Untold Dylan

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

• NET, 2004, Part 1 – The best singing audience
• NET 2004 part 2: The Jazz Connection
• Never Ending Tour, 2004, part 3, Harping On
• Never Ending Tour, 2004, Part 4 More jazz, regulars and rarities

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

While we have considered Dylan’s jazzy tendencies, his roots in folk music, and we have noticed how he leans towards country and blues, that is both urban and country blues, it is rock music that is core to Dylan’s musical project. Dylan is a rocker – the last of the best, as he boasts in ‘False Prophet.’

From the moment he got on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a hastily improvised group of musicians from The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and belted out a rough and rowdy ‘Maggie’s Farm’ Dylan was all about rock music. Not folk rock (like Simon and Garfunkel) or soft rock (like The Eagles) but hard rock, solid rock.

Rock music is harder to define than it is to identify. Google describes it as, ‘a form of popular music that evolved from rock and roll and pop music during the mid and late 1960s. Harsher and often self-consciously more serious than its predecessors, it was initially characterized by musical experimentation and drug-related or anti-establishment lyrics.’ It is also described simply as ‘a form of music with a strong beat.’

In his early acoustic, pre-rock period, Dylan liked to start his shows with ‘The Time They Are A’Changing,’ a declaration of form as much as the ‘protest’ content of those early songs. By the time we get to the period we’re looking at now, 2003 – 2005, the folky Dylan has almost entirely vanished, and his favourite concert openers were ‘Maggie’s Farm’ or ‘Drifter’s Escape,’ both blistering rockers.

As it moved further away from its 1950’s roots in rock ‘n roll, rock music became more and more sophisticated. By the time we get to the end of the 1960s the great rock bands, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, were making albums like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Their Satanic Majesties Request in which rock music, having moved away from its blues and rock ‘n roll roots, had become complex, elaborate, Baroque and at times over-inflated. King Crimson’s Court of the Crimson King took rock music to new levels of orchestration and portentousness.

Despite the sophistication of his lyrics, Dylan never went there. As a rocker, he remained true to the music’s ‘primitive’ roots. As a singer he was more drawn to the blues shouters like Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Joe Turner than the gauzy harmonies of King Crimson or the sweet melodious tones of Simon and Garfunkel.

So let’s turn to that prototype of Dylan rock songs, ‘Maggie’s Farm’ the first song that clearly marked him as a rock singer. Here’s how he kicks off the Rochester concert. He’s taken some of the jangle out of it and turned the song into a smooth, somewhat minimal, hard-hitting rock song, with all the emphasis on the compelling beat. The drums and bass sure move it along. Dylan feels entirely comfortable with this one. He rarely plays harmonica on this song, although it feels like the song’s made for it, or at least that’s the way Dylan makes it sound here:

Maggie’s farm

Listening to that, I have to wonder how we ever thought this song was not a protest song. Maggie’s dysfunctional farm is Dylan’s America, the stultifying 1950s by the sound of it. It is satire by absurdity.

A straight-out blues-rocker, ‘Down Along The Cove,’ was also a favourite to kick off a concert or played early. Dylan feels comfortable with this one too. He’s adding new verses. Whether he’s making them up on the spot, which is what it sounds like, or not I wouldn’t know, but it gives the performance an off-the-cuff, improvised feel. A great foot-tapper, mood setter this one. There’s a joyousness in it, a simple unaffected feeling. You see your true love coming your way!

Dylan kicks off the Manchester concert with this one. (11^th June)

Down Along the Cove

‘Watching the River Flow’ is another bluesy rocker that Dylan likes bring out early in the concerts. It has a relaxed and easy beat to swing along to. It’s a good one to follow a slow song. Dylan does a remarkable vocal here, slurring his voice, making it sound as if he’s too weary to even catch the beat – but of course he does, appearing to just catch the line in time. That vocal, plus an insistent harp break at the end, makes this one compulsive listening.

Watching the river flow

‘Wicked Messenger’ that obscure little ballad from John Wesley Harding has turned into a real slammer, full-frontal assault. If it doesn’t wake you up, nothing will. We have seen some outstanding performances of this song over the last four or five years. This recording from Plougskeepsie (NY) 4^th August, where it is the opening number, is not as good as some we have had, but fans of the song will be glad to know that it’s as wicked as ever.

Wicked Messenger

Now for a change of pace. ‘Can’t Wait,’ is a dark and desperate rocker from Time Out of Mind, and early performances of the song pretty much stuck with the album arrangement. In 2003, however, we saw Dylan transform the song into a quiet, almost sinister, prowling rocker. This 2004 performance keeps that arrangement, and what a powerful performance it is, outdoing the 2003 version in my opinion, as good as the earlier one was (See NET, 2003, Part 1). This has all the prowling energy of a caged tiger. It’s a restrained performance, but like a coiled spring. A powerful vocal pushes at the edges of that restraint. It doesn’t have to be loud to be explosive. [I don’t have the date for this one. It is from a compilation called Gone to the Finest Schools, for which I have lost the paperwork. Apologies.] It comes in at number eight on the setlist.

Can’t Wait

What better song to stir things up after that but ‘Highway 61 Revisited.’ Like Maggie’s Farm it rips a hole in the American dream. Death, deception and war; it’s all there. I’m glad Dylan’s never tried to slow this one down. Over the years it hasn’t changed much, hardly at all. It still rushes along at full gallop. It comes in at number 10 on the Manchester setlist.

Highway 61 Revisited

In Part 1 of this year, I included ‘Lovesick,’ that song of twilight shadows. I have to include it here again, I’m afraid, as I’ve since discovered a performance in which Dylan plays the harmonica, rare for this song. To my ear the harmonica is under-recorded, but it’s Dylan in his old form, playing those high, wild, mercurial notes he loves so much. It adds a certain desperate edge to the song. It’s lurching, emphatic beat makes it a rock song, just slowed down. [Another from Gone to the Finest Schools, slot 7 on the setlist]

Lovesick

We can’t get too deep into any imagined concert without encountering  ‘High Water.’ This one, a vision of ecological and moral mayhem, has a country rock feel, especially when the banjo comes in, but with that heavy back beat and those rock chords, the song is more rock than country. This one comes in at number 9 at Rochester. Dylan belts it out, a compelling performance.

High Water

Many of Dylan songs have the sense of a journey in them, a journey through a dystopic vision of modern America. Remember ‘Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream,’ a comic, madcap pilgrimage through modern American life. ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again’ is a song like that, out of the same bag. It’s just that the terms have changed, and the vision is darker. You might get the Memphis Blues when you’re coming down off an amphetamine trip and the world begins to look twisted and strange, and you’re trapped in repetitive cycles. I don’t know if post-album performances of the song have quite captured its ambience (Blonde on Blonde) but this Rochester performance is as good as you’re going to get in 2004. It’s certainly raw and real enough.

Memphis Blues Again

‘Lonesome Day Blues’ is a classic urban rock blues. Dylan received some criticism for writing generic, ‘derivative’ songs like this, but that’s what the blues are. There is a familiarity to the best of these urban blues songs. You feel like you might have heard them before somewhere. Did Paul Butterfield play that? No, he didn’t. It might sound like it was written in 1948 for Sonny Boy Williamson, but it was actually written in 2001 for “Love and Theft”. The complaints in such a blues are similarly generic and derivative. That’s what makes such songs what they are. They have the force of familiarity about them. This was number 4 on the Rochester setlist.

Last night the wind was whispering, 
       I was trying to make out what it was
Last night the wind was whispering something, 
       I was trying to make out what it was
Yeah I tell myself something's coming, but it never does

Lonesome Day Blues

‘Honest with Me’ is another generic, derivative sounding song, although the tempo is faster and the lyrics more edgy. Elements of the absurd are woven in. It’s highly repetitive and relies on its wide-ranging lyrics to keep its interest. This is number 13 on the Rochester setlist

Well, my parents, they warned me not to risk my years
And I still got their advice oozing out of my ears

Honest with Me

‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ is one of Dylan’s greatest mid-1960s rock songs. It has a queasy, swaying motion in keeping with its tripped-out lyrics. During the 1966 tours Dylan would play the piano, but that didn’t stop it from being a heavy number. The album version had a spooky feel Dylan didn’t aim for on stage, at least not at this point (later he will try an echo for this song, to give it that feel). This is a solid performance, with Dylan starting to play harmonica more often on this song. This is number eight on the Glasgow setlist.

Ballad of a Thin Man

I’ve run out of space, but before the inevitable ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ always the last song, I don’t want to miss this ‘Senor’ (date unknown). This is a classic performance of another slow and heavy rock song. Slow and heavy yet oddly uplifting. For me the song is about putting an end to what, in False Prophet’ Dylan calls ‘the unlived meaningless life.’ We can overturn the tables of the money lenders, and maybe find salvation. Because of the epic harp solo at the end, reminiscent of the 2003 version, this performance really belonged with the songs in Never Ending Tour, 2004, part 3, Harping On but I’m happy to fit it in here.

Senor

And, as promised, the inevitable ‘Watchtower,’ always the last song on the setlist, or used as the last encore.

This first one’s number 17 on the Rochester setlist. Dark and threatening and slower than usual. Almost quiet during the verses. Note the echo on Dylan’s voice.

Watchtower (A)

This second one is from Glasgow, and is no less of a blast.

Watchtower (B)

Kia Ora

Previously in this series

• Mixing-Up The Fluids: Red Crimson And Yellow Dylan
• King Crimson And Yellow Dylan (Part II)
• The Crimson King And The Yellow Jester (Part III)

By Larry Fyffe

Christian theologians and artists tend to simplify the rather complicated ancient depiction of the cosomological order – Beelzebub, for instance, becomes equated with Satan, who rebels against the Almighty; or, at least, he’s Satan’s spokesman or ‘captain’. Either way, Beelzebub is implicated in causing humans to become mortal.

Nonetheless, the mixed-up confusion does not end. According to some latter-day Gnostics, Beelzebub hooks up with Lilith after she flees from Adam because of his domination over her when she’s his first mate; Lilith is therefore exiled as a ‘screech owl” to some God-forsaken place.

A burlesque perhaps, but with reference to:

There shall the great owl make her nest
And lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow
There shall the vultures also be gathered 
Everyone with his mate
(Isaiah 34: 15)

Beelzebub and Lilith are crowned the King and Queen of  Hell-on-Earth.

In the song lyrics below, rather Baroque in tone, their disorderly conduct is countered by the King and Queen of Swords, depicted on Tarot cards, who strive to restore some semblance of an Edenic order where the coming on of death is made a bit more peaceful; yet death still triumphs:

Peace will come
With tranquility and splendour on the wheels of fire
But will bring us no reward when the false idols fall
And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating
Between the King and Queen of Swords
(Bob Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)

Jochen Markhorst, analyzing the song lyrics above, dismisses any attempt to find coherent meaning therein; the words are just there for the way they sound; they’re empty vessels that have no meaning – they have no life of their own.

