Untold Dylan

• Crossing The Rubicon part 1: A hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-fighting guy
• Crossing The Rubicon (2020) part 2: That day I’ll always remember
• Crossing The Rubicon (2020) part 3: So many things that we never will undo
• Crossing The Rubicon (2020) part 4: Red River Shore 2: The Guy Strikes Back

by Jochen Markhorst

V          One step from the Shadow Kingdom

The Rubicon is the Red River, going gently as she flows
Redder then your ruby lips and the blood that flows from the rose
Three miles north of purgatory - one step from the great beyond
I prayed to the cross and I kissed the girls and I crossed the Rubicon

Dante, whom we can trust as a guide after that abandon all hope quote in the first stanza, explains quite precisely where the Mount of Purgatory is located. On an island in the Pacific. Even more precisely: right under Jerusalem – the island in question is Jerusalem’s antipode. Not coincidentally; the island came into being as a result of Lucifer’s fall from heaven. The rebellious angel was thrown out of heaven with such force that his landing near Jerusalem caused a crater right down to the centre of the earth, where hell is now. The rock that was displaced, pushed a mountain out of the ocean on the other side of the earth: the Mount of Purgatory. Thanks to Google Earth, we can now see it with our own eyes, but that turns out to be a bit of a disappointment.

Jerusalem lies at 31° 47′ N, 35° 13′ E, so Purgatorio should be visible at 31° 47′ S, 144°87′ W. But alas: water, water, water. Nor does Dylan’s specification, “three miles north of purgatory”, bring any land in sight; the nearest island, Rapa Iti, the only inhabited island of the Bass Islands in French Polynesia, is about 280 miles north.

Thus, Dante is no longer a reliable guide.

The alternative location of the Mountain and its purgatorial fire produces a more spectacular, and puzzling, result. A century and a half before Dante’s geolocation in Purgatorio, the second part of La Divina Commedia, we thought we knew the location fairly precisely thanks to the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii (written around 1180): Station Island or St Patrick’s Purgatory in the lake of Lough Derg, County Donegal, Ireland. The treatise was written by a monk and tells of the journey of the Irish knight Owein to paradise via Purgatory. More satisfying than Dante’s location, in any case, as Station Island does exist. It is really in Lough Derg, in the current Republic of Ireland, near the border with Northern Ireland, Van Morrison’s native country. And that’s where it gets a bit weird: Dylan’s treasure map-like addition “three miles north” is exactly, to the metre, the border with the United Kingdom. Dylan’s next addition “one step from the great beyond” would therefore mean: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is equivalent to “the great beyond”.

Weird. Too weird even, so let’s just attribute it to a strange coincidence. It’s not likely, anyway, that Dylan would have been fooling around on his laptop with Google Maps’ distance-measuring function to find out the exact distance from Station Island to the Irish/Northern Irish border. And even more unlikely is that Dylan feels a poetic need to use cryptic clues to lead us to the politically sensitive border of the European Union with post-Brexit United Kingdom.

Just before that, we get a first clue as to what drives the narrator, and with it a hint of an underlying plot. “Redder then your ruby lips” at the very least suggests that he has a love story to deal with – whereby his immediately following association, “blood that flows from the rose”, is a little disconcerting. Uncomfortably brooding like, say, Shutter Island or, to stay with the rivers, Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. And a little less ambiguous than metaphors like “crossing the Rubicon” or “the most dangerous month”. But not completely unambiguous. Blood + rose… traditionally, it symbolises defloration – but given the quite violent continuation in the next stanzas, it seems to be a build-up to love and crime, to the two strongest, indestructible themes through the ages: sex and murder.

The combination really is indestructible. The Oedipus myth, whose plot is driven by sex (with the mother) and murder (of the father), is already mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, so we have been telling each other this story for about thirty centuries now. Centuries before that, in the very oldest stories we have, the Gilgamesh, the storyteller also recognises the attention-grabbing power of sex and murder, and that does not change in the centuries that follow. The oldest Babylonian stories, Canaanite folk tales institutionalising temple prostitution and child sacrifice, Greek and Roman mythology, the Old Testament, the Nibelungenlied up to and including Shakespeare: sex and murder. And if it is not explicit already, then scientists like Freud and Bruno Bettelheim prove from the nineteenth century onwards that all those old stories like Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are also “actually” about sex and murder.

Especially in his later oeuvre, Dylan seems to succumb to the magnetic attraction of that golden combination as well. Quite structurally even, approximately from “Man In The Long Black Coat” (Oh Mercy, 1989) onwards. Before that, in songs like “New Pony” (Street-Legal, 1978), the first verse of “Idiot Wind” and in “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts” (Blood On The Tracks, 1975), it comes up occasionally as a plot-driving theme, but from Oh Mercy onwards it seems to become a regular feature of Dylan’s output. With the emphasis on seems – many of Dylan’s later songs insinuate sex and murder, but remain nebulous enough to see other, more innocent, plots. On Time Out Of Mind (1997) in songs like “Dirt Road Blues”, “Cold Irons Bound” and “Million Miles”, the narrator alarms us through small, ambiguous hints like the last thing you said and that girl who won’t be back no more, and it doesn’t stop there.

In the twenty-first century, these veiled hints of underlying sex and murder, develop into a stylistic feature. Though they do get in more and more explicitly too, by the way. Tempest‘s “Tin Angel” (2012) is an old-fashioned, full-blooded sex-and-murder ballad. Just like other songs contain increasingly more explicit wording. I’m gonna ring your neck in “Someday Baby”, for example, “Early Roman Kings” and “Pay In Blood”, and They’re lying there dying in their blood in “Soon After Midnight”. But just as often it remains subcutaneous, as in “Moonlight” and in “Red River Shore” – the theme, explicit or subcutaneous, has now made it into the Top 3 Most Used Themes. And when Dylan rewrites an oldie from his catalogue – 1969’s “To Be Alone With You” for his corona surprise Shadow Kingdom, 2021 – the fairly simple-minded, cloudless song suddenly becomes a menacing, homicidal, murder insinuating thriller about a sinister protagonist intent on luring his victim to a castle high in a gothic, nineteenth-century shadowy kingdom setting.

https://youtu.be/9XG9bRMb0x8

At the same crossroads now stands the narrator in “Crossing The Rubicon”. The closing line of this second verse continues the accumulation from the first couplet. After I painted my wagon and abondoned all hope, the narrator now says I prayed to the cross and I kissed the girls. Symbolic, farewell-suggesting actions of a protagonist who is on the verge of a life-changing, irrevocable action – who is about to cross the Rubicon.

To be continued. Next up Crossing The Rubicon part 6: I got my head on straight

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

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

—————-

Untold Dylan has its own Facebook group with over 11,000 members – if you would like to join please just type into your search engine Untold Dylan Facebook.

• I Contain Multitudes – Part 1 and 2

By Larry Fyffe

God’s no wimp, as expressed metaphorically in the following biblical verse:

For He put on righteousness as a breastplate
And an helmet of salvation upon His head
And He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing
And was clad with zeal as a cloke
(Isaiah 59:17)

Echoed in the song lyrics below:

Well, the word of God is sharper
Than any double-bladed sword
He's the hammer of salvation
The breastplate of righteousness
(Bob Dylan: Cover Down, Pray Through)

A lion be on the Israeli flag, a symbol of Judah’s masculine strength:

For thus hath the Lord spoken unto me
Like a lion and the young lion roaring on his prey
When a multitude of shepherds is called forth against
He will not be afraid of their voice
(Isaiah 31:4)

Indeed, the biblical prophet Isaiah’s upset that kings like Ahaz turn over and show their  bellies to aggressive lions ~ the Assyrians, for example.

As  Eve does for Adam, the Hebrews at this time act like lambs; not like lions; nor  like knights; not even like screech owl Lilith.

Isaiah’s upset because God is upset; having made Man in His image, Yahweh informs the prophet that He’s uncomfortable at His Jungian feminine side being exposed at this particular time in history.

The lion-hearted Assyrians are in the Northern Kingdom, and the Babylonians are on their way.

Isaiah accuses the Judeans as being like women at the bloody time of a month:

But we are all as an unclean thing
And all our righteousness are as fifthy rags
And we all do fade as a leaf
And our iniquities, like the wind
Have taken us away
(Isaiah's 64: 6)

In the subtle, but satirical, song lyrics beneath, so agrees the narrator who dons a “he-man” mask just like Isaiah does.

He’s a modern prophet in the New Babylon of America.

Yes, there’s trouble – months in and months out, there’s lots of trouble:

You can't get to glory by the raising
And lowering of the flag
Put your goodness next to God's
And it come out like a filthy rag
In the city of darkness, there's no need for the sun
And there ain't no man righteous
No not one
(Bob Dylan: Ain't No Man Righteous)

Part IV

Interpreted it can be that more than previous Jewish prophets, Isaiah asserts that the Judeans at this time in biblical history seek salvation through rational means; they’ve abandoned the caring “spiritual” side of the Lord; this causes the Almighty One to become weary, and His frustration sometimes leads to anger.

God has feelings.

Poet William Blake picks up on the idea that rationalism has come too much to the fore –  at the expense of emotionally driven love.

The prophet Isaiah takes the weight on his shoulders to explain how Almighty God can be considered a tough guy with an unchangeable mind, but can also act  like a doting and delicate father who spoils his children.

For example, the Heavenly Father permits King Ahaz down on Earth to play ball with the likes of Baal-worshipping Assyrians (The latter-day prophet Emanuel Swedenborg one morning sees Plato in the mirror; and claims that the Assyrians represent rationalism).

Isaiah attempts to deliver the meaning of God’s message that he believes is given to him ~ simply put, the Almighty has a feminine need to be comforted:

Remember this, and show yourself men
Bring it again to your mind, O ye transgressors ....
I am God, and there is none like me
Declaring the end from the beginning
And from ancient times the things that are not yet done 
Saying,  my counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure
(Isaiah  46: 8,9,1O)

With the gates of Eden now barred, the Christ child (thought by Christians to be the Immanuel that Isaiah mentions), after He grows up, turns out a lot like His father  ~ ready to be rough on those who refuse to please Him.

So claimed, apparently, in the song lyrics below:

Oh child, why you wannna hurt me
I'm exiled, you can't convert me
I'm lost in the haze of your delicate ways
With both eyes in a glaze
(Bob Dylan: We Better Talk This Over)

There is a somewhat similar sentiment, expressed, on the micro-level, by a troubled New Romantic singer ~ in the lyrics beneath:

Give me time to realize my crime
Let me love and steal
I have danced inside your eyes
How can I be real
Do you really want to hurt me
(Boy George: Do You Really Want To Hurt Me ~   O'Dawd, et.al.)

Apparently, to Isaiah, the all-powerful male Creator possesses aspects of two sexes  ~ which  He passes on, in varying degrees, to all earth-dwellers.

Biblical words matter.

