Untold Dylan

Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 7: A Spider’s Life On Mars

Posted on October 30, 2021 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

VII A Spider’s Life On Mars

I should have left this town this morning                I could have left this town by noon
But it was more than I could do                                 By tonight I’d been to someplace new
Oh, your love comes on so strong                              But I was feeling a little bit scattered
And I’ve waited all day long                                        And your love was all that mattered
For tonight when I’ll be staying here with you        So tonight I’ll be staying here with you

More drastic than any textual change, of course, is the musical turnaround. On Nashville Skyline, “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is a melodic mid-tempo country ballad, Dylan using his new crooner voice and singing with the brakes on.

Colour is added by long steel guitar strokes, the piano suggests some debauchery and the only – modest – fireworks come from the electric guitar (Norman Blake, by the sound of it).

But at the Rolling Thunder Revue, six years later, we have Mick Ronson on stage.

Mick Ronson is probably the most famous Hullensian, although a remarkable number of notable people come from the relatively small city of Hull, or rather: Kingston upon Hull (about 260,000 inhabitants). Who then also usually show a kind of regional pride. Songwriter Phillip Goodhand-Tait writes “Lincoln County”, the popular 80s band The Housemartins give their successful debut album the witty title London 0 Hull 4 and Ronson calls his third, posthumously released album Heaven And Hull (1994). On which, by the way, one of the few tolerable covers of “Like A Rolling Stone” can be found, sung by David Bowie.

A cynic might think that Heaven And Hull is not too complimentary, but Ronson means well. And so it is understood; after his death (29 April 1993, liver cancer), the city honours him with a Memorial Stage in Queen’s Gardens, a guitar sculpture in East Park and a wonderful memorial rock show, Turn And Face The Strange, performed 22 times in 2017, 2018 and 2019 to sold-out audiences each time.

It is fitting that Ronson’s musical life should end with Bowie – after all, the Spider From Mars also emerged in the shadow of Ziggy Stardust in the early 1970s.

Before Ziggy Stardust, on Bowie’s Hunky Dory, Ronson really shines for the first time. As a child, he learned to play the recorder, piano, harmonium and violin, and that diverse upbringing now pays off. And his talent, of course – a brilliant string arrangement like in “Life On Mars?” requires more than just skill.

The exceptional beauty of “Life On Mars?” is in any case largely due to Ronno. The rough demo recording, with only Bowie on piano, already reveals that it’s a beautiful song, but it only becomes a hors category song because of Ronson’s recorder (second verse), both guitar solos and above all the strings – remarkably his very first string arrangement, which he nervously had written out note for note with sweaty hands for the arrogant studio musicians of the BBC. Especially admirable given the complex chord progression and the widely varying melody lines – it’s not a ten-a-penny song that Ronson arranges so masterfully, so sumptuously.

Van Morrison, Mott The Hoople, Elton John, Morrissey… Ronson’s name as a go-to guy is established. Even more so after he turns out to be able to surpass the high school art of his masterpiece Hunky Dory on Ziggy Stardust (on “Five Years”, piano, autoharp, electric guitar, backing vocals and string arrangement are all his, for instance), and then on Lou Reed’s bestseller Transformer (1973) – yep, that’s Ronno’s piano, recorder and string arrangements again, in again outer category pop songs, in “Perfect Day” and “Satellite Of Love”.

Wonderful, moving arrangements by a classically trained prodigy – but at heart Ronson has always remained a rock ‘n’ roller. We hear that in both the nippy lead guitar parts of Reed’s “Vicious”, in the straightforward sweaty rock of Bowie’s “Hang On To Yourself” and “Suffragette City”, in the neurotic solo on Elton John’s “Madman Across The Water” – and with Dylan, on the stage of the Rolling Thunder Revue.

On a social, personal level, there seems to be no special connection with Dylan, although according to Sam Shepard’s wonderful Rolling Thunder Logbook, Ronson is the “chief instigator of the make-up craze which swept through Rolling Thunder like a brush fire”. But musically, there is all the more of a click – and the reanimated “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is one of the best examples thereof.

“Ronson,” Shepard notes in the same Logbook about the Night Of The Hurricane concert, “really gets off on this monster crowd. Slashing his guitar with huge full-arm uppercuts. Platinum-blond hair spraying in all directions. Then stalking across the stage, stiff-legged, Frankenstein macho strutting, shaking the neck of his guitar with his vicious chord hand as though throttling his weaker brother. All the time, never losing a lick. Through every motion playing genius, inspirational lead lines.”

… genius, inspirational lead lines of his characteristic Gibson Les Paul with that characteristic full-bodied, slightly floating sound. And that inspiring fire also seems to ignite Dylan’s vocals; the difference between Dylan the elderly crooner from Nashville and Dylan the syllable-spitting, splattering rocker from the Rolling Thunder Revue is immense. Debatable, sure, but a significant faction of fans considers Dylan’s singing on this tour a highlight in his long concert history – and there is something to be said for that. Dylan sings “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” with the passion of a smitten, fierce rock god – and that seems to help influence the otherwise insignificant changes in content. Like in this second verse; “I could” sounds more energetic, louder, than the original “I should”, like “leaving by noon” fits a creature of the night more than “leaving by morning”, like “scattered” is a great word to hurl enthusiastically through a wall of guitar violence into the concert hall. Better than “Oh, your love comes on so strong”, anyway.

After the Rolling Thunder tour, Ronson gives his guitar to one of his biggest fans, Mick Rossi from punk rock band Slaughter And The Dogs. An anonymous collector from Manchester gets his hands on it, but thankfully lends it to the temporary exhibition and performance Turn And Face The Strange in Hull.

“Mick’s Rolling Thunder Les Paul,” says the exhibition sign. She is a shining centrepiece.

To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 8: On The 309

—————-

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:

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Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XVI) and an index to the videos

Posted on October 29, 2021 by TonyAttwood

The series (which continues two or three times a week on Untold Dylan) contains not only the exposition of the Dylavinic Code but also a series of videos that illuminate the thesis.

Most of these videos are cover versions, and now for the first time, at the foot of this article, we have an index to the (mostly) cover versions of Dylan songs incorporated in the Dylavinci Code series. Just click on any of the links and you will be taken to the article wherein you can click on the video. We’ll be updating this list as the series continues.

But first, today’s article.

by Larry Fyffe

The breaking of the Dylavinci Code shows that Bob Dylan travels way back in time, and takes on the persona of Jesus.

In the song lyrics below, we learn that initially Jesus really loves Mary Magdalene, but resents the interference of her mother Eucharis, and Maggie’s seemingly ‘older’ sister, the more aggressive Martha (a good cook though she be).

Both her sister and mother are concerned about the outcome of Maggie’s relationship with Jesus.

As we have already seen, the Code reveals that the couple eventually end up in Morocco with their girl-child after Jesus and Mary with her brother Lazarus and sister Martha journey to France:

I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze
With the innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn
I courted her proudly, but now she is gone
Gone as the season she's taken
In a young summer's youth, I stole her away
From her mother and sister, though close did they stay
Each one of them suffering from the failures of their day
With strings of guilt they tried hard to guide us
(Bob Dylan: Ballad In Plain D)

Certainly, a different story than told in the Holy Bible where Jesus is depicted as the sacrificial Lamb:

The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him
And saith, "Behold the Lamb of God
Which taketh away the sin of the world"
(John 1: 29)

So dear reader you have to decide if it be I or the Bible that’s telling the truth … whilst noting that Rosemary sacrifices herself in the song “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts.”

To be perfectly honest, it was with the assistance of my computer ‘Fat Nancy’ that I was able to figure out the Code embedded in Dylan’s song lyrics.

So it’s a tough decision to make, that’s for sure.

Uncovered too is that the following song lyrics be an allegory, the boss is Jesus; the lady, Mary Magdalene:

It was late last night when the boss came home
To a deserted mansion and a desolate throne
Servant said, "Boss, the lady's gone
She left this morning, just 'fore dawn"
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

The boss tracks down Maggie, but her husband, the Boss, is shot down by Henry Lee, her lover, and she, in turn, stabs Henry; then stabs herself to death.

Poor Henry:

His knees went limp, and he reached for the door
His doom was sealed, he slid to the floor
He whispered into her ear, "This is all your fault
My fighting days have come to a halt"
(Bob Dylan: Tin Angel)

In the song above, Henry, Mary’s lover, ends up dead, wrapped in white linen, as cold as the clay.

Again quite unlike the biblical story told:

Jesus saith unto her
"Woman, why weepest thou
Whom seekest thou?"
She, supposing him to be the gardener
Saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence
Tell me where you have laid him
And I will take him away"
Jesus saith unto her, "Mary"
She turned herself, and saith unto him
"Raboni", which is to say 'Master'
(John 20: 15,16)

It’s clear that Joker Jesus either sends a look-alike Libyan in His place to find Mary, and do the dirty work; or Jesus is simply unkillable.

In any event, Mary is tricked, like mythological Semele by Hera, into killing herself.

———————-

The Dylavinci Code Index to videos

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Why does Dylan like “Easy and Slow”?

Posted on October 28, 2021 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

One of the great things about having a website that has been running since 2008 (which now seems to me to be an awfully long time ago) is that over that time we have come up with all sorts of ideas, which have amused us for a while, and then run their course, but which upon re-inspection, still seem worthy of dusting down and considering again.

So it is with the “Why does Dylan like” series which to my amazement when I looked up the index has 45 entries in it.

Thus Aaron has come up with the idea of looking at the theme (which is pretty much explained by the title) once again, and suggested we take a look at Easy and Slow to start with. Here’s Bob’s version:

Aaron: Dylan only tried it once, at a rehearsal in 1975 and as you can hear, it’s just him and his guitar. The version was included on the 14 disc Rolling Thunder box.

It had been suggested that Dominic Behan wrote (or maybe he simply “collected”) the verses in the 40s. The Dubliners as well as the Clancy Brothers popularized the song in the late 60s, and that’s probably where Bob knows the song from.

Tony: It is interesting that this is at a rehearsal, in that there is applause at the end. At rehearsals, people don’t normally applaud each other – and the number of people clapping sounds far larger than one would expect to be at a rehearsal. But maybe it was all different with Bob.

Bob clearly knows the song very well – he’s obviously played it through many times, has the lyrics perfect, and the accompaniment sounds like it has been played often. That doesn’t mean it’s particularly complex but rather it has that easy feel of a guitar part that is now an old friend. The harmonica fits in neatly as well.

I am often amazed at Dylan’s recollection of lyrics; he picks them up so quickly and even when he has changed the lyrics between on-stage versions he rarely slips. Believe me, it is much harder than you might think and needs total focus, even when playing a song that one has played 500 times before.

For me this is staggeringly beautiful both in terms of the arrangement and the performance. It is sad it is not better known.

The Dubliners

Tony: I do admire the Dubliners both for their persistence in maintaining the traditions of Irish folk songs. But for me the accompaniment isn’t right – it doesn’t add anything to the performance or the delivery of the vocals. I just don’t have the need to go on listening.

Now of course I know that in the days when the traditional songs were written, each verse was performed in the same way – but then normally without accompaniment so even the slightest extra emphasis here or pause there was important musically. However …

Frank Harte suggests that Dominic Behan was the first to popularise it, and that what he did was take the verses from Sean O’Casey’ play “Red Roses for Me” in the 1940s.

So maybe not as old as it is made to sound.

The Clancy’s

Tony: My opening reaction is “What a silly picture”. Of course that is by the way, but really these guys don’t need something as naff as that.

But, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I am a Dylan fan, maybe it’s because I listened to his version first and then came to these earlier versions, it is the Dylan version that I much prefer.

Indeed in this version, adding the beat just before the three minute mark seems rather like the producer saying “come on guys can’t we have something else in here, it’s getting tedious.” Maybe not, but as a musical arrangement it really does seem false, and the best arrangements are those that instantly sound completely right and natural.

