Untold Dylan

• Bob Dylan And Jezebel (Parts I and II)

By Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan And Jezebel (Part III)

In the Old Testament, prophet Ezekiel has to contend with double-dealing Abolah and Aholibah; then, prophet Elijah with Ahab and Baal-worshipper Jezebel.

So spins the roulette wheel of history, and prophets of Jesus, in the New Testament, have once again to deal with an apparently re-incarnated Jezebel.

In the Old Testament, Jezebel sends a fraudulent letter to the appropriate authorities, under the seal of King Ahab, ordering the death of a “blasphemous” vineyard-owner so that his property can be taken.

Not to be outdone, the death of the now resurrected Jezebel, and of her children too, is ordered by a New Testament prophet, in the name of Jesus, if they do not repent:

Behold I will cast her into a bed
And them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation
Except they repent of their deeds
(Revelations 2: 22)

The crucified, now-resurrected, Christ gets transformed into a chip off the old block, at least by some of His most ardent followers.

In the song lyrics quoted below, could be said that Jezebel takes heed of the stern biblical warning – only to leave the narrator thereof, as in the dramatic monologue to the Mona Lisa portrait in the “Visions Of Johanna”, with a fixed smile upon his face.

He’s been jilted by Jezebel:

Now I'm wearing the cloak of misery
And I've tasted jilted love
And the frozen smile upon my face
Fits me like glove
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

There are those among us who claim that Bob Dylan writes a number of lyrics just because they sound good, but biblical roots they often have that entwine with  word images to render the song a meaningful unity:

Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel
(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

In the Old Testament, a prophet is promised silver by a king if has a meeting with him and curses the Hebrews escaping from Egypt. The mule can see an angel up ahead, and balks at taking the pathway to the king’s residence; after suffering a bad beating, the mule talks, and the prophet then is able to see the angel too.

The false prophet changes his mind, and instead has the Hebrew men distracted by sexually-seductive, Baal-worshipping women:

And the Lord said unto Moses
Take all the leaders of the people
And hang them up before the Lord against the sun
That the fierce anger of the Lord may not be turned away from Israel
(Numbers 25:4)

Now that’s tough love.

No wonder that the narrator in “Red River Shore” be thankful that he was sent home by Jezebel, or whomever it was, to live a quiet life.

Part IV

If dog-eaten Queen Jezebel be an actual, a literal, historical figure who’s able to travel forward in time to the days when a Jewish rabbi known as  Christ is crucified, then magically comes back to life, I find no stated reason in the Holy Bible why musician/singer/songwriter Bob Dylan can’t fly around in space and time though still alive.

Below, crucified Jesus is said to  speak through a prophet to members of  a “church”, not to wayward Hebrews of days long gone, but rather to those claiming  to be Christians:

[T]hou sufferest that woman Jezebel
Which calleth herself a prophetess
To teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication
And eat things sacrificed unto idols
(Revelations 2 :22)

So it is not that far-fetched of a stretch to imagine a reformed Jezebel be the gal brought back to life in the song “Red River Shore” with the ‘river of blood’ located in the Jezreel Valley of the Northern Kingdom of Israel … a Lilith-like archetype, but one who mends her wicked ways; or a Mary Magdalene from whom demons have been cast out:

She gave me her best advice
And said, "Go home, and lead a quiet life"
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

One analyst of the song above asserts that Dylan is a prisoner of time and rhyme when the songwriter chooses to pen “… she should always be with me” – in order to create a rhyme with “free”. Apparently, the analyst is quite sure that “… I should always be with her” was initially intended to be the line in the song, but then, of course, the rhyme doesn’t work.

But ” …. I should always be with thee” would more than serve the purpose of a rhyme for ‘free’ were not the songwriter, as he often does, switching the polarity of the relationship between the guy and gal, whether she be a Jezebel or not.

Interestingly, the same analyst has a bird in another song portrayed as a demon haunting that song when it’s the bird that is injured, quite likely symbolic of a female lover who has been abandoned by the narrator of the song –  Poe’s “Raven” in reverse, it might be claimed:

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

That is, Poe’s melancholy motif in lot of his poetry be followed, but this time the shoe is on the other claw, so to speak.

At other times, Poe’s sorrowful theme is less messed with:

I haven’t got a single rose

(Bob Dylan: I Feel A Change Coming On ~ Dylan/Hunter)

As in:

Drear path, alas, where grows

Not even one lonely rose

(Edgar Allan Poe: To F …)

By Tony Attwood

This is going to be an oddity in this series, because I can only find one cover of “Lenny Bruce” and obviously as that is the only version by another artist I’ll include it.   If you know of any other versions please do write in.

I take it that the artist in this rendition is an amateur performer, but he’s none the worse for that, and does a damn sight better than I ever could achieve… which isn’t saying much, but it does show what can be achieved by people with real talent, even if there is no recording contract to go with it.

So why does no one cover this song?   It can’t be because it doesn’t lend itself to re-interpretation as it is fairly easy to think up an orchestral accompaniment to the piece while keeping the time and rhythm the same, and indeed to deliver a performance with some heavy percussion to relate to the fact that it is about death.

But that is how it is, so since I don’t want to pass this song by I’m going to pick up on a few of Dylan’s own variations on the song.  He has played the song 117 times on tour, so we have a few to choose from.

In the version above there are some really interesting slight variations in the melody, and the instrumentation changes its rhythm, while Bob restrains himself beautifully in terms of the vocals.  Goodness knows what the crash from the lead guitar is doing at the very end, but still, it is at the very end so is not too hard to ignore!

In this  next version with Tom Petty, Bob shows how the harmonies can work, and for me this is very effective indeed.

https://youtu.be/lqiJPZBEfqc

And of course, I do have to include this very strange version from 2019.   I’m really not too sure about this; it feels to me like an experiment that has been made public before it is quite ready for release.  The idea of the strings in the accompaniment is excellent, but I feel the piano part is just not right playing those half scales.   And the electric bass and the viola seem to me to contradict each other.   It is so frustrating because the idea is brilliant, but I just don’t feel the orchestration is right.

But that of course is just me, as ever.

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

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

• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 1: Choice cuts from London and Dublin
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 2: More choice cuts from London and Dublin.
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 3: Seattle Stopovers
• NET, 2005, Part 4, Hello, Goodbye: First Ever, Last Ever
• NET 2005, part 5: Old friends grow old too
• Never Ending Tour, 2005, Part 6: God knows you gotta weep

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

By Mike Johnson (kiwipoet)

In 2005 Dylan did a few cover songs. One he hadn’t done before was ‘Blue Monday,’ not to be confused with a famous song by New Order of the same name. The song Dylan sang was originally written by Dave Bartholomew, first recorded in 1953 by Smiley Lewis and issued as a single, in January 1954, on Imperial Records. It was popular with rock and blues bands in the 1960s.

This recording is from London (3^rd concert), and is a faithful, high-powered performance.

Blue Monday

‘Sing Me Back Home’ was written by Merle Haggard, who opened the show for Dylan during the American leg of the 2005 tour. Elvis Costello commented:

“I thought that show was tremendous. Both Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard were absolutely at their peak.  Bob has a great new band. He’s playing very intricate arrangements … Merle Haggard was funny as hell and sang like a bird.  It was a terrific complementary show of two  people you admire.”

For a full account of these shows please see this link

‘Sing Me Back Home’ was ranked by Rolling Stone as No. 32 on its list of the 40 Saddest Country Songs of All Time. And that’s just the spirit in which Dylan sings it. (8^th March)

Sing Me Back Home

Another tear-jerker is ‘You Win Again’ by Hank Williams, released in 1952 (Again, not to be confused with the Bee Gees’ song of the same name). Dylan seems to relish packing a sad on this one.  (4^th July)

You Win Again

Before putting away your hanky, try ‘A 11’ written by Hank Cochran in 1963, and first sung by Don Deal. Dylan liked this song and covered it a number of times. In 2005, he’s ably backed by Donnie Herron on pedal steel guitar.

A 11

An old favourite of Dylan’s is ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ by Johnny Cash. It’s a foot-stomper and popular with audiences. Dylan, as always, gets right into the spirit of the song. This one’s from 18^th March.

Folsom Prison Blues

Dylan would finish off the five London concerts by a brief version of ‘London Calling’ by The Clash (1979). It doesn’t sound much like The Clash, but it’s certainly rough and ready. It reminds us that Dylan often has a punky edge to him anyway. It’s just a taste of the song, really. A London crowd-pleasing moment. This one’s from the 3^rd night.

 London Calling

‘Mid-June 2005, halfway through a thirty-two-date tour with Willie Nelson, Dylan used a two-day break from the road to cut his latest movie soundtrack offering, for an independent film, North Country, based on the life of a female miner who brought a sexual harassment suit in North Carolina. .. It had been three years since he cut ‘’Cross The Green Mountain’, but there was no sign of a sea-change in his working method.’ Heylin, Clinton. Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2 1974-2008 (p. 473)

The song he is referring to is ‘Tell Ol Bill,’ which Dylan never performed live, although I wish he had. All we have is the ten different takes made during that recording session. The song was not included in the up and coming Modern Times, to be released in 2006.

I have no business covering it here, as it is not a part of the NET, but I mention it because, like our editor Tony Attwood, I believe it to be one of Dylan’s greatest songs. (See https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/49, and again, https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/21120.

Larry Fyffe has also written about the imagery of the song: https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/5265)

So, it’s a song I wish he’d performed. In fact, I’d declare it to be his greatest song if it weren’t for ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.’ Those songs are hard to best.

Wikipedia describes North Country like this: Single mother Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) is part of a group of the first women to work at a local iron mine in Minnesota. Offended that they have to work with women, male workers at Eveleth Mines lash out at them and subject them to sexual harassment. Appalled by the constant stream of insults, sexually explicit language and physical abuse, Josey — despite being cautioned against it by family and friends — files a historic sexual harassment lawsuit.’

The film was inspired by ‘the life of a real person, Lois Jenson, who filed the first class action lawsuit for sexual harassment in American history.’ (Google)

With other soundtrack songs like ‘Over the Green Mountain’ and ‘Things Have Changed,’ some of the imagery can be traced to the storyline of the film, but with ‘Tell Ol Bill,’ it’s not so clear.  The song’s narrator appears to be a drifter in the grip of intense loneliness and isolation, a favourite subject of Dylan’s dating back to his earliest songs like ‘Only a Hobo.’

However, the way in which the lyrics evoke despair in the face of oppression does seem to reflect the film:

The evenin' sun is sinkin' low
The woods are dark, the town isn't new
They''ll drag you down, they'll run the show
Ain't no telling what they'll do

I detect the possible mind-set of Lois Jenson as she wanders through the rugged hills of Minnesota, burdened by her experiences, brave in her lonely stand.

All the world I would defy
Let me make it plain as day

What makes it a great song is the way Dylan uses the stormy landscape, which would be familiar to him from his childhood in Minnesota, to reflect and express inner turbulence. Shakespeare does this brilliantly in King Lear.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!

Here’s Dylan:

The tempest struggles in the air
And to myself alone I sing
It could sink me then and there
I can hear the echoes ring

And

Beneath the thunder blasted trees
The words are ringin' off your tongue
The ground is hard in times like these
Stars are cold, the night is young

The rocks are bleak, the trees are bare
Iron clouds go floating by
Snowflakes fallin' in my hair
Beneath the gray and stormy sky

The Ol Bill of the title could refer to Shakespeare – or the police.

Tony Attwood prefers take 9, arguing that the song finds its fullest expression with that jazzy arrangement (See Tony’s posts), while I prefer take 3, a more primitive, bluesy, emphatic (dumpty-dum) version. With this slow and steady pace, every word gets its due.

Tell Ol Bill

That wraps up 2005. You might think, given the sound he’d developed over three years with the piano, getting better every year on the instrument, welding his band into a formidable force, and achieving a rich, often intricate sound, that Dylan would continue to build on that foundation – but no. He threw it all away. The triumphant London residency and outstanding Dublin performances were not a harbinger of what was to come but a finale, the final act of that three-year narrative.

