Untold Dylan

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

by Tony Attwood, based on “The Never Ending Tour” series by Mike Johnson.

Dylan said that he knocked this song off during a time spent in the Caribbean in about 15 minutes.  That may or may not be the absolute truth, but if it were composed quickly, then it must be one of the most rewarding ways ever to have spent a quarter of an hour or so, not least because between 1984 and its final putting to bed in 1999 Dylan performed it 204 times.   That’s about 17 hours of live performance, all out of 15 minutes original work (although to be fair they would have spent some time in rehearsal getting the arrangement sorted).

And it is clearly not an easy song to get a perfect performance out of, because of the instrumental sections in which the various parts of the band seem to be competing with each other to be at the fore, in musical representation of the I and I message.

I’ve read the various reviews of what the song is all about, and indeed I wrote one myself, but I think I have just reached the stage where it has become a set of lyrics and musical phrases that eternally intertwine representing this “two sides of everything” concept.  The exact meaning of the lyrics, if there is one, has for me become secondary to the overall sound.

And indeed why not?   Why should not lyrics be more about sound rather than meaning?  Of course I have now meandered into the world of sound poetry, of which I am absolutely not in any way an expert, but which is there and has some highly praised practitioners.  Just because poetry with meaning dominates, it doesn’t mean that sound poetry isn’t of equal merit – or at the very least worthy of contemplation.

These are the thoughts that swirl around as I listen to this recording in which there is such a movement from the opening section to the frenetic build-up of the music later.  And as a result, while writing this I jumped from the frantic musical entanglement that we get to at the five-minute mark back to the start.  It is a phenomenal contrast, and the fact that after the five-minute section they do take it all back down as they enter the final coda, shows that there is an overall conception in the piece rather than just an improvisation around a theme.

In fact, it is the extraordinary set of contrasts within this performance that made me think of adding it to this series.   The opening, both in terms of the musical accompaniment and Bob’s singing is an extraordinary entwining of voice and instruments, so that it seems to me we are no longer in the world of vocals and accompaniment but of an entwining of a range of sounds in which at different moments different elements come to the fore.  The meaning of the lyrics thus disappears in terms of importance.

And in this entanglement, take the piano as an example: a lot of the time we don’t know it is there at all, and yet occasionally up it turns.   But always it is those repeated guitar phrases that entwine themselves and dominate our vision.

But despite this level of entwining, still there are moments where everything is taken back down.  Indeed in this regard just consider the final verse of the song which starts around the four minute mark:

Noontime, and I'm still along the road, on the darkest part
Into the narrow lanes, I can't stumble or stay put
Someone else is speakin' with my mouth, 
        but I'm listening only to my heart
I've made shoes for everyone,  I'm still going barefoot

I and I
In creation where one's nature neither honors nor forgives
I and I
One said to the other, "No man sees my face and lives"

This is, for me, a perfect example of a Dylan sound picture.  The lyrics give us images which are not precise – we can change them as we wish.  For me the “darkest part” makes sure that we do appreciate this is the bleakness of the world that is being portrayed in which we each have two parts to our personality, each facing the other.

The entanglement of the music through the guitars thus expresses this vision perfectly.  Everything is a contradiction, but everything fits together into one life, one piece of music, two parts of the same.   I and I.

Brilliant.

• • 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)

Please note a full index to this series, of which this is episode 114, is available here.

Mike Johnson (Kiwi Poet)

I ain't dead yet
My bell still rings
(Early Roman Kings)

2012 is one of those pivot years for the NET in which big changes are heralded. I am reminded of 1992, when Dylan added a fifth musician, steel guitarist, to his basic line of four. A decade later, in the most dramatic change of all, Dylan largely abandoned the guitar to take to the keyboards. A decade after that, 2012, Dylan abandoned his little electronic keyboard to get in behind a real piano, a grand piano no less, and so laid the foundation for the sound we hear now, if we tune into the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.

