by Jochen Markhorst

• I Contain Multitudes (2020) part 1: Two Irish counties at odds

II          To the buried that repose around us

Gotta tell tale heart like Mr. Poe
Got skeletons in the walls of people you know
I’ll drink to the truth of things that we said
I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed
I paint landscapes - I paint nudes . . . I contain multitudes

It is his secret project, Alan Parsons and his first LP Tales Of Mystery And Imagination – Edgar Allan Poe (1976). Why he keeps it so secret is not entirely clear. Parsons already has a solid reputation and, young as he is at this point (he is 27 when he records the album), already has a dream career; first as sound engineer for Abbey Road, Let It Be, McCartney’s solo albums and Dark Side Of The Moon, then as producer for highly successful records by Pilot, The Hollies, John Miles and Steve Harley’s Cockney Rebel. Alan Parsons, in short, has long since had the stature and authority to do as he pleases, right there at his workplace at Abbey Road Studios.

But the songs he is writing with Eric Woolfson for the themed project on Poe’s oeuvre are being secretly recorded in between, with the help of musicians who are not allowed to know exactly what they are collaborating on either. Only the flamboyant fool Arthur Brown (of “Fire”, and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown) seems to suspect something:

“For instance, “The Cask Of Amontillado” we titled “Bristol Cream”. It was just the first idea that came into our head, just to keep the whole thing a secret. I think Arthur Brown had an inkling of what was happening. Because the lyrics alone were enough to give it away. When he first came into the studio he was very subdued, you know. We ran through it. He was humming the tune, listening to the melody. But when we went into the studio, the whole thing changed. He started leaping around, yelling and screaming – which was just the job for “The Tell-Tale Heart” on the album. ”
(1976 interview with Parsons, bonus track on the 2007 deluxe edition of the album).

Dylan has been allowing Poe into his catalogue for some sixty years, but until now much more indirectly than Alan Parsons. A paraphrase here, a borrowed metre there, a meaningless wink like Rue Morgue Avenue in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”… it isn’t until 2020, until “I Contain Multitudes”, that Dylan finally unabashedly, loud and clear, name-checks Poe and his work in a song.

And apart from explicitly, “The Tell-Tale Heart” in line 1 that is, also indirectly the plot of “The Cask Of Amontillado” in line 2, the short story in monologue form in which a Signor Montresor recounts in an antique, Venice-like setting how, fifty years ago, he immured the kind Fortunato alive downstairs in his huge wine cellar. As revenge for an unspecified, and presumably imaginary insult. Compositionally, therefore, very similar to “The Tell-Tale Heart”; again the dramatic monologue of an apparently mentally disturbed murderer, also driven by a macabre kind of paranoia, who confesses in a long monologue, and in vain tries to gain understanding for his atrocity.

Interesting, as it offers some insight into Dylan’s creative process. He analyses himself, and credibly, that the one line I contain multitudes opened the floodgates to “trance writing”, that this one Walt Whitman line, which, incidentally, we also heard him quote in Martin Scorcese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019), is the catalyst, “the kind of thing where you pile up stream-of-consciousness verses.”

So, Dylan appears to associate “having multitudes” with an archetype from distinctive Poe stories. To some extent recognisable; in 2004, Dylan tries to express to interviewer Ed Bradley in the interview for the CBS “60 Minutes” special the unease with his 1960s image:

EB: What was the image that people had of you? And what was the reality?
BD: The image of me was certainly not a songwriter or a singer. It was more like some kind of a threat to society in some kind of way.
EB: What was the toughest part for you personally?
BD: It was like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story. And you’re just not that person everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time. ‘You’re the prophet.’ ‘You’re the savior.’ I never wanted to be a prophet or savior.

Dylan uses “like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story” as a metaphor for some kind of schizophrenia; a rather radical clash of a self-image with the outside world’s perception – which makes the associative leap from I contain multitudes to precisely these two Poe stories more insightful.

The stream-of-consciousness, then, seems to meander on through Montresor’s wine cellar cum catacombs, through the skeleton-decorated setting of The Cask of Amontillado‘s gruesome finale;

“Drink,” I said, presenting him the wine.
He raised it to his lips with a leer. He paused and nodded to me 
familiarly, while his bells jingled.
“I drink,” he said, “to the buried that repose around us.”
“And I to your long life.”
He again took my arm, and we proceeded.

At least, it seems that Dylan’s follow-up line, I’ll drink to the truth of things that we said, is an echo of Montresor’s cynical drinking salute, minutes before he fetters and immures the perplexed, half-drunk Fortunato. How the meandering current then arrives at I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed is probably as puzzling to Dylan himself as it is to his audience. “I’m just as bewildered as anybody else,” as Dylan says in that same New York Times interview. Who knows, perhaps the river bed takes him via Alan Parsons to Gram Parsons to The Flying Burrito Brothers to:

He was gone in the early morning
And he said he wouldn't be long
But that was spring and now 
That the leaves have all turned brown
She only shares her bed with 
The loneliness she has found

… the heartbreaking country-tearjerker “All Alone” from the 1971 album The Flying Burrito Bros, the somewhat underrated album featuring Gene Clark’s “Tried So Hard”, Merle Haggard’s “White Line Fever” and the gorgeous cover of Dylan’s “To Ramona”. After all, “all these songs are connected,”, as the master argued with academic seriousness, at his MusiCares speech in February 2015.

To be continued. Next up I Contain Multitudes part 3: The thrill of rhyming something that’s never been rhymed before.

———-

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

The forthcoming tour of Europe: The songs Dylan might play:  This series looks at 23 songs Dylan could be induced to play, and the reasons why, with musical examples.

by mr tambourine

• Part 1 “When I first unto this country”, “Heaven help the devil”, “Ring them bells”.
• Part 2, Delia, Dark as a Dungeon, New Speedway Boogie, Big River

16. Girl From The North Country

This is one of those Dylan songs that wasn’t played too long ago, in 2019 as a matter of fact.   This is also one of the rare songs of Dylan that Lightfoot has covered, not in studio though, but live, and maybe only once, according to setlist.fm.

https://youtu.be/DoTORXZUqqk

Not only that, but Dylan covered this song along with Johnny Cash for Nashville Skyline.

Also, Dylan admitted that he loves Conor McPherson’s musical of the same name, which
adds more reasons for him to still consider playing this one at least one more time soon.

15. Shadows

Another Gordon Lightfoot song that Dylan has covered only once in 2012 live.   Usually, Lightfoot tributes live by Dylan happened in Canada, so it’s hard to say whether it’s
possible for some of them to happen in Europe this time around. But since these’ll be the
first concerts by Dylan after Gordon’s death, the possibility of that happening definitely
exist.

14. Touch Of Grey

This run of tributes to the Grateful Dead is not gonna last forever. If Dylan was gonna do his “last ever” Dead cover, he might want to make it special. This is the one suitable to close out with.

This song has been performed during Dylan shows in 1987, but were never actually sang by Dylan to my knowledge. Which would make it special if he did.

13. That Lucky Old Sun

Along with the Grateful Dead covers, the covers of the Great American Songbook aren’t
gonna last forever either. It’s just a matter of time before Dylan takes yet another artistic
direction.

If he was to perform his last ever standard, might as well be this one, a song he’s been doing occasionally in 1985, 1986, 1991, 1992, 1995, 2000, 2015, 2016, 2017.   On one of those rare instances where he played it in 1995, it was a very special concert, first
since Jerry Garcia’s passing, which makes it a likely candidate.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

The Never Ending Tour index to 116 previous articles can be found here. The most recent articles covering 2012 are…

• NET 2012 part 1 The Ivory Revolution Begins
• NET 2012 part 2 The Ivory Revolution Continues
• NET 2012 Part 3 New wine in old bottles

NET 2012 Part 4 New wine in old bottles (continued)

In 1962, when Dylan wrote ‘Hard Rain,’ he adopted the persona of the innocent young man who’d been out into the world and witnessed many horrors which he was reporting to his mother. By the time we got to ‘Visions of Johanna’ in 1966, the horrors had become internalized. The apocalypse, the end of things, was now projected from the psyche onto the dying phases of a drug party:

And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

I have argued in these articles that the post-1966 performances of ‘Visions of Johanna’ mostly fail to convey the song’s bleak grandeur. Dylan performed the song twenty-eight times in 2012, and these performances have not convinced me to change my mind. Nevertheless, I’m glad he didn’t abandon what may be his greatest-ever song. This one from Toronto, with strong support from the piano, is as good as they get; perhaps it’s that hint of the dumpty-dum with the over-emphatic vocal that gets to me.

Visions of Johanna.

This internalizing of the apocalypse is evident in the great sister song to ‘Visions,’ ‘Desolation Row’ from 1965. It’s easy to grasp why Dylan is considered to be the quintessential songwriter of his time when you listen to these two songs side by side; there is no greater achievement in modern songwriting. Despite dropping a verse or two, ‘Desolation Row’ has fared better than ‘Visions’ in post 1960s performances. We have seen some powerful performances along the way, especially in 2000 and 2003. It never fails to weave its magic. This one from Winnipeg continues the tradition. Sit back and enjoy the circus. I particularly like the piano accompaniment here; it’s both strong and tasteful.

Desolation Row

‘All along the Watchtower,’ for many years Dylan’s favourite closing song, is another vision of the apocalypse, both personal and universal. The ‘two riders approaching’ at the end of the song are not bringing good news. War and death are subtly implied – ‘the wind began to howl.’

At Washington (20^th Nov), Dylan played the song second to last, leaving the last slot for ‘Blowin in the Wind.’ Over the years performances of this song have grown more spare and less guitar-heavy without losing any of its menace.

This is certainly not the greatest performance of the song. Dylan’s rushed, emphatic vocal that heavily hits the beat, doesn’t to my mind capture the rather lonely pathos of the song.

Watchtower

Love and desire can wipe us out as effectively as any plague or atomic blast. ‘Can’t Wait’ is about the kind of love that can drive us to the very edge of our beings and leave us with nothing.

It’s mighty funny, the end of time has just begun
Oh, honey, after all these years you’re still the one
While I’m strolling through the lonely graveyard of my mind
I left my life with you somewhere back there along the line
I thought somehow that I would be spared this fate
But I don’t know how much longer I can wait

In this song, love is its own variety of the apocalypse. To my mind the 2010 performance has not yet been bettered for sheer prowling menace.

Those who have followed the various approaches to this song on ‘Tell Tale Signs’ will recognize this performance from Chester as returning to one of the slower, spookier conceptions of the song. From 2003 to 2005 the song was performed with a restless, descending bass line, and we get an echo of that here, although much slowed down. Perhaps there is no ‘perfect’ or ideal arrangement for this song; all of these different approaches sound wonderful in their own right, each presenting us with a different conception or facet of the song.

Can’t Wait

Brief sexual encounters can haunt us as much as a sustained love affair. That is the insight that lies behind ‘A Simple Twist of Fate.’

He woke up, the room was bare
He didn't see her anywhere
He told himself he didn't care
Pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside
To which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate

This experience is common enough, I suspect, for most of us to relate to. Fate can bring us together, and pull us apart again; we are but playthings of the gods. Dylan has not dropped this song, it was last performed in 2021, and we have had many exciting performances of it over the years. I don’t think this one from Barlo (16^th July) is the best by any means, but what’s interesting is that Dylan forsakes the piano and plays guitar – these strange, angular notes you hear are Dylan.

Simple Twist of Fate

Dylan’s on the guitar also for this ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ from Winnipeg, another song that will stay until 2019. This famous renunciation with its repeated ‘No no no!’ is said to be a sling off the Beatles’ ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’ The song shows that we often have to resist the projections people put onto us. If you project your view of a person, and your expectations of them, onto that person, you end up in relationship to your projection rather than the person themself who, at that point, you can no longer see. Dylan was having none of it; he was no hippy flower child.

A strong vocal from Dylan here.

It Ain’t Me Babe

Back on the piano, Dylan has fun with ‘Summer Days’ from Washington. There’s crazy stuff going on, and maybe the apocalypse is kept at bay for a while, but there is no escape from the soul-shaking presence of the divine.

Standing by God’s river, my soul is beginnin’ to shake
Standing by God’s river, my soul is beginnin’ to shake
I’m countin’ on you love, to give me a break

When the song first appeared in 2001 we were treated to some loud, brassy performances that took us back to the big band heyday of the 1940s. Here (Washington), in keeping with his latest style, the brassiness is stripped out of the song which is carried by drum and bass. A minimal, boogie grove, but it sure does rock along.