Beelzebub will surely see to it that such Dylanologists are not cremated “on wheels of fire”, but buried alive – as occurs in a number of stories by Edgar Allan Poe…. Well, maybe not.

In any event, the singer/songwriter/musician below can’ t help

mixing-up the message – you’re going to have to serve somebody; it may be beastly Beelzebub who supposedly has a big one; it may be the Lord, or it may be Jesus.

You’re really never sure which one. After all, it had to be the Almighty One who creates Satan, the Great Deceiver:

He’s a great humanitarian, he’s a great philanthropist

He knows how to touch you, honey, and how you like 
to be kissed
He'll put both his arms around you
You can feel the tender touch of the beast
You know sometimes Satan will come as a man of peace

(Bob Dylan: Man Of Peace)

Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published once or twice a day –  sometimes more, sometimes less.  Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone).  Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.

Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here    If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk.

We also have a Facebook site with over 14,000 members.

By Tony Attwood

Unless this is the first “Cover A Day” you’ve read, you may have got the hang of what I am looking for in this series: people who are able to find something extra or at least different in the Dylan song they are covering.  Something which takes Dylan’s original thoughts and finds a new place to send them.  Something perhaps which through the musical arrangements gives a new edge – maybe even a new meaning – to the music.

This doesn’t mean I think all these covers are better than the originals, but rather that they give me a chance to return to songs that I know by heart and can play in my head, if the mood so takes me.

And I spell that out here because that is exactly what this version of “If you see her” does

Peter Viskinde was a major force in Danish rock music who died last year; I’m really pleased to have a chance to feature one of his performances.  To me, he really gets hold of the song and find levels in it which Dylan chose not to exploit in his recording.   Here we have the anger expressed which so often comes years after a relationship has broken down.

And in the arrangement he gets that heart-piercing gut-wrenching final section perfectly:

Sundown, yellow moon
I replay the past
I know every scene by heart
They all went by so fast

If she's passin' back this way
I'm not that hard to find
Tell her she can look me up
If she's got the time

“If she’s got the time” is a real killer of a final line for this song which has earlier had the lines

And though our separation
It pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me
We've never been apart

The singer is so screwed by the end of the relationship that “if she’s got the time” is just one of those amazing Dylan lines that looks so simple but carries with it depths of emotion that reach down to the core of the earth itself.

Sfuzzi (who once produced an album of Transylvanian Surf Music – a notion that gets my vote for the most unlikely genre of all time) go a totally different way, even changing the chord sequence to take out the blues feeling Dylan introduces with the flattened 7th.  So “go from town to town” is just another line rather than having that blues edge that Dylan gives us.

But it is so pop all the way through it catches me out – rather than the music adding to the feelings of despair it contradicts those feelings in a strange, but effective way.  If you can, do play this all the way through, because the ending will come as a bit of a surprise too.

Jeff Buckley produced one of the oddest re-workings of a Dylan song ever with “If you see her”.  It’s not just that he really does take the song to another planet, it is that this recording gives us a minute and a half of attempts to tune his guitar.   If you are short of time head for about 3 minutes 30 seconds by which time he’s got the hang of where he is going.   By 6 minutes 21 seconds, with “Sundown, yellow moon” I think we’ve got what he was really after.

Moving on, if you are a regular reader of these ramblings you will not be surprised to find Mary Lee’s Corvette turning up.  After all, their third album was indeed, Blood on the Tracks.

This is a version where “still gives me a chill” really does send my nerves a-tingling.  I am not sure the contrasts in the low and high range of Mary Lee Kortes’ voice in the recording is the best use of her talent but it’s an interesting idea.

My final offering is one that changes the sex of who is being sung about – which of course we are prepared for by the fact that it’s from the Stonewall Celebration Concert.   It’s great to hear the song performed by a man with a sublime singing voice, who can use its range of pitch and phraseology to perfection within what is quite a limited song musically.

It is really worth a listen.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

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

• Red River Shore (1997) part 1: She wrote me a letter
• Red River Shore (1997) part 2: The importance of capturing spontaneity
• Red River Shore part 3: Pretty angels all flying in a row
• Red River Shore (1997) part 4: I got a gal named Sue
• Red River Shore (1997) part 5: Mom says the pills must be working
• Red River Shore (1997): part 6;  Misery is but the shadow of happiness
• Red River Shore (1997) part 7: Please try to make it rhyme
• Red River Shore (1997) part 8:  He is no one

by Jochen Markhorst

IX         A floating nothing

Well I’m a stranger here in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong
I’ll ramble and gamble for the one I love
And the hills will give me a song
Though nothing looks familiar to me
I know I’ve stayed here before
Once a thousand nights ago
With the girl from the red river shore

It’s a diesel, Dylan’s lyrical engine. Today, anyway. It starts slowly and sputters, but is now almost at its optimum. After that wonderful opening full of alienation and melancholy, the engine sputters again, just for a second, and reluctantly produces one last filler. The unreal, dreamy atmosphere that the song poet evokes with the Kafkaesque I’m a stranger here in a strange land but I know this is where I belong evaporates at once with the introduction of a clichéd, earthy Rambling, Gambling Willie, the knave who indeed rambled and gambled for the ones he loved (“He supported all his children and all their mothers too”). A colourful protagonist, and a wonderful song – but a total miscast here.

Equally out of place is the meaningless, unrelated And the hills will give me a song. It’s possible that the faltering engine seeks a shortcut via Bing Crosby (“The Singing Hills”, 1940), or sputters past Rex Allen’s “Song Of The Hills” from 1949. And if Dylan has a hidden drawer somewhere in which he keeps the ignored phenomenon of Kevin Coyne, we may owe the musical hills to one of his hidden treasures, to “Shangri-La” from 1976 (when the later Police star Andy Summers is still in Coyne’s band, demonstrating his crushing talent);

Shangri-La is a million miles away
You might see it on a clear blue day
Over the hills and far away
They're singing out: 
Duh-de-doo-doo, duh-de-doo-doo

… who knows. After all, “Million Miles” also features in these same recording sessions for Time Out Of Mind, and our protagonist is also on a hopeless quest for unattainable happiness. Unlikely, though. Singing hills probably impose themselves on the poet Dylan the way the image will impose itself on almost every listener: via one of the corniest highs (or lows, depending on personal taste) of the twentieth century:

The hills are alive with the sound of music
With songs they have sung for a thousand years
The hills fill my heart with the sound of music
My heart wants to sing every song it hears

… the song with which Julie Andrews introduces the Unbearable Lightness of her Being in The Sound Of Music, an association that at the most a minority of Dylan’s generation, and of the generation before that, and of the generation after that, will escape. And an association that, like Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie, quite seriously clashes with the mood and the setting that the songwriter in “Red River Shore” seems to want to evoke; the rather uncomfortable, Kafkaesque uncanniness. In Kafka’s words:

“To describe reality in a realistic way, but at the same time as a “floating nothing”, as a clear, lucid dream, so as a realistically perceived irreality.”
(the so-called “Petřín Hill Experience”, in his Reflections From The Year 1920)

… the mood that Dylan, fortunately, rediscovers after this little dip.

Though nothing looks familiar to me I know I’ve stayed here before is an oppressive outpouring from the protagonist. More sinister and less innocent, and even more unreal than a déjà vu – a déjà venu, as it were. It is a plot that is effectively used in mindfuck films such as Total Recall and Before I Go to Sleep, to evoke in the audience the same frightening feeling as in the protagonist, who usually has undergone something like a memory reset or implanted memories. Or, in the more criminal variety, the stories that suck us into the maddening frustration of victims of gaslighting; offices are dismantled, photos are swapped, walls are painted over, and when the protagonist returns with the police, the evidence is gone and everything is different. Though nothing looks familiar to me I know I’ve stayed here before – it’s the paranoid version of the musical highlight from The Muppets Movie (1979), from Gonzo’s heartbreaking “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday”;

This looks familiar
Vaguely familiar
Almost unreal yet
It's too soon to feel yet

Close to my soul
And yet so far away
I'm going to go back there
Someday 

It really does seem that the song poet Dylan has found the tone again now. The following once a thousand nights ago is not such a hollow cliché as, say, “ramblin’ and gamblin’” or “when it’s all been said and done”, but has the same magical, poetic sheen as cloak of misery and fires of time; the paradoxical quality of being simultaneously fresh and old-fashioned. Its magical sheen can surely be traced back to Sheherazade, the Persian storyteller of the tales from One Thousand and One Nights, and is perhaps unintentionally reinforced by choosing not something like “once a long, long time ago” but rather “once a thousand nights ago”.

The poetic power, then, is due to a kind of generally accepted metaphorical quality of “thousand”; although thousand nights covers a relatively manageable span of time (not much more than two and a half years, in fact), we all experience it as “endlessly long”, “half a lifetime”. Like Emmylou Harris uses it in her moving ode to Gram Parsons from 1985, “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo”, in the beautiful opening line A thousand nights a thousand towns I took the bows, eventually leading to the equally beautiful closing couplet

I stepped into the light you left behind
I stood there where all the world could see me shine
Oh I was on my way to you to make you mine
But I took the longest road that I could find

Or as it is used in “I’ve Made Love To You A Thousand Times” by Smokey Robinson, the man whose poetic value was once equated by Dylan with Rimbaud and Allen Ginsberg (jokingly, we may assume, in an interview with the Chicago Daily News in 1965). And like this, there are a few more songs in which thousand nights, usually in a romantic context, is used as a metaphor for “unbearably long time” – but except for Sinatra’s “How Old Am I?” no songs from the canon – it’s not too common. “Thousand nights” is a realistically perceived irreality, so to speak.

To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 10: Send it to Lulu

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:

• Mixing-Up The Fluids: Red Crimson And Yellow Dylan
• King Crimson And Yellow Dylan (Part II)

by Larry Fyffe

Jesus, says, in an ironic tone to his accusers, that it’s with the help of Almighty God that the evil influence of demons can be removed from one’s body; not with the aid of the Gnostic Beelzebub, the prince of darkness (Satan, as construed by many Christian authorities), because he does not have the spiritual strength, doesn’t possess the brightness, to do it:

"And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils
By whom do your sons cast them out? ...
He that is not with me is against me
And he that gathereth not with me scattereth"
 (Luke11:19, 23)

The narrator in the song lyrics beneath takes the side of Jesus:

Jesus said, "Be ready
For you know not the hour which I come"
Jesus said, "Be ready
He said, "He who is not for Me is against Me"
Just so you know where He's coming from
 (Bob Dylan: Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking)

Apparently, the problem is that there be those who claim to support Jesus and the Almighty, but behave as though they’re actually on the side of Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies:

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

Happy little children, Diana and Apollo their names could be, greet King Crimson when he wings off to a Late Baroque/ Rococo light-scattered Fairy Land in the song lyrics below – a place to which Bob Dylan seldom travels:

Sailing on the wind
In a milk white gown
Dropping circle stones on a sun dial
Playing hide and seek
With the ghosts of dawn
Waiting for a smile from a sun child
(King Crimson: Moonchild)

The ‘yellow jester”, sometimes imagines himself in a rather Rococoesque fairy place where the reddish-purple Beelzebub of autumn appears to be in control:

The clouds are turning crimson
The leaves fall from the limbs and
The branches cast their shadows over stone
Won't you meet me in the moonlight all alone
(Bob Dylan: Moonlight)

Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published once or twice a day –  sometimes more, sometimes less.  Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone).  Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.

Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here    If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk.

We also have a Facebook site with over 14,000 members.

by Jochen Markhorst

• Red River Shore (1997) part 1: She wrote me a letter
• Red River Shore (1997) part 2: The importance of capturing spontaneity
• Red River Shore part 3: Pretty angels all flying in a row
• Red River Shore (1997) part 4: I got a gal named Sue
• Red River Shore (1997) part 5: Mom says the pills must be working
• Red River Shore (1997): part 6;  Misery is but the shadow of happiness
• Red River Shore (1997) part 7: Please try to make it rhyme

VIII       He is no one

Well I’m a stranger here in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong

 According to legend, Sean Lennon, John and Yoko’s son, triggered the song. In 1989, Sean visits Billy Joel in the studio, they got talking and Sean complains about the misery of our time, AIDS and wars and crises, and how hard it is to be 21 in this day and age. Ah yes, says Joel, we felt the same when we were 21. “Yeah, but at least when you were a kid,” counters Sean, “you grew up in the fifties, when nothing happened.” Do you really believe that, asks the Piano Man in surprise. Korean War, the Hungarian Uprising, the Little Rock Nine… a lot of stuff happened. I don’t know anything about it, Sean answers. I have to write about this, Joel thinks, I have to explain to Sean’s generation that this kind of epic struggle is of all times.

“The chain of news events and personalities came easily—mostly they just spilled out of my memory as fast as I could scribble them down,” says Billy. “I had a chord progression that originally belonged to a country song I was trying to write, and I sandwiched the words into those chords—‘Harry Truman, Doris Day,’ okay, so far so good—but then I didn’t know what to call the song, and therefore what words to use in the chorus.”

Something with “fire”, anyway. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner drops by the studio these same days and disapproves of both Dancing Through the Fire (“that sucks”) and Waltzing Through The Fire. In the end, Jann thinks “We Didn’t Start The Fire” is cool. The lyrics are a recapitulation of 118 events, loaded names, controversial films and influential books, interspersed with the now-familiar chorus, and it becomes a No. 1 hit. Not really one of Joel’s great masterpieces, but at least more sincere and exciting than the bland “The Fires Of Time” by The Bellamy Brothers.

Looking back, Billy Joel himself is not too proud of the song either;

“Even I realized I hated the melody. It was horrendous, as I said at the time; it was like a droning mosquito. What does the song really mean? Is it an apologia for the baby boomers? No, it’s not. It’s just a song that says the world’s a mess. It’s always been a mess, it’s always going to be a mess.”
(Fred Schruers – Billy Joel. The Definitive Biography, 2014)

Still, the song has a value. The Scholastic Weekly uses the lyrics as a teaching aid, and indeed, Sean Lennon’s generation now does see the 1950s a bit more nuanced, with less rose-tinted glasses.

And just like in “The Fires Of Time”, Dylan comes along in “We Didn’t Start The Fire” as a historical landmark;

Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?

… when Joel, in his – almost chronological – enumeration, has arrived at the 1960s. Between Hemingway’s suicide, the Eichmann trial, the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Bay of Pigs Invasion – so we are in 1961, the year Dylan scored his record deal. And the year in which the infamous “Stranger In A Strange Land” was published, the overwhelming socio- critical science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein. Bowie didn’t like it (“It was a staggeringly, awesomely trite book”), but the novel is on the bookshelf of the front fighters from the sixties scenes, as David McGowan shows in his wonderful book Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon (2020). Zappa is a fan, as are Gene Clark, Grace Slick, Charles Manson, Jim Morrison and David Crosby, to name but a few. Heinlein himself lives in Laurel Canyon (at 8775 Lookout Mountain Avenue) during those years, and not only his book, but he, personally, too lingers at the crossroads of revolution, hippie rock, avant garde and Hollywood.

It seems that Dylan is thinking of Heinlein’s protagonist Valentine Michael Smith when he opens the sixth verse of his “Red River Shore” with the overused expression stranger in a strange land. The phrase itself, of course, has been around for 27 centuries or so (already spoken by Moses in Exodus 2:22, “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land”, and Moses probably didn’t get it from himself either), and is almost always used as Moses intended: to express displacement, literal non-home-ness and consequent discomfort. The feeling that even Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula fears (“But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one”), the feeling that Mark Twain’s Chinese alter ego Ah Song Hi incorporates into a letter home with words that we also hear in Dylan’s “I Was Young When I Left Home”: “I was to begin life a stranger in a strange land, without a friend, or a penny, or any clothes but those I had on my back” (Not a shirt on my back, not a penny on my name, sings He-who-never-wrote-a-letter-to-his-home in Dylan’s song). Madonna (“Wash All Over Me”), Herman Melville, Pete Townshend, U2, journalists, Robbie Robertson (in the beautiful, atmospheric Lanois production “Somewhere Down The Crazy River”), Albert Camus and Sophocles… the expression is used gladly and often in all times in all corners of the cultural spectrum – and always to express that something or someone does not belong here.

But Heinlein’s protagonist in Stranger In A Strange Land, Michael Smith, is a stranger who, as Dylan says, knows that this is where he belongs, here, on Earth. Michael is born aboard a spaceship on its way to Mars. The landing fails fatally and baby Michael is the only survivor. Raised by Martians, he is discovered twenty-five years later by a next, this time successful, Mars expedition and taken back to Earth. He belongs here – but remains an alien. About the situation Mowgli finds himself in when he goes to the village, how Tarzan feels like Lord Greystoke, the state of mind of the civilised savage John in Brave New World and of the surveyor K. in Kafka’s The Castle: “But I know this is where I belong”.

It is a beautiful, both poetic and Kafkaesque situation sketch, stranger here in a strange land, but I know this is where I belong. Uncanny and frustrating, meaningless and indeterminate; it is the existentialist version of an unrequited love – like the love for a girl from the Red River shore.

To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 9: A floating nothing

———

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

Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published once or twice a day –  sometimes more, sometimes less.  Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone).  Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.

Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here    If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk.

We also have a Facebook site with over 14,000 members.

By Tony Attwood

There are some Dylan songs that I really think ought to be covered by other artists, but which no one seems to want to try.  “If you ever go to Houston” is one such.   Listening to it today, I can just hear what I would want to try if I were a) a lot younger and b) still playing in a band.   Indeed I think after finishing this little piece I might pop downstairs and see what I can do on the piano.

So I moved on to “If you gotta go” but before I get to that, I would add that while looking just to see if anyone had had a bash at Houston, I did discover this from Don Gibson recorded in 1976.  The song has nothing to do with Bob’s composition, but I wonder if Bob overtly or subliminally took his title from there.

Mind you, “Midnight special” also has the line “If you ever go to Houston”  so maybe that was the source.  Bob was certainly there having been invited to play harmonica on the original recording of that song with Harry Belafonte.   Here’s one of the run-through takes with Bob…

All of which finally brings me on to “If you gotta go go now”.

The first-ever cover version was by The Liverpool Five.

Despite their silly name (well, I think it is silly, but then I’m a Londoner, so I would do) they were one of those warm-up bands that seemed to turn up all over the place playing at concerts of The Lovin’ Spoonful, Stevie Wonder, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, The Righteous Brothers and The Byrds.  And probably a lot more.

As for the music – for me, it’s too much of a plod which takes all the fun out of the song.

The next one is also not to my taste but my goodness it really made me smile…

Oh that plinky guitar in between verses!

One of the funny things about this song is that it seems to inspire people to do all sorts of funny things with it – if you see what I mean.  Just listen…

Somewhat better, because the singer understands what the words are about, is the Cowboy Junkies version.  The only problem is the band are seemingly fighting with each other to be part of the overall sound.  Didn’t they have producers in those days?

But there is always someone with some musical intelligence who can apply him or herself to making more out of the composition.  And finally, I found one (and you should hear some of the covers that didn’t make it to this edition, some of them really are pretty lacking in understanding of what music is actually about.)

And yes I would say this version has been worth waiting for.

Tony Skeggs is a Cavern Club performer and there’s a little bit about him through that link.

But I must include the Fairport Convention version, just because it is so silly and funny and just whacky.   And I always love whacky.

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

This is part of a series covering the whole of the Never Ending Tour.  You can find an index to all the articles here.

• NET, 2004, Part 1 – The best singing audience
• NET 2004 part 2: The Jazz Connection
• Never Ending Tour, 2004, part 3, Harping On

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

When I came to the end of Part 2 of my survey of 2004, which I entitled ‘The Jazz Connection,’ I thought I had done a pretty good job of covering the jazzier side of Dylan’s music for that year.

In fact, I’d missed out big time by forgetting two songs that Dylan did with the Wynton Marsalis Band, a big jazz band with a traditional line up of horns as in the late 1940s. The reason for my slip, or rather my poor excuse, is that these two performances were not part of Dylan’s regular tour schedule, not part of the NET, but part of a project by the Wynton Marsalis Band to perform with a number of different artists. Dylan took time out from the NET in early July to make these recordings, which are live.

So here they are. I have to say that Dylan sounds rather subdued, if not constrained. He sounds oddly flat. He certainly doesn’t sound as relaxed as he does with his regular band. These performances are interesting, rather than exciting. My own feeling is that Dylan would have needed more performing with this band to properly find his feet. He does sound as if he is not entirely in his element, and perhaps a little nervous; Wynton Marsalis is one formidable cat.

I’m also rather surprised that Dylan chose two of his old stand-bys, ‘It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train to Cry’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice’ rather than his newer, jazzier songs like ‘Million Miles’ or ‘Summer Days.’ These might have been a better fit.

Here’s ‘It Takes A Lot to Laugh’

At least that one is a blues, and swings. ‘Don’t Think Twice’ sounds like even a more awkward fit.

Don’t Think Twice

Back with the regular NET, I also missed this jazzy performance of ‘Sugar Baby’ from “Love and Theft”. The difference from the album version is that here (Pittsburgh, 7^th Nov) Dylan gives the song more swing. It becomes less dirge-like. The song is a melancholy reflection on a past relationship with that wider context that Dylan is so masterful at providing:

Every moment of existence
seems like some dirty trick
Happiness can come suddenly
and leave just as quick
Any minute of the day the bubble could burst
Try to make things better for someone,
sometimes you just end up making it a thousand times worse

Sugar Baby

I finished off Part 2 with two wonderful performances of ‘Summer Days,’ one from the famous Glasgow concert and the other from Rochester, equally brilliant. If you didn’t catch those, don’t miss them. However, I missed out the most interesting, if not the best. At Comstock Park (24^th August), Dylan played the song with well-known jazz guitarist Tommy Morrongiello. Morrongiello rips into it and Dylan does his usual sterling performance. I might have missed this because the recording is not quite as crisp as those from Glasgow and Rochester.

