Untold Dylan

The Never Ending Tour 2010: part 1 – Centre Stage: A change comin’ on

Posted on December 5, 2022 by TonyAttwood

The Never Ending Tour – over 100 reviews, over 1000 recordings. The Index

NET 2010 part 1 – in which Mr Guitar Man makes a startling comeback.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

How you view 2010 depends very much on the narrative you construct around the NET. For Andrew Muir, author of One More Night, and others who share his narrative, the NET fell into a black hole from 2005 – 2009, and 2010 was the year of Dylan’s emergence. He entitles this chapter ‘2010 – 2011: In which your author is mysteriously saved.’ He begins by saying that guitarist Charlie Sexton’s rejoining of the band (which he left in 2002) ‘was the first step in a rejuvenation and transformation of my NET experience.’

Reading between the lines, what Muir really means is that Dylan underwent the rejuvenation and transformation, just as in his previous chapter “2005 – 2009: In which your author becomes lost” he really meant that Dylan became lost. He suggests that during these years Dylan fell into doing zombie concerts and lost his musical and moral bearings, cynically wrecking his old songs mostly by means of that ridiculous rinky-dink organ, known as the IOT (instrument of torture), turning up just for the sake of the paycheck.

There was a feeling around Dylan circles at the time that he should put his suitcase down before he lost his voice completely and trashed the NET, that he had become a parody of himself and had been on the job too long.

If you have been following this series you will know that I don’t buy into this narrative. Having listened to hundreds of concert recordings I simply don’t find it credible. During these so-called ‘lost years’ we find Dylan hard at work doing what he has always done, reconfiguring and reimagining his songs, adapting them to his changing voice, ‘making old things new again’ with the same passion and commitment he’s always had. Not only that, but by 2009 we discovered that he was pushing his evolving arrangements towards an ‘uncovering’ of the foundations of his songs, musical foundations that reached deep into the first half of the 20^th Century. Rather than imitate himself, he stripped back these songs to their most basic, unadorned selves, often using a churchy, circus like organ and his circus barker voice to do it.

Oh, I had my problems with the ‘dumpty-dum’ as I called it, and didn’t always like these old/new arrangements, not all of which seemed to me to work, but I had no doubt that there was a method in Dylan’s madness. And, looking back over these years, you can find some astonishing performances.

What first struck me about 2010 is its continuity with 2009. I’m not sure I could do a blindfold test and distinguish some of these 2010 performances from 2008/9, not unless I listened for Sexton’s felicitous guitar licks. The same project, to strip these songs to their foundations, is at work, the same prominence of the harmonica, the same circus barker vocal delivery, the same vamping organ.

And yet, changes are talking place. We begin to move away from the dumpty-dum into arrangements more trenchant and gutsy, more bluesy in fact. And he begins to play the guitar more often, two or three songs per show. I can only speculate that Dylan recognized that his audiences were missing their guitar-playing troubadour. What this means for the theory that Dylan stopped playing the guitar because of arthritis I’m not too sure. Perhaps he just wanted to give his audiences a break from the IOT.

Vocally, he begins to break into falsetto more often, especially on the word ‘you,’ giving these performances the manic, almost demented edge he will carry through into 2011 and 2012.

I want to dedicate this post to those centre-stage performances in which Dylan came out from behind his IOT to front up with either his harp or, more often, his guitar.

The harp features on this performance of ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ from Osaka, 16^th March. Talk about trenchant and gutsy! Warning: best-ever performance coming up. Long gone are the queasy, psychedelic arrangements of the 1960’s, epitomized by Julie Driscoll’s marvellously wild rendition set to Brian Auger’s swirling organ…

In its place you find this stripped down, edgy, desperate performance which brings the mystery of the lyrics into sharp, bitter relief. We don’t know what ‘favours’ the singer has done for the person addressed, but it’s something that has to be hidden from us. There’s a druggy feel here. Things hidden, things forbidden. ‘You know that we shall meet again’ becomes more of a threat than a promise. Dylan’s harp work turns this performance into a tour-de-force.

This Wheel’s On Fire

The first leg of the tour, Japan and Korea, has gone down in NET history for its five-night run in Osaka and seven-night run in Tokyo. (For a review of Osaka see here.)

This centre stage performance of ‘Every Grain Of Sand’ is another best-ever performance in my books and comes from a two-night run in Nagoya (19^th March). I’ve written about this performance in my Master Harpist series (see Master Harpist 4). There I describe it as one of Dylan’s greatest vocal/harmonica duets ever. We go beyond the idea of a harp ‘break’ or solo to what becomes, after the first verse, a duet for voice and harp, with the harp ‘talking’ back to the voice. Long gone is the sweeping, lush album version (Shot of Love, 1981) and we are back with trenchant and gutsy, a performance that brings us to the dividing line between doubt and faith. I would love to have been there.

Every Grain of Sand

Dylan’s superlative harp work is again featured on another centre stage performance, the moody ‘Forgetful Heart’ from Together Through Life, an ode to the bitterness of memory – was love ever even on the cards? Co-written with Robert Hunter, this song became one of the stand-out songs performed over 2009 – 2012. Driven by nostalgia and doubt, it’s a great dramatic monologue. In my imagination I see a man walking the streets in the early hours, lonely and despairing, interrogating his heart, his ever-forgetful heart.

Again, I’m not sure I could distinguish this performance from Billings (11^th August), from similar 2009 performances.

Forgetful Heart

Dylan divided his centre-stage performances between the guitar and the harp. Always good for a change in mood from the edgy and desperate, ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ remained a concert favourite, usually early in the show, and an opportunity to front up with guitar. This performance from Lintz, Austria (12^th June), number 3 on the setlist, beautifully captures the careless mood of the original, fast tempo and upbeat. Very tasteful. I’ve heard better vocal performances, but few as exuberant.

I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight (A)

Lovers of this song might appreciate this version from Pardova, Italy (15^th June) where it was number 4 on the setlist. It’s pretty much the same as Lintz, maybe the recording’s a bit clearer and sharper. This probably has the edge on the Lintz.

I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight (B)

At Lintz, Dylan stayed onstage to do a guitar-driven, acoustic ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ his great NET standby. His audience would have been happy to see their old Bob, still tangled up in everything, picking away as if their Mr Guitar Man had never abandoned them for the IOT.

Tangled Up in Blue

Number 3 on the Pardova setlist was his 1960s classic ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.’ Just seeing Dylan centre stage with guitar had its own nostalgia value. Dylan had gone through many arrangements of this song, not all of them successful, but this upbeat performance, with a bit of swing to it, is as good as any we’ve heard in recent years. You can dance to it. It may not have the emotional intensity and drama of some of the great performances of the song (go back to 1995 and check out the Prague performance) but Dylan’s vocal is pleasingly suggestive.

It’s All Over Now Baby Blue

In Palma, Italy, 18^th June, Dylan did four songs on the guitar, scattered across the setlist. While most of these centre stage performances are early songs from the acoustic era, here’s a rare performance of ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothing’ (another from Together Through Life) featuring Dylan on guitar. I still prefer the rowdier harp and trumpet performance from 2009, but appreciate the clean sound on this one.

Beyond Here Lies Nothing

Talking about nostalgia for the early, acoustic Dylan, at Palma we find ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ at number 2 on the setlist. As with its sister song ‘It’s All Over Now,’ Dylan plays this upbeat with a hint of swing. With this arrangement, the song loses something of its acerbity and the passion of renunciation, but it works pretty well as a foot-tapper too.

It Ain’t Me Babe

In Dornbirn, Austria (19^th June), he does something similar with ‘Don’t Think Twice’ at number 2 on the setlist. This is another survivor from his early period, and would last through to 2019. I’m glad. There’s nothing quite so bitter-sweet as this little gem, a reflection on a relationship that didn’t quite make it. In the moment of the song, it’s the ‘dark side of the road’ that claims him. A hushed, acoustic, undramatic performance. It’s him, babe!

Don’t Think Twice

At Dornbirn, Dylan follows ‘Don’t Think Twice’ by picking up his electric guitar for a rare version of ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.’ We’ve grown accustomed to his keyboard and harp driven versions of this song, so this one comes as a refreshing change, although, again, it’s not as intense or desperate as some performances.

Tom Thumb’s Blues

In Kansas City (7^th August) Dylan again picks up the electric guitar for a punchy performance of ‘My Wife’s Home Town’ from Together Through Life. Another ‘slight’ song from the Dylan/Hunter team, but it swings along like an old big-band number from the 1940s. This bluesy version is my favourite. Just the bare, minimal guitar suits the song admirably.

My Wife’s Home Town

Unexpectedly, Dylan plays the electric guitar again on ‘Tweedle Dum & Tweedle Dee’ putting a new slant on this Love and Theft song. Lyrically and musically it’s a busy number, and Dylan has never varied the arrangements much.

Tweedle Dum & Tweedle Dee

I’ve saved the best till last. First, this brooding, dark performance of ‘Can’t Wait’ from Lintz ranks as my best over, and you won’t hear me say different until we get to 2019, when we’ll meet another best ever. The Lintz performance has all the intensity of a tiger pacing in its cage. For brooding intensity this performance is unmatched. There are occasional, brief interjections from the harp, but it’s all in the vocal (Dylan’s not playing guitar). This is one to be savoured, folks.

Can’t Wait

Finally, also from Lintz, yet another best ever (again until 2019), ‘It’s Not Dark Yet.’ Spoiler: an outstanding harp solo, hard and insistent. Amazing what Dylan can do with just a few notes. As I’ve suggested before, this song grows more convincing as the years pass and Dylan, now on the verge of 70 years old, takes us deep into his mortality.

