this is a perfect example of where Bob’s declaimed style (as opposed to a conventional singing of the song) works completely.

There is also an interesting instrumental break around 3 minutes 40 seconds, which sounds to me rather different from all that has gone before with the bass reaching its highest possible notes against the staccato organ part.   And do listen to what the organ does when Bob’s voice comes back in as we move into the fifth minute of the song.

All in all this is where a song benefits from so many performances.  It has evolved to such a degree that the second break with the ultra-simple harmonica part, which ends the performance, really, really works.

2013 – part 3  A Date with The Faerie Queene?

As this version starts, once again I feel this is going to be another bit of fun, and an enjoyable listen.   By now the song has become very much an old favourite within which small variations can always be found without the essence of the song being removed in any way.

And there really is a sense that Bob is enjoying it too – as if he is caressing a favoured pet.  The lyrics are often unintelligible but then by now who cares?   And I get the real feeling that the band love it too.   There is a perfect gentleness in the instrumental sections which seems to make it all complete.

2016 part 1  Riding the Wave

This is one of the last recordings we have from the tour of this song, and Bob’s voice is more dominant here.  There’s not too much new here but rather a feeling that although by now the band has played the song so often, it is still an enjoyable experience for them.

Although maybe there is also a feeling that it has been performed enough.   The variations in the instrumentation sound a little more forced, as if they are looking for changes rather than just finding them.

So, a good moment to say farewell to a piece that Bob was clearly extremely fond of.  It’s maybe been performed a little too often, and that heavier than normal beat at the end doesn’t quite seem right to me… but then Bob’s the boss.  And it is throughout a really great song.

Other articles in this series…

• Absolutely Sweet Marie
• Blind Willie McTell. 1997-2006
• Blowing in the Wind. 1991-2001
• Desolation Row beyond imagination: 1992-2017
• Don’t think twice it’s alright 1993-1997
• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• 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
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• One too many mornings. 
• Rainy day women, from push to stroke
• 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
• 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 Rough and Rowdy Way Tour: 2021.
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour: part 2 Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 3: I contain multitudes
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 4: False Prophet
• The Rought and Rowdy Ways Tour part 5: When I paint my masterpiece.

The song runs from approximately 27 minutes into the concert to 31 minutes and indeed Black Rider is performed at pretty much the same speed on stage as it did on the album, although somehow it seems to me to be more strung out.

I have a problem here because although I am fascinated by the lyrics which have from the off seemed to me simply an address to Death (not a really an original concept) with the notion that Death can be cheated (again not really original – but very unusual for a song that is not in the classic blues style).

And as I wonder about making the song simply a declamation over a series of 16 chords I guess that is as valid a way of writing music about death as any.  Indeed in a real sense it works because the question can be raised, how else do you address Death (if you are going to at all)?   But then each time I listen I reach the end wondering exactly where I have got to, have I enjoyed the experience of the song, have I learned anything, have I appreciated anything, was this a good use of my time?   I’m still struggling with that.

What’s interesting in the concert is that the song comes between “When I paint my masterpiece” and “I’ll be your baby tonight”.  And I said in my thoughts about the “Masterpiece” version that it comes across as if Bob is saying, “Hey let’s not get too excited about anything.”   And although I’ve not written the next piece yet (it is strictly one at a time with me) I can imagine that might be a reasonable response to “Baby tonight”.

If that is the case (and the more I listen the more I think it is) then he really is saying here (either deliberately or it just seeps out as it might do for an octogenarian) then let’s not get too excited about death or love or life or anything.  Time passes.  Just enjoy it as it goes.

Now I didn’t start the reviews of this concert tour with the thought that it could possibly be the “Let’s not get too excited” tour; I do write the reviews individually, listening to the music and watching the video as we go.   But that thought has now arisen.  The “Let’s not get too excited” tour.

And as I think back to the show that I saw on the tour, yes there were moments when I was thinking something along those lines.  Not all the time, but sometimes.

It will be interesting to see where this goes for the rest of the songs in the sequence.

High Water (for Charley Patton) (2001) part 18

by Jochen Markhorst

“So-called hardcore fans of mine, whoever they might be — those folks out there who are obsessed with finding every scrap of paper I’ve ever written on, every single outtake,” Dylan sneers at the press conference in Rome, 2001. He despises how manuscripts, sketches and outtakes get out in the open, that they are traded and that people make money from them, calls it theft, and declares that “Mississippi” only survived because the 1997 outtakes were never leaked – which is why he was still able to record the song for “Love And Theft” in 2001.

After all, leaked outtakes, being “unfinished” anyway, are “contaminated” and even a masterpiece like “Mississippi” would in that case ruthlessly have been discarded.

Unfortunately, the journalists present don’t ask the obvious next question. This is ten years after he himself released the highly successful, trendsetting triple box set The Bootleg Series 1-3, after the official release of 58 outtakes, alternative takes and live recordings, it is three years after The Bootleg Series 4: Royal Albert Hall 1966, and one year before The Bootleg Series 5 – Live 1975.

Apparently, we are long past the point where Dylan has artistic or moral objections to publicising of outtakes and the like, long past the point where Dylan and his record company have figured out that it would be better for them to make a profit themselves. Which is perfectly understandable, of course.

It doesn’t stop, hereafter. The hunger of fans is insatiable, and in the first decades of the twenty-first century, a next volume in the Bootleg Series or a next “50th Anniversary Collection” (to secure copyright extensions) is released on average every 13 months. Among them, monumental releases like The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 in 2015; eighteen CDs of just about everything Dylan did in the studio (and outside, in hotel rooms, for instance) during those years while a tape recorder was running. One goldmine after another treasure trove for so-called hardcore fans, for Dylanologists and academics – the Bootleg Series bestows fascinating insights into the genesis of masterpieces.

