A sorrowful ballad by an American Romantic “lieder” writer:
Though battered and old
Our hearts are bold
Yet oft do we repine
For the days of old
For the days of gold
For the days of forty-nine
(Joaquin Miller: Forty Nine)
Over time, the lyrics gallop off in different directions – recorded, for example, by a minstrel cowboy below:
You're gazing now on old Tom Moore
A relic of bygone days
'Tis a bummer too they call me now
But what care I for praise
(Jules Allen: The Days Of Forty-Nine ~ traditional)
Rendered in folk rock:
I'm old Tom Moore from the bummer's shore
In the good old golden days
They call me a bummer, and a gin sot too
But what cares I for praise
(Bob Dylan: Days Of Forty-Nine ~ traditional)
Take what you gather from coincidence – Thomas Moore (prior to the time of the overseas California gold rush) be an Irish writer, a Robbie Burns-like poet who pens the following ballad:
The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone
In the ranks of death you'll find him
His father's sword he has girded on
And his wild harp slung behind him
(Thomas Moore: Minstrel Boy)
An obverse, a light-hearted, response to the lyrics above, as those beneath can be taken:
Who's gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin
Who's gonna let it roll
Who's gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin
Who's gonna let it down easy to save his soul
(Bob Dylan: Minstrel Boy)
An Irish tenor renders Moore’s song in high burlesque style, giving it operatic surgery:
"Land of song", cried the warrior bard
Though all the world betrays thee
One sound, at least, thy rights shall guard
One faithful heart to praise thee
(John McCormack: Ministrel Boy ~ Moore)
The traditional song below is given an obverse treatment in that the traditional lyrics are ~ “to buckle her shoe”:
And what's it to any man, whether or no
Whether I'm easy, or whether I'm true
And I lifted her petticoat, easy and slow
And I rolled up my sleeves to unbuckle her shoe
(Bob Dylan: Slow And Easy ~ traditional)
The minstrel boy forgets nought:
I must admit that I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe
(Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Blue)
In the originally recorded song lyrics beneath, the narrator thereof can be understood as addressing an idealized gal with whom he’s looks forward to spending the night:
Throw my ticket out the window
Throw my suitcase out there too
Throw my troubles out the door
I don't need them any more
'Cause tonight I'll be staying here with you
(Bob Dylan: Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You)
In the revised lyrics below, the softness of the country tune above turns hard with the change of music to the rhythm pattern of rocknroll, and diction composed of consonance ‘rhymes’ ~ “mattress”, “letters”, “little”, “scattered”, “mattered”.
The song’s now from the perspective of a minstrel performer; he addresses a real audience during a one-night stand on stage:
Throw my ticket in the wind
Throw my mattress out there too
Throw my letters in the sand
'Cause you got to understand
That tonight I'll be staying here with you ....
But I'm feeling a little bit scattered
And your love was all that mattered
(Bob Dylan: Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You, no. II)
———-
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
Details of the earlier episodes of the Released/Unreleased series can be found at the end of the article.
As with other pieces presented by the two of us, Aaron (in the US) selects the material and then I (Tony in the UK) writes the commentary as I listen to the music.
Aaron: In April 1976 Bob booked the Belleview Biltmore Hotel to record his first TV special. With Baez and McGuinn in tow, they performed two 3-hour sets in front of around 100 lucky souls.
An hour-long show was edited and prepared for release. Bob even appeared on the cover of TV Guide to promote the special. Then, just like that, he nixed the whole thing, allegedly not happy with his voice. It was replaced in the schedule with the Hard Rain show, recorded about a month after Clearwater.
Luckily for us, the whole show has leaked and you can watch it all on YouTube.
I’ll present my edited highlights for Tony to review and then the whole show at the end.
Mr Tambourine Man
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aBQRaU2pWHg
Tony: My instant reaction is that I like this voice. Yes, it is different from Bob’s normal singing voice of the era, but then why not? After all the music is different as well with two beats added to the end of each line, and four beats added at the end of each verse. Plus other rhythmic oddities too.
And yes I like this throughout. And in terms of the music, interestingly, unlike many musical changes repeated through a piece, these don’t pale into the boredom of repetitiveness but are as central to the performance at the end of the piece as they are at the beginning.
(Incidentally, perhaps I could use that “boredom of repetitiveness” phrase in a song… although I suspect not).
The Times They Are A-Changin’
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l-bgA4aupD0
Tony: So immediately I am listening out for changes to the way the song is sung, and yes here we have one or two or even more extra beats at the end of each line, as well as the melody going for a meander too. And Bob is doing that raising of the left side of the guitar at the end of each line.
I really like the change to the melody at the opening of the lines – it is repetitive and simple but incredibly effective. Goodness knows why Bob didn’t want this released; musically I think it is superb, and there’s nothing at all wrong with the filming. I’m so glad you’ve presented this Aaron.
I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine (with Joan Baez)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJWxjBGaIs
Tony: Oh yes I am enjoying this so much – that little interplay between the two of them, and the face Joan pulls at the end of the first verse as if to say, “well that is not too far away from the way we rehearsed it, I guess.”
And yet again it is a terrific re-working of the song. This really is a remarkable archive.
When I Paint My Masterpiece
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MTzQT69VNDg
Tony: It is so strange that Bob decided to ditch the whole recording when everyone seems to be having such a jolly time. And musically the songs all work beautifully. Which given how well we know them, is quite an achievement. The harmonies both in this piece and the last one are remarkable, and Bob is not known for his vocal harmonics inventiveness. And the mandolin is exquisite too.
Maybe he just didn’t like the fact that everyone was having so much fun.
Lay Lady Lay
Tony: Upon its original release this was not one of my favourite Dylan songs, for reasons I won’t bore you with now, but this is a terrific version, once again drawing so strongly on the harmonies which change the whole aspect of the song.
Indeed the whole production is remarkable. Not for the first time Aaron, I owe you for introducing me to a performance I didn’t know.
Aaron: Now if you have an hour, here is the complete show. Check out Baez solo spot – a sublime Diamonds and Rust – I wonder what Bob thought of that?!
Tony:Diamonds and Rust (in case you just one to pick up that song Aaron highlighted) starts around 16′ 30″. I haven’t played Diamonds and Rust for a while, but I have a feeling this version is taken faster than normal, and it is none the worse for that.
In keeping with the rest of the show it is a sublime performance, but maybe if Bob really did object to that song, that is why he didn’t allow it to be released… I’ve no evidence for that and it would be an incredibly petty thing to do, but these artists you know…
Here’s the full listing of the show.
– Mr Tambourine Man – The Times They Are A-Changin’ – Blowin’ In The Wind – I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine – Diamonds And Rust – When I Paint My Masterpiece – Like A Rolling Stone – Isis – Just Like A Woman – Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Lay Lady Lay
At the start of my previous post, I spoke of the special musical alchemy Dylan created in 2003 from the mix of harmonica, piano and voice, music that is exuberant and irrepressible, rollicking and turbulent. These qualities make 2003 a standout year, despite the growly roughness of Dylan’s voice. Even without the wailing harp, those qualities are still evident.
Besides the old favourites, Dylan surprised his audiences with two new songs for the NET. ‘Saving Grace,’ from Saved, 1980, had not been performed since the glory days of 1981. It is a rare song in the Dylan opus in that it is driven by gratitude, gratitude to God and to love’s saving grace. It belongs beside ‘What Can I Do For You?’ also from Saved. In his book on the NET, One More Night, Andrew Muir comments
‘It was asking a lot to expect Dylan to be able to sing this song properly, demanding as it does a sweeping devotional vocal to convincingly convey the depth of feeling and intent behind the simple words. Asking too much, as it transpired. Dylan’s trademark elongated endings sounded strained almost to the point of parody…The rest of the year’s problems were foreshadowed here, not least Dylan’s ever-growing need to repeat words to make lines fit: ‘all, all I’m seeing’ and ‘so many many times.’
Muir is referring to the first concert (6th Feb), and while it may be terribly unfair of me to offer a performance from two months later (30th March) as a way of meeting Muir’s comment, Muir doesn’t say that the performances of the song grew better as the year progressed. Besides, Muir’s comment that Dylan’s voice wasn’t up to the job might apply to many songs and not just from the gospel era. ‘Saving Grace’ is no different from many other songs for which Dylan has to find new forms of vocal expression to accommodate his changing voice. I’ll leave it up to you to decide to what extent Dylan was successful in translating this song for his 2003 voice. For me, these intimations of mortality sound just fine in this cracked and aged voice, sound much closer to ‘sleeping in a pine box for all eternity.’
Saving Grace
Staying with Dylan’s gospel years, let’s look at ‘I Believe in You’ (from Slow Train Coming), not a new song for the NET but, by 2003, pretty much a rarity. If any song requires the full sweep of Dylan’s vocal range it is this one. The famous performances from 1980/81 had Dylan pushing his voice to its very limit in almost hysterical assertions of faith. The older Dylan cannot match these vocal pyrotechnics, but can still deliver the song powerfully and convincingly. It can be heard with a secular ear as a passionate love song; there are some loves we will hold to no matter what people say. (This one’s from 23rd Nov, London).
I Believe in You
You can hear the audience’s surprise when, at Hammersmith, Dylan begins ‘Romance in Durango’ (from Desire), not heard since the heady days of the Rolling Thunder Tour.
Dylan excels in writing dramatic monologues, defined by Google as ‘A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader.’ The narrator ‘reveals their feelings, inner thoughts, or motivations. Unlike a soliloquy, which is a private speech in which a character addresses themselves, a dramatic monologue is addressed to another character or to the audience.’
Some Dylan songs, like ‘North Country Blues,’ ‘Lonesome Hobo,’ ‘My Own Version of You,’ ‘Isis,’ ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ and ‘Romance in Durango’ are clearly and obviously dramatic monologues, but it’s not always so clear. What about the street-wise hipster in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ or the past-haunted drifter of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’? You could argue that all Dylan songs are dramatic monologues, but this is not the place to do it. Enough for us to note here that ‘Romance in Durango’ is one of the most dramatic of these monologues.
A bandit takes his last ride with his love, Magdalena, dangling before her the prospect of the life they will be living, a life of freedom and gaiety summed up by ‘dancing the fandango.’ The setting is Mexico, and the details are hallucinations of hope with the prospects of marriage:
Then the padre will recite the prayers of old
In the little church this side of town
I will wear new boots and an earring of gold
You'll shine with diamonds in your wedding gown
These hallucinations, however, are not all propitious. There’s a sense of impending threat:
The way is long but the end is near
Already the fiesta has begun
And in the streets the face of God will appear
With His serpent eyes of obsidian
Then, suddenly, he is shot, mortally wounded, but the killing doesn’t end there, at least the prospect of it. The song ends with the continuation of violence.
Quick, Magdalena, take my gun
Look up in the hills, that flash of light
Aim well my little one
We may not make it through the night
Again, this performance, spirited as it is, probably can’t stand against the best of the Rolling Thunder performances, but it is a virtuoso vocal that doesn’t drift too far from the album version.