It’s not dark yet

Songs covered in this post give us the flavour of how Dylan sounded away from the organ. Next post we’ll look at some more outstanding songs from 2010. Until then,

Kia Ora

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Western Road (1969) part 2 (final): Ridin’ in a buggy, Miss Mary Anne

Posted on December 4, 2022 by TonyAttwood

Western Road 1: They wanted to record everything in case Dylan said something profound

by Jochen Markhorst

II Ridin’ in a buggy, Miss Mary Anne

Peggy Seeger has many merits, obviously, and deserves to be knighted for her own contributions to music history as well, but surely her main claim to fame is and remains that she inspired Ewan MacColl to write “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”. Which is perhaps somewhat ironic, given her decades-long fight for women’s rights and her feminist fire, but presumably she herself would be at peace with that feat; Peggy, above all, has an unshakeable respect for songs. And “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is, after all, an indestructible song from the stratosphere. Heck, she even named her own autobiography after the song. And she loved Ewan MacColl, let’s not forget that.

Her love for Dylan seems to run a little less deep. The story that both Joan Baez and Bob Dylan stalked her for an autograph in 1961 is amusing though not very watertight, and by now belongs to folklore. As is the story that both MacColl and Peggy, who may indeed both be labelled folksnobs, would have felt and expressed disdain for Dylan. In Howard Sounes’ Down The Highway (2001), she recalls Dylan’s visit in December ’62 to the club MacColl and she ran in London, The Singers Club in Holborn;

“He seemed lost without a microphone, as plenty of U.S.A. performers did in our nonwired clubs. Ewan and I were rather standoffish at that time and perhaps we were not welcoming enough.”

Twenty years later, in the magazine Uncut on the occasion of Dylan’s 80th birthday, she tries to nuance her unwelcoming attitude slightly, but is not too successful at that:

“Not long after, he came to the UK and performed at the Singers Club. But nobody could hear him because we didn’t have microphones and his voice wasn’t loud enough. Some people have since said that he was given the cold shoulder, but I don’t think that’s true. It was just that at that time we were singing pretty much folk songs or highly political songs in our club. Bob Dylan’s songs fell halfway in between. It was a new kind of song.”

However, other sources such as the also present Martin Carthy, A.L. Lloyd and Anthea Joseph could apparently hear it just fine and all recall, independently, that Dylan played “Masters Of War”, “Blowin’ In The Wind” and presumably an early version of “Ballad Of Hollis Brown”. It does look a bit as if Peggy, as the daughter of musicologist Charles and composer Ruth, sister of Mike Seeger and half-sister of Pete Seeger, and partner of Ewan MacColl, sixty years on still is having some trouble admitting that she at the time did not recognise the extraordinary, earth-shattering power of three of Dylan’s all-time greatest songs while she was standing next to them. Like in her autobiography First Time Ever (2017), where she makes no mention of the not insignificant music-historical fact of Dylan’s repeated visits to her club and the subsequent creation of songs like “Hard Rain” and “Girl Of The North Country”. Indeed, Dylan is not mentioned at all. Well alright, one time, quite indirectly though, when she recounts with slightly awkward smugness how she manages to get out from under a fine. In a rather implausibly embellished anecdote:

“A handsome young policeman sticks his head in the window and asks if I know how fast I was going. My Maggie could indeed gallop at full tilt. I admit that I only glanced at the speedometer when I saw the blue lights. 95 mph on a 65 mph road. No, officer, I’m a musician and I’m very sorry and I was writing a song in my head and I wasn’t paying attention and his face lights up. I write songs too! What’s your song about? Off we went, commiserating on the difficulties of putting thoughts and emotions into verse and melody. You play folk music? Do you know Bobby Dylan and Joanie Baez? He was impressed that before they were Bobby and Joanie they’d both asked for my autograph, but he zipped back to our songs. He just wanted some tips. He let me off with a warning.”

Yes, the Realm of Fantasy is a very nice place to dwell, filled with Things That Never Happened. Unfortunately, Peggy Seeger’s memoir is larded with this kind of blatantly pumped up reveries.

Anyway, vice versa, there has always been respect and admiration. In interviews and in his autobiography Chronicles, Dylan usually mentions her among names like Bill Monroe and Jean Ritchie, artists he enjoyed listening to. Indeed, songs that are in Peggy’s repertoire in the early 1960s can be heard throughout Dylan’s oeuvre. “The Wagoner’s Lad”, “Pretty Saro”, “Girl Of Constant Sorrow”, “The Death Of Queen Jane”, “Railroad Bill”… and again in this third verse of “Western Road”;

Have you seen, have you seen, have you seen Miss Mary Anne?
Have you seen, have you seen, have you seen Miss Mary Anne?
Well I want to tell you that's one kind of woman, 
                                     who is missing her man

The engine falters, by the sound of it. On the spot, Dylan decides to start the third stanza with “Have you seen…” but then his improvisational skills let him down for a moment. In haste, he fills the bars with a double repeat of have you seen, and then the associations lead him via “Baltimore” from both previous stanzas to “Miss Mary Anne”, which must have been prompted by Peggy Seeger:

Ridin’ in a buggy, Miss Mary Jane, Miss Mary Jane
I’ve got a house in Baltimore, in Baltimore, in Baltimore
I’ve got a house in Baltimore, and it's full of chicken pie

… “Ridin’ In A Buggy”, the old folksong/nursery rhyme that has been in Seeger’s repertoire since the 1950s. The purist Peggy would presumably raise her finger at Dylan’s name change (from “Miss Mary Jane” to “Miss Mary Anne”), but then probably accept Dylan’s obvious excuse – after all, during the 1960s, “Mary Jane” has become an insider’s wink at marijuana. Or actually already no longer an “insider’s wink”, but almost colloquial language; even The Everly Brothers sing it on their under-appreciated 1967 flop The Everly Brothers Sing:

Clouds so sweet, cloud my mind girl
And I don't know, what way I'll go girl
But I don't care no more
I've got my Mary Jane
And I'm secure once more
I've got my Mary Jane

“Mary Jane”, the trippy opening of Side B, and like most songs on the record an admittedly overproduced (it’s 1967, after all), but otherwise fine song. The decision to release it on single, hoping to attract a new, hipper audience is defensible (but sadly failed miserably).

Dylan, incidentally, would quote Peggy’s “Ridin’ In A Buggy” more correctly and respectfully some 30 years later, on Time Out Of Mind, in “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”; I was riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane / Miss Mary-Jane got a house in Baltimore.

Anyway, today, on this late Thursday evening 13 February 1969 in Nashville, it seems more than likely that Dylan’s feverishly meandering brain arrives at “Miss Mary Anne” via Baltimore – although the proximity of Johnny Cash could also be a trigger, of course. And that his “The Blizzard” from Sings The Ballads Of The True West (1965) bubbles up, the tragic countdown song of the traveller who is seven miles, five miles, three miles, one mile away from his beloved Mary Anne, only to be found frozen to death the next morning… He was just a hundred yards from Mary Anne. On the other hand: that’s no “Miss”.

Either way, she is not a keeper. Either a tired Dylan loses concentration, or he regrets the name choice after just one verse, as she has been renamed already in the next, last verse of this improvised trifle:

Look down the street on Friday and found out she was gone
I looked for her on Thursday but she has moved along
Miss Maggie Anne, has anybody seen Miss Maggie Anne?
Well let me tell you that's one woman
One woman who's sure missing her man

The well is starting to dry up. Half-heartedly, Dylan seems to want to quickly improvise a countdown song, or at least a countdown couplet, one of those that count down the weekdays. An easy way out, though often enough it makes for wonderful songs. “Re-Enlistment Blues” by Merle Travis from 1953, for instance, Etta James’s irresistible “Seven Day Fool” (1961), “Stormy Monday” and “Friday On My Mind”. And “I Got Stripes”, of course, by the inevitable Johnny Cash, lovingly stolen from Lead Belly’s upbeat prison song “On A Monday” from ’39.

But Dylan seems to have exhausted his resources. After one line he has already lost count (going from Friday to Thursday), after the second line Mary Anne has changed to Maggie Anne, and after three lines Dylan has lost the storyline: the untraceable Maggie/Mary Anne who has just run off to the dismay of the abandoned narrator, suddenly is the abandoned one herself in the last line: that’s one woman who’s sure missing her man.

Yeah well, who cares. “Western Road” is just an unserious throwaway anyway. But 50 years later it does give Dylanologists a nice, fleeting glimpse into the inner jukebox of a Nobel Prize-winning grandmaster. Which in itself is a merit, still.

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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Mano A Mano

Posted on December 3, 2022 by TonyAttwood

by Larry Fyffe

Some versions of Greek/Roman pre-Trojan War narratives assert that goddess Aphrodite curses Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, to lust after her stepson while Hera, the wife of Zeus, curses Heracules to suffer fits of uncontrollable rage.

Claimed too is that Theseus and Hercules are both partially divine within.

Heracules be a strong fellow indeed:
Distant ships are sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists
While a hurricane was blowing
(Bob Dylan: Jokerman)

Theseus befriends Heracules since the King of Athens realizes that the strongman at times is not knowingly responsible for the deaths he inflicts, and at others times does not intend that death be the result – rather it’s due to his overwhelming strength.

Regardless, Heracules, not the brightest torch on the castle walls, and prone to drunkedness and merriment, tries to make amends for any sorrows that he causes, and attempts to reciprocate any favours received.

All too often, Heracules ends up messing things up.

For example, Apollo asks the Fates to delay the death of the hospitable Admetus should the death-bound appointee find them a substitute; his wife volunteers, and off she goes to the Underworld.

Not aware of the deal, Hercules, having been kindly invited to stay at Admetus’ home, uses his great strength to rescue the wife from the Underworld. Heracules brings her back home to the husband that she’s tried to save from sure death by going to Hades in the first place.

Similar to the following story ~ according to some early Christian authorities, God makes a deal with Satan whereby the Almighty agrees to sacrifice His Son Jesus in order to save humankind from the ordeals suffered by its members as a result of their sinful behaviour.

Supposedly in an intermediate stage between heaven and hell, Jesus travels to the Underworld in order to attempt to resolve issues outstanding between God and the Devil; there He’s to settle matters “mano a mano”, so to speak.

However, on second thoughts, Christ is called back from Hell, and sent to Heaven.

So interpreted by some are the biblical lines below:

He that descended 
Is the same also that ascended
Up far beyond the heavens
That He might fill all things
(Esphesians 4:10)

That is, Jesus leaves Hades before the possible wrestling contest with Satan gets to take place.

