Untold Dylan

How most analyses of Dylan’s songs mistake the essence of what the songs are

Posted on March 25, 2023 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

From what we know about Bob Dylan’s creativity in relation to the world of song writing, for him, songs just happen – they emerge as songs, and then are, as often as not, subject to change, sometimes quite considerable change.

And a key point here is that they “emerge as songs”, not as poems to which music is added later. Nor are they merely instrumental pieces to which lyrics are a secondary element. For it seems that for the most part the various elements within the songs (melody, rhythm, chord sequence, tempo and lyrics) emerge together or in close proximity and then are varied as the song itself evolves both in the immediate writing stage, and then later as Dylan returns to the song in preparation for a new version offered on tour.

Of course Bob might start with a chord sequence and a rhythm, and then find a melody that fits over them, at which moment he might also find some lyrics, so in that sense there is a sequence in the writing. But my point is that it is a sequence of events that happen in close proximity, as part of the complete evolution of the work as a whole.

Obvioulsy there can be exceptions – I am not saying every song is written in the same way, but by and large no matter how much I look into the subject, listening to all the recordings of songs that we have as they evolve before the final album version is delivered, and listening to them again as Dylan varies the works over time in performance, I always reach the same point: music and lyrics evolve together. They are entwined and are of equal importance. They evolve and develop as elements within the same work of art.

And yet when I come to read commentaries on Dylan’s work, despite the obviousness of what I have noted above, most of these commentaries focus almost 100% on the lyrics, maybe with just a note about which musicians are involved.

There are of course exceptions, and indeed there are notes about who is playing on the recorded tracks, and comments on verses missed out and lines changed, but for every 1000 words examining the lyrics and their supposed meaning, there is maybe one sentence on the evolution of the music or the music’s interaction with the lyrics, beyond noting changes in the personnel on stage or in the studio.

And yet Dylan writes songs, not poems, as is patently obvious. Yet surely, if the lyrics were by far the most important thing to him, Dylan would write poems not songs.

Of course one could argue that the music is merely a vehicle to bring the poems to the audience’s attention, but if that is the case it seems strange that so much attention is paid to the “vehicle” by Dylan, with him re-writing the music regularly, changing the musical content of songs from one tour to another. It’s not something that happens in a few moments – those re-writes need to be created and rehearsed, and it all takes time.

Now it could also be argued that as a songwriter Dylan can bring his verse to a broader audience than if he were just a poet, and that is the only function of the music. And in the first regard that is undoubtedly true – Dylan as a poet would be less known than he is now as a songwriter. But Dylan spends so much energy on his music, creating it and re-creating it over and over, I feel that any attempt to argue that his primary concern is the lyrics and that the music is just an add-on, really needs a lot of evidence to sustain it.

Indeed it seems to me much more likely that such an argument is simply an excuse for focussing on the lyrics. For the obvious fact is that Dylan is a songwriter who gives us original music and original lyrics in equal measure. It is the commentators who have chosen to focus on just part of what Dylan offers because of their lack of ability to comment on the music.

Thus I would argue that Bob Dylan writes songs in which music and the lyrics are of equal value. It is the commentators who have chosen to ignore 50% of his work much of the time, focussing totally on the lyrics or the personnel in the band. And I would argue that they do that either because that is because that’s what everyone else does, or because they don’t know much about music.

And thus I would suggest that these commentators have been kidding us, focussing only on the lyrics to hide their own profound lack of knowledge of music and their equal lack of ability to write about music as music. In the end they are reduced to considering music as background, not because that is what it is, but either because that’s what everyone else has done, or because it is all they know how to write about.

Yet the obvious conclusion, in terms of considering what Dylan actually does, must be that in order to appreciate and understand Dylan’s work we need to consider both lyrics and music in equal measure.

My guess is that Bob Dylan, like so many creative people, has an inner need or drive to be creative, and that need is unrelated to fame, money, or wish to change the world. Rather it is simply this overwhelming need to be creative – and for him that creativity is expressed primarily through the writing and performing of songs. Not the writing of poetry.

This then is my starting point in understanding Dylan’s work, and it leads of course to a rejection of the validity of commentaries that focus on the lyrics alone. For when one does this, one misses out on much of what is happening as Bob Dylan re-writes his songs. For he often is re-writing both the music (changing melody, tempo, chord structure, and accompaniment at will) and the lyrics, (changing occasional lines, omitting verses, adding verses…)

As we know Dylan also engages in other art forms too – novels, physical constructions, paintings etc, and it is interesting that no one seems to feel that in discussing these art works, that the work can be considered properly by cutting the work of art into its constituent elements, focussing on one bit, and then drawing a conclusion from that.

And yet that is exactly what many writers do in considering Bob Dylan as a songwriter. They focus on the lyrics, not on song. A similar approach to Bob as a painter would be to focus on what he paints, or the colours he uses, rather than the paintings as complete entities.

From this starting point, I conclude that most commentators on the music of Dylan get it utterly wrong, because they consider one part of Dylan’s work (the lyrics) to be of primary importance where there is no evidence at all that this is how Dylan sees it. As a result much of the commentary on Dylan’s work is in my view, utterly incomplete and because of that it misunderstands what Dylan is communicating.

In future articles, to illustrate my point, I’m going to have a go at writing reviews of Dylan’s songs which overcome this deficiency, and consider the music and the lyrics equally, and hopefully do so in a way which might be of interest to both musicians and non-musicians alike.

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A Dylan cover a day: Quit your lowdown ways, backwards in time

Posted on March 24, 2023 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

This first version is by Dave & The Biscuit Rollers, a band whose style is known as “high-powered bluegrass music.” And yes it is. It’s a really fun mix of harmonies, excellent harmonies and just plain fun. I really love it. In fact it makes it quite clear that you need quality musicians to make this work.

Also someone had fun finding pictures of dissolute behaviour throughout history – and a few other odds and ends.

And the great thing about the song is that it has so many possibilities. Take this for example

And yet another variation – and what I really enjoy is the fact that each one of these interpretations works in its own way without feeling it has been forced out of the original. Each could be, in fact, where the song started from.

For reasons that will not become clear at this time I’m working backwards in time with these covers. I don’t particularly remember the Hollies with great affection – but really maybe I ought to be re-assessing them if there is much more in their back catalogue as good as this…

Which leads us all the way back to Peter Paul and Mary – and yes this too is great fun with the harmony and speed working together perfectly.

And actually going backwards in time has a purpose because unless you have a perfect memory for everything Dylan has done, it can come as a little bit of a surprise just what Bob himself did with the song.

Actually it makes me think – maybe going backwards through the covers is not at all a bad idea.

The Dylan Cover a Day series

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Nashville Skyline Rag (1969) part 1: “Do what you want to do”

Posted on March 23, 2023 by TonyAttwood

A month ago, Jochen’s book on “Nashville Skyline” was released. In English, German and Dutch. It is available on Amazon: Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Markhorst, Jochen: 9798377036241: Amazon.com: Books

Here on Untold, we publish the three-part series on “Nashville Skyline Rag” from it.

by Jochen Markhorst

I “Do what you want to do”

“Nashville Skyline Rag,” Jann Wenner asks in the 1969 Rolling Stone interview, “was that a jam that took place in a studio or did you write the lyrics before?”

Which is a bit of a difficult question. After all, the song has no lyrics. Dylan is polite enough not to correct him: “Umm…. I had that little melody quite a while before I recorded it.” Still, Wenner’s curiosity is nonetheless not misplaced and in fact understandable; “Nashville Skyline Rag” does sound as if it was mainly improvised on the spot. Plus: Dylan has never released an instrumental song on record before; indeed, something is a bit odd about the song.

Civilised, likeable, a little awkward, intelligent and prone to well-dosed pinches of self-mockery, plus some mild irony at times – the image that rises from interviews with “Spider” John Koerner over the decades is pretty constant. Totally in line with this is also the answer he gives when asked for his opinion on all those particularly nice things Dylan says about him in Chronicles:

“Well, I’ve read the book,” says John, “and sometimes what I see is either he’s got a better memory than I have or he’s making stuff up. It could be either way. Because some of that I don’t remember all that well, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But the general sense of it is correct.”
(fRoots 325, July 2010)

… with which Koerner very civilly hints that Dylan is not too particular about factual matters. Incidentally, this will not so much concern the passages in which the autobiographer comments on his old friend’s character and appearance: “Koerner was tall and thin with a look of perpetual amusement on his face. We hit it off right away. When he spoke he was soft spoken, but when he sang he became a field holler shouter. Koerner was an exciting singer, and we began playing a lot together.” But presumably Koerner’s surprises included the songs he would have played to the young Dylan. “I learned a lot of songs off Koerner,” Dylan writes;

John played “Casey Jones,” “Golden Vanity” — he played a lot of ragtime style stuff, things like “Dallas Rag.”

Koerner does have a huge repertoire, that much is true. Both solo, and with Dylan’s mate Tony Glover, and as a member of the legendary trio Koerner, Ray & Glover recorded dozens of songs, all of which we find again on Dylan’s set and track list. Either one-on-one or re-worked or paraphrased.

“Delia”, “Froggie Went A-Courtin'”, “When First Unto This Country”, “The Days of ’49”, “St. James Infirmary”, “Danville Girl”, “Corrina”… and that’s just a fraction of the songs whose echoes we hear back with Dylan. I learned a lot of songs off Koerner doesn’t seem an overstatement, in any case. But that “Dallas Rag” was among them is unlikely – Koerner never recorded that song and it is not on any of his setlists. On guitar, it is played by men like Stefan Grossman and Mark Knopfler (with his charming occasional band The Notting Hillbillies, 1990) – a catchy performance really does require a technical skill slightly above the level of a good, but not towering guitarist like Koerner, in any case.

The song appears at 30:15 in the video below

Well within the capabilities of the guitarist who is one of them most illustrious pillars of Nashville Skyline‘s beauty, though: Norman Blake.

In 1969, Norman Blake has long made his mark at the top of rootsy country, bluegrass and blues, has been playing with Johnny Cash for years, and has everything that appeals to Dylan in these days: a deep love of traditionals, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the oeuvre of greats like Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff and The Carter family, and enviable skills on guitar, mandolin, dobro and fiddle. And an expressed, deep love for ragtime. Which is how it began for him, in his youth in the 1940s, as he explains to The Bluegrass Situation interviewer in February 2017:

“Sam McGee was playing guitar. He was on there. He was playing solo-type guitar, playing with his brother Kirk. So I heard him.”
Sam McGee? I’ve never heard of Sam McGee.
“You’ve never heard of Sam McGee!”
Well … [laughs] I’ve heard of a good number of guitar players from back then, I think, but I don’t know of him.
“Well, the McGee brothers. Sam and Kirk McGee, the boys from sunny Tennessee, they were billed. They played with Uncle Dave Macon. Sam played a lot with Uncle Dave, made records with him, and then he and his brother Kirk also made records. And then they played with Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, band called The Dixieliners.”
What was his guitar style like?
“Sam was a finger-style guitar player, played guitar-banjo and played guitar, kind of a ragtime style. They were extremely good, some of my favorite people. I used to hear them on the Opry when I was a kid.”

After his interlude with Dylan, Blake remains at the top. He is a regular in Johnny Cash’s band, helps Joan Baez to a hit with his contribution to “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, plays dobro on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s best-selling Will The Circle Be Unbroken, wins Grammys, including for his contribution to the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack (2000, Norman plays “You Are My Sunshine”, “Little Sadie” the instrumental version of “I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow”, and “Big Rock Candy Mountain”), is a sound-determining member of John Hartford’s band and thus one of the founders of the so-called newgrass sound (Aereo-Plain, 1971), and ragtime remains a constant in Blake’s repertoire from his first solo album (Home in Sulphur Springs, 1972) to setlists deep into the 21st century.