Romance in Durango
One of the performances that, for me, best encapsulates the spirit of the 2003 NET is this ‘High Water’ from Red Bluff, 7th Oct. It has that open-ended, jazzy feel, with Dylan coming the closest he gets to playing lead piano. His piano playing here foreshadows how he will use the instrument after 2012, with syncopated clusters of notes and a driving beat. Above all, I think, it’s the joyousness of the performance that gets through. We get that exciting sense that anything could happen; anarchy is indeed let loose.
High Water
While the Hammersmith concert is highly regarded, and rightly so, I like the Red Bluff concert, both for the clarity of the recording and Dylan’s piano work. This ‘Bye and Bye,’ also from “Love and Theft”, swings sweetly along, a deceptive sweetness. On the surface we have a happy-go-lucky, relaxed sentiment, as open and bouncy as a summer day.
I’m rollin’ slow—I’m doing all I know
I’m tellin’ myself I found true happiness
That I’ve still got a dream that hasn’t been repossessed
I’m rollin’ slow, goin’ where the wild red roses grow
The mention of repossessed dreams might evoke the era of the great Depression, but the last verse slips in a new level of threat:
Papa gone mad, mama, she’s feeling sad
I’ll establish my rule through civil war
Bring it on up from the ocean’s floor
I’ll take you higher just so you can see the fire.
And that doesn’t sound so nice at all.
Bye and bye
At Red Bluff, we find Dylan giving his energetic ode to indolence, ‘Watching the River Flow,’ a boogie twist. Google defines boogie-woogie as a ‘heavily percussive style of blues piano in which the right hand plays riffs (syncopated, repeating phrases) against a driving pattern of repeating eighth notes (ostinato bass).’ That heavily percussive style is characteristic of all Dylan’s piano playing during this period, but you can hear it most clearly in this performance. Again the band gives him room for a piano solo but Dylan is more interested in playing the rhythm, albeit with some flourishes.
Watching the River Flow
While I find Dylan’s vocal performance in this ‘Visions of Johanna,’ possibly his greatest song, a little rushed and breathless, he finds a nice little piano riff to underpin it. Dylan has experimented with different tempos for the song, but mostly I find his skipping rhythms run counter to the dark, swirling nature of the lyrics. These are lyrics you need to sink into, become immersed. ‘Visions’ is a journey through a perilous shadow world, through hell, an urban, wee-small-hours of the morning kind of hell. Little of that feeling is conveyed by Dylan’s NET performances of the song, but it’s served better here by the piano than by previous upbeat acoustic guitar backings. Another excellent recording from Red Bluff. Pity he misses the lyric at one point.
Visions of Johanna
While on the subject of Dylan’s greatest songs, we also find at Red Bluff a sharply delivered ‘Just Like A Rolling Stone,’ the greatest rock song ever written according to the magazine Rolling Stone. This famous attack on insincerity, snobbery and bad faith has gone down in history, but like ‘Visions,’ has not always fared well during the NET. This performance from Red Bluff is triumphant enough, and sung with gusto. You might be put off by the incessant upsinging, but in this case it seems to hammer home the bitter irony that drives the attack. Fans of Dylan’s guitar will be pleased to hear him back on the job, picking darkly away at the melody.
Like a Rolling Stone
If there is one song more famous than ‘Just like A Rolling Stone,’ it would be ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ a song Dylan apparently wrote in ten minutes back in 1963. The protest here is directed at human indifference to suffering. Dylan again abandons the keyboard for this one, delivering a characteristically oddball acoustic guitar solo, quite minimal, built around a few repeated notes. This is also from Red Bluff.
Blowing in the Wind.
Since we are in the Dylan hall of fame, we can’t let ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ go by. Dylan seldom fails to nail this one, and the Red Bluff performance is no exception. It’s got that sad, elegiac feeling, beautifully introduced by the keening voices of the band, suitably spooky and unearthly. We are so familiar with the song, it may be too easy to forget the dramatic context. A man, a lawman, is dying, bleeding out from a stomach wound – the song plays behind the death scene in Sam Peckinpah’s movie, Pat Garret and Billy the Kid. Dylan stays on the guitar, and delivers an impassioned vocal.
Knocking on Heaven’s door
We return to Dylan on the keyboard to finish this post with the wistful ‘Born in Time.’ From Under the Red Sky (1991), not one of Dylan’s most famous songs, but, to my mind, one of his most underestimated. All great Dylan songs are mood pieces, often, like ‘Visions’ after midnight moods, and this is one of those. We are but playthings of the gods, struggling in ‘the foggy web of destiny.’ Despite its sadness, it remains a love song, shot through with tenderness. But love, while it may be inevitable, is not easy, makes us too vulnerable, too exposed to the world.
Not one more night
not one more kiss
Not this time baby
no more of this
Takes too much skill
takes too much will
It's revealing
Another fine Red Bluff performance, Dylan in strong voice with that gentle piano quietly backing up the mood and pushing it all along. My favourite performance of the song.
Born in Time
That’s it for now, see you soon with more sounds from 2003
Kia Ora
We find that same joyousness in ‘Summer Days’ another song from ‘Love and Theft.’
We all want to be the one to crack the code and find the absolute meaning in the song intended by Dylan, even when he scoffs at our attempts. We may be very smart or very stupid in our attempts to decipher meaning as intended by Dylan, but truth be told, we cannot, at least not on a regular basis, do so.
For one thing, we each have our own unique biases and optical prisms we view life from. If we have a Christian bent, we find Christian meanings in Dylan songs that are not realistically there. If we are Jewish, we find Jewish meanings in Dylan songs where perhaps none existed. If we are secular and anti-religion, we insert our own religion protestations in Dylan songs. In other words, we interpolate our own values and beliefs in Dylan songs, to satisfy our own needs.
The other reason we will not crack the code in each Dylan song is because Dylan, in creating his song, uses his own unique and deep set of life experiences and everchanging moods. There are so many personal and public inputs that go into every Dylan song, that it would not be reasonable or even possible for him to relate each song’s intended meaning to us, if indeed there is an intended meaning.
This doesn’t mean we should stop trying to interpret his songs. Our evolving interpretations is what gives each song, extended life.
Dylan, in creating his song, is like Dr. Frankenstein. His songs become living monsters. Each song has a life of their own. Our interpretations of Dylan songs help give each respective song, life. (Other artists covering and interpreting, musically, Dylan songs, sometimes in different genres, also give Dylan songs, extra-life). Through space or place and time, we give our interpretations and found meanings relevant to us, and which may resonate with other people.
Dylan songs are timeless because they are biblical in proportion. Dylan songs, which often borrow content and imagery from Bible sources, is very much like the Bible. They are both timeless.
Like Dylan songs, the Bible uses metaphors and colourful imagery. Critics of religion and the Bible tend to throw out the baby with the bath water when they fail to recognize the inherent wisdom collected over thousands of years of human civilization in the Bible. Ironically, critics of religion often read and interpret the Bible, the same way that religious fundamentalists interpret it. They both read and interpret the Bible literally, as if it were primarily a history book written directly by G-d.
Mainstream and religious followers have for centuries got past this literal reading and interpretation of the Bible. We recognize the allegories and imagery in the Bible (and in Dylan songs), and study it not so much as a history book but as a record or narrative of the human condition and lesson on human behaviours. For example, in the opening editorial analysis of the English translated Stone Edition of The Torah and Genesis, it states, “We begin the study of the Torah with the realization that the Torah is not a history book, but the charter of Man’s mission in the universe”. The figures in the Bible, while not necessarily real either, represent humans with all their decencies and all their flaws. By way of example, we can relate to King David who exhibited both exceptional and questionable human behaviour. We don’t necessarily believe that G-d directly wrote the Bible, but we allow for the possibility that G-d inspired some or all its writings.
The Bible, like Dylan, uses concise language to narrate a story. The stories are sparse with puzzling gaps in information. We, the reader, must fill in those gaps. We fill in those gaps, in different times and places, to attach our own meaning and relevance in what we read.
Reading an article, Theater of the Mind in the February 2021 edition of Psychology Today, by Antonio Zadr (PH.D.) and Robert Stickgold (PH.D.), also helped me to surmise that Dylan songs are often like dreams. Dreams, like many Dylan songs, have a narrative structure with lots of images and allusions, not entirely random, partially related, and partially coherent. The dream, according to Allan Hobson of Harvard Medical School, “(is the result of the forebrain) making the best of a bad job in producing even partially coherent dream imagery from the relative noisy signals sent up to it from the brainstem.” With Dylan songs, Dylan is the “brainstem” sending us imagery and we are the forebrain trying to make sense of it.
The fact that we continue to attach meaning and relevance in Dylan songs, through space and time, demonstrates that his songs will stand the test of time and always be recognized as great works of art.
Let’s come back to my interpretation, improbable as it may be, that the lost love references in Time Out of Mind songs could be a reference to G-d as opposed to or in addition to a woman.
In Dirt Road Blues, DYLAN cannot seem to find peace of mind or salvation until he regains his lost love. DYLAN’s desperation and search for his lost love, in this song, can just as easily be G-d as it is a woman.
In Standing in the Doorway, we hear the following verse:
“Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you
It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow
You left me standing in the doorway crying
I got nothing to go back to now”
DYLAN is frustrated that a woman or G-d is not returning his love for her/Him.
“Standing in the doorway, crying” may be an allegory and image that Dylan uses several times in the album.
Seth Rogovoy believes, “You left me standing in the doorway crying” could also be an allusion to the Yom Kippur Neilah service when Jews, are tearfully pleading with G-d to be inscribed for another year in the Book of Life, just before the closing of the gates”. In ’Dylan’s’ case, he is still crying after the door is closed which is very ominous. ‘Dylan’, by still crying after the gates of heaven closes, may not be too confident about G-d’s judgment for him.
In Million Miles, DYLAN might as well be a million miles from his lost lover, which could easily, physically, and figuratively, be G-d.
In Cold Irons Bound, DYLAN says, “It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay.” All physical beauty decays, including the beauty of a woman whose love he presumably lost. It is an odd thing to say about a lost love that one can’t shake. Perhaps then, ‘Dylan’ is not referring specifically to a former loving woman with this reference.
G’d’s “beauty”, which is spiritual, never decays. Perhaps DYLAN is intentionally making this statement to signal to us that his lost love cannot be that of a woman, whose beauty erodes over time. It must be G-d.
In Can’t Wait, DYLAN is once again standing, praying, in front of the gate:
“I’m breathing hard, standing at the gate”.
Also, in Can’t Wait, DYLAN sings, “It’s late, I’m trying to walk the line”
“Walk the line” means “to behave in an authorized or socially accepted manner. “
We would have presumed Dylan was to behave in a socially acceptable manner to regain his lost love but if his lost love is G-d, he may have to toe the line, ritually speaking, to recover G-d’s love.
If Dylan or DYLAN is struggling with his relationship to G-d, he is following in the tradition of most, if not all religions and certainly Judaism.
Abraham challenges G-d when He announces he will destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, killing all its inhabitants.