The unintended consequences of doing so are unforeseen, but thankfully not so subtly encrypted within the song lyrics quoted beneath.

The Devil’s given a win by default, and humankind keeps right on sinning:

Shake the dust off of your feet
Don't look back
Nothing can hold you down
Nothing that you lack
Temptation's not an easy thing
Adam given the Devil reign
Because he sinned I got no choice
It run in my vein
(Bob Dylan: Pressing On)

Fear lurks in the background ~ the fear that, unlike the match in which the powerful Heracules with little trouble smacks Death down on the canvas, the horned ruler of Hades might just beat demi-human Jesus to a pulp.

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Never Ending tour: The Absolute Highlights. 4: Tangled up in Blue

Posted on December 3, 2022 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood, based on recordings collected and presented by Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet) for the series The Never Ending Tour.

This 1998 recording of Tangled up in Blue is not an easy listen – it is gritty, edgy, unsettling, difficult, and musically with a set of clashes between two guitars which take us light years away from the original.

Indeed in the original album recording I always have the feeling that Bob was reflecting plaintively on the way that he and she had lives that had become tangled together and could not be separated. They are apart, they can’t happily co-exist in the same time and place but they can’t be apart from each other. Hence those exquisite lines at the end – for me the most perfect insightful wonderful exquisite couplet in the whole of the entire history of popular music…

We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view

And it is the contradiction within the unity of feeling the same that makes this piece of music open to so many interpretations, and here I’ve deliberately sought out one of the performances by Bob which emphasises the edginess of that relationship – that “can’t live with you can’t live without you” concept.

So while I could happily play the original recorded version of the song over and over, this version is not selected for its playability nor indeed one might say even for its enjoyment. It is selected for its challenges, and because it reminds me that no matter how well life might be going there is always something that is on the edge. If not, then it is not a full life. I don’t want to be on the edge, but if I don’t have those moments, how am I to value fully those times of utter perfection and happiness?

From the opening chord changes we know what this is all about… we settle back for a much-loved favourite… but Bob’s voice tells us there are extra challenges ahead.

And interestingly, this is clearly a highly rehearsed version, rather than something Bob came up with on spot or during the sound check – and that is interesting, because of the way he manages to get so much angst into his voice. Doing that once or twice takes a bit of thought and practice – doing it night after night in a song that is nine minutes long takes some doing. OK a lot of the nine minutes are instrumentals, but even so…

If there is something that I am not totally taken by it is the acoustic guitar solo – for me it is almost too edgy – the lyrics have all the edge we need. But what I do love is the fact that Bob has overcome his occasional tendency to sing the same notes for each line of the melody. And actually looking back to the performance once again, no – I think Bob has got it right. With what this song talks about there can’t be too much edge. It is all edge.

But as we get to the second instrumental break even the oddness of the two acoustic guitars fighting each other have made the point. And speaking of “point” just listen to Bob’s voice with the “started from a different point of view” line – it is choking with emotion – and by the next instrumental break the sheer chaos of the relationship is being relayed by the bucket load. It is as if those repeated notes and the two guitars are each a perfect symbolic representation of the loving and fighting between these two people – something that is amplified in the prolonged harmonica solo which adds to the co-existing horror show and the desperate love affair.

But above everything it is the ending that envelops me completely and draws me back to this performance. By the penultimate vocal verse Bob is getting fairly desperate, but for the last verse he has got more certainty and power. And more than in any other performance I find myself believing this is a real autobiographical moment.

If I want a Bob “telling it like it is” moment it is this.

Don't know how it all got started
I don't what they do with their lives
But me, I'm still on the road
Heading for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue

It is far from comfortable, and not something I choose to listen to daily or I must confess even monthly, but it is something that challenges, something that takes us to the edge of the cliff, has a look over at the 1000 feet drop, and then…. leaves on just standing there on the edge.

Bob doesn’t jump. She doesn’t jump. I don’t jump. But then neither of us takes a step back. We just stand there.

Looking over the cliff edge.

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Western Road 1: They wanted to record everything in case Dylan said something profound

Posted on December 2, 2022 by TonyAttwood

Western Road (1969) part 1

by Jochen Markhorst

I They wanted to record everything in case Dylan said something profound

Well I'm going to Chicago, going on the Western Road
Yes I'm going to Chicago, going on the Western Road
There are good times in Baltimore
But I've packed this heavy load

It is clearly an improvised cooling down, the trifle “Western Road”, the “outtake” we received as an unexpected gift, just like that, on the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 15 1967-1969: Travelin’ Thru (2019). The song bubbles up at the end of the second recording session for Nashville Skyline, 13 February 1969. From six p.m. to midnight, Dylan, bassist Charlie McCoy and drummer Kenny Buttrey, assisted by Bob Wilson on piano and four alternating guitarists, have been busy putting the final versions of “I Threw It All Away”, “To Be Alone With You” and “One More Night” on tape, plus four attempts to capture the beauty of “Lay, Lady, Lay”, and now we’re pretty much ready to call it a day. But then someone serves up another nightcap.

“Take 1 (Outtake)”, as it is somewhat overly ambitiously catalogued on CD1 of this episode of The Bootleg Series, begins abruptly, when the first bars have already been played. Remarkable, since producer Bob Johnston has a habit of always having a tape running when Dylan is in the studio (to which we also owe the invaluable The Bootleg Series 12 – The Cutting Edge 1965-1966). A quirk confirmed again in 2016 by one directly involved, by Bob Wilson, the pianist of the Nashville Skyline sessions, being interviewed on a panel with Charlie Daniels and Ron Cornelius, among others, on the occasion of the release of Cornelius’ book The Guitar Behind Dylan & Cohen:

“They rolled the tape constantly. And they’d run the tape machine on high speed, 30 ips instead of the usual, you know half of that speed. It’s a higher fidelity, but it also ate the tape up. They had stacks of tape lined up. I mean, they had the engineers moving them tapes in and out… ’cause they ate all that tape up, they recorded everything. All the time the machine was running, which was very, very unusual, very rare – they didn’t do it that way. So, consequently, the red light was on all the time. So what they wanted, what Bob Johnston wanted, if Dylan said something, they wanted to record everything in case Dylan said something profound [audience laughter].”

So those first bars of “Western Road” must also be on a tape somewhere. But for the official release, the first seconds have been cut out; presumably it took a little while before the originator was followed, whoever that might have been. That same pianist, Bob Wilson, would be an educated guess; “Western Road” is musically a copy of Wilson’s “After Hours”, the B-side of his not-very-successful single “Suzy’s Serenade”. It is, of course, only a run-of-the-mill 12-bar blues, so both “Western Road” and “After Hours” are copies of a billion other blues songs, but still – Wilson plays exactly the same runs with his right hand, the key is neighbourly (now C major, after the G major of “After Hours”), the groove is identical, albeit the tempo is slightly slower.

And it sort of ignites Dylan. “Unleashed” would be a somewhat overenthusiastic characterisation, but he does shake, with apparent ease, tolerable lyrics out of his immaculate white shirt sleeve. Very deeply he does not dive into his stream-of-consciousness, though. “Going to Chicago” bubbles up rather smoothly as (presumably) Bob Wilson deploys a Chicago blues. Any research hasn’t been done, evidently; if you take the Western Road from Baltimore, you’re heading northeast – away from Chicago, that is. Unwise, especially if you “packed this heavy load”. As such, it’s a dead end. Dylan sticks to Baltimore and Chicago for another verse, but his head is clearly already very much elsewhere, much further west:

Might take a train I might take a plane
But if I have to walk
I'll be going to Chicago just the same
I'm going to Chicago on the Western Road
There's bad times in Baltimore I can't take this load

Dylan has already sung “I’m going to…” twice, and now no longer resists the words that then inevitably impose themselves on a walking jukebox:

Well I might take a train I might take a plane, 
But if I have to walk I'm going just the same
I'm going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come
They got some crazy lil' women there
And I'm gonna get me one

… the third verse of one of the all-time great rock songs of the 20th century, Leiber and Stoller’s “Kansas City”. A song that apparently continues to bounce around in the creative part of Dylan’s brain through the decades. It is just short of “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)”, the Sinatra song that echoes in at least seven Dylan songs, but “Kansas City” also comes a long way. It is the song from which Dylan lovingly steals in 1965 for “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (they got some hungry women there is a little disguised derivation of Wilbert Harrison’s they got some crazy women there), and in 2001 for “High Water” (He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine is literally copied). He himself plays it once in between, in – of course – Kansas City, when Tom Petty’s band is backing him, 24 July 1986. “Well. That’s the first time I’ve ever played that. Well anyway, we know where we are,” he says contentedly after the final chord. And as a DJ, in the twenty-first century on his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour, he can’t ignore the monument either, in Episode 20, “Musical Maps”:

“Here’s a chart-topping smash by Mr. Wilbert Harrison, recorded for Bobby Robinson in 1959, and features the barbed-wire guitar of Wild Jimmy Spruill. Y’all know this song, and it always sounds good. Wilbert Harrison. Kansas City.”

The song is, in short, unstoppable when an improvising Dylan accidentally sings “I’m going to…” over a spontaneous Chicago blues at the end of a recording day in Nashville.

But soon he will return to Baltimore…

To be continued. Next: Western Road part 2: Ridin’ in a buggy, Miss Mary Anne

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: Do you hear what I hear?

Posted on December 1, 2022 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: ‘tis the season to dust off the Christmas in the Heart album and give it its annual listen. The next few entries in the series will therefore concentrate on this album, don’t worry normal service will be resumed in the new year!

The first song we are going to look at will be Do You Hear What I Hear?

Wikipedia tells us this “is a song written in October 1962, with lyrics by Noël Regney and music by Gloria Shayne. The pair, married at the time, wrote it as a plea for peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Regney had been invited by a record producer to write a Christmas song, but he was hesitant due to the commercialism of Christmas. It has sold tens of millions of copies and has been covered by hundreds of artists.”

Regney said in a 1985 interview in The New York, “I wrote it as a clear and plaintive plea for peace at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, in October 1962.”

