Untold Dylan

This article records how two of us came to create a new Dylanesque song, with lyrics generated by artificial intelligence.  

A recording of the song can be found at the end of the article.

Part 1: by Bob Bjarke

Over recent years Artificial Intelligence (AI)  has become a bigger part of our lives, even if it’s not always obvious to all of us. From movie recommendations to autocorrect spelling assistants to traffic directions on mobile apps, AI has become a constant companion in many of our daily lives.

As a person interested in technology and creativity, I’m exploring AI’s potential as a creative partner asking the question, “Can AI be as useful to creative pursuits as it can be to navigating our cities or filtering spam from our email inboxes?”

One of the most accessible ways to experiment with AI is through text generation. There are many AI tools we can use to generate a high volume of text quickly and inexpensively, using free data sources found on the web. But before we ask AI to write, we need to teach it to read.

To do this, I used an AI software called GPT-2. AI scientists built GPT-2 by feeding it text found on 8 million web pages. Essentially GPT-2 learned to read by spending lots of time on the internet (like much of AI research and experimentation, this “education” raises lots of ethical concerns, but that’s the subject for another article), and is now able reliably to mimic human writing.

This software is also highly malleable. It can learn to mimic any additional text it reads, simply by studying a large quantity of data–and the bigger the sample size, the better the mimicry. 

This brings us to the catalog of Bob Dylan. Dylan’s catalog is an excellent dataset, including over 600 songs. His style is also notoriously unique, having been the recipient of innumerable accolades throughout his career, including the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

The Dylan oeuvre is therefore excellent source material to help answer our question: can AI learn to be an inspiring creative partner?

In creating the AI songwriter I call Bob Dylain, GPT-2 generated thousands of lyrics for me, ranging from garbled nonsense to literal regurgitations of existing Dylan lyrics. Somewhere in between, AI composed lyrics that you might call Dylan-esque–exhibiting deft use of metaphor and social commentary often drawing from the experience of the American west.

Now, I’m not a Dylan scholar, but I am a fan. Sifting through these AI-generated lyrics at times felt like trudging through a dystopian nightmare, but at others it felt like flipping through an undiscovered Dylan notebook–watching new Dylan lyrics appear in front of me in real-time. 

These lyrics are not perfect. They often lack rhyme, and they haven’t grasped Dylan’s expert phrasing and structure. I’d never pretend that they achieve anything like the poetic genius Dylan has generated throughout his career. But they do begin a conversation about AI and human creative partnerships and they do give us a glimpse into the future of AI-assisted creativity.

Part 2: Tony Attwood

When I received Bob’s details of his work, I was struck by the notion that maybe I could have a go at setting music to one of these Dylan-esque lyrics.   It was a fascinating and challenging thought.

For many years I’ve been an amateur songwriter; in my early life when playing with bands I had a tiny level of success as a composer, but it was vanishingly small.  Since then I’ve just written songs as an escape from the real world, playing them to long-suffering friends and occasionally within folk clubs wherein the managers kindly lock the doors to stop the audience escaping when it’s my turn to play.

But I thought I’d be the first to have a chance at writing the music to Dylan inspired lyrics was overwhelming, and as soon as I got the transcript I sat down and… failed totally.

The lyrics I tried to write the music for were fascinating indeed, and yes I could write some music, but it was not only non-Dylan it was also truly awful.  In dismay, I gave up.

It took me weeks to go back to Bob Bjarke’s email and have a second go with a different set of lyrics.  This time the opening lines worked well, but I still got tangled up in knots later.  The lyrics are reprinted below.  I’ve not changed any to fit with the music – the music has to fit with the lyrics.   However the division of the lyrics into verses and a “middle 8” is mine.

This is very much a home, (not a studio) recording, and I want to stress I’m not suggesting that this is a Dylanesque song – it is a setting to music of the lyrics by an amateur songwriter.

And I’m not saying Bob would ever write music like this.  Rather when faced with these lyrics, this is what I came up with.  The lyrics are below.

I had a long talk with your aunt       
In the churchyard, in the alley
She told me all about your death
I lay in bed and talked to myself

But I didn’t know what to do
Three bodies lyin’ there was nothin’ I could do to stop it
Memory is like a rolling cloud
Where the ancient light never fades

I had a long talk with your uncle
In the county jail
He sat in a rocking chair
He talked about the golden age

When men, women, and children went free
He said the darkest hour was still ahead
When men, women, and children went free
I had a right to be saved by love, I had a right to be

I had a long talk with your grandmother
In the home of the living
She talked about the trials and the tribulations
She said you had a right to know

What she knew about disease
and about how it was to be killed
How many people died from it, and what was left? 
How many more would be left to rot?

   When you died, your body was buried in the rocks
   In the gutter like a boiled fish
   I never saw my heart begin to bleed
   I never saw my whole being disappear

I had a long talk with my brother
In the cold dark of night
He spoke of the great final struggle
When all is lost and all is made of stone 

You and me we had completeness
I gave you all of what you wanted I did it my way
You followed your own fancy I had a right to be 
Saved by love, I had a right to be

I enjoyed this little project enormously and having got the hang of this particular process (which included me giving myself the rule that I would not change the lyrics, no matter how obtuse, nor how difficult they were to set) I’d like to have another try.

If you find my music is nonsense, by all means have a go yourself, and then send it to me attached to an email – as ever it is Tony@schools.co.uk    I’ll be delighted to publish the results.

And as long as the daily audience of Untold Dylan doesn’t fall off the edge of the cliff as a result of this, I’ll have a go at another song shortly.

By Larry Fyffe

(Part I)

A humourous cowgirl Dante rides on the foam of the Jungian sea:

Now we're on our cowboy honeymoon
I'll find a shack over back 
In the valley
(Patsy Montana: A Cowboy Honeymoon)

Waiting for her is hairy:

Pacing round the room
Hoping maybe she'd come back
Well, I praying for salvation
Laying round in a one-room country shack
(Bob Dylan: Dirt Road Blues)

While listening to a tune about the fickle moon:

Where are you old moon of Kentucky
There's somebody lonesome and blue
There's nothing it seems
But memories and dreams
Waiting to whisper to you
Day is done, and here am I
All alone and you know why
Roll along, roll along, Kentucky moon
(Montana Slim: Roll Along Kentucky Moon)

A moon that can apparently speak:

Whatever you want to say to me
Won't come as any shock
I must be guilty of something
Just whisper it into my ear
(Bob Dylan: Tight Connection To My Heart)

In the meantime, the blacksmith forges a tune of his own:

The seasons they are turning
And my sad heart is yearning
To hear the songbird's sweet melodious tone
Won't you meet me in the moonlight all alone
Bob Dylan: Moonlight)

While he’s listening to another song that makes a reference to the constant ‘tiny’ stars afar; ‘Elena’ like ‘Selene’ means “moon”.

In Greek/Roman mythology, she is the sister of Apollo, the Sun and Music god:

Maria Elena, you're the idol of my heart
Maria Elena, why are we so far apart
I linger here inside a reverie tonight
Where tiny stars remind me of your eyes so bright
Maria Elena, tell me, will we meet again
Maria Elena, must I hope in vain
You're all I long to call my very own
'Til dreams come true, I'll wait for you alone
(Jimmy Wakely: Maria Elena)

Zeus, the god of Thunder is their father:

Oh sister, am I not a brother to you
And one deserving of affection
And is our purpose not the same on this earth
To love and follow his direction
(Bob Dylan: Oh Sister)

Part II

Play Nat King Cole. Play Nature Boy
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

Dante Alighieri saddle up, not in the afterlife, but alive in the Old West.

In the song lyrics below, infernal hell is reduced to a campfire around which a boy plays a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’:

Brush that little tear away, old timer
You know a cowboy never cries
Something must have spoiled your day, old timer
Did campfire smoke get in your eyes
(Jimmie Davis: Old Timer)

The lyrics beneath express a romantic heavenly vision of country life in contrast to the hellish aspects of big city life, a song made famous by country singer Jimmie Rodgers:

Memories are bringing happy days of yore
Miss the Mississippi and you
Mocking birds are singing around the cabin door
(Bob Dylan: Miss The Mississippi And You)

The sentimental motif expressed above akin to that in the song lyrics quoted beneath:

Pretty maids all in a row lined up
Outside my cabin door
I've never wanted any of them wanting me
Except the girl from the Red River Shore
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

In the following song lyrics, the advice of temperance offered in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” heeded:

Sycamore tree, sycamore tree
Tell the folks, tell the shack, that my heart is dragging me back
Sycamore tree, tell'em for me
I know I'm going to find my Paradise Lost
In the hills of Tennessee
I know I'm going to find my Seventh Heaven
It's just a cabin, my Seventh Heaven
(Jimmie Rodgers: The Hills Of Tennessee)

With some luck the moderate path between extremes just might be found:

Well, I'm a stranger in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong
I'll ramble and gamble for the one I love
And the hills will bring me a song
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

The inconstancy of the lunar sphere addressed below (the song also recorded by
Wilf Carter/Montana Slim, and by Hank Snow:

Where are you old moon of Kentucky
There's somebody lonesome and blue
With nothing it seems, but memories and dreams
Waiting to whisper to you
(Jimmie Rodgers: Roll Along Kentucky Moon)

Sad things happen beyond the control of mere mortals:

Let the bird sing
Let the bird fly
One day the man in the moon went home
And the river went dry
(Bob Dylan: Under The Red Sky)

An obverse vision of the above Kentucky moon song follows (sung together by
Bob Dylan and Paul Simon); it be the sphere of fixed and far-off stars that speaks this time:

Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining
Shine on the one that's gone and left me blue
It was on a moonlight night, the stars were shining bright
And they whispered from on high, your love has said goodbye
(Bill Monroe: Blue Moon Of Kentucky)

A star closer by, that wise old Sun, sends sounder advice:

This he said to me
The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love, and be loved in return
(Nat King Cole: Nature Boy)

By Tony Attwood

A meander around the internet today found me over 180 cover versions of this song, including a surprising number of instrumental pieces.

It is of course one of the most widely known Dylan songs, and it has a highly distinctive melody, opening line, chord sequence and chorus, and when you’ve got all three you have a song that everyone will remember.

It is also an incredibly simple song, something that comes across if one just looks at the lyrics

Mama, take this badge off of me
I can’t use it anymore
It’s gettin’ dark, too dark for me to see
I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door

Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door

Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can’t shoot them anymore
That long black cloud is comin’ down
I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door

Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door

This is not Dylan the great lyricist but Dylan turning a simple phrase into a song everyone remembers.  It is in fact the antithesis of “Visions of Johanna” – and that one man could write both is extraordinary.

So perhaps it is the sheer simplicity that attracts everyone.  I can only give the simplest of samplings of what musicians have done with the song..

Kuku treats it with due regard and simplicity and keeps the accompaniment down to a minimum, using the choir to give the extra element.  I’m not sure about mixing up the verses though.

Turning the piece into an instrumental seems to be a favourite activity – perhaps the attraction is that there is so little to work with that the deviations that the performer needs can go anywhere.  This is not to everyone’s taste, of course, because it deviates from the meaning of the lyrics, and instead becomes an extemporisation.

I find I can remove the lyrics from my mind, and enjoy where this goes; I find it fun, but I know not everyone is happy with this.

Staying with the basic elements that Bob has given us, means that those who can’t develop the song and can’t add their own deviations from the original get a bit stuck.  Thom Cooper shows us just how much one can do with only the slightest movement.

Jochen’s contribution on this site to the discussion of the song is as ever comprehensive and insightful, and I certainly can’t improve in any way on his insights, so I’ll reprint from the original…

Following the horrific shooting of school children in the Scottish village of Dunblane, in which a 43-year-old man kills fifteen children between the ages of five and six plus a teacher, musician Ted Christopher rewrites the lyrics. Mark Knopfler helps free of charge and in the Abbey Road studios, with a choir of brothers and sisters of the victims, the single is recorded on December 9, 1996. It immediately climbs to first place in the English charts.

Psalm 23 is incorporated in it (The Lord is my shepherd), the second verse has been rewritten and a third verse has been added:

Lord these guns have caused too much pain
This town will never be the same
So for the bairns of Dunblane
We ask please never again

Lord put all these guns in the ground
We just can’t shoot them anymore
It’s time that we spread some love around
Before we’re knockin’ on heaven’s door

Nobody knows what possessed the murderous coward, who commits suicide on the spot. Heaven’s Door remained closed to him, in any case.

I was thinking I would stop there, but was then reminded of The Cat and Owl, a mysterious ensemble – if you want to know more, try their Facebook page

And that’s where I shall stop, because I rather like that and it is just right for me at this moment.  I forget the lyrics of the original and this soothes me at a moment when my head is everywhere at once.   (Not in a bad way, I should add, but through very positive events: I have just for the first time met the brother I never knew I had).