Jacob wrestled with an Angel of G-d, which could also be an allegory for the struggle in his own mind for his faith in G-d.
The Prophets, beginning with Moses, desperately wanted to reject their callings or missions directed by G-d.
DYLAN has decided at the end of the song, Highland, that he will not follow the conventional path that he took during his Christian phase, or even the ways of the orthodox Jewish order or the disciplines from any religion.
“There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow”
DYLAN is going to find his own way, not some religious institutional prescribed ritual way, to unite with G-d.
Maybe the Highlands is that figurative place where he finds communion with G-d in his mind’s eye. (Or perhaps he unites with G-d with the creation and performance of his songs).
That is why the last line of the song and album is such a powerful album ending statement:
“Well I’m already there in my mind and that’s good enough for now.” (In other words, DYLAN will find communion with G-d, not through institutional religion, but by his own way and G-d’s calling, through mind and song).
Or as Paul Anka or Frank Sinatra would sing, “I’ll do it my way.”
Getting back specifically to the song, Richard F. Thomas remarks about the studio recording, Love Sick, in his book, Why Bob Dylan Matters, “The melancholy (of the song) is only made more stunningly poignant and beautiful by the bluesy voice of the singer and the music of it all.”
While the sorrow and pain are evident in Dylan’s vocals, the song structure also contributes to the underlying sadness with its use of minor to major to minor chords.
“Trying thinking of that pulsating beat and the reverberating guitar gives us the plod of the lyrics walking, but the sudden quick guitar change at the end of each verse jerks us out of the descent.”
Margotin and Guesdon in their book, Bob Dylan, All The Songs, describes the production perfecting this song:
“The gloomy atmosphere of the production is in perfect harmony with the lyrics. According to Daniel Lanois, ‘We treated the voice almost like a harmonica when you overdrive it through a small guitar amplifier.’ The vocals are actually very dark, sepulchral, almost evoking the classic horror films. This ‘spinning’ effect is produced by an Eventide He500 stereo flanger. It is also one of the first times Dylan permitted the distortion of his voice by studio effects.
“Since the 1960’s, (Dylan) had refused to follow the sonic experiments of many artists of the time. The result is mesmerizing. The orchestration releases a dark feeling, in particular Augie Meyers on organ and Jim Dickinson on the Wurlitzer.
“In the introduction, a rhythmic loop is buried in the sound mass. The presence of two drummers does not affect the clarity of the mix. Neither of them takes over the song. On the contrary, their parts remain airy. The production is again remarkable: Daniel Lanois created an absolute unique world.”
Evidently, Love Sick is a favourite of Dylan. As of 2018, he has performed it 835 times.
Although sonically speaking, I like the audio album version of Love Sick best, there is an interesting performance I would like to share with you.
Look for the “Soy Bomb” incident during the Grammy Awards Dylan and band performance:
Dylan hardly bats an eye when the “Soy Bomb” guy comes on stage!
Michael Portnoy, the “Soy Bomb” guy, was hired by Dylan’s production company to stand in the background with the other dancers and groove to the music.
Unexpectedly, Portnoy ripped off his shirt, displaying “Soy Bomb” written across his chest, stepped on stage, and started dancing and contorting spastically.
Portnoy explained his found meaning and relevance in the song:
“Soy”… represents dense nutritional life. “Bomb” is, obviously, an explosive destructive force. So, “soy bomb” is what I think art should be: dense, transformational, explosive life.”
According to Entertainment Weekly, “he meant Soy Bomb as a ‘spontaneous explosion of the self’ to re-invigorate the current music scene.”
Both Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show, parodied the event with Will Ferrell and Jay Leno, respectively, portraying Portnoy.
And the song continues to breathe and find new life.
When asked by a reporter in 1965, what, if anything, would he sell out to…
Dylan wittingly replied, “Ladies undergarments.”
In 2004, Dylan actually consented Victoria’s Secret Line of Lingerie to appear and use his song, Love Sick, commercially, in one of their ads.
A sexy, scantily clad model appears in the ad with Dylan looking on:
Here is a toast to Bob Dylan. “To his songs and their everlasting life!”
———-
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
What songs that get included in a Dylan studio recorded album, are a mystery to us, especially when many “masterpieces” like Blind Willie McTell, become outtakes. Perhaps, for Dylan, it is not important how “good” the song is but whether it fits in atmosphere or tone with the rest of the album. Likewise, the sequencing of songs on an album are important to Dylan, and the first and the last song bear special significance.
Love Sick is not only the first song on Time Out of Mind but it is also the first released composition in about five years. Love Sick sets the theme and atmosphere for the whole album. On a broader note, we shall also examine our role as interpreters of Dylan’s music. Our song interpretations, however unlikely they are in matching the intended meanings given by Dylan, nevertheless, add life and timelessness to each song.
We know from the first verse and even the first line, that this song and album are going to be melancholic:
I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping
Compare the opening line in Love Sick:
“My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming”
The two songs were written about thirty-two years apart represent different journeys, for the narrator of the songs, at different times in his life and at different places, if indeed the narrator for each song is the same person.
Dylan wrote Mr. Tambourine Man in his mid-twenties in or before 1965. The narrator of this song is likely a young man with a long journey ahead.
In Love Sick, Dylan, or the narrator, is more like an elder statesman, and his walking is more like a slow even pace, close to the end of his journey or death, not gazing at the future, because there isn’t much of one, but looking over his shoulder at his past.
The elder statesman is struggling over a past relationship as he is “walking with you in my head”. The lost love theme is introduced here and becomes a recurring theme in the album.
The narrator in Love Sick is love-sick, walking through the streets, as if he was a walking dead person, his senses numb, a zombie, or an invisible man. He is not part of and/or is unmoved by the whole world around him.
Who is the narrator of this and other Dylan songs?
In Love Sick, he sees everyone around him, happy and in love, accentuating his own loneliness and hopelessness. He walks in a “shadow”, unseen by others:
I see lovers in the meadow
I see silhouettes in the window
I watch them ’til they’re gone and they leave me hanging on
To a shadow
We have become so “intimate” with Dylan over the years because he has been quite a force in our lives. We form strong associations with his lifetime of songs, as they connect us to personal and global events in places and times in our lives.
As such, we want to believe the narrator is Dylan himself.
However, Dylan denies that his songs are personal, about him or people he knows.
Afterall, when he writes about mortality, world dysfunction, love relationships and spirituality, he is writing about the whole human condition and not just himself.
When Dylan is in concert these days, he is on stage, never talking directly to the audience, because like the other “stage actors” or band members, he is playing a role. He carefully selects the songs and their sequence, which together make up a “stage play” he and his band members are performing. Dylan is in costume. It is not surprising that Dylan had a white painted face, like a mask, and wore a cream-coloured fedora adorned with a bouquet of flowers during his Rolling Thunder Review concerts. As Dylan ages, he changes and his “acting roles” suitable for stage, also changes.
Likewise, his songs are often constructed like plays or stories. As Dylan, the songwriter changes with age, so to do his songs with his evolving emotional sensibilities, along with his vocal and physical abilities to perform them.
So, one more time, who is the narrator in Dylan songs? While many of us would like to think it is Dylan himself, who is Dylan? Dylan, clearly, is everchanging. The Dylan who first sang Mr Tambourine Man in 1965, is not the same Dylan who sings it today. Dylan, I believe, consciously recognizes that. While using his growing lifetime experiences and changing moods to inform him in his songwriting, he is writing about the broader human condition.
Dylan inserts a character or “actor” to play the part of the narrator in each song. The narrator may possess physical and emotional qualities which are like his own, but the character in each song is fluid.
As such, going forward, I will use DYLAN and the ‘narrator of the song’ interchangeably.
The all- important refrain in the first song of the album, sets the atmosphere for the song and album. The theme it expresses, lovesickness, which he cannot shake off, is an important and recurring theme in the album:
“I’m sick of love…but I’m in the thick of it
This kind of love…I’m so sick of it”
DYLAN is experiencing an internal struggle, and is torn between the desire he still has for his former lover and his need to erase her from his memory.
The last song refrain, DYLAN in anguish sings:
“I’m sick of love…I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love…I’m trying to forget you”
The last refrain is followed by the last lines in the song which are:
“Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you”
Compare the refrain with King Solomon’s lament in the Song of Songs, 2:7:
“(Bereft of your presence)/ I am sick with love.”
Dylan has alluded to the Song of Songs in other compositions. Could this be another allusion to the Song of Songs? If so, it is a very important one.
The Song of Songs is a love poem written by King Solomon. On the surface it appears that King Solomon is grieving about his love for a woman.
However, Song of Songs as explained by Seth Rogovoy, author of Bob Dylan, Prophet, Mystic, Poet, “is commonly understood to be an allegory for the love that exists between G-d and the exiled people of Israel. Early in the poem, Israel speaks to G-d, seeking His comfort from afar, from exile…In other words, Israel is “lovesick” for G-d.”
If Dylan is deliberately making an allusion to the Song of Songs in Love Sick, it is not much of a leap to believe that Dylan too is using an allegory in his song and album for the narrator’s love for G-d. DYLAN too, like the exiled people of Israel, is living “afar” and in “exile”, removed from G-d.
Dylan or DYLAN is perhaps still struggling in finding communion or even a relationship with G-d after unsatisfactory life experiences with Institutional Religion. Is Dylan or DYLAN searching for a more unconventional method to connect with G-d?
Substituting G-d for woman whenever the lovesickness theme appears in the album songs, seems to fit well, as we shall see below.
However, before digging deeper into this interpretation, let me raise the question, ‘is this interpretation a stretch?’
The article continues….
———-
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
“But, on the other hand, with Dirt Road Blues he made me pull out the original cassette, sample 16 bars and we all played over that.” (Daniel Lanois, Irish Times, Oct. 24, 1997)
The hun t for the right sound seems to be one of Dylan’s greater concerns in all the decades of his career, and especially in his late work. More important than a chord sequence, more important than semantics, more important than the arrangement and the key and the melody. Its importance to Dylan is a refrain in the interviews, speeches and self-analyses, and close associates like studio staff, producers and session musicians emphasise it again and again. Roughly from Time Out Of Mind onwards, it even seems to become something of an obsession.
In the wonderful interview series published by Uncut in the run-up to The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs (2008), this fascination with sound is a theme with each of the interviewees. Technician Mark Howard, for example, tells:
“He’d tune into this radio station that he could only get between Point Dune and Oxnard. It would just pop up at one point, and it was all these old blues recordings, Little Walter, guys like that. And he’d ask us, “Why do those records sound so great? Why can’t anybody have a record sound like that anymore? Can I have that?” And so, I say, “Yeah, you can get those sounds still.” “Well,” he says, “ that’s the sound I’m thinking of for this record.”
