Links to all the cover versions used in this series are given at the end of the article, as well as links to all the previous articles themselves.
According to the Holy Bible, after the ‘crucifixion’ of Jesus, a disciple from Damascus convinces Paul (Saul) to convert to Christianity:
And Ananias went his way
And entered into the house
And putting his hands on him said
"Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus ....
Hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight
And be filled with the Holy Ghost"
(Acts 9: 17)
The Dylavinvi Code cracked in the song lyrics quoted beneath, reveals that floating time-traveller/shape-shifter Bob Dylan elaborates on the above biblical narrative.
The singer/ songwriter mixes modern-day celebrities into the soupy tale – i.e., like entertainers Errol Flynn and Dorothy Lamour (she stars in “Hello Dolly”).
He cloaks himself in the persona of the early Christian disciple Ananias.
Dylanias visits Paul, calling him his ‘brother’, who’s been locked up in the royal prison in Rome by Nero, falsely accused of setting the fire there:
He had a brother named Paul out at the cafe royal
Where Miss Dolly plays, and the reviews have been mixed
(Bob Dylan: Too Late)
The Code deciphered makes it quite clear that Ananias hears about the ‘crucifixion’ of Jesus; under questioning by secular and religious authorities, the disciple says he does not remember, or at least claims he doesn’t, whether it’s been rumoured that Jesus escapes death because he can’t actually be killed, or because a Libyan is put in place of Jesus on the cross.
Dylan as Ananias explains:
Well whether there was a murder, I don't know
I was busy visiting a friend in jail
(Bob Dylan: Too Late)
Actress Amanda Blake plays Marshall Dillon’s girlfriend in TV “Gunsmoke” series; in the song ‘Too Late’, strangely beautiful Magdalene is encoded by Dylanias as Blake, the girlfriend of Jesus.
Magdalene comes from the shore of the Sea of Galilee:
But then there's Rosetta Blake
Who's been on both sides of the lake
She's rough to look at, but she's righteously fit
She'll feed you coconut bread, and spiced buns in bed
(Bob Dylan: Too Late)
Whatever the crucifixion case may be, Ananias states that Christ and Mary Magdalene have sailed off to America.
Says he, the details of what happened consequently don’t matter:
Yes, I loved him too
I still see him in my mind climbing up the hill
Or was it a wall, I don't recall
It don't matter at all, and it never will
(Bob Dylan: Too Late)
Lightening flashes, and, one way or the other, Jesus Christ, the drifter, escapes in the confusion.
This series started yesterday with the article linked above. Next should be Abandoned Love but we’ve already done a review of a whole range of interesting covers in the Beautiful Obscurity series.
And moving on through the Dylan compositions in alphabetical order it has quickly become clear that there are lots of Dylan songs that no one seems to have covered. Or indeed maybe just one or two people have had a go at, but in my imperious way I don’t rate them highly enough to be worthy of a place in “Cover of the Day”.
And so I’ve meandered on to Ain’t Talkin’ recorded by Betty LaVette
I love the fact that the percussionist is reduced to doing the same thing all the way through – and yet it works perfectly. Mind you when you get a full band shot, he looks bored out of his mind.
But, hell, the band and Ms LaVette, really do get something out of this song. Worthy of inclusion as cover of the day. The sudden stop of the band took me by surprise too.
I An absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written
Ostalgie, the contraction of “Ost” (East) and “Nostalgie”, is the beautiful portmanteau word that emerges from 1991 to express the longing for life in Ostdeutschland, in East Germany before the fall of the Wall. The fall of the Wall, 9 November 1989, initially led to euphoria and to an exaggerated expectation of all the blessings that the wealth of the capitalist West would bring – the sobering, slowly sinking realisation that it is not all moonlight and roses, this capitalist welfare paradise of prosperity, is quite disappointing. The disappointment is combated with a return to the products and music of the GDR era at Ostalgie-Party’s and from 2000 the entertainment industry joins in. Television series set in an idealised GDR, bands specialising in East German hits, and films such as the witty Sonnenallee and especially the brilliant Good Bye Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003). That film, in which the main character goes to extremes to save his mother from the shock of finding out that the Wall has fallen, drives Ostalgie to unprecedented heights and makes the demand for old GDR products explode.
Ostalgie, in short, is not only for works of art a fertile emotion to exploit. However, the assimilation of the term contributes to a blurring of the actual, original meaning of nostalgia – it has become more and more something like melancholy, the bittersweet longing for the “good old days”. Originally, however, “nostalgia” denotes the feeling that Dylan expresses so masterfully and poetically in “I Was Young When I Left Home”: the pain of realising that you have lost something dear to you forever. As the Greek origin reveals; nostos = return and algos = sadness, pain, suffering.
Only one recording exists, Dylan never played it live. That one recording was made in Minneapolis, in the flat of friend Bonnie Beecher. On that December day in 1961, no less than 26 songs are put on a tape, which is called the Minnesota Hotel Tape (Bonnie’s flat was called “Beecher Hotel” in the circle of friends). On the soundtrack to No Direction Home, which was released in 2007 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 7, Dylan announces the song and we can hear that he appropriates it: I sorta made it up on a train. And he has an opinion as well: This must be good for somebody, this sad song. Iknowit’s good for somebody. If it ain’t for me, it’s good for somebody.
“I sorta made it up” is sorta about right. Dylan copies almost entirely two verses of “500 Miles” by folk singer Hedy West (the Not a shirt on my back and the If you miss the train I’m on verses), the structure is the same and he borrows a few fragments from the melody. This “500 Miles” is the song of a down and out vagabond, consumed by homesickness.
Dylan adds more melodrama, stepping into the shoes of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15, 11-32), but without a happy end. This runaway remains lost; mother dead and gone, sister on the wrong track, father in trouble… no, I can never go home again. By the way, West’s song is also an adaptation: she nibbles 400 miles off the folk-traditional “900 Miles” but spares enough that eventually trickles through to Dylan’s adaptation.
A line like You will hear that whistle blow a hundred miles, for instance, is already in that original 900 miles version. A mutilated version thereof, to complete the circle, is played by Dylan in 1967 in the Big Pink and can be heard on The Basement Tapes. In it, only the line ‘Cause I’m 900 miles from home and the melody (more or less) remain. A playful Dylan further shuffles the old negro spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep” and a lot of spontaneously made-up verse lines into the song.
The second part of Dylan’s introductory talk is telling. “This must be good for somebody. If it ain’t for me, it’s good for somebody.” Which is in line with the modest self-image that emerges from the autobiography Chronicles Vol. 1; Dylan often refers to himself as a conduit – it’s The Song that matters, not the singer. He himself is just 20 when he sings this. Far too young and inexperienced, one might say, to be able to identify with the protagonist here. The protagonist is a tired, beaten-up over-50-year-old who has the right to be nostalgic and to tell his sad story. Of course, tenderfoot Dylan is an extremely gifted natural. It’s still amazing, though.
Marianne Faithfull expresses a similar, admiringly meant, amazement relating to the creation of “As Tears Go By”:
“I was never that crazy about “As Tears Go By.” God knows how Mick and Keith wrote it or where it came from. It’s a great fusion of dissimilar ingredients: “The Lady of Shalott” to the tune of “These Foolish Things.” The image that comes to mind for me is the Lady of Shalott looking into the mirror and watching life go by. It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written. A song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened. It’s almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.”
“An absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written.” Beautifully phrased by the as always eloquent Faithfull, and she indirectly puts her finger on the sore spot: for all the beauty of the song, the gap between the unmistakably pure, innocent youthfulness of the singer and the nostalgic, autumnal ripeness of the protagonist is insurmountable. Marianne is simply too young and too green to cover up that gap. She sings heartbreakingly melodic and high – totally out of character, in other words. Later, as her young voice fades, everything falls into place, by the way. On Negative Capability, the album she will record in 2018 with Nick Cave and her current life partner Warren Ellis, she sings a fairly definitive, withered version.
A highlight that is even surpassed by the bare recitation of the lyrics, in September 2021.
In 2020, the grand old lady experiences another low point in her constant, endless succession of health problems and physical discomforts when she suffers pneumonia on top of a Covid-19 infection. As usual, she gets back on her feet, again as usual against all odds. In September 2021, La Faithfull is staying at Denville Hall, a retirement home for performing artists. In the garden, sitting in a wheelchair next to an oxygen machine, she receives journalists to promote her new album She Walks In Beauty. On that album, she doesn’t sing, but recites, over a sober carpet of murmuring muzak, eleven poems by the Romantics, by poets like Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth. The album concludes with, very fittingly, Tennyson’s “The Lady Of Shalott”, the poem she already linked to “As Tears Go By” in her first autobiography (1994). It may explain her receptivity to the somewhat silly question from a Dutch journalist whether she would care to recite the lyrics of her first hit, here in the garden of Denville Hall. La Faithfull half-heartedly objects (“But this is not a poem”), but then does it anyway – somewhat surly, presumably mainly motivated by the urge to put the whole thing behind her, gasping for oxygen in between… and now suddenly a real 74-year-old lady is speaking, interpreting the words of a fictional 74-year-old lady.
The fantasy of how much beauty and power Dylan’s “I Was Young When I Left Home” would gain if some silly journalist could persuade 80-year-old Dylan to perform the song again, sixty years later, is tantalizingly attractive. But it doesn’t seem to be in the cards. A Faithfull-like reworking, an “I Was Young When I Left Home Revisited”… we can only dream. “I’m not a nostalgic person,” says Dylan, in his Post-MusiCares Conversation with Bill Flanagan in 2015. And in October 2021, another well-informed source, oldest son Jesse Dylan, provides a verbatim confirmation of that self-analysis in the Times interview, when the interviewer asks him if he and his dad ever look back on the Sixties. “He’s not a nostalgic person, he’s always looking forward to the next thing,” Jesse says.
On the other hand… “Highway 61 Revisited” is still on the set list often enough. And Highway 61 does lead to Duluth, does lead home…
To be continued. Next up: I Was Young When I Left Home part II: Different doors
——-
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:
(Writer’s note: there’s a long preamble here of no particular significance or importance. If you just want to hear the cover version that maybe you’ve never heard before, and which might surprise you, skip the chitchat and go scroll straight to the end. You won’t miss much).
Anyway, before I started this site, 13 years, 2430 articles and 10,126 comments ago, I didn’t really have much interest in covers of Bob Dylan records. I’m not sure why, but it simply hadn’t happened even though my life changed in 1988 when Ashley Hutchings recorded “Angelina”. But then people like Jochen, Larry and Aaron came along and through one route or another, I became much more focussed on just what covers could do for my understanding of Dylan’s work.