Yes I can see the point of the harp and pennywhistle, and maybe if I hadn’t listened to the earlier versions I would have been more receptive, but once you know the story, it just sounds to me as if they are desperately trying to find a way to keep the song going.

Actually, I can imagine sitting in a folk club where the audience is appreciative, attentive and above all silent, and being drawn into this by the atmosphere of the club and the quality of the singing, but on record, sitting here, looking at the wind blowing the trees in the autumn sunshine, no, it doesn’t quite get there.

Back to Dylan I think. Try the recording here…

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=912310209228393

This one says on the internet “Easy and slow 1975 – Bob Dylan club Norway – Facebook”. The album says “Seacrest Motel Rehearsals, Falmouth, MA – October 1975”. Probably not Norway then. Or is there a Norway in MA?

My time is almost up on this one, but from listening to each recording once while writing I’d say they are both the same. Can anyone give a definitive source of information?

And so, to end by answering the question, “Why does Dylan like Easy and Slow” – it is a beautifully crafted song, very much reminiscent of past days, and with lyrics that allow the emotions of the song to come through without being overplayed in the performance. It just tells the tale as it was, and the sadness is for us to take or leave. Played as Dylan plays it, it is beautiful. Really, really worth a listen. Forget the other versions.

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Never Ending Tour, 2001, Part 4 – Down Electric Avenue

Posted on October 27, 2021 by TonyAttwood

This is episode 57 of the Never Ending Tour series. An index of the previous 56 episodes is provided here.

The three previous episodes covering 2001 are

———————-

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

For the last three posts I have been building towards the arrival on stage of the new songs from Love and Theft, released later in the year. We’re getting there. The next two posts will be dedicated to those songs. In the meantime we’ve got some more old favourites to catch up on, so let’s kick off with the roughest and rowdiest of these songs – ‘The Wicked Messenger’.

I’ve talked myself into a bit of a corner with this song, having extolled the wonders of the 2000 performances, blathered on about peak performances and so on, not leaving me much space to move when it comes to the 2001 performances. Well, they are a bit rougher than the previous year, Dylan’s voice rougher, but I’d pretty much decided that the mythical ‘best ever’ performance of this song was this one, from Seattle (10^th June)…

Wicked Messenger (A)

until I heard this next one and decided I’d finally arrived at the definitive electric version of the song with this blistering performance. Wonderfully staged vocal, and some wild guitar and harp work from Bob. You can hear him sing ‘Good News’ rather than just ‘good news’. Puts another slant on the song.

Wicked Messenger (B)

Keeping up the pace, let’s turn to ‘Tough Mama’ from 20^th August. The song’s a tribute to a pretty wild woman, by the sounds of it, ‘tough mama… dark goddess… sweet angel’. We don’t know who Jack the Cowboy is, but he might be the Jack of Hearts from a song Dylan is soon to write, none other than the ‘leading player’ himself, Mr D, the ‘perfect stranger’. It might be a bit too easy to see (construe?) the seeds of Blood on the Tracks in these songs from the previous Planet Waves. This is a rowdy, robust love song. But where is Dylan in all this? Oh yes,

‘Today on the countryside it was a-hotter than a crotch
I stood alone upon the ridge and all I did was watch
Sweet goddess
It must be time to carve another notch’

Tough Mama

Another notch in his belt perhaps. Another conquest? Here’s a song dedicated to doing just that. ‘Lay Lady Lay’ needs no introduction. It may be Dylan’s most famous song of seduction.

Lay Lady Lay

What a tender, beguiling performance! Dylan uses all the resources of his mature voice, upsinging, downsinging, half talking/pleading, to produce this standout performance.

Of course, once the lady has lain across the bed, complications ensue, especially when we fall in love only to find the lady heading for a door, for ‘somebody’s room’. She’s a big girl now, and you’re bound for heartbreak, singing through your tears.

You’re a big girl now (A)

Another wrenching vocal performance (Larry on steel guitar, 5^th Oct, Spokane). These 2001 performances are hard to beat, aren’t they? That was so good, let’s hear the song again, this time from the Hiroshima concert. I’ve got a weakness for this concert, the whole ambience of it. Dylan brings great focus to his performance, and takes the audience with him.

You’re a big girl now (B)

‘Just Like a Woman’ must be the most tender put-down song ever written. While it presents an uncompromising picture of the woman, in all her pretensions, we get an equally uncompromising picture of the man’s vulnerability, his denial and hunger. It’s how these two contrary elements work together that make this such a great song. The mature voice of 2001 Dylan is perfect for the song. Beautiful little heartbreaking harp break at the end of the song too. (15^th Nov, Washington)

Just like a woman (A)

That was so nice, let’s hear another one, a little softer. Another consummate performance. This one from 19^th Nov, New York

Just like a woman (B)

‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is a put-down song without the tenderness, a song that throws us to the outer edges of existential despair. It’s hard to keep up snobby pretensions when you’re out on the street with the highway blues looking for your next fix, and there’s nowhere to go but down. This is an ‘I told you so’ kind of song. Whether the woman’s downfall is treated with triumph or sorrow, you’ll have to decide. Maybe it’s a mix of both. This one’s from 21^st August, Telluride.

Like a Rolling Stone

Let’s return to Blood on the Tracks for a moment to catch our old favourite ‘Shelter from the Storm’. Here love is seen as a salvation from war and chaos. We understand love within this larger, grimmer context:

‘Well, the deputy walks on hard nails
and the preacher rides a mount
But nothing really matters much
it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn
Come in, she said
I'll give ya shelter from the storm’

To put it the other way round, in a world of doom, it’s love alone that counts.

This one’s also from 21^st August, Telluride, and features Larry on the steel guitar.

Shelter from the Storm

If love may offer some escape from doom and craziness, the drifter in ‘The Drifter’ finds another escape, by sheer luck and maybe a flash of God’s grace. Chaos can cut both ways. It can take us deeper into the madness, as in ‘Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream’ or offer a door to freedom. The drifter takes the door and the frenetic song is over. The slashing, blistering rock performance fits the song quite perfectly. Interesting that three of the hardest rock songs on Dylan’s setlist come from that quiet, gentle album, John Wesley Harding. (‘Watchtower’, ‘Drifter’s Escape’, ‘Wicked Messenger’)

This performance from Madison Square Gardens comes out on top for me, hard-hitting and sustained harp solo. It rips along.

Drifters Escape (A)

But this one from 10^th of May is a strong contender. A little more on the gutsier side, perhaps. It’s a real pleasure trying to decide which is best.

Drifters Escape (B)

There’s no escape, however, from the world of ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile’. It’s a world full of strangeness and falsity, it’s Dylan’s circus world, and there’s no back door.

‘And the ladies treat me kindly
And furnish me with tape
But deep inside my heart
Lord, I know I can't escape’

The song is claustrophobic, funny, and maybe a bit scary. Dylan’s 2001 half talking, up and downsinging, use of all his vocal resources fits this song like a glove. True, I’ll never get over the album version, but that won’t stop me from appreciating this masterpiece. Dylan sets an even pace, doesn’t try to hurry the song, and before long we’re away, lost in one of Bob Dylan’s dreams.

Stuck inside of Mobile

Slipping ‘Thing’s Have Changed’ (2000) into these 60s songs creates an odd effect. Some things have not changed; the prospect of escape is as elusive as ever:

‘Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose’

That world would fit easily into ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile.’

A similar paradox arises here to what we find in ‘Watching the River Flow’. In that song the indolence of the lyrics is belied by the vigour of the performance; with ‘Things have Changed’, the more passionately he sings it, the less I believe it. He cares all right, can’t you tell by his voice? A remarkable vocal performance. (MSG)

Things have changed.

There is some sense of escape in ‘This Wheel’s on Fire,’ as this wheel’s rollin’ down the road, but it’s headed for disintegration, the explosion of self. The wheel’s not in control, it has no free will. It’s headed for destruction in most peculiar circumstances involving unspecified ‘favours’. I’m glad Dylan kept this song alive on stage. These later performances are not as spooky as the originals from The Basement Tapes, but we are in the hands of fate nonetheless. Some nice harmonies in the choruses.

This wheel’s on fire

One way out of the conundrums and terrors of life is – death. Dylan is too feisty and robust to yearn for death. Only on his latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways do I hear a trace of it.

‘Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, then let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war’

But Dylan has been knocking on that door for a long time now, not because of a desire for death, but because there’s not much else you can do when you’re bleeding out and the world’s growing darker. The drifter has to really knock hard on that door, or it’s the other place, the place whose gates are always gaping open wide. That’s why he has to keep on knocking. Eventually somebody might answer. (10^th May)

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

However dire things may be, and you may even be knocking on heaven’s door, but you can still ring them bells. Ring out the good news. Or the Good News.

‘Ring them bells for Saint Catherine from the top of the room
Ring them bells from the fortress for the lilies that bloom’

How poignant that second line is. A fortress may be a sanctuary from our enemies, but it may also be the prison. The lilies that bloom seem just within reach. Freedom is theirs. Even in the midst of unending moral war. (3^rd August)

The most famous live performance of this song is probably from The Supper Club, 1993, but I rather like this slow, dreamy version. It’s Larry’s steel guitar that gives it that quality.

Ring them Bells

A song Dylan has often used to escape his concerts is ‘All Along the Watchtower’, always a rousing ending to a night of Dylan. There is ‘someway out of here’, it’s the highway to the next concert. Sometimes I wish he might have tried a simple, acoustic approach to the song, but no, the hurricane is upon us. The ghost of Hendrix rides.

This is a good gutsy one from 21^st August, Telluride

Watchtower (A)

But if you can take another dose, try this one. It starts with the chords to ‘The Exodus Song’, a stirring anthem about the Jewish return to Palestine after WW2, sung by Pat Boone and family back in 1960. (20^th August Telluride)

Watchtower (B)

There is however another way to finish a Dylan concert. A timely reminder that they’ll stone you whatever you do. There is no escape from getting stoned. ‘Stone you when you’re hit by a truck’, he sings here. Stone you and wish you good luck. (MSG)

So I’ll wish you all good luck and see you next time with the Love and Theft songs.

Rainy Day Woman

Kia Ora.

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Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 6: A mattress and sand letters

Posted on October 26, 2021 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

VI A mattress and sand letters

Throw my ticket out the window                               Throw my ticket in the wind
Throw my suitcase out there, too                              Throw my mattress out there too
Throw my troubles out the door Draw my letters in the sand,
I don’t need them anymore                                         ’cause you got to understand
’cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you that tonight I’ll be staying here with you

The Rolling Thunder Revue kicks off in late October 1975, and one of the many pleasant surprises is the live debut of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” at the 22nd concert of the tour, on Saturday, November 22 in Waltham, Massachusetts. Surprising, this rehabilitation, but even more remarkable is the complete, sweeping restoration; almost every verse has been changed. And there is a third surprise, which seems to be a present for the steadily growing army of Dylanologists.

The first two more serious Dylan biographies were published in the previous years (Toby Thompson’s Positively Main Street: An unorthodox view of Bob Dylan and Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan, both 1972). And Dylan, of course, has had plenty to contend with, from the likes of A.J. Weberman, the garbage scavenger, to the intrusive fans who think they can invade his privacy, to the remorseless, bootlicking “journalists”, who all think they can distil the most intimate private matters from his song lyrics. Heroin addiction, homosexuality, anarchistic beliefs, messianic qualities, adultery… you name it. Dylan’s image and the misty quality of many of his lyrics unleash a great deal of creativity and obsessiveness, and correspondingly many painfully stupid conclusions about the man’s private life – mostly because a significant faction of Dylanologists stubbornly believes that every “I” in the songs is “I, Bob Dylan”.

As if to trigger that faction, Dylan announces the song twice with a teaser. “The next one is also a true story,” he says 27 November in Bangor, after “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll”. And four days later, in Toronto: “Here’s another true story comin’ up.”

