Untold Dylan

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

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: Bob chose this song to open his 1992 album Good as I Been to You. Based on true events it was originally copyrighted in 1904 and credited to Hughie Cannon. Bob’s version was based on an arrangement by Mississippi John Hurt.

Tony: I think this is Bob at his very, very best.   The guitar playing is stunning, and his voice is perfect for this type of music.  Indeed that is the simple message: it is not the song that stands out here, it is this stunning performance.  Bob plays and sings with the fulsome impression that he really cares about this music – and do listen to the way the guitar part develops through the piece.

And although normally Aaron selects the music for these joint articles I want to cheat and slip in the work that Bob used to base his performance on.  It is, like Bob’s recording, really worth a listen.  The quality of the 78rpm is cracked in part, but it is still possible to understand just how wonderful this recording is.

https://youtu.be/tr_VUEITbjY

Aaron: The song has been recorded over 250 times, here are three I have in my collection.

Elvis had a gold record in 1966 with his version Frankie & Johnny

Tony: By this stage the song had mutated so much that it takes a few moments to realise that there is any relationship between this – which became a popular ballad – and the original sublime piece.  So, if I may, I’ll interject a small interlude (as it were).

As Aaron notes above, the song is based (at least according to many reports) on actual events in 1899, which are generally reported as 22 year old Frankie Baker shooting her 17 year old lover Allen Britt (sometimes called Albert) when he returned from a dancing competition in which he and Nelly Bly won the slow-dance prize (the “cakewalk”).

Britt died and at her trial Frankie Baker claimed she acted in self-defence.  She was acquitted and lived on until 1952, tragically spending the latter part of her life in a psychiatric institution.

There is some dispute as to the origination of the piece, for it is reported in other places that the song was composed by Bill Dooley, but either way it reached public attention a couple of years later, and by then it was, as Aaron points out above, then credited to Hughie Cannon who also wrote “Won’t you come home Bill Bailey”.

 Aaron: Lonnie Donegan and Van Morrison recorded a version for their 2000 The Skiffle Sessions album…

Tony: I don’t know for sure but I suspect that Lonnie Donegan is an unknown name in much of the world, but in the 1950s and early 1960s in the UK he was one of the biggest stars of popular music, specialising in skiffle – and a significant influence on the music of the era.  He also had hits in the USA and was awarded an MBE in 2000, a couple of years before his death.   Most of his performances had this sort of fun and vibrancy in them.

Aaron: Johnny Cash released it in 1959 as his third Columbia single with the title Frankie’s Man, Johnny.

Tony: This is Johnny Cash doing Johnny Cash.  And I think it is worth comparing this version with the Lonnie Donnegan version … for me the Cash version is just going through the actions.   There is none of the vibrancy of the earlier version, nor indeed any of the excitement generated by the music within Bob’s version.   For me, (and of course this is just me) it’s just plinky plonk music.  And I think this song deserves so much more than that.

But we have got Bob’s version, and the original, and the Skiffle Sessions version – and they are all wonderful.   Three brilliant versions of one song: not bad going Aaron!

• Million Miles part 1: The closer I get, the farther away I feel
• Million Miles part 2: They kind of write themselves

by Jochen Markhorst

III         And thou didst commit whoredom with them

You took the silver, you took the gold
You left me standing out in the cold
People asked about you, I didn’t tell them everything I knew
Well, I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you

Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) considers it very cool and also makes a point of mentioning the source of the quotation; “There’s a passage I got memorized, seems appropriate for this situation: Ezekiel 25:17.” And then he quotes a big chunk of the Bible text (94 words), ending with the words And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you, and usually he then blasts his audience away. But today is different. “I been sayin’ that shit for years,” Jules says in the last scene (Pulp Fiction, 1994) to the petrified “Pumpkin”, the robber who tried to take Jules’ valuable briefcase,

“… and if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a coldblooded thing to say to a motherfucker ‘fore you popped a cap in his ass.”

It is cool, indeed. Well, coldblooded even. And the fact that it is actually not a correct Ezekiel quote is not that important. It is in fact an insider’s wink from director and scriptwriter Quentin Tarantino to one of his heroes from the 1970s karate films, Sonny Chiba, who paraphrases Ezekiel (in Karate Kiba, 1973). It does bring Ezekiel back into the spotlight, though.

In 2001, Dr Eric Altschuler, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, makes the BBC News. He diagnoses some 26 centuries after the patient’s death, a form of epilepsy in the prophet Ezekiel. Temporal lobe epilepsy, to be precise; a disease that can affect the functions of speech, memory and levels of awareness, and “in very rare cases people with the condition can develop symptoms such as hyper religiosity and hypergraphia.”

It is these symptoms in particular that lead Dr Altschuler to his provocative diagnosis; Ezekiel was indeed not only extremely religious but also rather verbose and, well, long-winded. His Bible book indeed is one of the longest, which is mainly due to the author’s verbosity. So stylistically, it is not really a highlight. This hypergraphia, compulsive writing, does make the book really impenetrable at times. That, and presumably all those apocalyptic visions, may also explain why Jews were not allowed to read the book before their thirtieth birthday.

Throughout the ages it is nevertheless, despite its tiresome style, a popular book; Ezekiel’s visions are bloodcurdling and breathtaking, his metaphors particularly evocative, and some of his adventures, such as those in the Valley of Dry Bones, have a pleasantly scary fantasy quality. The book is a constant in Dylan’s oeuvre as well. Quotations, references and allusions can be found in “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, in “This Wheel’s On Fire” and “Angelina”, in “Dignity”, and with some tolerance for what may be classified as “reference” or “influence”, in even more songs.

Like in this second verse of “Million Miles”;

“Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them.”

…says the pissed Ezekiel in 16:17, poetically railing against those naughty inhabitants of Jerusalem, who deceive God with all kinds of idols. Which has at most very indirectly something to do with “Million Miles”, but You took the silver, you took the gold Dylan seems to take, including the narrative perspective, to his song. And then actually only based on that thou hast taken / you took similarity – the sole combination “gold and silver” we know, after all, from hundreds of stories, songs and poems. Including Dylan songs, by the way; “High Water”, “Seven Curses”, “10,000 Men”, “Silvio”, “Boots Of Spanish Leather”, “You Changed My Life”, “Unbelievable”… and those are by far not all the songs in which Dylan sings “silver and gold”.

The silver and gold from the legendary “The Prisoner’s Song” (1924) is not in this list, but it seems to be a song that keeps haunting Dylan’s mind in these turn-of-the-century years. The status of “The Prisoner’s Song”, one of the greatest hits of the 1920s and indeed one of the greatest hillbilly hits ever, is undisputed. Dylan cites the song in his autobiography Chronicles as a benchmark, as an example of a song that has the power to elevate history to mythology;

“Either one of those guys, Stevens or Roosevelt or even Morgan could have stepped out of a folk ballad. Songs like “Walkin’ Boss,” “The Prisoner’s Song” or even one like “Ballad of Charles Guiteau.” They’re just in there somewhere, though maybe not in a specific way.”

… and the short song (154 words) inspires him more than once to write his own songs. The first verse, for example;

Oh I wish I had someone to love me yes someone to call me their own
Oh I wish I had someone to live with cause 
     I'm tired of living all alone
Please meet me tonight in the moonlight 
     please meet me tonight all alone
For I had a sad story to tell you it's a story 
     that's never been told

… doesn’t seem too dazzling, but that one line Please meet me tonight in the moonlight please meet me tonight all alone apparently has enough impact to inspire Dylan to write an entire song, “Moonlight”, in 2001;

The seasons they are turnin’
And my sad heart is yearnin’
To hear again the songbird’s sweet melodious tone
Meet me in the moonlight alone

As we also hear the end of the song, Now if I had the wings of an angel over these prison walls I would fly returning, in variants, in dozens of songs. In “Watching The River Flow”, for example (“If I had wings and I could fly I know where I would go”), in “Spike Driver’s Blues” by Mississippi John Hurt and in Sleepy John Estes’ “Sweet Mama”, but which ultimately, of course, can all be traced back to one of the most beautiful songs of the twentieth century, to “Fare Thee Well”, the song from Dink who complains that her lover seems to be a million miles away;

If I had wings like Noah's dove,
I'd fly up da river to the man I love.
Fare thee well, O Honey, fare thee well

… “Dink’s Song”, as Alan Lomax calls the song when he writes it down in 1908. It is also part of Dylan’s repertoire and is an indestructible song that in every version has the power to move. Dylan played the song first in ’61, and undoubtedly admired the versions of Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, Dave Van Ronk and whoever else.

But the most beautiful twist the song receives in 2016, at the end of episode 20 of the eleventh season of the successful TV series Supernatural, when “God” reveals himself. It was Chuck all along. “God”, Chuck, has given himself the skill to play guitar, and, lonely on the stage of a small-town café in front of a one-man audience, he performs a crushing “Dink’s Song”. Every word, in this context, sung by God, gets a new meaning.

… more moving than all the visions of Ezekiel put together.

To be continued. Next up Million Miles part 4: What’s it all coming to?

————-

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

This article is part of a series that reviews the art work of over 30 of Bob Dylan’s albums.  There is a list of previous articles with links to their pages on this site, below.

by Patrick Roefflaer

• Released                       September 30, 1965
• Photographer              Daniel Kramer
• Liner Notes                  Bob Dylan
• Art-director                  John Berg

“Usually you have a plan, especially for a cover. And this wasn’t the plan.”- Daniel Kramer, 2015

At 1pm on Friday December 3rd 1965 Bob Dylan faces the press in the KQED Studios in San Francisco to promote his five Bay Area shows. Dylan is twenty-four and not really enjoying this sort of obligation. The first question is about the cover of his recently released album, Highway 61 Revisited.

Q: I’d like to know the meaning of the cover photo on your album? I’d like to know the meaning of the photograph with you wearing the Triumph T-shirt.

A. What would you like to know about it?

Q: It seems to have some philosophy in it. I’d like to know visually what it represents to you – you’re a part of it..

A: I haven’t really looked at it that much.

Q: I’ve thought about it a great deal.

A: It was just taken one day when I was sitting on the steps y’know – I don’t really remember too much about it.

Q: What about the motorcycle as an image in your songwriting. You seem to like that.

A: Oh, we all like motorcycles to some degree.

Yet although it wasn’t planned, the iconic image on the cover of Dylan’s second electrically amplified album was no fluke.

The photo was taken sometime in the Summer of 1965, by Daniel Kramer – the same photographer who made the iconic photo that graces Dylan’s previous album Bringing It All Back Home.

Kramer was a privileged witness in Dylan’s transition from folk singer to rock star, as he found himself photographing Dylan on thirty occasions between August 27, 1964 and August 28, 1965. Hence, the title of his book, Bob Dylan: A Year and a Day (Taschen, 2016). (Note 1)

The photoshoot for Highway 61 Revisited takes place after the recording of “Like A Rolling Stone,”(June 15-16)  but before the start of the rest of the sessions for the album (July 29 – August 4).