Summer Days

Enough with my sins of omission! Hovering close to my list to include in the Jazz Connection post was this rocking version of ‘To Be Alone With You.’ I have a fondness for the rip-snortin performance of this song from 2003, where Dylan appears to be channelling Jerry Lee Lewis, and while Dylan’s vocal is similar in this 2004 performance, the backing is quite different, and reminiscent of early jazz-influenced rock and roll. Listen to the backing carefully, and you can imagine it played with horns, late jump jazz style. If the original ‘Rock around the Clock’ man, Bill Haley, had played this song he might have done it like this. Of course, he could never have sung it like this. (20^th March, Toronto)

To Be Alone With You

Of course, there are crossovers between blues and jazz. Each has influenced the other in their evolution. In 1963 the great blues singer Sonny Boy Williamson released a song called ‘Help Me,’ which built a strong blues riff that Dylan was to use in these later versions of ‘It’s All Right Ma.’   If you want to hear the origin of that riff, and Sonny Boy’s recording can be found here.

Interestingly, thinking of Dylan’s most recent album, the Blues Foundation describes Sonny Boy as ‘a strong-willed bluesman known for his rough and rowdy ways.’

However, whether or not that riff entirely suits ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ is another matter. Maybe I can’t get past the fast-paced, solo acoustic versions Dylan played right from the start in 1964, and which you can hear with wonderful effect in 1991 (See NET, 1991, Part 1), but this later arrangement is too rigid, even though Dylan gives it a bit of swing. What makes ‘Help Me’ work is the simplicity of the lyric and the short lyrical line. Neither of those things are true of ‘It’s All Right Ma,’ the words don’t always fit easily into the musical line, and the tempo may be a little lumbering for the song. That’s a personal take; it’s still a powerful song, powerfully performed. This is another one from Glasgow.

It’s All Right Ma (A)

Much as I like the Glasgow performance, I think it is eclipsed by this one from Amherst, 20^th Nov. A superior vocal performance?

It’s All Right Ma (B)

Another protest song that Dylan gave a bit of a swing in 2004 is ‘Hard Rain.’ You could almost waltz to it. In that respect it’s moved a long way from the original folky ballad of the original. Giving a lilt to it like this certainly moves it along, although it’s far from jazz. I’ve included it here because of the outstanding nature of this acoustic performance. There’s nothing old and tired about this performance, from Motil, 7^th October. Dylan tears out the vocal like there’s no tomorrow (and maybe there isn’t). Listening to this masterpiece, inadequately described as an ‘anti-war’ song (it is, but it is also much more than that), I can’t help thinking of the present war in Ukraine. I saw a heart-rending picture of a child with a rifle from that war, and thought of that line from the song ‘I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.’

Time doesn’t age this song, not as long as we are still ‘wounded in hatred’ and war continues. The song has never been timelier. Its images feel like they are hot off the press.

Hard Rain

We switch countries to catch this performance of ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ from the Glasgow concert, and the light-hearted harp break that kicks the song off. I was never going to be able to fit in all of Dylan’s outstanding harp solos into one post, although I got quite a few of them into my last post, NET, 2004, part 3. I had a few songs left on the cutting room floor from that post, and ‘I’ll Be your Baby Tonight’ was one of them, as the harp work is brief enough, but it’s a great mood setter. This is a nice change of pace.

I’ll be your baby tonight.

Now for a rarity. We have to go back to 1995, and before that to 1992, to find ‘Unbelievable’ from Under The Red Sky. It’s a hard-hitting rocker aimed, as is so much of Dylan, at the rank, godless materialism of modern America:

It's undeniable what they'd have you to think,
It's indescribable it can drive you to drink.
They said it was the land of milk and honey,
Now they say it's the land of money.
Who ever thought they could ever make that stick.
It's unbelievable you can get this rich this quick.

That’s as trenchant as anything Dylan wrote during his protest era. Just as trenchant, hitting another familiar Dylan theme, the imminence of war, we find this:

Kill that beast and feed that swine,
Scale that wall and smoke that vine,
Feed that horse and saddle up the drum.
It's unbelievable, the day would finally come.

Dylan is the master of fusing the political and the personal. His anguish at the state of the world slips easily over into a personal anguish. This is what that godless materialism has done to our relationships:

Once there was a man who had no eyes,
Every lady in the land told him lies,
He stood beneath the silver skies
And his heart began to bleed.
Every brain is civilized,
Every nerve is analyzed,
Everything is criticized when you are in need.

The ending is as dark as you might care to find.

Turn your back, wash your hands,
There's always someone who understands
It don't matter no more what you got to say
It's unbelievable it would go down this way.

That’s as true today as it was in 1991.

I’m quoting at length here, partly because the chance won’t come again, this is the last time Dylan will perform the song, and partly because to my mind these are some of the finest lyrics Dylan wrote. It’s too easy to miss them because of the hectic pace of the song. I keep imagining how the song might sound if he slowed it down a bit, lingered over those incomparable lyrics.

You go north
And you go south
Just like bait in a fish’s mouth
Must be living in the shadow of some kind of evil star
It’s unbelievable, it would get this far

Again, thinking of Ukraine, these lines give me a shiver.

Unbelievable

I think that ‘I Believe in You’ qualifies as a rarity, although it was performed twelve times in 2004, having something of a revival in 2003/4. This passionate avowal of faith belongs to Dylan’s gospel period (1979 – 81), although taken out of context, it doesn’t have to be seen as a Christian song, more like a great love song. It is however a demanding song in terms of the vocal. We have to be convinced of the intensity of that faith that is unshaken by anything and everything that the world can throw at it, when you are forsaken by friends and when ‘white turns to black.’

This Glasgow performance achieves that, no question.

I believe in you

That’s it for now. Back soon with a look at of the rockers Dylan performed in 2004.

Kia Ora.

By by Jochen Markhorst

• Red River Shore (1997) part 1: She wrote me a letter
• Red River Shore (1997) part 2: The importance of capturing spontaneity
• Red River Shore part 3: Pretty angels all flying in a row
• Red River Shore (1997) part 4: I got a gal named Sue
• Red River Shore (1997) part 5: Mom says the pills must be working
• Red River Shore (1997): part 6;  Misery is but the shadow of happiness

VII        Please try to make it rhyme

Well we’re living in the shadows of a fading past
Trapped in the fires of time
I’ve tried not to ever hurt anybody
And to stay out of the life of crime
And when it’s all been said and done
I never did know the score
One more day is another day away
From the girl from the red river shore

Cosmologists will agree. Before the Big Bang there was an endless, timeless Nothing, then a brief flash of light, gravity, sulphur storms, atoms, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate and event horizons, and after this brief flash, the flash in which we exist, the All shrinks back to a singularity and there will be an endless, eternal Nothing again. Nothingness without any Something, so also without matter, time or light. Nabokov puts it a little more simplified: “Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses,” and Dylan a little more poetically: “We’re trapped in the fires of time.”

This fifth stanza of Dylan’s “Red River Shore” illustrates (finally) that the song is a Time Out Of Mind song. After the New Morning rhetoric of the first verse, the Freewheelin’ imagery of the second, the Nashville Skyline clichés of the third, and the Street-Legal poetry of the fourth, we’re back to the world-weariness of “Standing In The Doorway”, the melancholy of “Not Dark Yet”, the despondency of “Cold Irons Bound”. Just take the opening line.

“Living in the shadows of a fading past” is a great, classic line with which Dylan announces in eight words the overarching theme of his twenty-first-century oeuvre. It echoes À la recherche du temps perdu and Neil Young’s Dylanesque gem “Time Fades Away”, the old protest song “Which Side Are You On?” (are we living in the shadow of slavery) and Original Sin, it has the couleur of every film noir between The Maltese Falcon and Touch Of Evil, and it would have been an even nicer album title than Time Out Of Mind.

Classical, almost archaic beauty – though therefore not too original. All the stronger hits the subsequent image, trapped in the fires of time.

“Fires of Time” is a rather unusual image. Which is remarkable, really – after all, it’s a not too far-fetched, extremely strong and very visual metaphor to express the destructive power of Time. It has the potential to trigger a plethora of related metaphors with burning, heat, flames and smoke, with the added bonus of the religious, autumnal connotation of ashes to ashes. But Dylan resists that temptation – this one, remarkable trapped in the fires of time remains unexplored, and colleagues don’t pick it up either after this. Yes, a single exception like The Bellamy Brothers song makes an attempt. Little successful, unfortunately – their “The Fires Of Time” (on The Anthology, Vol. 1, 2009) is a somewhat overcooked throwaway with a tiresome enumeration of historical milestones à la Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, but full of stylistic embarrassments (“The Roman Empire fell, they found some dinosaur bones”).  And with a modest salute:

From Buddy Holly to Hendrix
From Haggard to Jones
From Elvis to Dylan
From The Beatles to The Stones
Well, the guitars twang
And the poetry rhyme
And they rocked our world
Right through the Fires of Time

… with some awkwardly mixed away, presumably Hendrixesque-meant guitar fury after “Hendrix”, and ditto, presumably Dylanesque-meant harmonica honking after “Dylan”.

The Bellamys are forgiven – they have given the world “Let Your Love Flow” and “If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me”, so they can do whatever they like. And in their defence: Dylan doesn’t do any better with fires of time either.

The remainder of this fifth stanza, after that intriguing and potentially fruitful opening, is disappointingly flat – and stylistically rather weak, if we are honest. I’ve tried not to ever hurt anybody and to stay out of the life of crime is a bumpy verse line with clichés nonchalantly pasted together, and the following And when it’s all been said and done I never did know the score is of the same ilk (though less bumpy). It even comes awfully close to filler lyrics; as if the song poet has already designed the beautiful closing line One more day is another day away from the girl from the red river shore, and for now just bridges the road thereto with rather haphazard grab finds from his inner jukebox.

I’ve tried not to ever hurt anybody has a somewhat alienating “John Wesley Harding” echo, for example (he was never known to hurt an honest man), although it is quite likely that Dylan has long since forgotten that song. Oh well, he knows the word combination from dozens of other songs too, of course. Charley Pride could, after borrowing I could never be free in the third verse, be a candidate supplier again (from “You’re So Good When You’re Bad”, his no.2 hit from 1982). But another Nashville Cat probably appeals more to Dylan;

So let me say this, I never tried to hurt anybody
Though I guess there's a few, that I still couldn't look in the eye
If I've got one wish, I hope it rains at my funeral
For once, I'd like to be the only one dry

… the bittersweet, funny “I Hope It Rains At My Funeral” from 1971. By Tom T. Hall, who is so wittily dismissed by Dylan in his 2015 MusiCares Speech. He recalls reading an interview in which Tom was “bitching about” a James Taylor song. Coincidentally, Dylan tells, he was just listening to a song by Tom T. Hall on the radio; “I Love” – indeed a quite corny, über-sentimental drag of a song;

“Now listen, I’m not ever going to disparage another songwriter. I’m not going to do that. I’m not saying it’s a bad song. I’m just saying it might be a little overcooked. But, you know, it was in the top 10 anyway.”