It gives extra weight to the second surprise, to the textual changes. At least, it does suggest that Dylan has deleted the “untrue” elements, and that the text has become “true” because of these corrections. In any case, it is immediately clear that Dylan took the revision seriously. In the first verse, for instance, the metre is corrected – it is still trochaic tetrameters, but each line now has a correctly stressed, masculine, ending. In the original lyrics, the opening line still had an unstressed, feminine ending. It seems to explain the rather meaningless change from “out the window” to “in the wind”.

Less traceable is the utterly radical change of verse two, from “Throw my suitcase out there, too” to “Throw my mattress out there too”. Technically almost identical; same number of syllables, same rhythm, male ending, but for some reason a scratching and rewriting Dylan has changed suitcase to mattress. Stylistically, a minor, insignificant enhancement with a thin alliteration (my mattress), but that debatable enhancement is completely overshadowed by the quite drastic change to the enigmatic command of the I-person, who demands that his apparently strong and muscular mistress throws out his mattress – for otherwise unclear reasons. But, mind you, this is “a true story”. So maybe it was an air mattress. Still, apart from the presumed physical challenge the antagonist is facing here, the symbolism is particularly disturbing: the removal of the lover’s sleeping place does not at all match the love message tonight I’ll be staying here with you.

It is a fairly recent intervention. On CD1 of The Bootleg Series 15 – The Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), we can listen to the rehearsal of the song on 19 October in New York, and here is no mention of a mattress. The line there is, “Throw my troubles out there too”, and no mattress appears in the rest of the lyrics either. The same applies to the equally curious follow-up line, Draw my letters in the sand. This line is not sung in the rehearsal either, and ambiguous it is as well, to say the least. After all, letters in the sand signal transience, brevity, impermanence. In fact, since 1957, since Pat Boone scored a major hit with the time-honoured “Love Letters In The Sand”, an inescapable connotation – and Dylan, who most likely has Gene Austin’s 1931 version on a pedestal, knows that too.

It is, all in all, a somewhat alienating rewriting. In the rest of the lyrics, almost every line has been rewritten too, but those rewritings are all in line with the protagonist’s original state of love. “Your love was all that mattered”, for instance, and ‘You came down on me like rolling thunder”. There is no “leakage” from other songs either, as is sometimes the case with Dylan. The surrounding songs in this show, and during the tour in general, are all mattress-less and sandletter-free. At most, “mattress” recalls 1966’s “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, recalls the bizarre line “You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine” – apparently, the mere word “mattress” inspires frenzies. And Dylan used it before as an attribute to represent exceptional physical strength of the female counterpart:

“love is gentleness – softness – creaminess” says Phaedra – who is now having a pillow fight – her weapon, a mattress – she stands on a deserted marshmallow,”

…like in his poetic prose explosion Tarantula, in which Phaedra does not, as it should be, swings a pillow during a pillow fight, but the whole mattress.

On the other hand, perhaps Dylan’s mind is again “normally” haunted by Johnny Cash, who recently had a minor hit with the potentially charming, but unfortunately rather overproduced (saccharine violins, terrible ladies’ choir) “Papa Was a Good Man”;

It rained all the way to Cincinnati
With our mattress on top of the car
Us kids were eatin' crackers and baloney
And papa kept on driving never stopped once at a bar

Little in common with “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, that’s true. But that mattress has to come from somewhere.

To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 7: A Spider’s Life On Mars

———–

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:

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Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XV)

Posted on October 25, 2021 by TonyAttwood

by Larry Fyffe

A list of the earlier articles in this series appears at the foot of this page.

The Dylavinci Code reveals that Jesus has a long-time grudge, other than that he thinks she’s a whore, against Mary ‘Maggie’ Magdalene.

He affectionately calls her Maggie in that she comes from a wealthy farming family that supports Him.

The grudge no doubt explains in part why Mary’s abandoned by Jesus and left lying ‘undead” in a tomb within the Great Sphinx of Egypt.

He also has a grudge against her brother Lazarus whom He raised from the dead:

No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more
Well, he hands me a nickel, he has me a dime
He asks me with a grin if you're having a good time
Then he fines you every time you slam the door
(Bob Dylan: Maggie's Farm)

A grudge against Mary’s father Cyrus too:

No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more
Well, he puts his cigar out in your face just for kicks
His bedroom window, it is made out of bricks
The National Guard stands around his door
(Bob Dylan: Maggie's Farm)

And a grudge against Mary’s mother Eucharis as well:

Now I ain't gonna work for Maggie's ma no more
Well, she talks to all the servants about man and God and law
Everybody says she's the brains behind pa
She's sixty-eight, but she says she's fifty-four
(Bob Dylan: Maggie's Farm)

But most of all the big grudge is against Magdalene herself:

No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more
Well, I wake up in the morning, fold my hands and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane
It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor
(Bob Dylan: Maggie's Farm)

With Maggie’s sister Martha, who cooks for the poor, Jesus has no problem:

Ring them bells Sweet Martha for the poor man's son
Ring them bells so the world will know that God is one
(Bob Dylan: Ring Them Bells)

The breaking of the Dylavinci Code leaves no doubt that it’s Mary Magdalene that the ‘lone soldier’ Jesus marries.

There’s a big hint an unnatural death awaits her:

And when he saw her loyalty
And Mary so true hearted
He said, "My darling, married we'll be
And nothing but death will part us"

(Bob Dylan: Mary And The Soldier ~ traditional/Brady)

Note the sincerity of Maggie’s loyalty is questioned:

In Scarlet Town in the month of May
Sweet William on his deathbed lay
Mistress Mary by the side of the bed
Kissing his face, heaping prayers on his head
(Bob Dylan: Scarlet Town)

https://youtu.be/U3XP-S2Z9xw

According to the Dylavinci Code, Christ accepts no blame for what transpires:

Sometimes I have a nickel
Sometimes I have a dime
Sometimes I have ten dollars
Just to buy Little Maggie wine

(Bob Dylan: Little Maggie ~ traditional, Stanley Brothers, etc)

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Tom Jones covers “Not Dark Yet” and expands the title – and then goes further

Posted on October 24, 2021 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

Important note: Larry has just told me that some or all of the videos in this article are not available in North America – if you are looking at this article and find that is so, can you do a search and see if anything relating to Tom Jones “Not Dark Yet” is available – and if so send a link and note to Tony@schools.co.uk and I will add that link to the article. Sorry everyone if you are affected by this.

————-

I’ve never actually been to a Tom Jones concert, but I did once go to a BBQ in a friend’s house which backed onto the Northampton County Cricket Club ground, while Sir Tom was playing a concert – and since the garden of my friend’s house backed onto the field we heard the whole thing.

Not exactly my type of music, but some interesting background to an afternoon out. And that is where my level of interest has stayed until Jochen sent me a note asking if I had yet listened to Sir Tom (as he technically is, having been knighted by Her Majesty in 2006) doing Not Dark Yet.

Now if you want the whole story of his making the song (well, no not really but a bit of chit chat) there is an interview with Sir Tom available…

https://youtu.be/OiPc-1OrzWU

The talk about Not Dark Yet starts at 3 minutes 45 seconds.

But if it is the music you are looking for…

I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but my interest was raised at once because this immediately meets my personal criteria – that the cover version does something new, adds an extra dimension or gives a new insight while retaining a musical understanding of what the composer intended.

And of course, this version does that exactly because it turns the song upside down in terms of rhythm and energy – but does keep the essence of the song in place, and so rather amazingly it works, which I never imagined it could (especially as Sir Tom doesn’t quite get what the song is actually called).

Two things really help here: one is that even his advanced age Sir Tom still has an extraordinary voice, and the other is that the energetic accompaniment never once gets carried away. All the instrumentalists are kept under control – and for those of us who know the original there are elements of the Dylan original in the background that are kept in the orchestration – a lovely touch.

That’s exactly right because the change of the tempo is so dramatic that to add any further changes would take us so far away from the song as to lose all contact with it.

And then what happens on the video is that it continues with Rufus Wainwright version – which is a good choice because he too has a brilliant voice. Of course it may not be that you want to listen to Not Dark Yet twice in these new formats, but if you do have the time, do try. Running the Wainwright after the Jones version is a challenge (the normal approach would be to start with the slow and build up to the fast), but I think it is worth it.

The way the piano part develops while still keeping the piece under control, and restraining the vocalists desires to extemporise really does work for me – especially with the piano playing variations on the accompaniment we are so familiar with, coming from the original.

It continues to build with slight additions, but I won’t spoil it for you – please, if you have the time, do let this run all the way through.

There’s more on the video if you want an accompaniment to your day, but I’ll leave you to discover that.

However, to return to Tom Jones, his approach to “One more cup of coffee” is interesting too – I must find out who writes these instrumental arrangements – they really are quite intriguing. It doesn’t lift me as much as the Not Dark Yet version, but is worthy of a listen, in my view.

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All Directions 69: Is this really going to be the end? 2006-2008

Posted on October 23, 2021 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

This is part of the series “All Directions at Once” which aims to consider Bob Dylan’s compositions as a sequence of works, rather than individual pieces or songs that can be understood by being examined line by line.

Bob Dylan had returned to songwriting in 2005 after a three year break with the majestic Tell Ol Bill, and a couple of try outs that didn’t go too far. Tell Ol Bill itself was a derivative song based on earlier works and snatches of lyrics from elsewhere, and as we know from the rehearsal tapes, Bob tried it in many different formats and styles.

Through 2005/6 he used the notion of borrowing extracts of lyrics, chord sequences and melodies from elsewhere while often expressing the notion of a future without too much hope. In the last episode of “All Directions” we got as far as Nettie Moore, where Bob found he could still develop interesting and alluring pieces even when using this model of everyone else’s ideas, phrases and music. Now he rounded the era off.

https://youtu.be/sUO7Lwiw1lI

“The Levee’s Gonna Break” continues the approach being based on “When the Levee Breaks” by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. It is a straight 12 bar blues in B flat without any variations – even the instrumental verses follow the theme. Dylan has a guitar play a two-note signature when he’s not singing (D flat to B flat) which is quite attractive, although must have been the most boring part ever to play. “Here’s your part mate – just play these two notes 32 times. OK?”

And we get a bit of Ovid too. “Some people got barely enough skin to cover their bones” probably comes from Ovid’s Tristia, Book 4: “there’s barely enough skin to cover my bones.”

“Aint Talkin” the next song written continues the theme, with more lines from Ovid, and a feeling that he is telling us once and for all that is the situation described in the songs is not made up for the sake of writing a song, but is real. He is not pretending, not playing. His pain is real.

Finally in this year we get to Huck’s Tune where Dylan is in a world where life is a version of death, and even when things seem to be working out they can go wrong. And they do go wrong. He’s carrying a heavy load.

Bob then stopped writing again – and stayed silent on the compositional front until 2008 when he came back with a song that sums up everything that is wrong with the world in, but sticking with just one chord. This really does tell it as it is, and by and large it is pretty much all over.

Indeed “Life is hard” as a title seems to sum up exactly where Bob has got to, using other people’s lyrics and other people’s music (often, it must be said, to great effect) but still knowing, Life is hard.

Life is hard is a straight strophic song – verse, verse, verse, verse, verse, with (as the title suggests) no uplift and nothing to make us want to listen again.

The nature of the song’s construction wouldn’t matter too much if the lyrics grabbed us in the way that Bob has done so often in his writing career but there really is nothing here to make us care, because Bob doesn’t care…

The evening winds are still
I’ve lost the way and will
Can’t tell you where they went
I just know what they meant
I’m always on my guard
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me

And indeed after that first verse there’s nothing in the accompaniment, the melody or the lyrics to keep us coming back. So there is nothing more to say. As the cover version above shows us, it can be turned into an interesting piece, but I am not sure this takes us to any new ground, which in the past has been Bob’s hallmark.

The friend you used to be
So near and dear to me
You slipped so far away
Where did we go a-stray
I pass the old schoolyard
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me

So Bob has told us , now we know. There are no arresting images, no interesting instrumentation, no uncertainties to keep us guessing.