Summer Days

Last but not least, we have the gentle ‘This Dream Of You’ from Together Through Life (Winnepeg). It’s my last look at 2012, and also Dylan’s final performance of the song. I regret its passing. It was only ever performed twelve times, having a short life-span in the NET. Perhaps it fails to generate the powerful emotional charge that we find with ‘Forgetful Heart’ from the same album, and yet it gently opens the door to the ineffable, that which keeps us alive while always being just out of reach.

I look away, but I keep seeing it
I don't want to believe, but I keep believing it
Shadows dance upon the wall
Shadows that seem to know it all

Am I too blind to see?
Is my heart playing tricks on me?
Too late to stop now even though all my friends are gone
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you
Which keeps me living on

This Dream of You

So that’s 2012. I think we can see it, with all its faults, as the beginning of the next, and last, movement of the NET. We are at the beginning of a new rising curve.

I used the term rising curve to describe the progression of the NET from 1991/2 through to 2001. 2012 reminds me of 1992. Dylan had just added steel guitar and dobro to his lineup, and was very much feeling his way forward in the post GE Smith lead guitar era. He was also having trouble with his voice.

In 2012 Dylan begins to explore a new sound, and feel for new arrangements of the songs. It’s a foundational year, and when we come to 2013, we will see how Dylan builds on that foundation and takes a big step forward in terms of the quality of his performances.

All the best until next time and

Kia Ora

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: As we’ve come to the end of the series about Dylan’s favorite songs (the last episode being here, with an index to the full series) I put my thinking cap on to come up with something else we could do.

And I thought a nice way to piggy back off that series would be to look at songs that were inspired by Dylan. Hence I came up with this series which I have called Dylanesque (I stole the title from the Bryan Ferry album). Sometimes the songs will be ones we know and love and others will be new.

In fact, there is even a Wikipedia page devoted to the term Dylanesque and it describes it as:

Dylanesque (comparative more Dylanesque, superlative most Dylanesque)

1. In the style of, or reminiscent of the music or lyrics of Bob Dylan (born 1941).

So I thought we could do the usual format: I will find a couple of songs that I feel were inspired by Dylan and send them over to you for your comments. Does that sound good?

Tony: Absolutely.  I know I’ll enjoy it, and I am hopeful that some of the three quarters of a million or so visits we get each year on the site will be directed to reading it.  And might I also extend a thought to everyone who ever takes a look at Untold Dylan – if you have an article, or just an idea for an article, and you think it might fit in with Untold, please do send in your thoughts to Tony@schools.co.uk

Aaron: OK, then let’s begin!

Here are a couple of songs I always got a Desolation Row vibe from… what do you think?

First is Joe Strummer with Ramshackle Day Parade from his 2003 posthumous album Streetcore

Tony: As I understand this is a song about or perhaps I should say, a remembrance of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001; he was one of the original members of the Clash, and as such one of the heroes of my pal who I go to football matches with and indeed who I spent much of yesterday with.

I read a comment that said that the lyrics don’t point the blame at anyone; no one knows or can say how it has all gone wrong, but it all has.  And that feels right to me…

The lyrics start

Muffle the drums
The hope of a new century comes
Was it all the amphetamine presidents
And their busy wives
Or did Manhattan crumble
The day Marlyn died

So while Dylan takes a single graphic image (postcards of the hanging) and (most certainly on the original recording) a very gentle relaxed musical style in contrast to the lyrics, Strummer uses multiple images and music that at times seems to strive to represent the chaos and catastrophe of everything.

Yet to my mind (and as ever of course this is just me) the images that Dylan utilises have an extra strength somehow.  “And the riot squad they’re restless, they need somewhere to go,” sung in such a gentle non-rioting way, always signifies to me that once the state creates the mechanisms of repression it has to use them, but also try to keep them under cover  – which I think is absolutely true.

But I find

Bring out the banners of Stalingrad
Here come the marching band

much more confusing.  And because the music at times seems to be falling over itself (which is of course an excellent notion if the music is to represent September 11) it becomes too much for me to take.   Dylan, by making the music so simple, allows me to feel the horrors of what was happening in the story he re-tells.  I don’t find that so much with the Clash.

Aaron: Next we have Dan Bern with Thanksgiving Day Parade from has 2001 album “New American Language.”

Tony: Technical note – it is one of those links which works for Aaron in the USA, but not for me in the UK.  I’ve added a second link below that works for me – hopefully one of these will work for you.

Tony (continuing): And I am overwhelmed.  Just as I was when you presented us with “Lawyers, guns and money”.   This is just such overwhelming fun, in the sense that it presents everything that can happen at a party, in a parade, in a holiday celebration, in everything, it can all just explode in this colourful overwhelming adventure of ideas, sounds, people, places…

As I have often mentioned my response to music is a mix of pure emotion (in which the sound knocks me out even before I know anything of the lyrics), plus then either the meaning or the fun of the words, and then finally the music, in which I often go in my own direction, having worked as a musician in the early part of my life.

And because this is a combination of various emotional rather than logical responses, it is often hard to understand and hard to express verbally.  And my responses are always related to where I am emotionally as I listen.

Now today (the morning of a public holiday in England) I’m still on a high because yesterday I drove to London (about 80 miles from my home) to the house of my best pal, and from there we went to our favourite pub and then on to watch the football team we both support.  The team won magnificently, it was the last game of the season and there was an overwhelming outpouring of emotion from the crowd of 60,000. not least when the coach came onto the pitch at the end and made a speech thanking us all for our support.

So I am still buzzing from that day out, and now I get to hear this song which I didn’t know, and which relates to yesterday, and to going to the Isle of Wight concert in my youth, all at once.

I don’t know if this is great music and I have my doubts about some of the lyrics, but it is above everything overwhelming fun, on the morning after a day of overwhelming fun.  I can only hope that you, dear reader, will be able to join in the fun at bit as well.

The link with Desolation Row of course is the chaos, but here the chaos is being celebrated.  But song appreciation is also always personal, and I’m suddenly jerked out of just bouncing along and enjoying the piece when I hear

And we slowly started dancing
And began slowly to heal

And if you have read my ramblings across the years you may have picked up somewhere that even at my advanced age I still indulge in my lifelong hobby of jiving (although these days it is modern jive, which is safer for us oldies, and more like swing), and I am out five nights a week dancing away – as a way of overcoming a day spent typing away on the computer.

But I guess this is my point: responses to music and lyrics are personal.  No one can outdo Dylan’s “Desolation Row” but here we have two approaches to the same subject: one is harsh and focuses on the horrors, one is fun, and says even in a world such as this where such awful things happen, we can, and indeed I think we must, on occasion find ways to release and let go.  And today, after a great day out with my pal, that’s where I want to be.

I’m going to publish all the lyrics, because I think if you like the music, you’ll enjoy it even more next time through with the words made a little clearer.

Everybody was ecstatic
‘Bout the light show on the farm
And everyone got crazy
And nobody got harmed
And the five televisions
Huge upon the stage
Had come to pay their union dues
And make a living wage
And the bathroom was the clubhouse
Where the colors all got made
And plans were cast in feathers
For the Thanksgiving Day Parade

And the DJ spins his records
From here out to the sun
And he flings them through a big hole
In the ozone one by one
And somewhere beyond Mercury
The wax begins to melt
And we touched a perfect stranger
And we loved the way it felt
And we all hung together
In our crew cuts and our braids
Floating down Broadway
Above the Thanksgiving Day Parade

And you and I were discussing Natalie
As you poised to thrust above her
And I told you how I admire her
And will always need to love her
But I told you how I lost
My best friend Mr. Neill
And we slowly started dancing
And began slowly to heal
And then we all held hands
And no one was afraid
On our way to sell our sculptures
At the Thanksgiving Day Parade

And Michelangelo finally came down
After 4 years on the ceiling
He said he’d lost his funding
And the paint had started peeling
And he told us that his patron
His Holiness, the Pope
Was demanding productivity
With which our friend just couldn’t cope
And he rode off on his skateboard
With his brushes and his blade
Muttering something ’bout some food
And the Thanksgiving Day Parade

And we who were born in one millennium
And will die in the next
Are slightly underappreciated
And slightly oversexed
And as the seconds and the minutes
Start to vanish one by one
I’m watching more cartoons
As I get my toenails done
And we went downtown to deliver
Turkeys to people with AIDS
And then we headed uptown
To the Thanksgiving Day Parade

And the music keeps on grinding
And the electrophonic crunch
And my father’s hair is thinning
And my mom ate some for lunch
And you, you were my babysitter
And you let me break my tooth
And we sit here tied together
In a bar in the back booth
And the band is in an uproar
Only the drum machine’s been paid
And we’ll have to bring our own tunes
To the Thanksgiving Day Parade

Australians are the coolest
People in the world
Let’s all go down under
With strings of colored pearls
And lay them at the feet
Of the heirs of English crime
And listen to old Men At Work
And have a real good time
And we dug until we hit the rocks
Then we threw away the spade
And built a platform to get a better view
Of the Thanksgiving Day Parade

And I love whoever’s next to me
I love them so, so much
They let me lean against them
Like a beautiful crutch
And everyone should come up
On the stage and grab the mike
And tell us one by one
Who they are and what they like
And the babies are the only ones
To have lately gotten laid
And I’m feeling young and eager
For the Thanksgiving Day Parade

And you explained to me that without your fans
You’d be back out on the street
With nothing but chitlins on your plate
And splinters in your feet
And if you die, you’re gone you said
And your friends are left behind
And you’ll be a statistic
And we’ll be deaf and blind
And darkness is a virtue
And molasses is not afraid
To slow down the countdown
To the Thanksgiving Day Parade

And somewhere in the distance
An orchestra shows its face
With Natalie on the oboe
Ty on double bass
John plays the viola
Slik the tenor sax
James he blows harmonica
In vanilla skintight slacks
Hugo oozes alto sax
Ivory the trombone
Masuda squawks the trumpet
Andre xylophone
Ron he shreds the violin
In a green Italian suit
Mike talks on the telephone
On a tape with an endless loop
Geoff he blows the clarinet
With an old-time rockin’ feel
Charlie dings the triangle
Dave the glockenspiel
Chris puffs on the tuba
H a big bass drum
Alfonso throbs the cello
Like he would a woman, with his thumb
And high up on the podium
In tails with his baton poised
Banksy leads the orchestra
In a glorious, awful noise
And on a float of dripping oil paint
The orchestra, it played
Kissing the whole universe
In the Thanksgiving Day Parade

And life is like a fairy tale
Every step feels like a dream
That keeps on getting nearer
And more and more extreme
And we just got switched with Venus
And we’re closer to the sun
And I got no problem with it
Nor should anyone
And the cops just blew on in here
And we’re in some kind of raid
I just hope they will release us
For the Thanksgiving Day Parade

If you have enjoyed this song one tenth as much as I have while writing this, then, just take care as you come down from the ceiling.

Untold Dylan – the current series

by Jochen Markhorst

I           Two Irish counties at odds

Today and tomorrow and yesterday too
The flowers are dying like all things do
Follow me close - I’m going to Bally-Na-Lee
I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me
I fuss with my hair and I fight blood feuds... I contain multitudes

 The tesseract in Christopher Nolan’s smashing pièce de résistance Interstellar (2014) is the backdrop for the climax, and one of many breathtaking scenes. On an intellectual level as well; the scene accomplishes the impossible feat of using a four-dimensional object (the tesseract is actually a four-dimensional hypercube) to explain how protagonist Cooper can experience a fifth dimension.

Just to be sure, Cooper’s companion, the robot TARS, simplifies it again for Cooper and for us, the audience: “You’ve seen that time is represented here as a physical dimension.” In his fascinating 2014 book The Science of Interstellar the film’s scientific consultant Kip Thorne, the later winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics (2017), devotes over 2,700 words to explaining the scientifically sound way that Cooper, in his tesseract, can see today and tomorrow and yesterday too, and with the help of gravity can even manipulate them.

Professor Thorne has an admirable talent for explaining baffling phenomena like wormholes and event horizons, and complex, perplexing theories about space, motion and time to non-scientists, but at the conclusion of “The Tesseract” chapter, he nevertheless gives the floor back to the scriptwriters, through Amelia Brand, the character played by the ever-enchanting Anne Hathaway: “To Them, time may be just another physical dimension. To Them the past might be a canyon they can climb into and the future a mountain they can climb up. But to us it’s not. Okay?”

