Hecate, in ancient mythology, watches the crossroads at night; she represents the dark side of Diana, the latter being the bright moon-goddess, sister of Apollo, the sun-god.
The following song lyrics warn everyone of the Gothic witch of the night:
Don't go out tonight
Well, it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise
(Creedence Clearwater Revival ~ Fogerty)
Construed it can be that the narrator in the song lyrics beneath considers himself a relative of Hecate; yet more closely related to the flaming-haired Apollo – the sun-god of Mount Olympus who’s associated with music:
Can you help me walk that moonlight mile
Can you give me the blessing of your smile
I'll bring someone to life, use all my powers
Do it in the dark, in the wee, small hours
(Bob Dylan: My Own Version Of You)
In the lyrics below, the narrator’s stuck in a Mobile-like town where people complacently accept being compelled to fight in a war that those from rich families are able to avoid:
Well, if I had a dollar
For every song I sung
Every time the band played
While the people sat there drunk
You know I'd catch the next train
Way back to where I live
Oh Lord, stuck in a Lodi again
(Creedence Clearwater Revival: Lodi ~ Fogerty)
https://youtu.be/yA7iGxV6rt4
The narrator in the song lyrics below ponders the fundamental nature of human beings, the dis-ease, that causes them to resort to war; even powerful Apollo on Mount Olympus didn’t initially want to get involved in the Trojan War, but he does.
And, of course, you don’t count the dead when the gods are on your side:
I wish I had a dollar for everyone that died within that year
Got'em grabbed by the collar, and plenty a maid shed a tear
Now beneath my heart, it sure put on a squeeze
Oh that Legionaire's disease
(Delta/Cross Band: Legionaire's Disease ~ Bob Dylan)
In Greek/Roman mythology, the god of thunder, lightning bolts, and rain is Zeus, the oft angry ruler of the sky, and the father of Apollo:
Long as I remember, the rain been coming down
Clouds of mystery pouring confusion on the ground
Good men through the ages trying to find the sun
And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain
(Creedence Clearwater Revival: Who'll Stop The Rain ~ Fogerty)
Alluding to a nursery rhyme:
Oh, don't let the rain come down
My roof's got a hole in it, and I might drown
(Crooked Little Man)
And to a romantic-inclined ‘seize-the-day’ poet:
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay
(Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night)
In the following song lyrics, surrealistic images built from the matchsticks of words correlate with the shortness of life:
The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
In the ceremonies of the horsemen
Even the pawn must hold a grudge
(Bob Dylan: Love Minus Zero)
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with around 14,000 members.
by Aaron Galbraith in the USA and Tony Attwood in the UK
A list of earlier articles from this series is given at the end.
Aaron: I thought it would be fun to have Tony take a listen to some obscure, esoteric Dylan duets from over the years. I’m really looking forward to reading his opinions!
First up it’s a cover of Eric Von Schmidt’s Acne. This was recorded live with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in 1961. The audio was released on the soundtrack to the movie “The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack”
Tony:Even the beginning is wonderful – “Looks like we have another dramatic…” [long pause then softly] “entrance”. What a shame we don’t have a film of this.
I don’t know what the silliest part of this is; the recording or Aaron asking me to review it! For once I am lost for words!! Except right at the end there is a lovely moment where one of the people on stage says “All good things….” and leaves it hanging. Which is actually very funny in the context of what has just happened. But then another speaker says “comes to an end” which totally destroys the moment. Hey ho!
Aaron: Next up we have two completely unreleased tracks.
First a duet with Ringo Starr called “Wish I Knew Now What I Knew Then”. This was recorded for an unreleased Ringo album in 1987, there is no word as to who the writer is.
Tony:A bit of background I just looked up. Our friends at the Bob Dylan Project have this listed as “Composed by:Charlie Craig, Vince Gill (?)” Charlie Craig wrote for such luminaries as Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Alan Jackson, Travis Tritt, Johnny Cash, Aaron Tippin and George Strait. Vince Gill, according to Wiki “has recorded more than 20 studio albums, charted over 40 singles on the U.S. Billboard charts as Hot Country Songs, and has sold more than 26 million albums.”
The one thing that hits me is the unusual musical construction at “what I knew then” which is known in classical music as an interrupted cadence. What actually happens is that one expects to return to the major chord that the song is based around, known as the tonic, and written with the Roman numeral I, but instead we get the chord built on the sixth note of the scale, which is a minor. So the music is never resolved – we are left hanging.
The song is performed in E flat so those final two chords are B flat major and C minor. It is not that uncommon a cadence in the music of the classical romantic era but in rock – I can’t remember ever hearing it before, and it doesn’t quite sound right.
Listening and knowing that the album was not released despite having such luminaries on it, I think I can feel why. With such luminaries, it ought to sparkle a bit more than it does.
Aaron:Next we have The Spirit Of Rock and Roll. An unreleased duet with Brian Wilson, recorded for his unreleased album Sweet Insanity. It also has some input from Jeff Lynne. A version without Dylan and Lynne was released on a Beach Boys compilation “Songs From Here and Back”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WE8vPvIoyJo
Tony:I am not sure about having Bob Dylan associated with a song that has the line “every boy and girl” in it, nor come to that “the spirit the spirit the spirit of rock and roll”.
There is also an attempt, it seems to me, to be the Beachboys but without the material. Indeed the reason there is so much backing with bass singer, female chorus and all the instruments pounding out is probably because there is nothing much there in the first place and they are trying to cover it all up.
And sadly the lyrics don’t really help either….
Once it's in your blood
You won't be the same no more
Reaching every land
From L.A. to Tokyo
It's in the heart of every boy and girl
Everywhere all around the world
Aaron: Last up, for now, is a duet with Ralph Stanley of The Lonesome River. Originally released on Stanley’s “Clinch Mountain County” album it was eventually included on Bob’s Bootleg Series 8: Tell Tale Signs.
Tony:Just listen to that instrumental opening. It is only about 20 seconds but it is perfection in terms of musicianship and setting the scene. And all done in 20 seconds. Really, I mean, just go back and listen again. And then compare with the songs we have heard prior to this. This really is great music and brilliant musicians.
Bob’s voice is slightly cracked and aged as becomes the song. And then the harmonies in the chorus are perfect; in short a dead-simple song but it is performed to perfection. The accompaniment is held in check, with all the players understanding the essence of the song, and no one trying to out do the other. The fiddle comes in, during the instrumental break, but not at once. It is all so underplayed, with everyone understanding the meaning of the lyrics and the tradition of the music.
This is what I search for in the archives – the lesser known Dylan tracks where his amazing historical knowledge and understanding shines through an exquisite performance.
Wonderful Aaron. All previous sins are forgiven when you deliver a recording like this.
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with around 14,000 members.
In 2004, Simon & Schuster publishes Dylan’s third official song lyrics collection, Lyrics: 1962-2001. The previous edition ran until 1985, so this is the first with the lyrics of Time Out Of Mind, and thus also the first with the lyrics of “Dirt Road Blues”.
Textual discrepancies in Lyrics are not uncommon. Words, half-sentences and, in extremis, even whole stanzas are different from what Dylan actually sings – which has been the case since the very first official release, since Writings & Drawings from 1973. In general hardly understandable, these changes, and puzzling in any case. We don’t know if Dylan personally makes the changes, for example. Sometimes text differences seem to be due to careless transcriptions by a dyslexic secretary with hearing problems (Ol’ black Bascom, don’t break no mirrors as the opening line of “Tell Me, Momma” is famous), sometimes one suspects a teasing Dylan wants to play a prank (I’ll build a geodesic dome in the transcription of “Santa Fe”), and sometimes it looks as if an embarrassed lyricist tries to cover up his own lousy poetry (“You Angel You”).
None of the three options seem to apply to the rewritten last verse of “Dirt Road Blues”. On Time Out Of Mind, Dylan sings, perfectly intelligible:
Gonna walk down that dirt road 'til everything becomes the same
Gonna walk down that dirt road 'til everything becomes the same
I keep on walking 'til I hear her holler out my name
Completely different from the lyrics published in Lyrics 1962-2001, in Lyrics 1961-2012 and on the site:
Gon’ walk on down that dirt road ’til I’m right beside the sun
Gon’ walk on down until I’m right beside the sun
I’m gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone
Dylan will never perform the song, so we can’t trace which one is meant to be the “actual” text. Normally, it would be plausible that the published text is the “definitive” one. Lyrics 1962-2001 was released in 2004, seven years after Time Out Of Mind. It seems obvious that Dylan, in the meantime, went through the proofs with his red pencil, and made some changes here and there.
Against that scenario speaks the tip of the iceberg that producer Daniel Lanois offers, in a telephone interview with The Irish Times, 24 October 1997 (so three weeks after the release of Time Out Of Mind):
“In fact, when we first got together, he didn’t play me any songs; he read me the songs. He read 12 lyrics back-to-back for an hour and it was like listening to someone reading a book. Then, later, in the studio, he modified the lyrics.”
… which suggests that Dylan gave these very same written-out lyrics to Simon & Schuster, but forgot, or didn’t bother, to incorporate the modifications that Lanois says he made later in the studio into the written-out lyrics. In that – somewhat more likely – case the published text in Lyrics and on the site is the older text, the original text.