And that was it until through 2008/9 Bob wrote and co-wrote a series of songs starting with “This dream of you” in which we can find perhaps the influence of Doc Pomus who wrote, and a continuation of Bob’s negative themes.

How long can I stay in this nowhere café
‘fore night turns into day
I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you
Which keeps me living on

In an interview at the time Bob spoke of

“…those people stumbling around in the night out there, uncertain or not always so certain of exactly where they fit in and where they were headed…”

“It’s me who’s singing that, plain and simple. We shouldn’t confuse singers and performers with actors….

“The more you act the further you get away from the truth. And a lot of those singers lose who they are after a while. You sing, ‘I’m a lineman for the county,’ enough times and you start to scamper up poles.”

Thus the song is not about Dylan’s experiences, any more than Jimmy Webb was a Wichita Lineman or repeatedly needed to get to Phoenix. But the brilliant songwriter makes the experiences and emotions of those who are in the song become part of his world through writing and singing the song. We feel the isolation of the Wichita Lineman we feel the isolation of sitting all night in the nowhere café.

Thus he argues that the expression of the opening…

How long can I stay in this nowhere café
‘fore night turns into day
I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn
All I have and all I know
Is this dream of you
Which keeps me living on

is not an expression of what happened to Dylan – it is a fictional story that becomes real for us, and indeed for him, through his performances.

This is the only song on “Together through Life” that was written wholly by Bob Dylan, and not with Robert Hunter. The theme thus is regret of what is lost, the power of the memories of the past and the feeling of utter isolation.

The opening lines are utterly evocative…

How long can I stay in this nowhere café
‘fore night turns into day
I wonder why I’m so frightened of dawn

… I can immediately picture the actual scene. It is the sort of experience that has never happened, will never happen to me, but I can feel it, appreciate it, be part of it, wonder about it.

This is the feeling of the loner, or the drifter, or the man who has run away – that constant theme in Dylan – the man who knows that the next thing that will happen could well turn out to be very bad. Somehow he wants to stop time, but of course can’t. It is as Doc Pomus said…

I keep right on stumblin’
In this no-man’s land out here

Indeed one could argue that if there is a dominant theme throughout Dylan’s entire songwriting career – a theme that no matter how often he leaves it, he comes back to it – it is this loneliness, leaving, isolation, fear, moving on, getting stuck, theme. This inability to escape no matter how hard he tries…

I look away, but I keep seeing it
I don’t want to believe, but I keep believing it
Shadows dance upon the wall
Shadows that seem to know it all

This is indeed, as Bob has confessed, his tribute to Doc Pomus and his own return to his ever-recurring theme – although as a final footnote we might note that “curtained gloom” is a phrase in a line from Dylan’s favourite civil war poet Henry Timrod who in Serenade wrote

And let the zephyrs rise and fall
About her in the curtained gloom,
And then return to tell me all
The silken secrets of the room.

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Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 5: Hits of sorts

Posted on October 22, 2021 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

V Hits of sorts

The song has a somewhat peculiar hopscotch career. Dylan writes it quickly on a February weekend to fill up Nashville Skyline, it is recorded on Monday, and that’s that. In August, at the Isle Of Wight concert, it’s not on the setlist – the twin sister of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, the closing song of the previous John Wesley Harding record, “I’ll be Your Baby Tonight”, is preferred. Dylan does not perform any concerts in 1970 or 1971, but remarkably, he now considers “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” a Greatest Hit; the song is selected for the successful Greatest Hits Vol. 2.

Collaborator and confidant Happy Traum, who assisted Dylan recording “Down In The Flood”, “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”, “I Shall Be Released” and the outtake “Only a Hobo” in September ’71 especially for the compilation, reveals to Clinton Heylin a selection criterion for the songs: “He felt there were some songs that he had written that had become hits of sorts for other people, that he didn’t actually perform himself, and he wanted to fit those on the record as well.”

Traum is of course referring to the four songs to which he himself contributed, but it seems likely that the same considerations were made for the rest of the track list. After all, songs like “The Mighty Quinn” (Manfred Mann), “All I Really Want To Do” (Cher) and “All Along The Watchtower” (Jimi Hendrix), to name but three examples, were never hits for Dylan either, but rather “hits of sorts for other people”.

“Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, however, can hardly be called a hit of sorts. And all too often the song has not been covered either at that time, September 1971.

Cher is the first. For her underrated 3614 Jackson Highway (1969) she records a soulful, brilliant version. Cher acts fast, by the way. Two weeks after the release of Nashville Skyline. And she also records the Skyline songs “Lay, Lady, Lay” (as “Lay, Baby, Lay”; even tough lady Cher prefers to avoid homoerotic connotations) and “I Threw It All Away” for this beautiful album, produced by Jerry Wexler in Muscle Shoals – equally great renditions, sounding even better on the 2000 remaster.

But it’s not a hit – not even a single. About the same time, in May ’69, Esther Phillips records her version. Just as soulful, and even more beautifully sung. This one is released as a single, but does not make any waves. Phillips uses the recording again a few months later, in October ’69, as a B-side for the modest hit “Too Late To Worry, Too Blue To Cry” (#121 Billboard, #35 on the R&B charts). So Dylan has seen some royalties from it. And Esther’s version seems to have some staying power as well; in 2010, 41 years after the recording, her cover is selected for the wonderful compilation How Many Roads: Black America Sings Dylan.

Not a hit either, but blessed with curiosity value and an irresistible dated sheen, is the single by British psychedelic rockers Orange Bicycle, again from 1969 (release 18 July). Orange Bicycle were a charming band that tried to ride along on the psychedelic wave, crafting attractive, Byrds-like songs to go with it. Their “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is in fact a bit of an outlier in their output (the B-side, “Last Cloud Home” is actually nicer), but at the very least it has a nostalgic quality, fifty years later.

The same applies, approximately, to the last pre-Greatest Hits Vol. II cover, legendary Ben E. King’s funky jam session from 1970. Fuzzy guitars, James Brown vibe, soaring Hammond organ and even a gospel-like diminuendo… it is, in short, 1970 – with all its charm and all its clichés.

All in all, none of the covers deserves the qualification hits of sorts for other people. But nevertheless, the song gets the honour of being selected for the double album Greatest Hits Vol. II compilation. As the closing track of Side 2, the same side that opens with her twin sister “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”. And thus displacing hits like “With God On Our Side” and “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” (both a hit for Manfred Mann), and popular, much-covered songs like “Girl From The North Country”, “Boots Of Spanish Leather” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”… to name just a few titles of songs that actually do deserve the qualification “hits of sorts”. So it does appear as if “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” has some special place in Dylan’s heart.

The appearance is deceptive, as appearances usually are. The first concert after the Greatest Hits release (17 November 1971) is two years and two months later, the first concert of the 1974 Tour of America with The Band on 3 January in Chicago. The setlist is dominated by crowd pleasers, Dylan playing plenty of songs from the first and second Greatest Hits compilations, but no “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”.

Notwithstanding the fact that the song’s status has only grown in the meantime. Jeff Beck, in particular, produces an as of now ultimate, heartbreaking cover for his Memphis-based Jeff Beck Group (1972). It is probably mainly thanks to the producer, Booker T. & the M.G.’s guitarist Steve Cropper, that this is one of the most successful exercises in the sound that Beck so desperately seeks in these years, the definitive blend of Memphis soul, Chicago blues and British rock.

Tina Turner operates in the same A-category, and with her debut solo album Tina Turns The Country On! (1974) she tries to tap into a new audience – the Nashville audience, to be precise. With covers of Kristofferson (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”), Hank Snow and Dolly Parton… and two Dylan songs: “He Belongs To Me” and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”. It doesn’t really match up, Tina’s excited, scintillating vocals on the one hand and the friendly steel guitar parts, the neat bass lines and conveyor belt drumming on the other, but it does get attention; it earns her a Grammy nomination.

To no avail. Dylan is adamant and cannot be tempted into putting the song on his setlist in January 1974. Indeed, at none of the 40 concerts of that American tour with The Band the song is performed – apparently the promotion of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” to Greatest Hit was just a whim after all. A fling. A one-night stand.

But soon it’ll be 1975, and thunder will be rolling…

To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 6: A mattress and sand letters

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:

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Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XIV)

Posted on October 21, 2021 by TonyAttwood

by Larry Fyffe

A list of the earlier articles in this series appears at the foot of this page.

Deciphered from the Dylavinci Code (uncovered in song lyrics) reveals that singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, shape-shifts into the form of Jesus; the risen Christ now with the sepulcher of Mary Magdalene, enclosed in the Great Sphinx of Egypt.

Dylan-as-Jesus has memories of Roman soldiers outside, of the two angels inside, and meeting Mary in the rock-covered tomb on Skull Hill near the walls of Jerusalem:

The palace of mirrors where dog soldiers are reflected
The endless road, and the wailing of chimes
The empty rooms where her memory is protected
Where the angles' voices whisper to the souls of previous times
(Bob Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)

https://youtu.be/oKr6nXJoO2M

The Egyptian tomb echoes with the voices of Israfel and Orpheus singing in a background choir:

It was many and many a year ago
In a kingdom by the sea
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love, and be loved by me
(Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee)

The ‘undead’ mummified body of the beloved maiden of Jesus at first appears to be “beyond communication”, but Magdalene shows that she is still in love with Him; she envisions Christ as the golden-haired Sun-God Apollo.

The good shepherd grieves for what he has done, and Jesus lies down beside Mary in the coffin:

She wakes him up forty-eight hours later, the sun is breaking
Near the broken chains, the mountain laurel, and rolling rocks
She begs to know what measures he now will be taking
He's pulling her down, and she's clutching on to his long 
golden locks

(Bob Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)

The Code broken reveals that Christ is determined to make amends for the terrible sin He has committed by murdering the only one he ever loved because He supposed her a whore.

Alas, considering that’s He’s perfect’ Jesus still does not think Mary is good enough for her to be His bride:

All through the summers, into January
I've been visiting morgues, and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers, and brains and hearts
I'll bring someone back to life, it's what I wanna do
I wanna create my own version of you
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)

The revelations of the Dylavinci Code provide no happy ending – Mary Magdalene’s forgotten, sealed up in the walls of the Great Sphinx forever.

In the song lyrics below, Mary is called Claudette, about whom Dylan-as-Jesus says he “ain’t seen’er since January”:

Don't know what I can say about Claudette that 
    wouldn't come back to haunt me
Finally had to give her up 'bout the time she began to want me
But I know God has mercy on them who are slandered and humiliated
I'd a-done anything for that woman if she'd only 
     made me feel obligated
(Bob Dylan: The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar)

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Tonight I’ll be Staying Here With You (1969) part 4: The cadence of click-clack

Posted on October 20, 2021 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

I can hear that whistle blowin’
I see that stationmaster, too
If there’s a poor boy on the street
Then let him have my seat
’Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you

It would be going way too far to call Udo Lindenberg the German Bob Dylan, but still. His status, for starters, is quite comparable. Roughly speaking, Udo has since the beginning of the twenty-first century the same stature in Germany as Dylan has in the rest of the world: respected in all corners of cultural circles, beyond criticism, living legend. The old rocker (he was born in 1946) also has been in the front trenches for half a century now, shook up the German music scene with his Panik Orchester, is an accomplished painter (his works hang in museums and even in the Bundeskanzleramt, the German Chancellery), he writes books and for five decades, right up until 2021, his records have been topping the charts.

More relevant similarities between Dylan and Lindenberg are a superior sense of rhyme and rhythm, respect for tradition, the infectious enjoyment of playing with language and the demonstrable influence on colleagues. A sublime example is “Sonderzug nach Pankow” from 1983, one of Udo’s biggest hits.

Entschuldigen Sie, ist das der Sonderzug nach Pankow?
Ich muss mal eben dahin, mal eben nach Ost-Berlin
Ich muss da was klären, mit eurem Oberindianer
Ich bin ein Jodeltalent, und ich will da spielen mit 'ner Band

Pardon me Sir, is this the Special Train to Pankow?
I have to get over there, over to East Berlin.
I gotta sort something out with your Chief Indian.
I'm a yodelling talent, and I wanna play there with a band.