But they can be Jung-like; that is, mixed up, and confusing:

So God created Man in His own image
In the image of God created He him
Male and female created He them
(Genesis 1:27)

1. NET 2007 Part 1: The light is never dying.
2. Never Ending Tour, 2007, part 2: Your servant both night and day.

The Never Ending Tour complete series index

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

It is not surprising that in 2007 Dylan sang ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in Newcastle, home of The Animals, a band even harder and gutsier than the Rolling Stones. Dylan did the song on his first album, and was reportedly very excited on hearing The Animals now famous version.

Dylan doesn’t play any tricks with the song, which is suited to his harsh tones, and we get another reminder of the roots of Dylan’s music.

House of the Rising Sun

Dylan didn’t do a lot of covers in 2007, but one song he returned to is Robert Hunter’s ‘Friend to the Devil’ (1970). Another no-frills performance (Orilla,19^th July)

Friend to the Devil

I think that much of the reaction to the 2006/7 tours lies not so much with the music but the stage performances. Never one to bound up to the mic and yell, ‘Hello New York, we love you,’ Dylan nevertheless unnerved audiences with his silence, and how, at the end of a concert, before leaving the stage, the band would stand in a row and stare back at the people who had been staring at them. Perhaps more importantly, the way the band arranged itself on stage, in a semi-circle, left the centre stage unoccupied, with Dylan hunched over his keyboard, often playing with a portion of the audience behind him. (Which one is Dylan…?)

While his contemporaries, particularly Bowie and Jagger, grasped that a rock concert is a spectacle and a performance, Dylan’s anti-performance performances and anti-spectacle spectacles left audiences bemused and sometimes disappointed. It just wasn’t such a fun night out.

Dylan’s performances are all in the sounds he makes. He performs with his voice, his instruments and his band. He doesn’t act out his songs, but his voice does.

However, if you’re looking for some failed renditions of the songs, I think I’ve found something for you. Despite my traitorous tapping foot, I did not enjoy this performance of ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ from Birmingham. The lack of flow, the dumpty-dum, the dissonance, the effort to turn this into a mid-tempo rock song (as Dylan did more successfully with ‘You Belong to Me’ – See NET, 2007, part 1) adds up to a less than thrilling experience for those who know the song and some of the wonderful performances from the 1990s. It just ain’t him, babe. I do appreciate that this is a very personal response. Others may enjoy where I have not.

It Ain’t Me Babe

To set my mood a-right, I turn to this bleak, minimal and powerful performance of ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown.’ This is more like it. There’s some brilliant slide guitar and a stark vocal performance from Dylan. He doesn’t let the ball drop for a second, and there are no instrumental fillers. All hail the blues!

Hollis Brown

With the same stark tones and minimal backing, Dylan delivers another compelling performance of ‘Masters of War’ (Florence). I still prefer the 2005 performance with piano (see NET 2005, part 5), and this one is marked by a little of the rinky-dink, dumpty dum, but there is no escaping the power of the song.

Masters of War (A)

While I enjoy the more muted Florence performance, it’s probably this one from Birmingham that takes the prize for the year. Rougher and more forceful than the Florence performance, it’s full of power and menace.

Masters of War (B)

As early songs go, ‘Don’t Think Twice’ fares a lot better than ‘It Ain’t Me Babe.’ The simple guitar picking takes us back to the earliest versions while Dylan’s vocal is unaffected and full of feeling. This one from Stockholm is a tender reminiscence.

Don’t Think Twice (A)

However, I rather like this half spoken version from Orilla. I miss the harmonica in both of these performances. Neither of them become the rousing celebration we have heard in previous years. Keep it simple, keep it plain, works fine for this song.

Don’t Think Twice (B)

While most of these early songs survive the years well enough, it is in the later songs that we find Dylan at his most inspired in 2007. I covered most of these songs in the last post. The contrast is evident in this complex and fascinating performance of ‘Things have Changed’ from Florence. Dylan’s vocal is in line with previous performances, that is excellent, but it is the backing that provides the real interest. Both baroque and jazzy, with a bit of a swing, the song’s never been done quite this way before. One thing that hasn’t changed is Dylan’s commitment to this song. He used to care and still does.

Things have changed (A)

Good as that is, fans of the St Louis concert will enjoy this one. I thought they were both equally good.

Things have changed (B)

Similarly, ‘Love Sick’ provides an interesting instrumental backing. Here Dylan’s ‘one-finger’ organ playing can be heard at its most effective. The heaviness of the backing has been complemented by a sound more whimsical and dreamlike. The song walks and doesn’t drag its feet. Once more Dylan is in excellent voice. This one’s from St Louis.

Love Sick

‘Blind Willy McTell’ came to prominence along with the songs from Time Out of Mind. In a few years this song will undergo a major overhaul, and be re-presented as a jazzy, swing number. But in the meantime, here it is, pretty much the same as we heard in 2006 (See NET, 2006, part 3). This is from London, 15^th April.

Blind Willy McTell

In Part 3 of my Master Harpist series I included this performance of ‘Under the Red Sky.’ I’m repeating it here, not just for the wonderful opening harp break, but Dylan’s vocal performance, which is dark and chilling. Despite the rather aimless instrumental break in the middle, this one has become my ‘best ever’ performance of the song. (Sorry, lost the date of this one.) The song points us towards the dream world of childhood, and its inevitable end. And it reminds us of the inherent violence of some of those old fairy tales and rhymes in which children might be baked in a pie, and we might be deceived by unreal promises of wealth. Whimsical, sad, provocative, a neglected song from a neglected album.

Under the Red Sky

The other song from Under the Red Sky to persist is ‘Cat’s in the Well.’ Dylan would sometimes use it as an opening song to replace ‘Maggie’s Farm.’ This performance from Stockholm isn’t anything special. It bumpity-bumps along but to my mind it sounds very much like a warm-up. There are better performances of this one.

Cat’s in the Well

two songs from Oh Mercy that have survived the attrition of the years are ‘Man In the Long Black Coat’ and ‘Shooting Star.’ The former was played only once in 2007, in Copenhagen 2^nd April, but the recording is too poor for us to enjoy here. Not so with ‘Shooting Star.’ We have an excellent recording from Morrison (19^th July) which does full justice to the song. I got hooked on the 2000 versions which generate much intensity, and at first thought that this 2007 performance was a bit too laid back. I was wrong. It starts gently enough, with a soft, nostalgic backing, but Dylan soon ups the ante with his vocal performance, piling on the lines. My only complaint is that the instrumental interludes don’t add much and have the feel of fillers.

Shooting Star

‘Serve Somebody’ disappeared between 2002 and 2008 and I thought it might have gone forever. It has had a remarkable revival in 2021/22, but in 2007 the only surviving song from the gospel era is ‘Every Grain of Sand.’ This song is still evolving and is becoming a showcase for Dylan’s harmonica. This gentle performance, again from Morrison, is a pleasure to listen to. My favourite lines:

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn there’s someone there, at times it’s only me

Every Grain of Sand (A)

There is an equally beguiling performance from Florence, without harmonica.

Every Grain of Sand (B)

This brings us to our old friend ‘Tangled up in Blue,’ a song which never fails to get our feet tapping. Note the lyrical variation: ‘She was working at the Tropicana…’ The Birmingham performance is top notch in terms of Dylan’s vocal performance, but I find the Crystal Cat recording a little harsh with this one, and the closing harp break pretty perfunctory. Still, no complaints.

Tangled up in Blue (A)

Those who prefer the song in a softer, gentler vein will enjoy this one from Orilla. The bootlegger at Orilla had some problem with his mic, so there is a little scratching here. Not enough, however, to spoil our enjoyment of the performance. I prefer this one to Birmingham, but that’s a personal choice.

Tangled up in Blue (B)

This brings us back to the 1960s again and those songs that are never too far from Dylan’s setlist. I’d like to finish this post with a relaxed rendition of ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ from Florence, and a ‘Tears of Rage’ from St Louis in which Dylan fan Elvis Costello joins Dylan onstage to do the singing. I don’t hear much of Bob at all, but that could be him joining in the chorus.

I’ll Be your Baby Tonight.

Tears of Rage

That’s all for now. I’ll be back soon to wrap up our account of 2007.

Kia Ora

by Larry Fyffe

And what I assume, you shall assume (Walt Whitman).

Another ghost of a biblical prophet that floats around in the back of Bob Dylan’s Jungian mind is Isaiah.

Isaiah’s a prophet, a prophet with a feminine side, who puts a different slant on the Almighty.

Isaiah condemns King Manasseh of southern Judea because he appeases the worshippers of Baal, the Golden Calf, in order to create trading partners (As the earlier prophet Elijah condemns King Ahab of Northern Israel for doing).

According to Isaiah, however, God’s in need of shelter and love:

Thus saith the Lord, "The heaven is my throne
And the earth is my footstool
Where is the house ye built unto me
And where is the place of my rest?"
(Isaiah 66:I)

In the song lyrics beneath, the narrator therein is likewise in need of love and shelter:

Oh well, I love you pretty baby
You're the only love I've ever known
Just as long as you stay with me
The whole world is my throne
(Bob Dylan: Beyond Here Lies Nothing)

It’s tough all over.

In heaven:

We all roar like bears
And mourn sore like doves
We look for judgment but there is none
For salvation, but it is far from us
(Isaiah 59: 11)

And down on earth:

I've heard newborn babies
Wailing like a mourning dove
And old men with broken teeth
Stranded without love
Do I understand your question, man
"Is it hopeless and forlorn?"
(Bob Dylan: Shelter From the Storm)

In order to work, says the prophet, it has to work both ways;

For thou has been a strength to the poor
A strength to the needy in his distress
A refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat
When the blast of the terrible ones
Is as a storm against the wall
(Isaiah 25: 4)

Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.

Part 2

I Contain Multitudes (Part II)

by Larry Fyffe

Later Christian speakers go along with an Isaiah, but assert that he’s talking about the coming of Jesus Christ; that is, when a babe to be called Immanuel gets mentioned.

It’s not just a nonspecific sign that a worldly assistant is on the way to lend a hand to the Heavenly Father Who has to  deal with trouble, trouble that’s springing up here, there, and everywhere.

In an effort to show King (Jeho)Azah of Judah that Yahweh has lots of powers at His disposal, Isaiah prophesies that a son called Immanuel will be born among the Hebrews to free the southern kingdom from the likes of the Assyrians, and all others who worship idols such as the Golden Cafe.

The Assyrians, after the reign of Azah, attack Judah; we are told it’s God using tough love in order to punish its wayward inhabitants .

Whether or not the prophet Isaiah means the son to come will be his own or one sired by the King of Judah is not made clear.

Rather like the ambiguous poet he be:

Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign

Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son

And call his name Immanuel

(Isaiah 7:14)

In any event, in the following song lyrics, the narrator thereof ponders if Azah has been given bad press from both Judists and Christians for trying to deal with matters that seem hopeless and forlorn.

To make matters worse, Christ gets crucified; His Father stands aloof; His male

followers can’t be trusted; most of the females who attended Jesus desert Him.

After all, the latter be descendants of Eve who made a deal with the Devil:

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes

I bargained for salvation, and she gave me a legal dose

I offered up my innocence, I got repaid with scorn

(Bob Dylan: Shelter From the Storm)

Or so it might be interpreted.