In 2006, Dylan would abandon the piano and take up the organ, sparking a new development that would take him through to 2012.

We begin that leg of the NET in our next post.

Kia Ora

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         If moonshine don’t kill me

Well, I eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry / Live my life on the square
Even if the flesh falls off my face / It won’t matter, long as you’re there
Feel like a ghost in love
Underneath the heavens above
Feel further away
than I ever did before
Feel further than I can take
Dreamin’ of you
is all I do
But it’s driving me insane

The Original Soundtrack to the 2007 Dylan biopic I’m Not There is a treasure trove. A double CD with 34 lovely Dylan covers, almost all of them surprising, original and quirky. Even such usual suspects as “All Along the Watchtower” (Eddie Vedder), “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (Antony and the Johnsons) and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (Mason Jennings), which are apparently unavoidable, qualitatively stand out from the thousands of covers that already exist of these songs. But the real magic of the collection comes from the dusted-off insider tips, from the covers of songs that suffer a languishing existence at the outer edges of Dylan’s vast catalogue. “Can’t Leave Her Behind”, “I’m Not There”, the brilliant “Goin’ to Acapulco” cover by Jim James and Calexico, John Doe’s unsurpassed “Pressing On”, “Billy 1” by Los Lobos… both the selection and the performances show genuine, intrinsic Dylan love and knowledge.

Within that list of exotic birds, Bob Forrest’s “The Moonshiner” is the odd duck out. Not because of Bob Forrest, obviously. The frontman of Thelonious Monster, who, after a devastating detour through heroin hell in 1999, was helped back into the saddle by men from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, returning under the name The Bicycle Thief with the smashingly beautiful album You Come And Go Like A Pop Song, can still do no wrong in 2007. His contribution to I’m Not There is “just” another one of the heartwarming highlights. No, his song choice is remarkable, is the odd duck out: it is the only song on the 34-song track list that is not a Dylan song. “The Moonshiner” is a traditional, written probably half a century before Dylan was born.

However, it is defensible, up to a point, to call it a Dylan song. The song is still quite popular when Dylan records it during the Times They Are A-Changin’ sessions in 1963, but it is not selected for the album at the time, nor is it ever on Dylan’s set list. After 1963, “The Moonshiner” still does float around in hard-core folk circles for about thirty years (plus a peerless recording by Tim Hardin, 1971), until The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 is released, featuring that forgotten Dylan recording. Which leads to a major reappraisal. In the years that follow, the song appears on the track and setlists of names such as Uncle Tupelo, Cat Power, David Bromberg and Rich Lerner – to name but a few; “The Moonshiner” is experiencing quite a revival, after the success of that bootleg box in 1991.

The origin is unclear, but the song is at least a hundred years old and there are – of course – dozens of text variants. After 1991, nearly all colleagues follow Dylan’s lyrics. But Dylan himself seems, when he records “Dreamin’ Of You” in 1997, to have the version in his head as he once learned it: the one by The Clancy Brothers from 1961. Not so much because of the lines that return word for word in “Dreamin’ Of You”, but because of the opening words with The Clancy Brothers:

I'm a rambler, I'm a gambler,
I'm a long way from home
And if you don't like me
You can leave me alone
I'll eat when I'm hungry
And I'll drink when I'm dry
And if moonshine don't kill me
I'll live till I die

… “I’m a rambler and I’m a gambler”, which echoes almost literally in “Red River Shore”, that other Time Out Of Mind outtake, is not sung in any version other than The Clancy Brothers. And “Moonshiner” playing in Dylan’s head should be clear enough from the words that follow: I’ll eat when I’m hungry and I’ll drink when I’m dry, which is sung in virtually every version, including those by Dylan, Bob Forrest and The New Lost City Ramblers (Tim Hardin sings the “Kentucky Moonshiner” version; Corn bread when i’m hungry, corn liquor when i’m dry).

So, for some reason, perhaps the white moonlight from the previous stanza, the stream of consciousness in Dylan’s creating mind meanders via Henry Rollins to an antique folksong that he had in his repertoire almost forty years ago. At least, the disturbing image from the next line, Even if the flesh falls off my face, is something Scott Warmuth has also found with Rollins, in one of the 61 dreams described in Black Coffee Blues:

“One guy comes through the door and I unload an entire clip into him but he keeps coming at me. Flesh is falling off his face, his skull is made of metal. He smiles and falls.”

In itself that is, of course, a bit too thin to draw an a-ha! line to Dylan. Flesh falling off bones or bodies or faces as an image of mortality and our corruptible lives is admittedly rather gruesome, and for that reason alone has never become mainstream, but it is hardly unique. We know the image from plenty of film horror scenes, Dylan himself has been singing along with “O Death” for years (Leave the body and leave it cold / To draw up the flesh off of the frame), Hieronymus Bosch was painting flesh-ripping scenes already five hundred years ago, and the opening line of Dylan’s own “Foot Of Pride” uses a similar idiom: “Like the lion tears the flesh off from a man”.

Still, these words are surrounded by literal quotes and unmistakable paraphrases from Rollins’ work… it is quite likely that Warmuth is right, that Dylan got this gruesome image also from the ferocious poet from Washington DC. And he really likes them, these lines; they move almost unchanged to “Standing In The Doorway”:

I’ll eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry
And live my life on the square
And even if the flesh falls off of my face
I know someone will be there to care

… where its beauty, arguably, indeed does shine even brighter. Well, less sinister anyway. In a soft, white moonshiner’s light.

To be continued. Next up Dreamin’ Of You part 5: It’s me, Cathy

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

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

by Larry Fyffe

Part I

Elijah, prophet of the Hebrew God, tells King Ahab, the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom are being punished with drought for worshipping Baal; Jezebel, Ahab’s wife, claims Baal is punishing them for straying away from the natural laws of the Golden Calf.

Elijah’s God says a hard rain’s hard agonna fall, and, sure enough, the Baal-prophets and soldiers are swept away in the River of Slaughter – the Kishon flows red with blood:

And it came to pass in the mean while
That the heaven was black with clouds and wind
And there was a great rain ...
And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done
And withal how he had slain all the prophets with the sword
(I Kings 18: 45; -19: I)

Poor Ahab was attempting to keep the peace with the Baalists, but begins have second thoughts about his marriage to Jezebel.

In the song below the singer/narrator takes on the role of Ahab:

Could be better had I never
Known such a lover as you
(Frankie Laine: Jezebel ~ Shanklin)

And so it goes –

Ahab say, I was just trying to play Baal with Belle
Elijah say the next time you see me coming, you better take a hike
And Ahab says, "It's enough; now O Lord, take away my life 
For l am no better than my fathers" (I Kings 19: 4)

Captain Ahab hangs around, however, and, to make a long story short, he gets killed, and Jezebel, her face covered in a fresh coat of paint, now with no one on her side, gets thrown out a window, and her flesh eaten by a pack of dogs “so they shall not say, ‘This is Jezebel’ ” (II Kings 9:30)

It could be said that the singer/songwriter/musician, whose lyrics are quoted beneath, gives an obverse twist to the biblical story above.

Turns Jez into a good gal:

Well,  I sat by her side, and for a while 
I tried to make that girl my wife 
She gave me her best advice
And she said , "Go home, and lead a quiet life"
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

Part II

In the concluding chapters of the Holy Bible, things start to get interesting.

Thus speaks Jesus:

Behold I stand at the door, and knock
If any man hear my voice
And open the door, I will come in to him
And will sup with him, and him with me
(Revelations 3: 20)

Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan opens the mirrored door; not sure who’s there.

For one thing, were readers of the Holy Bible to take the Kishon River in the Northern Kingdom of Israel as the Red River spoken of in the song “Red River Shore”, we would indeed find ourselves strangers transported to the backstage of a strange Gnostic Land.

The unrepentant wife of King Ahab, Jezebel from the Kishon River shore, is said to end up eaten by dogs in the Old Testament, but backstage she’s magically brought back to life by the crucified Jesus of the NewTestament.

There, Christ, at the very least His Ghostly Spirit, admonishes those who claim to accept Him as their Messiah. They (in a city where temples to the many-breasted fertility goddess, a variation on the virgin goddess, Diana are built) have fallen away from His teachings:

Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee
Because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel
Which calls herself a prophetess
To teach and seduce my servants to commit fornication
And to eat things sacrificed unto idols
(Revelations 2: 20)

The following song lyrics thus interpreted:

Now, I've heard of this guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife
That if someone around him died, and was dead
He knew how to bring'em on back to life
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

Given the revelations above, the temptress Jezebel could well be the person brought back to life in the song.

With the curtains drawn, It's not  clear, that's for sure:
Well, I don't know what kind of language that he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore
Sometimes, I think nobody ever saw me here at all
Except the girl from the Red River Shore
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

The New Testament Jezebel does not repent; no more than she does in the Old.

But the gal in the song, akin to the southern belle in the movie ‘Jezebel’, starring Bette Davis, does – in the song, by sending her lusty buck back across the river before he gets into trouble.

Clear it be that she’s not among the ones who, in the song, knock at the narrator’s door looking to seduce him:

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

If that be the case, the face of the evil female archetype – just happens she’s a  good cook – is given a brand new coat of paint by the refomed gold hunter, the Jack of Hearts.

He, now into commerce, a.k.a the RAZ, stands in the doorway:

The ghost of  Belle Starr, she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun, she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper, who sits
At the head of the Chamber of Commerce
(Bob Dylan: Tombstone Blues)

Previously in this series…

• Other people’s songs. How Dylan covers the work of other composers
• Other People’s songs: Bob and others perform “Froggie went a courtin”
• Other people’s songs: They killed him
• Other people’s songs: Frankie & Albert
• Other people’s songs: Tomorrow Night where the music is always everything
• Other people’s songs: from Stack a Lee to Stagger Lee and Hugh Laurie
• Other people’s songs: Love Henry
• Other people’s songs: Rank Stranger To Me

Intro note – in case you have not come across any of these articles before.  Aaron is in the USA and Tony in the UK – Aaron selects the theme and sends the videos to Tony who then tries to write up his commentary while the music is playing.

Aaron: Here is Bob’s version of “Man of Constant Sorrow” from the debut album.

Aaron: I must have heard hundreds of versions of the song over the years.

Tony: This was a central part of my performance as a teenager in the folk club in Bournemouth (England) in the days when I still thought I might make it as a professional musician (something I singularly failed to do).  I used to play a couple of songs from Dylan’s first two albums copying Dylan note for note, and then throw in one or two of my own.  Those were the days!  But back to the point …

Aaron: Here’s three of my favorites

Ginger Baker (Cream) & Denny Laine (Moody Blues/Wings)

Tony:  Oh from the off I love this, perhaps it is such a contrast from the Dylan song that has been a part of my life, for most of my life.  But then I’m not sure about bringing the chorus in and then keep on building up and up with the vocals getting more and more excitable before the instrumental break.

I know it is something that producers love to do – the whole “let’s start real soft and make it build up” but the latter part of the instrumental break is, for me, just a mess, and then by the return of the vocals I just hear everyone fighting each other.   Of course, the percussion needs to have prominence because it is Ginger, but really…   the vocals on that last verse are just too much for me.   There is no thought at all in any way about the lyrics.  He’s singing “I am a man of constant sorrow” for goodness sake.  It certainly doesn’t sound like he’s in sorrow.    Shoot the producer, go back to the start and listen to how good the opening is.

(Actually, I like that phrase about “shoot the producer”.  I wonder if it is possible to write a song called “Shoot the producer”).