The opening line of “I Contain Multitudes”, thus also of Rough And Rowdy Ways, plus the key line from the fourth verse, Everything’s flowin’ all at the same time, which is already pre-empted by this opening line, introduce a leitmotif of the album, and in fact of Dylan’s entire oeuvre: Time. And especially the notion that Time is non-linear, or indeed an illusion. We have seen the fascination for it, for how we experience Time and what we do with it, since The Freewheelin, and explicitly Dylan names it in 1985, in the interview with Bill Flanagan, when Flanagan asks about Dylan’s lyric revisions of “Tangled Up In Blue”. Dylan’s answer has since been widely quoted:

“I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it or see all of it together. I wanted that song to be like a painting.”

… everything flowing all at the same time, in other words. And when Dylan immediately afterwards tries to explain that he also wanted to apply this concept to “Idiot Wind” and, in fact, to the whole Blood On The Tracks album, we hear the words that will echo 45 years later in the opening of Rough And Rowdy Ways:

“It was just a concept of putting in images that defy time – yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I wanted to make them all connect in some kind of a strange way.”

Time, or the illusion thereof, remains a motif on the album after this opening – there is a hint of it in every song (as the ensuing “False Prophet” opens with “Another day that don’t end”, for example), most prominently in Side C’s prize track, “Crossing The Rubicon”, in which between the first and last lines it is both morning and evening, and it is both Indian summer, spring, autumn and also winter.

The motif for this particular song was presumably prompted by the recurring refrain line I contain multitudes, the line that Dylan, after all, says gave birth to the song, and to which all the verse lines then work towards (“Obviously, the catalyst for the song is the title line,” New York Times, June 2020). And the “trance writing”, as Dylan qualifies the rest of the lyrics, then takes him to Ireland via his Eternal Theme Time:

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
Ye'll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an Avé there for me.

… first to the dying flowers from “Danny Boy”, that is, and then surprisingly to Bally-Na-Lee – which causes quite a stir among our Irish friends.

The song is released on 17 April 2020, and after a day of squabbling over what Dylan sings there (the tautological “Balian Bali” is initially the most popular candidate), the consensus is pretty soon: the Irish town of Ballinalee. Or Ballylee? Complete consensus has not been reached yet – is Dylan now referring to the better-known Ballylee, County Galway, or the obscure Ballinalee, County Longford?

To Dylan himself, who undoubtedly was guided by sound and rhythm when writing this particular word combination, the question is probably in the Department of Big Deals. At least: it is quite unlikely that he made any tourism-promoting, cultural-historical or geographical considerations in choosing Bally-Na-Lee (as the spelling on Dylan’s official site is).  Still, eventually, most fingers are pointing to “The Lass from Ballynalee” by Irish poet Antoine Ó Raifteirí (or Anthony Raftery), a blind Irish poet who lived from 1779 to 1835.

Granted, that is a charming poem, which indeed has a recognisable, folky Dylan vibe;

On my way to Mass
To say a prayer,
The wind was high
Sowing rain,

I met a maid
With wind-wild hair
And madly fell
In love again.

… is the – translated from the Irish – beginning, in which we effortlessly recognise the tone and content of early Dylan songs like, say, “Percy’s Song” and “Girl From The North Country”. And the closing verse is equally charming;

A table with glasses
And drink was set
And then says the lassie,
Turning to me:

‘You are welcome, Raftery,
So drink a wet
To love’s demands
In Bally-na-Lee.’

For most Dylanologists, that pretty much ends the matter, but in Ireland it is, understandably, still simmering for a while. The Longford Leader places a proud notice on its front page on 24 April. A Galway faction tries to draw the discussion back to Ballylee via a Yeats poem (pointing out how his famous epic poem “Meditations in Time of Civil War” has Thoor Ballylee as its setting).

The Irish Times devotes a whole page to the Ballylee/Ballinalee controversy on 1 May (“How a new Bob Dylan song has set two Irish counties at odds”). And theories about how Dylan might then have come into contact with the not-too-familiar Rafterty are occupying minds as well. Pogues singer Shane MacGowan, who spent a pleasant evening with Dylan in Ireland at a table full of bottles and glasses in 2017, is finally identified as the supplier. Without Shane’s agreement by the way, who of course has no memory of that alcohol-soaked evening. In short, “I Contain Multitudes” impresses all over the world, but most of all, with our Irish friends.

The Ballynalee question is completely irrelevant to the song itself, obviously. Indeed, Dylan himself has long since deleted the words and instead sings the rather vacuous variant Follow me close – just as close as can be these days. The squabbling of Irish fans may surprise him, and at best mildly amuse. It doesn’t matter, after all. It’s today and tomorrow and yesterday too, it’s Ballylee, Ballinalee and Bally-Na-Lee too. It’s just which side you happen to be looking at, from your tesseract.

To be continued. Next up I Contain Multitudes part 2: To the buried that repose around us

————–

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

by mr tambourine

The forthcoming tour of Europe: The songs Dylan might play:  This series looks at 23 songs Dylan could be induced to play, and the reasons why, with musical examples.  Part 1 “When I first unto this country”, “Heaven help the devil”, “Ring them bells”.

Part 2

20. Delia (or Delia’s Gone)

I don’t have too many particular reasons why I chose this song to be one of the possible
additions.   Dylan seems to do this song once in a while but it’s an extreme live rarity.

Dylan performed this song live in 1960, 1992, 1993, 2000 and 2012.   Knowing that it’s the 30 year anniversary of the release of the album World Gone Wrong, doing another rare version of this song seems suitable for such an occasion.

Also, based on research, if correct, the recently deceased Harry Belafonte, performed this
song in 1959. Dylan has once covered Belafonte’s Jamaica Farewell during the New
Morning sessions I believe, so it wouldn’t be the craziest thing if he did this song as a secret tribute to Harry. And besides, “all the friends I ever had are gone” must be getting an even deeper line as Dylan gets older.  [There’s more on Dylan and Delia here.]

19. Dark As A Dungeon

As you may know, Dylan has performed this song only occasionally over the years, in 1975, 1989, 1990, 1998 and 2000.

This song was also covered by the previously mentioned Gordon Lightfoot and Harry Belafonte who both recently passed away, which I think makes it a very likely candidate to
performed again.   (See also here).

18. New Speedway Boogie

A Grateful Dead song that I believe is very suitable for the current tour, it has a lot of
similarities to “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” in some cases and could probably work well as another upbeat song of the set for a show or two. If only Dylan could get the lyrics right, we could be looking at another great cover possibly.

17. Big River

It’s been exactly 20 years since Johnny Cash passed away in 2003.  To my knowledge, Dylan hasn’t done many covers of his songs since he passed away, if any.   Can’t think of them at the moment at least.

One of the rare covers he’s done across the years of his songs is “Big River”, but only three
times so far only. Once in 1988, once in 1999 and once in 2000. Since the Grateful Dead
have been covering this song a lot through the years, especially live, it makes it a very likely
candidate to be performed soon.

The series continues….

There’s an index to all our current series on the home page    And if you are not already a member you might enjoy our Facebook site.  Just visit www.facebook.com/groups/UntoldDylan/ 

by Michael Corrigan |

My Bob Dylan epiphany came on November 22, 1963. President Kennedy had just been assassinated. School was closed and I sat with a fellow student, a young woman from the south who played some Renaissance music. Then I saw the “Freewheelin Bob Dylan” album cover, Dylan walking down a New York Street, long-haired, smiling Suze Rotolo clinging to his arm. The shot recalled the photo of James Dean walking through a rainy Times Square. I played the album, and the first song was “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It was too perfect for the moment, a song that asks nine questions about the human condition that can never be answered:

“How many roads must a man walk down/before you call him a man?”

A year later, I saw Dylan perform in San Francisco. Out came Dylan in jeans, boots, a leather jacket, playing only his guitar and harmonica and singing in that bluesy ethnic voice, the first of many voices Dylan has used over the years. Songs from that concert that became iconic were not yet recorded: imagine hearing “Tambourine Man,” “It’s All Right, Ma,” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” for the first time. How could someone so young be writing these brilliant lyrics?

Dylan seemed vulnerable on stage, shy, even surprised at the audience’s raucous approval and applause. Joan Baez joined him on stage and the coronation was complete: the king and queen of folk music had emerged. Many of his songs from that concert like “Times They Are a Changin’’ belong to that 60’s era, but so many others have stood the brutal test of time.

The following year, I bought a guitar and learned how to play many of Dylan’s songs. They may seem simple with only a few chords, but to get Dylan’s effect takes skill, as he uses different chord positions, fingering and alternate bass runs. Dylan loves the F chord, hard to play on a guitar without a capo. Dylan often uses open tuning where the guitar is tuned to a chord.

But of course, it’s Dylan’s power as a writer that matters. He can compose a song that might cause one to pull over and take a deep breath. “Not Dark yet” is such a song, capturing the essence of growing older.

“Sometimes I wonder why I should even care/ Not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there.”

If Eliot’s Prufrock measured out his life in “coffee spoons,” I could state that mine has been measured, to some extent, by Dylan concerts over the decades, each with a different Dylan: maverick folk singer, rock and roll rebel, gospel singer, country crooner and elder statesman. I even had some success playing Dylan songs in San Francisco coffee houses until his music became too popular and therefore expected. Everyone was playing “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

When Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, there were boos and cries of treason from left-wing folk purists. Acoustic folk was “authentic” and “pure.” Rock and roll was “commercial.” Dylan admitted he was hurt when he heard that Pete Seeger, a folk singer icon, wanted to cut the cable during Dylan’s performance of an electrified “Maggie’s Farm.”

A motorcycle accident took Dylan out of the public eye. When Dylan finally reappeared and released “John Wesley Harding,” an album of folk song parables, it was as musically simple as the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was complex. I first heard the album while in the hospital recovering from a serious illness, and one song, “Along the Watchtower,” seemed to describe my situation.

“Let us not talk falsely now/The hour is getting late.”

In 1975, Dylan released “Blood on the Tracks,” considered by many to be his best album, if one can select a “best” from so many. It’s an album about a bitter divorce, and to Dylan’s surprise, all his pain made for a popular album. It has four songs that continue to resonate for me: “Buckets of Rain,” “You’re a Big Girl Now,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” and my favorite, “Tangled Up in Blue,” a dramatic song Dylan has rewritten many times.

“And I was standin’ by the side of the road
Rain fallin’ on my shoesHeaded up to the east coast
God knows I paid some dues gettin’ through
Tangled up in blue.”

The album remains poignant and popular because Dylan turned his pain into sublime art.

In 1978, Bob Dylan faced outrage from secular fans when he became a born again Christian and produced the moving gospel album, “Slow Train Coming.”  When he performed in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dylan refused to play his old songs. His set list featured only his new songs about Jesus, and soon, a horrified secular audience of Berkeley Marxists and San Francisco latter-day hippies began shouting and booing, just as they did when he went electric in 1965. Dylan dug in and defiantly shouted back:

“You want an old song? How about a song about Jesus Christ? Is that old enough for you-uuu?” To another heckler who shouted, “Where’s Bob Dylan?” he replied, “Bob Dylan left the building. I’m his replacement.” Dylan even lectured the audience about their impending banishment to hell if they didn’t see the light. To add to this theatrical scene, a group of born-again Christians pointed to the ceiling and voiced their hallelujahs. There was a great moment in what the critics blasted as the “God-awful gospel according to Bobby” when Dylan sang “When He Returns.” With Dylan’s emotional performance, even this cynical audience was hushed into submission.

I left the Warfield theatre determined to find another source of musical guidance. For me, Dylan was finished.  About a month later, I bought the album.  “I Believe in You” is one of Dylan’s most heartfelt honest songs. The following year, Lou Johnson, a classical guitarist, suggested we see Dylan when he returned to San Francisco. I resisted.

“The gospel tunes are good, but I don’t feel like sitting through two hours of just those songs.”

“Why do you care? He’s a great artist.”

I decided to attend.  This time, Dylan mixed his classics with the gospel tunes and gave a memorable concert, playing both guitar and piano, and adding a long acoustic encore. Once again, a magical spirit moved beneath the waters. To thunderous applause, Dylan simply wiped his face with a towel and left the stage.

Dylan seemed to fade during the late eighties, but “Infidels” and “Oh Mercy” suggested a comeback. Many famous musicians gathered to honor Bob Dylan’s forty years in music at a special tribute concert in 1992. Perhaps they assumed Bob Dylan had finally reached the end of that road and why not give the old guy a nice send off? The concert ended with Dylan, backed by the crème de la crème of popular singers, performing his bittersweet “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” It seemed a somewhat symbolic choice.

“Wipe these tears from my face/I can’t see through them anymore.”

It was Dylan’s near death due to a viral heart sac infection that brought him to the forefront of the news yet again. According to David Gates in a 1997 cover story for Newsweek, “the death scare reminded us that Dylan was a major cultural figure—and that we won’t always have him with us.” That same year, Dylan released “Time Out of Mind,” a dark brilliant album that approached his celebrated “Blood on the Tracks.”

