Untold Dylan

An index to the Never Ending Tour series can be found here.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

“When I received the Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering how exactly my songs related to literature,” Bob Dylan.

“If people in the literary world groan, one must remind them that the gods don’t write, they dance and they sing,” Swedish Academy’s award speech.

Because of the ever-diminishing number of songs Dylan was performing, even with the addition of a handful of American Standards, and the rigidity of the Setlist, I can barely scrape together enough performances for a third post on 2016. I thought, therefore, that I would take a little space to make a comment on Dylan receiving the ultimate prize for any writer – the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The story of how in October 2016, the Award was announced, how Dylan was silent for the following two weeks and how he didn’t make it to the Award ceremony, has been told many times and this is not the place to go back over all that. What interests me here is the comment made by the Swedish Nobel Award committee.

The prize was given ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.’ That is true. I am tempted to go a step further and say that Dylan created a new art form, or revived an ancient one, in the fusion of song and poetry. Dylan’s songs are not poems, but are something more than songs.

This is where I think the Nobel Award Committee gets it wrong when they say, ‘He can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the English tradition.’ No; Dylan can’t just be read, he needs to be listened to, and it’s that belief that has compelled me through these articles on the Never Ending Tour. His ‘songs’ can look flat on the page; they are performance pieces; they need voice to give them body.

Not only that, Dylan’s songs have no final form, they are constantly in a process of evolution both lyrically and musically; we catch them on the fly. There is no definitive version to which we can defer. Album, studio versions are just another performance caught at a particular time. The lyrics put up by Dylan’s official website, bobdylan.com, are often not what he actually sings, and different websites have differing versions of the lyrics. That’s not a result of confusion so much as indicative of the nature of Dylan’s art. His songs must be inhabited, given voice, performed, and they exist only in the moment of that performance. Written versions alone are empty husks (unless you have Dylan’s voice in your head when you’re reading them).

This reminds me of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca who was similarly suspicious of the printed word, had no interest in seeing his poems published, and believed they only came alive in performance.

We could go deeper into this and consider attitudes to permanence and impermanence, a fixed versus a shapeshifting view of reality and how that might affect the construction of the lyrics themselves, but that will have to wait for another occasion. For the moment let’s turn to some final performances from 2016, starting with what I have called a deadly little ballad ‘Soon After Midnight,’ a fixture in the Setlist that would remain through to 2019. It was usually played towards the end of the concert. Another brilliant performance from the Durham concert.

Soon After Midnight

‘Early Roman Kings,’ also from Tempest, is another fixture on the Setlist. It has a rousing quality which makes it a solid performance piece. The enigmatic ‘kings,’ arbiters of our fate, have a decidedly sinister aspect to them. The generic blues riff on which it’s built anchors the song firmly in the blues tradition of Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. (Tokyo, April 23^rd)

Early Roman Kings

In anticipation of Triplicate in 2017, a 30 song collection of American Standards, Dylan performed two new songs from that collection, ‘How Deep is the Ocean’ and ‘That Old Feeling.’ ‘How Deep is the Ocean’ is an Irving Berlin song from 1932, performed by Sinatra in 1960. Here’s Dylan’s first performance of the song in Toledo, June 29^th.

How Deep is the Ocean

Here’s the first performance of ‘That Old Feeling’ from Portland, July 16^th. Written by Sammy Fain, with lyrics by Lew Brown, it was published in 1937 and was a hit for Sinatra in 1960. Nostalgia has seldom been done with such lush indulgence.

That Old Feeling

By this time, ‘Blowing In The Wind’ had replaced ‘All Along The Watchtower’ as the final song of the night. Being the only surviving song from Dylan’s acoustic, protest period, the others having all fallen by the way, even such stalwarts as ‘Hard Rain,’ its performance will be saturated with nostalgia. Here, right at the end, a tantalizing glimpse of the old protest singer, the skinny kid with a guitar and an attitude. He’s back from Scarlet Town to sing an old song before disappearing into the night. The audience greets him ecstatically.

Here’s how it sounded in Durham…

Blowing in the Wind (A)

And here’s how it sounded in Paducah (Oct 30^th)

Blowing in the Wind (B)

But it would not be the end of the concert. When called back to do an encore, Dylan invariably sang ‘Why Try To Change Me Now?’ It strikes me as an odd trajectory from ‘Things Have Changed’ at the beginning to ‘Why Try To Change Me Now?’ to finish. The crooner gets the last word. (Durham)

Why Try To Change Me Now?

We have seen that 2016 is a worthy successor to 2015 as Dylan continues to be inspired by American Standards, revolutionising his vocals and his approach to his own songs. Next up, 2017, and we’ll see what delights await us there.

In the meantime

Kia Ora

—————–

Mike Johnson is fiction writer and poet little known outside of his country New Zealand/Aotearoa. His eleventh novel, Driftdead, a dark fantasy, has been critically well-received.

‘Driftdead is as canny a book about the uncanny as you would want to read. Past and future stream; our catastrophic present is registered with hallucinatory clarity; haunting characters from a small Aotearoan town speak the rhapsodies of their passing from a dreamland where beauty and horror orbit each other in the eye of an incorrigibly domestic storm. It is disturbing and salutary in equal measure; philosophically astute; a slow burn which generates terrific suspense. Mike Johnson has written a classic.’ Martin Edmond

If you want a signed copy sent to you, email Mike at: m.johnson@xtra.co.nz

Or order it from our website: https://lasaviapublishing.com/driftdead/

By Larry Fyffe with additional commentary on musical technicalities by Tony Attwood

With the accompanying music a-blazing, singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan still likes his lyrics, even when they are not that complex, to grab the listener’s, and/or reader’s attention, by one means or another.

Say, as a riddle to be solved:

It's quite possible that I'm your third man, girl
But it's a fact that I'm the seventh son
It was the other two which made me your third
But it's my mother who me the seventh son
(Ball and Biscuit ~ Jack White)

That is, the narrator above be his mother’s seventh son, and as well he’s his girl friend’s third boy friend.

The number seven, including seventh son, has always had an association, a mystical connection, with some special ‘spiritual’ value, some good, some bad ~  in folk songs and the mythology of yore:

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
(Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall)

There be seven heavens; seven days; seven sisters; seven seals; seven drawfs; so on, and so forth.

Not to mention western music based on seven scales*.

Comments by Tony Attwood

Untold Dylan published an article on Ball and Biscuit in July 2019 but now we have found that the New Musical Express (a UK publication) has recently run the headline “Jack White to release Bob Dylan collaboration of ‘Ball and Biscuit’.”  The “collaboration” to be clear is in the performance, not the writing of the song.

In a subsequent interview, Jack White explainted how the collaboration came about stating that, “Bob said come on, let’s play something, and we played ‘Ball and Biscuit’, one of my songs. It’s not lost on me that he played one of my songs, not the other way around.”

Personally. I find the live version with Dylan rather hard to take, especially when compared with the original studio recording, so I thought would add that…

And although I wouldn’t normally comment at all on what my fellow writers say (I am as ever utterly overwhelmed by the time they take and the devotion they show in contributing to Untold Dylan on such a regular basis) I feel I must add a PS on the issue of the seven scales that Larry mentions.

Larry is of course perfectly correct to talk of seven scales in the sense that one can start a scale on any of the white notes of the piano (A to G), but there is a bit more to it than that.

Technically in classical western music there are three basic scales in terms of form (major, harmonic minor and melodic minor).  There is also a pentatonic scale which takes the five black notes of the piano keyboard and makes a scale out of them, but because the pentatonic scale doesn’t have the variety that the major and minor scales do, it is not generally considered one of the basic scales on which classical, pop and rock music are all built.

The point about the penatonic scale is that it doesn’t matter which note one starts on, the scale always has the same five notes (Db, Eb, Gb, Ab, Bb).  However this is not at all the case with the major and minor scales since which note one starts on does in fact determine which notes come after.   Thus C major scale runs

C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C.

But D major scale goes

D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D.

• Goodbye Jimmy Reed (2020) part 1
• Goodbye Jimmy Reed (2020) part 2: All songs lead back t’ the sea

by Jochen Markhorst

III         An amazing ability

I live on a street named after a Saint
Women in the churches wear powder and paint
Where the Jews and the Catholics and the Muslims all pray
I can tell a Proddy from a mile away
Goodbye Jimmy Reed – Jimmy Reed indeed
Give me that old time religion, it’s just what I need

“Ik ben makelaar in koffi, en woon op de Lauriergracht, N° 37 – I am a coffee broker, and I live on Laurel Canal, N° 37.” The opening line of the greatest novel in Dutch literature, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar (1860), illustrates that an opening line does not necessarily have to be poetic, bizarre, surprising or mysterious to become immortal; the fact that it is the opening line of a masterpiece is usually enough. “Call me Ishmael”, “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up”, “When shall we three meet again?”… in itself not too glamorous, none of them, but because they open Moby Dick, On The Road and Macbeth, appreciated and quoted all over the world.

Conversely, we quote opening sentences the author has thought long and hard about, that have been polished, that have a brilliance of their own, that suck the reader into the story. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”, “I am an invisible man”, “Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure”… sentences that not only survive because they introduce inevitable masterpieces (1984, Invisible Man and L’Étranger respectively), but also have a magical power of their own. Like perhaps the most beautiful of all, penned in 1967 by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

“Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo – Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to see ice.”

… try putting away Cien años de soledad after reading that.

Dylan has a reputation to uphold, too. “Maybe a significant part of Dylan’s genius is his amazing ability with opening lines,” as Tony Attwood writes on Untold Dylan in 2016. Among fans, it is a popular pastime, choosing the Ten Most Beautiful Opening Lines, and in June 2023 Tony makes the ultimate attempt at structure – and more or less capitulates; on the final list, 114 (!) candidates remain. If anything, it demonstrates that Dylan recognises the importance of a smashing opening, and has a rare talent for it. And we see that convincingly and exuberantly practised here on Rough And Rowdy Ways:

- Today and tomorrow and yesterday too, the flowers 
                        are dying like all things do

- Another day that don't end, another ship goin' out

- All through the summers into January I’ve been 
                        visiting morgues and monasteries

- I’m sitting on my terrace, lost in the stars, 
                        listening to the sounds of the sad guitars

- Black rider, black rider, you been living too hard

- Mother of muses sing for me

- I crossed the Rubicon on the 14th day of the 
                         most dangerous month of the year

- McKinley hollered; McKinley squalled

- 'Twas a dark day in Dallas, November '63, 
                         a day that will live on in infamy

One opening is even stronger, more mysterious, catchier than the other. One classical (“Mother Of Muses”), another epic (“Murder Most Foul”), a third gothic (“My Own Version Of You”), suspenseful (“Crossing The Rubicon”) or lyrical (“Black Rider”, “Key West”)… stylistically it is multicoloured, and amazing they all are.

In that line-up of amazing opening sentences, the opening of “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”, I live on a street named after a Saint, women in the churches wear powder and paint, can be catalogued under the heading “epic” as well. At least, it’s an opening like that of Anthony Doerrs brilliant novel All The Light We Cannot See from 2014;

“In a corner of the city, inside a tall, narrow house at Number 4 rue Vauborel, on the sixth and highest floor, a sightless sixteen-year-old named Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered entirely with a model.”

… or, even more to the point, as the opening of Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, in which the protagonist, while not on a street named after a Saint, still lives on the next best thing for nineteenth-century Dutchmen: on a canal named after a spice. Openings that, like Dylan’s song written in the present imperfect, insinuate an upcoming epic, indicate a story of a fascinating life, combining a dry bureaucratic fact like the exact residential address with a curiosity-raising detail.