… Lindenberg actually tried for years to be allowed to perform in East Germany, and this song really was an attempt to get permission from “the Chief Indian”; from Secretary General Erich Honecker. Tone and word choice, however, are absolutely melodious and funny, but not very diplomatic. “Ey Honni, I sing for little money,” for example, and further on Udo states that Honecker probably also secretly, in the toilet, listens to rock ‘n’ roll on West-radio.

The template is, obviously, Glenn Miller’s immortal “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (1941), the first gold record in music history. Lindenberg picks up the opening words (“Pardon me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?”) transforms the shoeshine boy into a stationmaster and then takes the lyrics his inimitable way. And the song starts, just like “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, with a train whistle blowin’.

It is one of the strongest and most popular images in a hundred years of song history: the train whistle blowin’. With the abolition of the steam whistle and the introduction of the air horn, it has actually become an archaic concept, but like dial a number or the floppy disk icon for “save”, it is firmly anchored in our cultural baggage. Even in the twenty-first century, artists such as Kid Rock (“Cowboy”), The Tragically Hip (“Are You Ready”) and Cake (“The Distance”) still sing with straight faces about lonesome whistles that they could have never heard themselves.

Dylan’s anchor points are easy to point out. There are dozens of records in his record cabinet on which a steam whistle is blowing anyway. “How Long Blues” by Dinah Washington, Conway Twitty ‘s “Mama Tried”, “Southbound Train” by Big Bill Broonzy, “On the Atchison, Topeka And The Santa Fe”, “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad”, “Won’t Be Long”, “500 Miles”… without steam whistles, Dylan’s record cabinet would be pretty empty. He’d even be missing his own first album:

I got the freight train blues
Oh Lord mama, I got them in the bottom of my rambling shoes
And when the whistle blows, I gotta go baby, don't you know
Well, it looks like I'm never gonna lose the freight train blues

… not to mention the song that was on his repertoire even before his first album, and which he performed on Cynthia Gooding’s radio show, March ’62:

I was riding number nine
Heading south from Caroline
I heard that lonesome whistle blow
Got in trouble had to roam
Left my gal and left my home
I heard that lonesome whistle blow

… Hank Williams’ “Lonesome Whistle Blues”, one of the heaviest anchors under Dylan’s entire oeuvre. And the other anchors are whistleblowers too. The second anchor is Harold Arlen’s “Blues In The Night”, the song of which more or less every line recurs in Dylan’s oeuvre.

“Blues In The Night”, like “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, was written in 1941, like “Chattanooga Choo Choo” for a movie, and both are nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1942. And both lost, inexplicably, to Jerome Kern’s “The Last Time I Saw Paris”. Incomprehensible, because that is a) a pretty mediocre song, and b) not even an Original Song (the song is five years old by then). Jerome Kern, who hadn’t even come to the awards ceremony, fully convinced that both “Blues In The Night” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” were far superior to his “The Last Time I Saw Paris”, felt so embarrassed that he personally made sure that the rules were tightened: from 1943, an Original Song must really be an Original Song, written especially for the film.

Too late for Arlen, of course. But still. “The Last Time I Saw Paris” was one of the few songs that year that did not involve the blowing of a steam whistle – perhaps that won over the Oscar jury. And “Blues In The Night” has reached its place of honour on the Olympus easily, even without that Oscar – not only because there are at least eight Dylan songs in which the song descends;

Now the rain's a-fallin'
Hear the train a-callin, "whoo-ee!"
My mama done tol' me
Hear that lonesome whistle blowin' 'cross the trestle, "whoo-ee!"
My mama done tol' me
A-whooee-ah-whooee ol' clickety-clack's
A-echoin' back th' blues in the night

… nine, if we include “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”.

And the third, and heaviest steam whistle blower in Dylan’s backpack is of course Johnny Cash. If only for Johnny’s alpha and omega song “Folsom Prison Blues”,

Well, if they freed me from this prison
If that railroad train was mine
I bet I'd move it on a little
Farther down the line
Far from Folsom Prison
That's where I want to stay
And I'd let that lonesome whistle
Blow my blues away

… and because of that whole earth-shattering debut album Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar! (1957) too, the album with “The Rock Island Line” and Hank Williams’ “I Heard That Lonesome Whistle” and “I Walk The Line” and “Doin’ My Time” and “The Wreck of the Old ’97”… the songs that make Dylan sigh in his autobiography Chronicles: “Ten thousand years of culture fell from him,” and

“The coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger. I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. Indeed. I must have recited those lines to myself a million times. Johnny’s voice was so big, it made the world grow small, unusually low pitched — dark and booming, and he had the right band to match him, the rippling rhythm and cadence of click-clack. Words that were the rule of law and backed by the power of God.”

… songs with words about prisoners with ball and chain, about John Henry, about Jesus and about tramps. And especially about trains. Lots of trains, all of them with lonesome whistles. As in “Train Of Love”, the song Dylan picks for his contribution to the wonderful tribute album Kindred Spirits (1999);

Der Udo eventually managed to take his Special Train to Pankow after all. Eight months after the release of “Sonderzug nach Pankow”, four years after his first request, Lindenberg is suddenly allowed to perform at the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin (25 October 1983). On condition that he does not perform “Sonderzug nach Pankow”. The GDR leadership keeps him on a leash with the promise of a tour in 1984, but this promise is (of course) withdrawn after the Pankow-less concert. Three years after the fall of the Wall, in 1992, Leipzig fans paint a train that does indeed travel to Berlin, bearing the inscription Sonderzug nach Pankow, and on 25 March 2015, thirty-two years after the release of “Sonderzug nach Pankow”, Lindenberg finally really does travel, by underground U-Bahn train, from West Berlin to the Far East, to Pankow. The Oberindianer, meanwhile, has long since become little more than an embarrassing memory from a bizarre past.

————–

To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 5: Hits of sorts

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:

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All Directions 68: Paying tribute to everyone – and then some

Posted on October 19, 2021 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

This is part of the series “All Directions at Once” which aims to consider Bob Dylan’s compositions as a sequence of works, rather than individual pieces or songs that that can be understood by being examined line by line.

The theme behind the writing in 2005/6 was set early on as we have seen in the last episode with Bob Dylan taking up ideas from other songs, books and poems and exploring each in his own way. He might take a title, a line, an idea, a chord sequence – anything he fancied and from there evolve his new song.

The next song we can consider is “When the deal goes down” for which Bob turned to his old favourite Henry Timrod along with the songwriters Roy Turk and Fred E. Ahlert who wrote the Bing Crosby classic “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.”

Dylan’s thoughts here (and one can understand this, given his age) have moved towards what psychologists call “finitude” – the state of having limits. And limits there certainly are in this piece…

My bewildering brain, toils in vain
Through the darkness on the pathways of life
Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air
Tomorrow keeps turning around
We live and we die, we know not why
But I’ll be with you when the deal goes down

And there is some Robert Johnson too with “Last fair deal gone down”

But if Bob is not just wanting to pay tribute or just borrow some good ideas, musically he is traveling in new dimensions as the opening chord sequence shows:

C, E7, F6, Dm7-5

C, G11, C, G

That is new territory for Bob. But in virtually every new song that he produces at this time there is an origin somewhere in the past.

For Someday Baby, the source is “Worried Life Blues” which was probably first recorded and maybe even written by Sleepy John Estes, and known in some recordings as Trouble No More. The Allman Brothers also did a version later, and some sources (almost certainly mistakenly) suggest the Dylan copied their version.

And really that sentence contains the essence of the debate surrounding these songs. Some see Dylan as a man who has run out of ideas and is copying past music, others see his as paying tribute, and still others (perhaps the smallest group of all) see this as a perfectly valid musical exploration, taking in the past, and evolving the ideas for modern times.

Plus of course it may be that by now Bob felt he had written so many songs there was nowhere else he could go

I’m so hard pressed, my mind tied up in knots
I keep recycling the same old thoughts

At the same time, songs such as “Cant Wait” and “Someday Baby” turned up in variant versions. He’s re-writing others, he’s re-writing himself. But much of this is missed by the critics who insist on writing about individual lines within the lyrics, and forget the music.

In effect, from the critics’ point of view we have moved on from seeing lines here and then as pointing to a continuing religious belief, and instead, discussions emerge as to which song influenced Bob Dylan. Yet such treatises tend to ignore the fact that 99% of art in all forms builds on what has gone before. Maybe Visions of Johanna was totally novel, but such moments are rare; that’s not how it normally goes, even for the greatest artist.

And we must not forget that Bob wanted to do all those radio programmes, to show us where his musical influences came from.

Thus commentators can choose: either Bob had run out of ideas (it is “all he’s got left in the tank” as Heylin puts it), or he is using source material to create yet more masterpieces.

And in making such a judgement there is a cultural issue. At school I was always told not to copy. But then if I really tried to be wholly original I was often told it “didn’t work” and I had to learn more about form and style. Bob of course takes no notice of the critics and just goes his own way.

Thus Heylin says, “There is a laziness that manifests itself in the way Dylan wanders from thought to thought, resorting to the lexicon to fill in any blanks…” and I could say of Heylin “There is an utter laziness in which he marches from song to song, resorting to telling us how poor some works are, in order to fill up the pages.”

And ultimately the point is, it was only in the 20th century that we started to see novelty as something of virtue in its own right. My point being that copying, using, re-using, developing, exploring – these are not mortal crimes, but ways of working for artists across thousands of years.

As I have so often asked before, are we to dismiss Shakespeare because Juvenal, the 1st/2nd century poet from the early days of the Roman Empire wrote in Satire 3 “All of Greece is a stage, and every Greek’s an actor.”

Beyond the Horizon is a reworking of “Red Sails in the Sunset”. I offer two different versions here in case you are interested of where Bob got it from…

and a totally different version from Fast Domino.

I love Fats, but really you need to hear Bing to see what the song was really about. Simplifying the chords and rhythm back to “Blueberry Hill” doesn’t do justice to the composition in my view.

The opening lyrics are…

Red sails in the sunset way out on the sea
Oh carry my loved one home safely to me
He sailed at the dawning, all day I’ve been blue
Red sails in the sunset, I’m trusting in you

Swift wings you must borrow, make straight for the shore
We marry tomorrow and he goes sailing no more
Red sails in the sunset way out on the sea
Oh carry my loved one home safely to me

And Bob wrote

Beyond the horizon, behind the sun
At the end of the rainbow life has only begun
In the long hours of twilight ‘neath the stardust above
Beyond the horizon it is easy to love...

My wretched heart’s pounding
I felt an angel’s kiss
My memories are drowning
In mortal bliss

One interesting review I have found on line says, “Beyond The Horizon is a song about transcending the fear of death. Maybe. Or maybe Bob just liked the originals and played around with them for a while, moving across times and places from the American Civil War, to whiskey distillers, W.C. Handy to Robert Johnson…

Out of this we get some great songs like Nettie Moore and some highly derivative pieces such as “The Levee’s Gonna Break” based on “When the Levee Breaks” by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. It is a straight 12 bar blues in B flat without any variations – even the instrumental verses follow the theme. Dylan has a guitar play a two note signature when he’s not singing (D flat to B flat) which is quite attractive, although must have been the most boring part ever to play. “Here’s your part – just play these two notes 32 times. OK?”

And we get a bit of Ovid too. “Some people got barely enough skin to cover their bones” probably comes from Ovid’s Tristia, Book 4: “there’s barely enough skin to cover my bones.”

 But with Nettie Moore, we get a beautiful song that, if we allow it to, lingers long in the memory.  And surely there’s nothing wrong with that is there?   To me at this time Bob really was travelling through his record collection in all directions at once, and giving us some of the musical thoughts that came to him

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Beautiful Obscurity: Playing for Change, including one of the greatest covers ever

Posted on October 18, 2021 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

There is an index to some of the other entries in this series here.