By Tony Attwood

It has been a long time since anyone told us that we had missed a Bob Dylan composition on this site, but it seems we have done: “The Price of Love”.  Jochen spotted the omission, so here I am adding it to the list.  The full alphabetical list with links to articles on this site is given here.

And I have to admit I am bemused by this because I felt sure I had written about it in the past, and yet I can’t find and record of that.   So, the old man (me) has finally lost it, and the memory’s tricks have taken over.  If I ever did write about this song the commentary has vanished into the darkness.

But the official Dylan site has it listed, so that’s a starting point and it turned up on volume 16 of the bootleg series.  So all things considered we really should be listing this song.  It takes Bob’s total songwriting to 627 separate works.

The song was recorded in 1980 and is one of the Shot of Love outtakes.

And what do we have?   Well, a Bo Diddley beat complete with the echo on the rhythm guitar – not something that Bob uses very often.   At first, the verses have just one chord behind them in the Bo Diddley style, but with two extra chords (the flattened 7th and the 4th) in the repeated one line of the chorus.

At least that’s how it starts, but this is Bob Dylan, so he has some surprises.

The first two verses follow the pattern above, but then after a single chord instrumental verse with the saxophones getting a little more to the fore it changes.

For in the third verse an extra chord is added and then we get a completely new sequence.  But such is the dominance of the Diddley rhythm that it is hard to realise quite what variations are being added.

The instrumental break is completely on one chord, and from here on the sections get mixed up.

The point is that this is on the surface an incredibly simple piece, but actually, because of these slight variations at different points that view is deceptive.  It is a song that is tangled up within itself, and must have been rehearsed a number of times before this take was made.

And historically there has been something strange going on, because on the website Songtexte there is a set of lyrics for Price of Love which have nothing to do with this recording above although at the head of the page it quite clearly says

PRICE OF LOVE (SHOT OF LOVE OUTTAKE) SONGTEXT

Now of course there may be a complete set of lyrics that we actually hear on the recording above, available somewhere and I have completely missed them – so if you can find them could you write in with the link to the relevant page where they are provided.

Meanwhile, perhaps a kind reader would like to transcribe the lyrics for publication here.   And as ever no harm in having several versions for where the lyrics are not exactly clear.  Larry, are you reading me?

FOOTNOTE

Larry was indeed reading me and has provided a transcript of the lyrics

Seeing my baby on a Wednesday night
I have a felling time is right
Ohh, time to love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up

Two dollar, one dollar, where do ya pay
How much you got with you today
Two dollar, one dollar, two dollar bill
If you don't, somebody else will
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up

Come down, baby, I'm bark to wood
Found a snake in the neighbourhood
Might a-been old master Wool
Met him on my way to school
Two dollar, one dollar, where do ya pay
How much you got on you today 

Two dollar, three dollar, three dollar bill
You know somebody else will
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up

Leave the valley, and across the ridge
Write up a note that I need your head
Well, I gotta run to serve
Wave on by me in the neighbourhood
Two dollar, one dollar, where do ya pay
How much you got on you today

Two dollar, two dollar, one dollar bill
If you don't, nobody else will
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up

Two dollar, one dollar, two dollar bill
You know somebody else will
Two dollar, two dollar, where do ya pay
How much you got on you today
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love, going up
Ohh, the price of love going up

Footnote from Larry: Sources

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         Red River Shore 2: The Guy Strikes Back

The Rubicon is the Red River, going gently as she flows
Redder then your ruby lips and the blood that flows from the rose

We have, alas, only a finite number of Tolkiens, Mario Puzos, Ian Flemings, Stephen Kings and Stan Lees, a finite number of exceptionally talented storytellers who produce filmable masterpieces. On the other hand, there is an infinite need, a demand that exceeds supply many times over. Hollywood has been solving this discrepancy for decades in an obvious way: the movie companies pay less talented storytellers to milk the master stories. And feed the insatiable market with prequels, sequels, retellings, remakes and adaptations. Which doesn’t always end badly, by the way. The Jungle Book, Apocalypse Now, The Joker, Bram Stoker’s Dracula… there are plenty of remakes and adaptations that surpass or at least match the source.

But much more often, of course, it leads to unsatisfactory, flaccid dilutions – after all, the film scripts are not written by those exceptionally talented storytellers. So the video stores are full of horrors like Around The World In 80 Days, the 2016 remake of Ben-Hur, and embarrassing sequels like Grease 2 and Blues Brothers 2000.

And then there are the failures with a golden edge: the film adaptations that disfigure the original book, but still do have something. A memorable scene, for example, or a starring role, or spectacular special effects, something like that. The Da Vinci Code is a cramped, nervous adaptation from which all the creeping tension of the book has evaporated, but in the meantime offers a breathtaking journey through Rome and its art treasures. The Hobbit is an unbearable stretch of Tolkien’s little masterpiece with added storylines bordering on sacrilege (such as the pathetic subplot involving the impossible love of the dwarf Kili and the elf Tauriel), but also has the brilliant scenes with the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch). And the gruesome rape of the ancient Beowulf story in 2007 (despite the script by master storyteller Neil Gaiman) has as its golden edge the music of Alan Silvestri, especially the one song sung by actress Robin Wright-Penn:

Lips, ripe as the berries in June
Red the rose, red the rose
Skin, pale as the light of the moon
Gently as she goes

… “Gently As She Goes”, a short song with medieval allure, which perfectly hits the simplicity and elegance that takes us back twelve hundred years, to a throne room full of rough warriors at a meal while a frail damsel with a lute sings her song. With a poetic sheen, of course, through the magical, immaculate elegance of the title line gently as she goes – which apparently also touches Dylan, who then transfers it to his “Crossing The Rubicon” with a minor adjustment: gently as she flows.

It seems to be a formula that always works. Dylan’s mate Jack White scored his first hit with his hobby project The Raconteurs with “Steady, As She Goes” (2006), but the formula has been around since 1961, since songwriter Hal Shaper translated the Italian canzone “Piano” into “Softly, As I Leave You”. After Matt Monro scored his hit with it, the song quickly made its way into the canon. Andy Williams, Bobby Darin, Doris Day, Shirley Bassey… when Sinatra recorded the song in ’64 and named an entire album after it (Softly, As I Leave You, the first album to which Sinatra allowed rock ‘n’ roll, or at least pop), the song was definitely ennobled. Elvis demonstrates the inspirational power of the formula in ’75 when, introducing the song on stage, he makes up an origin story. Written, the King tells us, by a dying songwriter while his wife sat at his deathbed dozing off. He felt he was dying, didn’t want his sleeping wife to see it, and wrote these words down. “And it’s a true story.”

Hogwash, of course. Writer Giorgio Calabrese lived happily ever after writing the song, long enough to work with Charles Aznavour for years (the original of “She”, “Lei”, is also his), long enough to witness the success of “Softly, As I Leave You”, and even to outlive Elvis: Calabrese dies in 2016, at the age of 86, forty years after Elvis declared him dead. In Rome, about 300 km south of the Rubicon.

But the elegance of that gently as she flows is not the most remarkable thing about this opening line of the second stanza. “The Rubicon is the Red River,” Dylan sings, and when we hear the song for the first time, we notice “the”. And when we read the official lyrics (on the site) we also notice: “Red River”, capital letters. So it is a name. But “the” Red River does not exist – there is not one Red River, after all. In the United States alone, there are eleven. All over the world, there are hundreds of Red Rivers, Colorados, Rubicons, Ipirangas, Krasnayas, Llobegrats, and all those other variants that all mean “red river”.

Not to mention all those Red Rivers in Dylan’s jukebox. Woody Guthrie’s “Red River Valley” of course, the ancient Western song sung in the nineteenth century near the Red River of the North, the Red River that flows not so far, some 200 miles, from Dylan’s childhood in Hibbing, the song that Johnny Cash meant when he recorded “Please Don’t Play Red River Valley” in 1966. “Red River Shore” by the Kingston Trio, Guy Clark’s “Red River”, Buck Owens’ “Sweet Rosie Jones” (I met her out in Oklahoma down where the old Red River flows), Porter Wagoner’s “Where the Old Red River Flows”, Charley Patton’s “Hammer Blues” (I went up Red River, crawlin’, on a log, 1929, unfortunately only a well-worn recording exists)… well, the walking music encyclopaedia Dylan undoubtedly shakes off ten more sung-about red rivers effortlessly.

Meaning, we can hardly escape intertextuality – however desirable it may be to regard a work of art as a work in itself. But then: it’s a narrator in a Dylan song who doesn’t say something like “The Rubicon is a red river” or “Rubicon means ‘red river’”, but who says: “The Rubicon is the Red River”… seeing a link to the rejected, dusty, never performed “Red River Shore”, the brilliant Time Out Of Mind outtake from 1997, is almost inevitable. All the more so because the next line, as the only line in “Crossing The Rubicon”, sings of the beauty of a lady (“your ruby lips”), as the whole song “Red River Shore” is steeped in the desire for the girl from the Red River shore (with capitals).

Has “Crossing The Rubicon” been set up as a remake? Or as a prequel or a sequel? Something like “Red River Shore 2: The Guy Strikes Back”? Or: “Return To The Red River Shore”? Nah. Dylan isn’t a less talented storyteller who milks his own master narratives.

But still. “The Rubicon is the Red River”, capital letters….

To be continued. Next up Crossing The Rubicon part 5: One step from the Shadow Kingdom

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

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

• Dylan’s next tour will be legendary (part 1)

What about Stockholm? Too many things to mention but here’s a few.

What about the the 2009 live debut and only performance to date of Billy?

Or the 2017 one-off performance of Standing In The Doorway, first since 2005?

Or the additions of Can’t Wait and Girl From The North Country in 2019, first performances of the songs since 2012 and 2014 respectively?

Gothenburg?

In 2014, Gothenburg was one of the rare 2013/2014 locations where Bob did not perform a single song from his then latest album Tempest, and has played rarities of that era like Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.

London?

From 2003, you have rare performances of Jokerman, Dear Landlord, Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread, Romance In Durango.

From 2005, you have rare performances of Million Dollar Bash, Waiting For You, London Calling.

In 2013, he did play a rare Roll On John, didn’t he?

What about other locations?

Glasgow could be special as well, as he has been kind to Scottish audiences, especially in the late 80s and early to mid 90s, but probably even after that.

Amsterdam could be interesting as well. It might not bring out the rarities, but some of his Amsterdam shows, like the ones in 2003 and 2009, have produced some superb sound quality concerts and performances altogether. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be like that again?

The Paris shows could be in for a treat as well.

I don’t want to disregard the German shows and the one in Brussels and such. I’m sure they’ll most likely have special performances to.

But, if you want possible surprises or rarities, or permanent setlist changes, they’ll happen in one of the locations I’ve mentioned most likely.

I want to make myself clear that I don’t expect setlist changes on every show. But I do expect the setlist to be different than it was so far and I believe that there might be a few more songs added to the list of songs played.

And this is not a wishlist. This is based on legitimate research, even though I still could be wrong. I’m never saying that that’s not the case.

I’ve been asked recently why I even bother researching this?