Debatable though it remains. Both in terms of content and stylistically, the “wrong”, the published final couplet fits better with the rest of the song and with the overall colour of Time Out Of Mind at all;
Gon’ walk on down until I’m right beside the sun
I’m gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone
… escapism pur sang. The whole of Time Out Of Mind is permeated with Dark Romanticism as it is; desire, Wanderlust, night, Evil, approaching death, decay, despair and melancholy – all the nineteenth century themes of Dark Romanticism can be found in every song. And the closing couplet is a textbook example of the romantic longing for an unattainable ideal: right beside the sun is, after all, just as unattainable as, say, “the horizon” or “the next mountain”. A classic theme, but still an original way of putting it – “right beside the sun” does sound rather archaic, but is in fact an unknown image. Vaguely, we hear an echo of Kris Kristofferson’s immortal classic “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (I stopped beside the Sunday school), but actually, it is an exclusively scientific word combination; to indicate the position of planets, for example, or to describe phenomena such as sun dogs.
We never hear the image in the art of song. Yes, across the border, though still hardly ever. With Francis Cabrel, the man who, with even more rights than Hugues Aufray, can be considered the French Bob Dylan. On his breakthrough album Les Chemins de traverse from 1979, the album with the hit “Je l’aime à mourir” and with the horrible cover, we find halfway through Side 2 the heartbreaking “C’était l’hiver”, a Chronicle of a Suicide Foretold, with the final couplet:
Elle a sûrement rejoint le ciel
Elle brille à côté du soleil
Comme les nouvelles églises
Mais si depuis ce soir-là je pleure
C'est qu'il fait froid dans le fond de mon cœur
(She has surely joined the sky
She shines beside the sun
Like the new churches
But ever since that night I’ve been crying
For it's cold in the depths of my heart)
… so with a connotation completely different from Dylan’s “beside the sun”.
Just as Dark Romantic is the closing line. With, after that lookin’ at my shadow from the previous verse, a second hint at the dark-romantic doppelganger motif; the narrator doesn’t just want to keep away from everyone, no, he has to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone. As if there were a second I, which the first I must keep under control. Fitting with the earlier insinuations (run away and hide, praying for salvation, chains) that a second I has just committed an atrocity. An atrocity that leads the first I to close the barrier, flee to unreachable distances and hide beside the sun.
Again, a chilling image, and again quite original. But not entirely original; four years earlier, on their successful debut album August And Everything After, the Dylan disciples Counting Crows already sang in “Perfect Blue Buildings”:
Gonna get me a little oblivion
Try to keep myself away from me
… but without the sinister connotations that linger under the skin of Dylan’s song; singer Adam Duritz seems to be singing about the practical benefits of a drug or alcohol high. From the record with their breakthrough hit “Mr. Jones”, the supposed ode to “Ballad Of A Thin Man” – and the predecessor of their catchy Dylan cover that concisely brings to the point the actual destiny of the fleeing “Dirt Road Blues” protagonist:
To be continued. Next up: Dirt Road Blues part 9
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
This is the 25th album of Bob Dylan’s for which the art work has been reviewed. Details of the previous articles can be found here.
41 – Triplicate
Released March 31, 2017
Photographer John Shearer
Liner Notes Tom Piazza
Art-director Geoff Gans
Following Shadows In The Night and Fallen Angels, Bob Dylan released a third selection from the Great American Songbook. Again all these song were previously recorded by Frank Sinatra, between 1939 and 1964.
Although these 30 songs could easily fit on two vinyl albums, Dylan chose to present them as a three-disc set, each individually titled and presented in a thematically-arranged 10-song sequence. Perhaps it’s his homage to the inventor of the concept album?
At first glance, the art-work for Triplicate appears to be very minimalist, especially for a triple album. On the front, only the album’s title is featured, printed in white lettering against a glossy, deep purple background. On the back there’s the name of the singer above three vertical rectangles. In each of these, the title of the individual LPs is printed above a list of the song titles (No writers/composer’s credits).
Underneath these rectangles there’s just one more piece of information: “Produced by Jack Frost”.
That’s it.
The title, Triplicate, can be seen as another reference to Sinatra, who’s 1980 Reprise 3LP set is called Trilogy: Past Present Future. Dylanologist Andreas Volkert however has discovered that in 1876 a set of playing cards was manufactured by Andrew Dougherty called Triplicate. A replica of this set was reissued in 2014. This may seem far-fetched, but another set by the same manufacturer, Chinese Dragon Back No. 81, is depicted on the cover of Fallen Angels.
The font on the cover is Goudy Text, which was designed in 1928 by Frederic W. Goudy, based on Gutenberg’s 42-line bible. That same typeface was used on Testify! The Gospel Box, a 3 cd-box, released by Rhino Records, in June 1999. (Remember that Geoff Gans, who did the artwork for Triplicate is an ex-Rhino art director.) That box set design was presented as a kind of prayer book.
However Dylan (or Gans) adds another layer.
In the Roaring Twenties of last century, the 78 rpm shellac disc became the recording standard for the music industry. The time limit of 3 1⁄2 minutes on a 10-inch was enough for most popular songs. But even 12-inch 78s could only give about 4–5 minutes per side, which was not nearly enough for classical-music.
In the 1930s, record companies began issuing collections of 78 rpm records in specially assembled packages, which included three or four records, with two sides each, making six or eight times 3½ minutes for a longer work. The individual records were housed in paper sleeves, with a paperboard or leather cover on the front and the back. The covers of these bound books were wider and taller than the records inside, allowing the record album to be placed on a shelf upright, like a book, suspending the fragile records above the shelf and protecting them. Some artwork was provided on the front cover and liner notes on the back or inside cover.
As this design resembled that of photo albums, the were called “Record albums”, or simply albums. Later on, when the 33 rpm 12 inch Long Player was introduced, the name “album” stuck in the US, while in Great Britten the name Long Player or LP was preferred.
The artwork of Dylan’s triplicate not only refers to the prayer book, but also to the way records were released before the LP. Frank Sinatra’s first studio album was released by Columbia Records, on March 4, 1946 as an album with four shellac 10-inches.
As Dylan said in his New York Times interview to promote Time Out Of Mind (September 29, 1997): “These old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book … All my beliefs come out of these old songs, literally anything from ‘Let Me Rest on that Peaceful Mountain’ to ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’.”
Back to Triplicate.
Opening the front cover, there’s a full page black and white portrait of the singer. This photo hides a long essay by novelist Tom Piazza. It’s the first time liner notes have appeared in a Dylan studio album since Dylan’s self-penned notes for World Gone Wrong in 1993.
The text is illustrated with a second photo – this time in colour, of Dylan standing in front of a red convertible with a pretty girl inside the car. In the background are palm trees.
The girl is most likely Tracy Phillips, actress, dancer, and choreographer. She’s the daughter of football coach Wade Phillips. Tracy also appears in the “The Night We Called It A Day” video, where she is wearing a blonde wig. Another photo from the same series was used on the back of the “Beaten Path” catalogue (2016). Both the Triplicate photos as the one in the catalogue were made by John Shearer.
In the Wikipedia page for Triplicate the photographer is referred to another John Shearer (April 21, 1947 – June 22, 2019). While the deceased photographer, writer, and filmmaker is best known for his photojournalism, especially of “racial subjects”, the actual Triplicate photographer is still alive. The real Shearer is living in Nashville and is specialized in entertainment portraiture, backstage coverage, and live-music photography. On his Instagram and also on his website, there is a post with Bob Dylan leaning against what looks to be the same car.
Shearer was first associated with Bob Dylan for the cover of Tempest (2012) and since was called upon when some publicity photos were needed for whiskey, ironworks, catalogue for paintings , or indeed album artwork.
PS: The Goudy Text typeface is used for the artwork of the digital single ‘Murder Most Foul’.
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Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
In 2003 we find some of the most exciting rock music Dylan ever made. That music is the result of the three-way marriage between Dylan’s voice, never more expressive, his piano and harmonica. Putting these three elements together is like letting a genie out of a bottle, or the mixing of three potent elements into the alchemical vessel of the music to, from the heat of performance, produce pure gold.
In Part 3 of my Master Harpist series I covered five songs from 2003, ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ ‘Senor,’ ‘Drifter’s Escape’ and ‘Desolation Row.’ I included the Berlin performance of ‘Desolation Row’ in my previous post, as well as ‘Floater’ and ‘It Takes A Lot to Laugh,’ but these were only the tip of the iceberg. I want to use this post to dig deeper into that territory and to get a feel for how that alchemical process worked and the results that emerged.
In the last post I noted the celebratory vigour of the 2003 performances, the openness and looseness of the arrangements, the jazzy bass lines and the beguiling roughness of Dylan’s voice. Add to that some whimsical blasts on the harp, with openings in the music for the rhythms beneath to show, and you have a description of ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.’ A delightfully irreverent, irrelevant, bouncy, happy-go-lucky song. This one’s from the Hammersmith concert.
You ain’t goin’ nowhere
Keeping with the happy mood, let’s go to Sydney (17th Feb) and catch ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.’ In my previous post I said that the Australasian leg of the tour was not well received in comparison to later concerts, but there were still some fine performances. It’s a wonderful jaunty performance from Dylan.
I was going to leave this one out however because, towards the end, just as we are enjoying a jazzy harp break from the master, we suddenly hear a voice in our right ears asking us for our tickets. The down-under security boys are on the job, and either the bootleggers themselves or someone very close to them are instructed to return to their seats. On balance, however, I decided to retain the track, not just because of the quality of Dylan’s performance, but because the interruption captures the spirit of these audience recordings, reminding us of what a chancy business these informal, unofficial recordings are.