In 2016, the same year that Dylan is awarded the Nobel Prize and with it definitive literary recognition, the last restraint evaporates too: Dylan sells his entire archive of thousands of items to the George Kaiser Family Foundation to build a real museum, the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which will open its doors to the public in May 2022. The archive contains some six thousand manuscripts, rejected versions, corrected drafts of hundreds of songs, poems and diary-like notes: “every scrap of paper I’ve ever written on,” as it were. Of which a select club of authors will gratefully make use of for contributions to the paper pavement tile to be published in 2023, Mixing up the Medicine, or for research for their own books.

Thus, of “High Water (For Charley Patton)” we also get to see first manuscripts, handwritten drafts with deletions and annotations and alternative stanzas. Not very much and partly illegible, but intriguing enough – and it does what you hope for from manuscripts: it gives some insight into the creation of the masterpiece. Dylan author Clinton Heylin, for instance, enthuses (“a corker”) about a complete but rejected couplet:

Doctor Frankenstein's still up there at his castle on the hill 
If he ain't come down by now 
I guess he never will
Livin' there in the underworld, I ain't sayin' it's wrong or right 
The sun is shining down 
Like it's twelve o'clock at night. 
Like a nightmare up there
High water everywhere.

Presumably a candidate who dropped out late, we may assume with some certainty. The metre has already been reasonably polished up, the rhyme scheme “fits” (is similar to the other stanzas), but mostly:

… on the fragment of the draft manuscript printed on page 496 of Mixing up the Medicine, we see Dylan jotting down the inspiration “Dr Frankenstein” under an earlier version of the opening couplet. Written with a different pen. Apparently Dylan had already put this – presumably second – draft version away again, he makes a cup of tea, the stream of consciousness still ripples on, then bears a possibly fitting mosaic stone with “Dr Frankenstein”, Dylan grabs the nearby pen and scribbles down a reminder. Something like that, probably – one of the many examples, anyway, from the Bob Dylan Centre archives that give us a glimpse of the path from a scribble in the margin to a song couplet.

To call the “Frankenstein couplet”, which eventually fails to make the final selection, a “corker”, a brilliant achievement, is perhaps a bit overly enthusiastic, but it does indeed have its own distinct charm. At first glance, and without prior knowledge, most Dylanologists would probably classify it as a lost “Desolation Row” couplet, a classification justified by the opening line Doctor Frankenstein’s still up there at his castle on the hill alone. A literary celebrity as protagonist, presented as the film character (no castle appears in Shelley’s book; only in film adaptations is Dr Frankenstein portrayed as an eccentric mad scientist in some castle on a hill). Very similar to other 60s protagonists in Dylan’s songs. Like Captain Ahab in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” (he was stuck on a whale – that’s Gregory Peck in the film, in Melville’s book it doesn’t happen) or Cinderella, who puts her hands in her back pockets “Bette Davis style”.

Equally deceptive is the strong doom vibe, identical to the “agents & superhuman crew” couplet from “Desolation Row”. Besides the matching décor (“castle”) and a cultural icon as the protagonist, word choices like underworld, nightmare and midnight, the poetic paradox The sun is shining down / Like it’s twelve o’clock at night, and postmodernist blending of cultural stereotypes also push the associating Dylanologist into the mercurial ’65-’66s. In this case: it ís Dr Frankenstein, yet for the character’s colouring, the song poet reaches for the clichés from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Not to mention the form:

Doctor Frankenstein’s still up there                  Now at midnight all the agents
at his castle on the hill                                         And the superhuman crew
If he ain’t come down by now                         Come out and round up everyone
I guess he never will                                          That knows more than they do

Same number of syllables, identical rhyme scheme, matching metre, stylistically a copy plus content parallels… it becomes increasingly understandable why Dylan discarded this verse, this “corker” in the end. “Dylan really, really hates to repeat himself” (engineer Chris Shaw in Uncut, October 2008).

Incidentally, the Frankenstein couplet is not completely discarded. As we so often see in manuscripts and drafts, things move to subsequent songs. The Frankenstein theme keeps bouncing around in the back of Dylan’s mind for about 20 years, eventually descending in “My Own Version Of You” on Rough And Rowdy Ways, 2020, the verse fragment I ain’t sayin’ it’s wrong or right popping up a few years later as I don’t know what’s wrong or right in “Life Is Hard” (Together Through Life, 2009) and the underworld in “Tempest”, 2012.

“He has these fragments round in his head all the time,” as Larry Charles says, “and he’s constantly trying different bits together and seeing what happens.”

————————

To be continued. Next up High Water (For Charley Patton) part 19: Water’s gonna overflow

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

By Tony Attwood

I can only find one cover version of Dylan’s “Whatcha gonna do?” which either emphasises a view that I have put forward before that there is a feeling among musicians generally that if you are going to do a cover version of a Dylan song, do a famous Dylan song, or else they simply don’t know the more obscure bits of the catalogue.

Anyway, just in case you didn’t read my original “Dylan as the modern Robert Johnson” piece in 2017 you can find it here but the key point is the recording which is below…

Now when I listen to that even now, years after having first heard it, it still knocks me out and I can’t imagine why others have not taken the song up as there is so much you could with it.   (I’d record my own version of it and put it here, but you’d only laugh, so we’ll by-pass that).

But there is one terrific cover version which is on the internet and here it is

What I love about this is not just the music itself, but the thinking that has gone into this production.   The female voices are not what I would have introduced, but they do give a terrific extra dimension to the song.

If there is a criticism to be made it is that there are so many extra elements added it is neigh on impossible to make the whole piece balanced; it perhaps begins to feel that as if they threw in every idea that they had.

But I am being extremely churlish here, because after a few listens to this song I get to appreciate it more and more, and understand exactly what those involved in the musical direction and arrangement had in mind.