… and he does find it eventually, that sound, with a slight detour. Mark Howard explains it admirably. A few months before the studio sessions, Dylan asks the technical guys whether they could record and mix a live show (House Of Blues, Atlanta, August 3 and 4, 1996). Dylan is peeping over Howard’s shoulder as he mixes the recordings:
“He says, “Hey, Mark, d’ya think you can make my harmonica sound electric on this one?” So I said, yeah, sure, and I took the harmonica off the tape and ran it through this little distortion box, and I played it, and he said, “Wow, that’s great.” So we’re mixing away, and, after he stops playing harmonica, he starts singing into the same mic, and Dylan hears his voice going through this little vocal amp, and he gets really excited about it. “Wow! This is great!” And so I had to remix the whole record, putting this little vocal amp on all of his vocals for the whole show. And that sound became the sound of Time Out Of Mind.”
As producer Daniel Lanois, not only in his interview with the Irish Times, but in Uncut as well, talks again about those “reference records”:
“Bob has a fascination with records from the Forties, Fifities and even further back. We listened to some of these old recordings to see what it was about them that made them compelling.”
Lanois himself recalls old Al Johnson recordings, and in the 2001 interview with Mikal Gilmore for Rolling Stone, Dylan remembers yet another name:
“I familiarized [Lanois] with the way I wanted the songs to sound. I think I played him some Slim Harpo recordings—early stuff like that. He seemed pretty agreeable to it”
Dylan’s memory could be right. Slim Harpo has been a constant over the past half century. In interviews, he regularly cites him as an example of artists who fascinated the adolescent Bobby Zimmerman back in Duluth;
“Up north, at night, you could find these radio stations with no name on the dials, you know, that played pre-rock ’n’ roll things — country blues. We would hear Slim Harpo or Lightnin’ Slim and gospel groups, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. I was so far north, I didn’t even know where Alabama was.”
And Dylan remains faithful to Harpo. The throwaway “Seven Days” (1976) already seems to be a rip-off of Slim’s “Mailbox Blues”; for Down In The Groove (1988) Dylan records an unreleased version of “Got Love If You Want It”; on this album Time Out Of Mind, the melody of “’Til I Fell In Love With You” is very similar to “Strange Love”; as DJ of Theme Time Radio Hour Dylan plays “Raining In My Heart” and “I Need Money (Keep Your Alibis)” in the twenty-first century; and in “Murder Most Foul” (2020) Slim drops by again: play “Scratch My Back”, the narrator asks Wolfman Jack.
Enough Slim Harpo traces, in any case, to go along with Dylan’s claim that he is moved by this sound to such an extent that he wants to copy it for Time Out Of Mind. And indeed, the warm underwater sound of the bass, the tinny guitar sound and the metallic vocals with chilly reverb of, for example, “Strange Love” are quite similar to the sound of “Dirt Road Blues”:
… but still a bit warmer than the rest of Time Out Of Mind. Which can be traced back to that technical fact revealed by Lanois, that only this song used the basic tracks from that mythical demo session, presumably somewhere around that August 1996 live recording in Atlanta. Hence, this is the only song on which Winston Watson’s drums can be heard; unusually, months before the actual studio recordings, Dylan had already been demo-ing new songs, searching for the sound, with members of his touring band. Of which Winston Watson, in Joel Gilbert’s wonderful rockumentary Bob Dylan Never Ending Tour Diaries: Drummer Winston Watson’s Incredible Journey (2009), has a vague recollection:
“So, at one point, he said actually something like to de facto: there’s a sound I’m looking for and we’re not getting it.”
Winston remembers, with a pained face, how desperate he became when Dylan again and again stops rehearsals, unsatisfied, and how he sought to blame himself. When Dylan for the umpteenth time stops a song halfway through, Winston stands up and says (“I with my big mouth”) that he can’t take it anymore.
“This is nerve-wracking. Obviously, there’s something you wanna hear from me that I’m not giving you. I wanna go home. I can’t do this. This is… this is… I can’t.” So Dylan turns around to me, and he says: “Sit down, Winnie.” I thought, oh my God, now I’ve done it, I’ve made Bob Dylan mad. And he puts his cigarette out and he stands up and he says: “Winston is here because he has a certain vibe. I want that vibe. I’m not getting that vibe. This whole room is full of complacency. So if you don’t all wanna go home now, we’re gonna start playing some music in here. Or everybody goes home.”
The harsh pep talk seems to do the job. “Dirt Road Blues” most certainly has a certain vibe, in any case.
To be continued. Next up: Dirt Road Blues part 11 postscript
————-
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:
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
I’ve had a little pause in the Dylan cover a day series (there’s a full list of the 47 songs covered below) but have now gathered enough strength to carry on… and what better cover song to offer than “I contain multitudes by Emma Swift
Quite why so much of the double album has been ignored by cover artists I am not sure – but thankfully we have this most beautiful rendition.
What can one say about this? The accompaniment is perfection, the voice is utterly beautiful, and for me (even if no one else) the lyrics take on a new and higher meaning than they achieve in Bob’s own version. If I gave out awards this track would get multiples of the things.
On the Cover me songs site Emma is quoted as saying, “Like many of the great Bob Dylan songs, ‘I Contain Multitudes’ is a magnet, a fly’s eye view of the cultural wilderness in which we wander. It’s magnificent and heartbreaking, a love letter to words and art and music, to all that has been lost and all that might be redeemed. To me this song has become an obsession, a mantra, a prayer. I can’t hope to eclipse it, all I hope to do is allow more people to hear it, to feel comforted by it, and to love it the way I do.”
Just listen. It is beautiful.
——————
A list of previous songs reviewed is given below.
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 14,000 members.
The city-dwelling Romantic Transcendentalist poet in the lines below finds comfort from the memory of a sunlit breeze in the countryside:
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
(William Wordsworth: I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud)
Not so the Modernist poet quoted beneath; the hustle and bustle of modern city life darkens his vision of the natural world:
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth and polished
(TS Eliot: Rhapsody On A Windy Night)
There’s a yearning hope for some “gentle” healing power from outside the self, expressed in the following song lyrics:
Treat me kindly dear blue angel
Deepest colour of the night
Be merciful, be gentle
For I have no strength to fight
(Dave Cousins: Blue Angel)
Somewhat like the sentiment expressed in the “response” lyrics below, but the strength to fight the “chilly breeze” is to come from within oneself:
I felt the emptiness so wide
I don't know what's wrong from right
I just know I need the strength to fight
Strength to fight the world outside
(Bob Dylan: Life Is Hard ~ Dylan/Hunter)
TS Eliot questions the motif of strength coming from within the individual:
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
(TS Eliot: The Hollow Men)
TS Eliot admires the prose of Henry James, an American who became a British citizen; James is a writer caught on the borderline between the older Hegel-influenced Romantic Transcendentalists and the new Realists.
In the novel ‘Daisy Miller’ by Henry James, the Calvinistic-bent American Mr. Winterbourne, now a class-oriented Victorian moralist living in Switzerland, is confused by the flirty behaviour of newly-arrived younger ‘Daisy’ Miller from America.
The use of correlative symbolism in regards to a person’s name casually picked up in the Robert Frost-influenced song lyrics beneath:
Winterlude, Winterlude, my little daisy
Winterlude, by the telephone wire
Winterlude, it's making me lazy
Come on, sit by the logs in the fire
(Bob Dylan: Winterlude)
—————-
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with around 14,000 members.
Aaron: Bob appeared on Letterman in 1992 and performed Like A Rolling Stone. Just check out some of the musicians on stage with him here!
Chrissie Hynde (guitar) Steve Vai (guitar) Carole King (piano) Jim Keltner (drums) Roseanne Cash, Nancy Griffith, Emmylou Harris, Michelle Shocked, Mavis Staples (backup vocals)
Tony: Another set of subtle changes to the melody – and everyone looks happy except Bob.
This is a remarkable performance; I could do with a little more volume on the voice, but then you can’t have everything. Carole King looks like she’s really enjoying every second of it, and as time goes by even Bob gets a slight smile. If I find anything less than perfection it is the backing female voice after about five minutes – it is almost too much with the complete a brass section doing their thing by then. But why not?
Aaron: Unfortunately Bob’s 1979 appearance on Saturday Night Live is not on YouTube but it is on Facebook. Hopefully if you click on the link below it should take you there. The video is presented slightly out of order. The order of the songs performed was:
Tony: Don’t forget that because this is Facebook you might have to turn up the Facebook volume on the page, as well as the volume on your computer; but then again I’m probably the only person who regularly forgets.
If you are very kindly a regular reader of my ramblings you will know that this is one of my favourite Dylan compositions, not just because of the music itself but because of Sinead O’Connor’s version which was most recently mentioned in the Dylan Cover a Day series.
This is a gorgeous version by Bob, and I am endlessly intrigued by the way this song can have two utterly different meanings depending on where you start. Interesting to see how Bob looks during this performance.
And it is a beautiful rendition of this extraordinary song. There’s no special reason why you should want to follow the background on this song, but in case you do, my commentary is here,
But I’m not trying to divert you from this version, which I do love. It is just that for me the background to the song is now a core part of what it is.
“Serve Somebody” continues with the same sound and relaxed version. I do love the way Bob also gives us some blanks within the piece – moments when there is just the backing music without any feeling that there always has to be fill-ins.
“When you gonna wake up” carries on the same theme and musical style. It’s just nice and relaxed musically, which is in complete contrast to the message within the lyrics. But Bob can do that. Not always, but he can.
Aaron:Bob’s most recent appearance on Letterman was 2015 and he played The Night We Called It A Day.
Tony: Well, yes of course the greatest songwriter of modern times is Bob Dylan. There has only been one other songwriter of such stature and that was Irving Berlin. But then, after that intro, Bob sings a song that is not one his own. It was written in 1941 by Matt Dennis, the lyrics by Tom Adair. I like the way Bob goes for a little wander during the instrumental break.
And to add something of my own here, just in case you are interested, here is what the original sounded like…
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with around 14,000 members.
Gonna walk down that dirt road ’til everything becomes the same
Gonna walk down that dirt road ’til everything becomes the same
I keep on walking ’til I hear her holler out my name
The sung version, remarkably, offers a kind of opposite form of oblivion compared to the published final couplet. “Til everything becomes the same” is a terrifying prospect for the future, although it seems as if a sardonic David Byrne is trying to sell it as Paradise: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens,” says the refrain of one of his most beautiful songs, “Heaven” from one of Talking Heads’ most perfect albums, Fear Of Music (1979). However, it turns out to be a multi-layered wordplay in the category of “My name is Nobody” and “Who’s on first”;
Everyone is trying to get to the bar
The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven
The band in Heaven, they play my favorite song
They play it once again, they play it all night long
No, the place where everything becomes the same is in all cultures and story variants a poetic representation of Hell or else a diabolical punishment. The 49 daughters of Danaos are forever filling the bottomless barrel of the Danaids, Sisyphos has to push a boulder up a mountain in the Tartaros until the end of time, and a bit down the road Tantalos suffers perpetually from hunger and thirst while standing in a pond of crystal-clear water up to his chin. And that is just Greek mythology.