I’ll be your baby
Dylan’s New Zealand concerts are also not without interest. This spirited ‘Lay Lady Lay’ from Wellington (24th Feb) is worthy of inclusion. Despite not being as vigorous and hard-driving as later performances, it captures the balance between instructing and imploring needed to make the song work. Is he ordering her to lay across his ‘big brass bed’ or pleading, is the tone seductive or desperate? – it’s all in the performance. The album version is certainly seductive, and would have us throw our panties overboard no questions asked, but later performances have moved from entreating to beseeching. As Dylan’s voice gets rougher and older, the outcome of this petitioning has become less certain. Does he get her onto his bed or not is the burning question, and the song may work best when the outcome remains in doubt, hanging in the balance.
Lay Lady Lay
‘Love Minus Zero,’ is a celebration of the great mystery of love; the intensity of the poetry transcends the subject matter but keeps all the feeling. The album performance worked because of the contrast between the sophistication and beautiful obscurity of the lyrics with the brevity and simplicity of the ballad form – it takes under three minutes (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965). Later performances tend to take advantage of the exquisite melody line to create a slower, richer, more sumptuous effect. We have a beautiful example of that from the 1994 MTV Unplugged concert. By 2003, Dylan is still working in that vein, but here he adds Larry Campbell’s steel guitar to create the feeling of a sentimental country song. Despite the surreal verses, this remains a love song, lit by melancholy.
The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.
That melancholy is underpinned by Dylan’s quiet piano riff, nicely syncopated towards the end of the song, and given a lonely edge by the frail yet insistent harp break. (21st Nov, Birmingham).
Love Minus Zero
We have seen some epic and spectacular performances of ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ and this one from 15th October can join the ranks of those great performances. The song is a world-weary offer of companionship and understanding in the face of the demands of the world and ‘all this repetition.’ It makes most sense when seen as an address to another artist, another musician (as usual, Joan Baez is suggested as the most probable recipient of these sentiments) – ‘When you’re tired of yourself and all of your creations…’
The harp break sounds under-recorded to me, but maybe that far off, distant wailing is what Dylan is after here. It adds to the forlorn effect of the song.
Queen Jane Approximately
I’ve introduced Dylan’s gentlest and most piercing love song, ‘Girl from the North Country’ many times now, as it is a song that Dylan hasn’t let drop. No wonder. It’s a marvellous tribute to a past love, with just enough regret to drive it forward. This 2003 arrangement, however, is completely new. There is a baroque feel to the piano riff that gives this performance its structure and rhythm. Unexpectedly, it works with this slow and steady beat. Dylan’s voice veers between a croon and a whisper, and, as he does more often in 2003, he uses the harp to introduce the song. In this case, however, he picks the harp up again towards the end.
With Dylan playing electric piano on all the songs, the old division between his acoustic and electric sounds is further blurred. We can still have an acoustic guitar backing, but with Larry on steel guitar and Dylan on piano, the difference is far from evident. ‘Girl from the North Country’ is the perfect acoustic folk song, but this performance is more acoustic in spirit than in actuality. (Hammersmith)
Girl from the North Country
‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ is certainly electric, but in this case gently so. We have heard much harsher versions than this. The 1966 electric versions are seriously kick-arse, but so is this, although there is a lyrical effect here thanks to Freddie Koella’s gentle guitar sounds. It’s George Recile’s drumming that is the secret of this performance’s success. It’s that foot-tapping rhythm as much as Dylan’s emphatic vocals that makes this my favourite version of the song. And the wailing harp, again a little in the background, gives the performance that nerve-racking edge the song needs. The piano is where Dylan likes it to be, vamping away in the background supporting the rhythm, pushing it along. (3rd Nov)
Tom Thumb’s Blues
‘To Ramona’ can sound a little like a prequel to ‘Queen Jane Approximately.’ In ‘Queen Jane,’ Dylan sings
Now, when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you
And the smell of their roses does not remain
whereas in ‘To Ramona,’ he sings
For the flowers of the city
Though breathlike, get deathlike sometimes
A comparison of the two songs shows a fascinating evolution of mood from the accusations and admonitions of ‘Ramona’ to the empathy and rapport of ‘Queen Jane’.
Vocally, Dylan makes a meal out of this one, pulling his voice downward into a cynical snarl or rising triumphantly. It’s not so much a love song as a mockery of a love song. Those Mexican sounding guitars should be serenading a waltzing bridal couple, not this rather nasty-edged good-bye, but the sharpness of the opening harp break gives fair warning of what is to come.
To Ramona
We pop back to Sydney to catch ‘Just Like A Woman.’ This is one song from Blonde on Blonde that Dylan has been able to transform in later performances. Sheered of the sneering tone of the album, which hid the hurt, that hurt, and the vulnerability to hurt, can now show. The eloquence of the opening harp solo takes us directly to the emotional complexity of the song. With the vocal, Dylan tends to break up the lines as if each word or phrase was its own line. It breaks up the continuity of the lines and emphasizes the importance of each word or phrase. This is how he sings this verse:
Queen Mary
she's my friend
Yes, I believe
I'll go see her again
Nobody
has to guess
that baby
can't be blessed
'Til she sees
finally
that she's just like all the rest
With her fog
with her amphetamine
and her pearls
This is a much less smooth and confident voice than that of the album. Add to that a quietly understated piano and we have a compelling performance.
Just like a woman
For me, any subsequent performances of ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ invite invidious comparisons to the 1995 Prague performance, one of the greatest moments of the NET. However well he builds this one up, and he does so quite nicely, I can’t help but miss those soaring tones. This one’s from the Birmingham concert.
It’s all over now baby blue
The end of the world haunts ‘Shooting Star’ from Oh Mercy. It works as a love song, but also as a valediction, a goodbye to the world. The shooting star is the star of earthly love, but it also represents the last chance for salvation. People used to see shooting stars as portents; Dylan does that here. A wonderfully intense performance.
Shooting Star.
I’m going to finish this post with a quick intro to three more songs, those already covered in Master Harpist 3. I would encourage you to go to that post to pick up my comments on each of these songs.
This ‘Drifter’s Escape,’ from Hammersmith is the last in a long line of best ever performances. Urgent and gutsy.
Drifter’s escape.
We have this ‘Senor,’ perhaps the most desperate performance of this dark and desperate song, ending with a primal scream from the harmonica. The crowd goes crazy. An overwhelming, ecstatic performance.
Senor
Last but not least, ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ the most ecstatic of all best ever performances, driven by an urgent, rumbling piano and jubilant harp. This is Bob Dylan at his very best, powerful and celebratory, voice rich and suggestive. One of the finest moments of the NET, and a high note on which to complete this post.
Tangled Up in Blue
Kia Ora
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Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with some 14,000 members.
This is one of those moments where there is a cover version I have raved over so much on this site that I suspect most of the series’ dozen or so readers will know exactly where I am going. Or maybe I am being pompous imagining I have a dozen readers and any of them are going to remember something I wrote over a year ago. Possibly yes I am, so I’ll go with it anyway.
The problem is that many of the cover artists either go after the Sinead O’Connor version and don’t quite get there, or the Dylan version and don’t quite get it.
Is there another way of doing the song? There must be, but I seem to have probably missed it.
Ava Wyne gives us an unexpected bounce and some fun orchestration which sounds a trifle forced, but nevertheless makes for good entertainment.
Cat Power don’t want none of that delicacy nonsense, and by taking away the chord sequence that becomes a lot easier, so it is a refreshing listen. The use of minor chords totally changes the impact and the arrangement is kept suitably restrained. Yes there is another way of doing the song, and this is it.
And there are surprises all the way through as those chord and melodic changes constantly take us not quite where we expect. Not sure about the fade out end, but it is a good piece.
Judy Collins takes it straight of course, but she has such a wonderful magical voice that the vocal harmonies work to perfection. Now this one I could listen to; not as much as that which is to come in a moment, but yes, I could listen again.
There are two points: what do you do with the instrumental break and what do you do with the “oh when the dawn is breaking section”? Solve those two conundrums and you have a superb piece of music.
Judy Collins has a magical way of holding the beat back just a tiny fraction – maybe one-sixteenth of beat. It is extraordinary. Although maybe I am just hearing it that way. But her overdub of the harmonies with her own voice while the lead guitar soars away is sensational and yes, listening again I am sure she is that fraction of a beat behind, and it adds so much.
(Incidentally, as I type this a spam message has appeared telling me my G mail settings are out of date. As if I minded while being the closest I will ever get to heaven).
Anyway, there is no point in going on because we do have perfection, and because we have all that the lady who gave us perfection did to fight back against the horrors and outrages of the Magdalen Laundries. And yes I am once more giving sway to my own strongly held opinions on corruption here. But then, I would argue I don’t do it very often, and if you’ve read any of my stuff here already, and know the history of this song, you must have expected it.
As an atheist, I am asking for this to be played at my funeral dedicated to my friends who can make it there, and of course to my daughters and my grandchildren.
In his lyrics, singer/songwriter/musician oft expresses the trials and tribulations that a performer faces.
Once a work is waxed in the black plastic of a vinyl record (though more likely burned on a CD in these modern times), it’s fixed in concrete, so to speak.
Any message located therein, though open somewhat to interpretation, is canonized once set down permanently.