The song was originally recorded by the Harry Simeone Chorale, in 1962,

Bing Crosby made the song into a hit when he recorded his version of it on October 21, 1963.

Here is Bob’s version

Now a version from 2016 by American country a cappella group Home Free

Comments from Tony:

As you’ll know if you are a regular reader, Aaron selects the recordings and send the videos and his comments to me. Then I try and add my comments – writing them only for as long as the recording lasts, in order to stop me getting into some sort of deep theoretical musical analysis.

And for the opening two recordings here I was on the verge of hiding under my desk, wondering if I could find a way to say anything positive. I find those opening songs horribly over the top with no redeeming features whatsoever. The song may have been written about the Cuban crisis, but to me it so deeply imbued with sentimentalism that I can’t relate to it.

So my opening thought is that it is interesting that the composer of Masters of War should choose to record it. I don’t mean that as a criticism, but just what it says – it is interesting.

Of course it doesn’t help that I am an atheist who would love to see the separation of church and state in my country (the UK), and on listening to the first two versions of the song that thought dominated.

But I loved Dylan’s version, which I doubt that I have heard more than a couple of times before, simply because I have chosen not to play the songs. It’s the croak in the voice I think that transforms it. And the lead guitar between the verses marks it out.

Yet I still find it hard to appreciate Bob singing “mighty king” without any sense of irony, just as I find the awful modulation by jerking the key up a tone so very, very un-Dylan. That is awfully hackneyed. But ok, overall the recording is interesting.

However, everything was rescued by Home Free. I was helped by the fact this was the last of the versions of the song, and I guess I was used to the lyrics and knew what to expect. But more than that, this version is inventive… just take the way the lead singer holds back on “what I hear” on occasion. This, the rhythm, the harmonies… everything just makes the song beautiful as a piece of music so that I forget that it has become a piece of propaganda.

Of course to Christians, it is the truth rather than propaganda, and I’ve no problem with that at all. My only request is that people like me who do not believe in any religion get the same rights as people who do, in my country. But none of that stops me enjoying this last track, no more than my atheism stops me from enjoying the giving of presents to each other with my children and grandchildren at Christmas.

Put another way: it’s complicated.

Previously in this series…

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Better to Rule in Hell

Posted on November 29, 2022 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

Metonymy, a hallmark of Post Modernism, is a figure of speech whereby a broader matter is represented by an associated part thereof.

Say, for example, when the picture of the King of Diamonds on a playing card stands-in for material wealth, and power.

Diamonds are associated with being rich, and the axe held by the King of Diamonds represents the power that comes with that richness.

What’s more, the monarch is depicted standing on his feet as well as standing on his head.

Karl Marx turns Friedrich Hegel, King of the spiritualistic Romantics, on his head, prophesizing that the material wealth and power held by the few will be turned upside down, and the axe placed into the hands of the members of the larger working class.

From the point of view of the rulers, and their supporters, the liberation of the working class from the woes of economic and religious establishment would be hell, not just for the capitalist rulers but for everybody, including the workers so lovingly cared for by the rulers and by the religious leaders of the status quo.

A heavenly circus run by Satan:

Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell
Mr. Freud with his dreams, Mr. Marx with his axe
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

On the other hand, Friedrich Nietzsche asserts that the powerless have a ‘slave mentality’ engendered by the Christian religion with the promise of happiness in the Afterlife for the workers if they obey their masters.

There’ll be no need for the ruling class to bring the axe down on the workers if they behave themselves.

A hellish circus run by God:

See the rawhide lash rip the skin off their backs
Got the right spirit, you can feel it, you can see it
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

Which side are you on?

The narrator in the song above seeks to balance the scales for the benefit of all mankind, to tread a middle path between the two conflicting views.

The solution ~ sing some songs to soothe the passengers when the ship goes down:

I'm gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell
Like Liberace, like St. John the Apostle
I'll play every number that I can play
I'll see you maybe on judgment day
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

An option is to go and ask Alice ~

I think she can tell you what it means to be or not to be.

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Wanted Man Part 6: There’s one place I’m not wanted

Posted on November 28, 2022 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

VI There’s one place I’m not wanted

Then slowly, extending from his sleeve,
A cold, white, satin hand took mine.
Hey, I like what you do, he said to me.
I like what you do, too, I replied. I nearly died.
Then his hand retracted up his sleeve,
And Bob Dylan turned and took his leave,
Disappearing back into the rain.
                                                                (Nick Cave, The Sick Bag Song, 2015)

Cave’s poetic account of his encounter with Dylan at Glastonbury in 1998 is charming and moving, revealing a sympathetic kinship with Dylan himself: the ability to admire the artistry of colleagues without restraint. A superlative example of this is demonstrated by Cave in September 2013, when he reflects on the death of Johnny Cash, a day earlier, in The Guardian. Already the opening of that personal obituary is touching, thanks to Cave’s superior sense of dosed drama:

“I lost my innocence with Johnny Cash. I used to watch the Johnny Cash Show on television in Wangaratta when I was about 9 or 10 years old. At that stage I had really no idea about rock’n’roll. I watched him and from that point I saw that music could be an evil thing, a beautiful, evil thing.”

Cave talks about how Cash continues to fascinate him, that he covers several Cash songs throughout his career (as far back as his Australian punk days, such as “The Singer”, which he recorded with his band The Bad Seeds), and what a highlight it is when, in 2000, The Man In Black records his old underground hit, the terrifying “The Mercy Seat” from 1988. In a way, that one cover (on volume 3 of Cash’s magisterial American Recordings Series, American III: Solitary Man) definitively elevates Cave to the elite. Which he himself seems to realise, as that one cover comes up in almost every interview in the twenty-first century – where Cave always, with due pride, says something along the lines of “it doesn’t matter what anyone says, Johnny Cash recorded my song”. And in this eulogy in The Guardian, he mentions it again himself:

“He did a version of The Mercy Seat. I got a call from Rick Rubin that Johnny Cash wanted to record it and was that all right? That was pretty exciting. The version is so good. He just claims that song as he does with so many. There’s no one who can touch him. I wrote and recorded that when I was fairly young, but he has a wealth of experience which he can bring. He can sing a line and give that line both heaven and hell.”

The real highlight, however, is yet to come. In 2002, producer Rick Rubin records Cash’s last, and perhaps very best of the American Recordings, American IV: The Man Comes Around, when Cave just happens to be in Los Angeles. Rubin calls him and asks if he might want to record a song with Cash tomorrow. Cave has to depart the next day, but he still has a few hours before his plane leaves and is of course keen. He gets to choose a song himself and he chooses the old Hank Williams classic “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, the song of which Elvis said “I’d like to sing a song that’s probably the saddest song I’ve ever heard” (Aloha From Hawaii, 1973).

He arrived, and this man with such extraordinary generosity, such an immense spirit made me feel so much at ease. I suggested this song, and he said: “Hey yeah, Nick, I know that one. Let’s do it.” And the band started up and we just did it.

The duet is one of the many highlights of that peerless swan song American IV: The Man Comes Around.

Dylan’s and Cash’s public acknowledgement of Cave’s talent and the admiration demonstrated, retroactively elevate the already unique cover of “Wanted Man”. In 1985, a year before Cave records Cash’s “The Singer” (actually: “The Folk Singer”) for the superb cover album Kicking Against the Pricks, he records “Wanted Man” with his Bad Seeds. Remarkably, by then he apparently has status enough to be allowed to change the lyrics; both Cash and Dylan reportedly gave permission.

Cave injects the song, of course, with suspense and drama. To begin with musically. First a hesitant, searching beginning of a lonely piano chord and a wavering guitar lick over which Cave gloomily sighs “I’m a wanted man”, and from 0’17” onwards a crescendo begins with theatrical claps on every beat: it promises to be a classic build-up to a devastating climax. Which just doesn’t come: the song keeps building and building and building… but the denouement just doesn’t come – capturing perfectly the neurotic, never-ending persecution mania of a wanted man.

Lyrically, there’s something going on as well; Cave boldly tinkers with the narrative. In the first three verses, he still remains fairly text proof. The wanted man is wanted in Buffalo and Old Cheyenne, in Albuquerque and Baton Rouge – we recognise the first twelve places from the Cash/Dylan original. Only at the end of the third verse does Cave allow himself a first, insignificant deviation;

Wanted man in Arizona, wanted man in Galveston
Wanted man in El Dorado, this wanted man's in great demand

… three locations coming of his own devising, announcing his first drastic text change:

If you ever catch me sleepin'
Just see the price flashin' 'bove my head
Well take a look again my friend
That's a gun pointed at your head

… the paranoia already suggested by the music is now also expressed more explicitly by the protagonist, compounded by the raw, gasping delivery. Lucy Watson and Nellie Johnson still want him, but now the “Boller Sisters” and “Kid Callahan” also join those bounty hunters, and Cave adds tragedy; I am

A wanted man who's lost his will to live
A wanted man who won't lay down
There's a woman kneelin' on my grave
Pushin' daisies in the ground

… unequivocally adding a deeper layer to the original. The following list of locations where he is wanted are all places with their own historical or discographical connotations: Windy City, Wounded Knee, Death Valley, El Paso, New York City, Laredo and Tupelo, after which the lyrics finally conclude with a tragic, heartbreaking denouement that is not offered by the music:

Wanted man in every cat house, wanted man in a many saloons
Wanted man is a ghost in hundred homes, a shadow in a thousand rooms
Wanted man down in St. Louis, wanted man in New Orleans
Wanted man in Mossel Bay, wanted man in Cripple Creek
Wanted man in Detroit City, wanted man in San Anton'
But there's one place I'm not wanted lord
It's the place that I call home

It is a plot twist with melodramatic overtones, but it brings The Other Man In Black lasting admiration of and acceptance by the two men at the top of Olympus, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

——-

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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A Dylan Cover a Day: Only a Hobo

Posted on November 27, 2022 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

I have written about this song before, and it troubled me then. And it still troubles me now. It is a desperate reminder of the appallingness of aspects of our society, and yet cover versions of the song tend to treat it as a jaunty piece to be sung without any consideration of the lyrics.