In Dante’s Inferno it is not much different; most of the punished are in a loop of everything is the same, have to undergo an eternal repetition. The greedy and profligate constantly and aimlessly move the heavy stones that symbolise their former earthly possessions, the jealous helplessly suffer in an everlasting cold rain and hail, in the Fifth Circle the aggressive ones fight each other ceaselessly until the End of Time, and so on.
It all inspires Friedrich Nietzsche in August 1881 to write his famous Aphorism 341, “The Greatest Weight”, which he publishes in The Gay Science in 1882:
What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?
… and which eventually inspires Harold Ramis to film the classic Groundhog Day (1993). Although, strictly speaking, not everything becomes the same there; the cynical weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) does relive the same February 2 in a seemingly endless time loop, but he himself fills each day differently – he learns to play the piano, picks up foreign languages, commits thefts and has one-night stands, learns from his mistakes and becomes a different person. The denouement, however, does have a similarity to Dylan’s plot. It will finally be February 3, Phil is finally redeemed: by the love of a woman.
Apparently, the narrator from “Dirt Road Blues” hopes for a similar redemption. He will keep walking until everything has become the same, and then keep walking ’til I hear her holler out my name. Already quite classic; identical, for instance, to adaptations of The Flying Dutchman, such as Heine’s fictional report in Memoirs of the Herr von Schnabelowopski (1833) and especially Wagner’s opera (1843), in which the Dutchman is indeed cursed to try to round the Cape of Good Hope until the End of Time, but in which he can be redeemed: by a woman’s love to the death. Which Wagner, of course, handles quite dramatically and literally; Senta tears herself loose from the arms of the men who try to stop her and throws herself off the cliff, hollering out:
Preis' deinen Engel und sein Gebot!
Hier steh' ich, treu dir bis zum Tod!
(Praise your angel and his words!
Here I am, true to you till death!)
Or the queen who can save her son if she says the name of Rumpelstiltskin, or all those other stories from different cultures that attribute magical powers to the mere knowing or mentioning of a name. Jehovah with the Jews, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named with Harry Potter, the many pseudonyms we invent to avoid having to pronounce the name of the Devil.
The Dark Romantic, Gothic version then suggests that Dylan’s narrator is pursuing a slightly macabre afterlife experience, much like the aggressive climax on The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat (1968), in the trashy garage sale “I Heard Her Call My Name” (produced by Dylan producer Tom Wilson, by the way);
And I know that she's long, dead and gone,
Still it ain't the same.
When I wake up in the morning, mama,
I heard her call my name.
… in other words, the murder-ballad variant, the scenario in which the narrator has murdered his beloved in that one-room country shack, and is now doomed to be on the run forever ’til everything becomes the same.
All in all, then, this final couplet of “Dirt Road Blues” offers an opposite plot to the published version; in Lyrics, the narrator opts for total isolation and oblivion, for a hideaway right beside the sun, a life behind a barrier to keep myself away from everyone. In this sung version, however, he can be rescued from the eternal sameness by communication, by interaction: when the woman he loves also loves him and calls his name.
Richard Wagner would undoubtedly have chosen this variant.
To be continued. Next up: Dirt Road Blues part 10
————
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:
Hecate, in ancient mythology, watches the crossroads at night; she represents the dark side of Diana, the latter being the bright moon-goddess, sister of Apollo, the sun-god.
The following song lyrics warn everyone of the Gothic witch of the night:
Don't go out tonight
Well, it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise
(Creedence Clearwater Revival ~ Fogerty)
Construed it can be that the narrator in the song lyrics beneath considers himself a relative of Hecate; yet more closely related to the flaming-haired Apollo – the sun-god of Mount Olympus who’s associated with music:
Can you help me walk that moonlight mile
Can you give me the blessing of your smile
I'll bring someone to life, use all my powers
Do it in the dark, in the wee, small hours
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)
In the lyrics below, the narrator’s stuck in a Mobile-like town where people complacently accept being compelled to fight in a war that those from rich families are able to avoid:
Well, if I had a dollar
For every song I sung
Every time the band played
While the people sat there drunk
You know I'd catch the next train
Way back to where I live
Oh Lord, stuck in a Lodi again
(Creedence Clearwater Revival: Lodi ~ Fogerty)
https://youtu.be/yA7iGxV6rt4
The narrator in the song lyrics below ponders the fundamental nature of human beings, the dis-ease, that causes them to resort to war; even powerful Apollo on Mount Olympus didn’t initially want to get involved in the Trojan War, but he does.
And, of course, you don’t count the dead when the gods are on your side:
I wish I had a dollar for everyone that died within that year
Got'em grabbed by the collar, and plenty a maid shed a tear
Now beneath my heart, it sure put on a squeeze
Oh that Legionaire's disease
(Delta/Cross Band: Legionaire's Disease ~ Bob Dylan)
In Greek/Roman mythology, the god of thunder, lightning bolts, and rain is Zeus, the oft angry ruler of the sky, and the father of Apollo:
Long as I remember, the rain been coming down
Clouds of mystery pouring confusion on the ground
Good men through the ages trying to find the sun
And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain
(Creedence Clearwater Revival: Who'll Stop The Rain ~ Fogerty)
Alluding to a nursery rhyme:
Oh, don't let the rain come down
My roof's got a hole in it, and I might drown
(Crooked Little Man)
And to a romantic-inclined ‘seize-the-day’ poet:
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay
(Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night)
In the following song lyrics, surrealistic images built from the matchsticks of words correlate with the shortness of life:
The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
In the ceremonies of the horsemen
Even the pawn must hold a grudge
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero)
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with around 14,000 members.
by Aaron Galbraith in the USA and Tony Attwood in the UK
A list of earlier articles from this series is given at the end.
Aaron: I thought it would be fun to have Tony take a listen to some obscure, esoteric Dylan duets from over the years. I’m really looking forward to reading his opinions!
First up it’s a cover of Eric Von Schmidt’s Acne. This was recorded live with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in 1961. The audio was released on the soundtrack to the movie “The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack”
Tony:Even the beginning is wonderful – “Looks like we have another dramatic…” [long pause then softly] “entrance”. What a shame we don’t have a film of this.
I don’t know what the silliest part of this is; the recording or Aaron asking me to review it! For once I am lost for words!! Except right at the end there is a lovely moment where one of the people on stage says “All good things….” and leaves it hanging. Which is actually very funny in the context of what has just happened. But then another speaker says “comes to an end” which totally destroys the moment. Hey ho!
Aaron: Next up we have two completely unreleased tracks.
First a duet with Ringo Starr called “Wish I Knew Now What I Knew Then”. This was recorded for an unreleased Ringo album in 1987, there is no word as to who the writer is.
Tony:A bit of background I just looked up. Our friends at the Bob Dylan Project have this listed as “Composed by:Charlie Craig, Vince Gill (?)” Charlie Craig wrote for such luminaries as Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Alan Jackson, Travis Tritt, Johnny Cash, Aaron Tippin and George Strait. Vince Gill, according to Wiki “has recorded more than 20 studio albums, charted over 40 singles on the U.S. Billboard charts as Hot Country Songs, and has sold more than 26 million albums.”
The one thing that hits me is the unusual musical construction at “what I knew then” which is known in classical music as an interrupted cadence. What actually happens is that one expects to return to the major chord that the song is based around, known as the tonic, and written with the Roman numeral I, but instead we get the chord built on the sixth note of the scale, which is a minor. So the music is never resolved – we are left hanging.
The song is performed in E flat so those final two chords are B flat major and C minor. It is not that uncommon a cadence in the music of the classical romantic era but in rock – I can’t remember ever hearing it before, and it doesn’t quite sound right.
Listening and knowing that the album was not released despite having such luminaries on it, I think I can feel why. With such luminaries, it ought to sparkle a bit more than it does.
Aaron:Next we have The Spirit Of Rock and Roll. An unreleased duet with Brian Wilson, recorded for his unreleased album Sweet Insanity. It also has some input from Jeff Lynne. A version without Dylan and Lynne was released on a Beach Boys compilation “Songs From Here and Back”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WE8vPvIoyJo
Tony:I am not sure about having Bob Dylan associated with a song that has the line “every boy and girl” in it, nor come to that “the spirit the spirit the spirit of rock and roll”.
There is also an attempt, it seems to me, to be the Beachboys but without the material. Indeed the reason there is so much backing with bass singer, female chorus and all the instruments pounding out is probably because there is nothing much there in the first place and they are trying to cover it all up.
And sadly the lyrics don’t really help either….
Once it's in your blood
You won't be the same no more
Reaching every land
From L.A. to Tokyo
It's in the heart of every boy and girl
Everywhere all around the world
Aaron: Last up, for now, is a duet with Ralph Stanley of The Lonesome River. Originally released on Stanley’s “Clinch Mountain County” album it was eventually included on Bob’s Bootleg Series 8: Tell Tale Signs.
Tony:Just listen to that instrumental opening. It is only about 20 seconds but it is perfection in terms of musicianship and setting the scene. And all done in 20 seconds. Really, I mean, just go back and listen again. And then compare with the songs we have heard prior to this. This really is great music and brilliant musicians.
Bob’s voice is slightly cracked and aged as becomes the song. And then the harmonies in the chorus are perfect; in short a dead-simple song but it is performed to perfection. The accompaniment is held in check, with all the players understanding the essence of the song, and no one trying to out do the other. The fiddle comes in, during the instrumental break, but not at once. It is all so underplayed, with everyone understanding the meaning of the lyrics and the tradition of the music.
This is what I search for in the archives – the lesser known Dylan tracks where his amazing historical knowledge and understanding shines through an exquisite performance.
Wonderful Aaron. All previous sins are forgiven when you deliver a recording like this.
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with around 14,000 members.
In 2004, Simon & Schuster publishes Dylan’s third official song lyrics collection, Lyrics: 1962-2001. The previous edition ran until 1985, so this is the first with the lyrics of Time Out Of Mind, and thus also the first with the lyrics of “Dirt Road Blues”.
Textual discrepancies in Lyrics are not uncommon. Words, half-sentences and, in extremis, even whole stanzas are different from what Dylan actually sings – which has been the case since the very first official release, since Writings & Drawings from 1973. In general hardly understandable, these changes, and puzzling in any case. We don’t know if Dylan personally makes the changes, for example. Sometimes text differences seem to be due to careless transcriptions by a dyslexic secretary with hearing problems (Ol’ black Bascom, don’t break no mirrors as the opening line of “Tell Me, Momma” is famous), sometimes one suspects a teasing Dylan wants to play a prank (I’ll build a geodesic dome in the transcription of “Santa Fe”), and sometimes it looks as if an embarrassed lyricist tries to cover up his own lousy poetry (“You Angel You”).