In the series, Aaron in the USA selects some cover versions of Dylan songs and sends them to Tony in the UK, and Tony has to write a review while the track is playing – no going on and on for ever and ever.

Aaron: I first came across Playing for Change a couple of years ago when I stumbled upon this version of The Bands’ The Weight on YouTube

This is from their website:

Playing For Change is a movement created to inspire and connect the world through music, born from the shared belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. Our primary focus is to record and film musicians performing in their natural environments and combine their talents and cultural power in innovative videos we call Songs Around The World.

Aaron: Several big names have been involved over the years (Robbie & Ringo, Keith Richards, Yusuf/Cat Stevens & Peter Gabriel etc) and as you can imagine Dylan covers pop up regularly. Here are some I’ve came across for your listening pleasure, let’s see what Tony thinks of these! I’ll put these in order of my favorites – leaving the best to last (in my opinion!)

If the videos don’t work in your country you can listen/watch them all on their website above.

Times They Are A-Changin’

Tony: I am of course a pedant, (and as such note that the word “pedant” isn’t recognised by my wordpress spell checker by some bizarre reason!) and I’ve noted time and again that the song doesn’t tell us that we can make change for the better happen, but rather that change happens, and that no matter what, we can’t stop it. That’s the point of the of the “senators and congressmen” line – not that they should, or can, or will implement change but rather that they can’t stop the natural course of change.

There is a more about this song that intrigues me – I was a schoolboy when it was first produced, and now (obviously) in my later years, so the song has been with me virtually all of my life that I can remember. And yes I have seen times change. But for the better? Medically and scientifically maybe, but socially, no I don’t think so.

However, enough of that, this is a great version. We all know it off by heart but they put more vigour and bounce and power into it than most, and given the song is so well know, that is indeed what we need.

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

Tony: What is striking me here with this collection is the original approach to the arrangements – far more original and entertaining than many of the cover versions Aaron has selected for me to ramble on about. (That’s not a knock at your choice Aaron, it is more a reflection that I seem to have lost the power to be engaged and surprised much of the time).

But here – just listen to that rhythm – that is brilliantly clever – I think this is the best version of Knockin I have ever heard. The production is utterly perfect and utterly laid back, the harmonies are sublime, the accompaniment is exactly where it should be, and above everything that rhythm…

And just when I was running out of superlatives there is the oh so double extra plus laid back acoustic guitar solo. And then… I am sorry to say I don’t know what language we have moved into, but it works brilliantly.

Jokerman

Tony: Yet again a beautifully original setting, quite right for a totally original cover version. Blimey, I can’t take all this in in one go. I’m sticking by the rules of the game and just writing as I hear and see the videos for the first time ever, but that’s only because I am a law-abiding soul these days.

And just listen to the way the performance evolves both in terms of the vocal and the instrumental – that takes really sublime talent, taking us up and down, playing the audience through the performance. You don’t need me rambling on – just listen. The fact you know the song by heart is neither here nor there, there is a new insight into the song.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

All Along The Watchtower

Tony: Phew I don’t know if I can take any more – but here we are with another setting and with another set of surprises. Goodness me, I hope Bob has heard and seen this. And Aaron, what a good one to finish with – did you realise I would have used up all my superlatives by now and had nothing left?

We’ve all heard this song so many thousand times but have we ever seen or heard anything like this?

No, you don’t need me here. Just watch the video and hear the music, and enjoy every second.

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Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XIII)

Posted on October 17, 2021 by TonyAttwood

Bon Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XIII)

by Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan write songs – many of them burlesque bound.

Mary Magdalene talks with two angels in Christ’s tomb:

And they unto the her, "Woman, why weepest thou?"
She saith unto them, "Because they have taken away my Lord
And I know not where they have laid Him".
(John 20:13)

Christ Himself then appears in the tomb, and whispers to Mary that it’s off to America where the risen Jesus goes.

Mary apparently follows after Him; however, turns out that the New World is the New Babylon.

Further deciphering of the Dylavinci Code hidden in Bob Dylan song lyrics reveals that Jesus and Mary Magdalene spend some time in Virginia before they head back across the Atlantic Ocean for Europe, they having been chased down to Mexico by a dogmatic posse.

To hide their identities, Mary disguises herself as Pocahontas, a native American princess, and Jesus transfigures Himself into John Rolfe. John’s a tobacco exporter, and husband to Pocahontas. The English colony possessed some black slaves.

Some so-called Dylanologists claim that Rolfe is actually John the Baptist, but the Code, taken as a whole, shows that this is clearly not the case.

"Pocahontas" is described in the following poem:
Knowest what thou hast done, thou dark-haired child
What great events on thy compassion hung
(Lydia Sigourney: Pocahontas)

In the lyrics beneath, the singer/songwriter/time-traveller hauls on the persona of Jesus:

I got a house on a hill, I got hogs out lying in the mud
Got a long-haired woman, she got royal Indian blood
(Bob Dylan: Summer Days)

There exists Christian lore that Mary Magdalene goes to Indian, but obviously confused therein is Virginia for the Asian subcontinent.

Though there are Dylanologists amongst us who believe there be no connections, Bob Dylan, in his burlesque of religions, puts on the duo-masks of Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ; of John Rolfe and Jimmy Reed, a black blues singer.

‘Official’ published lyrics notwithstanding:

'Cause thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory
Go tell it on the mountain, go tell the real story 
Tell it in that straightforward puritanical tone
In the mystic hours when a person's alone
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, Godspeed
Thump on the Bible, co-claim a creed
(Bob Dylan: Goodbye Jimmy Reed)

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Never Ending Tour, 2001, Part 3, In bed with the blues

Posted on October 16, 2021 by TonyAttwood

This series traces the performances of the Never Ending Tour from 1987 onward. This is episode 56 in the series, and a full index to the series can be found here.

The previous articles on 2001 are

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

For 2001, I’m holding back the best till last, that is, the new songs from Love and Theft. I’m building up to them. The first two posts for 2001 were dedicated to Dylan’s acoustic performances. In this post I’ll focus on his electric setlist and so inch closer to the new songs.

One of the themes I’ve been developing here is the increasingly retro element in Dylan’s performances. Antique music, to use Dylan’s expression, music that takes us back to the 1950s and earlier. The songs from Time out of Mind set us in that direction, and the songs from Love and Theft will take us even deeper into that territory.

The signs are there, not just in the Time out of Mind songs, but in the way in which Dylan is treating his older songs. A good place to start is with ‘To Be Alone with You’, from Nashville Skyline (1969), a bouncy, happy song that, by 2001, Dylan has transformed into a ripping rocker. The opening bars do the trick, straight out of the rhythm and blues music that underpinned rock-and-roll. If Dylan and his band were suddenly magically transported back to the mid 1950s his audience would not be too far out of their depth with this. But it’s not an exact copy of that antique music, rather it evokes the era. To my ear it’s just a bit too sophisticated to be mistaken for the music it’s modelled on. Rock and Roll with a country twist. Is that a fiddle I can hear in the background? This one’s from Seattle 6^th Oct.

To Be Alone with You

‘Cat’s in the Well’ (Under a Red Sky, 1991) mines the same territory. With its dark message, this is a more typically Dylan song than “To Be Alone with You” but it gets into a very similar groove. ‘Back alley Sally is doing the American jump…’ I’ve always loved that line for some unknown reason. And the deadly casualness of this:

‘The cat's in the well and the servant is at the door.
The drinks are ready and the dogs are going to war.’

This is a great performance to listen to, as Dylan more or less sings his introductions to the band. He’s closing a concert on an exciting note. (Sorry, no date for this one.)

Cat’s in the Well

‘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

Staying with the blues brings us to ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’, the great blues song off Highway 61 Revisited. With its unvarying three chord, twelve bar structure, the blues hasn’t changed in a 100 years. In the 1960s there were rock bands like John Mayall’s blues band. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band made a particular impression on Dylan, who early on had ambitions to be their lead singer. Mamie Smith, the vaudevillian, did the first known blues recording, ‘Crazy Blues’ in 1920. She would be quickly followed by Ma Rainy and Bessie Smith. The line ‘blues all around my head,’ close to the last line of Dylan’s ‘Standing in the Doorway’, can be traced to Leadbelly’s ‘Good Morning Blues’ 1941.

The blues is naturally antique, you don’t have to do anything special to it. Here Dylan does ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh’ as a slow, gutsy urban blues. Note that Dylan changes the traditional lyrical pattern by not repeating the first line. Classic blues only gives us three lines, the first repeated and an extended third line. Dylan turns that into a classic four-liner rock song. An outstanding vocal performance. What a wonderful blues singer the older Dylan makes. He now really is starting to sound like those old travel-hardened, whisky drinking blues journeymen Dylan loves so much. You’ve really got to be sixty or over to sound like you’ve lived the blues. Dylan’s note-bending style works wonders here. He’s got the blood of the land in his voice.

It takes a lot to laugh

‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ is not exactly a twelve bar, three chord song, although it comes very close, the first two lines leading to the climax of the third line, with the fourth following to wrap it up:

‘Now all the authorities, they just stand around and boast
How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms into leaving his post
And picking up Angel, who just arrived from the coast
Who looked so fine at first, but left looking just like a ghost’

Dylan the master rhyme maker is at work here, as the same sound at the end of each line builds to the last line, the cumulative effect of that sound. Despite a little slip with the lyrics, this is a powerful vocal.

Tom Thumb’s Blues

‘St James Infirmary Blues’ was first recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1928, but the origins of the song are obscure. By the 1960s it had become a famous blues song, full of grief and sadness at the death of a love, and had been covered by many singers. It’s not surprising then that Dylan picked up on it and used it as a template for ‘Blind Willy McTell’ in 1983. Recognised as one of Dylan’s lyrically finest songs, it quickly became a favourite after its live debut in 1997. Although I’m sure we all love the quiet, spare, piano and guitar version that was eventually released, I’ve come to appreciate the heavier, electric treatment the song gets during this period. It suits the grandeur of the song. On this one Larry is playing a bouzouki, a long-necked plucked lute from Greece. You can also hear Mr Guitar Man himself deliberately wrenching the sound off key. For the thousandth time I have to ask why he does it. There’s a strategy here, and I wish someone would explain it to me.

Blind Willy McTell

Mr Guitar Man also makes some strange interjections in this performance of ‘Lovesick’, another blues-drenched song from Time out of Mind. It’s as if the song’s key signature, and musical structure, is a sheet upon which Dylan can draw crazy patterns. He can use his hollow sounding Stratocaster to scribble over the song. I’m not sure if it’s just plain bad or twisted genius. I have to leave that over to you.

Lovesick

‘Lovesick’ takes a step away from the twelve bar structure, but its sentiment is pure blues, the blues that expressed the despair and alienation of the black culture out of which it sprang. The blues belongs to prisons, chain gangs, cotton fields and lonely streets at night when the emptiness rings in the heart, and there are nothing but shadows to cling to. ‘Lovesick’ reminds me of the insight that the great blues singers did not sing the blues to make themselves sad, but to get out of their sadness by giving it full expression. That helps explain the paradox of the blues, which is how singing about the sad, dark side of life can be uplifting.

The same applies to ‘Cold Irons Bound’. It takes a step further from the blues template while staying within the spirit of the blues, hard driving, urban blues, the expression of a convict heart, one which is cold irons bound. (24^th August)

Cold Irons Bound

‘If Dogs Run Free’ brings us a different style of retro, bluesy only by implication, more the slinky jazz favoured by the beat poets, and the lyrics themselves are right out of the beat poetry songbook. The song both satirizes and celebrates the era. Dylan’s treatment of the song hasn’t changed since we heard it in 2000. It’s so different from other Dylan songs from the past, yet it sits quite comfortably with the jazz flavoured songs of Love and Theft, like ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Poor Boy’. (25^th Feb) Pity about the hand-clapping.