Kramer explained that he met Dylan “at his apartment”.

Generally, it’s assumed that this must have been the apartment at 161 West 4th Street in the West Village. That was Dylan’s first permanent address in New York, after crashing on couches for almost a year. He went to live in this apartment with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, in December 1961, shortly after the recording of his debut album.

From April 1964, after the break with Suze, he lived a while in the house of Saturday Evening Post journalist Al Aronowitz, where he could hide from the fans.
In November 1964, while Albert Grossman was on honeymoon, Bob moved into his manager’s apartment at Gramercy Park, with his new girlfriend Sara and her daughter Maria.

Gramercy Park is a small parcel of a private park between East 20th and 21st Streets and 3rd Avenue and Park Avenue South. Only keyholders of any of the buildings surrounding the park can enter it. Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman had an apartment in the stately mansion at No. 4.

In December 1964 Bob took his new family to the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street. Their room 211 was a modest suite with a bedroom on the backside of the building.

As Dylan is notoriously private, it is unlikely he would invite the photographer to his room at the Chelsea Hotel. So, it’s more likely that the journey for the photo shoot started and ended at Grossman’s apartment at 4 Gramercy Park.

So, on that Summer’s day, the singer is waiting for his guest at the apartment, in the company of his friend and bodyguard Bob Neuwirth.

For two out of the five photoshoots for his albums he has released before this, the idea was to walk out on the street and see what happened. It was Don Hunstein who suggested this for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and it also worked for Sandy Speiser for Another Side of Bob Dylan.

So, the three of them hit the street. At some time, Kramer might have mentioned that he feels the clothes Bob is wearing are a bit plain for a photo session, so they go shopping for a more colourful outfit.

After that they take a rest at a restaurant on the corner of 6th Avenue and West 4th Street, called O. Henry’s Steak House. On the picture Bob can be seen wearing the costume he just  bought.

Finally, they head back to Gramercy Park, a twenty-minute walk.

There Dylan changes into something more casual. From his new gear he chooses a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt and a silk shirt.

Dressed like this, he sits down on the stairs of the front porch of No. 4, in his hand his Ray-Ban glasses with dark lenses.

“Usually you have a plan”, Kramer explains in an interview with Bob Egan (notes 2 and 3). ‘Especially for a cover. And this wasn’t the plan.”

“This [Kramer points at the left side of the picture on the sleeve] was kind of… all naked here. So, I asked Neuwirth to stand there. So I grabbed my camera  [a 35mm Range Finder Nikon] and said, ‘Hold this camera’.

“Once he did that, it seems like something’s going on. Not that we’re taking the picture, but there’s a making of a picture: there’s a photographer, he’s got his camera…”

“This wasn’t the plan”, Kramer repeats. “This wasn’t even expected that we would do a picture like this.”

Although Bob Egan says that Kramer only took two photos, this appears not to be true.

The picture confirms the image presented on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home: Dylan is no longer a folk singer, but a rock and roll star. About Dylan’s menacing look at the selected photo, the photographer says in 2010: “He looks hostile or at least moody. He seems to challenge me – or whoever he looks at – “What are you going to do about it, dude?”

As on the previous album, Columbia art director John Berg provides the photo with a white frame.

On the back sleeve, the space is mostly filled with quirky prose by Bob Dylan. The surreal text is accompanied by three black and white photos of the singer in the studio, also made by Daniel Kramer (note 4).

The very first American mono pressing included a portrait drawing. On the left, the signature ‘Lambert’ is legible (note 5). The drawing was enclosed in the plastic protective film, over the back of the cover. Because the song titles were not visible, a strip with the titles and playback times was enclosed at the bottom of the front. The drawing was already announced on the front with a sticker: ‘FREE! INCLUDES A STRIKING PORTRAIT SUITABLE FOR FRAMING’.

The title Highway 61 Revisited is a reference to U.S. Route 61, a highway that runs across the United States, parallel to the Mississippi, from Minnesota all the way down to New Orleans.

It is the Blues Highway that the black people followed from the plantations in the South to the industrial cities in the North, which brought with it the transition from the acoustic blues to the electric blues.

Notes:

1. For more details about Daniel Kramer see the story about the art work of Bringing It All Back Home
2. Thanks to Bob Egan for finding the exact location of the shoot and shearing it on his fabulous website PopSpots
3. The interview is part of a mini documentary, posted in October 2015 on RollingStone.com:
4. On the back of the cover of the British pressings there is only one photo of Bob Dylan: at the piano.
   On the original French pressings, two of the three photos are present, but the text is missing. The free space is used by advertising for some other albums. However the album is presented in a gatefold sleeve containing a French translation of the lyrics on the inside.
5. Saul Lambert (1928-2009) was a painter and illustrator, perhaps most famous for his self-illustrated book Mrs. Poggi’s Holiday (1969). For Columbia Records, he produced sketches of artists on the label.
   The Dylan sketch became the basis for a promotional easel-backed poster captioned “Bob Dylan on Columbia Records”, produced and distributed by his US record company Columbia Records.
6. The cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) depicts The Beatles surrounded by a large number of people for whom they somehow admired. Bob Dylan of course could not to be missed. His image is a black and white magnification of his head cut from the cover of Highway 61 Revisited.

The art work series

Here are the articles so far .  All are by Patrick Roefflaer.

• Another side of Bob Dylan
• Biograph – see Empire Burlesque
• Blonde On Blonde: The Artwork
• Blood on the Tracks
• Bob Dylan
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• Bringing it All Back Home
• Desire
• Down in the Groove
• Dylan
• Empire Burlesque and Biograph artwork
• Good as I’ve been to you
• Greatest Hits Volume II
• Highway 61 Revisited
• Infidels: what’s in a name?
• John Wesley Harding: the art work
• Knocked Out Loaded
• Nashville Skyline
• New Morning
• Oh Mercy
• Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
• Self-Portrait
• Slow Train Coming
• Street Legal and the secret cover location
• The Basement Tapes
• The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – the untold story of the artwork of the album
• The Times they are a changin’ album artwork
• Time out of Mind
• Travelling Wilburys Vol 1 (guest visitor, Michael Palin)
• Triplicate
• World Gone Wrong

• It’s Not Just About Sound Part I

by Larry Fyffe

The verse of the poem quoted below replaces Edgar Allan Poe’s symbolic dark raven with a silver trout; Aengus, a mythological god of youth and love:

When I laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame
But something rustled on the floor
And someone called my name
(William Yeats: The Song Of Wandering Aengus)

More Poe-like are the lyrics in the song beneath; the lover’s just not the same when dead and still:

I know she cares about me 
I heard her call my name
And I know that she's dead and gone
Still she ain't the same
(Velvet Underground: I Heard Her Call My Name)

Writes the Gothic poet:

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door
That I scarce was sure I heard you
(Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven)

In the song below, as in “Wildwood Flower”, the words are lined with realism, and with the idealistic hope of finding an everlasting, mutual love relationship while both partners are living. The words carefully chosen – loud love rather than a love scarcely heard:

Looking at my shadow, watching the clouds up above
Rolling through the rain and hail
Looking for the sunny side of love
Gonna walk on that dirt road 'til everything becomes the same
Gonna walk down that dirt road 'til everything becomes the same
Gotta keep on walking 'til I hear her holler out my name
(Bob Dylan: Dirt Road Blues)

Unlike the following song lyrics in which the swarn represents a Universe
uncaring to whatever humankind’s situation may be therein, dead or alive:

Tenderly William kissed his wife
Then he opened her head with a buther knife
And the swarn on the river went gliding by
Lady Margaret's pillow is wet with tears
No body's been on it in twenty years
(Bob Dylan: The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan ~ Evans/Dylan)

It’s a big mistake to conclude that Bob Dylan chooses his words just for the sound rather than for their meaning as well.

Roll on John Part 1: Death is part of life

By Allan Cheskes (taken from a prepared session)

Was Roll On John a song exclusively written about John Lennon? Many do not think so. Let’s roll through the song and come to terms with it.

For my analyses, and this other perspective, I got lots of help from a 10,000-word review of Roll On John, by Kees de Graaf.

The first verse and refrain from Roll On John:

“Doctor, doctor, tell me the time of day
Another bottle’s empty, another penny spent
He turned around and he slowly walked away
They shot him in the back and down he went”

The refrain which follows the first verse:

“Shine your light
Move it on
You burned so bright
Roll on, John”

In the first line, Kees de Graaf sourced the first line, “Doctor, doctor, tell me the time of day” to a Lonnie Johnson song called Oh! Doctor The Blues (1926).

The opening lines of the Lonnie Johnson song are:

“Oh doctor, doctor, tell me the time of day, Oh doctor, tell me the time of day, all I wants is a good drink of whiskey, to drive my blues away, some people say, that it’s women, wine, and song, but it’s the blues and whiskey, that lead another good man wrong”

If we put Roll on John, in context with Lonnie Johnson’s song, the rest of Dylan’s verse might begin to make some sense.

As de Graaf puts it:

“So the opening lines have more to do with the use of alcoholic beverages, of liquor, and the effects this use has on the mental status of the poet. He was so much in a state of intoxication that he had lost all sense of time and now he starts to awake and begs for help from a doctor, as if he says: ‘Doctor please help me, I don’t know who I am, where I am, and what day it is, help me out of this dreadful trance…”

From the same opening verse, “Another bottle’s empty” which is narrated in the first person, could easily mean the consumption of bottles of alcohol. This could easily be a reference to John Lennon, who had significant drug and alcohol issues.

Following “Another bottle’s empty”, is, “another penny spent” which according to de Graaf, is an expression which means to use a public lavatory. (Especially in the UK, it was common practice to use a coin to open locks on public toilet doors).

This adds up. If you are drinking excessive alcohol, you will be using many coins to operate the locks on the public toilet doors.

Maybe the drinking alcohol also relates to Dylan as he needed a crutch to numb his senses and help ease his mind with his own fears and paranoia about the public. If “they” can murder Lennon, they can get to him too.

De Graaf also offers up another possibility as to why Dylan opens the song with a drinking scene. The narrator is not in an alert state of mind, almost like in a dream, and he can’t even tell the time of day. (Not unlike other Dylan songs which have dream-like patterns).

The third and fourth lines of the first verse are now narrated in the third person:

“He turned around and he slowly walked away/ They shot him in the back and down he went” can very easily be connected to December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was shot four times in the back by Mark David Chapman. (Lennon was shot at the entrance of the Dakota building in New York City, where he lived. He was returning from the recording studio with his wife, Yoko Ono).

After being shot, Lennon staggered up five steps to the reception area, where he was heard to say, “I’m shot, I’m shot.”