None of the three options seem to apply to the rewritten last verse of “Dirt Road Blues”. On Time Out Of Mind, Dylan sings, perfectly intelligible:
Gonna walk down that dirt road 'til everything becomes the same
Gonna walk down that dirt road 'til everything becomes the same
I keep on walking 'til I hear her holler out my name
Completely different from the lyrics published in Lyrics 1962-2001, in Lyrics 1961-2012 and on the site:
Gon’ walk on down that dirt road ’til I’m right beside the sun
Gon’ walk on down until I’m right beside the sun
I’m gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone
Dylan will never perform the song, so we can’t trace which one is meant to be the “actual” text. Normally, it would be plausible that the published text is the “definitive” one. Lyrics 1962-2001 was released in 2004, seven years after Time Out Of Mind. It seems obvious that Dylan, in the meantime, went through the proofs with his red pencil, and made some changes here and there.
Against that scenario speaks the tip of the iceberg that producer Daniel Lanois offers, in a telephone interview with The Irish Times, 24 October 1997 (so three weeks after the release of Time Out Of Mind):
“In fact, when we first got together, he didn’t play me any songs; he read me the songs. He read 12 lyrics back-to-back for an hour and it was like listening to someone reading a book. Then, later, in the studio, he modified the lyrics.”
… which suggests that Dylan gave these very same written-out lyrics to Simon & Schuster, but forgot, or didn’t bother, to incorporate the modifications that Lanois says he made later in the studio into the written-out lyrics. In that – somewhat more likely – case the published text in Lyrics and on the site is the older text, the original text.
Debatable though it remains. Both in terms of content and stylistically, the “wrong”, the published final couplet fits better with the rest of the song and with the overall colour of Time Out Of Mind at all;
Gon’ walk on down until I’m right beside the sun
I’m gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone
… escapism pur sang. The whole of Time Out Of Mind is permeated with Dark Romanticism as it is; desire, Wanderlust, night, Evil, approaching death, decay, despair and melancholy – all the nineteenth century themes of Dark Romanticism can be found in every song. And the closing couplet is a textbook example of the romantic longing for an unattainable ideal: right beside the sun is, after all, just as unattainable as, say, “the horizon” or “the next mountain”. A classic theme, but still an original way of putting it – “right beside the sun” does sound rather archaic, but is in fact an unknown image. Vaguely, we hear an echo of Kris Kristofferson’s immortal classic “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (I stopped beside the Sunday school), but actually, it is an exclusively scientific word combination; to indicate the position of planets, for example, or to describe phenomena such as sun dogs.
We never hear the image in the art of song. Yes, across the border, though still hardly ever. With Francis Cabrel, the man who, with even more rights than Hugues Aufray, can be considered the French Bob Dylan. On his breakthrough album Les Chemins de traverse from 1979, the album with the hit “Je l’aime à mourir” and with the horrible cover, we find halfway through Side 2 the heartbreaking “C’était l’hiver”, a Chronicle of a Suicide Foretold, with the final couplet:
Elle a sûrement rejoint le ciel
Elle brille à côté du soleil
Comme les nouvelles églises
Mais si depuis ce soir-là je pleure
C'est qu'il fait froid dans le fond de mon cœur
(She has surely joined the sky
She shines beside the sun
Like the new churches
But ever since that night I’ve been crying
For it's cold in the depths of my heart)
… so with a connotation completely different from Dylan’s “beside the sun”.
Just as Dark Romantic is the closing line. With, after that lookin’ at my shadow from the previous verse, a second hint at the dark-romantic doppelganger motif; the narrator doesn’t just want to keep away from everyone, no, he has to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone. As if there were a second I, which the first I must keep under control. Fitting with the earlier insinuations (run away and hide, praying for salvation, chains) that a second I has just committed an atrocity. An atrocity that leads the first I to close the barrier, flee to unreachable distances and hide beside the sun.
Again, a chilling image, and again quite original. But not entirely original; four years earlier, on their successful debut album August And Everything After, the Dylan disciples Counting Crows already sang in “Perfect Blue Buildings”:
Gonna get me a little oblivion
Try to keep myself away from me
… but without the sinister connotations that linger under the skin of Dylan’s song; singer Adam Duritz seems to be singing about the practical benefits of a drug or alcohol high. From the record with their breakthrough hit “Mr. Jones”, the supposed ode to “Ballad Of A Thin Man” – and the predecessor of their catchy Dylan cover that concisely brings to the point the actual destiny of the fleeing “Dirt Road Blues” protagonist:
To be continued. Next up: Dirt Road Blues part 9
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:
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
This is the 25th album of Bob Dylan’s for which the art work has been reviewed. Details of the previous articles can be found here.
41 – Triplicate
Released March 31, 2017
Photographer John Shearer
Liner Notes Tom Piazza
Art-director Geoff Gans
Following Shadows In The Night and Fallen Angels, Bob Dylan released a third selection from the Great American Songbook. Again all these song were previously recorded by Frank Sinatra, between 1939 and 1964.
Although these 30 songs could easily fit on two vinyl albums, Dylan chose to present them as a three-disc set, each individually titled and presented in a thematically-arranged 10-song sequence. Perhaps it’s his homage to the inventor of the concept album?
At first glance, the art-work for Triplicate appears to be very minimalist, especially for a triple album. On the front, only the album’s title is featured, printed in white lettering against a glossy, deep purple background. On the back there’s the name of the singer above three vertical rectangles. In each of these, the title of the individual LPs is printed above a list of the song titles (No writers/composer’s credits).
Underneath these rectangles there’s just one more piece of information: “Produced by Jack Frost”.
That’s it.
The title, Triplicate, can be seen as another reference to Sinatra, who’s 1980 Reprise 3LP set is called Trilogy: Past Present Future. Dylanologist Andreas Volkert however has discovered that in 1876 a set of playing cards was manufactured by Andrew Dougherty called Triplicate. A replica of this set was reissued in 2014. This may seem far-fetched, but another set by the same manufacturer, Chinese Dragon Back No. 81, is depicted on the cover of Fallen Angels.
The font on the cover is Goudy Text, which was designed in 1928 by Frederic W. Goudy, based on Gutenberg’s 42-line bible. That same typeface was used on Testify! The Gospel Box, a 3 cd-box, released by Rhino Records, in June 1999. (Remember that Geoff Gans, who did the artwork for Triplicate is an ex-Rhino art director.) That box set design was presented as a kind of prayer book.
However Dylan (or Gans) adds another layer.
In the Roaring Twenties of last century, the 78 rpm shellac disc became the recording standard for the music industry. The time limit of 3 1⁄2 minutes on a 10-inch was enough for most popular songs. But even 12-inch 78s could only give about 4–5 minutes per side, which was not nearly enough for classical-music.
In the 1930s, record companies began issuing collections of 78 rpm records in specially assembled packages, which included three or four records, with two sides each, making six or eight times 3½ minutes for a longer work. The individual records were housed in paper sleeves, with a paperboard or leather cover on the front and the back. The covers of these bound books were wider and taller than the records inside, allowing the record album to be placed on a shelf upright, like a book, suspending the fragile records above the shelf and protecting them. Some artwork was provided on the front cover and liner notes on the back or inside cover.
As this design resembled that of photo albums, the were called “Record albums”, or simply albums. Later on, when the 33 rpm 12 inch Long Player was introduced, the name “album” stuck in the US, while in Great Britten the name Long Player or LP was preferred.
The artwork of Dylan’s triplicate not only refers to the prayer book, but also to the way records were released before the LP. Frank Sinatra’s first studio album was released by Columbia Records, on March 4, 1946 as an album with four shellac 10-inches.
As Dylan said in his New York Times interview to promote Time Out Of Mind (September 29, 1997): “These old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book … All my beliefs come out of these old songs, literally anything from ‘Let Me Rest on that Peaceful Mountain’ to ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’.”
Back to Triplicate.
Opening the front cover, there’s a full page black and white portrait of the singer. This photo hides a long essay by novelist Tom Piazza. It’s the first time liner notes have appeared in a Dylan studio album since Dylan’s self-penned notes for World Gone Wrong in 1993.
The text is illustrated with a second photo – this time in colour, of Dylan standing in front of a red convertible with a pretty girl inside the car. In the background are palm trees.
The girl is most likely Tracy Phillips, actress, dancer, and choreographer. She’s the daughter of football coach Wade Phillips. Tracy also appears in the “The Night We Called It A Day” video, where she is wearing a blonde wig. Another photo from the same series was used on the back of the “Beaten Path” catalogue (2016). Both the Triplicate photos as the one in the catalogue were made by John Shearer.
In the Wikipedia page for Triplicate the photographer is referred to another John Shearer (April 21, 1947 – June 22, 2019). While the deceased photographer, writer, and filmmaker is best known for his photojournalism, especially of “racial subjects”, the actual Triplicate photographer is still alive. The real Shearer is living in Nashville and is specialized in entertainment portraiture, backstage coverage, and live-music photography. On his Instagram and also on his website, there is a post with Bob Dylan leaning against what looks to be the same car.
Shearer was first associated with Bob Dylan for the cover of Tempest (2012) and since was called upon when some publicity photos were needed for whiskey, ironworks, catalogue for paintings , or indeed album artwork.
PS: The Goudy Text typeface is used for the artwork of the digital single ‘Murder Most Foul’.
——————————–
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
In 2003 we find some of the most exciting rock music Dylan ever made. That music is the result of the three-way marriage between Dylan’s voice, never more expressive, his piano and harmonica. Putting these three elements together is like letting a genie out of a bottle, or the mixing of three potent elements into the alchemical vessel of the music to, from the heat of performance, produce pure gold.
In Part 3 of my Master Harpist series I covered five songs from 2003, ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ ‘Senor,’ ‘Drifter’s Escape’ and ‘Desolation Row.’ I included the Berlin performance of ‘Desolation Row’ in my previous post, as well as ‘Floater’ and ‘It Takes A Lot to Laugh,’ but these were only the tip of the iceberg. I want to use this post to dig deeper into that territory and to get a feel for how that alchemical process worked and the results that emerged.
In the last post I noted the celebratory vigour of the 2003 performances, the openness and looseness of the arrangements, the jazzy bass lines and the beguiling roughness of Dylan’s voice. Add to that some whimsical blasts on the harp, with openings in the music for the rhythms beneath to show, and you have a description of ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.’ A delightfully irreverent, irrelevant, bouncy, happy-go-lucky song. This one’s from the Hammersmith concert.
You ain’t goin’ nowhere
Keeping with the happy mood, let’s go to Sydney (17th Feb) and catch ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.’ In my previous post I said that the Australasian leg of the tour was not well received in comparison to later concerts, but there were still some fine performances. It’s a wonderful jaunty performance from Dylan.
I was going to leave this one out however because, towards the end, just as we are enjoying a jazzy harp break from the master, we suddenly hear a voice in our right ears asking us for our tickets. The down-under security boys are on the job, and either the bootleggers themselves or someone very close to them are instructed to return to their seats. On balance, however, I decided to retain the track, not just because of the quality of Dylan’s performance, but because the interruption captures the spirit of these audience recordings, reminding us of what a chancy business these informal, unofficial recordings are.