In my head I can hear a version of the song that is half way between this full-blown version with accompanying singers, hand-clapping and the rest and Dylan’s stripped back solo.  And maybe one day someone will do that.  Indeed maybe someone has and I just haven’t found it yet.

However more than anything there is this point: this is a great upbeat blues song that deserves far more recognition than it has ever had, and it really makes me wonder what the “Dylanologists” are up to.  This is not the only forgotten masterpiece of simplicity from the early Dylan catalogue that has gone this way.   And anyway, think of the publicity there is to be gained from the headline that Block Xerox and the Copycats release “lost” Dylan masterpiece.

Well, ok maybe I’m no good at made-up band names, but really, this is far too good an upbeat blues tune to be left on the shelf.

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

by Bob Jope

False Prophet Part 1: ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’

Shadows are falling but it’s a day without end, dragging towards eternity, ships ‘going out’, their journeys unnamed, unremarked upon. Days wearily repeat themselves, full of tellingly unspecified ‘anger’ and coloured by ‘bitterness and doubt’. The near-hopelessness, though, shifts to something closer to a worldly knowingness, the voice of a prophet looking back, one who’s seen it all, who saw, too, what was coming  – ‘I know how it happened – I saw it begin’ – but one who also suffered, martyr-like, in his truth-telling and in his searching, we later hear, for ‘the holy grail’:

I opened my heart to the world and the world came in

If you ‘open your heart’ to someone, you tell them truths, your real thoughts and feelings, because you trust them – but in doing that you’re at the same time rendering yourself vulnerable, opening yourself to another’s exploitation if that trusted person turns out to be anything but trustworthy: you can be taken advantage of, something that’s implied here by the embittered follow-on, sung with a tired sense of seen-it-all beforeness: ‘and the world came in’.

You ‘open your heart’ to or confide in usually one person, not to ‘the world’, but the speaker’s naïve mistake was perhaps to have assumed that his audience would listen and respond with generosity of spirit rather than seizing an advantage, moving in and, as it were, setting up camp *. Perhaps that’s why the speaker now seeks refuge in isolation, the safety of being ‘where only the lonely can go’, the prophet’s wilderness…

(*There’s likely to be an autobiographical note here, of course: the world-addressing, world-admonishing proselytiser – ‘so much older then’ – found himself claimed, owned even, as a voice or ‘spokesman’, a mouthpiece for others and their causes.)

On the other hand, while he may go where ‘only the lonely can go’, he’s not unaccompanied:

Hello Mary Lou - Hello Miss Pearl
My fleet footed guides from the underworld
No stars in the sky shine brighter than you
You girls mean business and I do too

‘Hello Mary Lou’ is pretty harmless pop stuff but Jimmy Wages’ ‘Miss Pearl’ sounds more like trouble:

Miss Pearl, Miss Pearl
Daylight recalls you, hang your head, go home…

Whatever she gets up to at night in her ‘underworld’ before daylight ‘recalls her’ we can only guess –  the admonishing singer sounds desperate –  but Dylan’s False Prophet welcomes his Miss Pearl and Mary Lou as ‘guides from the underworld’, subterranean muses calling to mind Maggie who once came ‘fleet foot Face full of black soot’. Ready now to do business, the three form a threateningly unholy trio – that ‘I do too’ is added with sardonic relish. The Shadow and his ‘guides’ are, as Elvis sang, ‘Lookin’ for trouble’.

That troublesome ‘business’ is intimated in the next verse with its implied declaration of intent, listing the enemies, the targets to be taken on:

I’m the enemy of treason - the enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life

Another intriguing trio: treason, strife and life not fully lived.

Treason, an act of criminal disloyalty, typically to the state, is a crime that covers some of the more extreme acts against the nation (or its sovereign). It implies betrayal, and the voice here might well have in mind both personal experience (reminding us of the ‘world’ that ‘came in’ when he opened up his heart?) and something grander: a political leader (I can’t help but think again of that Trumpean silhouette) who betrays his own nation and all that it stands for. ‘Strife’ might well have a contemporary relevance, too, suggesting as it does, ‘angry or bitter disagreement over fundamental issues’, or ‘vigorous, bitter conflict’: a nation at war with itself – and with a leader at war with his own nation.

The lines, then, condemn betrayal and destructive conflict, while, again, Blake comes to mind in the enmity towards ‘the unlived meaningless life’. Treason and strife are, by implication, life-denying, dark negatives, symptoms or products of the ‘Mind-forg’d manacles’ Blake hears in ‘London’, manacles that a lived, meaningful life would presumably be free of, the ‘chains’ that Rousseau and, later, Marx, saw as denying life and liberty. The speaker’s own freedom is expressed, in fact, in the triumphant separateness of the declaration that follows:

I’m first among equals - second to none
I’m last of the best *

(*Robert Currie’s Genius has a lot to say about this essentially Romantic concept, the creative artist as the One versus the Many, reaching something of an apotheosis in Nietzsche’s notion of ‘Man and Superman’: or ‘Man and The Shadow’?)

Michael Goldberg’s thoughts come to mind here:

The funny thing about ‘False Prophet’ is that when Dylan sings, “I ain’t no false prophet/ I just know what I know,” he could be indicating that he’s actually the real thing…In this new song he also sings,

“I’m the enemy of treason…
“Enemy of strife…
“Enemy of the unlived meaningless life.”

That final line is a theme of the Beats, as I was recently reminded when I read three books by the novelist/memoirist Joyce Johnson, who in her youth was Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend when On the Road, written in 1951, was finally published in 1957. “Enemy of the unlived meaningless life.” It’s as relevant today as a philosophy of life as it ever was.