But just consider them…

As I was out walking on a corner one day
I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay
His face was all grounded in the cold sidewalk floor
And I guess he’d been there for the whole night or more

Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leaving nobody to sing his sad song
Leaving nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone

A blanket of newspaper covered his head
As the curb was his pillow, the street was his bed
One look at his face showed the hard road he’d come
And a fistful of coins showed the money he bummed

Does it take much of a man to see his whole life go down
To look up on the world from a hole in the ground
To wait for your future like a horse that’s gone lame
To lie in the gutter and die with no name?

I’ve listened again to the recordings that there are available on the internet of other artists re-working this song, and I remain as appalled as ever as to how artists not lacking for talent can choose to take these lyrics and then deliver them without appearing to have any concern or interest in the story they tell. Why, if the lyrics mean nothing to you, would you record the piece? Just for self-aggrandisement?

How can anyone with any artistic integrity read that last verse and then perform it as a jaunty little piece that just fills a few minutes before the next number on the song sheet? It is quite beyond me.

In case you are interested I have written on this before and in an earlier article placed recordings of the songs that are the antecedents of “Only a Hobo” which I still think are worth hearing, if you have the time.

As for Dylan’s recording below however, it remains a clear statement of what he intended – if the lyrics were not enough to make this clear… And if you want another one, there is a second version available through the link above.

So as I have suggested, I really can’t bring myself to include other cover versions here because I think they show such total ignorance of what the song is about and such a lack of artistic integrity they make a mockery of the whole notion of doing a cover a Dylan song.

Except…

Except, as I have mentioned before there is one version that gets it. And it comes from a slightly unexpected source – but then the unexpected is what keeps me writing on this blog. And maybe it being unexpected is a reflection of my prejudice.

If you don’t know this recording I do hope you have time to listen. And if you do, I hope you’ll always have time to listen again.

The Dylan Cover a Day series

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Love and Death

Posted on November 26, 2022 by TonyAttwood

by Larry Fyffe

Love and death be oft associated with each other in the poems and song lyrics by artists with a Romantic bent.

In the poem quoted beneath, no fear of death there be even with grave doubts about there being an Afterlife:

How well I knew the light before
I could not see it now
'Tis dying, I am dying 
But I'm not afraid to know
(Emily Dickinson: I Am Dying)

Likewise expressed below, there’s scepticism about the existence of an ‘actual’ transcendental life after death:

Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)

Below in the Gothic poem that’s “full of sorrow”, a person forsaken by the women he loves feels like he’s buried alive:

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne
Clustered around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms, and winding mossy ways
(John Keats: Ode To A Nightingale)

In the following song, not so filled with sorrow, her leaving likened to a temporary death suffered by the one who loves her:

One more night, I will wait for the light
While the wind blows high above the trees
Oh, I miss my darling so
I didn't mean to see her go
But tonight no light will shine on me
(Bob Dylan: One More Night)

Far worse is getting blamed – falsely by others – for the death of a person (ie, Christ), and then consequently barred from an Afterlife should there be one:

I won't be with you in paradise
And it seems so unfair
I can't go to paradise, my love
I killed a man back there
(Bob Dylan: Spirit On The Water)

Nor is the poet quoted beneath concerned that the transcendental Afterlife isn’t like it’s depicted by orthodox Christianity:

Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon
When their bones are picked clean, and the clean bones gone
They shall have stars at elbow and foot ....
And death shall have no dominion
No more may gulls cry at their ears
(Dylan Thomas: And Death Shall Have No Dominion)

Not only is it apparent the poet above steals from Bob Dylan’s name, but from the style and content of his song lyrics as well

As from:

Of war and peace, the truth just twists, it's curfew
gull it glides
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

From this below too, Thomas thieves:

One day the man in the moon went home
and the river went dry
(Bob Dylan: Under The Red Sky)

Love and death, love and theft ~ that’s what it must be all about.

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Other people’s songs: Freight Train Blues

Posted on November 25, 2022 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith (in the USA) and Tony Attwood (in the UK)

John Lair wrote this song for Red Foley, who recorded the song in 1934.

Lair is reputed to have written over 500 songs, as well as being a major player in promoting the music of Ohio and Kentucky.

He started collecting the music of his part of the United States in the 1930s and eventually became a music librarian, not least for his particular interest in relating the old songs to people’s way of life in earlier days, and the events that shapes the lives of individuals and communities.

The song was recorded by Roy Acuff in 1936 and 1947. Here is the 1947 version

Tony: John Lair was also well known for his harmonica work, although it is not heard on the recording at the top of the page. The effect of giving the feeling of the train moving along the tracks, which is very common in this type of music, works particularly well here.

And since I have done it before, I’m going to interject here with another freight train song – one that I heard along with Freight Train Blues, as a child. Not, I hasten to add, that I was brought up in Ohio or Kentucky – I was actually raised in Tottenham, north London, but still I heard music from all over, somehow.

Anyway, back to the script…

Aaron: Dylan later adapted it for his self-titled debut album (1962). The sleeve notes indicate that it was “was adapted from an old disk by Roy Acuff”. It features Dylan’s longest recorded note—over 25 seconds.

Tony: OK, my chance to add a bit more now, and that is Roy Acuff’s original version. This works in the UK, and I hope it is not blocked for copyright reasons in North America. I think it is worth a listen as it does give a clear indication of the basis from which Bob worked in generating his performance on that first album. The harmonica work in the instrumental break clearly leads onto Bob’s style of playing.

This recording was made in 1947. If you have a moment do play it all the way, if for no reason other than to hear the harmonica break before the final verse.

Aaron: Here are two recent versions I like a lot. First, The Local Honeys from 2015 album Little Girls Actin’ Like Men

Tony: What a hilarious title – “Little Girls, actin like men”. I love self-deprication like this, and especially in this case, as the recording combines the various elements of the traditional versions without simply going for speed. And the two voices in harmony for the chorus are absolutely perfect with the reference to the train’s whistle on “blues.” Especially as the singer doesn’t just hold one note but descends starting on the flattened 7th. It adds a feeling of the blues to a song that doesn’t really have too much blues in it. Fabulous harmonies too.

Aaron: The Peasall Sisters from 2014 album Home to You

Tony: And this time a really amusing cover. And what a sound with perfect harmonies and a racing accompaniment. My goodness, that is pure vocal talent to be able to do vocals like that. Just listen to what they do on “I got the freight train blues”. Most artists would just treat those words as just given reference to the title of the song, but these ladies do something else. I’m so glad you introduced me to this Aaron.

A great collection. Thanks.

Previously in this series…

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Wanted Man Part 5: Busted flat in Baton Rouge

Posted on November 24, 2022 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

V Busted flat in Baton Rouge

Wanted man in Albuquerque, wanted man in Syracuse
Wanted man in Tallahassee, wanted man in Baton Rouge
There’s somebody set to grab me anywhere that I might be
And wherever you might look tonight, you might get a glimpse of me

Peckinpah’s 1961 film debut, The Deadly Companions, was not a great success and would (rightly) have been long forgotten had “Bloody” Sam Peckinpah not become such a big name, later on. The second claim to fame is more impressive.

Despite the mediocre acting, clumsy editing and hideous soundtrack, Lowell George apparently endured the movie at least an hour: at two-thirds of the film we hear “Turk” (Chill Wills) say, “We’ll be able to burn a fire path through this country from Tucson to Tucumcari.” Lowell grabs his notepad and has a pillar for the song that will become one of his all-time greatest songs;

And I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonopah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me; weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin', to be movin'

Back then, Lowell George is still a member of The Mothers Of Invention, but when Zappa hears the song, he knows he should say farewell and allow Lowell a career of his own. At least, that’s the romantic version. Other sources report that Lowell was fired for smoking marijuana. And on Little Feat Live at the Auditorium Theatre Rochester NY October 18, 1975, we hear Lowell tell us at the introduction, “I was in a group called The Mothers Of Invention and I got fired because I wrote a song about dope. How about that shit?”

Either way, it’s an out-of-category song, which is also recognised by the master; when DJ Dylan plays it in his Theme Time Radio Hour in 2008 (ep. 84, “Street Maps”), he appreciatively calls “Willin’” a “crowd pleaser that has grown to become a country classic”, and he puts his words where the money is: on stage, where Dylan plays the song ten times.

The pleasure with which Dylan sings the opening line of the chorus demonstrates his sensitivity to its magical euphony: I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah. Place names that Lowell George may also have got from Hollywood, by the way; Tonopah is the setting for several episodes of the 60s series State Trooper, and in the classic The Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart says: “Well, if you get a good break, you’ll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years and you can come back to me then.” A text adaptation that creates a full circle, coincidentally; in the source text, Dashiell Hammett’s book, the archetypal hard-boiled private detective Sam Spade says:

Spade said tenderly: “You angel! Well, if you get a good break you’ll be out of San Quentin in twenty years and you can come back to me then.”

It means nothing, of course. Lowell chooses the four city locations for their euphony – just as Cash and Dylan throw in two towns not on Cash’s tour schedule in the last stanza (all right, second-to-last, but the last is a repeat of the first stanza): Tallahassee and Baton Rouge.

Given its euphoniousness, it is a bit disappointing in how few songs Tallahassee is sung. Presumably, Dylan’s record cabinet still contains Bing Crosby’s “Tallahassee” (along with the Andrews Sisters, 1947), Nancy Sinatra’s “Sugar Town” naturally (I heard it also rained in Tallahassee), the rockabilly gem that by now does have a kind of evergreen status, Freddy Cannon’s “Tallahassee Lassie” from 1959, and Charlie Daniels’ “Cowboy Hat In Dallas”.

Yet another one of those city name-list songs, by the way, just like Tom Waits’ “Had Me A Girl” (And I had me a girl in Tallahassee), and also from the early 70s – list songs with place names are popular apparently, in those years. But “Tallahassee” has been confiscated, forever probably, by Bobbie Gentry, although she doesn’t actually sing it at all, of course; “Today, Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge” (“Ode To Billie Joe”, 1967)

“Baton Rouge” is even less fraught, despite similar euphony. Until 1969, when Cash and Dylan topographically fill “Wanted Man”, Louisiana’s picturesque capital was actually only mentioned in Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.”;

New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearned for you
Detroit, Chicago, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge
Let alone just to be at my home back in ol' St. Lou
Did I miss the skyscrapers, did I miss the long freeway?
From the coast of California to the shores of Delaware Bay
You can bet your life I did, till I got back to the U.S.A.