Now “The Old Master,” Bob Dylan continues on that “Never Ending Tour.” Dylan describes the loneliness of the road in his long and paradoxically poetic “Ain’t Talkin’”:

“I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned/ain’t no altars on this long and lonesome road.”

Dylan’s concert in 2000 at Idaho State University’s Holt Arena illustrated why he was Bob Dylan. Dylan was inspired and inspiring, and my late wife, Karen, who never understood my Dylan obsession (“That pigeon-toed gnome with the frog’s voice is your hero?”) finally heard and felt the Dylan magic.  The audience stood for “Like a Rolling Stone,” reminiscent of audiences standing for the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah.

The last Dylan concert I attended—number nine—was in Jackson, Wyoming, in August of 2010. The audience, standing on the dark hill of a ski resort, was varied and enthusiastic.  Bob Dylan seemed frail, the voice now a catarrhal growl, the songs—including some decades old—still resonating. Dylan hovered stiffly behind the organ, stepping out once to play the guitar. Backed by the band, he also sang the biting “I Don’t Believe You,” Dylan blowing notes on the harmonica and even swivelling his hips like an old vaudeville performer. If his performance lacked the fire of ten years earlier, all the old arguments about whether or not Dylan was even a singer or a sellout or unhip for a younger generation seemed irrelevant. I recall three young women, their arms locked, swaying to Dylan’s “Spirit on the Water.” Dylan closed with “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The four-stanza “Dark Eyes” may capture what it’s like for Bob Dylan himself as he travels from town to town.

“A million faces at my feet/All I see are dark eyes.”

In 2012 at 71, Dylan released “Tempest,” an album of songs stripped down and simple and yet expansive with their poetic venom, defiance and even nostalgia if one considers his Celtic-flavored title song about the Titanic disaster.  As Dylan sings, “I ain’t dead yet, my bell still rings.” He followed that with “Shadows in the Night” (2015), an album of songs covered by Frank Sinatra. (Dylan prefers to say he is “uncovering” these songs.) For a singer criticized for not having a commercial voice, Dylan has found an intimate husky croon that ironically fits these nearly forgotten Sinatra classics originally sung by one of the greatest 20^th century commercial singers.

Bob Dylan continuously has power to astonish and charm us.

The road began in 1961 when Columbia Records producer, John Hammond, saw a latent genius in the 20 year-old Dylan singing blues songs in an old man’s voice. Perhaps Bob Dylan will continue to find poetry on those “ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming.”

By Tony Attwood

1998: Restless Farewell

Now these selections of mine of what I consider the highlights from the never-ending tour are very much personal selections, and never has this fact been made clearer to me than in reading  Mike Johnson’s comments when he presented this recording in his Never Ending Tour series.

“In 1995, at Frank Sinatra’s 80^th birthday bash, Dylan presented a song I don’t think he’d ever performed live before, ‘Restless Farewell’. Apparently, Sinatra requested the song. This is the last track on The Times They are a Changing(1964), and despite being a self-justifying exercise, it has a weary beauty with Dylan in fine lyrical form.

“It is therefore a surprise to find it appearing in 1998, quite out of the blue. I don’t think this is a particularly wonderful performance, or recording, but its sheer rarity value compels its inclusion here. This is from the Los Angeles concert 21^st May 1998″

I hesitate, hesitate and hesitate again to disagree with Mike.  The research he does is just so far beyond anything I could contemplate, and when his articles turn up in my in-box for me to publish on this site, I just read his reviews and listen to the recordings in absolute awe.

But here for once I am disagreeing.  I love this revised version of this song, and indeed I included the Sinatra performance on my mythical album Dylan Obscuranti and you can hear that performance through this link.  Yet it is not just my love of the song that makes me put it in as an absolute highlight, nor its rarity, but I really do think this is a great performance.

However, Bob doesn’t seem to value the song too highly since apart from the exquisite Sinatra performance, Mike is absolutely right (of course) this is the only one that there seems to be from the tour.

To see what Bob has done here is the original recording in which Bob keeps it much closer to the “Parting Glass” the traditional Scottish folk song of farewell on which it is based.

My favourite modern version of The Parting Glass is by Face Vocal Band – and I do hope you have time to play the whole piece – it has a few surprises in it.  Don’t play the opening and then move on, please.

So that is the tradition from which Dylan plucked this song, and then re-wrote it.  But this live version is not just a re-write of a classic folk piece, it is elegant and sublime in its own right.  But best of all, it conveys the message of the song with such delicate simplicity that I find it utterly overwhelming.

Obviously, I have no idea if Sinatra did specifically request the song, as the story goes, or why indeed Bob suddenly popped up with this version out of the blue for just one performance.   But I am so glad he did.   For me the re-write just works utterly perfectly.  I can only wish he had felt the same and taken the song once more to his heart and kept it on the tour.

But then, as ever, that’s just me.

The Absolute Highlights series

• 1: John Brown 1987
• 2: Desolation Row. 1990.
• 3: She Belongs to Me
• 4: Tangled up in Blue
• 5: I and I – power without meaning
• 6: It ain’t me babe – go lightly.
• 7: Perfection in desolation – Gates of Eden
• 8: Girl from the North Country.
• 9: When He Returns
• 10: It’s alright Ma
• 11: Satisfied Mind
• 12: Visions of Johanna
• 13: Dark Eyes
• 14: Man in the long black coat
• 15:  Don’t think twice (2000)
• 16: Silvio (1998)
• 17: Gates of Eden (2000)
• 18: One Too Many Mornings 2001.
• 19: It’s all over now baby blue 1994
• 20: The Wicked Messenger
• 21: Positively 4th Street (1994)
• 22: I and I

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

In this series Aaron looks at songs Dylan has sung but which he didn’t write, and Tony (across the Atlantic) adds some thoughts which spring to mind while reading Aaron’s commentary.   Links to previous articles can be found at the end.

Aaron: Little Maggie is a traditional folk song from the southern Appalachians probably from the late 1800s. The song, about a hard-drinking, fun-loving heart breaker, is considered a cousin to Darlin’ Cory. Both use only two chords and fewer than the standard number of notes typical in folk songs, but the tunes are distinctly different. Similarly, while the lyrics to the two songs are not the same, versions of the songs often share this verse:

"Last time a saw Little Maggie [Darlin' Cory]
She was sitting on the banks of the sea
With a forty-four on her hip
And a banjo on her knee".

Grayson and Whitter released the first recording as a Single on December 6, 1929 as “Little Maggie with a Dram Glass in Her Hand.”

Tony: The comment about the two chords is really interesting (to me, if no one else) because these are not just any old chords but a very, very distinctive combination of chords.   The recording above is in G (unless my musical ear has totally been blown, and I am not going all the way downstairs to the piano and guitar to check, so I am hoping I am right) and the chords are G major and D minor.   Now the point is that in the classical sense, these are unrelated chords – you can’t make the notes of the D minor chord out of the notes available from the G major scale.

So it sounds unexpected and slightly odd.   Besides which, most people brought up on western music hear minor chords as sad and major chords as happy, so there is this strange disjunction between the chords.  If we take the opening lines with the chords…

G                        Dm
"Last time a saw Little Maggie
G                       Dm           G   
She was sitting on the banks of the sea

what we hear is jolly happiness in the rhythm, melody and chord, suddenly contrasted at the word “Maggie” with the sadness of the minor.   It gives a feeling that everything that looked bright and cheery has in fact a sad background – adding the feeling that the “last time” was not yesterday but a long time ago.   And that works with the lyrics because “the last time a saw” (which is to say in modern parlance “The last time I saw”) gives a feeling of lost love.   So happy memories and sad memories are completely mirrored by the choice of chords.  It works brilliantly and can be felt whether one knows anything about music or not.

Aaron: Bob probably knew The Stanley Brothers version from 1948

Tony: Here the speed of the song and joy of the banjo sound keep emphasising the inter-connection of the happy and sad.  The result is a great, lively song, which gives us the message that life can be happy and sad, and that’s ok.

I really love this performance.  It reminds me that life is fun and life is crap.  And that’s ok as that is how it is.

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

Tony:  Bob adds an extra chord, replacing the second chord with a major and replacing the minor chord to the end of the line again with a major.   So staying with the song in G we would get  G  C  (D) as the chords, (although in fact Bob is performing in the key of B).   I think this is achieved with a capo on the second fret and playing it in A, but that’s just a thought in hearing the way the chords move.

It is incidentally a reminder of what a great musician Bob is – something that I find easy to forget when listening to some Never Ending Tour songs in which he just keeps playing two or three notes over and over again.

Aaron: Subsequent versions include Tom Petty & The Heart Breakers

Tony: And here they are using the same chord sequence that Bob used – with of course the extension of the first line by holding the word with the harmony.  The unexpected element beyond that, and what makes this version for me is the electric (I think) piano in the instrumental break.   I wish we had more piano breaks in fact because the pianist seems to get much more out of the song than the other soloists.  But still, great fun.

Aaron: Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters

Tony: That is a very strange album cover and a very inventive version of this song.  How ever did they get to think of this arrangement?   It is one of those interpretations that I would use if I wanted to show to anyone who was inclined to be disparaging of the work of rock musicians, that there is as much inventiveness in this genre of music as there is in anything else in western music.

Aaron, I am as ever, in your debt.  What a fabulous collection.   Really enjoyed it.

Previously in this series…

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

Happy birthday to Bob Dylan as he prepares for a new tour soon in Europe

by mr tambourine

Happy birthday to Bob Dylan as he prepares for a new tour soon in Europe, which covers
Portugal, Spain, France and Italy.

For such a special occasion I want to contribute my thoughts and feelings on what could happen, not that I was ever right before!

So this article is not meant to be some big statement nor does it express my personal wishlist.  Not all of the songs mentioned on the list are my personal choices, nor am I trying to suggest all of these will be played. I will be lucky to get one right. But it’s not even about being right. I’m just doing this for fun mostly.

I’ve been analysing Bob’s ways of changing the set for many years, trying to come close to
the pattern he uses, still all for fun, and not to look like a geek or a smartass.  Hopefully, this can help with other fans’ enthusiasm for live shows. I would love if the fun I have can be shared with others.

I don’t think I’m even close to figuring out Bob nor is that the point of why I’m doing this.
I’m just trying to help spread good energy to as many Bob fans as possible.  Now let’s get to the list.

Obviously, we could go on and on what songs Bob could play, and there’s so many he could
bring back. But I’m gonna try the most logical guesses here based on Bob’s current style
live, his most recent tours and the arrangements of songs. Also, Bob’s particular interests in these times and the most current circumstances.

Here’s 23 possible setlist additions with context on why I think they could be added.

23. When First Unto This Country

This one may be a little bit of a long shot, but hear me out. The Rough and Rowdy Ways tour is beginning to more and more look like some of the early years of the Never-Ending Tour.  This particular song was done live by Bob only twice, in 1989 and 1991 once each. So why would Bob bring back a song he hasn’t played in more than 30 years?

Well, seems like the theme of some recent tours is to perform anything that has something
to do with the Grateful Dead. This one may not be directly linked with the Grateful Dead, but Jerry Garcia is, as he covered this song in 1993, which is now exactly 30 years since then.

It was also one of his last works I believe before his sudden death in 1995. Knowing how
respectful of not only the Grateful Dead, but of Jerry Garcia especially, Dylan is, this has to
be somehow in consideration, at least in Dylan’s subconscious mind. The only mystery
would be which arrangement Dylan would use for this one, as he doesn’t seem to rely on
heavily acoustic arrangements these days, but I’m not doubting that he could find a way to
make his current band perform this in a way most suitable for the overall sound of the group.

22. Heaven Help The Devil

With the recent death of Gordon Lightfoot, many Dylan fans start to wonder if Dylan was
gonna pay tribute to his longtime companion.

If he was going to choose a song that’s a little bit under the radar that he’s never performed
before, this one would be suitable. Especially if you consider that this is a man that in 2022
could perform both “Every Grain of Sand” and “Friend of the Devil”, a man that literally
contains multitudes.

This song seems like a suitable choice with all that put into consideration.  I know this one doesn’t fit with the title of this article, which is “songs to bring back live”, since this one wasn’t played live by Dylan, but it would sort of bring Lightfoot back to life at least temporary as a tribute to him.

The memory of him will continue with that tribute and it would bring back attention to him. And as long as he’s still remembered, he’s among us.

According to setlist.fm (which can sometimes be dead on, and sometimes unreliable),
Lightfoot performed this particular song only 5 times live, and not since 1982. It would be an odd choice, but sometimes odd and Dylan go hand in hand (might as well call
him Odd Dylan instead of Bob Dylan..it’s a joke of course).