We need to appreciate that when Dylan started playing ‘piano’ in 2002, and ‘organ’ in 2006, he was playing a little electronic keyboard. You could flip a switch and make it sound like a piano and flip another switch and make it sound like an organ. An actual piano, however, especially a grand, is a different beastie altogether; its resonant tones and more mellow sound were to shape Dylan’s sound as it emerged over 2012 and 2013. Dylan used his electronic piano from 2002 to 2005 strictly as a rhythm instrument, mostly vamping chords, adding urgency to the band’s sound. With the grand however, he was prepared to go further, using the instrument as a lead, often picking at single and double notes as he had done when playing lead guitar during those years from 1992 to 2002.

A distinctive, ‘primitive’ style emerged with echoes of Dr John and Thelonious Monk.

At the moment I don’t have access to the Hop Farm Festival concert, (Kent, June 30^th) when Dylan first presented the grand, and the ivory revolution began, so we’ll skip to Barolo, Italy (16^th July), to hear what those first audiences heard. As was his wont with these early concerts, Dylan kicked off with an organ number, in this case ‘Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat,’ before moving to the grand for the second number and the rest of the concert. In Barlo that second song was the softer ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,’ a song that had gone through many changes. It’s an upbeat take on the song. Note the piano break starting around 3.30 mins.

Baby Blue

We find him doing the same thing at Chester(Sept 4^th), kicking off the concert on the organ with ‘Watching the River Flow,’ to switch to the grand for a moving rendition of ‘Love Minus Zero No Limit.’ Again you can hear him shaping the arrangement around the softer sound of the grand.

Love Minus Zero

Another notable aspect of that performance is that it is the second to last time we’ll hear that mysterious little love song (last play Oct 30^th). In an earlier post, can’t remember which, I made a reference to the great purge of his setlists in 2011. That was not quite accurate. Dylan began dropping significant songs in 2010 – ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ for example, never to be heard again, and ‘Masters of War,’ gone but for a lone performance in 2016; these slipped into NET history without me noticing – but his purge of the setlists cranked up in earnest in 2012 and 2013, losing fifteen songs in each year, a total of thirty songs over the two years.

Songs last played in 2012 are:

‘My Back Pages’ (Montreux, July 8), ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ (Lyon, July 18), ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ (Carhaix, July 23), ‘Saving Grace’ (Johnstown, August 29), ‘This Dream Of You’ (Winnipeg, October 5), ‘Nettie Moore’ (Edmonton, October 9), ‘Hattie Carroll’ (Sacramento, October 20), ‘Hollis Brown’ (Sacramento, October 20), ‘Love Minus Zero’ (Broomfield, October 30), ‘John Brown’ (Broomfield, October 30), ‘Joey’ (Toronto, November 14), ‘Sugar Baby’ (Toronto, November 14), ‘Mississippi’ (Philadelphia, November 19), ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ (Brooklyn, November 21), ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ (Brooklyn, November 21).

This is more than just pushing a few songs aside to make way for new material, but a significant narrowing and refocusing of the setlists. And a step in the direction of solidifying the setlist into songs he’d play pretty much every night with little variation. The setlists in his current Rough and Rowdy Ways tour are almost identical, just a few wild cards thrown in here and there. The days of turning up to a Dylan concert not knowing what to expect are well and truly over, and that movement began in 2012.

I lament the passing of a number of these songs, ‘Love Minus Zero,’ both ‘Hollis Brown’ and ‘John Brown’, staples from his earliest writing of topical protest songs. Sad to see the trenchant ‘Wheel’s on Fire’ and the magnificent ‘Mississippi’ disappear. In 2002 Dylan shifted from guitar to piano, which changed the sound of the band, but everything else stayed in place and there was no great purge of songs or upheaval in the setlists as in 2012/2013

I’m not going to cover all of these vanishing songs, but let’s at least pay homage to a few of them. Here’s the last performance of the happy-go-lucky sounding ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,’ the opening number at Toronto (Dylan on organ here).