Well, I want to encourage people to keep close attention. Because, if they don’t, they might be shocked when something happens. If they want to be shocked, great, they don’t have to read what I have to say.

I do believe I contribute somewhat to the excitement of people. At least I try to.

How much has the list of songs shortened?

In 2013, usually refered to as the static year and one of the most static ones, because it was the first, has had about 60 songs played across the year.

In 2014 and 2015, it was around 40-45.

In 2016, it was around 35-40 I believe.

In 2017 and 2018, it wasn’t different compared to 2016, but in 2019, I believe, it was barely over 30. Yet, 2019 is always praised and rarely criticized. A rare year that where the “static setlist” argument never gets brought up.

Even though in 2013 Bob played two times more songs than in 2019.

So, when are people going to just stop talking in generalities, without checking the facts first?

We don’t have to be specific about everything, but we could at least not tell each other lies, and then keep repeating them to death until it becomes the truth.

In 2022, Bob has played 19 songs so far only. That’s the reality.

We’ve also had the longest running same setlist streak this year, which is the reason for that.

I expect him to play at least 4 more songs, if not more, which would then make it 23 or more. But, that’s just me.

What’s also the story of 2022?

No songs from Time Out Of Mind, Love And Theft, Modern Times, Together Through Life and Tempest were played, giving more room for the Rough And Rowdy Ways songs to shine.

Will this continue in Europe? Possibly.  But I wouldn’t bet completely against that.

If Bob was to bring any songs back to the set, it’s hard to say at this point which ones would they be. Will it be really old material or something newer? Hard to say as well.

That’s why the anticipation should be very high.

We don’t know which songs in the current set are safe.

I wouldn’t even count on the Rough And Rowdy Ways ones. Just because Bob used to, in 2013 and 2014, have concerts where he completely disregarded the Tempest songs, not playing a single song from there on multiple shows in those two years. Which of course was a laughable number compared to the number of concerts that did feature Tempest songs in those years. But about 10 concerts had 0 Tempest songs, and two of them happened on the European Fall Tour, the same tour that also had two concerts with 7 Tempest songs in the set. Talk about extremes and talk about contrasts.

No song is safe.

No song is sure to be played, and no song is safe not to be played at this moment.

There might still be many similar songs in the set, but the order of the setlist might change drastically.

The band members might be featured on different instruments more often, particularly multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron, who might be featured more on violin this time compared to previous tours, or he might bring his accordion again, or he might even bring his trumpet after a while.

For anyone able, and who’s not attending the shows at all, I recommend getting on the internet, particularly Expecting Rain or maybe a YouTube live setlist discussion premiere (if one occurs at all) and follow the setlist from the very first Oslo concert on September 25.

Witnessing the songs one by one in order being reported by presumably trustworthy people, may not be as exciting as actually being there in attendance, but I guarantee it’s the best experience you can ask for outside of attending the actual show.

Can’t wait to see you there!

What are my personal setlist guesses…?

Maybe I’ll let Tony Attwood know in September, when we’re much closer to kick-off. I’ll know better by then.

Until then, I’ll be enjoying my break and I’ll also do some research when the time is right, but I won’t tire myself with it at this moment.

by Larry Fyffe

Members of the Sound School of Dylanology dwell on rejigged, allusion-filled,  viewpoints about the trials and tribulations of human existence; even on the paste-up method employed by Post Modernist writers; though underplayed is the obvious fact that the creative author plays the part of a unifying god when he re-arranges randomized scraps of paper to suit him/herself.

True believers like Christianized Saint Paul warns about these wicked people a long time ago.

About their messing around with the teaching of the “narrow way”, with the  faith (not works) demand by Jesus of Nazareth:

From which some having swerved
Have turned aside into vain jangling
Desiring to be teachers of the law
Understanding neither what they say
Nor whereof they affirm
(I Timothy 1: 6,7)

A motif taken up by Charles Dickens with his wayward “Scrooge” character –  later satirized by the comedian/author beneath ~ the “Nazz” pictured on the “Bringing It All Back Home” album cover:

He looked like seventeen gas-light stove pipes
Come together with jingle-jangle bells all over
(Lord Buckley: Scrooge)

“Jangling”, can you believe it, that’s carried on to this very day by the care-free narrator in the song lyrics below:

Hey, Mr, Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning, I'll come following you
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

The far-too-long ‘narrow way’ to salvation demanded by Apostle Paul for one, gets scrambled up good in the following song lyrics:

I'm going to walk across the desert 'til I'm in my right mind
I won't think about what I left behind
Nothing back there that I can call my own
Go back home and leave me alone
It's a long road, it's a long and narrow way
If I can't work up to you
You'll surely have to work down to me someday
(Bob Dylan: Narrow Way)

The Buckley-eyed RAZ flees the future of an inevitable death that’s blowing in the wind.

Robert Allen Zimmerman, at least as the narrator in the lyrics below, seizes the now-moment:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
(Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man)

Wicked!!

Footnote

We also have a very active moderated group on Facebook: just type in Untold Dylan Facebook.

Songs selected By Aaron Galbraith; commentary by Tony Attwood

Aaron: Bob Dylan recorded “Step It Up and Go” for his 1992 album “Good as I Been to You”. His interpretation has been described as being similar to Blind Boy Fuller’s version, although writer Brian Hinton believes “he probably knew it via the Everly Brothers”.

Tony:  The introductory guitar part was taught to me as “Boogie Woogie” and was the first piano music beside that from the classical romantic repertoire (that I learned because I came from a musical family, although my dad was a dance band musician as well as knowing the classical repertoire).  It is a the accompaniment to millions of songs.

Now as it happens just as I had written that little paragraph above my phone rang and in passing I mentioned what I was currently writing and to my surprise my pal didn’t fully know what the boogie woogie style was, and actually accused me of making the phrase up!  As if I would!!

But anyway, here’s some piano work that I would call boogie  Incidentally once they get going around the 2 minut mark, the two guys clapping their hands are actually doing it properly on the off beats – the second and fourth beat of the bar.  Many people wrongly clap on beats 1 and 3.

Anyway back to Bob,….

Aaron: Originally the song was called Bottle It Up and Go – I was going to include a very early version however some of the lyrics are a little bit unsavory.

Tony: That’s never stopped us before unless they are racist, in which case I’m with you Aaron – and besides this column is your show, so I follow your lead…

Aaron: Here is Blind Boy Fuller’s version

Tony: Oh I love this – it really takes me back to my early days trying to make a living in music.    I love the accompaniment too – is that a washboard and spoons?

Aaron: The Everly Brothers recorded an uptempo version of the song, which is the opening track on their 1962 album Instant Party!

Tony: I do still adore the Everley’s harmonies, but so often I feel that sometimes they could have done with a better arranger who just let them do their thing.   The drumming is fine, but the guitar is a bit too plinky plonk for my taste.  And the seemingly obligatory key jerk upwards seems unnecessary.   All a bit of a rush.

Aaron: Leon Redbone released it on two albums in a row in the early 80s… I couldn’t decide which one was best so I included both! (Tony- feel free to just include the one you like best!).  From Branch To Branch in 1981

Tony: Aaron – I’d never dare remove one of your choices, unless it was because it is only available for you in the US and not for me in the UK.

From Branch To Branch in 1981

This really has an authentic sound even though the style of the arrangement is not something you would have found in the earlier days.  Love the clarinet: what a clever idea.

Aaron: From Mystery Man in 1982

Tony: That’s a surprise at the start, when we have got so used to everything moving at hyper speed.  But then we get going and it sounds to me as if they even speed up a bit – but my time keeping has become notoriously awful as the years advance, so maybe not.

This has been great fun – one of the best.  It is such a simple song, but it really challenges the musicians to show that they can keep up the pace while making it entertaining throughout.  It is much harder than it sounds.

Actually I just went back and played the Dylan version again – in the light of what we have heard here, it sounds positively sedate – if you have a moment having got this far, do go back and listen again.  It really does show the song from a different point of view.

And that’s a thought Aaron: maybe we ought to look at the Dylan song last, so we hear the antecedents that Bob would have heard and which drove him to his version.

I’ll leave that with you – you’re the boss on this series.

Footnote:Aside from this blog, Untold Dylan also has a very active (and excellently moderated) Facebook page.  If you don’t know it just go to your search engine and type in Facebook 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
• Other people’s songs: Frankie & Albert
• Other people’s songs: Tomorrow Night where the music is always everything
• Other people’s songs: from Stack a Lee to Stagger Lee and Hugh Laurie
• Other people’s songs: Love Henry
• Other people’s songs: Rank Stranger To Me
• Other people’s songs: Man of Constant Sorrow
• Other people’s songs: Satisfied Mind
• Other people’s songs: See that my grave is kept clean
• Other people’s songs: Precious moments and some extras
• Other people’s songs: You go to my head
• Other people’s songs: What’ll I do?
• Other people’s songs: Copper Kettle
• Other people’s songs: Belle Isle
• Other people’s songs: Fixing to Die
• Other people’s songs: When did you leave heaven?
• Other people’s songs: Sally Sue Brown
• Other people’s songs: Ninety miles an hour down a dead end street

by mr tambourine

Bob Dylan hasn’t stepped on European ground for more than three years, which will be his first time here since the world has changed drastically.

His touring so far that was limited only to the States hasn’t brought much diversity, as Bob got into a comfort zone and hasn’t gone out of it much. Which has nothing to do with what might happen in Europe this fall.

Keep in mind this is the first fall tour in Europe since 2015 as well, which is also a big deal, since that was seven years ago.

Europe used to bring out the most surprising faces of Bob that he could offer to the lucky audience in attendance, and it’s become a very common thing. Especially those surprising faces of his were brought out on European tours in the fall. Why exactly? I haven’t researched deeply enough to understand that and I never will probably. But this much I am sure, that there is always some reason.

Especially certain locations of this tour that Bob will be playing are special to Bob in one way or another. It has happened too many times by now for it to be an accident.

As for what I meant with my diversity comment earlier in the text, that relates to the fact that the variety of songs so far on the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour was really limited. At least when we compare it to some previous Never-Ending Tour years. Since 2013, the variety of songs played by year has dropped significantly. How much exactly? We’ll get into that a little bit later.

But let’s first mention that there has been much more variety than people realize. Multiple songs in the setlist have gone through arrangement changes and tweaks, with Key West leading the charge in that regard, having gone through more than five arrangement changes already. Not to mention how many in-concert rehearsals there were in front of a paying audience where you could see the band working on the song on the spot and perfecting it.

One thing that nobody has ever said about Bob’s previous years, where the setlist was changing all the time, there was a reason how and why Bob could pull it off so easily way back.

You were getting a lot of unrehearsed performances even back then, where the band was perfecting the song in front of a paying audience. The only difference was that Bob had more songs on the list that he was ready to attack. He also gave a certain number of songs a very similar melody and arrangement, so that the band wouldn’t just keep learning new melodies and arrangements all the time, which made it easier to work. And this has been the case since Dylan was way younger.