Like Dylan himself, this narrator is good at keeping things vague – he does suggest that he shares intimate information, but then does not tell, say, 125 Hyndford Street or 87 Randolph Street, but limits himself to a somewhat anonymous designation. His home is in a (former) Catholic neighbourhood, that’s about all the information he is willing to share. And apparently near a church. At a time in history when the image of powdered ladies with colourful make-up was still predominant – nineteenth-century, instinctively, but not much later than the 1950s, presumably. Enthusiastic bloggers and exegetes, led by Niall Brennan on his blog High Summer Street (13 July 2020), see it as confirmation that Dylan has been browsing Johnny Rogan’s 2005 biography Van Morrison: No Surrender. Triggered by the title of the chapter “Are You A Proddy?”, a thorough investigation is set up.

The opening of Dylan’s song would then be inspired by an excerpt on page 40: “Catholics all went to schools named after saints and Protestants went to schools named after streets”, and on the same page is written: “you could tell by looking at somebody if they were a Protestant.” Proddy George Ivan Morrison attended Elmgrove Primary School and then Orangefield Boys Secondary School – both named after nearby Elmgrove Road and Orangefield Road respectively, indeed. So admittedly, two echoes of this page 40 in the Van Morrison biography seem audible in the first verse of Dylan’s song. But ultimately, if we’re honest, a bit too generic to be promoted to “inspiration” – it barely transcends coincidence, after all.

Anyway: vague or not, I live on a street named after a Saint is a classic opening, and actually more than just insinuating or suggesting – it’s a promise. Promising something like a novella, a gripping story about a profound event in the protagonist’s life…

To be continued. Next up Goodbye Jimmy Reed part 4: The truth was not known

———–

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

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Other people’s songs: Performances by Dylan of traditional songs, and those written by others with explorations of their origins.

Songs selected by Aaron, additional commentary from the other side of the Atlantic by Tony.  There is an index of earlier commentaries at the end of the article.

Tony: We ran an article on “Diamond Joe” just recently.  Here’s another but it is a different song – atlhough the name is the same.

Aaron: In 1927, the Georgia Crackers recorded the fiddle tune “Diamond Joe”. This is different from the cowboy song of the same name. ‘Country Music Sources’ note that this ‘Diamond Joe’ was probably addressed not to a person but to a steamboat: “Jo Reynolds ran the Diamond Jo Steamboat line from 1892 to 1910 and each boat had a large diamond with the name “JO” in the middle of it.”

Tony: What really strikes is the way the guitar accompaniment is actually used as the percussion, keeping the pounding rhythm going throughout.  I think there are lots of versions of the lyrics, but always based around the same structure

Diamond Joe come and get me
My wife gonna quit me
Diamond Joe come and get me, Diamond Joe

It’s highly repetitive of course, but it is fun, although I think it is probably one of those songs that is much more fun to be in a band playing the song, than to hear more than once as a member of the audience!

Aaron: Jerry Garcia with David Nelson on vocals recorded in 1987 from a run of shows at the Lunt Fontanne Theatre in NYC.

Tony: Immediately the music is much more interesting in itself, and this is added to by the fact that each verse is extended with a change of chord for part two.  Then we have the really interesting instrumental break, and after that the verses are modified from the opening version.  It all gives a sense of movement and progression, which keeps us all much more interested.

I don’t think I could listen to the original again, other than for academic purposes, but this Jerry Garcia version is much more engaging and great fun.  If I were still in a band I’d suggest we play this, no matter what sort of band we were!  Great harmonies too!!

Aaron: Bob Dylan covered the song in 2003 and it appeared as a highlight of the movie and soundtrack album “Masked And Anonymous”.

Tony: Another set of variations from Bob to make the song move along.  It really is a load of nonsense in the film, but I do love that final throwaway line about not calling the phone number.

Aaron: Jim Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur covered the song in 2016 for the album Penny’s Farm

Tony: It is extraordinary how this song has varied over the years and this version totally changes the rhythm as well as everything else.  And it all originates from one simple folk blues song.    Here, quite amazingly the song moves between the standard 4/4 time (that is to say, four beats in the bar) to an utterly unprecedented (for folk music) 10/4 (meaning ten beats in the bar), with the line “Joe come on to get me Diamond” which really is ten beats long.   (I know it would read in the lyrics “Diamond Joe come on to get me” but what the band is actually doing is making “Joe” the first beat of the bar in the chorus, and that does mean the bar is 10 beats long.)  That really is amazing.  A brilliant find Aaron.

Other people’s songs…

1. Other people’s songs. How Dylan covers the work of other composers
2. Other People’s songs: Bob and others perform “Froggie went a courtin”
3. Other people’s songs: They killed him
4. Other people’s songs: Frankie & Albert
5. Other people’s songs: Tomorrow Night where the music is always everything
6. Other people’s songs: from Stack a Lee to Stagger Lee and Hugh Laurie
7. Other people’s songs: Love Henry
8. Other people’s songs: Rank Stranger To Me
9. Other people’s songs: Man of Constant Sorrow
10. Other people’s songs: Satisfied Mind
11. Other people’s songs: See that my grave is kept clean
12. Other people’s songs: Precious moments and some extras
13. Other people’s songs: You go to my head
14. Other people’s songs: What’ll I do?
15. Other people’s songs: Copper Kettle
16. Other people’s songs: Belle Isle
17. Other people’s songs: Fixing to Die
18. Other people’s songs: When did you leave heaven?
19. Other people’s songs: Sally Sue Brown
20. Other people’s songs: Ninety miles an hour down a dead end street
21. Other people’s songs: Step it up and Go
22. Other people’s songs: Canadee-I-O
23. Other people’s songs: Arthur McBride
24. Other people’s songs: Little Sadie
25. Other people’s songs: Blue Moon, and North London Forever
26. Other people’s songs: Hard times come again no more
27. Other people’s songs: You’re no good
28. Other people’s songs: Lone Pilgrim (and more Crooked Still)
29. Other people’s songs: Blood in my eyes
30. Other people’s songs: I forgot more than you’ll ever know
31.  Other people’s songs: Let’s stick (or maybe work) together.
32. Other people’s songs: Highway 51
33. Other people’s songs: Jim Jones
34. Other people’s songs: Let’s stick (or maybe work) together.
35. Other people’s songs: Jim Jones
36. Other people’s songs: Highway 51 Blues
37. Other people’s songs: Freight Train Blues
38. Other People’s Songs: The Little Drummer Boy
39. Other People’s Songs: Must be Santa
40. Other People’s songs: The Christmas Song
41. Other People’s songs: Corina Corina
42. Other People’s Songs: Mr Bojangles
43. Other People’s Songs: It hurts me too
44. Other people’s songs: Take a message to Mary
45. Other people’s songs: House of the Rising Sun
46. Other people’s songs: “Days of 49”
47. Other people’s songs: In my time of dying
48. Other people’s songs: Pretty Peggy O
49. Other people’s songs: Baby Let me Follow You Down
50. Other people’s songs: Gospel Plow
51. Other People’s Songs: Melancholy Mood
52. Other people’s songs: The Boxer and Big Yellow Taxi
53. Other people’s songs: Early morning rain
54. Other people’s Songs: Gotta Travel On
55. Other people’s songs: “Can’t help falling in love”
56. Other people’s songs: Lily of the West
57. Other people’s songs: Alberta
58. Other people’s songs: Little Maggie
59. Other people’s songs: Sitting on top of the world
60. Dylan’s take on “Let it be me”
61. Other people’s songs: From “Take me as I am” all the way to “Baker Street”
62. Other people’s songs: A fool such as I
63. Other people’s songs: Sarah Jane and the rhythmic changes
64. Other people’s songs: Spanish is the loving tongue. Author drawn to tears
65. Other people’s songs: The ballad of Ira Hayes
66. Other people’s songs: The usual
67. Other people’s songs: Blackjack Davey
68. Other people’s songs: You’re gonna quit me
69. Other people’s songs: You belong to me
70. Other people’s songs: Stardust
71. Other people’s songs: Diamond Joe

God knows it's terrifying
God sees it all unfold
There's a million reasons for you to be crying
You been so bold and so cold

by having a chord change which symbolises the change expressed in the lyrics.  Dylan gives us a musical edge to match with the power and terror of the words.

But by the time the version that appears on Tell Tale Signs was recorded, the power and certainty of the original recording had gone.   As a result that augmented chord has gone.   The message is softer, as is reflected in the music.  OK there is going to be a Second Coming, except that well, really, that’s no longer such a big deal.

Bb                   Eb
God knows you ain't pretty
Bb             Eb
God knows it's true
Bb               Bb+
God knows there ain't anybody
G               Bb
Ever gonna take the place of you

By Tony Attwood, delving a little further and comparing some of the recordings from the Never Ending Tour, based on the comprehensive NET series by Mike Johnson (for which there is an index here).

Previously I’ve taken a look at

• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• Visions of Johanna
• The Hard Rain of 1988, 2003 and 2015
• Tangled up in Blue 1988 to 1993

The earliest recording that we have featured in of “Blowing in the Wind” from the Never Ending Tour series is one that sounds utterly different from the way the song sounded on “Freewheelin” 28 years earlier.   We’ve got a new melody and a real beat to the music as if to say, “The future really is going to be better than this” – which is certainly not how things sounded in 1962 when Bob composed the piece.

In fact, this 1991 version it is so different I had to go back and remind myself just how it did sound at the beginning.   Now of course I won’t suggest your memory is as likely to trip itself up as mine regularly is, so I won’t insult you by including that original recording here – we’ll go straight to the 1991 version.   But just in case you feel like hearing the original again, I’ll see if I can remember to slip it in at the end.

1991

One year later Bob had changed key (something that we noted him doing quite often, in the last article).  And this time he is back to playing it as a solo; there is no hint of anyone else accompanying him, but the melody has gone onwards once again and it is only the chorus line that remains the same.

There’s also quite a shock with the harmonica break which takes the whole song down a few levels too, and  I really would love to know what Bob is thinking when he does this kind of thing.   Is it just to make a difference, just because it is a crowd pleaser, just because he can do it, or because he feels this extends the meaning further, or indeed changes it?  Certainly, the audience loves it.

1992

We next come across this song seven years later, and the change that then occurred was once again enormous, as Bob now has the band behind, and he delivers a slow, plaintive, meaningful version, in which the essence of the lyrics is emphasised by the full arrangement, and of course by the harmonies in the chorus lines at the end of each line.

I’m not 100% ok with the instrumental verse, which feels a little as if the lead instruments are falling over each other, but of course I am being picky.  For it is hard immediately to think of Bob being more plaintive than he sounds here – although of course if I sat down and worked through the hundreds of recordings that we now have we would certainly find something.

Listening to this today really does emphasise to me, not for the first time, the incredible value there is in the Never Ending Tour recordings that have been made by numerous fans and collected together for Untold by Mike.  Sometimes I feel that we ought to be getting in touch with a museum where they can be stored for posterity.

1999

Bob was obviously happy with this approach as this 1999 style of delivery continued into 2000, although with occasional slight adjustments to the melody.  But as Mike showed by presenting several versions of the song from 2000, there were subtle changes happening as the tour continued…

2000

By next year, the uplift of the vocal at the end of the lines was firmly established, as indeed it became in other songs.  But just listen to what has happened to the chorus line at the end of each verse.