• Million Miles part 1: The closer I get, the farther away I feel
• Million Miles part 2: They kind of write themselves
• Million Miles part 3: And thou didst commit whoredom with them
• Million Miles part 4: What’s it all coming to?
• Million Miles part 5: The sounds inside my mind
• Million Miles part 6: Like a Wagon Wheel

Million Miles (1997) part 7

by Jochen Markhorst

VII        Songs that float in a luminous haze

Well, there’s voices in the night trying to be heard
I’m sitting here listening to every mind-polluting word

Suddenly producer Tom Wilson is gone and replaced by Bob Johnston. In January ’65, Dylan and Wilson passionately and harmoniously complete the first album of the mercurial trio, Bringing It All Back Home. When Dylan is over in England to be called Judas, Wilson is in New York doing overdubs for the intended single “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” (21 May 1965). And when Dylan returns, the men just get to work on the next masterpiece, on Highway 61 Revisited. Two days of recording, Wilson is still in the control room (15 and 16 June), the days when the final recording of “Like A Rolling Stone” is realised. No small feat either.

But still Wilson’s swan song. On the third day of recording, 29 July, Bob Johnston is suddenly at the controls. Dylan acts like he doesn’t know why, when Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner asks him four years later;

JW: Why did you make the change of producers from Tom Wilson to Bob Johnston?
BD: Well, I can’t remember, Jann. I can’t remember… All I know is that I was out recording one day, and Tom had always been there – I had no reason to think he wasn’t going to be there – and I looked up one day and Bob was there. (Laughs)

Evasive and not very credible. It is not too plausible that Dylan, like a submissive wage slave, would let the Bosses Above Him decide with whom he must cooperate. Johnston doesn’t know the ins and outs of it either, but he has an educated guess:

“His producer was Tom Wilson then. Gallagher called me in the office said, “We’re getting rid of Tom Wilson.” He didn’t say why but maybe it was because Albert Grossman said he didn’t like him, and I don’t think Dylan liked him. I don’t know, but he never said anything about it.”

Wilson will never meet Dylan himself again, but indirectly, as a producer of other artists, still often enough, of course. In 1967, for instance, when he and Nico record one of Dylan’s masterly throwaways, “I’ll Keep It With Mine”. And even more indirectly in 1970, when Wilson is the producer for the fifth LP of the infectious weirdos from San Francisco, for CJ Fish of Country Joe and the Fish. The final track of Side One will have taken him back in time a few years;

Hey Bobby, where you been ? We missed you out on the streets
I hear you've got yourself another scene, it's called a retreat
I can still remember days when men were men
I know it's difficult for you to remember way back then , hey

… “Hey Bobby”, the slightly awkward call for Dylan to return to the front, set to the same chord progression as “Like A Rolling Stone” is set, to “La Bamba”.

In Dylan’s 2004 autobiography Chronicles, it is a theme. In Chapter 3, “New Morning”, Dylan looks back on a dark period in his life, the period around 1970, the years when Country Joe McDonald (among others) makes his pathetic appeal. The bard leaves no doubt about how enormously unpleasant he found it to be promoted “as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation”. And how disruptive the consequences were. In Woodstock, he and his family were harassed by fans, followers and other nutcases, “goons were breaking into our place all hours of the night”, in the press they kept portraying him as a kind of High Priest of Protest, colleagues like Robbie Robertson were waiting for his next move, waiting to show them where he’s “gonna take it”.

It is very, very unpleasant. “It would have driven anybody mad,” Dylan writes. All the more so because he does not recognise himself at all in that image, nor does he have the ambition to be a spokesman of any kind. “I would tell them repeatedly that I was not a spokesman for anything or anybody and that I was only a musician,” but that doesn’t help, of course. It seems to frustrate Dylan still thirty years later, when he writes these words. “I really was never any more than what I was – a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”

And even more than Robbie Robertson’s docility, even more than Country Joe’s “Hey Bobby” or David Bowie’s brilliant harangue, “Song For Bob Dylan”, he will have been irritated by the embarrassing “protest song” of his former life partner Joan Baez.

“Joan Baez recorded a protest song about me that was getting big play, challenging me to get with it — come out and take charge, lead the masses — be an advocate, lead the crusade. The song called out to me from the radio like a public service announcement.”

Dylan refers to Baez’s open letter “To Bobby”, the much-discussed song from the very mediocre album whose title also signals painful naiveté: Come From The Shadows (1972). In the self-written song, Baez does her best to wrap her appeal in dylanesque rhyme patterns and eloquence. Like in the third verse;

Perhaps the pictures in the Times could no longer be put in rhymes
When all the eyes of starving children are wide open
You cast aside the cursed crown and put your magic into a sound
That made me think your heart was aching or even broken

… four lines that are “actually” six lines, judging by the aabccb-rhyme scheme (Times-rhymes-open / crown-sound-broken), just like “Love Minus Zero” and “I Don’t Believe You”, dylanesque assonant rhyme (open-broken, for instance) and a dylanesque image like a cursed crown. From a technical point of view just fine – but unfortunately Baez’ foible for toe-curling melodrama, for kitschy images like the wide-open eyes of the starving children, is dominant. A foible she unfortunately also demonstrates in the possibly even more pathetic chorus, in

Do you hear the voices in the night, Bobby?
They're crying for you
See the children in the morning light, Bobby
They're dying

“Now listen,” Dylan says in his 2015 MusiCares speech, “I’m not ever going to disparage another songwriter.” And indeed, in this same speech, he does speak of Baez only with praise, with love and admiration (“A woman of devastating honesty. And for her kind of love and devotion, I could never pay that back”). Elegant. But probably no one in the audience, and not even Baez herself, would have blamed Dylan if, more than forty years after the fact, he had given his opinion about “To Bobby”.

However, exactly halfway between Baez’s 1972 song and Dylan’s 2015 speech, he seems to be venting his opinion, subtly of course. In the last verse of “Million Miles”, which Dylan recorded in January ’97, he echoes the chorus of “To Bobby”:

Well, there’s voices in the night trying to be heard 
I’m sitting here listening to every mind-polluting word

… in which, in this scenario, he expresses his opinion somewhat less elegantly (every mind-polluting word). Not unequivocal, however. The metaphor “voices in the night” is hardly unique (The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” comes to mind, and Joni Mitchell’s “I Think I Understand”), but it is still so unusual that it seems obvious that Dylan himself would think of Baez’s whiny refrain. And apart from that, it fits perfectly on an album full of wandering protagonists with confused sensory impressions, on a record on which one protagonist confesses “I’m beginning to hear voices and there’s no one around” (“Cold Irons Bound”), a second wonders if he hears someone’s distant cry (“Love Sick”) and a third, in “Not Dark Yet”, sighs: “Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer”.

But still. The expression “voices in the night” is just a bit too distinctive. And after all, “To Bobby” is, for all its awkwardness, one of those songs that float in a luminous haze.

To be continued. Next up Million Miles part 8: Write twenty verses while you’re in The Zone

———-

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang

• An index of the Never Ending Tour series can be found here.
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 1: Choice cuts from London and Dublin
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 2: More choice cuts from London and Dublin.
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 3: Seattle Stopovers

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

‘If something’s worth thinking about, it’s worth singing about.’

Bob Dylan (Interviews)

As the years go by Dylan sheds some songs and introduces new ones. In 2005 he did introduce one new song, an orphan, which we’ll come to shortly. A notable first performance.

I haven’t always noted last performances, but for 2005 I count nine songs never to be heard again. They are not core songs, but rather songs that have been hanging around in the periphery, occasional songs used to bring some variation into the setlists.

But we have the remarkable case of a song only ever performed once, both a first and a last, ‘Million Dollar Bash’ from The Basement Tapes. Like ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’ and ‘Tiny Montomery’ the lyrics merely flirt with meaning. We know there’s a crazy party going to happen (or is happening), and some Dylan circus characters will be there, and chaos will reign, but not much else. It has a similar anarchic feel to ‘Rainy Day Woman.’

Well, I'm hittin' it too hard
My stones won't take
I'm get up in the mornin'
But it's too early to wake
First it's hello, goodbye
Then push and then crash
But we're all gonna make it
At that million dollar bash

Note the reference to the Beatles song, ‘Hello, Goodbye.’ It’s not the only reference to a popular song:

Well, I took my counsellor
Out to the barn
Silly Nelly was there
She told him a yarn
Then along came Jones
Emptied the trash
Ev’rybody went down
To that million dollar bash

‘Along Came Jones’ is a Leiber-Stoller song released by The Coasters in 1959.

‘Million Dollar Bash’ is a raucous, drunken kind of song. A celebration of partying. Dylan’s one and only live performance is from the London residency (2^nd night) and there’s nothing tentative about it; it sounds like he’s been doing it for years. And the audience loves it.

Million Dollar Bash

Now to ‘Waiting For You,’ the new Dylan song I mentioned. Untold editor Tony Attwood is not a great fan of the song. After digging into some of the song’s references he writes: ‘And all in all I find this a bit confusing, a bit of a mish-mash, a bit, dare I say it, of a waste of time.  I have the awful suspicion that Bob had thrown everything into his writing this year, and just as with the song that preceded this (“Sugar Babe”) he was somewhat out of ideas, and so used an old classic for the music and lines from elsewhere, so he started collecting other people’s lines and putting them together. The problem for me is that he now seemed to be writing them at random…. Of course I could be completely wrong – maybe there is an art in all this. Maybe it all makes a lot of sense and carries deeper meanings, but … well sorry.  Someone else needs to write a review of this song to make that point, because I really just don’t see it.’ https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/487

I sympathise with Tony’s frustrations. I have to confess when I first heard the song, I didn’t know it was a Dylan song and thought he was singing something by Hank Williams or the like. It had that doleful sound. As with other orphan songs, ‘Things Have Changed,’ ‘Cross The Green Mountains’ and ‘Tell Ol Bill,’ ‘Waiting For You’ was written for a film, this one called Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, which was released in May 2002, and the song alludes to the relationship in the film between the characters Shep and Vivi.

Interestingly, in response to Tony’s article a correspondent, Carrie Frey writes ‘I always felt like this song was Shep describing his and Vivi’s relationship. He loved her so much and waited for her to return the love despite knowing he wasn’t her first choice. Vivi was so unhappy about losing her first love that I felt like “happiness is but a state of mind, anytime you want you can cross the state line” was him begging her to see she could be happy with him. Even the “it’s been so long since I held you tight, been so long since we said goodnight” makes me think of them sleeping in separate rooms and never speaking at night. All of the jazz references fit with the Louisiana backdrop and while it sounds like a mish-mash, it seemed like a poetic way of Shep promising to always be there for Vivi no matter the abuse she threw at him.’

Without overthinking it, the song seems to have quite a simple emotion driving it, summed up in the title. Arguably, as Carrie Frey suggests, the songs random images fall in line with this emotional pull, or rather tug on the heartstrings.  Anyway, here it is from London (3^rd night)

Waiting For You

Now for the songs we must bid farewell too. Let’s start with one of my favourites, one I most regret not hearing again, ‘To Be Alone With You,’ an exuberant, rousing 1950’s style rocker. Dylan was to find the song again after the NET, for Shadow Kingdom and his 2022  performances, but for the NET it is lost.

Here it is from 29^th April, and Dylan doesn’t sound the least bit tired of the song. With Donnie Herron ripping it up with his violin and Dylan with an exultant harp break, the song has never sounded more vigourous and so much fun. Another celebratory song.

To Be Alone With You

‘Never Gonna Be the Same Again’ is a real rarity, having only ever been played twenty-six times, and only twice in 2005, but I can’t say it’s a favourite. It comes from Empire Burlesque, 1985, and although Dylan does his best to breathe some life into the song, I find it a bit lumbering, and it doesn’t break any new or interesting ground, at least for me. Not even the sharp, jagged harp break can lift this one. (26^th October)

 Never Gonna Be the Same Again

I feel a bit the same about ‘I’ll Remember You’ also from Empire Burlesque. Dylan is seldom mawkish, although he doesn’t mind being sentimental. For me, this song slips from the sentimental into mawkishness. Crying into his cups. We all know the feeling; remembering somebody we can’t forget. Consider the apologetic last verse:

I’ll remember you
When the wind blows through the piney wood
It was you who came right through
It was you who understood
Though I’d never say
That I done it the way
That you’d have liked me to
In the end
My dear sweet friend
I’ll remember you

‘Piney wood’ is a good example of the kind of poetic diction we can do without, and rarely indulged in by Dylan. Yet, on the other hand, one of things I love about Dylan is his unselfconsciousness. He doesn’t censor himself. If something’s worth feeling it’s worth singing. Certain kinds of feeling might require language like this, to explore the maudlin and not care if it sounds like some pop song on the B side of a Patty Paige album. Yes, there is a strong tradition in pop songs for this kind of emotional indulgence. (26^th May)

I Remember You

‘Bye and Bye’ takes that kind of feeling to a whole different level, one with humour and wry reflection (‘I’m singing love’s praises with sugar-coated rhyme’), an exquisite little song, and I was surprised to learn that this was its last performance, especially since it is from “Love and Theft” and so only four years old, with only 76 performances. The song contains one of my favourite couplets:

Well the future for me is already a thing of the past
You were my first love and you will be my last

It’s with much regret that I say goodbye to this little gem. And, to rub salt into the wound, this is a great performance, full of bitter-sweet nostalgia. Brilliant period sounding violin from Herron. I lovely take on 1930s jazz. Dylan manages to turn his upsinging into a jazzy style all its own, with some muted trumpet sounding harp to take the song out. (17^th October)

Bye and Bye

Another song I’m reluctant to see go is ‘If Dogs Run Free.’ This song, from New Morning, made an unexpected appearance in 2000, and had a brief run with 104 performances. It fits in well with the jazzy turn Dylan took with “Love and Theft” and I think the song has rather come into its own over those five years, with its lazy beat and insouciant, jaunty lyrics. As I have written, it’s a send up, a piss take of the cosmic mysticism of the beat poets, but it is beguiling in its amusing play with those ideas.