… and in one of the Songs That Made Him Famous, the song Cash and Dylan play half an hour before “Wanted Man Take 1” at this same Columbia Studio A in Nashville, the song Dylan played with the men of The Band at The Basement two years before, and which will continue to appear on his setlist with some regularity well into the twenty-first century: Cash’s own “Big River” from 1958;

Now, won't you batter down by Baton Rouge, River Queen, roll it on
Take that woman on down to New Orleans, New Orleans
Go on, I've had enough, dump my blues down in the Gulf
She loves you, big river, more than me

It is a wonderful word combination with an irresistible rhythm and magical sheen of its own, batter down by Baton Rouge, and undoubtedly it still lingers in the studio air, when the men venture into the first take of “Wanted Man” half an hour later. After all, “All these songs are connected,” as Dylan says in his MusiCares speech in February 2015.

Kris Kristofferson hangs out there too, by the way, in Nashville, at Cash House and Columbia Studios. And that eloquent Baton Rouge seems to strike a chord with him as well – in these same days, Kristofferson writes his pièce de résistance “Me And Bobby McGee”:

Busted flat in Baton Rouge
Waitin' for the train
Feelin' nearly faded as my jeans
Bobby thumbed a diesel down
Just before it rained
Rode us all the way to New Orleans

… “Back In The U.S.A.”, “Big River”, “Wanted Man”, “Me And Bobby McGee”… Baton Rouge doesn’t unleash the worst, in the best songwriters of the 20th century.

To be continued. Next: Wanted Man part 6 (final): There’s one place I’m not wanted

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 Pawns his Watch (Part XXII)

Posted on November 23, 2022 by TonyAttwood

by Larry Fyffe

Turn on your secret Untold Decoder Ring if you have been wise enough to purchase one.

While some Jewish authorities in the Holy Bible accuse Jesus of being possessed by Beelzebub, the mythological gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans are even more upset.

They accuse the Almighty God of the Hebrews and His Son of attempting to usurp the heavenly throne rightfully occupied by the immortal Zeus, the God of Thunder and Lightning, and his son Apollo.

That is, akin to Dionysus who is able to rise from the Underground each spring, the mortal human Christ is considered by these Judeo-Christian upstarts as eternal.

He’s able to exist both in and out of time; sired as He is by an immortal God Who covers Mary, the wife of Joseph.

Jesus Christ depicted as timeless in the Holy Bible:

His countenance was like the lightning
And His raiment white as snow
(Matthew 28:3)

Likewise thusly presented in the following song lyrics:

You were snow, you were rain
You were striped, you were plain
(Bob Dylan: Born In Time)

According to the Holy Bible, the crucified Christ comes back to life for a short time; then ascends to Heaven.

He promises to come back again to His earth-bound Bride soon.

However, according to the song above, things aren’t looking that good for her as she sits and waits anxiously for His Second Coming.

Expressed with a Poe-like dream-twist in the song lyrics beneath:

I feel alone in the hills of mystery
In the foggy web of destiny
You're still so deep inside of me
When we were born in time
(Bob Dylan: Born In Time)

https://youtu.be/JXjAfFYyymw

As below, the motif of the four basic transmutational elements of ancient alchemy

– earth, wind, fire and water –

appear often in many of the song lyrics by the singer/songwriter/musician:

And take me disappearing through
The smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves
The haunted frightened trees
Out to the windy beach
(Mr. Tambourine Man)

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A Dylan cover a day: One too many mornings

Posted on November 22, 2022 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

Looking at just a handful of the many many cover versions of “One too many mornings” I am struck by the fact that I have inside me a notion of how this song should be performed. As a plaintive, calm, gentle piece – nothing more. And so attempts to add more to the song than this calm gentleness always leave me reaching for the off button. The song is about loss and sadness, and if the music doesn’t reflect that, then it takes the song to another place which really has nothing much to do with the lyrics.

After all the lines

When ev'rything I'm a-sayin'
You can say it just as good

are a stunningly overwhelming statement from the man who became the Nobel Prize winner as a result of this type of writing.

And of course my answer is “No Bob we can’t say it just as good, but I know what you mean”. And that response doesn’t leave much musical room for reinterpretation. It has to be calm, it has to be simple, it has to be reflective. It is just some people never quite got the message.

This first version I have chosen is not one that I like – but I have chosen it to try and show why. The arranger has changed the words, the chord sequence and the rhythm, to turn it into a bouncy country-ish song which takes away all the power from the original. This is only the same song in the sense that the lyrics are the same and so is some of the melody. As a result the power and force of Dylan’s original work has vanished. It has become trivia. And whatever the original is, it most certainly is not trivia.

And here again with Steve Howe we have another attempt to re-write the piece. Just listen to the descending four chords played in close proximity at the end of the verse, or the addition of the banjo part. These again have nothing to with the power and emotion portrayed by the simplicity of Dylan’s lyrics and the music in the original version of the song. As for the “woo woo” during the end of the instrumental, had this been a record I was playing rather than a recording from the internet, the disc would have gone out of the window, and the cracked remains left on the patio a floor below, as a testimony to what one should never do with a perfect song.

I could go on – including perhaps Abijah doing a reggae version but no, I have tormented my brain, and possibly yours, enough. Let us travel in a different direction.

This is what one should do if one wants to do a cover of this song – or at least it is one of many possibilities – in this case Siobhan Miller. The melody is changed slightly and of course so has the accompaniment. And yes there is an extra line added occasionally. Plus there are also additional instruments – but it all keeps the essence of the song. The reflection, the calmness, the sadness are still there. You’re alright on your side and I’m all right on mine, now once again means something. I love this.

Aaron wrote a really interesting review of the song and nominated a couple of performances to include. David Gray knows a lot about what songs actually mean and say, and this is no exception. He adds extras, but they are appropriate extras. OK I am not sure about the “Everybody knows” addition, but I’ll forgive him this as the rest really works because everything is kept under control.

But I want to finish with Stephen Inglis, and if all he had on offer was the introduction of this song, then that would be enough for me to include this version. Musically the opening minute is a complete calming statement which cools me down, and takes me back to the original lyrics, hearing them not as lyrics I know by heart but something I am listening to for the first time.

When ev'rything I'm a-sayin'
You can say it just as good

Well Bob, no that’s not quite true, as you well know. But thanks for the thought. On a bad day it is quite cheering to pretend it is 10% true.

The Dylan Cover a Day series

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Never Ending Tour – the absolute highlights 3: She Belongs to Me

Posted on November 21, 2022 by TonyAttwood

She Belongs to Me is one of those songs to opens itself up to being performed in many ways at many speeds, with any sort of accompaniment one wants. Which is pretty amazing for such a simple song. Three chords, two lines of lyrics per verse, one of which is repeated and one can do so much with it.

And so given that functional description, it is easy to see why an arranger might be tempted to add violins, slow the whole thing down, and squeeze whatever one can out of the lyrics.

But not Bob. In this version, he not only takes it at speed but gives us two instrumental verses with the harmonica and then for good measure a strummed acoustic guitar solo, after which his voice changes and he appears to be in more reflective mood… before we have another instrumental break.

The whole re-working gives me new thoughts about the relationship described within the song: this is playful, joyful, adventurous and outgoing, rather than the reflective piece that “She Belongs to Me” had always been before hearing this.

And I find it interesting to contemplate how the title of the song changes its meaning in relation to the performance. The whole notion of the woman “belonging” to the man is not something I warm to; although from the very start the description of the free-thinking artist seems in utter contradiction to the relationship described or implied in the lyrics.

To me, what happens with this re-arrangement is that the vibrancy of the woman, her outgoing-ness, her artistry, her independence now come shining through in the music, making the “She Belongs to Me” title utterly contradictory.

What’s more the last verse highlighting the implication that she is a child now has much more power. I’m not really trying to suggest that this implication was not there before, but the joy and vigour in this approach makes it much clearer an implication than it was before.

The point I’m stumbling toward is that if the subject of the piece is a child then the joy of a child’s life and daily experience needs the vigour expressed in this rendition, rather than the original approach found on the album.

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Bob Dylan Pawns His Watch Parts XIX and XX

Posted on November 20, 2022 by TonyAttwood

Bob Dylan Pawns His Watch (Part XIX)

by Larry Fyffe

Behind the Clown of Satire marches the Champion of Truth.

Ancient alchemy seeks a method to reverse and forward the process of time; thereby transforming the four basic elements of earth, wind, fire, water into one another for the benefit of humankind.

Pointed out by Richard Thomas:

I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder, who likewise 
showed me a treatise he had written concerning the malleability 
of fire, which he intended to publish

(Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels, Part III, chapter v)

Echoed in the song lyrics below:

I'll be saved by the creature
I'll get blood from a cactus, gunpowder from ice
I don't gamble with cards, and I don't shoot no dice
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

In Mary Shelley’s novel, Dr. Victor Frankenstein abandons the Romantic Transcendentalist writers whose thoughts focus on communal and family love.

Instead, he turns to modern science and technology as a sure means to improve the living conditions of mankind.

Through a friend, Victor comes in contact with ancient writings that focus on the wisdom of social solidarity rather than on science:

Alas, it’s too little, too late:

The Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit language engaged his attention,
and I was easily induced to enter on the same studies
(Mary Shelley: Dr. Frankenstein - Chapter 6)

In the following song lyrics, the narrator thereof takes on the persona of Doctor Frankenstein; determined he is to do a better job at creating a well-rounded good human being whereas Victor fails miserably at his attempt to play God:

I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind
I wanna do things for the benefit of all mankind
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

Frankenstein can not bear the hideous creature he brings to life; cannot love him though that it what the creature most craves.

No female does Victor make to grant the monster his wish for the warmth of a loving companion.