There is also a feeling of Bob playing with an old friend – consider for example “and pretends that he just doesn’t see”.  Plus there is a feeling that Bob himself is presenting the song as a classic piece – which of course it already was, as it approached its 40 year anniversary.

And in this 2001 version I really get a feeling of that – a total awareness by Bob himself that this was written coming up to 40 years ago.   I mean, what must it be like to have written such a work 40 years before, and then not only be recognised for that work, but to have been playing it to audiences ever since?  I find it impossible to imagine, except that I think this retrospective version gives us something of an insight.

2001

To finish this edition, here, as promised is the original, just in case you have forgotten what a different piece it was in the beginning.

Postscript: I’m very pleased to say that this relatively new series has been met with some encouragement and so I will be continuing it, and I hope with songs such as this and Tangled, which I looked at last time, to return to in days to come with recordings from later events.   But I think five NET versions in one article is enough to be going on with!  It certainly is for me as I try to grasp exactly what Bob has done from one version to the next.

If you have been, thank you for reading.

By Tony Attwood

It was five years ago that Jochen suddenly sprung the Indigo Girls version of “Tangled up in Blue” on me (and maybe some other people too – although it is quite possible that it was just me who was unaware of it at the time.)   And I’ve been enjoying it ever since.   And just in case it doesn’t grab you, do keep going to listen to that violin solo.  Oh yes and those vocal harmonies.  And wow, talk about harmonies giving a song a new set of meanings.

Indeed, because it was five years ago, and because this is a great version too, here’s another edition that Jochen came up with…   Just how cool do you need to be?

Everyone has had a go in multiple languages, some even getting the masterpiece sound like something out of a music box, but what comes over to me is that with such a masterpiece, mere novelty isn’t enough.  There needs to be a deep understanding of what the song is, and where it goes to make a really worthwhile cover version.  Indeed I’ve been through a dozen instrumental versions and the same number of foreign language editions but none of them leap out.  They just don’t tell me, or make me feel, anything new

Of course the problems for the cover artist are multiple: it is a long song and we know it well, the rhythm is distinctive too, so are the chord changes.  Just performing it verse after verse tells us nothing that Bob didn’t say already.

However although Joan Osborne does it straight, there are subtle changes in the way she treats the melody which somehow draw me it.  It is relaxed enough for me to engage my whole self in the song once more, despite having heard it a thousand times before.

But I really do enjoy the energy of Charlie Daniels – and his violinist.  Suddenly I feel enlivened and I want to hear it all again.

And here’s another: Engerling who perform it as Bob could have performed it.  Indeed maybe as Bob did perform it; I really can’t remember all the Dylan reworkings of the song, especially since I started comparing one with another (see Tangled up in Blue: 1988 to 1993 for example).

But I think as I re-visit many of the covers that are out there, what I really do get drawn into (and this seems always to be the case with me) are the versions that try and take the song onwards somewhere else.  Sometimes it is a complete re-write, sometimes it is just a change of emphasis that draws me back in… it can be anything.   But listening to these covers, and indeed many more that I’ve rejected in trying to pull a little set together, it is the attempts to take the song on another step that I really value.

But having had a morning of nothing but entangledness, I now do need to come down somewhat.  There are many more versions to consider, but sadly my brain is now full and my colleagues are waiting for some work from me.

However Wendy Ellison Mullen however offers me a way to reflect once more, before making a coffee, and then moving on.

But life then goes on and it’s not all work.  This afternoon, a five mile walk with friends in the quiet Cambridgeshire countryside beckons.  This version (below) seems a perfect preparation.

• The Dylan Cover a Day 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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Other people’s songs: Performances by Dylan of traditional songs, and those written by others with explorations of their origins.

Songs selected by Aaron, additional commentary from the other side of the Atlantic by Tony.  There is an index of earlier commentaries at the end of the article.

Aaron: Often described as “traditional”, the lyrics for this song were actually written in 1944 for a radio show. The tune is the traditional, “Arkansas Traveler.”

This was the second of two ballad operas created by Alan Lomax for the New York City branch of the BBC for broadcast in the UK.

The cast included Wade Mainer, Red Rector, J.E. Mainer, Fred Smith, Cisco Houston, Rosie Ledford, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Sonny Terry, Susie Ledford, Burl Ives and Lily May Ledford. The visual shows the cast in the radio studio.

Diamond Joe · Cisco Houston

Tony: Not knowing the song at all, what with Arkansas traditional songs not being particularly well known in the English county of Northamptonshire, where I now live, I did a bit of looking up, while the recording was playing, and found that when it was first published (in 1847) it went under the name of the “The Arkansas Traveller and Rackinsac Waltz”.

Which then made me look up “Rackinsac”, and thus far I have been defeated.  I’m getting the impression it is  small town, but for once the internet has let me down.  If you know can you write in and say?   A supporting reference on the internet would be helpful.

But it makes me wonder: are there towns and villages that have no listing at all on the internet?   I mean, having moved out of London many, many years ago, I now live in an English village now with a population of 2000.  There’s no school or shop or post office, but we still have our own village website, commemorating the great and glorious history of the village, which is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.  But maybe it doesn’t always go like this.

Anyway, back to the music.  It’s a traditional folk song, with a very particular style emphasised by the held notes in the vocal line.

Aaron: Bob’s version was included on his 1992 album Good as I Been to You.

Tony: Bob keeps the mournful approach of the song, although the distinguishing held notes at the end of the lines are shorter.   But Bob’s voice here is very much in keeping with the lyrics – he has that ability to do “mournful” and make it sound absolutely real, and this really is a mournful song.

But beside  the mournfulness it made me think, we really ought to try and create folk songs for villages that exist today.  The characters of course don’t have to be real, but it would be an interesting project.   Maybe one day…

However, most of all, with Bob’s version I really started listening to the lyrics, which somehow had passed me by.   So in case you have missed them too, this is the story of a very rich outlaw, who is known for tricking everyone who does business with him and for treating his own team really badly.  As for example in the tale Joe rents out some horses to the singer, but they are “so old they could not stand”.

The singer works for Joe but Joe pays so badly, the singer never has enough money, and the food Joe gives his team is inedible.   But those who work for him find it hard to escape, so in the end the singer is left to reflect on the fact that

And when I'm called up yonder
And it's my time to go
Give my blankets to my buddies
Give the fleas to Diamond Joe

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a folk song that ends that way, and its a shame that (at least for me) Dylan’s voice is not clear enough for that message to be put across – although of course the vocals certainly portray the misery of working for Diamond Joe.

Aaron: Guy Clark recording it as a duet with Verlon Thompson in 2006 for the album Workbench Songs

Tony:  I guess the problem here is that when one puts a bounce in the music as this does, it takes away the awfulness of Joe,  but in a very real sense this still works, as it leaves me nodding in recognition of one or two people I have met over the years who are just inexorably mean or are tricksters.

Overall, Dylan really tells us the horrors of working with Joe, the others make us glad we never came across him.

Aaron: Next time we will look at the other song named Diamond Joe that Bob covered

Other people’s songs…

1. Other people’s songs. How Dylan covers the work of other composers
2. Other People’s songs: Bob and others perform “Froggie went a courtin”
3. Other people’s songs: They killed him
4. Other people’s songs: Frankie & Albert
5. Other people’s songs: Tomorrow Night where the music is always everything
6. Other people’s songs: from Stack a Lee to Stagger Lee and Hugh Laurie
7. Other people’s songs: Love Henry
8. Other people’s songs: Rank Stranger To Me
9. Other people’s songs: Man of Constant Sorrow
10. Other people’s songs: Satisfied Mind
11. Other people’s songs: See that my grave is kept clean
12. Other people’s songs: Precious moments and some extras
13. Other people’s songs: You go to my head
14. Other people’s songs: What’ll I do?
15. Other people’s songs: Copper Kettle
16. Other people’s songs: Belle Isle
17. Other people’s songs: Fixing to Die
18. Other people’s songs: When did you leave heaven?
19. Other people’s songs: Sally Sue Brown
20. Other people’s songs: Ninety miles an hour down a dead end street
21. Other people’s songs: Step it up and Go
22. Other people’s songs: Canadee-I-O
23. Other people’s songs: Arthur McBride
24. Other people’s songs: Little Sadie
25. Other people’s songs: Blue Moon, and North London Forever
26. Other people’s songs: Hard times come again no more
27. Other people’s songs: You’re no good
28. Other people’s songs: Lone Pilgrim (and more Crooked Still)
29. Other people’s songs: Blood in my eyes
30. Other people’s songs: I forgot more than you’ll ever know
31.  Other people’s songs: Let’s stick (or maybe work) together.
32. Other people’s songs: Highway 51
33. Other people’s songs: Jim Jones
34. Other people’s songs: Let’s stick (or maybe work) together.
35. Other people’s songs: Jim Jones
36. Other people’s songs: Highway 51 Blues
37. Other people’s songs: Freight Train Blues
38. Other People’s Songs: The Little Drummer Boy
39. Other People’s Songs: Must be Santa
40. Other People’s songs: The Christmas Song
41. Other People’s songs: Corina Corina
42. Other People’s Songs: Mr Bojangles
43. Other People’s Songs: It hurts me too
44. Other people’s songs: Take a message to Mary
45. Other people’s songs: House of the Rising Sun
46. Other people’s songs: “Days of 49”
47. Other people’s songs: In my time of dying
48. Other people’s songs: Pretty Peggy O
49. Other people’s songs: Baby Let me Follow You Down
50. Other people’s songs: Gospel Plow
51. Other People’s Songs: Melancholy Mood
52. Other people’s songs: The Boxer and Big Yellow Taxi
53. Other people’s songs: Early morning rain
54. Other people’s Songs: Gotta Travel On
55. Other people’s songs: “Can’t help falling in love”
56. Other people’s songs: Lily of the West
57. Other people’s songs: Alberta
58. Other people’s songs: Little Maggie
59. Other people’s songs: Sitting on top of the world
60. Dylan’s take on “Let it be me”
61. Other people’s songs: From “Take me as I am” all the way to “Baker Street”
62. Other people’s songs: A fool such as I
63. Other people’s songs: Sarah Jane and the rhythmic changes
64. Other people’s songs: Spanish is the loving tongue. Author drawn to tears
65. Other people’s songs: The ballad of Ira Hayes
66. Other people’s songs: The usual
67. Other people’s songs: Blackjack Davey
68. Other people’s songs: You’re gonna quit me
69. Other people’s songs: You belong to me
70. Other people’s songs: Stardust

Goodbye Jimmy Reed (2020) part 2

by Jochen Markhorst

II          All songs lead back t’ the sea

Over the years, Jimmy Reed pops up occasionally in Dylan’s working life. He plays “Big Boss Man” with Eric Clapton at the Crossroads Benefit Concert in June 1999 in New York City, and again with Grateful Dead in 2003; he tries “Baby, What Do You Want Me To Do?” during a rehearsal for Farm Aid (1985); as a DJ, he plays two songs by Jimmy Reed (“Going To New York” and again “Big Boss Man”); in interviews and in Chronicles, Dylan keeps mentioning the name as an example of an admired artist, and in 2022, i.e. after his tribute “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”, Dylan goes in his Philosophy Of Modern Song into more detail regarding his admiration for “Jimmy Reed, the essence of electric simplicity”. “Big Boss Man” gets its own chapter (Chapter 53) and in it Dylan makes it unequivocally clear what touches him so much in Reed’s recordings for Vee-Jay Records:

“Jimmy Reed is about space. About air being moved around the room. You feel like you can see the light hitting the dust as it swirls under the sway of music.”