It’s a solid performance, with Dylan doing so much upsinging it becomes, as with ‘Bye and Bye,’ a style all of its own. It’s no longer just a flourish at end of the line, but comes in midline, any point. The instrumental is outstanding, with Dylan doing some great jazzy harp to finish.

If dogs run free

‘Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)’ is another song from The Basement Tapes. It had 176 plays from 1995. This song is not to be confused with ‘The Levee’s Gonna Break,’ which will appear in 2006 on Modern Times, but the song does remind me of ‘High Water (For Charley Patten)’ from “Love and Theft”. ‘Crash on the Levee’ might be seen as a background song for both these later songs, as rising flood water is used to suggest chaos and apocalypse in all three. This final performance is from Karlstad, Sweden, 20^th Oct.

Down in the flood 

What a great rocker! We’ll miss this one.

I wrote about ‘Ring Them Bells’ in NET, 2004, part 3, and don’t have much to add to those comments except that I’ve always had a soft spot for this song. It has a magic to it I find hard to explain. It’s a song that haunts us with the possibility of salvation. He does, however, change one of my favourite lines. ‘Time is running backward and so is the bride’ becomes ‘time is running backward and there’s nowhere to hide’ which to my mind is not an improvement. This last performance is from Erfurt, Germany, 6^th Nov. A strong, somewhat dreamy performance. Somewhere those bells will go on ringing for the ‘lilies that bloom.’

Ring Them Bells

‘Hazel’ from Planet Waves must be, ‘Million Dollar Bash’ aside, the rarest of the rare, played only seven times from 1994, four of those performances from 2005. It is a beautiful tribute song, slow and gentle. This is from Clearwater, 29th May, and is the second to last performance. The last was on 10^th June but I don’t have that recording on hand.

Hazel

So we’ve said our hellos and goodbyes. Next post we’ll visit some old friends, friends that stick around and never say goodbye.

Until then

Kia Ora

By Tony Attwood

At first I thought this version of Tom Thumb by Whiskerman was going to take us all the way through the song without any beat at all, but no, the rhythm section comes in at around 2′ 45″ and suggested to me that this was worth persevering with.   But having listened to the whole piece I wondered whether it might not have just used the music of that verse from 2′ 45″ onwards as the template.

I did listen all the way through and it is interesting, in that the final line of “do believe I’ve had enough” takes on a new meaning by the end, but I’m not sure I will happily go back to  this another time.  I’ve got the idea, and I suspect five seconds of the piece in a week or two’s time will do enough to remind me of the whole thing.

I was also unsure what extra insights Stephen Inglis was giving me until just after the first minute mark when the instrumental section came in… and this version (below) is really worth listening to just for the wonderful dexterity of the accompaniment.  Oh to be able to play like that!

And I must admit the more it progressed the more I enjoyed the recording, although it was probably in part caused by the fact that I was just waiting to see what on earth the guitarist could manage to do in the second instrumental break (and I guessed there had to be one, after such extraordinary dexterity in the first).

It’s one of those songs which will stay in the memory but I am not sure quite powerfully enough to make me want to play it again later.   And I wasn’t really too sure of the point of the coda.

Totta Näslund goes a different way with the sort of beat I don’t think I’ve heard anyone else use in accompanying this song.

What I particularly like is that the accompaniment is written to be in the background behind the voice and the beat, and the production team manage to keep it there and not compromise the artistic notion.

Somehow this version creates a new musical arrangement which utterly fits with the lyrics, as if this could be how it was originally intended by the composer.  Of course, from all that we know, that’s not true, but that feeling stays with me all the way through.

I really, really do like this, not least because as it progresses the song manages to incorporate new elements in the accompaniment without destroying the essence of the song.  Just consider the “Now all the authorities” verse – that tells us the song is growing, and that continues with the “burgandy” verse next, but this growth has been gradual, verse by verse, so it really works.

Somehow by the time we get to going back to New York City it has all happened, and the instrumental verse that follows conveys both where the signer has been and where he’s going to.

I do pity the poor pianist however; his/her performance is essential to the whole piece, but my god it must be mind-numbing to play, especially when the producer says, “Oh guys that was great but can we take it one more time all the way through.”

I love it.

Here’s a list of most of the articles from this series…

• The song with numbers in the title.
• Ain’t Talkin
• All I really want to do
•  Angelina
•  Apple Suckling and Are you Ready.
• As I went out one morning
•  Ballad for a Friend
• Ballad in Plain D
• Ballad of a thin man
•  Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• The ballad of Hollis Brown
• Beyond here lies nothing
• Blind Willie McTell
•  Black Crow Blues (more fun than you might recall)
• An unexpected cover of “Black Diamond Bay”
• Blowin in the wind as never before
• Bob Dylan’s Dream
• You will not believe this… 115th Dream revisited
• Boots of Spanish leather
• Born in Time
• Buckets of Rain
• Can you please crawl out your window
• Can’t wait
• Changing of the Guard
• Chimes of Freedom
• Country Pie
•  Crash on the Levee
• Dark Eyes
• Dear Landlord
• Desolation Row as never ever before (twice)
• Dignity.
• Dirge
• Don’t fall apart on me tonight.
• Don’t think twice
•  Down along the cove
• Drifter’s Escape
• Duquesne Whistle
• Farewell Angelina
• Foot of Pride and Forever Young
• Fourth Time Around
• From a Buick 6
• Gates of Eden
• Gotta Serve Somebody
• Hard Rain’s a-gonna Fall.
• 42 Heart of Mine
• 43: High Water
•  44: Highway 61.5
• 45: Hurricane
• 46: I am a lonesome hobo
• 47: I believe in you
• 48: I contain multitudes
• 49: I don’t believe you.
• 50: I love you too much
• 51: I pity the poor immigrent. 
•  52: I shall be released
• 53: I threw it all away
• 54: I want you
• 55: I was young when I left home
• 56: I’ll remember you
• 57: Idiot Wind and  More idiot wind
• 58: If not for you, and a rant against prosody
• 59: A Dylan cover a Day: If you Gotta Go, please go and do something different
• 60: If you see her say hello
• 61: Dylan cover a day: I’ll be your baby tonight
• 62: I’m not there.
• 63: In the Summertime, Is your love and an amazing Isis
• 64: It ain’t me babe
• 65: It takes a lot to laugh
• 66: It’s all over now Baby Blue
• 67: It’s all right ma
• 68: Cover versions of Just Like a Woman

• Million Miles part 1: The closer I get, the farther away I feel
• Million Miles part 2: They kind of write themselves
• Million Miles part 3: And thou didst commit whoredom with them
• Million Miles part 4: What’s it all coming to?
• Million Miles part 5: The sounds inside my mind

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         Like a wagon wheel

The last thing you said before you hit the street 
“Gonna find me a janitor to sweep me off my feet” 
I said, “That’s all right, you do what you gotta do” 
Well, I’m tryin’ to get closer, I’m still a million miles from you

 The song poet Dylan has a nice final couplet up his sleeve. But makes the debatable decision of going there by taking a detour; the two verses before that final couplet surely are the weakest links of the song. The penultimate verse even comes frighteningly close to being filler or even lousy poetry, and this sixth verse is unfortunately quite forgettable too. Mainly due, of course, to the corny pun with the janitor.

In itself, there is nothing wrong with a corny pun, every once in a while. Dylan indulges in it with some frequency, in fact in every decade of his sixty-year career. In the early sixties in songs whose form alone allows a cabaretesque approach, in talkin’ blues songs like “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” and “Talkin’ World War III Blues”. Later in frenzied mercurial songs like “Tombstone Blues” (The sun’s not yellow – it’s chicken), it continues through to twenty-first century songs like “Po’ Boy” (Freddy or not here I come), and culminates on Rough And Rowdy Ways (2020).

Here, however, there is something amiss. In a blues in which the protagonist is tossed to and fro between bitterness and despair, the cheap pun with “janitor” and “sweep me off my feet” is, well, inappropriate. All the more so, because the line catches the ear coming after the drama-promising opening line The last thing you said before you hit the street and before the melodious but clichéd That’s all right, you do what you gotta do. A verse line with a word combination, by the way, that is always attractive anyhow, as we can hear in Manfred Mann’s “You Gave Me Somebody To Love”, and in Santana’s “Choose”, but especially as demonstrated by the Grandmaster Jimmy Webb, who in 1968 wrote a whole song around it. “Do What You Gotta Do” sounds great in any version (B.J. Thomas, Nina Simone, The Four Tops, Clarence Carter, and more), but rarely as beautiful as when Roberta Flack halves the tempo and pours a can of violins over it (1970, on the same record that features Roberta’s heartbreaking “Just Like A Woman”, Chapter Two);

… a beautiful song Jimmy Webb dashes off in 1968, sometime between “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, “MacArthur Park” and “Wichita Lineman” (to name but three landmarks).

Dylan himself seems to feel some dissatisfaction as well. After the recording, in January ’97, he first ignores the song completely. Other Time Out Of Mind songs like “Love Sick”, “Can’t Wait” and “Cold Irons Bound” are immediately taken to the stage and performed over thirty times in their year of birth, “Million Miles” has to wait until the next year, until January 1998. This verse is then sung, but the following one is skipped – and a year later, in 1999, this janitorial couplet is also discarded completely. After that, “Million Miles” is only performed occasionally. Three or four times a year, culminating in 2008, when the song is on the set list a mere eight times – leaving out even the last three verses.

The reservations about the penultimate verse are even more pronounced. In the studio, Dylan sings:

Rock me, pretty baby, rock me all at once
Rock me for a little while, rock me for a couple of months 
And I’ll rock you too 
I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you

… hardly earth-shattering, indeed. A friendly critic might qualify it as a reverence to one of the great blues foundations, to B.B. King’s “Rock Me Baby”, but Dylan’s own fumbling with this verse suggests that he himself also sees it as a less successful improvisation product. In 1998, when the song is finally allowed to the stage, it is inexorably dropped. Only in 2003, in England, we hear the seventh verse return, but it has been rewritten in the meantime:

Rock me, pretty baby, rock me ’til everything gets real
Rock me for a little while, rock me 
       ’til there’s nothing left to feel
And I’ll rock you too
I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you

… rewritten to the version as it is published officially (in Lyrics and on the site). Dylan seems to think it’s okay now; in 2004 and 2005 this rewritten Lyrics version is maintained – but in the dying year of the song, 2008, the stanza, together with the preceding and the concluding one, is removed again. The void is filled – rather un-dylanesquely – with long, somewhat rudderless guitar solos.

A pity, still. The rewritten version is superior; both ’til everything gets real and ’til there’s nothing left to feel have the same colour, communicate the same emotional wound as “Cold Irons Bound” and “Dirt Road Blues”, as Time Out Of Mind at all, actually. And the intentional or unintentional reverence to “Rock Me Baby”, or rather, to its real father “Rockin’ And Rollin’” by Lil’ Son Jackson from 1950 remains intact. Not inconceivable, this reverence option; the song is one of the stepfathers of the unsightly snippet that a slightly bored Dylan shakes off in ’73, during the recordings for the Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid soundtrack, and which is later polished up and promoted to a world hit by Old Crow Medicine Show and Darius Rucker, of the throwaway “Rock Me Mama (Like A Wagon Wheel)”.

Colleagues hardly have problems with it, for that matter, with the skipped or rewritten rock me couplet. The two best-known covers, the one by Alvin Youngblood Hart (2002) and the one by Bonnie Raitt from 2012, simply stick to the discarded lyrics of the original studio recording, and unconcernedly rock all at once, rock happily for a couple of months.