Which fits with the last line of the opening verse, “They shot him in the back and down he went.”

We can only speculate why Dylan used “they” as opposed to “he.” Could Dylan be referring generically, to other tragic assassinations and deaths, including that of John Lennon’s?

Chapman could be just a pawn in “their” game and Dylan could also be concerned, broadly speaking, about his fan base and public. If “they” can do it to Lennon, then “they” can do it to him too.

Dylan or DYLAN, the song narrator, is presumably addressing John Lennon in the refrain.

Shine your light/ Move it on/ You burned so bright

Lennon’s music was so illuminating and will burn forever, so his legacy will move on forever.

This is where some, including De Graaf, connect the song to another John, St. John the Apostle.

“Shine your light” is to Illuminate the world and reveal the truth. The “truth”, in Christian tradition is the light of Jesus or the gospel. St John, the last surviving apostle of Jesus, was also known as the Apostle of Light. Certainly, Dylan was once immersed in the Christian faith. Dylan, even more so, was and still is obsessed with the Book of Revelation. St John is said to have written the Book of Revelation.

Dylan makes specific reference to the Book of Revelation, in the previous album track, Tempest. The captain of the Titanic, in Dylan’s song, contemplates the Book of Revelation, just before he dies. The tempest itself may be symbolic of the apocalypse to come.

It is therefore not a stretch to believe that Dylan is also thinking about St. John the Apostle in addition to John Lennon, in Roll On John.

On the other hand, “Shine your light” is very commonly used in songs, especially in many traditional gospel songs, which Dylan admired so much. Dylan’s buddy, Robbie Robertson, former member of The Band, also wrote a song, Shine Your Light. Dylan himself used the phrase in his gospel period song, Precious Angel.

Let’s review a little history or legend about St. John the Apostle.

In Christian tradition, St John is the author of the Gospel of John, the Three Johannine epistles and the Book of Revelation.

Quite an accomplishment of works, except that most contemporary biblical scholars do not believe that St. John the Apostle wrote any of these works. John the Apostle was also identified as John the Evangelist, John the Elder, and John of Patmos.

Mainstream Bible scholars assert that all four gospels from the New Testament are fundamentally anonymous and most of the mainstream scholars agree that these gospels have not been written by eyewitnesses.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2018) puts it this way: “Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus.”

Persecuted by the Romans, John the Apostle in Christian tradition was said to have been exiled to the Greek island, Patmos, where he received visions and the inspiration to write the Book of Revelation. Many political and religious prisoners and slaves were banished to Patmos to do hard labour in the quarry mines. Legend has it that John the Apostle did hard labour here until he died in his nineties.

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”

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: The idea for this series is to take a listen to the tracks Bob has covered on record over the years and compare his versions with those of other artists’ versions and decide: Who did it best?

I’ll provide the song and the different versions whilst Tony provides the commentary, with the normal rule that we have (just to stop Tony from rambling on for too long) that he has to write the commentary while listening to the track, and then stop.

Dylan’s version of this Kris Kristofferson track appeared on his 1987 album Knocked Out Loaded

Tony: There is so much to like about this song and this arrangement, but there is something that doesn’t quite work for me.  It is a beautiful piece, and an exquisite arrangement that Dylan uses, but somehow there is something here that jars with me.  The children’s chorus and the change in the style of adult chorus at the very end just don’t fit well for me.   But against this Dylan’s singing is superb.

However when we come to verse two the way the percussion (or if I didn’t know better I’d say it’s a percussion machine, or at least a recording of the three beats played over and over again) just doesn’t work.  In fact more than that, it is very off-putting.

And I suggest it might be a recording of the three beats (although that is so very un-Dylan) because getting that timing right against the singing is just about impossible.  I expect a Dylan song to be played in the studio by Dylan and the band in one go, this sounds like a production job, to me.

Normally playing off the beat as the percussion machine does at or just before the start of each line can be attractive, but there is so much else happening here that I really find it difficult to take.

And the children’s chorus … it just seems like one of those dreadful “Hey guys lets get a bunch of school kids to sing at that point, that would be real cool…”   No artistic integrity, just a promotional idea.

And then… even the fade-out is so un-Dylan.   I really don’t like it.

Aaron: Johnny Cash was so enamoured with the song he rush-recorded and released it as a stand-alone single in 1984 (his second last single for Columbia)

Tony: Johnny Cash takes a simpler approach but still can’t resist having that opening theme played over and again in the accompaniment.  But at least there is no percussion machine (if that is what it was in Dylan’s version).

I find this version more acceptable except that the beat is, for much of the piece, plodding.   I don’t want the complexity of the rhythms in Dylan’s version, but just the thump thump thump of the percussion that we get for much of this version is just as bad, but in the opposite way.   Just listen to the reprise of the opening verse.

Oh yes, and Johnny Cash brings in the children too.   Does it say in the right-to-record contract “you have to have children singing?”

Aaron: Kristofferson didn’t record his own version until his 1986 Repossessed album

Tony: Ok now I am getting really worried.   And what do we get?  A bouncy bounce rhythm after the opening lines.   OK, by now I have to accept the fact that these great musicians can’t be wrong, it must be me.  And I do like the guitar break, except that the bass goes into the plod-plod-bounce approach.

After the instrumental break it does get a bit better, and thank goodness there aren’t any school children singing.  It’s not that I am against school children singing, but rather it just seems too obvious.

I don’t know… maybe I just want simplicity for a song about Gandhi, with no effects, no bouncy rhythm.  Perhaps I want Dylan 1962, not Dylan 1987.  No production, just a song.  After all, Gandhi’s message was so simple, so shouldn’t the music be too?

————

Untold Dylan is written by fans of Dylan’s music.  If you would like to offer a piece for publication please do send the article, or details of the idea, to Tony@schools.co.uk.

You can find details of some of the series of articles we have published at the top of the page, and there are also some more details on the home page.

By Tony Attwood

Varied melody, rhythmic amendments, repeated lines, change of chord sequence, bars cut in half, different accompaniment…    I’ve often said that if one is going to do a cover version one should make changes – otherwise what is the point.

And it is rather as if Sing Sing Sing have read my comments and taken note (although of course I am sure they haven’t in reality) for they really do work to create an arrangement that gives a completely new feel and new insight.

I really like that, although I am not quite sure it was also necessary to change the name of the song as well – it now appears as “Baby Blue”.  Interestingly, when the same band recorded “My Back Pages” they did it as a straight reproduction of Dylan’s version.

Continuing with the notion of complete re-arrangements of the song, it is difficult to imagine anything further from the original than Bad Religion’s version…

However they achieve this by only affecting the rhythm, which goes punk, yet the melody and chords stay the same.  It doesn’t hold the same interest level for me as Sing Sing Sing’s version.  More like someone said, “Let’s do it as a punk version” and then didn’t think on it any further.

However, it is true that I do prefer versions that don’t try too hard.  Sholi gets that right as far as I am concerned, except for the electronic additions.  I am not quite sure why they are there or what they achieve, but I do like the way the melody changes by the time we get to the seasick sailors.   And I really do get the feeling that the arrangers had thought a lot about the meanings within the music – which may sound an obvious requirement, but is not always something that is fulfilled.

But in all these versions, and the hundreds of others available, in one regard they all lack the sense of deep, deep, sadness that I find there is in the song.   Except maybe this one final submission

Run for Cover seems a thoroughly appropriate title for the album.  This is the one recording that for me adds something to a song that I first heard 57 years ago, and which I find a truly valuable addition.   And indeed when you’ve had a song with you for that long, then for a new version to make an impact it really does have to be something else.   Which this is.

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

by Jochen Markhorst

II          They kind of write themselves

You took a part of me that I really miss 
I keep asking myself how long it can go on like this 
You told yourself a lie, that’s all right mama I told myself one too 
I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you

True, in the New York Times interview with Douglas Brinkley from June 2020, there are some questionable passages. “Pretty Maids All-in A Row, that could be one of the best songs ever,” Dylan declares on the hardly remarkable Eagles song. “Ruby, My Dear” by Thelonious Monk “inspired me as a songwriter” (Monk’s ballad is one of his most beautiful, but: the song is an instrumental, the chords are off-centre, and progress quite unusual – if Dylan was inspired by it at all, it at most inspired him how to not write a song).

But those strange passages pale into insignificance compared to the enlightening statements Dylan makes elsewhere. Especially about his working method, which he reveals in response to Brinkley’s question about the song “I Contain Multitudes”: “In that particular song, the last few verses came first. So that’s where the song was going all along. Obviously, the catalyst for the song is the title line.” And: “Most of my recent songs are like that.”

Dylan has been a fan of it for more than half a century, of the antique ballad form inspired by François Villon (1431-1463), recognisable by the repetition of a single line at the end of each stanza. On Blood On The Tracks (1975), for instance, in five of the ten songs. On Rough And Rowdy Ways (2020) in three songs, six songs of The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964)… this specific form, in which “the catalyst for the song is the title line”, is a constant in Dylan’s oeuvre.

And here on Time Out Of Mind, it sets records; in eight of the eleven songs, the stanzas work towards the title line. Like in this “Million Miles”, to the title line that, according to Scott Warmuth, is probably due to the inspiring Henry Rollins: “I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you.” The other verse lines in the eight stanzas should then be regarded, in this genesis scenario, as eight times the carriers of where the song was going all along.

The song poet does not make it too difficult for himself. Only three lines leading up to this title line, in the simplest rhyme scheme (aabb). Something like Blind Willie McTell’s “You Was Born To Die”, for example;

Don't want no woman that run around
Stay out in the street and like a badfoot clown
You made me love you and you made me cry
You should remember that you were born to die

… also four-line verses working towards a title line in the rhyme scheme aabb. And as in dozens of other songs, of course – but Blind Willie McTell’s spirit seems to hover above the song anyway, and above the album altogether.

https://youtu.be/OtNZm9KXm8w

Not (yet) in the opening lines, though. The gentle, autumnal You took a part of me that I really miss is far too poetic for the he-man McTell, with his boastful, manly kind of manner, as Willie Dixon would say about Muddy Waters. Blind Willie McTell is a man who sings Now looka here mama let me tell you this: if you wants to get crooked I’m gonna give you my fist, and who sings Mama, you’ll never find another hot shot like me – Blind Willie’s machoism forbids vulnerabilities like You took a part of me that I really miss. That is something for heart-broken country heroes like Hank Williams or Hank Snow. Or, even more, for Ferlin Husky:

When you walked out a part of me went with you
My teardrops fell as you walked out the door
Everything's gone wrong darling since you've gone 
And I'm not me without you anymore

… “I’m Not Me Without You Anymore” from 1965. It’s a drag of a song, actually, but the opening line is beautiful. And Dylan does have a thing for Ferlin too, as we know. In his autobiography, Robbie Robertson reveals that Dylan thought already back in 1967 of Ferlin Husky, wondering whether a Basement song would be suitable for the hit machine Husky:

“The logic behind these recordings was to put together a collection of new Bob Dylan tunes that other artists might cover. After we would lay down a cut like “Too Much of Nothing”, Bob might comment, “Okay, that one would be good to send to Ferlin Husky.” He was only half kidding.”