Of course, I had a few favourites before starting this site, and knew all the famous covers (Hendrix, Byrds etc) but those covers didn’t really get to the centre of my consciousness until I began to realise how listening to another musician re-work a Dylan song gave me a much deeper understanding of the music than I ever had before. The lyrics of course tend to stay the same in cover versions, and I don’t think many of us actually want a cover musician to start messing around with what Bob wrote. After all, he does enough of that himself. But the music does change.
So a while back, instead of seeking out another recording of Bob playing the song the latest article on this site was about, I started (as is my right as the editor/publisher!) to slip in cover versions instead, to illustrate a point being made in the article.
Aaron and I then started our little game which often involves Aaron supplying cover versions of Dylan songs and me writing a review in the time it takes to play the song. I have no idea if anyone else thinks that’s interesting, or instead finds it a pretentious load of old tripe – but then that’s the beauty of a blog. There’s no use of paper, and if you don’t like today’s article, well there are 2430 previous ones on line, and another one tomorrow.
But I must also mention Jochen who appears to have a knowledge of everything musical far beyond mine (which is annoying since I’m the one who worked as a musician – albeit an unsuccessful one) and liberally illustrates his articles with musical examples, and Larry who kindly leaves it up to me to pick which musical examples go into his pieces – as indeed happened this morning where Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XX) which has a staggeringly beautiful rendition of “Not Dark Yet” tucked away within it.
And so now I have got to the notion of thinking: aside from all these opportunities, why don’t I just pick out one cover version a day, and put it online for you, a person who is kind enough to read my ramblings (and the much more illuminating articles by my pals who so kindly give of their time in keeping Untold Dylan going). Just in case you are interested. A Dylan cover a Day in fact.
Or better said, A somewhat obscure Dylan Cover A Day.
Maybe I’ll write a few words about the selected version, maybe not. Maybe you’ll listen, maybe not. Maybe you’ll come back tomorrow to see what odd piece I have chosen. Maybe not. I’d like it if you did, but really, in the nature of things, it’s up to you. With a bit of luck Untold Dylan will last a few more years before they take me away to the Old Writer’s Home, where, when I turn up the CD player too loud they’ll say “Oh give the old sod some paper and tell him to write about Bob Dylan”) so there should be time to pick up tomorrow what you don’t pick up today.
And if the series stops because I get bored with it, maybe someone else will pick it up. But at least after today, you won’t have to read a long rambling piece of nonsense explaining something that really doesn’t need explaining at all. I’ll just put in a link back to this page.
I’ve decided to go in alphabetical order. Which means we start with 2×2. Don’t blame me – numbers just always come before letters in alphabetical lists. I don’t know why. But anyway, if you don’t know it, try it. It might surprise you.
PS: If any aspiring band would like to bribe me to include their version of a song as my selected cover, my bank details are available on request.
Links to all the cover versions used in this series are given at the end of the article, as well as links to all the previous articles themselves.
by Larry Fyffe
Our unwavering researchers, digging deep into the files of the Untold Archives, are able to uncover the psychological consequences of the mental scars that Jesus endures.
The love relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ ends in sorrow; beautiful Maggie entombed in the Sphinx forever.
Just like all good psychiatrists do when they are at a lost to see what’s causes the odd behaviour of patients, the blame for their mental condition is placed squarely on the shoulders of their mommas.
Documents uncovered at the Archives show that singer songwriter Bob Dylan, while lying on the couch in Dr. Sigmund Freud’s Vienna office, tells about his travels through space and time, and about his “troubles” therein.
According to papers marked “Confidential”, Bob confides that he has the supernatural ability to time-travel, and also acknowledges that he’s a bon fide, dyed-in-the-wool, shape-shifter.
And, listen to this, Dylan explains to the Doctor that he often takes on the form of Jesus Christ, and through these transfigurative experiences, we learn that during her earthly life Mary, the mother of Jesus, “had done a lot of bad things, even once tried suicide”.
In one of his sessions with Sigmund, the singer/songwriter describes what happens to him while floating around in Relativity, floating up there in the spiritual plane of Gnostic Time, shape-shifted into the figure of the Saviour.
There Bob/Jesus bumps into the Greek philosopher who goes by the name of Celsus. The philosopher supports Hadrian, the Emperor who builds the ‘Temple of Venus’ in Rome (Dylan claims he makes fun of the Emperor’s name by later penning the song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”).
Anyway, Celsus, interested in Egyptian mythology, taunts Christian evangelists for spreading what he calls ‘supernatural’ beliefs, such as Christ being the ‘Son of God’.
According to Greek/Roman mythology, Venus has an affair with Dionysus, a son of Zeus by a mortal woman. Hera gets her revenge on the Goddess of Love for her being judged more beautiful than she, the wife of Zeus (Jupiter). Hera bewitches the son of Venus and Dionysus – son Priapus is ugly, and his huge cock, usually hard all the time, does not function when the grown-up Priapus wants it to.
Celus strikes back at the Christians because they call the philosopher a ‘pagan’, a follower of the Roman God Jupiter.
So it goes that Celsus whispers into the ear of the transformed Jesus that some Jews say that Mary cuckolds her husband Joseph by having an affair with a Roman soldier whose last name is Pantera, which translates into “Panther”.
Gleefully embellishing the gossip with the information that the Roman soldier has a large reproductive organ, Celsus whispers that when Mary becomes pregnant with Jesus, she tells Joseph, her husband, that she’s been impregnated by the Holy Ghost of God.
Jesus realizes His actual last name is “Panther”, and He’s not the “Son of God” that John the Baptist says He is. Rather shocking news that leaves psychological scars on the mind of Jesus for life; there’s no sunshine that’s a-gonna heal it.
Sings a song to Sigmund:
Shadows are falling, and I've been here all day
It's too hot to sleep, time is running away
Feels like my soul has turned into steel
I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal
(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)
Dylan as Jesus explains to the head doctor how He takes revenge on the Roman soldier, his daddy:
Black Rider, black rider, hold it right there
The size of your cock will get you nowhere
I'll suffer in silence, I'll not make a sound
Maybe I'll take the high moral ground
(Bob Dylan: Black Rider)
If you’re a regular reader here you’ll know mr tambourine is and has for a long time been a good friend of Untold Dylan. So as a little thank you here’s a video from mr tambourine,
Bob Dylan – Chicago 2021 Full Show (Audio+Footage)
Great pictures – what a good seat you had!
Maybe one of us will get round to doing a review of the tour. Here’s the set list
In this series Aaron selects the tracks, and sends them over to Tony who tries to write some sort of commentary while the music is playing.
Aaron:The track was written and first recorded by Peter La Farge
Tony: Being British, the name Ira Hayes meant nothing to me, and I don’t know how widely his name is known in the US. I’ve picked up such information as I have from the wiki article on him (Curiously I do know a little of Peter La Farge and I’ll come back to that at the end after the listening has finished).
I must admit I am not a fan of songs about the sad collapse of a hero; perhaps just generally I don’t like this type of sentimentality and because as mentioned above I do by chance know a little of the composer.
In essence it seems to me we’ve all got huge numbers of faults, and perhaps for that reason it feels a better idea to remember the positive contributions of our heroes rather than their failings – at least in a song. Maybe the failings can be left for the biography.
But of course, that is not the way of the world: failings are what people talk about, maybe as compensation for not being able to do what their heroes do. Maybe that is why some people focus so much on the way Bob has taken lyrics and melodies from other songs, just as composers have done through all human history.
I would call the song “maudlin” but as ever that’s just me: I’d choose not to listen if I had the choice. But having listened, I still don’t get this – the beat seems to have nothing to do with the hero or the tragedy.
Aaron: The most famous and popular version was by Johnny Cash on his 1964 Bitter Tears album (which contains mostly La Farge compositions)
Tony:The point I suppose is that many of us have two sides to our lives, not least because we are human, and we need to cope with all the complexities of life. So we adapt to different circumstances, sometimes in good ways sometimes in very regrettable ways.
The problem is, that is not that profound a message, is it?
Aaron:Bob recorded his version during the Self Portrait sessions. It was eventually released on the 1973 Dylan album.
Tony: This song is clearly considered a classic, and Bob adds a very reasonable piano background with the organ sitting behind, which works well – at least until the organist starts to fight for a greater exposure. But I must say that of the versions that I have now heard this is the one I would go for because Bob gets the move from the talking to the singing just right.
The problem for me is that he then returns to the talking, which is of course the essence of the song, and by the time we get to the chorus again we’ve got a set of choral vocalists joining in as well. It’s too much for me.
Yes, it is the best of the versions presented above, but by the later parts the organ player really has gone far too far for my taste.
However. the way Bob sings the chorus really is the highlight of all these recordings, and he extracts the meaning of the song in a way that other performers don’t.
Tony:Now having picked up on the song properly, through having heard the earlier versions, I really do wonder about this.
Culturally what is going on here? By now I can get toward an understanding of the song and its history, but I just don’t have a good feeling about that last video. Of course, I am totally outside of the cultural references going on here and maybe that’s the problem, but even taking that into account, I am really not sure where Bob was going with this.
As for why does Bob like the song… well, I don’t know really. He does make something interesting out of it in his recorded version, although I could have done without the chorus, but …
I do want to add something about the composer of this song, because he was a most interesting man who died at the age of 34, just as Dylan was reaching out toward the stratosphere.
La Farge was a military man serving his country in the Korean War, and later working as an undercover agent (I think for the CIA but I might have remembered that wrongly) in the fight against drug smuggling. He was highly decorated for his bravery and patriotic work.
But like many men who were then discharged from the military, he appears to have found it hard to settle down, working as a cowboy in rodeo shows before studying to be an actor, and his tragically early death.
‘Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff.’ ‘Sugar Baby’
This post is a continuation from the previous post in which I began to introduce the new songs from Love and Theft. As far as I can make out, ten of the twelve songs on that album were performed in the last two months of 2001. ‘Bye and Bye’ and ‘Po Boy’ would have to wait for 2002. (Since writing that I have heard that there is a recording of ‘Po Boy’ from 2001, but if so, I don’t have access to it.)
Because Dylan recorded Love and Theft with his touring band, not his usual practice, there is less distance between the studio and stage performances of the songs – unlike our experience with Time Out of Mind, which saw Dylan reacting to Lanois’ production by performing the songs in a harder, sharper manner.
In addition, Dylan did his own producing on Love and Theft (calling himself Jack Frost), the result being that the stage performances sound very much like the album’s.
Let’s start with ‘Lonesome Day Blues.’ As Dylan wrote the four bluesy songs for the album first, we can surmise that he used the blues, with its familiar 12 bar, three chord pattern, deeply rooted in American musical history, to write his way into the album.
‘Lonesome Day Blues’ might sound like a standard, urban blues song, but in terms of the lyrics it is far from that. There is a fanciful weave of phrases from Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakusa and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There are 12 references to Saga on the album, spread over five songs, generally two per song.