Aaron: Soggy Bottom Boys – from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? movie. The original idea was for George Clooney to provide the lead vocals but when it was obvious his take wasn’t convincing enough Dan Tyminski stepped in. Jump to 1:15

Tony: Actually I disobeyed the instructions and watched the whole thing, which is, what shall I say… actually I don’t know.   But the music is superb – it is a great rendition of the song with superb accompaniment and brilliant harmonies.  Everything the Baker Boys couldn’t do.

Aaron: Home Free – believe it or not this is completely a cappella, everything you hear is made by a human voice!

Tony: Wow.   Aaron are you really sure everything is made by a human voice?   OK I’ll your word for it, but no, surely there are drums in use here!   But either way it is a great version.

And now I’m going to be cheeky and throw in one other recording.

According to Wiki, the song was originally called “Farewell Song” in a songbook by Burnett dated to around 1913.  I think this is about the earliest recording there is – it comes from 1928.

Times change, but the message is still as valid as ever.

By Tony Attwood based on the work of Bob Bjarke

If you have a good memory you might recall the article “A new Dylan song, written using artificial intelligence and an old-time songwriter” in which a set of lyrics created by an artificial intelligence program was created through the programming of Bob Bjarke and then had music added to them.

A second article followed, “The Laughter of the Drowned” which is one of the spookiest song titles that I have ever come across.

Bob did in fact send me a third set of lyrics created by the program and they have sat in the vast pile of papers in and around my piano and guitar, and time and again I have tried and failed to create anything that could be vaguely considered to be music, to accompany them.

However knowing that there won’t be any more lyrics from the program since Bob is now engaged in refining and re-working the program, I did not want to be beaten, and so I have finally created a piece of music to go with these rather challenging lyrics.

As I pointed out before, I’ve simply taken the lyrics and written music around them, without thinking “what would Bob do?” because that just makes the whole thing too difficult – at least for me.

Instead, the music tries to capture the essence of the lyrics.  In this case, what came first was the chorus, but trying to fit the rest of  the music around the lyrics was tough

The agreement with Bob was that I would take the lyrics as written and not mess with them, but I have slipped on the occasional word just to try and get some sort of scansion out of them.

And as I have mentioned before, if you are a long term reader you might remember our series Showcase in which readers of Untold Dylan who had made recordings of their own music, or of Dylan songs but with a new interpretation or twist, were welcome to send me recordings and I put them onto this site.

Those recordings are all still online (see the links below) and will now be added to the “Showcase” series.

But as for these songs, and most especially “Solid Rock”, please do consider it an experiment – a challenge perhaps – and I’m sharing this because I found the whole challenge fun and interesting.  And if Bob does continue with re-programming his AI project, in the light of these first three pieces, I’d love to have a chance at working on whatever comes along next.

And please remember the recording below was made in the living room of my home on everyday equipment – plus with no chance to jump back in and sort out the words that I muffed or the piano accompaniment that slipped.   So please don’t compare to a finished studio recording!  And remember, where the words don’t fit, I’ve had to work the music around them.  I’m not allowed to change the program’s lyrics!

They say if you wanna be remembered    
You better move fast, you better move with the times 
Truman had his White House 
And the Capitol was his
The same place that he now sits 

I’m hangin’ on to a solid rock
Made before the willow tree
And I’m going to hell for standin’ on a hill 
And about it givin’ custody of me

So I got a woman named Marya  
She’s a Methodist and she worships at midnight 
She pulls out a knife and cuts me in the back 
I’ve survived by drinkin’ water
I didn’t make it through the wall crawlin’ by

I’m hangin’ on to a solid rock
Made before the willow tree
And I’m going to hell for standin’ on a hill
And a—bout it givin’ custody of me

Ya know I once wondered what it was all meant to be?
Like a swarm of bees looking for a home 
I’m tryin’ to keep from falling down 
But like a lot of people that died long ago

It doesn’t make me angry or suspicious 
I just can’t remember you I am not a doctor
I do not experience pain I do not theorize 
I do not speculate I do not offer my thoughts 
To anyone but myself

Pain is not a thought It’s a feeling
That I’d rather confess 
It’s a knowing
That I do not deny

I’m hangin’ on to a solid rock
Made before the willow tree
And I’m going to hell for standin’ on a hill
And a—bout it givin’ custody of me

You can feel it in the wound you’ve been healin’
You can feel it in the blood they’ve been drainin'
You can’t turn it off 
You can’t remove it 
You can feel it in the wound you’re healin’ 
You cant’ back away

The guilty undertaker pacing on the steps 
He’s prayin’ that the sun don’t shine down upon him 
The light is in the prisoner’s cell    
He’s in the corner prayin’ that the others are asleep

I’m hangin’ on to a solid rock 
Made before the willow tree
And I’m going to hell for standin’ on a hill
And a—bout it givin’ custody of me

By Larry Fyffe

She came down the aisle
Wearing a smile
A vision of loveliness
I uttered a sigh
Whispered goodbye
Goodbye to my happiness
(Patty Page: I Went To Your Wedding ~ JM Robinson)

Patti Smith, like Patty Page, follows the footpath blazed by Patsy Montana and Bonnie Lou (the two latter female stage names chosen because they ‘sound country’).

Bonnie ventures farther than Patsy, and steps into rocknroll “doo-wha”:

I want you badly
You're driving me madly
(Bonnie Lou: I Want You ~ Burton)

The doo-wha revamped in the following song lyrics:

I want you, I want you
I want you so bad
(Bob Dylan: I Want You)

Bonnie’s namesake mentioned as a nod perhaps thereto in the lyrics beneath.

The hollow-dwelling narrator sinks into a bottle:

Patty gone to Laredo
But she be back soon
Left Jamaica this morning
On a boat "Bonnie Lou"
(Bob Dylan: Patty Gone To Laredo)

(A recording of Patty’s gone to Laredo can be found at 4 min 45 sec on this video)

Unlikely known to Bob Dylan when he sings “Patty Gone To Laredo” is that the “Bonnie Lou” be a NS fishing boat that burned and sank; certainly the song has nothing to  do with its replacement the “Bonnie Lou ll” being lost in a storm along with its crew,  since the latter sinking happened after the time “Patty Gone To Laredo” was made.

We have to start over, our life to renew

The men are fishing in Heaven

From the Bonnie Lou Two

(Isle Aux Morts Boys: The Bonnie Lou II ~ Henneberry/Clark )

Likewise, it’s unlikely that the Patty Hearst saga has anything to do with Dylan’s fragmented, “stream of consciousness” lyrics.

More befitting of Dylan be Poe-like sorrowful songs about deserted towns, winged demons and angels.

And ghost-like many-headed creatures re-incarnated in the tall-timber nests of days gone by:

Born in ‘Liz Texas timber

Up where the eagles fly

Then makes him tell in never

But she don’t cry

(Bob Dylan: Patty Gone To Laredo)

• Dreamin’ Of You (1997) part 1: Dreamin’ of Henry
• Dreamin’ Of You (1997) part 2: The Lay of the Last Minstrel

III         I don’t reckon I got no reason to kill nobody

Maybe they’ll get me, maybe they won’t / But whatever it won’t be tonight
I wish your hand was in mine right now / We could go where the moon is white
For years they had me locked in a cage
Then they threw me onto the stage
Some things just last longer 
than you thought they would
And they never, ever explain
I’ve been dreamin’ of you, 
that’s all I do
And it’s driving me insane

Allen Holdsworth was an inimitable British guitar magician for whom even men like Frank Zappa, Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani took their hats off. Contributions to projects by names like U.K., Stanley Clarke and Level 42 are, without exception, Olympic, but Holdsworth (1946-2017) was never really a team player – perhaps a little too self-willed and uncompromising. His true passion was his solo projects, filled with mainly instrumental exercises at the outer limits of guitar virtuosity and eccentric soundscapes. Perhaps not too accessible, but always fascinating. Like his eleventh and last studio album Flat Tire: Music for a Non-Existent Movie (2001). It is – as the title already reveals – a very atmospheric album with, as one of the highlights, the disturbing “Snow Moon” – just as disturbing and even more ominous than Dylan’s We could go where the moon is white, by the way.

Holdsworth is not the first and not the last to try to capture a strong visual idea in music, or to think, after the creation of the music: my, this sounds like a movie soundtrack. Elton John calls his short instrumental interlude on his unjustly somewhat forgotten Blue Moves (1976) “Theme From A Non-Existent TV Series”. Radiohead’s pièce de résistance OK Computer contains the heartbreaking “Exit Music (For A Film)”, which, incidentally, was indeed originally intended for the closing credits of the film Romeo + Juliet (1996). Complete albums by Eno (Music for Films from 1978, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, and more), side 2 of Bowie’s Low… non-existent films and fantasised scenes prove to be a fertile source of inspiration for many artists.

The suspicion that Dylan wanted to write a veiled murder ballad à la “Soon After Midnight” (Tempest, 2012) with “Dreamin’ Of You”, or at least leave the suggestion open, as in “Cold Irons Bound” and “Dirt Road Blues”, gains more weight in this third decastich. “Maybe they’ll get me”, “locked in a cage’, “thrown onto the stage”… this narrator chooses images and words that, at the very least, insinuate a conflict with law enforcers.

Fitting also with the chosen music, its arrangement and colour. The outtake we finally get in 2008, as a free download to promote the upcoming release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs is, if anything, very, very Lanoisesque. This sound and atmosphere is familiar to us from Lanois’ work for Robbie Robertson’s first solo album, for instance, for a great song like “Somewhere Down The Crazy River”, and equally from Lanois’ more recent solo effort, the beautiful soundtrack for the film Sling Blade (1996). In musical highlights of that soundtrack like “Blue Waltz”, “Asylum” and especially the brilliant “Jimmy Was”, the colour of “Dreamin’ Of You” is unmistakably already pre-cooked, probably also thanks to co-producer Mark Howard, who is the engineer for Time Out Of Mind a few months after recording Sling Blade. We hear the same space, the same reverb of Lanois’ guitar notes swirling around in “Shenandoah”, “Bettina” and “Secret Place”, his very characteristic carpet of guitars at all, all over the soundtrack, and on “Jimmy Was” the drum part is even almost identical to “Dreamin’ Of You”;

Besides the sound of the soundtrack, Dylan’s lyrics occasionally skim remarkably close along the film script – as this verse seems to express the introduction of Billy Bob Thornton’s Karl Childers. Twenty-five years ago, as a twelve-year-old, the feeble-minded Karl murdered his mother and her lover, and has been put away in a mental hospital ever since. And now he is being released: For years they had me locked in a cage / Then they threw me onto the stage. He is cured, or at least: no longer considered a danger to society. Which Karl can relate to: “I don’t reckon I got no reason to kill nobody.” Incidentally, according to Dylan researcher Scott Warmuth the direct inspiration comes again from Henry Rollins; “For years they had me locked in a cage” is the opening line of one of the poems in his See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991.

Likewise, the potentially romantic walk in the moonshine happens to be in keeping with a film scene;

LINDA
Karl, why don’t you and Melinda go take a walk. It’s nice out.
KARL
All right then.
He gets up and walks toward the front door. Melinda gets up and tries to catch up.
EXT. SIDEWALK – NIGHT
Karl and Melinda are walking in the moonlight. It seems a little hard for Melinda to keep up.

… but that scene is above all touchingly awkward and funny, and has no relation whatsoever to the subcutaneous threat in Dylan’s I wish your hand was in mine right now / We could go where the moon is white. The adjective “white” is particularly striking – in song and poetry, a colourless moon is actually always “pale”. “Copper Kettle”, “Sleepy Time Down South”, Hank Williams’ “When God Comes And Gathers His Jewels”, “East Of The Sun”, the American Songbook monument “The Nearness Of You”… all songs from Dylan’s jukebox with moonlight, and that light is always pale. “White” is a tad more ominous, maybe that’s why. And a bit more nineteenth-century, perhaps – both Melville and Poe sometimes colour their moon white too. Melville in Dylan’s beloved Moby Dick (“as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead”) and Poe in his early work Tamarlane (1827);

What tho' the moon—the white moon
Shed all the splendour of her noon,
Her smile is chilly—and her beam,
In that time of dreariness, will seem
(So like you gather in your breath)
A portrait taken after death.