The artist gets labelled by listeners and by music critics as a folksinger, a bluesman, an electric rocknroller, a gospeller, whatever.
Allegorically speaking, it’s really just the sound that matters – the gliding arm of the record player considered figuratively broken should the artist change his style to the chagrin of any particular group of followers.
The second king in the humorous allegory below, with his broken arm, might well be considered a portrait of the “Sound School” of Dylanology (the “Autobiographical School” is another breed altogether) that considers lyrics to be secondary to any recorded production:
The first had a broken nose, the second, a broken arm,
the third was broke ....
(Bob Dylan: John Wesley Harding ~ liner notes)
In the following song lyrics, the shiny Edenic ‘spirit’ of a live performance is considered diminished somewhat when entrapped in a vinyl recording:
With his candle lit into the sun, though it's glow
is waxed in black
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Eden)
Frankly, according to the lyrics beneath, renewed inspiration is the key that’s needed to keep the record’s needle from getting stuck:
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye, good luck
I can't play the record 'cause my needle got stuck
(Bob Dylan: Goodbye Jimmy Reed)
The artist is likened in the song lyrics below to a western cowboy who’s forced to balance himself in the saddle of the black plastic horse provided to him by recording marketeers:
Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war
Don't hug me, don't flatter me, don't turn on the charm
I'll take a sword, and hack off your arm
(Bob Dylan: Black Rider)
The following satirical song lyrics warn artists that they are at risk of having the recording industry pour them into a single mould:
Neither one gonna turn and run
They're making a voyage to the sun
"His Master's Voice is calling me"
Says Tweedle-Dum to Tweedle-Dee
(Bob Dylan: Tweedle-Dee And Tweedle-Dum)
I been lookin’ at my shadow, I been watching the colors up above
Lookin’ at my shadow, watching the colors up above
Rolling through the rain and hail, looking for the sunny side of love
It is a meteorological interlude, all in all, this fourth verse. Sun, rainbow, rain and hail… probably all dug up from the archives by a lazy lyricist to arrive at the somewhat stale metaphor the sunny side of love.
It is not very likely, but still appealing to suppose that Dylan wanted to give Katie Webster an insider’s wink with it, at her 1961 single “Close To My Heart b/w Sunny Side Of Love”. When Dylan writes his song in 1997, Katie Webster is already a grand old dame, the Swamp Boogie Queen Of Louisiana. Dylan will certainly be impressed by the fact that Katie was Otis Redding’s pianist, ever since a young Otis happened to see her perform in 1964, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Reportedly, Otis was instantly hooked and demanded that she join his touring band immediately. In the 1980s, Mrs. Webster herself tells the story to radio host Louis X. Erlanger in New York, broadcast by After Hours:
“Otis came out of his dressing room in his underwear. In this club, with all these people. “Stop that woman! Don’t let her get off the stage! I gotta talk to her tonight!” So when I finished my song and did my encores and everything, I went back to the dressing room to talk to Otis, and he said, I’ve never in my life seen a woman work like that. He said, I have to have you as a part of my group. Can you go on the road with me and my band? I said, sure, I’d love to. He said, would you be ready to leave tonight? I said, no I couldn’t leave tonight. But I could be ready for you very early in the morning.”
So yes indeed, that is Katie Webster, on the brilliant Live At The Whiskey A-Go-Go, the gig Dylan also attends, April 1966, and at which he offers Otis “Just Like A Woman”, in the dressing room afterwards. Maybe Katie was there too.
December 1967 Katie is heavily pregnant. She has to cancel the next Otis tour. And thus, on that fateful Sunday 10 December, she does not board Redding’s Beechcraft H18 airplane to Madison, Wisconsin.
Otis’ death hits Katie like a brick. She retreats from the spotlight for years, only to make a glorious comeback – especially in Europe – in the 1980s. The records she makes in those years are all wonderful (Dylan probably listened open-jawed to her goose-bumps inducing “Never Let Me Go”), but the walking music encyclopaedia Dylan undoubtedly has a soft spot for the obscure singles she released in the early 60s. Like the swinging “Close To My Heart b/w Sunny Side Of Love”, which is released on Action Records in August ’61. Both songs quite obviously show that Katie is the touring pianist for Ivory Joe Hunter at the time (“Since I Met You Baby”), but she still manages to put her own stamp on the sound. According to Bonnie Raitt, who assists Katie on her 1988 album The Swamp Boogie Queen, she even has “the voice of the century”.
It’s a nice scenario, the one where Dylan waves at a grand old dame two years before she dies. But a bit too romantic, probably. The Carter Family is much deeper under Dylan’s skin, as is keep on the sunny side of life, the chorus line of their signature song “Keep On The Sunny Side”, the song title that is inscribed in gold on A. P. Carter’s pink marble tombstone at the country churchyard in Maces Spring, Virginia.
Dylan has always been quite outspoken about his love for The Carter Family. In Chronicles, he mentions them a few times; in interviews when the journalist asks him about his favourites and influences (“Odetta, The Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, The Carter Family. Guthrie only came along afterwards”, for example); he considers them a point of reference (“There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman”, Jerry Garcia’s Obituary, 1995); in all phases of his career he plays their songs, and in the twenty-first century that doesn’t change. He becomes even more explicit. “My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form,” he says in the Robert Hilburn interview in 2003.
As a radio DJ (Theme Time Radio Hour, 2006-2008), he plays The Carter Family records four times, usually introduced with words of respect and admiration. He plays “Keep On The Sunny Side” from 1928 in his very first broadcast (Episode 1, Weather), and the next Carter Family record is in Episode 11, Flowers. When the DJ plays the monument “Wildwood Flower,” he goes into great detail about the group and the song. As an introduction, he calls them “the most influential group in country music history” and praises A.P. Carter’s approach, “enhancing the pure beauty of these facts-of-life tunes”. After the last notes have sounded, Dylan goes on:
“That was The Carter Family with “Wildwood Flower”. The song was originally a written song from 1860 called “I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets”. These songs were passed around, from person to person, over a long period. By the time the tune got to The Carter Family, many people claimed to have written it. And like a game of telephone, some of the words stopped making sense altogether:
I will twine and will mingle my raven black hair
With the roses so red and the lilies so fair
The myrtle so green of an emerald hue
The pale emanita and the violets so blue
These lyrics are difficult to interpret. There is no flower named “emanita”. Some hear it as the pale and the leader. Somehow, amidst the confusion, the song still makes sense.”
… with which the DJ seems to allow himself a little dig at Johnny Cash. Who indeed does sing zappaesk nonsense, with almost frightening, very convincing solemnity:
O, I’ll twine with my mingles and waving black hair
With the roses so red and the lilies so fair
And the myrtles so bright with the emerald dew
The pale and the leader and eyes look like blue
From the same LP that also contains three Dylan covers (“It Ain’t Me Babe”, “Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright” and “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind”), Orange Blossom Special (1965), which a proud Dylan must have heard more than once.
Anyway, in passing the DJ Dylan reveals how much value the songwriter Dylan attaches to semantics. A protagonist who walks in the sun, under a rainbow, rolls through the hail and rain, looking for the sunny side of love… somehow, amidst the confusion, the song still makes sense.
To be continued. Next up: Dirt Road Blues part 8
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Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
One of the few Dylan songs that I re-arranged myself for the band I was in at the time was “I am a lonesome hobo” and I recall adding a descending bass which across the first line of the song would move down from D almost totally chromatically until reaching G at “friends”.
So I was wondering if anyone who actually turned a cover version into a recording had followed that route… but no. This either suggests my idea was rubbish and explains why I became a writer not a musician, or it suggests that even after all these cover versions have been made, there are still other options available for any upcoming band that wants to go further.
Anyway, you’ll recall perhaps that the original version of “hobo” stays resolutely on one chord for the first three lines with the bass playing the same note over and over through the first 12 bars, and only then giving us variation.
And indeed, trying to give a variation to that remorseless one chord approach is the main issue here and that’s what I have been listening to, to see if anyone did find a good solution.
The Duke Robillard Band clearly recognise the meaning of the words: the desperation of loneliness, failure and nothingness. And so the musical background gives us a soundtrack to an awful life, which Bob doesn’t do at all, as he prefers to leave the lyrics to do it all.
The trouble with this approach for me is that after a moment or three I’ve got the idea, and with this much desperation there really isn’t anywhere else to go.
So moving on to Thea Gilmore, you might just recall that I have in the past raved over some of her arrangements on her complete JWH cover album.
She too sticks to the single chord approach, but the introduction of the banjo, and the stretching of certain words in the lyrics challenges the rhythm in a very interesting way.
And the approach keeps up the interest throughout. Indeed, the way she takes it all down with the “Kind ladies” verse reignites the feeling, and there is just a faint change of melody near the end to give a feeling that the little track was worth listening to. Of course she found herself able to do so much more with The Drifters’ Escape on this album, but I still find this version enjoyable enough.
Now the likes of Steve Gibbons and Dave Pegg know infinitely more about performing Dylan than I ever could in a dozen lifetimes, but I am sorry to say I just don’t feel inspired here, even by the instrumental break.
And so I go searching further afield, and yes the Triffids do take me further on the journey that I have been following as I seek the perfect version of the song. Here it is the percussion that leads the way with the unexpected emphasis. Quite why it is so unexpected is because it is on the quarter beat before each bar starts – which given the way Dylan performs the song is utterly unexpected.