Dr. Bob is not going to make the same mistake; he’s gonna make himself a female companion.

Even if she’s just in his imagination, she’ll always be in his art:

Shimmy your ribs, I'll stick in the knife
Gonna jump-start my creature to life
I wanna bring someone back to life, turn back the years
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

Thereby, with his bow of burning gold, his arrows of desire, and his spear, the narrator brings his creative self back to life.

Brings him his chariot of fire; brings it all the way home.

Bob Dylan Pawns His Watch (Part XX)

My Own Version Of Me/You

The song “My Own Version Of You” by Bob Dylan contains hope for happiness and harmony on the micro-level for humans down on Earth, but on the macro-level a darker interpretation is there for the taking.

A Gnostic view of creation holds that a flawed Demiurge is conceived after the female half splits from the male half of the Unknowable God who’s far-away in the high spiritual world.

He erroneously believes he’s the absolute and perfect light of God, but flawed be the Demiurge, and so is the dark fragmented material world that he creates.

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” springs to mind:

I'll take the Scarface Pacino  and the Godfather Brando
Mix it up in a tank, and get a robot commando
If I do it up right, and put the head on straight
I'll be saved by the creature that I create
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version of You)

Ominous are the lines below with a twisted Gothic tombstone feeling; the optimistic light-bearing sentiments of the Romantic Transcendentalists thrown out the window.

Yearning for the comfort of female companionship, the isolated Demiurge opens a moonlit sepulcre that’s down by the sea.

Therein lies the body of the young and beautiful Annabel Lee:

Can you help me walk that moonlight mile
Can you give me the blessing of your smile
I'll bring someone back to life, use all my power
Do it in the dark, in the wee small hours
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

The narrator in the song settles on the image of the Satanic aspects of the nearby Demiurge.

The supposedly caring Gnostic hermaphroditic God is simply hiding too far beyond the horizon of the Cosmos for any unifying communication with Earth to be received.

Pleads the narrator, let us mere mortals know why there is being and not rather nothing:

Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be
You won't get away with fooling me
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

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Wanted Man part 4: To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before

Posted on November 20, 2022 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

IV To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before

Wanted man by Lucy Watson, wanted man by Jeannie Brown
Wanted man by Nellie Johnson, wanted man in this next town
But I’ve had all that I’ve wanted of a lot of things I had
And a lot more than I needed of some things that turned out bad

In 2015, the Gibraltarian Albert Hammond finally receives the massive bronze statuette of the muse of lyric poetry Euterpe, the award that perhaps should have been given to him several decades earlier: the Ivor Novello Award for his entire oeuvre.

Rightly so, but a bit late; by the mid-80s, Hammond already had a respectable number of world hits to his name, either as a performing artist or as a songwriter for others. “It Never Rains in Southern California”, “Down By The River”, “The Free Electric Band”, “I’m A Train”, and “When I’m Gone”… all great songs.

Not to mention the songs he writes for colleagues. The Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe” is arguably a 70s signature song, Leo Sayer scored his biggest hit with “When I Need You”, Art Garfunkel made “99 Miles From L.A.” immortal, Grace Slick is thankful for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”, the underrated beauty “Smokey Factory Blues” with which Johnny Cash closes the 1975 John R. Cash album (one of his finest records, but The Man In Black doesn’t agree in his autobiography: “I wasn’t pleased with either the process or the results”), Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, and we could go on and on; the list is long.

Most of those immortal hits a justifiably proud Hammond performs in the successful concept with which he has toured annually since 2013; the “Songbook Tours”. In his crowning year 2015, no fewer than 30 songs are on the setlist, and (usually) on 21 is the world hit that even so few people know was written by Hammond (together with master lyricist Hal David): “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before”.

True, it is a song that indeed comes into its own better when Willie Nelson sings it together with the archetypal womaniser Julio Iglesias: a song of an irresistibly charming bad boy who leaves a trail of broken hearts. We know the archetype from such milestones as The Eagles’ “Take It Easy” (Well, I’m a runnin’ down the road, tryin’ to loosen my load / I’ve got seven women on my mind), The Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man”, and the 1999 global summer hit, Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5”, the song in which Lou with deep affection sings of the charms of Angela, Pamela, Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary and Jessica.

It has something farcical, of course, and that seems to be the effect Dylan and Cash are aiming for, with this “women’s names verse”. There is no trace of it yet in the manuscript, and indeed it also seems to be an intervention with the upcoming premiere in mind: Dylan and Cash know that the song will be played in front of a room full of male inmates. And an audience player, a showman like Johnny Cash knows he should not only insert an occasional “son of a bitch”, a “damned” here and a “what the hell” there, but also that a nudge nudge wink wink to erotic escapades will go down well.

Accordingly, on the concert video, we see Cash singing this verse with a lopsided grin, but cheers from the inmates do not erupt yet – that does not happen until the next verse, which is also absent from the manuscript:

I got sidetracked in El Paso, stopped to get myself a map
Went the wrong way into Juarez with Juanita on my lap
Then I went to sleep in Shreveport, woke up in Abilene
Wonderin’ why the hell I’m wanted at some town halfway between

… with “Juanita on my lap” in particular seeming to stir up randy fantasies. And apart from that, this seems to be a textual contribution by Cash himself. Or at least initiated by Cash; after all, on 5 October 1965, he was arrested in El Paso while returning from Juarez with 668 Dexedrine and 475 Equanil pills in his guitar case. Thus, “Got sidetracked in El Paso and went the wrong way in Juarez” is an admittedly concise but historically accurate summary of that much-discussed misstep. Life imitating art, in other words, to which Jaoquin Phoenix also refers in the crushing biopic Walk The Line (2005); Cash has had “Cocaine Blues” on his setlist for years before that arrest in El Paso;

Made a good run but I run too slow
They overtook me down in Juarez, Mexico

Laid in the hot joints takin’ the pill
In walked the sheriff from Jericho Hill

… not on Dylan’s, by the way. Dylan, who has “Cocaine Blues” on the setlist over 70 times between 1961 and 1999, sings the other “Cocaine Blues”, the Reverend Gary Davis song, the one with the “cocaine, running all around my brain” refrain.

Things end relatively well for Cash. In March ’66, the case comes to trial, and The Man In Black shows himself to be a repentant sinner (“I realise my mistake. It was bad, very bad, misconduct on my part”), claims he was tired and drunk, and vows never to take a pill again. Which is a bit odd, as Cash’s lawyer argues that the drugs were “prescribed”. Which the judge goes along with: because the drugs are “prescribed”, and perhaps because Tex Ritter and Gene Autry wrote sweet letters to the judge vouching for the “good character” of the accused, Cash gets off with a $1000 fine and a suspended jail sentence. Quite a lighter sentence than Willy Lee from “Cocaine Blues”, all things considered;

The judge, he smiled as he picked up his pen
99 years in the Folsom pen
99 years underneath that ground
I can’t forget the day I shot that bad bitch down

… which, when Cash sings it at that previous prison concert, in the Folsom Prison cafeteria on 13 January 1968, is also greeted with cheers, applause and laughter. “They were the most enthusiastic audience I have ever played to,” Cash later declares.

Dylan never won an Ivor Novello Award, by the way. Others were more worthy each time, apparently. Adam Ant, for instance (Songwriter of the Year 1982). And Björn and Benny (Special International Award, 2002) and Jon Bon Jovi (2021). But Randy Newman and Jimmy Webb have also already been honoured, so if Dylan hangs on a little longer, he will probably get his turn. Otherwise, he’ll just have to make do with his minor prizes, with his Grammy Awards, his Oscar and his Nobel Prize and all those other ones. I’ve had all that I’ve wanted of a lot of things I had.

To be continued. Next: Wanted Man part 5: Busted flat in Baton Rouge

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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A Dylan cover a Day: (Sooner or Later) One of us must know

Posted on November 19, 2022 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

There are some songs where I simply don’t want to go searching for multiple cover versions, because even before I start writing I know where the works of artistic genius are, and I don’t think I can go any further.

So I start in the obvious place, because I do have a very soft spot for Emma Swift’s work, and since this is also one of my favourite Dylan songs of all – as it has been since I first heard it upon its release – the combination of favoured song and favoured artist is overwhelming.

Ms Swift takes it slowly as her exquisite, perfect voice demands, and thus I listen to this and believe every word. And that is before we get to the chorus where without going over the top she utterly distinguishes verse from chorus in a way which I can’t imagine could be improved upon.

And I must add a word about the accompaniment – delightfully done so that the chorus and verse are instrumentally as well as vocally and lyrically distinguished from each other.

In many ways the verse accompaniment should not work – it uses the plink plink plink technique combined with a simple emphasis on each beat. But it works and it contrasts so elegantly with the chorus in every way. Indeed if I were asked I’d give an award to this recording for “best accompaniment to a Dylan song ever”.

It is stunning it is gorgeous and it tears my heart apart even now as I am taken back to every breakup in a life that seems to have been full of break ups.

But I must tear myself and my tears away, and what better way than to move to Old Crowe. With their live performances, there is the inevitable chat before the music starts, and if you want to skip it, jump the first 40 seconds. But it is part of the show.

For me the amazing thing about this version is that having played the overwhelming Emma Swift version, this now takes me off to a different land and again I can be overwhelmed but in a different way. Those harmonies in the chorus are wonderfully executed so that even though, by the start of verse two, we know what the arrangement consists of, it still engages totally.

Old Crowe of course have the strings (violin/s and double bass) at the heart of their arrangements, and yet I never ever feel I have had enough of their style of reworking. Indeed listening, and listening and listening to Old Crowe I often find myself wondering how they work these violin parts out. Are they originally improvised, or carefully worked out step by step? I’d love to know.

And whoever would have thought of two pizzicato violins as an accompaniment? Well, maybe lots of people, all better musicians than I, but certainly I could never have imagined it. It takes me back to when I first heard it, it brings me forward to today, it brings tears to my eyes, it makes me marvel at what can be done when musical imagination is let loose.

My final choice is one that I owe to Jochen who highlighted the Chip Taylor version. Jochen wrote “The most attractive cover, by far, is on Mojo’s 2016 Blonde On Blonde Revisited tribute, on the occasion of the monument’s fiftieth anniversary.”