‘Lonesome Day Blues’:
‘Samantha Brown lived in my house
For about four or five months
Don’t know how it looked to other people
I never slept with her even once’
Saga:
‘Just because she was in the same house didn’t mean we were living together as man and wife… I don’t know how it looked to other people, but I never even slept with her, not once.’
‘Lonesome Day Blues’:
‘Well, my captain, he’s decorated
He’s well schooled and he’s skilled
He’s not sentimental, doesn’t bother him at all
How many of his pals have been killed’
Saga:
‘There was nothing sentimental about him – It didn’t bother him at all that some of his pals had been killed. He said he’d been given any number of decorations…’
‘Lonesome Day Blues’:
‘My sister, she ran off and got married
Never was heard of any more’
Huckleberry Finn:
‘…and my sister Ann ran off and got married and was never heard of no more.’
(My thanks To Richard F Thomas, Why Dylan Matters for these examples, pages 197 – 201. A reader has questioned this last example, however as simply phrases in common usage.)
This intertextuality gives the song a much great range of expression than most blues lyrics, which are about whisky, women and hard times.
I like this performance from Milwaukee, 28th Oct, for its sharpness and clarity.
Lonesome Day Blues (A)
However, this somewhat more solid version from New York, 19th Nov, has its attractions, with Dylan’s voice powerful and upfront. Excellent recording.
Lonesome Day Blues (B)
I find, in ‘Honest With Me,’ although it’s written fifteen years earlier, a curious echo of Donald Trump’s promise to ‘make America great again.’
‘I’m here to create the new imperial empire
I’m going to do whatever circumstances require’
These dark lines go back to Virgil who witnessed Augustus turn the Roman republic into an empire. As a whole, however, the lyrics of ‘Honest With Me’ are a whirl of the humorous and the absurd. It’s more sheer fun than anything else. I’m reminded of the exuberant nonsense of ‘Mighty Quinn’ and ‘Tiny Montgomery.’
‘I'm stark naked but I don't care
I'm goin' off into the woods, I'm huntin' bare’
This performance from Madison Square Gardens does full justice to the song. Larry sounding good on slide guitar. It rips along.
Honest with Me (A)
If you like your sound a bit harder and sharper, however, this one from Seattle might suit you better.
Honest with Me (B)
Dylan kicks off the album with ‘Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.’ It wasn’t my favourite track from the album, I had trouble relating to the lyrics. I just didn’t understand the song, and still don’t. Maybe these are the Siamese twins referred to in ‘Honest with Me.’ Is this a kind of protest song about the way the power-hungry echo each other? The song tempts us into political interpretations (Republicans and Democrats, Arabs and Israelis?) but these can’t be sustained. Sense has been abandoned.
What we do pick up is that these twins are backstabbing phonies, to borrow a phrase from ‘Cry A While.’ It’s all about power and wealth – and violence.
In his account of the song Tony Attwood quotes the critic Kot. It’s such an excellent quote I think it can be repeated here: ‘It rolls in like a storm, drums galloping over the horizon into earshot, guitar riffs slicing with terse dexterity while a tale about a pair of vagabonds unfolds. It ends in death, and sets the stage for an album populated by rogues, con men, outcasts, gamblers, gunfighters and desperados, many of them with nothing to lose, some of them out of their minds, all of them quintessentially American.’
It also sets the stage for the strong streak of absurdist humour that runs through the album. We can be pushed beyond earnest outrage into a mad humour in which the whole spectacle becomes ridiculous and despicable. As for the tweedle dum and tweedle dee, neither of them are to be what they claim, to steal a line from a much earlier song. Incidentally, the phrase ‘His Master’s voice is calling me’ has been variously interpreted. My only contribution here is that ‘His Master’s Voice’ was a record label.
This performance is also from Seattle. The sharp sound from that concert suits the song, which if too muted can lose its potency. The song bears the full weight of Dylan’s vocal sarcasm. There’s nothing tender about the song. Another song ideally suited to Dylan’s downsinging.
Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee
Another song deeply steeped in the blues is ‘Cry A While.’ The changes of rhythm in the original, and these early performances, evoke different blues traditions. The underlying sentiment, that it’s ‘your turn’ to cry is common enough in the blues, where there is a lot of crying over lost and broken love – and above all, betrayal.
But no blues singer I’ve ever heard evokes the world of Italian Opera, in this case Don Pasquale, a story full of intrigue, false appearances, backstabbing and betrayal. The context in which Dylan puts this story, having the fool Pasquale making a ‘booty call’, is clearly humorous in its intent, despite the lack of humour in the heavy blues sound and nasty-edged delivery of the song.
‘Last night 'cross the alley there was a pounding on the walls
It must have been Don Pasquale, making a 2 a.m. booty call
To break a trusting heart like mine
Was just your style’
While that might bring a smile to our faces, the song is darker than most of the others on the album. For a moment we return to a Time Out of Mind frame of mind, even maybe a taste from the Dylan of Blood On The Tracks:
‘I'm on the fringes of the night, fighting back tears that I can't control
Some people they ain't human, they got no heart or soul
But I'm crying to the Lord
Tryin' to be meek and mild’
At the same time we’ve got the old Dylan resilience and defiance, retranslated for old age.
‘I'm gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey
I'll die before I turn senile’
Mordant humour indeed. This one’s from 6th Nov. Again, it’s very like the album version, just a bit stronger and appropriately vengeful.
Cry A While
‘Sugar Baby’ seems to come from a similar dark place, reminding us that despair does not go away just because we make jokes in the face of it, or seek a larger, comic – cosmic? – perspective, or take refuge in absurdity, or channel the Classical poets. There is no cure for fate:
‘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’
Despite the grim chorus, I don’t feel this to be a finger-pointing song. Yes, it’s about betrayal in its most personal form, but behind that there lies a deeper sense of how the world might work.
‘Love is pleasing, love is teasing,
love's not an evil thing.’
That strikes me as the central revelation of this slow, thoughtful song. Just to step out onto the street is be up for grabs. Eros and other gods are there eager to make a fool of you, but ‘love’s not an evil thing.’
‘The ladies down in Darktown, they're doing the Darktown Strut
You always got to be prepared but you never know for what’
This one’s from New York (MSG), and features Tony Garnier on the upright bass.
Sugar Baby
If these two songs come from the darker side of the album, so does ‘Mississippi,’ the most famous song on the album. This song, however, is something of an odd man out here, originating in the Time Out of Mind sessions in 1997. The mood and themes of this song are deeply embedded in that album.
For those wishing to plumb the depths of this marvellous song, you couldn’t do better than read the 16 part account of the song by Jochen Markhorst on this site. Nothing I say here can add anything to that. As with the greatest Dylan songs, ‘Mississippi’ can bear countless hearings. It’s the way Dylan juxtaposes images, traditions and literatures that makes for a great Dylan song.
The song starts humbly enough, evoking Johnny Cash, the journey of the hobo, very familiar territory
‘Every step of the way, I walk the line
Your days are numbered, and so are mine’
but soon gently extends the sentiment into a love/regret song of the highest order:
All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long’
What song better sums up the ethos of the blues journeyman, who never does put his suitcase down?
This first performance is from Portland. It’s a solid performance and a good introduction to how the song sounds onstage.
Mississippi (A)
But I rather prefer this, harder-edged recording from the Washington concert.
Mississippi (B)
So that’s it for 2001. Next up, the most pivotal year in the NET, perhaps in Dylan’s whole career. 2002, the year in which he would lay down his guitar.
Nick Hornby is a justly celebrated writer and talented scriptwriter whose own books are often made into very enjoyable films by other scriptwriters. About A Boy, Fever Pitch, A Long Way Down… but the real success began with the film adaptation of his first novel, High Fidelity (book 1995, film 2000, musical 2006, television series 2020). Autobiographical elements shine through enough, but most clearly in protagonist Rob’s obsessive tendency to make Top 5 lists of everything. The book even opens therewith;
“My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order:
1) Alison Ashworth
2) Penny Hardwick
3) Jackie Allen
4) Charlie Nicholson
5) Sarah Kendrew
These were the ones that really hurt.”
How fond Nick Hornby himself is of making lists, he shows in 2003, with the publication of 31 Songs, a beautiful collection of essays on his 31 favourite songs. In it, he also expresses his awkward, very two-faced relationship with Dylan’s records. In the opening line to Favourite Song No. 8, Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”, he is quite clear: “l’m not a big Dylan fan.” A stroll through his record collection, however, reveals, to his own surprise, that he has some twenty CDs by Dylan – “in fact I own more recordings by Dylan than by any other artist.” And when discussing Favourite Song No. 7, Rod Stewart’s cover of the Dylan song “Mama You Been On My Mind”, the not-a-big-Dylan fan drops:
“Dylan’s ‘Mama You Been On My Mind’ seems to me to be not much more than a strum – an exquisite strum, with one of Dylan’s loveliest and simplest lyrics, but a strum nonetheless. Stewart’s evident love for the song rescues it, or at least spotlights it: where Dylan almost throws it away, with the implication that there’s plenty more where that one came from, Stewart’s reverence seems to dignify it, invest it with an epical quality Dylan denies it.”
That same special talent, the talent to express admiration with highly quotable, cast-iron sentences, Hornby demonstrates again in Chapter 8, the chapter on “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”: There’s a density and a gravity to a Dylan song that you can’t find anywhere else.
In the book High Fidelity, however, Dylan is not mentioned too often. About four times. Very respectful, though: “All-time top five favourite recording artists: Madness, Eurythmics, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley.” And Dylan is explicitly linked to Rob’s emotional struggles once:
“When I get home (twenty quid, Putney to Crouch End, and no tip) I make myself a cup of tea, plug in the headphones, and plow through every angry song about women by Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello I own.”
Striking enough, in any case, for the screenwriters to highlight Dylan more in the otherwise very faithful film adaptation. “Most Of The Time”, under the romantic climax, in the pouring rain after a funeral vigil late at night, makes the most impression. The song from 1989 was covered once until the filming, by Lloyd Cole in 1995. After the success of the film and the soundtrack, it has been covered more than twenty times (most beautifully by Sophie Zelmani in 2003, but the raw, unadorned cover by ex-Grandaddy Jason Lytle in 2021 also has its own distinctive emotional power).
In the scenario Dylan’s name pops up as well, every now and then. Like in the witty shop scene in which Barry (Jack Black) pushes one must-have album after another into the hands of a dorky customer:
“You don’t have it? That is perverse. Don’t tell anybody you don’t own fucking Blonde On Blonde [stacking the album on the pile in the hands of the overwhelmed customer]. It’s gonna be okay.”