…as a DJ, Dylan plays him twice in Theme Time Hour, including Husky’s biggest hit “On the Wings Of A Snow White Dove”, the song Dylan will also quote in 2020, in “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” (If I had the wings of a snow-white dove / I’d preach the gospel, the gospel of love).

So there are some Dylan-Husky lines, but actually too thin to promote When you walked out a part of me went with you to a trigger; at best it demonstrates an unlikely, artistic kinship with the song’s author, Red “I’m A Truck” Simpson.

For the time being, Dylan the poet leaves it at that, and leans back after his beautiful opening line. The road to the title line, the next two lines, is filled with unspectacular cliché talk. I keep asking myself how long it can go on like this is a run-of-the-mill lament that we know, in variations, from dozens of country tear-in-my-beer songs, and undoubtedly also sung somewhere by Dylan’s great hero George Jones. A bit more ambitious and original is the following You told yourself a lie, that’s all right mama I told myself one too, although it does smell a bit like self-plagiarism; tone and content are very close to I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too from “Mississippi”, which Dylan records during these same sessions.

The interlude that’s alright mama seems too casual to be really meant as an Elvis-wink, but it does add to the eclectic nature of the song – like the previous line, it seems like a self-controlling intruder. “The songs seem to know themselves and they know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically,” Dylan says in that same New York Times interview, “they kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them.”

To be continued. Next up Million Miles part 3: And thou didst commit whoredom with them

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 Larry Fyffe

Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan not only reshapes the sound of previous poems and songs, but their meaning as well:

And when the white moths were on the wing
And the moth-like stars were flickering out ....
It became a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
(William Yeats: The Song Of Wandering Aengus)

The poet William Yeats influences the song lyrics below (found in the Untold Archives); the song has a happy ending though there be memories of a previous so-so relationship.

Essentially, the song is brand new:

I will play with my maiden with the raven  black hair
In the valley so free, in the vale so fair
And the pale amoliter was gone with the hour
And my pale virgin with my gay wildwood flower
Now it's on with those days with my own honey love
And the streams were to ripple, and the clouds seen above
In the dawn, my love is sleeping, but I know it will last
In the days, good old days, in my old wildwood flower

(Bob Dylan Wildwood Flower)

Uplifts the following sorrowful song lyrics that could even be taken as a murder ballad:

Oh, I twine with my mangos, and raven black hair
With the roses so red, and the lilies so fair
And the myrtles so bright with emerald dew
The pale amelida, and eyes with bright blue ....
Oh, he taught me to love him, and call me his flower
That was blooming to cheer him through life's dreary hour
Oh, I long to seek him, and regret that dark hour
He's gone and neglected his pale wildwood flower
(Carter Family: Wildwood Flower)

Another song, previously mentioned, clearly influenced by Yeats:

You gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I'll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go
(Bob Dylan: You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

As in:

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands, and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips, and take her hands
And walk among long dappled grass
(William Yeats: The Song Of Wandering Aengus)

———-

Untold Dylan is published once or twice a day.  Indexes to various series can be found at the top of the page under the picture, and on the home page.

We also have a Facebook group with over 14,000 members – just search Facebook for “Untold Dylan”.

If you would like to write for Untold Dylan please either send your article, or an outline of its contents to Tony@schools.co.uk

By Allan Cheskes (taken from a prepared session)

Roll On John is the final track on Tempest, but it is not the first time Dylan recorded a song by this name, except previously, “On,” was followed by a comma. On March 11, 1962, Dylan appeared on a radio show with Cynthia Gooding called Folksingers Choice. On the show, Dylan explained to Gooding that the song was a traditional ballad with one or two verses included that are his own.

Dylan’s first borrowing used on the Tempest version, is therefore a nod to the traditional song he once performed on radio.

On first listen to Roll On John (from the Tempest album), there can be no doubt that the song is a tribute to John Lennon.

Dylan clearly influenced John Lennon and the Beatles (as the Beatles influenced Bob Dylan). Each Beatle member marvelled over Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. John Lennon, especially, after hearing this landmark album, began to write more introspectively and play more acoustic songs.

I’m a Loser, recorded in August 1964, is a good early example of that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TssB4J4MrJI

Another track that Lennon mentioned was inspired by his then hero, Dylan, was You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away on the album, Help!:

“That’s me in my Dylan period again.” Lennon said, “I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it.”

Paul McCartney even took the term inspiration a step further in 1984 and claimed it was rather a direct imitation, stating:

“That was John doing a Dylan… heavily influenced by Bob. If you listen, he’s singing it like Bob.”

Lennon went whole-hog Dylan with Norwegian Wood on the 1965 Rubber Soul album:

Norwegian Wood did not go unnoticed by Dylan. Dylan responded to Norwegian Wood with 4^th Time Around, (which we previously covered). 4^th Time Around was a playful homage to John Lennon, also letting Lennon know that he is aware of where Lennon’s song came from.

Hey, Dylan borrows melodies, styles and even lyrics, much of the time, so he couldn’t in good conscience have been upset with Lennon.

Lennon and Dylan crossed paths in 1964, twice in 1966 and once in 1969. D.A. Pennebaker captured one of those encounters in 1966, in Don’t Look Back.

Recall from an earlier session, John Lennon criticized Dylan after he released Gotta Serve Somebody. Lennon jokingly called it ‘Everybody’s Gotta Get Served’. “He wants to be a waiter for Christ,” Lennon adds laughingly.

Lennon’s critique became a bit more vicious when he said, “The backing is mediocre […] the singing’s really pathetic and the words were just embarrassing.”

The icing on the cake came with Lennon’s response song, Serve Yourself, which mocked Gotta serve Somebody.

With that scathing attack by John Lennon, could Dylan really like John? Yet there are indications that Dylan liked and admired Lennon. Let bygones be bygones. Dylan was after all beyond his Christian proselytizing phase which was what offended Lennon.

Here is what Dylan had to say in his September 27, 2012 Rolling Stone Interview with Mikal Gilmore, about John Lennon:

“John came from the northern regions of Britain. The hinterlands. Just like I did in America, so we had some kind of environmental things in common. Both places were pretty isolated. Everything is stacked up against you when you come from that. You have to have the talent to overcome everything. That was something I had in common with him. We were all about the same age and heard the same exact things growing up. Our paths crossed at a certain time, and we both faced a lot of adversity. We even had that in common. I wish that he was still here because we could talk about a lot of things now.”

In the same interview, Dylan mentioned that while he was on tour in England in 2009, he joined a minibus tour of John Lennon’s childhood home behind Strawberry Field in Liverpool, (with 13 tourists who never appeared to recognize him). By all accounts, Dylan loved the tour and was totally immersed in it.

The idea for a tribute song was probably percolating in his head after that visit. He pretty much says this in the above-mentioned Rolling Stone interview, and that he began practising it during soundchecks, well before its recording in 2012:

“I wasn’t even sure that song fit on this record. I just took a chance and stuck it in there. I think I might’ve finished it to include it. It’s not like it was written yesterday. I started practising it late last year on some stages.”

It is said that Dylan only performed Roll On John, twice in concert, both times in 2013. Dylan performed it on November 24 at the Opera House Theatre in Blackpool, England and on November 26 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. John Lennon had ties to both locations.

Stu Kimball, guitarist during that tour said about the performance of Roll On John, the first night:

“That was the night that the boss called Roll On John, which was the first time we ever played it, and it was amazing. The whole place went crazy and then silent, listening…More than one tear was shed.”

Margotin and Guesdon, in their book, Bob Dylan, All the Songs, say this about Roll On John:

“(The song) retraces the fabulous evolution of the former Beatle ‘from the Liverpool docks to the red-light Hamburg streets’ (and that Dylan) gives a friendly nod to some of Lennon’s great Beatles and post-Beatles compositions (A Day in the Life, Come Together, The Ballad of John and Yoko, Instant Karma)…and his commitment to the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War.”

Also, tellingly, they noted, “Dylan chooses to play piano, with a Lennon-like delay in his voice. The interpretation is moving, the harmonies reminiscent of John’s first solo album in which he confessed not to believe, neither in the Beatles nor in a certain…Zimmerman. (God on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970).”

From all of this, it is likely Dylan thought of and admired Lennon. At the very least, Dylan wanted to write another song among many that he and others have written, as he put it, in the tradition of tragic deaths and sometimes about larger-than-life folk heroes.

In the interview with Rolling Stone with Mikal Gilmore, Dylan had this to say about Roll On John:

“There’s a fair amount of mortality, certainly in the last three songs – Tin Angel, Tempest, and Roll On John. People come to hard endings… I can name you a hundred where everything ends in tragedy. It’s called tradition, and that’s what I deal in. There’s plenty of death songs. Everybody sings them. Death is a part of life.”

———————

Untold Dylan is published once or twice a day.  Indexes to various series can be found at the top of the page under the picture, and on the home page.

We also have a Facebook group with over 14,000 members – just search Facebook for “Untold Dylan”.

If you would like to write for Untold Dylan please either send your article, or an outline of its contents to Tony@schools.co.uk

• Other people’s songs. How Dylan covers the work of other composers

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

Aaron: Bob’s 28th studio album Good as I Been to You ended with a cover of this classic children’s song. 

Spectrum Culture included the track on a 2020 list of “Bob Dylan’s 20 Best Songs of the 1990s”

It is a song with as many lyrical variations as there are versions, So I am glad I decided for this series to just use a version that I own and I am aware of.

Tony: OK, it is a children’s song; I think I probably sang and played it to my daughters, although I doubt I got through more than one verse.  But I do have a memory of a young daughter saying, “But a frog can’t marry a person.”  Or something like that.

But one of the best 20 recordings of Dylan in the 1990s?  Well, Dylan only wrote and recorded 16 new songs in the whole of the decade (given that I think songs like the sublime “Well, Well, Well,” were not recorded by Dylan at the time) so I guess the competition is not that great.   And this does go on for a while – and even my children who loved to have the same songs sung to them over and again in childhood didn’t really expect them to last over six minutes.  Mind you that was probably my singing and playing that made them demand something else after thirty seconds.

No, sorry, but I lost focus quite quickly, and also couldn’t really keep up my interest in what happened to the frog.

I’m going to trust my memory to say that this is a 16th-century Scottish folk song – but beyond that I don’t know anything about it.   However I am now going to break the rules of these pieces Aaron and I do, by looking it up, as I am sure there is something odd about this piece….