Another reason why this may seem like a nice candidate is because Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead has a song with a similar name “Heaven Help The Fool”. Sometimes these tiny details can matter very much with Bob.

21. Ring Them Bells

This seems very unlikely in many ways, but when you bring some context into it, it doesn’t
seem so far-fetched.  One of the few Dylan covers that Lightfoot ever did was Ring Them Bells. Not only that, but Lightfoot has performed it many times live, over a hundred in fact. The very last being not so long ago in 2017.

Dylan himself has not performed this song live as much, nor so recently as Lightfoot did. He did it about 25 times live and the last time in 2005. That last performance was also in
Europe.

Being in much better voice nowadays than back then, Dylan could do it justice if he wanted
to today. Not only that, but Bob has a history in recent years where he was bringing songs back into the set for the first time since 2005.

• In 2013, for the first time since 2005, he played “Waiting For You”.
• In 2017, for the first time since 2005, he played “Standing In The Doorway”.
• In 2018, for the first time since 2005, he played “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”.
• In 2021, for the first time since 2005, he played “To Be Alone With You”.

Is this a pattern or is it pure coincidence? If it’s a pattern, what is it about 2005?

If that’s the pattern, that makes “Ring Them Bells” a great candidate.

The series continues….

NB: Musical examples in this series have been selected by Tony.

Please note, a list of past articles in this series appears here.  The previous articles on 2012 are…

• NET 2012 part 1 The Ivory Revolution Begins
• NET 2012 part 2 The Ivory Revolution Continues

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Although as the year rolled out problems emerged with his voice, there were criticisms of his piano playing and tales of audiences deserting his concerts, Dylan looked suave and on top of his game in January, 2012, performing ‘Blind Willie McTell’ to a celebrity-studded audience at the Hollywood Palladium in honour of film director Martin Scorsese. This is a centre stage performance in which Dylan is clearly enjoying himself. Fascinating to watch the response of these celebs to his performance.

This arrangement of the song dates back to 2011, when Dylan started putting a swing beat into a number of his songs. (See https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/25202)

‘Man in the Long Black Coat’ gets the same swinging treatment in 2012 as it did in 2011. Fans of Mark Knopfler’s guitar style will be happy to hear him backing Dylan on this one from Toronto:

Man in the Long Black Coat

The question I asked in the 2011 post was, “does this dark song survive the bouncy swing arrangement”, and remarkably, it seems to do so.

Dylan began putting a swing into his songs in 2009, in particular his jaunty ‘Blowing In the Wind.’    In this gentle performance (sorry, lost the date of this one), he adds the piano to the mix to give the song a lilt. Not quite as cheeky as the 2009 version, but very much in keeping with the spirit of the song, and all those unanswerable questions it poses. Some tooting from the harp to finish it off.

Blowing in the Wind (A)

In Washington at the end of the year (20^th Nov), he puts his harp aside and brings Donnie Herron in on the violin which adds a touch of pathos to the song.

Blowing in the Wind (B)

Not wanting to push this too far, but you can hear Dylan experimenting with piano sounds in this Winnipeg (Oct 5^th) version. He loves to find two or three notes he can repeat with a childlike simplicity.

Blowing in the Wind (C)

These three samples of that most famous song show that Dylan has not yet settled on a particular arrangement but is experimenting with it, trying out styles and arrangements.

Let’s slip back to Toronto to hear Mark Knopfler accompany Dylan on ‘Things Have Changed.’ It’s a beautifully smooth version and, at least at Toronto, Dylan seems to be able to work with his voice. Of this song Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone commented: ‘”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.’ The song contemplates the apocalypse with a cynical shrug of the shoulders: ‘I used to care but things have changed.’ It’s worth remembering that this song won both the Academy Award for Best Original Song and the Golden Glow Award for Best Original Song.

Things Have Changed

Dylan’s original vision of the apocalypse was of course in ‘Hard Rain,’ dating back to 1962, which was played 24 times in 2012, but would fade quickly in the years to follow. More’s the pity, as it is one of Dylan’s best and most enduring songs. This one’s from Washington, 20^th Nov, and his second to last concert for the year.

Hard Rain

‘High Water (For Charlie Patton)’ offers us another view of the apocalypse, when everything goes down in a flood. I thought of this song recently when, here in New Zealand, we faced severe flooding in a cyclone and then another big flooding event a week later. ‘Don’t reach out for me, she said, can’t you see I’m drowning too,’ seemed very apposite.  As with Shakespeare, in Dylan physical chaos always reflects and accompanies moral chaos in the human sphere. This one, with Donnie Herron once more on banjo giving it a country feel, is from Sao Paulo, 22^nd April.

High Water (A)

This second ‘High Water’ is a remarkable performance, ending with Dylan goading the audience with cheeky blasts of the harp. The audience responds by whooping. At one point he seems to crack up with laughter, then recovers quickly. A very minimal backing thrusts Dylan’s cracked voice to the fore. A striking performance all round, and a fun one to listen to. (Sorry, lost the date of this one.)

High Water (B)

Of course the apocalypse can appear in a very personal way, as an awareness of one’s mortality. In the end twilight will succumb to night, no matter what we do. ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’ is the starkest expression of that awareness. Dylan wrote it in 1997 and twenty-six years later he’s still going, but eventually the dark will fall. We have heard some marvellous versions of this song over the years, and can add this one from Sao Paulo to that collection.

It’s Not Dark Yet

‘When the Deal Goes Down’ also confronts the inevitability of death, but with quite a different spirit from ‘Not Dark Yet.’ Rather it gleams with the possibility of redemption.

‘Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air
Tomorrow keeps turning around.’

‘In a five-star review of Modern Times, The Guardian‘s Sean O’Hagan saw the song as an example of Dylan “waking with God”: “‘When the Deal Goes Down’ is a distant cousin of ‘Let Me Die In My Footsteps‘, youthful defiance replaced by gritty stoicism. It is also a divine love song. Literally: ‘You come to my eyes/ Like a vision from the skies/ I’ll be with you when the deal goes down’. You have to go way back beyond Verlaine and Rimbaud, to the likes of Marvell and Donne to hear voices that echo with such metaphysical intimacy.”

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Deal_Goes_Down)

We will not die alone, the song suggests, as an invisible presence, the “I” of the song, will be with us when we go.

This powerful song was played only once in 2012, at Madison (5^th Nov) and would  be played once more in 2013 before disappearing from Dylan’s setlists.

When the Deal Goes Down

‘Tryin to Get To Heaven’ tackles the same subject although this time with a streak of humour. That door could well close just before we get there!

The Wikipedia entry gives our own Jochen Markhorst an honourable mention, “Dylan scholar Jochen Markhorst ranks the song among the author’s “most beautiful works,” noting that it’s similar to but “more accessible” than the celebrated “Not Dark Yet” because it offers the “prospect of redemption in an afterlife”.

Jochen’s excellent article can be found here:

My favourite lines from the song evoke the Edgar Allen Poe story, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ in which a razor sharp blade swings back and forth, coming ever closer to the hapless prisoner chained to a stone slab. There is both pathos and danger here:

People on the platforms
Waiting for the trains
I can hear their hearts a-beatin'
Like pendulums swinging on chains

This performance is from Sao Paulo

Tryin to Get to Heaven

I’m going to pause at this point as I’ve still got nine songs to cover, and I’m not going to get through them all in one post. I’ll break the post here and resume with a continuation shortly.

In the meantime

Kia Ora

Previously in this series…

• Part 1: He must keep himself clean in speech
• Part 2: O where are you going?
• Part 3: A chance is gonna come
• Part 4: He let’s them synthasise into a coherent thing
• Part 5: Marjorie
• Part 6:   ‘Tis but a scratch

by Jochen Markhorst

VII        A feeling for words

Black rider, black rider, hold it right there
The size of your cock won’t get you nowhere
I suffer in silence, I’ll not make a sound
Maybe I’ll take the high moral ground
Some enchanted evening, I’ll sing you a song
Black rider, black rider, you’ve been on the job too long

 “Anybody with a feeling for words and language,” Dylan says in conclusion, as he lists which artists he is a fan of in the December 2022 Wall Street Journal interview. Among the usual suspects (Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave) and talented “normal” newcomers like Rag’n’Bone Man and Celeste, stand out: Eminem and Wu-Tang Clan. The latter come a bit out of the blue. In 2001, at the press conference in Rome, he still claims rather credibly that he has never heard of Dr Dre or Eminem, and that “the present-day music scene has never been of my personal concern”. But then again, at that same press conference, he claims just as seemingly sincerely that he cannot remember working with Kurtis Blow (“Street Rock”, 1986). Anyway; maybe thanks to his grandchildren, maybe because he has had enough of that posed detachment he has cultivated for some three decades now, around his 80s Dylan knows again what’s on the charts and acknowledges the position of rap music in recent music history. With apparent appreciation, even.

It perhaps explains the sudden receptivity to unfiltered banalities like sucking off all of the younger men in the lyrics revision for the first live renditions of “Crossing The Rubicon”, and to one of the most remarkable verse lines of the album Rough And Rowdy Ways, and of Dylan’s oeuvre at all, the very undylanesque line The size of your cock won’t get you nowhere.

In the six decades before, there are plenty of obscene frivolities and sexual banalities in Dylan’s oeuvre, sure, but: always in the blues tradition. So veiled indecency, half-hidden behind sanctimonious metaphors like fiddle, pencil, pie, door, juice, the whole fruit basket and all variations of riding, playing and rocking. Or even more vague – like it gets so hard (“Absolutely Sweet Marie”), for instance, or last night I knew you (“Mississippi”).

Purely linguistically, of course, “cock” is also in fact a metaphor, but this is precisely one of those rare examples of a metaphor whose symbolic meaning has now superseded its actual meaning – to the extent that the originally neutral “cock” is now X-rated. Children’s programmes, and entertainment productions at all, feel forced to flee to “rooster” since the 1970s (Howlin’ Wolf’s sexualisation of Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster” fortunately did not penetrate the upper world). A fate that also threatens “anaconda”, by the way, but more dramatically – after all, we have no synonym for this constrictor, the Eunectes murinus.

Anyway, Dylan’s The size of your cock won’t get you nowhere. The fans’ discomfort can at least be soothed somewhat with the consolation that Dylan has copied, reassuringly dylanesque, from the work of an Ancient Roman, from the Satires of Juvenal (first century AD). From Satires IX, the only piece Juvenal writes in dialogue form, about the life of a pitiful boy of shame: “If your stars go against you the fantastic size of your cock will get you precisely nowhere” (in the translation by Peter Green, 1967). Still, perhaps we should be grateful that Dylan left it at that, and did not venture into the perversity that Juvenal composes ten lines away: “You think it’s easy, or fun, this job of cramming my cock up into your guts till it’s stopped by last night’s supper?”

Atypical within Dylan’s oeuvre, all things considered, but paradoxically appropriate again, for all the incoherence, within the lyrics of “Black Rider”. After all, by now we can’t ignore the fact that the lyrics are rather disjointed in terms of content. Stylistically, it is a lump of granite, with its cast-iron rhyme scheme, the elegant metre and the repetitio black rider black rider as the opening of each verse. But substantively, it is a swept-together heap of shards from very disparate sources, the character sketches hopelessly diffuse.

The narrator’s state of mind is particularly unstable, to put it kindly. Rocking back and forth between slavishness, aggression, appeasement and conflict-prone, and contradicting himself, too. As does this size of your cock line clash with his own words. That won’t get you nowhere, snarls the narrator – who just two stanzas ago revealed to us that the black rider is visiting his wife (stop visiting mine). So the size of his cock apparently at least gets him into the narrator’s marital bedroom – call that “nowhere”.

It almost seems as if the poet is thematising content inconsistency, and wants to underline that in this final couplet with sought-after, obvious exaggeration. “Some enchanted evening” is a quote that cannot escape any fan and hardly any music lover – everyone knows the Rodgers/Hammerstein song, and Dylan himself recorded it in 2015 for Shadows In The Night. Less well known, but nevertheless just as much stolen is taking the high moral ground; from Ovid, of which Dylan had already plundered so much for “Love And Theft”, 2001. Dylan read this combination of words in one of Ovid’s erotic elegies, Elegy XIV, “To His Mistress” (No, I’m not going to take high moral ground, in J. Lewis May’s translation, 1925).