And on the soundtrack, one more Dylan song comes along: “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, under the sensual love scene Rob has with a one-night stand, the enchanting singer/songwriter Marie DeSalle. Played, incidentally, by the secret childhood crush of half the Western world’s population over 40, Lisa “Denise Huxtable” Bonet. To complete the circle, the lead role in High Fidelity‘s 2020 television adaptation is played by Zoë Kravitz, Lisa Bonet’s equally enchanting daughter from her marriage to Lenny Kravitz.
The splashing Rolling Thunder performance of the song did not really lead to a broad, general reappraisal of the song at the time. From the 70s, only the 1979 version by British blues veteran Dave Kelly is worth mentioning. An unadventurous, country-like arrangement, true, but it’s all the first years after the Rolling Thunder Revue have to offer. And it does have a pleasantly nostalgic piano.
https://youtu.be/O7WNTEqBGJ0
In the 80s, the song remains just as obscure. Dylan himself never plays it, his colleagues also ignore “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”. With one exception: the energetic soul veteran Nappy Brown experiences a come-back in the 80s, some thirty years after his glory years (between 1954 and ’58 he scored his biggest hits). After Jeff Beck, Cher and Esther Williams, Nappy is the next to recognize the soul potential of the song and records a catchy, swinging mid-tempo soul stomp for his strong album Tore Up (1984).
From 1990 onwards, Dylan plays it himself again, at irregular intervals, and that, plus perhaps the reasonably successful cover of Albert Lee (1991), leads to a steady reappraisal.
In the course of the 90s, the song then appears here and there on the setlist of Second Division artists, until Premier League player and Dylan disciple Jimmy LaFave reanimates it completely in 1999;
… in turn inciting the blues potential, but above all – as usual – appealing because of his husky, skipping vocals and his unique phrasing.
The film adaptation of High Fidelity then seems, as it did for “Most Of The Time”, to throw open the gate once and for all; after 2000, “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” enters the canon. In all categories, too; blues, country and rock artists, of course. A forgotten recording by Rick Nelson from 1969 surfaces, as a bonus track on the reissue of Rick Nelson In Concert (2011). [Editor’s interruption, for this track just click on the link]
And even in jazz circles, as in a somewhat safe, sultry, but not unattractive rendition by Janet Planet;
And soul, especially soul – which usually makes for very attractive covers;
…as the delightful Ann Peebles, with old master Allen Toussaint on the piano in 2005, proves. En passant demonstrating why the old soul diva (“I Can’t Stand The Rain”) is inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2014.
However, its particular beauty is best appreciated in a hybrid, in a mash-up of rock, soul, blues and country, as Jeff Beck argued half a century ago. For an exercise in that winning category we have to go to continental Europe, to a small town in the south of Holland. In Breda, Jan Barten and Fons Havermans produce Dylan covers, in which the Muscle Shoals-like piano, funky guitar, driving Hammond organ, Kenny Buttrey drums and jazz-rock-ish Steely Dan guitar solos create the perfect blend of Memphis, Nashville and New York. Their “One Of Us Must Know” with brilliant, percussive Stevie Wonder keyboard work is a great example of that approach, and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” emulates the warmth and drive:
Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” never made it to the real top, though. In a – fictitious – list of Most Covered Dylan Songs, the song probably only just makes it to the Top 30 – at best, it ‘s a mid-tier. And apparently, only Dylan’s original has the magical power to give even a sucker like Rob Gordon the chance to make out with Lisa Bonet:
…after which he is allowed to be staying with her tonight, the lucky devil.
————————
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:
Links to all the cover versions used in this series are given at the end of the article, as well as links to all the previous articles themselves.
by Larry Fyffe
Bob Dylan’s songs considered a whole be a mixture of Gnostic and Hermetic profusion and confusion.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” tells the tale of sickly Roderick Usher whose cracked house contains a library full of books including Emanuel Swedenborg’s “Heaven And Hell”.
Encrypted be ‘Horus’, an Egyptian symbol of regeneration, within the name “Roderick Usher”.
Roderick represents the isolated human mind. Mistakenly believing her dead, he buries his twin sister Madeline alive in the family vault.
Madeline, a variant of ‘Magdalene’, represents the isolated human body.
She breaks out of her tomb, and scares her mind-oriented brother to death.
The deteriorating house surrounding the twins then collapses, entombing both of them beneath the rubble.
The cracking of the Delavinci Code reveals that the obverse story of Jesus and Magdalene found therein is similar in theme to Poe’ short story with the major exception that the couple have a female child who survives.
Thus, the House of Christ does not collapse.
Nevertheless, Lady Magdalene ends up mummified; ‘undead’ in a sepulchre. Nor is it at all clear whether Lord Jesus is alive or dead (it’s after His ‘crucifixion’).
According to the uncovered Code, the following song lyrics indicate that Mary is the narrator’s sister, akin to the twins (‘rational’ Christ and ‘wise’ Sophia) depicted in Gnostic thought (and twins Apollo and Artemis in Greek/Roman mythology).
Anyway, when all is said and done, Jesus and Mary save one another from being captured by the authorities of organized religion who are in pursuit of the duo:
We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
We died, and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved
(Bob Dylan: Oh Sister ~ Dylan/Levy)
It becomes increasingly evident, thanks to the unravelling of the Dylavinci Code, that many of the time-travelling songs of Bob Dylan about love found and love lost refer to the recurrent archetypical figure of Mary Magdalene.
At times, as below, the narrator feels alone and sickly without Madeline:
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated
Just me, and an over-worked dancer, between walls that have deteriorated.
(Bob Dylan: The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar)
At other times, it’s the memory of raven-haired Mary that haunts the story-teller:
Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated
She was walking down the hallway while the walls deteriorated
(Bob Dylan: The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar)
So it might be said that the moon never beams without bringing dreams of the beautiful Maggie Madeline –
wherein, the narrator lies down beside the ‘undead’ Mary in her burial chamber by the Nile River in Egypt:
You turn the tide on me each day, and teach my eyes to see
Just being next to you is a natural thing for me
And I could never let you go, no matter what goes on
'Cause I love you more than ever now the past is gone
(Bob Dylan: Wedding Song)
The Dylavinci Code Index to videos (songs without links are in the article above)
How often have we said? “It would have been terrific to be a fly on the wall to see how that happened”.
Get ready because there is a chance that can happen to you. How would you have liked to have been in the recording studio for the taping session of Bob Dylan’s first album? Yes, it is possible for you to experience Bob Dylan going through the process of recording this seminal album, “Bob Dylan”, the first album, is also referred to as “Hammond’s Folly.” But more about that later.
My dear friend, and human being extraordinaire, is a 70-year-old, artist, sculpturer, civil rights pioneer and currently helping blind individuals defend themselves. Mr. Stephen Handschu, who 95% blind can let you be the fly on the wall.
Sixty years ago, Stephen’s roommate in NYC, was a janitor at the Columbia recording studio. When, after the Bob Dylan’s recording session was over, someone in the production company was ready to throw Master Recordings in the garbage, Mr Handschu’s friend asked if he could have the tapes. The protocol at the time was to scrub the tapes before putting them in the garbage. His friend brought the tapes home and just put them away. Sometime, shortly thereafter, the roommate decided to leave the U.S. and move to British Columbia. Intending to travel light, he offered the tapes to Stephen. Both parties believed they were merely blank tapes.
Now, move the clock to three years ago. Stephen, while living in Detroit, became very friendly with a studio engineer. During a casual conversation, he told the engineer that he had these old Scotch tapes and could they be of any use to him. The engineer said “Yes.” They met again and the engineer needed to rustle up a tape player that would play these ancient tapes. He did and started to play the tapes. They weren’t blank. They were listening to the whole recording session Hammond’s Folly. Carrumba!
At the time of Bob Dylan’s recording, one of the most important agents for talent was John Hammond. He represented the crème de la crème in the singing world. He was taking a bet on Bob Dylan, who at the time was just another young folk singer. We can now hear what went on in the studio. You hear the patter between the singer and the engineers and John Hammond. It’s amazing.
The album was released and it flopped. Only about 5,000 copies were sold. Mr. Hammond wasted his time. Ergo thus got labelled “Hammond’s Folly. What happened after that changed the history of folk music and the incredible influence Bob Dylan has had in the music world and culture in general.
We have to find a way to get Stephen Handshu to share what is on these tapes with the fans of Bob Dylan and music history. Stephen doesn’t know quite what to do with what he has. He is looking for a way for these tapes to be shared with Bob Dylan’s fans. If you would like to be that fly on the wall, let us know.
Links to some of the earlier articles in this series are given at the end of the article
By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood
In this series Aaron in the USA selects videos for Tony in the UK to write about, based around one song of Dylan’s. Just for the hell of doing something different, the rule is that Tony is only allowed as long as the recording lasts, to write his article. So no pontificating, and no looking stuff up.
The Rolling Stones
Aaron: This was a big hit for the Stones in 1995 (UK #12/USA #16). I know Tony usually doesn’t like music videos but I really liked this one (audio only versions are available if you’d rather!)
Tony: It’s not that I don’t like music videos per se but rather that most of them seem to be made by film makers who think that cut and paste is an art form and that context, insight or artistic ability has nothing to do with making a video. (Cue ex-theatrical walking around waving his arms shouting, “I’m an artist darling I can’t possibly work in these conditions”.)
This video (which I can watch as I type, having bothered to learn how to touch type when attempting to make a living as a journalist) is indeed one of the worst in my views as I got the message in the first 20 seconds and the rest is mere repetition.
As for the music, the one thing that stands out for me is the harmonica playing – so very different in style from Dylan’s but still interesting and insightful. The trouble with the music is that it is so close to Dylan’s original in terms of accompaniment and Jagger is Jagger, being as shouty as ever. So not much new to learn here.
Does this add anything to my understanding of the song? No, not at all.
Bob Marley and the Wailers
Aaron: I believe Bunny Wailer is on lead vocals here.
Tony: now from the off I am encouraged because this doesn’t sound remotely like the original, and for the very first time in this long series of articles I actually stopped and wondered if Aaron had made a mistake and sent me over the wrong video.
And this is where our routine is almost going to break down – to do a proper review of this I will need to hear this again. On this one listen while typing I am not even sure that the verse is a verse from Dylan’s original – have they added something new and just used the chorus.
That is really interesting. I won’t cheat and go back, but I do hope you have a good listen to this if you don’t know it. Really interesting. I’ll certainly come back to it when my scribbling of these notes is over.
Mick Ronson (with David Bowie on lead vocals) – from Ronson’s album “Heaven and Hull)
Tony: OK a rock version using the famous chord sequence at full tilt. I am not really overly impressed, although I can see what they are up to. I get the impression that someone just said, “OK let’s see how fast we can do it.”