…. and oh yes there is.   I knew there was something…  It is apparently about François, Duke of Anjou’s attempt to form a liaison (as they say) with Queen Elizabeth in the early 17th century.  And thus perhaps the origin of the pejorative “froggie” meaning French person.

Thanks for that one Aaron.  Let’s see what you have got in store for us next…

Aaron: Bruce Springsteen

Tony: I immediately am more attracted to this by the beat in the first verse and then the variations that come in as instrumentation is added.   The accordion helps enormously – and then although the bass is very simple it is a very effective addition.

It is in fact this range of instrumentation that allows me to stay focussed, and the instrumental break comes in just at the right moment – the fiddles played absolutely to perfection.

And this is what I think we always need in these strophic songs – the ones that go verse, verse, verse.    And now I’ve checked up on the origins of the piece it is much more comprehensible.  Love the second instrumental break too.

Actually, this would be a great piece to do a sort of country and western dance to, especially if you know the softer verse is coming along before the very upbeat instrumental for the coda.  Yes, I like that, and find it much more approachable than Bob’s version.  Sorry about that.

Paul McCartney (unreleased)

I don’t follow the activities of Paul McCartney so I have no idea what his weekly radio programme was all about, but I wonder if it was only available in the US, given that the word “program” on the cover is the American spelling.

The accompaniment has some lovely guitar playing, and actually, I would have preferred to listen to a track of the accompaniment without the singing.

Nick Cave (with the alternative title King Kong Kitchee Kitchee Ki-Mi-O)

Tony: Hmmmm.   Nick Cave always seems to me to be an oddball performer – not one that I am particularly familiar with, but when I do come across his work it seems, well, odd.  My youngest daughter has now settled in Australia where Nick Cave comes from and I must ask her what her opinion of Nick Cave is in Sydney.   Who knows.

Is this entertainment?

By Tony Attwood

This song has always been one of my favourites, not just for what seemed in my youth an incomprehensible title, but also for the individual lines within the song.

And as such the thoughts and visions of the song mix with my own experiences and life, and somehow start to merge so I find myself having special relationship with the piece.  It becomes part of my life.

As such my visions of how the song needs to be interpreted change over time as new thoughts join with or replace the old.   Where once I was looking for a spot of joy and bounce, now the world has changed and I have new issues that I want those who record the song to deal with and acknowledge.

Except of course, these fine musicians who choose to re-work Dylan know nothing of my needs, and when they do hit the right note (as it were) for me, it is of course by purest chance.

A very quick search found well over 60 cover cover recordings available, and I am sure there are many many more.   Indeed Jochen has already introduced to the wide range available – including this extraordinary version from Higher Animals…

Talk about turning it into another song altogether….

But of Jochen’s choices in his earlier series, Chris Smither’s version is still played in my house on a regular basis.   Fortunately (or perhaps because of my propensity to play certain songs quite often) I live alone these days so no one else is disturbed…

This version just digs inside me so much that although I utterly adore it and if my daughters chose to have it played at my funeral when that time comes I don’t think I’d object (although I rather think I might have a hard time trying to do so, so maybe that doesn’t matter).

I think it is the combination of the persistently held pulse and note in the background with the vision of the sun coming down over the trees that turns me on… and this starts to lead into the link with my environment, which I’ll try to explain.

In fact, as for wintertime coming, Yo La Tengo tells us, it is already here, the ice age has settled in once more and we’ve all had it.  The only problem I have with the music is the end, which is a far too sudden conclusion for the visit to the places I have been taken.

So now I really need to divert for a moment, to explain myself more fully.

For it does seem to me that the images the sounds create are linking with my everyday life.   And if we can but acknowledge that this happens, and pull ourselves away from the lyrics and our in-depth knowledge of the song, then we can perhaps find something so personal that trying to explain to others why THIS version rather than THAT version is so moving, is really not just a consideration of musical integrity but also an expression of a totally personal issue.

In short my relationship with this song is not just something about the music and the lyrics, it is much deeper than this, and this is where I have to acknowledge that Yo La Tengo takes me into the ice age.  And from there try to explain why.

Obviously, there is the Winter Time coming line, but there is also something about the sound that is produced here which just seems to represent icicles and frozen countryside.  And once I had that feeling I was taken into my own personal relationship with the Ice Age – or at least one of the Ice Ages.

Which is going to sound a bit freaky, but if you have another few minutes to spare, please stay with me…

I live in a part of rural England in which the remains of pre-human times are still to be seen.   On part of a journey to and from one of the dance clubs I regularly frequent, there are hills and sudden drops into valleys, these valleys having been scoured out by glaciers edging from what is now the Midlands, towards what is now the North Sea.  It’s a thought that arrives in my head each time the car makes its way up and down these steep hills – I’m travelling over a landscape formed by glaciers.  For reasons I can’t explain I find that thought quite moving.

But there’s more because at the edge of the biggest lake in the region, incredibly well-preserved remains of a 10 meter long 180 million year old ichthyosaur have been found.  It’s the largest remains of a predator from the time of the dinosaurs that has ever been found in the UK .  Fortunately, the region is a nature reserve, so no one has built on it – the creature was preserved and will stay that way.  (There’s a picture of it above).

Now I find a link between Yo La Tengo and my nearby rural environment.  Why is hard to explain, but there is something in the sounds that brings these feelings to the fore.  So I feel this version of a song that has been with me for much of my life, relates to where I am now, where I live now, what I think now.  And the environment in which I live.

And maybe that’s what it is always about.  Do the musical sounds (not the lyrics, but the sounds) link to something in your current or past existence?  If yes, then maybe the music turns you on.  If not, maybe it doesn’t.

We tend to talk and write so much about the lyrics, probably because that’s easier – and you can most likely see how I am struggling to put this notion across.   But this version of this song links somehow my local environment – an environment that intrigues me, and which I care about and want to be preserved.

A bit weird I know, but that’s how I feel 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

See also: Bob Dylan, Jack of Diamonds and Robert Browning

by Larry Fyffe

There are analysts of song lyrics by Bob Dylan who walk the plank of the Auto/Biographical School of Dylanology, fall off the end of it, and nearly drown; and there are those who turn around only to fall off the other end, and nearly drown in the Sound School of Dylanology.

However, the singer/songwriter often refers to artistic works of others, to traditional songs or pieces of literature, containing meaningful themes which Dylan sometimes follows quite closely, and at other times turns the meaning therein around in one aspect or another.

As noted previously, Robert Browning is one source Dylan chooses from the world of literature; Browning’s a poet known for employing the literary device known as the ‘dramatic monologue’ – akin to the “talking blues”, the speaker in the poem addresses an implied audience; tells a story, often humorous, that reveals the narrator’s own character when doing so.

Below, an example of a dramatic monologue concerning life in the busy city versus that in the quiet countryside. It’s rather clear that the Romantic Transcendentalist theme of life being better in the countryside is mocked by the Victorian poet:

Look, two and two go the priests, then the monks 
    with cowl and sandals
And penitents dressed in white shirts a-holding the yellow candles
One he carries a flag up straight, and another a cross with handles
And the Duke's guard brings up the rear, 
    for the better prevention of scandals
(Robert Browning: Up At The Villa, Down In The City)

The source of the song lyrics quoted beneath given away by ‘Dylanesque rhyme twists’

~’sandals’/’sandals’;~ ‘scandals’/’scandals’;~’candles’/’candle’; ~’handles’/’handle’/’vandals’ –

The meaning thereof, trapped in words claimed to be subconsciously chosen, abounds with irony – the established norms of society, of straight people, scorn ‘unacceptable’ lifestyles like that of pot-smoking, supposedly nature-loving hippies:

Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals
Try to avoid scandals
Don't wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handle
(Bob Dylan: Subterranean  Homesick Blues)

In the bouncing music and song lyrics below, the narrator is stuck for a little while in the countryside, away from the hustle and bustle of big city life; he expresses not a romantic sentiment concerning the countryside, but a realistic one – practical, he makes the best of a lonesome situation:

Wish I was back in the city
Instead of this old bank of sand
Withe the sun beating down on the chimney tops
And the one I love so close at hand ...
But right now I'll just sit here contentedly
And watch the river flow
(Bob Dylan: Watching The River Flow)

As previously noted, the Christian School of Dylanology attempts to bind many of Bob Dylan’s songs with the established dogmas of organized religious theology; or at least tries to transform them into “morality tales” based thereon.

by Jochen Markhorst

I           The closer I get, the farther away I feel

 “I knew I should have taken that left toin at Albukoykee,” Bugs Bunny usually says, when he has gone a million miles off course again and consults the map. Which tells us that Bugs certainly didn’t intend to follow Route 66 – that one goes straight through Albuquerque and on to Los Angeles. A second claim to fame is the exceptionally successful TV series Breaking Bad, the saga about chemistry teacher Walter White who, in order to pay his hospital bills, becomes the most powerful drug dealer in the US Southwest. The success of the series seems to have given tourism to the city an enormous boost. And in Dylan circles, the city gets a third tick because of Scott Warmuth.

Goon Talk is the name of the wonderful blogspot of the admirable Scott Warmuth from Albuquerque. The site publishes results with academic quality of Warmuth’s search for sources of Dylan’s work and sparks for Dylan’s inspiration, and describes those results in clear prose, always down to earth, avoiding sensationalism. Beyond this site, the New Mexican continues his work on Twitter; to this day Warmuth finds and publishes sources of verse fragments, of passages from Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles, and templates of Dylan’s paintings (almost always film stills). These sources are as colourful as Dylan’s oeuvre: a 1961 Time magazine, Baudelaire, revue texts from the nineteenth century, Coen Brothers films, Jack London, non-fiction travel guides and historical studies, Doc Pomus and Willie Dixon.

Warmuth’s groundbreaking work is not everywhere received with the same enthusiasm. There is a whole cohort of devout fans for whom it is intolerable that Dylan is not a divine genius who steadily manages to create something out of nothing. And then post unintelligent reactions to give vent to their indignation. With ‘counter-arguments’ like “C’mon!” and “This is all a bit silly” and “idiotic”, and for some reason these displeased fans also have a tendency to write in capitals. Fortunately, it does not deter Warmuth.

A special chapter in Goon Talk‘s fascinating series of articles concerns the remarkable multi-talent Henry Rollins. The all-round workaholic Rollins became famous as a punk rock singer, he is a successful and good actor, a regular columnist for Rolling Stone Australia and LA Weekly, wins a Grammy Award for his autobiographical Get in the Van (1994) and publishes remarkable collections of poems or diary-like short stories. In these, in books such as Black Coffee Blues and See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, Warmuth finds a wealth of paraphrases, whole and half quotes, and sparks of inspiration for Dylan songs, mainly from the period 1997-2001, as well as for Chronicles.