… in both cases, evidently, to give a threatening, sinister touch to the narrative. And it is of course, for the third time already in this Dylan song, again a director’s instruction for the lighting technician.

The repetitiveness of the endlessly repeated five-tone lick over the same four chords from start to finish strengthens the suspicion: the film fan Dylan sees a film scene in his mind’s eye during the creation of the song – like one of those wordless interludes in which the camera follows the protagonist on his way to the next key scene. He walks along a dusty road at sunset, we get a backlit wide shot of a panoramic landscape and a lonely protagonist trudging along, a close-up of the man on a bridge staring at the water flowing underneath, usually interspersed with slow-motion flashbacks in sepia tones, of the man at the grave of a child, something like that. An interplay, in any case, where the director needs music, preferably with a repeating motif and minor chords.

It is beginning to look as if Henry Rollins has projected an unsettling character onto Dylan’s inner white screen – and that the musician Dylan hears the soundtrack to it.

To be continued. Next up Dreamin’ Of You part 4: If moonshine don’t kill me

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

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

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

Here are the earlier articles from 2005…

• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 1: Choice cuts from London and Dublin
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 2: More choice cuts from London and Dublin.
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 3: Seattle Stopovers
• NET, 2005, Part 4, Hello, Goodbye: First Ever, Last Ever
• NET 2005, part 5: Old friends grow old too

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

In the last post we looked at some of Dylan’s core songs from the 1960s in terms of an increasing rigidity of musical form, a loss of fluidity with what I called the ‘dumpty-dum’ effect. However, if we move forward forty-odd years to Dylan’s more recent work, we hardly notice any loss of fluidity, particularly with the jazz-oriented songs from Love and Theft. Some of these songs, ‘High Water,’ ‘Summer Days’ and ‘Moonlight’ have been covered in previous posts, and we have heard some stunning performances of those songs.

‘Po Boy’ is Dylan’s jazziest composition and 2005 performances reflect that. Despite the jokiness of it, I see it as a protest song, a Great Depression-era song dealing with a black man on the run from Jim Crow laws and the police, trying not to ‘fall between the cars’ (for non-Americans that’s train carriages). In this New York performance (30^th April) Dylan turns his upsinging into a jazz style, and Herron’s violin evokes the era in fine swinging style.

Po Boy

We have a particularly good performance from Dublin (2^nd night) of ‘Till I Fell in Love with You’ which is more of a blues than jazz, and given a lighter touch than in previous years with a minimal instrumental background and a bit of a swing to avoid the dumpty dum. This is my favourite performance of the song, with its consummate vocal and sense of the dance music of the era, the same era as ‘Po Boy.’

Till I fell in love with you

I am however less certain about this London (3^rd Night) version of the album’s master work, ‘Mississippi.’ It has all the hallmarks of these great London shows, a strong vocal and a brilliant recording.

My problem is with the skipping, lolloping beat Dylan has put behind the song. He could be aiming to swing it, but it starts to sound a bit dumpty-dum to me. The issue here is the loss of the emotional intensity that drives the song, although I am reminded of Dylan’s attempts to lighten the song, and the wonderful acoustic version on Tell Tale Signs.

My favourite Dylan couplet:

All my powers of expression, my thoughts so sublime
Can never do you justice in reason or rhyme

Mississippi

Finally from Love and Theft, we have that jazzy, 1920’s style ‘Floater.’ There’s no other song quite like it in Dylan’s canon. It’s an irresistible, bouncy piece of whimsy. I remember first hearing it, thinking ‘where the hell does this come from?’ He creates a narrator who is looking back fondly on something of a Norman Rockwell childhood. Dylan doesn’t mess with the song and delivers it straight. With violin and whimsical harp, this one’s a treat. (Sorry, no date for this one.)

Floater

Leaving Love and Theft behind, we go back to Time out of Mind and start with perhaps the jazziest composition in that album, ‘Million Miles.’ I feel a ‘best ever’ moment coming on here. I loved the 2003 performance for its vocal power (See NET 2003, Part 1), but nothing matches the subtlety and bluesy broodiness of this performance (Manchester, 16^th Nov). With bonus masterful muted harp break to finish it off.

Million Miles

And if you would like to see Dylan in action:

While on the subject of mood songs, let’s check out ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’ from the New York concert. This song will go on evolving right through to 2019. It is the most powerful evocation of approaching death that Dylan wrote (except ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ perhaps). This is a slow, broody version, with a spacey muted harp break. Just how the upsinging works for a song like this however I’ll leave over to you…

It’s Not Dark Yet

There’s a beautifully clear recording of ‘Trying to Get to Heaven’ (10^th July Illinois.) Dylan is in great voice, and it’s a confident performance. What bothers me with this one is the dreaded upsinging. I do appreciate that Dylan is trying to bring some variety into his vocal expression, and training his voice to make those octave leaps, but it becomes an affectation, a regrettable vocal mannerism. For some songs it might work okay, but for this one, well again, I have to leave it over to you…

Trying to Get to Heaven

Not as well recorded, but arguably a better performance is this ‘Things Have Changed.’ (4^th Nov). No upsinging at all, but a swinging, passionate performance enlivened with Herron’s violin once more. The raw power of the song comes across despite the recording. I’m glad this song hasn’t changed.

Things have changed

We have to wind the clock back now to 1991, and Under A Red Sky, for this fast-paced ‘God Knows.’ (Dublin, 2^nd night.) The song kicks itself into rocker. A bit of dumpty-dum works fine here. I count this as a protest song which, like ‘Masters of War,’ doesn’t lose its relevance with the passing years. There is a desperation, a feature of the songs from that album, and an urgency to it. The phrase ‘God knows’ is used in both its ironical and straight sense.

God knows that when you see it
God knows you've got to weep
God knows the secrets of your heart
He'll tell them to you when you're asleep

Chilling.

God Knows

Now back to Oh Mercy to catch a shooting star. Since 2000 we have had many intense performances of this song. Those performances expressed the power of the nostalgia that drives the song. Love or salvation, it’s all the same yearning. Despite the upsinging, this is a forceful vocal. Although it needs the slow tempo, this one’s a bit more sedate than previous performances. For some who have enjoyed previous performances, this might lumber along somewhat. The final harp break lifts it, however. (30^th Oct)

Shooting Star

Now we have to shoot back to the gospel era, to revisit, first ‘Lenny Bruce,’ generally considered one of the weaker songs from Shot of Love (1981). That may well be, but I think that Dylan, who loves to play with personas and pen dramatic monologues, is playing it straight here. It’s a tribute song. A eulogy, and a eulogy is fond reminiscence of someone who has died, usually delivered at a funeral. It’s a chance to be sentimental and say what qualities of the deceased you most admire. Sincerity rather than literary cleverness is its hallmark. In that respect, the modest ‘Lenny Bruce’ works just fine.

And so does this performance from 16^th April.

Lenny Bruce

‘Saving Grace’ from Saved (1980). Dylan played it thirty-two times during the NET, and only twice in 2005. The song, another of those occasional visitors, is on its way out, and will be played only once more in 2012.

It’s not my favourite Dylan gospel song, but I value it for expressing the sense we get sometimes that life is blessed, and that we have been touched by a larger sense of grace. To be in a ‘state of grace’ is to be in a blessed state indeed. (11^th April) For my ear, this is one of the better performances. It’s slow but not too thumpy, Dylan pours everything into the vocal and Herron polishes it off with a soul rending violin break.

Saving Grace

‘I Believe In You’ from Slow Train Coming (1979) is in a similar position. It was played six times in 2005, but is also on its way out. By 2009 it will be gone. What seems remarkable, given the vocal virtuosity of the 1980 Toronto performance, is that Dylan can capture the extremity of this passion in these later years even with his throat sounding half gone. The 2004 performance is particularly solid. (See NET, 2004, part 6) There he proved he could do it, and he does it again here, although he keeps it pretty much in the lower register. The shimmering restraint of the harp break gives the song a whole new sense. The sense that this is not a hysterical assertion of faith (Montreal 1980) but something gentler and more considered. A love that simmers beneath the surface. A love that can be more quietly stated, but with just as much dedication.

I believe in you

We now turn back the page a year to 1978 and Street Legal. Dylan’s old friend ‘Senor’ has grown more sedate over the past three years. Consider the wild ending of the 2003 performance (NET, 2003, part 2) with these more controlled 2005 versions.  The first is from Dublin, 2^nd night. A high-quality performance.

Senor (A)

Despite the excellence of that performance, this one from London (1^st Night) is a good rival. Maybe a touch more desperation. (By the way, I missed this London/Dublin pair when doing my first two posts for this year). A touch of wildness at the end. You have to go back to the 2003 performance to beat that ecstatic harp.

Senor (B)

We have wound the clock back now to Blood on the Tracks (1974) and Dylan’s most regular friend of all, ‘Tangled Up In Blue.’ Where would we be without it? According to the official Dylan website, it has been performed a phenomenal 1648 times. In 2005 this stadium rock song par-excellence suffered something of an eclipse, being played only four times. This epic ruled from 1993, with its twelve/thirteen minute performances, to 2003 with a ‘best ever’ wild performance. It was to come back in 2006, but by 2009 the arrangement was quite different. Those interested in the history of the song might like to check out my Tangled Up In Harmonicas post

This performance from 29^th October (Oberhausen) is not particularly remarkable and lacks the harp break at the end which, in previous performances, generated a lot of musical excitement.

Tangled Up in Blue

That brings us back to the 1960s where we began in Part 5, and I have enough room to squeeze in a couple of songs that didn’t make it into Part 5.

This London (1^st night) performance of ‘Queen Jane Approximately,’ joins a growing list of stunning performances of this song. It’s a rare but valued visitor, with only seventy-five performances in all. The older Dylan seems to relish the world-weariness of the song, turning it into an eight-minute epic.

Queen Jane

I thought we’d better catch that little ballad, ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’ before it disappears from the setlists. This is its second to last performance (the last will be in 2008) and it’s easy to see why so many other artists, including Elvis Presley,  covered the song. It belongs with ‘Don’t Think Twice’ and ‘One Too Many Mornings’ as a song of regret, and is an exquisite lyric:

I can’t see my reflection in the waters
I can’t speak the sounds that show no pain
I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps
Or can’t remember the sound of my own name

That says it all. See you soon with an epilogue for 2005.

Kia Ora

• Bob Dylan And Dante and Bill Heagney (Part I and II)
• Bob Dylan and Dante (Part III and IV)
• Bob Dylan and Dante (Part V )
• Bob Dylan and Dante Part VI and VII
• Bob Dylan and Dante Part VIII and IX

By Larry Fyffe

Bob  Dylan And Dante (Part X)

“Can’t Escape From You”, inspired by the Bing Crosby song, is one by Bob Dylan with a fragmented narrative that deliberately leaves the meaning of the piece open to more than one interpretation on both the micro- and macro-level in regards to the existential position of human beings in the whole wide Universe.

Applying the template of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” – the 13th century Italian poet figuratively climbs from the basement of Hell to the rooftop of Heaven while he’s still alive.

Using the template helps to uncover a unity in the lyrics of Dylan’s otherwise rather amorphous song.

Trains are waiting at the station; one heading for Hell; one for Purgatory; and one for Heaven.

Dante boards the one going to Hell:

Oh, the train is rolling
All along the homeward way
All my hopes are over the horizon
All my dreams are gone astray

Its passenger dreams of his beloved Beatrice, whom he has left behind – tells her that he has abandoned all hope:

The hills darkly shaded
Stars fall from above
All the joys of earth have faded
The night's untouched, my love

Another train’s leaving for Purgatory, but for now Dante’s in Hell, and he might as well make the best of it:

I'll be here 'til tomorrow
Beneath a shroud of gray
I'll pretend I'm free of sorrow
My heart is miles away

Dante worries that he’s agonna get stuck in Hell:

The dead bells are ringing
My train is overdue
To your memories I'm clinging
I can't escape from you

At last the train arrives. In Purgatory, Dante knows another one will take him on to Heaven.