The recording sessions for that landmark Newgrass record by John Hartford must have given Norman Blake a sense of déjà vu. “John let us play what we wanted to play. ‘Cause that’s one of the beautiful parts about it – he just let us get in there and pick,” says colleague Tut Taylor in the John Hartford essay in Ray Robertson’s Lives of the Poets (with Guitars), 2016, about working on Aereo-Plain. Exactly the same as what Blake experienced two years earlier with Bob Johnston and Dylan, as we know thanks to the Letterman interview with Charlie Daniels (“he wanted you to do what you wanted to do”).

The fruits of that freedom are effortlessly traceable: on Aereo-Plain, we hear Blake going all-out on side two, in “Symphony Hall Rag”, and no doubt we owe “Nashville Skyline Rag” to that same freedom. A year after the Nashville Skyline sessions the song is on John Hartford’s setlist, along with Norman Blake live (Turn Your Radio On, 1971), where Hartford introduces “Nashville Skyline Rag”:

“Uhmm, let’s see… I guess we should introduce Norman Blake next. I guess I can best introduce him by saying that people who read their liner notes closely, will know who he is. He plays on a lot of sessions. With people such as Johnny Cash and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan… I guess that’s one of my favorite Dylan albums, Nashville Skyline. Plays the definitive version on that.”

And again a year later Blake showcases the roots of “Nashville Skyline Rag” on his debut album, in “Richland Avenue Rag” – all recordings that demonstrate what happens when Bob Dylan gathers top country musicians around him on a Monday afternoon in Nashville, and then says: “These are the chords. This is the melody. Do what you want to do.”

——–

To be continued. Next up Nashville Skyline Rag part 2: Some of the names just didn’t seem to fit

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:

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NET: The absolute highlights: Silvio (1998)

Posted on March 22, 2023 by TonyAttwood

Silvio is one of those songs Bob wrote with Robert Hunter, and performed with Grateful Dead – this recording comes from the year of the song’s release. By my reckoning it is the 25th most played song by Dylan with getting on for 600 outings. And why not, it is just a great piece of fun.

This performance comes from the early days, so is not the result of a reworking of an old favourite. But it has already been re-worked from the album version.

And what I really love here is that Bob’s voice really is in keeping with the melody and lyrics – he is singing it rather than resorting to just saying the lyrics. He’s playing, yes, but he is playing musically with the extended lines, and the simple but nevertheless very entertaining harmonies.

And then there is that guitar work which shines through what we realise is, musically, a very simple song with a complex instrumental arrangement.

Plus (and this is not something one can always say) it is perfectly rehearsed. Everyone in the band knows exactly what Bob is going to do – and he remembers to do exactly what they did in rehearsal. Quite often with a song like this which is based around just three chords repeated over and over, that is not the case.

Plus the two guitars playing together are indeed playing together and not fighting each other, or (just as bad) having each instrumentalist wondering what the other is going to do next.

And then three-quarters of the way through we get that pull back so we can have three guitars intertwining in one of the best instrumental breaks from the whole tour, which takes us to the end of the piece.

But that’s not all, for if one goes back to the start and to play the song again, we can appreciate there is a real contrast but also a perfect link between the start and the end of the song, which I really enjoy.

One more thing – if you have the time – go back to the opening, and play that again with the lyrics in front of you

Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is a coming on fast
Ain't complaining about what I got
Seen better times but who has not

Rarely, in my opinion, have lyrics and music in a Dylan performance with the full band, ever been so much in harmony.

My only regret is that one of my all-time favourite verses of Dylan when he is having fun and just messing about with the genre, is missing

I can snap my fingers and require the rain
From a clear blue sky and turn it off again
I can stroke your body and relieve your pain
And charm the whistle off an evening train

I just listen to that and think, “Is he really claiming to be God” and then, “What on earth does that last line actually mean?” and then I always have to smile because it fits in so much with the whole song. And then, and then… I smile some more, because, well, most of these critics who analyse everything Bob does (which I know I do sometimes) don’t get round to smiling very much. Which is a shame.

So we don’t get my favourite verse, but we get a lot of the original fun, with the band perfectly rehearsed having an absolutely great time.

It’s one of the best, for sure.

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The Tarantula Tales: Oedipus and Agnes

Posted on March 21, 2023 by TonyAttwood

by Larry Fyffe

Oedipus

“Tarantula” by Bob Dylan is a sludgy story that mixes fluid facts with flowing fictions.

Of possible interpretations, there are many.

Therein, for one example, be French Normans, led by William the Conqueror; their arrows a-flying, they defeat Harold, ruler of Anglo-Saxon England.

Fiendish William establishes feudalism.

The son of the Conqueror’s daughter – her name’s Matilda – becomes Henry II of England.

Harold dethroned – perhaps fated to be so because he can’t resist a pun:

We sat in a room where Harold, who called himself
'Lord of the dead animals", was climbing down from a ladder
& he said "friend or doe? friend or doe?"
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Anyway, to make a long story short, actor Randolph Scott ends up giving Harold a big hug at President Eisenhower’s hometown saloon in Abilene, Kansas.

That is, after they sip a bit, and both reminisce about the good ole days they had fighting the Normans at the Battle of Hastings.

Randolf remarks, “Harold, I have the feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”:

(A)nd says
it sure wasnt like this
in abilene
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Of course, there are those who say that one’s Fate can be avoided ~ in Greek/Roman mythology, Laius, the father of Oedipus, gets rid of his son to prevent getting killed by Oedipus as foretold by Sun-God Apollo.

According to the postmodernistic version below, Oedipus ends up once again unknowingly killing his own father – in this case, father be the young Bob Dylan, the creator and writer of “Tarantula”:

(B)ob dylan - killed by a 
discarded Oedipus
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

The careful reader might indeed conclude by the adages given beneath that it’s not a bad thing to sell one’s soul down the river during life’s journey.

And that for sure possessing a good memory is a good thing.

And that the answer to the riddle posed by the mythological man-eating she-sphinx is a good thing to know.

{The answer: mankind (as he or she grows older) has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and one at night}

And seems we’re being told that it’s usually better not to tell the truth to those with the power to do us harm.

Thusly, albeit ambiguously, boasts the wise Tarantulaius:

(M)y mind is running down the river
- i'd sell my soul to the elephant
- i'd cheat the sphinx
- i'd lie to the conqueror
 (Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Of course, too, it’s just dandy if you happen to possess a whole bunch of different lives as well.

Agnes

The Almighty Tarantula is determined to out-devil the Devil; he considers himself the better Deceiver and Riddler ~ on the spider’s watch, nobody’s getting to know who tells the truth, and who tells a lie:

(T)he fact is this: we must be willing
to die for freedom (end of fact)
now what I wanna know about the fact 
is this: "could hitler have said it? degaulle?
pinnocchio? lincoln? agnes moorehead?"
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

The names above postmodernly metonymic.

For example ~

Agnes Moorehead plays Rebecca Prescott, the mother of two daughters – Eve (Carroll Baker), and younger Lilith (Debbie Reynolds) ~ in the previously-mentioned movie: “How The West Was Won”.

In the epic film, loyal wife Anges reluctantly leaves the comfort of their eastern farm behind; with her husband and daughters, Rebecca heads out West.

She and her husband drown along the way.

Moorehead also appears in movie titled ‘The Conqueror’ that stars John Wayne; he plays the slow-talking, hard-riding Mongol Genghis Khan.

The film’s considered by many critics to be the worst ever made.

“The Conqueror” is shot near a former nuclear test site; the location of the film is thusly thought by some to be the cause of cancer that develops among many of those involved in making the movie:

(A)lso, john wayne mightve kicked cancer, but you oughta see his foot
- forget about those hollywood people telling you what to do
- they're all gonna get killed by the indians
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

In a biblical story, Rebecca, wife of Isaac, has Jacob deceive his nearly-blind father into blessing him as the next leader of the clan instead of twin Esau:

And Jacob said unto his father, I am Esau thy firstborn
I have done according as thou badest me ....
That thy soul may bless me
(Genesis 27: 19)

And it’ll never be known who shoots US President John Kennedy:

(L)ook, you know I don't wanna come on ungrateful, but that warren
report, you know as well as me, just didn't make it
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Not ever will you learn the truth:

What is the truth, and where did it go
Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know
Shut your mouth, says the wise old owl
Business is business, and it's murder most foul
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

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Other people’s songs: The Boxer and Big Yellow Taxi

Posted on March 20, 2023 by TonyAttwood

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: As I am going to be busy next week with a medical procedure, I thought I would put together a quick “Other people’s songs” for Tony to look at.

So this time I thought I would do a two-fer as these two songs are so iconic there is little point looking past the originals and Dylan’s versions.

Firstly then here is Simon and Garfunkel with The Boxer

Tony: There’s a line in this which has stayed with me ever since

Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

How true that is and rather relevant in terms of the second song in this article). And listening to the original again, for the first time in decades, I am reminded how incredibly powerful the harmonies are. And that is saying something when what one has here is a remarkable melody, beautiful accompaniment and extraordinarily powerful words. Just listen to it all the way through with the sudden reduction of the massive build up of sound, with the “I love you” line only just audible. It is extraordinary.

Aaron: Dylan’s version came from 1970s Self Portrait

Tony: And here, for me (and for many commentators I have read) the harmonies just don’t work – they are the other end of the scale of success from Simon and Garfunkel. I mean 10 out of 10 to Bob for trying, but given that what he is copying is an utter work of art, one of the most beautiful popular songs ever recorded, one wonders why. Was it to show that he can sing harmonies?

And that all-important “I love you” tucked away as the last line of “Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie, lie-lie-lie-lie-lie” runs through.

Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

How true that is. But surely someone must have said to Bob, “Actually Bob, this doesn’t work….” Although maybe it took a really long time to record and get those harmonies right by which time Bob couldn’t bear to throw it away. Or maybe it is true, no one dares tell Bob what to do.

Indeed I wonder what Paul Simon thought. Presumably, he didn’t mind because the two appeared together in 38 shows in 1988.

Aaron: Next we have Joni Mitchell with Big Yellow Taxi

Tony: Another of my much loved artists, and I always enjoyed this song which gave such great opportunities to show off her amazing vocal range reaching every part of its range with perfection. The repeat of “bees” is just beyond belief.

So yes I do love the music of Joni Mitchell, and indeed appreciate many of her political / religious quotes, such as “Lord, there’s danger in this land, you get witch hunts and wars when church and state hold hands.” (Tax free).

Aaron: Bob’s version appeared on his 1973 studio album, Dylan

Tony: Oh. I hate the twinky organ. And virtually all of the recording, because the accompaniment has nothing to do with the lyrics although at the same time this version includes elements from the original. The “Do bop” female chorus is taken from the original as is much of the rhythm. But oh….. this is horrible. Horrible horrible horrible.

The organ part is the key element that puts me off, but I am not at all sure about Bob’s singing here. (Surely there must be a deserted part of the world where the organist can be put). Just listen to where Bob sings “DDT” and the organ part that follows and ask, “what on earth has this organ part got to do with the lyrics?”

And maybe it was this recording that made Joni Mitchell say of Dylan, “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake.” Although most commentators I seem to recall, said the spat started in the Rolling Thunder years.