As indeed is the end!
And that could be the end of my meander through the covers today, however there is one more and I have left what for me is the best until last. It’s in Swedish, but that’s neither here nor there, since we all know the lyrics, for the key point is the orchestration.
The contrast between the repeated three lines of each verse with the final line is exactly what this song needs to give it life again over 50 years since the piece was written.
I still think there is something else to be taken from this song, but I’m way past the age of working with a band to put what I can hear in my head onto a recording, so it will have to wait for someone else to come along and give it a try. And anyway what I hear in my head often doesn’t really work out when played out loud.
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A list of previous songs reviewed is given below.
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
Aaron: Let’s take a look at some more lost Dylan performances from the 60s all the way to the 90s. First “Only A Pawn In Their Game” from Newport 1963.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l3kjsbmZ-g0
Tony: I am still amazed at the confidence of Dylan in these early films. Not just a confidence of being onstage, but in the delivery of what at the time was a unique musical form. After all no one else was writing or performing music like this at the time.
It is not that he was a folk singer, but that he had invented a completely new form of folk song. I know we’ve all heard the song so many million times now it is easy to forget just how radical this musical approach was – the varied lengths of the verse, the brief punchy lines (as below from walk in a pack onward)
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
In listening to the early recordings again, I try to think if the power of the structure and the lines as if on first hearing, and this video is such good quality that it really helps to do that. I do this sounds like a pretentious load of twaddle, but really, if you can just consider the above lines as if you have never heard them before, and never heard Dylan, they really are surely among the most extraordinary lines ever written in folk or rock music.
Aaron: With God On Our Side. This was from the BBC show Tonight in 1964.
Tony: It is helpful to remember that the evolution of broadcasting in the UK was utterly different from the Americas. Until 1955 there was only one TV channel in the UK, that of the BBC, independent but funded by the state, which had its view of being the arbiter of what the British audience should be allowed to see. (Film censorship was also very strong at the time). The first rival to the BBC was the commercial channel ITV which started in 1955 but wasn’t rolled out across the whole kingdom for about ten years.
So when this was broadcast most British viewers did have a choice of two channels, and the BBC was trying to make itself more relevant to a younger audience. But the result was horrifically patronising at times, and Cliff Michelmore who introduces Dylan here clearly has no idea of the what is going on – which just seemed to make the broadcaster’s output even more remote from day to day life.
Aaron: Gotta Serve Somebody – from the 1979 Grammys. Bob won the award for Best Rock Vocal Performance
Tony: Ah Bob all spruced up and looking smart. I wonder has anyone done a book about Bob’s dresser. If so could you post a note to tell me about it, because I’ve obviously missed it.
Musically, it’s a great arrangement, really controlled but really bouncy at the same time. One of the best I’ve heard. I particularly like the two or three times where suddenly a line is dropped – really takes one by surprise.
Aaron: Bob was back at the Grammys for his lifetime achievement award in 1991. Here is Masters Of War followed by his speech.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0O3Ud8nFLE4
Tony: the re-arrangement with the monotone approach followed by the unexpected two chords at the end of the verse, and then no pause onto the next verse. The only problem is that although it makes the message very strongly it doesn’t actually make for musical entertainment. But goodness it is powerful. The little speech is certainly worth waiting for, if nothing else but to see Bob’s extreme uncomfortableness at the whole thing.
Aaron: Last up for this go round is an appearance on Letterman from 1993. Billy Connolly was on the show too, my all time favorite comedian..what a show this would have been!
Tony: Billy Connolly is great in his introductory remarks and this is a lovely delivery of Forever Young – so simple and so perfectly delivered. And it is is one of the very, very few recordings that actually has a proper Bob guitar solo in a full-band recording. What’s more it is utterly perfect, in keeping with the arrangement, and perfectly understated as the lyrics demand.
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
Dramatic, powerful, message dominated… what can you do with Hurricane?
The opening of Ani DiFranco’s version really is challenging and menacing, which is of course a big contrast with Bob’s original which always seems to me to be designed to incorporate his interest in boxing as much as to express outrage.
It is of course the bass that conveys that new feeling, but it is not just that, for there are other instrumental contributions that edge in and out. Nothing really obvious, it is all thought through, and the pull-back at the start of each verse returns our attention to the lyrics.
There is also a sense of absolute weirdness in some of this, which for me is how it should be because I have always felt the sport was itself weird. But that’s just me of course. Even the moments between the verses change each time. And the bit I don’t like the “triple murder” line which I find musically awful in the original, she makes work.
It’s not a piece I want to play over and over, but as an interpretation of Dylan’s original, it is something to think about.
And so by way of contrast the Vitamin String Quartet who we have met before. It is an interesting choice for them because there really isn’t too much they can do here… yet even the brief interlude between verses is handled excellently.
I suppose I like it as a contrast with Ani DiFranco telling us how it really is, and Dylan’s love of the sport. And besides whoever heard of a string quartet playing a piece about boxing?
The coda from 2 minutes 36 seconds onward is completely unexpected too – a superb ending.
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A list of previous songs reviewed is given below.
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
The reality of mournful death marches into the flowery pastures of the American NeoTranscendentalist Romantic poem quoted beneath:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring
(Walt Whitman: When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloomed)
So too in the song lyrics quoted below:
There's a far and distant river
Where the roses are in bloom
A sweetheart who is waiting there for me
And it's there I pray you take me
I've been faithful, don't forsake me
I'll be with her when the roses bloom again
(Billy Bragg: When The Roses Bloom Again ~ Cobb/Edwards)
A dreamland sentimentality, burlesqued in the following lines:
You belong to me, baby, without a doubt
Don't forsake me, baby, don't sell me out
Don't keep me knocking about
From Mexico toTibet
True love, true love, true love tends to forget
(Bob Dylan: True Love Tends To Forget)
In the song beneath, the lover’s not dead, but she ups and departs in search of a better life:
Oh, I thought I heard that steamboat whistle a-blow
And she blowed like she never blowed before ....
I'm afraid my little lover's on that boat
And it will take her to the Lord knows where
(Shirkey & Harper: Steamboat Man)
The chance of love best seized quickly, it seems:
I can hear that whistle blowing
I see that station master, 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
(Bob Dylan: Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You)
Parody abounds around a love that’s supposed to be everlasting – lovers reunited after death:
I was going down the river to my little cottage home
The revenue men were waiting there for me
I was coming up the hill
When they caught me with the still
I'll be with you when the roses bloom again
When the roses bloom again beside the river
And the robin redbreast sings his melody
(Shirkey & Harper: When The Roses Bloom Again For The Bootlegger)
Yes, indeed, he loves her still:
Oh, I see by the angel beside me
That love has a reason to shine
You're the one I adore
Come over here, and give me more
Then, Winterlude, this dude thinks you're fine
Winterlude, my little apple
Winterlude, by the corn in the field
(Bob Dylan: Winterlude)
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Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
Highway 61 is such an original concept, and we have all now heard Dylan’s version so often, that it is stuck. Most people who play it, stick pretty close to what Bob did. The beat, the melody, the accompaniment… that’s what Bob did so that’s how we’ll do it, seems to be the key.
Except there are just a few who will take a gamble and go somewhere different.
The first video from Joan Osbourne has a pretty ropey sound to the recording, but I’ve included it because they’ve taken a daring part and changed the chord structure completely, putting the song in a minor key. From here all other changes follow and give a totally different feel.
I’m not saying this a great recording, or indeed that the new approach gives a totally new perspective, as can happen sometimes, but rather it is a perfect example of tearing up the rule book and starting afresh. Which is what is needed sometimes.
It is the sound balance that is all wrong for me – and maybe that is just the problem with the club they are playing in, but full marks for seeing a way of taking this song forward that no one else has tried. I think given a studio to record in and a few hours work this could really turn into something.
And of course that trio were not the only people to realise what is possible. You don’t need the same rhythm, or a police siren… change things around and you get a totally new meaning. This Ben Sidran version gets it just right because everything flows from the relaxed vocals. Well may he smile during the performance because the sound works so perfectly. So do the variations on the text. And the decision to cut out the instrumental bars at the end of the verse.
Love the ending too.
Mountain go for a shouty approach which might not work, but the arranger and the quality of the musicians keeps me listening. The pauses between the lines work to as does the change in vocal style.
I’m not saying this is something I’ll want to listen to over and over but it has done its job in showing me another approach into the song.
When I hear a virtuoso performer do his stuff at the very start of a song, I’ll listen, just to see what else he can deliver. And what Pat Flynn delivers is a beat and a half – as well as a nifty harp commentary on each line.
In fact there is so much clever thinking going on here – as with the instrumental verse, followed by the cut back following verse… yes it all works. Great harmonica too. Perfectly in tune with the whole occasion.
Ah I rather enjoyed that little trip around. Whoever would have thought that with a bit of imagination so many different things could be done with just an old 12 bar blues.
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Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
Recently in the “A Dylan Cover a Day” series I mentioned the work of Francesco Garolfi. To my delight and surprise, Francesco Garolfi saw the piece and got in touch with me – which says a lot about the man (taking the trouble to write back when a reviewer has written about his music). And it also perhaps says something about (if I may add a boast) the way Untold Dylan has reached readers around the world.
So the first thing to say is if you want to know more about this artist there is a biography in English here.