But it won’t leave until he’s cleansed of all sins:

Well, there's the sound of thunder
Roaring loud and long
Sometimes you got to wonder
God knows I've done nothing wrong

And not before Beatrice gives him a good scolding:

Ah, you've wasted all your power
You've thrown out the Christmas pie
Now you're withered like a flower
You'll play the fool and die

The poet snaps back at Beatrice for saying he’s not worthy for the Christian afterlife – just because he dressed in black vinyl:

I'm neither sad nor sorry
I'm all dressed up in black
I fought for fame and glory
And you tried to break my back

The Gnostic-like story goes on; in short, Dante Dylan reaches Seventh Heaven, but not the sublimely lit place where Beatrice waits for him beyond the Fixed Stars.

Before that happens, her smile will surely blind him:

The path is never ending
The stars they never age
The morning light is blinding
All the world's a stage
(Bob Dylan: Can't Escape From You)

Bob Dylan And Dante (Part XI)

“Can’t Get Away From You” can be considered an allegorical song,
a mini-rendition of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’.  The narrator in the song reaches Seventh Heaven where an individual tries to rationally balance the four fluids in the body (made up of fire, earth, air, and water)  by restraining impulses that lead to excess – for example, too much sexual activity, or the accumulation of too many material objects.

Apollo, who’s the mythological Sun god, is both rational as well as wise; he plays Music.

The ideal balance, at least on earth, Dante Dylan fails to reach:

In the far off sweet forever
The sunshine peeking through
We should've walked together
I can't escape from you

His beloved (and living Beatrice, indicated by her shadow) composed more of water; he more of fire.

Sadly, things don’t work out in the end:

I cannot grasp the shadows
That gather near my door
The rainfall round my window
I wished I'd seen you more

Dante comes to terms with the situation he’s now in, but he’s sorrowful about how he handled matters:

Should be the time of gladness
Happy faces everywhere
The mystery of madness
Is propagating in the air

Expresses the Romantic vision of an idyllic country life that’s closer to the
far-away stars:

I don't like the city
Not like some folks do
Isn't it a pity
I can't escape from you:

Elysium lost

We ploughed the fields of Heaven
Right down to the end
I hope I can be forgiven
If any of my words offend

In those Elysian Fields on Earth:

All our days were splendid
They were simple, and they were plain
It never should have ended
I should have kissed you in the rain

Where grow flowers representing the innocence of youth, and, in Christianity, the Holy Trinity:

I've been thinking things over
All the moments full of grace
The primrose and the clover
Your ever-changing face

Where Beatice makes love to the unknowable and mysterious Godhead:

Can't help looking at you
You made love with God-knows-who
Never found a gal to match you
I can't escape from you
(Bob Dylan: Can't Escape From You)

The song lyrics, an epic narrative; with accompanying music to match the sombre mood… a Wonder to behold!

Bob Dylan And Dante (Part XII)

By Larry Fyffe

Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan, in the following lyrics, makes it clear he’s aware of Dante Alighieri.

Dante with a Christian background, Dylan, a Jewish one:

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
(Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Blue)

Like Dante, the former Robert Zimmerman, in his writings, references biblical characters, as well as historical and literary ones.

For example, biblical farmer Cain slays his shepherd brother Abel; Cain’s forced to wander off, and later he establishes a sinful city.

In the Ditches of Hell where sinners are punished, Dante and Virgil meet up with fortune tellers and false prophets who claim they’re able to see the future; Cain, a giver of inferior gifts, is there too; his great trespass against his blood brother marked on his face like blood spots on the Moon:

For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine
Both hemispheres, touching the waves
Beneath the towers of Seville
(Dante: The Infernal, Canto XX)

Fraudsters of a modern “Divine Comedy” are referred to in the song lyrics below:

Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortune-telling lady
Has even taken all of her things inside

Dante’s narrator here seemingly speaks out the window of Limbo, not from  Hell:

All except for Cain and Abel
And the Hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or expecting rain
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

According to the New Testament verse below, claimed it be, by some theologians anyway, that the crucified Jesus descends to the Underworld to rescue from Limbo the souls (shades) of particularly worthy people who are stuck there; they aren’t Christians, but it’s not any fault of their own:

He that descended is the same also
That ascended up far above the heavens
That He might fill all things
(Ephesians 4:10)

Pagan poet Virgil tells Dante he saw this happen:

He drew forth the shade of our first parent
His child Abel, and Noah, a righteous man
And Moses, lawgiver for faith approved ...
(Dante: The Inferno, Canto IV)

Eve, the mother of Cain and Abel, who likes to eat apples, and the murderer Cain, get no mention above; Eve, akin to Persephone, is seduced or raped by Pluto, the mythological ruler of Hades.

The Eve and Cain story be one to consider. Dante’s claim that some souls of Jews are saved by organized superhuman crews surrounding Jesus quite another.

So it can be construed in the double-edged song lyrics quoted beneath – in reference to the Christian concept of “original sin”:

Preacher was talking, there's a sermon he gave
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved ...
It ain't easy to swallow, it sticks in your throat
She gave her heart to the man in the long black coat
(Bob Dylan: The Man In The Long Black Coat)

https://youtu.be/8Q1EFoOs_CU

Christian Dante makes no mention of the possibility of Adam’s first wife; that the couple splits up, and Eve, cleaved from Adam, replaces her:

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

Could be she’s acknowledged in the song lyrics below:

Please, see for me if her hair is hanging long
For that's  the way I remember her best
(Bob Dylan: Girl From The North Country)

Previously in this series…

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: Bob’s version of Rank Stranger To Me appeared on Down in the Groove

Tony: This was written by Albert E Brumley, and I must admit I found myself completely without any knowledge of the composer of this wonderful song.  He was a tenant farmer (sharecropper) and so grew up picking cotton on the family farm.  But his musical talent took him away from the farm to Hartford Musical Institute in Arkansas.

Aside from Rank Stranger, he wrote around 800 songs (including the hymn “I’ll fly away”) and was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.   He died in 1977.

Aaron: Back in the day the song was recorded by all and sundry with the Stanley Brothers being the most famous.

Tony: Not knowing the song in any version other than Bob’s, it is a bit of a shock to hear this version – and I guess this is how it originally sounded.  I don’t know enough about the song to know if Bob was the first person to transform it as he did for “Down in the Groove” version, but my goodness he has put in a lot of power and passion into his version, which I don’t hear in the Stanley Brothers version.

Aaron: More recently the song seems to have fallen out of favor to cover. I only have one other version in my collection: Vic Chesnutt.

He was a quadriplegic with limited use of his hands but realized he could still play basic chords. He recorded 17 albums before his untimely death at just 45 in 2009. Check out his work if you have a moment, he was quite, quite brilliant.

Tony: This is an extraordinary sound with the guitar being dominant over the voices.  For me the rhythm feels too plodding, and it is Bob’s move away from this that makes his version seem so good in my opinion.  But the notion of making it sound this way is really interesting.

Aaron: The only other recent version was by tenor Alfie Boe on his 2012 album Storyteller.

Tony: This video isn’t playing for me in the UK [to explain, Aaron is in the USA and sends me his selection and comments and then I add mine in England], but I am guessing it works in the US so I am leaving it in.   But if it doesn’t work for you, please scroll down…

… for here is one that I have found that works in the UK

This is the Royal Albert Hall performance from 2013 (which I add in case this version isn’t available in your area).   The performance starts at around 1 minute 35 seconds.

And for me, this is the one performance that like Bob’s that gives me a piece that I want to listen to today – it delivers the power that the lyrics demand.

I wandered again to my home in the mountain
Where in youth's early dawn, I was happy and free
I looked for my friends but I never could find them
I found they were all rank strangers to me

Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me

"Well, they all moved away, " said the voice of a stranger
"To some beautiful home on that bright, crystal sea"
Some beautiful day, well, I'll meet 'em in Heaven
Where no one will be a stranger to me

Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me

These lyrics are incredibly powerful and they deserve a performance like this, or like Bob’s, to do them justice.

And oh, to have a voice like Alfie Boe’s!

Thanks Aaron as ever for launching us yet again into another fascinating musical journey.  I really do enjoy these journies of discovery.

• Dreamin’ Of You (1997) part 1: Dreamin’ of Henry

by Jochen Markhorst

II          The Lay of the Last Minstrel

 The only official publication of the lyrics of “Dreamin’ Of You” is on www.bobdylan.com, on the official site. In Lyrics 1962-2001 from 2004 there are no lyrics of outtakes in the chapter Time Out Of Mind, only the lyrics of “Things Have Changed” under “additional lyrics”. In the successor, The Lyrics 1961-2012 (2016) “Red River Shore” is added too, again with the indication “additional lyrics”. The word “outtake” is never used anyway, and would of course be incorrect in the case of the Oscar-winning “Things Have Changed”; that song was recorded two and a half years after Time Out Of Mind, somewhere between May and July 1999. When compiling the book edition, the choice was apparently made to place the song with Time Out Of Mind for practical reasons only – although chronologically it is actually closer to “Love And Theft” (recorded May 2001).

On that only official publication then of “Dreamin’ Of You”, on the site that is, the lyrics are presented in ten stanzas. Each second verse ends with the recurring lines I’ve been dreamin’ of you, that’s all I do / And it’s driving me insane, which we can call the refrain with some tolerance. Some irregularities do stand out, though:

– the ten stanzas alternate between four and six verses, except for the second stanza, which has five verses;
– the poet seems to have fixed a rhyme scheme in mind, but that scheme is not correct in a few places – or not yet, assuming that Dylan has recorded a work in progress;
– the line breaks in the published text seem rather arbitrary, hence perhaps the “not quite right” second stanza with the different number of five lines – in any case, presented like this, the lyrics ignore existing rhyme and a content-wise logical division into strophes.

All in all, it does seem that Dylan had a much tighter, more logical structure in mind: not stanzas of varying length, but five stanzas of ten lines, rhyme scheme aabbcc – deed, where the last four lines have a chorus function. A rhyme scheme like Sir Walter Scott uses, for instance, in the nineteenth century (in The Lay of the Last Minstrel). The published text is fairly easy to rearrange into this structure, or rather: to restore. The first two stanzas, for example, are on the site shown as a four-line stanza plus a five-line stanza:

The light in this place is really bad
Like being at the bottom of a stream
Any minute now
I’m expecting to wake up from a dream

Means so much, the softest touch
By the grave of some child, who neither wept or smiled
I pondered my faith in the rain
I’ve been dreamin’ of you, that’s all I do
And it’s driving me insane

Illogical sentence breaks (verse 3 to 4, for example), only two end rhymes, an overdose of inner rhymes… a restructuring to a ten-line couplet seems much more obvious:

The light in this place is really bad, 
     like being at the bottom of a stream
Any minute now I’m expecting to wake up from a dream
Means so much,
The softest touch,
By the grave of some child,
who neither wept or smiled.
I pondered my faith in the rain - 
I’ve been dreamin’ of you,
That’s all I do
And it’s driving me insane

The strongest indication for this option is the aabbcc – deed rhyme scheme. The whole text can be reformed into this scheme (still having three “wrong” rhymes, though – again: work in progress, presumably). So, the next two stanzas are not stanza 3 and 4, but the second ten-line stanza:

Somewhere dawn is breaking / Light is streaking ‘cross the floor
Church bells are ringing / I wonder who they’re ringing for
Travel under any star
You’ll see me wherever you are
The shadowy past
is awake and so vast
I’m sleeping in the palace of pain
I’ve been dreamin’ of you,
that’s all I do
But it’s driving me insane

The same number of lines, a similar syllable distribution per stanza, an identical rhyme scheme… it seems very likely that this was the form the poet had in mind. Why Dylan, or the book editor, or the web editor, conceals this form is unclear. Maybe he thinks it looks corny, or that dissimilar couplets are cooler, or whatever. It does occur quite often, actually – that the layout of the official publication ignores or disguises the “true” form of a song text. The most extreme example is “No Time To Think”, which is in fact a long, cleverly composed sonnet cycle of nine inverted sonnets,  and there are plenty of other examples (“Where Are You Tonight”, “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, to name but three). The rearranging of the lyrics into their “real” form, as with this song, usually reveals cast-iron, classic poetry forms – and shows authentic, honest craftsmanship. Nothing to be ashamed of, in any case.