Anyway I need something strong to distract my mind after that. So here it is. Sorry Aaron, but I just couldn’t leave this article with Bob’s destruction of a song I really do like. Get well soon, mate.

Previously in this series…

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I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You, part 11 (final): Things aren’t what they were

Posted on March 19, 2023 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

XI Things aren’t what they were

From the plains and the prairies - from the mountains to the sea
I hope that the gods go easy with me
I knew you’d say yes - I’m saying it too
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you

On 8 December 2019, Dylan is in Washington for the final concert of the US Fall Tour. Thirty-nine concerts with, from the fourth concert (17 October, Denver), pretty much the same setlist every night, and the same encore every night: “Ballad Of A Thin Man” and “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”.

In January and February 2020, Dylan is in Los Angeles, at Sunset Sound Recorders’ studio. On Sunset Boulevard, so about 45 minutes by car from home, from Malibu. No concert obligations March 2020, the whole month of April Dylan is expected to be in Japan (11 concerts in Tokyo, three in Osaka), May is me-time, and 4 June 2020 should then see the start of the US Summer Tour. But alas; in March 2020, the world goes on lockdown. The Covid pandemic wipes clean all agendas and all tour schedules.

In May 2021, the workless master then records the Corona surprise Shadow Kingdom, a sort of constructed concert film, unfortunately without any new songs. Mostly 60s songs. The most recent one is “What Was It You Wanted” from 1989 – so still 32 years young. For the live premieres of the Rough And Rowdy songs, we will have to wait until November, until the pandemic is over. But then we’ll get right down to business.

The first post-Corona concert will take place on 2 November 2021 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For two songs, some fans may still fear that Dylan wants to serve up a Shadow Kingdom Revisited. The concert opens with “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Most Likely You Go Your Way”; two songs we were also presented with on-line, last July.

But then relief follows; without further notice, the band launches into “I Contain Multitudes” – the first of eight Rough And Rowdy songs Dylan will play tonight, as he will for the rest of this tour. As was to be expected, of course: the tour is called “Rough And Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2024” and at the top of the concert posters is written “Things aren’t what they were….” – a quote from “I’ve Made Up My Mind”.

“Murder Most Foul” will not be performed for understandable reasons (the song is, after all, very long), and the premiere of the last unplayed song, “Crossing The Rubicon”, will be pushed forward to the next tour, to the 2022 US Spring Tour (3 March 2022, Phoenix).

So on 2 November ’21 in Milwaukee is also the premiere of “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”. Almost two years after Dylan recorded the song in Hollywood, about a year and a half after the world was introduced to it. At the end of the setlist. The first two nights at the fifteenth spot, then it moves to spot 13, and there “I’ve Made Up My Mind” will stay until the last gig in this year’s concert series, 2 December 2021 in Washington.

Musically, the live renditions are not much different from the studio version. Donnie Herron’s mandolin replaces the “marimba part” Blake Mills conjured from his guitar, Bob Britt plays a faithful copy of the short guitar solo, the understated background chorus has been dropped – for pragmatic reasons, presumably. The lyrics have been tinkered with a little. Not much, and not too drastic. It looks at nothing here or there, looks at nothing near or far, for example, has been reduced to It looks at nothing, neither near or far. Other interventions are even smaller. The only really noticeable one is in the last stanza: the first line.

At the premiere, Dylan is not yet completely text proof. He mixes up the second and fourth stanzas, forgets a word here and adds a word there. And the intended lyric adaptation of the last verse has apparently not yet fully crystallised. On the album, Dylan sings

I’ve traveled from the mountains to the sea,

at the Milwaukee premiere, it has been changed to

I’ve traveled from the plains and mountains to the sea,

and the next evening, 3 November in Chicago, Dylan finds the more or less final lyrics:

From the plains to the prairies, from the mountains to the sea

… more or less final; at the fourth performance (6 November, Columbus) he rehashes it once more to From the mountains to the prairies, from the plains to the seas, but hereafter, he will return to the words as they are also published officially, on the site:

From the plains and the prairies – from the mountains to the sea

It tells us two things. First, that the text change is not the result of lengthy and deliberate editing, writing and deleting – the three variations in the first four performances suggest that Dylan did not feel the need until these November days, probably still scribbling and erasing while in the tour bus. And secondly, that he attaches importance to it: Dylan has changed hundreds of fragments of lyrics in live performances of his oeuvre over the years, but only a very small minority of them lead to official publication in Lyrics or on the site.

It is a somewhat peculiar addition, though. The average listener’s association is forced almost naturally towards Irving Berlin’s patriotic “God Bless America”;

From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans white with foam
God bless America, my home sweet home

… the song that made Woody Guthrie puke so much so, that he wrote “This Land Is Your Land” as an answer song. Dylan has sung the song himself on occasion (awkwardly; at the Kennedy Center Award ceremony in 1997, Dylan doesn’t escape it either), but here, in “I’ve Made Up My Mind”, a reference to “God Bless America” really does seem out of place – neither a patriotic salute nor an ironic wink fits here.

No, perhaps then, it is meant as yet another salute to Warren Zevon, the admired colleague who has received compliments from Dylan for decades, even before his death in 2003. And on Rough And Rowdy Ways, we also can hear a reverence again. The line Looking far, far away down Gower Avenue in “Murder Most Foul” is the last line of Zevon’s “Desperados Under the Eaves”, the 1976 song with the Dylanesque line Don’t the sun look angry through the trees and Carl Wilson’s heavenly backing vocals. Incidentally, the last verse of Zevon’s song opens with

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was listening to the air conditioner hum

… which just might have been the template for

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

… for the opening of “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”, that is. And that late, seemingly hasty addition in the last verse of that From the plains and the prairies could then just be understood as a thank you or a salute to Warren Zevon, via a Zevon song at least as close to Dylan’s heart;

Frank and Jesse James
Keep on riding, riding, riding
'Til you clear your names
Keep on riding, riding, riding
Across the prairies and the plains
Keep on riding, riding, riding
Frank and Jesse James

… “Frank And Jesse James”, the opening song from the same Warren Zevon album (1976) on which “Desperados Under the Eaves” can be found (as a finale).

Zevon, to whom Dylan also devotes an honourable chapter in The Philosophy Of Modern Song (Chapter 39, “Dirty Life And Times”), as well as to the song “Jesse James” (Chapter 10); Zevon, who is also quoted again in the only interview Dylan gives in 2022 (“We’re in ‘Splendid Isolation,’ like in the Warren Zevon song; the world of self, like Georgia O’Keefe alone in the desert” – Wall Street Journal, 19 December 2022); like Dylan quotes just as reverently from that same “Dirty Life And Times” back in 2011, in the Elderfield interview:

“Sure, but everything in life, directly or indirectly, has a great degree of mystery. To paraphrase Warren Zevon, some days I feel like my shadow’s casting me. Persons, places, things … time itself is a mystery.”

… the song in which the narrator sighs: “She can’t seem to make up her mind.”

“This is a great record,” Dylan writes, continuing with effervescent praise of both this one song, one of the very last songs Zevon writes, and of Warren Zevon the artist at all.

“Being a writer is not something one chooses to do. It’s something you just do and sometimes people stop and notice. Warren was a writer till the very end.”

It’s almost as if Dylan is talking about himself; just before this, again admiringly, he describes the different sides of Zevon at different stages of his career, as well as “all the roles Zevon chose to play in his songs”.

Zevon dies of cancer, 7 September 2003. Just before his death, he manages to record one last record, The Wind, the album featuring “Dirty Life And Times”. And with a breathtaking, moving cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”.

Let’s hope that the gods go easy with him.

————–

Editor’s note: In case you want to discover more of Warren Zevon, our previous post on this site was: Dylans favourite songs: Warren Zevon: ‘Lawyers, Guns, and Money’

————–

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:

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Dylans favourite songs: Warren Zevon: ‘Lawyers, Guns, and Money’

Posted on March 18, 2023 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

We have already had one Warren Zevon song in this list of Dylan favourites: ‘Desperado Under the Eaves’, And now it is time for a second: ‘Lawyers, Guns, and Money’. And we do have several recordings of this song to contemplate

Now I want to make something clear: most of these songs that Bob has chosen I don’t know – or at best don’t know very well. And so I am listening to them for the first time (or at least the first time in many years) as I come to write each review. And indeed having developed the habit of writing reviews while listening (as opposed to listening in silence and then contemplating for a while) when co-authoring the articles I write with Aaron, I carry on that format here.

So this is my first interaction with this song (my excuse being that in 1989 I had three daughters all under 10 years old and that rather takes up a lot of time – although it was certainly worth it; they are all three of them, now my best friends).

Anyway back to the song. The lyrics are quite something.

I went home with the waitress, the way I always do
How was I to know, she was with the Russians, too?

I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money, dad, get me out of this, ha

I'm the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck 
between the rock and a hard place
And I'm down on my luck, yes I'm down on my luck
Well, I'm down on my luck

And I'm hiding in Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan

Alright, send lawyers, guns, and money

So looking at the song’s lyrics it is simple: exactly the opposite of Dylan’s work, and yet it is equally stunningly brilliant. My guess (as a person who has written several hundred songs across a lifetime, but without any commercial success) is that the title came first, and then the song evolved around it. The title phrase indeed demands that two-chord accompaniment (musicians would write it as IV, I) and then the third chord is added at the end. From that emerges everything else. I suspect the notion of introducing the Russians, Havana and Honduras just arose as he played the chords in that rhythm on the piano.

Interestingly (to me if no one else) for this live recording, they’ve changed key. And I do love the way an extra bar is added in places.

In fact I love all of it. Especially the notion of going through all this and claiming to be an innocent by-stander. Fabulous.

I did however know Warren Zevon, because of “Werewolves of London”, but nothing more, so learning about him really is learning for me. He was, it seems, born in the same year as me but died of cancer 20 years ago. (And that is quite an unsettling thought: how come I, just a regular guy who enjoys all this music, managed to survive? Beats me.)

Here’s another live version recorded for TV.

So here we have another song that is a million miles from anything Bob would ever write or perform, which he names in his favourite song list, and I am immediately taken by.

You know, I am really enjoying this idea for a series.

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NET 2011 Part 4 – Forgetful Hearts and the Crystal Cat Blues

Posted on March 17, 2023 by TonyAttwood

An index to all 111 previous episodes in this definitive series on the Never Ending Tour can be found here.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Some songs seem to have their peak years in terms of their live performances. Those are years in which all the elements of the performance come together to produce ‘best ever’ performances before fading into business-as-usual presentations or fading from the setlists altogether.

‘Forgetful Heart,’ that elegiac, haunting Dylan/Hunter song from Together Through Life (2009) is a case in point. First played in 2009, the song would last through to 2015 and yet, it seems to me, it was never played better or more expressively than in 2011. Played acoustically, with Tony Garnier on double bass and Donnie Herron on the viola (sometimes the violin), the song was, from the start, a stand-out performance piece, creating a brooding, sad and self-reflecting mood, and yet the 2011 performances seem to have magic it’s hard to find before or afterwards.

While planning this post, I culled the recordings down to ten marvellous renditions. Since putting all ten into one post would be excessive, and probably overkill, I whittled them down to five that I considered to be necessary performances. I trust you, my dear reader, will forgive me this indulgence, but there are nuances in vocal delivery and harp playing I believe justify the repetition and can only hope my editor agrees with me.

I’m not going to follow these chronologically, although that’s a tempting approach, as I feel that, even within this narrow field of superlative performances, there is one that stands out as being the best of the best. I will however begin with that excellent first concert of the year, Taipei (April 3^rd).