“It never sounds crowded,” he adds. Exactly the aspect he himself, very consciously, strives for. In the 2008 Uncut interview, session musician Jim Dickinson (keyboardist on Time Out Of Mind) reveals:

“One thing that really struck me during those sessions, Dylan, he was standing singing four feet from the microphone, with no earphones on. He was listening to the sound in the room.”

In which he fully succeeds, as Henry Rollins argues. Rollins, a soul mate of Dylan’s and a source from which Dylan gratefully and frequently draws at the time of Time Out Of Mind (1997), as we know thanks to the digging of Dylan researcher Scott Warmuth, laments the general sound quality that is predominant from the 1990s onwards, from the time Pro Tools emerged. Everything sounds so “contained”, Rollins complains to the DVD Talk interviewer (February 2004):

“I miss the space, I miss the sound of a guitar in a room where you can hear the air around it. Who makes records like that still? Tom Waits does, Bob Dylan does.”

… almost literally the vocabulary Dylan uses to express the magic of Jimmy Reed’s sound. And what Dylan also immediately hears in Boz Scaggs’ recording of “Down In Virginia”, no doubt: space, the air around it.

The crystal-clear, splashing intro riff by Charlie Sexton, Jim Keltner’s claps on the drums resounding as if they were in the stairwell, a slight reverberation on Jack “Applejack” Walroth’s piercing harmonica, succeeding excellently in imitating Jimmy Reed’s flares and fireworks, the warmth of the bass and the intimacy of Boz’s voice that sounds as if he’s standing next to you in the kitchen… it’s quite understandable that Dylan falls head over heels for this recording. And it is probably no coincidence either that this is the only song on Rough And Rowdy Ways for which Dylan finally pulls his harmonica out of his inside pocket again.

A few days after his gig for Scaggs in March 2018, Charlie Sexton then reports to Dylan for rehearsals for the upcoming Europe tour, which kicks off 22 March in Lisbon. It seems obvious that over a coffee break Charlie would tell Dylan what he has been up to recently, and that Dylan would be eager to hear those recordings. Charlie knows that his employer is a Jimmy Reed fan. And that subsequently, upon hearing the Scaggs recording, Dylan’s “Bob Nolan mechanism” is activated;

“What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate. […] I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s Tumbling Tumbleweeds, for instance, in my head constantly — while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”
(Robert Hilburn interview, Los Angeles Times 2003)

Of which we know plenty of examples, of course. “Sugar Baby”, “Girl From The North Country”, “Floater”, “Masters Of War”, “Things Have Changed”… Dylan has been using the “Bob Nolan method” for sixty years now, listening to “The Lonesome Road”, “Scarborough Fair”, “Snuggled On Your Shoulder”, “Nottamun Town”, “Observations Of A Crow” in his head, and at a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song. Which has also been sparking the not very fruitful plagiarism-or-inspiration debates for sixty years now, but Dylan himself, in the liner notes of The Times They Are A-Changin’ sixty years ago, was pretty clear about it, especially in the eighth of the “11 Outlined Epitaphs”:

(influences?
hundreds thousands
perhaps millions
for all songs lead back t’ the sea
an’ at one time, there was
no singin’ tongue t’ imitate it)
t’ make new sounds out of old sounds
an’ new words out of old words

… and making “new sounds out of old sounds” Dylan has continued to do. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal” is usually attributed to Picasso, and just as often to T.S. Eliot (who indeed wrote “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” in his essay Philip Massinger, 1920). And to Steve Jobs, Stravinsky and Faulkner and dozens more – all of whom undoubtedly have said something along these lines at one time or another. And Dylan’s version, which he writes down in the opening of this same eighth Outlined Epitaph, shamelessly proclaims the same thing, basically:

Yes, I am a thief of thoughts
not, I pray, a stealer of souls
I have built an’ rebuilt
upon what is waitin’

“A word, a tune, a story, a line,” philosophises the young song poet, “keys in the wind t’ unlock my mind.”

Over half a century later, Charlie Sexton plays the tape with the “Down In Virginia” cover he has just recorded with Boz Scaggs. I went down in Virginia, honey, where the green grass grows, repeats the tape in Dylan’s head, as his right hand searches for a pencil. Soon, he knows, some of the words will change.

To be continued. Next up Goodbye Jimmy Reed part 3: An amazing ability

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

by Larry Fyffe

Archetypical Helen

Young Achilles, a demi-god (fresh out of ancient Greek and Roman mythology) is dressed up as a pretty girl in an effort to hide him away from military service.

However, just in case he does become a Greek warrior, his mom decides to provide him with protection from harm by dipping his body in a special river of the Underworld ~ alas, but for the heel that she holds him by.

Achilles grows up, and learns to do his manly duty. He battles the Trojans in an effort to rescue Helen, the Greek princess who’s been stolen away to Troy by Paris.

Things mess up. The Greek warrior ceases fighting the Trojans when he feels he’s been disrespected, his favorite slave girl snatched away from him by the Greek commander.

Achilles is by no means as devoted to his cause as Satan is to removing the Almighty One from His throne in Heaven:

Not less but more heroic than the wrath of Achilles
on his foe pursued

(John Milton: Paradise Lost, Book ix)

At least for the time being anyway, Prince Paris can keep the beautiful Helen as his captive.

Achilles, he’s no longer interested in supporting the Greeks.

Said it could be that in his the song lyrics beneath, singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan dresses himself up in the clothes of Paris.

Achilles, now upstairs and disguised in the Trojan’s robes, wants Helen for himself:

Achilles is in your alley way 
He don't want me here, he does brag
He's pointing to the sky
And he's hungry like a man in drag
How come you get someone like him to be your guard
You know I want your loving
Honey, but you're so hard

(Bob Dylan: Temporary Like Achilles)

What country  Helen’s actually from, or where her loyalty lies, is not at all made clear.

As indicated in the lines following, she’s put on trial, accused apparently of being the ebony-faced Ethiopian, right out of the biblical Song of Solomon.

Indeed, more interested she seems to be in the golden-haired Sun-God of Egypt than some foreign Jehovah or Jove:

They shaved her head
She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo
A messenger arrived with a black nightingale
I seen her on the staircase, and couldn't help but follow
Down past the fountain where they lifted her veil
(Bob  Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)

Ethiopia, not a perfect earthly paradise for sure, but blissful enough as far as Helen is concerned.

And for the guys, the gals are really “hot” too:

It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount  Abora
(Samuel Coleridge: Kubla Khan)

Disputed though in the epic poem quoted beneath – Ethiopia’s no Heaven:

Nor where Abassin kings their issue guard
Mont Amara,  though this by some supposed
True Paradise under the Ethiop line
(John Milton: Paradise Lost, part iv)

Left unresolved – the ending of the drama’s hanging:

You're the lamp of my soul, girl
And you touch up the night
But there's violence in your eyes, girl
So let us not be enticed
On the way out of Egypt, though Ethiopia
To the judgement hall of Christ
(Bob Dylan: Precious Angel)

Menippean Satire

Ironical and moral judgemental in tone, be the burlesque cartoons of Walt Kelly, popular in newspapers at the time Bob Dylan comes of age.

George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower,  Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Nikita Krushchev, Fidel Castro, Winston Churchill, George Romney, Spiro Agnew, John Mitchell, Joseph McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy, George Wallace, and Patrick McCarran – they’re all people associated with American politics who are satirized, to one extent or another, in “Pogo”.

All of  the above characters fit, directy or indirectly, into the historical context that surrounds the works of contempory singer/songwriter, musician Bob Dylan.

Kelly depicts a number of these political people in the shape of animals or birds ~ Joseph McCarthy, a wily cat; Richard Nixon, a long-nosed dog; John Mitchell, an eaglet-beaked lawyer; Edgar Hoover, a bulldog ‘chief of police’; Lyndon Johnson, a longhorn bull,  a silver-srarred Texas Range stallion; George Wallace, a racist rooster; Spiro Agnew, a hyena; Nikita Krushchev, a decorated pig; Pat McCarran, a glasses-wearing mole; George Washington, a hound dog.

Reminds of the following dark-humored song – one in which “Mother” Nature (unlike the “everyman” marsupial Pogo who cares about others) takes little interest in what happens to her offspring:

Mr. Frog went a-hopping up over the brook
A lily-white duck came and swallowed him up, uh-huh
(Bob Dylan: Froggie Went A-Courting ~ traditional/Dylan)

Of course, names specified for animals and birds can be flipped back on human beings to highlight some characteristics that they are supposed to possess:

He saw an animal that liked to snort
Horns on his head, and they weren't too short
It looked like there was nothing he couldn't pull
"Ah, I think I'll call it a bull"
(Bob Dylan: Man Gave Names To All The Animals)

President Lyndon Johnson gets depicted as a long-horned bull by Walt Kelly.

Also, as a half-horse,  and half-Texas Ranger.

By Tony Attwood

As noted before, in this series I attempt to show that analyses of Dylan’s songs that focus solely on the lyrics can, to a certain degree, miss an understanding of the elegance, beauty, power and indeed at times sheer genius of the composition as a work of music, rather than just as a set of lyrics.  It is, I am arguing, the combination of this music with these lyrics that makes the songs as memorable and important as they are.

In this example, I am looking at two of the songs from the religious period.    Bob performed, “I believe in You” 204 times on stage, and given his views at the time it is obviously fundamental for the music of the song to reflect the message of the song to be reflected in the music.  That most certainly is also the case with “When He returns” although this only got an outing 47 times.

What is remarkable is that each of the songs manages to get both the power of the message of Bob’s belief at the time in both the music and the lyrics – which of course amplifies that message enormously.   But achieving this is not as simple as it might sound, for the power cannot say “You MUST believe,” because that is not the complete message of Christianity.   As I perceive it, the religion offers us a reason to believe, but to believe or not is our choice.  In short the lyrics and the music of these songs of the religion need to offer us the benefits of belief but not the compunction to believe.

In my view, in these two songs presented here, Bob uses both the lyrics and the music to generate that feeling brilliantly.   There is enormous power in the music but it is not the power of the Bible-thumping preaching shouting “You must believe” but rather of “There is a really good reason to believe,” and that is what makes both songs so successful, and indeed so enjoyable, even to a confirmed atheist such as myself.

With “I believe in You” we can hear that distinction between “must believe” and “reason to believe” very clearly in the opening lines of the music.  If we just compare what happens with the music of the first two lines (gentle, no push, very clear) and the third line (the rise of the melody and the strain of the voice representing the struggle to stay true to the faith) we can appreciate the two elements of the song.

They ask me how I feel
And if my love is real
And how I know I'll make it through

That indeed is the contradiction expressed in both lyrics and music, and it is that duality – that similarity of approach in both lyrics and music – that makes this song work so well.

That same dichotomy appears in the music and lyrics of “When He Returns”

There is also the interesting way in which the piano moves over to playing in the upper register with “Truth is an arrow” and then in subsequent lines moves to the lower register.  The voice is delivering the truth (as perceived in the song) as an absolute strength, but also as a source of gentleness and kindness, and this change can happen over just a few words, as for example with “as it passes through”.

What is thus being expressed is the contradiction between the gentleness in life that is portrayed as part of the essence of the religion with the burning in hell notion for non-believers as portrayed in Revelations.  In short, the religion portrayed is one of two alternatives, and the music seeks to explore that, without doing anything as crude as simply contrasting soft and loud.

The contrasts achieved within the song are continued throughout the performance as with the treatment of “unknown hour” in the line “He unleashed his power at an unknown hour that no one knew” – the contrast is felt musically between the power available and the humility demanded.