The triumphant note is sustained in the next snarled insistence:

you can bury the rest
Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold
Put ‘em six feet under and then pray for their souls

The implication seems to be that ‘the rest’ are those whose (‘unlived meaningless’) lives have been dedicated to – and wasted – on material, earthly pursuits, falling in love ‘with wealth itself’ (‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’). Wrong-footing us again, though, a sudden, challenging question, ‘what are you lookin’ at?’, turns into an ambiguous reassurance, ‘There’s nothin’ to see’: he’s invisible now, but, as I suggested earlier, there’s a possible dark undercurrent here, the invitation to ‘walk in the garden’ on the one hand possibly innocently meant but on the other calling to mind the wily serpent (hinted at in the wind’s winding movement, ‘encircling me’)in the Garden of Eden, not actually invisible but, of course, the Devil in disguise, something picked up on a few lines later:

You don’t know me darlin’ - you never would guess
I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest

Again we’re left wondering about the voice, its tone (Inviting? Reassuring? Deceitful? Boastful?) and its intention: who, exactly are we hearing and ‘What was it [he] wanted?’ Unsettling us still more, the swaggering shifts into vengeful mode again:

I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head

That ‘somebody’s head’ is particularly unnerving – somebody could be anybody – and the ‘ghostly appearance’ is now still more insubstantial, ‘nothin’ to hold’ where a hand should be. The threat of vengeance, on the other hand, is horribly actualised or particularised, stuffing with gold the mouth of the ‘poor Devil’ who can, perhaps, only look up and see, not ever reach or experience the City of God – the new Jerusalem, or Paradise: Paradise lost to Adam and Eve, corrupted by Satan – who himself was hurled out of Heaven:

Put out your hand - there’s nothin’ to hold
Open your mouth - I’ll stuff it with gold
Oh you poor Devil - look up if you will
The City of God is there on the hill

This already cryptic, allusive song (addressed by whom, and to whom?) concludes on yet another dense and enigmatic note, loaded with questions:

Hello stranger - Hello and goodbye
You rule the land but so do I
You lusty old mule - you got a poisoned brain
I’m gonna marry you to a ball and chain

You know darlin’ the kind of life that I live
When your smile meets my smile - something’s got to give
I ain’t no false prophet - I’m nobody’s bride
Can’t remember when I was born and I forgot when I died

Ambiguities, uncertainties abound: the voice of a/the Devil, or a/the Devil addressed? Hello – and goodbye –  to a stranger who rules the (strange?) land –  ‘but so do I’? Once again: ‘I and I’? And that stranger is now a poison-brained ‘lusty old mule’ who’s threatened with marriage, but not a marriage to a wife, instead – vengeance again – an ironic, punishing  ‘ball and chain’, calling to mind, for me, Shakespeare’s Lucio who’s punished by, in his words, marriage to ‘a punk!’(By delightful chance, Cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife’ is not, of course, ‘ball and chain’ but ‘trouble and strife’,  while in Janis Joplin’s song, Love is the ‘ball and chain’ that drags her down.)

The voice, meanwhile , telling us again that he’s no false prophet, adds that he’s ‘nobody’s bride’ (not ‘Nobody’s Child’), whereas, we might remember (and Dylan reminds us in ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting’) the church is the ‘bride of Christ’ in John’s Gospel. Mischievously, too , the voice, the Prophet or Seer – Blake’s eternal Bard – not only can’t remember when he was born but, weirder still, ‘forgot when I died’.

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There is an index to all the latest articles on this site on our home page.

“The Lyrics and the Music” is a series by Tony Attwood which tries to find out what happens when one reviews a Dylan song not primarily as a set of lyrics, but as a piece of music which includes lyrics.   An updated list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.

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This is a genuine 12-bar blues with a very strange extra instrumental bar at the end of each verse which endlessly must throw anyone who is actually listening to the music, off balance.  It makes the song a 13-bar blues.  In fact, as far as I know, the only 13 bar blues ever recorded.

Just listen to the last line (unaccompanied) of each verse, and then hear that guitar solo – which means that the final line of each verse actually has five beats rather than four.  It really throws everything else in the song in terms of the music, into question.

And the fact is that even if one doesn’t know anything about the construction of songs, the balance and equality of everything within the song is perfect until that last little one-bar guitar solo.  It feels odd… as if one is walking along at a regular pace and then suddenly puts in one skip, but then keeps on walking as if nothing had happened.

The fact is that without that extra bar the song would have a lot less.  It would still be a Dylan song with some intriguing lyrics.  For example

They threw everything at me, everything in the book
I had nothing to fight with but a butcher's hook
They had no pity, they never lend a hand
I can't sing a song that I don't understand
Goodbye, Jimmy Reed, goodbye, good luck
I can't play the record 'cause my needle got stuck

but that extra moment, that extra edge, that extra something that throws us all off balance, would not be there.

In the live concerts Bob tended to hold the last note of the melody while the guitar plays the 13th bar, and that lessens the impact somewhat, but it is still there, still that something that makes the song feel slightly out of kilter at the end of each verse.

But does the 13th bar in a 12 bar blues actually have any meaning in the sense of adding something to the lyrics apart from throwing us off balance just for the sake of it?   If it does I can’t find it, except as a way of saying thank you to Jimmy Reed for the difference he made.  In fact it takes me back to the famous line at the end of “I shall be free Number 10” in which Dylan sings/recites…

You're probably wondering by now
Just what this song is all about
What's probably got you baffled more
What this thing here is for
It's nothing
It's something I learned over in England

There, you might recall, there is a strange instrumental moment at the end of each verse, which is what Dylan is commenting upon, saying that he just added it to the music because he heard someone else do something like that.  The tale might well be apocryphal but it adds a moment of difference and lightness, and the same is true with the extra bar in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.”  It is just a twist, a bit of fun, a smile, a nod… all those things but captured within one musical moment.

And the reason I spend my time (and your time if you are still with me at this point) featuring this, is that it reveals not only a moment of humour in Dylan, but also a moment of humour expressed in music, which is something that is somewhat rarer.