Forgetful Heart (A)

There is softness in the recording, a gentle feel to it, and Dylan’s vocal stays sensitive to the lyrics without breaking into falsetto too noticeably. There is also, albeit not too obviously, an echo to Dylan’s voice which gives the song an other-worldly quality. The song comes across as a gentler ‘Lovesick,’ a soliloquy of loneliness. (Herron is on the violin here.)

If we are looking for vocal excellence, we can’t go past the Tel Aviv performance (June 20^th). The vocal is more upfront than Taipei, and a touch more emphatic, while Herron’s move to the viola creates a darker, more sombre sound. It’s hard to tell to what extent some of these differences are due to the accident of an audience recording, or a deliberate re-balancing of the song by Dylan, and we’ll come back to that issue shortly when considering the Crystal Cat recording from London at the end of the year. Depending on my mood, I can equally enjoy both the Taipei version and the Tel Aviv version.

Forgetful Heart (B)

The recording at the Odense (June 27^th) is certainly sharper, and more hard-edged than the previous two performances. The song comes out of the shadows and is right in our faces. I don’t know if that is better than the softer, Taipei performance, but it does, in effect, shift the mood from a tender melancholy to pungent self-accusation.

Forgetful Heart (C)

The superiority of the Crystal Cat recordings can be instantly recognised in this London performance. Dylan performed the song twice in London, in the second concert (Nov 20^th) and in the third (Nov 21^st). I’ve chosen the version from the second concert. I have to say, however, that despite the evident excellence of the recording, and the performance, I find myself harking back to the softer Taipei and Tel Aviv performances. Is this because of the recording or has Dylan adopted a harsher tone in his soliloquy? Or am I getting soft?

These are only quibbles in the face of an emotionally compelling performance in which we find both the old circus barker and the emerging crooner at work to stunning effect. Wonderful the way Herron complements Dylan’s voice and harp with those dark, sustained viola notes.

Forgetful Heart (D)

The opening sombre strings set the mood, which is sustained right to the end, but this song is not just about the backing and the vocals but the harp. Those lonely, piercing gull-like cries Dylan wrenches from that little instrument stand in counterpoint to the low rumble of the viola and double bass, and give the song a bluesy, anguished edge. Nowhere is that more evident than in the following performance.

I haven’t been able to track the date of this performance, it has proved elusive, but to my ear it is the finest of them all, and that’s largely due to the extended second harp break which runs into a second chorus. The harp delivers a series of emotional jabs which push the song to another level. It’s an astonishing performance, the jewel in the crown. Best ever? I have to say so.

Forgetful Heart (E)

Later, when Dylan started singing Frank Sinatra songs, some commentators traced the origin of his crooning to ‘Forgetful Heart.’ I think that’s an oversimplification. Dylan had been trying out his silky voiced Bing Crosbyish vibrato for some time, and the style can be traced back to his collaborations with Johnny Cash back in the late 1960s.

For the remainder of this post, I have tried to select songs which are in harmony with the mood of ‘Forgetful Heart,’ songs which have a similar elegiac bent and in which sadness rules. I believe that’s the case with ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’ Oddly, this song will be dropped after 2012 for a four-year break, emerging again in 2016 when it would complement Dylan’s Sinatra performances.

While the song urges forgetfulness, striking another match, it is a love song (somewhere I described it as love’s last song) and is haunted by sadness and the anguish of saying goodbye.

Since the mid-1990s Dylan has had trouble finding the right arrangement to carry the complex emotions of this song, and I’m not sure that the medium-paced versions of 2011 do the trick. However, I have two offerings, one from Tel Aviv and one from London (1^st concert). Putting these two together also furthers my enquiry into the virtues or otherwise of the Crystal Cat recordings, and brings something of my unease with the latter, despite their brilliance, into focus.

First, Tel Aviv:

It’s All Over Now Baby Blue (A)

That’s a convincing and emotionally satisfying performance. Once more the circus barker gives way to the emergent balladeer and the harp sharpens the feelings that drive the song.

Now London (1^st concert):

It’s All Over Now Baby Blue (B)

I can understand why some might prefer that centre stage performance, with Dylan on guitar, but I find it less engaging than the Tel Aviv performance. I find the sound a little too brash for the song, but this is a purely personal reaction. Perhaps I like Tel Aviv because I prefer Dylan’s harp playing to his electric guitar, and I am just imagining that that performance is more subtle than London. Over to you, dear reader.

Another song soaked in sadness is ‘Working Man’s Blues # 2.’ Of course this song is more political than the two songs we’ve considered so far, and it’s a longer, more ambitious song, but no less sombre

In the dark I hear the night birds call
I can hear a lover's breath
I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death

In this case the heart does not forget:

Where the place I love best is a sweet memory
It's a new path that we trod

Memories, however, bring their own tribulations, and personal melancholy mixes with the sense of political struggle. This slow-paced song has a certain grandeur, is carried well in this performance which my fact sheet tell me was performed at Rotterdam on Oct 10^th, but is not listed by the official website as being played on that date. Whenever, it has the feel of a Crystal Cat recording to me. It is ably sung, but there’s just a hint too much of dumpty-dum in the organ notes to be fully satisfying.

Workingman’s Blues # 2

‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ is a plea to be not forgotten by someone else’s forgetful heart when they go travelling, and has long been recognised as a masterful piece of dialogue – it’s all too easy to forget the love you leave behind once you’re on the road. Since Dylan is usually the one moving on, this song is something of a reversal; he’s the one left behind this time.

This Odense performance features Herron on violin and Dylan on guitar. To me it lacks the heart-rending pathos of the original studio recording way back in 1964, and I could have done with a bit less barking and more crooning, but it’s a fine, committed performance in its own right.

Boots of Spanish Leather

We’ll stay in Odense to catch ‘Every Grain of Sand,’ another elegiac song in which the ‘dying voice within me,’ reaches out for the verities of faith and spiritual love. For my ear, this song reached its performance peak in 2009, with a brilliant centre-stage duet between voice and harp (See NET 2009 part 2), a performance full of bleak insistence. However, this Odense performance is powerfully presented and sung with precision and passion and there is some trenchant harp work. You do have to deal with a pretty dominant organ riff and the tendency is still strong in Dylan to become too barkingly emphatic on some of the lyrics.

Every Grain of Sand

As I’ve commented before, ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ might be the saddest of all Dylan’s love songs, with the pathos running high. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful, more so sung in Dylan’s cracked, broken-hearted voice. This gorgeous rendition is from the 1^st London performance. Crystal Cat strikes again with the clarity of the recording, every instrument can be clearly heard. It’s got that vamping organ again, but in this case, it works better than in ‘Every Grain of Sand,’ a bit more complex and sensitive to the mood of the song.

To Make You Feel My Love

I’m going to finish with this Milan (22^nd June) performance of ‘Visions of Johanna,’ the greatest 3 a.m. song ever written, filled with yearning, sadness and pathos. Here, memory has been taken over by all-consuming ‘visions’ of ‘Johanna,’ a lost love or the end of the world, depending on how much you read into the name. Many times in these posts I’ve commented that this song has never achieved the burned-out grandeur of the Perth performance of 1966, or the spooky grandeur of the Manchester performance of the same year, but I’d rather have it this way, a little too bouncy for me, than not at all.

Visions of Johanna

I’ve done four posts on 2011 now, and it still feels as if I have barely scratched the surface. I’ll be back shortly, therefore, with another post to hopefully wrap the year up.

Until then

Kia Ora

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A Dylan Cover a Day: the Quinn the Eskimo as it should be performed.

Posted on March 16, 2023 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

“I don’t know what it’s about,” said Bob, and that’s good enough for me. I like poems and songs and abstract works of art that are not about anything. After all why does art have to be about something?

In terms of Bob Dylan there are hundreds of thousands of commentators out there who believe that Bob’s work must be about something – and wow! this particular writer has an insight that is real and true and well, insightful. Except it probably isn’t.

My view (oft-expressed on these pages) is that Dylan, like many other poets before and since, like the sounds of words and phrases, and has always done so. And indeed this is how much of the world is. I look out from where I write each day in rural England, across the grass, beyond the small windmill to four trees at the end of my garden stretching up to the sky. Does that mean anything? Not especially, but I have chosen this room and this house, because I love this view, and it helps me write on the various subjects I’m paid to write about or want to write about. That’s it. I watch the seasons pass, I write stuff, people pay, I go dancing.

And that’s not to compare myself in any way at all with the genius that is Bob, or any genius, as obviously I’m not in that league, but rather to say, from a lifetime of being involved with the arts, in the theatre, in music and in writing, I’m utterly sure art does not have to be about anything. And certainly, for me, that is the case with Quinn the Eskimo. So the question for me with this song is, how do different performers deal with a song that means nothing?

Adding harmonies at the start and then keeping the rest of the song as it always has been, is a good way of handling a piece that we all have heard many times before. Indeed the song is so well known, it is hard to do much with the music without destroying the essence of the song, so harmonies are great.

And then they add an interesting backing. The harmonica, what sounds to me like a violin being plucked at one point, the jaunty bowed violin in the background elsewhere before it gets its jolly solo near the end… It’s all fun. What’s not to like?

Lots of heavy metal (and similar) bands have had a bash at the song, and then have found they have to compromise a bit to make the chorus work. I’m not a heavy metal fan at all, but I can appreciate the short instrumental break… but beyond this I think it is a case of liking the genre or not. Mind you I do like the subheading “Executing the classics”. Yes indeed. I wish I’d thought of that.

Oh yes and that break around 1 minute 45 – it gets carried away with itself in my view, but I do like the way it starts.

The opening of Joan Osborne’s version doesn’t really give much hope for something different, but she does deliver fine harmonies, and someone on the team has decided to change the chord structure at the start of “Come on without” with the bass holding its note, to imply something quite different from the norm for the words “Come on within”.

As a result, for me, suddenly “come on within” is no longer a fairly meaningless reply to “come on without”. With that held bass note it takes on a totally different concept. It gives a notion of slow-growing progress that is not part of the song otherwise.

This Manfred Mann realisation of the song is the version that Jochen chose for his article: Quinn the Eskimo: one semitone is all it takes, which of course I do recommend if you want to know about the song itself. It (this version) mixes genres although I am not sure that now, all these years on, it still gives me much to think about. Although the change at around 2.20 really is unexpected and most certainly musically very interesting.

Trouble is, “interesting” doesn’t mean that one necessarily wants to go back and listen to it again and again. Yes, being able to play fast and do the unexpected is good, and entertaining – and I most certainly was not expecting what happens at 3.30. It is fun thereafter, but on my “do I want to play this again?” chart it doesn’t score. They do get back to the song in the end, however – and there’s a lovely fun effect at the end which is worth waiting for.

I suppose I have included London Pops as an antidote to Manfred Mann, and although it is fun, it is clear that at moments they struggled to think of enough variations to keep going, so not one of my favourites. But it leads me to….

This takes me back to the origins, and I love it. The song is a bit of nonsense. It is fun, and somehow listening to all the takes above I get to feel that some of these performers are taking themselves awfully seriously with a song that was never meant to be taken that way in the slightest. These guys are just doing their thing and enjoying themselves, and enjoying the nonsense that the song is.

Being gentle with this song is like being gentle with an old friend, unexpectedly met once more – an old friend who perhaps hasn’t had the best of times across the years, but is your old friend and so needs respect and courtesy and maybe some encouragement and help.

Which is why I not only had to include this version, but also include it at the end. It is, for me, how the song should be played.