Now of course we know these songs so well that it can all seem rather obvious, and yet from the point of view of a composer it is anything but, and a change of energy within a song is in fact very hard to pull off if it is to be at all convincing.  Indeed very, very few songs manage it at all.

There is a similar but more subtle approach in “I believe in You” and can be found if we listen to the musical interlude before the lyrics return with “I believe in you when winter turn to summer” and the build-up to “Oh even that couldn’t make me go back”.   Indeed throughout the whole song rises and falls in tension in a way that beyond these religious songs, is not that common with Bob’s writing, and indeed not heard in that many hymns either.

Yes Bob can take us up to a bursting finale on occasion, but for Bob a movement between power and subtlety is rare.   Take for example “Desolation Row” which could be excused having outbursts of anger or despair; that song just keeps going with its plaintive description of how the social and physical world has crumbled.  Likewise “Visions of Johanna” stays at its same level of hopelessness throughout both in the music and the lyrics.  But here the music does rise to proclaim the power of the Almighty and falls back to recognise man’s place within such a world.

My view thus is that with these songs Dylan is using a technique he doesn’t often use, and yet managing to use it with enormous effect, while making the whole thing seem unforced and natural.   In short, the songs sound this way because they ought to sound this way, but they take a musical genius to get the effect to work.  It seems obvious to say, but when the song contains changes of viewpoint within the lyrics, that is enormously difficult to achieve musically at the same time.

Performances by Dylan of traditional songs, and those written by others, with explorations of their origins. 

By Aaron Galbraith in USA and Tony Attwood in UK.  An index to the other articles in this series if given at the end.

Aaron: “Stardust” was composed by Hoagy Carmichael with lyrics by Mitchell Parish. Now considered a standard and part of the Great American Songbook, the song has been recorded over 1,500 times.

The first version with vocals was released in 1931 by Chester Leighton & His Sophomores

Tony: Not a song that I know but it strikes me as a very curious melody line.   It sounds fine when played on the trumpet (I think) but when sung it just sounds very jumpy to me.  I don’t recall Bob’s version at all… I am intrigued, and brought down several pegs through my lack of knowledge.

Aaron: In the following years, the song was recorded hundreds of times both instrumentally and vocally. The first rock star to record the song was Ringo Starr in 1970 on his Sentimental Journey album featuring an arrangement by Paul McCartney.

Tony: Now this is strange; with this version it makes a lot more musical sense to me – at least the first half of the verse does.   But I did find this picture above both distracting and rather strange, as I do the wandering melody of the song.  It took me a moment to realise there were people at the windows of the pub – I was further distracted by the boy on the bottom right, and the contradiction between the size of the pub with the terraced houses.   It is a very strange picture all round.   A very long pause on the final orchestral notes too.  This really is a piece of music I’m not getting in the way everyone else seems to.

Aaron: In 1978, Willie Nelson recorded it as the title-track of his album of pop standards. In its review, the Gannett News Service felt that “Carmichael would be proud”. National Public Radio commented: “Today, people who never heard of Isham Jones or Artie Shaw or even composer Hoagy Carmichael know his work thanks to Willie Nelson.”

Tony: I guess I am totally back to front.  I mean, I know the work of Hoagy Carmichael, for example, through songs like “Lazybones”, “The Nearness of You”, “Georgia on my Mind,” “Heart and Soul” and so on.   I guess those were the songs I was brought up with (as I’ve probably mentioned before, my father was a pianist and saxophone player in dance bands in the era), but somehow of this song I have no memory.  I guess my dad never played it, or didn’t like it.

But now I am getting used to it, I understand it a lot better.  It still doesn’t do too much for me, but I guess I must have heard it before and now listening to several versions of it a couple of times, old memories buried deep are starting to re-emerge.  Maybe my dad did play it…

Aaron: Dylan recorded it for Triplicate in 2017. Rolling Stone considered that “Dylan’s approach finds a pleasing, country-tinged arrangement” that the reviewer noted to be “somewhere between” Sinatra and Nelson’s version.

Tony: What a strange journey this has been.   Now, having heard the versions above, as we get to Bob’s version, I do indeed find I remember it … a bit.   It’s a lilting swing along but I feel maybe Bob is straining a little for the high notes.

I must admit that when Bob started to record the classics of American popular music I wondered why.  I never had any problem with understanding why he was recording old blues songs, not least because his interpretations were generally original, and of course many people wouldn’t have known the songs at all until Bob came along, but the classics of American songs from the 1930s and 1940s… I’ve never been quite sure that he has added to our understanding.

Doing some background reading I’ve noted that Hoagy Carmichael recorded an instrumental version of the song, and discovering it now, 96 years after it was written, it seems to me that it works much better as an instrumental.  But on the other hand it appears that over 1500 recordings of it with the lyrics have been made, so more than ever I’m out on my own over this one.

Ah well, but I have learned a lot, and a gap in my knowledge has been filled.  As ever Aaron I’m obliged to you for improving my education!  Mind you, it’s a good thing we didn’t start with this song, otherwise I might have abandoned the series before we started.  As it is, this is episode 70.  As I say Aaron, I’m obliged to you.  I’m still learning something every day.

Other people’s songs…

1. Other people’s songs. How Dylan covers the work of other composers
2. Other People’s songs: Bob and others perform “Froggie went a courtin”
3. Other people’s songs: They killed him
4. Other people’s songs: Frankie & Albert
5. Other people’s songs: Tomorrow Night where the music is always everything
6. Other people’s songs: from Stack a Lee to Stagger Lee and Hugh Laurie
7. Other people’s songs: Love Henry
8. Other people’s songs: Rank Stranger To Me
9. Other people’s songs: Man of Constant Sorrow
10. Other people’s songs: Satisfied Mind
11. Other people’s songs: See that my grave is kept clean
12. Other people’s songs: Precious moments and some extras
13. Other people’s songs: You go to my head
14. Other people’s songs: What’ll I do?
15. Other people’s songs: Copper Kettle
16. Other people’s songs: Belle Isle
17. Other people’s songs: Fixing to Die
18. Other people’s songs: When did you leave heaven?
19. Other people’s songs: Sally Sue Brown
20. Other people’s songs: Ninety miles an hour down a dead end street
21. Other people’s songs: Step it up and Go
22. Other people’s songs: Canadee-I-O
23. Other people’s songs: Arthur McBride
24. Other people’s songs: Little Sadie
25. Other people’s songs: Blue Moon, and North London Forever
26. Other people’s songs: Hard times come again no more
27. Other people’s songs: You’re no good
28. Other people’s songs: Lone Pilgrim (and more Crooked Still)
29. Other people’s songs: Blood in my eyes
30. Other people’s songs: I forgot more than you’ll ever know
31.  Other people’s songs: Let’s stick (or maybe work) together.
32. Other people’s songs: Highway 51
33. Other people’s songs: Jim Jones
34. Other people’s songs: Let’s stick (or maybe work) together.
35. Other people’s songs: Jim Jones
36. Other people’s songs: Highway 51 Blues
37. Other people’s songs: Freight Train Blues
38. Other People’s Songs: The Little Drummer Boy
39. Other People’s Songs: Must be Santa
40. Other People’s songs: The Christmas Song
41. Other People’s songs: Corina Corina
42. Other People’s Songs: Mr Bojangles
43. Other People’s Songs: It hurts me too
44. Other people’s songs: Take a message to Mary
45. Other people’s songs: House of the Rising Sun
46. Other people’s songs: “Days of 49”
47. Other people’s songs: In my time of dying
48. Other people’s songs: Pretty Peggy O
49. Other people’s songs: Baby Let me Follow You Down
50. Other people’s songs: Gospel Plow
51. Other People’s Songs: Melancholy Mood
52. Other people’s songs: The Boxer and Big Yellow Taxi
53. Other people’s songs: Early morning rain
54. Other people’s Songs: Gotta Travel On
55. Other people’s songs: “Can’t help falling in love”
56. Other people’s songs: Lily of the West
57. Other people’s songs: Alberta
58. Other people’s songs: Little Maggie
59. Other people’s songs: Sitting on top of the world
60. Dylan’s take on “Let it be me”
61. Other people’s songs: From “Take me as I am” all the way to “Baker Street”
62. Other people’s songs: A fool such as I
63. Other people’s songs: Sarah Jane and the rhythmic changes
64. Other people’s songs: Spanish is the loving tongue. Author drawn to tears
65. Other people’s songs: The ballad of Ira Hayes
66. Other people’s songs: The usual
67. Other people’s songs: Blackjack Davey
68. Other people’s songs: You’re gonna quit me
69. Other people’s songs: You belong to me

Goodbye Jimmy Reed (2020) part 1

by Jochen Markhorst

I           A HUGE thanks to our friend Charlie Sexton

“I just hate the phrase yacht rock. I hate being put in that bag or categorized in that way,” Boz Scaggs says when asked by Rolling Stone journalist David Browne (28 November 2018). Understandable, Boz’s distaste for such a condescending yuppie disqualification, but to be fair: he mostly has himself to blame, of course. After the worldwide success of Silk Degrees (1976, the record featuring “We’re All Alone”, “Lowdown” and, above all, “Lido Shuffle”), he voluntarily converts to the slick, overproduced R&B that dominated the clubs and the charts deep into the 1980s, making both his sound and his songs on the two albums that followed more and more sterile. Shifting his oeuvre, by extension, into the record bin with Steely Dan, Toto and Hall & Oates, yes. Which Scaggs also acknowledges, in that same interview:

“Silk Degrees was a big blast, and the records that came after followed the same track in a way, but I just felt I lost my way. It became a career, an exercise — the publicity, the fame, the trappings of all that. The music just kind of got lost to me. I wanted to take some time away, and that time away turned out to be six or seven or eight years. I just didn’t feel like going back to it. The music had left me. ”

It takes eight years before the music returns, and from then on (Other Roads, 1988), we see and hear a gradual return to the roots – the blues, the Americana and the soul of his first American record Boz Scaggs (1969), the wonderful, somewhat forgotten record featuring that beautiful blues marathon “Loan Me A Dime” with Duane Allman on guitar, recorded at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio.

In the second decade of the 21st century, Boz picks up this return to roots in an explicit and structured way. The trilogy Memphis in 2013, A Fool To Care in 2015 and finally Out Of The Blues in 2018 is actually set up as a trilogy indeed; three records full of respectful covers of often less obvious songs from Curtis Mayfield, The Band, Al Green, Willy DeVille and Moon Martin (“Cadillac Walk”), rootsy own work with strong Chuck Berry and Bobby Bland echoes, traditionals like “Corrina, Corrina” and surprising choices, such as Neil Young’s shelf warmer “On The Beach” and Steely Dan’s half-forgotten gem “Pearl Of The Quarter”.

Result of a lengthy, well considered selection process, as Scaggs explains: “I’m a list person.” He loves exchanging forgotten or undiscovered song titles with colleagues like Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald. “It’s really fun when you’re talking to someone who’s an aficionado,” he tells, “it’s fun to track all that and to share notes with other people.” He owes the introduction to the Neil Young song to his son Austin, for instance, and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos draws his attention to Jimmy McCracklin’s, “I’ve Just Got to Know”. And then, after much toing and froing and inching and pinching, Scaggs ends up with about forty songs that could probably get a place in that roots trilogy. On the Deluxe Editions we hear some examples of songs that were chosen, but were nevertheless dropped in the very last selection, including an attractive demo of Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” (last song on Memphis Deluxe Edition, 2022). Which, by the way, closes a circle; his very, very first record, the Stockholm and only European-distributed record Boz (1965) is already a mix of traditionals (“C.C. Rider”), roots classics (“Baby Let Me Follow You Down”) and a Dylan song (“Girl From The North Country”) as well.