Just as famous as some enchanted evening, then again, are the closing words, you’ve been on the job too long:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star
'Long comes Brady in his 'lectric car
Got a mean look right   in his eye
Gonna shoot somebody jus' to watch him die
He been on the job too long

… the closing words of each verse of “Duncan And Brady”, as sung by Dylan himself in the version recorded for Good As I Been To You in 1992, and eventually released on Tell-Tale Signs in 2008. He also performs the song (some eighty times, at the beginning of the 21st century), and then broadly follows the Tom Rush version from 1964, in which this line is also sung at the end of each verse (eight times in total).

Juvenal, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Ovid, “Duncan and Brady”… and in between established clichés like I’ll sing you a song and hold it right there and suffer in silence (although the latter could just as well be a nod to the Willie Nelson song) – the multicoloured nature of Dylan’s sources at least mirrors the chaotic content of the lyrics.

Yeah well. “I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs,” as Dylan says at the conclusion of his Nobel Prize speech, “and I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.”

———-

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

By Tony Attwood, based on an article written with Dearbhla Egan

About eight years ago Dearbhla and I concocted the idea of noting down some of our favourite opening lines from Dylan songs.  I think at the time the idea was that we would then go further and maybe even make an index of all the opening lines of Dylan’s songs, just because…. well, just because we could.  Perhaps just to see if there was any pattern, or just to see if Dylan was particularly brilliant at opening lines, or whether the lines we all remember come from later in the songs.

Of course, at first it is easy to think of the opening lines that stay with us because they start our favourite songs.  Like the first song on the alphabetical list of opening lines below “Ain’t it just like the night…”   We all know that one.  Brilliant song, brilliant first line.

Anyway, I stumbled on this work that we did and which we published here, but then never went back to, and I wondered if there were more gems to be found.  So I went through all Dylan’s compositions that begin with A or B and added them to the list, just to see what I got.  And really…. it was a little disappointing.  Dylan can do exquisite first lines that stay in the memory forever, but often the first line is just an opener, like the chord played at the start to get us in the mood.    In short, the opening line doesn’t seem to be that vital to Dylan when writing a song.   Which is probably why Dearbhla and I stopped making our list.

But since no one else seems to have done an index of Dylan’s opening lines, I thought maybe I would re-publish what we did, and then go on and gradually finish it, so there is an index of Dylan’s opening lines on the internet.

Mostly I wanted to look at this again because even in this list of just about one sixth of Bob’s full list of compositions that have lyrics, there are some gems.   Such as that first one (Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?).   I mean, how can one write a more amazing first line than that?

Now in pondering all of this I thought I would develop my own list of Dylan’s ten best openers, as I remember them at the moment.   And then see if by building a complete list of Dylan’s opening list (complete in the sense that I am for the moment only considering songs where the lyrics have actually been published).  Here is my list for now.

1. Darkness at the break of noon.
2. Far between sundown’s finish and midnight’s broken toll.
3. I can hear the turning of the key
4. If you see her say hello.
5. My love she speaks like silence.
6. Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside.
7. Shadows have fallen and I’ve been here all day…
8. The pawnbroker roared also so did the landlord.
9. Well, it’s always been my nature to take chances.
10. You got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.

I’m going to plod on through the rest of the songbook and pick out some more favourite opening lines and publish one or two more updates on “Dylan’s opening lines” – if you would like to add any, please do make a comment and I’ll put them in the list.

So here we go…

Dylan’s opening lines… from a list that will be continued.

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?  (Visions of Johanna)

All the early Roman kings in their sharkskin suits bow ties and buttons high top boots (Early Roman Kings)

All the tired horses in the sun (All the tired horses)

Are you ready, are you ready? (Are you ready?)

As I went out one morning ( As I went out one morning)

As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden, the wounded flowers were dangling from the vines (Ain’t Taking)

At the time of my confession, and the hour of my deepest need (Every grain of sand)

B

Band of the hand (Band of the hand)

Been so long since a strange woman slept in my bed… (I and I)

Beyond the horizon, behind the sun, at the end of the rainbow, life has just begun.  (Beyond the horizon)

Black Rider Black Rider you been livin’ too hard (Black Rider)

Buckets of rain, buckets of tears (Buckets of rain)

Bye and bye, I’m breathin’ a lover’s sigh (Bye and Bye)

C

Come around you rovin’ gamblers, and a story I will tell. (Rambling, Gambling Willie)

Crimson flames tied through my ears, rollin’ high and mighty traps (My back pages)

D

Darkness at the break of noon (It’s all right Ma, I’m only bleeding)

E

Everything went from bad to worse, money never changed a thing (Up to Me)

F

Far between sundown’s finish and midnight’s broken toll  (Chimes of Freedom)

Fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel (Dignity)

G

Go away from my window, leave at your own chosen speed (It Ain’t Me Babe)

God said to Abraham “Kill me a son” (Highway 61 Revisited)

Gon’ walk down that dirt road, ’til someone lets me ride (Dirt Road Blues)

H

He sits in your room, his tomb, with a fist full of tacks (Can you please Crawl out Your Window)

Hollis Brown he lived on the outside of town (Ballad of Hollis Brown)

Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun  (Romance in Durango)

How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? (Blowing in the wind)

I

I ain’t lookin’ to compete with you (All I really want to do)

I can hear the turning of the key (Abandoned Love)

I crossed the green mountain, I slept by the stream (‘Cross the green mountain)

I hate myself for lovin’ you and the weakness that it showed (Dirge)

I ain’t looking to compete with you (All I really want to do)

I love you more than ever, more than time and more than love (Wedding Song)

I love you pretty baby (Beyond here lies nothing)

I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze (Balled in Plain D)

I woke in the mornin’, wand’rin’ wasted and worn out (Black crow blues)

If I had wings, like Noah’s dove  (Dink’s Song)

I’m walking through the summer nights, jukebox playing low (Standing in the Doorway)

I’m walkin’ through streets that are dead (Love Sick)

If today was not an endless highway (Tomorrow is a long time)

If you find it in your heart, can I be forgiven?  Guess I owe You some kind of apology  (Saving Grace)

If you see her say hello (If You See Her Say Hello)

If your memory serves you well, we were going to meet again and wait (This wheel’s on fire)

In the lonely night, In the blinking stardust of a pale blue light (Born in Time)

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need (Every Grain of Sand)

I’ve just reached a place where the willow don’t bend (Going Going Gone)

I was riding on the Mayflower when I thought I spied some land (115th Dream)

I woke in the mornin’, wand’rin’ (Black Crow Blues)

J

Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine, I’m on the pavement talking ’bout the government. (Subterranean Homesick Blues)

K

L

Like a lion tears the flesh off of a man, so can a woman who passes herself off as a male. (Foot of Pride)

M

Man thinks, cuz he rules the world, he can do with it as he please (Licence to kill)

May God bless and keep you always, may your wishes all come true (Forever Young)

My love she speaks like silence. (Love Minus zero / No Limit)

My name is Donald White, you see (Ballad of Donald White)

N

Nobody feels any pain (Just like a woman)

Now the ragman draws circles up and down the block  (Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again)

O

Of war and peace the truth just twists, it’s curfew gull it glides (Gates of Eden)

Oh I’m sailing away, my own true love. (Boots of Spanish Leather)

Oh, the benches were stained with tears and perspiration (Day of the Locusts)

Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside (Dark Eyes)

Oh, help me in my weakness  (The Drifter’s Escape)

Oh the streets of Rome are filled with rubble, ancient footprints are everywhere. (When I Paint my Masterpiece)

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?  (Hard Rain)

Old man sailin’ in a dinghy boat (Apple suckling tree)

P

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night  (Hurricane)

Q

R

Ring them bells ye heathen from the city that dreams (Ring them Bells)

S

Sad I’m a-sittin’ on the railroad track (Ballad for a friend)

Seen the arrow on the doorpost saying this land is condemned (Blind Willie McTell)

Shadows have fallen and I’ve been here all day,  (Not Dark Yet)

She’s got everything she needs she’s an artist she don’t look back (She Belongs to Me)

Sometimes I’m in the mood, I wanna leave my lonesome home (Baby I’m in the mood for you)

Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press.  (Idiot Wind)

Some of us turn off the lights and we live in the moonlight shooting by (Red River Shore)

Something there is about you that strikes a match in me (Something there is About You)

Standing on the waters casting your bread while the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing? (Jokerman)

Stake my future on a hell of a past (Silvio)

T

Ten thousand men on a hill (Ten Thousand Men)

The air is gettin’ hotter, there’s a rumblin’ in the sky, (Lucinda Williams Tryin’ to get to Heaven)

The pale moon rose in its glory out on the Western town (Tempest)

The pawnbroker roared also so did the landlord (She’s your lover now)

The river whispers in my ear, I’ve hardly a penny to my name (Tell Ol Bill)

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief (All along the Watchtower)

There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain, tears on the letter I write. (Where are you Tonight?  (Journey through Dark Heat))

There’s guns across the river aimin’ at ya (Billy 1)

They’re selling postcards of the hanging (Desolation Row)

They say everything can be replaced, yet every distance is not near (I Shall be Released)

Twas another lifetime, one of toil and blood (Shelter from the Storm)

Twilight on the frozen lake (Never say Goodbye)

U

Up on the white veranda, she wears a necktie and a Panama Hat  (Black Diamond Bay)

V

W

Well, if I had to do it all over again (All over you)

Well, it’s always been my nature to take chances (Angelina)

Well, the Lone Ranger and Tonto they are ridin’ down the line (Bob Dylan’s Blues)

Well, there was this movie I seen one time about a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck. (Brownsville Girl)

Well, my nerves are exploding and my body’s tense (Til I fell in love with you)

Well, your railroad gate, you know I just can’t jump it (Absolutely Sweet Marie)

What’s the matter with me, I don’t have much to say (Watching the River Flow)

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Eastertime too (Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues)

While riding on a train goin’ west I fell asleep for to take my rest (Bob Dylan’s Dream)

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carrol with a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger (The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol)

X

Y

You been down to the bottom with a bad man, babe  (Baby stop crying)

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand, you see somebody naked and you say “who is that man?”  (Ballad of a Thin Man)

You got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend (Positively 4th Street)

There is an index to our current series and most recent posts on the home page.

By Tony Attwood

“Sara” was played live by Dylan 33 times over a three month period in late 1975 and early 1976, and then set aside – as indeed many other Dylan compositions have been across the years.  And it’s not a song I’m particularly drawn to, although that is not to say I dislike it, so I suspect I haven’t listened to it much in these past decades.  And it is an easy song to remember and play in one’s head (if one wants to, that is).

So, not a particular favourite of mine, and coming to this song as the next piece in the “Cover a Day” series I did wonder if many artists would have tackled the idea of a cover.  It is after all a very distinctive song, and the notion of a radical change to the instrumentation, speed or accompaniment seemed unlikely.  Although in that thought I turned out to be quite wrong – and most certainly not for the first time.

But Barb Jungr has recorded the piece, and she knows what she’s doing so I turned to that with interest… not least because the simple piano introduction is short, but gorgeous, and she seems to have caught the image of the song to perfection.   The piano remains restrained but very interesting throughout… the pictures painted by the song come more to life than I remember them doing in Bob’s own recording.

I am lucky in that where I live and write there is silence – there’s no traffic noise, very occasionally the grandchildren of the family in the next house along the road play in their garden… but today there is silence.  Perfect for hearing this version of this song.  The giant trees at the far end of the garden wave very slightly in the breeze as if in understanding.

This music is so restrained, so gorgeous, … I imagine it has to be heard in the right circumstances.  Only the end, the last two chords, seem to offer a foreboding of something going wrong.   But let’s not dwell on that.

Els Miralls de Dylan

This band perform in Catalan, which (surely obviously) I don’t speak but that never worries me especially, for it is the gorgeous sound of the accompaniment and the exquisite harmonies that draws one in.  Indeed I find I don’t actually need the lyrics; this is just a total sound.  A gorgeous end too, on that hovering unresolved chord with the briefest of resolutions just when I thought there wasn’t going to be one.

The Casual Lean

One wouldn’t actually expect an indie rock band from Massachusetts to pick on this song, and they’ve added a level of aggression to the song, which was certainly unexpected, at least by me.  The gentleness has gone, and yet it doesn’t sound inappropriate, and maybe that is the secret of so much of Dylan’s music.  He really has so often given us songs that could be treated in a multiplicity of ways, and still make sense.

I’m not sure that they don’t take it too far in the penultimate verse, but it made me pause and think and while in the end I do feel they had pushed the idea more than I wanted, I’m still glad I listened.

Wiehe & Forsberg

I was really pleased to have another version of the song to perform after the Casual Lean’s approach, for I felt a definite need to be taken back down.   And this version Swedish does create a real sense of emptiness – a feeling of what eventually happened between the couple afterwards, which of course was not there at the start.   There’s a bleakness here which is interesting to hear today – but I am not sure I would have enjoyed it when I first started this series during the lockdown period in England and I was, in a very real sense, totally on my own.