By the second verse, it is making a bit more sense, but really, I am not at all sure I will want to play this again. It is just Rolling Stone played fast. Even the guitar two-note counter-melody running through the chorus is not very interesting. Nor is the shouting.
OK it improves when the frantic instrumental break ends, but I just get the impression of everyone trying too hard to be too frantic. Indeed why do you have to be so frantic? (to quote Bob himself).
Jimi Hendrix
Tony: I feel a complete outsider now, as I didn’t know this Hendrix version before – and I am sure that as ever, everyone else does. But here we are listening to a master at the height of his game, knowing exactly what he is doing, secure in the knowledge this is going to be a work of substance and insight, even though he hasn’t quite thought it through yet.
And it is. We all know what he can do with the guitar, so that’s not the issue. The issue is simply what is he going to do with the lyrics? Of course, it is different, and he even manages to find a new melody for the first “How does it feel?”
I must admit that as it goes on, it is for me, not the most inspired Hendrix outing, but the way he can knock out the riffs in between the lyrical lines is just so extraordinary.
There is a problem, and I think this is a problem that anyone trying to record this song faces – it is what to do with the “How does it feel” lines of the chorus. I don’t know how many times they turn up in the piece, but it is a lot. In the original Dylan includes them as a relief from the avalanche of lyrics in each verse, and that worked wonderfully because we didn’t yet know every line off by heart. But now we all know all the lyrics inside out, and so “How does it feel” has lost its function. The singer has to give it a new point, and that’s what I feel Hendrix does to some degree – but only some degree. When he was performing this of course it mattered far less, but now, all these years on, it is an issue. For me at least.
Aaron: Lastly, following all the legends of rock mentioned above I wanted to finish off with this one from 1967 :
Sebastian Cabot
Tony: Oh what a scream. Everything about this is wonderful. The musical background, the recitation, the tone colours in the voice. Even the way he says, “Thought they were all kidding you.” This is the first time in goodness knows how many years some of these lines have brought to me a new insight into the lines.
Just listen to “never compromise” and the way he says “vacuum of his eyes”. Oh I do hope that you don’t just listen to a few lines and think, “that’s not right” and turn off. This man brings extra meanings even after all these years. Even the “how does it feel” lines get a new treatment.
This recording, even after hearing the song so many many times, gives me a new feel for the song, by taking out all the rhythm that Dylan put into it and replacing it with something new. That is the one track from this selection I’m going back to play, and almost certainly not just the once – although I do want to hear Bob Marley again, now I come to think of it.
Magic. Thanks Aaron. I owe you for that one.
Beautiful Obscurity – comparing the cover versions
Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 9
by Jochen Markhorst
IX Music from the Big Mushroom
evil charlatans masquerading in pullover vests & tuxedos talking gobbledyook
(Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong, 1993)
The spirit of Bob Dylan hovers throughout the British Charlatans’ oeuvre anyway, and openly and unashamedly comes to the fore on their successful fifth album, Tellin’ Stories (1997). The album is stuffed with references to Dylan songs, like in the answer song to “Like A Rolling Stone”, the more melancholy “Get On It” (no matter how you’re feeling, you’re never on your own), like in The Charlatans’ cheerful answer to “Girl Of The North Country”, the swaggering “North Country Boy” (I threw it all away / I don’t know where I put it / But I miss it all the same) and as in the charming, understated Dylan reverence “You’re A Big Girl Now”, probably the only other song in the world with the word combination “jet pilot eyes”;
See her through jet pilot eyes
Mysterious and thin
Like a raven breakin' free
From the towers they keep you in
… borrowed from the obscure 1965 outtake “Jet Pilot Eyes”, which The Charlatans know from Biograph. That compilation box leaves more traces, by the way. For the intro of “Blue For You” (Up At The Lake, 2004), guitarist Mark Collins boldly incorporates Biograph‘s live version of “Isis”, for instance.
And the box set inspires the October 2021 release of their own Biograph-like box set, A Head Full of Ideas: The Best of Charlatans; “We were all at The Charlatans studio and there was a Bob Dylan box set lying around and it was there shouting at me that we should do one of these,” singer Tim Burgess tells Headliner. That studio of The Charlatans is called Big Mushroom – a nod to the Big Pink. The name of the box set, A Head Full Of Ideas, is a line from their biggest hit “One To Another” (1997), the song whose last verse opens with the familiar words Can you please crawl out your window.
In his 2012 autobiographical book, also titled Tellin’ Stories, Tim Burgess then reveals that Biograph actually marks a kind of beginning for The Charlatans:
“Martin Kelly and I became inseparable at this time. I remember going to his flat in Ladbroke Grove and spending the whole evening talking about Bob Dylan. I was into Dylan, and getting in deeper. Martin pulled out Biograph and asked me whether I had it. I didn’t. He played me ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’, a version only available as part of this box set. Martin thought it was the best thing Dylan had ever done. He had two copies of Biograph, a CD and vinyl, and he generously gave me the vinyl. Mates for life!”
(Chapter 4: Garlic Bread and Britpop)
Tellin’ Stories is followed by the somewhat snowed under Us And Us Only (1999), an album with at least as much staying power as its predecessor, and with even more and even stronger traces of Dylan – not only in the lyrics, but now also in the music. Still pleasantly unobtrusive, and still loving.
The Dylan worship starts already in the opening song, in the hypnotic “Forever”. The long, instrumental intro mainly evokes associations with The Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, but when Tim Burgess starts singing after 2’38”, he soon returns to his Bob roots: Love is all there is (from “I Trew It All Away”), I wonder what you people do with your lives (paraphrasing “Tangled Up In Blue”), I see my true love coming, my little bundle of joy (quoting “Down Along The Cove”)… and like this, there are more half and whole references to Dylan’s catalogue. The opening song is followed by a trio of songs that form the most Dylanesque trio in The Charlatans’ output. “Sounds like Bob Dylan and The Band on ecstasy playing at the last night of the Heavenly Social,” as bassist Martin Blunt admits in an interview with New Musical Express (15 June 1999).
“Impossible” is one of the best mercurial-period-Dylan songs not written by Dylan. Every verse seems to come from an unreleased Blonde On Blonde song. From the opening verse onwards;
Impossible raw women
I you know you're all too hard to please
I can help you
If you only ask me kindly
Don't make me get down on my knees
God bless these hungry women
Impossible to ever keep
Your breath has never tasted as sweet
… up to shining Dylanesque put-downs like Y’know he looks like a plastic surgeon and Your new friend he seems to love you / I hope he cries himself to sleep. All framed by acoustic guitar, Al Kooper-like organ playing and Nashville piano. Plus, for dessert, a perfect imitation of Dylan’s harmonica playing.
The song flows smoothly, in many ways, into the next track, “The Blonde Waltz”. Again acoustic guitar, mercurial organ and piano, the title is lovingly stolen from Tarantula (chapter 40, “Subterranean Homesick Blues & the Blonde Waltz”) and the opening line is the biggest giveaway: Oh! my love my darling young son… “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” revisited. After which one subtle hint after another follows (I heard the sound of thunder in the place where all the poets sing, for instance).
And the “Dylan terzet” closes with the beautiful rock song “A House Is Not A Home”. With the most catchy tribute to Dylan: the driving lick is love & theft from “I Don’t Believe You”. The song is again embellished with the by now usual half-quotes and paraphrases (I can’t believe this is the end and blowing on your trumpet from Blonde On Blonde, and I think I used a little too much force from “Tangled Up In Blue”, for example), but that half I Don’t Believe You-lick is the real anchor.
The Dylan storm then seems to die down a bit. In tracks 6, 7 and 8 (“Senses”, “My Beautiful Friend” and “I Don’t Care Where You Live”), one or two modest Dylan references pass by (Our lives are a-changin’, for example), but towards the end of the album, on track 9, the hurricane picks up again. The wonderful “The Blind Stagger” is actually much more than a vehicle for a few sympathetic Dylan references: the song is in fact one big tribute to the great hero of The Charlatans. Take a fragment like
You're invisible, is there something I can give to you
I see my light come shining
There is good on the horizon
Daylight sneaking through my window
I will give you a rainbow and a bucket full of gold
You've been bitten by eleven hungry kittens
Who will go the whole distance while the blind stagger
… which is successively cut and pasted from fragments of “Like A Rolling Stone”, “Boots Of Spanish Leather”, “I Shall Be Released”, “You’re A Big Girl Now”, “Watching The River Flow” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. More subtle is the reverence in the musical setting; the chord progression G-G7-C-G6, on which the song rests, seems to be inspired by Dylan’s most favourite chord scheme – the bard does use the G-G6-G7 figure in combination with the C in dozens of songs. “Percy’s Song”, “With God On Our Side”, “My Back Pages”, “Don’t Think Twice”, “The Times”, “Hattie Carroll”, “Restless Farewell”, “To Ramona”, “I Don’t Believe You”, “Mama You Been On My Mind”… you probably can’t find a chord combination that Dylan uses more often than this one.
The lyrics to the opening couplet of “The Blind Stagger” are no less Dylanesque;
Lord, it's been a long, long time
And people don't you find always leave their troubles at your door
I, I live on my own
I don't need a bitter soul beatin' on about my country anymore
Don't you think your daddy needs you home right away
Your daddy needs you home right away
… the most striking is of course the last line, copied from the early masterpiece “I Was Young When I Left Home”. But almost unnoticed, the “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” reference to throw my troubles out the door slips through. It leads to the only Dylan cover The Charlatans recorded in the studio (2002), to one of the most beautiful “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” covers of the twenty-first century. Borne by the extraordinarily beautiful, driving Hammond organ, larded with elusive Madchester psychedelia, especially in the bridge, and above all: Burgess’ irresistible, weirdly attractive singing, alternating back-and-forth between falsetto and tenor.
The Japanese release of Us And Us Alone, by the way, has two more great bonus tracks. “Your Precious Love”, The Charlatans’ version of “Tombstone Blues”, and “Sleepy Little Sunshine Boy”, in which Burgess wishes the sunshine boy: may you grow up to be righteous. Yes, Dylan staying forever young is also thanks to the love of The Charlatans.
—————
To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 10 (final): Smooching with Lisa Bonet
———————-
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:
A while back Aaron came up with an idea for a series in which we might look at a very early performance by Dylan of a song and then what it sounded like around the time when when he played it for the last time.
In keeping with the other writing I’ve done with Aaron I’m going to try and write this straight off, without planning or plotting and re-writing. I did have an email a while back asking why I was doing this, and there is a reason: it seems to me that this is the closest I can get in writing to what Bob does in performing – improvising as he goes along around a theme. It just seems more in keeping with the music I’m writing about.