Still, he does quote effortlessly half the lyrics – and Tom T. Hall’s name is of course also under “I Washed My Face In The Morning Dew” and especially the successful “Ode to Billie Joe” rip-off “Harper Valley P.T.A.”, so The Storyteller probably does have some credit with Dylan.

Somewhere in that same corner of that inner jukebox, Dylan also finds the other clichés, or so it seems. When it’s all been said and done we know from a hundred songs, and if Dylan’s muse indeed does hang around in the country corner at the moment, then it may have been lifted from Charlie Rich’s “Who Will The Next Fool Be” – or picked up via Jimmie Davis’ evergreen “It Makes No Difference Now” (recorded by everything and everyone from Gene Autry to Willie Nelson and from Fats Domino to Merle Haggard, but the ultimate version is Ray Charles’). Although Dylan himself will attribute this particular line to Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too”;

“Buddy Holly. You know, I don’t really recall exactly what I said about Buddy Holly, but while we were recording [Time Out Of Mind], every place I turned there was Buddy Holly. You know what I mean? It was one of those things. Every place you turned. You walked down a hallway and you heard Buddy Holly records, like “That’ll Be the Day.” Then you’d get in the car to go over to the studio and “Rave On” would be playing. Then you’d walk into this studio and someone’s playing a cassette of “It’s so Easy”. And this would happen day after day after day. Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere. It was spooky. But after we recorded and left, you know, it stayed in our minds. Well, Buddy Holly’s spirit must have been someplace, hastening this record.”
(Murray Engleheart interview for Guitar World, 1998)

“Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere.” And then Elvis probably does supply I never knew the score (from Lonnie Donegan’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”). Or a dozen other songs, of course; the phrase is as generic as the life of crime in the verse line before. It is tempting, though, to think that Dylan subconsciously is revealing a secret love for the immortal Mose Allison there, and for his superior “Your Mind Is On Vacation”;

You're quoting figures, you're dropping names
You're telling stories about the dames
You're always laughin' when things ain't funny
You try to sound like you're big money
If talk was criminal, you'd lead a life of crime
Because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is
Working overtime

Mose Allison – Your Mind Is On Vacation

… not a very likely scenario, no. But if so, Dylan must have taken the last line to heart: “If you must keep talking please try to make it rhyme”.

To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 8: He is no one

————————-

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

Previously:

• Mixing-Up The Fluids: Red Crimson And Yellow Dylan

So it can be posited that the lyrics of “The Court Of The Crimson King” sets up a tournament  between the purplish-red king, and the “yellow jester”; that is, Bob Dylan who  alludes to biblical verses in his songs:

On soft grey mornings widows cry
The wise men share a joke
I run to grasp divine signs
To satisfy the hoax

(KIng Crimson: The Court Of The Crimson King)

According to the Holy Bible, King Ahab, marries Jezebel from the land of the Philistines and Phoenicians; to please her the king allows the worship of Baal, a fertility god, and along with that the statue of the Golden Calf. As a consequence, Northern Israel (Samaria) becomes separated from King Solomon’s once united country.

The next king of Samaria sustains an injury, and  seeks the aid of Baalzebub. Angered, the Hebrew God of southern Judah tells Elijah to challenge the strength of Baalzebub by smiting the northern king’s soldiers; no Jesus-type is prophet Elijah – he calls fire down upon their heads.

Then Elijah says to the wayward king:

Forasmuch as thou has sent messengers 
To enquire of Baalzebub ...
Therefore, thou shalt not come down off that bed ...
But shall surely die
(II Kings: 1)

The band members of ‘King Crimson’ take on the role of  Baal-ze-bub, the Lord of the Flies, the bringer of plagues upon the wicked who do not worship him or the Golden Calf:

I wait outside the pilgrim's door
With insufficient schemes
The black queen chants
The funeral march
The cracked brass bells will ring
To summon back the fire witch
To the court of the crimson king
(King Crimson: The Court Of The Crimson King)

Alluding to:

The cracked bells, and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
(Bob Dylan: I Want You)

In the Bible, little David upstages Goliath, the Philistine giant who has the god Baalzebub on his side.

More than once Dylan struggles with the symbol of death known as Baalzebub/Beelzebub – transformed into Satan by the authors of the New Testament.

Therein, strict Jewish priests accuse the Christian messiah Jesus of having the Lord of the Flies on His side:

But when the Pharisees heard of it, they said
This fellow doth not cast out devils
But by Beelzebub, the prince of devils

 (Matthew 12: 24)

Taking on the role of a modern-day Elijah, Dylan, ahead of Crimson, burlesques biblical stories to criticize America’s military involvement in the Vietnam mess:

The king of the Philistines his soldiers to save
Puts jawbones on their tombstones, and flatters their graves
Puts the pied pipers in prison, and fattens their slaves
Then sends them out to the jungle
(Bob Dylan: Tombstone Blues)

By Tony Attwood

A nice bouncy version from Barry Hay to begin which has a surprise sudden ending.  I thought they’d keep it going longer!

And as the second example, something completely different – which I think shows the beauty of this song.  It is very simple, and as such lends itself to be interpreted in many different way.

But I am really not at all sure about the sudden introduction of the timpani in the middle 8; it seems a bit too obvious in terms of “the sky would fall”, although the rest is beautifully re-imagined.  After all the careful delicacy it sounds like one of those moments when the producer insists on having his say.

Indeed, why is it that otherwise fully competent arrangers and producers do suddenly feel the need for prosody – where the sound has to reflect the meaning of the words.  It invariably sounds false to me, and indeed makes me think that either the arranger or producer had incredibly limited musical knowledge, or one or the other of them is treating the audience with utter contempt.   We are all able to understand the meaning of the song without having a musical illustration to help us along.  I do wish they’d stop doing it.  Dylan never feels the need for it – so why do the re-interpreters?

What is needed is imagination.  And just to show that even with very simple songs it is possible to go in all sorts of directions, this is Terrance Simien and the Zydeco Experience.

I’ll show my ignorance here by confessing I didn’t know what Zydeco meant – so I looked it up on Wiki.  You probably knew this already but if not, here is their take…

“Zydeco  is a music genre that evolved in southwest Louisiana by French Creole speakers which blends blues, rhythm and blues, and music indigenous to the Louisiana Creoles and the Native American people of Louisiana.”  There is plenty more here.

And finally this is the one that gave me the most enjoyment from a little bit of searching around for versions I’d not heard before.  It is just so unpretentious, and even the sudden introduction of harmonies in the vocal works elegently.

Indeed now I come to think of it, elegance is the key to this song.

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

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         Misery is but the shadow of happiness

Well I’m wearing the cloak of misery
And I’ve tasted jilted love
And the frozen smile upon my face
Fits me like a glove
But I can’t escape from the memory
Of the one I’ll always adore
All those nights when I lay in the arms
Of the girl from the red river shore

In Overwatch, one of Blizzard Entertainment’s most successful multiplayer first-person shooter games, we hear it again, spoken by the Japanese fighting hero Hanzo: “If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy floating by.”

Presumably copied from the fairly successful crime thriller Rising Sun (1993), in which Sean Connery plays a former police captain, John Connor, expert on Japanese affairs. Throughout the film, “Connor-san” sprinkles ancient Japanese wisdom and proverbs, and towards the end of the film there is an appropriate moment to throw in the floating corpse aphorism. And the scriptwriter, in turn, presumably took it from James Clavell’s bestseller Shōgun (1975), where it is also presented as a “Japanese wisdom”.

Just as often it is attributed to – of course – Sun Tzu, to The Art Of War, and the Most Erudite Man of the Western World, Umberto Eco, muddies the already murky waters further in the Postscript to The Name Of The Rose (1980): “But there is an Indian proverb that goes, ‘Sit on the bank of a river and wait: your enemy’s corpse will soon float by’.”

Enough confusion, all in all, to drive Western sinologists in particular to a mild state of frenzy. Especially since the original Chinese – not Japanese – wisdom is a completely unsuccessful translation of Confucius; “The time is passing like a river running day and night,” is the best approximate translation – the Chinese characters for passing time can be understood as passed away, deceased, and from there a well-meaning, but slightly too creative translator went wrong. In any case, Confucius does not speak at all of floating corpses.

The beautiful metaphor wearing a cloak of misery has a similar life cycle. Throughout the centuries, it has been attributed to literary gifted journalists (New York Times reporter Paul Montgomery, 1968), to nineteenth-century Polish authorities warning against dziady, criminal beggars who swindle respectable citizens “under the cloak of misery”, to French composer Gabriel Fauré (“Je ne me sense plus qu’un affreux manteau de misère et de découragement sur les épaules – I feel that there is on my shoulders nothing more than a terrible cloak of misery and discouragement,” from a letter dated August 1903, discussing his encroaching deafness), and whatnot. And to Dylan, of course.

However, the source is as old as that floating corpse: Confucius’ colleague and contemporary Lao Tze. It may comfort the easily appalled sinologists that the quotation has survived more than twenty-five centuries undamaged:

Misery is but the shadow of happiness
Happiness is but the cloak of misery

… from the immortal Tao Te Ching, the most important writing of Taoism, The Book Of The Simple Way.

Still, it’s not very likely that the songwriter Dylan, leafing through the Tao Te Ching, put a tick in the margin here. This whole fourth verse seems, after three verses full of country and folk clichés, a deliberate attempt to leave the Simple Way, and to take a turn to the narrow, thorny path. So: not I’m feeling blue, but I’m wearing the cloak of misery. Not: my baby left me, but I’ve tasted jilted love. And not: I’ll remember you, but I can’t escape from the memory of the one I’ll always adore.

All right, that last line may have a vague echo of Hank Thompson’s “I Cast A Lonely Shadow”, which, not only because of its lyrics, but also because of its sound, could be a candidate for a place on Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind;

I sit and watch the candle and the flicker of the flame 
My writhing shadow twists and turns as though it is in pain  
I'm trying to escape the memory my mind recalls  
And I cast a lonesome shadow on these lonely, lonely walls

…and, of course, “jilted love” and variants with “jilted” can also be found in Dylan’s jukebox. In Freddie King’s “Woman Across The River”, for instance (1974, with a band, incidentally, consisting only of Dylan disciples: Jim Keltner, Leon Russel and Carl Radle). Or, to stay more in the Hank Thompson mood, Red Foley’s “Jilted” (also a hit for Teresa Brewer in 1954). Even more attractive, though, is the idea that Dylan was inspired by his art brother Heinrich Heine, one of the greatest Jewish poets of the 19th century;

Wandere! 
Wenn dich ein Weib verraten hat, 
So liebe flink eine andre; 
Noch besser wär es, du ließest die Stadt 
Schnüre den Ranzen und wandre!