• 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. You will not believe this… 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. A Dylan Cover a Day: Ring them bells in many different ways
  123. A Dylan cover a day: Romance in Durango, covered and re-written
  124. Dylan cover a day: Sad Eyed Lady of Lowlands, like you won’t believe

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Please note, a list of past articles in this series appears here.

As we saw in the last post, the songs from Dylan’s new album, Tempest, hardly impacted Dylan’s setlists in 2012. Songs that would make a major impact, ‘Duquesne Whistle’ and ‘Long and Wasted Years’ didn’t appear until 2013. I covered ‘Early Roman Kings’ and a sole performance of ‘Scarlet Town’ in the previous post, but one more song from Tempest, that deadly little ballad ‘Soon After Midnight,’ was performed twice in 2012, and ‘Pay in Blood’ was performed once only, in Detroit, Nov 13^th, but there is no known recording of that concert.

We can’t approach ‘Soon After Midnight’ without understanding the role that dramatic monologues play in Dylan’s work, especially his 21^st Century songs. This needs a whole article to itself, which I have on my list to write after this NET series has finished, but in the meantime, if you have enjoyed, ‘My Own Version of You’ from Rough and Rowdy Ways, you will know what I mean when I talk of a scurrilous, creepy narrator who tries to inveigle us into his point of view in that song. ‘Soon After Midnight’ is something of a forerunner to that later song, featuring another creepy narrator.

There are various types of unreliable narrators from the honestly deluded to the deliberately deceptive. In ‘Soon After Midnight’ we have a narrator who can barely hide his murderous intent. The apparent sweetness and gentleness of the melody and sweetness of some of the lyrics fail to hide the homicidal nature of the narrator.

I am reminded here of the poem, ‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning, a master of the dramatic monologue. In the poem the narrator is showing somebody a portrait of his now deceased wife.

She had
A heart
-- how shall I say? -- too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere

There’s a nasty edge to the comment that reveals the man’s jealousy and secret rage. The woman was, he is suggesting, unfaithful and promiscuous. Murder is his solution:

Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.

A chilling comment. We get the same kind of chill from ‘Soon After Midnight’ as it slowly dawns on us that the narrator has murdered these women he speaks of. Here are the give-away lines:

They chirp and they chatter, what does it matter
They’re lying there dying in their blood

I am indebted to Jochen Markhorst for a fuller understanding of the evil that lies behind this song:

‘By the time the killing floors occur, in the third verse, the attentive listener begins to realize that this is not just a love song, that this is not some desolate whiny bigot, outside pining lonely between dusk and dawn, but that something else is going on… It is, in short, a real murder ballad. Not a love song, not a song that, as the reviewer of Pitchfork thinks, belongs to “Blood On The Tracks”, because of some bitter, vicious heartbreak, but a song like “Mac The Knife”, or “Where The Wild Roses Grow”, or “Little Sadie”, songs in which the protagonist is a murderous psychopath… The upcoming murder remains, however, as in the more subtle thrillers, beyond the reach of the cameras. The contrast is reinforced by the misleading musical decoration; it is sweet, seductive and slightly melancholy, just like Dylan’s delivery.’

There’s a nasty kick in the last verse as we realize he’s not talking about some new romantic adventure, but his next victim:

It's now or never
More than ever
When I met you I didn't think you would do
It's soon after midnight
And I don't want nobody but you

This performance is from the second to last concert of the year, Washington, Nov 20^th, and without any tricks, projects our vicious narrator in all his gentle deceptiveness.

Soon After Midnight

While on the subject of murder ballads, ‘Delia,’ not performed since 2000, gets a single playing in 2012. Although listed on the Bob Dylan official website as a Dylan song, it was in fact written by Karl Silbersdorf and Dick Toops, originally recorded by Johnny Cash in 1962 for his The Sound of Johnny Cash album. The country legend re-recorded it in 1994, a year after Dylan included it on his album of cover songs, World Gone Wrong.

We’ll never know why Dylan revisited this song after twelve years, perhaps because it does deal with murder and fits neatly with the violence of the songs on Tempest. Here it is performed in Las Vegas, 27^th October.

Delia

Another rarity for 2012 is a one-off performance of Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Shadows,’ off his 1982 album of the same name. Again, we can’t know what drew Dylan to this song. It’s no murder ballad, no shadow of death lies over it. In fact it’s a sweet, lyrical love song. Rather refreshing, and Dylan does a loving cover version. (12^th Oct)

Shadows

We now switch focus from rarities to the songs Dylan most often played in 2012. ‘Ballad of a Thin Man,’ ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ and ‘Thunder On The Mountain’ were all played a whopping eighty-five times during the year, which saw eighty-six concerts in all. It’s curious that three of these songs are from his classic 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited.

His main interest in these songs, it seems to me, is adapting them with fresh arrangements for his new love – the grand piano. In 2009/10 we saw ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and some other hard rockers stripped down to their rock ‘n roll essentials, and the rendition is similarly minimal in these two performances of the song. The song is no longer guitar-heavy but thumps along with bass and drums, some light guitar work, and of course Dylan’s strange piano interjections. Sometimes he sounds like a child who’s just learned how to play boogie, hammering individual notes or odd little riffs, obsessive and repetitive; it’s a completely unique style, both primitive and sophisticated at the same time.

This first one’s from Toronto:

Highway 61 Revisited (A)

This one from Barlo (16^th July) is even more stripped down. Odd vocal phrasing which hits the rhythm rather than arcing across it. You need to know the lyrics to pick them up when sung in this rushed, jerky way.

Highway 61 Revisited (B)

Dylan’s voice is very rough and full of bark in 2012. If I were looking for the best vocal outreach in these years I’d go back to 2011, where you get the feeling that Dylan is really working his voice. In 2012 the sweet, mellifluous tones with which he would soon negotiate the Frank Sinatra songs, able to soar up into the high notes, had not yet emerged and his vocal range feels severely constrained. 2013 will see an improvement, 2012 seems to me a low point in Dylan’s vocalisation.

I notice it in this performance of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ from Dresden (3^rd July). He screeches a few high notes but it feels like a struggle.

Like A Rolling Stone (A)

By the time we get to Edmonton three months later (Oct 9^th), his voice seems to have improved somewhat. Here, he slows the pace of the song, and seems more in tune with the spirit of it. To my mind, a better performance all round.

Like A Rolling Stone (B)

Dylan’s still using the echo effect for ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’ This Toronto performance is centre stage (I don’t hear any piano) with an edgy harp break. His broken voice seems to suit the song. Not so much spooky as accusative and triumphant. Best not to stray into strange and unlikely places where weird shit is happening!

Ballad of a Thin Man

In a somewhat quieter, more reflective vein we have this one from Sao Paulo (22^nd April). I prefer this one as the harp break is jazzier and more whimsical and there is a more understated feel to the performance.

Ballad of a Thin Man (B)

Over the next couple of years, Dylan would develop a pattern for delivering ‘Tangled Up in Blue.’ He would begin centre stage, sing the first verses, blast out a chorus on the harp, then do his odd, rubbery walk to the grand where he would finish the song off. In 2012, however, he was still trying out different approaches.

In this one from Winnepeg, he doesn’t play the harp at all, and concentrates on developing the piano accompaniment. Once more this indefatigable song works its magic. Lyrically, it mixes the regular verses with the 1984 version. You can hear the switch in the last verse:

Now I’m going back again
I’ve got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
Are an illusion to me now
Some are masters of illusion
Some are ministers of the trade
All of the strong delusion
All of their beds are unmade
Me I'm still heading towards the sun
Trying to stay out of the joint
We always did love the very same one
We just saw her from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue

(For some further lyrical variations of this song see the Bob Dylan Lyric Archive)

Tangled up in Blue (A)

This one, from Toronto, is introduced by the harp and has a harp break before the last verse, but Dylan does move to the piano before the last verse. And that is Mark Knopfler on the guitar. As in 2011 Knopfler travelled with Dylan during the fourth, North American leg of the tour, often playing on the first few songs. Of this leg of the tour Wikipedia comments:  “The tour was met with a mixed to negative response. Many reviews complained about Dylan’s decreasing vocal abilities and his lack of piano playing skills. As usual with Dylan reviews the press complained about Dylan’s changing of song, beyond recognition sometimes. The tour’s attendance was fairly poor with many reviews reporting fans leaving long before the concert was over.”

Tangled up in Blue (B)

While I have already commented on Dylan’s restricted vocal range in 2012,  I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to make your own judgement on Dylan’s piano playing. I find it strange and intriguing, if not ‘good’ in the conventional sense. Who other than Dylan would dare play in this odd, elliptical way? One way or the other, he gives it a fair go in this ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ (Toronto) aiming for a jazzy effect. Again the musical backing is minimal, with bass and drums holding it together. You can see where he’s going with this, it’s just a pity that his voice hardly seems up to it.

Thunder on the Mountain (A)

Same with this version from Madison (Nov 5^th), although the vocal seems marginally better than Toronto. Another jazzy ending. Interesting the way the band picks up on Dylan’s piano riffs and feeds them back to him. This is my preferred version.

Thunder on the Mountain (B)

That’s all for now. Be back soon with more from 2012.

Until then,

Kia Ora

by Tony Attwood

When I wrote a review of this song in 2015, I noted the piece as one of the forgotten Dylan masterpieces and made a few passing references to the music – which (re-reading them now, eight years later) I find are fair enough as far as they go, but… they miss something rather important.  In fact, I find now that I missed out the key issue which is the way the chords work as a background to the melody.

My defence for that error is that although the song was recorded in 1962 hardly anyone has noticed it, and even when I came to write about the song in “A cover a day” I only had one cover version that I could find.  And to my shame I have to admit that I satisfied myself by saying little more than the fact that I thought the band had missed the point of the song.

But there is something else that the cover (linked in at the end of this piece) misses and which helps explains why (in my view at least) the cover doesn’t work.  In the original (above) there is no regularity as to the way Dylan plays the guitar.  Even when he is just playing alternating chords he keeps changing when those two chords alternate in each line, while the melody proceeds over the top.

Now most people, when they play a solo guitar accompaniment to themselves singing, keep the guitar part steady and regular, letting the variation of the song exist in the ever-changing lyrics.

But Dylan keeps on making subtle changes to the length of time he holds onto each chord.   Quite often these are very subtle changes – just a beat or two – but it gives a real feel in the song for the randomness of life which is really at the heart of the song.  As for example in the simple details of the cause of the friend’s death…

A diesel truck was rollin’ slow,
Pullin’ down a heavy load.
It left him on a Utah road.

Now I doubt very much that Dylan actually thought about this consciously.  In my experience when talking to songwriters about the way a song evolves and is played, the answer to “why did you play it like that?” is, as often as not, “I don’t know it just came out like that.”  In short, the great talents feel the music and put in subtle variations, while the regular musicians play the music regularly, making each verse pretty much the same as the verse before, letting the lyrics be the heart of the evolution of the song.  By and large they don’t change the way the chords work.

But it does show that this notion of making the music respond to the lyrics (and sometimes vice versa) was there from the start, albeit (in this song) in a very subtle way.

Now, as I did manage to note before, what we also have here is a clash between the notes played on the guitar, and at times the notes used in the melody.   That itself is something that does turn up in a lot of blues-related songs, so in this regard Dylan is not being particularly unusual – although those subtle clashes do have an emotional impact.

However, when added to this additional set of changes in the way Dylan plays the rotating chords, the music gives us an extra feeling of disconnect, which is what is at the heart of the song.  And this in fact compensates for the fact that, as I did manage to note before, the melody is based around the notes of the chord of A major (A,  C#, E).

So what we have is a melody that doesn’t change that much, and the use of just two chords on the guitar, but a constant variation in the way those two chords are played against the melody.   But then to give constancy, as I did manage to note in the first review, “…his foot is tapping throughout, tapping out the unchanging rhythm of the truck rolling down the road.”

Thus there is this most unusual mix of a regular beat, changing lyrics, regular chords but changing at different times, and regular melody (with variations as we go along).

I’ve always loved this song, right from the moment I first heard it, but never actually worked out before what it is within the song that keeps drawing me back to it.    Yet what we find here is a key to Dylan’s musical world: that ability to take any element of the song and vary it, in the most unexpected ways.

A lot of the commentaries written about Dylan’s songs focus on this effect in terms of the lyrics.   Here we see him doing it in a very, very early composition, within the music too.  I’m rather pleased I have finally understood what makes this song so attractive.