To be continued. Next up Million Miles part 7: Songs that float in a luminous haze

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang

Previously in this series…

• Other people’s songs. How Dylan covers the work of other composers
• Other People’s songs: Bob and others perform “Froggie went a courtin”
• Other people’s songs: They killed him
• Other people’s songs: Frankie & Albert
• Other people’s songs: Tomorrow Night where the music is always everything

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: This track is known by various names: Stagger Lee, Stagolee and other variants. Bob’s version, Stack a Lee, appeared on Worlds gone Wrong.

Tony: Now you are really pushing my musical knowledge beyond the boundaries… I had to look this one up, although I did know it has been around for a long old time.   I just didn’t know where it had been.

The journey took me to Frank Hutchison who is pictured on the left, (and I’ll come back to him in a moment) to my favourite actor and comedian.   But let’s try and do the whole journey…

According to wiki: “The song was first published in 1911 and first recorded in 1923, by Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians. A version by Lloyd Price reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959.

As you can hear that was an instrumental, and the first version with lyrics did not turn up until 1924, as Skeeg-a-Lee Blues, by Lovie Austin.  It’s available on Spotify and really worth hearing.

And then in 1925 Ma Rainey recorded it.  Ma Rainey you will of course know because “ma rainey and beethoven once unwrapped a bedroll” on Tombstone Blues.  Although quite what that means I have no idea.

So the song evolved and meandered and then Bob went back to the early version

It may be that my English upbringing leaves me not fully attuned to the lyrics and Bob’s intonation in this song, so in case that affliction affects you also, here are the lyrics…

Hawlin Alley on a dark and drizzly night,
Billy Lyons and Stack-A-Lee had one terrible fight.
All about that John B. Stetson hat.

Stack-A-Lee walked to the bar-room, 
    and he called for a glass of beer,
Turned around to Billy Lyons, said, "What are you doin' here?"
"Waitin' for a train, please bring my woman home.

"Stack-A-Lee, oh Stack-A-Lee. please don't take my life.
Got three little children and a-weepin', lovin' wife.
You're a bad man, bad man, Stack-A-Lee."

"God bless your children and I'll take care of your wife.
You stole my John B., now I'm bound to take your life."
All about that John B. Stetson hat.

Stack-A-Lee turned to Billy Lyons and 
    he shot him right through the head,
Only taking one shot to kill Billy Lyons dead.
All about that John B. Stetson hat.

Sent for the doctor, well the doctor he did come,
Just pointed out Stack-A-Lee, said, "Now what have you done?"
You're a bad man, bad man, Stack-A-Lee."

Six big horses and a rubber-tired hack,
Taking him to the cemetery, buy they failed to bring him back.
All about that John B. Stetson hat.

Hawlin Alley, thought I heard the bulldogs bark.
It must have been old Stack-A-Lee stumbling in the dark.
He's a bad man, gonna land him right back in jail.

High police walked on to Stack-A-Lee, he was lying fast asleep.
High police walked on to Stack-A-Lee, and he jumped forty feet.
He's a bad man, gonna land him right back in jail.

Well they got old Stack-A-Lee and they laid him right back in jail.
Couldn't get a man around to go Stack-A Lee's bail
All about that John B. Stetson hat.

Stack-A-Lee turned to the jailer, he said, "Jailer, I can't sleep.
'Round my bedside Billy Lyons began to creep."
All about that John B. Stetson hat.

So how on earth did we get from the music and lyrics of the early versions to Bob’s version?  Did he re-write it himself, or is he re-interpreting an earlier interpretation?

This is where Frank Hutchison comes in…

Frank Hutchison was an early 20th century Piedmont blues singer/songwriter who worked with Okeh Records (who called him “The Pride of West Virginia.”)  Most reports name him as the first non-African American musician to perform and record the country blues.   Which would explain very much why Bob was drawn to hims music.

Aaron: Many artists have tackled the song using variants of the lyrics and melody. Here are a couple I liked.

Grateful Dead

Tony: This is one of the reasons why I love working through the history of these old songs – Stagger Lee seems to have transformed itself into a million different forms.  I quite enjoyed that.  But then….

Hugh Laurie

Tony:  Now Hugh Laurie has for many years been at or near the very top of my list of people who I would love to meet, and who, if I did meet, I would undoubtedly end up with my mouth hanging open and being utterly unable to say a word and then probably find I had been dribbling.

If you don’t know the work of Hugh Laurie well, all I can do is say it ranges from music as above, to his primary source of fame and undoubtedly income, acting.  From “House” to “Jeeves and Wooster”, from “Fry and Laurie” to my absolute favourite, “The Night Manager”.

Indeed it has always seemed rather unfair that one man should have such a phenomenal range of talent – but I guess when they were doshing it out the bucket slipped and Hugh Laurie got 150 people’s worth, leaving us poor mortals scrabbling around for the odd bits that dripped down after he had been submerged in the stuff.

He has won three Golden Globe Awards and two Screen Actors Guild Awards was appointed OBE in the 2007 New Year Honours and CBE in the 2018 New Year Honours, for services to drama.

Thank you Aaron for giving me a chance to say something about this amazing man.  And to Hugh Laurie, thank you for that really is a most fantastic version of Stagger Lee that you recorded.  I’m so glad it was filmed.  I live in awe of your multiple talents.

By Larry Fyffe

Accidental shootings do happen:

Her apron wrapped about her
And he took her for a swan
Oh and alas, it was she Polly Vaughn
(Bob Dylan: Polly Vaughn)

In the song lyrics below, a husband does in his wife, the world outside not caring:

Tenderly William kissed his wife
Then he opened her head with a butcher knife
And the swan on the river went gliding by
(Bob Dylan: Ballad Of The Gliding Swans ~ Jones/Dylan)

Supernatural events occur in mythology, and indeed are not always happy ones:

In the following song lyrics, the narrator thereof might be considered Trojan Paris; upstairs he is visiting Aphrodite/Venus, with her pet scorpion; she promised Paris that he’d get to have beautiful Helen; she (and her sister) the offspring of Leda by Zeus –  the thunder god having disguised himself as a swan.

Achilles has sworn to fight for Helen’s return to Greece, but he’ll be killed by archer Paris, his arrow guided by Apollo, son of Zeus but not born of wife Hera:

Achilles is in your alleyway
He don't want me here, he does brag
(Bob Dylan: Temporary Like Achilles)

Seems in the song below, Paris poses a question to the sea-foam goddess as to why her beauty is so alluring to all men as is the swan-like body of Helen; Paris decides he must have Venus, who sides with the Trojans for the most part anyway, as much as he desires Helen the Greek.

Meanwhile, temporary as it be, Achilles has turned against his Greek commander; his heels are showing, and they ought to be wandering:

How come you get someone like him to be your guard
You know I want your loving, honey, but you're so hard
(Bob Dylan: Temporary Like Achilles)

As the story goes, Venus, by a prince, becomes the mother of the Trojan commander Aeneas.

The victorious Greek commander on his return home is done in by his betrayed wife and her lover.

The commander of the Greek forces ought not to have angered his wife, she fathered by swan Zeus just like Helen.

The story condensed in the poem below ~ ‘thighs’/’lies”:

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs
And how can body, laid in that white rush
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies
(William Yeats: Leda And The Swan)

Low burlesqued, and obversed in the song lyrics beneath ~ ‘my’/’pie’:

Saddle me up my big white goose
Tie me on'er and let her loose
Oh me, oh my
Love that country pie
(Bob Dylan: Country Pie)

• An index of the Never Ending Tour series can be found here.
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 1: Choice cuts from London and Dublin
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 2: More choice cuts from London and Dublin.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

The last two posts have been all about the London residency and the Dublin concerts in November, and I’ll certainly be returning to those six concerts for further treasures they contain. However, I want to take time out from London and Dublin to look at two concerts Dylan did in Seattle, one on March 7^th and again on July 16^th.

The March 7^th concert was a regular NET concert, but the July 16^th concert was a special event sponsored by Amazon.com. Here’s how it was noted in the Seattle Times:

Amazon.com will celebrate its 10th anniversary with a present to employees — an exclusive concert featuring Bob Dylan, Norah Jones and political satirist Bill Maher. The event will take place in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall on July 16.

No tickets will be sold to the public, but the company says it will be broadcast live on the Internet (Amazon.com/showofthanks), beginning at 5 p.m.

I want to start by working through the July 16^th concert as what we have here is no run of the mill audience recording, but a beautifully balanced soundboard. This is the best quality sound you’ll find in 2005, Crystal Cat’s famous London recordings notwithstanding. Not only is it the best recording, but it is also arguably one of Dylan’s best performances for the year, again London and Dublin notwithstanding.

Because of this, I’m taking the unusual step of going through the concert from start to finish. It’s the only way to do justice to these performances.

One thing that struck me was the quality of Dylan’s piano playing. Because, with the audience recordings, the piano is often grumbling away in the background, it is not always evident how skilful Dylan’s keyboard playing has become. As always, he never takes the lead, but these recordings show clearly the importance of the piano in creating the musical texture.

I’m going to skip ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ the opening song, as we’ve had two fine performances of this from London and Dublin, and the July 16th Seattle performance is pretty standard. The next two songs, however, are outstanding. Exquisite performances of two songs from NashvilleSkyline (1969), ‘Tell Me That It Isn’t True’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.’ As the years have rolled on, and the songs on Dylan’s setlists have grown darker and more complex, particularly with the arrival of songs from Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft, these more modest, lighter songs from Nashville Skyline have grown more precious. These two songs could have been pop songs with a country twist from the 1950s. There is an innocence to them.

These are very accomplished performances; there are no rough edges. Dylan’s  performance is restrained and quietly assured, as are the two beautiful harp breaks in both songs.

Tell me that it isn’t true

The necessary touch of melancholy in that song is not found in ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,’ a happy-go-lucky love song which takes a different approach to seduction than the more famous ‘Lay Lady Lay’ – a somewhat more subtle and indirect approach, but with the same aim in mind.

Well, that mockingbird’s gonna sail away
We’re gonna forget it
That big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon
But we’re gonna let it
You won’t regret it

Another state of the art performance:

I’ll be your baby

I don’t feel quite so effusive about ‘Lay Lady Lay,’ which comes as number four on the Seattle setlist. I’d like to say that he hits three in a row from Nashville Skyline, but for me this performance is marred by too much upsinging and a sound not quite as smooth as the preceding two. I think he did a better job of the song at Dublin, but we’ll catch up with that in a later post.

Lay lady lay

Number 5 on the setlist is ‘You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine’ from Blonde on Blonde. A nice clean recording, and a superior performance. Nothing particularly special about it, however.

You Go Your Way

‘Blind Willy McTell’ however is special, as Dylan has come up with a totally new arrangement of the song. Fans of his swinging 2012 performances will find the origin of that arrangement here, in 2005. For the first time, Dylan experiments with making the song swing. Swing music originates with the big bands, and does have a technical definition. This is Wikipedia:

‘The term swing, as well as swung note(s) and swung rhythm,[b] is also used more specifically to refer to a technique (most commonly associated with jazz[1] but also used in other genres) that involves alternately lengthening and shortening the first and second consecutive notes in the two-part pulse-divisions in a beat.’

Put more simply: ‘The name derived from its emphasis of the off-beat, or nominally weaker beat.’

It’s odd that such an intense song, with its dark themes of ‘power and greed and corruptible seed’ should work so well put to what is essentially a dance rhythm, but it works. It works well here, and will work well even better in years to come. I still lament, however the disappearance of ‘the ghost of slavery ships’ and that wonderful verse with the ‘sweet magnolias blooming.’

Blind Willy McTell

Now for a real treat. A performance of ‘Watching the River Flow’ that puts me in a ‘best ever’ mood, especially given the fine extended harp break. He performs the song at the March 7^th concert too, and we’ll be checking that one out shortly as an interesting comparison. Here it is from July 16^th, number 7 on the setlist.

Watching the river flow (A)

Number 8 on the setlist, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ keeps the energy going. Another superlative performance. Wonderful ending with Dylan playing a duet with himself, harp and piano. Hints of swing here too. It may not be as spooky as the album version, but loses none of the mockery.

Ballad of a thin man

Now for the treat of treats, Dylan singing ‘I Shall Be Released’ with Nora Jones. Dylan invites her onto the stage and an exquisite performance follows. Doesn’t seem like they’d done much in the way of rehearsal, but that just adds to the spontaneous feel of it.

The whole professionally filmed concert can be found on YouTube and ‘I Shall Be Released’ starts around 43.45 mins. There’s a lot of communication going on between them as they work through the song. Nora Jones is watching Dylan closely, and you can feel the buzz between them. Two consummate professionals at work. It’s a pleasure to watch.