Especially for Time Out Of Mind, Rollins seems to be a purveyor, as Warmuth demonstrates quite convincingly. Rollins traces can be found in no less than eight of the eleven songs, as well as in the outtakes “Mississippi” and “Dreamin’ Of You”. The only songs that seem to be Rollins-free (as far as we know) are “Love Sick”, “Not Dark Yet” and “Make You Feel My Love”. All other songs contain similarities that transcend coincidence. Copied fragments of verse like You can’t come back, not all the way and I have nothing for you, I don’t even have a self for myself anymore (transferred almost unchanged to “Mississippi”), or “I think what I need might be a full-length leather coat / Somebody just asked me if I registered to vote” from “Highlands”, a sum of two parts found by Warmuth in two Rollins books. Or the sentences Now if you think you lost it all, you’re wrong. You can always lose a little more, which Dylan slightly reworks for “Tryin’ to Get To Heaven”. I hear voices when no one is around that becomes the opening line for “Cold Irons Bound”…

These are just a few examples. There are dozens, which is too many to be attributed to coincidence anyway, but usually also so idiosyncratic that any doubt about Rollin’s significance as a source of inspiration can be ruled out. This also applies to the fragments Warmuth recognises from “Million Miles”. In Black Coffee Blues, he first ticks off I love dreamless sleep. Dreams tell me too much, which takes him to the opening of the third verse:

I’m drifting in and out of dreamless sleep
Throwing all my memories in a ditch so deep

… which in itself is not too specific. But on the same page we also read: Slowly I am forgetting them and their mind polluting words. And that is quite specific;

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

… far too specific, in any case, to ignore the connection with the opening of Dylan’s last stanza – which, in retrospect, also elevates that dreamless sleep on the same page to “borrowing”.

Fascinating, but ultimately these are merely idiomatic details. More serious is Warmuth’s more daring observation. In that same Black Coffee Blues, he finds, twenty pages before that dreamless sleep and the mind-polluting words:

“The next song I wrote was about the distance I felt when I thought about that girl. The song centered around the lines, “The closer I get, the farther away I feel.” I was thinking that all the time I was with her, I worked hard to put that out of my mind. Romance passes the time.”

Warmuth goes searching and does indeed find the song whose genesis Rollins describes here: “Down And Away”, a trashy, riff-driven metal song on the Rollins Band’s second album, Hard Volume from 1989. Rollins does indeed incorporate those key lines, in the second verse:

There's an ego followin' the way I feel
The closer I get, the farther away I feel
I can't get in and I can't get out
Why don't you touch me so I can feel it

Further on, that one line The closer I get, the farther away I feel, like a refrain, is repeated four times, then the band switches back to half-speed, and heavy and droning, mantra-like, Rollins shouts the line four more times. He is, apparently, quite content with its dramatic power. And Dylan might be too, Warmuth speculates. After all, the chorus line of “Million Miles”, I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you, expresses exactly the same thing in a similar idiom. Dylan chooses a poetic exaggeration (farther away becomes a million miles), but still: the sentiment is the same.

“I suspect,” Warmuth writes, “that Dylan read that passage and considered that to be a good theme for a song, and that that passage very well may have been one of the sparks that led to Million Miles”. And that is a proposition more exciting than all the paraphrases, quotations and borrowings put together; the proposition that one single sentence in Rollins’ work can be the spark for an entire Dylan song suggests that we can see the workings of the creative mind of a Nobel Prize-winning poet. Which may actually lead us to hope for the answer to the Mother of All Questions: What’s up, Doc?

To be continued. Next up Million Miles part 2: They kind of write themselves

———-

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 Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: The idea for this series is to take a listen to the tracks Bob has covered on record over the years and compare his versions with those of other artists versions and decide: Who did it best?

I’ll provide the song and the different versions whilst Tony provides the commentary, with the normal rule that we have (just to stop Tony from rambling on for too long) that he has to write the commentary while listening to the track, and then stop.

First up, let’s reacquaint ourselves with Bob’s version of Shenandoah from Down in the Groove.

Tony: When I write my reviews of cover versions of Dylan’s work I often find myself asking what the cover does to enhance my enjoyment of and indeed understanding of the original.  So I don’t go much for covers that perform large amounts of the song exactly the same as has been done before.  Or those which use some utterly obvious musical device to make the arrangement sound different.

So changing the rhythm, accompaniment, chords and indeed the whole feel of the song, but still keeping enough of the song to refer us back to the original takes a lot of musical ability and insight.

And my goodness doesn’t Bob show that here!   Much of the melody has gone, and the rhythm has been modified all over the place, but this is still  “Shenandoah” – and just as I think I’ve got the hang of where Bob is going he does something like re-work the final line totally.

In fact, the way he rearranges the lines

We're bound away
'Cross the wide Missouri

is utterly remarkable.  I don’t know other versions of the song well enough to say this is a totally original version, but whether it is or not, it is superb.   The rhythm is hypnotic and completely unexpected as the instrumentation plays against the vocals, and the Dylan vocal cuts across the chorus.  I absolutely need to play this again.

Aaron:   Now here are some versions I found in my own collection. Over to you Tony…are any of these better than Bob?

Bruce Springsteen 

Tony: Now this is more in keeping with how I am used to hearing Shenandoah, and because of this perhaps I became a little impatient to see where it was going.   And once the vocals started I knew.   That is not to say I am a better orchestrator than those involved here, of course not, but they have laid out their cards on the table and we know exactly what will happen.  And unlike Bob’s version where it is going is completely obvious – everything can be understood and anticipated from the off.

By the instrumental break I’m ready for it to end – so that I can go back to Bob’s version again.

Aaron: Tom Waits (Feat Keith Richards)

Tony: I love the cover artwork and I love the gruff lead vocal which they manage to fit perfectly with the chorus.  This is one of those recordings that I can enjoy, and I’m glad I’ve heard it, but I’m not sure I’ll want to play it again.  It’s one of those versions that it is fun and enjoyable once, but there’s not enough there to make me want to play it again and again.

And I am not sure the arrangement works with the second voice joining in the verse before the instrumental break.   By this stage I am thinking, this is a piece where the arranger has had one idea, but then the producer says “we need something else” and it all gets a bit artificial.

But in case, like me, you had lost touch with Bob’s version, I want to play that again so I can see if I have anything else to say

Tony: It is the energy throughout, and that final line of each verse that really does it for me.  It is impossible to catch it in my head so I can sing it back to myself because of the way the rhythm extends itself into the extra bar.

Surely I must have heard this and recognised its brilliance before now.  But seemingly not.  Not for the first time I owe you Aaron.

An index to the whole series on the Never Ending Tour can be found here.     Below are the episodes for 2004.

• NET, 2004, Part 1 – The best singing audience
• NET 2004 part 2: The Jazz Connection
• Never Ending Tour, 2004, part 3, Harping On
• Never Ending Tour, 2004, Part 4 More jazz, regulars and rarities
• NET 2004 Part 5: Rocking on
• Never Ending Tour 2004 part 6: Stone you and then come back again
• NET, 2004, part 7 Epilogue: Sing me back home

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Discussions of Dylan’s performances in 2005 have been dominated by the extraordinary five-day residency at the Brixton Academy, London, at the end of the year – November 20^th to the 25^th. Compiler CS at A Thousand Highways dedicates his fourteen-song selection from that year entirely to the London residency as if the rest of the year did not exist.

That residency casts a long shadow, not just over 2005, but the whole NET, with some commentators suggesting that these are Dylan’s best-ever performances. That shadow stretches all the way back to the three-day Prague residency of 1995, and the Supper Club residency of 1993.

There are good reasons for the pre-eminence of the London shows, not least the quality of the recordings. In the shadow kingdom of Dylan bootlegging, the outfit known as Crystal Cat are famous for the sharp clarity of their recordings. I’m no techie, but I suspect that recording technology was taking some big leaps around this time with the rise of compact, hand-held devices. Studio techies started complaining that the bootleggers were making better recordings than they could!

But Dylan also revitalises his lineup for 2005, bringing in Stu Kimball on lead guitar with Denny Freeman on backup guitar, as well as multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron who will remain with Dylan until 2019. The eternal Tony Garnier stays on bass with the accomplished George Recile on drums. This lineup leads to richness and fullness of sound we haven’t heard before.

Dylan is also in wonderful voice in 2005, throaty but powerful, and his harmonica playing reaches new heights of sublimity.

It is not, however, all sweetness and light. Some NET followers find the Crystal Cat recordings too sharp, too trebly, too abrasive, too brash, and in need of some filtering. And then there is Dylan’s persistent upsinging to deal with. I’ll have more to say about this as we go along, but this salmon leap of the voice at the end of the line has been an issue now for several years and, for my ear, mars some otherwise magnificent performances.

And while we might admire the richness of the recordings, not everybody is going to like some of the arrangements for some of the songs. I detect a movement towards less flexibility, or free-flowing rhythms. Some of these arrangements become dogmatic and thumpy and might seem to run counter to the spirit of the songs. This heralds a move away from the looser, innovative, club-jazz sounds of 2003, towards the more rigid, bluesy tempos that will mark the post-2005 years.

What we can say about the London residency is that it is the triumphant fruition of the sound that Dylan has been developing since he shifted to the piano in October 2002. This is where it’s all been leading. It’s a fascinating exercise to go back to those rather thin, tentative beginnings in 2002 and compare them to the full-bodied, confident sounds of 2005. We have a rising curve here that starts in 2002, is developed during the innovative and free-spirited 2003, consolidated and enriched in 2004 and brought to a head in 2005, particularly at the London residency.

But I have another, albeit playful, argument to make here. While the London residency is rightly famous, it casts its shadow over two, to my mind equally remarkable concerts Dylan did in Dublin, after just one night’s break from London – 26^th and 27^th November. The recordings from the Dublin concerts are not by Crystal Cat, and tend to be more muted and softer. I tend to push the volume up to hear them better. They don’t sound as dramatic as the London concerts, and the sound of each instrument does not come across so clearly, but to my mind, it’s not just the sound that’s different, it’s that Dylan’s approach to the songs is subtly different, warmer and more intimate. Less brash and more sensitive. In some cases I’m going to suggest that the Dublin performances are a cut above the more famous London ones.

So, it’s time to come to grips with what I’m talking about. I’m starting with ‘Shelter From The Storm’ (London, 4^th night) as it must surely be one of the most choice of these choice cuts and a wonderful way in to the London shows. Spoiler alert, a best-ever performance coming up.

Shelter from the storm (A)

How well that jaunty, somewhat countrified sound suits the song!

The best Dylan songs never wear out, which is the case with this love song, this celebration of the universal female principle (and archetypal hippy chick).

Now let’s compare that performance with this one from Dublin (1^st night).

Shelter from the storm (B)

You can see the fun we’re going to have trying to decide which performance is ‘the best.’ And there’s no wrong answer. I detect a gentler spirit at work in this Dublin performance. A refinement of feeling which brings out the nuances of the song. Which is what the harmonica does.