What I would like to do here is look again at “Buckets of Rain” and also at “Tears of Rage”, and hope this will lead you on to listen to Francesco’s album “Wild” – which is available on the internet.
I’ve also found some of his songs on Spotify – although I always have to be cautious here – I’m a Spotify subscriber and it may well be that these recordings are not available on the non-subscriber version of Spotify. I can never work that out.
What I would stress however before we get going, is that none of this comes because Francesco is trying to persuade me to say nice things about his songs, and no money is changing hands! Here we have a most unpretentious musician, writing extraordinarily original arrangements of songs, and simply offering them to whosoever wants to listen.
I’m hoping you’ll enjoy these two Dylan songs, even if you choose not to go any further.
Buckets of Rainwas the song that I reviewed for the original version – and it is one of those Dylan songs that is covered and covered over and over again. I think I found around 50 versions of the song before I couldn’t take any more.
Yet this version stood out because of its beauty and simplicity. It is a vision that is perfectly executed. I just have the feeling that the artist knows exactly where he is going and why he is going there. And he delivers perfectly.
The notion in the song
If you want me
Honey baby, I'll be here
is one of the saddest approaches of the love / lost love genre. She is free as a bird, she goes where she wants, and all he can do is say, “if you ever want me, I’ll still be here”.
Dylan’s original music suits the message perfectly but somehow Francesco Garolfi gives us that little bit more. There’s no crude over-emphasis; he retains the gentility, and as I listen I travel back to younger days and remember moments like that. Tears come to my eyes.
Tears of Rage
A second point about this artist’s work is that I am in no way thinking, “Oh this is like…”. Maybe someone else has approached Tears of Rage in this way but I don’t think so.
The harmonies, which are a consistent feature of his work, are so achingly beautiful I find it hard to say much more. Perhaps just for once I really should shut up and let the music do the talking (as it were).
So I’ll leave you to contemplate those two songs, but if you are still with me on this I would also like to direct you to “A handful of songs” – the EP which is certainly available on Spotify.
Just go on Spotify and type in the artist’s name and you should find links to more songs. Look out for “John the Revelator” – which is dead simple in the construction but actually has a depth and insight to it which I find hard to explain. We have a chorus, a harmonica and a banjo or ukelele (sorry I am not sure which). It is extraordinary what this musician can do!
I do hope you enjoy his work as much as I have been doing these last few days. And also appreciate a musician who is able to reach out to some guy sitting in middle England tapping away on his computer and say “Thanks for the review”. That really is something.
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Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
Links to all the previous articles in this series are given below.
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There is a particular challenge to be found in a song with very limited melody or indeed a song with virtually no chord changes behind. Put both facets of music together and you have “High Water”.
Dylan copes brilliantly in High Water, because although the start of each line is monotonal he does vary the melody somewhat, and so each variation becomes more and more noticeable, and the end of each verse does give us those two extra chords.
And if you go back to Bob’s recording, the use of the percussion is superb – utterly restrained but just occasionally coming in to give a sense of the dam finally giving way.
The challenge of a song with such a limited melody and with an even more limited chord changes means that the cover artists have tended to pass the song by. But there are two covers that really do appeal to me.
Joan Osborne’s version has not only a regular rhythm pattern but also that same guitar riff repeated over and over as a counter melody to her exquisite voice. I just want it to go on, even when we have verses which are almost monotonal. When she sings “things are breaking up out there” it feels true.
The introduction of changes to the music after about 1 minute 30 seconds, and then the sudden unexpected stop is to my mind, utterly gorgeous. That moment when we all think the worst is over, and it really isn’t. In fact it is easy to miss the subtle changes that the band members introduce through the piece – it is worth playing this over and over just to find them.
Oh if I still played in a band, I’d have us playing this arrangement of this song (assuming anyone would listen to the old man in the corner).
The second version is quite different and full credit to these guys in giving us a different musical introduction. This is what playing Dylan is all about to my mind – trying something different, experimenting just to see what we get.
Contemporary music depends on bands like this – bands that are very unlikely to become household names (and gentlemen in the band please forgive me if you are the biggest thing south Flordia has ever seen – I’d not come across your music until today).
My point is that they are not just playing Dylan – they are adding something to Dylan. And by that I don’t mean that this is better than Dylan himself performing the song, but rather they are giving people pleasure, spreading the word, and giving us all a chance to hear the music from a different perspective.
If we didn’t have bands like this, the world would be a much sadder place. If you would like to know a bit more about the band they have a Facebook page.
Actually, come to think of it, so do we. See below!
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Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
VI Passion, on the other hand, is something no one wants
’Til there’s nothing left to see, ’til the chains have been shattered and I’ve been freed
Friedrich Schiller himself was not too satisfied with it, with the work that is by far his most popular and most performed: “Ode To Joy” from 1785. The most performed, of course, because Beethoven used it for the choral finale of his Symphony No. 9, which in the twentieth century became the Anthem of Europe. In a letter from 1800 to his friend and patron, the freemason Christian Körner, Schiller judges that the long ode (originally 18 stanzas, 556 words) has little value, “nicht für die Welt, noch für die Dichtkunst – not for the world, nor for poetry”. But that was way past the point of being able to stop it; immediately after its publication (in the magazine Thalia, 1786) it became popular, several artists set it to music and it was sung often and gladly, especially in student circles. The great composers were attracted as well; years before Beethoven adapted the poem, Schubert, Reichardt and others already had set it to music, and after Beethoven there were musical settings by Tchaikovsky and Johann Strauss, among others.
Schiller does try to intervene with a text revision. He deletes the last stanza and changes a few lines. In particular, the line that would become the most famous: “Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder, beggars become princes’ brothers” from the first stanza was rewritten as the famous, nations-unifying “Alle Menschen werden Brüder, all men shall be brothers”. The revision was published posthumously (Schiller died in 1805) and is the version used by Beethoven.
Incidentally, the most alienating demonstration of this unifying quality is provided by the Japanese glam metal band X Japan, the mascara collective that in the early years (around 1993) manifests itself as a living L’Oréal advertisement but does embellish, in between all the Formula 1 power rock, the hyper-neurotic songs with flawlessly executed Beethoven-on-speed interludes.
Friedrich’s dissatisfaction is somewhat understandable, though. It really is a bit too pathetic, perhaps. “Whoever has succeeded in the great attempt / To be a friend’s friend / Whoever has won a lovely wife / Add his to the jubilation!” and dozens of similarly sweet, naïve imperatives that call for a society of equal people, united by joy and friendship. Not really Schilleresque, and there are indeed indications that he originally wanted to ride his old familiar hobbyhorse “Freiheit” – so not “An die Freude, To Joy”, but “An die Freiheit, To Freedom”, actually.
Breaking chains, escaping, being freed from oppression… ninety per cent of Schiller’s oeuvre can be summed up by this one line from Dylan’s “Dirt Road Blues”: I’ll go on ’til the chains have been shattered and I’ve been freed. In his early work, they are often real, physical chains, prisons and oppressive tyrants; in his later work, the protagonists strive for what Schiller calls “innere Freiheit, inner freedom”, the goal also of Dylan’s protagonist: real freedom is being freed from “Leidenschaften und Trieben, passions and urges”. Schiller does not need to adapt the language; “chains”, “shackles”, “prisoners”… the idiom is perfectly adequate as a metaphor as well.
The German poet is not the first and not the only one who is fond of its symbolic power. The metaphorical meaning of words such as “slave”, “jail”, “cuffs”, etcetera, is in the Top 10 of Most Popular Metaphors in the eighteenth century. Not initiated, but at the very least scaffolded by the famous opening words of Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social (“Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains”, 1762). And, even more fittingly for Schiller and Dylan, by Immanuel Kant: “Leidenschaft dagegen wünscht sich kein Mensch. Denn wer will sich in Ketten legen lassen, wenn er frei sein kann? – Passion, on the other hand, is something no one wants. For who wants to be put in chains when they can be free?”
It all may explain the classical, perhaps even somewhat archaic beauty of Dylan’s words; the eighteenth-century ideal of inner freedom expressed with the eighteenth-century metaphor of shattered chains.
But as yet, the miserable runaway has not achieved that freedom, the freedom he expects from “nothing left to see”:
I been lookin’ at my shadow, I been watching the colors up above
Lookin’ at my shadow, watching the colors up above
Rolling through the rain and hail, looking for the sunny side of love
… on the contrary; in every line of the following fourth stanza, the narrator explicitly stresses that he still has the capacity to see. “Lookin’ at my shadow”, for starters. Which, combined with the subsequent “watching the colours above”, raises some concern about the man’s mental state.
“My shadow” is still a relatively mundane image to illustrate the loneliness of the protagonist. It is perhaps most touchingly brought about in the classic “Me And My Shadow”, which Dylan will appreciate in the versions of Bing Crosby, of The Mills Brothers, or in the most beautiful version, the one by Peggy Lee on one of her most beautiful albums (Is That All There Is?, 1969);
Me and my shadow
Strolling down the avenue
Me and my shadow
Not a soul to tell our troubles to
And when it's twelve o'clock
We climb the stair
We never knock
For nobody's there
Just me and my shadow
All alone and feeling blue
… just one example of the combination “shadow – lonely protagonist”, which has been established in dozens of other songs long before Dylan’s “Dirt Road Blues”, of course. Johnny Cash’s “To Beat The Devil” (When no one stood behind me / But my shadow on the floor / And lonesome was more than a state of mind); the Lovin’ Spoonful’s wonderful “Six O’ Clock” (And now I’m back alone with just my shadow in front / At six o’clock), written and sung by Dylan’s confidant and occasional guitarist John Sebastian, on the last Lovin’ Spoonful record to feature Sebastian (Everything Playing, 1967); The Monkees’ “Early Morning Blues And Greens”, on another highlight of the Summer Of Love, Headquarters… all songs that link my shadow to loneliness.