Bob Dylan, of course, knows the classic musical forms that he plays with, such as the 12 bar blues, inside out and upside down, and so it is natural to have the occasional twist added to the mix.   It is just a little extra, but is a little extra that could only have been added by someone who not only can play and write the music, but also someone who feels and thinks about the musical form.  It’s Bob’s little joke, just like a great Shakespearian actor might occasionally deliberately misquote a line, just because he can.

And just to appreciate Bob’s jokes, consider the above in which he leaves his position as the lead singer and goes over to the piano.   At the very end he has a lovely grin for one of the musicians, as if to say “I don’t know why I did that but I just did,” as if to explain his movement to the piano part way through.

I can’t be sure that’s what it is about, but it fits with that impish extra bar that turns the 12 bar blues that has been heard a billion times into what is probably the one and only 13 bar bar blues ever written

The lyrics and the music: the series…

• Series intro: most analyses of Dylan’s songs mistake the essence of what the songs are
• 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
• High Water, a rise, a fall, a bounce, a flood
• Idiot wind
• It ain’t me babe
• 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: Comparing recordings of Dylan performing his own compositions across the years.

This series uses recordings selected by Mike Johnson in his inestimable masterpiece The Never Ending Tour, and looks at how those performances change as time goes by.   The selection of songs from the series, and the commentary, is by Tony Attwood.

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I am not sure what I expected going back to some of the earliest recordings we have of Desolation Row on the Never Ending Tour, but I am sure I didn’t expect this version from 1992.  Of course by the time of that concert the song was over a quarter of a century old, which is a long time for a composer to be not just contemplating one of his greatest ever works but constantly re-imagining it.

And equally “of course” I listened to this when Mike first presented the article in 2020, and was knocked out then.  But then 2020 was the time of the pandemic in England, where I live, and life was weird, disrupted, and a case of somehow just hanging on as my normal life which I was rather enjoying was utterly torn to pieces within one afternoon of insane government diktats.  I was left alone, isolated, bereft.  I turned to Dylan and came across the NET recordings of Desolation Row.  Talk about music that fits life at that moment.

Now four years on, I still think of Desolation Row as sad and sedate, a desperate shaking of the head as one moves away to look elsewhere.   Yet turning back to Dylan’s live presentations of the song that we published in the “Never Ending Tour” series, the song is nothing in any way like that: it is, well…, “explosive” is the only word that comes to mind.

But explosive without the explosion.   Not explosive because of a full-band treatment; that would be far too obvious, but explosive because it just hits me on the face like a punch that sends me reeling backwards, and leaves me wondering where on earth that came from, but perversely wondering, could we do that again?

And if you are not convinced that there is something here that demands your attention, please don’t move away but give yourself time and go on to the instrumental sections.  For example try 6 minutes 25 seconds of this first example, and just let it roll on.  Remember this is planned but nonetheless improvised, and yes the various instruments tangle themselves up, undoubtedly because Bob changes what he is doing each night… but please stay with it.  This instrumental section lasts and lasts, going through multiple chasms… and the first hint of the harmonica doesn’t come until past the ten minute marker.

It ends at 11 minutes 30 seconds, and my goodness does the audience know that it has been witness to something utterly amazing.   If I was looking to write a “highlights of the highlights of the highlights” series (which I am not, so I’ll leave that to you – email your copy to Tony@schools.co.uk) this would be right there.

1992 part 3: All the friends I ever had are gone

So what would Bob do next?   Cut it down to size maybe?  Make it more pleading?  More emphasis on the key issue of how we are all just looking out on the ever increasing wreckage of… well, everything.  Our personal lives, our civilisation, everyone else’s civilisation, our humanity…   Well yes, but that’s all a bit obvious isn’t it?  (At least it is from where I am sitting, beautiful, peaceful and calm though the countryside is around here).

But does it need 11 and half minutes to express disaster?   Actually, yes it does if one is trying to express both the universal and personal catastrophes at the same time.   In fact in that case 11 and a half minutes might not be enough.

Indeed that turned out to be the case, because the following year the performances were even longer, showing that one can never accuse Bob of not taking an experimentation as far as anyone could imagine and then going further.

Now I appreciate that if you have been following me this far you have just had 11 and a half minutes of Desolation Row, and as I tell you that by the following year the performance had got even longer, you might feel you want to leave this for another day.  And of course it is your computer, your life, and your partner asking if you’ve cleaned up the bedroom yet, and isn’t it time for a coffee?  Yes, you choose.

So you might want to wait.  But let me tempt you slightly.  If you thought that 1992 was of a certain interest, this is going to blow what is left of your mind even further than you could possibly imagine.  I can’t say this is the ultimate highlight of the Never Ending Tour, for there is just so much of it, that I can’t hold it all in my head to make a comparison.   But if nothing else take in the harmonica solo around 9 minutes 45 seconds.

And oh yes I should have warned you.   This piece lasts over 13 minutes.

1993 part 3: Mr Guitar Man Goes Acoustic

Of course there are many more Desolation Row performances to contemplate, and I could imagine writing a whole website on the live performances of this song alone.  But I am going to offer you just one more and leap forward 14 years to 2017.   If you are still reeling from the two versions above you might want to take a few deep breaths before pressing the button again.   Not because Bob is about to take you down even more, but rather the opposite.

And that’s the point.  This magnificent work of genius can be worked in any way Bob wants it.   But as you listen to this, just imagine what it must be like to have performed it previously as we have heard above, and then come up with something so utterly different, and yet still so meaningful.  This time we have wrecked the world, as ever, but now it is met by a shrug of the shoulders.  I mean, that world’s gone, but there are a billion others out there, aren’t there?