Hello old friend.

The Dylan Cover a Day series

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I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You (2020) part 10

Posted on March 15, 2023 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

X A Neapolitan mandolin and a half-hidden marimba

“Gorgeous, limpid and brushed by drowsy steel drums,” writes Mark Beaumont in the New Musical Express of 15 June 2020, in his review of Rough And Rowdy Ways. Paul Haney, in his assessment for Glide Magazine, also in June 2020, hears the same thing: “A brushed snare along with subtle steel drums lend the song a celestial feel.” “The whisper of steel drums echoes the song’s sentiment,” thinks his colleague Doug Colette. Flood Magazine’s Ad Amorosi goes a step further: “Brushed snare and marimba-filled.” Someone on Tumblr analyses “chiming bells and schoolyard xylophones intersect with steel drums”, “meandering on sultry waves of marimba and ooh’s and aah’s in the background,” says Cis van Looy admiringly in Written In Music, and Uncut‘s Richard Williams gets all sultry:

“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You may be the most cumbersome title of his career, but the track is also one of his loveliest creations. A Neapolitan mandolin and a half-hidden marimba conjure the image of a lone figure sitting in a waterside café on a warm evening, while male voices hum a four-note melody behind him.”

Very evocative, really. But a marimba it is not. Nor a steel drum or xylophone.

Shortly after the release of Rough And Rowdy Ways, June 2020, Blake Mills posts seven short videos on his Instagram account. The clips last no longer than a minute (except for “Black Rider” lasting 1’35”) and are visually unspectacular: a static camera films the guitar-playing Mills, who, sitting on a chair, hunched over his electric guitar, does not look into the camera once.

But the content, especially for Dylan fans, is indeed spectacular: in each clip, Mills demonstrates the guitar part he played on seven songs from Rough And Rowdy Ways: “I Contain Multitudes”, “False Prophet”, “Mother Of Muses”, “My Own Version Of You”, “Crossing The Rubicon”, “Black Rider” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”. They are partly overwhelming demonstrations of creativity and craftsmanship, they are mood- and colour-defining guitar parts, and one might suspect that Mills is sharing these remarkable clips with the world out of some sort of assertiveness. On the LP cover, he is merely listed under “additional musicians” – judging by this Instagram demonstration, that is indeed a somewhat too economical qualification of Mills’ contributions.

He himself prudently dodges confrontational questions about why he did the Instagram action, limiting himself in later posts to safe, grateful and humble words about his work for Dylan. But when interviewed by Belgian magazine Knack a year later, he is a little less restrained – Belgium is on the other side of the ocean, the interview is only published in Dutch… safe and far, so to speak;

Knack: “It has been suggested that you wanted to delicately point out with those videos that your role was bigger than the credit as additional musician you got.”
Mills: “To a certain extent that’s true, yes. See, as a fan of his music, I also understand how Bob makes his records come about in a mysterious way. There is nothing clearly outlined about it, there is no plan. That’s his art. So I do understand that his camp protects that mystery as much as possible, to put it that way.”

Interviewer Kurt Blondeel is an experienced journalist with an understanding of the music business, and knows how to drill down further. He knows that Mills is one of the house producers at Sound City, the studio where Rough And Rowdy Ways was recorded, that Mills is also a producer for top acts like Alabama Shakes and John Legend, apart from his own music, and thus assumes that Mills must also have interfered with the fantastic sound of Dylan’s album. But either Mills really wasn’t an “additional producer”, or he displays modesty very well:

“Let me say this clearly: I owe some of my fondest studio memories to that record. Why? Because he’s Bob Dylan [laughs]. I only now realise how profound that experience was for me. […] On the other hand, you shouldn’t make more out of it than it is. You are there to make a business succeed by doing your best yourself. You are generous because you are playing for an imagined audience that you know will appreciate what you are doing. At the same time, you are creating something that you would enjoy as a listener yourself.”

… with which he keeps the focus on his guitar contributions. Which, by the way, he has to find on his own. That’s what Dylan expects you to do, Mills explains:

“The most important thing remains that you put yourself at the service of the song, the story or the mood. But of course you may also follow your instinct. Dylan doesn’t tell you exactly what to play. He does expect you to play what needs to be played. That may seem the same, but it’s a world of difference.”
(Knack, 9 March 2021)

The accents with the slide on “False Prophet”, the subdued echo-simulation on “My Own Version of You”, the all-around 50s-Chicago blues sound… it’s clear why Dylan is so enamoured with Mills, incidentally practically a neighbourhood kid of Dylan’s in Malibu. In the “I’ve Made Up My Mind” clip Mills then demonstrates that supposed “marimba” (or steel drums, or xylophone): it’s his old Telecaster, a damping thumb on the bass strings and lightning-fast triplets with the fingers of the right hand on the lower strings.

https://youtu.be/ae77IGXOYnA

The exceptionally talented boy next door has been noticed, inside and outside Dylan circles, more than once before. In a 2014 Rolling Stone interview, he is lauded by none other than Clapton: “The last guitarist I heard that I thought was phenomenal.” Longtime Dylan drummer Jim Keltner, who met him at a Jakob Dylan session, is a fan, and seems to feel a kind of paternal pride when talking about Blake (Washington Post, 12 June 2020): “He’s so good that you can’t forget what it would be like to be his age and be one of his peers – you either have to love the guy, or be very jealous.” At the 2015 Newport Festival, Blake plays a stunning “When I Paint My Masterpiece” on Dylan’s old 1965 guitar. And there he explains what fascinates him so much:

“He is a torch. And an example of a lot of bravery. People are afraid that he’s gonna do something and they’re not gonna like it. What a weird position to be placed. I just marvel it. You know, his strength.”

The sympathy of Dylan fans Mills had won long before Newport. With his wonderful cover of “Heart Of Mine” on the Amnesty project Chimes of Freedom, 2012, and especially with its superlative on national television with Conan O’Brien, also in January 2012 – catapulting himself to the level of a Derek Trucks or Ry Cooder with his guitar playing.

The Dylan love doesn’t extinguish, not after Chimes Of Freedom and not after Newport, and his name as a Dylan interpreter seems to be established; when Diana Krall, Mrs Elvis Costello, records her beautiful covers album Wallflower, she calls Mills to contribute to the only Dylan cover on the album – “Wallflower”, indeed – with a heartbreaking, tasteful guitar part and ditto solo. In 2016, Blake is mainly responsible for one of the very best “Not Dark Yet” covers at all, when he provides the guitar parts for his cousin Jon Peter Lewis, the American Idol finalist.

It must have been a godsend to be asked by Dylan for session work. And still reeling from the experience, Mills recounts what we have heard so many times from Dylan’s session musicians. You don’t get time:

“Everything that we did was happening in the room and performed as it sounds. So in that sense, it’s quick, almost like a live show. There are certain people who definitely construct records in layers, but for Rough And Rowdy Ways – I think for most of Bob’s records – you get the sense that it’s more performance-based and live. You don’t sit around with Bob and he explains the song to you – either you get it right away or you don’t.”
(Guitar.com, 7 April 2021)

No one ever told me, it’s just something I knew. I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

To be continued. Next up I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You part 11 (final): Things aren’t what they were

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:

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Claudette and Peoria: The Tarantula Files (continued)

Posted on March 14, 2023 by TonyAttwood

by Larry Fyffe

38: Claudette

The Travelling Tarantula Show carries biblical allusions and allegories, often dark humorous ones, on its ink-stained back.

Claudette, the sandman's pupil
wounded in her fifth year in the business
& she's only fifteen
& go and ask her what she thinks of married men
& governors & shriner conventions ...
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Biblically speaking, with the benefit of far-stretching hindsight, Claudette’s easily conflated with Aholibah, a female symbol for Judah, historically the southern region of mighty Israel.

Informed are its inhabitants (the sons of man) that, though the country is at the time like a two-horned stick, the southern part will get re-united with the northern region of Samaria (symbolized by sister Aholah):

Moreover, thou son of man
Take one stick, and write upon it
"For Judah, and the children of Israel ..."
(Ezekiel 37:16)

Both Aholibah and Aholah are accused of being guilty of idolatry; that is, they are unfaithful to Yahweh ~ the Hebrew God – construed as the aforementioned ‘Sandman’:

Don't know what I can say about Claudette
That wouldn't come back to haunt me
Finally had to give her up
About the time she began to want me
(Bob Dylan: The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar)

Supposedly, in those days of old, Aholah consorts with Assyrians, and “Claudette”, she’s a worse sinner – Aholibah also has sex with the Babylonians; and she’s rather fond of Egyptian soldiers with penises as large as those of donkeys.

Needless to say, Claudette’s not like the innocent, loyal, and faithful Ruth, the youthful gleaner-of-grain mentioned in the Bible.

She’s alluded to below:

(N)ow Ruthy - she was different
- she always wanted to see a cock fight
& went to Mexico City when she was 17
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Also alluded to beneath, but Ruth’s less worldly in the Romantic Transcendentalist’s poem:

No nightingale did ever chant
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt
Among Arabian sands
(William Wordsworth: The Solitary Reaper)

Meanwhile, the always-patient groom Yahweh waits for Claudette at the altar … wondering what the hell the little whore is up to:

What can I say about Claudette
Ain't seen her since January
(She could be in the mountains or the prairies)
She could be respectfully married
Or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires 
(Bob Dylan: The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar)

Anyway, not to worry ~ Christianized apostle Paul’s a-gonna see to it that all them naughty boys and girls receive their just punishments:

Now the works of the flesh are manifest
Which are these -
Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness
Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations
Wrath, strife, seditions, heresies
Envyings,  murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like 
(Galatians 5: 19,20, 21)

39: Peoria, Illinois

George Custer IV, third bachelor, weary from trying to
chew up a stork, takes out his harmonica
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

In ‘Tarantula’, singer/writer/musician Bob Dylan tosses out some fishy tails behind his travelling salvation medicine show to throw bloodhounds off the trail.

Likely, it’s George Hamilton IV, an American guitar-picker to whom Dylan refers above; a rockabilly singer who becomes popular in Canada.

Sings ‘Abilene’, a song based on a Randolph Scott western film; therein lawman Dan convinces the folks of a small town in Kansas to stand up to rough and rowdy cattlemen; Scott shoots the boss of the cattle drivers

Says the TS Eliot-influenced marshal at the end of the movie, “This is how a tough street dies, not with a roar but with a whine”:

Prettiest town I've ever seen
Women there don't treat you mean
In Abilene, my Abilene
(George Hamilton IV: Abilene -  Gibson,  et.al.)

Apparently, George IV is able to sidestep a shootout with a notorious gunslinger from Illinois – known as the Peoria Kid:

& men going outside with Maurice
Who ain't the Peoria Kid
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Also avoids a fight against Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, a battle that takes place along the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory:

Offers up the following ditty:

May your heart always be righteous
May your heart always be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you ...
May you stay forever young
(George Hamilton IV: Forever Young ~ Dylan)

In the lyrics beneath, the li’l Illinois town of Peoria gets burlesqued:

Oh how I wish I was in Peoria, Peoria tonight
Oh how I miss those gals in Peoria, Peoria tonight
Why did I ever roam with those sailor boys
I should-a stayed back home in Illinois
(Smothers Brothers: I Wish I Was In Peoria ~ Rose/Dixon/Woods)

The song harks back to the Zulu War in South Africa:

& the fellow next door
- he must be a Zulu
- the doctors cant stand him
& he gets no visitors
((Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Thus go the song lyrics:

We are marching to Pretoria, Pretoria, Pretoria
We are marching to Pretoria, Pretoria, hoorah ...
Dance with me, I'll dance with you
And so we will dance together
(The Weavers: We Are Marching To Pretoria ~ traditional)

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Bob Dylan’s favourite songs: Sundown (Gordon Lightfoot)

Posted on March 13, 2023 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

The songs that we have covered so far in this series are listed at the end of this piece, and if you’ve played through the songs, or indeed already know them, I rather suspect you might have noted just how complex they tend to be both musically and lyrically.