Let’s try another comparison. Another of the choicest cuts from London would have to be this ‘High Water (For Charley Patton)’. This is from the 3^rd night and really cooks up a storm. Note how a cool little sequence of piano notes around 4.54 minutes in is picked up by the guitar and worked into the musical fabric. Donnie Herron comes to the fore with his banjo. It’s a grim song, yet somehow celebrates life with that infectious beat.

High Water (A)

The Dublin performance is not quite so effusive, yet sounds more pointed to me, and I can make out the lyrics better. It’s fascinating that around 5.40 mins the band goes quiet and Dylan has the chance to do some fancy piano work, as in a jazz break, if he wants to. He doesn’t. He sticks to that cool little piano riff and just lets the song ride on the rhythm section for a few bars.

High Water (B)

Time for a change of pace, and another comparison. We turn to ‘Cry Awhile’ and start with the London 4^th night performance. Another ‘best ever’ coming up, folks. At this stage Dylan is still singing all the verses to this complex song with its exciting shift in tempo when it drops from upbeat into a slow blues. Superb work by Garnier here.

There’s a gangster feel to this song, not surprising as when he wrote the song Dylan was reading, and filching a few lines from, Confessions of a Yakuza, an obscure 1989 biography of a gangster by Japanese writer Junichi Saga.

The first three lines are a compact piece of vindictiveness:

Well, I had to go down and see a guy named Mr. Goldsmith
Nasty, dirty, double-crossing, backstabbing phony
I didn't have to wanna have to deal with

There are subsequent mentions of lawyers, horses that run the wrong way, and funerals, but behind the tough guy, there’s a broken heart at the heart of the song.

I'm on the fringes of the night, fighting back tears 
                                   that I can't control
Some people they ain't human, they got no heart or soul

Cry Awhile (A)

Again, the Dublin performance is not as strident, or perhaps striking, but Dylan’s vocal is every bit a match for the London performance. In fact, although the Dublin recordings are softer, Dylan’s voice is clearer in the mix.

Cry Awhile (B)

Coming to ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ I’d make a firmer claim for the superiority of the Dublin performance. This song is probably first equal with ‘Hard Rain’ as Dylan’s finest protest song, a song very much directed at the ‘unlived meaningless life’ he excoriates in ‘False Prophet.’ He’s still using what to me is the rather clunky Sonny Boy Williamson riff from ‘Help Me,’ but Dylan swings it along in this London (2^nd night) performance. Whereas Dylan once understated the vocal, it now lurches along with a fine swagger.

It’s all right ma (A)

We have the same swagger with the Dublin version (2^nd night), but am I mistaken in finding it more nuanced, with Dylan’s voice soaring through the verses which come across with their full dramatic weight?

It’s all right Ma (B)

There is a certain grandeur to ‘Every Grain of Sand’ that makes it hypnotic listening. It is a song about faith as much as it is an expression of faith. There is a little upsinging in this London (4^th night) performance, but it is well integrated into the vocal performance. And there is a beautiful, troubled harp break at the end.

Every Grain of Sand (A)

If anything, the Dublin performance (2^nd night) is quieter and more contemplative than London. I would certainly prefer this performance if it weren’t for the upsinging, which becomes an issue here. Properly used, upsinging can lift the mood of a song momentarily, bring a little light into the darkness. But when repeatedly used in one verse, it draws attention to itself in an unwelcome way. Hear the way he slips into it during the Baudelairean ‘flowers of indulgence’ verse, starting at 2.42 mins, going through to 3.38 mins. A magnificent performance magnificently ruined? This song can only take so much mood lift. It is a sombre song.

Every Grain of Sand (B)

I’ll finish this post with a pair of performances I hope will establish beyond all doubt the superiority of at least some of the Dublin performances. ‘Visions of Johanna,’ perhaps the most ambitious of all Dylan songs (with the exception perhaps of ‘Tell Ol’ Bill’), an hallucinatory mood song that somehow never seemed to make it out of the 1960s in performance terms. (That’s a purely personal judgement.) Damnation and salvation swirl about in this after-midnight trippy-trip through the underworld.

It contains the famous line, which both the London and Dublin audience recognize, ‘the ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face’ but there’s lots more trippy stuff.

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial
Voice echo this is what salvation must be like after a while

The London performance (2^nd night) gives it a good go, but to my ear it is the Dublin performance that nails it. It needs that quieter, more subdued if not spooky atmosphere, which is maybe why Dylan didn’t follow up on his fast versions during the Blonde on Blonde recording sessions.

The Dublin performance is sweetly melancholic, as is the thoughtful guitar break by Stu Kimball.

But first the London performance.

Visions of Johanna (A)

And now for the Dublin ace:

Visions of Johanna (B)

That’s all I have room for, although I have not finished this comparison of choice cuts from these shows. I’m about halfway through, so I hope you’ll join me soon for more choice cuts.

Kia Ora

• Mixing-Up The Fluids: Red Crimson And Yellow Dylan
• King Crimson And Yellow Dylan (Part II)
• The Crimson King And The Yellow Jester (Part III)
• King Crimson and the Yellow Jester (Part IV)
• King Crimson And BeelzeBob (Part V)
• The Crimson King And Serpent Lilith (Part VI)
• Beelzebub And Lilith (Part VII)

By Larry Fyffe

According to the New Testament, there’s no doubt of a final battle being fought between the forces of ‘good’ led by the three-fold Christian God, and the forces of ‘evil’ led by the Devil,  sometimes referred to as Beelzebub.

The Lord’s Judgement Day will follow as to who’s in and who’s out of luck in so far as the Edenic return to eternal life is concerned:

To execute judgment upon all
And to convince all that are ungodly among them
Of all their ungodly deeds
Which they have ungodly committed
And of all their hard speeches
Which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him
(Jude 1:15)

An apocalytic vision that’s supposedly repeated in the following song lyrics:

If the Bible is right, the world will explode
I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)

It’s a dark vision and a true one, or so it’s claimed by Dylanologists such as Kees de Graaf. However, to claim so, avoided must be the biggest word in the song verse above – “If”. That is, should one suppose the Bible to be literally true.

Another problem – what exactly comprises ‘godly’ behaviour versus ‘ungodly’ behaviour is left up to particular religious organizations to figure out.

Examining the works of Bob Dylan as a whole demonstrates that the singer / songwriter / musician is not a fire-and- brimstone-breathing ‘final days’ apocalyptic – there’s hope, even though a small one, that such a religious prophecy will not come to fruition; instead, the song above is a warning that such a terrible event could indeed happen, especially now with the invention of the hydrogen bomb.

A warning that's given in the following song as well:
I'm going back out 'fore the rain starts a-falling
I'll walk to the depth of deepest black forest ....
And I'll tell it, and speak it, and think it, and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
(Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall)

The elaborate biblical-like lyrics above inspired by the rather simplistic folk song quoted beneath, first sung by the blacklisted “Weavers”; the hammer and sickle symbolic of the then-idealized Communist Party; at the insistence of activist Libby Frank “and sisters” added to the lyrics:

If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land
I'd hammer out danger, I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between my brothers and sisters
All over this land
(Peter, Paul, And Mary: If I Had A Hammer ~ Seeger/Hays)

Certainly, the next quoted is not a dogmatic religious song; there’s that big word “if” again:

The confusion I'm feeling
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
That if God's on our side
He'll stop the next war
(Bob Dylan: With God On Our Side)

By Tony Attwood

To me, Dylan’s performance of “It Ain’t Me Babe” is angry, but it is also possible to perform it plaintively and with a deep regret that is not in Dylan’s original.  And rarely does a performer get this more than Sandra McCracken.

The simplicity of the guitar accompaniment and the elegance of the harmonies make this an exquisite piece of writing.

And just in case you don’t know this lady’s work (and she is prolific) try this as another example of just how she can get inside a song and fine where it starts and where it goes.

And for my other choice I am going to cheat and quote an earlier article by Jochen, as he put across the point better than I can.

Here’s what he said…

Quite indestructible, the combination of these lyrics with this magnetic melody. Thus, almost all covers are fun, at the very least – you have to dress it up very, very corny to compromise the power of the song. The downside is: it is apparently difficult to add something. All those nice covers are actually quite interchangeable. Only radically different arrangements stand out. Not necessarily better than the original, but some of them do surprise, at any rate.

At the top of that category: the old-fashioned, glowing soul approach by Bedford Incident, a completely unknown band with a completely unknown single from May 1969 – with a magnificent harmony-intermezzo and an overflowing, irresistible arrangement. Horns, violins, four male vocalists and a complete band – fortunately, Bedford Incident completely fails in Henry Miller’s function-requirement to inoculate the world with disillusionment. Although… Bedford Incident’s single never got any further than “Best Leftfield Pick” on Radio KIBH in the remote village of Sewald, Alaska, August 1969.
Which, with all due respect for Sewald and Radio KIBH, is a bit of a disillusionment, obviously.

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

• Red River Shore (1997) part 1: She wrote me a letter
• Red River Shore (1997) part 2: The importance of capturing spontaneity
• Red River Shore part 3: Pretty angels all flying in a row
• Red River Shore (1997) part 4: I got a gal named Sue
• Red River Shore (1997) part 5: Mom says the pills must be working
• Red River Shore (1997): part 6;  Misery is but the shadow of happiness
• Red River Shore (1997) part 7: Please try to make it rhyme
• Red River Shore (1997) part 8:  He is no one
• Red River Shore (1997) part 9: A floating nothing
• Red River Shore (1997) part 10: Send it to Lulu
• Red River Shore (1997) part 11: It’s complicated
• Red River Shore (1997) part 12: I see dead people

by Jochen Markhorst

’Twas in the merry month of June

“Girl From The Red River Shore I personally felt was the best thing we recorded. But as we walked in to hear the playback, Dylan was in front of me, and he said, ‘Well, we’ve done everything on that one except call the symphony orchestra.’ Which indicated to me they’d tried to cut it before. If it had been my session, I would have got on the phone at that point and called the fucking symphony orchestra. But the cut was amazing. You couldn’t even identify what instruments were playing what parts.”
– Jim Dickinson (keyboards on Red River Shore) in Uncut

So, there should be four versions, according to engineer Chris Shaw, who together with manager Jeff Rosen is ploughing his way through the tapes to come to a selection for Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (2008). “Dreamin’ Of You”, the unreleased song they want to put on the website as a teaser, is easily found, Shaw says, but

“… there were others that took forever to find, like “Red River Shore”, there were four versions of that, that we had to go looking for. It’s an archival process, and it’s fun digging through that stuff, especially all the banter you hear between tracks and stuff.”
– Chris Shaw (engineer Red River Shore) in Uncut

Those closely involved, like Dickinson and Shaw, have no idea why the song was rejected. Neither do drummer Jim Keltner or producer Daniel Lanois. Guitarist Duke Robillard seems to have at least indirectly a clue, and is either remarkably well informed, or he can read the tell-tale signs remarkably well:

There was one song that I’m not sure will make the cut, that when I first heard Bob do it, right away I thought it was a Jimmie Rodgers thing circa 1929, it was that genuine. I was mesmerized by it, completely blown away . . . Lanois and Dylan talked about [how the album] was all designed to create a mood. The record is set in another time . . . it’s steamboat, civil war, very Mark Twain.
– Duke Robillard (electric guitar on Red River Shore) in Isis #73

Number 73 of the fanzine Isis is published in June 1997, so the interview with Robillard has taken place months before the release of Time Out Of Mind (30 September 1997). And at that time Robillard apparently already realises that “Red River Shore” will be dropped. Notable are the last words from the Isis quote, about the mood: “The record is set in another time . . . it’s steamboat, civil war, very Mark Twain.” Words that, apart from “Red River Shore”, fit just as seamlessly on that other legendary dropout, on “Mississippi”. Fitting with what Dylan himself says about “Mississippi”, and his disagreement about it with producer Lanois: “I tried to explain that the song had more to do with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than witch doctors.” And especially fitting for the next record, the one on which “Mississippi” will eventually make its glorious debut, four years later, on “Love And Theft” (2001).