So, I don’t think things have changed much, it’s just that Bob for years now has a particular setlist that he wants to keep working on, until he feels he’s reached a peak with it or is dissatisfied with it and needs to change it eventually.

Tony Attwood, I believe, has written many great articles that I used to read constantly back in the day about how does Dylan choose which songs to play and which songs not to play. He also tried to understand why he never played certain songs at all in his career so far.

Since reading those articles, my research for setlists has become a pleasurable experience of personal education and analysis, where I feel comfort and joy.

How do I, as a researcher of setlist, dare to make any guesses before certain tours?

I don’t like to make guesses, but I sometimes do them anyway, since I can’t understand why more Dylan fans aren’t making them.

And when you make guesses, you need to put your personal feelings towards certain songs of Bob and be realistic.

I’m not here to make many guesses, but I’m here as a researcher, not a fan, to tell you that all the odds suggest that the setlist will most certainly be different compared to so far. How different? That’s hard to say.

But new songs, that weren’t played on the Rough And Rowdy Ways tour so far, are almost certainly going to be added to the list of played songs. Which ones will those be? That’s also hard to say.

We can start doing the “most likely” songs with the “most likely” odds, but we could be here all day probably with that argument, an argument I’ve been trying to make for so long that I don’t think the majority of people can comprehend completely.

Nonetheless, we can look at past examples, if anything.

And this is not a wasted look at the past, where I’m trying to suggest something opposite of what Dylan’s nature truly is, which is the fact that Dylan is an in-the-moment person, which I’m quite aware of.

I’m just trying to show you a history of repetition. Don’t you think that if something repeats itself, doesn’t suggest it’s accidental? Right?

Well, here it is and here I’m specifically looking at four locations: Oslo, Stockholm, Gothenburg and London, among others.

The most recent example of Oslo had Dylan bringing out a still-to-this-day rare and special performance of Boots Of Spanish Leather in 2019, which back then hadn’t been played since 2013, meaning 6 years.

Oslo was also a kick-off show for the 2015 fall tour, Dylan’s last fall tour in Europe so far, as already mentioned. What did Dylan do that night? He played half of the setlist with songs from the great American songbook, for the first time ever he played that many songbook covers in his show, including ones that weren’t even released on any of his studio albums yet, like Melancholy Mood, which was released a few months later in 2016 on the Fallen Angels album. This multiple standards in the setlist approach lasted for quite a few years and has frustrated many of his fans.

Long And Wasted Years, by the way, was debuted in Oslo in 2013.

To be continued…

by Larry Fyffe

Taken as a whole, the metonymic motifs in the songs of Bob Dylan are not nearly as fragmented as they first appear.

Mythologists, poets, writers, and other artists, speak up for the languageless, for the ‘silent’, Cosmos – once thought made up of the basic elements of wind, water, fire and earth.

The Sun in ancient Greek/Roman mythology is personified as Apollo; he’s masculine, rational, fiery and prone to war.

Influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg, poet and engraver William Blake goes further; presents Apollo as Urizen; gnostic-like, he’s a sinful and bloodied Demiurge who overlooks dark Satanic Mills down on earth.

He’s grouped in with Deists, and with Satan of the Holy Bible:

Then the Divine Vision like a silent sun appeared above

Setting ... in clouds of blood
(William Blake: Jerusalem)

Los (Sol spelled backwards) represents fallen man; he’s a blacksmith, an artist, who struggles in the prison of a dark world to spread some light:

The blow of his hammer is justice
The swing of his hammer mercy
(William Blake: Jerusalem)

Dominant-seeking Venus, from mythology, for Blake be disharmonious Eniharmon.

She has a motherly side that’s revealed in the song lyrics below:

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn't have to say she's faithful
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero)

According to Blake, the modern world has been led astray by rationalists, corrupted – imagination lost.

There’s a dark earthy side to Enilhamon that fails to console under such circumstances:

Well, the road is rocky, and the hillside's mud
Up over my head nothing but clouds of blood
I found my own, I found my one in you
But your love hasn't proved  true
(Bob Dylan: Cold Irons Bound)

Los is lost in Blake’s poetry, locked outside as he is with the once-perfect Eve who’s been seduced by Satan, both locked outside the Gates of Eden:

The silent sun
He's got me on the run
Burning a hole in my brain
I'm dreaming of you
That's all I do
But it's driving me insane
(Bob Dylan: Dreaming Of You)

Perhaps it’s just William Blake’s esoteric poetry that Los is dreaming about, and his trying to untangle what the preRomanic poet is getting at, that’s driving Bob Dylan insane.

Bob Dylan Is Los (Part II)

An American Neo-Transcendentist poet accepts noisy modern city life for the most part; it’s a sign of human progress.

But has fond memories of the presentation by forgoing Transcendentalist writers of a peaceful countryside where the beauty of Nature inspires them.

No way is there a reason to become a dark Existentialist:

Give me the splendid silent sun
with his beams full-dazzling
(Walt Whitman: Leaves Of Grass)

In the following song lyrics quoted, the narrator therein, Mani-like, casts a sceptical eye on an idealistic pastoral place of light wherein awaits a caring, loving woman, a Diana symbolized by the white moon.

Dylan takes an obverse view of such an Eden (preRomantic poet William Blake even dresses sun-god Apollo, Diana’s twin brother, in the cloak of Satan).

Below, for all intents and purposes, music-loving Apollo is missing; he neither sings nor plays his lyre, makes not a sound.

Trapped inside the gates of Paradise Lost is not a nice place to be:

The silent sun
Has got me on the run
(Bob Dylan: Dreaming Of You)

According to the Holy Bible, even when short, silence be a harbinger of worse things to come:

And when he opened the seventh seal
There was a silence in heaven
About the space of half an hour
(Revelation 8:1)

Similarly in the following song lyrics –  the narrator’s been stranded alone with Diana. Alas, she has a dark side as well as a light side.

No more an inspiring female muse, she’s gone missing too:

The light in this place
Is really bad
(Bob Dylan: Dreaming Of You)

—————-

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There are details of some of our series on this site, at the top of the page immediately under the picture of the record store.

By Tony Attwood.  Lyrics transcribed by Larry Fyffe

“Patty gone to Larado” has always annoyed me in the sense that there is no recording of it on the internet which is readily – or at least easily –  available.  I’m sure there are other Dylan songs that are likewise not available, but this one always sticks in my mind largely because I rather like the piece.

There is a recording that is part of the Rolling Thunder Review 1975 Live Recordings package, and that is still available on Amazon at £50 in the UK, so I guess about $60 in the US, which is quite a lot if you are just after one track.

But quite some time ago, I found a recording of Dylan (I think) performing it, and that is still on this site here.  You need to go to around the five minute mark on the video.

And that is the recording you need to listen to if you are interested in the song unless you want to buy the  complete album, but… there is a danger of course that it might be removed at some time.  And given there is only one…

Therefore a while back I made a recording myself, just to keep one available.

Then Larry did a new transcription of the lyrics recently…

Patty gone to Larado
Everything in the blue
Patty gone to Larado
Bring on that tune

Gonna think in a bar room
Have to figure it soon 
I don't drink alone 
Within the hollow

And don't anything in a wedding
By an old eye happen tonight
But the door is still locked
And it's so

Patty gone to Laredo
But she be back soon
Left Jamaica this morning
On a boat Bonnie Lou

Born in 'Liz Texas timber
Up where the eagles fly
Then makes him tell it never
But she don't cry

And Laurel's playing for money
On your ribbon wide, get on his side
Yes, the doorway, the door is locked
But the key's inside

And so following on from that I thought I would have another bash at singing it.  Now you’ll probably only want to listen to this after a few stiff ones, but given the paucity of copies that are available (what with no artists wanting to have a go themselves, probably because it is near impossible to make any sense of the lyrics) I thought I would try again.

Please don’t take this to mean I am offering this as a recording you need to listen to, but rather just to try and make sure that at least one version remains available.

Recordings of other Dylan songs by readers of Untold, plus our efforts at using an artificial intelligence program to create new Dylan songs, can be found at the foot of the most recent episode of Bob Dylan Showcase

And just in case you are a real glutton for punishment, and in case it vanishes, here is a copy of the first recording that appeared on this site some years ago.

You might also like to note that we have an active Facebook site which you can find by typing Untold Dylan Facebook into your search engine (or words to that effect).  It has over 11,000 members and very interesting discussions too – which do stay on track.

• Crossing The Rubicon part 1: A hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-fighting guy
• Crossing The Rubicon (2020) part 2: That day I’ll always remember

by Jochen Markhorst

III         So many things that we never will undo

I crossed the Rubicon on the 14th day of the most 
         dangerous month of the year
At the worst time at the worst place - that’s all I seem to hear
I got up early so I could greet the Goddess of the Dawn
I painted my wagon, abandoned all hope and I crossed the Rubicon

 A leading candidate for the crushing artist in “Tangled Up In Blue”, that Italian poet from the thirteenth century, is Boccaccio, the poet who lived at the worst time at the worst place. Which is, obviously, yet again a vague place and time designation, as ambiguous as “the most dangerous month”, but in our history few focal points are worse than Italy in 1347, when the Black Death enters the port of Messina. On board a Genoese merchant ship is Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that is estimated having wiped out about 60% of Europe before it had run its course. So: if we were to ignore poetic license and take imagery literally, we would have to set the scene, the where and when of Dylan’s “Crossing The Rubicon” on Northern Italy, 14 April 1348. Just before the plague reaches Florence, becoming Boccaccio’s instigator for the Decamerone.

Still – the premise that we then take both “Rubicon” and “the 14th day of the most dangerous month” and “at the worst time at the worst place” as factual indications is of course quite shaky. And is definitely knocked down when we get to verse 3. He greets the “Goddess of Dawn”? Right, it is a poem – it doesn’t say what it says.

No, after the brilliant opening line, the promise of a narrative is not yet fulfilled. Indeed, the foggy who-where-when of the opening line is only made foggier. So the narrator reports, again only seemingly informatively, that it was the “worst time” and the “worst place”. And he had apparently to be told so by others (“that’s all I seem to hear”) – which may explain the clichéd nature of the choice of words.

In any case, in songwriting there are quite a few variants of worst time, worst place that express approximately the same thing. Dr John’s “Right Time, Wrong Place”, for example, and the response of English post-punkers The Fall (“Wrong Place, Right Time”, 1988), “Could be the right time, but it sure is the wrong place,” sing Mike + The Mechanics (“I Get The Feeling”, 1985), and the best of them all, Gene Clark’s brilliant “Train Leaves Here This Morning”. Which we all know in the Eagles’ brilliant rendition on their 1972 self-titled debut album, but the 1968 Dillard & Clark original has Gene Clark, so there’s that.