So let’s see what happened to “‘Til I fell in love with you”. This song comes right at the top of the official website’s list of Dylan songs in alphabetical order because they count the apostrophe at the start of ‘Til as a letter. As such it just comes behind ‘Cross The Green Mountain. OK that’s trivia, let’s get on…
The site gives us 194 performances from October 24, 1997 through to July 12, 2015 – almost 18 years. The links there give you the full set lists in case you are interested.
And we do indeed have what is (or is claimed to be) the world premiere (or “live debut” as they say), thanks to Mr tambourine. (Mr T if you have got a video of the last live, or the nearly last live please do get in touch again. Tony@schools.co.uk as ever).
https://youtu.be/iQtYvx4Y4lM
We can notice the uncertainty of the opening, as if whoever is playing those opening guitar notes (Bob I suspect) can’t quite remember what he is up to. The steel guitar adds and interesting effect on the second chord of this 12 bar blues. By the end of the first first verse everyone has remembered what they agreed to do and it seems smoother.
So now I need a copy from the end of times – and that has turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.
Here it is in 1998
The quality is obviously not nearly so clear. And the key has changed it is something like three tones higher and Bob is putting much more expression into the singing.
This contrasts completely with the album recording which is much cleaner, clearer and slower – but then of course it has had the benefit of the producer cutting the sound in and out, and giving the very slightest of echo on Bob’s voice.
But now the project falls down because I can’t find videos from near the end of the round of performances. Worse, one of the things Youtube wants to do all the time is tell us when the video is put up, not when the video was created.
But… there is always the wonderful Mike Johnson (there’s more on Mike in the “About the Authors” section of this site). Mike as I am sure you know, is writing the first ever complete and absolute history of the Never Ending Tour, and we are publishing it week by week. If you’ve not read it, shame on you, it is brilliant. The index is there.
And what do we find: a live rendition from 2001. Here it is, with part of Mike’s notes reprinted by way of introduction…
‘Till I Fell in Love with You’ (1997) brings the blues into the city. Although the backing on this performance is pleasingly minimal, it still derives from big band city blues. What is called Delta Blues migrated to Chicago where blues masters like Buddy Guy created a particular Chicago style. Again, this is not exactly that music, but points us in that direction. I’m also reminded of the versatile Big Joe Turner, the blues ‘shouter’. Dylan has absorbed these influences and come up with his own brand of retro.
“What’s so good about this performance is that the backing does not overwhelm the song. Foregrounding Dylan’s voice provides for the variations needed in a rigidly repetitive song like this. Vocal variations carry it, while the band manage to keep it interesting all the way through, and it never becomes rote, which can be a problem with blues. This would have to be my favourite performance of this song.”
Till I fell in love with you 1997
So I don’t have a first and last performance – at least not at the moment, but I do have an early and later “on stage” version. That key change that was introduced early on has stayed, but the timing is pretty much the same. Different words are emphasised but most of all the sound is a lot cleaner. Oh yes and there is a rather unexpected hammering of the dominant chord at the end of the each verse (which I really don’t quite understand – it seems totally out of context, almost as if Bob is laughing at his own composition), and some other chords added in en route.
In short the essence of the song has stayed the same, but little bits around the edges have been manipulated. It is almost as if it has become too familiar – the band and Bob forgetting that most of us will not have as intimate a knowledge of the song as they do.
So as an experiment “first and last” turned out to be harder than expected – I thought I would be able to find a “last ever live performance video” but no – life’s never that simple.
But I am going to have another go – and if you can help by providing a link to a first or last performance of any song, it would make my life a lot easier. And of course if you want to write the review yourself, wonderful. I’d love to read it.
If you can help, as noted above just email Tony@schools.co.uk and write Untold Dylan in the subject line, and give a link to what I have found. I always try and give credit to anyone who has helped me, so if you don’t want to be mentioned or want to use a nom-de-plume please say very clearly in the email.
And if no one can help, I might bore you stupid with another attempt on my own, in a few days.
There are indexes to many of our series under the picture at the top of the page.
Links to all the cover versions used in this series are given at the end of the article, as well as links to all the previous articles themselves.
By Larry Fyffe
Cracking the Code within the songs of Bob Dylan clearly shows the obverse path that Jesus takes from Ethiopia and then to Egypt where he locks the ‘undead’ body of Mary Magdalene inside a vault of the Sphinx, and there, with some regrets, abandons her.
Matters are not so clear-cut after this, but apparently, Dylan transfigured as Christ, bounds off to Spain.
Time-travelling Dylan/Jesus is obviously still in love with Mary – In the lyrics beneath, the narrator shows remorse at what happened to apostle James the Great, “Big Jim” who’s now the patron saint of Spain (the encoded incident concerning the apostle and “Rosemary” previously revealed):
My patron saint is a-fighting with a ghost
He's always off somewhere when I need him most
The Spanish moon is rising on the hill
But my hearts a-telling me I love you still
(Bob Dylan: Abandoned Love)
Noted already – the sexual adventures involving Jesus and Mary (aka Rose Marie) when on the other side of the Atlantic down in Spanish-speaking Mexico:
I'm going down to Rose Marie's
She never does me wrong
She puts it to me plain as day
And gives it to me for a song
(Bob Dylan: Going To Acapulco)
What becomes of daughter Sophia Sarah, or any of her children, is not revealed. Church officials consider any direct biological line of descent from Christ as a dangerous threat to their authority and any thoughts of Mary Magdalene as the Holy Ghost of the Trinity to be “an abomination and a heresy”.
The breaking of the Dylavinci Code demonstrates that other investigations into the matter simply come to the wrong conclusions.
We now realize that Mary and Jesus end up in Morocco with the baby, and so the crazy claim that descendants of the two lovers remain in France is a trough of hogwash.
On the other hand, there is the speculation that Jesus journeys to England at one time, perhaps after a sojourn in Spain, although no clues to that former event actually occurring are uncovered in the Delavinci Code:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen
(William Blake: Jerusalem)
Discovered though is the not-unusual Dylanesque out-of-time clue that Jesus and Maggie once made a brief stop in London, England:
They walked alone by the old canal
A little confused, I remember well
And stopped into a strange hotel, with a neon
burning bright
He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train
(Bob Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)
Contended is that an alternate interpretation of the Code conflates Mary Magdalene with the “Liverpool girl” who’s mentioned in the song lyrics below.
The dispute results in a split within the recently established “Church of Saint Mary Magdalene”:
So it's now I'm leaving London Town, boys
Well, the town I'll soon forget ...
But there's one thing that's for certain
Sure as the sun shines down
I'll never forget that Liverpool gal
Who lived in London Town
(Bob Dylan: Liverpool Gal)
One branch of that church asserts that Jesus was in Libya, living in an oil refinery, at the time when He’s supposed to be in England.
The Dylavinci Code Index to videos(songs without links are in the article above)
Aaron: One of my favorite Dylan tracks from the late 80s has surprisingly few covers, here are just a few for your delectation.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer, from In The Hot Seat…there was a rumour Bob plays on this, but I doubt it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q1EFoOs_CU
Tony: It is also a song I’ve always loved, not least for its very unusual (for rock) time signature – 6/8 is normally associated with traditional folk music, and is widely used by classical romantic composers, but not nearly so much in pop and rock. It runs as a quick 1 2 3; 1 2 3 to make up the six beats. Here the strong drum beat emphasises the start of each second group of three, which is really interesting – nothing here is as expected
The intro gives no clue at all as to what is coming up, and if I didn’t know this was going to be Long Black Coat I would have never guessed. Strong singing and great original accompaniment throughout, this is excellent for me and I want to hear it again, after this little session of writing is over.
The way the singing of the lyrics emphasise the distance that is implied throughout the song is brilliant also. I can’t pause here to think of other Dylan songs that relate to this – I am sure there are some obvious examples but they escape me. But for now this is one of the best discoveries of this series of articles.
Mark Lanegan from I’m Not There
Tony: The “I’m not there” soundtrack has always struck me as strange, although this song keeps close to the original, with a new approach to the instrumental backing. This brings across the horror implied of the ghostly element within the lyrics. And indeed the lyrics are so good, it doesn’t really need the music to vary itself very much.
Indeed that middle 8 is one of the most powerful moments in Dylan’s music – it comes as such as surprise.
But there are moments here I don’t quite like – it is as if they have decided to do it “like this” and that is how they do it. The vibrato guitar gets a bit wearing after a while, and it just stops, whereas I have always imagined the man in the clock fading into the distance. That doesn’t mean it has to be a fade-out, but not a quick dead stop either.
Joan Osborne
So vibrato guitar – it is the obvious thing to do, but there is one thing this makes clear – this song is very suited to a female voice; the lyrics might imply a growling man, but the woman’s voice can deliver just as well.
Actually, the sound here is really fascinating, and I want to stop typing this and listen, which is always the most positive sign. But I’ve managed to get it while typing away – what they have done is turned it into three long beats in a bar but subdivided each beat into six. Now that is clever, and it really works.
The other challenge in this song is what to do with the instrumental verse if you have one, and this sailing guitar gets it right for me. Just laid back enough to keep the ghostly feel. But it is the way they play with the beat that really makes it for me. And she does have a really fine voice for this type of song.
A tiny detail, I didn’t think the repeating of the title line over and over at the end helped – I’d got the message by then, and somehow it distracted.
Count To Fire
Tony:Of course the challenge for each new interpreter is to come up with something new while not drifting too far from the original. But the problem is we all know the song well, so a movement away from the original is needed to keep our interest and show why this new version is needed.
Playing a dominant piano part as the lead accompaniment with the guitar way behind it, is an original thought but I am not quite sure it is enough to hold us to the song. And yet the vocals are so good and clear that the lyrics come through so very powerfully, and that is good because apart from the rhythm it is about the lyrics and that very unusual melody, which doesn’t need to be played with at all.
I do like this version, but by removing the pulses between each group of three I beats I feel something is lost. Of course, versions that come later in Aaron’s selection always are at a disadvantage because by the time I get to them I’ve just heard the song three or four or more times, and maybe that’s the problem here. But excellent though the rendition is, I find it a bit of a plod.
Aaron: Steve Hackett – a rare cover from one of my all time favorite artists/ musicians from his excellent album Wild Orchid
Tony:Ah Mr Genesis – still here after all these years. Goodness, I haven’t listened to your music for years.
Of course, there is going to be some dramatic guitar entries and yes at one level this song cries out for them, so this version runs as I expected when I saw who it was. But no, the song doesn’t need the regular virtuoso performance that Steve Hackett can give. But the harmony on lines like “People don’t live or die” is sublime.