• How most analyses of Dylan’s songs mistake the essence of what the songs are
• Dylan: how the music and the lyrics make the song. 2: Desolation Row
• The music and the lyrics: “Not Dark Yet”
• Dylan: the music and the lyrics: Sign on the window
• Dylan: the lyrics and the music. It ain’t me babe
• Abandoned Love
• Angelina

Previously in this series…

• Part 1: He must keep himself clean in speech
• Part 2: O where are you going?
• Part 3: A chance is gonna come
• Part 4: He let’s them synthasise into a coherent thing
• Part 5: Marjorie

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         ‘Tis but a scratch

Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, then let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war
Don’t hug me, don’t flatter me, don’t turn on the charm
I take a sword, and hack off your arm

It is the second-weirdest line of verse in the song, I take a sword, and hack off your arm. Of course, Shakespeare has plenty of limbs hacked off too (Henry V, Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus), but when we hear this line surely we all think of that other classic from the canon, of Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975), of Scene 4, “Arthur Meets a Brave Knight… and Cuts His Limbs Off”:

BLACK KNIGHT: None shall pass.
ARTHUR: I have no quarrel with you, good Sir Knight, but I must cross this bridge.
BLACK KNIGHT: Then you shall die.
ARTHUR: I command you, as King of the Britons, to stand aside!
BLACK KNIGHT: I move for no man.
ARTHUR: So be it!
ARTHUR and BLACK KNIGHT: Aaah!, hiyaah!, etc.
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT’s left arm off]
ARTHUR: Now stand aside, worthy adversary.
BLACK KNIGHT: ‘Tis but a scratch.
ARTHUR: A scratch? Your arm’s off!
BLACK KNIGHT: No, it isn’t.
ARTHUR: Well, what’s that, then?
BLACK KNIGHT: I’ve had worse.

We all know the continuation. The Black Knight does not give up, loses his right arm as well, fights on without arms, kicking ferociously, loses his legs, then offers a draw, and as a now bored Arthur continues his march without further regard for the Black Knight who is now reduced to a torso plus head, the Black Knight shouts after him: “Oh, I see. Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what’s coming to you. I’ll bite your legs off!”

The build-up to Dylan’s bizarre final line in no way prepares for the alienating finale. In fact, it seems mostly a rather classic build-up to a bouncer that will confirm that the Black Rider is a metaphor for Death, or something similarly profound. At least, pleas like tell me when, tell me how, the suggestion that “now is the time”, and heavily symbolic images like a door that will now be opened, push the associations rather compellingly in that direction.

The key line, My soul is distressed, my mind is at war is likewise hardly alarming; a fairly classic mirroring with My heart is at rest from the previous verse as well as a “normal” bridge to I suffer in silence in the subsequent, final verse. The substantively rather empty distinction between “my heart”, “my soul” and “my mind” has been used by Dylan, for little insightful reasons, since 1963, since “Don’t Think Twice” (I give her my heart but she wanted my soul), but that is a sticking point that has little to do with this. The word choice and combination are remarkable, though. We know a distressed mind from the age-old English street ballad “Lily Of The West”;

I courted lovely Flora
Some pleasure for to find
But she turned unto another man
Which sore distressed my mind
She robbed me of my liberty
Deprived me off my rest

… which is also in Dylan’s repertoire (officially we know the fine, somewhat un-Dylanesque recording from Dylan, 1973), just as a distressed soul is rather archaic. A word combination that we mostly encounter in stiff nineteenth-century translations of the Classics, often with Proust, or also with Shakespeare (“O, that thou wert not, poor distressed soul!”, Comedy Of Errors, for example).

My mind is at war, then, is still somewhat alienating. The thrust – the narrator being in an emotional crisis – is clear, but the specific choice of words seems inappropriate; my mind at war signals an inner conflict, a moral dilemma, something like that. But not so much an emotional crisis anyway as a mental one. Which the subsequent accumulatio only illustrates all the more explicitly. Don’t hug me, don’t flatter me, don’t turn on the charm… all outward-looking imperatives to ward off emotional expressions – not utterances signaling mental conflict, at any rate.

A friendly analyst might then still conclude that the narrator in “Black Rider” is emotionally troubled to such an extent that his mind is affected, that his mind tries to ward off feelings of anger, confusion, of depression perhaps even, and then becomes at war with himself. But that same kind analyst must then also admit that the last, extremely aggressive threat (I hack off your arm) is, like all the other words in this verse, directed outwards, towards the black rider. Or to the Black Knight, for that matter.

The incongruity and alienating choice of words does not bother Dylan himself, apparently. The live performances of “Black Rider” are textually faithful; he changes virtually nothing about the words for dozens of live performances. But there is a turnaround nonetheless; when he resumes his Never Ending Tour in Japan in the spring of 2023, playing “Black Rider” for the 103rd time, the song has taken on a gorgeous, dreamy arrangement – from the second verse onwards suddenly tightened, with continuous drum accompaniment and leaning on the same simple guitar lick, or rather strum, with which Jimi Hendrix always opens “Red House”. Dylan lets the lick carry the song until the end.

It’s a wonderful find, unexpectedly giving the song a hypnotic, waltz-like candance – and the charge of a verse like I’ll hack off your arm suddenly a warm glow. Enhanced further by Dylan’s diction; he sings it almost affectionately. “I have no quarrel with you, good Sir Knight.”

Bob Dylan – Black Rider live in Tokyo, 15 april 2023:

To be continued. Next up Black Rider part 7: A feeling for words

———————-

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

In this series, Aaron looks at songs that Dylan has recorded but not composed, and then finds some other recordings of the song of note.  He then sends his commentary across the Atlantic to Tony who adds any thoughts that occur while reading.   A list of previous articles for the series (which has been running for over a year) appears at the end.

Aaron: From Wikipedia: Lead Belly recorded four different versions of “Alberta”. One of these was recorded in New York on January 23, 1935 (for ARC Records, which did not issue it), and a similar version was recorded in New York on June 15, 1940 (included on Leadbelly: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1, 1 April 1939 to 15 June 1940).

Another version, recorded in Wilton, Connecticut, on January 20, 1935, included the lyrics “Take me, Alberta, take me down in your rocking chair” and is included on Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In (Rounder Records, Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 2).

Lead Belly’s fourth recorded version survives on recording disc BC-122 of the Mary Elizabeth Barnicle–Tillman Cadle Collection at East Tennessee State University, recorded near the date of June 15, 1948, with which several related discs are labelled.

Tony: My knowledge of the history of the blues is very intermittent, and this is one of the songs that I’ve never previously heard in its original forms.  I love this version and particularly the fact that we get a bit of a guitar solo near the end.

Aaron: Odetta recorded the song under the title “Roberta,” for Odetta Sings Folk Songs (1963).

Tony: This is one of those occasions where the video Aaron has found in the United States won’t play in the UK, so I’ve included both the copy Aaron found, and a copy that does play in the UK – hoping as ever that they are two identical recordings and that one of them works for you!

Tony: This is such a total transformation it is hard to imagine how we got from the original versions to this, but it is nevertheless beautiful – and relaxing which the early versions could not be described as in any way.

Aaron: Bob Dylan recorded two versions for Self Portrait (1970)

Alberta #1

Tony: There are certain moments on Self Portrait that I still hold dear.  The Isle of Wight recordings for example, and indeed Alberta.   To me, Dylan gets this absolutely right; it is gorgeously relaxed and somehow just perfect in every way.

Alberta #2

Tony: I often wonder why we get two versions of the song on the album.  Did Dylan just decide to do versions thinking he would pick one of the two.  And then decided that he couldn’t choose, so both were included?   Or was there an argument about which was best, so they agreed to include both?   Or maybe there was not enough other material that Bob approved of, so both the Alberta’s were included?

Certainly, we know the piece was tried several times as there was another version on “Another Self Portrait” (Bootleg volume 10).  That recording is not on the internet (at least not in the UK) but can be found on Spotify.  The opening guitar part on that version is reminiscent of “It takes a lot to laugh” and it is a beautiful version, although the accompaniment just occasionally becomes slightly confused with each instrumentalist doing his own thing that little bit too much.  As a result, I don’t think that version was ever seriously considered for the album, and it just stops at the end in the way recordings do when the lead performer just stops and waves an arm, and everyone knows he’s not happy.

Aaron: Eric Clapton also recorded two versions for Slowhand (1977) & Unplugged (1992)

Slowhand (1977)

Tony:  I am not sure I’ve heard this before, and it is quite a surprise finding how differently Clapton has decided to play the piece.  There is a very understated guitar solo in the piece too, Clapton seemingly not wanting to shine through or dominate, and let the song do the talking.  Classic light blues ending too.

Unplugged (1992)

Tony: Eric Clapton does get that utterly relaxed feel out of the song.  And something has just made me go back to the very first version in this selection… and again I am thinking, it is amazing how far this song has travelled.   How did it get so transformed?   The later versions owe far more to “Corina Corina” than they ever do to the original version; it’s strange.

If you have a moment do go back and play the first recording in this sequence; I think you might agree it is one hell of a journey.

Previously in this series…

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

By Tony Attwood from an idea by Aaron Galbraith

Farout magazine published a list of songs that Dylan gave in answer to a question about his favourite pieces by other songwriters.  I’ve been taking a look at the songs in the list and this is the final piece.

Just one of the four writers Dylan selected to make up his list, had four entries to his name: Warren Zevon.  And so his fourth piece makes our last entry in this series – it is ‘Join Me In L.A.’   A list of all the songs Dylan selected is given at the end of this piece, and if you have not read through the articles I would urge you to listen to the songs.  My commentaries are just an extra: it is the songs and Dylan’s choice of the songs that is the point.

So here we go.

What really strikes me is about Dylan’s choice of this song is that it is not actually about anything other than the fact that LA is a good place, please come here.

This is quite different from the other songs that Dylan chose for his list, and I wonder if this was just added to make up the dozen that maybe the publisher had asked for.  Of course as ever this is just my opinion in listening to the songs, and what I have done in each case is just listened to the piece as I have come to write the article.

And throughout I’ve not been disappointed – except here.   Which is strange because one of the other Warren Zevon pieces included in the list (“Lawyers Guns and Money”) has been playing in my house on a regular basis ever since I came to it in this series.  I’ve even been known to knock it out myself on the piano a few times, although only late at night after coming home from a dance.  (Fortunately, I live in a detached house in the countryside, so no one is going to be disturbed).

Overall, I’d say there are some absolute ultimate masterpieces of songwriting in this selection such as “If you could read my mind”, “Sail Away” and that aching, heart-wrenching piece from John Prine, “Donald and Lydia”.

Maybe therefore, I felt, there is something here I am missing in this final selection, and a little bit of work revealed what at first I thought might be the answer: Warren Zevon died in LA.   His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles – I believe at his request.

Unfortunately, this story however doesn’t work, because the song was recorded for Zevon’s second album in 1975, and he passed away in 2003.  So, it would seem this is just another case of my looking for meanings that are not there.

Or perhaps more likely, this is a great song and I am just not getting it.  Here are the lyrics…

Well, they say this place is evil
That ain't why I stay
'Cause I found something
That will never be nothing
And I found it in L.A

It was midnight in Topanga (in Topanga)
I heard the DJ say
There's a full moon rising (full moon rising)
Join me in L.A
Join me in L.A

Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh
Oh-oh-oh (wake up, wake up)
Oh-oh, oh-oh, oh

I was at the Tropicana
On a dark and sultry day
Had to call someone long distance
I said, "Join me in L.A"
Join me in L.A

What I would say is that the rest of this little series has been a wonderful excursion into music that I am not particularly familiar with, and it really has been a joy to discover and re-discover the songs and to puzzle out what Dylan perhaps saw in each one to make him include it in the list.

I will, if I may, finish with a repeat of by far and away my favourite song from the collection, knowing of course that you don’t, in any way, have to play it.   There is a full list of the rest of the series below, and may I add, if you have an idea for what might make a good series for Untold Dylan do let me know (email tony@schools.co.uk).  Then, if we agree, you can write it for the site.  Or if you don’t want to write it, and if you give me permission, if I feel I can make something of the idea, I’ll have a go.

So, to conclude, here’s my rave favourite track from the series, and the full list of articles is below.  And if you have been, thank you for staying with the series.  If not, well, perhaps I’ll do better next time.

• Death of an Unpopular Poet
• Shadows
• ‘Desperado Under the Eaves’
• Sail Away
• Sam Stone
• He Went to Paris’
• Sundown (Gordon Lightfoot)
• “Burn down the cornfield”
• Donald and Lydia
• ‘Boom Boom Mancini’
• If you could read my mind
• Louisiana 1927