But only thanks to The Monkees do we know which colours Dylan’s narrator and his shadow are seeing there, up above.
To be continued. Next up: Dirt Road Blues part 7
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Untold Dylanwas created in 2008 and is published daily – currently twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
A list of the previous articles in this series is given at the foot of the page.
Inevitably Jochen got to this song before I started work on this little article today, but as I generally do, I decided to make my selection without referring back to his, just to see if we both came out the same. And I have taken the opportunity to update the links in my earlier review of the song – they are very pesky things these links to internet recordings.
But onwards…
I love the start of the Blake Mills version – the first selection today. Obviously, we know what track we have chosen to play but even so it takes a moment to realise that it really is “Heart of Mine”. The artists here are Blake Mills & Danielle Haim.
I also love the way this is understated until the percussion comes in for the instrumental break. In fact, every moment within the accompaniment seems to emphasise that the heart can be broken – there’s a sort of fragility within the music which is very difficult to balance with the regularity of the heartbeat I think they want to portray. But it works.
The sheer difference between each of these cover versions shows just what a magnificent song this is. And this version below has awoken me to just how interesting the lyrics actually are. I mean, the title “Heart of Mine” could well be just a simple song about simple emotions and feelings. But it is so much more than this.
Also in the Mountain version below the instrumental break is aggressive and strong – and this is a song about “this heart of mine” – how can that work? I am not sure, but I think a lot has to do with the lead guitarist who doesn’t seek to push him/herself forward but plays always around the vocalist.
And if you have time, and the inclination, listen to the song again, and just focus on the lead guitar. This musician really knows what’ s what.
Next is the version that Jochen highlighted. I’ve always had time for the work of Norah Jones, and I’d love to know how much input she has in the arrangements. Is she “produced” or does she have the ideas? Or indeed does she tell the band, “this is how we are doing it”? I think the latter – including such beautiful elements such as pulling back the start of the verse, that fraction further than one might expect.
Lovely restrained instrumental break as well – yes let the percussion bang on, because that’s the heart beat – but all around it, the music represents the essence of the emotions. The heart beat / drum beat is there, as it has to be / but it’s not the essence.
Love the lead guitar too.
And now, if you’ve been following this series since it began, you’ll know I have a fascination with non-English performances since when they are in a language I have no knowledge of (which is most of them) it allows me to consider the music further.
What’s interesting is that almost everyone seems to want to keep the strong drum beat (except Norah J0nes) presumably because they think it represents the heart (ok, but really is that the most important part of it all?)
There’s an extra strength in these vocals and in the guitar solo too. Delicacy has gone out of the window. In this version he’s taking control of his emotions. And why not?
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is published daily – currently twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
2003 is one of my favourite NET years. Not that there weren’t problems. Charlie Sexton left the band at the end of 2002, to be replaced by Billy Burnette, in turn replaced by Freddie Koella after a couple of months. It took a while for these guitarists to bed down. More importantly, Dylan’s voice continued to show cracks and strains; a new roughness had entered that amazing voice, including the emergence of what fans of the NET call his ‘wolfman voice,’ a low, throaty growl. Dylan’s rhythmic piano playing, begun in October 2002, also continued to attract negative comment from those more wedded than Dylan himself to his guitar.
And yet there is a rough vigour in these 2003 performances that is hard to match. The Dylan compiler CS at A Thousand Highways, who also confesses his liking for the year, calls his collection of songs ‘Piano Blues and Barroom Ballads,’ pretty much a perfect title to capture the unique spirit of the year’s performances. The sound is more like what you would find in a blues or jazz club, or indeed a barroom.
The concerts of the past two years became finely honed, hard-edged and disciplined. The Atlanta concert of 2002 is a perfect example. (See NET, 2002, Part 4) This is stadium rock at its most gritty. By contrast, the 2003 concerts are generally looser, jazzier and more free-spirited. More like club music. It’s Dylan’s shift to the keyboards that does the trick, abandoning the cold iron sound of his Stratocaster, and using the piano to drive the rhythm forward while evoking a bygone era of piano blues and barroom ballads (Remember Shadow Kingdom?). If it weren’t for the songs and those words of his, we could be back in the early 1950s.
Close your eyes and wander into a bar. Maybe you’re in Berlin, or New Orleans. There’s a bunch of guys rocking the joint while people smoke and flirt and live and die. There’s an old guy at the piano who thinks he’s Jerry Lee Lewis. It’s an exuberant performance. His voice is as rough as guts, sounds like he’s been on the job too long, and his piano playing’s even rougher, but it has a joyful spirit, and is sort of beguiling. (Berlin 20th Oct.) It sure rips along.
To Be Alone with You
He can’t really play like Jerry Lee Lewis, but he can pretend, with a bit of a nod and a wink, and everybody has a good time without the old guy actually having to put his foot up on the piano.
But the next song – sheoot! It’s about some place called Desolation Row and a bunch of people all dressed up doing weird things. It knocks our sox off. Nobody knows where to look; some of us laugh. Maybe that old guy’s been snortin’ too much of the silly stuff, you know, to write some screwed-up song like that. Funny thing about that Desolation Row place, it’s like I’ve been there before. It slips in between familiar streets. It used to be called Lonely Avenue. It’s where you go to cold turkey. It’s right there in front of us every day. It’s like we all live there but don’t know it. Even after the song finishes, I don’t want to go out and look up at the street sign. That old guy’s got the voodoo. I used to know Cinderella (we all did); she lived just around the corner.
But man, does he drive it along with that piano! putting funny little bunches of notes in before every verse, bluesy and forceful, and he bellows it out, a voice rougher than sandpaper but packed with power. You can bring the roof down with a voice like that; you can blast ‘em right out of their seats, and that rough and ready harmonica rips the air open like a chainsaw. This song will mangle your mind, lock you in a room and break the key, leave scratch marks on your fate.
Desolation Row
Moving from guitar to piano means more than just swapping one instrument for another; it shifts the whole balance of sound away from ‘hard rock’ Atlanta 2002, to a more rollicking, jazzy blues sound, the kind of sound you hear in this ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh.’ Without the guitar, Dylan lacks a lead instrument, and that’s where his harmonica comes in handy. He sits it up on the piano, within easy reach, and can keep the rhythm going on the piano with one hand and play the harmonica with the other as he does here. He can’t do that with the guitar. 2003 saw a revival in Dylan’s harmonica work, as if rediscovering the instrument after a long break.
The piano is a softer instrument than the electric guitar. It has different roots, taking us back through the jazz years to Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller with their ragtime jumps. We hear echoes of blues shouters like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charlie Patten in the ragged vocals. More than ever, now the guitar has gone, we get the feeling that this is the kind of music out of which rock music grew. Old classics sound new again. (23rd Nov, London).
It takes a lot to laugh
Those who want to catch a look at how Dylan plays both instruments at once can find it here, a video of the London performance.
We get the same kind of rollicking sound with ‘Dear Landlord.’ Dylan played piano on the album version (John Wesley Harding), so it’s not too surprising that he should revive the song in 2003, but with a less fragile and more rollicking version. We may suspect that Dylan’s pleas to the masters of his fate will fall on deaf ears; you don’t make deals with the gods – unless you’re Bob Dylan. Just a little mutual respect is what he’s asking for. Give me a chance to use my ‘special gift.’ It’s a blues prayer. (24th Nov, Hammersmith)
Dear Landlord
You could argue that a song like ‘Million Miles’ from Time out of Mind doesn’t come fully into its own until Dylan gets in behind the keyboard. The roots of the song are much closer to smoky jazz than rock music, and the piano is the instrument of smoky jazz. It still rollicks, but with a slower, skippier beat. The sense of being in a blues or jazz club is even stronger. The lyrics feed into that atmosphere. ‘I’m drifting in and out of dreamless sleep…’ We’re way down Lonely Avenue at 3 a.m thinking about telling lies, how impossible it is to feel close to someone with all those lies, how impossible it is to get a decent night’s rest with all those ‘voices in the night trying to be heard.’ (This is another one from Hammersmith, 24th Nov).
Million Miles
That slinky, jazzy feel starts to creep into Dylan’s arrangements of other songs from Time out of Mind. ‘Can’t Wait’ gets a prowling, descending bass line that transforms the song, making it quieter and more menacing. Someone’s on the prowl, padding through the night, someone who’s reached a final, desperate edge. A compelling performance. (3rd Nov.)
Can’t Wait (A)
Again, it strikes me that the song seems to come into its own with that obsessive little riff he plays on the piano, a little gentle syncopation towards the end, again pushing away from rock towards jazz. Some particularly effective backing guitar from Freddy Koella, whose guitar playing can sound oddly like Dylan’s own.
I thought I could leave ‘Can’t Wait’ there, but this performance from Berlin (20th Oct) is so good I couldn’t leave it out. The same arrangement, but perhaps bit more vocal power from Dylan, a bit edgier maybe? He’s pushing the song for all its worth.