However the second Gordon Lightfoot song Bob chose (and to be clear, this is a song written and recorded by Gordon Lightfoot) is a song of utterly elegant simplicity in its musical construction but (if press reports are true) is a song that tells a story much more complex than appears on the surface.

But before I dig further into the origins, here’s the original version of the song…

And just in case you don’t feel that simplicity by listening to the music, just play the song again and follow the lyrics

I can see her lying back in her satin dress
In a room where you do what you don't confess

Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs

She's been looking like a queen in a sailor's dream
And she don't always say what she really means

Sometimes I think it's a shame
When I get feeling better, when I'm feeling no pain
Sometimes I think it's a shame
When I get feeling better, when I'm feeling no pain

I can picture every move that a man could make
Getting lost in her loving is your first mistake

Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs
Sometimes I think it's a sin
When I feel like I'm winning, when I'm losing again

I can see her looking fast in her faded jeans
She's a hard-loving woman, got me feeling mean

Sometimes I think it's a shame
When I get feeling better, when I'm feeling no pain
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs

Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs
Sometimes I think it's a sin
When I feel like I'm winning, when I'm losing again

There are four two-line verses and five choruses with tiny variants in them – in effect there are three choruses, but even then the variations are very small.

So when we compare this beautiful, elegant piece with Dylan’s master works the contrasts could not be different. Dylan, the songwriter who uses words to create a complexity of images and this piece which makes a song that we (or at least I) can never play just once but need to play over and over.

Here the opening tells us all: acoustic guitar, bass and gentle percussion. The only surprise we get is the second line of the chorus with the harmonies. And the music itself is so simple – the verse consists of only three different notes repeated in varying ways and turned into an elegant melody. The percussion is simple, as is the guitar part.

Plus to emphasise this while the bass has an interesting part to play in the introduction now is mostly reduced to playing the fundamental note of each chord.

So what makes this such a remarkable piece of music?

First, simplicity can be elegant, and second the simplicity of the music contrasts with the essence of the lyrics

Sometimes I think it's a sin
When I feel like I'm winning, when I'm losing again

Second the song, in its simplicity incorporates the essence of heartache. Just ignore the chorus for a moment and consider those lyrics

I can see her lying back in her satin dress
In a room where you do what you don't confess

She's been looking like a queen in a sailor's dream
And she don't always say what she really means

I can picture every move that a man could make
Getting lost in her loving is your first mistake

I can see her looking fast in her faded jeans
She's a hard-loving woman, got me feeling mean

This is every man’s angst when he finds himself in love with a beautiful sexy woman who has a mind of her own. And the lyrics really are exquisite – just consider

Sometimes I think it's a sin
When I feel like I'm winning, when I'm losing again

It is that contradiction that a man can feel if he falls in love with the adventurousness of a woman, and then worries she is that adventurous when he’s not there.

So yes it is a brilliant and remarkable song. It reached number 1 on the Billboard charts – Gordon Lightfoot’s only number one single. In a 2008 interview, Lightfoot said: “I think my girlfriend was out with her friends one night at a bar while I was at home writing songs. I thought, ‘I wonder what she’s doing with her friends at that bar!’ It’s that kind of a feeling. ‘Where is my true love tonight? What is my true love doing?'”

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NET: The Absolute Highlights: Don’t think twice (2000)

Posted on March 12, 2023 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood, based on the series The Never Ending Tour by Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet).

This version of “Don’t think twice” turned up in 2000 (noted in the review “Back to Bedrock part one”)

The song is obviously a song of leaving, a song that says the relationship is over, but don’t worry about it, we had a good time, and all things come to an end.

Which is unusual for generally leaving songs are either songs of great regret and sadness or rather unpleasant bitterness. One of the two people in the relationship needs to break it up, and more than likely the other doesn’t. And yes I have a special feeling for these songs for it’s something that I have rather too much experience of, with me being the party that is left – which is perhaps why I have always been fascinated by this song. How does one break up a relationship without someone getting hurt?

And there is that contradiction, that he wishes she would do or say something to make him stay, and the fact that she is not doing or saying anything, and that she is just continuing to criticise him or complain about something, or not spend enough time with him or whatever… that is the problem and the heart of the wistfulness of the song.

That wistfulness: that is what Bob captures here more than in other versions. He really wanted it to work but it isn’t working and she won’t change so he’s off without saying goodbye. And that is what this rendition captures utterly and totally. That contradiction of feelings and emotions.

So we have gone through two verses, and it sounds as if we are going to get an instrumental break, but no, it is cut short and in comes “It ain’t no use in calling out…”

The essence here is in the famous lines

I'm a-thinking and a-wonderin' walking down the road
I once loved a woman, a child, I'm told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don't think twice, it's all right

And speaking of wistfulness just listen to that line, “I once loved a woman, a child, I’m told”. Is there a more wistful line within popular music? Probably, but at the moment I can’t think of it.

The issue in the song is, is this a line delivered to the woman he is leaving or it is just ruminating on his past which is why he’s moving on – the past has meant he finds it hard to have relationships?

Obviously, none of us really know, and any hints that are found in the lyrics can be accepted or disregarded on the grounds that Dylan is never that clear anyway.

But why this version?

Because it does something that is obvious when one looks at it and hears it, but it has never been done before in the multiple performances by Bob and by millions of others (at least not as far as I’ve heard).

First, the piece has a jaunty beat, which reflects the positive thoughts of the man walking away – he’s finally done it and left her, and there’s no point in looking and thinking about it. That’s how the song starts, and this version captures that thought perfectly. It’s gentle, because yes even if he didn’t love her he was fond of her.

So he tells her she won’t find him even if she looks with that wonderful “dark side of the road” image – something which I find many people just hear but don’t consider. Being “on the dark side of the road” doesn’t just mean he’s left in the night, it means so much more. He’s hiding from her, he’s doing something illegal, he’s mixing with a bad set… we are not sure what, but there’s something there.

And it is, “I give her my heart but she wanted my soul, But don’t think twice, it’s all right” which in this version is the key to the change of the music. Bob places an emphasis on “she wanted my soul” and the instrumental break continues the musical treatment much as before: he’s creeping out.

Now here I want to divert slightly and point out that this version has two very different instrumental breaks. The first one continues the theme set in the music thus far, and we can just hear the notes from the acoustic guitar reflecting on the situation, but over the two verses of break there is a sense of greater liberation as the guitar almost reflects that the man leaving the woman is speeding up (which is clever given that the music doesn’t do that at all).

Yet we are gentle again for the “long and lonesome road” verse, and we get to that sudden upturn with that sudden, unexpected “get out of my way” line “You could’ve done better but I don’t mind You just kinda wasted my precious time” which changes the whole perspective on the song.

It is a line that deserves a change of music, although keeping the music the same, as normally happens, emphasises the fact that he is creeping out. But with that version of the music he becomes cowardly, just walking away, not liberated from the fact that they are just a couple but not really together. He’s run away but his mind is not free.

But now in this version, that changes.

At first, this is just another instrumental break although with a little bit more of a beat, but listen carefully to the guitar – there is more bounce just before the harmonica comes in. Then suddenly it is quiet – he is creeping out, but there is fun and joyfulness in the harmonica and as he gets further away there’s more fun and expression until the band ups the volume. He’s out on the open road where he wants to be. And that sudden change of pace at the centre – he is swaggering his way along the open road. Yes he really is good about his newfound liberty. It was an experience, it’s over, it’s done, this is better.

In a sense, this musical interpretation is somewhat obvious, but on the other hand I don’t think anyone did this before, and it is one of those musical moments that only becomes obvious after it has been done. It wasn’t something anyone thought of in the previous 37 years of the song’s life – at least not as far as I know.

And there’s one more thing: changing the pace of a tune within the performance is incredibly rare for Dylan. I’m sure there are other instances, but I don’t think there are many. He’s given us a treat here, and I love it.

Other articles in this 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

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I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You part 9: “Yes” is the answer to your question

Posted on March 11, 2023 by TonyAttwood

I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You (2020) part 9

by Jochen Markhorst

IX “Yes” is the answer to your question

I traveled from the mountains to the sea
I hope that the gods go easy with me
I knew you’d say yes, I’m saying it too
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you

“Yes” is the first word of the film, and is spoken off-screen. By an invisible something – even protagonist Bill Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) cannot see the speaker. He can feel him, though: he wakes up in pain, grabs his upper arm, his face contorted with pain. The pain subsides, and Bill goes to the bathroom. There he hears, for the second time, “yes,” heavy, unearthly, somehow distant and yet – close. It is unmistakably a voice, not the wind or anything. Troubled and not understanding, he goes back to bed. He tries to sleep on, but is then startled anew a third time; again that unearthly “Yes”.

During the following day, “the voice” repeatedly revisits Parrish. In the lift. In the office. And the third time, the voice says:

VOICE: ‘Yes’ is the answer to your question.
PARRISH: I didn’t ask any question.
VOICE: I believe you did.

It is Death, who will manifest himself in human form (Brad Pitt) this evening, in Bill’s home library, in Meet Joe Black (1998). And then Bill is also ready to admit that he indeed has been asking the question: “Am I going to die?”

It has to be said, Hollywood tells it more dramatically and definitely more poetically than the format does: Alberto Casella’s 1923 play La morte in vacanza. In the play, Death presents himself to Duke Lambert as a shadow, and likewise takes a long run-up before putting an end to all doubts (“You see, I am… or I was until I crossed your threshold… Death”), a run-up that is similar to the way Death, or The Devil, or other supernatural entities usually present themselves in narratives: lots of cryptic hints and poetic obfuscations before the word finally is out:

“I am… how shall I describe it? A sort of… vagabond of space. Think, if you can, of infinity. That may help. Think of limitless reaches of light, and limitless reaches of darkness. Think of sound that goes whispering on forever. You see, if you are to grasp this you will have to discard your usual formulas. For instance, at one moment I am touching the evening star with my shadow and plucking some mortal on the earth by the sleeve… Do I make myself clear?”

The scriptwriters of Meet Joe Black cannot quite resist that temptation either: “Just think of millenniums multiplied by aeons compounded by infinity, I’ve been around that long, but it’s only recently that your affairs here have piqued my interest,” says Joe Black, just before he reveals himself. And then lets the dismayed host fill it in himself:

PARRISH: You are –?
VOICE: ‘…Yes –‘ (gently) Who am I?
PARRISH: …Death. You’re Death?
VOICE: Yes.

The plot is broadly, obviously, the same: for once, Death wants to experience what it is like to be alive, and gives himself, and his host, a few days to learn about life, emotions, being human. After those days, the party is over – then both Death and his host will have to say “yes”. It is time. The river has arrived at its endpoint.

It is like, for instance, “twilight” in “Not Dark Yet”, or “threshold” in “One Too Many Mornings” and “Standing In The Doorway” an image of imperishable, classic beauty and elegance: the way of the river, the way from the mountains to the sea. Usually a life road metaphor – from its origin to its endpoint, from birth to death, after all. Something like that in Johnny Hallyday’s überpathetic, but still poetic, “Poème sur la 7ème” from 1970, the chanson in which he recites a life path poem over the Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th – looking back on his life, starting at the sea, following the river back to the mountains.