If Dogs Run Free

Another song reminiscent of the blues without being the blues is ‘Serve
Somebody’. It has a steady tom-tom beat, and a bluesy shift into the minor key. Dylan does his usual trick of slipping in new or revised lyrics, lyrics I suspect him of making up on the spot – ‘sleeping on nails, sleeping in a hollow log’. I think that’s what he’s singing. Can’t catch the preceding lines. It’s time someone compiled a full list of this song’s lyrical variations. They’d fill a book.

Serve Somebody

While the blues, and bluesy rock, can be smooth, gentle and creamy, Dylan likes to play it rough, gutsy, in a garage band style. It’s a hard-scrubbed sound he gets in this tight performance of ‘You Go Your Way’ (Blonde on Blonde, 1966). It sounds more scrappy than it really is. It’s sharp and edgy. The pissed-off impatience inherent in the song comes out in this performance. It’s a fine old finger pointing exercise; a little truth attack as you head out the door.

You go your way

‘You say you're sorry for tellin' stories
That you know I believe are true
You say ya got some other kinda lover
And yes, I believe you do’

‘You Go Your Way’ has a decidedly urban feel, but with ‘Tears of Rage’, we’re back in the country, that heavy, melancholy country sound that The Band perfected in their first solo album Music from Big Pink (1968). It’s in bed with the blues.

The lyrics are difficult, but the song is full of the sense of betrayal, greed and the inevitability of death. Dylan is in good voice, as usual, but for me his performance is spoiled by too much upsinging. It doesn’t suit the song. It becomes distracting. Somehow the downsinging he does so much of in 2001 is more effective. Right from the start he was bending his voice downward at the end of the line. That’s what gave him his early, distinctive wah-wah voice, brought to perfection on Blonde on Blonde. Upsinging feels less natural, more forced. At least for me.

Tears of Rage

That’s it for this post. I’ll be back shortly to finish looking at Dylan’s electric set for 2001. In the meantime, stay safe and stay sane.

Kia Ora

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Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 3 … and cheating husbands

Posted on October 15, 2021 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

III … and cheating husbands

Dylan is quite firm, in the interview he gives to John Cohen and Happy Traum in the summer of 1968, to give the ailing folk music magazine Sing Out! a financial boost: “The song has to be of a certain quality for me to sing and put on a record. One aspect it would have to have is that it didn’t repeat itself. I shy away from those songs which repeat phrases, bars and verses, bridges…” Actually, Dylan says, he wanted to record a whole album of other peoples songs, but “about nine-tenths of all the contemporary material being written” has those damned repeating phrases and bridges, so he went back to writing his own songs. Songs like “The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest” and “All Along The Watchtower”, so we don’t have to be too sad about Dylan’s alleged dislike of choruses and bridges.

Fortunately, the bard is not too principled either. For his most recent album, John Wesley Harding, which is the thread of the conversation, he already plucked “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” from the motel room air of the Ramada Inn in Nashville – a beautiful song which repeats phrases, bars and verses, and a bridge it has as well. It is not a one-off slip-up, not a rule-confirming exception. Six months after his declaration of principle, Dylan wholeheartedly embraces all those artifacts he so resolutely rejected; “To Be Alone With You”, “I Threw It All Away”, “Peggy Day”, “One More Night”, “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”, “Country Pie”… almost every song on Nashville Skyline repeats phrases, bars and verses, and has a bridge too. And in “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” he doesn’t “shy away from” a bridge either:

Is it really any wonder
The love that a stranger might receive
You cast your spell and I went under
I find it so difficult to leave

Textually, a hotchpotch of clichés. Mostly from recent radio hits, it seems. Is it any wonder Dylan has been hearing since he first played Hank Williams’ records (“Kaw-Liga”, for instance), and he hears the words every week on the radio. “So Sad” by The Everly Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald’s “Walking In The Sunshine”, “I’m In The Mood For Love”, “Gentleman Friend”, Cliff Richards’ “I Only Came To Say Goodbye”… the list is endless. Apparently, we find it a nice word combination to sing. Equally chewed out and indestructible are all the word combinations with under your spell. “Don’t Blame Me”, of course, but otherwise everyone from Sinatra to Buck Owens and from “Black Magic Woman” to The Everly Brothers. And especially “I Put A Spell On You”, obviously. And the third pillar under the bridge also is a third grab in the goldie-oldie box: the combination love-stranger is just as stereotypical as any wonder and as under a spell. One of the Four Tops’ greatest hits, for example. “Shake Me, Wake Me (When It’s Over)” still sounds often enough on the radio these days and can be found in any jukebox:

They say "She don't love him, she don't love him"
They say my heart's in danger
'Cause you're leaving me
For the love of a stranger

In terms of content, the middle-eight builds, as befits a classic middle-eight, a bridge to a better understanding. Though it seems to completely elude analysts like Clinton Heylin (who understands a “message of reassurance”), Robert Shelton (“commitment to a love”) and Michael Gray (“a deliberate announcement of the fall from restlessness”) that the first-person narrator is an utterly unstable, emotion-driven rolling stone. The critics seem to be fueled by biographical facts, by their knowledge of Dylan’s recent domestic, rural status as a young, newlywed father who has said goodbye to the frenzy of rock star life. Conveniently, they assume, as annoyingly do many Dylanologists, that the “I” is Dylan himself, and they also don’t appear to look much further than the title to conclude that I, Dylan, is here wording his farewell to the restless feeling. And expresses a moving pledge of allegiance to his dear wife Sara, something like that.

Both Heylin and Shelton and Gray write this in the twenty-first century, when Dylan has been saying, in variants, for nearly fifty years now: je est un autre. The “I” in my songs is not “I, Bob Dylan”. In vain, though.

In the bridge, the lyricist quite unambiguously confirms what has already been suggested in the previous lines: the first-person narrator is not a loving husband bidding farewell to his troubled life, but rather a stranger passing by, following an impulse. He doesn’t belong in this town at all, was already on his way to the station with his suitcase, probably heading home, but falls under the spell of some village beauty. Impulsively, he decides not to return to his troubles, he decides to throw away his train ticket and to stay the night with this irresistible lady. Granted, imperatives like “Throw my ticket out the window” can with a little tolerance be interpreted metaphorically, as poetic expressions of a desire to say goodbye to the hectic life of a restless rock star. But verses like “I should have left this town this morning” and “The love that a stranger might receive” do not fit into such a pliable interpretation – it really would take some surreal acrobatics to interpret them as romantic family man rhetoric. No, these are really the words of a cheating debaucher about to indulge in a one-night stand.

Dylan is in a motel in Nashville, after all. The classic décor of an extramarital escapade. In the town where “all the songs coming out of the studios then were about slut wives cheating on their husbands or vice versa.”

To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 4: The cadence of click-clack

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:

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Bob’s nephews, Luke & Seth Zimmerman. A failure to grasp what’s going on.

Posted on October 14, 2021 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Aaron: Some 2 years I wrote a piece documenting the music of Bob’s two nephews, Luke & Seth Zimmerman.

At the time I didn’t ask for Tony’s opinion on the music, so I thought it would be nice to present some more examples of their music , this time with Tony’s input. As Luke has had a new album out since the last article I thought I’d start with him. I’ll give Tony two tracks from older albums, plus three from his latest to consider.

First up, from his debut solo album, Twilight Waltz, it’s Duluth.

Tony: I’ve long been of the opinion that these days one really needs an opening line with a bit of bunch – or instrumentation with a bit of punch, or something else with a … well you get the idea.

Even something like “Come gather round people” in its day had it. “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” most certainly has it, and “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend” is one of the great all-timers beaten perhaps only by “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”.

Now this song has been playing for a couple of minutes I can’t recall the opening, but it seemed rather ordinary to me. And I am prejudiced because I don’t like the voice at all – too nasal for my taste. So a bit of a rejection from me, although the gentle guitar counter melody that sweeps in from time to time, does do it for me. That’s nice, but otherwise neither the sound nor the lyrics give me anything to write home about (although that would be rather silly since I am sitting at home anyway). (Although I’m going out later).

Aaron: From his third album, Heyday for the Naysayers, I have picked Little Girl.

Tony: Now this album has a great title – I do like “Heyday for the naysayers”. But the instrumental intro doesn’t give me hope, and yet, the voice is quite different. A much better sound, but the rhymes, oh, no… Rhyming “be still” with “window sill”. Argh!

OK I am a failed songwriter in the sense that I never made it in the business, but I’ve written around 150 songs that I have kept, so I know that sensation of looking for a rhyme, and it is all too easy to find a rhyme and slip it in because it rhymes not because it actually adds to the music.

Bob never ever does that – at least I can’t think of an occasion when he does. However the instrumentation here really does rescue this song. The opening “Little girl lay down your head” is nice when one realises he is singing to his daughter – I have three daughters (all married now) and I remember those days. Brings tears to my eyes…

So yes it’s a nice song, easy on the ear… Take the line “you’re the best thing I’ve ever seen” – of course I felt that with all three of my daughters as little ones being tucked up at night in bed, being told bedtime stories etc etc, but the rhyme just doesn’t excite. And it doesn’t really need four and a half minutes to put it all across.

Aaron: His latest album The Man In The Silver Box was released in August 2019. A full length film for the album is available on YouTube. For this article, I’ll just subject Tony to the audio versions!

The title track…

Tony: Oh, that’s a spooky picture. I’d love to have been able to look at the lyrics, and I did a very quick search while the music is playing but couldn’t find them… and can’t make them out myself.

So I am just left with the instrumentation, the melody, and the singing, and none of them really do anything for me. Indeed the wobbly synth sound in the instrumental break is, I think, horrible. There honestly is nothing here that makes me think “I must hear this again”.

Therefore, maybe it is all in the lyrics – but then if that is so perhaps some of them should have been a bit clearer.

I guess it is because I didn’t understand anything of what is going on, I also didn’t understand the repeated two-note chord at the end. Would anyone like to enlighten me – I am sure this is all my failing to understand, nothing else.

Spoon & Cherry

Tony: Trepidation – this track is over five minutes long. Will I survive the jerky introduction? OK I have to, although it goes on and on and … it’s still going. Aaron – would you like to write a review of this song, telling us why you selected it? Or if not Aaron, then is there a reader of Untold who could send in a positive review of this track (or failing that any track reviewed here). Send to Tony@schools.co.uk and mark it Zimmerman Review. Ideally as a word file, but if not, I can still use it.

I am really sorry Aaron, I just don’t get it. What is there here? I can’t make out the lyrics, the instrumentation seems unstructured, there is nothing in the melody or chord changes that makes me sit up. And although the song is not finished, I can’t think of anything else to say.

You Were There, But You Weren’t There

Tony: The last one, which is good, and I think this is the first time I’ve ever thought this in all the songs that we’ve reviewed this way between us. I think this must be a style of music that I have not been introduced to before, and that contains hidden depths and secrets which I have just not understood. I entered the cavern and took a wrong turning is a phrase that seems to encapsulate where I am.

Can someone tell me the generic name for this type of music? That’s not because I’m going to make some silly crack about “I’ll know to avoid it” but rather because I genuinely would like to understand.

Sorry everyone. I just don’t get it. Even the percussion just plods, lines without interest are simply repeated for no purpose… Is this art?

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Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XII)

Posted on October 13, 2021 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan dabbles in biblical burlesque a lot as the unravelling the Dylanvinci Code reveals.

No doubt, everybody’s asking what leads time-travelling and time-stopping adventurer Bob Dylan to Tangier in Morocco, and finally to Memphis in the United Arab Republic of Egypt?

The answer is quite simple. The key to breaking the whole code lies in the following song:

Let me tell you about Ahab the Arab
The shiek of the burning sand
He had emeralds and rubies just dripping off of him
And a ring on every finger of his hand
(Ray Stevens: Ahab The Arab)

A reference to the song above pops up in the lines of the song quoted beneath:

Sheikhs walking around like kings, wearing fancy jewels 
and nose rings
Deciding America's future from Amsterdam, and to Paris
(Bob Dylan: Slow Train Coming)

Burlesquer Dylan, like the Spanish burlesquer – par excellence – in ‘Don Quixote’, drops red herrings to divert literary analysts off the trail.