And I must admit I am including it not because I personally value it alongside the above two renditions but because I respect Jochen’s opinion, and because even if it doesn’t appeal to me as the above two versions do, it is an extraordinary rendition, and the fact that emotionally it takes me in the wrong direction, is my problem, no one else’s.

The harmonies in the second verse are indeed delightful, but somehow with this song this isn’t at all where I want to be although I must admit this takes the notion of recording a Dylan cover to a new level.

I think for me it is the old problem of knowing the song so well that by the time we get to the moment in the song it starts snowing, musically I know what is happening, and emotionally this version makes me feel I am too far gone to be able to take any more.

And that’s always my problem: maybe because I started out my working life as a musician or maybe because there is far too much emotion in my world, the combination of the feelings expressed here combined with the fact that I know the song totally off by heart means I just can’t bear the pain. And maybe that is why I love my two choices above: Emma Swift makes the emotions bearable and Old Crowe makes them fun. Chip Taylor however digs the knife into my heart, and that’s more than I can take.

The Dylan Cover a Day series

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Never Ending Tour: the absolute highlights 2: Desolation Row. 1990.

Posted on November 18, 2022 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood, based on the research of Mike Johnson

Dylan’s driving force in relation to his own music is, I believe, to see where his songs can go. And that driving force continues long after each song has been written and recorded.

This is a different drive from one that involves listening to the music and thinking, “this ought to be a blues” or “I’m losing the love interest, let’s slow it down” or even “it sounds too sad, let’s put it in a major key.”

Such changes by a composer are basic – the sort of things that the singer in a band might say to the rest of the band about a performance while ignoring the composer totally. “Let’s beef it up a bit,” is what I’ve had the group’s leader say. “Give it a bit of oomph” (which is probably a very English expression, but I’m sure there must be an American equivalent).

However, on the musical re-arrangement front, my guess would be that from around the time of “Times they are a-changin” no one could (or would probably dare) tell Bob what to do. They might make suggestions perhaps, but if Bob said “no, I want to do it like this,” then who could stop him?

Take “Desolation Row” – it is about the collapse of everything, your personal life, your heroes, your friends, our elected leaders. Everything is hopeless, everything has gone wrong, everything is lost. Somewhere along the line we really did take the wrong turn.

So you might expect slow and desperate – but to keep us on our toes in the original recording Bob gives us delicate and gentle, while indeed keeping the lilting gait. But now, in 1990, 35 years later, Bob says, “the collapse of everything has happened; let’s see how fast this can go – so fast in fact you can’t move to it, it is high-speed express blowing us all away.”

And what is the point of that? What does it say? In one sense that’s fairly obvious; everything is moving at hyperspeed, and we’ve lost control. As a result we are all there, rushing forward, hurtling onwards.

Except….

When we get to the traditional place for the harmonica solo – one verse before the end – it doesn’t happen. The harmonica solo comes at the end, and the harmonica doesn’t rush. The guitar might still be powering along at hyper speed, but the harmonica will none of that. It is a reminder of how things were. How it used to be. How we were able to reflect on times past…

The lyrics are of course still there, but having lived through those 35 years, the meaning is utterly different. This is the express train driving through reality heading straight at the brick wall, or if you prefer over the cliff edge, and it all comes from that relentless acoustic guitar.

So we are no longer thinking about now, about everything being desperate, looking up and down the street to avoid the junkies and the wild taxi drivers, and the dead beta poets. Instead, this is about the process of society and our government as it runs out of control and destroys the lives of everyone who is still there, just trying to survive, just trying to hold on.

Thus the lyrics are the same but the meaning evolves from a description of what is, into a painting of what we have crashed into. It’s all gone; we lost, there’s no going back.

And it doesn’t matter that we know the lyrics and have taken other meanings from them, the power and the driving force is so great that the old meanings are left behind; all that we now have is this drive towards that brick wall. Suddenly the rearrangement of faces takes on a new, ever more frightening meaning. They’re not even human anymore.

As a performance, I find it awesome at every level. It is phenomenally difficult to perform at that speed for a verse, let alone a whole song, and as a result of that speed, it is very powerful indeed. And above all, a totally unexpected vision from a piece that we know so well.

This is Dylan the composer-performer-reinventor at his very, very best.

Never Ending Tour – the absolute highlights. 1: John Brown 1987

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Bob Dylan Pawns His Watch (Parts XVII and XVIII)

Posted on November 17, 2022 by TonyAttwood

Bob Dylan Pawns His Watch (Part XVII)

By Larry Fyffe

[First an Ad: Dear reader, it’ll be a great help for you to purchase a secret Untold Decoder Ring]

Though Heracles is named after Hera, wife of Zeus, she tries to poison the baby with a couple of snakes, her husband having impregnated a mortal. The baby is so strong that he strangles the snakes with his bare hands.

Grown Heracles is inclined to fits of anger; Apollo and Artemis quarrel with him while Athena sides with her semi-divine half-brother. In the end, because of his exploits, Heracles is accepted as a full-fledged member of the Olympian family.

Encoded in the following song lyrics:

You were born with a snake in both of your fists
While a hurricane was blowing
Freedom just around the corner for you

It becomes clear that the Olympians do not like the Christian upstarts.

Apollo depicts Christ as a Devil and a Beelzebub:

It's a shadowy world, skies are slippery grey
A woman just gave birth to a prince today
And dressed him in scarlet

It becomes obvious that Jesus gets Judas Priest on His side in a scary plot to undermine the Olympian gods:

He'll put the priest in his pocket
Put the blade to the heat
(Bob Dylan: Jokerman)

If you’ve been following the story so far, you know that the Sun-God picks up on the idea as already deciphered in other song lyrics ~ Apollo steals six or seven knives and marks a number of Christ’s Apostles with an ‘x’.

Bob Dylan is no false prophet. His songs reveal the ins and outs, the ups and downs, of the never-ending “War Between The Olympians And The Judeo Christians”~ an obvious interpretation that’s missed by so many ‘Dylanologists’.

Below, a lament by a Gothic poet at the diminished life-affirming powers of the God of the Thunder, and the God of the Sun, in today’s death-oriented Christianized world.

The eagle a bird sacred to Zeus ~ ‘me’ rhyming with ~ ‘tree’:

For, alas! alas! with me
The light of life is over
No more - no more - no more ...
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree
Or the stricken eagle soar
(Edgar Allan Poe: To One In Paradise)

Echoed in the following song lyrics; ~ ‘these’ rhyming with ~’trees’:

Beneath the thunder-blasted trees
The words are ringing off your tongue
The ground is hard at times like these
The stars are cold, the night is young
(Bob Dylan: Tell Old Bill)

Bob Dylan Pawns His Watch (Part XVIII)

by Larry Fyffe

Cupid, the winged son of Venus, the Goddess of Love, and of Mars, the God of War, is the God of Desire; he’s armed with a bow by which is sent arrows tipped with uncontrollable-lust dust.

The struggle between the Olympians and the Christians depicted thus far continues.

In the following song, Apollo from Mount Olympus speaks through the lips of the narrator ~ spiritual love doesn’t matter; physical love is what’s important:

Cupid, bend back your bow
Let your arrow flow
Straight to my love and me
Cupid, don't matter why
Let your arrow fly
Straight to my love and me

(Bob Dylan: Cupid ~ Cooke/Dylan/Harrison)

The song quoted below contains a Christian promise of heartfelt love that will last forever:

Cupid, draw back your bow
And let your arrow go
Straight to my lover's heart for me
Cupid, please hear my cry
And let your arrow fly
Straight to my lover's heart for me
(Sam Cooke: Cupid)

Olympian Cupid’s not so “soft-hearted”. Sent out by his jealous mother to cause her beautiful rival Psyche to fall in love with someone ugly, he pricks himself with one of his own arrows; falls madly in love with the beautiful maiden.

Secrecy is in order. Psyche abides in Cupid’s palace; he visits her at night in order to keep both Psyche and Venus in the dark.

Later on, thinking winged Cupid might be an ugly creature, Psyche turns on a lamp, and the handsome fellow flies away.

Psyche’s now burdened with guilt. However, as the story goes, matters get straightened out in the end.

Said it can be that the song lyrics beneath reveal the disguised narrator therein to be the God of Desire:

I humbled myself to her beauty
Fair maid, where do you belong
Are you heaven descended
Abiding in Cupid's fair throne
(Bob Dylan: Belle Isle ~ traditional)

When all is said and done, the trials and tribulations involved in human existence are not as black and white as orthodox Christians would have it.

The poet below endeavours to load Zeus, Apollo, Venus, Mars, Cupid, and Jesus into one wagon:

Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire
(William Blake: Jerusalem)

In the following song lyrics, the carriage is not big enough to hold them all.

A couple of them have to get off:

They walked along by the old canal
A little confused, I remember well
And stopped into a strange hotel
With a neon burning bright
He felt the heat of the night
Hit him like a freight train
(Bob Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)

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The Never Ending Tour 2010: part 1 – Centre Stage: A change comin’ on

Western Road (1969) part 2 (final): Ridin’ in a buggy, Miss Mary Anne

Mano A Mano

Never Ending tour: The Absolute Highlights. 4: Tangled up in Blue

Western Road 1: They wanted to record everything in case Dylan said something profound

Other people’s songs: Do you hear what I hear?

Better to Rule in Hell

Wanted Man Part 6: There’s one place I’m not wanted

A Dylan Cover a Day: Only a Hobo

Love and Death

Other people’s songs: Freight Train Blues

Wanted Man Part 5: Busted flat in Baton Rouge

Bob Dylan Pawns his Watch (Part XXII)

A Dylan cover a day: One too many mornings

Never Ending Tour – the absolute highlights 3: She Belongs to Me

Bob Dylan Pawns His Watch Parts XIX and XX

Wanted Man part 4: To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before

A Dylan cover a Day: (Sooner or Later) One of us must know

Never Ending Tour: the absolute highlights 2: Desolation Row. 1990.

Bob Dylan Pawns His Watch (Parts XVII and XVIII)

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