Can’t Wait (B)
As with 2002, the better concerts seem to be clustered towards the end of the year. The first leg of the tour, Australasia, is not held in high regard. A simple comparison tells the story. This is ‘Floater’ from the Wellington, New Zealand concert, 24th Feb. In New Zealand we have felt a bit short-changed by Dylan concerts, as if he’s using his down-under gigs as rehearsals. Just a suspicion. It’s not clear how much rehearsing Billy Burnette had before being thrust into the limelight
Floater (A)
Not bad, but it pales in comparison to this performance from Hammersmith. It’s not just the recording that’s sharper and clearer. The music’s full of vitality. Who said anything about a worn-out star? Edwin Muir, in his book One More Night sees in these later performances a miraculous recovery after a patchy year. ‘Energised and resplendent in his white shirt, Dylan took the stage…’ (Describing the Hammersmith Show, page 310)
Floater (B)
One thing for certain, old NET fans were falling out over these 2003 concerts. These are serious Bobcats who follow the concerts around as much they are able, and who found themselves with divergent views of some concerts. I think it was all a bit exaggerated, but then, it’s all very well for me, I can cherry pick concerts and performances, and in the process, inadvertently give the impression that a particular year was stronger than it really was. I wasn’t driving for hours, lining up to buy tickets, only to find myself disappointed at yet another mediocre concert.
Dylan’s performances may have been uneven, but I persist in feeling that some of these songs, like ‘Floater’ and others from Time out of Mind sound just right with a piano backing in Dylan’s vigorous, ‘primitive’ style, as it places them more firmly in their era. Dylan’s gentle backing in this performance of ‘Trying to get to Heaven,’ is a case in point. He uses that soft piano vamping to back a wonderfully hushed, almost breathless performance of the song. It’s to do with creating a midnight atmosphere. Dylan’s guitar was often so weird and forceful it would tend to dominate the sound of the band, and therefore the atmosphere of the song. Here, the subtleties of the song get their full expression. And what a vocal performance! From power notes to soft whispering, from crooning to crackling. This can only be Dylan at his mature best.
‘Gonna sleep down in the parlor
And relive my dreams
I'll close my eyes and I wonder
If everything is as hollow as it seems’
Trying to get to heaven
You could make a similar argument for ‘Cold Irons Bound,’ another Time out of Mind gem. With Koella and Larry Campbell on the job, we have plenty of antique guitar sounds. I always thought it was a bit too guitar heavy. Here Dylan’s minimal piano, just a touch or two here and there during the verses, is enough to anchor us in the ‘piano ballad’ era, and to create a different balance of sound.
Cold Irons Bound
That’s it for this post. I’ll be back soon to continue looking at this fascinating year of the NET.
Until then
Kia Ora.
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Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is published daily – currently twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
I was hoping that someone might have done a cover of that old stomper, “Had a dream about you baby” but no one has – or at least if they have I can’t find a copy on the internet to offer unto you. But then last time I checked it wasn’t on BobDylan.com either and maybe that’s where the cover artists go a-looking. They really ought to use Untold Dylan.
So I keep meandering down the list looking for a song that the cover artists might have taken on in some new and meaningful manner. And I came to Hard Rain, and stumbled upon one of weirdest covers of all time. Don’t worry, there’s no test at the end so you can turn off after 30 seconds. The audience however quite liked it.
And if you want some more
I wonder what Bob thinks.
Indeed the point about all these articles is not that I am saying that these are my favourite versions, or even that they are musically exquisite, but rather in most cases they have informed me about the possibilities in the music – possibilities I most likely have never discovered or would ever have discovered on my own .
Moving on, Eliza Gilkyson takes us on a different route. And this really leads me to the other key point in all this – many commentators write and speak as if all that matters are the lyrics. I don’t think Dylan feels this at all, and I can assert I most certainly don’t. The lyrics become the bedrock of the possibilities for the music that can emerge from the song. Indeed why else would Bob himself have created so many versions of his songs? Yes sometimes he changes the lyrics (Tangled up in blue is perhaps the most famous example) but just think how often he then changes the music, taking the lyrics as the bedrock and then moving the music on.
There’s a lovely extra in this version, and that is the harmonies which are exquisite and from which I do, even after all these years, get more from the song. For example, in listening to the “who did you meet verse”, I can feel tears coming to my eyes… over the top I know but that’s how it goes.
I have found an instrumental of the song by DeJohnette – Gredadier – Medeski – Scofield which for me goes the wrong way into another universe where the song has no meaning at all. You can go and find it if you want to but I’m helping you. I really don’t like it.
And to clear my head of that I’m going to have to bring forward my favourite, or one of my favourite versions of the song – it ended one of the series of Peaky Blinders, one of my favourite TV series of recent years.
What makes it so good… oh I’ve thought about that so much. The vocal harmonies are delicious, the percussion is perfectly arranged, and above all, it retains the understatement of Dylan’s original, even when there is a build-up of the instrumentation. There is a sort of galloping punchiness to the piece that just works so perfectly.
But if you feel that the song’s message is so strong, so vital and so important that it really does need to be shouted from the rooftops then you’ll probably like Charlie Daniels.
But for every musical route in one direction, there is always the chance of going the other way. I’ve only just found this version with which I will conclude my meander today. It is not perfect, it is not exactly to my taste, but it offers me new insights through the harmonies of the voices, and the dedication to keeping the guitar part as simple as they can.
There is also a beautiful way in which they often hesitate for a quarter or even an eighth of a beat at the end of each line. It is that sort of inventiveness that I enjoy – just to know someone out there is actually thinking musically and artistically …. If you are going to be an artist that has to be the road map you follow. Just doing it straight doesn’t work; not in this world.
Untold Dylanwas created in 2008 and is published daily – currently twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk. Our readership is rather large (many thanks to Rolling Stone for help in that regard). Details of some of our past articles are also included on the home page.
We also have a Facebook site with over 13,000 members.
An index to this full series of Dylan Released and Unreleased is given at the end of the piece. As always with these articles by Aaron and Tony, Aaron in the USA chooses the tracks and writes a few words by way of introduction, and then Tony in the UK tries to write some sort of commentary while the music is playing.
Aaron:Let’s take a listen to some more rare and one-off Dylan performances released on other artists’ albums.
First from the album “Earl Scruggs Performing with His Family & Friends” it’s Nashville Skyline Rag with Bob on guitar.
Tony:Seeing the piece had a lead banjo I wondered what Bob was going to do… and the answer was to play a very appropriate rhythm guitar with some nice touches. It seems a little bit like having Martin Luther King Jnr reading a nursery rhyme, in that one is not actually going to get the full flavour of what the great man can actually do, but even so it’s a nice little jog-along piece.
Aaron: Now from the Grateful Dead compilation of Dylan live covers “Postcards Of The Hanging” we have this version of Man Of Peace recorded during a backstage rehearsal with Bob on lead vocals and guitar.
Tony:Listening to it, not able to grasp the words clearly, this sounds to me more like “From a Buick 6” than “Man of Peace” – and I do think Bob has taken some of the melody from the Buick and used it here. Although sitting here in my study looking across the English countryside and sneezing occasionally (just a cold, not covid) I might be meandering a bit in terms of my thought processes this morning. Of course these 12 bar blues can all take on an air of similarity – especially where the whole piece is improvised.
Aaron:The Ballad Of Hollis Brown from Mike Seeger’s Third Annual Farewell Reunion album featuring Bob on vocals and guitar.
Tony: The use of the minor third drop at the end of each line (the two notes sung for the last word on each line) gets to me a bit, it means that each line is, in essence, the same – which I guess is part of the point of the song; the ultimate repetitiveness of the life that Hollis Brown had, but I am not sure about this from a musical and performance point of view.
I am reminded of the complaint that Mike Johnson has quite reasonably made on occasion through the Never Ending Tour series about Bob’s repeated use of “upsinging” and “downsinging” – it does seem to be a thing with him; find a vocal idea and re-use it. He doesn’t do it with lyrics, nor with the melodies that we normally get on the albums. It just seems to occur on other occasions.
Aaron: It Takes A Lot To Laugh from Wynton Marsalis United We Stand. We covered this before but it is brilliant and meets the criteria of the series so let’s take another listen.
Tony: Unfortunately my memory is now so bad that I had no idea what was about to turn up when I just saw the cover and the note that we had covered this song before – but then when it started, oh yes I did remember it. And how!
This is a truly remarkable rendition and I know I was knocked out by it before, as I am hearing it again – in particular, what happens in the last verse with “I want to be your lover baby, I don’t want to be your boss”.
Dylan does sometimes put in small variations to the songs, sometimes he takes them on a different journey, and just occasionally he puts the song on a different planet, and that is what happens here.
I won’t repeat myself from last time (if you are the slightest bit interested in the technicality of what is actually happening in the music, I bored everyone senseless with that in the earlier review and you can read it here) but I would urge you, if at all possible, please do listen to this without anything interrupting your focus (by which I mean please don’t do the washing up at the same time or read my ramblings – just close your eyes and listen).
We know the song, we know where it is going, but this time it is travelling at a different speed through a different countryside. And as I mentioned before, just take in the “I want to be your lover” line and compare it with the recording we all know from the album. On the album it is a statement of intent and desire, here it is a statement from a relaxed world where everything sort of jogs along and somehow gets there, and let’s not worry about it all, because it will turn out ok at the end of the day.
And then, maybe if you have time, play it again, just to enjoy it.