Boz needs no insider tips for Jimmy Reed, though. Reed has been on a pedestal since his first guitar lessons, and has always remained a hero. And is subsequently the only songwriter honoured twice on the trilogy: “You Got Me Cryin'” on Memphis, and on Out Of The Blues the song that provides the template for Dylan’s “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”: “Down In Virginia”.

“Down In Virginia” is not really an outlier in Reed’s oeuvre. The song has nowhere near the status of evergreens like “Big Boss Man”, “Bright Lights, Big City”, “Baby What You Want Me To Do”, songs with which he himself scored hits and made immortal by names like The Stones and Elvis, nor the reputation of crowd pleasers like “Shame, Shame, Shame”, “I Ain’t Got You” or “Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby”, which have been in the repertoire from Bryan Ferry to Van Morrison and from The Yardbirds to Jerry Garcia. No, “Down In Virginia” is mostly ignored. Even on Ronnie Wood’s very loving and respectful Mr Luck – A Tribute to Jimmy Reed: Live at the Royal Albert Hall from 2021, tellingly; eighteen Reed songs, but no “Down In Virginia”.

Jimmy himself, however, seems to have something of a weak spot for the song. In 1958 he chooses the song to be released as a single, but it is not really a success: “Down In Virginia” is in the Billboard Hot 100 for one single week, at number 96 (11 August 1958, the week Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” is still clinging to 1, just before “Volare” hits). Still, the song remains on his setlist, and in 1969 he even names an entire album after it. Incidentally, a weird album with a not too impressive performance of the title song. All 11 songs on Down In Virginia begin with a fade-in and end with a fade-out; it seems to be a hotchpotch of live recordings from which any evidence of audiences has been erased (the liner notes merely say: “recorded in Chicago, late 1968”). Lacking that unique, irresistible 50s Vee-Jay sound anyway.

That 1958 recording also seems to be the source for Boz Scaggs’ second Reed cover, on 2018’s Out Of The Blues, the third album of the trilogy. In many ways, that album is similar to its two predecessors. Boz is still supported by giants like Ray Parker Jr., Willie Weeks and Jim Cox, for example. But there is at least one big, sound-defining difference: Dylan’s guitarist Charlie Sexton has just a few more days off in March 2018 (he is expected back in Lisbon on 22 March, when Dylan resumes his gigs with a Europe tour), so he is able to accept Boz’s invitation to contribute to the album, and things click well between Boz and Charlie. In September, between Dylan’s Far East Tour (ending 28 August in Christchurch, New Zealand) and the US Fall Tour starting in Phoenix on 4 October, Charlie is happy to oblige again, and plays a few concerts as a guest guitarist in Scaggs’ band. Which Scaggs appreciates with elegant gratitude:

“Thank you Temecula! A HUGE thanks to our friend Charlie Sexton for sitting in with us these last few shows. See you tomorrow LA!”
(@bozscaggs tweet, 29 September 2018)

Number 7 on both the record and the setlist then is “Down In Virginia” – the song that, incidentally, is not on the setlist on nights when Charlie Sexton does not play. Justifiable, as the performance is indeed carried by Charlie. From the introductory, splashing intro and the smooth licks under the verses, the fills in between and the subservient struts under Jack “Applejack” Walroth’s harmonica: Charlie Sexton.

“Charlie, though, creates songs and sings them as well, and he can play guitar to beat the band. There aren’t any of my songs that Charlie doesn’t feel part of and he’s always played great with me. […] He inhabits a song rather than attacking it. He’s always done that with me.”
(Dylan on Charlie Sexton, New York Times interview 12 June 2020)

… and vice versa, we might add. Charlie’s and Boz’s “Down In Virginia” is, in any case, a song in which Dylan moves in headlong. Fully furnished as it is.

To be continued. Next up Goodbye Jimmy Reed part 2: All songs lead back t’ the sea

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

There is an index to the 120+ earlier articles in this series, here.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Dylan: “All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains & lovers who are really geese & swans that turn into angels—they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s going to come & take away their toilet paper—they’re going to die.”

As he’d been doing over the past four years, Dylan kicked off every concert with ‘Things Have Changed.’ That much at least hadn’t changed. It was an effective way of reminding his audience that this was not the Dylan of old they were seeing. In 2015, by introducing American Classics into his concerts, Dylan transcended the boxes people had tended to put him in: folk singer, rock singer, folk-rock singer, spokesman for his generation and so on. Going beyond that, he had come to embody American music itself, to contain within himself the history and expression of that music from its deepest roots in the 1920s.

It’s worthwhile reminding ourselves that much of the specific imagery of ‘Things Have Changed’ is not at all personal, but relates to the film for which it was written, Wonder Boys, and that despite the refrain, ‘I used to care but things have changed,’ Dylan’s performances of the song were zesty and passionate. He still cares very much about his music.

‘The effortless feel of the playful-yet-ominous, hard-grooving, utterly dazzling ‘Things Have Changed’ was an early indication of the renewed friskiness of Dylan’s 21st-century work,’ Brian Hiatt wrote in Rolling Stone magazine. ( “The 25 Best Bob Dylan Songs of the 21st Century”)

The following recording (Tokyo, April 25^th) shows Dylan and his band at their playful, hard-grooving, dazzling best. Note the Sinatra-like ease with which he zooms through the vocal lines.

Things Have Changed

‘Duquesne Whistle’ keeps its place early in the setlist, usually around the fourth or fifth song, keeps up the ‘playful-but-ominous’ mood; there are forces at work that can uproot everything. That ol’ Duquesne whistle is the sound of the slow train, still comin’ around the bend. This one, also from Japan (Sendai, April 9^th) bustles along in its rather quaint, old fashioned way from those lovely opening chords to the jump beat which propels it. Another outstanding performance.

Duquesne Whistle

While in Sendai, let’s hear ‘What’ll I Do?’ Written by Irving Berlin in 1923, performed by Sinatra in 1947 and Judy Garland in 1963. Dylan first performed it in 2015 (See NET 2015 part 4). It’s a weary, lovelorn song, a perfect fit for that melancholy mood that underlies Dylan’s later concerts; the soft-voiced crooner at work.

What’ll I Do?

Unlike the timing of the live performances of his own songs, Dylan would sometimes perform one of the American Standards from an up and coming album as a teaser. In 2017 Dylan would release his final tranche of these songs on Triplicate; one of those songs ‘I Could Have Told You’ got its first airing in Durham (Nov 4^th) 2016. Written by Carl Sigman and Jimmy Van Heusen and released by Sinatra in 1954.

A masterful performance by Dylan. Breath-taking, is the expression. I can only stress what I have highlighted before – the consummate ease with which Dylan negotiates these songs, how he can sustain high notes while pouring feeling into them. An edge of I-told-you-so triumph in this one.

I Could Have Told You

For me, one of the primary interests of Dylan’s handling of these American Standards has been the influence of them, and of the Voice (Sinatra), on Dylan’s performances of his own songs. Not that he sings them like Sinatra, he has his own Voice, but Sinatra’s breezy ease and confidence somehow infuses itself into Dylan when he performs Dylan. He’s right on top of the song.

Take this performance of ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ for example. You get the feeling Dylan can do anything with his voice: roughen it or smooth it, lift it or drop it, hold notes or let them go, play with the timing, swoop up to or down upon the notes. You also get the feeling (at least I do) that this is only one vocal pathway through the song, that timing and emphasis could all be quite different.

The triple harmonica breaks are more than welcome, as by this stage Dylan rarely uses the instrument; I miss the whimsicality of Dylan’s harp playing, and the way it can sharpen the emotional edge of the song, as it does here.

There is a little too much audience noise on this recording for my taste, but the performance is too good to miss. (Oct 14^th, Indio: known as the Desert Trip concert)

Simple Twist of Fate

Despite the audience noise, we’ll stay in Indio for ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’ Dylan puts a bit of a bark into this one, which is perfectly fitting for the rough, confrontational nature of the song, and still likes to break into falsetto on the word ‘you’ lending the performance that hysterical edge that has become a trade mark of his later performances of his own songs, although its use is by now on the wane. By contrast, the instrumental breaks are curiously gentle.

Ballad of a Thin Man.

The fact that, despite the dropping of so many old songs from the Setlist, Dylan did four songs from the 1965 Album Highway 61 Revisited at the Indio concert demonstrates the longevity of those songs, and Dylan’s commitment to them. Here’s the song ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ this one from Durham (Nov 4^th), a better recording than Indio and, I think, a better performance too, a thrumming, powerful rendition of the song.

There’s a lot of evil stuff alluded to in this song (what really happened to ‘the fifth daughter on the twelfth night’?) which reverses the Biblical story of how God ‘stayed Abraham’s hand’ from sacrificing his child to show Abraham resisting and God egging him on in the masterful piece of dialogue that starts the song :

God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe say, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No, " Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
Next time you see me comin', you better run"
Abe said, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God said, "Out on Highway 61"

But none of that evil stuff matters when you can just shoot it down Highway 61. Dark and satirical, this is certainly one of Dylan’s great rockers, and this is certainly one of the great performances of it. (Add it to your ‘best ever’ list?)

Highway 61 Revisited

We’ll stay in Durham to catch ‘Desolation Row,’ the final triumphant track on the album, a song which has thrived in performance right through the NET. My favourite remains the piano-driven version from 2003 (See NET 2003 Part 1), but I have no quarrel with this one. I’m sure others must have noticed circus imagery underlying the whole album from ‘the jugglers and the clowns’ in the first track, ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ to the cavorting ‘sword swallower’ of ‘Thin Man’ to the profusion of bizarre figures that tumble from this ambitious masterpiece. This song’s old black magic hasn’t faded.

Desolation Row

At this stage Dylan’s great signature song ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was fading from view. The last year in which it was commonly played was 2012, was played once in 2013, dropped altogether in 2014 and 2015, and played only once in 2016, at Indio. It would revive somewhat in 2019. I think I can understand why. The song has been performed over 2000 times, and while we have heard some spirited performances, I have also felt it becoming a bit rote. As if the song had lost its charge for Dylan. I believe the same thing happened to ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ which suffered three or four years of ragged performances before being dropped for good in 2010.

Anyway, here it is, the only 2016 performance, crowd noise and all.

Like a Rolling Stone

In 2016 ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ underwent something of a revival. Like ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ another song from  Bringing It All Back Home, ‘Baby Blue’ showed signs of fatigue before being dropped in 2012, apparently for good. Now, four years later, it pops up again – fully revived and refreshed? I think so. It doesn’t have the searing passion of the performances from mid 1990s but it’s got something else, a rueful acceptance, perhaps. And it rocks. (Durham)

It’s All Over Now Baby Blue

Some of the songs from Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft might be showing some fatigue also. ‘Lonesome Day Blues’ wasn’t played at all in 2015 but revives in 2016. A short-lived revival however as the song will only be played once in 2017 and disappears after that. Sometimes the predictable three chord structure of the blues can make it a bit mind numbing. For me, it’s the lyrics that keep this song afloat. It may seem to lumber a little, but the picture that emerges of ‘this slow and lonesome day’ is compelling. That slowish, deliberate tempo is just right for the song. (Durham)

Lonesome Day Blues

One song that Dylan has not allowed to fall away is ‘Love Sick.’ Although I believe 2011 was its peak performance year (See NET 2011 Part 1), we’ve had no lack of haunting, powerful performances over the years. You can’t really mess with the tempo and melody of this song, and except for some lyrical changes it sounds pretty much the way it did when Dylan first brought it to the stage in 1997. It became a fixture in the Setlist. (Durham)

Love Sick

I’m going to finish with two American Standards, ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Melancholy Mood.’ Although Dylan now had two albums worth of these songs, he mostly drew from a very narrow range of them for live performance, maybe half a dozen songs. We have the two I’ve mentioned, ‘What’ll I do?,’ ‘Why Try to Change Me Now,’ ‘I’m a Fool to Love You,’ The Night We Called It A Day’ and that’s about it. We have to conclude that these were Dylan’s favourites. I would love to have heard ‘On a Little Street in Singapore’ off Fallen Angels live.