Now, that is an album where you can justifiably say: steamboat, civil war, very Mark Twain. “Mississippi”, “Summer Days”, “Bye And Bye”, “Floater”… songs that all share the same nineteenth century mood as “Red River Shore” – a mood that, strangely enough, wouldn’t characterise Time Out Of Mind that much. Despite the fact that Lanois and Dylan, if we are to believe Robillard, seem to seek it out so explicitly. But then: “Love Sick”, a highway of regret, the Scottish Highlands, a jukebox playing low, from London to gay Paree… no, on large parts of Time Out Of Mind the poet definitely has discarded the steamboats and the Civil War. To pass it on to his next project.

“Mississippi” is then, thankfully, rescued from oblivion. Thanks to an outside intervention as well, as drummer David Kemper reveals:

“I know of two versions of Mississippi. We thought we were done with “Love And Theft”, and then a friend of Bob’s passed him a note, and he said, oh, yeah, I forgot about this: Mississippi.”

… manager Jeff Rosen would be an educated guess if we had to guess the identity of “a friend of Bob’s”. But no such luck for “Red River Shore”; the song really only surfaces more than ten years after its conception, on Tell Tale Signs from 2008. Again, on Jeff Rosen’s instruction, praised be his name.

And further on, we find “The Girl from the Greenbriar Shore”, one of several candidates that can be considered as a template for the song. Although both chord progression and melody are actually too generic to attribute to one “mother song”, of course. And we know the combination girl + shore, as well as the vague topographic location “Red River”, from dozens of songs too. No, “Greenbriar Shore” seems to be an isolated burp that we owe to the rather prosaic fact that Dylan has the obvious association with “green shore” and the song that begins with the words “’Twas in the year of ’92, in the merry month of June” when he is on the Côte d’Opale near Dunkerque in June 1992.

Two performances are given to Greenbriar Shore (both in the merry month of June ’92). Two more than “Red River Shore”, which otherwise does not make waves either. In fan circles, it is celebrated as a lost masterpiece of a similar category as “She’s Your Lover Now” and “Blind Willie McTell”, but neither the master himself nor his colleagues seem to agree.

In fact, only a few usual suspects, artists who have already made a name for themselves with Dylan interpretations, put the song on the repertoire. In the Netherlands, one of the most successful musicians of the 80s, Ernst Jansz of the million-selling band Doe Maar, has distinguished himself with translated Dylan songs, a successful Dylan tribute album (Dromen Van Johanna – “Dreaming Of Johanna”, 2010) and a theatre tour. The album and the set list include “Het Meisje Van De Rode Rivier”. And when he performs with his old pals from the folk group CCC Inc., he occasionally manages to coax them into an English “Red River Shore”. Acoustic, with a lot of guitars, harmonica and accordion bag, as it should be. Just like the Austrian phenomenon Ernst Molden does, a shorter version in a smaller line-up, sung in unintelligible Viennese dialect, but with the same magic as Dylan. And we understand, at least, that with Molden she is a Madl aus der Lobau – a girl from the Lobau, the Vienna floodplain on the northern side of the Danube, loved by nudists.

More international allure is given by the only celebrity to record the song in its original English: the late, great Jimmy LaFave, the Texan with the high pitched voice and unique phrasing. On the wonderful 2012 album Depending On The Distance, which features the equally successful Dylan interpretations “I’ll Remember You” and “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”.

Over nine and a half minutes, and every second is wonderful. It’s steamboat, civil war, and very Mark Twain.

—————–

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

—————-

About Untold

Untold is written by people who want to write for Untold. They don’t get paid; they just like to do it.

If you’d like to write for Untold, or if you would like to suggest an article or a series of articles we could cover, even if you can’t write it yourself, please do write in to Tony@schools.co.uk

We also have a very active Facebook group with over 14,000 members – if you would like to join please go on Facebook and search for Untold Dylan.

There are indexes to some of our series at the very top of the page just below the picture, and some more on the (not always up to date) home page.

If you have been, thank you for reading.

Tony Attwood

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

An index to the whole series on the Never Ending Tour can be found here.     Below are the previous episodes for 2004.

• NET, 2004, Part 1 – The best singing audience
• NET 2004 part 2: The Jazz Connection
• Never Ending Tour, 2004, part 3, Harping On
• Never Ending Tour, 2004, Part 4 More jazz, regulars and rarities
• NET 2004 Part 5: Rocking on
• Never Ending Tour 2004 part 6: Stone you and then come back again

Every year Dylan sprinkles a few non-Dylan songs through his concerts.  In 2004, during the second leg of his US tour, up the east coast from 4^th June to 11^th June, he double billed with Willie Nelson, although they didn’t often appear on stage together.

Curiously, in one of these concerts, at Manchester (11^th June, Tennessee), Dylan performed four cover songs. This was not typical. The concerts we have been roughly following up to now, Glasgow, Rochester and Toronto, among others, had no non-Dylan songs. What was going on at Manchester, I’m not sure, but as far as I know some of these songs were firsts for the NET. And, what makes them of interest to us is that they are high-quality performances, not just fillers. Although there are not enough songs to make a full post, these Manchester performances are too interesting to leave behind.

Let’s start with the Merle Haggard song, ‘Sing Me Back Home.’ The song was released in 1968, was covered by Dylan’s old mates The Grateful Dead in 1971 and Flying Burrito Brothers in 1973, so Dylan would have been aware of it back then. Dylan likes prison songs, and this song is about someone about to be executed who wants to hear one last guitar song before he dies. It’s not too difficult to be a sucker for this kind of sentimentality:

I recall last Sunday morning a choir from 'cross the street
Came to sing a few old gospel songs
And I heard him tell the singers
There's a song my mama sang
Can I hear once before we move along?

The Merle Haggard original came in at under three minutes, but Dylan gives it a slow, loving treatment, stretching it to just under five minutes.

Sing Me Back Home

Hank Williams ‘You Win Again’ gets similar treatment. It was released in 1952, and again covered by the Grateful Dead. The Hank Williams version was only two and half minutes, but again, Dylan stretches it to five minutes. It is interesting that when Dylan does covers, he mostly returns to the songs of a previous generation, with a liking for cowboy tear-jerkers like this one:

You Win Again

‘Pancho & Lefty’ is country singer Townes Van Zandt’s best-known song, released in 1972 and widely covered by other artists including Guy Clarke and Steve Earle. Van Zandt and Willie Nelson made the song famous in 1983 with their duet.

The song ‘tells of a Mexican bandit named Pancho and his friendship with Lefty, the man who ultimately betrays him. Many of the details in the lyrics mirror the life of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, who was killed by unknown assassins in 1923. Villa’s dying words? “Don’t let it end like this, tell them I said something great.”’ The fascinating story behind the writing of the song is told here:

Lefty, he can't sing the blues
All night long like he used to
The dust that Pancho bit down south
Ended up in Lefty's mouth

Dylan loves these songs of betrayal and again gives this one the lavish treatment.

Pancho & Lefty

‘Samson & Delilah’ was written by Blind Willie Johnson and Reverend Gary Davis, was again covered by The Grateful Dead, and retells in verse the biblical story of how Samson’s strength was taken away when Delilah cut his hair. You can think of it as another tale of betrayal.

Dylan gives it a fast, shuffle beat, and keeps the interest up for six minutes.

Samson and Delilah

That brings us to the end of the Manchester cover songs, but we have more; a stray ‘No More One More Time.’ This is written by Troy Seals and Dave Kirby and, since it came out in 1988, cannot be described as a golden oldie, except perhaps in the spirit of it.

It’s an ‘I’m going to get over you’ song, but the lyrics are not especially interesting, and I’m not sure what might have attracted Dylan to the song. Maybe he just likes those country chord changes, you know, the corny ones CDCG. I think Dylan’s performance makes the song sound better than it really is. (Undated, from the ‘Gone to the Finest Schools’ collection).

No more one more time

We can finish this off with two songs done on stage with Willie and Lucas Nelson. The first is the well known ‘Milk Cow Blues’ by Kokomo Arnold, dating back to 1934, and covered by many artists including Elvis Presley. It’s an archetypal blues song, open to a country or urban blues interpretation. Big Joe Williams did it in an urban style. This one’s from 8^th August. Dylan takes the last verse and does the piano backing.

Milk Cow Blues

The last one is ‘Heartland’ also with Lucas and Willie Nelson. It was written by
Steve Dorff, John Bettis and appeared in a movie called ‘Pure Country.’ It’s a patriotic song celebrating country music as being the very heart of America:

When you hear twin fiddles and a steel guitar
You're listenin' to the sound of the American heart
And opry music on a Saturday night
Brings a smile to your face and a tear to your eye

This one’s from 20^th August, Lincoln. I can’t hear much Dylan on this one. I guess he was sitting quietly at the piano letting it all happen.

 Heartland

So that’s it for 2004, a big year in which the sound Dylan evolved in 2003 was consolidated. Next post we’ll move on to 2005 and see what happened to the NET in that year.

Kia Ora.

—————-

About Untold

Untold is written by people who want to write for Untold. They don’t get paid; they just like to do it.

If you’d like to write for Untold, or if you would like to suggest an article or a series of articles we could cover, even if you can’t write it yourself, please do write in to Tony@schools.co.uk

We also have a very active Facebook group with over 14,000 members – if you would like to join please go on Facebook and search for Untold Dylan.

There are indexes to some of our series at the very top of the page just below the picture, and some more on the (not always up to date) home page.

If you have been, thank you for reading.

Tony Attwood