So he slings his guitar over his shoulder, takes his lady by the hand, and walks off over the hill, just to see what’s on the other side…

2017 part 2:  The Moveable Feast

Other articles in this series…

• Absolutely Sweet Marie
• Blind Willie McTell. 1997-2006
• Blowing in the Wind. 1991-2001
• Don’t think twice it’s alright 1993-1997
• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• Highway 61 1989-2003
• Honest with Me – 2001-2017
• 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
• Masters of War 1978 to 2000.
• One too many mornings. 
• Rainy day women, from push to stroke
• 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
• 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 Rough and Rowdy Way Tour: 2021.
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour: Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour part 3: I contain multitudes
• The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour: False Prophet

This is a very relaxed version of the song that was first performed in 1975 and which has continued until the end of 2023.   It’s half sung, half spoken piece (“declaimed” seems to be a better word than “sung”) which even includes a trick ending and which continues the laid back feel of the whole concert.

For me it is almost as if Bob has taken his own line, “Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody” and is trying through this declaimed approach to get to that feeling.   As a result it comes across to me as a sort of, “Hey let’s not get too excited about anything” style, which I guess fits the demeanor of a revered octogenarian.

And in pondering this, it suddenly interested me to think what the same piece sounded like when we first came across it on the Never Ending Tour in 1991.    Then Bob played a trick with us giving a two minute 30 seconds musical introduction – which is a bit odd given that musically the song is just two chords alternating with the real interest being in the lyrics.  This comes from 1991 Part 2 – Feet walking by themselves

By the end of the Never Ending Tour the song sounded a little different, although Bob’s vision of the song remains the same albeit with a sung introduction.   This time it takes over two and a half minutes before we get to it being a song in the conventional sense.

The violin and harmonica do gell together nicely however….

This version from a concert in 2019: The liberated republic – and I’ve added this to make my point that in many ways the “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour is a continuation of the Never Ending Tour (although Bob himself has on occasion railed against the continuing use of the “Never Ending Tour” as a title.

So what I am suggesting is that Bob has a seemingly eternal fascination with this song which is musically limited, and which, for me (and of course as ever this is just me) is just a gentle reflection on being in Rome and the absolute feeling of history and art that it can bring.

I’ve not been to Italy that many times, but when I have, immediately this song springs to mind; yet for me that does not make it one of the almighty, great, wonderful, overwhelming Dylan compositions.  It’s just, well, nice, reflective, feel-good, relaxing, and with nothing really to do with Rome.

And I think that is the problem with the Rough and Rowdy Ways version.  Bob clearly feels a deep attraction to the piece, and he likes the notion of being in the home of such an historic extraordinary culture, and the notion that being there he too can produce a work comperable with Arellius … but this isn’t “Visions of Johanna” or “Not Dark Yet”… this is (for me, and of course my comments are always just about my perception) a rather pleasant two chord song.

I mean

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

is fun in the original, and that surely is the point.  Dylan is saying he can feel that being in Rome might induce a sense of being able to create a master work because of the heritage, but the heritage has long ago been commercialised to such a degree that he wants to be back home.  And besides, as has been pointed out endlessly, there are no gondolas in Rome.  They are in Venice, a city which if one wants to relax, is surely much preferable to Rome.

In the end I don’t quite know what Bob meant – if he meant anything.  Thus for me, his fascination with this song is difficult to understand.  Of course I fully realise that is my problem: Bob knows why he wants to keep this piece in the repertoire and that of course is fine.  And he knows why he likes these rearrangements.  It’s just me that’s not on board.

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

XVII     I’m drinking Bob Dylan Whiskey tonight

by Jochen Markhorst

I’m gettin’ up in the morning—I believe I’ll dust my broom
Keeping away from the women
I’m givin’ ’em lots of room
Thunder rolling over Clarksdale, everything is looking blue
I just can’t be happy, love
Unless you’re happy too
It’s bad out there
High water everywhere

“We were thinking that somebody needs to write some Bob Dylan songs to help change the world,” Jack Tempchin tells Songfacts, “we’re in a lot of trouble right now – maybe if I drink this whiskey, I can write a Bob Dylan song.”

By “this whiskey”, Tempchin obviously means Heaven’s Door, Dylan’s own brand of whiskey launched in 2018. The song is fun enough, but gains considerable traction when in 2022 Jack is joined by the guys of Mrs. Henry, the talented “official revival” quartet from San Diego that put so much love and skills into resuscitating The Band. Jack seeks contact when he sees Mrs. Henry’s recreation of The Last Waltz: “I wrote them an email, I said, look, I’m not Bob Dylan, and you’re not The Band, but maybe we should get together and make some music.” And a first fruit of that collaboration is a reanimation of the witty “Bob Dylan Whiskey”;

The times they are changing
Like never before
So I turn off the news
And pour me one more

And I’m tryin to write a song
Like I wish he would write
I’m drinking Bob Dylan
Whiskey tonight

Jack Tempchin and Mrs. Henry – Bob Dylan’s Whiskey:

The song has an appealing double layer of irony. Jack Tempchin’s own commentary allows us to equate the I-person with the writer and singer, with Tempchin, so we may understand the song as Jack’s personal, autobiographical desire to write a Great Song. Demonstrating sympathetic self-mockery; Tempchin has written songs for George Jones and Emmylou Harris, for Johnny Rivers and for Olivia Newton-John and a host of premier league artists more, but especially for the Eagles – the best-selling U.S. album of the twentieth century, Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, features two Tempchin songs: “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Already Gone”. In 2019, Jack will be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York City; no, Tempchin cannot complain about his ability to write Great Songs.