I lost ten points just for being in the right place 
At exactly the wrong time 
I looked right at the facts there, but I may as well have 
Been completely blind

And although the word combination right time / wrong place (or vice versa) has an attractive inner tension, and thus more dramatic power, there are at least as many, and probably more, songs that choose exactly the same words as Dylan’s narrator: the double negative. U2’s “The Refugee”, Neneh Cherry’s “Heart”, Depeche Mode’s “Wrong” (okay, everything is wrong in that song), Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bryan Ferry, Donna Summer, Iron Maiden… you can find songs with this wrong time / wrong place word combination in every corner of the record shop. And even the greats are not ashamed of its cliché – already in 1953 Cole Porter wrote one of his Very Great Songs, “It’s All Right With Me”, for the musical Can-Can:

It's the wrong time and the wrong place
Though your face is charming, it's the wrong face
It's not her face, but such a charming face
That it's all right with me

A monument that has been polished by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Brenda Lee, Oleta Adams and all them other giants – but seldom as idiosyncratically as by the indestructible Tom Waits (for Red, Hot + Blue, 1990).

After these two lines of verse with a much-suggesting, but ultimately nondescript depiction of the scenery, plus the small bridge in the third line in which the narrator poetically declares that he has risen before dawn, it is clear that this is the work of a lyrical song poet. After all, the sound trumps the content. Repetitio (at the worst-at the worst), vowel harmony (seem-hear), alliteration (got-greet-Godess), assonance (crossed-Rubicon-on-of-month-of)… this is a poet who uses all the stylistic devices in the handbook to achieve euphony. And in fact tells not much more than I woke up this morning and dusted my broom.

In that spirit, the beautiful, enigmatic, purely poetic closing line of this quatrain may be understood. I painted my wagon, abandoned all hope and I crossed the Rubicon… melodiousness by inner rhyme (wagon-bandon) and assonant o-sounds, and loaded, archaic metaphors transcending the centuries by combining them. No less than twenty centuries; “painting the wagon” does indeed come up once in Fagles’ translation of the Odyssey (in Book VI, the Nausicaa episode; “Folding the clothes, she packed them into her painted wagon”), but proverbial status, or at least metaphorical quality, was only given to the expression in the nineteenth century, courtesy of the settlers of the Wild West. At least, that’s how Alan J. Lerner, the writer of the hit musical Paint Your Wagon (the one with the singing Clint Eastwood), explains the meaning – according to Lerner, it refers to the practice of settlers to paint phrases like “California or Bust” on the sides of their wagons when heading out West.

In line with the Dante quote abandon all hope – after all, that is the last thing you read when your soul leaves this world. And in line with both the metaphorical and literal meaning of Julius Caesar’s action of crossing that shallow, insignificant river in north-eastern Italy; taking a drastic, irrevocable step.

The poet Dylan thus explores the beauty and eloquence of the accumulatio, the enumeration of equivalents, his own variant of the “list-song”. List-songs Dylan writes often enough, of course – lyrics that rely on the power of repetition. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, “Forever Young”, “Everything Is Broken”, “Blowin’ In The Wind”, just to name a few of the better known. But it is to the related accumulatio that he increasingly turns in the later stages of his career. A first variant is explored in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (with that accumulation of short imperatives), in some songs, like “Idiot Wind”, Dylan piles up antitheses, which you could call with some good will a kind of accumulatio, but later it does become more explicit. “Cold Irons Bound”, with all those misty expressions that seem to want to articulate “goodbye to life”, is already a better example, and, by the way, very similar to “Crossing The Rubicon” in this respect too. But “Mississippi” is perhaps the best example (well, at least the best song, arguably), in which Dylan chooses to fill a verse with accumulatio three times.

Not coincidentally, perhaps, also a narrator crossing the river. And who also already has made an irrevocable decision in an Inferno-like setting, and all hope seems to have been abandoned as well; “So many things that we never will undo / I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too.”

To be continued. Next up Crossing The Rubicon part 4: Red River Shore 2: The Guy Strikes Back

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

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

Compiled by Tony Attwood

Untold Dylan Showcase is a feature we’ve run whenever we’ve had the chance, which quite simply consists of recordings made by our readers or about our readers’ music making.   Sometimes the music we get is supplied simply because a reader wants to offer it up, other times there is a theme.

Here’s today’s latest piece by David Kerner, it is a regular 12 bar blues with a simple message – go and vote!   I love it, not least because I always vote.   I’m old enough to have ancestors who (my family has told me) died in the fight for the right to vote, which has always seemed as good a reason as one can get to exercise one’s democratic duty – and to remind others of the benefit.   (I don’t normally go into my political views here, but there seems a good excuse at this point!)

Prior to that we meandered around all sorts of other areas….

• Bowling Alley Blues: another Dylan set of lyrics needing the music
• Don’t let anyone write your story – original renditions
• Don’t let anyone write your story, Paul Robert Thomas
• Don’t let anyone write your story, Rob Beretta
• Don’t let anyone write your story, fourth edition
• Don’t Let Anyone write your story: Claudio Diarni
• Dope Fiend Robber Nick Juno.
• Dope Fiend Robber  – Paul Robert Thomas
• Listen Robert Moses: Chris Sheriden
• Song to Bonny Paul Robert Thomas

Our good friend Filip Łobodziński has also contributed a lot in this regard with his perspective on performing Dylan in Polish, and Bob Dylan in Poland.

• T.Love, top Polish rock band, paying tribute to Bob Dylan
• The consequences of sequences in Bob Dylan’s writing of song
• Studious Dylan in the Studio
• Memories of the first ever Polish concert Bob Dylan gave in 1994.
• Young students take on Dylan and his songs
• Dylan PL – Arlekin and Blind Wille

And we have had also had the privilege to showcase reader’s versions of Dylan’s work

• Bob Dylan Showcase: Señor, as never before. Listen, be amazed.
• Your chance to write the music to Dylan’s unfinished song
• Make you feel my love – Denise Konkal
• Rev Kevin Waters, “Tomorrow is a long time”
• Property of Jesus, Ron Sexsmith
• Imaginary Future: Times they are a changing
• Untold Dylan showcase: Make you feel my love – Jüri Aidas

Did I miss someone?  If so please give the details of the article.

And do you have something to perform in relation to Dylan?   Just email it to Tony@schools.co.uk with some background notes and I’ll see what I can do.

By Larry Fyffe

Biblical Beezlebub, linked to the worshippers of Baal, and later to Satan, seduces young women.

The Lord of the Flies sneaks into lyrics performed by a Christian-oriented singer:

They'd say when he grows up, watch out
When the gals see his big blue eyes
They'll hang around like a bunch of flies
Those women knew what they were talking about
(Hank Snow: Lady's Man ~ Coben)

In the following song lyrics, Beezlebub, though unnamed, and stinker though he be, fails to attract the female fly he’s after.

Perhaps she’s Jezebel, once a Baalist, who turns out to he more nun than fly:

Well I went back to see about her once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to had seen us there
Said they didn't know who I was talking about
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

In the lyrics below, Beezlebub, here sex changed into the Sweet Lady of the Flies, is warned that she will get her comeuppance:

You hurt the ones that I love best
And cover up the truth with lies
One day you'll be in the ditch
Flies buzzing around your eyes
(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

In a related tale of Greek mythology Io,  the daughter of a Water Naiad by a mortal, catches the eye of the Thunder God. To hide her from Hera,  Zeus turns her into a white heifer. The wife of Zeus torments the young cow with a gadfly. Io runs away, but Zeus follows her tail all the way to the Nile where he transforms her back to her beautiful human form.

Could be said that Beezlebub and Zeus come together in the song lyrics below:

Don't ever take yourself to a place
Where I can't find you
Don't ever take yourself away 
I will never leave you
I will never deceive you
I'll be right there walking behind you
(Bob Dylan: Steel And Feathers ~ Dylan/Jean)

Untold Dylan has a very active Facebook group – and we are always happy to receive positive articles about Bob Dylan, his music and those who have influenced him.  If you have an article, or an idea for an article please do email it to Tony@schools.co.uk

• A list of the previous episodes is here.
• Never Ending Tour 2007 part 1: The Light is Never Dying

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

It’s natural that the more recent songs, in performance, find Dylan at his most enthusiastic. While we have had some powerful performances of ‘It’s Alright Ma,’ ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown,’ some of those old chestnuts like ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ have started to sound pretty jet-lagged. Missed verses, mixed up verses, dropped lines and flubbed lines, a sense of strain trying to make the songs sound fresh, is what we can find.

But with songs written from 1997 (Time Out of Mind) through to 2006 (Modern Times), we can feel Dylan engaged and enthusiastic. In my last post (NET, 2007, Part 1), I started to look at Dylan’s 2007 performances of those songs, and I want to continue that in this post. Let’s start with ‘Spirit on the Water,’ a song that is very much in the same spirit as ‘Beyond the Horizon.’ A bright and breezy surface, but in this case, a sting in the tail. The singer will not be able to join his love in paradise because he ‘killed a man back there.’

Wikipedia says, ‘In their book Bob Dylan, All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon discuss the song as exhibiting Dylan’s “love for jazz”, noting that “the atmosphere is light and bright” and that “Dylan sings with his crooner voice, which foreshadows his 2015 album Shadows in the Night“.

For my ear, this performance from Birmingham (17^th April) has an edge on the 2006 performance (See NET, 2006 part 2).

Spirit on the Water (A)

The sharpness of the Crystal Cat recordings is hard to resist, although some find them a bit abrasive. This one, from Newcastle (12^th April), is also a Crystal Cat recording, but the performance is somewhat muted compared to Birmingham, somewhat lighter and more airy perhaps.

Spirit on the Water (B)

‘The Levee’s Gonna Break’ is an upbeat, rock-and-roll tinged song (See NET, 2006, part 2) that bustles along, Dylan once more mixing the political and the personal as he does. I offer two recordings here, quite different in spirit. This first one is from St Louis (22^nd Oct), and has been my favourite. Dylan belts it out in fine style.

Levee’s Gonna Break (A)

But I’m also aware of the appeal of this one from Florence (26^th of June) which is not as high-powered as the St Louis performance (a different key?), with Dylan singing in a lower register. Take your pick.

Levee’s Gonna Break (B)

Judging by the number of performances, ‘Summer Days’ must be counted as Dylan’s favourite from Love and Theft. Somewhere around number 14 on his setlist, this song is guaranteed to lift the energy in any concert. Full of humour, sexual innuendo, classic blues complaints about infidelity in love, and some wild touches, this one’s a crowd pleaser. I’m struck by the contrast between the way this song ends, in rabid defiance, and the bitter-sweet farewells of ‘Don’t Think Twice.’

Well, I'm leaving in the morning as soon as the dark clouds lift
Yes, I'm leaving in the morning just as soon as the dark clouds lift
Gonna break in the roof, set fire to the place as a parting gift.

And here’s ‘Don’t Think Twice’:

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm a-traveling on
But don't think twice, it's all right

Never let it be said that Dylan mellowed as he got older.

In terms of recordings, I have an embarrassment of riches here. Four excellent versions. I’ve chosen two, regretting the loss of the other two. This first one is from Birmingham again and is full of brash energy.

Summer Days (A)

This second one is from St Louis, with Dylan’s vocal to the fore.

Summer Days (B)

There are a couple of very slow songs on Modern Times, ‘When The Deal Goes Down’ and ‘Nettie Moore.’ The first is a melancholy ode to love, the kind of love that sticks with it right to the end. It’s a precursor to that wonderful ballad from Rough and Rowdy Ways, ‘I Made Up My Mind.’