Anyway; “Dreamin’Of You”. The content of this second ten-line stanza builds on the first. Again, it starts with a stage direction for the lighting technician, and there is again a reference to a grave, to a cemetery, to a death, at any rate. At least, variations of the expression Church bells are ringing / I wonder who they’re ringing for in blues lyrics always refer to death bells (not to an ordinary church service, hardly ever to wedding bells). Dylan knows it from blues classics as Roosevelt Sykes’ “Sad And Lonely Day” from 1933, from “Stop And Listen Blues” by The Mississippi Sheiks (1929) and Muddy Waters’ “Buryin’ Ground Blues”(1947). And Dylan himself sings it on his debut album, in “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”:

Did you ever hear them church bells tone
Means another poor boy is dead and gone

… as Dylan himself incorporates it in the Blood On The Tracks outtake “Call Letter Blues” (Well, I walked all night long / Listenin’ to them church bells tone). And in the big sister of “Dreamin’ Of You” of course, in “Can’t Escape From You” on Modern Times:

The dead bells are ringing
My train is overdue
To your memory I’m clinging
I can’t escape from you 

Ringing church bells, in short, always mean death, both in the blues and with Dylan. Something similar applies to shadowy in the verse “The shadowy past is awake and so vast”. In the canon, in American Songbook classics like “I Surrender, Dear”, or “The Lamp Is Low”, or the song of which “Dreamin’ Of You” is a kind of negative image, in “I Thought About You”, shadowy usually signals: idyll, romance, the place where lovers meet:

I took a trip on a train
And I thought about you
I passed a shadowy lane
And I thought about you

… but with Dylan it is always threatening, ominous. The shadowy sun from “Only A Pawn In Their Game”, the shadowy world from “Jokerman”, and the passage about Fred Neill in the first chapter of Chronicles:

“I’d heard stuff about him, that he was an errant sailor, harbored a skiff in Florida, was an underground cop, had hooker friends and a shadowy past.”

… and like shadows and shadowy is also used dozens of times by Henry Rollins – almost always metaphorically, and almost always with a sinister connotation;

Walk away from me as fast as you can
Never speak of me or to me again
It’s too late
For all that
Death is the only shadow on my road

(from “Don’t Come Close”, Now Watch Him Die, 1993)

“Dreamin’ Of You” is apparently, apart from being set up in a rigid, classical structure, also conceived as a sultry, uncomfortable cloak-and-dagger. “Confessions of an Assassin”, perhaps. “Memoirs of a Strangler”, or “Soon After Midnight”, something like that…

———-

To be continued. Next up Dreamin’ Of You part 3: I don’t reckon I got no reason to kill nobody

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

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

There are stage plays that run for years to spectacular successes. Written and staged by renowned artists. Played to capacity-filled auditoriums in different countries. Cf. Twyla Tharp’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ or Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country.

But I’d like to tell you about something completely different. A play of an ephemeral life, very well-conceived and written and fabulously played by students only to merit their acting college degrees.

In Poland, part of the acting schools are public. In order to get a degree, aspiring actors have not only to write theses but also to be cast in so-called “degree-plays”, plays that are either adaptations of existing dramas, or newly-conceived works.

One of the most important Polish acting schools is Leon Schiller National Film School in Łódź. Among its alumni, there are many great film and theatre artists: Roman Polański, Jerzy Skolimowski, Zbigniew Rybczyński of the Tango fame, Andrzej Wajda.

This year’s graduates prepared three plays. One of them was written by a renowned Polish musical director Wojciech Kościelniak. It is entitled 115 sen Boba Dylana, or “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”.

The plot tells a story of one Robert Zimmerman (Wiktor Dębski) who arrives in New York City in the early freezing weeks of 1961 and searches for the opportunity to see his idol Woody Guthrie. He’s determined to follow Guthrie’s footsteps and sing his mentor’s songs, or songs Guthrie sang.

While meandering through famous and not-so-famous places he meets several people, as if in a dream, some of them fictitious and some of them real. He learns about the realities of the music business and its expectations (that’s the lesson he gets from Kapitan, played by Kirył Pietruczuk), and he is made aware by a blind girl Moonbird (Karolina Kowalska, a variation on the figure of Louis ‘Moondog’ Hardin) that the only sense in pursuing a career is in being true to oneself and so he has to think of expressing himself and not only mimicking his hero.

He tries to find comfort in the arms of women – a married cloak keeper Chloe (Emilia Lewandowska) and young posh-raised activist Suze (Maria Adamska). He is figuratively told about the dangers of fame through the tale of Edie (Aleksandra Bernatek). Other people he meets are Queequeg (Hubert Sycz) of “Pequod”‘s fame and two clown-like figures Tirli Bim (Marcin Walkowski) and Tirli Bom (Bartek Dargiewicz) who act as commentators of the events.

And, last but not least, in this dream-like, Brechtian landscape he listens to tales of greed and despair, told by Mrs. Thomas (Olga Rayska) and Black Lady (Oliwia Adamowicz).

Eventually, Zimmerman-turned-Dylan he comes to the mental hospital where Woody Guthrie is confined to a bed, and sings him his tribute.

Not much of a plot, apparently.

But what struck me was the way it was all written, staged and played.

The libretto is based on Bob Dylan’s interviews, on his Chronicles Vol. 1, excerpts from Tarantula, Kościelniak’s own ideas – and the songs, in yours truly’s translations (which applies to Tarantula, too). And in spite of its apparently sketchy character, it all seems well-crafted and engaging, the intrigue is not difficult to follow.

These students are of course very young people. And yet they absorbed the storyline and its intricacies, they act and sing with conviction, making the songs their own. They are THEN and THERE, in the 1961 New York and New Jersey. They mention names that are next-to-anonymous to the majority of people in Poland – Woody Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Carolyn Hester, Edie Sedgwick, Suze Rotolo – and they seem to know who they talk about.

They managed to capture the audience’s attention fully, through an over-3h-performance. Incredible.

The songs are very cleverly arranged. They do not copy the existing Dylan-wannabes, they do not try to emulate the folk scene. It’s the theatre and its isolated world, and its one-of-a-kind reality requires something different. The students of Łódź’s Music Academy made splendid arrangements, played by a foursome of upright piano, drums (with a djembe), bass guitar and electric guitar, and the music is something unique between, say, Kurt Weill and trip-hop.

Finally, the selection of songs is rather unusual. All songs bar two are long pieces, and the actresses and actors sing them in their entirety, no short cuts. Just see:

The Times They Are a-Changin’, sung by Tirli Bim

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, sung in parts, throughout, by TIrli Bim and Tirli Bom:

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), sung by Kapitan [photo from a different play]:

A Hard Rain-s a-Gonna Fall, sung by Chloe:

Like a Rolling Stone, sung by Edie:

Tempest , sung by Karolina Kowalska

(all 49 verses, and she manages to keep us on a short lead):

North Country Blues, sung by Mrs. Thomas:

Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream…

sung by the whole cast:

Thereafter we had Hurricane, sung by Queequeg, Black Diamond Bay, sung by Black Lady, Gotta Serve Somebody, sung by Tirli Bom, and Song to Woody, sung by Zimmerman/Dylan:

What more can I say? It was impressive. It was moving. It was hope-bringing.

And sadly, it was a fugitive. The School has no rights to perpetuate the event so there was no nor will be any recording, sound- nor videowise. Thus, I just want to spread the message of young Poles who, for a couple of months, have been recreating the world of Dylan songs and his world. And they inhabited it.

After one of the shows, the one that I attended, I met them and we talked for a while. And I could see they were sorry to become aware it was not going to live much longer. They knew they’d done something special.

• Bob Dylan And Dante and Bill Heagney (Part I and II)
• Bob Dylan and Dante (Part III and IV)
• Bob Dylan and Dante (Part V )
• Bob Dylan and Dante Part VI and VII

Richard Thomas points out that Bob Dylan sources the poem below in his song “Crossing The Rubicon”.

Caesar marches on Rome:

The bright red river flows from a modest spring
Through the bottom of a valley
Valleys dividing Gaul from Italian lands
(Lucan: On The Civil War, Book I)

Dante crosses the River Styx, and enters Hades; to the right there is a path that leads to the blissful Elysium Fields:

Here comes the place where cleaves our way
The road to the right to Pluto's dwelling place goes
And leads to Elysium
But the one to the left leads to Tartarus
And speeds the souls of the cursed to doom
(Virgil: The Aeneid, Book I)

In the following song lyrics, Hades is placed above ground; the narrator therein takes on the role of the Trojan Aeneas:

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

In Seventh Heaven, Dante meets up with Beatrice in the Elysium Fields; he’s not yet been guided through the Sphere of the Fixed Stars, and onward to where they begin to rotate:

For in the smile that glowed in her eyes
I thought that I, with mine, had touched the height
Of both my blessedness and Paradise
(Dante: Paradise, Canto XV)

In the song lyrics quoted beneath, like Dante on tour when he still throws a shadow, the narrator’s quite content to have gotten thus far.

Coulld be said that Dante Dylan decides to give himself to his beloved Beatrice once he passes from this Earth:

Well, my heart's like a river, a river that sings
Just takes me a while to realize things
I'll see you are sunrise, I'll see you at dawn
I'll lay down beside you when everyone's gone
(Bob Dylan: I've Made up My Mind To Give Myself to You)

Part IX

“Can’t Escape From You”, inspired by the Bing Crosby song, is one by Bob Dylan with a fragmented narrative that deliberately leaves the meaning of the piece open to more than one interpretation on both the micro- and macro-level in regards to the existential position of human beings in the whole wide Universe.

Applying the template of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” – the 13th century Italian poet figuratively climbs from the basement of Hell to the rooftop of Heaven while he’s still alive.

Using the template helps to uncover a unity in the lyrics of Dylan’s otherwise rather amorphous song.

Trains are waiting at the station; one heading for Hell; one for Purgatory; and one for Heaven.

Dante boards the one going to Hell:

Oh, the train is rolling
All along the homeward way
All my hopes are over the horizon
All my dreams are gone astray

Its passenger dreams of his beloved Beatrice, whom he has left behind – tells her that he has abandoned all hope:

The hills darkly shaded
Stars fall from above
All the joys of earth have faded
The night's untouched, my love

Another train’s leaving for Purgatory, but for now Dante’s in Hell, and he might as well make the best of it:

I'll be here 'til tomorrow
Beneath a shroud of gray
I'll pretend I'm free of sorrow
My heart is miles away

Dante worries that he’s agonna get stuck in Hell:

The dead bells are ringing
My train is overdue
To your memories I'm clinging
I can't escape from you

At last the train arrives. In Purgatory, Dante knows another one will take him on to Heaven.

But it won’t leave until he’s cleansed of all sins:

Well, there's the sound of thunder
Roaring loud and long
Sometimes you got to wonder
God knows I've done nothing wrong

And not before Beatrice gives him a good scolding:

Ah, you've wasted all your power
You've thrown out the Christmas pie
Now you're withered like a flower
You'll play the fool and die

The poet snaps back at Beatrice for saying he’s not worthy for the Christian afterlife:

I'm neither sad nor sorry
I'm all dressed up in black
I fought for fame and glory
And you tried to break my back

The Gnostic-like story goes on; in short, Dante Dylan reaches Seventh Heaven, but not the sublimely lit place where Beatrice waits for him beyond the Fixed Stars.