The problem is that behind the virtuoso there is a plod plod plod with guitar in between. I know a lot of Genesis fans will hate me for this, but I think this is a case of the musician putting himself first and the composition second. It’s Steve, so Steve has to show off his sublime talent – except no he doesn’t, because we all know what he can do, and what would have been great would have been for him to explore those harmonies a little more and play the guitar at the speed of light a little less.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed this selection, but have the feeling no one has quite got to the very essence of the piece. Maybe there is another version out there that does….
Is it really any wonder Is it really any wonder
The love that a stranger might receive the changes we put on each other’s heads
You cast your spell and I went under You came down on me like rolling thunder
I find it so difficult to leave I left my dreams on the riverbed
The second alienating, radical textual change, after that mattress-slinging village beauty from the opening couplet, is the closing line of the bridge. Of course, almost every line in the 1975 Rolling Thunder version has been radically changed, in the sense that they are all different words, but the tenor is almost the same as the original. Throw my ticket in the wind is not much different from Throw my ticket out the window, and I could have left this town by noon communicates in other words the same as I should have left this town by morning, to name but two examples.
That also applies to the bridge at first. Stranger and changes are related, You cast your spell and I went under has the same emotional charge as You came down on me like rolling thunder – with the wordplay reference to the name of the tour as a bonus (which is appreciated by the audience with slightly exaggerated hilarity).
I left my dreams on the riverbed, however, suddenly takes a turn that is radically different from the message I find it so difficult to leave. The latter is a tender, loving expression of an infatuation; the revision, taken in isolation, expresses a rather bitter resignation – “leaving your dreams” is far from romantic in any case. Riverbed, while somewhat strange, can be understood as an insider’s wink at “a bed in a house by the river” or something like that. Anyhow, riverbed does not have an unambiguous, commonly understood connotation. A vague Western association at most. Dylan himself has used the word once before, not so long ago by the way, in “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts”;
Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall
And cleaned out the bank safe, it's said that
they got off with quite a haul
In the darkness by the riverbed they waited on the ground
For one more member who had business back in town
But they couldn't go no further without the Jack of Hearts
… Dylan himself seems to have that vague Western association as well: a riverbed is a piece of scenery for a nineteenth-century scene somewhere in the Wild West. Just like Johnny Cash (in “All Around Cowboy”; he’s dry as an old riverbed) or the Irish cowboy Van Morrison in “Moonshine Whiskey” (I just want to lay my feet on a river bed). Or Doug Kershaw’s hit “Louisiana Man” – which somewhere in Dylan’s inner jukebox is sung by Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Ricky Nelson, Jan & Dean, and an array of others. The most beautiful perhaps by the irresistible Bobbie Gentry;
At birth mom and papa called their little boy Ned
Raised him on the banks of a river bed
On a houseboat tied to a big tall tree
A home for my papa and my mama and me
… wherein, however, the emotional charge of riverbed drifts far from the tenor of Dylan’s song. I left my dreams behind has a melancholic, maybe even a bit bitter, overtone. But then again: maybe Dylan just shouts something out of the blue, filler lyrics – at the rehearsal in New York, a month earlier, this line did not yet exist. Dylan sings something partly unintelligible there (I finally …. …. so true, something like that), but nothing about lost dreams and riverbeds, in any case.
The remainder of the revised text, the third stanza, gives no reason either to think that the strange closing line of the bridge was a well-thought-out textual intervention:
I can hear that lonesome whistle blowin'
I hear them semis rolling too
If there's a driver on the road
Better let him have my load
cause tonight I'll be staying here with you
…the meaning of which is pretty much the same a month earlier, in the rehearsal:
I can hear that lonesome whistle blowin'
I can hear those semi-trucks rollin’ too
If there's a cowboy on the plane
then let him have my train
cause tonight I'll be staying here with you
An anecdotal change from train to the Rolling Thunder Revue’s mode of transport, with the resulting disappearance of the stationmaster and the poor boy in favour of a driver or a cowboy… it’s all not too earth-shattering. No hint of a clue, anyway, as to why or which dreams were abandoned in the preceding bridge. Still, Dylan seems to be quite content with that anecdotal shift from train to semi-trucks. The original from ’69 closes with a repeat of the first verse, of the throw my ticket out the window verse. During the first performance of the song at the Rolling Thunder Revue, he decides to repeat this last semi-truck verse.
Maybe because he thinks it’s the first rock song to use the word semi-truck, who knows. Though in fact he is just beaten on that front by Tom Waits and his cover of Red Sovine’s 1967 hit, “Big Joe and Phantom 309” (Nighthawks At The Diner, 1975). Waits is fairly faithful to the lyrics of the original, touching ghost story about the friendly spirit of Big Joe who picks up hitchhikers in his truck Phantom 309, entertaining them with his stories, but Waits changes one small detail:
He pushed her ahead with 10 forward gears
Man that dashboard was lit like the old
Madam La Rue pinball, a serious semi truck
… he turns Red Sovine’s truck into a semi-truck.
In 2003, Johnny Cash writes his last song, the masterful “Like The 309”, which is released only three years after his death (on American V: A Hundred Highways, 2006). Cash borrows “309”, obviously, from “Big Joe and Phantom 309”, but turns the truck back into a train. Johnny wrote his very first song in 1954 about a train journey (“Hey Porter”), and Johnny writes his very last song about a train journey again, fifty years later – about his coffin that will be taken on the 309 to its final resting place. Probably because Johnny Cash, just like Dylan, needs to hear the steam whistle blow:
I hear the sound of a railroad train
The whistle blows and I'm gone again
Hitman, take me higher than a Georgia pine
Stand back children, it's the 309
It's the 309, it's the 309
Put me in my box on the 309
Yep, I can hear that steam whistle blowin’.
To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 9: Music from the Big Mushroom
—————————–
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:
“All my songs, the styles I work in, were all developed before I was born. When I came into the world, that spirit of things was still very strong. Billie Holiday was still alive. Duke Ellington. All those old blues singers were still alive. And that was the music that was dear to me. I was never really interested in pop music.”
Bob Dylan 2001
“The whole album deals with power. If life teaches us anything, it’s that there’s nothing that men and women won’t do to get power. The album deals with power, wealth, knowledge and salvation – the way I look at it.” Dylan on “Love and Theft.”
When David Kempler, Bob Dylan’s drummer, emerged from a twelve-day recording session in May 2001, he made a very revealing comment: “And when we went in to record Love and Theft it was like, oh my God he’d been teaching us this music, not literally these songs but these styles. As a band, we’re familiar with every one of these.”
This comment provides a clue as to what Dylan had been doing onstage since Time out of Mind in 1997. He had been training the band in this antique music, those old sounds he loved so much. We have noted the number of covers of old songs Dylan performed in 1999 (Honky Tonk Dylan: Despair and sentimentality) and 2000 (Beyond Dylan), and the fifties rock and roll sound he evolved for some of his own songs. There was a strategy to all this; he knew where his music was heading, and he was keen to take the band with him.
“On any given day, Dylan might have played the band members a vintage recording by Holiday or Jimmy Rushing, have them learn that song, and then ask them to adapt that feel and arrangement to his own tune. But after listening back to a take, Dylan would just as often ask the musicians to change their instruments and adapt different keys or tempos for that song.” (Rolling Stone)
The result of all this was an album radically different from anything Dylan had done before. He pushed the boundaries of his music all the way back to the 1920s. This, and lyrics that ranged even further back, to the classical era of Catullus, Virgil and Ovid, enabled Dylan to encompass the despair evident on Time out of Mind within a larger framework, even a comic perspective. The despair didn’t go away, it was subsumed within the expanded borders of his art.
Untold editor Tony Attwood has shown how Dylan worked his way into the album though writing the blues songs first, as the blues is a solid link with Dylan’s previous work, but I would like to start with ‘Floater’ as this song drops us in the middle of these antique sounds.
Following Dylan only through his studio albums, there is nothing there to prepare us for a song like ‘Floater.’ Musically it takes us way back to the beginning of the 20th Century. The lyrics take us back to that era too.
‘I keep listenin' for footsteps
But I ain't hearing any
From the boat I fish for bullheads
I catch a lot, sometimes too many
A summer breeze is blowing
A squall is settin' in’
Dylan creates a family to exemplify the lifestyles and values of the time. There’s a touch of pastoralism here, a touch of nostalgia, mixed with tougher, more bitter elements:
‘My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had 'em once though, I suppose, to go along
With all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all of the Christmas eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves’
This is a wonderfully clear recording from Washington, 15th Nov. Bear in mind that the album was not released until 11th of Sept (the infamous 9/11) so we only have about two months worth of concerts to consider.
Floater
A bouncy, exuberant song, its brilliance as a lyrical composition has been largely overlooked because of barren arguments about Dylan’s ‘plagiarism.’ We should be clear from the outset that a song is not an academic essay; a song doesn’t have footnotes or references. Richard F Thomas (Why Dylan Matters, 2017) has identified twelve references to Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza across five songs on the album. Rather than attacks on the ‘Freestealing’ Bob Dylan, Thomas comments: ‘I was interested in how these lifted passages might work in their new settings. A Japanese gangster’s novel and the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid, side by side, felt like the sort of creative, surrealistic juxtapositions that had roots in Dylan’s songwriting going back to the sixties.’
Dylan is able to weave disparate elements into his compositions to create, in the case of ‘Floater,’ a sparkling collage-like portrait of life pre World War 1. Thomas goes on to say, ‘This method of composition is not to be thought of as mere quotation or citation. Rather it is a creative act involving the “transfiguring” of song and literature going back through Rome to Homer. It is the means by which Dylan imagines and creates the worlds that he then inhabits in his songs and performances.’
The most interesting thing about Dylan’s 21st Century work is its dense intertextuality, how it ranges through time, space and traditions
Also full of melodious buoyancy is ‘Moonlight,’ another song that evokes this earliest era of modern music. The refrain ‘won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone’ is repeated six times, and so the question arises, how much longer must he keep asking? The more often it’s asked, the more it tends to bring the anticipated meeting into question. There’s a melancholy here which suggests that maybe it’s already too late. When the invitation turns to pleading we might suspect that this romance is more wishful thinking than anything else, and the pastoralism of the song reinforces that sense.
The same thing happens when Dylan sings ‘don’t think twice, it’s all right’ four times in that song. The repetition undermines itself, and leads us to suspect that perhaps the underlying instruction is actually to think twice, maybe three or four times.
‘Moonlight’ is an exquisite little song. What is extraordinary about it in terms of Dylan’s oeuvre, is its use of natural imagery. We are far away from stuffy rooms and claustrophobia. We are out there with ‘the earth and sky that melts with flesh and bone’ and where ‘branches cast their shadows over stone.’ The song is a lyrical masterpiece posing as a gentle little filler.
This performance is from 28th October, Milwaukee. A beautifully clear, gentle performance.