The second layer is even more ironic: Jack Tempchin did, in fact, write Dylan songs. Well, sort of anyway. Which he also owes to his Eagles connection. When the Eagles break up and move on to solo projects, Tempchin remains the regular songwriter for Glenn Frey, the Eagles guitarist who is namechecked by Dylan in “Murder Most Foul” (Play Don Henley, play Glenn Frey / Take it to the limit and let it go by). On Frey’s solo debut No Fun Aloud, Tempchin (co-)wrote six of the 10 songs, on the successful follow-up The Allnighter all 10 of them. “We have a very good rapport,” Frey says of Tempchin (Ultimate Classic Rock, June 2015). “It’s funny, there are only those certain people where things click – at least for me. He’s very free. I’ll just run some soul licks by him.” To which Jack then writes his lyrics. Among others for the song from which Dylan will so gratefully draw.

Dylan himself turns the spotlight on the Eagles twice in 2020. Apart from that name-check, his remark in the interview with Douglas Brinkley for the New York Times in June 2020 also causes a stir. Brinkley is curious about how and why Play Don Henley, play Glenn Frey, and wants to know which Eagles songs Dylan admires;

“”New Kid in Town,” “Life in the Fast Lane,” “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” That could be one of the best songs ever.”

Which retrospectively sheds new light on the opening couplet of a Time Out Of Mind outtake, on the crushingly beautiful “Red River Shore”, which we don’t get to hear until 2008, on The Bootleg Series 8: Tell Tale Signs;

In the moonlight shooting by
Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark
To be where the angels fly
Pretty maids all in a row lined up
Outside my cabin door
I’ve never wanted any of ’em wanting me
’Cept the girl from the Red River shore

At the time, the eighteenth-century nursery rhyme “Mary” seemed the obvious source of pretty maids in a row, but now the Eagles song is becoming a serious option. And by extension, Glenn Frey’s solo work is being looked at with new eyes. Perhaps it is no coincidence after all that It’s too hot to sleep in the opening of “Not Dark Yet” was already sung by Glenn Frey in 1992, five years before “Not Dark Yet”, on Strange Weather in the song “Long Hot Summer”. Written by… Jack Tempchin.

It opens floodgates. And the most amazing aha! we then find on The Allnighter, the record on which every song was (co-)written by Tempchin. Number 3 is “I Got Love”, an attractive piece of craftsmanship that would have long since been forgotten if it had not contributed to one of Dylan’s Very Great Songs: I started thinkin’ ’bout the things we said / I said I’m sorry; She said I’m sorry too sings Glenn in the second verse – and Dylan copies it, paraphrasing it in “Mississippi”:

I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed
[…]
So many things that we never will undo
I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too

… so that we now also begin to believe that Frey’s fragment (or rather Tempchins) from the heavens above descends into the outtake Dylan writes in the same days as “Mississippi”, in “Dreamin’ Of You”, and that “I Got Love” is still echoing in the creative part of Dylan’s brain four years later when he writes another Very Great Song. The entire second verse of the Frey/Tempchin song inspiring “Mississippi” is:

Jumped on the freeway with this song in my head
I started thinkin' 'bout the things we said 
I said I'm sorry; She said I'm sorry too; 
You know I can't be happy unless I'm happy with you.

… which in Dylan’s meandering stream of consciousness four years later is regrinded to I just can’t be happy, love / Unless you’re happy too. Making Jack Tempchin’s dream of writing a song the way Dylan does at least partly come true; after his contributions to the majestic Dylan songs “Not Dark Yet”, “Mississippi” and “High Water”, he may by now with some right call himself a co-author. “I tried to be Bob Dylan over and over again in my life,” says Jack in 2016 to interviewer Paul Zollo for Laurel Canyon Radio. “And it always never worked. ‘Cause I am not him.”

Still, the next best thing Jack Tempchin did manage to reach.

We’re also on Facebook

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To be continued. Next up High Water (For Charley Patton) part 18: Every scrap of paper I’ve ever written on

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

By Tony Attwood

If you don’t recall “Walking Down the Line” as a Dylan song you are forgiven.

But it was indeed a Dylan piece, recorded in 1963 and released much much later.

OK so it is dead simple, just two chords, and only known to those of us who really follow most aspects of Bob’s work.  Bob has never once played it in a concert.

So why has it attained such popularity?   I think the answer can be summarised within this live version by Michael Cerveris and Loose Cattle: it is such fun to play.  I don’t mean everyone heard this version and thought they could have fun with the song, but rather that Loose Cattle seem to sum up all the fun that can be had if one just lets the imagination run riot.

Indeed you don’t have to do much by way of rehearsal because the song is just based on those two rocking chords, but it gives everyone a chance to shine.  Just listen to the violinist having a fantastic time in the instrumental break… and the laughter because the band having exactly agreed when that violin part is coming in as a solo.  It may look under-rehearsed, but playing like this is part of the great fun of creating music, and this is a perfect song with which to have such fun.

And of course there is the fun with the lyrics – just listen to the “My money comes and goes” verse here.

But don’t think this is simply the enclave of unknown bands having a lark.   Rick Nelson also made a recording emphasizing the country feel of the lyrics.   And I really do think it is interesting to hear the contrast between this version below and the high-power approach above – all from such a simple song!

Robin and Linda Williams give it a bit of an extra on-beat emphasis to mix with the country feel in the chorus – just listen to the percussion in the chorus – that drum thump is on beat three of every four beats which is profoundly odd.  Normally with rock the emphasis is on the second and fourth beat of the bar.

And then to contrast with that, try this next one… and enjoy these exquisite harmonies, which are perfect for their take on the song.   But also if possible just recall the distance we have already traveled with this most simple of songs.  (And that’s before I start waxing lyrical about the strings’ instrumental break).   I just wish she hadn’t changed the lyrics in the “rolls and flows” verse from Bob’s recording.

I suppose one of the things about this song is that because it is not particularly well known outside the circles of those of us who really do know a bit about Bob’s songs, it can be played around with – here’s an example…  This is Penny Lang.  New chords too.