So let’s hear ‘Melancholy Mood,’ the title of which seems to sum up the mood of the songs Dylan has chosen from American Standards. It’s a slow paced tear-jerker with sensitive lyrics. This one’s from Paducah (Kentucky, Oct 30^th).

Melancholy Mood

We’ll stay in Paducah for ‘Autumn Leaves.’ Dylan most often places this one at the end of a concert, before ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ another slow paced tear jerker with an autumnal flavour. A beautiful, soulful version.

Autumn Leaves

That’s it for now. I’ll be back soon to finish off 2016 and to say something about Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Until then

Kia Ora

By Tony Attwood, delving a little further and comparing some of the recordings from the Never Ending Tour, based on the comprehensive NET series by Mike Johnson (for which there is an index here).

Previously I’ve taken a look at

• Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• Visions of Johanna
• The Hard Rain of 1988, 2003 and 2015

Today it is the first look at Tangled Up in Blue, (of which there will beyond doubt be more in the future).

1988

This first recording from 1988 appeared in part 3 of that year’s review.

“Tangled up in Blue” was of course originally released in 1975; and thus this earliest NET recording we have therefore, is when the song was already 13 years old

And to me Bob here almost sounds as if he expects that we might not know the song, and he wants to tell us all about it.  The instrumentation is bare, all we hear is Bob singing, the lead guitar and the electric bass, plus of course drums keeping the beat

Each verse is the same musically, goes at quite a speed – it rattles along verse after verse.  Just how fast can he sing these words – they get lost falling one over the other.  Does Bob not realise just how important this song had become to his fans?  Maybe, maybe not, one never knows.

What we do know however is just how brilliant the guitar solos are.

1989

Bob now changes keys (which is a unusual) and takes the song faster and as a result the delivery of the vocals is totally different, it is as if the lyrics now once more mean something to Bob.  There is more power here too as if he is telling the story for the first time, rather than (as with one year before) just relating a not very important set of events.  Altogether there is a dynamism here – at times Bob seems almost breathless.

1993

More changes, and in fact the experimentation with the song was happening throughout 1993, as an earlier recording from this year gives us a far less powerful performance.  And indeed it is extraordinary how Bob has changed the key that the song is played in, over and over again.   And that is not just a detail – changing the key of a song does make a huge difference to everyone involved.   Which makes me aware that I am not sure I have read any commentaries on how Dylan changes the key his songs are played in.  (Note to self: pay more attention to the key!   If Bob is changing key, he does it for a reason.)

By this performance much of the melody has gone; the song has just become a rapid recital of the lyrics and the lead guitar’s solos are frantically trying to match the energy of the whole arrangement.   And we actually get two verses of instrumental next to each other in which they bass and lead guitar seem to be having a battle.

Indeed by the “keep on keeping on” phrase Bob is in fact just calling out the lyrics we know, before handing over once again to the lead guitar to improvise ever more frantically.

But then suddenly we get a pause via the instrumental break consisting of three verses, which become ever more energised although in my view not actually taking us much further on.

As a result, by the end Bob gets to “started from a different point … of view” by being reduced to shouting the phrase out at the top of his vocal range, before we move onto a much more sparse instrumental.

And then we get the harmonica break, one of the oddest harmonica solos ever, I think, with the first verse played at the top of the instrument’s range, and the second verse having nothing much to do with the melody of the song at all.   But that is not to say Bob has lost the plot – rather I find he is taking the song to a new place, to that different point of view – although not necessarily a coherent point of view.  The guitar then comes in to expand the new viewpoint and the song builds up … and takes us right down again.

I’ve never measured the length of instrumental breaks on the tour (it would seem an awfully artificial thing to do) but my memory (faulty as it is in old age) tells me this must be just about the longest break there is.  Although I feel fairly surely I will be corrected.

But still it is not finished, for then if what we have heard was  coda, we now have a post-coda, or perhaps a musical epilogue, which makes the point of just how tangled up the music as well as the lyrics can become.   It really is quite a performance.

Tangled up?  I most certainly am!   There is of course a lot more Tangled to be considered, and I will come back to it anon, but quite honestly, after that performance I’m exhausted.  Words, as they say, begin to fail me.

But if you are still with me, may I make the suggestion that you now go back to the 1988 recording (the top one above) and play it one more time, just to appreciate the incredible journey that Bob has taken with this song across these five years.

By Tony Attwood

The problem with covers is that the more distinctive the song, the more difficult it is to retain the essence of the song and yet make a new version that says and offers something different.

The opening chord sequence of Sweetheart Like, and that descending bass movement which turns up repeatedly in the song, makes making a difference very difficult.  Keep it in, and there’s not much room to change the song.  Leave it out, and you’ve lost the song.

Steve Gibbons tries his best with occasional moves into declaiming the lyrics rather than singing them, with the emphasis then on the pain of the break up.   But for me the lead guitar part that pops up at the end of each line makes it all seem too artificial.

Chrissie Hynde is an expert at re-working Dylan, and here again it seems she has managed to combine the essence of the song with her own occasionally hesitant interpretation.   Suddenly I’ve lost my memory of Dylan’s original and am treating the song as something new, something to be focussed on afresh.   This is how it should be done.  I’m not 100% sure of the instrumental verse at the end with the … what is it – an organ, a flute, a synth… picking out the melody.   But one can always stop listening and go back to the start.

World Party

World Party (ie Karl Wallinger) keeps the solid emphasis on the chord sequence, and it takes him a moment to establish himself, but once there it flows beautifully.   I would have taken the bass down quite a lot in the final mix, and maybe, just maybe asked Jimmy to lay off the tendency to edge towards histrionics, but these are thoughts depending on one interprets the lyrics.  Is it regret?  Is it sadness?  Is it a desperate attempt to get her out?   Yes, how you sing it all depends how you feel it.

Listening next to Jimmy LaFave is something of a relief at least for me since here we seem to have a much greater understanding of the lyrics.   He was the first recipient of the Restless Spirit Award, which I always thought was very appropriate – especially when one hears a recording like this.

Judy Collins

I am not sure why someone with such a perfect voice as Judy Collins would ever waste even half a second in a song by speaking the lyrics rather than singing them, but even with her singing 60% of a song is generally worth more than other artists singing 100%.  Every ounce of the plaintiveness of the song is still there, and one can always imagine that after the idea of the spoken lines was put on the song the musical director was quietly led away and allowed to direct no more.  But no matter what, it is still beautiful and gets every ounce out of the song that there is to be got.

• The Dylan Cover a Day 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

by Jochen Markhorst

XX        The elegance of Euler’s identity

17 April 2020

 Apart from enthusiasm, there is also some relief on 17 April 2020, when “I Contain Multitudes” is surprisingly released. It is a real song. “Murder Most Foul”, which came out of the blue three weeks ago was equally surprising and overwhelming, but still more of a meditation than a song. No, “I Contain Multitudes” is “a delicate ballad with a minimal arrangement,” as Rolling Stone‘s Brian Hiatt immediately noted on the day of its release. On the other side of the ocean, Ben Beaumont-Thomas of The Guardian, also right on that same Friday 17 April, still sees similarities with “Murder Most Foul” (“Like that song, though, I Contain Multitudes is drifting and percussion-free, backed by acoustic, electric and pedal steel guitars”), but opens his short, quick review with a sigh of relief: “Bob Dylan has continued to release his first original music in eight years.”

By far the most attention, however, is given to the title and the lyrics. And all journalists do agree: Dylan is singing about himself. “I Contain Multitudes is a more sanguine personal exposé,” analyses Mark Beaumont for New Musical Express (also on 17 April). Rasha Ali of USA Today had three days longer to think about it, but also concentrates on the lyrics, and likewise comes to the otherwise unsubstantiated and puerile conclusion: “a ballad that paints a vivid picture of what his ‘multitudes’ contain,” a finding she then repeats twice more in other words.

The musical accompaniment to those supposed autobiographical words is largely ignored though.

Couplet

It is quite likely that we owe the particular beauty of that musical accompaniment largely to guitarist Blake Mills. At least, it does seem obvious that Dylan himself arrived in the studio with a quite ordinary chord progression to open the song:

  C
Today, and tomorrow, and yesterday, too

Am                               G     C
 The flowers are dyin' like all things do

… C-Am-G-C, a ten a penny I-VI-V-I scheme, in other words, that we know from a multitude of songs, and on which most of us sweated in the first days of learning to play guitar. Nor is there too much melody; Dylan balances on the border between singing and speaking. But he does have the lucky hunch to invite the boy next door, Blake Mills, to the recording sessions.

The exceptionally talented guitarist Blake Mills from Malibu, young as he may be (born September 21, 1986), already has a name in Dylan circles and beyond. Eric Clapton publicly sings Mills’ praises: “The last guitarist I heard that I thought was phenomenal” (Rolling Stone, 2014). Jim Keltner, another undisputed great with plenty of Dylan experience, met him at a Jakob Dylan session, and judges: “He’s so good that you can’t forget what it would be like to be his age and be one of his peers – you either have to love the guy, or be very jealous” (Washington Post, 12 June 2020). We know him from the wonderful Dylan cover “Heart Of Mine” on the Amnesty project Chimes of Freedom, 2012, and from the Newport Festival in 2015, where he conjured a brilliant “When I Paint My Masterpiece” from Dylan’s old 1965 guitar, and from even more glittering tangents with Dylan.

But for now, the high point in Mills’ meteoric career is, of course, when Dylan not only chooses Mills’ workplace Sound City studio to record Rough And Rowdy Ways, but also asks Blake to bring his guitar. On the cover, he is only soberly listed in the album credits as one of the “additional musicians”, but we know by now that that is a somewhat overly economical description of Blake’s contributions.

Apparently, the sparingly worded job description does bother him somewhat. Shortly after the release of Rough And Rowdy Ways, June 2020, Blake Mills posts seven short videos on his Instagram account. The clips last no longer than a minute (except for “Black Rider”; which lasts 1’35”) and are visually unspectacular: a static camera films the guitar-playing Mills, who, sitting on a chair, hunched over his electric guitar, does not look into the camera once. But the content, especially for Dylan fans, is spectacular: in each clip, Mills demonstrates the guitar part he played on seven songs from Rough And Rowdy Ways: “I Contain Multitudes”, “False Prophet”, “Mother Of Muses”, “My Own Version Of You”, “Crossing The Rubicon”, “Black Rider” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”. They are mood- and colour-defining guitar parts, enviable demonstrations of creativity and craftsmanship, and one might suspect that Mills is sharing these remarkable clips with the world out of some sort of assertiveness.