Away!
If by one woman thou'rt jilted, love
Another, and so forget her ;
To pack up thy knapsack, and straight remove
From the town will be stil better

The same goes for the Cole Porter-like the frozen smile upon my face fits me like a glove. Poetic and so visual, as Dylan would say, and not too hackneyed. The formidable Etta James snarls a frozen smile (in the funky “Power Play”), and Dylan may have made a mental note when listening to the overly ambitious “The Modern Adventures of Plato, Diogenes and Freud” that his faithful organist Al Kooper wrote for the debut album of Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1968;

And the clock on the wall is a bore
As you wander past the door
And find him lying on the floor
As he begs you for some more, 
you frozen smile

… where the poet Dylan will at least notice the unusual aaaab rhyme scheme, that he himself once used for “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”. But the loudest association, and probably also a trigger for Dylan, is the evergreen “Behind A Painted Smile” (1968) by the indestructible Isley Brothers, who have now entered their eighth decade. With a protagonist who deals with adversity in a tougher way than Dylan’s protagonist does: “If I can’t have your love, I don’t need your sympathy.”

However, too thin all of it, to be worthy of the honourable label “paraphrase”. And that cloak of misery is an absolutely unusual metaphor in the art of song. No, the song poet Dylan has now sat on the bank long enough, watching the river flow, has seen all kinds of wreckage float by, and now takes a turn to the narrow, thorny path.

To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 7: Please try to make it rhyme

—————–

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

The Sound School of Dylanology tends to wash away the historical meaning of words by focusing on the sound loosed by the alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme, and the beat and tempo of the music that accompanies them.

The School is hallmarked by its pointing out Dylan’s comments on the sound in his lyrics and music as if the singer/songwriter/musician intends that any inherent meaning of words doesn’t mount to a hill of beans.

Comparing Dylan’s “Gates Of Eden” and King Crimson’s “Court Of The Crimson King” clarifies matters somewhat. Crimson out-Dylan’s Dylan whose diction can be described as Baroque with extended and, at first glance, rather odd metaphors that are quite often black in tone.

The poetry of William Blake is brought to mind in many of the works of both artists.

Out-Dylaning Dylan however does not make the Crimson song senseless; words, regardless of what the writer’s or speaker’s intentions may be or not be, take on a life of their own. The brain of the reader or listener to the songs will more likely than not seek out a unity in the fragmented, seemingly sometimes meaningless, diction chosen by the artists.

You do not have to be a Structuralist to know which way the words are flowing.

Dylan’s lyrics can be considered Baroque while Crimson mixes Baroque-like music with the light-scattering and sensory images of the Rococo diction style:

The gardener plants an evergreen
While trampling on a flower
I chase the wind of a prism ship
To taste the sweet and sour
(King Crimson: The Court Of The Crimson King)

In his version of “Gates Of Eden”, DM Stith goes completely Baroque in both the way he emotes the words, and the music he chooses to accompany them, choices not necessarily pleasing to the ear of a  listener of modern-day pop music.

In King Crimson’s court, the “yellow jester” might even be a reference to a rival of the buzzing, purplish “Lord Of the Flies”.

With an acoustic guitar and harmonica, Bob Dylan introduces a mixture of folklore, folk songs, the blues, literary works, the Bible, and classical mythology into the popular music industry of the day.

In the ancient voices of the “humour”-pseudo- scientists of yore, yellow coloured bile be linked to the four supposed basic elements: earth, air (wind), fire, and water. As well as to summer, yellow bile is related to fire, and if there is too much of the fluid within the body, to anger:

The yellow jester does not play
But gentle pulls the strings
And smiles as the puppets dance
In the court of the crimson king
(King Crimson: The Court Of The Crimson King)

Black bile is connected to earth, autumn, and sadness; crimson blood to air, spring, and optimism.

Words come laden with meaning from historical times  – rusty is a reddish-brown colour, crimson faded with the passing of time:

The rusted chains of prison moons

As shattered by the sun
I walk around, horizons change
The tournament's begun
(King Crimson: The Court Of King Crimson)

Earlier, so indicated in the following lines:

With a time-rusted compass blade, Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks, sidesaddle on the Golen Calf
And on their promises of paradise, you will not hear a laugh
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)

• Dylan Cover a Day: Gates of Eden as Never Before

By Tony Attwood

https://lgeb.bandcamp.com/track/viento-idiota

This little note is by way of a thank you, and by way of a more generalised request.   I’ll start with the request first.

Because of the reach of Untold Dylan and the generally positive way in which the site is viewed by a fair number of Dylan fans, people write in to me with thoughts and ideas about Dylan and the site.  And that is great – we’ve got half a dozen regular writers working on the site, but I know that lots of people don’t fancy writing a whole article, so they want to send in suggestions for something one of us could perhaps try.

And I guess this is why I have been sent the link above – it is to a superb recording of Idiot Wind in Spanish.  And I very much do hope that if you like the song as much as I do, you’ll play it.

Indeed if you missed the recent Dylan Cover a Day article on Idiot Wind, it will make a nice extra piece of listening.

But quite often when I get a follow up sent to my email address, what is missing is the context.  In this case I can guess that the context is “I saw your commentary on Idiot Wind and thought you might like to hear this version as well, and perhaps even give it a mention on the site.”   Although of course it could have been, “Talk about being an idiot, how could you miss this version?”

To be fair, I’m sure it is not that last approach, but this is a moment for me to make the point.  If you are writing to me please do remember that I am getting on a bit, and just because I wrote about something yesterday, that doesn’t mean I can remember what I wrote yesterday.  Well, maybe I can, but to be safe, please do give me a bit of context.

So thank you Francisco Garcia for forwarding this recording.  I am not sure if you are a fan of the band, or a member of the band, or the lead singer of the band, or…  But I’m taking it that you wanted me to consider this for inclusion on the site, and I have considered, like it a lot, and have put it up.  Hope I did what you wanted!

By the way, it would be nice to know (in English if possible) something about the band.  Any chance of that?

by Jochen Markhorst

V          Mom says the pills must be working

Well I knew when I first laid eyes on her
I could never be free
One look at her and I knew right away
She should always be with me
Well the dream dried up a long time ago
Don’t know where it is anymore
True to life, true to me
Was the girl from the red river shore

 Calvin and Hobbes, the brilliant comic strip by Bill Waterson, is one of the best and most successful newspaper comics of the twentieth century. Graphically often small masterpieces (Waterson had to fight for a long time to be allowed to deviate from the standard, obligatory panel format), infectious humour – as often hilarious as it is sardonic and moving – great acting by all the characters both mimically and in terms of body language, and a wealth of highly quotable, intelligent one-liners (“A good artist’s statement says more than his art ever does”).

Calvin has his adventures with his great friend Hobbes, a stuffed tiger who is only in Calvin’s imagination a real tiger – well, a real anthropomorphic tiger, anyway. Bill Waterson does view this plot-driving feature in a more nuanced way, though:

“The so-called “gimmick” of my strip — the two versions of Hobbes — is sometimes misunderstood. I don’t think of Hobbes as a doll that miraculously comes to life when Calvin’s around. Neither do I think of Hobbes as the product of Calvin’s imagination. Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way. I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that’s how life works. None of us sees the world exactly the same way, and I just draw that literally in the strip. Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality than about dolls coming to life.”

… in which Waterson seems to get a bit caught up in his apparent, and understandable, desire to be the authority on Calvin and Hobbes; he argues rather cumbersomely that Calvin has his own version of reality, which is different from “everyone else’s” reality. Which, of course, is a rather laborious way of saying “vivid imagination”. Or, less innocently: “hallucinations”. Waterson has, after all, already opened Schrödinger’s box, and is past the point where he could claim that Hobbes can be simultaneously both alive and not-alive.

On 31 December 1995, ten years after the launch date, the very last Calvin and Hobbes appears, to the chagrin of millions of fans. It is an open ending. A melancholy, moody Sunday comic strip in colour, in which Calvin and Hobbes sled down the hill in the last panel, while Calvin exclaims: “Let’s go exploring!”

“I believe I’ve done what I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels,” Waterson writes in his farewell letter, and he never changes his mind.

The loss and the emptiness are still felt today and are countered by dozens of rip-offs, copies, unofficial continuations and loving fan-art. All build on the “gimmick” that Hobbes exists only in Calvin’s imagination. The best, and usually most respectful rip-offs try to provide the series with a “real”, closed ending. And the most successful of these is from an anonymous artist who uses a classic staging. Calvin is sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework. Hobbes is surprised. “You’re working on your report already? It’s not due til Tuesday!” “Yeah, I know,” says Calvin, without looking up, “Mom says the pills must be working.” It’s snowing, says Hobbes, “and I thought, maybe… we could…” Now Calvin looks up for a moment. “Sorry, what? I wasn’t listening. I really have to finish this.” In the last picture, Hobbes is a stuffed tiger and Calvin is at work. In contrast to the three colourful ones before it, the panel is entirely in shades of grey.

But most artistic fans choose the “years later” variant, in which an adult Calvin holds his old stuffed tiger, wistfully realising that the dream dried up a long time ago.

The third stanza of “Red River Shore” seems to give away where the songwriter wanted to go with his song. “Dream”, “True to me”… a narrator who, looking back, misses his imaginary lover, his hallucination perhaps. And it is fitting that the songwriter paves the way there with clichés, paraphrases and nods to old folksongs, those old songs full of legend, myth, bible and ghosts, as Dylan says in an interview – after all, he wants to express the melancholy of the man who longs for something he never had.

In previous stanzas we have heard echoes of “John Hardy” and “Buffalo Gals”, the old “Red River Shore” and “Bonnie Woods” and “Mary” and whatnot, and here in this third stanza the songwriter persists; slaloming along fragments of mainly country classics, it seems. Hank Williams’ “Be Careful of Stones That You Throw” and “Howlin’ at the Moon”, Charley Pride’s “Please Help Me I’m Falling”, Peggy Lee’s “My Heart Stood Still”, Marty Robbins… with a bit of cutting and pasting, the entire third verse, with its ingrained word combinations like “one look at you”, “I could never be free” and “I knew right away”, can be constructed from the country section in Dylan’s jukebox. With a short turn to Warren Zevon, whom Dylan admired: from the first time I laid eyes on her I knew that she’d be mine from “Jeannie Needs A Shooter”, another “New River Shore”-like song about a fatal crush on a girl whose trigger-happy father keeps the narrator violently away from his daughter…

The bard ignores a characterological problem along the way. The romantic, swooning I knew when I first laid eyes on her I could never be free is followed by the slightly threatening, stalkerish One look at her and I knew right away she should always be with me. In keeping with the tone and character of the narrator, of course it should have been: I should always be with her. But then, that doesn’t rhyme. And you want your songs to sound good.