I shall be released

The first thing I noticed when moving to March 7^th was the difference in spirit between the two concerts. When Dylan does celebrity gigs or special gigs he tends to be more restrained, more careful, and the performances tend to be more polished than the ordinary NET concerts. I noticed the looser feel when I compared this version of ‘Watching the River Flow’ to the July 16^th version. This is looser, rougher, not as well recorded of course, but personally I like that less restrained feel. It’s not so perfect, but it has more of the excitement of performance to it.

Watching the river flow (B)

Although it’s not listed on the official Dylan website, he did a performance of ‘The Man In Me’ at Seattle March 7^th. This is another quite modest, unexceptional song off New Morning. I like this rougher, 2005 version better than the album’s. He puts a lot into the vocal, and an appreciative audience helps to make this relatively rare performance of the song an enjoyable listen. It begins to sound like a love song.

The Man in Me

In 2004 Dylan began to experiment with slow versions of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, Dylan’s ode to escapism. These slow versions are mesmerising, and bring out the inherent melancholy of the song. I don’t mind his missing the ‘skipping reels of rhyme’ verse, but I do wish he hadn’t dropped a line or two from the last verse. I miss ‘the haunted frightened trees’ and the ‘one hand waving free.’ I think the whole verse is so masterful, missed lines seem like a violation of the song. Nonetheless, this is a different experience from the faster versions, more thoughtful and contemplative, with Dylan slipping into semi-talking in his hushed voice, the harp break similarly restrained.

Mr Tambourine Man

‘Moonlight’ is a beguiling song from Love and Theft that hasn’t changed a lot in performance. However, what is of interest in this Seattle March 7^th performance is the way Dylan has speeded it up. This is very different to how he will perform it in London at the end of the year, where he returns to the slower tempo version. This Seattle ‘Moonlight’ could be seen as an experiment he was to abandon.

Moonlight

2003/4 saw some powerful performances of ‘Sugar Baby’ and 2005 continues that run. Another ace vocal performance from Dylan. At the heart of this complex song there is a sense of a stoical resignation. The efforts we make in the world are often futile and pointless, and have the opposite effect to what we intended:

Any minute of the day the bubble could burst
Try to make things better for someone, sometimes you just end up

making it a thousand times worse

Sugar Baby

Over the years we have also been treated to some powerful performances of ‘Queen Jane Approximately.’ From 2000 on this song has become one of Dylan’s core songs, although with only 76 performances in all, these recordings have all the more interest. I feel that the live performances have helped establish the song as a major work. It is an invitation to friendship, a post-love love song, full of world-weary stoical resignation. The world can be too much with us, people expecting all kinds of things from us.

Now when all the clowns that you have commissioned
Have died in battle or in vain
And you’re sick of all this repetition
Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?

Queen Jane

Let’s finish with a rousing performance of ‘Cat’s in the Well’ which is one of Dylan’s fast-beat rockers with an uncompromising message. What makes this performance special is the swirling violin. That’s Donnie Herron at work. It’s loud and a little messy, but it punches us out of Seattle with a bang. ‘May the Lord have mercy on us all.’

Cats in the well

That’s it for our Seattle stopovers. In the next post I’ll be welcoming a couple of new songs and saying farewell to quite a bunch. See you then.

Kia Ora

By Larry Fyffe

Part One

Sing in me, Muse, and though me tell the story
Of that man skilled in all ways of contention
The wanderer, harried for years on end
After he plundered the stronghold city of Troy
(Homer: The Odyssey, Book 1 ~ translated)

Lines echoed in the song lyrics quoted beneath:

Mothers of Muses, sing for me
Sing of the mountains, and the deep, dark sea .....
Got a mind to ramble, got a mind to roam
I'm travelling light, and I'm a-slow coming home
(Bob Dylan: Calliope)

In the epic poem is the story of  Odysseus, and how he  blinds the Cyclops; then he insults Zeus’ brother Neptune (Poseidon), the immortal god of the sea and of earthquakes, who’s also the father of the one-eyed giant.

‘Tis not a good idea to insult the gods:

Would to god I could strip you of life and breath
And ship you down to the house of death
As surely no one will ever heal your eye
Not even the earthquake god himself
(Homer: The Odyssey, Book 9 ~ translated)

The narrator in the song lyrics below takes on the role of Neptune himself – so you think you can build an ‘unsinkable’ ship do you…..you don’t know to whom you are talking, do you?!

I can strip you of life, strip you of breath
Ship you down to the house of death
One day, you will ask for me
There'll be no else that you'll wanna see
(Bob Dylan: Early Roman Kings)

The sea-god is mentioned in the lines quoted beneath:

Praise be to Nero's Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's asking, "Which side are you on?"
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

Our homeward hero makes it pass the sweet-singing Sirens by being tied to the mast, but Neptune’s brother then smashes the ship all to pieces, and only Captain Odysseus survives:

Then Zeus roared out his thunder
And with a bolt of lightning struck our ship
The blow from Zeus' lightning made our craft
Shutter from stem to stern
And filled it up with sulphur smoke
(Homer: The Odyssey, Book 12 ~ translated)

The narrator in the song below again takes on the role of Odysseus who’s trying bring it all back home – though now he’s not so self-assured:

Well, I sailed through the storm
Strapped to the mast
Oh, but our time has come
And I’m seeing the real you at last
(Bob Dylan: Seeing The Real You At Last)

Part Two

In Greek/Roman mythology, Poseidon (Neptune), the god of the sea, brother of Zeus(Jove), upset at Odysseus (Ulysses) for poking out the only eye of son Cyclopes tries to drown the hero of the Trojan War.

Due to the insistence of Athena (Minerva), the thunder god somewhat reluctantly, sees to it that the wandering seafarer eventually makes it back to his weaving wife Penelope.

In the following verse, the narrator takes on the persona of Pluto, ruler of the Underworld, and brother of Zeus and Neptune; Hermes (Mercury), his wing-footed guide to and from Hades – changed below to two female singers:

Hello, Mary Lou
Hello, Miss Pearl
My fleet-footed guides from the underworld
(Bob Dylan: False Prophet)

Hermes is depicted in the following lines:

They called him Hermes of the golden wand, the fleet-footed messenger
On his feet Hermes bound his golden sandals that never grew old
And bore him safely and swiftly over wet sea, and dry land
(Homer: Odyssey, Book 5 ~ translated)

So goes the story ~Trojan Paris, to gain Helen, judges Aphrodite (Venus) more beautiful than Athena, and Hera (Zeus’ wife). In the tangled story of the Trojan War that results, with his sister Artimis (Diana), Apollo, son of Zeus, along with Aphrodite, sides with the Trojans; Hera and Athena with the Greeks and Odysseus.

In the song lyrics quoted beneath, Aphrodite is portrayed as the protector of the Trojan leader:

And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes, the girl from the half-shell
Could keep you from harm
(John Baez: Diamonds And Rust)

In the lines below, Aeneas is told a bigger destiny awaits him in Italy:

Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth's peoples - for your arts are to be these
To pacify, to impose the rule of law
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud
(Virgil: The Aeneid, Book VI)

The Trojan leader gets the good news when taken on a special trip to the Underworld; modernized in the song lyrics below:

Key West, under the sun, under the radar, under the gun
You stay to the left, and then you lean to the right
Feel the sun on your skin, and the healing virtues of the wind
(Bob Dylan: Key West)

by Jochen Markhorst

• Million Miles part 1: The closer I get, the farther away I feel
• Million Miles part 2: They kind of write themselves
• Million Miles part 3: And thou didst commit whoredom with them
• Million Miles (1997) part 4: What’s it all coming to?

by Jochen Markhorst

V          The sounds inside my mind

Well, I don’t dare close my eyes and I don’t dare wink 
Maybe in the next life I’ll be able to hear myself think 
Feel like talking to somebody but I just don’t know who 
Well, I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you

The hint of acceptance from the previous stanza evaporates again already in the fifth stanza. No, this narrator is still pretty upset, still in the penultimate stage of mourning, depression. Disregarding the context, the opening line would seem to be the mantra of a serious case of FOMO, of Fear Of Missing Out. Very serious, even: “I don’t dare close my eyes and I don’t dare wink”; this guy really doesn’t want to miss anything. But within the context, and conditioned by a century of song tradition, we know what is really going on. Bing Crosby already warned about it:

Just when I think that I'm set
Just when I've learned to forget
I close my eyes, dear, and there you are
You keep coming back like a song
A song that keeps saying, remember

… in “You Keep Coming Back Like a Song” from 1946, with its truly beautiful title, which eventually inspired the heartbreaking album You Come And Go Like A Pop Song by The Bicycle Thief in 1999. In fact a project from the tragic hero Bob Forrest, whom Dylan fans know mainly from his contribution to the I’m Not There soundtrack, “Moonshiner”, and who, on his ’99 pièce de résistance, expresses with much more credibility the same suffering as Bing Crosby: “I can still see your face” (in “Everyone Asks”).

As Sinatra, too, confesses in ’55 on the unsurpassed heartburn album In The Wee Small Hours in “I See Your Face Before Me” (I close my eyes, and there you are always), as Dylan’s fellow Travelling Wilbury Roy Orbison confided in “Afraid To Sleep” (Can’t close my eyes, afraid to sleep / Cause when I do I would only dream of you, 1965)… we know by now what it means when a Victim of Love says he dare not close his eyes. The choice of these particular words, though, seems to be triggered by Henry Rollins – not for the first and not for the last time on Time Out Of Mind.

Rollins’ trigger, in turn, is of course more intense and more personal than fictional heartbreak. Rollins writes Now Watch Him Die (1993) after witnessing how his friend Joe Cole dies brutally and senselessly when he and Joe are victims of a robbery; before Henry’s eyes Joe is shot through the head. In the literary coping therewith, Rollins uses the word combination a few times to express a similar fear (“I close my eyes and I’m in the room with Joe’s body”, for instance), just as Dylan’s continuation Feel like talking to somebody but I just don’t know who seems to be inspired by it: “No one is anyone I can talk to,” Rollins writes, for instance, and “I look at the phone thinking about calling out there / There’s no one to call.”

The other distorted sense is less unambiguous. The narrator shares the inability to hear himself think with an earlier protagonist in Dylan’s oeuvre, with the I-person from “One Too Many Mornings” (1964):

An’ the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind

… at least, if we assume that it’s not interfering noise, preventing him to hear himself think. In any case, that is the scenario that Henry Rollins invokes time and again in his work. The choppers are so loud I can’t even hear myself think, for example (in “Art To Choke Hearts”, 1986), or I have the music cranking in my headphones so I can hear myself think over the caterwaul of my fellow masticators. It is disturbing enough, the state of Henry Rollins’ mind, but it is to be feared that Dylan’s narrators are even worse off – there it is the inner chaos that makes following one’s own thoughts impossible. In “Million Miles”, a threatening inner chaos, even; an addition like maybe in the next life and the ultimate loneliness of feel like talking to somebody but I just don’t know who suggest suicidal despair.

Seeing, hearing, feeling… his senses have been stripped, the poor soul. And apparently ready to fade too. But the cheerful, carefree connotation that Mr. Tambourine Man’s friend communicates with those words is completely missing here. This is the fourth song on Time Out Of Mind, and the motifs begin to emerge. Walking is one (preferably at night, or so it seems), world weariness, or rather life weariness a second one, and the disturbed perception, like here in this stanza of “Million Miles”, a third one. This motif returns in almost every song, with the devastating power of mental illness even. “I’m beginning to hear voices,” the man in “Cold Irons Bound” notices. “Insanity is smashing up against my soul,” says the narrator in the closing song “Highlands” – a superlative of the announcement “my brain is so wired” in the opening song “Love Sick”. Prior to “Million Miles”, in “Standing In The Doorway”, we have already heard the narrator complain that he feels “sick in the head”, and before that, in “Dirt Road Blues”, concerns about mental health and the reliability of his sensory perceptions are justified as well.

After the first four songs on Time Out Of Mind, all three motifs keep returning. The weariness less pronounced, but unmistakable. They all walk, sometimes in combination with the third motif, the mental crisis: “I’m strolling through the lonely graveyard of my mind,” says the pitiful wretch in song no. 10, in “Can’t Wait”. By then we have met his fellow sufferers one by one. Fellow sufferers whose nerves are exploding (“‘Til I Fell In Love With You”), whose nerves are vacant and numb (“Not Dark Yet”), who don’t even know what “all right” means (“Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”)… no, our narrator from “Million Miles” may be lonely, but he is not alone. Any one of those men is a suitable conversation partner for a guy who feels like talking to somebody but just doesn’t know who.

Indeed. But then again, every one of those possible conversation partners is probably a million miles away, too.

To be continued. Next up Million Miles part 6: Like a wagon wheel

————

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang

• Other people’s songs. How Dylan covers the work of other composers
• Other People’s songs: Bob and others perform “Froggie went a courtin”
• Other people’s songs: They killed him
• Other people’s songs: Frankie & Albert

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: I have always considered “World Gone Wrong” as my favorite of Dylan’s covers albums. However, in picking the songs for this series, “Good as I Been to you” is fast rising up the rankings.