Little wonder that Dutch Dylanologist Jochen Markhorst, as well as others, contends that certain song lyrics refer to Herman Melville’s whale-of-a-tale “Moby Dick”, and to its Captain Ahab.

But take note, it’s Captain “Arab”, not Captain Ahab, in the song lyrics below:

Well, the last I heard of Arab, he was stuck on a whale
That was married to the deputy sheriff of the jail
(Bob Dylan: 115th Dream)

[Editor’s note – despite the long intro this really is the right video]

According to the Holy Bible, Ishmael’s parented by Abraham and an Egyptian lady – although Abe’s married to Sarah.

God orders Abraham to kill Ishmael. Reprieved, the first-born son ends up living in the Arabian desert with his mother:

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe say, "Man, you must be putting me on"
(Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited)

Decoded, the dream tells us that Ishmael marries a fat woman in the desert, an Egyptain lady who’s been married 115 times before.

Anyway, Dylan’s now off to Egypt in search of the burial site of Mary Magdalene.

As we have observed, according to the Dylavinci Code, Mary Magdalene marries brown-skinned Jesus, a descendant of Isaac, the younger half-brother of Ishmael – Isaac being parented by Abraham and Sarah.

Ahab, who provokes the white whale in “Moby Dick”, gets a mention in the Holy Bible:

And Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger
Than all the kings of Israel that were before him

(1 Kings 16: 33)

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Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 2: Slut wives cheating

Posted on October 12, 2021 by TonyAttwood

Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 2

by Jochen Markhorst

II Slut wives cheating

I should have left this town this morning
But it was more than I could do
Oh, your love comes on so strong
And I’ve waited all day long
For tonight when I’ll be staying here with you

Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017) is an entertaining action film, lovingly spiced up with unobtrusive details like leading colours, lighting, superior camera use, sound effects and especially, less unobtrusively: music. Protagonist Miles ‘Baby’ (Ansel Elgort), a very young, exceptionally gifted getaway driver, suffers from tinnitus and suppresses the whistling beeping almost continuously with music – a not too far-fetched alibi for director Wright to inventively synchronise the overflowing soundtrack’s songs with storyline and action scenes. And for the Dutch viewers, there are two sequences that appeal to perhaps petty, but understandable national pride.

One is the brilliantly edited chase scene in which Baby escapes his assailants on the stop-and-go pattern, the rhythm and even the drum beats of Focus’ 1973 world hit, “Hocus Pocus”.

The other Dutch hurrah moment is Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” (1973), which is considered an alternative Dutch national anthem anyway. And, as with the actual national anthem, no one knows the correct lyrics. Especially the third verse has the most bizarre phonetic abberations, but officially it should be:

The radio's playin' some forgotten song
Brenda Lee's "Coming On Strong"
The road has got me hypnotized
And I'm speedin' into a new sunrise

The final line is reworded as, for instance, spitting into a nude sunrise, but Brenda Lee causes the most problems. Randal Lee, Brandon’s lead, The melody’s, Steadily, Reveille’s, Randy Leeds, Brad and Lee are coming on home… poor Brenda Lee has been overgrown by a thicket of wild onomatopoeic imitations.

Not really blameworthy, to be fair – in the Netherlands, Brenda Lee has nowhere near the status and name that she has in the UK and the US, and “Coming On Strong” is completely unknown. An informed Dutchman knows at most “I’m Sorry” from 1960. But then, Golden Earring’s singer and songwriter Barry Hay has a Scottish father, was born in India and attended an English boarding school in The Hague – Barry is a bit more international than the average Hollander. Plus: the band has just completed their first tour of America in 1969. A forgotten song like “Coming On Strong” might very well have been played on the radio there – perhaps also when Dylan, in his hotel room in Nashville, plucks “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” from the air.

It seems a rather thin line, the line from “Coming On Strong” to Oh, your love comes on so strong. Still, the line becomes already a little thicker when we look not at Brenda Lee, but at the discography of the Queen Of Nashville, at Kitty Wells. It seems that Dylan has her 1967 Love Makes The World Go Around on the turntable these days. The title track is quoted verbatim in “I Threw It All Away”;

Love is all there is, it makes the world go ’round
Love and only love, it can’t be denied

… the song in which in any case echo more songs from the Kitty Wells album (“The Hurtin’s All Over”, “There Goes My Everything”). And the final song of the album is Kitty’s version of “Coming On Strong” – again a lament of the abandoned love partner. “All the songs coming out of the studios then were about slut wives cheating on their husbands or vice versa,” as Dylan says in Chronicles about Nashville (Chapter 3 “New Morning”) – a concept Dylan also succumbs to once, here on Nashville Skyline, in the underrated gem “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”.

Kitty Wells’ ultimate contribution to the cheating slut wife and ditto husband genre is also on Love Makes The World Go Around:

Straighten up your tie and comb your hair 
Look as though you spent your time alone
Wash away her lipstick from your collar
Get your lie the way you want it then come on home

… “Get Your Lie The Way You Want It”, the closing track of Side A. In terms of content and theme, it is the opposite of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, but stylistically it is a copy: just like Dylan’s song, it opens with an accumulation of imperatives, of short commands from the first person to the love partner.

The album’s appeal to Dylan is recognisable. The album cover does not mention names of session musicians, but one Nashville Cat who also excels on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline is not too hard to spot: Pete Drake’s steel guitar dominates half of the songs. In the backing choir we recognise Elvis’ favourite men, The Jordanaires, the unknown duet partner in heartbreaking songs like “The Hurting’s All Over” provides an irresistible Everly Brothers sheen, and tremolo guitar like in “Once” must have taken Dylan back to magical moments from his youth, earth-shattering moments like the first time he heard “Uncloudy Day” by The Staple Singers. The song that shifts a not insignificant part of American rock music history, by the way. John Fogerty honours the monument too, in his autobiography (Fortunate Son, 2015):

“The Staple Singers, “Uncloudy Day.” The sound of that guitar—God, what a cool thing. That vibrato: bewoowowow. Even as a kid I could identify that sound right away. Pops Staples was doing all that. I loved that sound.”

Dylan expresses his admiration somewhat more poetically, of course:

“It was the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard. It was like the fog rolling in. I heard it again, maybe the next night, and its mystery had even deepened. What was that? How do you make that? It just went through me like my body was invisible. What is that? A tremolo guitar? What’s a tremolo guitar? I had no idea, I’d never seen one. And what kind of clapping is that? And that singer is pulling things out of my soul that I never knew were there. After hearing “Uncloudy Day” for the second time, I don’t think I could even sleep that night.”
(AARP The Magazine interview, 2015)

An inconspicuous footnote in Kitty Wells’ rich discography, Love Makes The World Go Around. Filled with forgotten songs. But still coming on strong.

To be continued. Next up: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 3: Cheating husbands

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:

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Beautiful Obscurity – A Smorgasbord of Delights?!

Posted on October 11, 2021 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith (in USA) and Tony Attwood (in UK)

In this series Aaron Galbraith based in the USA picks out interesting cover versions of Bob Dylan’s songs and Tony Attwood in the UK attempts to write a review of the performance while the song is playing, and without looking stuff up.

There is a list of some of our earlier articles in this series here.

Aaron: Hi Tony. I had a bunch of covers that I couldn’t find many other interesting versions of the songs but still wanted to present them to you for your opinions! So I thought I’d put together this smorgasbord of delights to see if any of these are to your taste!

First up it’s Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour with Chimes Of Freedom. He treats the song as an anthem for African’s struggling to survive.

In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine described him as, “perhaps the most famous singer alive” in Senegal and much of Africa.^[3] From April 2012 to September 2013, he was Senegal’s Minister of Tourism.

Tony: I absolutely love this man’s work. And he doesn’t disappoint – ever. The way he treats the rhythm is extraordinary, and he changes the chord sequence, but only from time to time. Plus his sense of orchestration is extraordinary. So many subtle touches. After I have finished writing this I am going back to play this a dozen times over just to get every nuance that he puts within the song.

This is surely the best ever Chimes of Freedom version ever isn’t it? Of course by the rules of this series I have to write the commentary without looking lots of things up, and it is hard to think of other versions while listening to just this one, but this is absolutely a knockout.

Aaron: Next up, from one of my favorite Britpop era bands, Kula Shaker with Ballad Of A Thin Man. This was released as a bonus track on their greatest hits compilation.

Tony: You have the advantage of me Aaron, as I don’t know the band (although that doesn’t mean anything – I don’t know most bands).

The problem for me is that by going in with all guns blazing as they do for the first verse, there feels like there isn’t going to be anywhere else to go. And that is a problem for me because we all know the song so well. And now we’ve heard their full-on approach from verse one.

The same is true with the instrumental break, we know where it is going to go. It is the opposite of the Youssou N’Dour version where he throws in so many unexpected variants I can’t stop listening.

Aaron: Another one exclusive to an artists greatest hits compilation is Its Alright Ma by Terrence Trent D’Arby.

Tony: Now that instrumental intro is a surprise – how are they going to run the lyrics against such a beat? But they do it ok, and it is fun, but something is lost, because in the original slower version there is a wonderful contrast between the first part of the verse and the second part (But don’t fear if you hear…)

It’s fun, but it sounds a little bit of trying too hard to be different. By which I mean that he music doesn’t flow naturally from the lyrics, but rather the aim is to do something that has never been done before. Which is ok but not enough – in my view.

It’s a bit like the three runs at “It’s all right ma” – ok the first time around, but thereafter… I’m not sure. I was rather glad it was only three and a half minutes long.

Aaron: Beck next, who covered Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat on the War Child presents Heroes album (surprisingly great album all around!)

Tony: a shout in the very first half second doesn’t bode well for me, but the notion of doing this as a dead standard 12 bar blues is fun, and actually works for me.

And why is that? Do you know, Aaron, I really am not at all sure. It is just so unexpected I suppose, and the beat is so unusual for this type of song. The instrumental break is a real treat too. The percussionist was having great fun too without simply getting louder and louder. Yep, this is genuinely inventive while at the same time having a real understanding for the original song. Fun ending too.

So far then, this song and Youssou N’Dour are winning hands down.

Lastly for now it’s Buckwheat Zydeco with On A Night Like This. I’ve actually came across a couple of Zydeco covers of Dylan tracks but this one is the best

Tony: Yep, the accordion fits well with this song, and its a bouncy, fun piece in this version. I’m not sure it adds too much to the original but it doesn’t offend either.

Aaron: To keep the fun going here’s a slightly faster paced live version.

Tony: More fun – shame I couldn’t quite make out the sound made by the washboard. What’s the sound engineer doing to earn his cash?

Although it’s a strange extra sound to want to add. It’s fun, it’s bouncy, it’s ok. Yes it’s ok, but it doesn’t keep me from doing the washing up. However I do rather think they were miming…

But thank you for reminding me of Youssou N’Dour. Time to dig out all the other recordings of his work I think.

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Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 7: A Spider’s Life On Mars

Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XVI) and an index to the videos

Why does Dylan like “Easy and Slow”?

Never Ending Tour, 2001, Part 4 – Down Electric Avenue

Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You part 6: A mattress and sand letters

Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XV)

Tom Jones covers “Not Dark Yet” and expands the title – and then goes further

All Directions 69: Is this really going to be the end? 2006-2008

Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 5: Hits of sorts

Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XIV)

Tonight I’ll be Staying Here With You (1969) part 4: The cadence of click-clack

All Directions 68: Paying tribute to everyone – and then some

Beautiful Obscurity: Playing for Change, including one of the greatest covers ever

Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XIII)

Never Ending Tour, 2001, Part 3, In bed with the blues

Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 3 … and cheating husbands

Bob’s nephews, Luke & Seth Zimmerman. A failure to grasp what’s going on.

Bob Dylan And The Dylavinci Code (Part XII)

Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (1969) part 2: Slut wives cheating

Beautiful Obscurity – A Smorgasbord of Delights?!

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