The song is shot through with a stoical acceptance of time, love and death.

In the still of the night, in the world's ancient light
Where wisdom grows up in strife
My bewilderin’ brain, toils in vain
Through the darkness on the pathways of life
Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air
Tomorrow keeps turning around
We live and we die, we know not why
But I'll be with you when the deal goes down

It’s a haunted but determined state of mind. A love song to God. It’s hard to beat this Birmingham performance:

When the Deal Goes Down (A)

But for those who like their recording with a bit of a softer edge, this one from Florence has its charms. On balance, this one is my favourite.

When the Deal Goes Down (B)

The blues soaked ‘Cry A While’ used to jump from one tempo to another just as the lyrics jump from a particularly Dylanesque defiance of fate and the world to grief and sorrow. Here Dylan smooths over those tempo changes to produce a more standard, consistent bluesy riff. I miss the tempo switches and find the 2007 versions somewhat less interesting. To my mind, this doesn’t stand up to earlier versions. For a contrast, try the performance from 2003 (NET, 2003, Part 4).

It’s worth noting the constant edge of rueful humour in the song:

I'm gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey
I'll die before I turn senile

This one’s from Florence.

Cry a While

Did Dylan test his audiences’ patience by singing the dead-slow ‘Nettie Moore’? Dead slow can turn dreary. It seems not. The audience stays with this one (Stockholm) and appreciates the progression of the lyrics. While this is a love song, the lyrics are wide-ranging and there doesn’t seem to be a lot holding it together.

Nettie Moore (A)

For those who like the sharper, Crystal Cat recordings, this one from Sheffield might do the trick.

Nettie Moore (B)

For a change of pace, let’s go to ‘Thunder on the Mountain.’ This is the ultimate chuggy song. It’s relentless, funny, and at times profound:

Feel like my soul is beginning to expand
Look into my heart and you will sort of understand
You brought me here, now you're trying to run me away
The writing on the wall, come read it, come see what it say

Thunder on the mountain, rolling like a drum
Gonna sleep over there, that's where the music coming from
I don't need any guide, I already know the way
Remember this, I'm your servant both night and day

It’s easy to miss the depth of this. We might need to remind ourselves that he’s probably addressing his god.

The song is all about movement, and momentum. There’s no time to think, to mull over a verse, as the next one is right on top of you. That thunder just keeps on rolling.

This first one’s from St Louis, and Dylan uses a descending vocal, starting high and moving low. It helps keep our interest in the performance.

Thunder on the Mountain (A)

This one, from Florence, doesn’t use the same trick but vocal expressiveness is to the fore here.

Thunder on the Mountain (B)

I can’t resist, however, popping in this one from Stockholm. The vocal’s not as gritty as Florence, or as adventurous as St Louis, but it’s smoother than both of those and is becoming my favourite.

Thunder on the Mountain (C)

Staying in Stockholm, let’s catch another of those generic blues songs the critics didn’t like because they thought Dylan’s compositions were getting a bit melodically lazy, and that Dylan was using such songs as album fillers. I don’t get that impression at all. Once he got rid of the repetitive guitar riff you hear on the album, the song bedded down very nicely. It thrums along with a suitably ominous edge.

Honest With Me

No one could accuse ‘Working Man’s Blues #2’ of being generic, even if it does reference the Merle Haggard song. It’s a very atmospheric song, political passion mixed with nostalgia for the world we have lost as we get ground down with globalization’s race to the bottom:

Where the place I love best is a sweet memory
It's a new path that we trod
They say low wages are reality
If we want to compete abroad

It’s a call to arms, but a sad, reflective one.

This Birmingham recording has to take top slot.

Working Man’s blues (A)

This one from St Louis, with its more hushed vocal, caught my ear. The softer feeling may suit the song better.

Working Man’s blues (B)

‘Rollin And Tumblin’ takes us back, once more, to classic urban blues. Tony Attwood has an excellent account of the song here;  I can’t add much to his account except to say that, like the best blues, it expresses the anguish of mind and heart when it comes to failed love. You may study the ‘arts of love’ all you want but you’ll still end up rollin and tumblin and crying the whole night long.

This Newcastle performance won’t leave you in any doubt. In this case the abrasive Crystal Cat recording fits the song like a glove.

Rollin and Tumblin

I’ll finish this post with another Newcastle performance, ‘High Water (for Charlie Patton).’ To my mind, the song reaches its performance high point in 2006 (see NET, 2006, part 3), which is an interesting contrast to this one. The 2006 performance features Donnie Herron’s banjo more prominently, but in both performances the darker undertones of the song are brought out by that heavy guitar riff.

The song hasn’t lost its bounce, or with increasing floods a consequence of global heating, its relevance.

‘Don’t reach out for me’, she said, ‘can’t you see I’m drowning too?’

High Water

That’s it for me this time around. Keep body and soul together and join me next time for another round of sounds from 2007.

Kia Ora

————–

Mike’s earlier series: Bob Dylan Master Harpist is also available on Untold Dylan.

If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, please simply drop a line to Tony@schools.co.uk with details of your idea.  We’ll be pleased to hear from you.

You might also like to follow Untold Dylan on Facebook – just type Untold Dylan Facebook into your search engine, and we should pop up.

by Denise Konkal

I am revisiting this amazing compilation of Bob Dylan’s LIVE *Lovesick* performances.

To me, this song brilliantly examines the deepest experience of love-longing. It effectively explores the torture that love can cause a person, especially when there is separation with no foreseeable end. The music alone sets a mood of perpetual agony and arduous passing of time.

This lyrical out-loud expression of inner dialogue truly captures the battle between the heart and mind. Many of Bob’s songs deal with aspects and themes of mind/heart struggle but “Lovesick” seems to illustrate it so well. It portrays how love can cause such misery; disobliging any rhyme or reason. Attempting to cerebrally subdue the overwhelming feelings of deep desire of love seems beyond the capability of the most astute mind.

In this song the protagonist feels it is impossible for them to be together. He’s so in love, he is sick from it and of it! His longing for her is so powerful that everything but her love seems dead to him. Even using the line: “streets that are dead” echoes back to Bob’s early years; to the innocence of youth and first love. It is so similar to his line in *Mr Tambourine Man* “…the ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming.”

This is not ordinary love and though it seems obsessive it’s not that either. It’s the kind of love in which their entire beings are inextricably connected. Love that is melded to the point that to hurt the other is to hurt yourself.

His brain is “wired” because “there’s a battle [inside] and it’s raging.” He and his love are separated for some reason and the waiting so long as indicated by: “I hear the clock tick.”

He also cannot fathom why she always seems to know and understands his secret hidden places of his soul like no one else ever has. How does she know? He tries to reason away this intuition and insight she seems to have informing her as shown in the line: “you went through my pockets when I was sleeping.” This also alludes to Bob’s song *Covenant Woman* in the line: “…who knows those secret things of me that are hidden from the world…”

So in this lonely separation, he tries desperately to find a way to dismiss his feelings by dismissing her. He begins to build a case against her by thinking she doesn’t love him the way he loves her. His heart and soul is ravaged. Wrestling with such thoughts, he’s trying to make himself believe she’s bad. It’s like if he can blame her and think she is fickle then maybe he can stop loving her. He cannot move on or love anyone else but he is worried that in this separation, she might not be faithful to him. He sees other couples enjoying love and imagines her in a silhouette with someone else and it’s driving him crazy inside. He asks: “…could you ever be true, I think of you and I wonder….” This love is so powerful it is tortuous and he can’t get it out of his head.

He wants to escape the pain of not being with her but in the end he knows he can’t because in his last line he says: “I’d give anything just to be with you.” For all this thinking, he cannot extinguish the fire of his desire! He still hopes they will be together somehow because he knows he’s in it for keeps.

This song is reminiscent of the Song of Songs (Solomon) in which two separated lovers are searching for the other. Their love is pure but sensual, and sweetly tender but also intense like fire; a perfect model of true love.

—————–

Denise is the moderator of the Untold Dylan Facebook group.  You can find out more about the group and apply to join at https://www.facebook.com/groups/UntoldDylan or by typing in Untold Dylan Facebook on your search engine.

• Crossing The Rubicon part 1: A hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-fighting guy

by Jochen Markhorst

II          That day I’ll always remember

I crossed the Rubicon on the 14th day of the most dangerous month of the year

It is a popular way to open a story, or – as in Dylan’s case – to merely suggest an epic writing: the exposition, the opening according to the classic formula who-where-when. Not only for fairy tales, but also for films, novels and short stories. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,” as Sylvia Plath in 1963 opens her The Bell Jar. Kafka’s “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (Metamorphosis, 1915) and Don Quichote opens in 1605 with “Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago.” And the best, the most wonderful of them all: “Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders,” although that is not actually the very first opening line of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), of course.

In sung narratives, in ballads, it is even more common – time and space are simply much more limited than in other art forms, so the writers often choose to get the necessary exposition, the who-where-when, over with as quickly as possible so that they can start with the what, how & why, with the story itself. After all, suggesting authenticity increases the attraction and tension, and can be achieved through detailed geolocation, for example, whether fictional or not. “Twelfth Street and Vine”, “56th and Wabasha”, “Rue Morgue Avenue”, “where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog”, “Bagby and Lamar”… Dylan himself has also felt the special power of precise location for over half a century.

The same applies, even more so, to the when. The choice of a date, then, not only works more authentically than, say, “once upon a time”, but has also, for all its factuality, a poetic, almost mysterious power. “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” is, of course, by itself an off-category song, but its brilliance would have been less without the magical opening “It was the third of September”. The same goes for remarkable songs like Arlo Guthrie’s “Darkest Hour” (It’s the tenth of January) or the Bee Gees’ “Odessa” (Fourteenth of February , eighteen ninety nine), and monuments like “Isis” (I married Isis on the fifth day of May) and “Ode to Billie Joe” (It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day)… all extraordinary songs that gain poetic lustre by opening with something as dry as a date.

But Dylan is Dylan, the poet that Joan Baez so aptly defined back in the 70s with “You who are so good with words and at keeping things vague” (“Diamond And Rust”), and he once again confirms Joan’s analysis with the brilliant opening line of “Crossing The Rubicon”: I crossed the Rubicon on the 14th day of the most dangerous month of the year.

The beauty of the verse line is mainly due to the embedded duality, of course. Ostensibly, the opening line offers a classic exposition, yet it gives nothing away. We do not know who the “I” is, the “where” is only a metaphor and the “when” is agonisingly unclear in its suggested clarity; no one knows which month is the “most dangerous month”. Or rather, depending on your perspective, any month qualifies for “most dangerous month” – sailors between Micronesia and Japan dread September (an average of four typhoons); health insurance companies see a pneumonia spike in March every year; the California traffic police know that August is the most dangerous month. In short: just as in his Very Great Songs, songs like “Shelter From The Storm” or “Visions Of Johanna”, the poet, through word choice, only suggests a narrative, only insinuates an epic – but in fact reports nothing more than that some anonymous I-person in an undisclosed place at an unclear moment has made an unknown, but apparently far-reaching decision.