I’ll be your baby
Dylan’s New Zealand concerts are also not without interest. This spirited ‘Lay Lady Lay’ from Wellington (24th Feb) is worthy of inclusion. Despite not being as vigorous and hard-driving as later performances, it captures the balance between instructing and imploring needed to make the song work. Is he ordering her to lay across his ‘big brass bed’ or pleading, is the tone seductive or desperate? – it’s all in the performance. The album version is certainly seductive, and would have us throw our panties overboard no questions asked, but later performances have moved from entreating to beseeching. As Dylan’s voice gets rougher and older, the outcome of this petitioning has become less certain. Does he get her onto his bed or not is the burning question, and the song may work best when the outcome remains in doubt, hanging in the balance.
Lay Lady Lay
‘Love Minus Zero,’ is a celebration of the great mystery of love; the intensity of the poetry transcends the subject matter but keeps all the feeling. The album performance worked because of the contrast between the sophistication and beautiful obscurity of the lyrics with the brevity and simplicity of the ballad form – it takes under three minutes (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965). Later performances tend to take advantage of the exquisite melody line to create a slower, richer, more sumptuous effect. We have a beautiful example of that from the 1994 MTV Unplugged concert. By 2003, Dylan is still working in that vein, but here he adds Larry Campbell’s steel guitar to create the feeling of a sentimental country song. Despite the surreal verses, this remains a love song, lit by melancholy.
The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.
That melancholy is underpinned by Dylan’s quiet piano riff, nicely syncopated towards the end of the song, and given a lonely edge by the frail yet insistent harp break. (21st Nov, Birmingham).
Love Minus Zero
We have seen some epic and spectacular performances of ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ and this one from 15th October can join the ranks of those great performances. The song is a world-weary offer of companionship and understanding in the face of the demands of the world and ‘all this repetition.’ It makes most sense when seen as an address to another artist, another musician (as usual, Joan Baez is suggested as the most probable recipient of these sentiments) – ‘When you’re tired of yourself and all of your creations…’
The harp break sounds under-recorded to me, but maybe that far off, distant wailing is what Dylan is after here. It adds to the forlorn effect of the song.
Queen Jane Approximately
I’ve introduced Dylan’s gentlest and most piercing love song, ‘Girl from the North Country’ many times now, as it is a song that Dylan hasn’t let drop. No wonder. It’s a marvellous tribute to a past love, with just enough regret to drive it forward. This 2003 arrangement, however, is completely new. There is a baroque feel to the piano riff that gives this performance its structure and rhythm. Unexpectedly, it works with this slow and steady beat. Dylan’s voice veers between a croon and a whisper, and, as he does more often in 2003, he uses the harp to introduce the song. In this case, however, he picks the harp up again towards the end.
With Dylan playing electric piano on all the songs, the old division between his acoustic and electric sounds is further blurred. We can still have an acoustic guitar backing, but with Larry on steel guitar and Dylan on piano, the difference is far from evident. ‘Girl from the North Country’ is the perfect acoustic folk song, but this performance is more acoustic in spirit than in actuality. (Hammersmith)
Girl from the North Country
‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ is certainly electric, but in this case gently so. We have heard much harsher versions than this. The 1966 electric versions are seriously kick-arse, but so is this, although there is a lyrical effect here thanks to Freddie Koella’s gentle guitar sounds. It’s George Recile’s drumming that is the secret of this performance’s success. It’s that foot-tapping rhythm as much as Dylan’s emphatic vocals that makes this my favourite version of the song. And the wailing harp, again a little in the background, gives the performance that nerve-racking edge the song needs. The piano is where Dylan likes it to be, vamping away in the background supporting the rhythm, pushing it along. (3rd Nov)
Tom Thumb’s Blues
‘To Ramona’ can sound a little like a prequel to ‘Queen Jane Approximately.’ In ‘Queen Jane,’ Dylan sings
Now, when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you
And the smell of their roses does not remain
whereas in ‘To Ramona,’ he sings
For the flowers of the city
Though breathlike, get deathlike sometimes
A comparison of the two songs shows a fascinating evolution of mood from the accusations and admonitions of ‘Ramona’ to the empathy and rapport of ‘Queen Jane’.
Vocally, Dylan makes a meal out of this one, pulling his voice downward into a cynical snarl or rising triumphantly. It’s not so much a love song as a mockery of a love song. Those Mexican sounding guitars should be serenading a waltzing bridal couple, not this rather nasty-edged good-bye, but the sharpness of the opening harp break gives fair warning of what is to come.
To Ramona
We pop back to Sydney to catch ‘Just Like A Woman.’ This is one song from Blonde on Blonde that Dylan has been able to transform in later performances. Sheered of the sneering tone of the album, which hid the hurt, that hurt, and the vulnerability to hurt, can now show. The eloquence of the opening harp solo takes us directly to the emotional complexity of the song. With the vocal, Dylan tends to break up the lines as if each word or phrase was its own line. It breaks up the continuity of the lines and emphasizes the importance of each word or phrase. This is how he sings this verse:
Queen Mary
she's my friend
Yes, I believe
I'll go see her again
Nobody
has to guess
that baby
can't be blessed
'Til she sees
finally
that she's just like all the rest
With her fog
with her amphetamine
and her pearls
This is a much less smooth and confident voice than that of the album. Add to that a quietly understated piano and we have a compelling performance.
Just like a woman
For me, any subsequent performances of ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ invite invidious comparisons to the 1995 Prague performance, one of the greatest moments of the NET. However well he builds this one up, and he does so quite nicely, I can’t help but miss those soaring tones. This one’s from the Birmingham concert.
It’s all over now baby blue
The end of the world haunts ‘Shooting Star’ from Oh Mercy. It works as a love song, but also as a valediction, a goodbye to the world. The shooting star is the star of earthly love, but it also represents the last chance for salvation. People used to see shooting stars as portents; Dylan does that here. A wonderfully intense performance.
Shooting Star.
I’m going to finish this post with a quick intro to three more songs, those already covered in Master Harpist 3. I would encourage you to go to that post to pick up my comments on each of these songs.
This ‘Drifter’s Escape,’ from Hammersmith is the last in a long line of best ever performances. Urgent and gutsy.
Drifter’s escape.
We have this ‘Senor,’ perhaps the most desperate performance of this dark and desperate song, ending with a primal scream from the harmonica. The crowd goes crazy. An overwhelming, ecstatic performance.
Senor
Last but not least, ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ the most ecstatic of all best ever performances, driven by an urgent, rumbling piano and jubilant harp. This is Bob Dylan at his very best, powerful and celebratory, voice rich and suggestive. One of the finest moments of the NET, and a high note on which to complete this post.
Tangled Up in Blue
Kia Ora
——————————–
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
This is one of those moments where there is a cover version I have raved over so much on this site that I suspect most of the series’ dozen or so readers will know exactly where I am going. Or maybe I am being pompous imagining I have a dozen readers and any of them are going to remember something I wrote over a year ago. Possibly yes I am, so I’ll go with it anyway.
The problem is that many of the cover artists either go after the Sinead O’Connor version and don’t quite get there, or the Dylan version and don’t quite get it.
Is there another way of doing the song? There must be, but I seem to have probably missed it.
Ava Wyne gives us an unexpected bounce and some fun orchestration which sounds a trifle forced, but nevertheless makes for good entertainment.
Cat Power don’t want none of that delicacy nonsense, and by taking away the chord sequence that becomes a lot easier, so it is a refreshing listen. The use of minor chords totally changes the impact and the arrangement is kept suitably restrained. Yes there is another way of doing the song, and this is it.
And there are surprises all the way through as those chord and melodic changes constantly take us not quite where we expect. Not sure about the fade out end, but it is a good piece.
Judy Collins takes it straight of course, but she has such a wonderful magical voice that the vocal harmonies work to perfection. Now this one I could listen to; not as much as that which is to come in a moment, but yes, I could listen again.
There are two points: what do you do with the instrumental break and what do you do with the “oh when the dawn is breaking section”? Solve those two conundrums and you have a superb piece of music.
Judy Collins has a magical way of holding the beat back just a tiny fraction – maybe one-sixteenth of beat. It is extraordinary. Although maybe I am just hearing it that way. But her overdub of the harmonies with her own voice while the lead guitar soars away is sensational and yes, listening again I am sure she is that fraction of a beat behind, and it adds so much.
(Incidentally, as I type this a spam message has appeared telling me my G mail settings are out of date. As if I minded while being the closest I will ever get to heaven).
Anyway, there is no point in going on because we do have perfection, and because we have all that the lady who gave us perfection did to fight back against the horrors and outrages of the Magdalen Laundries. And yes I am once more giving sway to my own strongly held opinions on corruption here. But then, I would argue I don’t do it very often, and if you’ve read any of my stuff here already, and know the history of this song, you must have expected it.
As an atheist, I am asking for this to be played at my funeral dedicated to my friends who can make it there, and of course to my daughters and my grandchildren.
In his lyrics, singer/songwriter/musician oft expresses the trials and tribulations that a performer faces.
Once a work is waxed in the black plastic of a vinyl record (though more likely burned on a CD in these modern times), it’s fixed in concrete, so to speak.
Any message located therein, though open somewhat to interpretation, is canonized once set down permanently.
The artist gets labelled by listeners and by music critics as a folksinger, a bluesman, an electric rocknroller, a gospeller, whatever.
Allegorically speaking, it’s really just the sound that matters – the gliding arm of the record player considered figuratively broken should the artist change his style to the chagrin of any particular group of followers.
The second king in the humorous allegory below, with his broken arm, might well be considered a portrait of the “Sound School” of Dylanology (the “Autobiographical School” is another breed altogether) that considers lyrics to be secondary to any recorded production:
The first had a broken nose, the second, a broken arm,
the third was broke ....
(Bob Dylan: John Wesley Harding ~ liner notes)
In the following song lyrics, the shiny Edenic ‘spirit’ of a live performance is considered diminished somewhat when entrapped in a vinyl recording:
With his candle lit into the sun, though it's glow
is waxed in black
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)
Frankly, according to the lyrics beneath, renewed inspiration is the key that’s needed to keep the record’s needle from getting stuck:
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye, good luck
I can't play the record 'cause my needle got stuck
(Bob Dylan: Goodbye Jimmy Reed)
The artist is likened in the song lyrics below to a western cowboy who’s forced to balance himself in the saddle of the black plastic horse provided to him by recording marketeers:
Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war
Don't hug me, don't flatter me, don't turn on the charm
I'll take a sword, and hack off your arm
(Bob Dylan: Black Rider)
The following satirical song lyrics warn artists that they are at risk of having the recording industry pour them into a single mould:
Neither one gonna turn and run
They're making a voyage to the sun
"His Master's Voice is calling me"
Says Tweedle-Dum to Tweedle-Dee
(Bob Dylan: Tweedle-Dee And Tweedle-Dum)
I been lookin’ at my shadow, I been watching the colors up above
Lookin’ at my shadow, watching the colors up above
Rolling through the rain and hail, looking for the sunny side of love
It is a meteorological interlude, all in all, this fourth verse. Sun, rainbow, rain and hail… probably all dug up from the archives by a lazy lyricist to arrive at the somewhat stale metaphor the sunny side of love.