As in songs like “Sweet Memories”, “Year Of The Cat” and U2’s “One Tree Hill”; song lyrics using “like a river”, “from the mountains to the sea” and variants thereof as a life path metaphor we can find in every corner of the record shop. Or else as “anywhere”, as in Waylon Jennings’ chauvinistic hit “America” and in Dylan’s own “Boots Of Spanish Leather” (Either from the mountains of Madrid / Or from the coast of Barcelona). A third function of metaphor is even more philosophical. Hermann Hesse’s Siddharta demonstrates the other, but no less gripping quality;

“The river is everywhere at once, at its source and at its mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and only the present exists for it, and not the shadow of the future.”

… that time does not really exist, that is – another concept Dylan is receptive to. Especially here on Rough And Rowdy Ways: “Everything’s flowing all at the same time” says the narrator right away in the opening song “I Contain Multitudes”, after which denial of linear time remains a motif on the rest of the album.

Still, here in this “I’ve Made Up My Mind” the songwriter chugs closer to “Not Dark Yet” than to “I Contain Multitudes”, closer to I followed the river and got to the sea than to Today and tomorrow and yesterday too. And, moreover, closer to the great, mercurial songs of the Sixties, songs like “Desolation Row”, “Tombstone Blues” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”; songs in which the last verse tilts the previous ones.

It does seem to be Joe Black now, Death, at this point. After that classic life metaphor by which the narrator articulates that he has now gone all the way, from the source to the mouth, from birth to the end, he utters the wish I hope the gods go easy with me. In doing so, the poet does force the setting to the gates of heaven. Hank Williams’ “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me” (1950), Cole Porter’s Great American Songbook standard “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” (1944), Jim Reeves’ “The Gods Were Angry With Me”: in the songs in Dylan’s inner jukebox in which “gods” are introduced, the narrator stands at heaven’s gate, the gods have taken away a loved one, the narrator ascends the golden stairs with his beloved… a life is, in short, brought to an end.

And apart from those deadly gods, the musician Dylan also takes to heart Cole Porter’s soundtrack directions:

There's no love song finer
But how strange the change
From major to minor
Ev'ry time we say goodbye

… the excerpt where Porter does indeed have the key shifted neatly from major to minor. Dylan paid attention; at the bridge, on I’m giving myself to you, I am and on Take me on travelling, you’re a travelling man, the band, after the major of the verses, switches briefly to minor.

Fitting, following the newly acquired insight that we may understand the you from “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” as the vagabond of space who has been around millennia multiplied by aeons compounded by infinity, as the travelling man who was already there at the first fall of snow, who is a nothing here or there, a nothing near or far, who will lay down beside you when everyone’s gone, and to whom the narrator will now give himself.

And who is the answer “yes” to the question.

To be continued. Next up I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You part 10: A Neapolitan mandolin and a half-hidden marimba

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:

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Other People’s Songs No. 51: Melancholy Mood

Posted on March 10, 2023 by TonyAttwood

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: The song is best known from its 1939 recording by Harry James and his Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra on vocals.

Tony: It was very common in the music of the first half of the 20th century for there to be an orchestral introduction of a minute of more – as here. My assumption is that what ended the approach was the arrival of rock n roll, where the singer became much more of a personality than was the case before. But that’s just an assumption on my part – all thoughts on what caused that move away from the instrumental introduction are very welcome.

But to be exact there were examples of the change happening before rock music, for there is another 1939 recording which doesn’t use that device. I’m sure you’re right about which came first Aaron, but it is interesting that there were two very different versions released in the same year. So around 85 years ago there were “cover versions” just as now.

Aaron: Bob’s version appears on his 2016 album Fallen Angels. The Big Issue listed the song as #56 on a list of the “80 best Bob Dylan songs – that aren’t the greatest hits”.

Jay Lustig noted that, there is “something to be said for resurrecting a forgotten gem such as ‘Melancholy Mood'”, which he cited as his favorite track on the album.

Indeed it is the 69^th most performed live by Dylan with 248 performances, the most for a cover. More than Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (243), One Too Many Mornings (237) and even Blind Willie McTell (226)

Tony: I think the success of Dylan’s version is that he retains that notion of an instrumental introduction as per the Kenny Baker version above. And most of all Bob doesn’t pretend to be he’s a natural crooner – he just sings it as Bob Dylan. Which in turn allows him to put more emotion into the recording, which singers in earlier eras couldn’t do, simply because it was not done. I’m not always a huge fan of Bob’s reworking of ealier classics, but this one I do enjoy.

Aaron: Here are two recent versions I like a lot. First, Satin Ragdoll & The Misfit Toys

Tony: That is a sublime performance and I do like the fact that we see the four musicians all the way through – I wish more recordings were captured in this way. And a neat idea to give two of the band woolly hats so that their headphones would fit. (Well either that or the studio was too cold for them.) Great performance; excellent video. Thanks for that, Aaron.

Aaron: Hashfinger

Tony: So back to the original concept of a one minute musical introduction, except I rather feel they’ve gone too much into the zone of music as a direct representation of the mood, which quite often seems a bit false to me. And indeed that feeling increases as the piece continues. There is some really good orchestration within this piece, but the crackles and sound effects seem to dominate. Not really right for me – especially when I’ve got the Dylan version and the Satin Ragdoll & The Misfit Toys approach.

Hashfinger to me is one of those pieces of music which comes about because someone has said, “hey why don’t we….” and everyone nods and they do it, and no one comes back and says, “did that really work?”

Previously in this series…

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The Tarantula Files continued: Nadine and The Censor

Posted on March 9, 2023 by TonyAttwood

Links to the previous articles in this series are provided at the end.

By Larry Fyffe

Nadine

& Nadine who comes running
& says 'Where's Gus?'
& she's salty about the bread he's 
been making off her worms ...
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

The oblique and slangy diction above suggests the Blakean negative aspects of sexual activity along with the negative Freudian and Christian depictions of sex observed in Salvador Dali’s surrealistic paintings.

Influenced be the word-images created by the author of “Tarantula”:

O Rose though art sick
The invisible worm ...
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy
(William Blake: The Sick Rose)

Discarded, however, by Dylan, be the ‘ little stick’ of Saint Dada Dali that’s bends towards general franco’s fascism.

Only some of the Spaniard’s bodily images that walk on the vile side of the street are replicated in words of the American singer/writer/musician, and then apparently only for humorous or shock value.

Listen and be silent ~ known Salvador Dali is by the anagram “Avida Dollars”.

Below, Dali’s political bent pun-ish-ing-ly blasted away with words:

No quiero tu sabiduria
(I don't want your wisdom)
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

For the most part, Bobby, the spider-writer, wraps Spanish letters around the pretty bodies of his female inspirations ~ letters that in English read “I want you”; and

“I love your eyes”:

Te quiero ....
Quiero tus ojos
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

In the song lyrics beneath, Nadine represents the flexible spirit that guides Chuck Berry’s rocknroll style that contrasts with the more rigid rhythmical style of, say for example, Bo Diddley:

Ah, Nadine, baby, is that you
Seems like every time I catch up with you
You got something else to do
(Bob Dylan: Nadine ~ Chuck Berry)

https://youtu.be/rVXlyjk4Lwo

Nadine, a Muse of Music whose heir springs from the depth of the ‘blues’:

The Censor

The minibook “Tarantula” at first sight appears to be nothing but a mixed-up mess of confusion, a Surealistic dream sequence put down on paper:

But no, it’s a tangled-up narrative “organized” in a word-playful fashion based on matters, real and fancied, of which the author is aware.

Post-Modernistic, the book might be described.

Filled with word associations:

(H)e's a congressional one
& carries the snapshots
& his name is Tapanga Red
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Referenced obliquely is a real Chicago bluesman who’s known for his recording of the song lyrics beneath.

Rendered by Bob Dylan as well:

When things go wrong
Go wrong with you
It hurts me too
(Tampa Red: It Hurts Me Too ~ Hudson/Whittaker)

Below, an actual TV host mixed in with a real painter from days gone by – Hieronymus Borch – and seemingly offered up as a ‘zonk’ on the comical “Let’s Make A Deal” TV show:

(D)own these narrow alleys of owls and flamenco guitar players
jack paar an other sex symbols are your prize
- check into bathrooms where bird lives
for when be comes flying out with a saber in his wing
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

The times, they are a-changing.

Not for his being more homophobic than John Wayne, Jack Paar’s mad as hell for being censored by network executives when he tells an innocuous joke about the initials ‘WC’ (water closet) getting mistaken by foreigners as a reference to a ‘Chapel’.

A bit later, singer/writer/musician Bob Dylan walks away from the the Ed Sullivan Show because he’s told by the powers-that-be not to perform a certain song that makes fun of an extremist right-wing political organization.

Seems Soviet ‘Commies’ are here, there, and everywhere in America; they’re even escaping down people’s toilet bowls:

Well, I finally started thinking straight
When I ran out of things to investigate
Couldn't imagine nothing else
So I'm home investigating myself
(Bob Dylan: Talking John Birch Blues)

To make matters worse, there’s really no place for a poor Lacky to turn ~ if the political right-leaning, sword-swinging word-censors don’t get you, then the left ones will:

(B)oth swords above the door fall down
- one sticks in the floor
- the other slices him in half
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Turns out it’s these hypocritical blacklisters are here, there, and everywhere too:

The censor in the twelve wheel drive semi
stopping in for donuts
& pinching the waitress
he likes his women raw and with syrup
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

However, Dylan’s ink-splattered tarantulas are seldom as mean-spirited as those released by Lucien Ducasse:

"(Z)ippers of truth!" says Chang Chung
 "there is no truth!"
(Bob Dylan: Tarantula)

Could be there are no snippets of truth outside those locked gates that are guarded by the flaming sword of the Lord:

At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside 
The Gates of Eden
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

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A Dylan Cover a Day: Queen Jane Approximately

Posted on March 9, 2023 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

The question is always: why is this artist or this band covering this particular Dylan song? And sadly the answer is too often “because it is a Dylan song and people like Dylan songs”. What that then often means is either “do it pretty much as Dylan did” or “take the song and make it sound like one of ours”.

The problem is that the former will obviously add nothing to the song, and the latter is often just a case of wedging a valuable piece of art into the wrong frame.

For me, a decent cover version of a song will always add something more to the song and our understanding of what it offers and so with Queen Jane (which has had a surprisingly large number of cover versions) I’ve looked, as ever, for the successfully different. But it has been a bit of a struggle.

And of course Jochen has got in before me, nominating his favourite as the version Jimmy LaFave. I’ll leave you to read Jochen’s exposition and listen to his choice, because I can’t add anything to it, and besides, I think I’ve found a few other covers that are at the very least, worthy of a mention. Although by the end, whether they go much beyond that “worth a mention” group I’m not too sure.

Surprisingly delicate is the Grateful Dead version, which I so like from its careful introduction followed by a gentle build up. Although there is one issue that this version makes me aware of from the start – how does one (as a performer) cope with that repeated “Won’t you come and see me” line. Are we just going to get it twice, or can something else be done with it? I mean it is not the most profound Dylan line ever, and the music is always the same, and well, we’ve heard it before, so… what’s new?

But that’s everyone’s problem – what this version particularly gives us is a super instrumental verse which most certainly is worthy of a listen.