Presumably, the by-catch amuses the elderly, playful poet Dylan. Predictably enough, all analysts, reviewers, professional Dylanologists and amateur interpreters bite. A disappointing large faction of them clicks through to Wikipedia, soon finds the historical source of the phrase to cross the Rubicon, and reports, usually with some misplaced triumphalism, the finding that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon not on a fourteenth day, but on January 10. Even such a highly respected and intelligent Dylan interpreter as the author of the brilliant Dylan book Why Dylan Matters, Professor Richard F. Thomas, in his wonderful, very readworthy essay “And I Crossed the Rubicon”: Another Classical Dylan (Dylan Review, 2020), devotes a great many words (some 900, almost half of the entire essay) to solving the date puzzle. For, “As always with detail in Dylan, there is a reason, here making us confront the puzzle.” Unfortunately, Prof. Thomas then allows himself to be partly led by the somewhat naive starting point of taking “Rubicon” literally, of seeing “Rubicon” as a concrete, historical and geographical indication. And then keeps on meandering around Julius Caesar again:

“But the 14th was also the eve of what for Julius Caesar was emphatically the most dangerous month, March, whose Ides of course fell on the next day, his death day.”

Why it should be relevant that 14 March is the eve of Caesar’s death on 15 March is completely unclear, apart from the fact that “most dangerous” would be a very poor, Dylan-unworthy choice of words to describe someone’s death month. And apart from the peculiar reflex to take a metaphor literally – that’s like poring over old weather reports in the archives to locate when and where a hard rain has a-fallen or trying to find Desolation Row in the New York street directory.

Anyway, the professor is certainly not the only one who gets carried away by the historical background of “Rubicon”. In the apparent belief that Dylan would have a childlike tendency to hide some secret meaning behind cryptic clues, which can be solved with the help of the chapter on code-cracking in the Junior Woodchuckers’ Guidebook, or something like that. Which, by the way, is a very popular belief; after all, cryptanalytic interpretation has been the most flourishing faculty of Dylanological studies worldwide for sixty years.

More obvious, and also less spectacular, however, is the observation that the expression crossing the Rubicon is used in the way we have all been using it for twenty centuries now: metaphorically. The premise that the lyrics are lyrical, not epic, is not too bold either. The song seems mainly to want to express the state of mind of a distressed protagonist who has just made an existential decision. An epic-suggesting exposition such as this opening line enhances the couleur and, moreover, is a strong attention grabber – it is quite unlikely to be a cryptic masking of some biographical fact.

And well, if you insist on finding a month to go with this “14th day of the most dangerous month”: in Dylan’s inner jukebox, there are two records with a “14th day”. Both quite prominent. Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Storm Disaster” is furthest in front, the song that was etched in Dylan’s memoria musica sixty years ago;

On the 14th day of April of 1935,
There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky.

And somewhere near there is undoubtedly Blind Willie Johnson with his “God Moves On The Water” from 1929;

Year of nineteen hundred and twelve, April the fourteenth day
Great Titanic struck an iceberg, people had to run and pray

… both opening lines, as it should be. Both marking a most dangerous event, the latter on the same day that Dylan himself has already named in his own Titanic song, in “Tempest” from 2012 (‘Twas the fourteen day of April / Over the waves she rode). For the Titanic sank on the fourteenth day of the month which, if not the most dangerous, is at least, as we all know, the cruellest month.

To be continued. Next up Crossing The Rubicon part 3: So many things that we never will undo

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

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

by Larry Fyffe

According to the Jewish/Christian Bible, with Moses gone up on the mountain, most of those fleeing Egypt demand that his brother Aaron construct a Golden Calf, a representation of a Baalist fertility god, for them to follow on their homeward journey to the Promised Land:

And all the people brake off the golden earrings 
    which were in their ears
And brought them unto Aaron, and he received them at their hand
And fashioned it with a graving tool, 
    after he had made it a molten calf

(Exodus 32; 3,4)

In the persona of a genie, the narrator in the following song lyrics takes into account the so-called pagan ideas of transitional alchemy along with the orthodox biblical story of Moses.

There's conflict between the two points of view:
With a time-rusted compass blade, Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks sidesaddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise you will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

As the biblical story goes, the Hebrew God gets angry, frightens his leading prophet Moses into crushing the sacred bull of the Baalists into tiny bits and pieces of gold:

And he took the calf which they had made
And burnt in the fire, and ground it to powder
And strawed it upon the water
And made the children of Israel drink of it
(Exodus 32: 20)

The narrator, apparently as Moses, in the song lyrics beneath burlesques the  orthodox depiction of the prophet:

Put out your hand, there's nothing to hold
Open your mouth, I'll stuff it with gold
Ah, you poor devil, look up if you will
The City of God is up there on the hill
(Bob Dylan: False Prophet)

The Holy Grail gets lost, the Ark of the Covenant too, but apparently Moses is wrong in thinking he’s gotten rid of the memory of the symbolic Golden Calf.

Egyptian mythology, rooted in gnostic ideas but then not so-called, depicts Isis, adorned with the headdress of a  motherly cow. Over time, she becomes as important as the bull in the ancient view of the renewal process; the moon, the white goddess, becomes as important as the sun. A later medieval theory of the fluid humours governed by earth, air, fire, and water, develops therefrom.

According to the Holy Bible, it’s an Egyptian princess who takes care of young Moses.

He’s reluctant to leave the caring offshoot of mother Isis at the command of the Hebrew God, portrayed as male:

And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh's daughter
And he became her son
And she called his name Moses
And she said, "Because I drew him out of the water"
(Exodus 2:10)

Moses does leave. But sorrowful memories of that day he has; so said in the following song lyrics:

Isis, oh Isis, you're a mystical child
What drives me to you is what drives me insane
I can still remember the way that you smiled
On the fifth day of May in the drizzling rain
(Bob Dylan: Isis)

Untold Dylan also runs a very active Facebook site: you can try  https://www.facebook.com/groups/UntoldDylan/about/  or just type in Untold Dylan Facebook – that normally works.

By Tony Attwood

I can still remember the first time I heard Dylan’s “Man in The Long Black Coat” – someone (I can’t recall who) had given me a cassette of the album (remember cassettes?) upon its release, and I was playing it in the car in the evening as I drove on my own to Leicester to visit a very ill very close friend in the hospital, and we got to this track.   I seem to recall I nearly caused an awful accident by not seeing that the car in front had stopped suddenly at a red light.   I missed causing a collision by an inch.

So presumably that was in 1989.  33 years ago.  And I can still recall it, but it is not the near accident, nor even my pal (sadly no longer with us) that I recall first: it is still the first time I heard this song and the incredible impact it made on me.

And in case that sounds heartless, of course I still remember my late friend, and I’m still very close to his family, but it is the music that symbolises that moment.  I have a thousand memories of one of the best friends I ever had, but for that evening, it is playing this song in the car that is the first recollection.

Rolling Stone said, it was “a chilling narrative ballad suffused with a medieval sense of sin, death, illicit sexuality and satanic power…the sparce musical background evokes a universe frighteningly devoid of absolute meaning”.    Much later I wrote “The sense of continuing futility is overwhelming which ever way you look at it,” and I think for once I really got it right.  What is the point of all this, if in the end we simply pass away in the night?

“Long Black Coat” is above everything pure and utter atmosphere, and coming to the cover versions all these years later, that is what I look for.  If the atmosphere goes, then the song has gone too.  But of course for cover-artists, the temptation is to use electronics as a way to create atmosphere as some sci-fi movies do.

And yes, of course you can get atmosphere by electronics, but really it is the spooky nature of the melody and sparce accompaniment that does it.  Emerson Lake and Palmer get half way there, but they have a repeated electronic guitar four note effect – and it is the repeat of that which really turns me off the version.

https://youtu.be/8Q1EFoOs_CU

The soft guitar of Admiral Freebee however gives the sense of menace, but then the suddenly loud couple of guitar notes seems too simple, too obvious.  This song is horrifying but also subtle.  It deserves more than sudden bangs, or their equivalent.

Daniel Bedingfield adds to the menance and chaos element, and although the occasional use of a chorus of voices helps enormously, it is just too repetitious for me, too pounding, too fast.    Certainly as the voices are used more and more the sheer sense of a world falling apart develops, but really someone should have shot the percussionist for his (or of course maybe her) use of the bass drum.  Without that we could have focussed so much more on the really clever use of the voices throughout.  Try and ignore the drum – although it is hard.

Barb Jungr obviously knows Dylan better than most and she’s done some brilliant work with his music – and here we really do get the sense of menace.  The church bell tolling is a bit obvious (really, do these musical directors not have a single new idea in their heads?) but everything else she gives us is remarkable – not least because she and the arranger hold back.   The piano is delicate and the rhythm is controlled, and the meance is heightened – its an extraordinary trick.  Very very difficult to pull off, but she gets it.   The shivers go up and down my arms as I type this.

Gentle can mean horror, threat, regret…  hard to do, but when it is right, it is spooky.

Found Wandering have this understanding too, but they manage to go further by doing less.  The singer is delicate, the harmonies are perfection, and yet still contain that absolute sense of menace.  It’s a good job this version wasn’t on that cassette I was playing when I first heard the song; if it had been I think the accident I just avoided would most certainly have happened.

Just listen to those harmonies as the performance evolves.  And do stay to the end, it is worth it.  This is perfection.

In fact, listening to these (and a few other versions I really didn’t want to include here) it turns out that the key to every performance comes in the last two lines of each verse.  Get those right, and you stand a chance of giving a superb recording.

And the fact is that the very last two lines of the song are probably the most chilling ever written by Bob.

She never said nothing there was nothing she wrote
She gone with the man in the long black coat

That is the ultimate darkness.  There is nothing beyond; nothing is left behind.

————-

The Dylan Cover a Day 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 immigrant. 
  •  52: I shall be released
  • 53: I threw it all away
  • 54: I want you
  • 55: I was young when I left home
  • 56: I’ll remember you
  • 57: Idiot Wind and  More idiot wind
  • 58: If not for you, and a rant against prosody
  • 59: A Dylan cover a Day: If you Gotta Go, please go and do something different
  • 60: If you see her say hello
  • 61: Dylan cover a day: I’ll be your baby tonight
  • 62: I’m not there.
  • 63: In the Summertime, Is your love and an amazing Isis
  • 64: It ain’t me babe
  • 65: It takes a lot to laugh
  • 66: It’s all over now Baby Blue
  • 67: It’s all right ma
  • 68: Just Like a Woman
  • 69: Knocking on Heaven’s Door
  • 70: Lay down your weary tune
  • 71:  Lay Lady Lay
  • 72: Dylan Cover a Day 72: Lenny Bruce
  • 73: That brand new leopard skin pill box hat
  • 74: Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts
  • 75: Dylan Cover a Day: License to kill
  • 76: Like a Rolling Stone
  • 77: Love is just a four letter word
  • 78: Love Sick
  • 79: Maggies Farm!
  • 80: Make you feel my love; a performance that made me cry.
  • 81: Mama you’ve been on my mind