It is not very likely, but still appealing to suppose that Dylan wanted to give Katie Webster an insider’s wink with it, at her 1961 single “Close To My Heart b/w Sunny Side Of Love”. When Dylan writes his song in 1997, Katie Webster is already a grand old dame, the Swamp Boogie Queen Of Louisiana. Dylan will certainly be impressed by the fact that Katie was Otis Redding’s pianist, ever since a young Otis happened to see her perform in 1964, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Reportedly, Otis was instantly hooked and demanded that she join his touring band immediately. In the 1980s, Mrs. Webster herself tells the story to radio host Louis X. Erlanger in New York, broadcast by After Hours:
“Otis came out of his dressing room in his underwear. In this club, with all these people. “Stop that woman! Don’t let her get off the stage! I gotta talk to her tonight!” So when I finished my song and did my encores and everything, I went back to the dressing room to talk to Otis, and he said, I’ve never in my life seen a woman work like that. He said, I have to have you as a part of my group. Can you go on the road with me and my band? I said, sure, I’d love to. He said, would you be ready to leave tonight? I said, no I couldn’t leave tonight. But I could be ready for you very early in the morning.”
So yes indeed, that is Katie Webster, on the brilliant Live At The Whiskey A-Go-Go, the gig Dylan also attends, April 1966, and at which he offers Otis “Just Like A Woman”, in the dressing room afterwards. Maybe Katie was there too.
December 1967 Katie is heavily pregnant. She has to cancel the next Otis tour. And thus, on that fateful Sunday 10 December, she does not board Redding’s Beechcraft H18 airplane to Madison, Wisconsin.
Otis’ death hits Katie like a brick. She retreats from the spotlight for years, only to make a glorious comeback – especially in Europe – in the 1980s. The records she makes in those years are all wonderful (Dylan probably listened open-jawed to her goose-bumps inducing “Never Let Me Go”), but the walking music encyclopaedia Dylan undoubtedly has a soft spot for the obscure singles she released in the early 60s. Like the swinging “Close To My Heart b/w Sunny Side Of Love”, which is released on Action Records in August ’61. Both songs quite obviously show that Katie is the touring pianist for Ivory Joe Hunter at the time (“Since I Met You Baby”), but she still manages to put her own stamp on the sound. According to Bonnie Raitt, who assists Katie on her 1988 album The Swamp Boogie Queen, she even has “the voice of the century”.
It’s a nice scenario, the one where Dylan waves at a grand old dame two years before she dies. But a bit too romantic, probably. The Carter Family is much deeper under Dylan’s skin, as is keep on the sunny side of life, the chorus line of their signature song “Keep On The Sunny Side”, the song title that is inscribed in gold on A. P. Carter’s pink marble tombstone at the country churchyard in Maces Spring, Virginia.
Dylan has always been quite outspoken about his love for The Carter Family. In Chronicles, he mentions them a few times; in interviews when the journalist asks him about his favourites and influences (“Odetta, The Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, The Carter Family. Guthrie only came along afterwards”, for example); he considers them a point of reference (“There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman”, Jerry Garcia’s Obituary, 1995); in all phases of his career he plays their songs, and in the twenty-first century that doesn’t change. He becomes even more explicit. “My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form,” he says in the Robert Hilburn interview in 2003.
As a radio DJ (Theme Time Radio Hour, 2006-2008), he plays The Carter Family records four times, usually introduced with words of respect and admiration. He plays “Keep On The Sunny Side” from 1928 in his very first broadcast (Episode 1, Weather), and the next Carter Family record is in Episode 11, Flowers. When the DJ plays the monument “Wildwood Flower,” he goes into great detail about the group and the song. As an introduction, he calls them “the most influential group in country music history” and praises A.P. Carter’s approach, “enhancing the pure beauty of these facts-of-life tunes”. After the last notes have sounded, Dylan goes on:
“That was The Carter Family with “Wildwood Flower”. The song was originally a written song from 1860 called “I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets”. These songs were passed around, from person to person, over a long period. By the time the tune got to The Carter Family, many people claimed to have written it. And like a game of telephone, some of the words stopped making sense altogether:
I will twine and will mingle my raven black hair
With the roses so red and the lilies so fair
The myrtle so green of an emerald hue
The pale emanita and the violets so blue
These lyrics are difficult to interpret. There is no flower named “emanita”. Some hear it as the pale and the leader. Somehow, amidst the confusion, the song still makes sense.”
… with which the DJ seems to allow himself a little dig at Johnny Cash. Who indeed does sing zappaesk nonsense, with almost frightening, very convincing solemnity:
O, I’ll twine with my mingles and waving black hair
With the roses so red and the lilies so fair
And the myrtles so bright with the emerald dew
The pale and the leader and eyes look like blue
From the same LP that also contains three Dylan covers (“It Ain’t Me Babe”, “Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright” and “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind”), Orange Blossom Special (1965), which a proud Dylan must have heard more than once.
Anyway, in passing the DJ Dylan reveals how much value the songwriter Dylan attaches to semantics. A protagonist who walks in the sun, under a rainbow, rolls through the hail and rain, looking for the sunny side of love… somehow, amidst the confusion, the song still makes sense.
To be continued. Next up: Dirt Road Blues part 8
———–
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:
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
One of the few Dylan songs that I re-arranged myself for the band I was in at the time was “I am a lonesome hobo” and I recall adding a descending bass which across the first line of the song would move down from D almost totally chromatically until reaching G at “friends”.
So I was wondering if anyone who actually turned a cover version into a recording had followed that route… but no. This either suggests my idea was rubbish and explains why I became a writer not a musician, or it suggests that even after all these cover versions have been made, there are still other options available for any upcoming band that wants to go further.
Anyway, you’ll recall perhaps that the original version of “hobo” stays resolutely on one chord for the first three lines with the bass playing the same note over and over through the first 12 bars, and only then giving us variation.
And indeed, trying to give a variation to that remorseless one chord approach is the main issue here and that’s what I have been listening to, to see if anyone did find a good solution.
The Duke Robillard Band clearly recognise the meaning of the words: the desperation of loneliness, failure and nothingness. And so the musical background gives us a soundtrack to an awful life, which Bob doesn’t do at all, as he prefers to leave the lyrics to do it all.
The trouble with this approach for me is that after a moment or three I’ve got the idea, and with this much desperation there really isn’t anywhere else to go.
So moving on to Thea Gilmore, you might just recall that I have in the past raved over some of her arrangements on her complete JWH cover album.
She too sticks to the single chord approach, but the introduction of the banjo, and the stretching of certain words in the lyrics challenges the rhythm in a very interesting way.
And the approach keeps up the interest throughout. Indeed, the way she takes it all down with the “Kind ladies” verse reignites the feeling, and there is just a faint change of melody near the end to give a feeling that the little track was worth listening to. Of course she found herself able to do so much more with The Drifters’ Escape on this album, but I still find this version enjoyable enough.
Now the likes of Steve Gibbons and Dave Pegg know infinitely more about performing Dylan than I ever could in a dozen lifetimes, but I am sorry to say I just don’t feel inspired here, even by the instrumental break.
And so I go searching further afield, and yes the Triffids do take me further on the journey that I have been following as I seek the perfect version of the song. Here it is the percussion that leads the way with the unexpected emphasis. Quite why it is so unexpected is because it is on the quarter beat before each bar starts – which given the way Dylan performs the song is utterly unexpected.
As indeed is the end!
And that could be the end of my meander through the covers today, however there is one more and I have left what for me is the best until last. It’s in Swedish, but that’s neither here nor there, since we all know the lyrics, for the key point is the orchestration.
The contrast between the repeated three lines of each verse with the final line is exactly what this song needs to give it life again over 50 years since the piece was written.
I still think there is something else to be taken from this song, but I’m way past the age of working with a band to put what I can hear in my head onto a recording, so it will have to wait for someone else to come along and give it a try. And anyway what I hear in my head often doesn’t really work out when played out loud.
===========
A list of previous songs reviewed is given below.
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
Aaron: Let’s take a look at some more lost Dylan performances from the 60s all the way to the 90s. First “Only A Pawn In Their Game” from Newport 1963.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l3kjsbmZ-g0
Tony: I am still amazed at the confidence of Dylan in these early films. Not just a confidence of being onstage, but in the delivery of what at the time was a unique musical form. After all no one else was writing or performing music like this at the time.
It is not that he was a folk singer, but that he had invented a completely new form of folk song. I know we’ve all heard the song so many million times now it is easy to forget just how radical this musical approach was – the varied lengths of the verse, the brief punchy lines (as below from walk in a pack onward)
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
In listening to the early recordings again, I try to think if the power of the structure and the lines as if on first hearing, and this video is such good quality that it really helps to do that. I do this sounds like a pretentious load of twaddle, but really, if you can just consider the above lines as if you have never heard them before, and never heard Dylan, they really are surely among the most extraordinary lines ever written in folk or rock music.
Aaron: With God On Our Side. This was from the BBC show Tonight in 1964.
Tony: It is helpful to remember that the evolution of broadcasting in the UK was utterly different from the Americas. Until 1955 there was only one TV channel in the UK, that of the BBC, independent but funded by the state, which had its view of being the arbiter of what the British audience should be allowed to see. (Film censorship was also very strong at the time). The first rival to the BBC was the commercial channel ITV which started in 1955 but wasn’t rolled out across the whole kingdom for about ten years.
So when this was broadcast most British viewers did have a choice of two channels, and the BBC was trying to make itself more relevant to a younger audience. But the result was horrifically patronising at times, and Cliff Michelmore who introduces Dylan here clearly has no idea of the what is going on – which just seemed to make the broadcaster’s output even more remote from day to day life.
Aaron: Gotta Serve Somebody – from the 1979 Grammys. Bob won the award for Best Rock Vocal Performance
Tony: Ah Bob all spruced up and looking smart. I wonder has anyone done a book about Bob’s dresser. If so could you post a note to tell me about it, because I’ve obviously missed it.
Musically, it’s a great arrangement, really controlled but really bouncy at the same time. One of the best I’ve heard. I particularly like the two or three times where suddenly a line is dropped – really takes one by surprise.
Aaron: Bob was back at the Grammys for his lifetime achievement award in 1991. Here is Masters Of War followed by his speech.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0O3Ud8nFLE4
Tony: the re-arrangement with the monotone approach followed by the unexpected two chords at the end of the verse, and then no pause onto the next verse. The only problem is that although it makes the message very strongly it doesn’t actually make for musical entertainment. But goodness it is powerful. The little speech is certainly worth waiting for, if nothing else but to see Bob’s extreme uncomfortableness at the whole thing.
Aaron: Last up for this go round is an appearance on Letterman from 1993. Billy Connolly was on the show too, my all time favorite comedian..what a show this would have been!
Tony: Billy Connolly is great in his introductory remarks and this is a lovely delivery of Forever Young – so simple and so perfectly delivered. And it is is one of the very, very few recordings that actually has a proper Bob guitar solo in a full-band recording. What’s more it is utterly perfect, in keeping with the arrangement, and perfectly understated as the lyrics demand.
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