The suggestion that the narrator is now beginning to realise that his memories of the Girl from the Red River Shore seem to be constructed memories, memories of a fantasised time with an imaginary pretty girl, is first suggested by the ambiguous the dream dried up a long time ago. The admission that he doesn’t even know where it is anymore reinforces that suggestion, and the wistful true to life, true to me seems to seal it. “True to me” is clear enough, and “true to life” is a remarkable choice of words. “True to life”, not “true to facts”, that is. Dylan himself uses the phrase several times in interviews as well as in his autobiography Chronicles, and always to express the power of folk music. To explain the magic of “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill”, for example, and less specific about folk music in general:

“It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified. Folk music was all I needed to exist.”

… which, coincidentally probably, is also very similar to the words with which Odysseus praises the song of the blind bard Demodocus: “Surely the Muse has taught you, Zeus’s daughter, or god Apollo himself. How true to life, all too true …” (in the translation by Fagles, 1996).

Odysseus cannot hold back his tears when he hears Demodocus singing about the past. Dylan’s narrator is not far off either.

To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 6: Misery is but the shadow of happiness

———-

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 Tony Attwood

Important note: in this article I mentioned that I knew little about the Minchmins, but thankfully we’ve now got the details – please see the comments section below the article.

I can’t imagine that one could be a Dylan fan and not be moved by “Idiot Wind”… by which I mean that there are Dylan songs I really don’t care for very much, and wouldn’t choose to play, but my feeling is, if you don’t like “Idiot Wind”, really how can you be a Dylan fan.  The song is so utterly Dylan.  It is unique.

Which makes doing a cover version of the piece quite difficult – but people do try and occasionaly (in my personal estimation) really add something to the original.

Lucinda Williams toured with Dylan and Tom Petty, so if she’s good enough for Bob…

I must admit that I nearly didn’t think of including this track, largely because I remember the start which someone just doesn’t work for me, but listening again after a while that seems far less of initial.

Above all she adds a real feeling of anger of her own which develops – one might almost say “matures” as the song progresses.   I think it is that unique way of singing; you can both see and hear that there either her own personal input from experience in the execution of the song, or she is really inside the song.   Like a superb actor, she has become the part and one forgets it is her.

Some really interesting hesitations in the timing add to the feeling, and the band are exactly there as well, fully appreciating what she is bringing to the production.

Just an advance note, on my computer the screen goes black after three minutes or so.  But really it is the music that is what we are here for.

The Coal Porters are described as “alt bluegrass” and bluegrass needs some “alt” for me to appreciate it.  I guess I just come from the wrong culture to understand what the appeal is.

But this is brilliant.  Even the banjo is kept under control – I mean, just think about it.  A plucked banjo on Idiot Wind!!!???   But it is fun (which again is another contradiction) and it works.

And I really don’t understand how it can work, because how can a thoroughly nasty composition become a piece of fun without either the music destroying the lyrics or vice versa.  But it works.

Gerard Quintana and Jordi Batiste have developed a series of Catalan covers of Dylan, who Quintana says is his musical inspiration.  They formed ‘Miralls de Dylan’ (‘Mirrors of Dylan’), and released a series of albums featuring Dylan’s songs.

I live this because so much feeling comes across – which of course is double hard when singing in what is not your native tongue.  (I mean I struggle even to get the words right let along put emotion into them, when attempting French).

Of course we all know the song off by heart, but somehow a little extra flowed from this performance into my soul (if I have a soul that is).

The Minch Mins

For this final version you’ll have to click on this link…

https://theminchmins.bandcamp.com/album/even-more-blood-on-the-tracks

And then scroll down to track four and click on that.

There is a fantastic energy and invention in this song which takes us to the edge, but never over it.  I find it really refreshing and exciting – and that takes some doing with a song that we’ve probably all heard a thousand times.

The extra energy that the production puts into song is so easy to get wrong because it just becomes more and more emphasis on every note and word but the band get there by changing the arrangement as the singer throws in more emphasis.

And I do love the instrumental section at the end (although don’t quite understand why the radio voice is added, but maybe it means something that I just don’t get – unless it is a simplistic representation of what mindless talking is all about… but then I think I knew that.).

There is precious little about the singer and band on the internet so I’d be grateful to learn some more.   What I did find on the website that has this recording is this

“This track by track re recording of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood On The Tracks’ wast the brainchild of creative genius yet humble space tech wizard James Minchau. Upon hearing of this quest the thick string’d yet nimble sir, Richard Cummins breaketh through the fourth mure and hath reached into yond dimension, collecting souvenirs to ordain the garden.

“and thither t wast”

It’s a tough song; I think these performers each help me understand it that little bit more.

There’s a list of the other songs covered in this series below.

———-

Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published once or twice a day –  sometimes more, sometimes less.  Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone).  Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.

Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here    If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk.  Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.

We also have a Facebook site with over 14,000 members.

• The 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

by Larry Fyffe

As more and more people move from small towns to big cities, the particular style of “blues” music changes, but the melancholic sentiment oft-expressed therein remains:

Now, tell you, mama, now, I'm sure gonna leave this town
Now, tell you, mama, now, I'm sure gonna leave this town
'Cause I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down
(Ishman Bracey: Leaving Town Blues)

https://youtu.be/Hed-UnEpMJE

As demonstrated in the lyrics of the country-rock song beneath:

City's just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away
I was raised in the country, I been working in town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down
(Bob Dylan: Mississippi)

Melancholic lyrics are retained even with an upbeat country-style of music:

Well, I never felt more like running away
But why should I go
'Cause I couldn't stay
Without you
You got me singing the blues

(Guy Mitchell: Singing The Blues ~ Melvin Endsley)

Brought down a peg is the sentiment expressed in the following lyrics with its country-sounding music:

If you'd see me this way
You'd come back, and you'd stay
Oh, how could you refuse
I've been living the blues
Every night without you
(Bob Dylan: Living The Blues)

The upbeat country-style music accompanying the lyrics beneath creates a feeling of contentment; the singer too happy in his unhappiness.

Sometimes I think about leaving
Doing a little bumming around
Throw my bills out the window
Catch me a train to another town
But I go back to working
I got to buy my kids a brand new pair of shoes
I drink a little bit of beer that evening
Sing a little bit of these workingman blues
(Merle Haggard: Workingman Blues)

Melancholic the music, and somewhat desperate the sound be in the lyrics below:

Meet me at the bottom, don't lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman blues
(Bob Dylan: Workingman's Blues, no. 2)

Next there’s fast-moving music with the dark humour of them “talking blues”:

Mama's in the pantry, preparing to eat
Sister's in the kitchen, a-fixing for the feast
Papa's in the cellar, a-mixing up the hops
Brother's at the window a-watching for the cops
(Chris Bouchillon: New Talking Blues)

That’s a-heared in the following song:

Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement, thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat, badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough, wants to get paid off
(Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Blues)

This is part of a series covering the whole of the Never Ending Tour.  You can find an index to all the articles here.

• NET, 2004, Part 1 – The best singing audience
• NET 2004 part 2: The Jazz Connection

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

When looking at 2003, we noticed that Dylan played the harmonica more than in the previous years. (See 2003, part 2, “Pounding pianos and hectic harps”.)

Since Dylan was only interested in the piano as a background, rhythm instrument, the humble harp became his only lead instrument. While we have some beautiful examples of harp work from 1996 to 2002, he rarely played it more often than once or twice per concert, if at all. By 2004 he was playing it four or five times per concert, much to the delight of his harmonica fans (like me).

We saw in the last post how Dylan started to use the instrument in a jazzy, what I call his ‘muted trumpet’ style, and how effective that was.

In this post I will further explore Dylan’s 2004 harmonica playing, and how his style of playing developed as he moved from his ‘squeaky’ sound, playing the high mercurial notes he loves so much, to a richer, fuller sound in the instrument’s mid-range.

A good place to start is with this performance of ‘This Wheel’s On Fire,’ an elusive and mysterious song from the Basement Tapes, often associated with The Band who played it on their first album, Music From Big Pink.

Dylan steers the song away from the woozy, psychedelic versions of the 1960’s into something harder, darker and more trenchant, something perhaps more fitting to the rather sordid tale it seems to be telling. I think the song alludes to drug deals (‘getting your favours done’), but the circumstances of the song are left deliberately vague. That which is ‘tied up in a sailor’s knot’ and hidden ‘in your lace’ remains unrevealed.

Dylan kicks off and finishes this performance, from Poughkeepsie (4^th August), with the harmonica, aiming for a sharp, mid-range sound. It’s worth pausing to reflect on how different this harp style is from Dylan’s 1960s and 70s harmonica playing. This newer, more wah-wah sound, is a result of Dylan being able to hold the instrument in both hands, cradling it the way blues players do, to get that modulated sound – very different from when he was using a brace to hold the harp to his mouth while he played the guitar. While in the post-2002 period he did play a lot with one hand, playing the piano with the other, I believe that for this kind of sound, he would need to use both hands.

This wheel’s on fire (A)

Compare that to this version from Newcastle (22^nd June). Dylan is in good voice at Newcastle, ready and willing to push his vocal, go for the higher notes. There’s a powerful harp break to finish.

This wheel’s on fire (B)

Gentle and restrained is how I would describe the harp playing on this performance of ‘Under the Red Sky.’ (9^th Nov, East Lansing.) The band plays very sweetly on this one, a fragile song reflecting on our creativity, rooted in the fairy and folk tales of our childhood. We could go really deep here, and see the song as a celebration of the divine syzygy, the little boy and the little girl, the sun and moon, and the sadness of their parting as the creative spirit ‘runs dry.’ It is a sad little song, and this is a moving performance of it, with lyrical instrumental prelude before Dylan begins to sing.

Under the Red Sky (A)

That was so nice, let’s pop back to Newcastle and hear it again. Here Dylan’s rich, husky voice comes into its own. He almost whispers. His voice caresses the song into being, and the harp solo at the end, although brief, is touched by anguish and is a fine example of the sounds Dylan can get from the instrument when playing it with both hands. Still gentle but not quite so restrained.

Under the Red Sky (B)

‘Ring Them Bells’ is not a song we associate with the harmonica. In fact, prior to this one, I can’t think of a single example. This song might suggest that Dylan never lost his Christian faith, although direct expressions of it become rare. In that respect ‘Ring Them Bells’ (1989) could be seen as a throwback to the gospel era. Maybe, but the terms of that faith are curiously antique, formal and oddly abstracted.

Ring them bells ye heathen from the city that dreams
Ring them bells from the sanctuaries cross the valleys and streams
For they're deep and they're wide
And the world is on its side
And time is running backwards
And so is the bride

‘Ye heathen’? And what is this about time running backwards? Like many Dylan songs, this may not be quite what it appears to be. The symbology of the fortress and the lilies remains open-ended rather than necessarily Christian.

This one is from Washington DC, Warner Theatre (4^th April). As had become a widespread practice, he opens the song with the harp, using it as a prelude for the verses to come. Again, Dylan’s voice is quite remarkable, rough and throaty, rich and gravelly, but he doesn’t let that hold him back from delivering a heartfelt performance.