Yet another track from the latter album worthy of reappraisal is Dylan’s version of Tomorrow Night.

Tony: This song has the utterly perfect blues opening, and this continues with the simple guitar part.

But what is strange about the song is that the chords are nothing like the chords we normally hear in blues music.  I am sure there is an F diminished in there, which is really unusual in the key of E.  (Or F#dim if you are playing it in F).   And it is because of this, I think, that Dylan simply strums the accompaniment with no attempt at anything beyond this.  The chords are telling us a story by themselves.

As our good friends at the Bob Dylan Project confirm (but I looked it up to be sure as my memory is getting very dodgy these days) the piece was written by the Austrian composer and conductor Wilhelm Grosz (1894-1939) and Sam Coslow.

Although you may only be familiar with this song beyond Dylan’s recording, you probably do know “Red Sails in the Sunset” by the same composer   Or, if I may be sold bold as to tell you what you ought to know, you ought to know it if you don’t.  Written in 1935 by which time Wilhelm Grosz was writing under the name Hugh Williams.

But I digress.   Back with “Tomorrow Night”, I have no evidence for this but I wonder if Dylan’s interest in the song came from this Lonnie Johnson recording

https://youtu.be/POnWb_fJc4I

This version brings out every element of the beauty of the song and ok there is the odd moment of perhaps unnecessary virtuoso guitar runs, but in essence the song is presented as itself – which of course is all it needs.  It is an absolute classic.

Aaron: Here are a couple of other versions of this song for Tony to compare with Dylan’s.  First, Elvis Presley.

Tony: It is interesting that the producer felt there needed to be a touch of echo in this – I mean Elvis had a superb voice so why add anything to this?

The basics are all there, but if you have a moment I would urge you to play a bit of Elvis’ version and then Lonnie Johnson’s.  I so much prefer the latter to what seems to me the horrible over-production of the Elvis performance.

Also, I lose touch with those gorgeous chord changes against that beautiful flowing melody in the Presley production.   So no, this is not for me.  But I could go on listening to Lonnie Johnson over and over.  And in fact I have been.

Aaron: And last, Tom Jones

Tony: I can’t turn this link into a cover shot for some reason, so you’ll have to click here to hear it.

I think there is something about my musical taste which somehow always takes me back to days way before I was born rather than enjoying contemporary versions of older songs.   The addition of violins in the latter stages of this version really isn’t necessary, in my view, nor are the moments of vocal solo without accompaniment.

To make the singer the forefront of the piece, rather than let this wonderful song speak for itself seems ludicrous to me, but of course I know that the producers were wanting to maximise the fact that each (with Elvis and with Tom Jones) had a star performer in the studio.

And that is the difference between Bob Dylan and these other latter-day performers.  Bob delivers the song, reveres the song, nurtures the song, caresses the song…  It is all about the song, not about Bob Dylan.   Elvis and Tom Jones make the song nothing more than a vehicle for their own glorification.

Which is one of 10,000 reasons why I like the work of Dylan so much.   He rarely if ever puts himself before the music.   With Bob, the music is always everything.  It’s not the singer, it’s the song.

by Tony Attwood

My eternal complaint about Dylan covers is that so many artists just perform the song of their choice as it is written or recorded, ignoring the fact that Bob himself clearly thinks that just because a song is recorded one way, that doesn’t mean that is the fixed or “proper” version.

After all, if he can play a song of his half a dozen different ways, then surely other performers ought to be able to find at least a few more ways of playing.

Take Los Cenzontles – they not only play with the instrumentation they turn the whole rhythm of the song inside out with so many off beats it’s hard to keep up yet all the time staying in the 12/8 time signature.  It must have been enormous fun to work this out and rehearse it.   But it must also have taken so long…

Travelling a completely different route is Old Crow – the band who on tour performed what is for me the ultimate version of Visions of Johanna.

They don’t play with the timing, but here I find new life in a song that until I heard this version was never one that I really felt at home with.   What do they do?

They give it a sort of gentleness that I don’t find in most other versions… somehow it drives through what feels like its natural style and speed.   And I do utterly love the instrumentation.

Enzo Pietropaoli however goes somewhere very, very different… and this works wonderfully well for me for the simple reason that I know the music so well.

But if anyone had said before I heard this, “How about a version of ‘Just like a woman’ played on a solo double bass?” I really would have laughed.  Please do listen all the way through – it is extraordinary, delicate and beautiful.

Less idiosyncratic but as interesting and beautiful is the Guitar Dreamers version, because once again they are re-imagining the work, not just saying “Hey let’s do ‘Woman’.”   For the right moment on the right day, this is there just to be put on, to have one’s eyes closed, and to say, “Yes I can stop this crazy helter-skelter of a day, and reflect for a while on where I am and why I am and what the hell I am doing here.”

And, at least for me, that is never a bad thing to do.

Last one, and I nearly didn’t get to hear this one because of the word “grass” – it just shows how prejudice can take over even a seasoned listener.  (I thought it might be bluegrass, which I really find rather hard going.)

But this is beautiful and relaxing.   I could do with a collection of songs played in this way.  And indeed if you have a Spotify account, do type in the band’s name and listen to “Tangled up in blue”.  It’s not a case of one version being better than another, it’s just that on a day when so far I find I haven’t smiled that much, I’m now just grinning all over my face.  (Oh and do listen to that track all the way through – no dropping out after a while).

Here’s a list of most of the articles from this series…

• The song with numbers in the title.
• Ain’t Talkin
• All I really want to do
•  Angelina
•  Apple Suckling and Are you Ready.
• As I went out one morning
•  Ballad for a Friend
• Ballad in Plain D
• Ballad of a thin man
•  Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• The ballad of Hollis Brown
• Beyond here lies nothing
• Blind Willie McTell
•  Black Crow Blues (more fun than you might recall)
• An unexpected cover of “Black Diamond Bay”
• Blowin in the wind as never before
• Bob Dylan’s Dream
• You will not believe this… 115th Dream revisited
• Boots of Spanish leather
• Born in Time
• Buckets of Rain
• Can you please crawl out your window
• Can’t wait
• Changing of the Guard
• Chimes of Freedom
• Country Pie
•  Crash on the Levee
• Dark Eyes
• Dear Landlord
• Desolation Row as never ever before (twice)
• Dignity.
• Dirge
• Don’t fall apart on me tonight.
• Don’t think twice
•  Down along the cove
• Drifter’s Escape
• Duquesne Whistle
• Farewell Angelina
• Foot of Pride and Forever Young
• Fourth Time Around
• From a Buick 6
• Gates of Eden
• Gotta Serve Somebody
• Hard Rain’s a-gonna Fall.
• 42 Heart of Mine
• 43: High Water
•  44: Highway 61.5
• 45: Hurricane
• 46: I am a lonesome hobo
• 47: I believe in you
• 48: I contain multitudes
• 49: I don’t believe you.
• 50: I love you too much
• 51: I pity the poor immigrent. 
•  52: I shall be released
• 53: I threw it all away
• 54: I want you
• 55: I was young when I left home
• 56: I’ll remember you
• 57: Idiot Wind and  More idiot wind
• 58: If not for you, and a rant against prosody
• 59: A Dylan cover a Day: If you Gotta Go, please go and do something different
• 60: If you see her say hello
• 61: Dylan cover a day: I’ll be your baby tonight
• 62: I’m not there.
• 63: In the Summertime, Is your love and an amazing Isis
• 64: It ain’t me babe
• 65: It takes a lot to laugh
• 66: It’s all over now Baby Blue
• 67: It’s all right ma

• It’s Not Just About Sound Part I
• It’s Not Just About The Sound Part II
• It’s Not Just About the Sound Part III

by Larry Fyffe

In their examination of Dylan lyrics, the members of the Sound School of Dylanology turn to the left rather than to the right once they enter the portals of Hades – there they find that everything is broken.

Those who seek one level of certain meaning in the song lyrics written by Bob Dylan search in vain – his words often take on a meaning of their own.

For example, time comes when the singer/songwriter/musician demands an improved business relationship with the recording establishment; he leaves “Columbia Records” which then issues an album of ‘outtakes’ from previous recording sessions – the album called simply “Dylan” does alright in the charts.

With the benefit of hindsight, one of its songs can be construed as an allegory – that is, the record company, of the West, of Columbia, is personified as Flora to whom the narrator returns after the relationship is all but straightened out:

Although she swore my life away
Deprived me of my rest
Still I love my faithless Flora
The Lily of the West
(Bob Dylan: Lily Of The West ~ Davies/Peterson)

Nevertheless, something’s gone amiss in the process; after the return, out spurts “Blood On The Tracks”, a confessional album that contains the allegorical “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts”:

Now there's a wall between us, something there's been lost
I took too much for granted, I got my signals crossed
Just to think that it all began on an unevenful morn
"Come in", she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm"
(Bob Dylan: Shelter From The Storm)

What is considered good art, and what is considered bad art by the officials of the music industry has its day in court:

"In short is a Flower, Rosemary
Or Lily, dead or alive, worth
The excrement of one sea-bird?"
(Arthur Rimbaud: On The Subject Of Flowers ~ translated)

Decided by the jury of his peers is that good walls make good neighbours:

"Be careful not to touch the wall, there's a brand-new coat of paint
I'm glad to see that you're still alive, you're looking like a saint"
Down the hallway, footsteps were coming for the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)

The record company that Dylan temporarily rides gets personified a bit later on as Venus, the morning star:

I had a pony, her name was Lucifer
She broke her leg, and needed shooting
I swear it hurt me more than it could have hurted her
(Bob Dylan: New Pony)

• Roll on John, Part 1: “Death is part of Life”
• Roll on John Part 2: The opening verses
• Roll on John Part 3: The third and fourth verses

By Allan Cheskes

Time to “move on” to the fifth verse:

“Put on your bags and get 'em packed
Leave right now, you won't be far from wrong
The sooner you go the quicker you'll be back
You've been cooped up on an island far too long”

Once again, there is an opportunity for Dylan to borrow from one of his favorite sources, a translation of The Odyssey. Compare the lyrics in the fifth verse with Fagle’s translation of The Odyssey:

“Here you are, cooped up on an island far too long, with no way out of it, none that you can find, while all your shipmates’ spirit ebbs away’ and repeated further on: “Here I am, cooped up on an island far too long”.

In repurposing these words, Dylan maybe referring to John Lennon being cooped up in his home on the island of Manhattan.

The first three lines of the fifth verse is the narrator telling John Lennon to pack his bags and leave the coop as soon as possible. Lennon, just before his death, had in fact spoken about his desire to return to England and visit relatives and friends. De Graaf also indicates that Lennon “had some sort of feeling in his bones, a premonition, that something bad was about to happen.” (I can’t confirm this, but this certainly adds drama to the song. ‘Leave, John, leave, as quickly as possible, please’ because we know what is about to happen. If only we can turn the clock back.)

De Graaf also proposes that the song narrator is speaking to John the Apostle. Instead of a warning that John the Apostle should physically leave the island of Patmos as soon as possible, which, clearly, he cannot, given he is a prisoner there, De Graaf suggests it could be something else.

John the Apostle just received the vision for the Book of Revelation, and De Graaf puts forward this “may on a deeper level function as an incentive for John the Apostle to hurry up and to forget his troubles and woes and to leave the island, (figuratively speaking), as soon as possible and to have the Apocalypse revealed to the world.”

With no disrespect to De Graaf, who has given us a very interesting and plausible analysis, I believe this interpretation emphasizes the inclusion of John the Apostle as the main object of this song, is fitting square blocks in a round hole.

Now we can have lots of fun with verse 6:

“Slow down you're moving way too fast
Come together right now over me

Your bones are weary, you're about to breathe your last
Lord, you know how hard that it can be”

The Beatles recorded a song in 1964 written by Larry Williams in 1958. The lyrics include, “You’d better slow down…baby, now you’re moving way too fast.”

I would love to throw another Beatle song at you but when I hear the first line of this verse, my mind shifts to Simon and Garfunkel’s The 59^th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy).

This Paul Simon written song offers possibilities and connections to Roll On John. Paul Simon’s lyrics include “Slow down, you move too fast, you got to make the morning last.”

John Lennon had entered a stage in his life where he was slowing down and finding time to smell and appreciate the roses. Lennon was hunkering down, after leading a fast and loose life, to be with his family and be the father and husband he needed and wanted to be. Lennon appeared to be in a good place at this stage in his life.

De Graaf suggests another possible connection with Simon’s song when he points out that Lennon was transported to a hospital on 59^th street and 10^th Avenue, after he was shot on December 8, 1980. There is also a sense of sad irony when Simon and Garfunkel sing, “Life I love you/ All is groovy.”