Blake Mills plays Dylan’s I Contain Multitudes

The unsurpassed Eyolf Østrem, the Scandinavian musicologist who has been selflessly delighting the world for years with his dynamic, abundant and intelligent site things twice, takes the trouble of analysing all of Dylan’s songs and publishing them with their chord progressions. He sees and hears what Blake Mills does with that basic C-Am-G-C scheme and the continuation of the verse:

  C                           C6
Today, and tomorrow, and yesterday, too

Am                               G/b                C
The flowers are dyin' like all things do

D#dim                           Em           F6
Follow me close, I'm going to Bally-na-Lee

C                                              G7
I'll lose my mind if you don't come with me

  F                        F#dim
I fuss with my hair, and I fight blood feuds

C/g            G11    C
I contain multitudes

… “bridge-building” might be an apt description. Mills builds extremely elegant, tasteful little bridges from one chord to the next, creates ethereal beauty with slightly dissonant accents, and injects tension with jazzy “in-between chords” like that D#dim or G11. Perhaps the most beautiful bridge is the staircase bridge from verse 3, the camouflaged ascending D-E-F staircase to the equally masterfully embellished final section of the verse – which he carves out of an essentially just as ordinary base as the opening (C-G-F). Almost casually, meanwhile, Blake provides an intriguingly irregular pulse under the ambient-like tapestry of sound laid down by his colleagues; Tony Garnier drawing long, heavy lines with his bow on the upright bass, while Donnie Herron’s steel guitar paints the back wall with moody, unobtrusive, broad brushstrokes.

Bridge

For the particular beauty of the twice-played bridge we have again to thank Mills, to an in itself simple artifice, which in all its simplicity has the same elegance as the most beautiful mathematical formula of all time, Euler’s e^iπ+1=0 (Euler’s so-called identity, 1734). Just as Euler manages to capture the two most important natural numbers, the most important mathematical constants and the three most important mathematical operations in one simple formula, Mills unites in this bridge the three most important keys (major, minor and seventh), the three pillars of pop music (blues, jazz and rock), and, most importantly, the three melody options (descending, ascending or unchanging). The latter most beautifully in the second line:

  Am                                     /g#
I'm just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones

C/g                                           D9/f#    Eaug
And them British bad boys, The Rolling Stones

     Am                                         /g#
I go right to the edge, I go right to the end

     C/g                                               D7/f#
I go right where all things lost are made good again

… while the root note appears to be rising (A-C-D-E), Blake pushes the bridge down by descending the bass in four firm steps, on each beat of the four measures, with his right thumb on the d string: a-g#-g-f#. Simple and classic (it’s the same four descending steps as “Stairway To Heaven”, for example), and irresistibly dynamic; simultaneously descending and ascending, after all.

Live

The song, like almost all Rough & Rowdy Ways songs, has been a regular fixture on the setlist since the resumption of the Never Ending Tour, 2 November 2021 in Milwaukee. “I Contain Multitudes” is almost always the third song of the evening.

The musical accompaniment is just as anchored as the lyrics: small, not too drastic additions, small, hardly atmosphere-determining variations in the arrangement. In the studio the song is the only track on the album without drums or percussion; in the live debut on 2 November 2021, Charley Drayton may briefly pick up his sticks in both bridges and add some modest drumming on the toms. Six months later, when the tour resumes in March 2022, the drums have been silenced again, Tony Garnier still, as in the studio, plays his upright bass with a bow to draw those long, droning lines and the guitar still carries the performance. After the summer break, as Dylan resumes touring in Europe, his piano steps forward, pushing the guitar more into the background – only for a few weeks though, just until the finale in Dublin on 7 November 2022. And a bit of drumming is allowed again (even beyond the bridge, albeit very restrained – rustling cymbals here, a careful brush on the snare there).

Perhaps most consequential then is the revision introduced in 2023, after Dylan takes a five-month break, and then resumes his tour in Japan. Right from the first concert, Osaka 6 April, we hear that Dylan has done some thinking about a new arrangement, back home in Malibu. Bassist Garnier abandons the bow, plucking the strings, giving the song a compelling pulse and most importantly: new drummer Jerry Pentecost gets to join in. Pentecost drops in like a true rock drummer, after forty seconds (in the last line of the first verse, I fuss with my hair), with swelling bangs on the upright tom, and then switching to a steady, compelling beat – it’s gone rock.

Bob Dylan  – I Contain Multitudes (live Osaka 6 Apr 2023): 

Exciting enough, but two months later, for the summer tour of southern Europe, the master has yet again decided otherwise; Garnier has his bow back, the drum part, while still quite prominent, is halved compared to Japan, the piano keys dominate again.

Dylan seems to be a man of many moods.

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: “You Belong to Me” is a popular music ballad from the 1950s. It is well known for its opening line, “See the pyramids along the Nile”. The first recording of the song, in February 1952, was by Joni James. She had seen the sheet music in the Woods Building in Chicago, and the lyrics attracted her. She recorded the song in Chicago, and it was released in March on the local Sharp Records label.

Tony: I was about to write “I don’t know this song” because I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t remember that opening line, but of course as soon as the music started I knew it – it just shows how much my brain is attuned to music first and lyrics second.   But still very odd that I could not have noticed the pyramids.   Especially since I took a trip down the Nile a few years ago in order to see the sites.  It is a gorgeous song.  The pyramids were quite impressive too!

I think it was written by Chilton Price, as a plea from an American woman to her husband who had been serving in the armed forces in the Second World War, but the co-composers then made it into the more universal piece that we now know, changing it from “Hurry Home to Me” to “You Belong to Me” – which of course made some sense commercially since the song was offered to performers seven years after the war had ended, and by 1952 America was very much looking forward to the new era rather than back to the war.

Aaron: The most popular version was recorded by Jo Stafford.

Tony:  Now I find this too overloaded with technique – the holding back on notes for an extra half beat, and the effects of all that instrumentation.   I much prefer the simpler backing from the original.   But then I suppose if you are going to a cover version you have to do something different.   But oh, that xylophone at the start of some of the lines (for example just as the vocalist is about to sing “See the pyramids”.

Also rather funny to have the line about the marketplace in “old Algiers”.   Some years before I went down the Nile I lived in Algiers for a year, and the marketplace was somewhere to be avoided rather than seen – at least for Europeans.   I suspect the lyricist had not actually been but was looking for a line that might resonate.  Besides I suspect quite a few listeners in the 1950s didn’t actually know that the Nile flows through Egypt not Algeria.    Ah well.

Aaron: Producer Debbie Gold was unable to convince Dylan to include, “You Belong to Me” on “Good As I Been to You.” Dylan’s version from the sessions eventually appeared in Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers and on its soundtrack album.

Stereogum ran an article to coincide with Dylan’s 80th birthday on May 24, 2021 in which 80 musicians were asked to name their favorite Dylan song. The Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr. selected “You Belong to Me”, noting “It’s just a very powerful song. You can’t explain sometimes how songs hit you…It’s impressive to keep going and still create stuff. It’s one of my favorite songs. Any mix I make for anyone, I put it on there. I know it’s not his. But you can definitely have something that’s not yours and own it. He’s done that a lot”.

Tony:  It is a bit of a shock to move from those earlier versions to Bob’s – his voice is at its most nasal, but he does have a feel for the song.  Yet I am not sure I can understand why Albert Hammond raved over this recording more than any other piece to put on an album.  The guitar accompaniment seems rather straightforward for this beautiful song, so somehow this Dylan cover doesn’t capture me at all.

Aaron: I think my favorite version comes from 1981 by Ringo Starr from the album “Stop and Smell the Roses”

Tony: Wow what a change.  I think the problem I have here is that I am so used to the regular rhythm of the original I can’t really take in this bouncy approach and all the choral effects.   That of course can often be a problem – one is so used to the original versions that when someone comes along and does something utterly different it seems just… well, odd.

Aaron: Annie Lennox from the 2014 album Nostalgia

Tony: Nope, I am still not moved.   Having now listed to all the recordings I am back with the first.  That is the one that grabs me.  It is just possible that my parents had a recording of this version and I heard it in my early years.  Also quite likely that my father played the song on the piano.   Whatever it was, something is constantly hauling me back to that first version.   If you have a moment, do go back and play it again.  It think it is gorgeous.

Other people’s songs…

1. Other people’s songs. How Dylan covers the work of other composers
2. Other People’s songs: Bob and others perform “Froggie went a courtin”
3. Other people’s songs: They killed him
4. Other people’s songs: Frankie & Albert
5. Other people’s songs: Tomorrow Night where the music is always everything
6. Other people’s songs: from Stack a Lee to Stagger Lee and Hugh Laurie
7. Other people’s songs: Love Henry
8. Other people’s songs: Rank Stranger To Me
9. Other people’s songs: Man of Constant Sorrow
10. Other people’s songs: Satisfied Mind
11. Other people’s songs: See that my grave is kept clean
12. Other people’s songs: Precious moments and some extras
13. Other people’s songs: You go to my head
14. Other people’s songs: What’ll I do?
15. Other people’s songs: Copper Kettle
16. Other people’s songs: Belle Isle
17. Other people’s songs: Fixing to Die
18. Other people’s songs: When did you leave heaven?
19. Other people’s songs: Sally Sue Brown
20. Other people’s songs: Ninety miles an hour down a dead end street
21. Other people’s songs: Step it up and Go
22. Other people’s songs: Canadee-I-O
23. Other people’s songs: Arthur McBride
24. Other people’s songs: Little Sadie
25. Other people’s songs: Blue Moon, and North London Forever
26. Other people’s songs: Hard times come again no more
27. Other people’s songs: You’re no good
28. Other people’s songs: Lone Pilgrim (and more Crooked Still)
29. Other people’s songs: Blood in my eyes
30. Other people’s songs: I forgot more than you’ll ever know
31.  Other people’s songs: Let’s stick (or maybe work) together.
32. Other people’s songs: Highway 51
33. Other people’s songs: Jim Jones
34. Other people’s songs: Let’s stick (or maybe work) together.
35. Other people’s songs: Jim Jones
36. Other people’s songs: Highway 51 Blues
37. Other people’s songs: Freight Train Blues
38. Other People’s Songs: The Little Drummer Boy
39. Other People’s Songs: Must be Santa
40. Other People’s songs: The Christmas Song
41. Other People’s songs: Corina Corina
42. Other People’s Songs: Mr Bojangles
43. Other People’s Songs: It hurts me too
44. Other people’s songs: Take a message to Mary
45. Other people’s songs: House of the Rising Sun
46. Other people’s songs: “Days of 49”
47. Other people’s songs: In my time of dying
48. Other people’s songs: Pretty Peggy O
49. Other people’s songs: Baby Let me Follow You Down
50. Other people’s songs: Gospel Plow
51. Other People’s Songs: Melancholy Mood
52. Other people’s songs: The Boxer and Big Yellow Taxi
53. Other people’s songs: Early morning rain
54. Other people’s Songs: Gotta Travel On
55. Other people’s songs: “Can’t help falling in love”
56. Other people’s songs: Lily of the West
57. Other people’s songs: Alberta
58. Other people’s songs: Little Maggie
59. Other people’s songs: Sitting on top of the world
60. Dylan’s take on “Let it be me”
61. Other people’s songs: From “Take me as I am” all the way to “Baker Street”
62. Other people’s songs: A fool such as I
63. Other people’s songs: Sarah Jane and the rhythmic changes
64. Other people’s songs: Spanish is the loving tongue. Author drawn to tears
65. Other people’s songs: The ballad of Ira Hayes
66. Other people’s songs: The usual
67. Other people’s songs: Blackjack Davey
68. Other people’s songs: You’re gonna quit me