Fortunately, we even have the odd recording made by musicians of repute trying to get to grips with what they are doing with this most simple, yet utterly endearing of songs.  Try this for example: it is Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, not quite getting where they expected to be.  (Please let it run; don’t judge it by the first five seconds).

But most of all it is the harmonies and simplicity that has attracted performers across the years.  Plus the fact that it can be taken at a ludicrous speed while still making it an understandable piece.  This next one is not, of course walking, but charging at 2000 mph.  But it is still fun: Hamilton Camp.

I must admit I am now exhausted and I have to stop there.  There are lots more recordings of this most simple of songs, and I am so glad they exist.  On days when I’m covered in blue, it is lovely to have pieces of music like this around.   Thank you to everyone who has felt it worth while… and thank you dear reader if you have listened to each one all the way through.  And if you haven’t, just take the last example above and make that the one you listen to completely.

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

False Prophet Part 1

by Bob Jope

‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’

With characteristically fastidious self-deprecation, TS Eliot’s Prufrock, in a poem alluded to – almost quoted from – by Dylan in ‘Desolation Row’, announces:

I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter

Dylan, by contrast, insists over and over, with an unPrufrockian defiance reaffirmed by a driving blues beat, “I ain’t no false prophet”.

The insistence draws attention to the telling epithet, ‘false’, as much as to the key word ‘prophet’, and there’s a typical ambivalence here, something that underscores the song and its possible meanings: by declaring that he’s not a ‘false prophet’ is the speaker here denying prophetic qualities or affirming that he’s not ‘false’ – ie he is a prophet of sorts, and one we can trust, or should pay heed to? I’m very much inclined to the latter.

It’s a cliché to say that we live in an age of ‘fake news’, but like so many clichés (it’s how they become them) it contains a truth: we’re confronted and affronted everywhere by fakery and falsehood, by lying politicians and their sycophantic media cronies inventing ‘facts’. By insisting on not being a false prophet the voice of the poem is setting itself apart from and in opposition to fakery.

The claim to be a prophet is a large one, but it calls to mind William Blake (whose ‘Songs of Experience’ are referenced in ‘I Contain Multitudes’) and his vision of the poet as seer, possessing a wisdom, an ability to see what others are blind to, a prophet who speaks truth to the present day from the perspective of an outsider, even a voice in the wilderness, one, perhaps, who goes ‘where only the lonely can go’:

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees

Blake claims that Milton, for example, was ‘a true poet’ who regarded that kind of Energy ‘call’d Evil’ as the ‘only life’. Blake considers Energy to be opposed to Reason, the force which, he believes, restrains desire. He exalts the life of the passions over that of Reason and the true poet/seer/prophet should exalt passionate life and deny imprisoning restraint, the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (in ‘London’) that chain us down. Comparably, Dylan’s prophet declares:

I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life

(Intriguingly, too, where Blake is the enemy of reason (mocked punningly as a god, Urizen) Dylan’s prophet – or seer – declares himself ‘the enemy of treason’.)

This elevation of Energy led Blake to believe that Milton in Paradise Lost was unconsciously on Satan’s side:

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Dylan’s ‘enemy of the unlived meaningless life’ can appear to be something like an embodiment of that Blakean Energy and Passion as he declares with a kind of snarling swagger:

I’m first among equals - second to none
I’m last of the best - you can bury the rest
Don’t care what I drink - don’t care what I eat
I climbed a mountain of swords on my bare feet

The extravagant boasting culminates in a reference to Wumen Huikai  a Chinese Chán (in Japanese: Zen) master during China‘s Song period, apparently famed for the 48-koan collection The Gateless Barrier, including this:

You must carry the iron with no hole.
No trivial matter, this curse passes to descendants.
If you want to support the gate and sustain the house
You must climb a mountain of swords with bare feet.

The commands are knowingly absurd, the feats demanded hyperbolic. That’s their point. Dylan’s Prophet, though, will have us believe that he’s achieved at least one of them.

In fact, as elsewhere on this multitudinous album – ‘Key West’, for example, is a rich, mesmerising dramatic monologue – we find ourselves wondering about the voice we’re hearing, who we’re hearing, as Dylan again appears to be adopting a persona – and part of the challenge of engaging fully with the song’s meaning(s) is coming to terms with that persona, or in this song’s case, personae? After all, ‘I is another’: ‘I and I’.

The image accompanying the early-released single offers a cryptic clue. It’s a loaded pastiche of the cover image for The Shadow #96, featuring the stories ‘Death About Town’ and ‘North Woods Mystery’. (Death About Town, we also read, ‘stalks rich and poor alike’.) The skeletal figure is The Shadow himself:

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Every fan of old-time radio, the fruit of a “golden age” on the American airwaves which lasted from the 1920s until television took hold, can tell you the answer: The Shadow knows.

http://www.openculture.com/2016/04/orson-welles-stars-in-the-shadow.html

The Shadow knows the evil lurking in men’s hearts and here he (or a version of him) carries a syringe with an intention we can only guess at (poison or a vaccine?) while behind him the silhouette of a hanged man has a Trumplike forelock. Dylan’s speaker stalks the land, and like The Shadow, ‘I just know what I know’.

Then again, ‘It may be the Devil, it may be the Lord…’ The persona, the voice, swings from boasts and vengeful threats, like an Old Testament Jehovah (Blake’s ‘Nobodaddy’) ‘here to bring vengeance’, to inveigling seducer as oily as Satan – who can also, of course, come disguised ‘as a Man of Peace’ –  tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden:

What are you lookin’ at - there’s nothing to see
Just a cool breeze encircling me
Let’s walk in the garden - so far and so wide
We can sit in the shade by the fountain side…

Shade cast by the Tree of Knowledge, Blake’s ‘Poison Tree’?

Tracking the voice as it addresses us through the verses, we begin with a world-weary, even cynical note of resignation:

Another day without end - another ship going out
Another day of anger - bitterness and doubt

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