Before that happens, her smile would surely blind him:

The path is never ending
The stars they never age
The morning light is blinding
All the world's a stage
(Bob Dylan: Can't Escape From You)

By Tony Attwood

What can you do with a song that is not only incredibly famous in terms of its original but has had such a vast number of covers that it is pretty difficult to imagine anything else being possible?

One answer seems to be to produce a vast number of instrumental covers, many of which are, well, rather bizarre and odd.  Take these two…

I am not going further down that road, but there are plenty more out there if you find that interesting.

Meanwhile, we’ve already done an article on how Lay Lady Lay can be used as the basis for something else, with Lay Lady Lay: The Sampler Sessions.

And Jochen has also chosen his selection of winning covers with versions by Magnet, Ministry, Cher and Isaac Hayes, and that selection is most certainly worth looking into.

So is there anything else?   Indiana Nomma goes somewhere else again, and has the virtue of sounding like she really believes it and wants to be performing the song.   It is perfectly arranged and performed, and nothing in the production shows any sign of someone saying, “we need to do something else here guys.”  It just is, it sounds complete.  I could almost believe that this is how the piece was initially imagined.

Of course, some have really tried to play around with the chords, the melody and rhythm to see what happens.   And the answer usually is nothing very exciting.   But here’s one that I would give 10 out of 10 to, for inventiveness and production.   It does show that differences can be made even with songs we know 100%.

Moving on, the next track is a version that does nothing new, and treats the song as it is, without trying to go anywhere else.  And yet contains far more than enough for me to want to keep listening, even though I know exactly where it is going.

How does that happen?  I guess, by no one trying too hard, and just accepting the fact that the song as written is complete in itself.  It needs an accompaniment, but that’s it… It is, and us listeners simply need to take it for what it is.

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

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

by Jochen Markhorst

I           Dreamin’ of Henry

 Just like the equally compelling time document The Bootleg Series 12 – The Cutting Edge 1965-66 (2015), on which we can voyeuristically follow the evolution from run-up to final studio recording (such as the twenty takes of “Like A Rolling Stone”), the brilliant The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006 from 2008 does give us a glimpse into the phase before as well, into the sketchbook, into the process of coming up with a lyric. We hear how lines and word combinations from the rejected “Marchin’ To The City” are transferred to “Not Dark Yet” and “‘Til I Fell In Love With You”, and we get alternative recordings with textual differences (“Born In Time” and “Dignity”, for example).

The rejected outtake “Dreamin’ Of You” offers the same insight as “Marchin’ To The City”, and more: apart from the gems Dylan picks out to use for other songs, it seems to reveal what a very first seed for a Dylan lyric can be. At least, that’s what the opening lines appear to give us, the opening which will eventually, after the rejection, be transferred to “Standing In The Doorway”:

The light in this place is really bad
Like being at the bottom of a stream
Any minute now
I’m expecting to wake up from a dream

The opening line, as Dylan researcher Scott Warmuth found, is lifted in its entirety from Henry Rollins’ poem “One Way Conversation” (in See A Grown Man Cry, 1992);

Yea, hi I thought I'd check in
This house I'm at is full of bugs
There's lots of things that I don't tell you
Lots of things that don't have words to wear
The light in this place is really bad
I'm thinking about your eyes
Hell, we're tied up in this shit you know
Stuck behind walls, frozen in doorways
I hope these bugs don't get into my food

… and from the remaining eight lines, which are similar in content, it becomes clear that the narrator is talking to an answering machine and is in a slightly detached state; he does not know exactly where he is, for example. Somewhere halfway through, there is then the line that Dylan has underlined, “The light in this place is really bad”, and which initially inspires him to the somewhat alienating, and in any case original metaphor, “Like being at the bottom of a stream”. Alienating, because few listeners or readers will have an aha-experience with “the light at the bottom of a stream” – given that a metaphor is actually meant to make something clear by naming a resemblance to something familiar. But then, of course, this characteristic does not apply so much to poetry. And to an even lesser extent to Dylan’s poetry.

“Being at the bottom of a stream” forces the associations to lugubrious distances, as a matter of fact. It is a location where we find victims of a witchcraft trial, where Ophelia ends up after her suicide, it is a classic dumping ground for murder weapons whose owner wants to get rid of, and more macabre connotations just like these – but there are really no positive links with a river bottom. The gloominess is triggered, presumably, by the morbid Now Watch Him Die, the 1993 work in which Henry Rollins processes the horror of the gruesome, senseless murder of his friend Joe Cole (who is shot through the head point-blank right before Henry’s eyes in a brutal robbery). Dylan incorporates more fragments from that chilling work into his Time Out Of Mind songs, like in this stanza; the fourth line, “I’m expecting to wake up from a dream”, is also taken from Now Watch Him Die:

“In semi-darkness I think about my friend. In a few days it will be a year since his death. I remember when it was a week. I sat behind the desk of the office space I was living in and I was amazed at how unreal the entire week had been. I kept expecting to wake up from it like a dream.”

… whereby Dylan will have poetically associated the setting, in semi-darkness, with that other Rollins quote The light in this place is really bad – and the morbid context might then trigger the sinister décor, the bottom of the stream.

In any case, the continuation of this first stanza confirms that we should not understand the title Dreamin’ Of You romantically, not as the title of a love song:

Means so much, the softest touch
By the grave of some child, who neither wept or smiled
I pondered my faith in the rain
I’ve been dreamin’ of you, that’s all I do
And it’s driving me insane

…the grave of “some child”, a crisis of faith at a funeral in the rain, the longing for a comforting hand – this is the despair of a narrator left behind after the death of his loved one. With similar word choice and identical emotion as one of Bob Forrest’s (well, officially The Bicycle Thief’s) most beautiful, raw mourning songs “Everyone Asks” from 1999, in which he poignantly tries to come to terms with the death of a loved one almost a year ago:

Why do I always
Call your name
If it doesn't stop
I'll go insane
I just know

https://youtu.be/8ztUSXZw2bg

Wonderful song by the devout Dylan fan Forrest, in whose work we hear more Dylan echoes – although usually more raw, more unadorned than at Dylan, of course. Dylan, meanwhile, is apparently also pleased with the word combinations in this first stanza: after the song’s dismissal, the line “means so much, the softest touch” moves to “Standing in the Doorway” as well (as “Dreamin’ Of You” will be the purveyor of the lyrics to that song anyway).

For the colour of his song the poet aims, or so it seems, at the nineteenth century, at “steamboat, civil war, very Mark Twain,” as guitarist Duke Robillard would say about that other discard, “Red River Shore”. The grave of a child is already a Chekhovian background, the disturbing character description who neither wept or smiled seems to come from Henry James (“she only looked at him silently in return, neither weeping, nor smiling, nor putting out her hand,” Madame De Mauves, 1874), and pondering faith in the rain is a rather Walt Whitman-like image.

It appears, all in all, as if Dylan has ticked those two Rollins lines, and then opened the floodgates. In the run-up to Time Out Of Mind, he has already dug a bed, the nineteenth-century steamboat, Mark Twain bed, and inspired the stream of consciousness leads him along Checkhov, Whitman and Henry James, along nineteenth-century word combinations and images to be found at the bottom of this stream. Far, far away from Henry Rollins, in any case.

To be continued. Next up Dreamin’ Of You part 2: The Lay of the Last Minstrel

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

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

Previously in this series…

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: My favorite performance from the two acoustic albums would be Bob’s take of “Love Henry”. It’s another song which has gone through many variations, lyrics and titles over the years

Here are the lyrics from the official Dylan site

1. "Get down, get down, Love Henry," she cried.
"And stay all night with me.
I have gold chains, and the finest I have
I'll apply them all to thee."

2. "I can't get down and I shan't get down,
Or stay all night with thee.
Some pretty little girl in Cornersville
I love far better than thee."

3. He layed his head on a pillow of down.
Kisses she gave him three.
With a penny knife that she held in her hand
She murdered mortal he.

4. "Get well, get well, Love Henry, " She cried,
"Get well, get well," said she.
"Oh don't you see my own heart's blood
Come flowin' down so free?"

5. She took him by his long yellow hair,
And also by his feet.
She plunged him into well water, where
It runs both cold and deep.

6. "Lie there, lie there, Love Henry," she cried,
"Til the flesh rots off your bones.
Some pretty little girl in Cornersville
Will mourn for your return."

7. "Hush up, hush up, my parrot," she cried,
"And light on my right knee.
The doors to your cage shall be decked with gold
And hung on a willow tree."

9. "I won't fly down, I can't fly down
And light on your right knee.
A girl who would murder her own true love
Would kill a little bird like me."

Tony: This song goes back to Scotland in the 18th century, and possibly before, and was collected both by Francis James Child and by Cecil Sharpe as they attempted to record the musical traditions of the two nations before they were lost forever.

The name of the song varies enormously across the British Isles and the United States, including Henry Lee, Earl Richard and the rather obvious, The Proud Girl.

Across all the versions the young man tells the woman he’s in love with another, she gets him drunk (although not in all versions), seduces him (ditto) and then murders him, throwing the body into the river.

The bird (sometimes a parrot) then talks with her but refuses to come to the woman for fear of being murdered also.    When challenged later the woman denies killing her lover, but later still admits it and is burned at the stake for her crime.

Dylan performs it without embellishment which gives us a lot of time to appreciate the excellent guitar work throughout.

Aaron: Here are a couple of other more recent versions for comparison

Ralph Stanley from 2002

Tony: This shows us at once just how the accompaniment can be varied to give a totally different feel to the song and here we don’t get any of the bleakness that comes from Dylan’s accompaniment.  Indeed Dylan’s decision to play an instrumental verse at the start adds to the sense of loneliness and desolation not to say hopelessness across the whole song – and I think this is missing in Henry Lee’s version.   This version makes me feel that the song has been adapted to the musical accompaniment he wants to add.  With Dylan it is the other way around.

PJ Harvey & Nick Cave

This 1996 recording from the “Murder Ballads” album and has a different set of lyrics.  It is one of the recordings where Nick Cave’s singing was recorded in one place and Harvey’s in a completely different location, and was one of a series of murder ballads the band recorded – hence the name of the album!  I’m not sure I need the video – I rather like the music to speak for itself.  Besides these two are musicians, not actors.

But that’s just me.   I’ll stick with Dylan’s version.

• Bob Dylan And Dante and Bill Heagney (Part I and II)
• Bob Dylan and Dante (Part III and IV)
• Bob Dylan and Dante (Part V )

by Larry Fyffe

Part VI

In ancient Greek/Roman mythology, King Minos, after his death, becomes a stern Judge of the Dead. In “The Divine Comedy” by Dante, Minos, at the entrance of Hell, issues a warning to the Italian poet from the thirteenth century for whom Beatrice has arranged a sightseeing tour of Hell, then of Purgatory, and finally of Heaven:

And eternal I endure
And  all hope abandon ye who enter here
(Dante: The Inferno, Canto Ill)

Akin to portraying himself as Dante crossing the River Styx to Hades, the narrator in the song lyrics below takes on the role of Julius Caesar who crosses the river that leads to Civil War, a hell-on-earth.

An imaginative, artistic mixing together of historical facts and fiction:

I've painted my red wagon, abandoned all hope
And I crossed the Rubicon
Well, the Rubicon is a red river
Going gently as she flows
Redder than your ruby lips
And the blood that flows from the rose
Three miles north of Purgatory
One step from the Great Beyond
(Bob Dylan: Crossing The Rubicon)

References Dante who’s climbed to the Seventh Sphere of Heaven, up to the fixed stars:

Says Beatrice, "Why does my face so entrance you
That you look not upon the lovely Garden below
That blooms the sun beams of Christ?
There the Rose in which the Divine Word is made flesh"
(Dante: Paradise, Canto XXIII)

Dante refers to Semele whom Zeus, disguised as an eagle, promises her anything she asks for. Cursed by Hera, Semele asks for a demonstration of his thunderbolts, and the flash of Zeus’ lightning kills her.