Punk is not my favourite type of music – somehow for me it is almost anti-music, as all the delicacy is removed and replaced by that pounding inevitable beat. What’s interesting is that the song is about asking the lady to come back when her grand adventure is over because he will still be there, still thinking of her, still patiently waiting. But here one verse becomes just like another…. except for the instrumental verse which I really do rather like. But delicacy? No, it’s punk.

And so to a total contrast, Muscle & Bone: a way of playing with the melody and finding the delicate harmonies which are appropriate to the lyrics. And that harmony over the chorus line suddenly gives it a reason for that line to be there twice, after each verse.

There’s also a superb harmonica part added for the instrumental voice, which is Dylanesque, but not quite – a sort of haunting reminder to us of where this song came from. And its return at the end offers a perfect haunting conclusion.

But of course a new version of a song does not have to be different, it can just be beautiful – and if one has a beautiful voice then why not. Emma Swift has it all, and so can just deliver the lyrics while doing very little to change the song. It simply is there, that’s it. There is nothing else one needs to do but perform with gentle feeling. And this version, yes, I could listen to over and again.

I am going to finish with something I would never have thought of doing: an instrumental version of the song. And I wouldn’t have even imagined it as possible, because there is not enough variation in the music to make me think this could work.

So does this work out? Actually I am not sure, for the simple reason that the essence of the song is the lyrics and melody, and taking the lyrics out, leaves us with something that charming, but for me not much more than that.

In the end it just stops, which I guess is what I have to do with a conclusion that in the end, despite all these valiant efforts, once a beautiful voice has tackled the song, there is not that much more anyone can do.

The Dylan Cover a Day series

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I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You (2020) part 8: There’s beauty in the silver, singin’ river

Posted on March 8, 2023 by TonyAttwood

Previously in this series…

by Jochen Markhorst

VIII There’s beauty in the silver, singin’ river

Well my heart’s like a river, a river that sings
Just takes me a while to realize things
I’ll see you at sunrise, I’ll see you at dawn
I’ll lay down beside you when everyone’s gone

“That’s just my hang up, you know, trains,” Dylan says in 1991, in the radio interview with Eliot Mintz. It is true, but “rivers” might have been a better candidate. At that point in his career, Dylan has had some 50 trains rumble by, both metaphorically (Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory, “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, 1971), symbolically (There’s a slow, slow train comin’, “Slow Train”, 1979) and literally (While riding on a train goin’ west, “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, 1963). But even more than trains, Dylan sings of rivers. Rivers that his protagonists have to cross, that freeze over, along which people walk, from which stones are taken, where rendezvous takes place, rivers that mirror and in which people stare. Almost ninety by now; on Rough And Rowdy Ways alone six rivers flow.

This particular river, the river from this most lyrical verse of “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”, we’ve seen before. It is unmistakably the river from one of Dylan’s most beautiful love songs:

There’s beauty in the silver, singin’ river
There’s beauty in the sunrise in the sky
But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty
That I remember in my true love’s eyes
Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin’
Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin’
Only if she was lyin’ by me
Then I’d lie in my bed once again

… a singin’ river, sunrise, the desire to lay down beside you… yep, this is the narrator from “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”. A song that holds a special place in Dylan’s heart, of course, as we have known since the Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner in 1969;

JW: Are there any particular artists that you like to see do your songs?
BD: Yeah, Elvis Presley. I liked Elvis Presley… Elvis Presley recorded a song of mine. That’s the one recording I treasure the most… It was called Tomorrow Is A Long Time. I wrote it but never recorded it.
JW: Which album is that on?
BD: Kismet.
JW: I’m not familiar with it at all.
BD: He did it with just guitar.

Well documented the confession is not. Dylan reveals that Elvis’ cover of his song can be found on the album Kismet. That LP does not exist. The song “Kismet” does exist, and can be found on Harum Scarum (1965), but “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” is on the LP Spinout (1966) – and he did it with just guitar isn’t right either; apart from two guitars, we hear Bob Moore on double bass and a lazy tambourine. Dylan wrote the song in 1963, by the way – Just takes me a while to realise things.

Anyway, back to my heart’s like a river, a river that sings from the penultimate verse of “I’ve Made Up My Mind “. Although Dylan will have been aware, though perhaps only on a second listen, of the identical setting and word choice as in “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”, it will not have been chosen as a deliberate reference. It is more likely that an artist like Dylan is naturally, associatively, led here. After all, he is writing a barcarolle, a song with the same cadence and melody as the most famous gondola song in music history (granted, gondoliers prefer to sing “O Sole Mio”, but that is not a barcarolle). Dylan is no doubt familiar with the setting of Offenbach’s barcarolle “Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour” from Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881): the arrival of Giulietta and Nicklausse in Venice by gondola over the Grand Canal… the step to a verse fragment like a river that sings should come to mind quite automatically.

We can also see this in the figures of style. The image of a river, of the eternal rippling of waves coming and going, pushes the poet’s pen naturally towards repetitio. The repetitions in line 1, My heart’s like a river, a river that sings, and in line 3, I’ll see you at sunrise, I’ll see you at dawn, which sound out the monotonous rippling, the poet Dylan can hardly resist. We’ve heard it in “When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky”; in the long lyric, Dylan reaches for repetitio only twice – once when tears flow, and the other time after I can hear your trembling heart beat like a river. In “Dignity”, I’m on the rollin’ river is preceded by the repetitio Got no place to fade, got no coat and in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”, too, there is only one repetition: I’m going down the river / Down to New Orleans.

And well, actually all great songwriters do succumb to the lure of “repetitio” as soon as they let a river flow through their song. Like Joni Mitchell in the Queen of all river songs, “River” (1971);

Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I made my baby say goodbye

John Fogerty (rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling on the river, “Proud Mary”), “Take Me To The River”, “Orinoco Flow”, “Ballad Of Easy Rider”, “Ol’ Man River”… repetitio is apparently inevitable as soon as the song poet sees the bank. Even the most beautiful river song of the 20th century demonstrates this mechanism:

Going to see the river man
Going to tell him all I can
About the plan
For lilac time

… Nick Drake’s “River Man” (1969). In which, as in Dylan’s song, the river is evoked in a perfect symbiosis of lyrics and music.

Incidentally, the figure of speech does not only impose itself on the song poet Dylan. We also see it with the essayist Dylan, in The Philosophy of Modern Song. “On the grand river, the big river, river of tears,” he writes there, for instance, in Chapter 24 (Nelly was a lady), or with the automatic writer Dylan; “my mind is running down the river – i’d sell my soul to the elephant – i’d cheat the sphinx – i’d lie to the conqueror” (Tarantula, p. 109).

Which river seems to be no question with Dylan, thus revealing which river must be on his mind in “I’ve Made Up My Mind ” as well: “Any time you mention a river in America you are thinking about the Mississippi. A beautiful, wide-flowing body of water that rolls down the middle of America. And everything that that conjures up.” But when our English friends Nick Drake or The Clash sing about a river, the essayist graciously allows us to see the Thames. No matter; the poetic power is identical:

“The guy is still living by the river, which gives him some type of hope, and a way to escape from any difficulty.”

From Chapter 33, London Calling. About the song in which Joe Strummer reaches for repetitio only one single time: “And I… I live by the river!”

To be continued. Next up I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You part 9: “Yes” is the answer to your question

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:

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Bob Dylan’s favourite songs: He Went to Paris

Posted on March 7, 2023 by TonyAttwood

There is an index of other articles from this series at the end of the article.

By Tony Attwood

I started this series with the Sam Stone song (“Death of an Unpopular Poet“) and if you want it, there is a little about Sam Stone in that article. Now I come to the second Sam Stone song on the list of Dylan’s favourite songs.

The accompaniment is simple and delicate, the melody is beautiful, the lyrics evocative in every line and the story is heart-breaking. I might wish for a different between-verses accompaniment on 1 minute 30 seconds, but then I’ve never been a fan of slide guitars, and besides I have no idea at all how I could possibly have introduced the following verse. For at that point the entire song takes a course that you know it must take, if you know the work of Jimmy Buffett.

Like all Buffet songs, this one speaks for itself and his delivery is so clear and calm it is of course easy to follow it line by line. But I’ll put the whole set of lyrics at the end just in case that is helpful…

My problem with this song is a totally personal one. I can recognise brilliant writing and a wonderful musical performance when I hear it, but I don’t like songs of tragedy, and I’m unhappy with the notion (obviously true, but that doesn’t stop me being unhappy about it) that a lot of our lives are controlled by pure chance. The good guys can be hurt; the bad guys can often come out on top; shit happens.

I only know of one cover of the song, and in a way that is not surprising, for the problem with doing a cover of a song like this is that the lyrics have such a clear meaning that nothing can be re-interpreted by developing a new accompaniment, changing the speed or otherwise exploring unseen elements within the song.

Thus in a very real way the song is the antithesis of Dylan songs; there is no chance of ambiguity. Life is what it is, and there is nothing you can do about it. And I suppose that is the message I don’t like.

But of course, as an artistic expression, the song is magnificent.

He went to Paris
Looking for answers
To questions that bothered him so

He was impressive,
Young and aggressive,
Saving the world on his own
Warm summer breezes
And french wines and cheeses
Put his ambitions at bay

Summers and winters
Scattered like splinters
And four or five years slipped away

He went to England
Played the piano
And married an actress named Kim
They had a fine life
She was a good wife
And bore him a young son named Jim

And all of the answers
To all of the questions
Locked in his attic one day
He liked the quiet
Clean country living
And twenty more years slipped away

Well, the war took his baby
Bombs killed his lady
And left him with only one eye
His body was battered
His whole world was shattered
And all he could do was just cry

While the tears were a' fallin'
He was recallin'
The answers he never found
So he hopped on a freighter
Skidded the ocean
And left England without a sound

Now he lives in the islands
Fishes the pylons
And drinks his green label each day
He's writing his memoirs
And losing his hearing
But he don't care what most people say

"Through eighty six years
Of perpetual motion, "
If he likes you, he'll smile and he'll say,
"Some of it's magic,
And some of it's tragic,
But I had a good life all the way"

He went to Paris
Looking for answers
To questions that bothered him so

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How most analyses of Dylan’s songs mistake the essence of what the songs are

A Dylan cover a day: Quit your lowdown ways, backwards in time

Nashville Skyline Rag (1969) part 1: “Do what you want to do”

NET: The absolute highlights: Silvio (1998)

The Tarantula Tales: Oedipus and Agnes

Other people’s songs: The Boxer and Big Yellow Taxi

I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You, part 11 (final): Things aren’t what they were

Dylans favourite songs: Warren Zevon: ‘Lawyers, Guns, and Money’

NET 2011 Part 4 – Forgetful Hearts and the Crystal Cat Blues

A Dylan Cover a Day: the Quinn the Eskimo as it should be performed.

I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You (2020) part 10

Claudette and Peoria: The Tarantula Files (continued)

Bob Dylan’s favourite songs: Sundown (Gordon Lightfoot)

NET: The Absolute Highlights: Don’t think twice (2000)

I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You part 9: “Yes” is the answer to your question

Other People’s Songs No. 51: Melancholy Mood

The Tarantula Files continued: Nadine and The Censor

A Dylan Cover a Day: Queen Jane Approximately

I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You (2020) part 8: There’s beauty in the silver, singin’ river

Bob Dylan’s favourite songs: He Went to Paris

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“Lightfoot wrote the No. 1 1974 hit “Sundown” about his tumultuous, extramarital and occasionally violent relationship with Smith.”

Maybe, maybe not, but either way it is a stunning and remarkable composition.

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