Moonlight (A)
This one, from Seattle (6th Sept) is a bit looser, swings a bit more, maybe a little more relaxed. And what a joy it is to hear that whimsical harmonica break at the end. It doesn’t get better than this. By the way, the opening bars on the guitar remind me strongly of the Ink Spots, the singing group from the 1930s and 40s. Try ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’ which you can find on You Tube.
Moonlight (B)
Rolling Stone magazine described Love and Theft as ‘an album steeped in Chicago blues, Tin Pan Alley crooning, jump blues and Western swing.’ Jump blues or jump jazz, described by our old friend Google as ‘A sub-style of swing played by small bands in the late 1930s and 1940s that combined strong rhythms, riff tunes, blues, and pop songs. A precursor to rhythm and blues.’
That last phrase springs to mind when considering ‘Summer Days,’ a brisk jump blues. It’s shot through with sexual innuendo, as that kind of music was, and has a happy, anarchic, celebratory feel. A touch of cheekiness and absurdity. There’s a sting in the tail here and there, but life is to be treated with gay abandon. Good humour reigns. This is the devil-may-care music of the Charleston era. Think of that frantic post WW1 dancing. Kick up your heels!
‘She's looking into my eyes, she's holding my hand
She's looking into my eyes, she's holding my hand
She says, "You can't repeat the past, " I say, "You can't?
What do you mean, you can't, of course you can!"’
This one’s from 19th November, and kicks along just fine. Some fine antique guitar work, with Mr Guitar Man sounding right at home.
Summer Days (A)
Since Dylan didn’t vary the song much at all, I didn’t think it worth putting in a second performance until I heard this one from the Washington concert. Perhaps it’s just better recorded, but everything clicks. Hard to stay still for this one.
Summer Days (B)
It’s little wonder that ‘High Water (for Charley Patton)’ is one of the most popular songs on the album. Patten was a blues singer from the 1920s and 30s, famous for his slide guitar. It’s worthwhile to point out that Dylan’s evocation of this era is just that, an evocation not an imitation. Dylan and his band are modern, sophisticated musicians, masters of many styles, and bring to the music a certain panache the originals lacked.
But ‘High Water’ brings another element to this antique music, a very contemporary concern with environmental destruction and extreme weather events, now commonplace, making the song more relevant with every passing year. The song has its prophetic side, Hurricane Katrina arrived four years later. The spirit of the song, however, like ‘Summer Days’, is anarchic and Devil-may-care (‘throw your panties overboard!’) but with a more desperate aspect.
‘High water risin', six inches 'bove my head
Coffins droppin' in the street
Like balloons made out of lead
Water pourin' into Vicksburg, don't know what I'm going to do
"Don't reach out for me, " she said
"Can't you see I'm drownin' too?"’
We might suspect that for Dylan the ‘high water’ is as much metaphorical as literal, like ‘hard rain.’ Not his fault if his metaphors turn into physical reality. There’s zaniness, and an exuberance here too that wouldn’t be out of place in his 1965 ‘Tombstone Blues’:
‘They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five
Judge says to the High Sheriff
"I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don't care"
High Water everywhere’
Again the Washington performance is hard to beat. The song has a good bounce with a brooding guitar riff. Wonderfully sharp recording.
High Water (A)
The backing on this one from Madison Square Gardens however is muted by comparison, Dylan’s voice foregrounded. I couldn’t overlook this one:
High Water (B)
That takes us to about halfway through the songs from Love and Theft that Dylan introduced to the NET in 2001. Performances full of zest, and a sense that the sixty-year-old Dylan is revelling in the expanded musical and lyrical horizons these new songs offer.
I’ll be back soon to complete our account of these new songs in the next post.
An index to past episodes and an index of the cover versions of Dylan songs from this series are given at the end of the article.
———–
The associative Postmodernist Dylavinci Odyssey continues; things get downright interesting.
Mary Magdalenes’s body gets placed in the judgement hall of Christ.
That is, in the Egyptian Sphinx, the ‘way out’ that allows the wayward drifter to escape.
Time traveller Bob Dylan, shape-shifts into Christ (plays a joke on Henry, a Scottish Rastafarian, which fools Queen Mary into committing suicide when Jesus and wife Mary Magdalene vacation in Ethiopia).
Sure enough, Jesus swears to God Almighty that He’ll never again be taken in, never again be enticed, by bright eyes like those of the demonic darling Mary Magdalene.
So beautiful Magdalene be; so like Annabel Lee, a distant cousin of the high-born Scotchman Henry Lee:
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of beautiful Annabel Lee
And so, all the night tide, I lay down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride
In her sepulchre there by the sea
In her tomb by the side of the sea
(Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee)
Maggie of Magdala, so like the dead beauty laid out in a hospital that’s named after St. James the Great, one of the twelve apostles, and the patron saint of Spain – aka “Big Jim”:
I went down to St. James Infirmary
Saw my baby there
Stretched out on a long white table
So cold, so sweet, so fair
(Louis Armstrong: St. James Infirmary ~ traditional)
Everything is delivered by the song lyrics quoted below when the Dylavinci Code therein is unravelled as carefully as a wrapped-up mummy.
With second thoughts, Jesus muses that perhaps there was no need to rush headlong into redemption.
Maybe there’s still time to be enticed yet again into temptation by Mary who lies so sweetly stretched out in her cold sepulchre within the walls of the Sphinx.
But perhaps not:
You're the queen of my flesh, girl
You're my woman, you're my delight
You're the lamp of my soul, and you torch up my life
But there's violence in the eyes, girl, so let us not be enticed
On the way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia
to the judgement hall of Christ
(Bob Dylan: Precious Angel)
According to the Code, Jesus is angry, thinks Mary’s sister can be damned:
Ring them bells Sweet Martha for the poor man's son
Ring them bells so the world will know God is one
(Bob Dylan: Ring Them Bells)
And Saint Jerome, with his ‘original sin’, can be damned too:
You bring it up to Saint Jerome
You can bring it all the way over
Bring it all back home
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)
Which brings us back to the play on words, such as “home”/”Holme”, in the following song about Sin City:
Scarlet Town in the month of May
Sweet William Holme on his deathbed lay
Miss Mary by the side of the bed
Kissing his face, and heaping prayers on his head
So brave, so true, so gentle is he
I'll weep for him as he would weep for me
Little Boy Blue come blow your horn
In Scarlet Town where I was born
(Bob Dylan: Scarlet Town)
https://youtu.be/U3XP-S2Z9xw
The Dylavinci Code Index to videos (songs without links are in the article above)
Aaron: For this one I thought we could take a look at the Dylan covers performed at the Woodstock festival, August 15 to 18 1969. This is going to be a two-parter and we’ll look at the tracks in performance order.
First up from Friday August 15th to Saturday 16th (her set started at 1am!) it’s…
Melanie with Mr Tambourine Man
Tony: This really is a shock. The guitar playing is that of an amateur sitting on the floor at the end of a private party in the 1960s, not what I would expect at a great festival. And the singing could come from such a venue as well.
But there’s an oddity here: the foot tapping. When Dylan (and almost everyone else) performs the song, the emphasis of the beat is on the first beat of each four beat bar as in
Hey Mr Tambourine Man play a song for me
From my memory, that really is how just about everyone – maybe everyone – does the song. The opening “Hey” is the accented first beat of the bar”. But what Melanie is doing (presumably purposely) is tapping her foot in a way that can very clearly be heard, on the second and fourth beat of each bar. Now this is what anyone who understands and knows about swing does – it is was rock and jazz drummers do, but not what Dylan does in this song.
So we get
Hey [tap] Mister Tambourine Man play a song for me
As a result all the unimportant words, parts of words and even once no word (after hey) are accented. It is really strange and rather alluring.
Aaron: Next up and on directly after Melanie (beginning at 1.45am) it’s…
Arlo Guthrie with Walkin’ Down The Line
Hmm, I’m not really that much of a fan of Arlo nor of his way of addressing an audience – if I go to a gig and don’t want to sing, well, that’s up to me.
But as a performance, it certainly is a good rendition of a song that we all know, and he does have a very fine voice. And here’s a thought, he’s now 74 years old. Wow, it seems like only yesterday.
Yep, a jolly performance of a song, and if we didn’t have that admonition of the audience, well, I’d enjoy it much more. Dylan’s original was recorded in 1962 and recorded for Broadside; today it almost feels like a traditional folk song.
Aaron: Directly after Arlo’s set at 3am came…
Joan Baez with the first of (count ‘em) 3 different performances of the song I Shall Be Released throughout the weekend.
Joan Baez
Tony: Another fine and accomplished performance in what must have been difficult circumstances, and a lovely understated accompaniment behind her. And that lovely “Sing it” to encourage the audience participation. I couldn’t hear any, but well, the mics were pointing the other way. She really does tell the audience what the meaning is, and I didn’t feel the slightest bit commanded by her demand for people to join in. Unlike Arlo.
Aaron: Curiously no Dylan tracks are performed throughout the Saturday daytime/Sunday night sets. The next 3 Dylan tracks come courtesy of…
Joe Cockerwho performed his set from 2pm to 3.45pm on Sunday August 17th.
Dear Landlord
Tony: OK problem time. Not all videos that can be seen in the US are available in the UK, and this is one of them. There is also the track on Spotify, but rather unusually that also comes up with the note that it is not available in the UK
So I am left with this 1970 version
Tony: What a fine voice he had – I’d forgotten – but I did remember the hand gestures. Of course I don’t know if this is like the Woodstock version, but hopefully it is not too far off. It’s a fine interpretation with really inventive instrumentation from both piano and guitar, and it makes a great dance track.
I just don’t know if it what he did at Woodstock! But if you are in other parts of the world, you probably will.
Just Like A Woman
Tony: Oh no – it looks like the whole run has been disavowed for UK audiences. Now that’s odd. Here’s a replacement, but not from Woodstock – but I do enjoy this. It is so understated, which is not something I would normally associate with Joe Cocker.
Tony: I know that I am not supposed to be listening to this version, but I do rather enjoy it. It’s the way
Aaron: And lastly the second version of I Shall Be Released
So for once our fun and games of Aaron writing in the US and me writing in the UK has fallen apart. There is an article about Joe Cocker at Woodstock here with a video
But I think the key to the whole thing of vanishing music in the UK, is that there is an album “Live at Woodstock” by Joe Cocker released in 2009 which might not want the copyright of the film reproduced for free in Europe.
So by way of compensation for UK readers here is I shall be released from another time and place
Aaron: In part II we will cover the remaining Dylan covers from the festival plus a bonus surprise performance!!
Tony: Let’s hope they’re available in the UK as well as the USA. Mind you, Aaron, we’ve got away with this game for quite a long time with only a couple of hitches, so we’re not doing too badly!