Ring them bells

While on the subject of songs from Oh Mercy, remember the intense performance of ‘Shooting Star’ in 2003 (See NET, 2003, part 2)? Well, he pulls it off again in 2004, using the same arrangement, if a little slower in tempo, and achieving pretty much the same effect. It is interesting to compare the two performances. There is no loss of intensity, far from it; the 2004 version might even have the edge because of the power of Dylan’s vocal performance. Another one ripped out from the back of his throat, the harp sharp as a razor and full of yearning. The loss of possible love/salvation is keenly felt. This one’s from Saint Paul, 10^th March.

Shooting Star

For a change of tempo, we move to ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way’ from Blonde on Blonde, and a tranche of 1960s songs. Because of the powerful and distinctive ambience of that album, and constant listening to it as a teenager, I’ve never really been able to get with subsequent performances of the songs. They just burned themselves too deeply into my brain. Several times I’ve mentioned ‘Visions of Johanna’ in that regard. But I have to admit that this vigorous ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way’ comes close to capturing the triumphant tone of the original – you go your way and I’ll go mine and see how you like it. Time will tell who will come out on top. (Note by the way the awkward ‘has fell’ to make the rhyme.) Listen to the relish with which he sings:

You say you're sorry for tellin' me stories
You know I believe are true
Say ya got some other, other kind of lover
And yes, I believe you do

 You go your way

Hardly the whining, adolescent tones of the album, but this gutsy, hard-hitting performance nails the song, no doubt of that.

I’m not sure we can say the same thing about ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.’ When looking at the 2003 performance, I commented that the song was in trouble. The somewhat rigid, baroque arrangement constricted the song, and while this 2004 Rochester performance is an improvement, to my ear, Dylan is struggling to get the song across. Again, we are haunted by earlier, superb performances; the tenderness of this farewell song is too easily lost. Still, Dylan was in top form at Rochester and he uses all the formidable resources of his voice to make the arrangement work, although the vocal at times seems too emphatic to me. Some nice, piercing harp work, however.

It’s all over now Baby Blue

Readers might recall the powerful ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ from 2003 (see NET, 2003, part 6). Once more, we have a baroque arrangement that gives the performance the same kind of intensity that we’ve heard with ‘Shooting Star.’ In 2004 Dylan attempts to repeat that success, but I’m not so sure. The 2004 vocal is marked by persistent upsinging, and as with ‘Baby Blue,’ the musical structure seems to hem the song in rather than liberating it. It’s hard to hear that one hand waving free.

There is some interest to be found in Dylan’s rough ‘n tumble vocals, despite the upsinging, but even the harp break at the end sounds somewhat rote, somewhat tame and muted compared to the intensity of the 2003 performance, which is in turn based on a passionate guitar version from 2001, (see NET, 2001, part 1) which is the most successful of this style. Dylan tries to pull it off again with this performance from East Lansing…

Mr T Man

Readers might also recall the powerful ‘Desolation Row’ from the Berlin concert in 2003 (see NET, 2003, Part 1), the urgent piano and blistering harp. That performance remains one of my all-time favourites. Dylan tries to pull it off again at East Lansing, 2004 and comes very close with a great vocal. Choosing between these two versions might be a matter of personal taste, but for me the guitar break in 2004 is not as clean as in 2003, the upsinging intrudes again, and the closing harp break, good as it is, is not recorded well enough to have the impact it needs.

Desolation Row

‘Girl from the North Country’ is another song to receive the baroque treatment (almost a madrigal sound) in 2004. This fares somewhat better than the others of this style we have considered in this post. Garnier bows the double bass, Dylan sings gently and softly, and the jazzy harp break is just what the song needs to balance the rigidity of the musical form. Dylan must have thought so too for he returns to the harp to play a duet with the guitar, with the guitar mimicking his phrases. It’s a crowd-pleaser this one.

Girl from the North Country

I’ve run out of space, with a few songs on my list not covered, but I’ll slip them into a later post. I’ll make my escape along with the drifter with ‘Drifter’s Escape.’

I thought this hard-edged rocker had peaked a couple of years ago, but listening to this performance from Toronto (19^th March) I’m forced to conclude that the song is very much alive and well and blistering along in fine style.

I must be losing my grip, however, because listening to the guitar breaks, which are not quite wild enough for my taste, I find myself nostalgic for Dylan’s own wacky guitar interjections back in the day when he still played the instrument (try the two performances in NET, 2001, part 4). Still, Dylan roars out the vocal, the piano digs into the rhythm, and the song finishes with some squealing harmonica flourishes. All in all, a real blast.

Drifter’s escape

I’ll be back soon to join the maestro with more from 2004.

Kia Ora

—————–

Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published once or twice a day –  sometimes more, sometimes less.  Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone).  Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.

Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here    If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk.

We also have a Facebook site with over 14,000 members.

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         I got a gal named Sue

Well, I sat by her side and for a while I tried
To make that girl my wife
She gave me her best advice when she said
"Go home and lead a quiet life."
Well, I've been to the east and I've been to the west
And I've been out where the black winds roar
Somehow, though, I never did get that far
With the girl from the Red River shore

In 2012, Rolling Stone publishes its list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time and at no. 50 is Here’s Little Richard from 1957. The eulogy ends with a stately certification: “Tutti Frutti still has the most inspired rock lyric on record: A wop bop alu bop, a wop bam boom!” Five years earlier, Mojo Magazine was even more enthusiastic. In June 2007, a panel of self-proclaimed experts compiles “Big Bangs: 100 Records That Changed the World” and “Tutti Frutti” is number 1 (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is 4, “Like A Rolling Stone” 17).

It is – naturally – a defensible choice. But if legendary producer Bumps Blackwell had been a little braver, or a little less commercial, he would have kept the original lyrics – which are truly a most inspired rock lyric and probably a few degrees more world-changing. In Charles White’s The Life and Times of Little Richard – The Authorised Biography by Little Richard from 1984, the man himself tells the story:

“I’d been singing Tutti Frutti for years, but it never struck me as a song you’d record. I didn’t go to New Orleans to record no Tutti Frutti. Sure, it used to crack the crowds up when I sang it in the clubs, with those risqué lyrics: Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy… But I never thought it would be a hit, even with the lyrics cleaned up.”

… and in the next verse the lyrics are no less “risqué”, just as clearly the words of an excited homosexual man:

Tutti Frutti, good booty
If it's tight, it's all right
And if it's greasy, it makes it easy

No, thinks Bumps Blackwell. First, he worries about Little Richard’s appearance;

“He was so far out! His hair was processed a foot high over his head. His shirt was so loud it looked as though he had drunk raspberry juice, cherryade, malt, and greens and then thrown up all over himself. Man, he was a freak”

… and then he let Dorothy LaBostrie clean up the text and partly rewrite it to the less scabrous lyrics with which Little Richard would change the world just as much. The Beatles, Chuck Berry, The Stones, Elvis… all recognise the song’s primal power. And up in the High North, in Hibbing, “Tutti Frutti” hits the radio in November 1955 as well, crushing the young Bobby Zimmerman. On the so-called John Bucklen Tape from 1958, the oldest tape recording of Dylan making music, we hear a musical declaration of love, “Hey Little Richard”, in the first seconds, and further on how the seventeen-year-old Bobby passionately puts his hero on a pedestal: “Elvis copied all the Richard songs – Rip It Up, Long Tall Sally, Ready Teddy, err – what’s the other one…”

“The other one” is, of course, “Tutti Frutti” – it is clear that the young Zimmerman by now has either Here’s Little Richard or a stack of singles in his record box. And that the songs have ingrained themselves in the receptive brain of the adolescent. Echoes of “Long Tall Sally” can be heard in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and in “Tombstone Blues”, “Slippin’ And Slidin’” leaves traces in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, and in the Basement Little Richard’s spirit hovers over enough fragments (shreds of “Rip It Up” and “Ready Teddy” in “Tiny Montgomery”, for instance).

And in 1997 we hear another slice of “Tutti Frutti”. In “Red River Girl”:

I got a gal, named Sue,
She knows just what to do.
I've been to the east, I've been to the west, 
But she's the gal that I love the best.

“I’ve been to the east and I’ve been to the west” is deeply implanted in Dylan’s memoria musica. The first incisions are done by Little Richard, and when Dylan immerses himself a few years later in Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, old folk songs and The Carter Family, the word order gets fixed. “John Hardy”, for example, has also been somewhere at the front of Dylan’s inner jukebox for sixty years;

I've been to the East and I've been to the West
I've traveled this wide world around
I've been to that river and I've been baptized
So take me to my burying ground

… as well as one of the founding fathers of American ballads and folk songs, “Reuben’s Train”;

I've been to the East, I've been to the West
I'm going where the chilly winds don't blow
Oh me, oh my I'm going where the chilly winds don't blow

With which Dylan, by using that one classic line, comes pretty close to how he describes his early songs in 1984: “I crossed Sonny Terry with the Stanley Brothers with Roscoe Holcombe with Big Bill Broonzy with Woody Guthrie… all the stuff that was dear to me.”

The rest of the verse, the surrounding lines, suggest that with “Red River Shore”, Dylan consciously, and perhaps somewhat forcefully, tries to return to precisely this method. To make that girl my wife is another formulaic line that has been around for centuries in broadside ballads, folk songs and variations of “Pretty Peggy-O”, the song Dylan recorded back in ’62. In the age-old “The Bonnie Woods o’ Hatton” for instance;

Ye comrades and companions, and all ye females dear,
To my sad lamentations, I pray you lend an ear;
There was once I lo'ed a bonnie lass, I lo'ed her as my life,
And it was my whole intention to make her my wedded wife.

… and in almost every arrangement of “Buffalo Gals” (Louisiana Gals, Bowery Gals, Philadelphia Gals, Alabama Gals, Round Town Girls, Midnight Serenade… the nineteenth-century song exists in dozens of variations);

She was de prettiest gal in de room.
I am bound to make dat gal my wife

According to Alan Lomax’s American Ballads And Folk Songs, her name is Sue, by the way; “I met a girl named Sue. So just like Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”: I got a gal named Sue, she knows just what to do – “all these songs are connected,” as Professor Dylan said in his MusiCares speech.

Anyway, “Red River Shore”. The most beautiful line of this second verse, and I’ve been out where the black winds roar, seems to be a Dylan original. True, with a clear echo from “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, but as an image, it is unusual in the art of song. At most recognisable to viewers of the Finnish Netflix series Sorjonen (English title: Bordertown). Over the credits of Episode 3 of the, for now, final Season Three, on 15 December 2019, fans like Stephen King suddenly hear an appealingly dated-sounding folk-rocker with garage sound:

Black winds, take this soul of mine
Take me to the dark below
Lord, I want to die
In the night, I killed my love
Black winds, take away my life
Oh, Lord, let me die

… “Black Winds”, an obscure 1965 single by an obscure band from Oregon, Little John and The Monks. Obscure enough, in any case, to have a place in Dylan’s mythical inner jukebox. Very unlikely, though. But still.

To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 5

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

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