Dante below is in danger of being set afire, left smouldering like a tree stuck by a lightning bolt.

Filled with the devine light of Jesus, Beatrice speaks:

Says Beatice, "Were I to smile
You'd be like Semele
When she was turned into ashes"
(Dante: Paradise, Canto XXI)

The following more-down-to-earth song lyrics ponder Dante’s dire situation:

Whatever you wanted
Slipped out of my mind
Would you remind me again
If you'd be so kind
Has the record been breaking
Did the needle just skip
Is there somebody waiting
Was there a slip of the lip
(Bob Dylan: What Was It You Wanted)

Bob Dylan And Dante (Part VII)

Richard Thomas points out that Bob Dylan sources the poem below in his song “Crossing The Rubicon”.

Caesar marches on Rome:

The bright red river flows from a modest spring
Through the bottom of a valley
Valleys dividing Gaul from Italian lands
(Lucan: On The Civil War, Book I)

Dante crosses the River Styx, and enters Hades; to the right there is a path that leads to the blissful Elysium Fields:

Here comes the place where cleaves our way
The road to the right to Pluto's dwelling place goes
And leads to Elysium
But the one to the left leads to Tartarus
And speeds the souls of the cursed to doom
(Virgil: The Aeneid, Book I)

In the following song lyrics, Hades is placed above ground; the narrator therein takes on the role of the Trojan Aeneas:

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

In Seventh Heaven, Dante meets up with Beatrice in the Elysium Fields; he’s not yet been guided through the Sphere of the Fixed Stars, and onward to where they begin to rotate:

For in the smile that glowed in her eyes
I thought that I, with mine, had touched the height
Of both my blessedness and Paradise
(Dante: Paradise, Canto XV)

In the song lyrics  quoted beneath, like Dante on tour when he still throws a shadow, the narrator’s quite content to have gotten thus far.

Could be said that Dante Dylan decides to give himself to his beloved Beatrice once he passes from this Earth:

Well, my heart's like a river, a river that sings
Just takes me a while to realize things
I'll see you are sunrise, I'll see you at dawn
I'll lay down beside you when everyone's gone
(Bob Dylan: I've Made up My Mind To Give Myself to You)

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

Here are the earlier articles from 2005…

• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 1: Choice cuts from London and Dublin
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 2: More choice cuts from London and Dublin.
• Never Ending Tour 2005 part 3: Seattle Stopovers
• NET, 2005, Part 4, Hello, Goodbye: First Ever, Last Ever

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Some of these old friends are very old indeed and go all the way back to the early 1960s. These are the songs that made Dylan’s name, and he has never forgotten them. He has stuck by them. We like to say that the old ‘protest’ singer has gone, but he has never stopped singing the songs. Each year they appear again, sometimes in new guises.

One of these is ‘Masters of War,’ from the Freewheelin album of 1963. This darkly-driven song has never grown old, but performances have changed drastically over the years. By 2005, we have an emphatic, minimal piano-based version that can raise the hair on the back of your head. Maturity has brought this song some gravitas.

In my article ‘Masters of War & Extinction Rebellion: Bob Dylan’s ongoing contemporary relevance’, I argued that the song can’t die because the world won’t let it, that as long as those masters of war still rule, the song will stay fresh. (See: https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/9984) And, with the war in Ukraine raging as I write, who can doubt it?

This performance is from Berlin, (25^th October), and to my mind is one of Dylan’s best ever performances of the song.

Masters of War

In my first post for 2005, I suggested that, to commit the sin of quoting myself, ‘these arrangements become dogmatic and thumpy, and might seem to run counter to the spirit of the songs.’  I think what I want to say here is that the songs are not as light on their feet as they were, not as agile in their arrangements and presentation. I’ll try and develop that idea a bit in these posts.

Right from the start ‘Hard Rain’ had a tendency to be a bit dumpty-dum because of the ballad form, but Dylan brilliantly overcomes this in both the Rolling Thunder Tour, with a swirling, hard-driving rock version, and in 1981 with an equally brilliant, fluid gospel version. But by 2005, London residency (4^th Night), the dumpty-dum is back and, good as it is, seems too rigid considering those earlier versions.

Hard Rain

We could say something similar about that other great early 1960s masterpiece, ‘Chimes of Freedom.’ This is something of a rarity, an occasional visitor rather than a close friend, having been performed only fifty-six times, with ten of those performances in 2005. This song relates a mystical experience in which the value and grace of all life, especially for the poor and socially outcast, flashes forth in a storm. The stormy elements themselves seem to assert and celebrate the freedom of the spirit for all, and seem like bells tolling

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

In this respect, Dylan’s message hasn’t changed at all. Compare those lyrics with these from ‘Crossing the Rubicon’,  Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020):

I feel the Holy Spirit inside and see the light that freedom gives
I believe it’s within the reach of every man who lives

Dylan doesn’t sing all the six verses in this performance from 15^th April (Boston), but enough to give us a good sense of the song and what it conveys. Again, however, it becomes dumpty-dum, the lilt of the original becomes somewhat too emphatic. Arguably, the song needs more fluidity to hold us.

Chimes of Freedom

This issue doesn’t arise in the same way with ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown,’ another protest classic from the 60s, because the blues, by its very nature, tends more towards rigidity of form than jazz. In other words, the musical form fits the song.

Hollis Brown

With ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, Dylan’s sustained vocal performance and the minimal nature of the instrumental backings push the problem of rigidity into the background. We don’t lose the narrative to the dumpty-dum. This one’s from Dublin (1^st concert).

Hattie Carroll

Although it’s not a blues, ‘John Brown’ comes out of the same bag as ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown,’ a similarly paced protest song, in this case the story of a mother and her soldier son. The reality of war is sharply contrasted to the mother’s rosy image of ‘a good old fashioned war.’ In the wonderful 1994 MTV Unplugged performance, Dylan plays it as a rock song and the lines flow smoothly; here he plays it as a folk blues, happy to allow the thump of an emphatic beat to drive the vocal line. It’s effective in creating a drums of war feeling, but doesn’t allow for a fluid vocal line.

John Brown

We can’t leave these protest songs behind without covering that dearest old friend of all, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin,’ that ode to passing time. Over the years the song has become as much a celebration as a warning, and we have been treated to many majestic versions of it. This performance is not too different from its predecessors in that respect, but again there is this tendency for it to become a bit jerky and ricky-tick. Wonderful harp break for the finale, however. The superiority of these Crystal Cat London recordings is evident here. (2^nd night)

The Times they are a changing

Are we really moving away from ‘protest songs’ when we come to ‘Drifter’s Escape’? I don’t think so. The poor drifter is caught up in a chaotic and vicious legal system, which he only escapes by divine intervention, when ‘lightning struck the courthouse out of shape.’ I think it must be the same lightning that flashed out the chimes of freedom in that song. No problem with any lumbering, emphatic quality. This performance, (Reno, 18^th March), is one in a now long row of kick-arse rock versions, dating back to 2000. The heavier and thumpier the better.

Drifters escape

Another song from John Wesley Harding that Dylan has been presenting as a kick-arse rocker is ‘Wicked Messenger.’ But here, ( 20^th April, Verona, US) it gets a major overhaul. With a new arrangement that curiously pre-figures the way it would sound on Shadow Kingdom, 2021, Dylan rubs off the hard rock edges, and puts a bit of lilt into it.

I’m not too sure of it. I liked the old kick-arse versions. I’m not sure it sustains itself; I’m not sure that a bit of dumpty-dum doesn’t creep in. The song is on its way out in terms of Dylan setlists, and after a few more performances will be gone by 2009. The great years for the song were 2000 – 2002. Fascinating though.

Wicked Messenger.

‘I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine,’ another from the same album, is more of an occasional friend than a regular visitor, being played only thirty-nine times, this being the second to last performance.

We don’t turn to poets for the literal truth. The real St Augustine (of Hippo) was not ‘put out to death’ in the sense of being martyred, but died of illness and old age. Dylan’s dream St Augustine, is a herald, a messenger, and he brings sad news. He wears a coat of solid gold, suggesting spiritual richness and purity, but the souls he’s searching for ‘already have been sold.’ The song ends on a note of anguish.

This bitter-sweet performance is from Dublin (1^st Night). Some beautiful steel guitar work from Herron saves it from being too dumpty-dum. Despite the upsinging, or maybe because of it, this is a powerful vocal performance.

St Augustine.

The rigidity, or lack of fluidity, I have been referring to may be the outcome of some successful adaption of Dylan’s early love songs to a more baroque feel. You hear it in this lovely, clear version of ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ and you’ll have to decide how successful that is.

Boots of Spanish Leather

One of the first songs to be given the baroque treatment is ‘Love Minus Zero (No Limit),’ and we have seen some successful adaptions of the song in that style. Here, however, he breaks away from that to deliver a mid-tempo performance, probably closer to the original pace than more recent slow versions. It’s quietly rollicking rather than dumpty-dum. (Dublin 2^nd Night)

Love minus zero /No limit

Jubilation greets the opening bars of ‘Don’t Think Twice’, which over the years has become a celebration rather than a sombre reflection. The original affected a jauntiness that Dylan wants to recapture here. That jauntiness saves it from the dumpty-dum. This one from London (1^st Night). Note the crowd rousing slammer of an ending.

Don’t think twice

A heavier, thumpier arrangement of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ worked brilliantly when set against Dylan’s soaring voice and harp in 1995. The 2005 arrangement, with hints of the baroque, does not work so well for me. The vocal line feels a bit rushed. It doesn’t feel like the great love song that it is. Somehow the soul of the song seems to have been lost.

It’s all over now baby blue

‘To Ramona’ has been a waltz right from the start, and so arguably suits the dumpty-dum treatment. With the slide guitar, this one has the feeling of a slowed down country waltz. I started off enjoying it very much, as it’s beautifully performed and recorded (London, 1^st Night) but by the end I had wearied of the lumbering tempo. Dylan’s harp can often cut across lumbering rhythms and lift them, and although this happens to some extent at the end of the song, Dylan’s ‘tooting’ style on the harp rather accentuates the lumbering effect.

To Ramona

The fast-paced jazz songs, like ‘Summer Days,’ and equally fast-paced rockers like ‘Tombstone Blues,’ are largely immune to the dumpty-dum effect. This band does sound good in kick-arse mode. This one throbs along in fine style. Gets into the groove and doesn’t lose it. (29^th June, Louisville, Kentucky.)

Tombstone blues

On the other hand ‘Tears of Rage’ was born with a lumbering beat back in the Basement Tapes days. You could say that The Band, with its album Music from Big Pink pioneered that heavy, ponderous sound. Maybe because of that, this mysterious song bears up well in the 2005 sound. (Hamburg, 24^th Oct) It successfully carries both the rage and the grief of the song.

Tears of Rage

For this post, I have saved the best till last. ‘Desolation Row’, a loyal friend indeed. This is a full version, all the verses sung; you can hear that wonderful line, ‘the Titanic sails at dawn.’ Dylan seems to stumble on the verse by accident as he fudges the lyrics on an earlier verse by singing a line from the verse he always misses. That accidental line seems to lead him to the whole verse. This, added to a generally high standard, a willingness to allow this epic to be a twelve-minute epic, makes this one of his best-ever performances of the song. It’s a little too emphatic at times but survives the worst of the dumpty-dum. A powerhouse performance.

Desolation Row

That’s it for eighteen old friends, all from the 1960s. Their joints are a bit stiffer, but they have survived their years. In the next post I’ll look at some other friends from later years and see how they have fared.

Until then

Kia Ora