I am sure you will make the connection right away with the line in verse six, “Come together right now over me” (and you know what is coming next). First, the story behind the related Beatle song is very interesting.

Did you know that John Lennon wrote the song during one of his and Yoko Ono’s bed-in sessions in Toronto in May 1969? Timothy Leary, who was an American psychologist and proponent for the use of psychedelic drugs to alter and improve our minds. Leary is known as the father of the psychedelic movement of the 1960’s. (Interestingly, I recently came across an article in Psychology Today that did recommend in certain dire mental health circumstances, the use of psychedelic drugs.)

When Leary appeared at the Toronto bed-sit-in, he informed Lennon and Ono that he was planning to run for political office and his campaign slogan would be “Come Together.”

Based on this campaign slogan, Leary asked Lennon to write a song for him to use during the upcoming slogan. Thus, that is how and why Lennon came to write the song.

Unfortunately for Leary, he was not able to use the song to promote his campaign because it never got off the ground when he was arrested and sent to jail. The Lennon song came together with a message of peace and calling for differences between nations and races to be put aside.

Thankfully, Lennon did not want to see a good song go to waste:

The Beatles – Come Together (I would have preferred the rooftop version, but the quality of the sound is not as good).

De Graaf examines the third line of the sixth verse, “Your bones are weary, you’re about to breathe your last” and once again makes a case for the connection to John the Apostle:

“(This line) can hardly be attributed to Lennon but rather take us back to the times of John the Apostle on Patmos. When John was exiled to Patmos in 95 AD to do hard labor in the quarry mine, he was well over 90 years old.”

However, I do believe a case can be made for a connection of this line to John Lennon. John Lennon has been through so much in his epic Odysseus-like journey through life, you could say his “bones (were) weary” just before he is about to take his last breath.

This line is followed in Roll On John by the well-known line written by John Lennon, “Lord, you know how hard that it can be.” From The Ballad of John and Yoko, Lennon sings, “Christ, you know it ain’t easy/ You know how hard it can be/ the way things are going/ they’re gonna crucify me”.

“They” (again as Dylan also puts it, and not “he”), are going to crucify Lennon. Shockingly, Lennon got it right:

Over to the seventh verse:

“Roll on, John, roll through the rain and snow
Take the right-hand road and go where the buffalo roam
They'll trap you in an ambush before you know
Too late now to sail back home”

I take the overall message from this verse that there is no going back home. “where the buffalo roam” are lyrics from the traditional folk song, “Home on the Range”. There is a longing to go to some romantic place that doesn’t exist. Do buffalo freely roam anymore? Maybe the home is some mythological place, like Heaven.

The only road to “Heaven”, is a “right-hand road” or a narrow straight path. Is John Lennon going to Heaven? Has he been “ambushed” and will not ascend to heaven?

In the Odyssey, the gods also conspired to ambush Odysseus on his journey home.

In “Custer’s Last Stand”, in the plains where buffalo did roam, Sitting Bull and the Sioux Indians ambushed him. (This is what I associate with when I hear these song lines). Is there a connection here?

De Graaf thanks Dave Richards who makes a connection to another John with this seventh verse.

John Smith (1580-1631) was an Admiral of New England, a soldier, explorer, and author.

De Graaf continues:

“Smith is said to have played an important role in the establishment of the first permanent English settlement in North America. Apart from the Indian tribes, the local weather is said to have been the biggest threat for these early Jamestown settlers. That is why it says, ‘roll on John through the rain and snow’. Dave Richardson pointed out to me that ‘ Pocahontas, daughter of the chief of the Powhatan Indian tribe, warned Smith about her tribe’s plot to ambush and kill John Smith in 1608, when this Powhatan tribe invited them to their land on supposedly friendly terms’. This may be the reason why it says: ‘they trap you in an ambush before you know’.”

I must admit, with verse seven, I am reaching for straws here to find explanations, which is no shame for most Dylan songs.

Hopefully, we will have better luck with the last verse:

“Tyger, tyger burning bright
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
In the forests of the night
Cover 'em over and let him sleep”

Given the spelling of “tiger” as “tyger”, Dylan is not trying to hide the fact that he is borrowing lines in this final song verse from the English poet, William Blake. The words “Tyger, tyger, burning bright” and “In the forest of the night” are literally quoted from the famous poem The Tyger by William Blake, from his collection, “Songs of Experience” published in 1794. (Dylan admired and has borrowed lines from William Blake on other occasions).

Blake, in his poem, reminds us that the tiger is both beautiful and at the same time, capable of terrible violence. Once again, the album concept of evil coexisting with good comes up. The tiger, a creation of G-d, as is nature and the natural thing, personifies that good and evil coexist in this challenging world.

“I pray the Lord my soul to keep” is a classic children’s bedtime prayer from the 18^th century, “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep”, which also fits with the last line of the song, before the refrain:

“Cover ’em over and let him sleep.”

I believe, the message, also delivered on other songs on this album, is that it is not for us to understand G-d and his uncanny ways. We must simply just accept his ways. Bad things happen.

John Lennon’s tragic and senseless death still leaves a hole in our hearts. Perhaps, Bob Dylan concludes the song by telling us that we cannot ever make sense of this world, and should take the wise words from John’s Lennon’s partner, Paul McCartney, and “let it be.”

May John Lennon’s soul rest in peace.

While it is not inconceivable that Bob Dylan intended “John” to be a tribute to various “Johns”, we will never be sure unless we hear it directly from the horse’s mouth, assuming we can believe him.

In Dylan’s 2012 Rolling Stone interview, Dylan answered Gilmore’s questions about Lennon in relation to the song, and he does not let on that the song is about anyone else besides Lennon. If we can believe him.

Dylan is, deliberately vague with his words. In doing so, he is inviting us to go wild with our imaginations and fill in the blanks. (And we do!)

Often, as Dylan has said, we interpret meanings in his songs, that are not intended. We also often, believe what we want to believe and insert our desired meanings into the lyrics. We need to understand and accept this. We will never know for sure. The Dylan mysteries of his songs are like the G-d-given mysteries of the world.

In the meantime, finding relevance and meaning in Dylan songs, even when not intended by Dylan, is what makes his songs timeless. As Dylan would write and sing, “It’s all good.”

Roll On John, live version with footage and tribute to John Lennon (Sorry, sound quality not as good as the official audio version).

by Jochen Markhorst

• Million Miles part 1: The closer I get, the farther away I feel
• Million Miles part 2: They kind of write themselves
• Million Miles part 3: And thou didst commit whoredom with them

I’m drifting in and out of dreamless sleep
Throwing all my memories in a ditch so deep
Did so many things I never did intend to do
Well, I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you

 Within the Dutch literary landscape, Belcampo (1902-1990), with his remarkable, fantastic, magical-realist works, is an odd man out; he has no predecessors and no followers, and remains a separate movement on his own. Internationally, he is somewhat comparable to Roald Dahl, to Murakami perhaps, to Petrushevskaya in a way… but above all: unique. A man accidentally cuts off his own index finger, doesn’t know what to do with it, and finally decides on an impulse to bake it and eat it. “When I had eaten it, the discovery had been made: the discovery that no enjoyment on earth can compare to eating your own flesh.” He becomes addicted to his own flesh, eats all his limbs in the following months and now needs the help of his friend the doctor to amputate and eat his last remaining limb, his right arm (Page From The Diary Of A Doctor, 1934). King Wurm forbids his people to dream. They are only allowed to drift in and out of dreamless sleep. His people revolt, behead him, but a surgeon manages to connect his head, the head of state as it were, to a device and keep it alive (The Triple Combination, 1934).

The Roller Coaster (“De Achtbaan”) from 1953 is set in a near future, in 2050, in which science not only manages to erase memories, but even to transplant them; someone’s memory, or selected parts of it, can be transferred to someone else’s brain – which then integrates it as its own memories. A topic that Philip K. Dick will borrow for his story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (1966), of which director Paul Verhoeven will then make the hit film Total Recall in 1990. In Belcampo’s tale a market of supply and demand soon emerges;

“Now, for the first time, one could see how great the dissatisfaction with this life was that prevailed among people, and it also appeared that this dissatisfaction was due much less to the presence of happiness-inhibiting complexes than to the absence of gratifying and blissful images.”

The story then centres on a couple who want to remove their memories of each other. Yes indeed, the same plot as in the brilliant 2004 film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind by Charlie Kaufman – with an identical ending too, by the way.

Belcampo, Charlie Kaufman, Philip K. Dick, Paul Verhoeven… they all vary on the lament of Dylan’s protagonist in “Million Miles”, on the fantasy how liberating it would be to throw all my memories in a ditch so deep. Oblivion as a healer of the tormented soul, ignorance is bliss, or, as Alexander Pope put it in 1717, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (from “Eloisa to Abelard”).

The mourning protagonist consciously seeks the ultimate state of denial, the first stage of any grieving process: he longs for a state in which he does not dream of her, cannot remember her… for the non-knowledge that she exists. But already in the third verse he seems to recognise the impossibility thereof; with the self-reproach Did so many things I never did intend to do he signals guilt, and thus already switches to the next phase of mourning. And immediately afterwards he shifts gear forward to the next phase:

I need your love so bad, turn your lamp down low 
I need every bit of it for the places that I go 
Sometimes I wonder just what it’s all coming to 
Well, I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you

… to depression. For which the songwriter can blindly dig into the blues grab bag; after all, three-quarters of all blues songs are about heartache – the canon offers an abundant choice of appropriate jargon. Dylan doesn’t grab too deep. “Need Your Love So Bad”, Little Willie John’s immortal pièce de résistance from 1955 is somewhere at the front of the canon, especially after Fleetwood Mac’s, or rather Peter Green’s upgrade of the song in 1968. With indirect input from Little Willie, by the way; the string section for Fleetwood Mac’s single was written by Little Willie’s guitarist, the legendary Mickey Baker, at the request of producer Mike Vernon.

At least as famous is the next borrowing, turn your lamp down low;

Wake up, mama, turn your lamp down low
Wake up, mama, turn your lamp down low
Have you got the nerve to drive Papa McTell from your door?

… Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues”, which is perhaps even a few steps higher up in the Pantheon. Blind Willie recorded the song as early as 1928, Taj Mahal made it popular again in 1968, and with their live version from 1971, The Allman Brothers elevated “Statesboro Blues” to the canon once and for all. On At Fillmore East, with a Duane Allman, shortly before his death, at the top of his game.

The meaning of the phrase turn your lamp down low is somewhat diffuse, though. And Dylan, too, seems to prefer to keep it a bit vague. Blind Willie probably heard it from Bobby Grant, who a year earlier recorded his “Nappy Head Blues”, with the opening lines When you hear me walkin’, turn your lamp down low / And turn it so your man’ll never know – in which “turn your lamp down” apparently means something like an invitation to adultery. But then, when Big Joe Williams takes the phrase in 1935 to the song that will also achieve such monumental status, to “Baby Please Don’t Go”, the meaning shifts to its opposite;

Turn your lamp down low
You turn your lamp down low
Turn your lamp down low, I cried all night long
Now baby please don't go

I begged you nice before
I begged you nice before
I begged you nice before, turn your lamp down low
Now, baby please don't go

… and seven more verses similar in content – the man begging his woman to remain faithful, to not let other men in; turn your lamp down low now meaning something like “keep your sexual urges under control”.

https://youtu.be/g22l1hnAnlA

In Dylan’s “Million Miles” it can mean both. “I need your love so bad, let me in”, or “I need your love so bad, don’t give it to another”. But the poet decides on playing with words, insinuating he needs both her love and her lamp: I need every bit of it for the places that I go – I’m entering a dark period, I may need some love and some light, so we have to be sparing with the lamp oil, something like that. Not too strong, but a signal that we are reaching the final stage of the mourning process: acceptance.

Yeah well. Sometimes I wonder just what it’s all coming to, one would be inclined to think.

To be continued. Next up Million Miles part 5: The sounds inside my mind

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

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

In the previous post, I flipped back and forward between Dylan’s famous London (Brixton) five-day residency, from 20^th Nov to 25^th Nov, and his two-night stand in Dublin immediately afterwards, 27^th and 29^th Nov, comparing performances of the same song. In this post, I will be continuing that exploration.

We saw how the sharp but full-bodied recordings (by the bootlegger Crystal Cat), considered some of the best Dylan live recordings ever, stood beside the softer, more muted Dublin recordings. The differences go beyond just recording quality to a subtly different approach to the songs, the Dublin performances being a shade more intimate, somewhat gentler and more contemplative. ‘Visions of Johanna’ was the best example.