You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere

Staying in Toronto, let’s hear the last ‘Sugar Baby.’ This slow, contemplative song was never an easy one to perform. I’ve argued that it is not an attack song, despite the line ‘you ain’t got no brains no how,’ and that the song is more melancholic than accusatory. I love this performance and find I’m regretting its passing; with its quiet tone, it seems to suit the piano perfectly.

Sugar Baby

‘Joey’ has never been a favourite Dylan song of mine. I find it portentous and bombastic, and the glorification of a hoodlum (but that’s just me). I have however given Dylan due credit for giving the song his all in a mere handful of performances, and it is a sustained piece of storytelling from an album, Desire, full of stories.

We return to Toronto to hear its final performance.

Joey

I’m not sure if Dylan ever really got on top of his masterpiece, ‘Mississippi’ in performance. I don’t think he ever improved on his passionate 2001 performances (See NET, 2001 part 6), and I seem to prefer the acoustic version on Tell Tale Signs. Here it is, the final performance, (Grand Prairie, 1^st Nov), a swinging rendition, and a good opportunity for Dylan to tickle those ivories.

Mississippi

Let’s go to Broomfield (29^th October) and catch the final performance of ‘Saving Grace,’ a song from Dylan’s gospel period from the album Saved. I just wish the recording was not so tinny.

I’ve got a soft spot for this song, and its gentle surrendered sentiment. I’m certainly not religious in the sense that Dylan was during those gospel years, but as someone who has recently escaped death by a whisker, I can certainly relate to these lines:

I've escaped death so many times, I know I'm only living
By the saving grace that's over me

By this time, I'd a-thought that I would be sleeping
In a pine box for all eternity
My faith keeps me alive, but I’ll still be weeping
For the saving grace that's over me

Saving Grace

Finally, in terms of these last performances, I can’t overlook the Edmonton performance of ‘John Brown’ (9^th Oct). Not only is it the last performance, but I would suggest a ‘best ever’ performance as well. Dylan has rarely played the harp on this song, but does so here to great effect. When I want to enjoy this song, this is my go-to performance. Donnie Herron’s banjo gives it both a country, and somewhat eerie sound, as if the song is coming across to us over the centuries with its timeless message of senseless war and death. This wonderful performance makes the loss of this song more acute.

 John Brown

(Before moving on, it’s worth noting that this winnowing of Dylan’s setlists will have a knock-on effect on these posts. Up till now I have written between four and six articles per NET year, but that will drop to three or even two as the setlists become more honed to fewer songs.)

2012 was not just remarkable for Dylan’s shift to the grand piano, and the loss of fifteen songs, but in September Dylan released a new album, Tempest. Tempest could not be more different from the previous Together Through Life. That album had a rough-and-ready, improvised, throw-away feel; Tempest is a precision machine, much more like the album which would come eight years later, Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Critics lavished praise on the album, some seeing it as even better than Love and Theft and Modern Times. “Tempest is Dylan’s best musical album of this century, a vibrant maximising of strict rules and the savaged-leather state of that voice” (Mojo Magazine) and “Tempest’s epic scale and grandeur makes his few previous albums look like short stories leading up to a great novel.” (Tiny Mix Tapes)

Dylan did not immediately overwhelm his setlists with this new material. Indeed, some of the concerts in September and October didn’t include any of the new material, or maybe one song. Duquesne Whistle,’ co-written with Robert Hunter, which would become a regular, was not performed until 2013. ‘Early Roman Kings,’ which would also become a favourite, was only played a handful of times.

For my ear, these first performances of the new songs would be surpassed in quality by performances in later years, but to kick things off, here is ‘Early Roman Kings’ from Toronto, the only song from Tempest played at that concert, and the second time the song was performed.

Early Roman Kings

I’m not going to attempt a full exploration of the song. Our editor Tony Attwood has a pretty good crack at it here.   It seems to deal with a state of lawlessness in which powerful groups can lord it over others for better or worse. ‘Sluggers and muggers,’ ‘peddlers and meddlers.’ What they give can just as arbitrarily be taken away.

This song contains a number of directions and misdirections and may perhaps be more playful than the heavy blues riff that carries it suggests.

I’m going to finish this post with the sole performance of ‘Scarlet Town’ in 2012 (Winnipeg 5^th Oct) and my favourite song from the album. It has a deep history in folk music. Again, Tony Atwood gives a good account of it here and Hobo Magazine goes into it pretty thoroughly here: 

I can’t add a lot to these accounts except that it makes me think of Lenard Cohen, I can imagine him singing it, and that it evokes both the comfort and terror of our childhood. Scarlet Town is a mythical contradictory place, a place you need to escape yet ‘wished to God’ you’d never left.

The last verse, the first two lines of which are beautifully aphoristic, and which reminds of maybe Catullus, seems to end with a vision of racial harmony, all the colours of humanity, ‘beautiful in their time,’ are ‘right there for ya’ in this mythical place of love and war, death and sacrifice:

If love is a sin then beauty is a crime
All things are beautiful in their time
The black and the white, the yellow and the brown
It’s all right there for ya in Scarlet Town

It’s a beautiful performance and a lovely way to meet this profound song.

Scarlet Town

That’s all for now. See you soon with more songs from that formative year – 2012.

Until then,

Kia Ora

by Jochen Markhorst

V          Marjorie

Black rider, black rider, all dressed in black
I’m walking away, you try to make me look back
My heart is at rest, I’d like to keep it that way
I don’t want to fight, at least not today
Go home to your wife, stop visiting mine
One of these days, I’ll forget to be kind

“Creative ability is about pulling old elements together and making something new,” Dylan says in the Wall Street Journal interview with Jeff Slate. That’s in December 2022, so Dylan’s conception of art is no longer really surprising; by then, we’ve known for more than 20 years that Dylan doesn’t so much borrow the occasional line here or metaphor there, but that he cobbles together whole songs out of odds and ends and bits and pieces.

What is new, though, is Dylan’s clarity – he has never expressed this so bluntly before. Interviewer Jeff Slate wants to hear it again, and comes back to it a few minutes later, when they pretty much conclude the topic of creativity. “Are you able to listen to music passively,” Slate asks, “or do you think maybe you are always assessing what’s special – or not – about a song and looking for potential inspiration?” Dylan’s answer is crystal clear:

“That’s exactly what I do. I listen for fragments, riffs, chords, even lyrics. Anything that sounds promising.”

Riffs or chords he does not seem to have borrowed for “Black Rider”. The music under the lyrics is remarkably complex, as a delighted Eyolf Østrem argues and demonstrates in his brilliant, comprehensive analysis “Black Rider – Dylan’s most complex song ever” on his site things twice (Black Rider – Dylan’s most complex song ever). Østrem is a highly versed musicologist, and cannot recognise the harmonic structure – so suspects that the music is a Dylan original. Although he still does build in a disclaimer; “If he has written it himself, which obviously can’t be taken for granted these days, given his track record of musical thievery. But for the sake of argument: his most complex song.”

The lyrics now in this third verse, on the other hand, prove more and more to be an example of Dylan’s working method of pulling old elements together and making something new. The opening, Black rider, black rider, all dressed in black, would have been disappointingly tautological if the clichédness of the word combination all dressed in black had not already detached itself from its content.

After all, we know it from hundreds of songs, and among them are quite a few monuments. “I’m Waiting For My Man”, of course (Here he comes, he’s all dressed in black), “Fool If You Think It’s Over”, “Heartbreak Hotel”, “Blues in D” by the McGarrigle sisters (All dressed in black, he won’t be coming back), “Cocaine Blues”… in Dylan’s jukebox alone, there are probably more than a dozen records to listen to with the words (all) dressed in black.

Which is equally true of the other lines in this verse. “I don’t want to fight” is already just as over-used (“Let The Good Times In”, Costello’s “Tears Before Bedtime”, Tom Petty, Arthur Alexander’s “Soldier Of Love”) as “I’m walking away” + all variants of “looking back”, which has been trotted out by poets since Orpheus and Eurydice, for thousands of years in other words.

Characteristically, 21st-century Dylan additionally draws from the literary canon. At least, a somewhat archaic sigh like My heart is at rest could theoretically also come to him via a lyric (Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Cry of the Wild Goose”, for instance), but seems, also given the other Shakespeare paraphrases here on Rough And Rowdy Ways in general and here in “Black Rider” in particular, to have come from the Supreme Bard, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Titiana: “Set your heart at rest: The fairy land buys not the child of me”).

Less uncertain is the source of Go home to your wife; that’s most likely an echo of…

Stop ramblin' and stop gamblin'
Quit staying out late at night
Go home to your wife and family
Stay there by the fireside bright

… of “Goodnight Irene”, one of the indestructible pillars under the song canon since John Lomax recorded Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter’s granite version in prison, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary Angola, in 1933. And has since been recorded by everything and everyone. From Pete Seeger and The Weavers to Keith Richards, Ry Cooder and Frank Sinatra, and one of the best might be Little Richard, with Jimi Hendrix on guitar, just before his dishonourable dismissal from the band.

But the Nobel laureate is not just a thief of thoughts, of course. His lyrics, in turn, inspire entire generations of artists. Often enough with overt tributes in the form of quotations, as in Hootie & the Blowfish’s world hit “Only Wanna Be With You”, or the dozens of quotes and references Gillian Welch incorporates into the songs of her wonderful album The Harrow And The Harvest (2011). Or like, less noticeable, the last line of this verse, One of these days, I’ll forget to be kind, a few months after its release seems to echo in the opening lines of one of the most beautiful songs by the phenomenon Taylor Swift, the moving “Marjorie”;

Never be so kind, you forget to be clever
Never be so clever, you forget to be kind

It is a superb ode to the memory of Taylor Swift’s grandmother, the opera singer Marjorie Finlay, and Taylor explains that she incorporates life wisdom and advice from her grandmother, who died in 2003. Which is touching enough, but perhaps a slightly embellished version of the genesis. Swift wrote the song just after the release of her album Folklore, 24 July 2020, and well before December 2020, when “Marjorie” is released – exactly in the weeks when Taylor, like the rest of the music-loving world, has Rough And Rowdy Ways on her turntable. And presumably has heard Dylan sing, “I’ll forget to be kind” more than once.

Yeah well. “All these songs are connected,” as Dylan says in that wonderful speech, in the MusiCares speech, February 2015.

To be continued. Next up Black Rider part 6: ‘Tis but a scratch

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

Aaron: This is a traditional Irish folk song, best known today as an American folk song.  It’s alternative title: “Flora, the Lily of the West”.   The lyrics to the American version were first published in 1861.

Joan Baez recorded the song in 1961, including it on her second album; her live concerts have frequently included performances of the song well into the 2010s.

Tony: It’s one of those pieces of music which really allows a singer such as Joan Baez, who has a terrific range in her singing voice, to show off that range, as well as giving the opportunity for an active, enjoyable guitar accompaniment – exactly as we hear on this recording (although just wait until you hear some of the other guitar and banjo work that appears in the recordings below!)

And believe me, singing the piece while playing this accompaniment is no easy achievement.   Which is why most people who attempt the song in live performances return to playing chords.

Aaron: Peter, Paul and Mary recorded it as Flora for their 1963 album “Moving”.

Tony: And unbelievably they took it even faster – and of course the speed does convey the extreme turn of events the song portrays.    In this way we can get through the whole story from

When first I came to Louisville
Some pleasure there to find
A damsel there from Lexington
Was pleasing to my mind

through to

Although she swore my life away
Deprived me of my rest
Still I love my faithless Flora
The Lily of the West

… in just three minutes.   It is a breathless performance, and then some.

Aaron: Bob’s version appeared on his 1973 studio album, Dylan. Just listen to the harpsichord. I think the player is being paid by the note!

Tony: If I didn’t know better, I’d say that wasn’t Bob singing, although of course once one knows, then yes it is Bob, and a reminder of how his voice used to be.   What I like far less is the very obvious bass part.  Surely that wonderful performance by Bob and the ladies deserves better than that plod plod.

Aaron: Subsequent versions include:

The Chieftains with Mark Knopfler on lead vocals

Tony: Ah the traditional Irish feel.  And indeed you can’t get more authentic in terms of recreations than the Chieftans.  Goodness, how many awards the guys have picked up!  And their interpretation is undoubtedly as authentic as it comes in terms of the melody and lyrics.

No one knows who wrote this, but it appeared in 1839 for the first time.  What it must be like to have a time machine and travel back to then, find the person who created the song, and tell that person that we are still listening to it in the 21st century, and still appreciating all the emotions within.

Aaron: Crooked Still included it on their 2004 album Hop High, as Flora

Tony: These guys are always utterly amazing in terms both of their technical skill and the arrangements they come up.   Really all I can say is play this and just listen.  And then play it again.   And then go and find some other recordings by the band.

And isn’t their ending just a perfect way to conclude my ramblings?

Well, to answer my question, yes, but I can’t resist adding one more by this band.  In case you are still reading, and want some more music.  If yes, try this…

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”

By Tony Attwood

I must admit I approached this classic with trepidation.  Of course it is a masterpiece of the genre, but it is just that I don’t think I’ve chosen to play it and listen with any sort of contemplative focus that I think the song needs to appreciate it, since I first bought it.   That failing is of course mine – the song is widely regarded as one of the greats, and yet I find I don’t want to give it 11 minutes of my time.  I bought the album in 1966 and dutifully played it a few times – and of course have listened a few times since, but it just doesn’t move me.   Work of genius it might be, so I guess the failings are all mine.

However in 2017 along came 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde – the album of the Old Crowe Medicine Show recorded the year before.  And then I discovered the composition properly.   But I’ll have to leave that recording to last in my little selection of Lowland covers, because for me it is such an overwhelmingly brilliant re-working of the song everything else falls into the shade.  Yet some of the covers deserve far more than that relegation.

And as I often try to say, that is just “for me.”  My response to music is always initially emotional, and I am sure that for everyone else it has always been a masterpiece, and perhaps Dylan’s original recording is still often listened to and noted as being a great work.  And indeed others have looked, listened and successfully taken the song elsewhere, and I’ll try and show in this little selection.

But if like me, the song is not for you, you are excused a complete run through all these tracks (although they are excellent), although if I may I would you not to skip everything but to go to the end of the article, for the final version in this collection really is beyond everything else.  (Although really I think you might get some enjoyment from the other versions that come before the grand finale.)

Jessica Rhaye and the Ramshackle Parade give us rhythms variations and harmonies that take us from the constancy of the original, without losing the message – but now the music brings us the thought that life does indeed go on, no matter what, and the memories of the past can be a useful bridge to the future.  Sometimes.

Moving on, I was very hesitant about including a solo version of the song, but Juliana Daily does carry it off through the restrained passion of her performance.  A memorable version indeed.

Weyes Blood keeps the feel of the original… at first but keeps my interest with the build up of the accompaniment and gives us an extra chorus and verse without lyrics at the end – which is a brave notion.   I didn’t think it would, but it does indeed work as a conclusion.

A solo guitar instrumental version of Sad Eyed Lady?  Surely that is impossible given that it is five identical musical verses (each of three sections) and what keeps us going are the lyrics… and yet it has been done – and again to my surprise, with success.  Although largely that is because it is by Ken Navarro.  And indeed this version really did invoke another re-think of the whole song.

But I must admit everything above is building up to this moment.   Old Crow, as you perhaps well know, did the whole double album some years back, in their own style.  And in fact they start “Sad Eyed Lady” by playing… yes their version of “Visions of Johanna”…. which amazingly does become “Sad Eyed Lady”.   It is a stunningly brilliant idea, and gives a completely new insight and meaning to the whole song.  In fact it virtually is a new song, except that when we get to the title line we know where we are.

Until I heard this version I really didn’t connect “Sad Eyed” with “Visions” and yet having heard both in the Old Crow versions, I suddenly realised they are both about the same woman.  OK she might not be real (how would I know?) but the image is the same.

So, back to “Sad Eyed”, the harmonies Old Crow find are extraordinary, in that they sound obvious, and yet I am not sure anyone thought of them before.

But most of all, this arrangement changes the entire meaning of the song.  The sadness is replaced by vigour.  Now the singer is fighting back.  He’s not defeated, he’s moving on, because he’s the one with life and vitality and a future.  The answer to “should I wait?” suddenly becomes “NO!  Absolutely not, there’s a world out there and it is waiting for me.”

So, the song now says, you are your own problem, not my problem.  I am moving on.  What a brilliant revision.

I have been so grateful over the years for a number of Old Crow reworkings of Dylan and I’ve noted these quite a few times on this site, but I think this one is the best of them all.

And if you have been lurking around Untold for a while you may recall my writing before the Old Crow’s version of “Visions” was how song was always meant to sound.   The same is true of “Sad Eyed Lady”.

And just in case you haven’t had enough here’s Visions by Old Crow

• 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

By Larry Fyffe

Songs Linked To Tarantula

(D)ictator wires for more candy
- US sending in marines
& arnold stang
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Arnold Stang plays “Peewee”, a US soldier, in the movie “Dondi” (based on a newspaper cartoon). Features David Janssen and Patti Page.

An orphaned Italian boy stows away on a ship returning American troops to New York City.

The following lyrics sung in that film:

There's a meadow in the sky
Where breezes spin the silver willow tree
Where you and I can leave our worldly cares
And wander anywhere we please
(Patti Page: Meadow In The Sky ~ Garson/Shuman)

Similar to the Edenic theme in a previously mentioned song:

I was just rambling through
Through the streets of Laredo
Just another stranger that day
On my way to anywhere

(Patti Page: Streets Of Laredo ~ Evans/Livingston)

Brings to mind by association the following improvised song lyrics:

Patty gone to Laredo
But she be back soon
Left Jamaica this morning
On a boat Bonnie Lou
(Bob Dylan: Patty Gone To Laredo)

The “Tarantula” informs us that all’s not well here, there, and everywhere:

& Lord Randall playing with a quart of beer
- Fanny Blair dragging a judge
- Willie Moore, a shoemaker, who counts his thumbs with a switchblade ...
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

The following ballad from the Old Country – about a poisoning:

Oh, where have you been, Lord Randall, my son
Oh, where have you been, my bonnie young man
I've been to the wild wood; mother, make my bed soon
For I'm weary of hunting, and I fain would lie down
(Ewan MacColl: Lord Randall ~ traditional)

This one from there too – about a false accusation:

It was last Monday morning, I lay in my bed
A young friend came to me, and unto me said
Rise up, Henry Higgins, and flee you elsewhere
For they're bound out against you by young Fanny Blair
(A.L. Lloyd: Fanny Blair ~ traditional)

Bob Dylan meets ‘Bert’ Lloyd and MacColl way back at the Singers Club in London, England.

Another death song –  the one below, an American Appalachia song, about Anna who drowns herself because her parents would not consent to her marrying the man she loves:

Willie Moore was a king, age twenty-one
Courted a lady fair
Her eyes were like two diamonds bright
Raven black was her hair
 (Joan Baez: Willie Moore ~ Baez/traditional)

The Talking Mule  

More suggestions for song and dance numbers in Untold’s production of “Tarantula: The Musical” by Bob Dylan.

Charles Starkweather (later executed for his deadly deeds), and his younger girlfriend Caril Fugate go on a killing rampage in Nebraska and Wyoming.

All makes for good entertainment as far as those in the media industry are concerned:

(T)hese people consider themselves gourmets 
for not attending charlie starkweather's funeral
ye gads the champagne being appropriate pagan 
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula )

The lyrics below, from the soundtrack of ‘Natural Born Killers”, a movie inspired by Starkweather and Fugate’s bloody spree:

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sun rise from a tropic isle
Just remember, darling, all the while
You belong to me
(Bob Dylan: You Belong To Me)

Let’s not forget that senators and businessmen have their troubles too:

He is on a prune diet
& secretly wishes he was bing crosby
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Crooning:

She sailed at the dawning
All day I've been blue
Red sails in the sunset
I'm trusting on you
(Bing Crosby: Red Sails In The Sunset ~ Kennedy/Grosz)

Bringing it all back home – lyrics beneath with same tune as above:

I'm touched with desire
What don't I do
Through the flame and fire
I'll build my world around you
(Bob Dylan: Beyond The Horizon ~  Dylan/Kennedy/Grosz)

There be other musicians and singers in the Tarantula pilgrimage from which to choose:

& it sounds like john lee (!!!!!!) coming
& oh Lord louder like a train
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

That is,  guitar-player and blues-singer John Lee Hooker.

Not to be confused with the rockabilly piano-player:

... (I) shall have to recommend that you place 
jerry lee lewis first and foremost
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

There’s Jose the piano player from “The Tonight Show”, hosted by Jack Paar; and then there’s Don the dancer with Francis, the talking mule.

Someone shouts out that freedom’s great:

(I)s it possible that jose melis could have said it? 
perhaps donald o'connor? 
i happen to be a library janitor, so could you please clarify things 
a little for me, thank you 
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Likely, it was the mule.

• 1: Tarantula
• 2: The Tarantula Crawls Across The Circus Floor and 3: Arachnida Is Dead
• 4: The Bride and 5: The Return of Tarantula
• 6: Everybody loves a critic and  7: Hopalong Bob
• 8: Mad, Bad, And A Stranger To Know and 9: Miss Lucy And Mr. Jinx
• 10: A Madder Piece From Ginsberg Street and 11: The Long Dark Stranger
• 12:  More Mixed Up Confusion and 13: Oval Faubus
• 14: A tattletale Heart; and 15: Tarzantula
• 16: Tarantula: “Shake that Spear” and 17: “Hopalong Bob”
• 18: The Tale Of Dale And Debbie and 19: The Golden Gate
• 20: Your Harmless Fate and 21: Thelonius
• 22: the Egotist and 23: The Lord of the Spiders
• 24: Cream Cheese and 25 Davy Crocker
• 26: The Lumberjacks Are Coming
• 27: Lem the Clam; 28: An Untold Production: Tyrantula, The Motion Picture
• 29: The Tarantula Files continued
• Tarantula 30: Oh Pancho Oh Cisco
• 31 & 32 “Too hot to handle” and “Lucien’s Tarantula”
• 33: The ‘Untold’ Movie Musical Extravaganza “Tarantula” (with liner notes)
• Tarantulazarus and Clytia (Tarantula 34 & 35)
• Nadine and the Censor (Tarantula 36 & 37)
• Claudette and Peoria: The Tarantula Files (38 & 39)
• Oedipus and Agnes (40 & 41)
• Zevon and Rip van Winkle (42 & 43)
• Tom Tom & Phaedra (The Tarantula Files 44 & 45)
• Maldoror and The Good World
• The Tarantula Files: Nothing to it and White Swan
• The Tarantula Files: Cowboy Angel and Who Wrote Tarantula?