That shade of difference is not so evident with the faster rock songs which don’t lend themselves to more intimate performances anyway. Nonetheless, the differences in performance are still interesting. When looking at 2003, we noted that the sound Dylan created was that fitting for a blues or jazz club. You feel that you have walked in off the street to catch a bunch of musos at work, having fun and improving new arrangements. By the time we get to the London residency in 2005, these same songs have morphed into stadium rock with a well-settled, rich and full sound. But the Dublin performances still recall that clublike feel.

Take for example ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ Dylan’s standard opening song, a great piss-take of American family life and its enforced conformity. Listen to this London performance (4^th night), to get that stadium rock feel.

Maggie’s Farm (A)

A great warm-up song. Here’s how it sounded in Dublin.

Maggie’s Farm (B)

Perhaps it’s my imagination warped from listening to too much Bob Dylan, but I find the Dublin performance more as you would hear in a rock club than in a stadium. And it doesn’t feel as busy, with Dylan’s voice more prominent in the mix.

With the London residency, Dylan varied his setlist so the same songs were not played every night. An exception to this was ‘Summer Days’ which was performed on four of the five nights of the residency. In this case, I think the 3rd night performance takes it away. This is as close to a perfect performance of the song as you could get. Note Garnier’s wonderful bass. Back to the 1930’s we go. Not even Dublin can match this one. (It’s a final song, so the track ends at 7 mins with 3 mins of clapping.)

Summer Days (A)

Here’s the Dublin performance from the 1^st night. Is this just a pale version of the London performance? I’ll let you decide. To my Dylan addled brain, this sounds a bit jazzier in the 1930’s style, the guitars coming in like the brass section of the era’s jazz bands.

Summer Days (B)

‘Cold Irons Bound.’ The most concentrated dose of alienation you will find anywhere in Dylan, compressed into a brain-shredding rocker. I’m not surprised this song won a Grammy Award. In this case I lean towards the sharper London performance. The brasher recording suits the song, although there is no loss of power at Dublin, just a smoother sound. Dylan has not changed the musical arrangement of the song since the album version in 1997, but there are some signs that he wants to provide some contrasts by quietening the song down just before he begins to sing a verse, to shift a little from a solid wall of sound to a more nuanced performance. Listen out for a wonderful jazzy riff powering the song around 3.39 mins

The London performance is from the 2^nd night.

Cold Irons Bound (A)

And here’s the Dublin performance, 1^st Night.

Cold Irons bound (B)

Considering the two performances, I think I’ve come to like the Dublin version because it’s a bit easier on the ears, and Dylan’s voice is clearer in the mix. The Crystal Cat recording of the London concert has been criticized for its very virtues, being too sharp and jangly, a bit too busy. Arguably the Dublin performance is leaner and meaner, at least in the recording.

We could say similar things about the satirical 1960’s rocker ‘Highway 61 Revisited.’ Looking back now, I can only wonder why we didn’t see that these early rock songs, with their satirical drive, were a logical continuation of Dylan’s protest period. They are another kind of protest. Songs like ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ were not as literal and earnest as some of the protest songs, but they had a sharp, cutting edge to them in terms of their social message.

More evident than in ‘Cold Irons Bound’ is Dylan’s 2005 urge to bring some drama into the song by quietening it down before cranking it up again. In this case, in both performances, at around 4.25 mins, he strips the song down to its rhythm section, light piano, bass and drums, before launching into the last verse, at the same time keeping the backing minimal during the singing of the verse. This builds up the tension for the break-out of the final instrumental. For me, this contrast works better with the Dublin performance, but really, who’s complaining?

This is from London, 1^st night.

Highway 61 Rev (A)

And here it is in Dublin, 1^st night.

Highway 61 Rev (B)

That satirical drive was to deepen over the years from 1964, with the first side of Bringing It All Back Home, to 1966 and Blonde on Blonde. Much of the surrealism and absurdity of the lyrics during those great years were attacks on the mindless, godless materialism which Dylan has consistently lambasted. To further that aim, he created a host of named characters and bizarre circus figures that flick in and out of the scenes he paints. These characters reflect some attitude or social role Dylan wants to highlight.

‘Desolation Row’ from Highway 61 Revisited is a seminal song in this regard, being populated with characters from ‘the blind commissioner’ (political wankery) to Casanova, victim of propaganda and manipulation. Dylan widens the range of these circus figures in Blonde on Blonde. We have ‘the dancing child in his Chinese suit’ from ‘I Want You’ to ‘the riverboat captain’ in ‘Where Are You Tonight Sweet Marie?’ But no song better picks up where ‘Desolation Row’ leaves off than ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.’ We have a host of characters here from grandpa to Shakespeare (‘with his pointed shoes and his bells’), the Senator (another wanky politico ‘showing everyone his gun’) and then there is Ruthie. It’s one of Dylan’s longest songs.

‘Mobile’ is more zany than ‘Desolation Row,’ as Dylan appears in every verse as comic protagonist, a Chaplinesque figure escaping from one situation to another, but both songs end with a similar feeling. In ‘Desolation Row,’ we have the claustrophobic reference to ‘the time the doorknob broke’ and a suggestion of illness and incapacity (‘right now I can’t read too good’) while ‘Mobile’ ends with a Groundhog Day paranoia and claustrophobic repetition:

Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice

‘Mobile’ is a much harder song to carry in performance than ‘Desolation Row’, which has a sweetness of melody and Dylan was able to work the song into a climax vocally and with harp. ‘Mobile’ remains determinedly lateral in the sense that it can’t be structured as ‘Desolation Row’ has been.

Both the London and the Dublin versions are vigorous performances, but to my mind not up to the standard of my other choice cuts. There’s a scrappy feel to them. My complaint, aside from the upsinging, is that Dylan messed about with the verses. Jumping around the song and leaving out verses. In Dublin he sings the third verse twice, then leaves out three verses. It’s pretty haphazard. The problem with dropping out so many verses of a long song like this is that it loses its epic dimension. We don’t get the song, just the flavour of the song.

If you love the song, you may face disappointment here.

First up London, 1^st night:

Stuck inside of mobile (A)

Dublin, 2^nd night:

 Stuck inside of mobile (B)

The concerts mostly end with ‘All Along The Watchtower,’ the signature last song and most commonly played song of all. In this song the band usually pulls out the stops and lets rip. The song tears along like a climate-change driven hurricane. By 2005, however, there are some signs of change. As with ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ Dylan wants to push the song away from a wall of sound to a piece of music with more drama, to quieten right down in places before opening it up again.

I listened to the performances expecting the same old same old, even if done well, and unexpectedly found myself caught up in the new arrangement, the band going soft and minimal while Dylan is singing, while cranking it up in-between the verses and of course at the end in an annihilation of guitars. The effect is more pronounced at Dublin, where it goes so quiet the sound almost disappears before surging back. There’s a musical tension in these performances often lacking from the song. The thrumming beat is urgent and ominous, as are the lyrics.

You can take your pick of these performances. The loud, harsh, Crystal Cat sound of London would seem to suit the song, the louder and harsher the better, but the Dublin performance brings out the drama more clearly. There’s that quiet moment before the last verse that recalls the well contained, acoustic album version. I’ve wondered how it would sound if Dylan abandoned the Jimi Hendrix approach and returned to that quiet little masterpiece from John Wesley Harding for inspiration. At Dublin, just for a moment, I get the feel of what that might sound like.

This is from London, 4^th night

Watchtower (A)

And this is from Dublin, 1^st Night

Watchtower (B)

That brings to a swirling end this set of comparisons. We haven’t finished with London and Dublin, as there are performances of interest that were not repeated, but in the next post I’ll be getting away from those two concerts for a quick stopover at Seattle.

Until then…

Kia Ora

By Tony Attwood

Well, no, I’m not going to write a complete article on “It’s alright ma’s” cover versions, because Jochen has already done that, and I can’t compete.   If you want to hear a whole string of staggering versions simply click here for his article.

Moving on to JWH, the problem here for performers is that the melody is very striking and so as soon as one starts out on the song we know it all too well – so the problem is, how to make a difference?

McKendree Spring makes no attempt to change the melody but instead the band tears up all concept of the original accompaniment and instead throw anything they can find at the piece.

As a result you’ve got everything from a wild harmonica, a bass that is playing a set of variations on the melody and a rhythm guitar having great fun all on its own.

I can’t think of what else I have heard that is quite like this.  Because we all know the melody so well, it is easy to miss the organised chaos that is now happening behind it but  I think it’s great fun – and indeed “chaos” is not really the word I should use, because this is clearly carefully planned.

It’s one of those versions that I don’t think I’ll go back and play very often, but yes, it makes me smile.

https://youtu.be/Swlh0MYuf5M

A totally different approach comes from Phil Cunneen; the accompaniment is again changed but with a much more gentle approach so that by the time we’ve got to the instrumental break, we really are in a different territory.  A sunny day where everyone is a jolly nice person.  JWH as Robin Hood in fact.

Once again the bass player gets a real part of his own to meander around, and yes, I did notice the fact that they slipped in an extra chord along the way.

Just one more… try it with a reggae beat and yes it works rather well.  In fact, listening to this I could find myself imagining that this was how the song was meant to sound.  Of course, I know it wasn’t but still…. it might have been.

Here’s a list of most of the articles from this series…

• The song with numbers in the title.
• Ain’t Talkin
• All I really want to do
•  Angelina
•  Apple Suckling and Are you Ready.
• As I went out one morning
•  Ballad for a Friend
• Ballad in Plain D
• Ballad of a thin man
•  Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• The ballad of Hollis Brown
• Beyond here lies nothing
• Blind Willie McTell
•  Black Crow Blues (more fun than you might recall)
• An unexpected cover of “Black Diamond Bay”
• Blowin in the wind as never before
• Bob Dylan’s Dream
• You will not believe this… 115th Dream revisited
• Boots of Spanish leather
• Born in Time
• Buckets of Rain
• Can you please crawl out your window
• Can’t wait
• Changing of the Guard
• Chimes of Freedom
• Country Pie
•  Crash on the Levee
• Dark Eyes
• Dear Landlord
• Desolation Row as never ever before (twice)
• Dignity.
• Dirge
• Don’t fall apart on me tonight.
• Don’t think twice
•  Down along the cove
• Drifter’s Escape
• Duquesne Whistle
• Farewell Angelina
• Foot of Pride and Forever Young
• Fourth Time Around
• From a Buick 6
• Gates of Eden
• Gotta Serve Somebody
• Hard Rain’s a-gonna Fall.
• 42 Heart of Mine
• 43: High Water
•  44: Highway 61.5
• 45: Hurricane
• 46: I am a lonesome hobo
• 47: I believe in you
• 48: I contain multitudes
• 49: I don’t believe you.
• 50: I love you too much
• 51: I pity the poor immigrent. 
•  52: I shall be released
• 53: I threw it all away
• 54: I want you
• 55: I was young when I left home
• 56: I’ll remember you
• 57: Idiot Wind and  More idiot wind
• 58: If not for you, and a rant against prosody
• 59: A Dylan cover a Day: If you Gotta Go, please go and do something different
• 60: If you see her say hello
• 61: Dylan cover a day: I’ll be your baby tonight
• 62: I’m not there.
• 63: In the Summertime, Is your love and an amazing Isis
• 64: It ain’t me babe
• 65: It takes a lot to laugh
• 66: It’s all over now Baby Blue
• 67: It’s all right ma

• It’s Not Just About Sound Part I
• It’s Not Just About The Sound Part II

By Larry Fyffe

Many of the songs previously mentioned are in the form of dramatic monologues that reveal the characteristics of the narrator thereof; some would claim of the author himself.

Though observed previously by a number of analysts of Bob Dylan’s songs and music, after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, more and more recently published books recognize that the singer/songwriter/musician, whether directly or indirectly, draws from the artistic well of high and low works of literature (including traditional ballads) from which he often creates his own thematic variations thereon.

If I may indulge myself for a moment, it’s about time – noticed by me long ago:

The meadows still as Sunday
The shut eye tasselled bulls, the goat and daisy dingles
Nap happy and lazy
(Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood)

The somewhat similar song lyrics below cannot be by pure coincidence:

The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero)

I noticed too that another Dylan song gives a nod to a poem by Edward Taylor.

Perhaps, the following song lyrics suggest the author thereof notices the same thing:

But now it's cloak and dagger
Walk on eggshells, and analyse
Every particle of difference
Ah, gets like mountains in our eyes
(Joni Mitchell: Good Friends)

That poem being:

Your want clear spectacles: your eyes are dim
Turn inside out, and turn your eyes within
Your sins like motes in the sun do swim: nay, see
Your mites are molehills, molehills mountains be
(Edward Taylor: The Accusation Of The Inward Man)

In any event, the strikingly similar lines be:

With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims
(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

And more power to Bob Dylan for bringing these artists of yore to the attention of his readers and listeners.

Including a thematic twist on the “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe:

My love she's like some raven 
At my window with a broken wing
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero)